Letterboxd — Your life in film

If you love the cheesy educational videos they play at local history museums, you're gonna love this movie.

Plays like a successor to Shane, Unforgiven, and True Grit, i.e. I loved it. It's a bit shocking in its refusal to gloss over the kind of damage that's regularly done in superhero movies and, fittingly, is strongest when it doesn't play like one. Hugh Jackman and Dafne Keen are obviously great, so I'm gonna pour one out for Patrick Stewart, who is so good. He's so good! Absolutely a ripping good time.

I felt my entire body go cold while watching this movie. It ran through everything I thought it was going to be within the first 15 minutes, and then stayed at full throttle all the way down. I thought, more than once, about this particular sentiment: "A mystery often empowers its protagonist [...] but horror takes that power away." It seems apt that Get Out falls somewhere in between, as race relations (at least in my experience) do, too. Absolutely thrilling.

(Has "Run, Rabbit, Run" always been that creepy?)

To quote Alan Scherstuhl, "The movies never get the Midwest right," but boy, does American Fable nail it. Maybe the only recent movie that does outside of Jeff Nichols' work.

Thought a lot of my own experience growing up in Illinois even as things took a turn for the fantastical. The details are more special than the broader strokes, though, i.e. the wordless sequence of kids catching fireflies at night, or the way cotton candy goes dark while you're eating it.

Goes a lot faster the second time around. That last act is still like pure ecstasy to me.

Like riding Space Mountain for two hours.

Things there are:
- Giant aliens
- Rainbow-colored everything
- Air balloons

Things there aren't:
- Matt Damon's accent

Y'all weren't kidding about those eels.

Limited release 3/17/17.

For Bright Wall/Dark Room's February issue.

Watched it for the first time last year (caught it on 35mm, and you bet I cried in front of strangers) and haven't really stopped thinking about it since. Maybe my favorite use of black and white vs. technicolor, also maybe my favorite Archers film. Mind-blowing in terms of technical invention (the Heaven stuff is crazy) and also in terms of the scope of its sentiment. Profoundly dig it.

Ebert noted in his review that this movie doesn't offer any release, but "the postponement of pain." To that end (and others) there's nothing else like it. Even the pace is entirely its own — the movie puts itself on pause for the entirety of Ray Charles' "Come Rain or Come Shine" to run through its titles — it never panders or does anything that it doesn't want to/need to.

Like living, for two hours straight, in the moment right before getting punched in the gut.

"Seriously, what do you see in that guy?"
"He makes me laugh."

Miss ya, Bob Hoskins.