Watching
My last 10 watched from Letterboxd.
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Number 24
A timely tale of the Norwegian resistance during WW2, and Norway’s most decorated hero, Gunnar Sønsteby. Framed by a Q&A many years after the war, Gunnar tells the audience of young Norwegians, “All these stories that you see that are published in the papers, they tell them. It’s the owners. What to print and what not to print. Every single time. So in the case of war, well, those papers should be lit instead. They’re mere kindling.” That really stuck with me given the current state of things. The flashbacks to the war are pretty standard fare, but Gunnar’s reckoning with his actions after being questioned by a young woman at the Q&A was quite poignant. Worth watching.
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Zero Effect
Such an underrated 90s gem. Maybe my favorite Bill Pullman movie. Kim Dickens is great, playing vulnerable, calculating and mysterious in equal turns. And Ben Stiller! It’s wild to me that the same director also did Walk Hard AND Red One. This movie practically begs for a TV show.
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Blink Twice
Wow, that was deeply unsettling. Blink Twice sets the table and then just kinda of lets you stew in a sense of unease before finally revealing itself. From there it gets wild. I never thought much of Channing Tatum as an actor but he’s perfectly cast here, delivering a mix of charm and menace. The ending is *chef’s kiss*.
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Gangs of New York
There’s a lot to love here, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Bill the Butcher. It feels like both DiCaprio and Diaz are miscast and Scorsese just tries to do too much at the end. There’s a lot of build-up to a climactic confrontation that’s largely disrupted by a historical event. This movie is probably more relevant to today’s political climate than it was in 2002. If only we could see we should be fighting the “$300 men” instead of each other.
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Nosferatu
Incredible. A feast for the eyes. Riveting from beginning to end. Perhaps my favorite Eggers film so far. Willem Dafoe is my king.
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2073
This “documentary” is like “Somebody Should Do Something About All the Problems” framed in a vague speculative fiction dystopia. It lists off problems that, to no one’s surprise, are bad! And if left unchecked, could lead to a disastrous future, as if it’s not already here. It asks us to take action before it’s too late but has no ideas about what those actions might be. One of the many problems it covers is AI, but it seems like AI was used to make the doc? 84 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
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I Saw the Devil
Well that was bleak.
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Se7en
Gorgeous 4K transfer. The last 20 minutes of this is perfect. Even after maybe a dozen viewings it’s still incredibly tense.
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A Real Pain
This was really bizarre to watch as I recognized aspects of myself in both Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg’s characters that are often in conflict. It was like seeing my inner voice projected on the screen. Their journey together and their interactions with the people around them almost felt like set dressing to inform the relationship between these two cousins. I’ll have to give it another watch. The last shot shook me.
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Your Friend, Nate Bargatze
I like Nate but his dry, clean humor doesn’t elicit much more than a hearty chuckle from me.