Yum! Italian food!

I’m randomly watching this because Redlettermedia made a good case for it. I’m totally unfamiliar with director Jeff Baena but the clips did look hilarious.

I had to stop watching halfway in because I didn’t want to get all spoilererd (that a word), though.

Yum! Olive Garden looks delicious!

This is… this is like a John Waters movie, but on the down low. It’s so cynical, but the jokes are like “ha ha” instead of “HA HA HA”!

This is teetering on the abyss of cringe humour (which I can’t stand at all), but then always (so far at least) pulls back into something more funny and interesting.

Every single shot is sarcastic. Like this classic romantic scene where they’re powering through the water on a huge speed boat…

… but then we get a shot of the bow and the sea and it’s barely splashing at all.

A sarcastic bow shot. Not many films have that.

This was really funny. I laughed out loud a bunch of times, and especially in the last half of the movie (and I’m not including any shots of that because I don’t wanna be all spoilerish).

So now I’m getting all of Baena’s previous movies.

It’s a solid movie. I think there will probably be people that watch this and don’t quite get that it’s a parody? Because they play most of these scenes so straight. And in a way, that’s a bit smarmy because you get the “oooh I’m so smart S M R T” audience factor, but it really works on every level, I think.

And, boy, people didn’t get this movie:

I know an innocuous rom-com should not stir such ire in me, but “Spin Me Round” represents so much of what I hate in movies. It’s an exceedingly pedestrian paint-by-numbers script with token people of color, character types rather than multi-dimensional characters and a blandly ridiculous plot that drags on for almost two hours. I mean, why try to be original when you can just throw in a trope?

I think it’s perfect in a way — I think it does exactly what it sets out to do. But I also think that it could have been pushed a bit further to make it more hilarious than archly funny? So:

Spin Me Round. Jeff Baena. 2022. ⚄

This is so cute! I’m totally invested in this movie now.

I haven’t stopped smiling since this movie started, and I’ve laughed out loud a couple of times. It’s just kinda perfect? It’s based on Pride & Prejudice, right? It flows so well; there’s no dead wood, no padding.

So I’m slightly dreading whether they’re gonna do a totally dour and dramatic third act or something, but I have high hopes they’re not gonna… let’s see…

The dreaded third act did sort of happen, but not as dreadfully as expected? Drama happened, but it wasn’t that awful.

So it’s an almost perfect movie.

Fire Island. Andrew Ahn. 2022. ⚄

Yay! Sci-fi! It’s been a while since I’ve seen a proper sci-fi movie.

But on the other hand, this is Roland Emmerich, so it’s gonna suck. But I’m fine with that.

It was so much work watching this movie. It’s a 4K movie using Dolby Vision, which my mpv didn’t support. But! The mpv people have written support for the format over the last few months in the form of a new library called libplacebo. But getting that to compile required upgrading my OS… a lot… which then broke some of my obscure peripherals (like the DisplayLink monitor that I use to display some info).

But! It was probably the least breakey ~5 year upgrade I’ve ever done? It’s surely the Year Of Linux On The Media PC now.

I kinda liked the first scene here, but then this movie takes a nose dive in interest?

There’s nothing really bad about these scenes… sure, they’re a bit boring, but not massively so?

It’s kinda by the numbers? But I’m not annoyed.

Nice matte painting! I mean CGI.

Emmerich gets more out of CGI artists than most directors these days. It actually looks kinda scary and pretty and awesome.

But I can see why everybody hates this movie: The mood is a bit… down? This isn’t quite what people need this week?

It’s him! Heh heh.

Oh, Emmerich has done a whole lot fewer movies than I thought he had. I’ve only seen a handful? Less than a handful. I was thinking this was Michael Bay.

It’s been like an hour of… nothing? I mean, character building. Nobody has actually used the phrase “you’re not my father! you weren’t there when I grew up!” but you can see that the characters are thinking about saying it.

Hopefully something will happen in the second hour.

But people love this sort of stuff! I’m not quite sure why people hate it in this movie…

This is a really cheesy movie. In a good way.

But I guess it has some issues with tone and pacing. If it had been zanier, it’d be easier to read, but it started off like it was, like, A Serious Sci Fi Movie. But it’s not really — it’s nice and goofy.

It’s the Moon! Run away!

Oh, now I get what this movie reminds me of! It’s totally like one of those 50s sci-fi movies where they have to send out a team of scrappy people into space to tackle some threat. But updated with better graphics.

This is totally MST3K fodder. In a good way.

Yeah! Laser cannons!

Yee haw! They did that scene! Classic.

I had so low expectations of this movie, but I really should have guessed that the amount of stick this movie was getting had to mean that it’s a quite nice movie. And it is. It’s a quite nice, goofy movie.

Googling a bit of reactions to it, I see nerds complaining about how stupid and unlikely it is… which is a bit like complaining about James Bond movies not being accurate.

Now, this isn’t a perfect movie. The first hour is inexplicably flabby. There’s about 90 minutes of material here, but padded out. So:

Moonfall. Roland Emmerich. 2022. ⚃

Edit: I’m now watching:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaILVoXZTqU]

And it’s… the worst. I mean, I like Red Letter Media, but this one just the most boring ever. Moonfall is 10x more entertaining than that episode, because they basically just retells the plot (as if that’s interesting?) and then complains that the plot isn’t quite realistic in some bits?

It’s so weird and lazy.