An improvement on the first one, to which it has no connection whatsoever.
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Secret Honor 1984
I'm not sure I'd even heard of this Altman-directed one-man film until the one man (Philip Baker Hall) died, but it's fantastic. PBH plays an especially agitated and paranoid Richard M. Nixon, ranting his memoirs into a tape recorder several years after his resignation. Only a great actor can pull off a one-man show without things getting dry, and Hall was a great actor.
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Jurassic Park III 2001
This got a passing notice from me when it came out (B-), but a rewatch a short 21 years later reveals I was smoking crack then.
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The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997
I remembered liking this one, but it had been years since I'd watched it. I still like it — though obviously it's not as good as the first one, which is basically perfect. What a wonderful feeling in that opening sequence when you realize the movie's going to begin with a little girl being attacked by dinosaurs! 😍 (It's a shame they had to ruin it with that subsequent, "Oh, don't worry, she's fine!" dialogue. Let the girl be eaten by dinosaurs!)
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Solaris 1972
Look. OK. I mean... Listen. I've seen two Tarkovsky movies (this and "Stalker"), and while I appreciate the craft involved and I like some of the story elements and ideas, I am mostly bored into stupefaction. I'm sorry, I guess, or whatever. If you can watch these and feel engaged, drawn into the contemplative world Tarkovsky creates, more power to ya.
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Evilspeak 1981
This cavalcade of unpleasant faces stars Clint Howard as a deservedly bullied military academy student named Coopersmith who stumbles upon a book of dark spells written by a 16th-century Spanish heretic named Esteban. When Coopersmith types the Latin spells into the school's computer, it translates them into English — "I love Satan" this, "I promise to serve the devil" that — and somehow this leads to some wild hogs killing a secretary (after she takes a shower). The bullies, all meat-faced…
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Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones 2002
I know everybody hates this one the most, and I hadn't watched it since it came out (when I really liked it), so I braced myself, but guess what, it's fine. I mean, Hayden Christensen is bad, and all the romance stuff with him and Natalie Portman (who's uncharacteristically kind of bad herself) is boring. But the rest is fine. I don't know what to tell you.
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2018
After "Spider-Man 2," this is the most emotionally satisfying Spider-Man movie in my book ("The Book of Eric's Thoughts About Spider-Man Movies").
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Avatar 2009
This was the first time I'd seen it since 2009. It looks really, really neat, and everything else about it is average. And honestly, looking neat doesn't impress me anymore. Digital effects have long since become so good in Hollywood films (generally speaking) that I take it for granted that whatever they spent all that money on is going to look convincing. (It's different when I'm watching a movie made before CGI.) At this point, I think giving a movie extra credit for creating a realistic-looking fantasy world is like gushing about a movie in 1935 because it has sound.
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Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson 1976
Robert Altman was a great filmmaker who could really bore the hell out of you when he wanted to.
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