So this is a thing that happened: this movie aged much better than you expect.
Like, when it came out in 1999, everybody dismissed it because it wasn't anywhere near as good as THE TRUMAN SHOW, because of course it isn't, THE TRUMAN SHOW is one of the best movies of that decade. And you got a lot of thinkpieces about how TRUMAN had anticipated the nascent rise of reality-TV culture and EDTV got it all wrong.
That was exactly…
You know, I used to think Katherine Heigl and Gerald Butler got too much mockery for their terrible movie choices, but now that I've seen this insanely misogynistic piece of garbage I think we've all been much too kind to them.
Counting this one as a fresh watch because I hadn't seen it in, oh, twenty-five years maybe?
Anyway, sometimes when people really like a film that doesn't have a sensible plot or well-defined characters they'll call it a "visual tone poem" and pretend that this is a thing. (I particularly remember a major critic suggesting this of THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS back in the day. That movie is dogshit, if you wondered.)
But MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO really *is* a…
As Hollywood studio comedies go, it's harder to manage better than what GAME NIGHT achieves at this point. By this I mean that there's nothing terribly surprising about it - I mean, Jason Bateman at one point actively references how studio comedies like GAME NIGHT always throw in callbacks to the main characters' personal crises that run alongside the plot of the film to distract viewers from the fact that they're running that same formula again - but it's really…
