(end of year Letterboxd catchup, part 2)
There is a fair comment to be made that Don't Look Up feels like a first draft of a much more polished film (like a lot of Netflix original films do, for some reason). A lot of bits don't quite hang together as well as one would hope, which gives the film an overall shaggy-dog sort of quality. And no, the asteroid-as-climate-change metaphor isn't 100% perfect. (Congratulations, Twitter, you figured that out real…
(end of year Letterboxd catchup, part 1)
Resurrections is a good movie.
It is not the best Matrix movie by any means. A lot of the original trilogy's look and feel is best described as being "approximated" in this one; Bill Pope, it seems, contributed more to the original trilogy's look than is widely appreciated. The loss of Yuen Woo-Ping's fight choreography is also felt and is not easily made up by CGI-gimmicked stunts and Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss…
I know some people will be leery of this because there's a lot of white-saviourish stuff hanging around the film (which is inevitable because it's based on a true story, and that true story is about a white teacher from southern Canada introducing afterschool lacrosse to an Inuit community and the success of that program). But what's remarkable about the movie is how hard it constantly pushes back against the white saviour narrative. The script allows Ben Schnetzer's prepbro teacher…
A triumph from pillar to post, Into the Spider-Verse is so improbable a success - an animated Spider-Man movie from a studio that has consistently fucked up both animated movies and Spider-Man movies based on a comic-nerdily dense idea that should be impenetrable to ninety-nine percent of the viewing audience - that it is hard to call it anything other than "remarkable," but that feels unfair simply because it is so good that just going with "remarkable" feels like giving…
