Just an island boy speaking for all the mediocrities. Not quite their patron saint though.
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Breaking Away 1979
To them, it's just a dirty word. To me, it's just somethin' else I never got a chance to be.
Rarely does a film typify a town the way Breaking Away does for Bloomington, Indiana. The competitive grit, the us-against-the-world mentality, the duality of purpose. A town I lived and loved in for four key years of my life, and to see it as it was in the late 70s is always a treat. It feels so out of time…
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Petite Maman 2021
Blown away by the ability to make something so pure and warm without sacrificing any of emotional integrity of the loneliness and fear of change that comes with childhood. Inarguably one of the great children's films to come around in some time, a film as much about the ease of friendship as a kid as it is about the difficulty of accepting the true sadness being human comes with.
There's a scene where there's a bit of a quandary about…
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 1982
"This is reality, Greg"
Watched this constantly as a kid, but reached a point as a teen where I found myself rejecting its brand of emotional transparency. I feel like I've come full circle as I became overwhelmed with emotion really as soon as it hits the halfway mark. The truly special kids movies take children's emotions seriously, and this never minimizes how Elliott feels about his connection with his titular alien buddy.
Henry Thomas in this, good grief. In…
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The Drowning Pool 1975
Even better than Harper for me. A lot of that is the setting, both that it's him as a fish out of water but also the natural layout of the Bayou makes for a good place for a mystery to unfold. I also love this era of Newman, he's so comfortable with his screen presence. It doesn't hurt to get Gordon Willis in his prime, hot off Godfather 2 (the swamp scene rivals anything he did with Coppola). Melanie Griffith…
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The Last Airbender 2010
Hello darkness my old friend
I watched The Last Airbender again
By act two my friend was sleeping
So bad it left me weeping
And the mispronunciations that were planted in my brain
Still cause pain
Within the sound...of Ong
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Don't Look Up 2021
McKay getting all these incredible movie stars together to make this is kinda like coming home from an intense workout and going for a refreshing bottle of water, only it tuns out the bottle is full of cheap tequila and causes an instantaneous feeling of complete repulsion.
I thought Vice was the peak of condescending cinema and yet this somehow tops it, filled with the kind of pithy snark that is serving nothing approaching anything genuine or interesting. It's not…