Watched Neil Breen’s debut film Double Down with some fellow cinephiles to take my mind off things. Not as much fun as Fateful Findings, but still great to see a director’s first movie to see how his technique evolved. Plus, you can see his entire taint in one scene. Def recommend to any Breen-heads out there.
Meandered around for a long time to find an elite comfort-food rewatch for the evening.
Yep. This will do.
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That one is so money 
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Man a ton of great movies out this week, I’m excited to be in a pitch dark room with no phone access more than ever in my life
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I turn it on for the laughs that live in my head all the time, but this really is a high-quality movie independent of the laughs. Kinda crazy how well it ages for a 30-year-old comedy, and it’s all thanks to Mikey just being this inherently decent guy who always makes a point of framing his buddies as huge clowns who are frequently out of line. Also lots of examples of what pretty ideal supportive friendship can look like. And such a feel-good ending. I’ve got basically no notes for this one.
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Two scenes from Swingers that will forever stick with me
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I really love that the blackjack dealer just HATES Mikey and Trent from the first moment. It makes the scene that much funnier.
PSA: My Old Ass now on Prime Video. One of the better 2024 releases so far IMO.
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I also saw that The Godfather 1 and 2 are on Prime Video now. Apparently only for November, so I’ll have to make it a point to rewatch those sometime soon.
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One time on YouTube I encountered a video that was a Michael Corleone tribute video…set to Fray’s “How to Save a Life.” I still periodically grapple with the notion that someone would just mash those two things together.
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Small Things Like These (2024)
Note #1: don’t name your movie this. C’mon. That’s clunky as hell.
Anyway, I spent much of this movie’s runtime trying to get attached to it. Trying hard to make this movie work for me. It was not easy. It has an extremely slow pace. People mumble to each other in Irish accents and I only understand like 80% of what they’re saying. But, whereas I will simply write some movies off and patiently wait for them to end so that I can say that they weren’t good, I never stopped putting in the effort here because this clearly had a number of components that worked. Cillian Murphy put the movie on his back very capably as our lead character, Bill. Some of the camera work was really cool. The movie had a compelling central tension.
But, beyond being slowly paced and mumbly, it did have other negatives. I didn’t love the way Bill’s wife was written. And I didn’t think the movie communicated very effectively until pretty late in the runtime about exactly why Bill was quite so indecisive as he dealt with the situation at hand.
Ultimately, the positives here slightly outweigh the negatives. It’s a challenging movie - I had the thought during, “sometimes I dislike a movie and only have a sneer to offer the people who like it; if I can’t bring myself to like this one, I’m going to have envy for those who do” - but it was worth the watch for me. Your mileage may vary.
3/5
Heretic
7/10
I felt disappointed. The first third to half was great. Tension filled discussions, dread, characterization through dialog.
But it devolves into stock horror and doesn’t really use that horror in an effective way. The whole time I was thinking man go back to the talking, the talking was great.
I got the ending but somehow it didn’t connect.
One thing I did like about the movie is there is almost no exposition. Within five minutes we are in Hugh Grant’s living room. It made the resulting discussion interesting because you don’t have a well developed idea of protagonists beforehand.
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Heretic (2024)
Watching this movie was the cinematic equivalent of watching a team run up a comfortable first-half lead before going on to lose the game.
I really liked the first 45 minutes or so. Watching Hugh Grant gleefully chew scenery in this role was a joy. The trailer for this movie really popped…but unfortunately this was an example of a movie giving a nutshell of its good parts in the preview and then smartly burying all the bad stuff until the unfortunate audience member has to experience them.
I won’t get into spoilers by offering specific nitpicks; I’ll say more generally that the movie reaches a point where every new plot reveal makes the movie seem dumber and dumber and dumber, and the trajectory only ever goes down once it starts in that direction. I really wish this Hugh Grant performance was attached to something worth rewatching, because that part of this movie does work. Unfortunately it just isn’t powerful enough to stop the freight train of stupid that comes unrelentingly barreling down the tracks.
2.5/5
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Fuck, looks like its gonna be a streaming watch and not a theater watch for me.
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Same. I appreciate these reviews.
Oh son of a bitch. That fucking blows
69 wayyyyy too young. Damn
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His face is so familiar to me and i know he did a bunch of minor roles but then i saw yeah he was kurn, son of mogh on star trek tng. rip to a real one
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