Category: movies

Read the credits after you watch a movie. Aren’t you amazed at how many people were paid to contribute to creating it? These are good times indeed.

Person of Interest (S1 to S5)

“You are being watched. The government has a secret system that spies on you every hour of every day…”
—quote from the show’s intro

My records indicate that I was watching this series in 2012. At the time, the premise seemed like just that, a premise: A guy gets some information about something bad that will happen unless he can prevent it, which then of course he sets out to do. That’s the same as the premise of a show I watched in the 1990s called Early Edition. In that show, a guy gets a magical newspaper and thus can read tomorrow’s news today.

Nobody reads newspapers anymore. In Person of Interest, the protagonist’s magical source of information isn’t yesterday’s technology, it’s tomorrow’s: artificial superintelligence.

See below for more on the show and what I thought of it.

TLDR? I think it’s a fantastically entertaining show, in part because it’s funny and in part because it’s deadly serious.

Continue reading Person of Interest (S1 to S5)

Movies watched in 2023

In 2023, I watched 7 movies in a theater, 5 on DVDs I own, and 1 on a plane. The rest, my husband Siqi and I watched online using a streaming subscription or rental platform of some sort. Subscriptions and online rentals are cheap in China, and the China platforms have Hollywood stuff with the original English audio, but here as elsewhere, no single platform has everything.

See below for top recommendations and a complete categorized list of what I watched, with some brief notes.

(It’s 2025 now, so these are movies I watched 1-2 years ago. If I don’t remember them, that’s partly why. Or maybe they’re just not that memorable. Or both.)

Continue reading Movies watched in 2023

Barbie (2023)

If you think Barbie was well done, you and I have a different idea about what a well done movie does.

My reaction in this case was not “Well done, thanks, I hate it.” That’s more or less how I felt about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), which I wouldn’t have watched if I had known it was horror sci-fi and not sci-fi. That’s on me.

Nor am I objecting to the fantasy premise, which is that someone in the real world is adversely influencing a Barbie in Barbieland, thus that Barbie has to go to the real world and do something to fix the situation.

Nor is my negative reaction rooted in culture politics. By all means, be overtly didactic and feminist or whatever, but for the love of cheesecake, have a coherent, positive message.

Much like Frozen, Barbie was immensely entertaining, but the longer I thought (and thought and thought) about it, the less the characters, plot, and theme made sense.

Spoilers below.

Continue reading Barbie (2023)

Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Amazing movie. Sure, it’s basically just “get the MacGuffin, save the world,” but it’s done so well! Tension, excitement, scenery! (Sand dunes, Rome, Venice, Norway pretending to be Austria!) I can’t believe the movie was 2 hours and 45 minutes. Felt a lot shorter.

It’s timely too, talking about AI, and I’m so glad there wasn’t a lot of fear-mongering anthropomorphic villainous moustache-twirling; and anyway, no one could equal Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith in The Matrix. Unlike the machines in The Matrix, the AI in Dead Reckoning is not, I would argue, actually central to the plot, nor is it a character. It’s just the setting, part of the premise. The story isn’t about AI any more than it is about a key. The story, to the extent that any story holds the action sequences together, is about people.

Why did they make this Part One? I have a theory about that.

Beware spoilers, there’s a whole plot summary below! It’s time to save the cat.

Continue reading Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Movies watched in 2022

I watched a ton of movies in 2022!

Whyyyy?

Partly it’s that I was having fun buying DVDs from a junk dealer in Chinatown for SG$1 each and arranging them on the massive new shelf in my living room—and thus of course also wanted to watch them.

The living room that was. (The shelves and movies are in storage now. Sigh.)

Partly it’s that watching a movie every Saturday online with my boyfriend Siqi was an important part of our long-distance relationship. (In December, I moved to China, so now we can actually watch movies together on the same sofa!)

See below for top recommendations and notes on some of the other movies I watched.

It’s not a complete list because I don’t remember much about some of them. It’s actually 2025 now, so these are movies I watched 2-3 years ago. If I don’t remember them, that’s why. Or maybe they’re just not that memorable. Or both.

Continue reading Movies watched in 2022

Movies watched in 2021

Apparently I watched 88 movies in 2021. They’re listed in my movie log.

  • 39 were movies I was rewatching.
  • 34 were in a series.
  • 16 were animated.
  • 9 were book adaptations that I watched because I read the book.
  • 6 were starring Keanu Reeves.
  • 5 were starring Tom Cruise.
  • 2 were live-action with animated characters.
  • 2 were Chinese.
  • 2 were in theaters.
  • 1 was a musical.
  • 1 was a documentary.

Continue reading Movies watched in 2021

Movies Watched in 2020

I watched 65 movies in 2020. That sounds like a lot, even for a lockdown / quarantine / stay-at-home kind of year, even for someone with no kids.

On the other hand, I don’t watch television.

Let that sink in.

TV shows add up fast! Movies don’t require the same time commitment. They come in self-contained 90-minute or two-hour chunks. Movie marathons are less likely to occur than TV binge-watching because not every movie is part of a series, and movies don’t tend to end in cliffhangers.

See below for stats and favorites.

Continue reading Movies Watched in 2020

Minority Report (2002)

I like sci-fi movies, and I like Tom Cruise movies, but I don’t like this particular sci-fi Tom Cruise movie, which I just watched for perhaps the second or third time. It’s a murder mystery that thinks it’s sci-fi—a philosophical murder mystery with some annoying CGI and a dash of horror.

See below for more thoughts (no spoilers).

Continue reading Minority Report (2002)

Total Recall (2012) again

The sensibility of this version is different. Totally different. 😉

I like the overall feel of this version better than that of the 1990 movie, but the story is much, much worse. The conflict between the haves and the have-nots doesn’t hold up. The resolution is not one.

I’ve written about Total Recall (2012) before. Here’s what I have to say this time. Beware spoilers.

Continue reading Total Recall (2012) again

Total Recall (1990) again

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Total Recall was one of the most expensive movies of its time, and like a lot of movies based on stories by Philip K. Dick, it has an interesting premise. It’s a classic of the sci-fi/action genre and its plot is a lot cleverer than that of the remake, but it’s still too bloody for my taste. Here’s what I wrote about it before.