I watch a lot of movies, mostly kids’ movies and Hollywood action blockbusters, but in principle I’m willing to watch anything that isn’t horror. I’m keeping a list of the movies I’ve seen. Read these posts for my reactions and plot summaries, many of which are in the form of a beat sheet as described in Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
This was fun. Silly, but with strong themes of hope, friendship, and family.
Wikipedia says: Polygon said Carrey’s “gloriously deranged one-man, two-character musical” contrasted with the “utter sincerity” of Reeves, who made Shadow a “weirdly likable little ball of pain”. Sounds about right.
A Christian knight named “Dante”, freshly returned from the Crusades, journeys through Hell looking for the soul of his lover Beatrice after she dies in his arms, the last of his family to be slaughtered by someone unknown. Her soul is snatched away from him by the devil as she screams that he must have betrayed her; he denies this. But at the gates of Hell, his torso is embroidered with a red ribbon cross depicting, like film slides, his sins. He meets Virgil and travels through the circles of Hell, attacking monsters, protesting his innocence, and calling out to Beatrice, whom the devil intends to wed. Can he stop the marriage? And is he worthy of Beatrice’s love? (Or God’s?)
This movie is based on a game that is based on the actual Inferno. The episodes in this Japanese/Korean/American production are animated in slightly different styles, but the plot all hangs together. It’s a clever fantasy/action/horror adaptation.
See below for more details about the plot. SPOILERS.
This historic movie was controversial because it featured two cross-dressing male characters; they pose as female musicians because they need to escape the mafia. I didn’t find it entertaining, just awkward and silly.
Your mileage may vary! According to Wikipedia, it “opened to critical and commercial success and is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time.” That’s why it keeps cropping up on lists of “must-watch movies,” and that’s why I watched it.
In this movie, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, whose boyfriend kicks her out because she’s unemployed, broke, and out drinking with friends all the time. She leaves NYC, moves into the empty house her family owns in her hometown, and gets a job with the grade-school classmate who runs the local bar, which means she gets to keep drinking. Here’s the thing, though: she discovers that whenever she steps into the local playground, Seoul, South Korea gets attacked by a giant monster whose movements exactly match her own.
That’s the premise.
I think they mismarketed this movie as comedy. It’s really dark, actually. Okay, fine, it’s black comedy. I thinnnk I’m glad I watched it… but I wouldn’t watch it again. Yeah, she’s under the spell of alcohol addiction, but it’s actually a lot worse than that. You can shake addiction. What you can’t do is reason with a psychopath who has some sort of hold over you. That’s scary, man.
Anyway, the movie is a clever metaphor, and there are flashbacks that ultimately “explain” (not that it’s really explicable) the origin of the monster. So if you’re not afraid to see Gloria cornered by a violent psychopath in the second half of the movie, and you like black comedy, give Colossal a try, I guess.
Rotten Tomatoes currently says 82%; IMDB says 6.2/10; Google says 53%.
The show is about John, the extremely smart but hermit-like identical twin brother of a police investigator. John makes a living inventing puzzles under the pen-name Ludwig. John must assume the identity of his brother James in order to figure out why James has disappeared. (Don’t expect Season 1 to answer that question, though!)
The episodes, as you would expect, are a mixture of fish-out-of-water comedy, displays of intellectual brilliance that address some specific police investigation that “James” becomes involved in, and delicate attempts to pursue the dark secret of the disappearance of the real James. And is there a love triangle? Maybe so…
See below for a few more thoughts (no spoilers).
In 2024, I watched 50 movies (well, 46 movies, a miniseries, and three tv shows).
Part of the reason the number is so big is that I went on two international trips and watched 13 movies on planes. I try to watch foreign movies that I’d never even hear about, rather than Hollywood movies that I already know I want to see.
Siqi and I only watched 2 movies in theaters. China does screen Hollywood movies in English, but you kinda have to look out for them and plan to go when they’re available, and we didn’t pay that much attention.
We (re)watched 14 movies and shows on DVD. Sadly, most of my DVDs are currently in storage.
Luckily, Chinese streaming services are super cheap and have a ton of English-language Hollywood movies, and we have a big TV in our living room. So we watched 21 movies and shows online. (Still, like everyone who uses a streaming service, we had to go looking for things on multiple platforms because licensing.)
See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.
What kind of movie *is* this?
Well, it combines a wide variety of genres: I’d say it’s sci-fi, martial arts, midlife crisis, coming-of-age, multicultural, LGBT, and dramedy—also, according to Wikipedia, it has elements of absurdism, surrealism, animation, and fantasy. Some of the humor is too deliberately gross, sexual, or absurd for my taste, but perhaps that’s inevitable, given how many styles are mixed together.
Kind of like Free Guy (2021), it was a creative, entertaining, meaningful, optimistic synthesis of many things I’d seen before. There’s a TV Tropes page on it that, well, lists the tropes it uses; and it’s lonnnnng….
Maybe what the movie reminded me of most (since arguably the movie’s salient aspect is zaniness) is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), especially the effects of the improbability drive (“Ford, I think I’m a sofa!”). Oh, and actually also Spies in Disguise (2019), which features defensive “weapons” that defuse violence instead of perpetuating it. And then there’s the idea, also found in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), that humans can’t absorb all the information in the universe without ceasing to be human.
The “themes” chunk of the Wikipedia article is worth reading. TLDR? It says the movie urges us to resist nihilism. In the end, something matters. That’s what overwhelmed Chinese immigrant Evelyn has to learn—but she’s in the middle of an IRS audit of her laundromat, a divorce, and a fight with her distant, angsty, overweight, tattooed, lesbian daughter about whether to tell grandpa she’s a lesbian. She’s mediocre at everything. How can she be expected to save the multiverse?!
“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.
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.)
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.
