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.
Between June 2024 and June 2026, I watched all six of the Jane Austen adaptations in this particular box set, which includes:
Most of these adaptations struck me as boring, fussy and strident like a stage performance, or terribly incomplete.
More on various other adaptations below.
The movie Gattaca combines many things successfully. For one thing, visually, it is a retrostylized future with buildings, clothes, and cars designed to look like those of the past. For another, the society has several types of advanced technology: rocket science, embryology, DNA forensics, and electric cars, which, well, we have too, just not as good as theirs.
But do we want biotech as good as theirs? I mean, look what they did with it: Gattaca depicts a dystopia where people with unfavorable “in-valid” DNA sequences are consistently excluded from social and career opportunities.
When I’m on a long flight, I try to watch a movie or two from the entertainment system that I never would have heard of any other way, and this Palestinian black comedy is one example.
“When their father passes away leaving a large sum of money in the bank, two sisters put their differences aside and join forces against Sharia law, according to which their brother has the right to take double what they are entitled to.”
If you think it’s hard being a woman in general, try being a woman in Palestine… in this depiction, all the family and economic relationships are tilted against the women. The ambulance staff at first even refuse to state whether their father, who is lying in bed unresponsive, has died because no other male is present. I mean it’s like, a woman is still an adult, right?
In case you’re curious, the two sisters do manage to claim the inheritance for themselves; that’s not really a spoiler because it very much matters for the overall effect of the film how they try to manage it, and how they succeed… Do they enlist the help of someone’s boyfriend, husband, or son? Do they impersonate their dead father, or their undeserving distant brother, or some other male? Do they march into the bank with masks and a stolen gun and threaten the bank teller? Do they launch a protest campaign and achieve policy change? Do they just walk up to a series of ATMs and take out a thousand dollars 150 times over the course of a week?
Underequipped but relentless Chinese soldiers fight Americans in North Korea during the Korean War in winter 1950, ultimately forcing a retreat.
The news is always bad stuff, because that’s what competes best for our attention. And according to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News, we’re better off without it. I think that’s largely true. But, asks the mystical feel-good 90s TV show Early Edition: What if you got tomorrow’s news today? Would you try to change it? Prevent the bad stuff from happening?
Gary Hobson, a newly unemployed stockbroker, is kicked out of his Chicago apartment by his soon-to-be ex-wife and, while living in an old hotel suite, mysteriously starts receiving a printed copy of the Chicago Sun-Times a day in advance. The accompanying orange cat seems to want him to help people (rather than, say, place sports bets), so helping people becomes, well, not only his full-time job but his entire identity, his raison d’etre, like it or not.
In Asia, Michael Jackson never really lost his reputation like he did in the US. Here, he is apparently remembered as the King of Pop, and that’s it.
With the release of the 2026 biopic, which involved the cooperation of family members, the yuckiness surrounding his image seemed to recede substantially, returning his status to that of a fantastically successful and exceptionally gifted, if strange, artistic performer. In fact, my impression of him based on the movie (I didn’t know anything about his family life previously) is that he was for many years a pitiable victim of his father’s controlling tendencies.
Movies that are based on a true story tend to fail on one or both of two counts: they simplify, exaggerate, embellish, or otherwise bend history too much for the sake of manufacturing an engaging drama, or they keep too closely to the facts and wind up being boringly sequential—but I imagine that actually this latter happens seldom because it too obviously spells financial doom. In any case, the point is, real life doesn’t have plot; it doesn’t naturally supply one particular antagonist or challenge for a person to overcome. Life is messy. A film can’t afford to be, even though the process of making one, as in this case, is often anything but straightforward.
I don’t think there was *anything* I didn’t like about Project Hail Mary.
It was a grand, beautiful, mysterious, high-stakes sci-fi adventure, with a lot of comedy and drama and symbolism. Really the best new movie I’ve seen in a long while. 100% recommend.
In 2025, I watched 46 movies and 3 different tv shows.
I watched 9 movies on planes and Siqi and I watched 10 movies in theaters. The rest, we watched on DVD or online. Also, I watched a bunch of stuff by myself when I was sick.
See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.
The colorful fantasy car racing scenes are magical, but they’re also emotional, because the underdog main character’s victory is a victory for Justice itself. Speed Racer demonstrates that integrity matters, that you can win by being honest (though not by being naive), that cheaters, in fact, never prosper in the long run. It’s not subtle. It’s not realistic. But it has an awesome kind of purity. There’s nothing quite like it.
It scrambles the timeline in the sequence at the beginning, which seems like genius to me now that I know who all the characters are and where the plot is going, having seen the movie several times. It probably didn’t make nearly as much sense the first time through.
See below for a detailed plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
BTW, this story perfectly fits the Save the Cat genre called “institutionalized,” in which the main character encounters a group or a system and has to join, escape, or destroy it.
Some scattered thoughts:
It was really weird seeing different actors for Superman/Clark, Lois, Jimmy, Perry White, and Clark’s parents, because I’ve been watching the 1990s Lois and Clark TV series. That show belongs to a completely different era. (I like the show better than this movie. No contest.)
