Movies I Watched in 2025 January & February
The past 10 or 15 years I've been pretty bad at watching movies. Friends, strangers, students, they've all been baffled that I haven't seen X movie. And mostly I haven't cared too much. I just tend to prefer playing games or reading. Or watching a serial, a TV show.
But I used to watch movies a lot. As a kid I rented several movies every weekend. I taped stuff off TV too, and rewatched a selection of movies endlessly every day of summer break.
I watched every episode of mst3k they aired once I could get hold of it.
And through grad school, friends watched movies with me all the time.
So, I'm trying on watching more, and watching more by myself. I think I got tired of watching movies every get together with friends, because I wanted to talk to these people, which I can't do during a film.
Now, don't get too excited. I'm still slow.
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
2019, Rønning dir.
I'm not sure why this movie exists.
My partner really wanted to watch the first Maleficent with me, so we did late last year. And I really enjoyed it! So she got this one too and we finally sat down a few weeks ago. It is... not a good movie. It's not bad either.
It does a lot of the things all annoying sequels do, like revoking character growth from the previous film so there can be conflict in this one. It's also just kind of a mess. All the stuff with the dark fey feels tacked on, even though they couldn't have done without it. It feels like Maleficent is barely in it. And Aurora seems very goofy compared to the first movie. She almost immediately rejects her dad in the first movie because he's a fucking nutjob, but can't figure out the emotionally abusive queen is a shit without discovering the evil plan itself.
And maybe there's something there about emotional abuse and how insidious it is, but the movie doesn't sell it.
I had a good time though! Diaval is in there! There's a lot of the kind of thing you'd expect in a longer series, where they include something good to watch for every character just so fans of each character have something to get excited about.
Lone Wolf and Cub 1: Sword of Vengeance
1972, Misumi dir.
Now we're talking. I watched this in grad school with my partner and our friend. Pursuant to this whole project of trying to watch more movies, I jumped at a big discount to get a full year's subscription to Criterion. And they've got all the Lone Wolf and Cub films.
The first one is exactly what you'd expect: it sets the scene, the semi-official betrayal, and the first job we see Lone Wolf take on. We get our first glimpse of the Swiss army knife that is the baby stroller, with its hidden weapons all over.
It's difficult for me to gauge this as a movie, because it feels like a long episode of a show. And to some degree that's what it is. I looked up the dates for this one and the next one and they're both 1972; nearly all the films were made in two or three years. There's six of them. That's insane.
These films are part of the gonzo violent film scene Japan had going on, not that I know a lot about it at this time. But they're insane; sword blades get visibly buried in people's skulls and they keep talking briefly. In the second film, a set of half a dozen women in kimono rip a ninja apart one piece at a time to prove they're good at their job, despite everyone in the room knowing that already.
That's actually an interesting thing I've seen but it's presumably from the source material manga -- people throw their lives away constantly at the whims of these nobles who don't know what they're doing. In this one, the only two remaining soldiers this one noble has volunteer -- rather forcedly -- to attack Lone Wolf when he's receiving the order to kill someone from the noble, just to test if he's really as good as everyone says. They die, and now this guy has no soldiers at all left, when they could have, I don't know, asked Lone Wolf to show them his moves. Someone does that in the second movie and none of his retinue have to die.
Anyway. The second movie.
Lone Wolf and Cub 2: Baby Cart at the River Styx
1972, Misumi dir.
More of what I said before, though I think this one's notable (out of a sample size of two so far) because the job he takes isn't really all that nice. In the first movie, Itto -- Lone Wolf -- is protecting a child lordling who's targeted for an assassination. In this one, he's helping a local noble keep their monopoly on a trade secret by murdering one of the chief dye-makers who's fled the province for his own safety.
Itto regularly calls back to his oath that we see in the first movie, that he and his child will walk the "demon path" to get their vengeance, and I think that's what we're seeing here. He doesn't actually care what the job is, or at least, he doesn't care the way a noble hitman type might in another story. He insists on being told all the secrets and the story behind the hit, so maybe we'll see him reject a job one day, I don't know.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
1976, Roeg dir.
Criterion's streaming service rotates movies in and out, and this one, which I was curious about and my partner really wanted to see -- she's a big Bowie fan -- was leaving at the end of February. So we watched half of it in a couple of evenings and then finished it in one go on the last day.
It's good. In looking it up afterwards, apparently people like it; my impression was nobody really liked it but people watched it because Bowie was in it.
It's weird, in both good and bad ways. It is about 20 minutes too long. And it's just cumulative: scenes last slightly too long, things are repeated both within and between scenes, and a handful of montages barely read like montages because each individual cut is so long.
On the other hand, I liked that it was slower than what we're used to nowadays. So what the fuck do I know?
I went into it knowing so little that I wasn't actually sure Bowie himself was the alien until about 20 minutes in. And I think I enjoyed the experience that way. So I suppose here's your chance to quit reading and go find it, if you're interested.
So anyway. The whole thing is kind of about a nice, neat space alien with a wholesome goal being corrupted by shitty humanity, which is kind of impressive honestly. Bowie's alien begins the film drinking only clean water and ends completely addicted to alcohol. Despite moving into spoiler territory, I mostly want to avoid a summary; I felt like the mystery of what exactly was going on was good. What I'll tell you is the basic hook: the alien uses his knowledge of advanced materials to get a bunch of patents in the US and make himself extremely rich, for initially unknown purposes. A woman working at a hotel helps him when he gets ill and falls in love with him, kind of. And a scientist who is tired of teaching becomes obsessed with the company and is eventually hired by it.
It's uncomfortable sometimes, and there's a lot of nudity, with breasts and penises often visible. Surreal shots enter the film and then leave again, by which I mean the entire movie isn't like that but when they show up they do a lot of work.
THX-1138
1971, Lucas dir
Up front, I didn't finish it. I watched about half an hour, and I thought it was good, but it also got dropped off the Criterion service and I was watching it by myself so I didn't have time. I had to watch it in small chunks, because it's good but it's not pleasant. And movies don't need to be, but I just mean I couldn't get through it at my pace before I lost access. If it comes back I hope to finish it.
What I'll say based on just half an hour is that it's kind of a shame that George Lucas accidentally figured out how to print money with Star Wars, because THX-1138 is weird as shit and we could have gotten some more weird shit out of him. Like, we might think of Lucas as in the same ballpark as Lynch. There's a scene where the main character watches a hologram of a woman dancing while a horrible machine unfolds from the ceiling and jerks him off -- all while his mate is in the other room peering around the corner and trying to get him to talk to her. That's some weird shit, it kicks ass.
Let's call this four and a half movies, I guess? Pretty good for someone who usually watches about half a dozen in a twelve month period.