February 2025 Watch

Saturday, 1 March 2025

This month was slow on movies and TV shows for me for different but related reasons, though my issue was with the difficulty I had finding anything I really like. I watched a handful of things I’d seen before and liked them well enough, but had little to say in the way of reviews, hence the reason I stopped including rewatches in the first place. I find myself a bit uncertain where to go with this, because I quite enjoy the process, but I’m less certain what I want out of these responses when everything I’m watching is boring me. I struggle with this because I love movies and TV shows but I am not loving these movies and TV shows. When my reviews are simply laundry lists of all the ways a movie could’ve been better, that’s deeply frustrating to me—I want to think, I want to be challenged.

I say all this to express: I’m figuring out where I’d like to go with this project. The process of taking the time to sit with my feelings on a film is genuinely enjoyable to me, and I don’t want to give that up. I want to recapture my excitement; I want to watch things that are intriguing, either by concept or thematically. I want to see films that make creative choices with writing or filmmaking, and I want to see those things cohere or fail to cohere, I want to see them have relevant, significant meaning. A film can do a horrible job of communicating what it wants to, and that’s fundamentally more interesting for me as there is a place to get a word in. If a film is technically proficient but less ambitious in its storytelling, I’m less likely to be engaged.

I’m not exactly sure of the steps to take to do this just yet, but I plan to figure it out soon. I’m hoping to be excited about this thing I love again, and to share that excitement here. This month’s responses are more about narrowing down what it is I’m looking for; as a spoiler: it’s not egregiously bad movies, but it’s not unambiguously good movies either.* I’ve been trying to compare movies I haven’t liked recently to movies I have, figuring out what exactly stands out as something I like, and going from there.

Fight Club (1999, dir. David Fincher)

It’s like, you finally watch the movie and understand what people are talking about. And not just the conversations around it regarding its themes and such, but like in high school when that guy just started talking like this all of the sudden. You understand that.

Fight Club is about a nameless narrator who comes in contact with Tyler Durden, a sort of stylish, charismatic everyman, and together they create a club where men can fight each other that eventually winds up in Tyler’s dilapidated basement. Eventually, this club turns into “Project Mayhem,” an organization of all the local men working on a mysterious project.

The thing is, my description is not doing the movie justice. I’m leaving out many details that makes it work cohesively because I think they make more sense in context. I was surprised I liked this movie so much because everyone is always talking about what a great movie it is and I didn’t think it could live up to the hype. But it does… until it doesn’t.

In the end, I think my issue with this movie is that I went in knowing about the twist, which meant that I predicted it in the first ten minutes. Normally I would not say this is an issue, but because I thought the twist was underwhelming, it sort of left me with a dread for the whole runtime. I kept thinking, “This is actually a really good movie, I sure hope this one thing doesn’t happen that will ruin it.” I spent a good portion of the time trying to reason away that explanation, and then failing every time Helena Bonham Carter came on screen. And then of course it plays out exactly how I feared it would.

I struggle with this because I think the way the twist actually played out was true to the rest of the movie: it was well-shot and edited, it worked with the rest of the story, and it captured that same level of artifice the audience had grown accustomed to. This artifice is best exemplified in the dialogue, which is so idiosyncratic to this movie, but easy to adjust to fairly quickly. It’s seen again in the “cigarette burns” scene and moments throughout the film, a call for us to acknowledge the construction of the movie, but also the distribution. And yet in a movie that was otherwise fresh and exciting despite the twenty-five year age, the content of the twist was so underwhelming.

In terms of how it relates to the themes, it’s fine. These are well-constructed due to a quintessential trait of this movie I was hesitant to admit to myself: it’s really cool. It draws you in, with exciting cinematography, strong editing, great costumes, and that strange dialogue. When people say this movie is “cool,” that observation alone is certainly sympathetic; it’s quite literally how the film arrives at its main messages. So then you have this moment that says, “This man is imagined,” and “He, too, could enact this type of behavior,” ideas that should be powerful and exciting, and it’s just undercut by how boring this trope is. Which, I cannot stress enough, is no fault of the movie; it’s purely a matter of personal taste.

My thoughts about this movie boil down to a wish I’d seen it earlier in my life. I hear people talk about how it changed the game for them, how it opened their eyes to film in a way they hadn’t before, and I get it. I completely understand how this movie could do that for someone, and I regret that it didn’t for me. With all that said, this is a legitimately good movie. My comments about the cinematography and editing are vastly understated; it works thematically and narratively, even though I can’t bring myself to like the direction it went in.

Moana 2 (2024, dir. Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand, David Derrick Jr.)

I’ve said in my reviews a couple times that I just had no idea what anyone was thinking when they made a choice, but this movie takes that comment to new heights. Strangely enough, I felt like I could see what they were going for in the many, many cracks, but I have a lack of specific understanding how it got to this point.

Moana 2 is the sequel to the 2016 movie Moana. It follows the titular character as she goes on a journey to explore the ocean hoping to reconnect its people. Along the way, she gains an ensemble crew and reunites with the demigod Maui. At the end of the movie, she becomes a demigod herself.

I suppose my main criticism of this movie was that it felt all over the place in pretty much every aspect. This is perhaps best emblematized by the horrible summary I just attempted, which I struggled with immensely because I had no idea how to succinctly express everything that happened, especially when so much of it was entirely inconsequential. The lack of cohesion or clarity made it genuinely frustrating to watch. It’s bad to such an extent that I feel mean even discussing it, as if the people involved were fully dealing with such difficult obstacles that they simply weren’t able to surmount. And yet, I spent time of my life on this movie and so I feel I must complain, to at least have some vindication of my wasted hours.

And so: the lack of cohesion. It permeates every element of this movie, from the incomplete plot threads to the lyrics of the songs to the visuals and scenery. The plot is horribly convoluted, with a fairly large cast that didn’t all need to be there—there’s Moana, Maui, the ensemble crew, the coconuts, the tattoo, multiple villains, and a new sister. The ensemble crew in particular felt entirely useless, with threads of a meaningful plot and a whole song dedicated to them, but they were ultimately meaningless in the face of Moana and Maui’s relationship in the climax of the movie. I found myself asking over and over why they were there, what they were adding for the story. I could see these hints at a movie that might’ve been, at a way they could’ve worked with the story, but the story that was told had no interest in making them meaningful characters, which meant we were wasting time that could’ve been spent elsewhere. The movie wrestled with its characters on a journey narrative and its characters battling powerful natural forces (i.e., gods), which meant that we didn’t spend enough time to develop either. With this massive cast, there were four bait-and-switch death moments in this movie, which undercut all of them so there was no stakes whatsoever. It is such a small detail, but it felt so massive to just keep getting the exact same plot beat over and over in the same movie. I genuinely had to wonder how many times the filmmakers thought this was going to trick the audience.

This was more than just a narrative problem, though, as even the visuals for the songs had strange timelines. There were no transitions between locations, making the world feel both huge and limitless and confusing, as well as shrunken and insignificant. With a story that deals with both a journey and gods in what are frankly unnecessarily convoluted plots, this sense of space only added to a deeply disorienting sense.

The songs are similarly incoherent, providing no orientation to the narrative and perhaps inhibiting it at a few points. They started out following a similar pattern to the first film, which was irksome, and then became quite expository. There was a lack of significance to the lyrics and their placement in the story, at times feeling like the narrative bent to the songs without much thought of what would come between them. The plot itself felt too fast and underdeveloped; I had little emotional connection to the characters or reception to the stakes. This would’ve been the perfect time for the songs to come in, but they did not manage to orient the otherwise incohesive narrative, only furthering the lack of clarity.

Compared to the massive structural issues with this movie, my final point is a small gripe, but it still bears sharing. This movie is so focused on cuteness and grossness in a way that completely undercuts both emotional and humorous moments. My friend made a quip at one of these gross sections of the film that explains the problem well, “That was for the babies in the audience.” Even if this movie made sense plot-wise and worked as a musical, it would still have this glaring issue of not working as a family film. It was clearly meant for an exclusively younger audience with its jokes and baiting plot beats, though I can’t imagine from its production this was actually the goal. I’m willing to admit that means it just wasn’t for me, but that does not explain the lack of narrative cohesion, which was difficult to follow as an adult—I cannot imagine being so young and trying to do the same.

Of all the movies this month, this one gave me the most pause in my response. It genuinely made me wonder what I was doing this for and if my reasons were worth it. Obviously if you watch the film, I am not saying anything all that surprising; it’s genuinely very disorganized and not at all worth it. Suffice to say, it was making me question my method. Specifically, throughout the movie I was rewriting it in my head, thinking about all the ways it could’ve been better. I struggle with the idea of using my reviews as a place to articulate these “rewrites,” because it’s not exactly what reviews are for, but I also don’t precisely see myself as a reviewer. I don’t yet have an answer for this question, but it’s something that will be on my mind for a little while until I do.

Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan)

It’s a bit hard to express this fully, but you know when you watch a movie that is technically proficient but gives you absolutely nothing? That’s how I felt watching this movie. It is, by all measures, a skilled and interesting film; I’m not here to disprove that at all. But it just didn’t manage to captivate me.

Memento tells the story of Leonard, a man with anterograde amnesia who is on a mission to kill the man who murdered his wife. He uses a combination of notes, tattoos, and polaroid photographs to help orient his search. The movie follows two timelines, one moving forward and the other moving backward, which eventually merge together at the end of the movie.

I think my disinterest in this film comes down to a sense of boredom with it; it’s a cool concept on paper but the execution was a little slow for me. As well, I found what it wanted to say thematically regarding revenge and belief was simply not deeply poignant to me. I just found it difficult to connect to this movie even as the concept genuinely intrigued me.

Furthermore, I have very little to actually say about this movie. I have one incredibly specific gripe I will get to, but other than that I find myself at a loss for more specific criticism. It’s a difficult situation to be in, because I spent a good two hours watching this film and having an opinion on it, experiencing a fair amount of intrigue for what would happen, but when I came out I was sort of just like “whatever.” This movie clearly had something to say, but it didn’t really challenge me at all. The filmmaking was cool—the way it worked with time especially was interesting and fun to watch unfold—but I actually felt it lacked enough tension to make those feelings more captivating than “I’m watching this now.”

And don’t get me wrong when I say all this—this is genuinely a well-made film. The noir feeling (a genre I disagreed with for most of the movie but heartily accepted in the following days) and storytelling timeline were well-done and fun to watch in the moment. My issues begin to arise as I think afterward about what the film managed to do. The more I write about it and discuss it, the closer I come to finding my conclusion: it’s thematically simplistic. That’s not to say the themes themselves aren’t complex and fully-realized, but merely that they are few and deeply intertwined with the subject matter. What the movie has to say about belief, trust of perception, and memory are so obvious with a memory-loss plotline that it’s not too demanding. Similarly, the didactic speech from Teddy at the end about revenge is a struggle to get through after a whole movie about getting revenge. I am frustrated by this need to instruct almost when sometimes it is just fun to watch a movie about a guy getting revenge. More complex ideas can and should arise from that, but—and it’s not so egregious as I’m about to phrase it—it seems resentful of its own concept. To bring in a comparison, I don’t like horror movies with speeches about how much violence sucks and things are scary sometimes; those are implicit motivations behind my viewing. I felt a similar issue with Nosferatu last month: in both films, there is such a lack of friction between the narrative and the themes that, despite complex conclusions, they feel relatively straightforward in what they are trying to do. I think this is what I mean when I’m calling these films boring, that they may be cohesive and thorough, but there is little to gnaw on.

As for my specific gripe: the transition in the colorful timeline to show time was moving backwards was really annoying. It felt like I was watching a made-for-TV movie cut to commercial but on like two times speed. At some point, I was fully sighing every time I saw it. I could say something about how I felt like I was being instructed on how to understand the movie even though it was clear what was going on without that, but honestly I think I just found it ugly.

So that’s really all I have to say about it. As I’ve stated: it’s technically captivating and a legitimately engaging concept. If you are interested in those things, which I am, it makes for a good watch; unfortunately, it loses a bit of that intrigue, ironically, when it comes to the scrutiny of memory, especially when that memory is keen to pick out lasting themes.

The Shape of Water (2017, dir. Guillermo del Toro)

I wouldn’t call this post late because it’s still the first of the next month, but the reason this post was not made in February was due to this movie. I knew that my reviews hadn’t been the most positive (or at least the negative aspects of some of them seemed to overshadow more positive feelings about others), and I was so excited to watch a film that would be a definite glowing review. I put off posting to watch this movie and write the subsequent review. That’s my bad.

The Shape of Water follows Elisa, a mute cleaner at a US government facility in Maryland. The facility she works at hosts a mysterious amphibious man whom Elisa develops a relationship with. When his treatment becomes dire and death appears imminent as American and Russian forces battle to get him first, Elisa sneaks him out of the facility and into her apartment. They continue their relationship, though she must eventually let him go.

This movie has been on my list since before it came out; my reasons for waiting so long are lost to time. As is immensely clear from my introduction of the film: I did not enjoy this movie. What’s worse is that I fully expected to adore it—not just like it, but only be able to think about it for days. If that is to happen, I am not aware of it yet, but certainly not with the attitude I’d anticipated.

I have very mixed feelings on Guillermo del Toro films; I find them all incredibly stunning visually, but my opinions grow more varied on the writing and plots. Crimson Peak, for example, is one of my favorite films of all time; even if I disliked everything else he’s done (which I don’t), this movie would be enough to make me try everything he’s worked on. My opinion on his adaptations, however, is much more straightforward. Suffice to say, even for something like this which is only an adaptation in the vaguest way, none of them have impressed me. The ideas taken from the originals rarely do enough to captivate me; his distinct visual style, while mesmerizing, can only go so far. What’s worse, he has such strong films that when I see ones like this, I can’t help but grow weary at them. It takes everything that makes films like Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth so incredible and almost insults them. Truthfully, I’m being dramatic, but I’m shocked at the kind of variety and inconsistency in his body of work.

All of which is to say: my issues came with the writing of this movie, but that is in no way unexpected, as unfortunate as that is. My praise, however, comes as this movie excels in its visuals in terms of aesthetic appeal. The vibrant color palette creates such a distinct sense and the opening sequence is genuinely one of my favorites of all time with how utterly stunning it is. The way its visuals are brought back later in the movie is so fun and ridiculous and all of the things that I wanted this movie to be. With that said, the visuals lacked at remaining consistently meaningful. There was such an opportunity for visual storytelling with this movie that was almost entirely ignored.

More specifically, the film failed to communicate Elisa’s— well, anything. Her personality, her flaws, her wants. I understand, as she explicitly tells us, that she wants to be understood in a particular way she doesn’t have access to and she’s attracted the amphibious man, but that’s a very small amount to know about the protagonist of the movie. We have another handful of trivia, but it’s exactly that: trivia. Her biggest flaw is that she’s physically careless or unaware of her environment, with people telling her not to be late or to watch out for that car, which is not much of a flaw to work with at all. The beginning of the movie and the way the characters, even her friends, speak for her (more on that in a moment) imply a routine and fear of the world that will be overcome or at least acknowledged by the end of the movie, but the romantic plotline does little to deal with it in a meaningful way.

And I found that a lot of this came down to how they handled Elisa’s mutism. Over the years, I’ve heard time and time again how brilliant this movie is for disability representation, but when it came down to it, there were few shots of Elisa herself. When characters spoke for her, we focused on them visually and vocally. Subtitles were used, but only at certain moments, moments when the film gave her the opportunity to speak for herself. Even this could’ve been interesting, the film molding around Elisa’s growing confidence and assertiveness. But instead this reaches a peak very early on in the movie, at the moment Elisa expresses her feelings about the amphibious man to Giles, whom she demands “Repeat” what she signs moments before. When characters like Zelda or Giles speak for her, we’re completely dependent on their interpretation of her words. The film doesn’t actually do anything meaningful with this; there are these moments of climax (the one with Giles and perhaps the one where she signs “Fuck you” to Strickland) but actual change pales in the face of the plot itself.

This really undercut her as a character; to be frank, she did not get nearly the same amount of complexity as her male counterparts like Giles or Strickland. We see a similar occurrence with Zelda, whose support of Elisa, and the moments where that support wavers, do not allow for the same depth of character as Giles, even though he embodies a similar role. David Boles’ “The Shape of Water: Guillermo del Toro and the Failure to Consecrate” does a solid job explaining how the representation of Elisa falls flat in terms of factual accuracy; I want to take that a step further and suggest that even just within the story, she is not given the same agency or even presence as other characters. And I want to stress: there is a world in which the film is doing to Elisa the thing that is being done to her in her personal life as a reflection of what is happening. If it is intentionally attempting to do that in service of a greater theme, it is failing and instead just reenacts what she goes through to no clear end.

Furthermore, with the inklings of understanding we have of Elisa (due almost exclusively to her performance, though the same cannot be said of her writing or the filmmaking), are not well complemented by the romance. The relationship between Elisa and the amphibious man is simple and straightforward. Once again, there is a world in which a minimalistic—or even an entirely physical—relationship works well for this movie, but as it is, it does not function that way. There is no arc beyond Elisa needing to let him go (and the inverse, to a lesser extent), no genuine connection between the two. It is literally about eggs, music, and having sex, and nothing else. This would not be a problem if there was not explicitly a scene of Elisa explaining how he views her being quintessential to her interest in him. There is a scene later in the movie that “calls back” to the eggs they shared at the beginning; it should be a charming, cute reference to their meeting in a high stakes moment and instead it reveals just how insubstantial their relationship is.

This is the reason I struggled with this movie: it sets up a clear arc for Elisa that it does not reward and that would be better expressed through the exclusive lens of her sexuality. Rather than that, we get a barebones romance that both undercuts that possible interpretation while not providing enough intrigue or tension to sustain the story. We spend about as much time with them as we do with the American-Russian scientist drama, and that is immensely more well-developed and engaging than Elisa’s romance. Any possible threads of interpretation of the agency angle for the story become meaningless as the film culminates in Elisa’s “death,” prioritizing the romance plotline over her personal development, thus solidifying the story the movie wants to tell.

I don’t feel as put off by this movie as some of the others I watched this month, so that’s an improvement. I felt myself able to pick out specific reasons I did not like it that spoke to a more substantial engagement with the film, even though I wouldn’t really call it “enjoyment.” That is, I saw it trying something and failing, which I appreciate if nothing else. In the end, I thought this movie would be so much better than it was, and the way it treated Elisa was the main cause of that dislike.

*From a technical and simplified perspective; this is not a categorization I love to make but it does make it easier to write sometimes. Please take my word choice with a hefty grain of salt.