#2,180: Ant-Man

Misery Loves Comedy - ★★½☆☆
Probably not a very good movie, but fun to put on in the background and listen to comics chat.

FWIW, I'd probably vote that the terrible childhood thing is a predictor, but not a direct precursor. I always think that I'm an exception to the rule, but then I realize that's just because I'm not miserable now.

Mr. Holmes - ★★★★☆
Fun, lovely, sad, faked me out once or twice by not going for an insane twist reveal thing. Uses the time that could have been spent on insane twists instead on earned payoffs. It has that classic novel-ish, multiple time period structure. Also has BEES!

Paper Towns - ★★★☆☆
Another solid high school movie of 2015. I recall really liking the music as it's used, but the soundtrack album sounds like one boring, samey blob.

This is a much less subtle movie than It Follows, and I delight in reading each review that misses the point. Of course, I would do well to imagine these reviewers complexly - not as idiots, but as people. Perhaps as idiotic people!

I dug the adventure gameness of the third act (of five), but Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is probably the better movie here, and carries a very similar message with more charisma.

Ant-Man - ★★★☆☆
I bet this would have been a good Edgar Wright movie. It'd be interesting to see the script he left behind. The one they shot has some pretty cliché lines in it, but I like to imagine that they were written deliberately, a counterpoint to the intended stylish visuals. Instead, we got Paul Rudd standing still in the middle of a frame saying something bland. It feels like the difference between Airplane! and Zero Hour!, except in this case the deadpan dry dialogue actually was written to be done as a comedy... and nobody noticed.

From the first announcement, I agreed with the popular wisdom that Marvel would never make a movie starring Hank Pym, but now I kinda wish they had.

#2,175: Burden of Dreams

World 1-1 - ★★★☆☆
The part with the history of Activision was new to me.

Deep Web - ★★☆☆☆
A summary of the Silk Road case. Less in-depth than some NPR coverage you can listen to out there.

Fitzcarraldo - ★★★½☆
The story of a man with a superhuman ability to reframe his situation. There is no calamity, no defeat that cannot also be a victory! A long movie, but not a wasteful one.

On a side note, it appears to have been shot in English, but also badly dubbed into English? Weird. The sync sound in Burden of Dreams was fine and normal.

Burden of Dreams - ★★★☆☆
Documentaries about the making of movies are usually interesting to me, even though clever documentarians might be responsible for the cliché that movies are always about their own making.

Documentaries about movies that do NOT get made are something I don't think we need so much of, but I guess I want to complete the trilogy of movies about Jason Robards getting sick and quitting movies.

#2,171: Inside Out

Mad Max: Fury Road - ★★★★☆
Still fun, easy to imagine how you'd end up watching this in years to come or as a frenetic background of some kind, but for this summer I'm maybe wearing down on it a little.

Terminator Genisys - ★★★☆☆
You think the first trailer gives away the big twist. Then you see the second trailer, which does give away the big twist. Then you start to think that's too big of a reveal, so it must be a fake-out. But it's not. Anyway, this is, I guess, my favorite non-canonical Terminator movie, and it wipes the slate clean for a whole new series of big budget Terminator fanfic.

The Terminator - ★★★★☆
When I was a kid I'd decided to tell people that they were going to make a sequel that was all about the future war. There was nothing to back up my story, and nobody in particular to tell it to, but the future segments just seemed so amazing. Of course, that's because all we get are glimpses, which are the correct amount. The movies about the future war are each a disaster.

I didn't realize, while watching T5, just how much of T1 they lifted. T1's still the better movie, of course. I love the look of movie lasers from the 80s.

Inside Out - ★★★★☆
I remember books that I read as a kid that were obviously, unambiguously fiction, and yet some explanation or concept from them stuck with me and became how I thought of or visualized a part of the real world. I don't know if this will become the most beloved of Pixar movies, but I do think this representation of the psyche is going to really stick with a lot of people. And I'm so happy that Pete Docter got to make another new movie. In 2016 we batten down the hatches and ride out wave after wave of sequels. (Okay, everybody loves the sequels, but I don't want them.)

#2,169: Jurassic World

Spy - ★★★☆☆
Better than I thought it'd be. It's like a good Mortdecai. I liked how the movie kind of pokes at the idea of how we typecast Melissa McCarthy by making all her disguises the kind of roles you'd expect her to be cast in instead of cool action spy, but then the movie still puts her in situations that seem like we're meant to laugh at her, not with her, so I'm not sure whether we've made any progress or not. I guess we're good for another three months until the next not-so-great spy comedy comes out.

The Wizard - ★★★☆☆
I don't think I'd ever seen this all the way through before, or realized that some of the internet jokes based on it were from this movie and not commercials. (A fine line, perhaps.)

Kind of fun to spot that it's shot by the guy who shot recent watches Spy and Love & Mercy, and stars Jenny Lewis whose name keeps popping up in movie theaters at the end of the ubiquitous Rikki and the Flash trailers. I mean, not very fun, but kind of.

Avengers: Age of Ultron - ★★★½☆
My original 5 stars was based on fan-wow, more or less the Harry Potter problem I described earlier. I did, and still do, want to see more of all of these heroes on the screen, but this is pretty cluttered.

Jurassic World - ★★☆☆☆
This reminds me of, like, Airport '77. It's a 70s disaster movie where we just cut away to the control tower to see people react to more bad news to help us understand that the news is bad. And we do that here because there's no character we care about. Nobody learns or grows or changes.

JP4 also makes me think of Birdman, because of the open contempt it has for audiences, who apparently love it.

#2,166: Dope

Love & Mercy - ★★★★☆ 
I could have watched a whole movie with re-enacted studio sessions. God only knows how much more fun this movie is for someone who really knows the album.

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - ★½☆☆☆
A lot of times when I pick a documentary to watch, I pick something that addresses a topic that I'm interested in.
And: a lot of documentaries are primers to the topic they discuss.
So: they cover a breadth of information about their topic, but don't get especially deep.
But: because I'm already interested in that thing, I'm already familiar with the basics, and then I'm kind of bored with the movie.

This is not that. This is a movie for someone with a deep love of Wilco. Or maybe at least a passing familiarity.
Also: I couldn't help but wonder whether the filmmaker actually liked the band by the time this was all said and done.

Nightcrawler - ★★★★★
A lovely portrait of a sociopath. I think I understand what we're meant to think of him, but as an LA resident, I also admire his drive.

I wonder if this is the first time I've seen a Jake Gyllenhaal movie that's about the character Jake Gyllenhaal is playing.

Dope - ★★★★☆  
This is turning out to be a great year for high school movies. Probably, one of the best trailers of the year too, in that the trailer was a weird music video kind of thing and I had no idea what this movie was really about. And the movie continues to be surprising in it's form almost throughout.

The scene where a character replaces the letter c in his speech with the letter b was a lot like the Monty Python scene where a character replaces the letter c in his speech with the letter b.