teslac0ils

If the last couple of movies I saw were surprising hits for me, this is an extremely unsurprising one. I love a good courtroom drama and this is just an extension of that genre.

For a movie where you could say nothing happens but a bunch of guys arguing in one room, it's impressively well-paced. Moments that need some time to breathe get them, but it never feels like it's lingering on any one thing for too long. I don't know what I can say that contributes anything. It's a classic! It's great! A story of "innocent until proven guilty" really thoroughly examined and put into practice.

I was kind of braced to not like this one. I've had a bad track record so far with ~3 hour dramas about dudes wanting to be the most important dudes. I was pleasantly surprised- I really got into this one!

Even before it was evident to me what this movie was really about, it was quickly clear to me that it was more my speed. Stakes are established right away for the characters and their entire community. Even though there is a good share of plotting, the consequences are more immediate. There's also a good amount of fleshing the characters that just comes from them bullshitting, which makes me feel more engaged with the characters as humans, rather than everything being about The Big Goals That Move The Plot. Then, I was REALLY into it when I realized it's about a man destroying his whole-ass life. It's about The American Dream, what people do to achieve it, what we think success looks like on a shallow level. The end of the movie is so blatant about the statement it's making, how pointless and tragic it is to just accrue wealth at the cost of one's humanity.

I loved it!

And then I remembered the little bit I had known going in. The pop-culture idea of Tony Montana. Cool guy. Aesthetic. Shooting people, snorting mountains of coke, Say Hello To My Little Friend, etc etc.... it all feels so taken out of context to me now. In the context of the movie this is all him at his absolute lowest point. After he has ruined his life in multiple ways. Moments before he winds up dead in his pool like Jay Gatsby, in front of a monument to his own hubris. He isn't the figure I expected, in the end. He's a tragic, spectacular fuckup.

Then again, The Great Gatsby, too, is a story that got a movie adaptation in my lifetime, which I saw remembered fondly for its aesthetics and not much else. Is that just the nature of depicting wealth and power? No matter how much the story is blatantly criticizing it, viewers are so primed to see it as a sign of a Good Life that a lot of us are going to be taken in by it no matter what a destructive force it is, no matter how much the pursuit of it ruins a character's ability to actually enjoy the luxury they live in? I don't even want to frame this as people not understanding the stories- but is there just too much dissonance with the emotional reaction people have to displays of wealth? (Am I spiraling into being a pretentious dick? Is it not that deep?)

Much for me to keep considering.

Another one that wasn't really on the main list but got the Wife Override. If she puts it on the TV it's not like I'm going to NOT watch it.

First, I have to share my VERY terminally online thought I had pretty early on. Something clicked in my head like, OH, this had to be a huge inspiration for the style and sound design of Salad Fingers! It all looks awful, in such a compelling way. (Another personal note, I'm kind of creeped out by babies to be honest. Obviously, this is a feeling best not expressed most of the time, so in public, I don't. But this movie is so good at depicting what's unnerving about them...)

I was talking about stories that "run on vibes" in reference to action movies, but surrealism is truly the purest form of that. As a fairly logic-based person who often thinks of stories in terms of their structure, it's a style that I have a lot of admiration for when it's pulled off well, because I think of it as creating art without the usual guidelines. Just translating emotion purely into visuals. It's so cool to me that some artists can just do that!!

Ngl, I think I needed this. I was getting burnt out on pushing through regular dramas. I needed something more symbolism than narrative for my brain to really chew on. There's so much unexplained about the setting, and about what events even actually take place in the story... It's fascinating. I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while.

I'm looking for fanfiction and other amateur writing posted in fandom spaces, for a daily posting and analysis project! I'd like to focus on stories centered on queer sexuality, romance and/or identity. Please let me know if you'd like to volunteer your own fics or recommend ones! Don't be shy if you want to volunteer your own. If I get more recs than I can read in a year, I will be giving priority to authors who have personally volunteered! (As long as your body of work isn't 100% stuff on my major squick list, then I may pass, nothing personal.)

❗ IMPORTANT NOTE:❗ Out of respect for any author who may want to keep their fic-writing presence quiet, I will NOT discuss archive-locked fics from Ao3 or anything else hidden under privacy features, unless the author themself has volunteered personally or posted an applicable permission statement.

Smut/”pwp” VERY welcome! Just because I intend to be doing literary analysis does not mean it has to resemble conventional literature- in fact, I want to celebrate what makes fanfiction stand out as a distinct type of art!

I cannot guarantee that my review will be positive. However, I can guarantee that I will be engaging with every work in good faith as a piece of amateur art, and I can guarantee that even if it isn't my thing, I will be thinking about what kind of person I would recommend it to, because every fic is someone's thing.

Since this is a daily reading project I'd prefer something I can read in a day easily- I would say 10k words or fewer. (either whole work or a good single chapter)

If you want to know my preferences and rec me something you think I'll like, more details about my preferences under the cut. No need to read all that shit if you don't want to though, I am an adult capable of reading tags and avoiding my squicks.
( optional info if you want to know what I like! )

This had to be the biggest letdown for me so far, the biggest gulf between how much people thought I would like it and how I felt watching it. When it all started with an in-your-face message about how our society doesn't have enough eugenics I thought, man, I hope it doesn't come on so strong about this for the whole movie....

I think that this movie is, at best, extremely dated. It gets referenced a lot (and having seen it now, I would say name-dropped more than referenced) and from the way people talk about it, I was expecting something completely different. I genuinely think that people in 2020 who were saying that Idiocracy has come true are all people who had seen it when it came out over a decade ago and were half-remembering a few plot points.

It just really left a bad taste in my mouth how this movie is ready to critique so many elements of the culture it came from, and yet it falls into the same trap of American hyper-individualism. It places the blame for everything on Stupid People on a population-wide level doing Stupid Things and, with one or two small exceptions, isn't interested in examining the reason or incentives for the movie's perceived "stupid" behavior that is magnified in the future. Near the end the protagonist gives a speech and says, among other things, that everyone should Read Some Books. How are they supposed to do that? I don't think I saw a single book in the movie's depicted future. How on earth is telling everyone to pick up a book supposed to be an actionable solution to widespread illiteracy? Aren't we missing a few steps here? I feel like that moment encapsulates a lot of the flaws with this movie's outlook.

(Side note, "why does he reference books if I never see a single book and people are depicted as functionally illiterate" is a type of detail I'm willing to overlook when It's Not That Deep and it was just a throwaway comment. However, this movie is presenting blatant social commentary and I'm meeting it on its level.)

Unfortunately, it is a comedy, and a lot of the jokes fall flat if one is not bought into the premise. It's a lot of 2000s edgy humor, which I am not inherently opposed to- there are a lot of jokes that I think could work conceptually if I weren't going in with such ill will for the framing. As it stands, I genuinely found the in-universe show "Ow, My Balls!" funnier than most of the actual movie.

Partially I'm disappointed in this one because I went in with very high expectations. Mike Judge is behind this one, so, this will be up my alley I thought. I like King of the Hill! It turns out that makes me feel even more negatively toward this movie, because I KNOW he can do better with depicting people of lower socioeconomic status, and deriving comedy from the way people act as a product of their environment in a way that still recognizes their humanity.

I could go on a whole nother rant about how I think this also fails as a work of dystopian sci-fi. I think I've said enough at this point though. I think this is one that people fondly remember but it really doesn't hold up in my opinion.

While watching this I realized it probably was one of the more personal, I in particular should have seen it, ones. Not as much one of the "general knowledge" picks. I just didn't realize it yet. It isn't as common-knowledge as The War of the Worlds, for sure, but this one is much more my speed. It feels more like it's sticking to the vision of the story it draws from rather than arbitrarily making changes to be a more flashy movie.

This should be obvious from the fact that I am a sci-fi lover and a Chuck Tingle fan, but I'll say it anyway, I love it when sci-fi makes absolutely no attempt to be subtle about its politics! For real, not very far into the movie, before I checked what year this came out to confirm, I was like, ok, got it, this is some Cold War shit right here. Yet, it doesn't feel dated in terms of its story and message. I wish it did, actually. I wish the baked-in xenophobia of American culture felt more like something of the past.

Wow. I sure was the youngest person in the room when much of this movie list was being lovingly shouted at me. That's a big thought I had here. Maybe this... used to be funnier when it was more contemporary? It's not even a case of me missing referential humor (a common problem for me), like, I've seen the original Star Wars trilogy and I got the other sci-fi references but I didn't feel much beyond recognition. (Ok, I did smile at the Alien bit near the end, I'll give this movie that.)

Idk. I wish more of the comedy hit for me. It's honestly bothering me that I'm having trouble articulating why it didn't. I've seen two other Mel Brooks comedies (The Producers and Blazing Saddles) and really enjoyed their style of humor. I like space operas and poking at their tropes. I like meta humor. I did enjoy the running gag of there being Spaceballs merchandise everywhere. So... Why didn't this movie get a laugh out of me?

This movie is, and I say this lovingly, kind of stupid. I accepted early on that this wasn't going to be a satire of the caliber of Blazing Saddles and that's ok. In my opinion, for what it is, needed MORE stupid though. More dick jokes, etc. For my taste it felt kind of slow for a goofball comedy and it just wasn't my speed.

Man, this one was a rough watch. I know I'm saying the obvious here. This movie is famous for, among other things, being a rough watch. That being said, I didn't hate it. It wasn't like one of the ones I was really uninterested by, where I found myself watching the runtime to see how much was left. This was a surprise! Sight unseen, I really thought I was going to bounce off this one and I was dreading it.

I think I'm learning something about my taste in stories here. I have thought in the past that History Stories and especially War Stories usually aren't my thing. I think what it is, though, is that I tend to bounce off stories centered on the big important people moving the pieces. I really struggle to connect to that. I'm way more able to get into a story if it's from the viewpoint of the people who are really in the shit. That's exactly what this movie is. It's an intimate, brutal and chaotic look at war as experienced on the ground. The central mission of the main characters has nothing to do with the politics or ideologies of World War II, even.

I get why this one has a reputation as one of the best movies. It's excellent at depicting what it is, for good and for bad. I was apprehensive at the beginning that it was going to be one of those stories about what wonderful heroes American soldiers are- and it isn't entirely NOT that, I guess- but it also doesn't shy away from the ways flawed human beings in dire situations can behave, and I appreciate that.

 I was here for this one. I get the hype. I understand how they've made a whole bunch of these. I would watch more of these.

 This is one of those movies I just remember seeing referenced ALL THE TIME when I was a kid. It had to be on the list because it was such a big cultural thing!