Category Archives: Movies

Hollywood Thinks They Know Everything

The great screenwriter William Goldman had a famous quote about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” His full quote elaborated: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Goldman meant that, beforehand, nobody (neither the producers, studio executives, directors, actors, or critics) could accurately predict which movies would be breakout hits or which would be box office duds. There are always surprises in both directions: movies everyone thinks will succeed end up bombing, while surefire flops become smash hits. At least that’s the way the movie industry used to work. Now Hollywood thinks they know everything.

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Best TV (and YT) I Streamed in 2023

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1. How to with John Wilson (Season 3)

This continues to be one of the most uniquely brilliant shows on television. It blows my mind how John Wilson is even able to create this show, what his process must be, constantly filming his daily life and somehow editing it all into something cohesive and interesting. There is nothing else like it on TV. It’s almost like an entire show built around synchronicity. He follows serendipity wherever it takes him, around New York City and the entire country. He finds the weirdest people, and like Nathan Fielder, isn’t afraid to get super awkward. But the show is also quite heartfelt at times. Sadly, this is the final season, but I will eagerly watch whatever John Wilson does next.

2. Succession

I wrote about all four seasons of Succession here (and a fictional fifth season here).

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Best New(ish) Movies I Watched in 2023

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I already did my annual list of the ten best older movies I saw in 2023, so here is a list of the newer movies I saw this past year. They are separated into five tiers based on quality and listed alphabetically within each tier. (Check JustWatch.com to see where they are currently streaming.)

Tier 1: Cinematic Masterpieces

A Dark Song (2016) directed by Liam Gavin

I sat stunned as the credits rolled, amazed at how great this low-budget indie horror film was. It is an absolute masterpiece, maybe my favorite horror movie ever—at least of the new millennium. I was on edge throughout, legitimately frightened—all without a single jump scare. It is an occult horror movie about black magick and rituals, but they take the subject matter extremely seriously and clearly did research to make it seem realistic—which makes it all the more haunting. [Slight Spoilers Ahead] The story is about a grieving mother who hires an occultist to perform a ritual to summon her guardian angel to ask a favor so she can speak to her murdered son—and get revenge against his killers (who used him to perform an occult ritual). The ritual in the film is based on an actual ritual from The Book of Abramelin, which the famous occultist Aleister Crowley performed in real life. I find the world of occult ritual magic fascinating but also frightening. Occult horror scares me more than most other subgenres because the type of dark magic portrayed in the film might actually exist. Whether such dark forces are real or not doesn’t matter, because there certainly do exist occultists who believe them to be real and actually perform these magical rituals—but to what end?

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Top 10 Movies (At Least 10 Years Old) I Watched in 2023

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With 2023 winding down, it is time for my annual list of the ten best movies (at least ten years old) that I watched this past year. As always, this is not a list of the best movies ever, just those I chose to watch in 2023. I ranked the top ten, but the order doesn’t matter as much as the “tiers,” which I separated into five groups: I) Cinematic Masterpieces, II) Great Films, III) Just Good, IV) Flawed But Watchable, and V) Disappointing (Don’t Bother). The ordering of films within each tier are interchangeable. [Use JustWatch.com to see if/where these films are currently streaming.]

Tier I: Cinematic Masterpieces

1. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) – Directed by Werner Herzog

This is an amazing piece of cinema. It feels like a documentary following actual Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century searching for El Dorado. The opening shot is stunning, as hundreds of people descend a steep mountain trail carrying all their supplies. With so many of today’s movies shot on green-screen using CGI, the verisimilitude of this film was a breath of fresh air—literally. You feel like you are there in the verdant jungles of the Amazon with the actors—because the film was shot on location in the jungles of the Amazon. As a result, you feel the same constant dread that the crew felt, of trekking into the complete unknown, not knowing what danger may be lurking in the thick forest or around the next river bend.

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Excavating The Exorcist

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In honor of spooky season I will be exploring the Exorcist franchise. The 1973 original is a classic horror movie I had never seen until this year. Actually, I’d seen bits and pieces, specifically the infamous scene of the possession in Regan’s bedroom. That is part of the reason I avoided seeing the film for so long. As I’ve detailed before, I was not a fan of horror movies when I was younger, but even when I got into horror I avoided the demonic possession subgenre, perhaps because I found it particularly horrific. Demons seemed more realistic than zombies or vampires, and—if real—being possessed by an evil entity is probably the most terrifying horror scenario of all. Demonic possession movies could even be a case of “hyperstition”—or a piece of fiction that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and manifests itself in reality. Demons like those depicted in The Exorcist may not have existed before, but after the popularity of the movie, they surely exist now—at least in the imaginations of the viewers. I also avoided The Exorcist because there have been so many copycats over the years, vastly inferior retreads that further pushed me away from the possession subgenre as a whole. Plus with all the parodies and references that have permeated pop culture, I felt like I had already seen the movie. But because The Exorcist is so highly rated, and I am a horror fan, I finally saw the film in full for the first time this year, and I can confirm it is more than worthy of its high praise.

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Indiana Jones and the Rewatching of Movies

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I used to work at a job where I had to watch cable TV all day. (It sounds more fun than it was.) One of the networks I had to watch would often replay the same movies over and over again. At that time I was studying screenwriting and wanted to write movies myself, so it was instructive to watch a single movie multiple times to deconstruct it and figure out what the filmmakers did right or wrong, how and why. I tend to avoid rewatching movies unless it’s one of my absolute favorites, and even then, only years later when I don’t remember it too well. But for this job, I wound up seeing the same movie multiple times in a single day, or two days in a row, or several times over the course of a week/month/year. I saw both good movies and bad movies this way—and some movies that I thought were good when I first saw them, but by the fifth or tenth time realized it wasn’t very good in the first place. One movie (or group of movies) that I repeatedly watched at my job was the Indiana Jones franchise.

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AI Art & the Simulacra of Simulacrum

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There is growing concern that the proliferation of generative AI will remove humans from the equation of creativity because eventually most art will be AI-generated images based on previous AI-generated images until all art is simulacra with no connection to reality. But in a way, this has already happened—before the invention of AI art.

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The Artistic Singularity: Generative AI and the Future of Movies

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One of my works in progress is a science fiction novella about the creation of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). The story features a scene where the human programmers are amazed that the AGI can create original artwork of any kind on demand. I wrote the first draft in 2018. Yes, just four years ago an AI that could create art seemed like a speculative bit of futurism. Now it appears I will need to revise that scene, as what was “sci-fi” then is now just “sci.” Reality is progressing faster than I can publish science fiction.

When I wrote this post about DALL-E last May, I had only seen others’ generative-AI creations; I hadn’t gotten the chance to create my own AI art yet. Now I have and am utterly addicted. There was much hype around AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney when they were first released. Usually when something is hyped that much in the media it is overblown; the reality is far less dramatic. But after DALL-E became public, plus the release of the free and open-source Stable Diffusion, I have had the chance to create my own AI art (thousands of images at this point—and counting). While the initial hype was quite high, I would venture to say it was not nearly high enough. Most people still don’t realize how significant generative AI is/will be. In the future, people will look back at the world pre-AI art as a distinct, unrecognizable time. Generative AI is a total game-changer, an artistic singularity.

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Best New(ish) Movies I Watched in 2022

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I rarely see movies in the theater anymore and instead wait until new releases are available for streaming, so my reviews of “new” movies are not so “new.” It sometimes takes me a year or two to catch up. There are still a lot of 2022 movies I want to see (look for those on next year’s list). I’ll break this year’s list into tiers, Tier-1 being the best and Tier-5 being the worst. The movies in each tier are sorted alphabetically as it’s pointless to rank equally great works of art over each other. One is not better than the other—they are just different. (Check JustWatch.com to see where movies on this list are currently streaming.)

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Top 10 Movies (At Least 10 Years Old) I Saw in 2022

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With 2022 winding down, it’s time for my seventh annual list of the ten best films (at least ten years old) that I watched over this past year. The list is somewhat random and arbitrary, based on the movies I happen to choose to watch (or re-watch). The only theme I noticed from this year’s list is that the 1970s truly were a Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking. Even some of the deeper cuts from that decade are great.

1. Jeremiah Johnson [1972] – Directed by Sydney Pollack

I would say they don’t make movies like this anymore, except they did—at least once with The Revenant in 2015, which was clearly influenced by Jeremiah Johnson. This is a powerful film, so different from most of the CGI-reliant movies made today. You can tell the cast and crew were actually there on location in the remote wilderness of Utah filming this movie—and simply seeing that natural landscape on the big screen was captivating. It makes you realize just how extraordinary the pioneers who ventured out West were, considering the lengths it took to survive mother nature. The film also portrays the tragic violence that took place between humans—the pioneers and the Native Americans. Sometimes I feel the desire to become like Jeremiah Johnson and move out to the remote mountains, build my own cabin, and live a quiet life alone in nature to read and write—but only sometimes.

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