Movies Archive

Just some writing about movies... from letterboxd but u know how long are any of these platforms gonna be around anyway so here they are on rice dash boy dot com. These are posted in reverse chronological order of me having written them. This is not very user friendly lol just wanted to put it here.

Rock & Rule (1983)

May 2025. some baffling decisions in there but it does go hard tho

X: The Movie (1996)

April 2025. kind of loose and incomprehensible to me but possibly the coolest looking animated thing ever made lol

Paul (2011)

April 2025. 'starman' but bad

True Stories (1986)

April 2025. nothing like it!!!!!

The Five Star Stories (1989)

April 2025. wow! there should be ten times more of this!! cramped and disorienting in a way that i like but maybe doesn't 'work.' beautiful Textures, preposterous mannerist character designs, last chunk goes extremely hard. insane opulent animation where it counts. i love it

The Day the Earth Blew Up (2024)

March 2025. precisely miraculous to me specifically that there is a movie in theaters in 2025 heavily trading in fucking Duck Dodgers aesthetics. Loved it!! The cartooning on daffy duck is just nonstop virtuosic in particular; like so good that it makes the whole thing work in my mind. The factory bit really hit. Engages with animation as a form and a history so hugely and passionately. i love cartoons

Escaflowne: The Movie (2000)

March 2025. HONESTLY Hard to not compare it to the series, one of the best works of serial fiction i have ever seen... This feels a bit flimsy and rushed sometimes by comparison, BUT there is some truly sick shit in it fairly constantly... Nobuteru yuki's character design habits are a fixation of mine and their implementation here feels sort of Weird but still very cool stuff... generally the visual style seems uneven, or not quite fluently-employed enough or something. The grotesque physicality and scale of the mech stuff really rocks; excellent. Charming moody cathartic in some nicely committed poetic moments. i should watch the series again probably

Flow (2024)

March 2025. wow quite good! so cool to see something made so earnestly and cheaply like this. exciting to see something like this. extremely smart and restrained in use of anthropomorphization i thought... cute and Beautiful but never really losing focus or momentum.... another excellent LATVIAN CAT CARTOON

Twilight of the Cockroaches (1987)

February 2025. can't believe i had never heard of this. really fairly wild premise executed with total commitment... emotional throughlines articulated just barely not quite well enough to forget the joke that they are all little cartoon cockroaches. animation always kind of simple and low-rent but remarkable compositing, really impressive i think.

Longlegs (2024)

February 2025. ehhhh seems a little disorganized. gets convoluted and obnoxious in a way that doesn't hold together for me. i like some aspects idk. a silence-of-the-lambslike

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

February 2025. it rocks idk man

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)

February 2022. generally i thought kind of unsubtle and goofy but i thought it held together and had a good rhythm. Characters are all kind of uncanny stereotypes and the image of 'political convictions' and 'activism' presented here are frustratingly low-resolution, but you can see how that sort of simplicity helps make the narrative structure work a little better and more intelligibly maybe? I guess I end up wishing it had felt more like the impassioned, desperate plea that it seemed to want to be.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

February 2025. compelling... often kind of hypnotic!! I am maybe a little too squeamish for this but there is a vibe of constant abstraction that makes some of the more horrible stuff less horrible. Generally all a little too abstract or affected for me maybe. Some great weird performances... often it is all kind of Hilarious honestly!!!! I would like to have more literacy with Cronenberg's other comparable stuff. Viggo occupies a role here that is weirdly parallel his role in Eastern Promises lol. viggo my beloved.

It feels kind of senseless for the product design of the surgery-technology company to all look like 'stuff out of a cronenberg movie.' right? Like the aesthetic is so LOUD, and so resonant in a particular way with audience, that it feels like it demands some more textual explanation, or something. I guess the idea is these things are treated more poetically than is my aesthetic... blurring technology/flesh distinction... but again the aesthetic is so loud it kind of demands further context to me. ON the other hand, at least it looks like fucking something lol

Garden State (2004)

January 2025. wow thats very profound zach braff. proud of you!

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

January 2025. Hmm I liked it... I think it is very interestingly and beautifully laid out... I dunno if it really 'connects' for me in any particularly smart or transcendent way beyond just being made really well lol. The lawyer guy is so adorable i am in love with him.

I guess I got really interested in the ambiguity about whether she actually did the thing, and how any little detail of her life could be spun out into an argument for this or that happening regardless of what 'actually' happened. And with that SEEMING to me to be the thing the story is ABOUT, it felt weirdly bland or noncommittal in the end?? I dunno I did like it! I just get fixated on my little reads and I want more power moves!!!

anxiety among viewership about 'did she do it' is the most frustrating thing to me. it is fiction! and it is obviously invested in you occupying the ambiguity there! there is no objective thing to point to; it's fiction!!!!

Con Air (1997)

January 2025. WOW! MOVIE

The Magnificent Seven (1960)

January 2025. i love it! Good focused and procedural in a way that westerns I like tend towards... Incredible cartoony characterization... Eli Wallach is GREAT... Yul is ELEMENTAL... James Coburn is very charming to me... Great movie also to watch thru a Homosexual Lens. Some of the prolonged gun violence in the latter chunk feels a little flat after a while. Like there's not much choreography or clear-enough storytelling going on... There's not enough Physicality in shooting revolvers at each other to sustain big action sequences imo. Invites comparison I guess to Seven Samurai in this area at least! must watch more WESTERNS

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

December 2024. i think i am developing the opinion that LED lighting has ruined movies....

bad! some fun bits! way messy and bloated plotwise! so much tiresome effort in getting all the continuity in order and accounting for the actors unable to appear in this episode. leaves the moments of ridiculous cartoony digression feeling totally incongruous in midst of all this fucking BUSINESS. just really great example of thinking they know what the Appeal of the original was while fully failing to engage with it or do anything actually interesting or substantial with it. in my opinion.

original beetlejuice for what it's worth is Flawless to me

Princess Mononoke (1997)

December 2024. it's perfect!

maybe this is the best most crystallized miyazaki thing, to me. not quite to the maximalist point of some later stuff... builds up the ideas obsessed-over with conan and everything else... perfect moment of peak technical perfection in physical drawn animation with barest tasteful hints of computer involvement... feels like a 'leave it all on the field' thing, feels like the biggest loudest statement possible. it's moby-dick, also.

it is interesting to see the computer stuff-- some bits of compositing, some conspicuous 'morphing' effects, some digitally-moving background layers, some textured 3d landscapes in tracking shots. All very smartly done and tasteful and not breaking the fundamental metaphor of hand-drawing that would be broken constantly and for good in the ensuing decades. it's HUMANIST! the appeal of animation to me is that it's drawings, and we can see the human work in drawing in ways that we can't see the human work in more abstracted and technologized processes. A lot of the appeal of miyazaki's whole deal to me is the preposterous attention to this; the self-evident ridiculous attention and manhours spent on every little overwrought moment of acting and movement. The NUMEROUS tracking shots thru 3d space done entirely with hand-drawn cels. there is just no reason to do this without a tremendous, miserable, suicidal love of humanity.

some aspects of the english dub leave things to be desired. it can't quite figure out its vibe sometimes. also i watched this on streaming which i hate and realized my ideal mode is to watch an mp4 in vlc and incessantly cut back and go frame-by-frame thru shit lol.

Radio City Fantasy (1984)

December 2024. i rather mostly liked it! kind of just a vaguely narrative sequence of music video segments BUT it does that pretty well. Some Big Swings taken with the animation fairly relentlessly!! Sometimes it looks like nothing else I have really ever seen! it is all about textures and moods and I liked its textures and moods!!!!!

yoshitaka amano character designer!!!!??

Christmas in January (1991)

December 2024. oof man i dont know. i am struggling to remember anything redeeming or interesting about this. stunningly low-rent... in an entirely uninteresting way, as counterpoint to 'radio city fantasy' the other thing played.

at spectacle theater mystery anime show

Hook (1991)

December 2024. I guess I hadn't watched this since I was a Kid but a lot of it was really clear in my memory in weird kid ways... the real-world stuff I had totally forgotten... the child actors and ridiculous maudlin vibe didn't annoy me as much in memory as they do watching it now... It is cute to have such different experiences of watching this as a kid and an adult-- this movie about being a kid and an adult... I dunno it's kind of OVERWROUGHT but there's good and bad things about that. I love the ridiculous visual texture, the sets and everything. Funny to read about spielberg's disappointment with it. I thought it played with and extrapolated the big ideas of the original story; it is kind of a perfect compelling premise i think. Everything it has in common with Popeye (1980) is done better and smarter in Popeye.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

December 2024. oh i dunno i was not really Sold on it but it has just constant ridiculously clever dialogue and it's all texturally very impressive and nicely cartoony. Some of them are a little too overtly 'doing a voice' in a way that powerfully irritated me. Ended up feeling slightly impersonal! Or like too much of an abstracted Fable!

I think about Raising Arizona which is maybe the other coen movie I'm aware of that has this much of a cartoony vibe, but that one is so much more character-focused and emotionally involving!! i think.

TO-Y (1987)

November 2024. also spectacle, played with 'cipher.' i am Pretty Good at guessing the release date of these things lol. Flimsy but charming, many good vibey passages, some weird clunky experimental animation. fun!!!! imo!!

Cipher (1989)

November 2024. at spectacle. it's basically just consecutive music-video sequences i kept expecting it to resolve into diegetic narrative. some charming moments... nice 80s airbrush nyc scenery...

The Bourne Identity (2002)

November 2024. clever sometimes and i got pulled thru it but mostly kind of feels very bland. like basically a default movie. how can there be sequels to this! there's no juice here aside from the amnesiac angle imo

Hackers (1995)

November 2024. really so pleasant to me

Face/Off (1997)

November 2024. quite stupid but i had a nice time watching it happen

Moonstruck (1987)

October 2024. i love it! i don't find a lot of it Convincing in like a granular character way but it's very charming to me and i like how it all wraps itself up. fun to watch young nic. cher is very pretty

Civil War (2024)

October 2024. uhh i dunno i liked this a whole lot more than i thought i would. I guess if you get caught up in it as a thing About Politics then it's flimsy and uncommitted-- it does that thing 'Joker' does where it uses a lot of topical political language without any real ideological throughline-- but it's not About Politics at all!! It's just like the most cartoonishly intense stage in which to make a big parable about subject-objectivity in journalism right?!?!!! I think it is occasionally really brilliant along these lines honestly. Would be better if even LESS context was given the viewer about what the war actually is about, imo.

often somewhat Stupid. but some great weird imagery and the whole ending chunk goes wayyy fucking hard

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

October 2024. i cant believe it. incredible

Predators (2010)

October 2024. umm it's fun slightly flimsy and stupid... the premise is so great and exciting to me that i wish it was done a little more elaborately or weirdly or interestingly... would be Great if it was a movie about some New alien monster we are not already familiar with... Like the whole thing would hit so much harder if we didn't know it was a movie about the predator from The Predator, and if there weren't stupid little metacontinuity nods. brody i'm not sure if he really Sells it but he's having fun and that's nice

Ma (2019)

October 2024. i did not really like this movie and i dont think it is a sort of movie there was a chance of me liking really, but octavia spencer is just going so hard with it and having so much fun and i love that for her

Tremors (1990)

September 2024. i suppose it is weird that i had never seen this. Wait why does the movie poster have a totally-different monster in it than the one in the movie!!!

quite charming movie. small-scale monster procedural. 'Who died and made you Einstein' is an all-timer of a line, that's honestly the big takeaway here

We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)

September 2024. video compression artifacts are being fetishized at an alarming rate.

texturally I feel like i Get it but it doesn't feel like there is anything going on but texture. like a first draft or like a sketch of something just barely beginning to work through its ideas. maddening! kind of!!! Kind of the same issues i had with tvglow! Like it feels like they just aren't really interested enough in what their movie is about to think about it or work through it with any kind of rigor?? I'm being mean and obviously a lot of this is just about my aesthetic not being their aesthetic!

the presentation and rhythm of it is really unusual in a way i thought was compelling, like i got very involved in it! It IS kind of weird how people get lonely and socialize in new and depersonalized ways on the internet i agree

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris (1999)

September 2024. gamera is great.... BUT AT WHAT COST?!?!

REMARKABLE!!! A really brilliant way to build on the previous two and complexify Gamera for an ending. Really more wild and brutal at parts than the first two!!! But still these are all extremely charming and confident and human movies and I love them. The 'I will have revenge on Gamera' moment man Hell yeah

Far less judicious use of cgi in this one! But they're really trying to do ambitious stuff with flying monsters and tentacles and stuff so it feels Honest. Iris is a Wild looking thing; I love its weird head. Much similarity to Biollante (in the vibe of the movie too, am I wrong??). And they redesigned Gamera to be more Menacing right?!

The fight in the train station is WILD and incredibly well-done; I have never seen something like that. Gamera and the people interacting towards the end is really affecting and convincing and I love Gamera

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

September 2024. i guess it is kind of 'worse' and 'stupider' than the first one but it GRABBED me i LOVED it. i guess i kind of want to watch all of these now.

man i love ludacris what a charming and hilarious guy and really very good at being in a movie

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

September 2024. letterboxed commentary seems fixated on 'why would she choose jack nicholson over keanu reeves,' but that's the point!!!! she falls 'in love' with the weird old guy instead of the perfect hot young guy! don't you get that that's the point

I think I first watched this on a plane?? It is weirdly compelling and sometimes very weird. jack nicholson seems to have been directed 'just act constantly, really creepy at all times,' but still he kind of becomes charming. keanu is adorable and i love him but he is fully unconvincing!! he is only here to be 'hot young guy' i guess and he does do that!!!

Beetlejuice (1988)

September 2024. perfect movie

Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (1996)

September 2024. banger... Tone and sense of scale and MAJESTY is so much more on point than the first one... It is remarkable how much better these are than the contemporary 90s godzillas... i love gamera so much and i look forward to seeing him uncover yet more perverse and ridiculous powerup moves to use

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

September 2024. great! charming! maybe slightly by-the-numbers but well-executed! some of the nighttime giant monster stuff is really very cool looking. too much laughter in the theater when his rockets go off in my opinion!! show gamera some respect please!!!

it is Sick that spectacle brooklyn is playing the 90s gameras i'm gonna watch all threee

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

September 2024. andre gregory DESTROYED with facts and logic

Husbands (1970)

August 2024. I feel like I don't really know how to even watch this sort of movie. It's so LOOSE and it's so much ABOUT the actors, like it's all built around these long, digressive apparently improv sequences-- yes this sometimes hits at a sort of intense and unusually raw emotional reality, but generally it is such a wildly different and looser approach to storytelling than i'm used to that i don't really know how to parse it. Like we are induced to look at it ONLY as a showcase for these three actors, and the characters they helped develop, and the acting and improvising they've been given space for. Right?? I dunno it's interesting to think about!! Peter Falk my beloved.

There is some insane, perverse misogyny throughout. I think the movie is sometimes employing it in a considered way but it became difficult honestly lol

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

August 2024. i liked it a lot; i love the art direction and whole style of the storytelling; I love the mystery and weirdness of it. It is extremely weakened of course by being a Prequel at all; it is way more concerned with detail and worldbuilding to its detriment (as genre sequels/prequels almost always are). Breaks the elemental Power that so motivated fury road. But even with that taken into account and in the Foreground of my mind while watching it the whole time, the way exposition and storytelling is handled is a hundred times more smart and elegant than practically any other invented-setting thing in mainstream pop culture right now. Am i wrong?!!?

Ladyhawke (1985)

August 2024. uhh interesting... often really kind of visually beautiful in sort of a blunt unimaginative way. I like seeing medieval fantasy from before we were locked-in to our current cultural voice for the genre... Like the synth score is often too goofy or emotionally on-the-nose, but it's a wild swing that feels interestingly incongruous and sometimes rocks. Broderick doesn't really work in this in my opinion at all. Some of the dialogue is better than it has to be. funny that it's yet another rutger hauer medieval movie with echoes in Berserk (other being 'flesh & blood')

ladyhawke... it's a hawk that's a lady

Withnail & I (1987)

August 2024. watched this in college and dimly remembered little bits of it here and there. i thought it was dumb and boring back then but I do not think that now. bleak grotesque and plodding but the character stuff is beautifully done !!! very engaging!! wild how much it is a big gay panic story.

Serial Mom (1994)

August 2024. great!! i struggle a little to grab onto the endless deranged cartooniness of waters' stuff but it is always a Joy to just ride along with it. this is definitely the most like... coherent of them that i have seen. Some extremely funny shit is in here. one of the best sex scenes in film history

Argylle (2024)

August 2024. why use CG for the cat. they make real cats. a cat is a real-life animal

Invader ZIm: Enter the Florpus (2019)

August 2024. hell yes fuck yes

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)

August 2024. a lot of 'what the fuck is this movie' moments throughout the course of this; this is something i love to experience that i have just identified.

so hilarious and unusual that he's a depraved monstrous person immediately, with no context or rationalization whatsoever. Other than 'it says he's Bad right there in the title.' And he's never redeemed and the text never really judges him he kind of just vibes through it all. And emerges triumphant, and everything's fine. Weird! Nic is fucking Running With It and I love the guy i gotta say

Do The Right Thing (1989)

August 2024. wow incredible!! love the jumping between apparently isolated, tiny but entirely intelligible sequences. love the Scale of it; trying to give a sense of the population of an entire block. It is just Constantly visually perfect; wild beautiful and graphic. intense cartoony camera angles, sometimes weird theatrical acting. i loved it!

interesting how sympathetically it presents sal and co; interesting how it seems not textually politically argumentative or clear-cut?? like we're led through the escalation at the end purely through character momentum, understandable righteous emotion. i dunno i'm still collecting my thoughts around that but it feels beautifully done

Communion (1989)

August 2024. i am really surprised at this. really remarkable and weird, really intensely weird. walken sells it pretty hard. the stilted goofiness makes it all hit a lot harder, heightens the uncanniness, etc. I like how little of an effort is made to rationalize any of what they experience!! the easy move would be to nail it all down way too much. I like that he has a special hat he wears to work on his novel

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

August 2024. pretty fun... does that clunky topical dialogue thing a little much... i like the disorienting playing with weird light sources... i guess the big twist is cute but makes me unlikely to be interested in ever seeing it again tbh