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Despicable Me (2010)
Some call him bad. They call him dad.

Villainous Gru lives up to his reputation as a despicable, deplorable and downright unlikable guy when he hatches a plan to steal the moon from the sky. But he has a tough time staying on task after three orphans land in his care.

Foreground/Background I see that I did not write a comment on this when it came out. I have since had kids and rewatched it recently, and am impressed by a couple key decisions. The first is the quality of the animation and choices made in the story....


Published July 7, 2024
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Inside Out 2 (2024)
Make room for new emotions.
Filmmaker(s): Kelsey Mann

Teenager Riley's mind headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.

Lassiter Layers Decades ago, I had the charter to ‘study Hollywood’, ostensibly as a model for virtual enterprises, but that extended into my now serious study of folding in film narrative. One expression of folding is the play within the play, where you have narratives and narrative...


Published June 23, 2024
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The Fall Guy (2024)
Fall hard.
Filmmaker(s): David Leitch

Fresh off an almost career-ending accident, stuntman Colt Seavers has to track down a missing movie star, solve a conspiracy and try to win back the love of his life while still doing his day job.

No Stuntman This film, and every comment I’ve seen seems to not be aware of 1980s ‘The Stunt Man”. That was a similar setup, but before the noir device evolved to the comedic. In the earlier film, the fact of the stunt guy being so was...


Published June 20, 2024
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Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (2020)
Identity is an illusion.
Filmmaker(s): Frank Oz

Storyteller and Conceptual Magician Derek DelGaudio attempts to understand the illusory nature of identity and answer the deceptively simple question 'Who am I?'

Dark Crystal Frank Oz has always puzzled me. He is the second voice, the Garfunkle to whomever is the Simon. He is not the guy to have and manifest the primary vision, so his projects are inept. On the other hand, given a framework from a...


Published June 16, 2024
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Lost in the Stars (2022)
Filmmaker(s): Rui Cui, Xiang Liu

He Fei's wife, Li Muzi, disappears during their anniversary trip. When she reappears, he insists that she is not his wife. As Chen Mai, a top lawyer gets involved in this bizarre case, more mysteries start to emerge.

Film within I think I have seen this plot twice before, and pretty sure one was a TeeVee movie. In that case, the orchestrator was the local police chief. What we have here is a combination of noir that turns out to be what I call a...


Published April 20, 2024
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Dune: Part Two (2024)
Long live the fighters.
Filmmaker(s): Denis Villeneuve

Follow the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, Paul endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee.

Melange In my comment on Part One, I noted that the complex charm of the books would in this part be flattened to basically two things: vast engagements with the environment, and action scenes: armies and heroes fighting. This is an action movie, alas, though the...


Published April 12, 2024
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Dune (2021)
It begins.
Filmmaker(s): Denis Villeneuve

Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet's exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence-a commodity capable of unlocking humanity's greatest potential-only those who can conquer their fear will survive.

Knives, Teeth, Motion I am perhaps not a good demographic for this. I saw ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ when it was new, the same as Herbert. I’m a bit younger, but I went through the same study of religious traditions before Buddhisms of the new age arrived....


Published April 7, 2024
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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
We all share the same fate.
Filmmaker(s): Christopher McQuarrie

Ethan Hunt and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the world's fate at stake and dark forces from Ethan's past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan must consider that nothing can matter more than his mission—not even the lives of those he cares about most.

The Women I’m sensitive to situations where women are the drivers. What we usually have in these kinds of films is a superhuman guy, often going ‘rogue’ (a movie term) dealing with bad guys. There’s a minor shift here where the opponent is not a secretive, well...


Published April 2, 2024
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River (2023)
Filmmaker(s): Junta Yamaguchi

The one-hundred-year-old Fujiya inn stands in the quiet region of Kyoto. Mikoto is standing in front of the Kibune river at the back of the building when she is called back to work. But two minutes later, she finds herself back at the river again. The whole inn seems to be stuck in a time loop!

Gentle flows There are films that use the cinematic vocabulary reluctantly. Most of those have visual exposition, alternated with action sequences as a common model. Or we have ‘character studies’ that use the camera like a novelist would, to penetrate the skin, so we can follow a...


Published April 2, 2024
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The Third Murder (2017)
Everyone has a truth to want to believe.
Filmmaker(s): Hirokazu Kore-eda

A lawyer tasked with defending a robbery-and-murder suspect begins developing doubts about what truly happened.

Wandering narratives You only have a few choices in film, alas. So when a filmmaker wants an adventure in narrative form, they are constrained. I come to these not for the experience, but to see the choices that have been made and whether they are effective. This...


Published March 24, 2024
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