A bit of rose-tinted childhood nostalgia can evoke memories of when life felt less chaotic and the future was full of unlimited possibilities. I remember seeing Beetlejuice with my friend Mark during sixth grade. I remember it distinctly because it was the first movie I saw in a theater without an adult present. My mom dropped the two of us off before and picked the two of us after the movie. It would not be such a significant milestone today as it was then, as this was long before the Internet, let alone cell phones. We had to look up the movie times in the newspaper and guess at the movie’s runtime based on the start times of when your film would start and when the movie after yours would begin. If there was an emergency or a miscommunication, it involved going to a pay phone and calling your home’s landline, praying that someone home could answer. I hadn’t thought about that day in years. With the 2024 release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I decided to revisit this Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) classic. My recent rewatch of Beetlejuice in preparation for the sequel brought back that fond memory.
Category Archives: Fantasy
All of Us Strangers (2023)
Dark. Mysterious. Unsettling. Romantic. Poetic Prophetic. Andrew Haigh’s (Leon on Pete, 45 Years) All of Us Strangers is an imaginative, transcendent love story with two Oscar-deserving actors portraying empathetic characters searching desperately for human connection. This idyllic love story gives a glimpse from its first scenes that our two leads are destined for something beautifully tragic.
About Time (2013)
About Time was a movie I watched for the first time a year after its 2013 release date. Despite relatively high Rotten Tomatoes scores (70% critics, 81% audience), I recall being unimpressed by it. Many accounts I follow on TikTok are of people giving film reviews. While most, if not all, of those I follow in this niche, are younger than me, more often than not, I generally agree with their assessments (hence, my reason for following them). So often, About Time is referenced in a video. The film is often called beautiful, poetic, and devastating. Some have gone so far as to call it a gut punch. Those characteristics I seek out in my romantic dramas, so I signed up for the rewatch, thinking I must have missed something. It turns out that I didn’t. My second viewing did hold my interest more than my first, but it still felt very average. I’m even more uncertain now about what others see in this film that I missed.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Sad memories are the worst kind. Of all the memories, these are the ones that can flip the switch of a day at a moment’s notice. It could be the waft of a familiar fragrance once worn by a significant other who has since left your life. Or it might be a forgotten song that pops up on a playlist, instantly transporting you to the time and place you first heard it. Or perhaps it’s a photo, once a bookmark now wedged between a pair of books, that falls to the floor when reorganizing a room and evokes a memory you weren’t prepared to face on a particular day. If we could rid ourselves of our sad memories so that we no longer need to experience the pain associated with them, would we? Some of us would do this in a heartbeat, while others would never choose to do something so drastic. Most of us lie in between, and our resiliency to these emotional triggers places us somewhere along that spectrum. Michel Gondry’s (The Green Hornet, Be Kind Rewind) universally revered cult classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Everything Everywhere All At Once has slowly and quietly followed the established template of A24, a studio known for releasing groundbreaking, original, and independent movies. Through initial word of mouth, the co-directed film by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (who also co-wrote), Everything Everywhere All At Once, has become a movie that everyone has at least heard of, even if it has not been seen. Other nonconventional A24 films that had a lot of buzz around them and ended up earning Best Picture nominations in the last half dozen years include Minari (2020), Lady Bird (2017), and Moonlight (the Best Picture winner of 2016). While I appreciated all three movies, I only enjoyed Moonlight. I know that many will die on the sword for Lady Bird. I was not one of those people. A growing number seem willing to do the same for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Again, I am not one of them. I found the story incredibly uneven, the pace hurried, and the narration unreliable.