I was going to come in here and post an expanded version of my Twitter thoughts about Ready Player One but then my brother sent me this McSweeney's article and I can't breathe I'm laughing so hard.

my brother sent me this McSweeney's article

Excellent choice of ship names!

Saw Love, Simon yesterday and Annihilation today. So basically the same movie twice.

I actually really enjoyed Pacific Rim, though about 75% of that was John Boyega, who is just ridic charismatic. Eastwood, as noted, is an actual charisma void.

I also thought the script was trying to be completely aware of its ridiculousness, even if it didn't always work. And there was some originality to the plot that I didn't expect.

Also, that was Glados as the computer in Gypsy, right? Little distracting.

Glados

Same as the first Pacific Rim.

You expect me to remember things from that long ago?

Recent trips to the multiplex:

Ready Player One: Minor Spielberg, but I had reasonably good time. It has a couple of outstanding set pieces -- a big thrilling car chase, and a creative knock-out of a scene featuring a very well-known film. But the characters are super-thin, especially the lead. I guess fittingly since he's basically a self-insert gamer avatar. The only one who brings the movie any degree of soulfulness is Mark Rylance's James Halliday, the creator of the whole VR universe, which... I mean, it's Mark fucking Rylance so kinda expected, I guess? The resolution is pat and the entire thing doesn't bear too much scrutiny (the stakes seem quite slight in retrospect) though.

Isle of Dogs: Immaculate visuals, fab voice cast, and the dogs are AMAZING. The setting... erm. I'll link to this thoughtful article by Alison Willmore at Buzzfeed rather than going into it myself: [link]

The foreign exchange student character is really kinda unfortunate. If it were just Atari and the dogs, and the other Japanese characters were treated a bit more thoughtfully, I would have given it much less of a side-eye.

On an unrelated note, someone pointed me to Kanopy a few weeks ago and I finally checked it out yesterday, and HOLY SHIT Y'ALL. Basically, it is a small scale streaming service with a tidy list of well-curated films including some classics from the Criterion collection, available for free access to anyone with a library card, provided that your library is participating in the service. I work for a university so logged in using my credentials without any issues. I installed the Kanopy app on my phone and projected stuff to my TV using Chromecast, then was off to the races. I mean, FREE MOVIES! I went in and added, like 40 films to my watchlist immediately, movies I've been meaning to watch for a while, like a bunch of Kurosawa (I'd never gotten around to watching Yojimbo, even though I love Rashmon, Ran and Seven Samurai). And it has some of my all-time favourites, like In the Mood for Love and My Brilliant Career and Cronos, Guillermo del Toro's Mexican vampire film from way back! I AM EXCITE! Very well worth checking out if you want to try some fare off the beaten path. Here's the link: [link]

So my BFF had his screenplay selected to be a finalist at the Nashville Film Festival, and he asked me to go with him to be his plus-one! Which means I'm going to get to go to a lot of movies (yay!). But I'm finding the website for the festival really hard to navigate and kind of overwhelming.

If anyone would be willing to take a look (Vonnie K.? megan walker? Anyone who would like to) and make some recs for 5/17-5/19 to help me narrow it down, I'd really appreciate it!

Yay, film festivals and awesome BFFs that invite you to the experience!

That schedule looks unwieldy at first glance, but seems to be blessed with a robust filter function! Since you are just going to be there for three days, that narrow things down quite a bit. I poked around a bit, and looks like the helpful thing to do is to go to the "Film Calendar" page, which lets you filter films by dates, length, genre, etc.: [link]

So I would go to to that page and click on each day you are there, then filter the resulting page to "feature" under length (the last tab) if you want to exclude short films or industry conferences. That leaves you with a reasonable number for films per day to shift through. A lot of the films are documentaries -- if you'd rather watch fiction, not documentaries, then you could filter under "genre" to drama, comedy, horror, animation, etc. BTW, you want to look at dramas first then look at films under other genre, hit "all" again (which repopulate the films on the grid), then hit "comedy" or "thriller" next.

As for specific films, I haven't heard of most of the films playing on your dates, I'm afraid. A few films that look interesting:

- "Hot Summer Nights" playing on 5/18 has Timothee Chalamet from "Call Me By Your Name" fame. It's distributed by A24 and received good reviews from South by Southwest last year -- I saw a trailer just yesterday that looked quite good: [link]

- "Dark River" on 5/18 has Ruth Wilson, whom I love, if you are in a mood for a dour drama about family dysfunction set in a Yorkshire sheep farm. :)

- "1985" on 5/17: a B&W movie about AIDS in the 80's, which per this review, it is an intimate tearjerker: [link]

- "Salvation" on 5/17 looks interesting if you feel like a genre fare. It's a Spanish vampire film set in a hospital, but with teenagers, so kinda like "Let the Right One In"?

These are just a few I picked at the first glance, but poke around, look at descriptions of other films, google for reviews if anything looks interesting, etc. Doing that is half of the fun!