★ 2024 ★ Criterion Challenge '24 ★

italics=in theater, *=rewatch

date	title	poster	thoughts
03/01	Aguirre, the Wrath of God		i feel like many scenes in this film were made up on the fly. very surreal, very good imagery, and very interesting ideas about the conquest of the americas.
09/01	Amadeus		my piano teacher put this on for class. it was a pretty good dramatization of mozart's life. i just wish she wasn't fast forwarding to save time.
16/01	The Seventh Seal		despite my love of speculative fiction, i haven't actually watched/read many historical fantasy stories. this one was really funny for a film about people dying in the middle ages. glad i had a snow day to do this.
21/01	Labyrinth		yippee the cinema was screening this on my birthday! it was an incredibly silly film, and i liked it a lot. sarah would have done numbers on tumblr i think. actually no, she's too good for tumblr (strong enough to stand up to manipulative magic twinks). i'm gonna have "magic dance" stuck in my head for the next few days.
26/01	Super Size Me		we watched ~half of this in health class. it's not particularly good.
15/02	Mysterious Skin		god this was good, but also what the fuck gregg araki. i got physical discomfort for like 60% of the screening. it freaked me up so bad that he was my age during the first playground scene. god, fuck.
17/02	We Are From Jazz		this would have been a very fun and charming musical if it wasn't for the nonzero amounts of blackface. what was karen shakhnazarov thinking.
25/02	Repo! The Genetic Opera		bad in a funny way. still not worth the $7 theater ticket. they needed more of the grody graverobber guy. and also lyrics that didn't sound like shit.
17/03	The End of Evangelion*		it was nice seeing this film in a better quality than my laptop screen could provide. a little before the film, i had read ~100 pages of donna tartt's "The Secret History", where richard's talking about the bacchae and the beauty of terror and all that. i think that idea kinda permeates this film, as the animation is so gory and yet so clean and good. and also there's the split mindset of the viewers, who want to see the evas being sick af and also the pilots being mentally sound. idk maybe i'm onto something or maybe i'm just rambling.
21/03-22/03	The Sandlot 2		we watched this in health because we finised all the curriculum and there were still two days left in the quarter. the movie is weirdly misogynistic in ways i can't really describe. i'd say its only redeeming quality is that it's free on youtube.
21/03-22/03	The Last Repair Shop		we watched this in piano because we had nothing else to do before the quarter ended. it's charming
22/03	Fight Club		jesus christ that was good. so glad i went into it w/o spoilers. the credits song was one i've only heard at some school performances, and i don't think i'll listen to it anywhere else to preserve the feeling i get from it.
24/03	The Battle of Algiers		a movie theater in town was doing a series on morricone (the guy who did the soundtrack), and i'd heard good things about this one, so i went. it was very good! i think the guy who sat in front of me has a wikipedia article regarding his actions during the vietnam war. my dad and i went out to eat after, and he ranted about his time in algeria yesterday.
28/03	The Thin Man		seen at home w/my grandparents + father. reasonably funny for something made 90 years ago.
02/05	Twelfth Night		we're at the end of the play in english class, and my teacher played the film for us in chunks every time we finished an act. sorry to be a dweeb, but shakespeare's good. i adore feste.
14/05-17/05	The Wind Rises		our permanent sub made us watch this in apwh after the exam. very pretty, but i didn't like how miyazaki got so buddy-buddy with nationalism and militarism. idk it just didn't rub me the right way.