What I've Been Watching (July)
I love to watch all different types of movies and see what I can learn from them in any aspect. I think this is going to become more of a normal thing where I talk about the movies I've seen that I loved but I will veer away from major spoilers. Enjoy!
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One: If you had asked me at the beginning of the year if I was going to the the new Mission Impossible movie I would've told you heck no. I have better things to do than watch Tom Cruise risk his life again and again. Slowly, the reviews started to come out and a lot of people really liked it, so I found time to get to a screening. It was insane but it quickly became one of my favorites of the year. If you're gonna go crazy unrealistic, do it at a 10 instead of a 6. There were so many threads going on at the same time that are seemingly easy to keep track of which is a feat in and of itself. You can feel everything that happens to Ethan Hunt because you know Tom Cruise did it in real life without the use of CGI. One person in my theater clapped when he drove off the mountain which is not representative of how impressive it was, but I wish I had clapped too.
Barbie: It would've been an almost impossible task to make Barbie my favorite movie from this year, but it did everything it had to do. My favorite part about this was how much time they spent in Barbieland. So many other movies start in a fantasy world and go into the real world for more than half of their runtime, but I'm glad I was able to spend a lot of time where the Barbies live. I don't know how replicable this is, but the movie felt like an event that everyone was going to see and will most likely be my favorite theater experience from this year. If other movies want to be as successful as Barbie, they have to make the theater experience an event by getting people to dress up and interact with the movie.
Oppenheimer: I am so glad I didn't double feature this with Barbie. Not because of the subject matter, five hours in a movie theater is just a lot. The three hours I spent in that theater that day were some of the fastest moving hours I've ever experienced. A long runtime doesn't necessarily mean the movie won't be fast paced, it can still move quickly. The sound and visuals of the actual explosion itself were incredible and left me on the edge of my seat and incredibly nervous as they were counting down. I almost never feel the need to say this, but see this movie in theaters it is well worth your time.
Inside: I was really excited to watch this movie when I heard it was about Willem Dafoe getting locked in an expensive penthouse after trying to steal art from it. I love whenever a movie takes place in one location and is able to capitalize on all the little things and keep a story going from a minimalistic point. This was sadly not one of those movies. I found myself getting bored and wondering when the movie was going to end when It was only an hour forty minutes total. I learned from this to not always squeeze extra time out of something just to make it longer. I think there's a very interesting short film in there that I would've watched intently, but making it longer to make it longer lost a lot of it for me.
Signs: My generation does not revere M. Night Shyamalan as one of the great horror and suspense directors. This movie showed me why people still have hope whenever he announces a new movie. I felt very close to the family in the short time I spent with them and understood their journey throughout the entire time. Although the aliens didn't scare me, I thought it was best to have a Jaws approach where they were rarely seen. Even when an alien was in the living room, it was rarely fully on screen and shown through reflections or bit by bit. You don't always have to see the full horror and sometimes it's scarier to leave it up to your imagination.