I haven't seen When Marnie Was There (yet), but I did really enjoy Only Yesterday, which was recently released in America for (I think) the first time. A little slight but the overall story was nice. I really appreciate Ghibli's style, attention to detail, and willingness to go slow in their narratives.

Soderbergh is great. Sex Lies & Videotape is still riveting, as is Erin Brockovich, and Gray's Anatomy introduced me to Spalding Gray, who's amazing. His Solaris isn't better than Tarkovsky's, but the soundtrack is super, super cool and chill.

Eh, can't be worse than Ocean's 12.

Does that mean the all-male team in Ocean's 11 is also unrealistic?

Another excellent documentary about small town USA life is Rich Hill, which follows a handful of poor kids in the south. There's some really gorgeous photography in it, and the kids themselves are really interesting. It might make a good double feature with "Born Rich", which was a documentary by the heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune where he interviewed all of his friends who were born rich.

"Arrival" is incredible. Really moving use of sci-fi concepts and amazing direction.

Yeah, I didn't care for it either, it felt like a movie made by committee.

Saw Alien: Covenant, it was passably entertaining but otherwise a forgettable rehash. It's funny that people are focusing so much on the aliens that they're not even, like, alien anymore. The whole thrill of the original film was that you didn't know what it would do next, but now they're so rote it's like a tradition. Some of the stuff with David's experimentation was cool, I liked the Island of Dr Moreau vibes. Too bad about the rest of it.

It just feels like such a limp compromise between doing something new and trying to hook viewers with something they're familiar with. The franchise is such a product now, all the creativity is suffocated by this obsessive need to kowtow to Approved Concepts. Just make a new movie!

I liked her, she looked like a real person, it's nice to have someone in a movie who doesn't look like they were plastiformed.

I've heard both good and bad things about Wonder Woman, but man, idk, I just can't get excited for any of these superhero movies. They're so corporate.

hahaha

Hah, yeah, I know they'll just churn these out for years. They feel like they're designed by committee. I didn't even like Deadpool or Guardians, because even those felt like a bunch of people in suits sat around with big graphs and sheets showing them exactly how weird or offensive they could be before their market numbers dropped.