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Stuff i watched recently: Oops! All thrillers! edition

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A montage of the four movies mentioned below

Last weekend i found myself with an unexpected glut of downtime, and i figured i’d put it to good use by crossing four films, all thrillers, off my “to-watch” list. I went into most of them essentially blind: for two out of the four, i had no idea what the premise even was, and for one of the remaining two i guessed incorrectly. Without further ado — here’s what i thought of each.

Eight Millimeter (1999)

What i “knew” going in: Nic Cage tracks down the creators of a child porno.

The celluloid macguffin is, blissfully(?), merely a teenage snuff film rather than a full-on porno — for the best, given they occasionally show snippets of the thing and i doubt Joel Schumacher wanted to be put on a list.

Regardless: Mr Cage is our greatest living actor, and, this being the nineties, he goes “full Cage” in a gloriously grimy thriller that sinks him into the depths of Los Angeles’ erotic underworld. Also featured is a disconcertingly young Joaquin Phoenix1 and Peter Stormare as a comically evil crossbow-wielding porno director. The third act gets pretty over-the-top, at times nearing John Wick territory. But that’s fine by me: i like over-the-top! It’s better for a film to go out with a bang than to die with a whimper.

When this came out, it was slammed by reviewers, and it still only sits at a six out of ten on all the major movie-buff websites. I hesitate to invoke the word “underrated”, so often misused, but… come on. The only assumption i can make is that it that the critics still held a grudge against Mr Schumacher over Batman and Robin, and that, four years after Showgirls, Eight Millimeter’s frank sexuality was still considered too much. Bah.2 They wouldn’t know kino if it hit them in the face. (8/10)

Frailty (2001)

What i “knew” going in: I thought it was going to be about a really, really old man.

It’s not. I’m willing to say Frailty, a directorial effort by Bill Paxton (of all people) ostensibly starring Matthew McConaughey, is good, even if it is mostly told through flashbacks (and, ergo, a child actor doing much of Mr McConaughey’s heavy lifting). But the twist veers things so sharply and so suddenly into a supernatural direction that the audience deserves a bit more time to take in the ramifications. And since for most of the film the viewer has been focussing not only on a child actor, but the wrong child actor, by the end of it i still felt i didn’t really know Mr McConaughey’s character — which is a problem when we’re talking about our alleged protagonist! (5½/10)

Misery (1990)

What i knew going in: Stephen King adaptation about a crazy fan who traps the author of her favourite book in her bed and demands he write Glup Shitto back in.

This is the only one i had a solid grasp on going in, since it’s hard to avoid learning about by osmosis. Great in concept, great in performance, great in script… but i could never quite shake off the fact that i was watching a psychological horror film from the director of The Princess Bride. (7/10)

Prisoners (2013)

What i “knew” going in: Denis Villeneuve. Jake Gyllenhaal. Hugh Jackman. I’m in.

Probably the best thing i’ve watched all year. It’s a punishing watch, but, my god, the talent on display from all cylinders is like nothing else. Behind the camera you have Denis Villeneuve, right in the middle of his transition from Québécois dramas to Hollywood blockbusters, and Roger Deakins, the legendary cinematographer who shot Fargo and No Country for Old Men.3 In front, you have a powerhouse ensemble cast of actors who could all easily carry a film by themselves. Hugh Jackman! Jake Gyllenhaal! Viola Davis! Paul Dano! David Dastmalchian!4 A masterpiece through and through — i hope we might some day get to see the original NC-17 cut, censors be damned. (10/10)

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLVIII

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Stuff i watched (+played) recently, May ’25

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A montage of the undermentioned films’ posters

The Naked Gun (1988)

I couldn’t possibly give a better review than a paraphrase of Roger Ebert: First, you laugh at the joke; then, you laugh at yourself for laughing at something so stupid. Brilliant stuff. (7/10)

Death of a Unicorn (2025)

I was ambivalent enough about this film that i already wrote a whole post about it to explain my feelings. A utilitarian’s worst nightmare. (5/10)

A Real Pain (2024)

Poignant and funny in equal measure. The scene that really stuck out to me was near the end, in Krasnystaw, as our two Jewish-American main characters visit their late grandmother’s old home and place stones in remembrance… only to be chided by an angry neighbour, who has no idea about the tradition, but does know that the old woman living there now is infirm and might well trip. He says this, of course, in Polish, but the two leads don’t speak it, and need his son to translate for them.

The short-term tragedy of the Holocaust, the cruel annihilation of the six million, has been well-trodden in cinema, but this film gets to the heart of the long tragedy — the hole left in European culture by the hollowing out of its Jewish communities (the angry man who doesn’t know), and, equally, the alienation of the survivors from their own roots (the two travellers who need an interpreter for their own ancestral tongue). (9/10)

Sinners (2025)

If you need any convincing at all to watch this, i have five words: Vampire musicians in 1930s Mississippi.

A rare successful original blockbuster that must be protected at all costs. It takes a while to get to the vampires, but it puts that time to good use setting up its characters so you can, like, care about them and stuff. (A lost art.) (8/10)

Companion (2025)

“Did you jailbreak your sexbot??”

Companion is better than it has any right to be. It’s a schlocky premise, but it mines every last twist and turn it can get out of it, with snappy dialogue, a galloping pace, and a magnetic cast. It might not be the best movie ever, but it’s the best movie Companion could ever be. (8/10)

Zatōichi: The Blind Swordsman (2003)

This Tarantinoesque rip-roarer of a period action film has all you could ever ask for: yakuza gangs, cross-dressing geishas, card-counting, a celebratory ending tap-dance routine, and heaps of dodgy CGI blood. When i found out the director’s name was Beat Takeshi, my first thought was “surely it’s not that Takeshi”. Reader… it was that Takeshi. The guy with the castle. We love a man of many talents. (7/10)

Oblivion (2013)

On the left, a generic sci-fi picture. On the right, a generic sci-fi picture with a Scientologist in it.

The left image is the result of asking an image-generating machine-learning model to draw the prompt “still from a science fiction movie”. It was made by a soulless, unthinking machine, and represents, roughly, the average of every science fiction film in its dataset. It is utterly generic, because that’s what happens when you average out thousands of film stills into a grey smoothie.

The right image is from the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion. Do you see the issue here?

Oblivion is a film with no identity of its own, an empty bottle of milk drifting along a back street. It’s just entertaining enough to keep you watching, and no more. The only saving grace is that — for those of you keeping track — it includes a full Tom Cruise Triathlon; he runs, he gets on his motorbike, and he swims (in a skyscraper pool, but a swim is a swim). (5/10)

A Complete Unknown (2024)

If you’re going to make a generic music biopic, the least you could do is spice it up with some fantastical musical sequences, like Rocketman and Better Man. This “effort”, starring the unavoidable Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, has none of that, instead falling into all the usual tired biopic tropes. Mr Dylan is not a character in this — he is a vessel that spouts platitutes and occasionally sings. At least the music was good? I guess? (2½/10)

🎮️ n++ (2015)

I buy, like, one video game a year, and this is 2025’s entry, a tough-as-nails momentum platformer that’s the third in a series based on a Flash game i have fond memories of. The noughties vibes are truly immaculate, not just in the futuristic æsthetics but the trancey EDM soundtrack as well. (8/10)

Thunderbolts* (2025)

I had sworn off Marvel after all the characters i cared about had their stories wrapped up with a bow, so, though i had heard through the grapevine that this was actually quite good, i was fully prepared to put on my clown makeup and order my “Fell For It Again Award” rosette if i tricked myself into watching two hours of super-slop for nothing.

Thankfully, it was great! My understanding is that all the characters here have shown up in MCU projects in the past, but the film does a great job at getting you up to speed with what their deal is that you never feel out of the loop. The action is on point, the comedy got some good laughs out of me, and the climax, thank fuck, eschews the usual “incomprehensible CGI battle against a giant laser beam” in favour of a more introspective talk-’em-up approach. Special commendations should go to the soundtrack, by Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Son Lux. Go watch it. (7½/10)

Sometimes i translate news headlines into Ancient Greek for practice — i thought i’d post a recent one here, just because. :-)

Ὁ Κόσμος ΥΠΒʹ, σοβιετικὴ ἀστροναῦς ἣ πεντήκοντα τρία ἔτη ἐκύκλει, κατέρραξέ ποι ὑπὲρ τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς Θαλάττης. Ἐβουλεύθη μὲν εἰς τὸν Ἕσπερον τὸ πλοῖον, εἴκοσι ταλάντων τὸν σταθμόν, πορεύεσθαι· ἐξώκειλε δὲ περὶ τὴν Γῆν.

Translation (and transliteration)

Ho Cósmos CDLXXXII, sobieticḕ astronaûs hḕ pentḗconta tría étē ecýclei, catérrhaxé poi hypèr tês Erythrâs Thaláttēs. Ebouleúthē mèn eis tòn Hésperon tò plœ̂on, eícosi talántōn tòn stathmón, poreúesthæ; exṓceile dè perì tḕn Gên.

Kosmos 482, a Soviet spacecraft which had been in orbit for fifty-three years, crashed down somewhere over the Indian Ocean. The craft, weighing twenty talents, was intended to travel to Venus, but ran aground around the Earth.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLVII

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One hundred and thirty-seven

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137

My favourite number is 137. It’s an odd choice: when surveyed, the vast majority of those who have a favourite number say theirs is under twenty, let alone a hundred.1 But i have my reasons, starting with the fact that each digit alone is fascinating in its own right.

One needs no introduction, and can barely even be called a number in the traditional sense. It is both the building block from which every other number is built and the unmoving rock, the sole multiplicand that leaves any factor it touches unchanged. It is so fundamental that we barely think of it: if there is an apple in front of us on the table, we call it an apple, only invoking the numeral one if we might have been expecting two. More than that, it is τὸ Ἑν, the Monad, that from which all else flows forth; so sublime it is barely a thing, just as it is barely a number.

Three, on the other hand, is the magic number2, and it has a way of getting in our heads. The technical term is hendiatris — things just sound better in threes. Think véní, vídí, vící; wine, women, and song; or liberté, égalité, fraternité. And how many cultures around the world have some sort of threefold God, be it the Holy Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, or Julian’s “Zeus, Haides, and Helios in one”?

Seven is where things get interesting. For once i’ll dispense with the cultural and metaphysical aspects — it’s been done — and note a curious thing about our human number sense. If there are, say, four cows in a field, we can look and instinctually know that there are four cows, without needing to consciously count. Five and six are doable, but difficult, and vary based on age and person.3 But seven is where this sense breaks down. Beyond that barrier, we lose our intuitive animal sense, and we have to actually count. Seven is the number that sets us apart from the animals; if one and three are the numbers of the Gods, then seven belongs to humanity.

So, what do you get if you smush those three digits together? By some sheer coincidence, the most famous number in physics. The number 137 is, give or take a few hundredths4, the value of the fine-structure constant, one of the universe’s fundamental, unchanging values as etched into the standard model of particles. Nobody really knows why it has the value it has; as Richard Feynman once said, “It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than [a hundred] years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.” (Worry they did: Wolfgang Pauli, the first man to theorise the neutrino, spent much time deliberating with Carl Jung on how this godforsaken 137 had wormed its way into the universe’s code, and why it might have done so.)

So, that’s why 137 is my favourite number. A remarkable figure, you might say.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLVI

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Death of a Unicorn is okay, but i wish it were better

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A mediĂŚval tapestry of a unicorn in captivity
Pictured: what the main characters would have done if they were not pro-cancer

Yesterday i went to the cinema to go watch Death of a Unicorn, A24’s new one-horned horror-comedy-thing. I could have reviewed it in prose, but i’ve elected to leave my thoughts in bullet-point form, as there’s a lot good, a lot bad, and not much conjoining the two in my mind.

The good

  • I appreciate that this movie is wholly unapologetic about being about a unicorn. No tongue in cheek, just, yep, that’s a mythical unicorn, we’re fucking rolling with it.
  • The design of the titular beast is also great, majestic but capable of being a horror monster when it needs to be. The decision to keep the legendary unicorn’s beard rather than shave it off (as has become common under the influence of My Little Pony) is commendable.
  • Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter are great in it, and are the only ones who seem to have understood the assignment in terms of going buck-wild with their performances.

The bad

  • The well of “films that are satires about the faux-progressive 2020s nouveau riche and how they’re all stupid dum-dums” has run well and truly dry — that this is a film literally about beating a dead horse doesn’t help. It could have at least had the dignity to come out before Glass Onion dealt the finishing blow.
  • For a film that was marketed as a ridiculous, bonkers horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead II, it’s not actually that funny. I chuckled a few times but… that’s it, really; it never veers off that cliff into complete insanity like i was hoping it would.
  • The portrayal of the visions given by the unicorn was boring as shit. Infinite ways you could show the sight of the transcendental, and you pick CGI nebulĂŚ and stars? What is this, Guardians of the Galaxy?
  • [peter_griffin_godfather.webm] I did not care for Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. Their performances are nothing. Their characters are nothing. They insist upon themselves.

The neutral observation

  • The fatal flaw is that the evil plan made a little too much sense. Like — actually, yeah, you’re right! I think once you’ve established that (a) the unicorn’s blood cures cancer and (b) the unicorn can heal itself, you do, in fact, have a utilitarian obligation to bring this stuff to market. Maybe not with the methods the evil pharma family use, but still.

TL;DR: 5/10.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XLV

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Two large white wolf puppies
Neo-dire-wolf puppy pics Š Colossal

Stuff i watched recently, April ’25

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The posters for “Jackie Brown”, „Spoorloos”, “The Monkey”, “Quiz Show”, “The Mist”, “The Blues Brothers”, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, “Severance”, “Flow”, and „Felidæ“.

Jackie Brown

What a great flick! My beef with Tarantino is that you can often tell that, just behind the camera, he’s jacking off at the thought of how clever he is and how many obscure seventies TV shows he knows, and while that’s still true here, the electric pairing of Pam Grier and Robert Forster washes all those eye-rolling feelings down until you’re left with the aftertaste of nothing but a good-ass crime thriller. 8/10 — my Tarantino power ranking goes something like Inglourious Basterds > this > Pulp Fiction > Django Unchained >>> Reservoir Dogs.

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

This grim Dutch crime thriller is consistently mentioned alongside Paul Verhoeven as proof that “see? Dutch cinema isn’t all bad”, which is something you could almost convince me of if it weren’t for every top-five list’s inclusion of a film about an evil lift.

Anyway, while Spoorloos does occasionally veer uncomfortably close to “TV movie of the week” territory, it’s carried by its villain, an exemplar of the banality of evil. He does what he does because he’s experienced being a hero, and he’s just curious what it feels like to be a villain — and that’s what makes him fucking terrifying. Check this out if you get the chance. 7/10.

The Monkey

Osgood Perkins returns right soon with another horror endeavour, this time a gory comedy about an evil cuddly monkey. The Monkey doesn’t reach the highs of fear and tension that Longlegs does, but neither does it completely bottle the ending, so let’s call it a draw, shall we? 6¾/10.

Quiz Show

I put this on on a lazy afternoon. I was suitably entertained. I remember nothing from it. A platonically perfect 5/10.

The Mist (rewatch)

The Twelve Angry Men of horror puts modern (well, 2000s) American society up against a mirror and examines how people would really react to a mass calamity in a way that hits different in the post-covid era, where everyone’s brain has had time to cook in the sun. Plus: the cruelest twist ending in cinematic history. 8/10.

The Blues Brothers

Dan Aykroyd is an actual crazy person and that’s why The Blues Brothers works. This is two-and-a-half hours of overindulgent insanity, the cinematic equivalent of a five-year-old playing with their toys, and i wouldn’t want it any other way. I nearly had an asthma attack laughing so hard. 10/10.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Warm. Fuzzy. Inessential. It’s weird seeing Adam Scott with a beard. 6/10.

Severance (season 2 finale)

The back half of Severance’s sophomore season fell victim to some shonky pacing decisions, placing two self-contained, slow-paced bottle episodes right before the final two, messing up the flow we were in and negating the chance for an epic Season 1-style three-episode ramp-up, but nonetheless, the double-length finale successfully sticks the landing. The camcorder conversation, where Mark’s innie and outie finally “meet”, may as well be what the whole show has been building up to, and it just keeps going from there. Every company needs a Choreography and Merriment department. 9/10.

Flow

The first part of a feline double feature, about an adorable black kitty who goes on a maritime journey after the world is inundated by a mysterious flood. The gimmick (if you can call it that) is that the film is told without a single line of dialogue — just animal noises and a backing of beautiful C418-esque music composed by the film’s director.

It’s a beautiful, serene, lovely experience — all animated in good ol’ open-source Blender, no less! It got me to really feel things for these animals — it was a good idea to dial the anthropomorphism down to, like, 10%, rather than 75%. They’re intelligent enough to steer a boat, but that’s about it. The kibby bats around a lemur’s tail and hates dogs. 9/10.

FelidĂŚ

The second part of the double feature: Felidæ1, a 1994 German film about… okay. Okay. Look. Bear with me here. The idea is that it’s a film noir except everybody is a cartoon housecat. And for the first twenty minutes or so, i was thinking, okay, that’s a nice idea, but i don’t know if it has much more than that idea? And then it goes full-tilt into Crazytown. This movie contains, in no particular order:

  • Cat buttholes
  • Cat sex
  • Cat homophobia
  • Cat eugenics
  • Cats speaking Latin
  • Cats reading German
  • Cats using a computer
  • Cat murder
  • So much gory cat murder
  • An electroshock cat cult
  • Genetically engineered lab cats
  • A cat psychopomp who takes care of the cat dead in his cat catacombs
  • A dream sequence involving a giant evil Gregor Mendel commanding a literal sea of dead cats

And it’s all done in the animation style of an eighties-nineties-type Disney film (with some budgetary concessions and dodgy lip-synch, because, hey, nobody’s actually going to watch this). It reminded me, weirdly enough, of an old Garfield cartoon i watched as a kid — the one where he had nine lives, specifically that segment where he was an escaped lab cat. I have only the haziest memory of it, but damned if it (and the annoying-ass little girl in the Garf-den of Eden) didn’t stick with me…

I don’t know who the fuck the audience for this is other than furries and sicko Europeans, but i fucking love that it exists. I’m gonna be thinking about it forever, whether i want to or not. All hail Claudandus? 9/10.

I’ll elaborate properly on getting around to the bimensal stuff-i-watched-recently post, but for now, you should absolutely go and watch Flow and Felidæ right now. Two films about cats: one beautiful and serene, one weird and deranged. Go do it. They’re great.