Since there's nothing interesting happening in the news today, I might as well post some movie micro-reviews.

The Crow: Upon a recent re-watch, I have a few observations:

1. This movie is about Ellis Act evictions. That's the entire plot.
2. Candyman is also a movie about a Vengeful Spirit fighting Gentrification. Therefore they are set in the same universe.
3. I always forget that Tintin is Lord Nikon. In my headcanon, following the events of Hackers, after all of his white friends went away to college, Nikon's life took an unfortunate, more explicitly criminal turn. RIP Nikon.
4. So now Hackers and Candyman are set in the same universe.
5. To this day, a Graeme Revell score is enough reason for me to go see a movie.
6. I saw a very clean 35mm print on a big screen, and even so, this movie is just so, so blurry. The mastering is crap. I truly hope that they never, ever re-make this movie -- it is and should remain a monument to Brandon Lee, and remaking it would just be an insult to him -- but I wish someone would re-master it, by which I mean, digitally generate a better render of every single frame. Throw some of that Fury Road tech at it and make a watchable 4K version.
7. A reminder about that TKK performace.

The Matrix: I re-watched all three to get in the mood for our upcoming screening of the first one on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. The first one is still a fantastic piece of filmmaking. That first scene, where we see Trinity performing the most incredible ass-kicking we've ever seen, and then she learns that Agents are inbound and she just turns tail and runs. She's afraid of someone? That's how you set the stakes. Also the dojo scene: "Do you think that's air you're breathing?"

The second two... can confirm: they are still an incoherent, babbling mess, and they make you like the first one less in retrospect. The freeway chase is pretty good. The Merovingian has a nice suit. That's about it.

And it reconfirms something I thought about Sense8: "Did they love that 'Burning Man rave in Zion' scene so much they had to expand it to 12 episodes? Yeah, I think they did."

Repo Man: I still love this movie so much. It's ridiculous. You should go watch it again.

The Magicians: I re-watched it from the beginning and it still holds up. The current season is killing it. And can I say how much I love that the Library Planets are triple mobius toruses? That makes so much sense to me in a Borgean way I can't explain. I am especially liking that the show is now totally "off book", because the show was always so much better than the books, largely by disregarding them.

The Man who Killed Hitler and Also The Bigfoot: This was great, and it was definitely not the movie I thought it would be. I mean, yes, those two things do happen, but mostly it's about how much he regrets them both, and they really make that work.

Perfect Skin: It's a "creepy stalker kidnaps and abuses a girl" movie, this time with non-consensual tattooing, so it's fair to ask "Why is this the story they chose to tell, again and again?" But the villain has this calmness to him and lack of mouth-foaming insanity that makes Stockholm Syndrome seem not-entirely out of the question. So, good acting and production. But still, "This story, again?"

Alita was pretty good. It was simple, but much punchy. It's relatively faithful to the manga, which is not necessarily great beause a lot of the manga was pretty stupid, such as her piece-of-shit boyfriend. The parts of it that were ripped off by Altered Carbon just made me angry at Altered Carbon all over again.

Vox Lux: This was really hard to watch. Good acting, but another movie about deeply unpleasant people. And it didn't really have much of an ending: I guess she just carries on being deeply unpleasant, the end?

Happy Death Day 2U: I am, as always, a sucker for Groundhog Day movies. This one is not as good as the first one, but still fun. It didn't waste a lot of time, so to speak. It adds some nice wrinkles in the cosmology, but it suffers from too much dumb slapstick. The "I am a blind French student in a beret and striped shirt" bit was stupid enough to almost overpower the whole rest of the movie. Why. Why would you do that, why. And the Dean doing his best Ed Rooney.... You are no Ed Rooney, Sir. Also, time travel fusion cores are clearly graduate level work, not undergrad, so why is that dude still living in the dorms?

Slaughterhouse Rulez: Well I should have known to veto it base solely on that "Z". Simon Pegg and some kids fight monsters, which sounds promising, but 3/4ths of it is on the theme, "English private schools are full of rich, bullying assholes", which was a daring revelation that I'm pretty sure has never before been committed to film.

Previously.