People with a bunch of Oscars making a black and white Macbeth adaptation the original Shakespearean dialogue doesn't necessarily sound exciting on paper, but Joel Coen, Denzel Washington, and Frances McDormand are just about the best set of people I can think of to do this (ironically, the Coens are working apart for the first time because one of them is directing an original play while the other is directing a movie of a very famous play). Denzel Washington is as fantastic as you would expect, but the part of the movie that really stuck with me was Kathryn Hunter, who played an old man and the three witches. Apparently she does mostly theatre and I'd never seen her in anything before, but she's just an amazing, unique presence, would love to see more of her. 

The direction Aaron Sorkin's career has gone in has kind of bummed me out because I actually like his writing, but his turn toward biopics and true stories doesn't play to his strengths because he's a distinctive writer who tends to imprint his own sensibility and obsessions on the material instead of capturing their essence. This tendency reached its nadir with the completely wrongheaded The Trial of the Chicago 7, and I feared the similarly poorly titled Being The Ricardos would be worse. But this turned out to be pretty good, which maybe I should've expected: his old-school style of patter is often better suited to the 1950s than the present day, and behind-the-scenes in the world of television is Sorkin's comfort zone (and Clark Gregg finally gets to play the network exec he was about to be when "Sports Night" got canceled). I've always thought of Nicole Kidman as someone who knocks it out of the park in roles that are right for her but not really very versatile or chameleonic, and only funny in a very certain kind of comedy, so I thought her Lucille Ball could be a disaster, but she's really great, got the voice just right and the hair and makeup really helped do the rest of the work. I still found plenty of problems with the overall execution of the movie, but Kidman, J.K. Simmons, and Nina Arianda were all fantastic, only Javier Bardem was completely miscast. 

I saw The Matrix in the theater when it came out, but I've never had any particular reverence for it, and thought the first two sequels were such a waste that if nothing else a 4th movie at least had an opportunity to bring up the series' overall batting average. But The Matrix Resurrections is just a little too transparent about the fact that Lilly Wachowski wouldn't have made it if Warner Bros. weren't dead set on making a sequel with or without the original filmmakers, and in the end it feels like a serious version of Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back where the protagonists of the franchise are against it continuing. And I mean, The Matrix Reloaded was incoherent but still had amazing action sequences, the action in Resurrections just felt perfunctory and like the movie cost way less than $200 million to make. And it felt like a waste of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jonathan Groff to have them doing weird meta reinventions of Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving's iconic characters. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, and then turned out right rancid when the credits rolled with a terrible ska cover of Rage Against The Machine's "Wake Up," as played by a band who recently became famous when the singer pissed on a fan onstage. 

I saw that there was an animated movie on Netflix starring Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and just immediately put it on. The House is a weird little British dark comedy anthology film with 3 stories, my favorite was definitely the one with the mouse voiced by Jarvis, but the whole thing is pretty cool, great animation. 

Swan Song is a near-future sci-fi story where Mahershala Ali's character is a man with a terminal illness who decides to secretly sign up for a new service where a perfect copy of him, with all the same memories and no health problems, will replace him and be married to his wife and raise his children. It's an interesting premise, and it's a little irritating that I just saw the exact same premise barely 6 months ago in the Anthony Mackie episode of the Amazon anthology series "Solos" -- the framing of the story was a little different, it was obviously shorter and smaller-scale, but otherwise pretty similar. Swan Song has more time to explore the emotional implications, though, and Ali is great as usual, and has excellent chemistry with Naomie Harris (who sings Prince's "Sometimes It Snows In April" really beautifully at one point). The concept is pretty thought-provoking -- as a parent, I now primarily fear death as a fear of leaving my kids without a dad and leaving my wife to raise them without me. But I don't think I'd be able to leave them with a clone of me and hope it works out, it's just too weird and creepy. 

I spent years kind of mocking the idea that that this overhyped "epic twitter thread" got turned into a semi-prestigious A24 movie that I was like, OK, I should at least watch it and give it a chance. But it kind of felt like even the hype over the Twitter story was like some kind of tail end remnant of the early 2010s trend of trashy Florida-based movies like Spring Breakers, Magic Mike, and Pain And Gain, so the movie's not just 5 years late but kind of a decade behind the zeitgeist. But Zola is fine, I guess, Taylour Paige carried the movie well, Riley Keough and Nicholas Braun were from that Aaron Paul school of somehow coming off really condescending and facile in just the act of playing a lower class white person who listens to a lot of rap music.

I have mixed feeling about Lin-Manuel Miranda in general, but when it comes to writing songs for Disney movies, he's got the perfect skillset. The songs from Moana have been a staple of my household for 5 years and it wouldn't surprise me if Encanto has a similar shelflife, my youngest watched it two days in a row and has been going around singing bits of the songs ever since. And I just found the whole thing pretty charming, loved the stuff with house that's alive. 

My kids have become big fans of the Hotel Transylvania movies, so this is another one my youngest was pretty into. I'm amused that Adam Sandler did 3 animated movies playing Dracula, each one making more money than the last, and then finally tapped out for the 4th one. Like, it took a long time, but we finally found something that Adam Sandler thinks is beneath him. My kid didn't notice that Dracula had a different voice actor, though, so it's probably a smart move to make it cheaper without him. 

I was in no rush to see the 'photorealistic' Lion King remake, but it was on TV and my kid watched it. I thought visually it worked a little better than I expected, but still felt pretty unnecessary -- the closer they got to mimicking the original, the less flattering it was. Beyonce's line readings were ridiculous, and Chiwetel Ejiofor in particular just had none of the campy menace Jeremy Irons brought to Scar, and it felt kind of pathetic how they didn't even try to pull of "Be Prepared" and just skipped it. But at least they had new jokes in the Timon and Pumbaa scenes so those felt a little fresh. The sad/violent parts were a bit more visceral and made my kid cry, he watched the whole thing but then the next day he asked to watch the original Lion King. 

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