My wife and I often go out for dinner and a movie on my birthday, but January can be kind of a dry time to go to the theater in terms of new releases. And when the first ads for M3GAN started going around a few months ago, I wasn't interested, but as the buzz reached a fever pitch on opening weekend, it seemed like a fun idea to see the movie everyone was talking about, and I enjoyed it. Turns out the director, Gerald Johnstone, did the New Zealand horror movie Housebound that I enjoyed a few years ago, and it had the same screenwriter, Akela Cooper, as Malignant. Not a masterpiece by any means, but the way things escalated and balanced out the comedy and the tragedy was pretty deft, and Violet McGraw's performance was so sincere and heartbreaking and brought a level of gravity to the story that the story might have just felt goofy without. Also I love Bruce, I hope Bruce is in the sequel. 

I think the original Avatar was the last time my late father, my brother and I all saw a movie together. And while I didn't love the movie, my dad's enthusiasm was infectious enough that I found myself enjoying the experience. So when my 13-year-old son watched Avatar recently and expressed interest in going to see the sequel, I was game. I let my kid choose a 3D screening, since he was the one who wanted to go, but that wouldn't have been my preference, and I feel like the 3D just made The Way of Water look even more like a video game or theme park ride than the first movie, I just really disliked the visual aesthetic. And man, 3 hours was just way too long -- there'd be a thrilling action sequence once every 40 minutes or so that I'd briefly get caught up in, but I was bored most of the time, it might be the only time I took two bathroom breaks at the theater just to get away from the movie for a few minutes.

There has been such a groundswell of enthusiasm around this movie that I was excited to see it, and while I didn't wind up on the side of its vocal detractors, I can't say I loved Everything Everywhere All At Once. To be fair, I was kind of tired the night I watched it and it really wore me out, and I may try to watch it again when I'm in a better mood. But I do wonder if there was something off about the pacing that exhausted me. I felt more engaged with the first 20 minutes than the rest of the movie where things were constantly flipping between different universes and different realities, it just felt like the movie lost its rhythm and started to feel like a long montage. But the cast was great and really made it worth watching, I grew up loving Ke Huy Quan in Temple of Doom and Goonies and it's so cool to see him have this big comeback decades later.

I loved the first Knives Out, and while I wouldn't put the second movie quite on the same level, I'm happy with the decision to serialize this thing and do more Benoit Blanc mysteries. It's such a fun role to see Daniel Craig in and Rian Johnson has such an indefatigable bag of tricks to dip into, it was a great movie to watch while drinking wine on New Year's Eve. And Kate Hudson was really the surprise MVP of this cast, great performance. 

I didn't think much of Martin McDonagh's three previous movies, and I loathed Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan's previous movie together, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. So I went into The Banshees of Inisherin with a lot of apprehension and was relieved to find myself enjoying it. Keoghan and Kerry Condon were especially great, I think the supporting players did a lot to elevate the movie because the conflict between Farrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters was so frustratingly opaque, even if that was, I suppose, a pretty deliberate choice. 

As much as I love Guillermo del Toro's work, I wasn't really too excited about him doing a Pinocchio movie. But I gotta hand it to him, the stop motion animation is gorgeous and he found a compelling emotional perspective for the story. 

It kind of goes without saying what I would prefer Guillermo del Toro's version of a story more than post-Polar Express Robert Zemeckis's version, and this deserved all the pans and unflattering comparisons to the other 2022 Pinocchio. That said, some of the dialogue was snappy and charming, and when I was a kid my favorite part of the movie was Figaro, and the CGI cat in this version is pretty cute too. But man, Joseph-Gordon Levitt is a classic example of a screen actor getting voice acting work he cannot pull off, his Jiminy Cricket is terrible. 

I was a big fan of "Difficult People" so I thought Bros was pretty funny, although I definitely get that Billy Eichner was trying to have his cake and eat it too -- making a romcom that still maintained his caustic style of comedy, or more precisely, making a historic mainstream gay romcom that also satirized other gay movies/shows that were much more anxious about accommodating and not scaring off hetero audiences. Ultimately, though, I think the movie satisfied most of its artistic goals even if it didn't reach its box office ambitions, because I love romcoms and this totally succeeded as a charming, romantic story without conforming to all the tropes of a guy/girl romance. The Debra Messing part was hilarious. And after watching Luke McFarlane for five seasons of the outer space bounty hunter show "Killjoys," it was cool to see him do well in something completely different. 

Top Gun was one of the first huge monoculture things I can remember being aware of and completely disinterested in, and that's really never changed, the whole thing is so eyerolling to me. But I did wanna see the Val Kilmer bit in the new movie, so I went ahead and watched it. It was fun and probably a better movie than the original despite its sometimes stifling fealty to recreating various visual and musical hallmarks of the 1986 movie. 

I realized as I put this on that the director, Zach Cregger, is one of the dudes from "The Whitest Kids U' Know," so he's kind of in that Jordan Peele sketch-comedy-guy-to-horror-auteur pipeline. Anyway this was excellent, one of the best horror movies I've seen in the past couple years. Bill Skarsgard's casting is brilliant in terms of throwing off your expectations, and Georgina Campbell is a great heroine. But Justin Long's performance, the best of his career, manages to feel like the centerpiece of the movie despite the fact that he doesn't show up until nearly the halfway mark. Even more impressively, they built a whole subplot about a celebrity getting 'canceled'/'MeTooed' that wasn't stupid, didn't derail the rest of the movie, and didn't pull its punches. 

Adult Swim has pulled some fun stunts with airing unannounced programming over the years, the most memorable of which was "Too Many Cooks." So I was excited to hear that in December they aired a yule log video of a fireplace that, after a few minutes, turned into an absurdist feature-length horror movie from "Too Many Cooks" director Casper Kelly. Like Barbarian, one of the main catalysts of the plot in The Fireplace is that a house is a doublebooked Airbnb, although I guess both movies came out so close together that that's just total parallel thinking there. But things quickly go off in a few different directions, some of them suspenseful and gorey, some of them just silly. In the end it kind of feels like they were working hard on capitalizing on the element of surprise and just throwing crazy stuff at the wall to amuse the viewer, but it also in some ways feels like a missed opportunity to make an actually good horror movie and not a sort of over-the-top satire of a few different kinds of horror movies.  

Spirited is such a self-aware modern update of A Christmas Carol is that the characters have seen the last big self-aware modern update, Scrooged. And while Spirited is not as good as Scrooged by any means, it exceeded my expectations with some clever scripting, and the fact that it's a full-on musical and a pretty solid one, despite the fact that Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell are not particularly good singers. 

Apple TV+ put this half-hour short film out on Christmas day that's apparently based on a children's book, and it's really just wonderful, cute and whimsical but also a little philosophical and sad. Now I definitely want to get the book for my 7-year-old, who enjoyed the movie. 

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