everythingeverywhereallatonce

There is so much to say about this movie, it's hard to know where to start.

The filmmaking team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert go simply by "Daniels" and have been making weird, intense, maximalist videos that blend down-to-earth emotions and larger than life metaphors. A great example is "Interesting Ball" which you can watch here.

... youtube sure chose an interesting screengrab for that embedding.

Anyway.

EEAAO is exactly the film you would expect if you gave these guys an eight figure budget, two and a half hours of runtime, and superstars like Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Like if you enjoyed the above short, just go out and see the movie now.

From here on out, there will be spoilers.

***

A tremendous amount of discourse about this movie has been the Asian representation. It has Asian stars, and the emotional story is about a mother who was an immigrant reconnecting with the daughter she disapproved of.

I find the praise very weird, because it certainly isn't the first movie with Asian representation. Yes it stars Michelle Yeoh but she is already a star, it's not like she was lacking public presence before. Why be excited that this random indy A24 movie has Asian actors and relevant themes?

The traditional answer is "because it's a big budget blockbuster that studios invested a ton of money in, a ton of advertising, and will be in every theater in America." Except it's not. It opened on like, 100 theaters, and had next to no advertising. This is not in anyway "Hollywood opening up."

Why get excited then that yet another indy film features this inclusion, when hundreds of other films have been this inclusive.

Because it's really really good.

People are excited that a phenomenally good and ground breaking work of art was also featuring a culture that usually does not get center stage. If people are discussing this twenty years from now as one of the most influential hundred films, they will have to be talking about a movie that is not all white.

***

The word is "possibility."

The concept that connects this entire work, and all their works so far, is possibility. It's even the name of their earlier short, where they follow one lover's argument through different branching paths.

Possibility is... that what you could do at any moment is much larger than you think. In the middle of a fight with your greatest enemy you could get up and kiss him... or comb his hair, or rip off your shirt and stomp on it, or climb the bookcase, or eat your pocket change, or go out the door and leave and... go home, or get hit by a car, or run back in and take a surprise attack on your enemy.

The way people jump to different universes is by using this magic. They do something "weird" that is 100% physically possible, but completely out of expectation. (And the movie has a very pointed speech on what you "can't do" versus what "you're not allowed to do.") If they are weird enough, they set themselves on a different lifepath, and that gives them the skills that path would have in this universe.

Humor is so often the apt use of unexpected possibilities, and EEAAO takes every chance for this type of humor, surprising you while also calling back to earlier elements.

But possibility also means all the closed doors in our past. We had to make so many choices about who to be, that necessitated who we would not be, as well.  The movie is about the way the shadows of those other life paths still live with us.

Possibility is also a metaphor for ADHD. When we have so many possibilities that we can not focus on a single one. Evelyn demonstrates this undiagnosed ADHD early in the movie, and the despair of choice-overload becomes a major theme at the end of the movie. (And becomes a metaphor for teenage depression.)

And lastly, possibility implies just such a big world. Can you actually hold in your mind all the possibility inherent in everything? Trying to do so will drive a tiny human brain mad.

And I don't just mean in the Everything Bagel sense that is the delightful metaphor in the film. But the film itself is... everything everywhere all at once. From the opening shot, every scene is cluttered and has too much going on. The pace never fucking stops, and in fact only accelerates constantly. The maximalism is a carefully crafted style.

(And you can tell the maximalism is intentional from the points where they contrast it, like the white curtained world where Jobu is building her bagel, or the long scene of two rocks just looking out over an austere landscape.)

***

Everything else I have to say is minor, and probably obvious to people who have seen it anyway? The movie crisply takes metaphors - like the ADHD - showcases how the metaphor works, and then moves on without rubbing it down to dust.

I did appreciate how deftly it dealt with the uber-themes of chaos versus order. A meta-narrative we see in so many stories is the forces of harmony and order staving off the collapse and destruction of the system. We can call this the conservative narrative. And the alphaverse characters early on show just this justification - since Jobu Topaki, your children don't listen to you and your institutions are crumbling and your coffee tastes wrong. To preserve the harmonious order you need to kill the Outsider. And if that means killing your own children, it's because the Outsider has "infected" your children and is now a monster that lives in them. (This perspective of course, is represented by the older generation.)

All of that is bunk, but of course, many many stories tell that tale (Thor, Transformers, almost every Disney movie) and I wasn't going to be too upset if EEAAO told this narrative as well.

But no, they utterly smash that narrative. The chaos is not "in" your daughter, it is your daughter. You can not and should not kill the chaos, you need to love and embrace the chaos. You need to become the primordial chaos. (This narrative is also fairly common to be clear - remember Captain Marvel? - but this movie did an excellent representation of it, from the moment Jobu stepped off the freight elevator and showed her fighting style.)

There's so much more to say. Every character you see is revealed to have a private story of their own going on with different universes once you pay attention to them (while paying attention to everything else on the screen.) Quotidian items are littered throughout the beginning - phone calls, circular mirrors, bagels, a karaoke machine, spinning circles - that acquire heavy meaning the longer the film goes on. You will laugh and cry at the same time.

***

Media this movie either references, or is so similar that if you loved that you should watch this: the Matrix, Wong Kar-Wai, Homestuck, Ratatouille, the OA, Turning Red, Crouching Tiger, James Acaster, Rick and Morty, Azathoth, Egirls, everything everywhere.

The Batmans

 A riddle: What is and is not a Batman movie? The Batman, apparently.

Yes. There will be spoilers.

In some ways it's very easy to say this isn't Batman - or rather, it's a dark crime thriller with various stock tropes, that someone decided to stick a label on as Batman characters. You have an autistic alt-right serial killer. Let's call him the Riddler. You have a morally gray badass woman who swims in the world of sex and drug trafficking and is looking for revenge for her mother and kidnapped friend. Let's call her Catwoman. And of course you have the emo trust fund protagonist who wears too much eyeshadow and journals to himself, looking intensely vulnerable. That's our Batman. He fails to save the city from a disaster that kills thousands, but at least he finds himself. You can imagine a lot die-hard fans would complain about in this movie.

And yet, there was so much about this epic that felt reminiscent of previous Batman outings. The strings and sort of art-deco depiction of Gotham as a full character on its own, reminded me a great deal of the Tim Burton movies (Batman '89 and Batman Returns), especially with scenes like "Bruce Wayne goes to a funeral of a high profile victim, and it gets crashed by the supervillain." The corruption stories were like the ones that drove the plot of Dark Knight, but even deeper and darker. And of course the explosive finale was very similar to the world-shaking twist in Dark Knight Rises.

Is it good? Yes. Did it really need the three hour runtime? Well none of it is wasted at least. Stuff is always happening that couldn't be easily cut without changing the whole story.

But move beyond that two thumbs up or down emptiness, what is the movie saying? 

On the most obvious level, it's a morality play about corruption and current politics. The rich, from the Mayor to Thomas Wayne, have failed to shepherd this city and even their good gestures (like a philanthropy project called Renewal) are cynically used to entrench criminal power. There are two responses to this: the atavistic rebellion of put upon white men, from the Riddler to Bruce Wayne, who just want to punch back at who hurt them and nothing more. Renewal is impossible, so instead let's let in the violent tides of change (literally) and see what's left after everything is swept aside.

(QAnon style conspiracy theorists are less dismissible when there really is an underground sex-trafficking club that all the politicians go to. Of course it's only been a recent thing that believing the government is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles is specifically right-coded.)

And the other side is two Black women trying to fix things in a reasonable manner. Bella Real is running for mayor, and while in any true noir the candidate of hope would ALSO be in hock to the crime lords, she seems the real deal. And Selina Kyle is the only one getting vengeance for the sex-trafficked innocent woman, while the cops and Bat focus on rich and powerful (and guilty) politicians who have been murdered. 

Selina gives the most fascinating scene of the movie, where she wears contact lenses and ear pieces for Batman to investigate a sex club, so he has to do his job through the eyes and abilities of a woman. Yes, she can look at any man (to get a solid ID) but if she does so the man may look at her and she'll have to play along - instead of just aloofly leaving and using his intimidating physical presence. She can find out a lot of information he can't, but at a real cost in opportunities. It's clear this Batman had never considered the perspective he is forced to deal with.

But what's the lesson here? Don't just go along with The System. But also don't try to burn it to the ground. Wait for some hero to come along, vote the bums out, and trust everything will get better? This seems like a message from 2008 not 2022.

Away from the plot, there are two more abstract things that stuck with me:

1. Sound. This movie has a dominating score and sound editing, and those aspects are definitely part of the experience. I can't talk about sound engineering well, I can only say pay attention to this one. When I saw it I sat right next to the speaker in a Dolby cinema and so the sound overwhelmed me frequently, shaking my eardrums uncomfortably. But that unpleasantness was certainly thematic to the moments.

2. Strength. Superhero movies are often about very dexterous acrobatics, where the skilled assassin dodges all attacks and delivers one killing blow. Or if the movie is saying a hero is strong, then a bullet or other major attack bounces right off them with no effect. We are rarely shown what it means to be "strong" in the sense of your punch mattering more, but also not being an unstoppable force.

The two examples I think of for strength in cape movies are the subway station fight in Matrix 1 (with those after-image fists slamming into concrete and bellies) and Daredevil('s ability to take a punch and keep going.)

This Batman was raw and brutal and strong. He beat criminal's heads in (well after they were defenseless.) The Batmobile, in its one overly long chase scene, roars with an jet engine that is barely restrained, and pushes cars and trucks off the road. Everything in the fight and car scenes is designed to give you the feel of thrumming power under the seat, where justice will be achieved but punching for it hard enough.

A Post-Post-Modern Defense of Analysis

 Scott Alexander wrote a review of Don’t Look Up, and then tongue-in-cheek defended it with:

Look, there’s a weird game called “movie criticism”, where you take a movie as a jumping-off point to have thoughts on Society or the Human Condition. In the real world, people watch movies because they’re funny, or they have cool action sequences, or because the lead actress is really hot. But the rules of the “movie criticism” game say you have to ignore this stuff and treat them as deep commentary. I agree this game is not as fun as, say, Civilization IV: Fall From Heaven. But I have deliberately limited the amount of time I play that game for the sake of my sanity and my career, which means I need to play other games, and the “movie criticism” game seems okay.

Which is funny because Scott is funny. But also I’m one of the people clearly skewered in this explanation. (Also my wife is playing Civ VI right now, so I guess that makes a new gender dichotomy - are you the spouse who writes to a movie blog or the spouse who plays Civ VI?)

So, really, why write abstruse analyses of movies? Is it just apophenia? Can we actually defend this from first principles? Is there anything we are *actually figuring out* or are we just having entirely subjective fun here?

Especially when we talk about themes. Someone says a movie is really about recovering from grief, or the unbearable weight of responsibility, or how we change ourselves for capitalism and -- maybe it's supported by the text but who cares. You might as well collect the first letter of each page of a novel and talk about what message can be read into that random noise.

What makes art good is a question that can't really give an objective answer to. No matter what you say, someone else can say "well I don't think that's good" and what can you say then?

What makes art powerful though? What makes it popular and impact the culture and people talk about it years from now?

... I could say "what makes money?" That somewhat is a solved problem. The advertising budget for a movie + the prior reputation of its inputs (franchise, actors, maybe director) can predict box office numbers really well. And even if MCU films for adults are only 90% formulaic, the CGI cartoon movies for kids that make half a billion dollars (Secret Life of Pets, etc) *are* 100% formulaic. So we're not talking about just money.

Sure, "cultural relevance" and psychological impact are vague quantities we can argue over, but hopefully we can agree they have *some* objective existence. If we are saying Shakespeare and Jaws and Miyazaki *mattered*, I'm not wholly incapable of defending the claim.

(We could go the entirely symbolic-social cynical route and say all of them are only widely appreciated because the existing order told them to exalt them but... I have enough dignity to not believe that. There was something *good* there that had an impact in the Real we could not ignore anymore than the Soviet politburo could ignore Chernobyl.)

We make thousands of movies every year. And dozens of them have actors and writers and directors and technical artists who can claim to be among the best on Earth. Plenty of skill and quality go into these dozens. But which ones will *stick*? Which ones will the audience love and have "long legs" as the box office analysts say and will be in memes next year and in best of lists next decade and studied by schoolchildren in a century? What will be Avatar the Last Airbender versus... James Cameron's Avatar?

So there, we have a question about objective qualities that is difficult and deep and we can look into.

Here's a follow-up: why do we watch more than one movie?

If all you want is say, witty actors and flashy swordfights and swelling music and good jokes, why haven't you just found your favorite example of this, and watched it over and over?

We do this with many of life's pleasures. The best sushi we find... we keep going back to. Porn has repeat value, for sure. You probably have a song you've listened to more than a hundred times.

But there are some forms of art where our joy declines precipitously the more we've already seen it. Videogames, books, movies. Sure there are some beloved examples we visit again every so often, but nothing ever matches the excitement of the first time we saw it.

Let's just fiat that our brains need something new for a reason we can't explain. Okay, but then how new?

If I just took the plot of Die Hard, and had actors of the same rough charisma as young(er) Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, and wrote the same style of jokes but slightly different punchlines, and shoot the action scenes again... would that satisfy our cravings? Why would it matter that critics would say it's just Die Hard again? We liked Die Hard! Why do we need new plots and new twists and new characters?

(Sometimes we don't, but more often we do? Even remakes have an entire meta-structure of how much needs to be changed for the remake to be "fresh.")

So now we have two serious questions: what makes a work "powerful", and what unites all the art we personally like even as we want it to be eternally different?

Well one theory is themes. 

What is the underlying theme of a work? How much clarity does that theme have? How much does the artistry support that theme?

The great hypothesis of reviewing is that the above three questions determine a lot both about the lasting power of a work, and whether individuals who are attached to those themes will like this work?

It might be true. It might not. There's some correlation we can make, but it's loose and it never really proves causation anyway. But, for the sake of this particular form of art, let's accept it as true. 

(What would Die Hard be without the subplot about his collapsing marriage and the cop who couldn't use a gun? 95% the same, or would its heart be ripped out?)

So first we can analyze the acknowledged great works on these metrics. What are there themes, and how much does the artistry support them?

From that we can ponder: what themes resonate with audiences (even the audience of I), and what film-making skills support them?

The next leap is to say: what art will be successful? Using the hypotheses we've come up with about which themes are resonant and what supports them, can we look at two movies by famous actresses and say "this one will be remembered, and this one forgotten?"

(You can even say "this movie that was forgotten just never got seen by people and if more people knew about it, then it would stick in memories and impact the culture." A not practically verifiable hypothesis, but still theoretically about something objective.)

And now the whole door is open. You argue about what theme a movie really has, for the purpose of determining if it will impact the culture, and as evidence you can say how much it resonated with you personally if you also care about that theme.

Don't Look Up (What This Movie Is About)

 After I published my best of 2022 list, I also saw the Matrix (bad) and Station Eleven (good) and the discourse topic du jour "Don't Look Up." I don't really have anything to say about the first two yet, but Don't Look Up is... surprisingly good.

Which you know, is unexpected for a moralistic allegory about climate change. And it's certainly been criticized on that front, for being more concerned with political allegiance than being good art.

I'm sympathetic to the above point of view. There's certainly a lot of people who will insist you like tone-deaf art as the price for being their political ally. The key to understanding this film is that it's not about climate change, and then you can realize how good it is.

DLU presents a challenge to us Barthe-ian believers of "the author is dead" in that the authors - writers, directors, actors - are all very much alive and clear on what their movie is about and saying so on Twitter. And yet, it's really not.

Matt Yglesias agrees that the political situation around climate change simply does not look like what is depicted in the film, whereas the metaphor the allegory is using is actually important and tracks with how it's discussed in the film as well.

I'm going to go further and say the movie isn't really about existential risk or any governmental policy at all, because DLU is not a movie about solutions. Climate change is really a term for a broad coalition of allies and policy changes aimed at responding to the effects of pollution.

Don't Look Up is about the importance of being sad in a particular way.

You see this most clearly in the early parts of DLU - their first meeting with the President and their first appearance on the web show "Daily Rip" (RIP, get it?) They've waited all day to talk with the President, and fumble at the start trying to impress how important this is and the President bluntly says "What's your ask?" like someone who gets a million requests a day and it all comes down to how much it's going to cost her. And the good guys' politico mumbles something about NASA plans and the conversation deteriorates from there. Same for the first talk show appearance. It's a huge breakdown for one character and a major plot turn in the movie, but there's still no discussion of "what are you asking people in power to do."

(We later get a major plan in response to the comet, but not in this scene. Most of an hour of a movie passes before there is any discussion of "what can we do.")

Now, I could believe that originally there was more discussion in the movie of what measures to take and the science of dealing with a comet, but that got cut before it's boring compared to the struggles of human emotion. But that rather reinforces the point then.

What is emphasized in all these scenes is "how people should be reacting to the threat of the end of the world." Our protagonists are breaking down and freaking out and taking this incredibly emotionally. The rest of the world is being satirized for not caring enough. Maybe they find a dumb way to deny it, or maybe they airily acknowledge the threat, but regardless they are far more interested in empty political scandal or celebrity gossip.

(Side note to mention how central "male desirability" is in this movie. Leo DiCaprio's schlub scientist is played up as a surprise viral sensation with meme-able daddy hotness. The woman President is embroiled in scandals over trying to put her nude model boyfriend on the Supreme Court. Even the celebrity scandal revolves around one singer not being able to get over her celebrity boyfriend who cheated on her.)

Now the people who do care correctly go through a variety of metaphorical scenarios for this. We know of the intended interpretation that is for the "caring" to be in the form of a political movement that can't get the rest of the country to agree with them because they are too stubborn and contrarian. (In fact one thing DLU captures is the horror of being a subject of political polarization: even when half the country supports you, they do so in unhelpful and annoying ways that make you feel just as bad. All the viral video sections about Dr. Hotty are reminiscent of the radio call in show at the start of Hancock this way.) But they are also depicted on the far end of the spectrum of universality as being like a small cult that is convinced everyone is going to die and their friends and family don't want to argue with them so they are "polite" and even pretend to go along - but of course polite pretending is at great dissonance with someone really believing they will die.

But the other end of the spectrum of universality is even more important, and it is this: we are all going to die. Whether in six months or sixty years, death is inevitable. When people first truly realize this, it often freaks them out. Death will be forever and all our striving before then is meaningless. If you are a person really thinking about this, then everything everyone else does all the time seems like ephemeral distraction just to ignore that fact. And that's what comes across in DLU: the universal experience of existential terror and wondering why the rest of the world isn't as crippled by it as you.

It's easy to say "yes, this fear of death is a metaphor for how our generation feels about climate change." But I prefer to say "an insipid piece of propaganda actually managed to be a solid metaphor for how humanity approaches death."

***

Anyway, the major theme of the work out of the way, we can see the rest of the movie is... a lot of small details and creative bits that support this theme and are funny on their own. Things I loved:

• The three star general who cons the scientists out of snack money in the White House (and how one scientist just can not get over that, even as catastrophe unravels around them.)
• The news anchor who has an apocalypse kink.
• The split path between "working with power and losing your soul" vs "rejecting power and becoming a fringe element of society."
• The chief of staff son of the President. Every line Jonah Hill has in this movie is some new twist that sums up a character beat beautifully, from wanting to bang his mom to his rambling litany against the educated elites, to being left alone after his mom has launched off on a lifeboat spaceship.
• The Garden of Eden ending and bronterocs.
• The other ending, where the main characters die. The whole movie has mocked the rest of the world for being concerned with shallow banal life instead of the world ending, but in the final moments at the comet actually hits, even our scientists are arguing over what makes good apple pie and coffee, as the shockwave rips through their walls. We know they know and are trying to focus on what is good in life instead of the oncoming death.
• The way a woman who is reacting honestly to the terror of the world suddenly becomes dismissed as a BPD girl with crazy eyes.
• "Okay, I guess it really is all over in just minutes. You wanna fuck? Or shoot each other?" "I... just want to drink and talk shit about people."
• The "Don't Look Up" movements and the "Look Both Ways" opportunistic consumerism.

The biggest element to discuss among these is BASHLiiF and the movie's depiction of an antagonistic establishment.

This is one of the places where DLU goes off the rails as a climate change analogy. In order for the proper horror narrative, our plucky scientists have to face enemies on both sides: those uneducated rabble who are too distracted to see any threats, and the overeducated establishment too confident in themselves to listen to anyone else. We get the latter in the form of BASHLiiF the Facebook analogue and its genteel effeminate CEO and his panoply of scientists who soothingly reassure "don't worry, we big brains have this all handled, and are going to make a ton of money off of this." They even have a CGI presentation for the White House, reminiscent of John Hammond's "we spared no expense" animation in Jurassic Park.

Of course the fatal flaw of the establishment extreme is that they don't listen to anyone who offers criticism or correction, and instead deluge the critics with all the unrelated things they do know that make them feel so much smarter than you. This is all very stock villain stuff and fine, but what does it relate to in our political world regarding climate change?

Yes you can of course list various corporations or the iconoclastic scientists who will say we don't have to worry about global warming. But they are much, much smaller fry than this sort of "consensus so overarching it can't imagine opposition" that this type of villain is.

You know who BASHLiiF really looks like? Theranos (topical news point, since Elizabeth Holms was just convicted yesterday.) 

Theranos is much closer to the sort of thing that was "Look we are Science! No don't look at our actual numbers, just be in awe of how many establishment figures agree with and supports us. We've set up some good looking press photo ops for you that actually mean nothing." But of course people like Holmes and Biden wholeheartedly endorse climate justice.

The mention of COVID is really fortunate. Because the movie was conceived before COVID, and yet filmed during that crisis, and it can't help but to be shaped by that crisis. And COVID really is a better match to the analogy of DLU than climate change (which Matt above notes.)

Particularly the horror of "it's coming right now!" "oh no it isn't." The movie captures the feel of February 2020 for all the people who were reading news out of China and realizing this was going to be us soon, as the rest of the news was focused on the Democratic primary or whatever else. And of course the little snark where the President announces their new plan and the stock market goes up.

Good Things in 2021

 My end of the year list is just "everything good I happened to watch in 2021." Maybe it was released this year, maybe I just got around to it now. (First viewings counted only.) It's only movies and series - no videogames, RPG's, streams, podcasts, plays, or books, though I was privileged to have enjoyed many of those as well. Also I grouped the TV series into the seasons I saw this year.

These are only the works I enjoyed and would recommend to others. I had about a 50/50 hit rating for that. It's sorted from best to worst - I'm not doing the artificial suspense where I count down and you wonder if I entirely forgot a movie, or made it number one.

The point of this list is mostly to tell people "you want to kill time and see something good? Watch these." If you see something on this list and think "wow yeah, that was killer", then think how good all the things above it must be.

I went through all my streaming accounts and blog posts and came up with 51 pieces from recent years I saw this year. After that I also list seven much older movies I saw for the first time that are basically classics, let alone rank them. You don't need me to describe them or pitch them to you.

When I had previously written a post on the work, I just link to that post. Otherwise I write a sentence of short description for why you might want to see it. Though as we go down the list and it just becomes things everyone knows about, I stop bothering to write up the description. You know plenty about what "Witcher Season 2" is like already.

The first two entries are not going to surprise anyone who has read me recently...

R	Movie/TV Series	Source	Commentary
1	Arcane	Netflix	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/11/how-to-recommend-arcane.html
2	The Harder They Fall	Netflix	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/11/megapost-six-movies-you-should-see.html
3	Lost Girls and Love Hotels	Amazon $	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/09/lost-girls-and-love-hotels.html
4	For All Mankind S1-2	Apple TV	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/10/i-watched-everything-good-on-apple-tv.html
5	Pig	Amazon $	Nick Cage doing John Wick but as a chef assaulting the Portland Fine Dining scene.
6	WandaVision	Disney	You all heard about this this year. The core 6 episodes are worthy of the acclaim.
7	Vast of Night	Amazon Prime	An extremely mesmerizing close-up of two kids in a small town facing the existential mystery of an alien invasion.
8	The Guard	Amazon $	Brendan Gleesan and Don Cheadle have great chemistry in an Irish Buddy Cop Comedy
9	Brand New Cherry Flavor	Netflix	Visceral horror movie drawn out over 8 hours, about the nature and costs of revenge.
10	Cruella	Disney	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/06/black-and-white-and-red-all-over.html
11	Green Knight	Amazon $	Tour de force of the meaning of masculinity and our understanding of Arthurian epics.
12	Killing Them Softly	Amazon $	Modern mafia movie with Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini giving great performances and heavy commentary on the 2008 financial crisis.
13	Midnight Mass	Netflix	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/09/midnight-mass-sun-rises-on-good-and-bad.html
14	Willy's Wonderland	Amazon $	Nick Cage doing Five Nights at Freddies as a silent protagonist action hero. It's really amazing and the plot moves fast.
15	Locke	Amazon $	Two hours of Tom Hardy making phone calls as his family crumbles and he tries to organize concrete logistics. WIll make you care about the world of concrete.
16	VAL	Amazon $	Documentary of Val Kilmer, told in three voices, who was much more a demiurgic character than I knew.
17	Revolver	Amazon $	Classic Guy Ritchie criminal romp that slowly turns into psychological-existential metaphor, plus kabbalah.
18	Nine Days	Amazon Prime	Metaphysical fantasy about souls who will be born into bodies, and how best to appreciate the many experiences of a human life.
19	Dune 2021	Theaters	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/11/megapost-six-movies-you-should-see.html
20	Tig Notaro Happy To Be Here	Netflix	This is more a general pointer to Tig's work. I only discovered it this year, and they do emotional devastation plus genuine comedy at the horror of it all amazingly well.
21	Cure	Youtube	My foray into japanese horror.
22	The Power of the Dog	Netflix	A very slow paced western focused on the emotional internality of a few characters, with very good, intense, and slow-moving scenes in the back half.
23	Katla	Netflix	Icelandic horror series about changelings, and the introspective questions their existence would inspire.
24	Nightcrawler	Amazon $
25	Bliss	Amazon Prime	Serious scifi that benefits from not being spoiled.
26	The Tangle	Amazon Prime	Cheap Amazon scifi sometimes turns out amazing set pieces.
27	Queen's Gambit	Netflix
28	Army of Thieves	Netflix	The prequel to Snyder's zombie remake, it's actually more engaging in it's faux-mythic-fantasy trappings.
29	The Boys S2	Amazon Prime
30	Justice League: Snyder Cut	HBO Max	Much better than expected, changing the focal point of the entire work.
31	Army of the Dead	Netflix
32	Expanse S5-6	Amazon Prime	Really good political drama in space but the highlights at two characters (Avisirala and Amos.)
33	Loki	Disney
34	Revenant	Amazon $
35	Spider-Man: No Way Home	Theaters	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/12/spider-man-no-way-home.html
36	I, Origins	Amazon $	Brit Marling at her most predictable, but I still love it.
37	Bo Burnham: Inside	Netflix	This comedian's intense introspection about a year in quarantine. Has some very compelling earworms.
38	History of Time Travel	Amazon Prime	Cheap Amazon scifi sometimes turns out amazing set pieces.
39	The Sinner S1	Netflix
40	Hell on Wheels S1 and S4	Amazon $	Very gritty exploration of race/class/gender divides on the frontier in the 19th century. Colm Meaney is amazing as an over the top villain. Common also takes my heart.
41	Angel Heart	Amazon $	Laughable and grotesque New Orleans horror.
42	Mandalorian S2	Disney
43	Witcher S2	Netflix
44	I Care a Lot	Netflix	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/02/i-care-about-bodies-lot.html
45	Helstrom	Hulu	Psychological horror that's presumably part of the MCU but not really.
46	THE Suicide Squad	HBO Max	It was what we expected based off the previous one.
47	Siren S1-S2	Hulu	CW style soapdrama that focuses on mermaids, the northwest, and polyamory.
48	Melancholia	Hulu
49	Art of Self Defense	Amazon $	Jesse Eisenberg doing mumblecore building masculine identity in an LA cult.
50	Exit Through the Gift Shop	Amazon $	Banksy's self-critical documentary about a person who mirrored him.
51	The Station Agent	Amazon $
Y	Classics Corner
1963	Contempt	Amazon $
1973	The Last of Shiela	Amazon $	Actually a puzzle hunt in movie form.
1975	Dog Day Afternoon	Amazon $
1979	Stalker	Amazon $	Best of the classics.
1988	Last Temptation of Christ	Amazon $
1990	Total Recall	Amazon $	https://prequelsredeemed.blogspot.com/2021/11/megapost-six-movies-you-should-see.html
1994	The Crow	Amazon $	Unavoidably more goth due to the IRL story around it.