2000s – Yesterday's Movies

Nine

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This week is the fifteenth anniversary of Yesterday’s Movies, and it seemed appropriate to do a special piece for that. In the past I’ve revisited the first movie reviewed here and the first movie reviewed going from twice a month to weekly. In this case though, I feel like I’m out of significant early reviews in that vicinity to revisit (though I could go back to the first review that I felt I’d figured out the format.

However, I’ve never liked non-narrative series that make the last installment a retrospective or otherwise more of a special thing about the project as a whole than another installment that can mostly stand on its own, leaving the penultimate entry as the actual last one. So even though retrospective is an easy way to fill space, I wanted to resist that urge and end Yesterday’s Movies with a normal review. But what to pick, if not a Rewind?

I’ve always felt a bit strange about the blog outlasting its moratorium. This is a fifteen year old project that’s allowed to reach back ten years. So it occurred to me to check out the movies that released around the date that Yesterday’s Movies launched. And I got lucky. The same week, a movie called Nine had its initial limited release. It’s a musical, which is a bonus, and it’s about making movies. It’s about an Italian director trying to work out what his next movie should be. And that’s about all I know about it.

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V For Vendetta

November 15, 2024November 15, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

When I planned this month of the greats that I kept considering and putting off, I wasn’t thinking of the timing, I just happened to have multiple films that I kept considering as springboards to political thoughts at various times of political import. But I completely failed to consider that this November could turn out to be a month of much political spilling of ink of its own accord. That said, this specific one was not in the plan, I just remembered it when I realized there were themes among some of the selections.

I suppose I know more than for a lot of movies going in. There’s a terrorist revolutionary in a mask instigating a revolution against a tyrannical government, there’s a woman brought into his world as a viewpoint character, a lot of people end up putting on the mask. And it’s based on a graphic novel.

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No Country For Old Men

November 8, 2024November 8, 2024temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

As I announced last week at the end of the post, there’s only one more full month before I conclude this blog. I had this exit planned for months and in that time I’ve been trying to cover a lot of movies that I had always meant to get to, maybe for the entire fifteen year run. This month is for the most highly acclaimed films that I’ve come close to reviewing many times, only to decide they were too heavy to get into.

I never really absorbed much about the plot of this movie. I know Javier Bardem’s character is a monstrously cold blooded, unstoppable killer whose weapon of choice is a pneumatic cattle bolt, and I get a sense of a “dark Western” atmosphere. I suppose the title is something about how this isn’t a hospitable place for the sensibilities of the aging.

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Cloverfield

November 1, 2024November 1, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This movie had so much hype when it came out that I couldn’t avoid learning that this is a story in found footage about a Kaiju style attack on New York from the perspective of the running screaming little people on the ground who know almost nothing. I know it was so popular that a franchise was quickly spun up, which had varying success in recapturing the response.

It just never appealed to me before as a monster movie, but the cultural impact of at least the marketing around this movie is undeniable. I think this was among the first times a mainstream media release used an Alternate Reality Game to build buzz, and it definitely caught attention. I think some people were let down by the high expectations from the hype train, so that was more reason for me not to bother at the time.

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Napoleon Dynamite

September 26, 2024September 26, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This movie took my school by storm. I saw nothing that appealed to me, but even as someone whose reaction to hype is to become more determined to avoid it until it goes away, the power and longevity of the hype was starting to wear me down, until a peer whose opinion I respected told me “watching it will take 20 points off your IQ”. So I decided it had nothing for me, and eventually the hype went away. The cult stayed, but they got quieter.

By now, the main evidence this movie was popular is the occasional Vote for Pedro reference drifting by like a tumbleweed. Perhaps that means it wasn’t as formative as some other movies I could have included this month, but when I think of movies my generation loved, this is at the top, even if it never sold me.

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Garden State

September 19, 2024September 19, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I honestly have no idea what this movie is. I think this movie fixed in my mind that New Jersey is called the Garden State, and it stars Zach Braff apparently trying to do something more serious than Scrubs. I seem to recall that it might be a road movie?

Beyond that, the only thing I associate with this movie is that it keeps coming up as an underappreciated failure that millennials love.

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Brokeback Mountain

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

Among this month’s selections I guess this isn’t the most widely watched. But I still consider it formative to my cohort. Everybody knew about the Gay Cowboy Movie. Many were not kind. But I think the fact that it existed, that it challenged masculine images, and came from a major studio with big name actors, affected our perspective, even if not all at once. The world was changing, and this was part of the background radiation in the course of that change. Almost two decades later, I don’t think anything about this premise seems nearly as controversial as it did back then. Is that representation in action? Is it the confirmation of culture warriors’ fears? Maybe it’s both, or maybe neither.

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(500) Days of Summer

September 4, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This month I’m taking a look at movies that seem to have defined my generation but I missed anyway. So I’ll start off with one that’s been at the top of my list of movies I feel left out about for over a decade and a half.
All I really know about this movie is that it’s about a relationship, I think it goes badly, and it’s one of the defining movies of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character archetype, the millennial-coded hipster free spirit love icon. Also I know it as the movie that made it apparent that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to continue his acting career as an adult.

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Battlefield Earth

August 28, 2024August 28, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Among the cinematic debacles, this is one of the most infamous failures. I recall it’s supposed to be ridiculous, and maybe with a heavy handed Scientologist message? All I know for sure is John Travolta hasn’t worked much since.

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Gigli

August 21, 2024August 21, 2024temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I have to confess that I thought this was a completely different kind of movie. I thought it was a carefree European romcom somehow that everyone hated for some reason. I thought it was in Paris, I thought Gigli was the girl’s name, and I didn’t really know anything else. Both of those things were wrong. In preparing to watch I have discovered that it’s more of a seamy crime comedy I guess? I wonder if I was mixing it up with another romantic comedy. I highly doubt it was Surviving Christmas. Probably Gigi.

Picking out posters, I do think that the marketing was partly to blame, at least what marketing I saw with the media I had access to in 2003 for an R-rated movie.

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