Summer Movies 2023

I’ll keep this list updated as I see more of the season’s movies… and there are a few placeholders in here so I can remember to watch all this stuff.

Air

Air is the riches to riches story of a little known shoe company called Nike. Despite the fact I have zero love for mega-brands, I thoroughly enjoyed the breezy nature of this flick. (Curiously, I’ve never watched a televised ballgame in its entirely, but I’m quite smitten on ESPN’s 30 for 30.) Matt Damon and Jason Bateman are two of the most likable actors in the business and they play off each other naturally. A good movie to watch on a rainy day.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

Placeholder… it’s taking me a while to get around to this one because I was told you have to see the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special first (you don’t), which I found to be mind-numbingly awful and not just because I hate Christmas movies (I do). I’m no longer a big fan of Chris Pratt fan, either, and I’ve found his character unlikable since Infinity War.

Fast X

This one is admirable in many ways (rich cinematography, beautiful looking people) and embarrassing in a lot of others (forced humor, Vin Diesel). When it’s not being corny, and the CGI cars aren’t flying around like toys, I can kinda see the franchise’s appeal. Jason Momoa is almost great as the villain, but he goes one notch too far. Fast is so phony looking, I can’t be sure any of its actors have ever driven a car in real life, much less stepped foot off a sound stage. Did not finish, but I’m amused that whenever the stakes are high, there’s always time to burn rubber instead of, you know, accelerating efficiently.

The Flash

I don’t care for DCU films. Against all odds, I think I liked this one. The CGI is possibly the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a mega budget movie, but they’re so consistently terrible that I kind of grew used to it? I detest nostalgia bait (and box office returns suggest most moviegoers feel the same way), but I actually liked seeing Michael Keaton in the bat suit again, even though the stuntwork makes him look far more agile than he did when he was half his age. I was also pleasantly surprised by this iteration of Supergirl, but I feel that the marketing team blew their load by spoiling her appearance in the trailers. Like, did they really think Keaton’s Batman wasn’t enough of a draw? At any rate, The Flash isn’t a great movie (far from it, in fact) and it isn’t a smart movie, but it is a fun one.

Asteroid City

Placeholder… Every time I see a Wes Anderson trailer, I think, “Oh, I already know what this is.” So it feels like a chore getting started on a Wes Anderson movie, but most of the time he exceeds my expectations. We’ll see.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Here’s yet another movie churned out of Disney’s artless acquisition of Lucasfilm, but—to no one’s surprise—it’s only the second worst film in Indiana Jones franchise. The disappointment comes early on when a CGI Indy runs across a train top in a sequence that looks only marginally better than the vine scene in Crystal Skull. At the end of the day, this movie would have served Jones’s legacy better by not existing at all, but once you’re past that hump, there is a pleasantly amusing movie here, which includes an absurdly stupid but fun finale. Also: Mads Mikkelsen is one of the most versatile actors, like, ever.

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1

This is my second favorite action movie of the year (#1 is John Wick 4, which was the first movie that ever exhausted me in a positive way). I’m tempted to name Dead Reckoning my favorite Mission: Impossible movie, but AI-related plots are already feeling a little old hat and there weren’t enough high-tech gadgets or farfetched break-ins for my liking. Sure, they use plenty of masks and Tom Cruise parachutes onto a runaway train, but I miss the clever use of building hacking seen in previous entries. (Remember when they used an eye-scanner and a projector to break into the Kremlin? Huh-huh, that was cool.)

Talk to Me

This is the freshest urban legend vibe since It Follows and The Babadook. So many horror movies forget to be fun, which is only excusable when they’re really good. Talk to Me is fun and good, and its energetic pace thrilled the hell out of me. The kids in this Australian flick are endearing little pricks, which is evidenced by a wild montage of teens doing what teens do best: meddling with evil entities while laughing like a bunch of jackasses. There isn’t a tired scare-attempt in the entire movie, which isn’t something you can say about 99% of demonic possession flicks. The inevitable sequel will suck so embrace this one.

Barbie

Okay, this one has Pee-Wee’s Playhouse energy. My biggest problem with movies like this is they tend to establish a great fantasy world and then quickly move the characters to the boring “real world” (Last Action Hero is the worst offender of this trope). Thankfully, Barbie knows better and spends most of its runtime in a fantasy setting. This is the first movie of its kind that focuses more on its star power than the IP and it sure is refreshing. Overall, a very amusing movie and the humor is on point.

Oppenheimer

See my full thoughts here. Probably the best movie of the summer.

Oppenhype

If you’re lucky enough to see a 70mm screening of Oppenheimer, I envy you. You won’t have to sit through twenty minutes of mostly bad trailers because the movie itself is already pushing the limits of the IMAX film size. Pictures of the 11-mile long reel look as if its been jury-rigged to fit existing projectors. Unfortunately, it would have taken my group longer to drive to the nearest 70mm screening of Oppenheimer than it takes to actually watch it, so we settled for the digital IMAX projection even though there is a local theater projecting it on 35mm film.

I’m glad we chose to see it big. I love big movies with big aspect ratios. Oppenheimer is certainly big, but it’s also bold. Director Christopher Nolan famously avoids CGI whenever possible, but the limitations of shooting this way are sometimes obvious in his previous films. Dunkirk features thousands of soldiers when there should be hundreds of thousands. The climactic shootout at the end of Tenet seemed more like a paintball match than a spectacle. What you get here is a three-hour picture that promises a big detonation and only shows it to you in glimpses reminiscent of what it must have been like to see it in person, carefully peeking out from behind cover miles way.

That’s not a complaint, it’s an admirable choice. There’s not a shred of war footage in the entire movie. The only violence we see is the violence in Oppenheimer’s head.

Was the real Oppenheimer capable of such empathy? Early on, we get our first indication that the character is going to be a challenging person to like when he injects cyanide into a professor’s apple over a classroom disagreement. Later, he’s disturbed by what he did and races back to the classroom to retrieve the poisoned apple moments before it unleashes unintended collateral damage. The historical accuracy of the scene is debatable, but I think it’s a peculiar coincidence that Alan Turing, another neurodivergent mastermind of the Allied victory in World War II, chose to kill himself with a cyanide-laced apple.

The film is so quickly paced (and dazzlingly scored) that even the audience with its benefit of hindsight is caught up in the scientists’ enthusiasm to build the mother of all weapons. By the time we remember the terrible implications, it’s too late, and the film abruptly cuts to Oppenheimer watching helplessly as two ominous crates ship out of Los Alamos. Soon after, Oppenheimer meets President Truman in person. Of the two men in this scene, one is portrayed as a tortured man who has a deep understanding of the very branch of science that eluded Einstein’s genius. The other is portrayed by Gary Oldman as a rankled sort with a high school education and the newfound power to cause unimaginable destruction. At the end of the scene, Truman ends up calling Oppenheimer a pussy when he doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the lives lost.

Famous actors with bit roles wander in and out of the movie at every other scene: Casey Affleck, Raimi Malek, Olivia Thirlby, James Remar, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine to name only a few of these supporting-supporting actors. Josh Hartnett proves to be a surprisingly complex and capable actor. Macon Blair, the Jeremy Saulnier favorite who’s reportedly directing the Hollywood remake of The Toxic Avenger, levels up in this movie in a most impressive way as well. I’ve held Florence Pugh at arms length for some time now, but now I’m eager to reexamine her previous roles with a different eye. Saying the star power in this one is huge is an understatement.

Cillian Murphy deserves to be nominated for this movie, but my gut feeling is the Academy will overlook him as well as Emily Blunt. Robert Downey Jr. is just as deserving and I think he’ll probably win. I hope so. He’s never been better.

14 Years

When I created this blog, around 14 years ago, I also created my first Twitter account. Twitter was a service I used a lot more frequently in the wake of the total enshittification of Reddit (long story short: the sex creep of a CEO decided to kill 3rd party apps in an effort to appeal to investors… RIP RIF). Even as I belatedly embraced Twitter, it was clear the writing was on the wall: the service was in an uncontrollable death spiral. Now that the brilliant Elon Musk has rebranded it as X for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, I have deleted the app altogether.

It wasn’t easy letting go of Reddit. It was easier letting go of Twitter. It will be even easier to let go of Threads when the time inevitably comes.

So what are my options for social media? While I love decentralization in theory (that pipe dream has been thoroughly murdered by billionaires and investors), Mastodon requires its users to be a bit more technical than Twitter. I qualify as a techie, but I wasn’t on Reddit and Twitter to hang out exclusively with other techies… gods no. Bluesky is currently invite-only, but I haven’t gotten my invite yet. Threads is a clean (read: “featureless”) app, but I don’t care for The Zuckster cloning yet another service I used to like. (RIP Craigslist.)

All this turmoil has made one thing clear: blogs, though kind of passé these days, could be more important than ever… okay, I just realized I sound like Jude Law’s arrogant character in Contagion (“The blogosphere has the right to know!”). So maybe this is not so much of global importance, but it’s important to me. I need a home on the internet. And though this blog has fallen to shambles in recent years, it’s the best home I’ve got.

Speaking of homes in shambles, here’s a picture of my house after the mother of all trees fell on it during an Oklahoma storm:

As I write this, it’s been over two years since my last blog post here. The Goug’ Blog was supposed to be a place for me to write about books, comics, and the occasional video game, but mostly movies. I grew bored of that narrow-focused hobby and moved on to game development and making comics. Somehow it didn’t occur to me I could write about those hobbies (and others) here. I also get more than 280 characters to do it.

So, uh, welcome to my blog. It’s about everything.