What I've Caught Up With, May 2026 Part 1

With the stated goal of 400 movies viewed for the year, I needed to see 34 in May to break even. I watched 35, so I caught up a single movie, putting me seven off the pace. Honestly, that's pretty good for me. Normally at this point, I'm a couple of dozen behind where I want to be. It was a pretty normal month. Nothing too bizarre, aside from a week where, due to circumstances, I didn't watch much of anything. Had I been a bit more dilligent, I might have caught up all the way.

No One Hurts You Like Family

Film: Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

As I slowly make my way through the latest crop of Oscar movies, I’ve found myself struggling at times to want to pull the trigger on them. All of the ones I haven’t seen are currently streaming at this point; I could finish this in less than a week if I had a mind to, but right now, what I want to watch is going in different directions. So, while Sentimental Value (or Affeksjonsverdi in the Norwegian) has gotten mountains of acclaim, I’ve found it difficult to want to watch it. But sometimes you just have to force yourself into doing those things that you know you need to do. I’d like to knock out one of the remaining Oscar films ever week—I’d be done late June/early July, and that would absolutely be a record for me.

Anyway, Sentimental Value on its surface is one of those movies that is about making a movie, but it’s really about the relationships of the people involved. Hollywood always likes movies about movies, but this is not a movie that at all feels like it’s glamorizing the business. In fact, it does the opposite, and it takes some very obvious digs at NetFlix to the point where it will clearly never be shown on that streaming platform.

Easier Said Than Done

Film: Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on gigantic television.

Gore Verbinksi has a surprisingly good track record as a director. Not many people could create an entertaining movie out of a Disney ride, after all. Verbinski’s latest, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, is a similar sort of project. This is a movie that shouldn’t work in a lot of ways, but does in spite of itself. It’s also a movie that you can point to when people complain that all movies are the same or that Hollywood is just producing remakes and sequels.

That said, there are certainly going to be people who will tell you that Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is in many ways a very long episode of Black Mirror, and there are certainly times when that seems to fit. There are also moments where it is far too surreal for Black Mirror, but much of it has the same feel. It’s darkly comic like many episodes and is very much a warning against technology, AI in specific. And there are strong connections to other movies and stories. There’s a lot of 12 Monkeys here just for a start, and the opening sequence is reminiscent in many ways of Pulp Fiction.

She's Got Those Baby Blues

Film: Die My Love
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

Remember a few years ago when Jennifer Lawrence was the flavor of the month? It was right around 2012 when she was in both The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, even though her real coming out party in Hollywood was her role in Winter’s Bone. She’s not that anymore, which is probably a good thing. In a sense, she has the ability to do what actors like Daniel Radcliffe and Kristen Stewart have—she can basically do what she wants and take whatever roles she feels like. That brings us to Die My Love, which is essentially a movie about post-partum depression.

Another person who has that same ability to pick projects that they want because they don’t really have to worry about their career is Lawrence’s co-star for this film, Robert Pattinson. Why am I talking about this? Because it’s important to have these people in the industry so that films like this get made. Die My Love was never going to be a box office smash. You need people who don’t care about how much money a film will make, who might even be willing to take scale for a film that has less big hit appeal but much more artistic credibility.

New List, Who Dis?

Film: Predator 2
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Just like almost every May, the They Shoot Zombies list of 1000 most highly acclaimed horror movies has been revamped and retooled. This year, the list returned six films previously cut and added another 26, many of them from the last couple of years. There were a few older brand new additions, though, including Predator 2. This seems like an odd addition. It’s much more a science fiction/action movie than a horror movie, although there are certainly some clear horror elements. Anyway, I figured this would be a good way to herald in the new version of the list.

The original Predator was released in 1987 and presumably took place in 1987. The sequel, released three years later, takes place in that far distant future for the time of 1997. In this world, Los Angeles (and presumably other parts of the country and world) has become a war zone of criminal gangs fighting each other and the police in broad daylight. Into this rides our good cop Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover). Our opening sequence will show him taking out a number of criminal thugs, not realizing that there’s also our title character in the mix.

Koi Pond

Film: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain ( Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes )
Format: Blu-Ray from Cortland Public Library on gigantic television.

Ray Bradbury said in interviews that he has distinct memories of being not merely an infant, but of being days old despite being told that this is essentially impossible. I say this because it’s going to be relevant to Little Amélie or the Character of Rain ( Amélie et la métaphysique detubes in the original French). This is a story a very young child, essentially in utero until 3, from that child’s perspective. Little kids have been in movies before, and have even been main characters in movies before, but this feels like the first time that a film has been narrated from this perspective.

What this means is that our title character, Amélie, is going to have an adult vocabulary, but a child’s version of the world around her. Specifically, this means that she is going to be a solipsist for the bulk of the film, which takes place between her second and third birthdays. Amélie is difficult to like initially because of this. It’s not inaccurate, but it is frustrating. Amélie is entirely self-absorbed, which makes her a difficult narrator.

Last Rites

Film: We Bury the Dead
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

There are times when I look at a film that a lot of the world outside of the film needs to be addressed. That’s definitely the case with We Bury the Dead, and it has nothing to do with the plot of the movie (although having the U.S. kill everything on the island of Tasmania certainly feels relevant). No, this is about the star of the film, Daisy Ridley. We need to take into account the toxicity of many an average Star Wars fan, who will reflexively hate anything Ridley touches for years specifically because they object to the character she played in some movies. We Bury the Dead is a great example of this—critic approval is almost double that of average viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, and while that does happen, many times it happens because of people who have an agenda.

The idea of We Bury the Dead isn’t going to be immediately obvious, but we’re going to figure it out as the audience in the first few minutes. After seeing a bit of the relationship of Ava (Ridley) and her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), we find out about the inciting incident of the film. The U.S. has accidentally tested a new weapon on Tasmania, destroying the city of Hobart and killing everything else on the island. Clean up teams are sent in, and Ava volunteers, because her husband was on a work trip on the southern end of the island. In her orientation, we learn that some of the brain dead bodies are waking up—while disturbing, most of them are peaceful.