What I've Caught Up With, January 2025 Part 1

My goal every year is to watch 400 movies--not necessarily new movies, but movies in general. A secondary goal is that I'd prefer 80% or so of those movies to be new. To be on pace, that's a movie per day, plus three movies per month. I'm not starting out perfectly in this case, since I watched only 32 in January. I did take a lot of movies off the giant list, though, a number of them being from 2024 and thus getting full reviews. So, while today and tomorrow will look a bit shorter than usual, I actually removed a bunch from that giant black hole of things I need to watch.

Picks from Chip: Much Ado About Nothing

Film: Much Ado About Nothing
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the second in a series of twelve films suggested by Chip Lary at Tips from Chip.

I’m guessing it’s fun to be Joss Whedon. Sure, the Avengers stuff is all fun and everything, but there’s a certain freedom he appears to have in choosing some projects. Much Ado About Nothing, a modernized version of Shakespeare’s play in all but language, appears to have been made with a bunch of alums from other Whedon projects. “Hey, gang! Let’s do Shakespeare!” As fitting Whedon’s sensibilities, this is one of Billy the Shake’s comedies. That does make me want to see him tackle something like MacBeth, though.

I should probably mention that modern retellings of Shakespeare don’t always work for me. Kept in the classic style, I buy the language. Keep the language the same but modernize everything else, and there’s a part of my brain that objects. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t happen here, at least for the first chunk of the film. I had trouble accepting a modern setting with the style of speech. Eventually it worked for me, though, but it was a struggle for me for the first 20 minutes.