Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Ring 1998

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 17 Mar 2025

  I'm realizing after this and the Smile movies that I love the idea of making the viewers either complicit or unwitting "victims" of the premise. If someone watches the videotape, they are cursed, but we have to watch it with them. If someone watches the cursed smiling person kill themselves brutally, they are cursed, but we have to watch it with them. There is no detachment available. We must watch. And this is why we go to horror movies in…

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  The Grudge 2004

  ★★★ Rewatched 16 Mar 2025

  Second time watching this one. Definitely some scary images and frightening moments. Every successful horror movie / franchise has to have something that stands out as memorable or a "signature" moment. For The Grudge, it's the throat "gurgle / rasp / death rattle" noise. It works very well as it is quite unsettling.

  That said, there is something I am noticing about Japanese horror films now that I have seen several of them in the past months. A unifying feature…

Popular reviews

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  Ear Buds: The Podcasting Documentary 2016

  ★★ Watched 20 Aug 2019

  This deserved to be far better than it ended up being. I've listened to podcasts for over ten years, including the podcast of the filmmakers, and I was hoping for something more than was presented. This had a great emotional core of how podcasts affect listeners, but they missed so much from the early days of the industry, and then got into the weeds with advertising, which will only be interesting and useful to those who want to start their…

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  Die Hard 1988

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 08 Feb 2025 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.