you all had me at nudity, The fact Audrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley are both starring has put it at must see for me, a
So my dad was like, "hey can you download The Housemaid onto your media server?" Which gave me a chuckle because, you know, Sydney Sweeney's boobs are basically an independent cast member on IMDB. So I added it and forgot about it, assuming it was trash. Was a couple of IPAs deep on Saturday night and flipping through Rotten Tomatoes scores, and saw it had 70%+ critic score so I thought I'd give it a shot. You know, there was an okay movie buried in there somewhere, but holy shit does that director have a contemptuous opinion of the audience's intelligence. The "twist" is delivered through - no kidding - a nonstop 20+ minute exposition dump of voice-over-plus-flashback, framed as one of the characters writing a retrospective letter, explicitly detailing every single step of the twist and how everything fit neatly together. It had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the skull. What a stupid fucking way to treat your audience. It actually would have been fun movie if they strung you along a little, showed you some of the context without explaining it, maybe allowing the watcher to look back at earlier parts of the movie and have a little, "ah hah!" moment. But nope: we do a setup, throw in a twist that had no hints, and immediately cut to a drawn-out re-contextualizing of every moment of the movie gone over in detail, lest the viewer have to turn their brain on for a moment. Some of these movies just make me angry when I turn them off because a decent movie was right fucking there. You just had to not treat people like assholes.
Project Hail Mary Loved it. It definitely didn't offer as much explanation / exposition as the book. For instance my wife couldn't figure why Grace and Rocky understood each other, which was explained in the book, but still really good anyway. Crazy that Rocky was entirely done with practical effects. Good love letter to ET and Interstellar. Worth seeing in IMAX. 9/10