Moonlight

[Moonlight]

I don’t know if I dare raise Donnie Darko here but absolutely one of my all-time favourites and I can’t wait to watch it again next week.

I saw the theatrical re-release at the beginning of the month. It didn’t feel as magical to me as it did in high school, but it was probably never going to. I still had a good time, although I was about ready to get up and beat the guy behind me to death because he was fucking talking constantly.

[Moonlight]

How does pizza delivery work in a society that doesn’t have telephones?

[Moonlight]

I think 2010: The Year We Make Contact is underrated and gets unfairly maligned for being only a pretty good movie that’s following up a masterpiece.

[Moonlight]

I haven’t been actively rating things for very long and I’m hesitant to retroactively rate movies I haven’t seen in years, but my 5/5s are mostly long time favorites. A decent few are movies that blew my mind and completely rewired my brain when I was a tween (i.e. Nosferatu, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which were some of the first capital F Films that I ever saw as a kid).

[Moonlight]

The way people use ratings online is so warped. It’s like:

10/10 = nothing ever gets this 

9/10 = almost nothing gets this, the very best

8/10 = very good 

7/10 = good

6/10 = meh

5/10 or below = shit

I don’t understand what the point of rating things out of 10 is if half the scale is treated as an amorphous blob of bad.

[Moonlight]

Tonight’s viewing: The Lair of the White Worm (1988, dir. Ken Russell) 

I have a feeling, on my third one, that Ken Russell movies are just Like That. I’d kind of assumed, having seen Altered States first, that it was a uniquely unhinged movie given the subject matter of hallucinogens and the other movies he made would probably be normal.

I am very happy to report that they are not, although Altered States remains my favorite.

This one is billed online as a comedy, and while it’s not really a ha-ha comedy it has that classic Ken Russell heightened reality where somewhat absurd and fantastical situations are played seriously (although this one definitely feels a little consciously tongue-in-cheek in a way that Altered States really doesn’t). There’s snakes and bagpipes for fans of venom and Scotland. Snakes! Snakes everywhere!

[Moonlight]

He passed by the All-Droid Donut Station on the way to crashing into that moon.

[Moonlight]

Today’s viewing:

I already discussed Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but I rewatched it today with a bunch of friends who hadn’t seen it.

Later, with someone else, I rewatched one of my all-time favorites: Return of the Living Dead (1985), which I would describe as a farce. Much like a classic sitcom episode, it follows a series of bad decisions cascading out of control.

[Moonlight]

I can’t say for sure but the subtitles reflect how I’ve always heard it.

[Moonlight]

I have a friend who gives absolutely everything 5 stars.

I reserve 5 stars for personal favorites.

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

I am out of there the SECOND the credits hit

I would feel like I’m being suddenly yanked out of the movie before it’s actually finished if I did that. But granted I am not watching big giant tentpole movies where the credits are 45 minutes long either.

[Moonlight]

I say this as someone who loves Eraserhead, but who the fuck was giving David Lynch money to direct films after Eraserhead?

It’s my dream, probably the dream of all artists, to make something that aggressively inaccessible and have it be praised.

[Moonlight]

I like opening credits that set the mood and I find myself missing them when movies don’t have them. I can tell Dog Day Afternoon is my favorite movie because I immediately thought of its opening titles as I typed this and then thought “God, I want to watch that again,” as if I didn’t last see it only 3 months ago.

The time before that, last year, it was the first movie I ever watched with my girlfriend <3

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

I’ve tuned out of American politics completely by this point and anything I learn about that fucked up nightmare land is completely against my will.

I’ll send you a letter when I end up in President Vance’s gay concentration camps in 2032.

[Moonlight]

I will never stop thinking he looks like this.

[Moonlight]

Also, here’s a question for the room:

Do you watch through the credits of a movie, or are you an adult who still doesn’t eat the pizza crusts?

[Moonlight]

It’s more common that I turn off a film after 20 minutes when it’s not doing it for me and do something else.

Meanwhile I’m like “Eh, I don’t think I like this, but I’m already two-thirds of the way in so I might as well finish so I can justify logging it on Letterboxd. Maybe it will redeem itself in the third act.”

And, to be fair, I have seen films that redeemed themselves in the third act. Rogue (2007) was kinda whatever, basically decent, to me for most of its runtime and then the climax of the movie fucking ruled.

[Moonlight]

Maybe it’s my fault for thinking of him with that hairpiece, and from 10 years ago, but Chris being bald now makes him look a hundred years old to me.

[Moonlight]

Tbf there was probably signifcantly less money put into it.

[Moonlight]

Last night’s viewing: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)

Let it be known throughout the land that one of the easiest ways to make me like a film more is to insert a cool acid trip sequence.

[Moonlight]

It was a distressing dream as I badly needed to immediately react to something with a Red Dwarf meme but couldn’t.

[Moonlight]

Some of the best films I’ve watched this year (hardly an exhaustive list, and not counting ones I’ve seen before):

12 Angry Men (1957) – the elusive film that I without hesitation immediately rated 5 stars out of 5. I really need to watch more Sidney Lumet movies because the three I’ve seen (the other two being Dog Day Afternoon and Fail Safe) are all 5 out of 5.

The Lighthouse (2019) – I needed subtitles for this one!

Sorry to Bother You (2018) – the only thing about this I knew going in was it was about a guy getting a job as a telemarketer and it went in such a surreal, satirical direction that delighted me.

Metropolis (2001) – lavishly animated loose adaptation of the Fritz Lang silent classic. Contains robots.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990) – Imagine if Perfect Blue was an episode of The X-Files. Actually, imagine if that one Star Trek TNG episode Frame of Mind was a Vietnam War movie.

[Moonlight]

Last night I dreamed that the Smegadrive had broken and was turning up Frinkiac results.

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

Did I not already start a thread like this? And if not, why not?

Anyway, Letterboxd has enabled me to become a total maniac about watching movies and I hope to further devolve into madness next year. This is what I’ve racked up so far for 2026:

I wanted Dog Day Afternoon (1975) to be my 100th for the year because it’s my favorite film of all time. I wanted Exorcist II (1977) to be #150 because I knew it would be bad. It was.

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

but is actually in the correct aspect ratio!

It astounds me how bad people are at formatting 4:3 things for 4:3 on the internet.

[Moonlight]

On any search engine I use it at work for things like inventory, if you don’t put in the EXACT letter-for-letter text string it expects you to, it will not find the item. They also like to abbreviate things with long names, so have fun reverse engineering the correct abbreviation from first principles.

[Moonlight]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 14/10/2026

[Moonlight]

I already corrected it but I need to save this truly incompetent bit of subtitling for posterity.

[Moonlight]

Holoship opens with some ducks getting into trouble. Then it turned into a romance and I fell asleep.

[Moonlight]

Blue opens with Lister polishing his shoes, sutbly foreshadowing the shoes the cast will be wearing throughout the episode.

[Moonlight]

I don’t think I’ve ever in my life parsed this line and listening back that’s so obviously what he says.

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

Bodysnatcher has it, yeah. And the Re-Dwarf documentary has that test shot from the movie which frankly might be the best Red Dwarf fly-by ever made and it’s not even in the show.

[Moonlight]

Red Dwarf Remastered if it had used the new physical model would have, quibbles over the design aside, been doing exactly what I want from a remastering project.

I mean, in that one area.

[Moonlight]

[Moonlight]

This is a very normal update. Should we be concerned?

[Moonlight]

He looks like somebody sat on an Easter Island head.

[Moonlight]

Anything that looks like CGI period is going to look grossly out of place in something that predates CGI even existing. If you’re going to make a better set of Enterprise shots I want them to look like a better effect from the time, not middling CGI from 50 years later that’s intermingling with an otherwise extremely 1960s looking production. It’s the anachronistic visuals that take me out of it.

I am aware this is a me problem.

[Moonlight]

I’m not sure a single human being in 1988 knew what RAM was.

[Moonlight]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 07/10/2026 

Parallel Universe

I’m so mad, I second-guessed my first instinct and then it turned out to be right.

[Moonlight]

OK, it is already fixed on my fork of the subs. I blame Cappsy then.

[Moonlight]

Colonel Mustard is most people’s favourite Cluedo character, and he has the most comedic name.

This seems like an appropriate juncture to mention that, seeing as how in America Cluedo is simply called Clue, in my younger years I always interpreted this line as:

I’m not fixing that comma-in-place-of-a-period in the images, but I’m going to fix it in the actual subs.

[Moonlight]

I’ve only seen the trailers but I love how the new FX and model sequences seem to match the OG aesthetic rather than being modern looking shots slapped onto an old looking show.

I love the sound of that because the anachronism of seeing middling 21st century CGI in something from the 60s or 70s (i.e. the TOS remasters) always annoys me.

[Moonlight]

The Lion King is good for toddlers. Plenty of colour, laughs.

It depends. My cousin’s 2 year old can barely focus on a show he asked to put on.

[Moonlight]

I think the consensus of this thread is that Kryten has the most threatening auras of the main cast despite being the nicest character in it.

[Moonlight]

#RedDwarf #Smegle 05/10/2026 

Cured, M-Corp

[Author]

Replies