Lousy Musings of a Star-Studded Cowboy

Oldboy 9/16/23 “Revenge is good for your health, but pain will find you again.” My first experience with Oldboy was years before I watched it, when I decided I would never watch it. This decision came after my sister wanted to talk to me about how crazy the movie was and told me that the plot would probably turn me off. I figured she knew me well enough to pretty accurately gauge my tastes so I let her explain what happened. She was right. I could see no future where I would go out of my way to watch the scenes that she described unfold. Fast forward to Oldboy’s 20th anniversary, and for some reason I agreed to see it in theaters. Perhaps time made me more open or perhaps it made me forget how turned off I was originally. But knowing what I knew, I was locked in from the start and still shocked by several scenes and developments. During the last act of the movie there’s a beautiful internal swell of emotions, where every piece of dialogue, every past piece of information, just ev...

February 13, 2026

Interstellar 1/30/24 “I love you, forever. You hear me? I love you forever. And I'm coming back. I'm coming back.” Love transcends. Even through time and space, love transcends. It’s a sentiment that feels a little corny, elevating love to such an abstract level, but it’s so endlessly genuine. Throughout Interstellar, you can see how powerful love is, being the primary driving force behind the actions of most of the characters here. Love is what makes it all bearable, and more importantly, worth it. Something I found fantastically done in Interstellar is the sense of scale created for concepts, worlds, and characters. The elements serve as an antagonistic role, getting in the way of the goal of finding a habitable planet for humanity to move to. Ideas of ownership are played with by really showing how much bigger planets are compared to the rest of us. There’s definitely an ecological angle in effect that just fits perfectly with the rest of the film’s themes. Extinction is p...