Boxing Day movies

There really is not that much to do in Toronto on Boxing Day, esp. if you don't want to head over to the mall.  I have booked a slot to see the Picasso show at the AGO -- for what surely will be the last time.  While I'm there I will check out the Robert Houle exhibit as well.  It doesn't look as if there are any other blockbuster exhibits on tap for 2022.

I had been planning on seeing The Matrix Resurrections on Boxing Day, despite some decidedly mixed reviews.  But when I dug into them a bit more, the convincing ones said that the action sequences weren't really great, the plot was fairly nonsensical and the only real reason to watch was the love story between Keanu and Carrie-Anne (easily the least interesting element from the original Matrix).  Given that they recast Morpheus (sort of) and Agent Smith and yet recycled lots of footage from the original (and the plot really does make no sense), I think I will have give this a hard pass and essentially pretend it never happened.*  I do wish Almodovar's Parallel Mothers was out, but I don't think that opens here until March.

I toyed with the idea of seeing Drive My Car at Tiff Lightbox, but it's 3 hours long!  Ridiculous.  You could film someone reading the Murakami short story it's based on, and that would take less than 60 minutes.  There's a small but non-zero chance I'll go watch the Summer of Love documentary at Hot Docs around 2.

I certainly have not seen a lot of movies in the theatre in the last two years.  Tenet (and the rerelease of Inception) took place in the summer of 2020.  I don't recall seeing anything this summer at all.  I tried but failed to catch Free Guy (when all the good seats were booked at Market Square).  I did watch Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch when it finally opened here.  It was ok, but it was peak Wes Anderson for sure!  I managed to see The Humans at the Fox (I think only the second time I've watched a movie there).  I preferred seeing the play live, but this was a reasonable proxy. And I think that's it.

In terms of watching things at home, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get the DVD of Free Guy through the library.  I watched that with my son last week.  I'm hoping to watch Dark City on Boxing Day proper, but sports may well get in the way.

Today we watched Chaplin's City Lights.  I think this may well be the first time I've seen the whole thing.  This means that we've gone through his best films (The Gold Rush, Modern Times, City Lights and The Great Dictator) and I watched The Circus on my own.  I'll probably watch the late Chaplin films (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York) on my own.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera.  We've pretty much gone through the best of the bunch, but I'll probably watch A Day at the Races and maybe Room Service and perhaps Go West with him.  The remaining few aren't nearly as good, and I'll just squeeze them in here and there on my own.

I'm a little surprised at how long some of Harold Lloyd silent films are (often 90+ minutes!), so that makes it a little harder to fit in, around all the other great movies I'd like to watch with him before this fall (and he goes off the college!), but I'll see what we can get to.

We still sometimes watch comic TV shows in the middle of the week (though less often than I would like, due to such things as him having homework to do, of all things).  Currently we are about midway through Season 2 of Slings & Arrows and just starting Season 4 of The IT Crowd (both of which are new to me).  Assuming we get through them by mid January, we can probably make a serious dent in Red Dwarf, but I don't think we'll get through (or indeed even start in on) Futurama, Max Headroom and certainly not Northern Exposure.  C'est dommage.

* I`m sure I would have gone if they had at least brought back Hugo Weaving, so this does feel like an own-goal on their part...

Edit (12/27): In the end I did watch Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions in preparation for Resurrections, and they are generally better than I recall, at least the action sequences.  The dialogue still sucks and the whole Neo as Christ-figure still grates.  

We did end up watching Dark City on Boxing Day, but my copy of the Director`s Cut had a complete malfunction/shutdown in one of the last chapters, and we had to switch to the theatrical version.  That kind of burns me up.  I completely forgot that Dark City actually came out the year before The Matrix, and The Matrix even used some parts of the Dark City set!