14/2180. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
This was another movie that TCM ran in honor of Martin Scorsese's birthday, and it's also on the list of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. So I watched it. It's shot like a documentary about an angry young man, but it's very loyal to its source material. The important takeaway is that the life story of Jesus is really quite shocking. The establishment hated him for preaching love, which remains a surprisingly difficult message for real humans to get behind. Very good.

15/2181. Rock Dog (2016)
Despite a stellar cast and a pretty good script, this animated film demonstrates the oft overlooked value of texture artists (and to a lesser extent, 3D modelers). The whole world "feels" distractingly shallow, as though it was made by a committee of amateurs, which is a real disappointment. In the hands of a Disney or Dreamworks (or anyone with a better eye for detail), this could have been a fantastic film.

16/2182. Within Our Gates (1920)
This silent film is essentially a contemporary rebuttal of D.W. Griffith's racist The Birth of a Nation. Unfortunately, it stars weak actors performing a weak narrative and is therefore not particularly entertaining. However, it is a very interesting historical document.

17/2183. Going Home (1971)
Jan-Michael Vincent is not a good enough actor to carry this story about a boy trying (and badly failing) to come to terms with his father's (pointless) murder of his mother, but the real question isn't so much why he was cast but why anyone would want to make this film at all.

Or, for that matter, why Coca-Cola would sponsor it.

18/2184. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)
I'm glad I watched this (bitter)sweet and unusual animated film at home, because I had access to closed captioning. I wouldn't have been able to understand *anything* if I'd seen it in a theater. I guess what I'm saying is that maybe the filmmakers should have treated this more like a foreign film and included subtitles. Cute, though.

More to come.

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