Here2024

“If you want, you could spend the rest of the night here.” “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Zemeckis-fest The kind of beautiful sentimentality that people reject wholesale today. This is a wonderful look at life and the heartache and joy, peace and pain it brings. This is a movie about perspective. We as mortal linear beings do not have that perspective that this film presents us with. We can imagine and we can remember, and both are tricky, fickle things. But here we see perspective and context through lifetimes in one home. We are all connected, even to people we can or will never meet.  Each time we meet, love I find complete love Without your sweet love What would life be? All the negativity towards this movie feels like it comes from an immature “you’re not my dad.” shakes fist angrily mentality. It is this cynicism that plagues the world today and has led to so much cruelty we see everywhere. Do you think you’re a better person for being so closed off? “Well, who cares about all these people? What does it have to do with anything?” It has to do with EVERYTHING. We are one. We all live and die just the same. We are all brothers and sisters, and we all need to work to remember it.  I see my life in this movie. My past and my future. And I do not want to live with regrets and wait until I’m ancient to live my dreams. That will undoubtedly happen anyways, but I can try to fight it. Or at least live in hope.  This is the last Robert Zemeckis film (at this point. And it is his best in 24 years. I hate people calling the format of this movie a “gimmick.” This is the movie. It lays everything right in front of your eyes as plainly as it can. It lays its heart out for you. It says “this is you. This is your neighbor. This is everyone you’ll ever meet and everyone you never will. We are together. Love one another.” As someone wise once said, “don’t let your dreams be dreams.” Life is beautiful, even the grueling, horrible parts that you regret.  This is Zemeckis’ Irishman. But I think this one is better. It speaks to things that are on his heart and mind, reunites him with the stars of probably his biggest and in my opinion best movie, and is experimental and pushes the limits of audience acceptability. And like every great Zemeckis film, it is satisfying.  Without a doubt, this is something special, and I hope we get more movies like this from Zemeckis.  Robert Zemeckis is an incredibly gifted director who got lost along the way. And really it’s hard to say when that happened. Some would call out his mocap animation work but I really think it is from the bland 2010s filmmaking that was so prevalent at that time. He went from being one of the greats to a face in the crowd. Still his work up until 2000 is legendary and his best films are some of the best ever made.  There weren’t as many hidden gems as I was hoping but I don’t regret this watchthrough. It was even just great having a reason to watch so many classics again. I would definitely do another Zemeckis marathon though maybe I don’t have to watch everything.  Love one another.