is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
November was a bit of a slow month for movie watching. The only new release I saw was director Jeymes Samuels’s “The Harder They Fall,” a Black western that had everything going for it and sadly whiffed. I’m a big fan of westerns and a big fan of nearly everyone in this cast, but after two relentless hours of stylish but empty posturing, I just got bored. Thanks to its provenance as a Netflix-financed production, it will probably experience a marginally kinder fate than it would have likely met had it been released twenty years ago in theaters: this is the kind of flick that would have been forgotten incredibly quickly, only to surface some years later in bargain DVD bins at Walmart, where a younger generation would have picked it up and said, “Look at this stacked cast! There’s no way this isn’t good, right?”—only to be disappointed all over again.
I’m keeping this entry short because it’s the holidays. I’ll do my December round-up soon, and then I’ll be posting a year-end round-up in January. Until then, here’s everything else I watched in November. Cheers!
“Thor: Ragnarok” (2017) ★★½ Rewatched. Never takes itself too seriously, which is amusing. Refuses to take anything seriously, which is exhausting.
“Pig” (2021) ★★★½ Nicolas Cage as a…well, part of the fun is that this is all very unexpected.
“Touchez Pas au Grisbi” (1954) ★★★★ French gangster classic details the quotidian drudgery of “one last score” that actually succeeds.
“Blade Runner 2049” (2017) ★★★★ Rewatched. Not unlike its predecessor, this gets deeper and richer with each viewing.
“Sicario” (2015) ★★★★★ Rewatched. As much as I like Villeneuve’s franchise work, original fare like this is what he was put on earth to do.
“Hangover Square” (1945) ★★★½ An entertainingly formal bit of Edwardian, paranoid noir, with a wacko editing.
“The Harder They Fall” (2021) ★★ Could’ve been a classic, should have been a classic, but it’s just boring instead.
“Neighboring Sounds” (2012) ★★★½ A Brazilian neighborhood where the mundane is bizarre and the bizarre is mundane. Mesmerizing.
“Paddington” (2014) ★★★ Rewatched. So genial that even Ben Whishaw’s nails-on-a-chalkboard voice is tolerable.
“Dune” (2021) ★★★★ Rewatched. I was down with the flu so I just figured I’d watch it a fourth time.
“In the Cut” (2003) ★½ Jane Campion tries to art up the thriller, but in the end it just amounts to a cavalcade of clichés.
“Point Blank” (1967) ★★★★ Rewatched. Throws you headlong into stylized, abstracted action that still seems striking, if shallow.
“The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974) ★★★★ Rewatched. A feast of New Yawk faces, swagger and patois. Also maybe the most five bouroughs-y movie ever made.
“Somewhere in the Night” (1946) ★★★ Hokey amnesia-driven noir premise is held together by an unusually light-on-its-feet script.
“Kicking and Screaming” (1995) ★★½ So, so nineties, but historically significant for featuring a make out scene between decade titans Christopher Eigeman and Parker Posey.
This is the latest roundup of my monthly movie consumption. You can also see what I previously watched this past October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January, and in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. Also, you can always keep up with what I’m watching by following me on Letterboxd—where I’m also writing tons of capsule reviews.
