Digitized Analog Letterboxd Monthly: May 2025
Selected notes and doodles from my analog movie journal from May 2025.
I keep a magical movie journal where I note certain production/viewing details, lightly hash out thoughts/feelings, and occasionally add a little doodle/drawing when the mood strikes me.
In Digital Analog Letterboxd Monthly, I share my favorite pages (by my own personal metric), and so a polite warning: There may be spoilers ahead. To minimize that possibility, below is the list of movies featured. If you give any fraction of a crap about any of them, then proceed with any amount of caution as you see fit from here on out. (If you can read my handwriting, great! And if you already follow me on Letterboxd, well then also great!)
The Movies
The Wicker Man (1973)
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)
The Producers (1967)
Fight or Flight (2024)
Scanners (1981)
Thieves Like Us (1974)
A Simple Favor (2018)
Another Simple Favor (2025)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Sneakers (1992)
Slugs (2025)
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Final Destination (2000)
Final Destination 2 (2003)
Final Destination 3 (2006)
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
Friendship (2024)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
Manhunter (1986)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
The Wicker Man, Making Waves
Additional commentary:
-
I wanted to watch The Wicker Man for May Day (May 1), but my wife and I ended up watching The Amazing Race and Survivor live instead (we don’t usually do that, we usually just stream it the next day on Paramount+ or whatever). Regardless, thinking back on it now, it might be more like a 5 than a 4.5; I guess I’m only a rewatch away from finding out!
Also, I’m pleased with how this drawing turned out.
- I think if anyone is the least bit interested in movie making, Making Waves is a pretty good little doc.
The Producers, Fight or Flight, Scanners
Additional commentary:
- A friend of mine was texting me about having just watched The Producers and how there was a line in it that she was going to start using, and wanted to see if I could figure out what line it was. I couldn’t, but (a) it was worth watching the whole thing to try and find out, because (b) it’s a greatly fun movie!
- I suppose now’s as good a time as any to bring up how AMC Theatres does a thing on random Monday nights called Screen Unseen (or Scream Unseen if it’s a horror movie) where, for $6, you can go and see a movie that hasn’t been widely released yet but is about to and you don’t know what it’ll be until it starts. I only bring this up to explain why I’ve seen (among a few other movies) Magazine Dreams, Drop, and now also Fight or Flight. Fight or Flight wasn’t great, but it had a few fun moments. I don’t recommend it.
- I wrote more about Scanners on Letterboxd, but basically I now think I might be a Cronenberg guy.
Thieves Like Us, A Simple Favor, Another Simple Favor
Additional commentary:
- I really really enjoyed Thieves Like Us, and wouldn’t mind giving it another watch! And the more I look at this drawing, the more I kinda think I captured the essence of Shelley Duvall there. Keith Carradine, not so much.
- I didn’t like enough the Simple Favors enough to even attempt to draw anything for them.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sneakers
Additional commentary:
- I haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine in ages, but it still holds up. I did find Clem to be more annoying than I remembered, but I guess that’s the power of growing up.
-
Sneakers remains one of my favorites. Everyone’s relationship feels real and mature. And who could forget COOTYS RAT SEMEN?
(If anyone would like to get me a fun gift, I’ll gladly accept a Panasonic KX-T1450 Easa-Phone Auto Logic Answering System Machine, the model from the movie.)
To Live and Die in L.A., Final Destination, Final Destination 2
Additional commentary:
- Like The Wicker Man and Thieves Like Us above, I’m probably only a rewatch away from a 5 for To Live and Die in L.A., that just might be all that’s needed to tip the scale.
- Perhaps the real star here (undrawn) is Conner O’Malley’s Slugs. I know you have 5 minutes to spare, go give it a watch.
- My wife really wanted to see Final Destination: Bloodlines, but both of us had only ever seen the first Final Destination, so we did a bit of cramming and watched the first five movies in three days. I only drew little guys like these for each of them, and I ranked them on Letterboxd, but I only opted to share a few of them here (most likely incidentally because they were on the same page as something else I actually wanted to share).
Final Destination 3, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Additional commentary:
- Final Destination 3 might be my favorite of its series(?), but…
-
…Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is definitely my least favorite of its franchise. It’s been a few years since I watched through most of the earlier entries, but The Entity and Gabriel remain the stupidest weapon/villain combo, and I did not find this to be a great way to wrap up the whole shebang.
That plane set piece at the end is undeniably great, though!
Friendship, Final Destination: Bloodlines
Additional commentary:
- Over the past few months, I learned that sometimes I think I want to draw a group of people, but then when I start drawing the group of people, I figure out that I don’t actually want to draw a group of people. For Friendship, I thought about drawing a group of people, but with this thought in mind, I instead went with a much beloved moment from the movie. IYKYK, I guess.
- Final Destination: Bloodlines is filled with some decently fun moments (though one person’s idea of a safe-from-death fortress is filled with questionable landscaping decisions if safety is meant to be the compound’s defining strength), and the focus on how one family affected so many others is neat.
Manhunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Additional commentary:
- It got to be close to 10 years since I read Thomas Harris’s novel, Red Dragon, and maybe close to 20 years since I last saw Brett Ratner’s take on the story, but here’s where I land: Red Dragon the movie is a more faithful adaptation of the book, but Manhunter is the better movie. (Fun fact: Both Michael Mann’s Manhunter and Ratner’s Red Dragon were shot by the same cinematographer, Dante Spinotti!)
-
Close Encounters is a classic for a reason. On this watch, I sided with Roy. It’s possible that next time (in another 15 years?) I won’t.
I guess that’s the power of growing up.
Two other movies that I watched and aren’t mentioned above are The Vanishing (1988) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), but I just wanted to say a little something about both:
- If you enjoy a good procedural like I do (Memories of Murder (2003) and Zodiac (2007) come to mind) but wish you could see it from a sociopath’s side of things, then I can’t recommend The Vanishing enough. Chilling and great!
- The Killing of a Sacred Deer was one of my favorite movies of the last decade (love that Yorgos!), and while I recognize that it won’t be for everyone, I still think that everyone should see it anyway to find out for themselves. One neat thing about this rewatch that I wanted to share was discovering that Colin Farrell’s daughter in this movie, actress Raffey Cassidy, was Adrien Brody’s niece in The Brutalist (2024). That is all.
Until next month!
Current Mood: Maintainin’
Listening to: Thao & The Get Down Stay Down - Phenom