Reasons I chose those two:
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was about the Manson murders. Long ago, when I was young, a dentist I was dating had wonderful red curly hair. He went to celebrity barber, Jay Sebring, who invited him to a party with “real movie stars.” He came over and invited me. I felt as if 15 guys with a battering ram had hit me in the gut. And I shouted, “NO!” He said of course we won’t go. Jay was killed that night and we might have been too. So, I decided to see the “sendup.” Laughed a lot. My daughter and son-in-law saw it the same night in a different town, said the whole theater was LTAO.
JoJo Rabbit was about WW2. I’m old enough to remember that war. In fact, I was 5 , and at Sunday afternoon dinner with my parents at a neighbor’s house. I finished early and went into the living room, where radio was on. A few minutes later, “This program is interrupted” and there was Roosevelt announcing war. I told my parents. It was an amazing, unforgettable moment. So a movie about a little kid involved in that war really appealed to me. Went with a friend who was not old enough to remember it and she had ZERO clue what the civilian population went through. Thought movie was lightweight and funny. I had to explain to her how serious it was for the civilian population.
PBS has old movies on most Saturday nights, and I watch many of them. Email info to friends who might enjoy them too. Lots of us, both liberals and conservatives, are disgusted with new movies. And the “actors” who don’t know how to act, they’re just “personalities” in expensive clothes.
And of course, theaters were locked down for a long time.
So how do you pick new movies?
You win the internet today for those two movie stories.:)
How do I find movies? First, I have several very specific interests and search for films on those topics. There are also a very few actors and directors with whom I am impressed enough to always check out their work; I may not watch their next film, but I will at least read reviews and watch the trailer. But mostly, I make a habit of scanning reviews and the various best of/most underrated/most overlooked lists regularly published by the pros. If Sundance or Telluride or Cannes select 80-120 movies, I’m happy if I find six or eight that look interesting to me. And there will probably be another six or eight that look like potential wildcards if I’m in the mood to be a bit experimental. It only takes a few minutes to scan the list.
Very few movies nowadays get big promotional campaigns, and those that do are mostly the big studio tentpoles, which are not of much interest to me. I have no use for flying spandex. (Mind you, I am aware that the flying spandex box office is the only thing keeping the theaters alive right now, and I’m grateful for that.) James Bond was worn out before Sean Connery gave up the role. I’ve seen enough zombie apocalypses and rampaging dinosaurs to last a lifetime. Etc. So the advertising misses me almost entirely.
The streaming networks make huge collections available, but the algorithms serve up endless clones of what you watched last time, which quickly becomes stale. And the streamers all create silos. Unless you want to subscribe to a lot of streamers — I don’t — you get quarantined from the bulk of what is actually available. I prefer to scan the lists, pay attention to the major festival selections, pay attention to reviews (especially in conservative publications), identify movies in which I’m interested, and then figure out how to see them. After a few months, they’re usually available for rental somewhere, but you have to know what you are looking for.
The bottom line is that I prefer to be an active consumer, as opposed to a passive viewer paging through whatever the streaming algorithms shove at me. Once it becomes a habit, it’s very easy to do. It becomes part of the automatic daily routine, like checking in to FR and seeing what has stirred the pot overnight.
And lest I forget: I do pay attention to freepers’ recommendations and add them to my watchlist. I may not get around to them, but it’s a place to start looking when I feel like a movie and don’t have anything specific in mind.