movies

🍿 Superman (2025)

The new Superman movie is so refreshing for showing Superman as bright and hopeful. I got so tired of the dark and gritty style of the last few Superman movies, because that style doesn’t match Superman’s personality or optimism.

🍿 I saw Ballerina this weekend. If you liked the other John Wick movies, you’ll like this one, too. I’m glad they gave Eve (the main character) an actual backstory and a distinct personality. She isn’t just a female version of John.

🍿 Ladyhawke (1985)

Ladyhawke has been on my list of movies to watch for a while, and I have no idea why I added it. It’s a ridiculous movie, but I kind of liked it.

My favorite bits:

🍿 I watched First Man today.

Making a movie about real events can be difficult because the audience likely knows the outcome of the story. The movie felt boring to me most of the time. But despite that, I recognize the cast was great, and the filmmakers included a lot of details to make the movie authentic to real life.

Movies I watched in 2024

Here’s the list of movies I watched in 2024. Titles with an asterisk after them (*) are ones I recommend.

My top 5, in no particular order

Superheroes

Documentaries

Prequels, sequels, and re-makes

Sci-fi

Grab bag

If you’d like to see movies I’ve watched in the past, I have a list going back to 2015. 🍿

🍿 Somewhere in Time (1980) - Streaming for free on Tubi. It’s a well-made movie with a great cast. I feel like it was probably well-received when it came out, but I don’t think it aged well.

🍿 Uglies (streaming on Netflix) - Same genre as Hunger Games and Divergent (and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing). I read the book years ago and liked it, so I watched the movie. Uglies is not super amazing, gonna blow your mind. But not every movie has to be. This is fine for what it is.

🍿 I watched the movie Predestination last weekend. It’s based on a short story, called “All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein.

The movie is confusing in that you learn info out of order. But if you’re okay with that, I recommend watching it.

The hot air balloon in Elemental

I watched Elemental without knowing what to expect, because Disney’s marketing missed the mark (again). But I liked the movie overall. One of my favorite parts was seeing how each character used their element, like Ember inflating a hot air balloon.

I wanted to draw the scene with the hot air balloon floating over the city. I started with a pencil sketch. It’s rough. I wanted to figure out the foreground vs. the background and where the balloon was in the sky, in relation to the skyline.

A rough pencil sketch of a hot air balloon floating over a city.

Here’s a photo of when I was painting the larger areas. I simplified colors and composition (all those buildings!) because it’s so much detail.

A painted illustration of a hot air balloon floating over the city. The buildings are painted in blocks of color, without many details at this point in the process.

Here’s the finished drawing.

A painted illustration of a hot air balloon floating over a city at night time. Blue and gray skyscrapers are in the background, against a starry sky.

Walking into Hill Valley

Here’s an illustration inspired by a scene in Back to the Future: Marty walking into Hill Valley.

A person wearing a red vest walks on a path in a grassy area, approaching a sign that reads Hill Valley 2 miles.

I made this as part of a course on illustrating with Posca pens. The assignment was to use two shades of the same color as the main colors in the piece. Since a lot of this image is grassy fields, I chose two shades of green. I kept Marty’s outfit realistic (orange vest and blue jeans) to signify that he’s out of place…or, more accurately, out of time.

Here are some thumbnail sketches I did prior to painting the scene. I wanted to test out colors–what looked good for the grass and Marty’s outfit.

Thumbnail sketches using different shades of green.

And here’s the simple pencil sketch I started with.

A sketch of a lone figure walking on a road with a blank sign in the distance.