{"id":296,"date":"2026-01-02T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/01\/02\/matt-happy-new-year\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T06:00:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T06:00:07","slug":"matt-happy-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/2026\/01\/02\/matt-happy-new-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt: Happy New Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts that ended up with friends.<\/p>\n

I made a resolution in 2025 to watch more films. It\u2019s an art form I have many friends in and when we have hung out I realized how shallow my understanding of the canon of film was. I have a lot of catch-up to do, and it also required a lifestyle change as I\u2019m usually at a laptop so to make the space to enjoy a film for a few hours was a departuture from my normal routines.<\/p>\n

I watched 72 movies last year! This definitely came at the cost of books finished, if I look at my stats. But I\u2019ve begun to really appreciate the contours of what I love about a movie now.<\/p>\n

This is a long lead to recommend the movie Jay Kelly<\/a>, which streams on Netflix with George Clooney and Adam Sandler. After seeing many great and terrible movies, old and new, I really appreciated what they did with this film, and it was one of the rare ones I watched entirely or in sections several times, gaining new appreciation for what they pulled off.<\/p>\n

It starts with a \u201cOne-er,\u201d<\/a> which is a continuous shot with no cuts that moves between a number of different scenes in a really slick way. (Excellent episode of The Studio about this!) It\u2019s a film way of showing off, as it must be incredibly hard to have hundreds of people all pulling off something flawlessly for a long period of time, not unlike a Broadway show.<\/p>\n

Jay Kelly is George Clooney playing himself, which as he says is the hardest thing to do. There are meta-levels of reality and fiction and so many allusions and callbacks the entire thing is a work of art. You learn to appreciate what actors do, and how film is made, while watching a film being done in such a nice way.<\/p>\n

So that is my recommendation from the year. In older movies I really enjoyed Kate & Leopold, which also includes an amazing Sting song that is impossible to find on streaming.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts that ended up with friends. I made a resolution in 2025 to watch more films. It\u2019s an art form I have many friends in and when we have hung out I realized how shallow my understanding of the canon of film was. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xn--mnchen-3ya.xyz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}