Pools (2025)

I really liked this.

Going to be honest - I was shown an ad for this movie on Instagram, and at first I thought it was an ad for an AI-written story slop app, but then saw it was for an actual movie (I think technically it was an ad into Apple TV). The brief trailer caught my attention though - it was a short snippet of dialogue, and it seemed goofy and fun. It lingered in my mind as something that might be fun to watch as a low-effort movie. So I watched it, a few days after exposure.

The premise is fun. A bunch of college students invading rich people's pools in the night. All led by the spontaneous plans of our protagonist, a girl named Kennedy. They eventually end up breaking into one of the houses and partying themselves to exhaustion. It sounds and seemed ridiculous -- are they not thinking about the consequences of trashing someone's house? They seem confident that the owners are away, but surely this could catch up to them. But they're living in the moment.

Again, it's fun to watch this. But the surface level fun isn't the point of the movie. It's actually a story about Kennedy processing emotions related to her father's death (who died of a stroke while in a pool) and dealing with her impending future. She feels, or feels that society feels, that she should stay in school and continue her education on her scholarship and do what would've made her father proud. Yet from the start of the movie, and in moments throughout, we can sense this force inside her which propels her away from her studies -- she can't do the bare minimum of showing up to class, even when skipping another class means she will be expelled.

It takes the pool boy, a stranger to Kennedy, to offer some wisdom which makes her realize that it's okay to actually follow her instincts and pursue a path of music rather than rigidly conform to that college education which other people are saying is right for her, or that her past self felt was right for her.

I love the emotion and heart here. I love the (wo)man-versus-self conflict. In the first third of the movie, you might think it's a man-versus-world conflict -- will they get caught by the homeowners or police? But it turns out that what we really care about is Kennedy's journey and for her to find resolution in the uncertainties of her path. Yeah, if I think too deep about the fact that they broke into and partied in these people's house, I have all kinds of questions, like, what is going on morally with these people. Yet as the movie progressed, even as Kennedy lingered in this mansion, the only important thing was her self-discovery and I became fully immersed in it.

Speaking of immersion -- the movie was beautifully shot and the score was really nice.

There was also poetry to this movie which I feel I don't see in that many movies. An example of a small detail I love - as a way to show the passing of time, there is a shot of a dial that is turned from "Winter" to "Summer" (I just realized that this is probably a reference to an Air Conditioner control, which yes is relevant to the plot). And then at the very end of the movie, after the credits, the dial is shown again and the disembodied hand turns it from Summer back to Winter.

There were also some really good lines that stood out to me. And they clearly were meant to. Specifically, I'm talking about the present vs future stuff. In an early scene of the movie, Kennedy tells her to-be-friend dude (Blake) that the future is basically impossible to reach. You can say something will happen "tomorrow", but then when tomorrow comes, tomorrow is still tomorrow. You can never get to tomorrow, really. Then, later, the Air Conditioner guy has a line essentially about living in the moment ("It's always now") and not worry about the future. --Okay you know what, I'm kind of at a loss for how I was connecting these two parts. But perhaps one message of the movie is that sometimes you have to do what feels best in the moment rather than worrying about what your future is supposed to look like. (Obviously this message isn't always true.)

Anyway these were some of these thoughts. I was surprised at the depth of the movie. I feel like I was taken on a journey and I often didn't know where it was going next. It felt fresh to me. Kind of makes me want to swim in a pool :)

Paint a picture

Don't take this as indicating that this movie has any more meaning to me than I've implied above -- but I've recently been wanting to make a painting of something, and saying the word "pools" so many times reminded me that I've taken pictures of my childhood home's pool area in the past, which would make a good subject for a painting. Especially since I've been wanting to paint something that is more of a landscape.

This is my sketch so far. Hopefully I do paint it and hopefully I remember to update this.