I watched another 7 movies last week:

• Hamnet is a wonderful, often excruciatingly beautiful exploration of grief. It takes quite a while to get there, though I can’t decide if that’s by necessity, if that last hour of grief and loss would work as well if you didn’t frame it within the larger love story. The movie has some genuinely incredible performances, not least by the child actor playing the title role, and some of the most beautiful shots I’ve ever seen, especially in that final hour—so much so that I can forgive it for feeling like it’s just waiting for that hour from its very first one.
• I don’t know if I kept waiting for Smiles of a Summer Night to become more, or less, like A Little Night Music, the musical which was based on it. Still, it has several playfully fun scenes and performances, even if there’s nary a clown to be sent in anywhere.
• Oh, Nighthawks is bad. Some of that, I’m sure, is the editing, which chops out whole characters and scenes, but what’s left is so boring and dumb that it’s difficult to see how the movie might have worked even in its original cut. The movie doesn’t even make a compelling case for its title. The Washington Post movie review at the time reportedly panned the movie by calling it “what The Day of the Jackal might have looked like if filmed by the producers of Baretta.” Rutger Hauer is only occasionally compelling, Sylvester Stallone is almost purposefully not, and everyone else gets lost by the wayside.
• Dust Bunny could do with a little more inventiveness in its story and characters to match its production design, but there’s a fun visual flair through most of the film. It’s hardly the best of Bryan Fuller’s work, but he at least acquits himself reasonably well in the transition from TV to movies.

• Pete Hujar’s Day isn’t necessarily profound, beyond finding profundity in the mundane, in the simple act of two people talking to one another, its glimpse of a brief moment of 1970s New York.
• Videoheaven makes a number of interesting observations, but none that it doesn’t belabor or support with too many clips. You could easily sharpen the film’s focus by editing out a full hour of the film’s three, without sacrificing any of its history, connections, or critical appraisals.
• I can’t really recommend Lady Frankenstein—it’s a shoddy mishmash of the Mary Shelley story and some Italian gothic horror—but if you are going to watch it, you could do a lot worse than the version hosted by Elvira.

There were 10 song lyrics last week:

And there are 10 new song lyrics this week:

1. “Even your emotions have an echo in so much space”
2. “Persecution you must fear”
3. “Come on, belly up, to this brave new language”
4. “For once I can touch what my heart used to dream of”
5. “There’s a reason for the sun-shining sky”
6. “I know a girl who thinks of ghosts”
7. “Still you forced a way into my scheme of things”
8. “These mishaps you bubble wrap”
9. “The white walls of your dressing room are stained in scarlet red”
10. “No one’s teenage pride or throttle”

Guess the song and artist in the comments if you know them! Good luck!

I saw 7 movies last week. There was something of a theme until the very end:

• Upon seeing Angel’s Egg, Hayao Miyazaki reportedly said it was “not something others would understand.” I’m not sure understanding is what the movie wants or expects, but he wasn’t wrong. It’s intriguing, often stunningly animated, but I could not for the life of me tell you what it’s supposed to be about.
• After the Rehearsal feels like a meditation on sadness and the end of a life—I know, a shock for Bergman!—with bare staging and three compelling performances.
• What makes It Was Just an Accident remarkable is not just its harrowing depiction of the cycle of violence, or what it says against the Iranian regime, or how it was filmed in secret, but its humor and humanity in addition to all of that.
• The costumes and special effects in Planeta bur never rise above classic Doctor Who level, and its grasp on planetary science is questionable at best, but it’s an intriguing glimpse into Soviet-era science fiction filmmaking.

• As with his appearances in other films, Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot character in Mon Oncle usually elicits more bemused smiles from me than full-on laughter, and yet there is a lovely and meticulous craft to Tati’s films, as well as a knowing lampooning of the characters and the society they have built around them.
• There’s a loveliness and real sense of longing in Babette’s Feast.
• Some impressive late-game costume and makeup work notwithstanding, The Boneyard is largely terrible, dull and confused for most of its runtime and a mishmash of tones that are ridiculous when they should be scary, creepy when they should be funny. There’s half a half-baked idea in the mess—and it could have been much worse, given what was obviously a very low budget—but I very much did not enjoy this.

Is this fun for anybody else? Is anybody but the very small handful of people guessing an equally small handful of lyrics the last couple of weeks even reading this? Who can say. Only a few lyrics were guessed last week…

…but maybe this week the throngs of silent readers will fare better. As always, the rules are simple: below are 10 random lyrics. Guess the song and artist in the comments if you know them. Don’t cheat by looking them up.

1. “Daylight is waiting for you”
   “Wolves” by Down Like Silver
2. “They beat a Valentine drum”
   “Counting Back to 1” by Beautiful Small Machines
3. “We’re gonna chug-a-lug and shout”
   “After Midnight” by J.J. Cale
4. “Dammit Elvis, don’t you know you made your mama so proud”
   “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” by Drive-By Truckers
5. “You gonna take away my energy”
   “Jive Talkin'” by the Bee Gees
6. “The actors and jesters are here”
   “If Everyone Was Listening” by Supertramp
7. “Young hearts can go their way”
   “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers
8. “The radio reminds me of my home far away”
   “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, guessed by John
9. “Will you join in our crusade?”
   “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables (original Broadway cast recording), guessed by Glen
10. “We’re gonna kick your collective posterior”
    “Sports Song” by “Weird Al” Yankovic

Good luck!

I watched 6 movies last week:

• A Touch of Zen is a lush and beautifully shot movie, full of fantastic stunts and wirework.
• To Be or Not to Be is such a clever and well-constructed satire, walking such a fine line between pathos and laugh-out-loud jokes, with a phenomenal performance by Jack Benny.
• I think I can safely say I have never seen a movie quite like The Color of Pomegranates before. This is not a narrative so much as a collection of images—vivid, striking, and strange.

• There is a lot to appreciate about The Brave Little Toaster, but there’s also a lot to reveal how much feature animation changed just two years later with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Not everything here works, or works well together, and while the movie is certainly a gem, it’s a very rough one.
• I don’t know that I necessarily wanted a longer movie from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but I absolutely wanted a lot of the character beats, conflict, and plot that was obviously excised to hit its current run time. There’s a lot to like here, from the retro-futuristic set design to the cast themselves, but there’s a lot more than feels underbaked and not given enough room to breathe.
• Sister Midnight isn’t the movie I expected it to be, and that’s in no way the movie’s fault, but I’m not entirely sure it’s successful as the movie it finally decides to be. Still, I can’t fault the movie for not making bold choices, and it’s largely held together by Radhika Apte’s strong performance.

I also re-watched Trilogy of Terror, which I think succeeds largely on the strength of Karen Black’s different performances. While I agree that “Zuni fetish doll” of the final sequence likely would have freaked me out if I’d seen it on 1975 television, none of the movie’s stories, including that third one, are especially well developed. There are some fun twists, some more telegraphed than others, but the whole thing is mostly just slightly above average for a TV movie of the week.