I watched just 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert described Radioland Murders as “all action and no character, all situation and no comedy.” There’s simply too much going on here, and almost none of it is particularly funny.
• There are several movies competing for attention in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The best of them is the one starring Wynona Ryder, but none of the movies are very good, and they collide against one another in bewilderingly unsatisfying ways.
• Its satire has lost more than some of its bite, but Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is still often amusing.

• Thunder on the Hill may not have the lush Technicolor of later Douglas Sirk movies, but it has all the exciting melodrama you expect.
• Roger Ebert called Into the Night “a fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.” I would argue only with the “funny” part of that, not the “fitfully.” I can’t remember the last time I was this bored and confused by what’s ostensibly a comedy.
• There’s some question about how the movie treats its other real-life characters, most notably reporter Kathy Scruggs, but Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is well crafted and features a legitimately breakout performance by Paul Walter Hauser.

I also somewhat randomly re-watched Runaway Jury. It isn’t the best Gene Hackman movie. It isn’t the best John Grisham adaptation. It isn’t even the best John Grisham adaptation starring Gene Hackman. But it’s a dumb freight train of a movie, and surprisingly still fun on rewatch even when I knew exactly where it was headed.

I watched 9 movies last week, and thank goodness not a single one of them was a Pink Panther film:

• “If ‘Eureka‘ is not completely successful,” wrote Roger Ebert, “if, indeed, it is sometimes merely silly and often confusing, maybe that’s the price we pay for Roeg’s intensity. At least it is never boring.”
• If Stage Door and now Kitty Foyle are any indication, I need to watch a lot more Ginger Rogers movies.
• Sing Sing is simply told, but with some fantastic, unshowy performances, and honest surprises.

• There’s too much world-building in Battle Beyond the Stars, but that’s a better problem to have than its opposite. The movie can’t ever shake off being a low-budget, over-stuffed Star Wars knockoff, but there’s just enough silly weirdness in the whole thing to be entertaining.
• John Ford’s The Informer is extremely melodramatic, but it’s grounded by Victor McLaglen’s conflicted performance.
• I love that the Adams Family make horror movies together, though Hell Hole is maybe my least favorite so far. As Brian Tallerico writes, “it’s kind of a disappointment” and “drain[ed]…of some of the DIY charm of the other flicks by Adams and Poser.” There are things to like here, some fun things the filmmakers get to do with their obviously bigger budget and some funny performances, but it also feels a little hollow, and the ending is a huge disappointment.

• There’s not a lot to say about The Great Dictator that hasn’t already been said, but there is nonetheless a lot to say for Chaplin’s bravery in making this film when he did, the bite of his satire, but also the lovely silent gags throughout. By his own admission, it’s not a movie he could have made only a few short years later, when the true horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were revealed, but for the moment in time it was made, it is an enduring masterpiece.
• Richard Harris is good in A Man Called Horse, and there’s something to be said for how much the film centers around the Sioux, given the time it was made, though it’s still a little a little disappointing. Not for nothing, as “a trashy, b-movie version of Dances With Wolves.”
• Pamela Anderson gives the best performance of her career in The Last Showgirl, which I think I’d be saying even if I had liked any of her past performances. It’s revelatory not just because we (maybe unfairly) don’t expect it from Anderson—she’s genuinely very good in this sad, complicated movie.

I also re-watched the thoroughly delightful My Fair Lady.

Last week, I watched 11 movies—the entire run of The Pink Panther, sequels and reboots included.

It all started innocently enough, when I thought I’d maybe rewatch The Pink Panther, only to discover that I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever actually seen the movie before. But I enjoyed it well enough, even if it was a little dated and Clouseau-light, so I decided to carry on with the sequel, A Shot in the Dark.

That’s maybe where I should have ended things, because the next film in the series, Inspector Clouseau, is not good at all. Alan Arkin is clearly trying. What he’s trying isn’t always clear, but he definitely is. It’s just that there isn’t a funny moment to be hand in the movie.

For some reason, though, I pressed on. The next three movies—The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Revenge of the Pink Panther—are each okay enough. They’re also quite dated, to the point of some very unfortunate yellowface, but they’re often also silly and amusing. I think my favorite was probably Strikes Again just for how silly it gets, with Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus becoming a full-out Bond villain, but they all have their moments.

I wish I could say the same for the next two films that followed. Trail of the Pink Panther is little better than a clip show, stitched together from deleted scenes and out-takes after Peter Sellers unexpectedly died early in the movie’s production. Some of those deleted scenes are kind of amusing, but most of them look like they were deleted for a reason, and the whole thing just falls apart as a narrative. Sellers’ estate reportedly successfully sued the filmmakers, and the whole thing just feels patched-together and sad. Even sadder is the very real possibility that this is the only one of these movies I had actually seen before. (I can’t say for certain, and it’s a Frankenstein of the whole rest of the series, but released in 1983, it is the first one I could have conceivably been taken to in theaters.)

Still, as bad Trail is, it can’t hold a candle to the absolutely dire Curse of the Pink Panther. If Trail was a misguided attempt to honor Sellers and the franchise, then Curse is a lamentable attempt to extend it with a spin-off nobody wanted, a complete miscalculation of a movie, just fundamentally flawed in its concept and desperately unfunny in execution. I don’t blame Ted Wass for being very confused about how to play this character, but his attempts do reveal the heart of the problem: Inspector Clouseau isn’t a funny character, Peter Sellers made him funny. Every attempt to play this material with someone else, first with Arkin and then with Wass, simply was never going to work.

Peter Ustinov was reportedly cast in the first film, before it eventually went to Sellers, and that I can see. I think Ustinov could have very successfully played the character as written in the first Pink Panther, where Clouseau is just one element of many. I don’t think the series would have carried on with that character, however. The series’ longevity owes everything to Sellers, and it was a fool’s errand asking anyone else to play the role.

So of course, that’s what they did for three more movies. Son of the Pink Panther is not as bad as Curse—and, in all fairness, I think Roberto Benigni is more under-used than miscast—but it’s also never very funny. It doesn’t even particularly feel like a Pink Panther movie, more like warmed-over James Bond. It’s a sad place to end the series, on its thirty-year anniversary no less, but it’s stumble of a step up from the movie before it.

The two Steve Martin remakes are a little better, but that’s not saying a whole lot. I did like the second one more, so it was nice to end this mad exercise on a high(er) note, but neither film was especially funny. We’ve now gone sixteen years without another attempt at the series, so hopefully that’s where things remain.

Honestly, the whole Pink Panther series is pretty checkered, with some fine but not necessarily remarkable entries, and with some utter garbage. I can’t necessarily recommend any of them, and certainly can’t in good conscience recommend running the entire series like I did.

Oh, but I did also re-watch 1972’s Asylum. I don’t think it’s the best of Amicus horror anthology movies, but it has a lot of fun moments.

I watched a dozen movies last week:

• The War of the Gargantuas does exactly what it says on the tin. Its charms are in the bad dubbing, the rubber suit monsters, and the wanton destruction of miniatures.

She-Wolf of London is fairly slight and a little silly, but June Lockhart’s quite good in it.

• Omni Loop is strange and surprising and more than a little sad, and Mary-Louise Parker is really great in it.

• Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) is maybe more about the second half of that equation more than the first, though it certainly never skirts around the amount that Sly Stone’s blackness impacted the arc of his own self-destructive behavior and career. The documentary is an interesting look back and some genuinely terrific music.
• In her review at the time, Janet Maslin reportedly called Rock & Rule “dopey and loud,” which describes the movie very well.
• I was surprised by how seriously and thoughtfully Crossfire tackled bigotry and the violence it inspires, and there are a lot of really good performances throughout.

• More American Graffiti is interesting, though it’s a little difficult to say what its disjointed narrative is really in service of, how these stories connect in any meaningful way to one another, much less the original film.
• Stage Door is just incredibly smart and acerbic, and all of the actresses in it (Hepburn and Rogers especially) are fantastic.
• Crank is as fast-paced and high-octane as you expect, which is honestly more than a little tiring after an hour and a half, especially with not especially likable characters.

• Tin Men is honest and straightforward and often very funny.
• Memoir of a Snail is a strange and obviously deeply personal film, in some ways a much less cozy, much more Ozzie flipside of Wallace & Gromit.
• The Brutalist is sweeping yet intimate, and if what it says isn’t always groundbreaking, how it does so, and the performances used to tell the story, are nothing short of fantastic.

I also re-watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which I haven’t rewatched in a few years but which remains just such an incredibly affecting film and genuinely one of Spielberg’s best.

Last week, I watched 9 movies:

• It’s not so much that Gladiator II can’t escape the shadow of the first film, it’s that it has no apparent desire to ever do so. Denzel Washington seems to be having fun, and Paul Mescal acquits himself well, but it’s difficult to see what, if anything, is the point of it all.
• Crossing is told with real compassion for its characters, even when we don’t understand, or even necessarily like them.
• I found it a little difficult to really connect with Kurosawa’s High and Low, at least as a suspenseful police procedural, but the film puts its main character, played by incomparable Toshiro Mifune, in an interesting ethical dilemma.

• Belle de Jour perhaps seemed more shocking in 1967 than it does almost 60 years later, but there is almost a quaintness to it now. That said, Catherine Deneuve remains coldly captivating, and there are intriguing surrealistic touches throughout.
• There are some interesting cinematic choices in The Picture of Dorian Gray—is it a spoiler to say that the portrait, when it’s finally seen, is photographed in color?—that I’m not entirely sure work. But the movie is always engaging.
• The Gorge is just so incredibly boring. The movie takes a ludicrous, but potentially fun, premise and does practically nothing with it, squandering also whatever chemistry the two leads have together.

• Cecil B. Demented works better in concept than execution, though there are amateurish charms to any John Waters movie.
• Of the “guy dies but returns to Earth as a guardian angel or ghost” subgenre of romantic comedy, I think I’ll take Her Comes Mr. Jordan (and its remakes) or A Matter of Life and Death over A Guy Named Joe, which is pleasant enough, thanks largely to Spencer Tracy’s charms, but takes much too long to get going, and doesn’t have much of anywhere to go when it finally does so.
• Return of the Living Dead III isn’t perfect. All of the real character development is left to the actors, and the movie is much grimmer in tone than the other two films in the series. But there’s some good creature work, interesting body horror, and at least a couple of surprisingly good performances.

I also rewatched both The Blues Brothers and The Warrirors, instead of watching the Super Bowl, which, the halftime show notwithstanding, feels like the better choice.