I watched 6 movies last week:

• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. Insofar as the movie earns anything, it earns that reputation. Roger Ebert was too kind when he called this incoherent, sleepwalking tedium “an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem, occasionally surfacing for cliches.”
• Even if I didn’t know Terry Gilliam had ever seen The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I probably could have guessed it. The movie—which, for the record, he said “captured the real spirit of the character”—is like the most Gilliamesque thing he never made. It’s delightfully silly and visually inventive in so many unexpected ways.
• Vamps is not without its cornball charm, but that’s thanks to the cast, not to any of the movie’s tired jokes or cheesy effects or shambling plot. The cast fully commits to the bit—no vampire pun intended, although that’s about the quality of the humor on display here. It’s not enough to save the movie, but there is an amiable, if somewhat halfhearted, charm to the whole thing.

• The Great Bank Hoax is exceptionally dull. There’s a decent enough idea for a comedy of errors in the basic setup, but the movie is all errors, no comedy, and there are a lot of good actors stranded in bad performances. A real waste of everyone’s time, my own included.
• There’s nothing particularly original in Ash‘s story—it would probably be a spoiler just to say what sci-fi horror movies it’s most indebted to, if not ripping off—but it’s handled with no small amount of visual style.
• Fritz Lang’s Fury isn’t necessarily subtle in what it says about mob violence, but it’s well acted and very well shot.

I also rewatched White Sands and Phantasm, although a week apart from one another, not as a double-feature. White Sands I had watched sometime in the early 2000s, when I was on something of a Mickey Rourke kick, but I remembered almost nothing about it. It’s pretty good, if a little overly complicated and not entirely satisfying, but also very much the kind of movie I could see myself completely forgetting about again for another twenty or thirty years. Meanwhile, I’d seen Phantasm a little more recently, though still almost twenty years ago at this point, and I remembered really disliking it then. I still think it’s a very bad movie in a lot of the things that matter, like story and acting and effects, but as a weird low-budget meditation on grief and nightmares—almost a surreal art piece? There’s something almost compelling there.

Another week, another six movies:

• They don’t make a lot of movies like Hooper anymore, partly because they don’t make a lot of movies the way they make movies in Hooper anymore. There’s a laid-back, if not shaggy and drunk, charm to the whole thing, but also some real pathos in Reynolds’ performance, which was one of his best.
• You can see its twists coming a mile away, and there’s more than a little cheesiness to the whole thing, but despite that—or maybe because of it—Spellbinder is an enjoyable enough little supernatural thriller.
• I had been led to believe that Punisher: War Zone was the good Punisher movie, but honestly, I’m just not seeing it. There’s a lot of over-the-top, comic-book-style violence, but it doesn’t lend itself to much of anything and isn’t entertaining in its own right.

• An early, Dutch-language war film from Paul Verhoeven, Soldier of Orange is often tense and thrilling.
• I might have enjoyed Days of Thunder more if it had anything like characters, a story, or even particularly interesting (and not just fetishistically photographed), racing. It’s such a vague gesture at a movie, not even silly fun.
• Belfast doesn’t dig especially deep into its narrative or characters, but it’s affectionate and well acted.

I also really enjoyed a rewatch of The Royal Tenenbaums.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• For a movie without a single likable character—and a fairly unlikable title character—Listen Up Philip is a fun and intelligent character study.
• Love & Basketball does exactly what it says on the tin, but Lathan and Epps are just wonderful together, and it’s a genuinely lovely love story.
• There is a chasm between how clever Lucky Number Slevin thinks it is and how clever the movie actually is. Every now and then, a scattered line of hyper-stylized dialogue halfway lands, usually thanks only to an actor’s delivery, but each one of those moments is a very long time coming.

• You may be shocked to learn that the 1960 comedy Sex Kittens Go to College has not aged well. Although I suspect it was never very good to begin with. Dated and sexist, but also confused and never particularly funny, grasping for zaniness but never more than a strange relic from the past—and that’s even before a ten-minute sequence near the end in which a robot and a chimpanzee watch four women in a row do topless stripteases in a dream sequence. (This is a thing that actually happens in the movie, even if it was apparently never included in the American release.) The best I can say about it is that Mamie Van Doren remains reasonably likable.
• There are scattered moments of inspired beauty in The Last Time I Committed Suicide, and I think some decent performances. But it’s difficult to say how true it is to Neal Cassady’s life, and the disjointed way in which it’s told—intentionally, I suppose, mirroring Cassady’s drug-fueled writing style—makes it difficult to connect with any of it. It’s a little like being on a lazy bender with someone, occasionally surfacing for a brief moment almost like profundity.
• Cleaner is hardly the worst Die Hard knockoff, but it is very, very far from the best. Daisy Ridley gives it a fair go, and director Martin Campbell is an old hand at action movies, but there’s nothing particularly clever, well staged, or memorable about any of this.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• I’m not sure what I can say about Parthenope, besides that yes, Celeste Dalla Porta is very bewitching in the title role. There are moments of strange and luxuriant beauty in the film, but it’s not altogether clear if the movie goes too far or not far enough into the unreal, or what it’s even trying to say with its languorous meditation on beauty and desire.
• A Different Man is a strangely absurd dark comedy, with a lot of interesting ideas swirling around it.
• Last Breath has some tense moments, but fewer than you might expect, and what it doesn’t have is any kind of propulsive forward momentum, which seems critical for what’s supposed to be a nail-biting survival movie. As Simon Abrams writes, “not every inspiring tale of heroism can be reduced to processed cheese without losing most of its flavor.” The cast does their best, but the script turns an inspiring real-life rescue into stock characters and trite dialogue.

• The Asphyx is an interesting idea, just not entirely well realized.
• The Tall Target just never hit its mark for me. On paper a compelling idea, I just couldn’t quite connect with it.
• Sinners is remarkable not just for the wildly audacious chances it takes, both stylistically and narratively, or the unflinching way it addresses questions both of racism and grief, but for how genuinely and unapologetically entertaining it is. This is blockbuster genre filmmaking at its absolute best.

I also re-watched The Terminator, which I don’t think I’ve seen it is entirety in several decades. And you know what? Still a pretty damn good movie.

• Short Term 12 runs the risk of melodrama and cliche, but the performances and honest empathy with which the characters are viewed lift it up to something genuinely moving.
• It is the times that stand out most in The Times of Harvey Milk. It’s the portrait of a charismatic and compassionate man cut down far too soon, but even more so, it’s a fascinating window into San Francisco and the fight for gay rights at the time.
• There are a lot of interesting ideas swirling around Night’s End, a good central performance from Geno Walker, and some decent scares for such an obviously micro-budget. But, sadly, it largely falls apart by…well, night’s end.

• The 13th Warrior is best when it leans into the Beowulf retelling. It’s fine but unremarkable as an action movie, more than a little dull as an historical drama, and most engaging as a horror movie.
• Liberty Heights is a little too meandering, maybe not focusing on any one of its characters enough, but Barry Levinson does a good job capturing what it must have felt like to grow up Jewish in Baltimore in the 1950s.
• Lucio Fulci called Demonia, one of the last movies he ever directed, “a wonderful movie, ruined from very bad photography.” I would reverse that, if I’m being honest. The scenic locations and architecture of the movie’s fake archaeological dig almost can’t help produce the occasionally interesting shot. If only the script and the acting could say the same. The movie is confused and dull, somehow both over and under-complicated, and it really doesn’t hold together as much of anything in the end. A half dozen movies into his filmography and I think I can safely say Fulci’s horror movies aren’t for me.

I also rewatched Broadcast News, which I haven’t seen since almost back when its topical references were current. The news media has changed dramatically since the movie was made, but I think the ethical questions it asks are still valid. Moreover, though, the characters are just so well drawn and the comedy so good that a little bit of stale datedness doesn’t detract too much.