About Fred

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Bride! is an bold and audacious movie if you can get on its strange and very particular wavelength, which is something I was never once able to do. Give Maggie Gyllenhaal due credit, the movie is a go-for-broke riff on a thousand different ideas. I’m just not convinced it has anything novel or especially interesting to say about any of them, or that their collision on screen isn’t anything more than a trainwreck.
• The Secret Agent, as Matt Zoller Seitz wrote, “doesn’t feel made, but extracted from a dreaming mind.” That sometimes means the movie follows a dream logic, requiring you to pay attention to detail and subtext, with storylines ending or crossing in unexpected ways. But that makes the movie sound more like homework than the rich, sometimes surreal delight that it is.
• Sliding Doors is two very boring movies for the price of one. I think the actors, particularly Paltrow, are trying their best with the character sketches they’ve been handed, but I didn’t care about a single one of them, a few are outright insufferable, and the whole thing ends on a weird downer. As Roger Ebert wrote, “Is either time-line interesting in itself? If not, then no amount of shifting back and forth between them can help. And I fear they are not.”

• There’s a certain melancholy and sadness running through most of Ozu’s work, but Tokyo Twilight has to easily be his bleakest film. There are moments of beauty, and the director fills the screen with many of his familiar actors, but it’s not the sort of movie to watch if you need a pick-me-up.
• Tourist Trap is a lousy movie, and I spent less time watching it than simply waiting for it to end. In future, before I watch a horror movie, I may want to answer the question “is there a Rifftrax version of this?” and then watch that version instead.
• I’m not sure White Material would work, much less half as well as it does, without Isabelle Huppert’s performance at the heart of it. Her character and actions are often inscrutable, even to those around her, but Huppert sells them as having some kind of internal strength and logic.

I also rewatched Stir of Echoes, which is a very serviceable ’90s horror movie. Nothing special, and more than a little rushed, but with some nice moments.

Last week, I watched 9 movies:

I found Exit 8 more creepy and unnerving than scary, but that’s not a knock against it, because the movie is unnerving. And while it’s not exactly subtle about its themes, it’s nice that it’s actually kind of about something.
• In/Frame/Out describes Seven Veils, in part, as an exploration of “why the idea that great work is born of suffering serves as an antiquated justification for allowing terrible things to go unchallenged.” Layered, often deeply uncomfortable, with arguably Amanda Seyfried’s best performance to date.
• When movies like DeepStar Six fail, it’s usually because the filmmakers put more attention and effort into the creature design than the characters, and here it’s more of the opposite problem. Not that the characters are always well drawn—their deaths are largely interchangeable, and their behavior becomes increasingly inconsistent—but the movie’s cheapness in both design and ideas only shows up at the end, when despite some decent scene-setting and character work, it’s clear they have nowhere interesting to go.

• 5 Fingers is a smart, tidy war-time thriller, with terrific turns by both Danielle Darrieux and James Mason.
• Four Men and a Prayer is serviceably entertaining, with a very game cast.
• The last of the three horror stories in Three is probably the best, but they all have their moments, and all three not enough of them. Aside from the very 2002 look to the movie, and the interesting look at horror across different Asian cultures, none of the stories quite come together in the end.

• Two for the Seesaw can’t help but feel dated in places, and there plenty of times when the characters sound like anything but real, but Mitchum and MacLaine are terrific together in this strange, sad romance.
• There are better The Old Dark House knockoffs than One Body Too Many, but this one is goofy, short-lived fun.
• The Dark Half is fine, but I kept expecting it to be a lot better than it is.

I also re-watched Zero Effect, which is a weird ’90s riff on Sherlock Holmes, but which is really quite engaging.

And with that, my weird, unexpected numbers game of the week concluded. It wasn’t anything I’d planned, but after following Exit 8 with Seven Veils, both of which I’d been meaning to watch for a while, it seemed all but inescapable, at least the way my brain works. And there were a bunch of really good movies in there I wouldn’t have thought to watch if I wasn’t searching for movies with numbers in them. This is actually isn’t the first time I’ve tried this experiment, and it’s yielded some odd results.

Last week, almost half of the lyrics were guessed correctly.

How will this week go? [Update (5/29/26): Nobody guessed any of these, so the answers are all posted below.]

1. “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian
   “And murmured vague obscenities”
2. “Big River” by the Secret Sisters (orig. Johnny Cash)
   “Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry”
3. “Civilian” by Wye Oak
   “I am nothing without pretend”
4. “Queen of Hearts” by Juice Newton
   “Won’t you keep my heart from breaking, if it’s only for a very short time?”
5. “Drag Me Down” by Boomtown Rats
   “Bless the night before the day grows old”
6. “Single” by Lissie
   “So what’s that thing hanging around your finger”
7. “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely” by Hüsker Dü
   “I keep my distance, but that distance is too far”
8. “Nightlight” by Silversun Pickups
   “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to beware”
9. “Where Is a Woman to Go?” by Dusty Springfield
   “Hey, bartender, honey, gimme change for a ten-dollar bill”
10. “The Price I Pay” by Billy Bragg
    “So keep that phone out of my way for the things I must say”

Good luck!

I watched 5 movies last week:

• It’s tempting to call State of Grace a forgotten gem, but it’s also a tarnished one, whose flaws I suspect have become more pronounced as even more films have trafficked in the same cliches. “What’s best about [the movie],” Roger Ebert wrote at the time, “is what’s unique about it,” while acknowledging that it “gets less and less original, the more complicated it becomes.” There is a lot to like about it, from the complicated characters to the strong performances, which is why it’s all the more disappointing when it falls apart in a hail of gunfire.
• “Mike Leigh’s films realize,” wrote Roger Ebert about the touching but low-stakes Career Girls, “that for most people, most days, life consists of the routine of earning a living, broken by fleeting thoughts of where our efforts will someday take us–financially, romantically, spiritually or even geographically. We never arrive in most of those places, but the mental images are what keep us trying.”
• I don’t know if Under Capricorn is Alfred Hitchcock’s worst movie, but it’s a strong contender. Decent performances mired in long, talky shots and largely uninteresting characters.
• At first, We Who Are About to Die seems like the only thing it has going for it is that title. But then it goes surprisingly hard on the prison scenes, making you actually care about these men society has condemned and thrown away.
• There are a few moments when The Astronaut builds tension and suspense…and if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all of those moments. You’ll almost certainly clock the twist ending before it comes, and the fact that it only works as a twist robs it of the weight the movie tries to place on it. Kate Mara tries her best to create some kind of character from her performance, but the movie itself never works.

I also rewatched 1977’s House, which I always remember is going to be weird, but always forget just how weird. This is my third time watching it, and while I’ve never used psychedelics, I always feel like I have after I’ve watched the movie. “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)?” asked the Criterion Collection. “As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip…”

Last week:

This week:

1. “Emmylou” by First Aid Kit
   “I was born to endure this kind of weather”
2. “Cocaine Blues” by Johnny Cash
   “They overtook me down in Juarez, Mexico”
3. “Lodestar” by Sarah Hammer
   “Your hand won’t write, not tonight”
4. “Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send”
   “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, guessed by Frodis Caper
5. “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” by Arcade Fire
   “They heard me singing and they told me to stop”
6. “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons
   “Packing my bags and giving the academy a rain check”
7. “We crave a different kind of buzz”
   “Royals” by Lorde, guessed by Glen
8. “And she probably lives in Tahiti”
   “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric, guessed by Glen
9. “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac
   “My friends say I’m acting peculiarly”
10. “Surrender” by Cheap Trick, guessed by HL
    “Stay away, you’ll never know what you’ll catch”

Guess the song lyrics, artist and song, in the comments. Good luck!