About Fred

• The way The Go-Between ends, particularly with its flash-forwards, doesn’t entirely work, and undermines a lot of what came before, but until then it’s a lovely period drama and coming-of-age story.
• The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas isn’t the best showcase of anyone’s talents, including Dolly Parton’s, but that’s very obviously the movie’s fault more than hers. She and Burt Reynolds have an easy charm together, and the movie has a few good songs—and to my mind two genuinely great ones.
• If you ever wondered what would happen if the writer/director of Enys Men made a time travel movie, then Rose of Nevada is for you. Sad and strangely haunting.

• Sean Baker makes movies about characters with such empathy, never presenting them as something that they’re not, but never judging them for who they are. He also often draws out terrific performances, usually from his female stars. To say that Starlet is no different risks dismissing it, but it’s a lovely, deceptively simple movie, with a very good performance by Dree Hemingway. (The title character is also well played.)
• Undertone is built on a lot of very familiar tropes—critics can, and have, listed all the other horror movies it appears to borrow from—but it uses those pieces in smart and scary ways. At least until the end, when it maybe runs out of interesting things to do, but even then it’s fairly effective.
• At only about forty-five minutes, From the Old Earth (aka O’r Ddaear Hen) almost doesn’t qualify as a movie at all—and certainly would have been better served as an episode of television or a short film. Even at its under-feature-film length, the movie feels very padded and dull, one poorly handled exposition scene dragging after another, and it doesn’t really do or say anything about the ancient mythology it brings up, or offer any scares. It’s not without its moments of fleeting atmosphere, but the fact of its existence—as a 1981 Welsh-language horror movie—is the only truly interesting thing about it.

I also rewatched F/X2, which has its moments—in the gadgetry more than the story—but which falls well flat from the original, and Clue, which is just a silly delight, as always.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight isn’t funny at all, which is a problem for a comedy. It’s much more interesting as a minor footnote to what was happening in Mafia movies at the time—the almost involvement of Francis Ford Coppola, the fact that Al Pacino dropped out to star in The Godfather and was replaced by a not-yet-famous Robert De Niro—than because of anything on the screen.
• The Beast Within isn’t remotely subtle—werewolves as a metaphor for alcoholic abuse—but it’s effective. Or would be, if it were a short film. It’s a solid metaphor, with good performances, seen through the dreamy, only half-understanding lens of childhood. The problem is, the movie overstays its welcome by more than half until and hammers that metaphor beyond recognition.
• It’s difficult to make a really good found-footage horror movie, but it’s got to be equally difficult to make one as bad as Solvent. The movie is obviously trying to do big things, like speak to generational violence and the lasting scars of right-wing Nazism, but it doesn’t necessarily have interesting things to say about them. Overall, it’s more than a little pretentious and unpleasant.

• I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the ending of Backrooms, but the unnerving way it uses liminal space to create dread and terror up until then is genuinely masterful.
• The Vampire Lovers is less chaste and less coy about being about lesbian vampires than I might have expected, even for 1970, but it’s also a decent enough Hammer horror movie.
• Claudine is a little dated—less in the things it’s about and more in the 1970s way it’s about them—but Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones are really great together.

I also rewatched F/X, which was a lot of fun, and Witchfinder General, which…well, it has other strengths besides fun. It’s a little too dour and sadistic to really be enjoyable, but Vincent Price and the rest of the cast—most of whom arguably are in the movie longer than Price—are quite good, so it kind of washes out.

I watched 9 movies last week:

• The 2003 version of Our Town starring Paul Newman mostly didn’t work for me, for reasons that were difficult to put my finger on. I’m a big fan of Newman, and of the 1977 adaptation of Wilder’s play, but this production always felt poorly staged, somehow less minimalist by drawing so much attention to the artifice and lack of finished sets. And while the acting is largely good, I felt no real warmth or connection for the characters, particularly George and Emily, which seems like a fundamental problem with the production.
• The Last House starts promisingly enough, with a simple but mysterious hook and strong leads in Greta Lee and Wagner Moura. And it does some clever things with its confined location—or at least most of the same things you would expect clever movies do when confined to a single location like this. But it’s really let down by unconvincingly tidy ending, and a plot that invites you to spend too much time looking through the holes in it.
• Sicario: Day of the Soldado doesn’t have anything like the weight or tension of the first movie, though it has a little of both, leant to it largely through the performances of Brolin and del Toro.

• Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother often feels more like an exercise than a narrative in and of itself, thanks in part to the anthology nature of the piece. It’s well made and acted, with some exceptionally well observed (and often bittersweet) details, but it really wasn’t until the final third of the triptych that I felt the movie come alive, with characters that felt fully real.
• The Crime of Monsieur Lange is a gem of a movie, albeit a small and modest one, and a pleasant glimpse into 1930s Paris.
• I’m not sure The Drama is always successful in what it’s trying to do, or if what it’s trying to do is always worth doing, but it does some interesting things along the way, and has good performances at its center.

• Dead Ringer is Bette Davis’ show all the way, so it’s good that she’s very good in it. The movie itself is a little hokey and uninspired, not doing a whole lot with its premise, throwing a lot of camera tricks on screen to try and sell it. It’s fun, but nothing special.
• All I can tell you about Lawyer Man is, William Powell is a lawyer, and he’s a man. In all seriousness, it’s a little morality play—more than a little convoluted, especially for such a short film—with a dependably charming Powell as the lead.
• I think I prefer the quiet and stylish retelling of the same story in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, but The Vourdalak certainly goes further with the gore and creepiness of it, particularly with that puppet.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Buddy Holly Story is a very by-the-numbers musical biopic, almost a little boring—which is maybe inevitable given the unfortunate shortness of the man’s life, the full potential of his musical career never reached—but Gary Busey is terrific enough in the title role to forgive all of that.
• I’m not sure They Will Kill You successfully pulls off everything it’s trying to do, and sometimes just throws stylized shots on the screen for their own sake, but it’s energetic, often clever, and a lot of fun./li>
• I was maybe impressed with, more than engaged by, Forty Guns, but it’s hard to deny the strength of the performances and simple effectiveness of Samuel Fuller’s direction.

• Over Your Dead Body is sometimes very funny, but it never quite figures out its tone, or a reason to care about the two leads coming together.
• MGM made nine Dr. Kildare movies in five years, so despite their charms, it’s no wonder they feel by turn a little thin, a little padded, and a little repetitive. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case is no exception, except here the medicine feels especially hokey and dated.
• Hagazussa is deeply weird and unsettling, slow to the point of ponderous, more mood than plot, never what you would call fun, and often genuinely disturbing, and yet it really got under its skin, and that mood worked on me.

• I think I can see the “sparks of talent and wit” that Roger Ebert recognized in Class of 1984, but there’s a lot more of the “raw, offensive, vulgar, and violent” that he also acknowledged in the film. I often couldn’t shake the feeling that might would better if it was worse, if it just embraced the camp that it keeps leaning towards, and yet its increasingly darker moments are the movie’s more effective ones. This isn’t a great movie, or even necessarily a good one, but it is a lot.
• Christmas in July feels effortless, which is good, because I’m not sure how much effort the movie could have sustained. It’s an endearing, well-directed and acted, if somewhat slight, comedy.
• Circus of Horrors could do with a lot less circus and a few more horrors, is all I’m saying.
• Cavalcade is a lovely (though very melancholic) Noel Coward trip through several decades of the early 20th century.

I also re-watched The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The movie’s pacing is more than a little chaotic, and it can’t help but feel a little pieced together from a movie that originally started as separate tales in an anthology film. But it’s a very creepy, well produced, and at times deeply upsetting, piece of folk horror.