About Fred

I watched an assortment of five movies last week:

• There’s a lot going on in American Fiction, sometimes almost too much, and certainly a lot more than just the satire of publishing and race that the trailers suggest. That’s in there, and it’s a smart and biting satire, but there’s also a very touching character study and family drama rattling around inside too.
• Paul Winfield really is exceptionally good in Sounder.
• I’m not even that big a Taylor Swift fan—I mean, I like her and several of her songs well enough, but I come to even that still scattershot appreciation fairly late. And yet, it’s hard to watch the three-hour, terrifically staged concert footage of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and not walk away genuinely impressed and wanting more.
• What Wings manages to do, entirely without any special effects beyond its own invented camera trickery, is even now, almost a century later, nothing short of astounding. That this silent film also manages to tell such an engaging story is remarkable as well.
• It’s easy to see how Warrior wouldn’t be half as effective if it wasn’t as well put together, or if the performances in it weren’t so strong. It’s not a terrifically surprising story, but often powerfully engaging.

I also re-watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Maggie Smith is still fantastic in it, but I think I forgot how very much this is Pamela Franklin’s movie. Hers is the character with an actual arc—defined against Jean Brodie’s inability or unwillingness to grow, despite her constant admonishments to her girls to the contrary. I was struck, on this re-watch, how unlikable and yet tragic Brodie is as a character.

• I don’t remember the first Aquaman movie all that well—as the near-endless flashbacks and voiceover recapping in the second one makes abundantly clear—but I remember it being mostly fun most of the time. The sequel mostly isn’t, despite a decent cast giving it a shot, or at least seeming like they’re having fun. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels surprisingly cheap and low-stakes, a real sputter to end the DCEU on.
• Find Me Guilty isn’t a lot more than agreeably serviceable, but it does win you over—and most of of that is due to Vin Diesel’s genuinely charming and heartfelt performance.
• Stunningly strange from top to bottom, Poor Things is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, and it works so well largely because of Emma Stone’s total commitment to the role.

• The 1940 version of Our Town isn’t the highest quality print, and it veers maybe a little too hard into realism and a happy ending the play doesn’t need. But the heart of Wilder’s play is here, even if I prefer other, later stagings of it.
• I’m not entirely convinced there was a compelling artistic reason to make Wonka, and yet the finished confection is actually quite delightful and sweet.
• The NY Times described Eyes of Fire, not inaccurately, as “an ambitious idea gone haywire, as if The Scarlet Letter had zoomed into the future and collided with the movie version of The Exorcist.” It’s often interesting, even fascinating, but its reach also often exceeds its grasp.

I also re-watched Kairo (Pulse), which I’ve often cited as one of my favorite horror movies. It remains a deeply unnerving, occasionally terrifying, profoundly sad, and yet also strangely hopeful movie.

I watched seven movies last week:

• Cliffhanger is dumb and very forgetable, but it’s also a fairly entertaining thrill ride.
• In Which We Serve is straight-up British stiff-upper-lip World War II propagaganda, but it’s often very effective as such, and it features some good performances.
• White Men Can’t Jump sometimes feels a little rough around the edges, but it has well-observed characters and dialogue, and it’s often very fun.

• Ministry of Fear plays initially a little like a horror movie, in which our hero wanders into a quiet English village only to discover it’s been overtaken by some kind of sinister forces. Only, in this case, it’s not body snatchers from beyond but Nazi spies. It’s gripping and suspenseful throughout.
• The One is dumb and very forgettable, full stop. It is not entertaining, and I just wanted the ride to stop.
• Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Roger Ebert wrote, “is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but [it] gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature—so odd, so valuable, so particular.”
• Spaceman is a little whispery and dull, even leaden at times. But because that seems largely by design, as deliberate as the decision to not Americanize the story and characters, the movie largely works. I’m not sure it has anything epescially deep to say—beyond, as Robert Daniels puts it, that “some men would rather go to space and talk to a giant spider than go to therapy”—but it’s not without its share of lovely little moments.

I also re-watched Die Hard (for the who-knows-how-many-th time), following something of a John McTiernan kick I’ve been on, following along with Blank Check. I don’t think Die Hard is the greatest movie ever made, but I do think it’s a near-perfect movie, and likely the best action movie ever made. Everything in it is so deliberate without ever feeling that way, and it’s hard to imagine a better version of the movie Die Hard is trying to be.

• Brief Encounter is such a lovely gem of a movie—one that, as Greta Gerwig puts it in an interview on the Criterion Channel, “lets you be in love with falling in love.” It doesn’t feel at first like it should even work, told so simply through flashback and voice-over narration, but there are such wonderful performances in it, particularly by Celia Johnson, and the movie is directed so deftly by David Lean.
• I don’t know that I would go so far as to call Blast of Silence a “neglected film noir masterpiece” (as Patton Oswalt does here), but it’s a uniquely grim and impressive early neo-noir.
• Drums Along the Mohawk isn’t very culturally sensitive, to say the least, but there are good performances and strong direction by John Ford.

• Nimona is, top to bottom, such an awesomely delightful and genuinely touching movie.
• Testament is a remarkable, but difficult, watch—a movie that, as Roger Ebert put it, “asks how we might act toward one another, how our values might stand up, in the face of an overwhelming catastrophe.” It is such a heartbreaking movie that, nevertheless, refuses to let go of hope.
• It’s not that there are great ideas in Screamers—those feel more than a little shopworn, confused, and under-developed—but there is (again as Roger Ebert put it) “a certain imagination and intelligence” to the filmmaking. Most of that comes through Peter Weller’s performance, which isn’t enough to recommend the movie, but is strong enough to make it interesting.

• How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a terrifically tense film, though I suppose how you end up feeling about it will depend on how much you sympathize with the characters, or how comfortable you are with not knowing who to sympathize with.
• John Frankenheimer’s documentary-like filmmaking is well suited to The Train, as is Burt Lancaster’s performance, though you can’t often go wrong with either one of them.
• The Watermelon Woman feels every bit like a mid-’90s independent movie—loose, semi-improvised scenes by non-professional actors—but it asks important questions with warmth and humor. Even if the filmmaking itself feels somewhat dated, or at least very much of its time, it’s an entertaining movie made by and about black lesbians.

• Cemetery Man feels reminiscient of Sam Raimi or early Peter Jackson, but is never as clever, interesting, or fun as either of them. It holds only scattered moments of enjoyment. As critic Mick LaSalle wrote, “It aims high and misses, but it does hold interest with visual flash, wry humor and a couple of sex scenes that can make steam come out of your ears.”
• Fallen Leaves is a bittersweet and deceptively simple love story.
• I don’t really share Steven Soderbergh’s recent fondness for anamorphic lenses, but the choice is less distracting in High Flying Bird, which is thoroughly engaging, thanks to some terrific performances all around, particularly by André Holland.

I also rewatched Predator, which is still a fantastic ’80s sci-fi action movie, but I don’t think it could ever be as cool as it was to ten-year-old me watching it on hotel cable in 1987.

I watched just four movies last week:

• I have vague memories of reading at least parts of Helen Keller’s autobiography when I was much younger, so it was interesting to see how much more The Miracle Worker is the story of Anne Sullivan. Both Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars for their performances, but the movie very much belongs to Bancroft.
• The Greatest Night in Pop tells the story of the making of “We Are the World” in more exhaustive detail than you might think necessary, but it’s actually often fascinating, from the madness of how it all came together, to all the behind-the-scenes footage that didn’t wind up in the original music video.
• The contrivance on which I Confess hangs might now seem a little shopworn, but the movie is helped enormously by Hitchcock’s direction on Montgomery Clift’s performance.
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can’t help but betray its 1970s TV budget, from the not entirely convincing old-age makeup to the episodic way the story unfolds. But it’s an engaging, unflinching story, held together by a strong performance by Cicely Tyson.

I also re-watched Gorillas in the Mist, which I haven’t seen since the year it came out, over thirty years ago now. It holds up well, thanks largely to Sigourney Weaver’s central performance, though it could be argued the movie doesn’t actually tell us a lot about Dian Fossey.