About Fred

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

• Knock at the Cabin isn’t bad. I’d argue it’s actually M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie in years, although that’s at least partly because he hasn’t made another good one in almost twenty. But it’s hard to see what it adds, since none of the changes it makes from the novel—from the title on down—are for the better, and some are actively for the worse. It’s often clunky and not especially scary, in typical late-Shyamalan fashion, but it holds together a lot better than his other recent efforts—maybe because it has a stronger base, or because it’s focused more on real human characters than high-concept, allowing at least Dave Bautista the room to portray the conflicting emotions of his scenes really well. (Spoiler: he’s the best thing in the movie.)
• Inside isn’t always what I would call pleasant to watch, but it does more or less exactly what it says on the tin—the one in which Willem Dafoe’s character is trapped. It’s a little like Cast Away, if that was weirdly set in a luxury high-rise apartment with a malfunctioning thermostat, and it’s interesting enough as far as that idea goes. Dafoe certainly gives it his all. But it’s hard to say what, if anything, else the movie is trying to say about isolation and hardship and creation.
• I’ll say this much for Corner Office: everything it does feels very deliberate. Very little of that is interesting, and none of it is especially funny. If the movie is supposed to be satire, it’s both toothless and tired; if it’s absurdism, it annoys more than amuses. Jon Hamm’s performance and (constant) narration feel very intentionally pitched at something, but what that something is, I wouldn’t care to guess.

• Manodrome isn’t exactly subtle in what it has to say about toxic masculinity, repressed homosexuality, and incel culture…but it also isn’t exactly wrong about any of it. If the movie eventually feels as confused Jesse Eisenberg’s main character, that doesn’t diminish from the uncomfortable rawness of his performance.
• Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com described The Passenger as a “queasy, then curious, then underwhelming embrace of extremes.” The movie is helped enormously by Kyle Gallner’s performance, even if it quickly runs out of anything to say.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny feels almost completely airless. I only wish I could say that felt unexpected. At the end of the day, I think I agree with most everything that Darren Mooney said in his review.

I also re-watched Flight of the Navigator, which I hadn’t seen since it was in theaters and I was nine. The movie doesn’t have much of a story beyond its central time travel concept, which is all I remembered from when I was a kid, and it resolves that story very quickly without much fuss. The movie is kind of endearing despite that, and Joey Cramer was a pretty good child actor, but it’s also nothing special. I can see why the time travel part of it rattled around in my head for almost forty years, but also why I remembered nothing else.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched a half dozen movies last week:

• When I watched Free Solo, I don’t remember thinking, what these directors need to make next is a non-documentary film. Yet now they have, with the sports biopic Nyad, and it’s the things you wouldn’t get with a documentary—namely, the outstanding performances by Annette Bening and Jodie Foster—that make this film worth watching. It’s otherwise a pretty standard-fare biopic, uplifting sure, but also light on the sort of details and critical eye that a documentary might have supplied.
• Albert Finney puts a lot of relish on his portrayal of Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, but honestly, that’s kind of what you want from this kind of star-studded whodunit.
• I can’t exactly fault 1984 for being too bleak, since that more or less comes with the territory. But it is bleak more than anything else. It’s very well made, though, and John Hurt and Richard Burton are both very good.

• I can’t help but feel like Moloch rushes its ending just a little, but that’s only because the rest of it is so well-paced and unsettling. And my quibbles aren’t with the ending itself, which is great and surprising and caps off a really strong small horror film.
• Hangover Square was the last movie in Laird Cregar’s too-short career, and he’s the best thing about it. The rest of the movie feels well made and noir-ish, but also a little dated.
• Body Snatchers makes a lot of really interesting and creepy choices. I still think the 1978 version has it easily beat for stylish science-fiction horror—and this remake apes its predecessor’s most iconic shot a few too many times—but there’s a lot to really like about this version as well.

I also rewatched a couple of movies:

• When Harry Met Sally… holds up really well, and it’s arguably the best romantic comedy ever made. (I’d discredit any list that doesn’t at least have it in the top ten.)
• Around the World in 80 Days…doesn’t really hold up. I probably haven’t seen it in forty-something years, and didn’t remember it terrifically well to begin with, but it was a Best Picture Winner with a great cast. So I was hoping for something a little more than a dated and very Eurocentric (if not borderline offensive) travelogue. It’s not unpleasant, just kind of dull.

I watched 9 movies last week:

• Albert Brooks is a very smart and funny man, and Albert Brooks: Defending My Life is an amiable stroll through his life and career. It’s sometimes a little strange who director Rob Reiner decides to talk to—why so much Jonah Hill, for instance? and did they even try to get Lorne Michaels or anyone else involved with the early days of Saturday Night Live?—but if you like Brooks’ movies and comedies, this is well worth a look.
• Jodie Foster’s commitment to her role in Nell is admirable, but the rest of the movie is a lot less so, with its tired “wild child shows us what it’s really like to be alive” storyline.
• The Killer is well crafted and a lot of fun, even if it does feel like little more than a genre exercise for David Fincher.

• I can’t pretend like Rambo III is a quiet and contemplative movie…except that it almost is, at least compared to the previous film in the series. It’s a little slow and boring at times, which surprisingly works in its favor. It’s not as thoughtful or as well made as the original First Blood, but I enjoyed it a lot more than First Blood Part II.
• Barbie is incredibly winning, vibrant and silly and clever and biting. It is in many ways a love letter to the toy line, making a real case for why an aspirational female doll remains important, but it also takes real shots at the culture and corporation that has mass-produced and marketed that aspiration. It’s not a scathing indictment of Mattel by any means, but it’s also not uncritical of them. The movie has a lot to say, and it speaks with such an inventive visual style, but it never once loses its sense of simple fun.
• It’s Pat: The Movie is more than a little dated in its jokes about gender, but what’s interesting about it—indeed, the only interesting thing about the movie—is that it’s not deeply offensive or weirdly backward. Pat isn’t being mocked for not being easily idenifiable as cisgender, despite the jokes. As Kevin Thomas wrote in his LA Times review, the movie “offers a simple message of self-acceptance, asserting that what counts is who you are rather than what your gender may or may not be. The trouble is that its telling is truly terrible…” The trouble is, Pat is an obnoxious and unpleasant character, full-stop, and the movie around that character isn’t ever funny.

• Blue Beetle feels very familiar, and it’s more than a little too long, but there are a lot of fun things to like about it. It’s hard not to imagine another strand of DC’s crumbled multiverse where this was a more successful entry.
• Clark Gable and Myrna Loy are well paired in Too Hot to Handle, but it’s not a particularly good movie, even before it devolves into a half-baked plot filled with racist caricatures and jungle witch doctors.
• I’m not sure that Rustin does the man, or the historic March on Washington, the full justice it deserves. But it’s a very compelling watch, and Colman Domingo is outstanding in the title role.

I also re-watched The Brood. In his original review, Roger Ebert asked, “Are there really people who want to see reprehensible trash like this?” Which, you know, seems kind of harsh. It’s not my favorite David Cronenberg movie—by his own admission, it’s fairly humorless, and more than anything you’re left with the thought that his own divorce must have been extremely unpleasant—but it grapples with some uncomfortable emotions in interesting and unsettling ways.