About Fred

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from this past week:

A week and a half ago, I tested positive for Covid. While that only slowed down my movie-watching for the first day or two, as I fought off a fever, I felt too tired to write about the half dozen movies I’d seen that week last Sunday. Of course, that means that I now have to write about those six movies and the other full dozen I watched this past week. But c’est la vie.

Anyway, these are the 20 movies I watched over the past two weeks:

• The Tale of Zatoichi is a fun and exciting samurai movie. Will I watch the next twenty-five movies in the series? I don’t know, but I’ll certainly watch the next one.
• A Master Builder often acts like a compelling movie without ever actually being one. For all the heightened emotion on screen, the movie feels strangely airless, and there’s nothing of Jonathan Demme’s personality as a director on screen.
• Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson isn’t top-tier Rober Altman, but it’s also nowhere near the bottom, and Paul Newman’s good in the title role.
• Jerry and Marge Go Large doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but it is very likable, thanks to Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston.

• A Most Wanted Man is a bit of a slow burn, but an effective spy thriller.
• Diary of a Madman is a little forgettable, but Vincent Price is characteristically fun.
• This feels like it’s technically a re-watch, since I’m not sure how much Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut really changes the 1980 theatrical cut—of which I was already a fan. There are some interesting moments that didn’t make Richard Lester’s version, but there are also some changes that don’t work—or at least don’t work in this pieced-together version.
• Please Don’t Eat the Daisies feels a little scattershot and dated, and while it’s often amusing, it’s never memorably funny.

• Anna Gunn is good in The Apology, and the movie almost works as a tight little revenge thriller. But it’s not quite satisfying, and holds no surprises beyond the initial reveal, which you’re already primed to expect.
• The Shallows gets just a little silly, but never enough to distract from its tense little survival story.
• I don’t exactly like the Chucky movies, but I can’t deny that they took an unexpectedly weird turn around the fourth one. That weirdness continues in Seed of Chucky, which is tiresome, but at least tiresome in some unexpected, moderately clever ways.
• A Place in the Sun gets a little too melodramatic for its own good, but it has really good performances, especially by Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters.

• Christina Ricci is good in Monstrous. It’s just a shame that not much else is. The movie takes too long building to what’s ultimately an unsatisfying reveal.
• Babylon 5: The Road Home isn’t much more than an amusingly diverting “what if?” for long-time fans of the series, but it is amusingly diverting. I’m not sure the movie ever truly justifies its existence—and the need to rely on (good but never amazing) sound-alike voice actors for so many sadly departed cast members means it’s never even quite as fan-servicey as you might like. But, still, Bruce Boxleitner is good in it, and it’s a fun time.
• Ida Lupino is terrific in the wonderfully tense and moody Ladies in Retirement.
• Encounter of the Spooky Kind is weird and all sorts of goofy, with some really fun fight choreography.

• Dragonwyk could maybe stand to be a little more gothic and atmospheric, but the performances, particularly Price’s, are pretty good.
• I’m not going to lie, Godzilla Raids Again is more than a little boring.
• There’s a whole lot to recommend Shanghai Express, from the surprisingly progressive-for-the-time racial and gender politics, to the the stunning black-and-white cinematography, to the sheer presence of Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong.
• Past Lives is such a lovely and tender movie, built on subtle moments and desires, and Greta Lee is just phenomenal in it.

I somehow also re-watched a whole bunch of movies, some of which I’ve seen very often, or even very recently, and some I haven’t seen in decades:

• Casablanca
• Ghostbusters
• Spotlight
• The Silence of the Lambs
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I enjoyed them all.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from this past week:

Last week took yet another unexpected turn—Covid—so again, only two songs made my #nowplaying mix:

It was a weird week, and in it, I watched 9 movies:

• It would probably be a spoiler to say that The Caller has a twist ending, if the whole movie didn’t feel like it was constantly building to several surprising twists, or if any of the twists the movie takes were even close to predictable. I don’t know that its ending makes a lick of sense, but it’s too bizarre not to watch—and probably best seen completely blind, beyond even the limited information IMDB gives you.
• Likewise, Cobweb feels like it’s building to a twist from the first frame, even if it never really delivers or knows what to do with that twist once it’s revealed. There are a lot of good performances and atmosphere here—Samuel Bodwin may be a director to watch—but it doesn’t add up to enough in the end or know when to stop.
• The Big Trees wasn’t well received at the time, and it’s more than a little rough around the edges, but I think it has some nice performances, particularly by Edgar Buchanan.

• The question you have to ask yourself, when watching Meet the Feebles is: would any of this be funny, or even remotely interesting, if the characters weren’t all puppets? Or is the “joke”—probably the only one—that they are puppets? This is a desperately crass and unfunny movie, earning points over something like 2018’s The Happytime Murders only because its terrible, one-note idea occurred to Peter Jackson first. It’s not bad because it’s rude or disgusting; it’s bad because it mistakes rude and disgusting for comedy.
• Xtro doesn’t entirely work, not least because its story feels very much patched together, but it does have some incredibly disturbing body horror special effects and does some really interesting things. It never rises above being an early ’80s B-movie, but the critical reception at the time—Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s movies like this that give movies a bad name.”—seems way out of proportion with the movie itself.
• The Mackintosh Man isn’t exactly great, and not a whole lot happens in it. But the cast is pretty good, as is John Huston’s direction, and even if the script was dashed off by Walter Hill just to get out of a legal dispute, it has some amusing and clever moments.

• Sex, Lies, and Videotape can’t shake off its early ’90s indie vibes—this is the movie that arguably kicked off the modern “indiewood” era—but at its heart it’s a pretty simple, well told story of sex and regret.
• The Little Hours has such a weird premise—it’s a medieval black comedy loosely based on The Decameron told in an anachronistic style with contemporary dialogue and behavior—that it’s even weirder when the movie turns out to be so funny and surprisingly touching.
• The Prisoner of Zenda is billed, obviously, as a dual role, but that maybe suggests there’s more split-screen and other camera tricks on hand than there actually are. Ronald Colman does a good job of distinguishing the characters, but he’s more often the one of the two throughout the film. Which doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. The plot is pretty simple, but the characters are a lot of fun.

I also re-watched 1997’s Cube, which I enjoyed, even if it does very much feel like the mid-’90s low-budget Canadian sci-fi horror movie that it is.