About Fred

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying on Mastodon last week:

I watched 8 movies last week:

• Them! is maybe the quintessential 1950s sci-fi monster movie.
• The 1976 remake of King Kong billed itself as “the most exciting original motion picture event of all time,” which is really saying something—especially since most of that is decidedly not true. I don’t think the remake an embarrassment, and probably would have been less so before the special effects (and that final act at the Twin Towers) became so dated. But it’s also nothing all that special.
• Gene Siskel once said that he enjoyed Switchblade Sisters at first as a campy “cultural artifact” but thought it got old by its third act. I’d agree with the first part, but argue it gets old only a few minutes into its first.

• Kes is kind of a heartbreaking movie.
• The bad dubbing and over-the-top acting in Fist of Fury holds only so much charm for me, but the fights themselves are a lot of fun.
• The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is maybe a little too screwball a comedy at times, and can almost become exhausting, but it’s also very funny—and it’s fascinating the hoops it has to jump through, given its basic premise, to stay within the Hays Code.

• For reasons even I don’t understand, I’ve watched all of the Resident Evil movies, and the only thing I could tell you about them with any certainty is that they are very bad. So I didn’t have great expectations for the prequel/soft reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, but oh boy, did I not expect it to be quite this bad. There are so many characters who wander aimlessly in and out, and not a single one of them is worth caring about, and this may actually be one of the worst structured movies I’ve ever seen. It’s apparently full of Easter eggs for anyone who’s played the video games—I never have, making my decision to watch the movies even more baffling—but it would almost have to, when it’s trying to cram two-plus games into a single hour-plus adaption. I really did not enjoy this.
• Mystery at the Wax Museum doesn’t have that big of a mystery, but it does have a wax museum, so I suppose that’s not false advertising. It’s not great, and I found Glenda Farrell’s performance a little grating, but the early Technicolor horror has its charms.

I also re-watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which really holds up.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying last week.

I watched just 5 movies last week.

• The Wrecking Crew doesn’t always dig deep as a documentary, but there are some interesting perspectives—I particularly liked hearing from Brian Wilson and members of the Monkees—and, if nothing else, there’s a lot of really fantastic music.
• When I watched Napoleon Dynamite a couple of years ago, I mused, “There’s got to be a term for a movie this rich in quirky detail that also manages to not be funny in any meaningful way. Maybe ‘Less Anderson’?” Anyway, I watched Nacho Libre, and my opinion of the this writer/director team has not changed. It’s a very unfunny movie.
• Night Train to Terror is maybe the most confusing horror movie I’ve ever seen. You can almost understand why the people who tried to make the three original films thought they were on to something before it all fell apart, and you can almost see why somebody else thought it was worth trying to salvage what they had into some kind of low-rent anthology film. But what they had was laughably unfinished, so it never holds together in any coherent way. And the framing device, in which God and the Devil debate the nature of mankind while a teenage band of breakdancers parties around them on a train bound for parts unknown…hell, even just saying that, I can’t imagine what they were thinking.

• Beast does exactly what it says on the tin. It doesn’t waste any time getting to the action, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and gives you just enough of the “dad trying to reconnect with his kids” storyline to make you care a little when things get tense. It’s unremarkable, but it’s not unentertaining.
• Made it, Ma! Top of the world! In a review of White Heat, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that the movie “feels less like a traditional gangster or cops-and-robbers picture than a criminal cousin of an old Universal Studios horror picture, about a dangerous creature for whom you feel pity, but only up to a point, and who can only roam the countryside for so long, because society can’t abide a threat of such magnitude.”

I also re-watched Moonraker, for no particular reason. It’s hardly Roger Moore’s best outing as James Bond, but Michael Lonsdale is good as the villain Hugo Drax, and the movie is at its best when it embraces the camp.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying this past week.