About Fred

• What’s Up, Doc? is a lot. Even by the standards of the screwball comedies it’s imitating, the movie is aggressively madcap—though maybe that’s it’s strength, since you never have a chance to exactly get bored even if you also never exactly laugh out loud at anything on screen.
• Don’t Let Go has a strong cast, and a neat (if somewhat familiar) time-travel concept, but it gets bogged down by a formulaic plot that wastes a lot of its actors and potential.
• If you can forgive the not very good makeup effects, the cliched plot, the padded running time, and the cultural appropriation that extends to unconvincing brown face, The Ghoul is a midlly interesting footnote in Boris Karloff’s career.

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows isn’t an amazing movie—even if ten-year-old me would strongly disagree—and it probably is for the best that they discontinued this Michael Bay-produced series. But it also isn’t terrible, and like the movie before it, it has some fun moments. I paid ninety-nine cents to rent the 2014 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and remember thinking that was about right for what I got. I didn’t pay anything to rent the sequel, and I feel like I got a real bargain.
• Roger Ebert described Crash—favorably, I need to add, in a three-and-a-half star review—as being “like a porno movie made by a computer.” It’s a deeply unenjoyable movie, but I don’t think Ebert was wrong in also calling it “challenging, courageous and original” in the things it has to say about sex and fetish and compulsion.
• Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap isn’t necessarily an informative documentary, even if it does talk at length to many of the pioneers and grandmasters of hip hop. But there is something to be said for simply listening to smart people talk about their creative process, and letting them just talk about the art that they love. It’s a scattershot history of the musical genre, but there are a lot of interesting, fun, and even insightful moments that arise in its conversations.

I also re-watched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which I remember liking the first time around, but which I actually think I liked more now, having just recently watched the first season of Andor.

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

I watched a half dozen movies last week:

• To quote Roger Ebert—one of several times I’ll do so in this post—Playtime “is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth.” It’s not so much a movie as a strange marvel of production design and observation. It’s often delightfully clever, and this “peculiar, mysterious, magical film” deserves to be seen, but it’s a weird trip all the same.
• Demon Seed is pretty dreadful. The Criterion Channel wants you to believe the movie is “[p]acked with suspense, surprise, and special effects,” which leads me to wonder if they know what any of those words mean. Julie Christie is a better actress than the movie deserves—and it’s arguably an interesting footnote to fans of AI horror movies, or Dean Koontz completists—but it’s a lousy movie all on its own.
• What passed for popular action movies in the 1970s, I’m starting to think, maybe just aren’t for me anymore. Case in point: The Getaway, which I found mostly boring, even amid its bank robberies, car chases, and shootouts. Then again, maybe it’s not ’70s movies’ fault; Roger Ebert at the time called The Getaway “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy…[that] functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything.”

• The Beast Must Die isn’t a bad movie, though it does sometimes almost seem like it’s trying to be one, from the constant day-for-night shoots to the laughably terrible werewolf effects. The movie never really works, but it’s interesting and has some surprisingly good performances.
• Not to give Hedda Hopper too much credit—because I suspect she disliked Keeper of the Flame thanks in no small part to its anti-fascist politics—but she wasn’t entirely wrong when she called it “Citizen Kane with all the art scraped off.”
• Dogville is an unpleasant movie—Our Town re-conceived by a misanthrope—which it might have gotten away with if it wasn’t also three, very slow hours long. It often seems on the verge of saying something interesting, a talented cast struggling to bring nuance to a script that fights it at every turn. “Few people will enjoy seeing it once,” wrote Roger Ebert, “and, take it from one who knows, even fewer will want to see it a second time.”

I also re-watched a double-feature of vaguely remembered 2011 science fiction action thrillers with Source Code and The Adjustment Bureau. I think the former holds up much better, even if it loses a lot when you know where it’s headed, while the latter is mostly as meh as I remember it, though Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have genuine on-screen chemistry together.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched only half as many movies last week as the week before:

• The 1955 version of Oklahoma! is the first I’ve ever seen, even if I was a little familiar with some of the songs. I enjoyed it, though it was a little darker than I’d expected, particularly with Jud Fry’s character—a darkness that more recent stage revivals have apparently reinterpreted up a notch. (I do think I maybe made a mistake it watching the Todd-AO version on the Blu-ray instead of the CinemaScope version, however, since I couldn’t get my TV to stop making it look like I had motion-smoothing on, which was distracting.)
• I really enjoyed They Cloned Tyrone, which has a fun cast, a lot of cleverness, and a really interesting message. This might be a slight, roundabout spoiler, but I think it would make an interesting double-feature with Sorry to Bother You.
• The Hand isn’t necessarily good, but it is better than it needs to be, and works as an interesting psychological thriller for almost all of its run-time.

• Hanover Street is laughably bad, and I think for the reason Gene Siskel articulates here: they tried to embrace sweeping, classic wartime romance cliches but instead tripped over themselves into unfunny parody.
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is good dumb fun.