About Fred

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Clerks III never justifies its existence, and a lot of its jokes don’t entirely land. It’s even less effective as a return and farewell to the series than what I remember of the two-decades-old Clerks II. But it has its heart in the right place and offers some modest rewards if you’re at all fond of these characters.
• If scientists were trying to re-create a giallo film in the lab, they could do a lot worse than The Strange Case of Mrs. Wardh. The movie ticks just about every checkbox of the genre imaginable, from lurid sex scenes to over-the-top violence, and is a victory of style over substance. There’s a lot to enjoy in that style, of course; I’m just not sure there’s much of anything else.
• The Show is a neon-lit Kafkaesque fever dream courtesy of Alan Moore.

• Jackass Forever may be a strange place to start watching the series, but nevertheless, here I am. I don’t know that I’d necessarily call what I watched funny—much less one of the funniest films of last year, as more than a few critics seem to have done—but there is something to it, beyond just the outrageousness. Maybe it’s that the Jackass crew recognize how stupid these pranks and stunts are, or maybe it’s just that they’re doing all of this to themselves, so the cringe never feels meanspirited. It’s often juvenile and gross, but also self-aware and clever enough to be entertaining.
• The Life of Emile Zola is maybe not a paragon of historical accuracy, or at least omits some key information as it speeds through decades of history. But Paul Muni is good in the title role, and it’s an effective old-Hollywood biopic.
• A few years ago, when First Man came out, I realized that I was growing to dislike Damien Chazelle’s films a little less with each new one. “At this rate,” I tweeted, “I may just kinda enjoy Chazelle’s next movie.” And you know what? I kinda did. Babylon is too long, and overly pretentious about the magic of film—even as it aims to take the business of filmmaking down several pegs—and it’s probably a lot less clever than it thinks it is. But it’s also audacious and ridiculous and brash, powered by dynamic performances and some fantastic set-pieces.

I also re-watched the Wachowski’s first movie, Bound. I can’t remember if I saw this before The Matrix, or shortly thereafter, but it’s been the better part of two decades either way. It remains a really stylish and seductive neo-noir.

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

I watched a half dozen movies last week:

• There’s too much that’s interesting in Stanley Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire, for it to be completely terrible, but there’s not enough for it to actually be any good. It’s almost certainly an urban legend that Kubrick himself was so displeased with the film that he destroyed the original negative, but it’s not impossible to see how such a legend got started.
• Brute Force is sometimes a little overly melodramatic and heavy handed—the multiple flashbacks that feel almost like different movies, for examples—but there are some great performances throughout.
• Equinox Flower feels very reminiscent of other Ozu films, not least because he casts many of the same actors and touches on many of the same themes. (He was also famously a director of very simple scene compositions, some of which here seem almost duplicated from other films.) And yet there’s also a feeling of transition here—to color film, to post-war Japan—and there are beautiful, touching moments in that.

• There’s no doubt that Merrily We Go to Hell is a pre-code Hollywood film, from its depiction of alcoholism and infidelity, but Sylvia Sidney are both really great Fredric March, even if their characters are so terrible together.
• Bride of Chucky does everything you’d expect a movie with that title and premise, but it does it in some odd and unexpected ways. It’s a strange, killer-dolls riff on Natural Born Killers, which I’m not sure always works—much less 25 years later—but you can’t claim it doesn’t have personality.
• There’s a lot going on in Black Bear, and a lot of it’s very interesting; Aubrey Plaza’s often fantastic, and there’s a lot of very well observed detail. But it’s not impossible to shake the feeling that it’s two different films, approaching the same ideas of jealousy, identity, movie-making, marriage, bears, et cetera from slightly different angles. It’s often electric, especially in that second film, but I’m not sure it always fits together well.

I also rewatched both Lawrence of Arabia and Critters 2, which makes for an interesting double-bill.

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

• Mad God is monstrous and astounding. Even if I’m not sure what if anything its nightmarish visions add up to in the end, there are moments of such strange inventiveness throughout.
• Twice in a Lifetime is a tender falling-out-of-love story. It offers no easy answers or resolution for its characters, but they’re acted with such grace and nuance that you care about them all by the end.
• The Interview isn’t a particularly satisfying puzzle, but it’s an often interesting one along the way.

• Dollman wasn’t ever going to have amazing special effects given its low budget, but it needed to have some. The movie does almost nothing to actually sell its own premise—there’s no forced perspective or giant sets, just a lot of “no, trust us, he really is small.” It doesn’t do anything interesting with that idea, and the story and characters aren’t very engaging on their own.
• Truly my only complaint about House Party, which really is a lot of fun, is that I don’t buy any of its characters as being young enough to still be in high school.
• Pickup on South Street is a terrific not-quite-noir, with lots of great performances.

• There’s a biting satire splashing around somewhere in Infinity Pool. The movie frames the nihilistic depravity of the ultra-rich, as well as questions of identity and xenophobia, against its unsettling and hallucinatory images—sometimes to great effect, and sometimes not. It’s an interesting, even haunting, mess, but it’s a mess all the same.

I also re-watched Critters, which I enjoyed. It’s more than a little goofy, but it’s also a better-than-decent ’80s creature feature. I think I’d forgotten how bloody it could get, or maybe only ever saw an edited-for-TV version.