About Fred

I watched just six movies last week. There was almost something like a theme to them.

• Denzel Washington turns in a really interesting, often magnetic performance in Roman J. Israel, Esq. The movie around that performance is less interesting, but it’s well enough cast and made to be entertaining.
• Putney Swope is more a collection of satirical ideas than a movie, with a plot that’s both simple and convoluted, maybe even a little cluttered by ’60s surrealism. It’s not uninteresting, but it doesn’t really hold together and is only occasionally what I’d call funny.
• Heath Ledger is good in Ned Kelly, but everyone, including him, feels a little wasted into this overly quiet, even hushed version of the outlaw’s story.

• Enola Holmes is charming enough, I guess, although honestly the mystery didn’t do a whole lot for me.
• Dolores Claiborne feels a little pedestrian and too familiar—it wasn’t hard to see where it was headed, even having never read the book—but Kathy Bates is good in the title role.
• Mike Leigh is known for long, improvisational rehearsals through which he and his actors build the characters and narrative. Meaning that there’s a real lived-in quality to what finally appears on screen, which is what makes Vera Drake so engaging—along with Imelda Staunton’s terrific performance.

I also re-watched Citizen Kane, which I hadn’t actually seen since college. You know what? Pretty good movie.

Once more from the top, here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying lyrics last week:

• Double Harness, which features a charming but strangely subdued William Powell, often feels rather old-fashioned—although, as a pre-Code movie, sometimes not in the ways you might expect.
• Criterion calls Vagabond “a splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman,” and I think that’s accurate. We know from the first scene where her story is headed, but because it’s pieced together from the other people she’s encountered, I’m not sure we ever really know her.
• Blue Collar is sometimes a little shaggier than I was expecting, and Paul Schrader may not be the best fit for goofy comedy, but the parts of it that work—the honest look at the guys on the line, just trying to get by, and the union that’s supposed to have their back—really work well.

• There are good actors in A Reflection of Fear, and they almost give some good performances, but the movie itself is just so slow and ponderous, building, very poorly, to a very bad twist ending.
• It! is better than its title. Not remarkably better, and it feels both cluttered and uneven, but Roddy McDowall is fun to watch.
• I’m not going to lie, the bear was maybe my least favorite part of Cocaine Bear. I liked it better as a comedy than a horror movie, and it’s hard to find the CGI bear very funny. (Leaving aside that the “true story” on which this is based was basically just “a bear accidentally ate a bunch of cocaine and it probably died painfully.”) But, yeah, when the movie is a comedy among the human characters, of which there are too many, it’s often very darkly funny.

• “I guess we go to ‘New York, New York‘ to enjoy the good parts,” wrote Roger Ebert in his original review, “and spend just a moment regretting the absence of a whole.” I think I can see what Scorsese was trying to do here, and maybe that would have come together if the movie was twice as long, but I mostly didn’t enjoy this.
• Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is remarkably engaging and honest, not least because of the man at the center of it. He knows he’s fighting a losing battle but hasn’t lost his sense of humor and determination to fight.

I also re-watched Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, which is perfectly fine, largely forgettable, although I still really enjoy the wizard’s duel scene quite a lot.

These are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying lyrics this past week:

I watched just 5 movies last week.

• Linoleum has a lot of interesting ideas, and if they don’t all come together in the end, that might actually be sort of the point. I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but the cast is really good, and there are some very nice moments throughout.
• The Sandlot is not without its charms, especially if you remember what it was like to be a twelve-year-old boy in the summertime, but it’s so incredibly hokey, with such low stakes and a weird episodic structure and annoying voiceover that do little but distract.
• The Hole in the Ground gets a lot of mileage out of spooky old houses in the Irish countryside and creepy child performances. At the same time, the movie felt like it was moving towards one of two unsatisfying endings, and I’m not sure if it picked the better of the two.

• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is surprisingly dark and violent for what’s ostensibly a children’s movie, but it’s also very tender and touching and often delightfully animated. You don’t need to have seen the first film, or any of the Shrek franchise, to enjoy this.
• If They Might Be Giants is remembered nowadays only as the movie from which the more famous band took its name…well, that’s probably for the best. There are almost some good performances here, particularly by George C. Scott, but it’s almost hard to even say what those performances are actually wasted on. I suppose the movie is a comedy, but I can’t recall a single real laugh.

I also re-watched 1983’s The Hunger, which is very much style over substance—it’s maybe Tony Scott’s Tony-Scottiest movie—but also very effectively so.