About Fred

• Rosaline doesn’t reinvent Shakespeare or anything, but it’s charming and good fun, and Kaitlyn Dever is very engaging in it.
• The Fallen Sparrow is a really effective noir, thanks in part to a really strong performance by star John Garfield.
• The Killers is the movie that made both Ava Gardner and Burth Lancaster movie stars, and it’s not hard to see why, with this tense and often terrific noir.

• Yes, Madam! is often very silly—even if it does take a pretty dark turn at the end—but it’s also a lot of fun, with great fights and stunts by Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock.
• Minor Premise doesn’t fully work, but that’s not for lack of trying. The film is proof you don’t need a big budget for big sci-fi ideas, but it’s much more interesting when it seems like it’s going to have deeper emotional revelations to unpack—when it seems like it’s going to have something to say about those ideas, which in the end it just kind of doesn’t.
• The Loved One is an odd…I guess satire? Of Hollywood, of the bereavement industry… It’s a bit zany and madcap, down to all the off-kilter cameos and odd casting choices, and not every scene of it works. But it’s interesting and entertaining enough.

• In many ways, Cobra feels like a pale ’80s imitation of the Dirty Harry movies—and I didn’t even like those.
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is silly and dumb, and I’m not sure it has anything to actually say about movie stardom, or that of Nicolas Cage in particular. The movie’s also genuinely entertaining, thanks to Cage and Pedro Pascal. I mean, it’s no Paddington 2, but then what is?

I also re-watched Platoon and The Lavender Hill Mob and enjoyed both quite a lot. I think Platoon maybe suffers a little from the voice-over narration, which can seem a little heavy-handed sometimes (or like it’s trying too hard to echo Apocalypse Now), and from the fact that so many Viet Nam war movies have imitated it in the years since.

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

• Women Talking is a powerful and moving film, but also incredibly cinematic and joyous, given its dark and difficult subject matter.
• EO doesn’t fully anthropomorphize the donkey for which it’s named, but it does ask you to empathize with it…which isn’t exactly hard, given how brutal and cruel most of the human characters he encounters are to him. And yet there are also moments of strange beauty throughout.
• Designing Woman is amiable enough, with some nice chemistry between its stars, but it’s also very dated and incredibly contrived.

• Skinamarink feels like being trapped in a nightmare. Not nightmarish exactly—although there are some (mostly implied) gruesome moments late in the film—but the terror and dread that can come only from being trapped by dream logic. I don’t think the movie needs to be as long as it is, but there are rewards for your (much-needed) patience, and it’s a fascinating work of experimental horror.
• Judy Holliday is just a delight, top to bottom, in Born Yesterday.
• Fade to Black is interesting but also very uneven, never really deciding what kind of movie it wants to be, or being any of its choices entirely convincingly.

• There are some striking images and good performances in Inside Daisy Clover—and maybe it felt more transgressive and shocking in 1965 to say that old Hollywood was a sham—but it feels a little too obvious and trite at times.

I also re-watched Barry Levinson’s Diner, which I really enjoyed. (It was interesting seeing a young Mickey Rourke in Fade to Black, made just the year before.) The movie is certainly sentimental and nostalgic, but it also does a good job of frequently undercutting that.

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

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• There’s a tight little thriller with some nice character moments and awkward comedy in Windfall, but it never entirely comes together. The movie has good performances, but it never quite shakes its staginess, or the feeling of being a movie made during lockdown, with those limitations.
• All Quiet on the Western Front is a lot more bloody and visceral than the 1930 adaptation—there’s more than a little Come and See peppered throughout this version—but both are equally concerned with the brutality of war, how it’s not a thing waged by nations but a thing done to soldiers. It’s unflinchingly honest and incredibly effective.
• You almost have to admire What Lies Beneath for how absurd it’s willing to get, and for the camera tricks that I’m sure are no less technically impressive than any Robert Zemeckis has ever committed to screen. But there’s not much fun to be had in that absurdity, or its execution. It would be easier to pine for a time when Hollywood made big-budget adult thrillers like this if this one was actually any good.

• Michael Bay’s Ambulance is often entertaining, with a pretty fun Jake Gyllenhaal performance, but I was constantly reminded while watching it of this Every Frame a Painting video deconstructing his style. When everything in your movie is spectacle, eventually none of it is spectacular. Ambulance is a thrill-ride, but it’s an exhausting one by the very end.
• We Have a Ghost has its moments, but it overstays its welcome and is mostly a disappointment, especially given how much fun I’ve had with director Christopher Landon’s previous movies.
• The Naked Spur has a lot of really great performances, not least by a devilish Robert Ryan.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is an experience, one that invites you to be bored—by the character, on her behalf, by the slow pace of her days and how long we just sit and watch them play out—and yet also a film that rewards patience, that needs that pace and length to reveal its rich depths. Roger Ebert called “one of the great formalist gambits of the 1970s,” and it’s a strangely fascinating film.
• The dream logic of the series means that A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is at least visually more interesting than equally later sequels in other ’80s slasher movies. But even here, the wheels are starting to come off just a little.

I also re-watched The World According to Garp, which might seem a little random—and is a film adaptation that I haven’t seen in a very long time—but which has for whatever reason been rattling around in my memory bank for a little while now. It’s not a perfect movie, or even a perfect adaptation of the novel, but I remain rather fond of it.