About Fred

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

I watched 8 movies last week. Some of them were really good. Some of them…were not.

• Ozu doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel in Good Morning—part of what makes his movies such a joy is how simple they seem—but this might be the funniest of his films that I’ve seen.
• You’re not going to watch An Adventure in Space and Time unless you have a real fondness for the early days of Doctor Who—and for jokes of the “this thing that contemporary audiences know was actually widlly successful will never work!” As a TV movie, this is slight but endearing, and well cast, although it does seem to lose (or at least swap) focus in its last third, perhaps inevitably moving from Verity Lambert to William Hartnell.
• Ghosted has such a simple—one might almost say can’t-miss—concept that it’s so disappointing when the movie proceeds to over-complicate everything and miss at every beat. I don’t think the problem is that de Armas and Evans don’t have chemistry; it’s just that it’s not at all romantic chemistry, and they both become kind of insufferable here. Add to that a really bad script over-filled with characters—the only thing the movie almost knowingly makes a joke about—and this is probably one of the worst movies of the year.

• Hell Is for Heroes isn’t perfect. The movie falls apart a little near the ened, and by some reports, Steve McQueen’s angry stoicism might have been less an acting choice and just him being an asshole. But it’s neat, often inventive little war picture that I really enjoyed.
• Wanna flee old? You will, once you start watching it. I’ve never read the comic on which the movie is based, so I don’t know if there were better ways to make this weird premise actually work visually, but Shyamalan hits upon the worst possible ways, and his dialogue is beyond terrible. There are some good actors here, but they don’t really rise above the material, and the almost obligatory twist ending belabors its point and doesn’t even work on its own terms. Several critics have argued we’re in a return to form for Shyamalan in recent years, but I’d counter that all of his recent movies, but in particular Old, are actually some of the worst he’s ever made.
• I don’t think Bigger Than Life is a lost classic of 1950s cinema or anything—and there are some things about it that just feel a little dated now—but it’s a really interesting film.

• Gene Siskel reportedly walked out of Maniac after the first twenty minutes. He didn’t miss much.
• Little Richard: I Am Everything is a straightforward but never uninteresting look at the man’s complicated legacy and incredible talent.

I also re-watched Taxi Driver, which seems no less disturbing nearly 50 years later.

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.