About Fred

I watched just 5 movies last week.

• The Wrecking Crew doesn’t always dig deep as a documentary, but there are some interesting perspectives—I particularly liked hearing from Brian Wilson and members of the Monkees—and, if nothing else, there’s a lot of really fantastic music.
• When I watched Napoleon Dynamite a couple of years ago, I mused, “There’s got to be a term for a movie this rich in quirky detail that also manages to not be funny in any meaningful way. Maybe ‘Less Anderson’?” Anyway, I watched Nacho Libre, and my opinion of the this writer/director team has not changed. It’s a very unfunny movie.
• Night Train to Terror is maybe the most confusing horror movie I’ve ever seen. You can almost understand why the people who tried to make the three original films thought they were on to something before it all fell apart, and you can almost see why somebody else thought it was worth trying to salvage what they had into some kind of low-rent anthology film. But what they had was laughably unfinished, so it never holds together in any coherent way. And the framing device, in which God and the Devil debate the nature of mankind while a teenage band of breakdancers parties around them on a train bound for parts unknown…hell, even just saying that, I can’t imagine what they were thinking.

• Beast does exactly what it says on the tin. It doesn’t waste any time getting to the action, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and gives you just enough of the “dad trying to reconnect with his kids” storyline to make you care a little when things get tense. It’s unremarkable, but it’s not unentertaining.
• Made it, Ma! Top of the world! In a review of White Heat, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that the movie “feels less like a traditional gangster or cops-and-robbers picture than a criminal cousin of an old Universal Studios horror picture, about a dangerous creature for whom you feel pity, but only up to a point, and who can only roam the countryside for so long, because society can’t abide a threat of such magnitude.”

I also re-watched Moonraker, for no particular reason. It’s hardly Roger Moore’s best outing as James Bond, but Michael Lonsdale is good as the villain Hugo Drax, and the movie is at its best when it embraces the camp.

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

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.