About Fred

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week.

I watched just four movies last week.

• I’m often on board for the darkly comic, surreal absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos, but it seems a lot less purposeful in Dogtooth than in his more recent films. A.O. Scott wrote that the movie “at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it,” and it’s sometimes honestly difficult to see the point of that.
• Jeopardy is more than a little contrived, but the film has its moments, usually thanks to Barbara Stanwyck, and often feeling like they’re from a differently, slightly more noir-ish film.
• Proof does some interesting things, and there’s a trio of intriguing character studies at its core, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful.
• Sr. is a son’s loving tribute to his dying father. It’s maybe too personal to be deeply revealing or entirely cohesive, but it’s lovely and charming and honest nonetheless.

I also re-watched Raising Arizona and Avengers: Endgame. While I enjoyed both of them again a lot, I’m not altogether sure either film worked quite as well for me the second time around.

The Coens’ film is still a delightfully silly, live-action cartoon, but it felt like such a kinetic game-changer back when I first encountered it in college that it was hard not to be just a little disappointed with this re-watch.

Endgame, meanwhile, really benefits from having all of the preceding MCU films, particularly Infinity War, still fresh in your head, and this is the first time I’ve revisited a single one of them. Still, I retain enough connection to the characters that, even if the whole thing is kind of a whirlwind mess, it’s a deeply satisfying one.

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

I watched only three movies last week.

• I’m not really a fan of Lucio Fulci, to be honest, and that didn’t change with Don’t Torture a Duckling. I don’t think the only interesting thing about the movie is its title, but nothing else about it is as interesting.
• As screwball comedies go, The Mad Miss Manton could stand to be a little screwier. The jokes don’t all land, and the murder mystery feels more than a little confused. It has its moments but feels more like a dry run for the much better chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda in The Lady Eve.
• There are pretty good performances in The Stranger, but it’s very unsatisfying, both as cat-and-mouse police procedural and as “undercover cop in too deep.” It does both of those things just well enough to be compelling for most of its run—even if it is so whispery and mumbly, on top of the Australian accents, that I had to turn on subtitles by the end—but it doesn’t quite work as either.

I also re-watched Charade, which is still as delightful as ever. They don’t call it the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made for nothing.

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