About Fred

I watched another 7 movies last week.

• It’s been a while since I’ve read Le Guin’s original novel, but The Lathe of Heaven feels true to both its plot and ideas, no doubt because of her own heavy involvement in the production. It can’t quite escape the feel of what it is—a cheap TV movie made by PBS in 1980—but it does a lot with its minimal cast and sets. Had I seen this as a child of the ’80s, I can see how it might still haunt my dreams.
• BASEketball feels lazy even by David Zucker standards: toothless as a satire, not even funny as a spoof, and going for gross-out instead of jokes almost every time. “Too much of this film,” wrote Roger Ebert (in a generous star-and-a-half review), “is pitched at the level of guys in the back row of homeroom, sticking their hands under their armpits and making farting noises.”
• Die Wand (The Wall) is a quiet meditation on loneliness, isolation, the loss of civilization. It’s very slow-paced and sad, but it’s also strangely beautiful and rewarding as a film.

• The Limehouse Golem is rich in historical detail and some good performances, though does feel a little cheaply made at times.
• Brian and Charles is a modest little gem, delightfully quirky, if a bit forgettable afterwards.
• The Wild, Wild Planet feels a little like Moonraker on acid. It’s a little dull, but its bizarre Italian schlock has its appeal.

• Originally part of a larger anthology film, Eros, which I’ve never seen—but of which this was reportedly the best part—Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand is by turns both erotic and claustrophobic. It feels a litlte like his earlier and better-known In the Mood for Love, with a little more griminess to it.

I also re-watched Jordan Peele’s Us, and I was reminded why it’s almost certainly my favorite of his three films.

Here’s all the songs I posted as #nowplaying this past week:

I watched another 7 movies last week.

• They had to know it was time to hang up the series when the jokes started to become how uncool Nick and Nora Charles were, right? (They’re real squaresville, daddy-o.) Still, Song of the Thin Man is a more than decent enough send-off for the pair.
• This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is filled with indelible joy and sadness and an incredible final performance by Mary Twala Mhlongo.
• Extra Ordinary is a very goofy and charming horror-comedy.

• You might be wondering, how is there a movie starring Paul Newman, Ed Asner, and Pam Grier that I’ve never heard of? And it’s because it’s a really lousy movie called Fort Apache the Bronx. Newman’s the best in it, creating something almost approaching a character, but he’s almost as wasted by the scattershot script as everyone else.
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever works best as a meditation on grief, and if the movie had sat with that more, it might have been less of an unfocused mess. Alas, the demands of the Marvel machine are all over the film, which is therefore all over the map.
• Performance is an interesting film—maybe a little dated and cluttered with stylistic touches, but interesting nonetheless.

• The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies, and it somehow rode that gimmick all the way to multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It’s not without its charms and cleverness—and is arguably no worse than any of the other movies nominated that year—but it’s also very, almost instantly, forgettable.

I also re-watched Blue Velvet and, not remembering that I’d seen it once before until I was a little ways in, The Rapture. They’re both really good movies. Although it occurred to me, as I re-watched him in Blue Velvet that Dennis Hopper was in four other films the same year it came out, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Hoosiers. The ’80s were weird, man.

Here’s this past week’s #nowplaying music playlist:

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Somehow, I’d managed to never see the entirety of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country until now. I don’t know that it’s a perfect movie, or even the best of the original Trek films, but it is one of the better ones, and moreover a really fitting farewell to the cast.
• I’m not sure that To Leslie has anything truly original to say about addiction or hitting rock bottom, but it’s helped enormously by some really good performances, including a remarkable turn by star Andrea Riseborough.
• If you’ve always wanted to see Angela Lansbury portray Agatha Christie’s famous sleuth Miss Marple…well, I’m sorry to report that The Mirror Crack’d is going to be your only option. That’s not the fault of Lansbury, who’s clearly having fun with the small handful of scenes she’s actually in, or of the rest of the cast, which includes heavy hitters like Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak, and Tony Curtis. The movie is not without some charms, but it’s slow and not especially engaging—which is all the more surprising, given director Guy Hamilton’s track record.

• The most interesting thing about Fast Company is that it’s the movie David Cronenberg made between Rabid and The Brood. It feels like such a weird B-movie blip in his early career, but also not a work-for-hire; Cronenberg co-wrote the script and was reportedly just a huge fan of drag racing. His enthusiasm for it isn’t exactly infectious, but the movie is passably entertaining for what it is.
• Scarecrows isn’t perfect—the limitations of its effects (and some of its acting) are occasionally on full display, and it maybe could have done with a little more explanation of the story—but it’s better than average, which is a lot better than I expected. It takes a pretty simple premise and tosses it up against another one, and it generates some pretty solid scares from that.
• Roger Ebert called The Presidio “a film assembled out of spare parts from other movies, out at the cinematic junkyard.” And for a short while, it’s tempting to think he was being too harsh. Peter Hyams is a talented, if workmanlike director, and there are reliable actors in the cast. But the movie and its plot are incredibly generic and don’t ever rise above that, relying instead on unconvincing plot twists and even less convincing character development.

• Medicine for Melancholy lacks a little of the polish and focus that director Barry Jenkins would later bring to Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk—but only a little of it.

I also re-watched Poltergeist, which I don’t think I’ve seen in some thirty years. It holds up really well, despite being a very 1980s horror movie.