About Fred

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

• Mad God is monstrous and astounding. Even if I’m not sure what if anything its nightmarish visions add up to in the end, there are moments of such strange inventiveness throughout.
• Twice in a Lifetime is a tender falling-out-of-love story. It offers no easy answers or resolution for its characters, but they’re acted with such grace and nuance that you care about them all by the end.
• The Interview isn’t a particularly satisfying puzzle, but it’s an often interesting one along the way.

• Dollman wasn’t ever going to have amazing special effects given its low budget, but it needed to have some. The movie does almost nothing to actually sell its own premise—there’s no forced perspective or giant sets, just a lot of “no, trust us, he really is small.” It doesn’t do anything interesting with that idea, and the story and characters aren’t very engaging on their own.
• Truly my only complaint about House Party, which really is a lot of fun, is that I don’t buy any of its characters as being young enough to still be in high school.
• Pickup on South Street is a terrific not-quite-noir, with lots of great performances.

• There’s a biting satire splashing around somewhere in Infinity Pool. The movie frames the nihilistic depravity of the ultra-rich, as well as questions of identity and xenophobia, against its unsettling and hallucinatory images—sometimes to great effect, and sometimes not. It’s an interesting, even haunting, mess, but it’s a mess all the same.

I also re-watched Critters, which I enjoyed. It’s more than a little goofy, but it’s also a better-than-decent ’80s creature feature. I think I’d forgotten how bloody it could get, or maybe only ever saw an edited-for-TV version.

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

• 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.