About Fred

Weekly Movie Roundup

I watched just 5 movies last week.

Linoleum The Sandlot The Hole in the Ground
  • Linoleum has a lot of interesting ideas, and if they don’t all come together in the end, that might actually be sort of the point. I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but the cast is really good, and there are some very nice moments throughout.
    • The Sandlot is not without its charms, especially if you remember what it was like to be a twelve-year-old boy in the summertime, but it’s so incredibly hokey, with such low stakes and a weird episodic structure and annoying voiceover that do little but distract.
      • The Hole in the Ground gets a lot of mileage out of spooky old houses in the Irish countryside and creepy child performances. At the same time, the movie felt like it was moving towards one of two unsatisfying endings, and I’m not sure if it picked the better of the two.
      Puss in Boots: The Last Wish They Might Be Giants
      • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is surprisingly dark and violent for what’s ostensibly a children’s movie, but it’s also very tender and touching and often delightfully animated. You don’t need to have seen the first film, or any of the Shrek franchise, to enjoy this.
        • If They Might Be Giants is remembered nowadays only as the movie from which the more famous band took its name…well, that’s probably for the best. There are almost some good performances here, particularly by George C. Scott, but it’s almost hard to even say what those performances are actually wasted on. I suppose the movie is a comedy, but I can’t recall a single real laugh.

        I also re-watched 1983’s The Hunger, which is very much style over substance—it’s maybe Tony Scott’s Tony-Scottiest movie—but also very effectively so.

        Weekly Movie Roundup

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

        Good Morning An Adventure in Space and Time Ghosted
        • 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 Old Bigger Than Life
            • 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.
                Maniac Little Richard: I Am Everything
                • 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.