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I watched 9 movies last week:

• Albert Brooks is a very smart and funny man, and Albert Brooks: Defending My Life is an amiable stroll through his life and career. It’s sometimes a little strange who director Rob Reiner decides to talk to—why so much Jonah Hill, for instance? and did they even try to get Lorne Michaels or anyone else involved with the early days of Saturday Night Live?—but if you like Brooks’ movies and comedies, this is well worth a look.
• Jodie Foster’s commitment to her role in Nell is admirable, but the rest of the movie is a lot less so, with its tired “wild child shows us what it’s really like to be alive” storyline.
• The Killer is well crafted and a lot of fun, even if it does feel like little more than a genre exercise for David Fincher.

• I can’t pretend like Rambo III is a quiet and contemplative movie…except that it almost is, at least compared to the previous film in the series. It’s a little slow and boring at times, which surprisingly works in its favor. It’s not as thoughtful or as well made as the original First Blood, but I enjoyed it a lot more than First Blood Part II.
• Barbie is incredibly winning, vibrant and silly and clever and biting. It is in many ways a love letter to the toy line, making a real case for why an aspirational female doll remains important, but it also takes real shots at the culture and corporation that has mass-produced and marketed that aspiration. It’s not a scathing indictment of Mattel by any means, but it’s also not uncritical of them. The movie has a lot to say, and it speaks with such an inventive visual style, but it never once loses its sense of simple fun.
• It’s Pat: The Movie is more than a little dated in its jokes about gender, but what’s interesting about it—indeed, the only interesting thing about the movie—is that it’s not deeply offensive or weirdly backward. Pat isn’t being mocked for not being easily idenifiable as cisgender, despite the jokes. As Kevin Thomas wrote in his LA Times review, the movie “offers a simple message of self-acceptance, asserting that what counts is who you are rather than what your gender may or may not be. The trouble is that its telling is truly terrible…” The trouble is, Pat is an obnoxious and unpleasant character, full-stop, and the movie around that character isn’t ever funny.

• Blue Beetle feels very familiar, and it’s more than a little too long, but there are a lot of fun things to like about it. It’s hard not to imagine another strand of DC’s crumbled multiverse where this was a more successful entry.
• Clark Gable and Myrna Loy are well paired in Too Hot to Handle, but it’s not a particularly good movie, even before it devolves into a half-baked plot filled with racist caricatures and jungle witch doctors.
• I’m not sure that Rustin does the man, or the historic March on Washington, the full justice it deserves. But it’s a very compelling watch, and Colman Domingo is outstanding in the title role.

I also re-watched The Brood. In his original review, Roger Ebert asked, “Are there really people who want to see reprehensible trash like this?” Which, you know, seems kind of harsh. It’s not my favorite David Cronenberg movie—by his own admission, it’s fairly humorless, and more than anything you’re left with the thought that his own divorce must have been extremely unpleasant—but it grapples with some uncomfortable emotions in interesting and unsettling ways.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 9 movies last week:

• Out of the Furnace is a little too slow and too long, and it doesn’t have anything wildly original to say about its characters. But they’re elevated by some very good performances, particularly from an understated Christian Bale.
• Citing a couple of different reviews, Wikipedia notes that Nobody Knows I’m Here has been “praised [for] its earnestness and simplicity.” The earnestness part is definitely on the mark, and much of that comes through Jorge Garcia’s quiet and wounded performance, with which we can’t help but empathize. I do wonder, though, if the film isn’t deceptively simple, if only because it leaves room to wonder how much of the ending is actually happening, and to question exactly how much we should empathize with Garcia’s Memo.
• MUBI describes Pandora and the Flying Dutchman as “a Technicolor fever dream of impossible love, heady folk mythology, and heartstopping color.” It’s such a strange movie, but James Mason and Ava Gardner are never less than compelling in it.

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is silly and inventive and charming, and it’s maybe the funniest Ice Cube performance since the first Friday movie.
• There’s a lot going on in The Furies, which appropriately has been described as a “Freudian Western.” Stanwyck and Huston are both very good.
• The Mysterious Island probably still wouldn’t be entirely effective even if it wasn’t a strange semi-silent movie—delayed at the cusp of the sound era—and that’s arguably the most interesting thing about it. There’s definitely ambition on screen, and even some genuinely impressive special effects for 1929, but the film isn’t especially exciting.

• Mixing together a little of movies like Booksmart and Superbad, Bottoms is never quite as smart or funny as those influences, but it is very silly and winning.
• The Sure Thing is maybe more amiable than laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s hard not to judge it against later, better movies in its cast and director’s careers. But overall, it has a good heart and a good cast, and that’s good enough.
• At nearly three (unresolved) hours, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One probably is too long for its own good. (That title alone could take you half an hour to stumble around.) It mostly gets past that by jumping (sometimes quite literally) from one fantastic set-piece to another, and doing so with a fairly simple story and a very engaging cast. Despite its over-abundance of plot and characters—some maybe only vaguely remembered from previous installments, some more or less retconned in entirely—the movie never really feels long, much less padded. And while it’s maybe a little silly, I did like the novelty of of making it so the antagonist is the MacGuffin.

I also, somewhat randomly, re-watched 1971’s The Andromeda Strain. A lot of pulse-pounding tedium in that one.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 8 movies last week:

• I know this is going to upset some people of a certain age, millennials just a handful of years younger than me, but Hocus Pocus is not a good movie. I understand how someone might think it is, if they’d watched it repeatedly as a child on VHS, and it’s not mean-spirited in any way. But Roger Ebert was right when he described watching it “like attending a party you weren’t invited to, and where you don’t know anybody, and they’re all in on a joke but won’t explain it to you.”
• None of the ten Tales of Halloween are abjectly terrible, but not a single one is in any way remarkable or worth seeking out on its own. Horror movie anthologies are almost always hit and miss—I’m not even that big a fan of what’s supposed to be the best of the modern lot, Trick ‘r Treat—but I’m already having trouble even remembering any of these particular tales.
• Reptile is smart and tense and suspenseful…until it just kind of isn’t. The cast is good throughout, particularly Del Toro, but the mystery never comes together as anything more than boilerplate, isn’t shocking in its revelations, and in retrospect isn’t much of a whodunit at all. As A.A. Dowd writes, “the movie often plays like the work of someone who caught Zodiac or Gone Girl on cable years earlier and is trying to recreate it from memory, getting some of the sickly sleekness down but remaining foggy on the specifics.”

• Showing Up is understated and low-key, flirting with many big moments that would probably be the centerpiece of—or even threaten to overwhelm—other movies but never making more of them than they are. It’s a lovely character study, and another terrific collaboration between Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt.
• I really enjoyed Thelma, which marries horror tropes to the European art film, and which, as Manohla Dargis wrote, has “a great talent for making loneliness visceral and visible, for showing how pain can make the world disappear.”
• Superman and the Mole-Men is corny and dated, but I think Steve Shives does a good job of detailing its charms (and its limitations), even if I didn’t like the short movie quite as much as him.

• Lynch/Oz makes the occasionally interesting observation—and lord knows it’s full of interesting film clips—but it’s hard to be convinced by any of its surface-level film criticism, none of which rises above the (already well-established) fact that David Lynch likes The Wizard of Oz and has referenced it in his own work.
• I like the cast a lot, and the movie dances around some interesting thoughts about love and loneliness, but Fingernails is pretty underbaked as a story.

I also re-watched Videodrome, which I probably haven’t seen in something like thirty years—back when VHS was still a going concern and James Woods was a bankable movie star. The movie is admittedly a little dated, and it’s never been my favorite Cronenberg. But for all his faults as a human being, Woods is a compelling screen presence, and the movie pokes around at a lot of the fascinating body-horror pre-occupations in a lot of Cronenberg’s work.