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I watched another 6 movies last week:

• For a movie without a single likable character—and a fairly unlikable title character—Listen Up Philip is a fun and intelligent character study.
• Love & Basketball does exactly what it says on the tin, but Lathan and Epps are just wonderful together, and it’s a genuinely lovely love story.
• There is a chasm between how clever Lucky Number Slevin thinks it is and how clever the movie actually is. Every now and then, a scattered line of hyper-stylized dialogue halfway lands, usually thanks only to an actor’s delivery, but each one of those moments is a very long time coming.

• You may be shocked to learn that the 1960 comedy Sex Kittens Go to College has not aged well. Although I suspect it was never very good to begin with. Dated and sexist, but also confused and never particularly funny, grasping for zaniness but never more than a strange relic from the past—and that’s even before a ten-minute sequence near the end in which a robot and a chimpanzee watch four women in a row do topless stripteases in a dream sequence. (This is a thing that actually happens in the movie, even if it was apparently never included in the American release.) The best I can say about it is that Mamie Van Doren remains reasonably likable.
• There are scattered moments of inspired beauty in The Last Time I Committed Suicide, and I think some decent performances. But it’s difficult to say how true it is to Neal Cassady’s life, and the disjointed way in which it’s told—intentionally, I suppose, mirroring Cassady’s drug-fueled writing style—makes it difficult to connect with any of it. It’s a little like being on a lazy bender with someone, occasionally surfacing for a brief moment almost like profundity.
• Cleaner is hardly the worst Die Hard knockoff, but it is very, very far from the best. Daisy Ridley gives it a fair go, and director Martin Campbell is an old hand at action movies, but there’s nothing particularly clever, well staged, or memorable about any of this.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• I’m not sure what I can say about Parthenope, besides that yes, Celeste Dalla Porta is very bewitching in the title role. There are moments of strange and luxuriant beauty in the film, but it’s not altogether clear if the movie goes too far or not far enough into the unreal, or what it’s even trying to say with its languorous meditation on beauty and desire.
• A Different Man is a strangely absurd dark comedy, with a lot of interesting ideas swirling around it.
• Last Breath has some tense moments, but fewer than you might expect, and what it doesn’t have is any kind of propulsive forward momentum, which seems critical for what’s supposed to be a nail-biting survival movie. As Simon Abrams writes, “not every inspiring tale of heroism can be reduced to processed cheese without losing most of its flavor.” The cast does their best, but the script turns an inspiring real-life rescue into stock characters and trite dialogue.

• The Asphyx is an interesting idea, just not entirely well realized.
• The Tall Target just never hit its mark for me. On paper a compelling idea, I just couldn’t quite connect with it.
• Sinners is remarkable not just for the wildly audacious chances it takes, both stylistically and narratively, or the unflinching way it addresses questions both of racism and grief, but for how genuinely and unapologetically entertaining it is. This is blockbuster genre filmmaking at its absolute best.

I also re-watched The Terminator, which I don’t think I’ve seen it is entirety in several decades. And you know what? Still a pretty damn good movie.

• Short Term 12 runs the risk of melodrama and cliche, but the performances and honest empathy with which the characters are viewed lift it up to something genuinely moving.
• It is the times that stand out most in The Times of Harvey Milk. It’s the portrait of a charismatic and compassionate man cut down far too soon, but even more so, it’s a fascinating window into San Francisco and the fight for gay rights at the time.
• There are a lot of interesting ideas swirling around Night’s End, a good central performance from Geno Walker, and some decent scares for such an obviously micro-budget. But, sadly, it largely falls apart by…well, night’s end.

• The 13th Warrior is best when it leans into the Beowulf retelling. It’s fine but unremarkable as an action movie, more than a little dull as an historical drama, and most engaging as a horror movie.
• Liberty Heights is a little too meandering, maybe not focusing on any one of its characters enough, but Barry Levinson does a good job capturing what it must have felt like to grow up Jewish in Baltimore in the 1950s.
• Lucio Fulci called Demonia, one of the last movies he ever directed, “a wonderful movie, ruined from very bad photography.” I would reverse that, if I’m being honest. The scenic locations and architecture of the movie’s fake archaeological dig almost can’t help produce the occasionally interesting shot. If only the script and the acting could say the same. The movie is confused and dull, somehow both over and under-complicated, and it really doesn’t hold together as much of anything in the end. A half dozen movies into his filmography and I think I can safely say Fulci’s horror movies aren’t for me.

I also rewatched Broadcast News, which I haven’t seen since almost back when its topical references were current. The news media has changed dramatically since the movie was made, but I think the ethical questions it asks are still valid. Moreover, though, the characters are just so well drawn and the comedy so good that a little bit of stale datedness doesn’t detract too much.

I watched just four movies last week:

• Novocaine some modest charms, and does about everything clever you can do with its premise, but it’s also kind of forgettable.
• Amy Taubin of Film Comment described Carol as “a film composed of gestures and glances….[that] could not exist without the extraordinary performances of Blanchett and Mara.”
• There’s probably good reason for film historians to watch Shockproof, for its collision of Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, but as a moviegoing experience, it’s mostly just very dated, stilted, and contrived.
• Presence is an interesting experiment—it’s no real spoiler to reveal that it’s a haunted house story from the viewpoint of the ghost—but I’m not entirely sure it successfully rises far enough above the level of experiment, if only because the way the movie is filmed imposes a certain cold distance from the characters and their story.

Last week I watched 8 movies. It mostly did not work out well.

It started when I rewatched A Simple Favor, mostly because I didn’t remember it well and was curious to watch the sequel. The original is stylish and clever and fun, if never quite enough of any of those things, and worth a watch for the verbal sparring between Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick.

• Another Simple Favor, meanwhile, is more of the same—although a little less clever and a little less fun. Lively and Kendrick are still the best reason to watch, and they’re fun together, but the movie sags a lot more than the first with its overcomplicated plot and characters.

After that, for some reason, I hit upon this idea to watch a week of sequels, usually of the forgotten (or misbegotten) variety. And this is where the week took a real turn.

• Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother, don’t watch Staying Alive. It’s difficult to tell if Travolta is genuinely terrible in the movie, or if it’s just that he’s playing one of so many unpleasant characters, but either way, this was not a fun experience. Nowadays, people remember Saturday Night Fever mostly for its dancing…and desperately try to forget Staying Alive for the same.
• If the first Grease is a bubblegum musical, then Grease 2 is what happens when that bubblegum gets accidentally stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Did they write a bunch of random scenes they were then forced to write songs to fit around, or vice versa? It’s tough to tell, but the songs do seem very random, and most of them aren’t very good. There’s a spark of something in Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance, but this Grease has very little groove or meaning.
• I’m not altogether convinced that Prince’s Graffiti Bridge is actually a movie. It’s certainly shaped a lot less like one than Purple Rain, to which it’s ostensibly a sequel, and it feels more like a haphazard collection of half-baked music videos. Some of that music isn’t bad, even this was hardly Prince’s best album, but as a movie with a story and characters it’s dull and confusing.

• The Sting is one of my favorite movies, so maybe I’m a little biased, but The Sting II is absolutely terrible. The movie is just so deeply confused—a direct sequel that for some reason is happening to (mostly) different characters—but it’s also pretty dumb and boring just on its own terms. A good con movie, like the first one, cons the audience too a little. A bad con movie, like this one, makes the audience feel conned.
• I suppose there could be an interesting story in the son of the devil who doesn’t know that’s who he is, is trying to fight that evil destiny, which I guess is what Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is trying to be—when it remembers to be anything at all. But it’s such a meandering dud of a movie, even for what is a cheap, decade-late TV movie sequel. Every now and then Ray Milland and Ruth Gordon show up to nibble on some scenery, which almost passes for amusing, but that’s about all this has going for it.
• Blues Brothers 2000 might have worked as novelty album or concert for charity, but they had to go ahead and ruin it by trying to make a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “‘Blues Brothers 2000’ has a lot of good music in it. It would have had more if they’d left out the story, which would have been an excellent idea.” Ebert might have oversold how good these specific musical numbers are—no one is going to ever point to this as Aretha Franklin’s definitive version of “Respect,” for instance—but he wasn’t wrong that they’re absolutely the only reason to watch this movie.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe was, hands down, the best movie I watched this week. That says a lot about the week I put myself through, but I don’t mean to just damn it with faint praise. It’s both dumb and clever and often very funny.