Month: November 2022

I watched 14 movies last week. Is that a lot?

• Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is actually not half bad. It’s a surprisingly clever take on the Robert Louis Stevenson original, that also draws on Jack the Ripper and the graverobbing Burke and Hare.
• Duck, You Sucker! (also known as A Fistful of Dynamite) is a fantastic spaghetti western, directed with real style by Sergio Leone and with terrific performances by James Coburn and Rod Steiger. (Though you’ll have to forgive Steiger’s Mexican brownface.)
• I’ve never read Donald E. Westlake’s original novel, The Hunter, but I have a certain, maybe undeserved, fondness for 1999’s adaptation, Payback. (That its star is Mel Gibson is the only reason I haven’t revisited it recently.) Point Blank is an undoubtedly better (and arguably more faithful) version, a stylishly dreamy and perfectly scuzzy pulp revenge thriller.

• There isn’t a lot of personality in Solomon Kane, but there are some good, workmanlike performances, particularly from James Purefoy.
• Neighbors is oddly amiable, but it feels more like a half dozen half-finished comedies than a cohesive whole.
• The Boys in the Band is dated and full of a lot of a lot of (often self-hating) stereotypes, but there’s a real raw-nerve intensity and honesty to the performances.

• Richard III can feel old-fashioned, if not stagey, but it’s hard to argue with Laurence Olivier in one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays.
• Malevolent has a pretty good performance by Florence Pugh and some unsettling, if not necessarily scary, moments early on. But it feels a little underbaked, especially once we get to the big twist in the story.
• The main problem with Gremlins knockoffs is simply that they don’t have Gremlins in them. The creatures in Ghoulies aren’t even half as impressive. The movie has some goofy, low-budget charm, but it’s hard to shake that feeling of being a poor man’s Gremlins.

• Ikiru asks, very simply and without sentiment, what is it to live? What is it to actually be alive?
• Trouble Every Day is sometimes upsetting, as you might expect a film that’s (at least vaguely) about the seductiveness of cannibalism and the violence of desire might be. But it’s too unfocused and overlong to ever really effectively say anything, much less develop its characters or anything like a story.
• For a film that’s mostly about the cruelty of youth, Welcome to the Dollhouse is surprisingly entertaining, and it may be my favorite of Todd Solondz’s work. As Roger Ebert wrote, the movie is not “some sort of grim sociological study…[but] in fact it’s a funny, intensely entertaining film: intense, because it focuses so mercilessly on the behavior of its characters that we are forced to confront both the comedy and the pain.”

• Blue Steel can often feel like the pieces of other, maybe better, movies stitched together. And yet, as Roger Ebert wrote, “It works because it’s so audacious in combining elements that don’t seem to belong together.” It’s far from perfect, and there are subplots and characters that don’t get their due—and in the end exist only for plot convenience. But the movie feels less Frankensteined-together than you might expect, and it’s held together by some good performances.
• There some good performances, particularly by a truly captivating Natalie Wood, in This Property Is Condemned, but it’s an unsatisfying film that just kind of peters out. God love ’em both, but Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola may not have been the best team to adapt Tennessee Williams.

Last week, I watched 8 movies.

You wouldn’t expect a movie with a title like CRY TERROR! to be quite so boring. But despite a strong cast, a theoretically tense plot, and a literal ticking time-bomb, the movie is mostly undone by voiceover narration and slow pacing.

ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME is often wickedly, uncomfortably well observed and funny—a horror movie played as comedy, or vice versa.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is beautiful, elegiac, sometimes a little dull, and a touching story about the stories we want to tell ourselves.

Elvis Mitchell’s documentary IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!? occasionally meanders a little, but it has a strong central thesis—namely, that representation matters. There are interviews with a lot of great black filmmakers, and I defy you to walk away without a long list of other films you now want to watch.

Florence Pugh is fantastic in THE WONDER, but so is everybody else. There’s not really a false note in the movie.

SLUMBERLAND has its…I want to say charms, but that might be a bit of a stretch. It does have some cute and clever moments, and is even occasionally touching, though it does feel a little cheaply made and under-populated, and it grates more than a little by the end.

There’s an argument that MOONAGE DAYDREAM doesn’t tell us anything new about David Bowie, but that doesn’t feel like the movie’s intent. (It also assumes that every viewer knows the same things.) It’s more an hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic, patchwork celebration of an artist’s life—not definitive, or even necessarily revelatory, but beautiful and substantial all the same.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY is beautiful and sweet, even if it’s also arguably slightly lesser Studio Ghibli.

Here’s my #nowplaying playlist for this past week.

Last week, I watched another half dozen movies.

I agree with most everything Mark Kermode says about DON’T WORRY DARLING here. The movie is nothing but a waiting game, to see which twist they’ve decided on, but it’s not an interesting twist, and it could just as easily have been half a dozen others. Florence Pugh turns in a good performance, but there isn’t much else to recommend it, and you could drive a vintage car through all its plot holes and unanswered questions.

If you want a movie where Amazons riding unicorns to fight robots and a space princess isn’t even close to the goofiest thing that happens, then THE ICE PIRATES is definitely for you. The New York Times described it at the time as “a Star Wars spin-off made in an underdeveloped galaxy,” and while there’s some charm to that and its cheapness, the movie isn’t exactly what you might call good.

There are a lot of good performances in DEEP COVER–which manages to feel only a little overly ‘90s–but Laurence Fishburne is especially good in it.

ALONE IN THE DARK does some interesting things with its slightly odd premise.

BILLY ELLIOT has its charms.

I don’t know that I love all of the songs in FUNNY GIRL, but it’s hard not to find something to love when Streisand and Sharif are on screen.