I watched a half dozen movies last week:
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- There’s too much that’s interesting in Stanley Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire, for it to be completely terrible, but there’s not enough for it to actually be any good. It’s almost certainly an urban legend that Kubrick himself was so displeased with the film that he destroyed the original negative, but it’s not impossible to see how such a legend got started.
- Brute Force is sometimes a little overly melodramatic and heavy handed—the multiple flashbacks that feel almost like different movies, for examples—but there are some great performances throughout.
- Equinox Flower feels very reminiscent of other Ozu films, not least because he casts many of the same actors and touches on many of the same themes. (He was also famously a director of very simple scene compositions, some of which here seem almost duplicated from other films.) And yet there’s also a feeling of transition here—to color film, to post-war Japan—and there are beautiful, touching moments in that.
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- There’s no doubt that Merrily We Go to Hell is a pre-code Hollywood film, from its depiction of alcoholism and infidelity, but Sylvia Sidney are both really great Fredric March, even if their characters are so terrible together.
- Bride of Chucky does everything you’d expect a movie with that title and premise, but it does it in some odd and unexpected ways. It’s a strange, killer-dolls riff on Natural Born Killers, which I’m not sure always works—much less 25 years later—but you can’t claim it doesn’t have personality.
- There’s a lot going on in Black Bear, and a lot of it’s very interesting; Aubrey Plaza’s often fantastic, and there’s a lot of very well observed detail. But it’s not impossible to shake the feeling that it’s two different films, approaching the same ideas of jealousy, identity, movie-making, marriage, bears, et cetera from slightly different angles. It’s often electric, especially in that second film, but I’m not sure it always fits together well.
I also rewatched both Lawrence of Arabia and Critters 2, which makes for an interesting double-bill.