Month: May 2023

I watched just five movies last week:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is just a whole lot of fun. I don’t think it’s as good or as clever as Galaxy Quest, but there’s definitely the same kind of vibe to it. I enjoyed hanging out with these characters, and I laughed a lot along the way.
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it makes even less sense as an Ant-Man movie. (The “and the Wasp” part feels superfluous here, given how very little Evangeline Lilly is given to do.) The movie tosses out almost everything that made the previous two films work in favor of re-re-establishing the MCU’s new big bad, but without actually making him the least bit interesting. (Say what you will about Jonathan Majors, and wonder what his ongoing legal issues will do Marvel’s future plans, but the version of Kang he played in Loki was at least fun to watch.) So instead of a movie that’s fun, or even looks good, we get an ugly swirl of CGI that’s desperately trying to set up the next ten movies that are coming.
• Zachary Levi is sometimes fun in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, but the movie often feels confused about things as simple as who its main character is. Maybe that’s not entirely the movie’s fault—given all the behind-the-scenes collapse and rebuilding of the DCEU, the impact of Covid on the shoot, and how its younger cast have largely aged out of their original parts—but the movie doesn’t offer much else to justify its existence. It rallies a little near the end, when it actually attempts to give a character some development, if not closure, but then it stumbles again, right into some pretty dumb cameos and mid-credits scenes.

• 65 does exactly what it says on the tin. Which is disappointing, because it doesn’t do any of those things especially well, and it’s not even that impressive a tin. Early on, it seems like the movie might become something unwieldy (but at least interesting) like Cast Away with dinosaurs. But the story’s premise is muddled, and its execution lacks even a moment of surprise. Adam Driver is reasonably compelling, but he doesn’t have a character to play, much less an arc, and it’s hard to care if he’s eaten by giant CGI lizards.
• Roger Ebert said The Stunt Man was “like magic tricks done by a magician in a movie: It doesn’t matter how well they’re done, or even if they’re really done, because cinematic special effects make it all trickery, anyway.” The movie has its moments—it’s hard not to be even a little charmed by Peter O’Toole’s performance—but it doesn’t really amount to very much in the end.

I also re-watched Fantasia, which was considerably more boring than I was expecting, or had remembered. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice section is inarguably amusing, but it’s also fairly short, and probably the only section that’s a straight-up adaptation of its source material. I think the best section, and maybe the only one that truly marries the music with animation interpretation in a unique and striking way, is the concluding Night on Bald Mountain section.

Here are all of last week’s #nowplaying songs:

I watched just six movies last week. There was almost something like a theme to them.

• Denzel Washington turns in a really interesting, often magnetic performance in Roman J. Israel, Esq. The movie around that performance is less interesting, but it’s well enough cast and made to be entertaining.
• Putney Swope is more a collection of satirical ideas than a movie, with a plot that’s both simple and convoluted, maybe even a little cluttered by ’60s surrealism. It’s not uninteresting, but it doesn’t really hold together and is only occasionally what I’d call funny.
• Heath Ledger is good in Ned Kelly, but everyone, including him, feels a little wasted into this overly quiet, even hushed version of the outlaw’s story.

• Enola Holmes is charming enough, I guess, although honestly the mystery didn’t do a whole lot for me.
• Dolores Claiborne feels a little pedestrian and too familiar—it wasn’t hard to see where it was headed, even having never read the book—but Kathy Bates is good in the title role.
• Mike Leigh is known for long, improvisational rehearsals through which he and his actors build the characters and narrative. Meaning that there’s a real lived-in quality to what finally appears on screen, which is what makes Vera Drake so engaging—along with Imelda Staunton’s terrific performance.

I also re-watched Citizen Kane, which I hadn’t actually seen since college. You know what? Pretty good movie.

Once more from the top, here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying lyrics last week:

• Double Harness, which features a charming but strangely subdued William Powell, often feels rather old-fashioned—although, as a pre-Code movie, sometimes not in the ways you might expect.
• Criterion calls Vagabond “a splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman,” and I think that’s accurate. We know from the first scene where her story is headed, but because it’s pieced together from the other people she’s encountered, I’m not sure we ever really know her.
• Blue Collar is sometimes a little shaggier than I was expecting, and Paul Schrader may not be the best fit for goofy comedy, but the parts of it that work—the honest look at the guys on the line, just trying to get by, and the union that’s supposed to have their back—really work well.

• There are good actors in A Reflection of Fear, and they almost give some good performances, but the movie itself is just so slow and ponderous, building, very poorly, to a very bad twist ending.
• It! is better than its title. Not remarkably better, and it feels both cluttered and uneven, but Roddy McDowall is fun to watch.
• I’m not going to lie, the bear was maybe my least favorite part of Cocaine Bear. I liked it better as a comedy than a horror movie, and it’s hard to find the CGI bear very funny. (Leaving aside that the “true story” on which this is based was basically just “a bear accidentally ate a bunch of cocaine and it probably died painfully.”) But, yeah, when the movie is a comedy among the human characters, of which there are too many, it’s often very darkly funny.

• “I guess we go to ‘New York, New York‘ to enjoy the good parts,” wrote Roger Ebert in his original review, “and spend just a moment regretting the absence of a whole.” I think I can see what Scorsese was trying to do here, and maybe that would have come together if the movie was twice as long, but I mostly didn’t enjoy this.
• Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is remarkably engaging and honest, not least because of the man at the center of it. He knows he’s fighting a losing battle but hasn’t lost his sense of humor and determination to fight.

I also re-watched Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, which is perfectly fine, largely forgettable, although I still really enjoy the wizard’s duel scene quite a lot.