Month: June 2023

I watched 8 movies last week. There was almost sort of a theme to them.

• Robin Hood—or, more properly speaking, Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood—doesn’t always have the finest quality print or score, depending on where you find it, but it’s nonetheless an impressively staged adventure for the silent movie era.
• Morning Glory is a little scattershot as a movie, but Katharine Hepburn is genuinely terrific in it. It’s not hard to see how, in just her third film role, she landed a Best Actress Oscar.
• Going My Way has some endearing performances, particularly by Barry Fitzgerald as the elderly priest, but it often feels incredibly padded.
• The Rose Tattoo isn’t exactly a great movie, but Anna Magnani gives a very nice performance.

• The racing montages in Grand Prix are kinetic and impressive, even on a small screen, some fifty years later. The problem is, the movie spends most of its (overly long) running time off of the track, and even the footage of speeding cars grows tiresome after a while.
• Some of the underwater scenes in The Deep are tense and exciting, but the movie itself feels like just another overblown ’70s potboiler.
• Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown are charming enough in Cocktail, but it’s otherwise a pretty lousy and boring concoction.
• Roger Ebert called All About My Mother “a struggle between real and fake heartbreak—between tragedy and soap opera,” and it’s a strange movie because of that struggle. And yet a lot of the heart and beauty in the film comes from that struggle, in trying to decide how we, much less the filmmakers, feel about these characters and their often unreal experiences.

I also re-watched I Never Sang for My Father, which doesn’t really fit the “theme,” but which does provide some familial symmetry to a week. I last saw this film as a teenager, when the Marist high school I attended for reasons I no longer remember showed it to my entire graduating class. (That another movie they showed us like this was Ordinary People leads me to think it was partly just because a lot of our teachers had been close to teenagers themselves when the movies first came out.)

Anyway, it’s still a really good movie, with great performances by both Gene Hackman and Melvyn Douglas, but it definitely hits a lot harder at 46 than at 16, when my own father and I are closer in age to the characters in the film.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week.

• The Cameraman has some very good, often isolated, scenes, but I don’t think it’s Buster Keaton at his best.
• The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is maybe a little too low-key, but it has some nice moments, and Joan Crawford’s rather good in the title role.
• Blood on the Moon has kind of lousy title, but everything else about it is top-notch—from strong direction by Wise to several very strong performances, particularly by Mitchum.

• Split Second probably has too many characters and is a little preposterous—only more so in today’s post-atomic age—but it has its fair share of tense ticking-clock moments.
• Dark of the Sun is far from perfect, but it tackles some difficult, complicated, even brutally violent issues, and it features a really solid performance by Rod Taylor.
• Boasting the thinnest of premises for the lousiest of jokes, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh is remarkably tedious from its opening jump-shot to the ref’s final whistle.

• Even by mid-’80s Brian De Palma standards, Body Double is a bit much. The movie plays like both a fawning homage to, and a smriking pardoy of, Alfred Hitchcock. It’s almost worth watching for the ridiculousness of its filmmaking alone, but I would hesitate to call it a good movie.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week.

I watched just four movies last week.

• I’m often on board for the darkly comic, surreal absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos, but it seems a lot less purposeful in Dogtooth than in his more recent films. A.O. Scott wrote that the movie “at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it,” and it’s sometimes honestly difficult to see the point of that.
• Jeopardy is more than a little contrived, but the film has its moments, usually thanks to Barbara Stanwyck, and often feeling like they’re from a differently, slightly more noir-ish film.
• Proof does some interesting things, and there’s a trio of intriguing character studies at its core, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful.
• Sr. is a son’s loving tribute to his dying father. It’s maybe too personal to be deeply revealing or entirely cohesive, but it’s lovely and charming and honest nonetheless.

I also re-watched Raising Arizona and Avengers: Endgame. While I enjoyed both of them again a lot, I’m not altogether sure either film worked quite as well for me the second time around.

The Coens’ film is still a delightfully silly, live-action cartoon, but it felt like such a kinetic game-changer back when I first encountered it in college that it was hard not to be just a little disappointed with this re-watch.

Endgame, meanwhile, really benefits from having all of the preceding MCU films, particularly Infinity War, still fresh in your head, and this is the first time I’ve revisited a single one of them. Still, I retain enough connection to the characters that, even if the whole thing is kind of a whirlwind mess, it’s a deeply satisfying one.