Month: July 2023

I watched a half dozen movies last week:

• To quote Roger Ebert—one of several times I’ll do so in this post—Playtime “is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth.” It’s not so much a movie as a strange marvel of production design and observation. It’s often delightfully clever, and this “peculiar, mysterious, magical film” deserves to be seen, but it’s a weird trip all the same.
• Demon Seed is pretty dreadful. The Criterion Channel wants you to believe the movie is “[p]acked with suspense, surprise, and special effects,” which leads me to wonder if they know what any of those words mean. Julie Christie is a better actress than the movie deserves—and it’s arguably an interesting footnote to fans of AI horror movies, or Dean Koontz completists—but it’s a lousy movie all on its own.
• What passed for popular action movies in the 1970s, I’m starting to think, maybe just aren’t for me anymore. Case in point: The Getaway, which I found mostly boring, even amid its bank robberies, car chases, and shootouts. Then again, maybe it’s not ’70s movies’ fault; Roger Ebert at the time called The Getaway “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy…[that] functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything.”

• The Beast Must Die isn’t a bad movie, though it does sometimes almost seem like it’s trying to be one, from the constant day-for-night shoots to the laughably terrible werewolf effects. The movie never really works, but it’s interesting and has some surprisingly good performances.
• Not to give Hedda Hopper too much credit—because I suspect she disliked Keeper of the Flame thanks in no small part to its anti-fascist politics—but she wasn’t entirely wrong when she called it “Citizen Kane with all the art scraped off.”
• Dogville is an unpleasant movie—Our Town re-conceived by a misanthrope—which it might have gotten away with if it wasn’t also three, very slow hours long. It often seems on the verge of saying something interesting, a talented cast struggling to bring nuance to a script that fights it at every turn. “Few people will enjoy seeing it once,” wrote Roger Ebert, “and, take it from one who knows, even fewer will want to see it a second time.”

I also re-watched a double-feature of vaguely remembered 2011 science fiction action thrillers with Source Code and The Adjustment Bureau. I think the former holds up much better, even if it loses a lot when you know where it’s headed, while the latter is mostly as meh as I remember it, though Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have genuine on-screen chemistry together.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched only half as many movies last week as the week before:

• The 1955 version of Oklahoma! is the first I’ve ever seen, even if I was a little familiar with some of the songs. I enjoyed it, though it was a little darker than I’d expected, particularly with Jud Fry’s character—a darkness that more recent stage revivals have apparently reinterpreted up a notch. (I do think I maybe made a mistake it watching the Todd-AO version on the Blu-ray instead of the CinemaScope version, however, since I couldn’t get my TV to stop making it look like I had motion-smoothing on, which was distracting.)
• I really enjoyed They Cloned Tyrone, which has a fun cast, a lot of cleverness, and a really interesting message. This might be a slight, roundabout spoiler, but I think it would make an interesting double-feature with Sorry to Bother You.
• The Hand isn’t necessarily good, but it is better than it needs to be, and works as an interesting psychological thriller for almost all of its run-time.

• Hanover Street is laughably bad, and I think for the reason Gene Siskel articulates here: they tried to embrace sweeping, classic wartime romance cliches but instead tripped over themselves into unfunny parody.
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is good dumb fun.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 10 movies last week.

• As TCM’s introduction to the film suggests, Winchester ’73 “stands out because it was the first to summarize the best of the Western motifs that preceded it…while modernizing the genre by featuring more complicated, tormented heroes.” Stewart, in particular, is quite good in it.
• Breakfast on Pluto occasionally feels a little too episodic, almost disjointed, but Cillian Murphy turns in a warm and tender lead performance.
• I recently heard cinematographer Roger Deakins say that the one movie people should watch to really understand what cinematography is, is In Cold Blood. And the man was not wrong. It’s really quite an astoundingly shot film, but also often chilling in its depiction of these two killers.

• Roger Ebert wrote that Sid & Nancy “pull[s] off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it.” We never grow to like these two self-destructive characters, but we do grow to understand and deeply empathize with them.
• There are some incredible shots in The Earrings of Madame De…, many of which could not have been easy to pull off, and yet the film never feels calculated or impersonal, those shots always revealing character rather than seeming like cheap dolly-shot tricks. The movie is genuine delight.
• A Wounded Fawn takes its grisly horror to such a comically surreal place. Katie Rife called the film a “blend of absurdity, audacity, and righteous anger,” whose “combined effect is one of feverish hallucination.” I’m not sure if it adds up to much of anything beyond the obviousness of its metaphors, but it’s told with such style that it’s hard not to be compelled.

• The Baron of Arizona features what was reportedly one of star Vincent Price’s favorite performances, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s delightfully duplicitous in this perhaps slight but always interesting Western.
• Even without its title, there’s never any real surprise where Invitation to Hell is headed, though it does take some weird detours along the way. (The plot hinges on an intelligent spacesuit planned for a mission to Venus, for instance.) Maybe the most interesting things about this television movie is that it’s one of three films Wes Craven directed in 1984—including the original Nightmare on Elm Street—and that it has such an odd, very ’80s cast. It’s not really what I would call good, much less scary, but it’s diverting enough.
• Two of the best things that Till does is focus on Danielle Deadwyler’s performance—she’s outstanding, in a very good cast—and not pretend like Emmett Till ever actually received justice. (It took 67 years for Congress to even pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.) The movie is often tough to watch because of those things, because of the obvious pain that Deadwyler’s Mamie Till-Mobley is feeling, and because we know how this tragic and unjust story is going to play out. But it’s a story that sadly still needs telling.

• British noir doesn’t come a lot more British or noir than It Always Rains on Sunday, which does a great job of combining both a tense manhunt with slice-of-life, almost kitchen-sink post-war drama.

I also re-watched Jaws 2 for the first time in several decades. It holds up well enough, but mostly only because it’s the only halfway decent Jaws sequel.