Month: February 2024

• Brief Encounter is such a lovely gem of a movie—one that, as Greta Gerwig puts it in an interview on the Criterion Channel, “lets you be in love with falling in love.” It doesn’t feel at first like it should even work, told so simply through flashback and voice-over narration, but there are such wonderful performances in it, particularly by Celia Johnson, and the movie is directed so deftly by David Lean.
• I don’t know that I would go so far as to call Blast of Silence a “neglected film noir masterpiece” (as Patton Oswalt does here), but it’s a uniquely grim and impressive early neo-noir.
• Drums Along the Mohawk isn’t very culturally sensitive, to say the least, but there are good performances and strong direction by John Ford.

• Nimona is, top to bottom, such an awesomely delightful and genuinely touching movie.
• Testament is a remarkable, but difficult, watch—a movie that, as Roger Ebert put it, “asks how we might act toward one another, how our values might stand up, in the face of an overwhelming catastrophe.” It is such a heartbreaking movie that, nevertheless, refuses to let go of hope.
• It’s not that there are great ideas in Screamers—those feel more than a little shopworn, confused, and under-developed—but there is (again as Roger Ebert put it) “a certain imagination and intelligence” to the filmmaking. Most of that comes through Peter Weller’s performance, which isn’t enough to recommend the movie, but is strong enough to make it interesting.

• How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a terrifically tense film, though I suppose how you end up feeling about it will depend on how much you sympathize with the characters, or how comfortable you are with not knowing who to sympathize with.
• John Frankenheimer’s documentary-like filmmaking is well suited to The Train, as is Burt Lancaster’s performance, though you can’t often go wrong with either one of them.
• The Watermelon Woman feels every bit like a mid-’90s independent movie—loose, semi-improvised scenes by non-professional actors—but it asks important questions with warmth and humor. Even if the filmmaking itself feels somewhat dated, or at least very much of its time, it’s an entertaining movie made by and about black lesbians.

• Cemetery Man feels reminiscient of Sam Raimi or early Peter Jackson, but is never as clever, interesting, or fun as either of them. It holds only scattered moments of enjoyment. As critic Mick LaSalle wrote, “It aims high and misses, but it does hold interest with visual flash, wry humor and a couple of sex scenes that can make steam come out of your ears.”
• Fallen Leaves is a bittersweet and deceptively simple love story.
• I don’t really share Steven Soderbergh’s recent fondness for anamorphic lenses, but the choice is less distracting in High Flying Bird, which is thoroughly engaging, thanks to some terrific performances all around, particularly by André Holland.

I also rewatched Predator, which is still a fantastic ’80s sci-fi action movie, but I don’t think it could ever be as cool as it was to ten-year-old me watching it on hotel cable in 1987.

I watched just four movies last week:

• I have vague memories of reading at least parts of Helen Keller’s autobiography when I was much younger, so it was interesting to see how much more The Miracle Worker is the story of Anne Sullivan. Both Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars for their performances, but the movie very much belongs to Bancroft.
• The Greatest Night in Pop tells the story of the making of “We Are the World” in more exhaustive detail than you might think necessary, but it’s actually often fascinating, from the madness of how it all came together, to all the behind-the-scenes footage that didn’t wind up in the original music video.
• The contrivance on which I Confess hangs might now seem a little shopworn, but the movie is helped enormously by Hitchcock’s direction on Montgomery Clift’s performance.
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can’t help but betray its 1970s TV budget, from the not entirely convincing old-age makeup to the episodic way the story unfolds. But it’s an engaging, unflinching story, held together by a strong performance by Cicely Tyson.

I also re-watched Gorillas in the Mist, which I haven’t seen since the year it came out, over thirty years ago now. It holds up well, thanks largely to Sigourney Weaver’s central performance, though it could be argued the movie doesn’t actually tell us a lot about Dian Fossey.

I watched 9 movies last week:

• There are a lot of really strong performances in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, not least by a very naturalistic Daniel Day-Lewis. But the film is cluttered with too many characters and often seems uncertain about what it’s actually trying to say, to the point that those performances kind of get lost in the mix.
• I wish I could agree with people who say that Action Jackson is an unsung and unjustly forgotten ’80s action movie, but it just isn’t very good. None of the blame for that lies with Carl Weathers, who is quite charismatic in the title role, but it never finds the right balance of tone and doesn’t offer any especially memorable action setpieces of its own.
• The Marvels is incredibly disappointing, more so than any other recent Marvel failure, largely because it feels like there was a really good, possibly even great movie somewhere inside this one. The movie we get is bright and inventive in flashes—something you couldn’t say about Quantumania, for instance—but it’s never given enough time to breathe and feels badly chopped together. There’s so much here that could have worked, and worked really well, but it feels like Marvel the studio just lost its nerve.

• I don’t know that the original is a masterpiece or anything, but there’s nothing in Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 that’s an improvement on, or even as good as it.
• Odds Against Tomorrow takes its time building tension, but it’s a taut little crime noir with some great moments.
• I’m not sure I understand Enys Men, but I’m not sure Enys Men is meant to be understood, merely experienced. In that respect, it is fascinating and unsettling—”feeling,” as critic Calum Russell put it, “more like an innovative art installation than a piece of narrative fiction.”

• Time Trap plays with some neat, if maybe slightly shopworn ideas, but it never really pulls any of them together into a clever or cohesive enough whole.
• Some of the gags in Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last inevitably feel dated, but some of them—like that clock scene, for instance—are rightly some of the most famous scenes in cinema history.
• God’s Pocket has a lot of good actors doing some very good work, and yet it all just falls apart into a weird mess of conflicting tones by the end. John Slattery is a capable enough directory, but having now seen both of his feature films, I think his greatest strength is convincing his famous friends to appear in them.

I also re-watched Sideways, which I hadn’t seen in twenty years. (Want to feel old? Sideways is now a twenty-year-old movie.) It had been on my mind to revisit the film for a while, having recently watched (and loved) Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti’s more recent collaboration The Holdovers. Like that one, Sideways is just a pitch-perfect character study, full of bold comedic moments and lovely, tender character beats. Twenty years or not, it’s still a really terrific film.

Things went a little sideways a couple of weeks ago, and while they seem to be returning to as close to normal again as can be hoped, in the last two weeks I’ve watched only two movies, and re-watched a couple more.

• There are a lot of really lovely performances and moments in The Heiress, but Olivia de Havilland is especially fantastic in every scene.
• While it’s true that Marie Antoinette isn’t the place to look for historical fact, doing so seems to be missing not just the point of the film, but also the joys of Kirsten Dunst’s performance. These sorts of criticisms, Roger Ebert wrote, “would alter is fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.”
• For whatever reason, Escape from New York didn’t really click for me the first time I saw it. I don’t know if it’s that I’ve grown to appreciate John Carpenter as a filmmaker even more since then—or if it’s just that I’ve now seen what happens when this idea goes really wrong, in Escape from L.A.—but it worked a lot better for me on re-watch.
• The Muppet Movie remains a joy from top to bottom. One thing that struck me, on this re-watch, is that, as a child, I wouldn’t have recognized the wall-to-wall cameos as cameos. They were just other characters in this fantastically fun movie.