Month: March 2024

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• I don’t know how much mileage there actually is in “Lord of the Flies in space” as a concept, but Voyagers doesn’t take it nearly far enough, and the movie never travels beyond the orbit of unengaging characters and tired cliches.
• Dumb Money has clearly studied at the feet of The Big Short, but at least it seems to have mostly learned the right lessons from that movie. (Unlike, for instance, The Big Short‘s director.) The narrative here feels a little incomplete, and too reliant on real-life footage (and memes), but the movie is genuinely crowd-pleasing, thanks largely to a very engaging cast.
• He Knows You’re Alone is a tedious bore—let down by bad acting, an even worse script, and pacing that would need a half dozen jump-scares to be called sluggish. Even by the relatively low standards of early 1980s slasher movies, this is bizarre and lousy. If, like me, you’re tempted to watch it simply because it happens to be Tom Hanks’ first film credit, just know that if his brief appearance qualifies as a highlight, that’s only because there are so many lowlights.

• Creep 2 adds an interesting new twist to the already oddball found-footage approach of the first movie. Maybe not interesting enough to justify its existence, but there is a certain magnetism to the two leads.
• I can understand why Shirley focuses so entirely on Chisholm’s failed 1972 run for President, but in doing so, the movie shortchanges the rest of her life and political career, and even the context necessary to understand that presidential bid. Regina King is very good, but the movie relies entirely on her to bring any actual character development to the table.
• Memoria definitely has a wavelength; I’m just not sure it’s a wavelength I’m entirely on.

I also re-watched Patton, which turns out to be a decent if unremarkable movie with a really great central performance.

• The Shout is strange and moody and pessimistic, and it gets under your skin even if you’re not exactly sure you can say what it’s supposed to be about.
• Roger Ebert was probably more forgiving of Single White Female than I might have been when he wrote, “No genre is beyond redemption or beneath contempt, and here the slasher genre is given its due with strong performances and direction.” Maybe that’s because I’ve seen some slasher movies I’ve enjoyed more, or because I think the performances here are fine but nothing special. There’s a mad, off-the-rails energy here that the movie rightly embraces, but it’s also strangely kind of forgettable.
• The Last Year of Darkness never feels like a documentary, which more often than not very much works in its favor. Occasionally, it can cause the movie to feel a little aimless, as it sets no agenda or even appears to be following a specific narrative. But it also paints an intensely intimate portrait of these few people at this very specific place and time, essentially just by hanging out with them and living in their world.
• Jason Goes to Hell is definitely one way to have taken the Friday the 13th series. It’s just very difficult to imagine the bizarre sequence of miscalculations that would have been necessary to think it was a good way, or that the finished movie was anything close to comprehensible. It’s more interesting than a lot of its predecessors in the series, but that doesn’t make it any good. A miss is still a miss, no matter how big the swing, no matter how lousy the other batters in the lineup. What this feels like is a very different kind of horror movie poorly grafted onto the Friday the 13th template, then chopped up in the editing bay, either because it ran too long or because somebody had the good sense to realize the performances and story made not a lick of sense. At least Jason X, for all its faults, had some fun with its bizarro take on the series.

• Is Head even a movie? It’s something, all right. Whatever that is, it’s more than a little arty-pretentious, very much of its time, and it all kind of just washes over you more than anything else.
• Prevenge is darkly funny, sometimes surprisingly tender, and good fun.
• It’s hard to tell if Hell House LLC gets some parts of the found-footage horror format exceptionally right, or if there are are just some parts of the format that are exceptionally hard to get wrong. The movie has its share of creepy moments and jump-scares, and marrying the format to the haunted house attraction is a neat idea. But it feels very padded, doesn’t do anything genuinely interesting with that idea, and really flubs the ending.
• Ox-Head Village is an oddly haunting, occasionally violently gory, meditation on loss and betrayal and kinship.

I also re-watched both Sorcerer and UHF, which I’ll be the first to admit make for a strange double feature. Sorcerer is an incredibly tense film, a great ’70s update to The Wages of Fear, and UHF is just silly, goofy fun, even if a few of its gags maybe go on a little longer than you remember.

I watched an assortment of five movies last week:

• There’s a lot going on in American Fiction, sometimes almost too much, and certainly a lot more than just the satire of publishing and race that the trailers suggest. That’s in there, and it’s a smart and biting satire, but there’s also a very touching character study and family drama rattling around inside too.
• Paul Winfield really is exceptionally good in Sounder.
• I’m not even that big a Taylor Swift fan—I mean, I like her and several of her songs well enough, but I come to even that still scattershot appreciation fairly late. And yet, it’s hard to watch the three-hour, terrifically staged concert footage of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and not walk away genuinely impressed and wanting more.
• What Wings manages to do, entirely without any special effects beyond its own invented camera trickery, is even now, almost a century later, nothing short of astounding. That this silent film also manages to tell such an engaging story is remarkable as well.
• It’s easy to see how Warrior wouldn’t be half as effective if it wasn’t as well put together, or if the performances in it weren’t so strong. It’s not a terrifically surprising story, but often powerfully engaging.

I also re-watched The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Maggie Smith is still fantastic in it, but I think I forgot how very much this is Pamela Franklin’s movie. Hers is the character with an actual arc—defined against Jean Brodie’s inability or unwillingness to grow, despite her constant admonishments to her girls to the contrary. I was struck, on this re-watch, how unlikable and yet tragic Brodie is as a character.

• I don’t remember the first Aquaman movie all that well—as the near-endless flashbacks and voiceover recapping in the second one makes abundantly clear—but I remember it being mostly fun most of the time. The sequel mostly isn’t, despite a decent cast giving it a shot, or at least seeming like they’re having fun. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels surprisingly cheap and low-stakes, a real sputter to end the DCEU on.
• Find Me Guilty isn’t a lot more than agreeably serviceable, but it does win you over—and most of of that is due to Vin Diesel’s genuinely charming and heartfelt performance.
• Stunningly strange from top to bottom, Poor Things is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, and it works so well largely because of Emma Stone’s total commitment to the role.

• The 1940 version of Our Town isn’t the highest quality print, and it veers maybe a little too hard into realism and a happy ending the play doesn’t need. But the heart of Wilder’s play is here, even if I prefer other, later stagings of it.
• I’m not entirely convinced there was a compelling artistic reason to make Wonka, and yet the finished confection is actually quite delightful and sweet.
• The NY Times described Eyes of Fire, not inaccurately, as “an ambitious idea gone haywire, as if The Scarlet Letter had zoomed into the future and collided with the movie version of The Exorcist.” It’s often interesting, even fascinating, but its reach also often exceeds its grasp.

I also re-watched Kairo (Pulse), which I’ve often cited as one of my favorite horror movies. It remains a deeply unnerving, occasionally terrifying, profoundly sad, and yet also strangely hopeful movie.

I watched seven movies last week:

• Cliffhanger is dumb and very forgetable, but it’s also a fairly entertaining thrill ride.
• In Which We Serve is straight-up British stiff-upper-lip World War II propagaganda, but it’s often very effective as such, and it features some good performances.
• White Men Can’t Jump sometimes feels a little rough around the edges, but it has well-observed characters and dialogue, and it’s often very fun.

• Ministry of Fear plays initially a little like a horror movie, in which our hero wanders into a quiet English village only to discover it’s been overtaken by some kind of sinister forces. Only, in this case, it’s not body snatchers from beyond but Nazi spies. It’s gripping and suspenseful throughout.
• The One is dumb and very forgettable, full stop. It is not entertaining, and I just wanted the ride to stop.
• Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Roger Ebert wrote, “is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but [it] gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature—so odd, so valuable, so particular.”
• Spaceman is a little whispery and dull, even leaden at times. But because that seems largely by design, as deliberate as the decision to not Americanize the story and characters, the movie largely works. I’m not sure it has anything epescially deep to say—beyond, as Robert Daniels puts it, that “some men would rather go to space and talk to a giant spider than go to therapy”—but it’s not without its share of lovely little moments.

I also re-watched Die Hard (for the who-knows-how-many-th time), following something of a John McTiernan kick I’ve been on, following along with Blank Check. I don’t think Die Hard is the greatest movie ever made, but I do think it’s a near-perfect movie, and likely the best action movie ever made. Everything in it is so deliberate without ever feeling that way, and it’s hard to imagine a better version of the movie Die Hard is trying to be.