Month: April 2024

• Clouds of Sils Maria makes some unexpected choices, particularly near the end, and it seems very deliberately to leave things (almost disappointingly) unresolved. And yet it’s also very engrossing, and the three leads—particularly Stewart and Binoche—really shine.
• Things escalate very quickly to the diabolic in Alucarda, which I’m not sure is entirely successful—and definitely shows its budget as a ’70s Mexican horror movie—but it has such an interesting, frequently unsettling look.
• Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Man from London is awful, near-unwatchable—and not just because it’s excruciatingly long or strangely dubbed, but because it hardly even qualifies as a film. It’s more a collection of still images occasionally interspersed with a slow sludge of movement or unengaging dialogue. That they’re sometimes well-composed images is hardly the point; a short film like La Jetée, for instance, still manages to make photographs feel cinematic, whereas The Man from London feels like an endurance test, or an art installation critics might nod appreciatively at but no one actually wants to sit through.

• None of the actors in The Seventh Cross are actually German, which is occasionally odd, as is the way the story is narrated. Yet there’s a lot about the movie that is pretty terrific, including an Oscar-nominated performance by Hume Cronyn.
• The Place Promised in Our Early Days has some lovely animated visuals, but the complicated timelines and alternate histories make it a little hard to follow.
• Charlotte Rampling is just so good, in such subtle ways, in 45 Years.

I also re-watched a couple of movies:

• I didn’t like Hackers in 1995, and if I’ve grown to appreciate it more by even the smallest measure since then, that’s only because it seems even more ridiculous, and you almost have to laugh at that.
• I also didn’t love my re-visit of Penn & Teller Get Killed, which has a few good moments, mostly at the beginning at end, but doesn’t hold together as a narrative or as a showcase for the duo. (Oddly enough, Penn Jillette gives a much more interesting performance in Hackers.)

• Robot Carnival has some visually impressive moments, and yet, a week later, I’d be hard-pressed to recall any of the individual animated segments.
• The File on Thelma Jordon is just a nice little noir.
• Perfect Days is a meditation on modest pleasures, finding simple joys in things like quietude and routine, the beauty in sunlight and shadow, a passage in a book or a favorite song played on a car radio’s tape deck. The movie doesn’t tell you much about its central character, or why he’s chosen this life of modesty and solitude; there are hints you can piece together, but the full story remains elusive, if not outright evasive, and not much actually happens. And yet it’s an often beautiful meditation, with a lovely performance by Koji Yakusho.

• You’ll Never Find Me works best early on, drawing real tension and fear from a very simple two-hander. I wouldn’t say the movie falls apart when it starts to reveal what’s actually going on, but the tension definitely eases up, and the movie becomes less compelling.
• If you were to imagine a 1972 movie about “a secret cult of lust-craved witches” set in the Philippines and starring a young Tom Selleck, Daughters of Satan is almost certainly the B-movie you would imagine. But for however cheaply and exploitatively it’s made, the movie was a little more interesting than I expected it to be.
• Run Silent, Run Deep is a terrifically tense little war movie, with really good peformances, particularly from Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable.

I also rewatched Repo Man, which I think I found more enjoyable in my early twenties, but which still has a whole lot of strange and oddball charms.

I watched just four movies last week:

• There might be a way to tell the story that Passengers tries to tell, but definitely not in the way that the movie tries to tell it.
• Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde are good together in So Long at the Fair, and it isn’t the movie’s fault if it now feels a little familiar.
• Dr. T. & the Women acts like a drama that thinks it’s a comedy. There are glimmers of things that work in the movie, like Gere’s central performance, but it always feels like the stakes are incredibly low, even when everything that’s happening on screen says they’re incredibly high.
• I’m not gonna lie, The Day of the Beast is a weird movie. Most of it’s a lot of wacky, almost Evil Dead-like fun.

I also kind of randomly re-watched The ‘Burbs, which I found about as occasionally amusing and under-developed as I did in 1989 when I was twelve.

I watched another half dozen movies last week:

• I have no particular fondness for—or even, strictly speaking, memory of—the original Road House, so I didn’t know at all what to expect from the remake. But it’s very bad. The trailer promises nothing more than some laidback charm, well-choreographed fights, and the occasional fun action set-piece. But the movie delivers very little of that, and none of it especially well. The plot is a muddle that grows increasingly uninteresting, even as it becomes needlessly complex, and the movie throws way too many characters on the screen, very few of whom ever make any impression at all. (A few of the actors who do make any impression might have wished afterwards that they hadn’t.) I’d like to think that the sped-up CGI that’s employed so heavily in the fight scenes was simply a misguided attempt to make those fights look frenetic and wild, but it’s all just janky as hell, and instead makes them look fake and unreal. That’s actually a problem with the movie as a whole; its stakes are confused, its characters are under-baked, and its plot seems chopped up and hastily reassembled in post—despite still clocking in at just over two hours. Jake Gyllenhaal’s charisma keeps things afloat for a little while, but even he feels desperately lost by the end. Honestly, the best thing about the movie is the live music that frequently plays at the fictional, titular bar. They could have saved everyone the trouble and just filmed those bands playing.
• Beau Is Afraid…is a lot. But a lot of that is strikingly, even startlingly, strange—a horror movie where anxiety is the monster and unreality unspools across the screen in totally unexpected ways. It’s off-kilter and self-indulgent but also incredibly compelling.
• Would The Last Voyage of the Demeter be better if it played coy about its source material? (“Dracula? What’s a Dracula?”) I’m tempted to say no, but it is interesting to wonder if the movie could have evaded the sense of anticlimactic inevitability that hangs over it from the very start if it didn’t so repetitively hammer in exactly which horror novel it’s supposed to be spun off from. There are no surprises here, but it doesn’t help that the movie doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it does have, though, are some impressively grisly kills and a vampire whose mean streak makes him at times genuinely frightening. That’s only in flashes, of course, and under cover of darkness; by the light of day, there isn’t very much to sink your teeth into here, and while the movie is passably entertaining, it’s also more a forgettable footnote than anything else.

• You Hurt My Feelings is warm and tender, perceptive and funny.
• I wasn’t wildly impressed by 2022’s X and didn’t hold out much hope for its immediately announced—and, to my mind, totally unnecessary—prequel. Now, however many months later, Pearl arrives to exceed my expectations, but only barely. The movie feels more like an emotional endurance test for its lead actress, especially in its final scenes; and while it’s ostensibly an origin story and character study, if there’s any character development, it’s only through the sheer force of Mia Goth’s will. The movie has very little to say, and certainly nothing that connects it in any meaningful way to its predecessor, and so just feels like an empty and slapped-together exercise in style.
• Friedkin Uncut doesn’t offer any surprise revelations about the late man or his work, especially if you’ve seen other documentaries about them, but he was an incredibly erudite and entertaining storyteller. This film offers Friedkin, and several others, the opportunity to talk at length about his impressive filmography.

I also re-watched the still-uplifting Rudy.