Month: May 2025

Last week I watched 8 movies. It mostly did not work out well.

It started when I rewatched A Simple Favor, mostly because I didn’t remember it well and was curious to watch the sequel. The original is stylish and clever and fun, if never quite enough of any of those things, and worth a watch for the verbal sparring between Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick.

• Another Simple Favor, meanwhile, is more of the same—although a little less clever and a little less fun. Lively and Kendrick are still the best reason to watch, and they’re fun together, but the movie sags a lot more than the first with its overcomplicated plot and characters.

After that, for some reason, I hit upon this idea to watch a week of sequels, usually of the forgotten (or misbegotten) variety. And this is where the week took a real turn.

• Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother, don’t watch Staying Alive. It’s difficult to tell if Travolta is genuinely terrible in the movie, or if it’s just that he’s playing one of so many unpleasant characters, but either way, this was not a fun experience. Nowadays, people remember Saturday Night Fever mostly for its dancing…and desperately try to forget Staying Alive for the same.
• If the first Grease is a bubblegum musical, then Grease 2 is what happens when that bubblegum gets accidentally stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Did they write a bunch of random scenes they were then forced to write songs to fit around, or vice versa? It’s tough to tell, but the songs do seem very random, and most of them aren’t very good. There’s a spark of something in Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance, but this Grease has very little groove or meaning.
• I’m not altogether convinced that Prince’s Graffiti Bridge is actually a movie. It’s certainly shaped a lot less like one than Purple Rain, to which it’s ostensibly a sequel, and it feels more like a haphazard collection of half-baked music videos. Some of that music isn’t bad, even this was hardly Prince’s best album, but as a movie with a story and characters it’s dull and confusing.

• The Sting is one of my favorite movies, so maybe I’m a little biased, but The Sting II is absolutely terrible. The movie is just so deeply confused—a direct sequel that for some reason is happening to (mostly) different characters—but it’s also pretty dumb and boring just on its own terms. A good con movie, like the first one, cons the audience too a little. A bad con movie, like this one, makes the audience feel conned.
• I suppose there could be an interesting story in the son of the devil who doesn’t know that’s who he is, is trying to fight that evil destiny, which I guess is what Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is trying to be—when it remembers to be anything at all. But it’s such a meandering dud of a movie, even for what is a cheap, decade-late TV movie sequel. Every now and then Ray Milland and Ruth Gordon show up to nibble on some scenery, which almost passes for amusing, but that’s about all this has going for it.
• Blues Brothers 2000 might have worked as novelty album or concert for charity, but they had to go ahead and ruin it by trying to make a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “‘Blues Brothers 2000’ has a lot of good music in it. It would have had more if they’d left out the story, which would have been an excellent idea.” Ebert might have oversold how good these specific musical numbers are—no one is going to ever point to this as Aretha Franklin’s definitive version of “Respect,” for instance—but he wasn’t wrong that they’re absolutely the only reason to watch this movie.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe was, hands down, the best movie I watched this week. That says a lot about the week I put myself through, but I don’t mean to just damn it with faint praise. It’s both dumb and clever and often very funny.

• It’s easy to see what Love Hurts is going for. The movie is a lot of things—way too many, as it happens—but none of those things is especially original. It’s easy to see what it’s going for, but it’s almost remarkable how immediately and completely almost none of the movie works. It’s overly complicated, yet only half-committed to any of its bits. None of it’s very fun—most of it is decidedly not so—and even if a scattered few of those bits show some fleeting promise—just enough to make it easy to see what they were going for—it’s hard to find any reason to care.
• The Monkey is a lot, but it’s exactly that go-for-broke, over-the-top gruesomeness, coupled with the very real, very personal trauma that writer-director Oz Perkins seems to be working out in the film, that makes it work so spectacularly. For a movie this gory and silly, it’s surprisingly heartfelt and just a lot of fun.
• Mickey 17 is goofy and inventive and also a lot of fun, thanks largely to Robert Pattinson’s central performance(s).

• I went into Better Man with only the most casual familiarity with who Robbie Williams even was, and I adored the movie. I can’t imagine how much I would have loved it if I had started out as a fan. The movie hits all the standard beats of the music biopic, but it does so in such clever and unexpectedly engaging ways.
• The (mostly) first-person POV in Nickel Boys is arguably both the film’s greatest strength and weakness. It’s visually compelling and immersive, leading to some interesting thematic connections, but it’s also a little distancing from the characters.
• When the first Paddington sequel knocked Citizen Kane (only semi-ironically) off some best-of-all-time lists, maybe that was a cue for the filmmakers to quit while they were ahead. Paddington in Peru never hits Paddington 2‘s heights, or even those of the first film, but it’s silly and charming and sweet enough that it never feels wholly unnecessary.

I also rewatched Wild Things, which I think Roger Ebert described accurately (and admiringly) as “lurid trash.”

Last week, I watched 7 movies:

• There’s a lot to like in Sword of Trust, with a strong performance from Maron and an improvised feel that often lends the movie a likable, laidback quality. That doesn’t always work in its favor, however, as the movie can sometimes lean into naturalism at the expense of jokes and any plot development. But it’s a fun idea with some playfully observed characters.
• The Long Dumb Road is an amiable enough road trip, with interesting if not always likable (or even fully drawn out) characters, though its lack of direction doesn’t always feel like an asset.
• It’s an interesting tactic, making your central character an unlikable dimwitted manchild, but that might be the most interesting thing about Most Likely to Murder has some fun with observing that character, and to its credit allows him some growth, but that still means hanging out with a dumb likable character for the whole movie.

• I’m not sure if The Voices is too quirky or not quirky enough, but despite some fun moments and a good performance from Reynolds, this dark comedy never entirely worked for me.
• Stephen King himself has called Graveyard Shift his least favorite adaptation of his work. While I think there have been worse—some of which King has even taken a more active hand in—this one is definitely not very good. The movie belabors its setup, then it squanders any scares it might have left with confused action and lack of character development.
• Same Time, Next Year would probably feel hokey and contrived even it didn’t also feel so dated. The two leads, Burstyn especially, do their best to elevate the material, but there’s only so much character the conceit of the movie will allow.
• Orson Welles’ The Trial is visually stunning and inventive and absolutely feels to its core Kafkaesque, but that can also lead to it feel confusing and claustrophobic.

I also enjoyed a re-watch of Hanna.

• I’m glad that Hollywood Shuffle exists. It has some important things to say, and it’s not infrequently very funny. But I’m also inclined to agree with Roger Ebert, who wrote in his review: “The story behind ‘Hollywood Shuffle’ is more thrilling than anything on the screen.
• By nearly all objective metrics, Nomads is a bad movie. The problem is, it’s not very badly made. John McTiernan, for all his many faults, would, right after this, go on to direct in a row three of the greatest action blockbuster action movies ever made. Nomads is deeply flawed, confusing on every level, and yet it’s also—maybe because of that confusion as much as in spite of it—strangely compelling.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger has called Red Sonja “the worst film I have ever made.” I don’t think it’s that bad—has he not seen The Expendables or Batman & Robin?—and there’s maybe just a hint of misogyny to the suggestion that it is, considering how Brigitte Nielsen is much more the center of the film than Schwarzenegger’s extended cameo. But yeah, Red Sonja is a pretty terrible movie, from its wooden acting to its extremely cheap-looking sets. It might have some hokey charm if it wasn’t also so boring. I mean, Schwarzenegger was wrong, but he wasn’t that wrong.

• The Age of Adaline gets a lot better midway through, with the introduction of Harrison Ford’s character (and Ford himself as a screen presence), but overall the movie is still clumsily structured, often emotionally distant, and filled to the brim with sometimes tedious voiceover. It plays like a film based on a novel, with a lot of character development and story details unfortunately left on the adaptation-room floor, and yet it’s somehow an original screenplay.
• Freaky Tales isn’t exactly deep, and it has a mean, gory streak that’s occasionally less than pleasant, but overall, it’s a very fun movie.
• Black Bag is perhaps a little too cold and precise, a little too straightforward for all the spycraft cat-and-mouse. But it is also a very fun and expertly made exercise.

I also re-watched two very different movies: Sicario and Brotherhood of the Wolf. I enjoyed them both, even if Sicario plays a little differently in the Trump era and Brotherhood of the Wolf is all a bit too much.