I watched another 6 movies last week:
- For a movie without a single likable character—and a fairly unlikable title character—Listen Up Philip is a fun and intelligent character study.
- Love & Basketball does exactly what it says on the tin, but Lathan and Epps are just wonderful together, and it’s a genuinely lovely love story.
- There is a chasm between how clever Lucky Number Slevin thinks it is and how clever the movie actually is. Every now and then, a scattered line of hyper-stylized dialogue halfway lands, usually thanks only to an actor’s delivery, but each one of those moments is a very long time coming.
- You may be shocked to learn that the 1960 comedy Sex Kittens Go to College has not aged well. Although I suspect it was never very good to begin with. Dated and sexist, but also confused and never particularly funny, grasping for zaniness but never more than a strange relic from the past—and that’s even before a ten-minute sequence near the end in which a robot and a chimpanzee watch four women in a row do topless stripteases in a dream sequence. (This is a thing that actually happens in the movie, even if it was apparently never included in the American release.) The best I can say about it is that Mamie Van Doren remains reasonably likable.
- There are scattered moments of inspired beauty in The Last Time I Committed Suicide, and I think some decent performances. But it’s difficult to say how true it is to Neal Cassady’s life, and the disjointed way in which it’s told—intentionally, I suppose, mirroring Cassady’s drug-fueled writing style—makes it difficult to connect with any of it. It’s a little like being on a lazy bender with someone, occasionally surfacing for a brief moment almost like profundity.
- Cleaner is hardly the worst Die Hard knockoff, but it is very, very far from the best. Daisy Ridley gives it a fair go, and director Martin Campbell is an old hand at action movies, but there’s nothing particularly clever, well staged, or memorable about any of this.
