- The music in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is pretty great, on the rare occasion it’s given a chance to play. Problem is, there’s this whole movie and plot that keep getting in the way, both of which feel like they’ve fizzled out before they’ve even attempted to build up any steam. And it certainly doesn’t help that most of that plot is taken up by maybe my least favorite Jennifer Jason Leigh performance ever.
- Roger Ebert called Full Moon in Blue Water “such a likable film in so many little ways that you want to forgive it for being so bad in so many big ones.” He wasn’t wrong that the movie has a few very modest charms, in spite of itself—namely, its two leads—but it’s such a confused and contrived mess, no matter how much Hackman and Garr struggle desperately to pull three-dimensional characters from the wreckage. By the end, I had almost no idea what was supposed to be happening, nor did I want to.
- I think The Shrouds is the best movie David Cronenberg has made in years—maybe one of his best ever. It’s strange and unsettling, obviously deeply personal and informed by the grief over his own wife’s death, both elegiac and absurd, and playfully exploring some very deep and interesting ideas, with a fantastic central performance by Vincent Cassel.
- There’s a sadness that hangs over La Strada, almost from the very first frame, and certainly to the last.
- Opus is tense fun for a while, keeping your interest for as long as you don’t know where any of it is going—until you realize the movie is going only exactly where you think it is, and until it stumbles badly at the end and you realize it doesn’t know where it’s going whatsoever. It’s buoyed by some good performances, particularly from Malkovich, but the weirdness ends up just being weird for its own sake, and the movie is very confused about what if anything it’s trying to say by the end.
- Jaws is one the best movies ever made, which is the main thing that makes Jaws @ 50 watchable. Despite archival and some more recent interviews, the documentary hardly feels like “the definitive inside story” it bills itself as. Full of as many aimless digressions as amusing anecdotes, it’s not particularly revealing or novel and mostly just makes you want to rewatch the original film. Which is probably the only reason it exists in the first place.
- The Breaking Point does what it says on the tin, but it does so with tension and style and several good very performances.
I also rewatched Bubba Ho-Tep, because after rewatching Phantasm last week, I was in the mood to revisit a good Don Coscarelli movie. This one is very silly, but also good fun.
