Last week, I watched 6 movies:
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- Can’t Stop the Music isn’t a particularly good movie, even as a vehicle for the Village People, but it’s goofily endearing all the same. That’s mostly thanks to it being such a schlocky time capsule of 1980—which is why it’s not hard at all to see why it failed so badly in that moment—but I think you also can’t underestimate the charms of Valerie Perrine’s performance.
- Lacombe, Lucien is an interesting take on some of the same ideas I saw recently in This Land Is Mine. That movie takes place mid-World War II, and more about reclaiming the nobility of the human spirit than the ugly violence we often trade it for, but both are about collaboration, and why many would choose it willingly, or without thinking.
- The Twelve Chairs is very amusing. I don’t know that I’d put it in the top half of Mel Brooks’ filmography, but I’d probably at least put it in the top half of the bottom half.
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- The Luckiest Man in America feels more fictionalized than it needs to be, which sometimes doesn’t work in its favor, but the cast, particularly Hauser, are the real draw.
- Ballerina doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really well. It plays heavily on the worldbuilding mythology of the John Wick series, which has always been that series’ weakest part, but it also plays to the series’ strengths with some fun, kickass fight scenes.
- I had a lot of fun watching Troll with the #HorrorWatch crew live on Bluesky, but that isn’t because the movie is particularly good. It’s one of two movies I can remember really frightening me as a child, enough that I never watched more than a few scattered minutes of it. But seeing the movie now, decades later, all I could think was: This? This is what frightened me? The movie has such a weird tone, neither scary in the least but also not exactly kid-friendly, so that might account for it. And it has its goofy charms, I suppose.
In honor the recently departed Terrence Stamp, I also rewatched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, probably for the first time in thirty years. It’s not a perfect movie, and not everything about it speaks to where we are today, but Stamp’s performance is one of the best things about it.