I watched just 4 movies last week:
 |
 |
 |
 |
- Though not without ambition, Lucy in the Sky is a terrible movie. It’s distracted by camera trickery almost constantly, and it strands its actors in ponderous dialogue and a confused premise. You can see director Noah Hawley attempting some of things that have worked well for him in prestige television, none of which work here at all to serve either the story or the characters. And it’s all so very loosely based on the real life of former astronaut Lisa Nowak that you have to wonder why they even bothered.
- I’m not sure Thunderbolts* is my favorite Marvel movie, but it’s definitely in the top ten, maybe even the top five, and it’s easily better than most of the others I’ve seen recently. A lot of that is down to the acting—Florence Pugh in particular is very good—but also because the movie is actually about something—in this case, depression—and has a beginning, middle, and end, rather than simply trying to set up the next installment in the MCU.
- There is so much to like about The Life of Chuck and the movie’s strange and sometimes unsettling joys, but it also very much feels like what it is: a novella padded out to feature length. The movie just kind of ends. And while it doesn’t leave anything necessarily unexplained, it doesn’t do a particularly good job of tying its disparate threads together.
- If you’ve never seen Fire and Ice, imagine what a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta might look like. The movie they made is exactly the movie you are imagining right now. It’s often visually interesting, almost charming, in the way that a lot of Bakshi’s rotoscoped animated films almost can’t help but be, but what little story you’ll find is so repetitive and juvenile.
But I also re-watched 3 other movies:
- A Man for All Seasons—a movie which featured heavily in my Catholic high school curriculum, but which I don’t think I’ve rewatched since then. The acting and period spectacle all still very much hold up, though I may be slightly less sure of Thomas More’s principled stand as I was a teenager.
- The Big Lebowski—another movie I hadn’t seen in decades, but also one that has so permeated meme and bro culture since then, I worried I might not enjoy it as much. I needn’t have worried.
- Twilight—a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The reason to see the film is to observe how relaxed and serene Paul Newman is before the camera….It’s sad to see all that assurance used in the service of a plot so worn and mechanical.