I watched 6 movies last week:
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- There’s a lot of swordplay in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, but not a lot of fun. The movie isn’t entirely charmless—there are hints of sly performances all around—but the plot is meandering, and the characters are drawn so thin it’s a wonder they don’t jus shred entirely each time one of those swords lands.
- Red Sonja is a vast improvement over the 1985 version, but it’s still not very good. The script is clunky, and the effects are weak—the movie at every turn straining against its obviously low budget and looking like a cheaply produced TV pilot. Which is kind of a shame, because most of the acting is actually not bad, and there’s a potentially interesting story buried beneath all the clanging swords and chainmail.
- There’s a little of the “bury your gays” trope running through The History of Sound, which is maybe unfortunate, but I don’t think works against the film too much, and to its credit isn’t its focus so much as the beautiful, patient, and tenderly acted love story at the center of the film.
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- Your mileage may vary with Grace of My Heart, depending on what you think of the songs—which to me, with maybe just one or two exceptions, are just fine, but rarely the equal of the songs from the eras which they’re emulating. And while I think the performances are all good, even when the characters they’re in service of border on parody, the movie simply throws too much at you, tries to span so many decades of popular music, that no stories or characters ever feel in any way developed.
- Terrence Stamp and Samantha Eggar are good in The Collector, but I’m also not sure there’s a lot more to say about the film than that.
- Brian Tallerico rightly points out that Eddington is designed to be divisive and provocative, adding that “even if you hate it, it’s kind of done its job.” And, well, fair enough, I suppose, and mission accomplished, because I really did not enjoy the movie. I can admire the skill with which it’s made, the strength of its performances, but in the end it felt like just an unpleasant, hollow, and even borderline irresponsible exercise.
I also re-watched The Goonies, which is just such an indelible childhood touchstone, and Galaxy of Terror…which is not. There’s a lot that’s really fun about the latter—the cast isn’t bad, Cameron’s production design is legitimately really good, and Corman was a genius at stretching a dollar—but ooh boy, there’s a lot that’s less than great about it. But yeah, of the two, I much prefer the former.