Last week, I watched 24 movies. That’s maybe a lot—some might argue too many.
- Your mileage may vary depending on your fondness for ’90s trash, but that’s really all The Gingerbread Man is. A little late to the game for John Grisham adaptations, this one isn’t even based on a book, but a discarded manuscript, and it kind of shows. The movie presses over-qualified actors into a lazy plot and not altogether convincing Southern accents, and while Altman’s considerable skill as a director is evident—if only because it’s easy to imagine this going completely off the rails with a less competent lead—his trademark overlapping dialogue seems ill-suited to a suspense thriller like this.
- Ganja & Hess isn’t necessarily a coherent narrative, or even an expertly made film, but there is something compelling about it—not least for its representation in horror of black filmmakers and characters.
- Train Dreams may not appeal to anyone looking for a tidier or more straightforward narrative, or wanting something to connect all its loose threads, beyond the fact that a life largely is loose threads. But I found it genuinely beautiful, sad and elegiac, anchored in a wonderful performance from Joel Edgerton.
- I heard Patton Oswalt describe While the City Sleeps as a “rough draft of what Hitchcock did with Psycho,” in that it explores some of the luridly psychological themes, but maybe not quite as well. It’s an interesting movie, with a strong cast, maybe leaning closer to film noir than the proto-slasher Hitchcock delivered, but it doesn’t necessarily hang together well.
- “Is Verhoeven’s explicit sexualization of religion [in Benedetta] a shallow provocation,” asked critic Brian Tallerico, “or a deep analysis of how implicit gender bias within institutions of faith only leads to violence and abuse? I’m honestly not entirely sure.” Honestly, me neither. It’s a compelling movie, and probably one that only Paul Verhoeven could have made, but what it’s trying to say isn’t always very clear.
- Blue Chips, wrote Roger Ebert, “projects a certain cynicism even in the midst of its bedrock morality. The message seems to be that although one man can take a stand, the system has been too corrupt for too long to change.” That maybe makes the movie sound less fun than it can sometimes be, or undersells the strength of Nolte’s performance as that one man.
- Black Angel isn’t a terrific film noir, but it does have a devilishly fun turn by Peter Lorre and a legitimately interesting twist.
- Descendent is a little disappointing in the end, not quite landing the thematic connections it’s aiming for, but it’s very creepy and unsettling all along the way, with a really strong performance from Ross Marquand.
- I don’t know why I expected—or maybe just hoped for—more from Jurassic World: Rebirth, given how little I enjoy most of the series, especially these late legacy sequels. (Even Spielberg’s original isn’t much of a touchstone for me.) But I was kind of amazed at how much of a nothingraptor the whole experience is—competently directed, full of over-qualified actors, but with such a paper-thin script and barely there characters. And if you’re just going to lazily remake one of the earlier sequels, why would you choose The Lost World, one of the worst ones?
- Vernon, Florida is interesting, full of philosophizing eccentrics, but I’m not sure what it has to say beyond a nonjudgmental “here are some interesting oddballs.”
- Curse of the Crimson Altar (alternately known as The Crimson Cult) isn’t a very good movie, but occasionally Boris Karloff and/or Christopher Lee are in, which elevates it momentarily.
- There’s probably more style than substance in Romeo Is Bleeding, but there’s a lot of style, as we watch a rapidly unraveling Gary Oldman collide with the feral force of nature that is Lena Olin.
- Quentin Tarantino once selected Pretty Maids All in a Row as one of his choices for Sight & Sound magazine’s top 10 greatest films of all time. He had to be trolling them, because the movie is just awful. It’s also deeply odd—a high school sexploitation/slasher movie comedy from the director of Barbarella, written by Gene Roddenberry, starring Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, and Roddy McDowall—and if your brain didn’t explode halfway into that description, you’re made of stronger stuff than me. The movie is exceptionally icky, confused in its tone, and interesting only as a glimpse into 1970s cringe and the embarrassing depths to which Rock Hudson’s later career sunk.
- The Toxic Avenger is a lot of silly fun, but maybe has a little too much affection for the original, or is made with more craft and skill than this kind of movie deserves.
- William Powell is, unsurprisingly, very charming in the otherwise kind of slight Private Detective 62.
- The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is colorful and quaintly charming—and in 1962 the widescreen Cinerama might have seemed genuinely thrilling—but it also drags in almost all of its segments, and that widescreen format feels more like a gimmick whose time has come and gone.
- La Antena is interesting, often striking and playful in its imagery, even if I’m not entirely sure what that imagery is in service of, beyond a winking replication of silent movie aesthetics.
- This is an interesting time to remake Good Night, and Good Luck, and it’s interesting to cast Clooney in a different role than the one he played in the movie. But I’m not entirely convinced the stage production adds anything to the original version, and more likely detracts, despite good staging and a very talented cast.
- The New York Times wrote at the time that The Oblong Box “illustrate[s] once again that horror can be made to be quaint, laughable and unconvincing at modest prices.” It’s an altogether disappointing and muddled concoction, maybe because it draws little from Edgar Allan Poe besides a title, which even Vincent Price and Christopher Lee—never together—can’t save.
- Everyone else around her is also good, but Dead of Winter really rests on Emma Thompson’s shoulders, and she really carries it as the aw-shucks Barb.
- You don’t see a lot of movies as smart and as dumb as Flight from Destiny, which has poses some interesting philosophical questions but then tackles them in some of the silliest ways. It helps that Thomas Mitchell’s performance is so engaging.
- Caught Stealing has a nastier streak than I was expecting, and even when the violence is cartoonish it’s very bloody, at times even brutal. Still, I had more fun than not with it.
- Bring Her Back can be a tough watch—and I imagine would be more so if I had children of my own. But it’s also genuinely creepy and scary, and there’s a lot to really like about it.
- At the time The Rounders came out, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “The plot is thin, the comedy rather forced and the casting is unbelievable but at least it’s a pleasant change from all those psychological westerns and attempted satires on same.” And yeah…the central, maybe only, joke in the movie seems to be “Glenn Ford and Peter Fonda get thrown off of horses,” and yet it’s not an altogether unpleasant diversion.
I also rewatched three movies:
I think The Social Network continues to work because it doesn’t pretend Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a destructive asshole. It’s kind of a strange rewatch given what we now know about some of the people involved—Armie Hammer on screen, Kevin Spacey behind it, for instance—and I jokingly wondered while watching it if we don’t need a legacy sequel about how much more terrible Facebook has gotten in the 15 years since. But it’s snappily written, well acted, and very well directed.
It Happened One Night is just a charming delight, with such fantastic on-screen chemistry between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.
When I saw Sphere in theaters in my 20s, I was mostly just disappointed in the ending. I think maybe it’s a sign of personal growth that I’m now disappointed in the whole thing. I don’t think it’s a terrible movie, though it is largely derivative of other, better ones, and this was not a particularly rewarding rewatch.
