Last week, I watched 8 movies:
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- Like the previous two films in the series, Wake Up Dead Man is a fun murder mystery full of outsized characters, but I think what I liked most about it was its honest examination of faith and service, what a life actually dedicated to god’s love and compassion would look like.
- Keeper is underbaked in its story and characters, and it feels more like an excuse for Osgood Perkins to work again with Tatiana Maslany than a fully formed movie. But you can’t exactly fault him for that, because she’s good again here, in a committed performance that makes the whole thing work better than it should. There also a lot of very surreal and creepy imagery, and even if the movie isn’t anywhere near the equal of some of Perkins’ other horror films, it’s not uninteresting.
- Roofman takes an odd tonal shift late in the film, which is probably necessary—given the real man it’s about—and which I think lends it a little more depth than the goofy comedy it’s been up until then. But it can’t help but feel like a tonal shift.
- Your mileage may vary with F1, depending on how much you love, or understand, Formula 1 as a sport. (Personally, I couldn’t really track more than “fast cars go fast,” even if it does seem oddly more complicated than that.) A lot of the racing is undeniably kinetic, even thrilling, even on a small screen, and there’s a lot of easygoing charm to the performances. But you can see where the story is headed from a mile lap away, the racial politics (which the movie doesn’t really acknowledge) are tired, and the fast cars aren’t nearly enough to carry the day.
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- Man Finds Tape does some creepy and interesting things, making not altogether unfamiliar ground feel like strange and unknown territory. It doesn’t necessarily do a lot with its premise, but it’s an interesting use of the found-footage genre.
- One Battle After Another is a lot of fun, not afraid to take some very silly, and then some very serious, swings. It has the feel of a movie I want to see again to fully appreciate, but I liked it a lot on this first viewing.
- The Long Walk is a very good adaptation of Stephen King’s original novel, which means it’s an exceptionally bleak, and not particularly subtle, experience. But what King’s, and the movie’s, metaphor perhaps lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its gut-punch simplicity, and the very compelling performances byCooper Hoffman and David Jonsson.
- Megadoc doesn’t necessarily explain why Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is such a bad movie, but it maybe offers some insight into why it’s the kind of bad movie it is. (It would be shocking, after seeing Mike Figgis’ behind-the-scenes footage, to discover that a good movie had come out of any of this.) Figgis’ documentary obviously calls to mind the earlier Hearts of Darkness about Coppola’s difficulties shooting Apocalypse Now, but here seems much more at a distance, admittedly focusing on only the handful of actors and crew who gave him the most access. (Which probably means too much Shia LaBeouf, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by how candid and owning up to past bad behavior he was, even if I still very much dislike his performance and he still seems a little like a method ass.) Figgis also stops short of the reaction to the film, ending as the curtain rises on its premiere at Cannes as if everything that came after was another crowning achievement for Coppola. It’s an interesting look at what might have been, but it’s not a redemption for Coppola’s last film. I’m glad both exist—one as a crazy passion project, the other a testament to why sometimes passion alone isn’t enough—but I’m not sure I’d ever find reason to rewatch either.
However, I did rewatch Eyes Without a Face, which I did not remember well, and certainly did not remember being this hauntingly sad. As – Guillermo del Toro told the Criterion Channel about the film, “At the core of every horror that film I’ve ever loved, there’s a poem in it.”