I watched 7 movies last week:
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- Jay Kelly is frustrating, because while it’s reasonably well written and acted, it’s also very shallow. Clooney coasts on his charm, and he’s well paired with Sandler, but the movie doesn’t have a lot to say beyond “famous people are kinda weird, huh?” There’s potential here, to actually invesigate the sadness beneath that charm—I don’t want to disqualify the movie simply because it maybe asks you to feel sorry for a wildly famous and rich character—but the movie stops short of really doing that.
- Ghostkeeper doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and you really have to guess at what’s happening near the end, but it really turns its cheapness and simple location into real virtues for a while, with a surprisingly creepy and haunted feel.
- Diary of a Mad Housewife wouldn’t work at all without the central performance by Carrie Snodgrass. It doesn’t always work very well even with it—the movie is dated and often cartoonish—but she’s easily the best reason to watch.
- Silkwood doesn’t fall into any of the traps or cliches of a thriller, and that’s dow to Mike Nichols’ direction and the peformances, espeically Meryl Streep, which just allow us to observe these characters and this story.
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- Stallone’s Judge Dredd isn’t very good, but it also isn’t bad enough to be very interesting. It’s 90 minutes of a lot of shouting, some decent but underused set design, and not much else.
- Give Hallow Road credit, it’s very tense for most of its runtime. And that might have been entertaining enough, if the movie had just been a short claustrophobic psychological drama. But, as Matt Zoller Seitz writes, the movie then swerves into “trying on various genre identities to see how they feel,” and none of them feel particularly good. There’s a taut thriller wrestling with moral decisions hiding underneath it all—not necessarily a novel morality play, but an entertaining one, at least—but it crashes into whatever it is by the end.
- Eddie Muller reportedly said that Edmond O’Brien’s performance in D.O.A. “had more animation than Daffy Duck.” He wasn’t wrong. I don’t think the character or story work at all, beyond the basic twist of a man investigating his own murder, but O’Brien’s over-the-top performance is the main compelling reason to keep watching.
I also re(re)watched the delightfully gory Re-Animator.