I watched 6 movies last week:
 |
 |
 |
- There’s a thick thread of melancholy running through An Autumn Afternoon. But then, there’s melancholy in almost all of Ozu’s movies, and he explores many of the same themes—the passing of a generation, love and marriage—with the same quiet grace that he does elsewhere. I don’t know that this is his most melancholic, or if it’s just the knowledge that it was also his last film, made the year after his mother died, and the year before he did.
- Zabriskie Point undeniably is widely considered Michelangelo Antonioni’s worst film. And while it sometimes looks undeniably good, with the director’s meticulous eye for visual composition and cinematography, the critics at the time—like Roger Ebert, who called it “such a silly and stupid movie”—were absolutely right.
- Mr. Vampire is just such delightfully silly fun.
 |
 |
 |
- Touki Bouki is perhaps most interesting as a time capsule to early 1970s Senegal, but the direction and editing is often daring and engaging all on its own.
- There are some real ways in which Girl with Hyacinths, and the tropes that it plays with, are very dated. And yet, for a movie made in 1950, it’s exceptionally daring, treating these subjects, beginning with suicide, very honestly and humanely. If this were an American film of that era, I would be shocked by its candor and compassion—to say nothing of its flouting of the Hays’ Code.
- The mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Predatorfranchise is possibly the worst thing about it, second only to the insistence on connecting it to the mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Alien franchise. And yet, while Predator: Badlands does both of those things, it’s overall very entertaining—knowing when not to take itself too seriously, offering some fun action set-pieces, and actually having a beginning, middle, and end.
I also rewatched Memoirs of an Invisible Man, which I think is far from perfect, but I think also underrated. Chevy Chase, however difficult he reportedly was to work with, is genuinely good in the movie, and certainly his instinct that the less comedic elements in the story were the more compelling ones was spot on, even if it often put him at odds with a lot of other people involved in developing the script.
I also rewatched Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), even though it’s only been three months since I first saw it. My opinion remains unchanged: it’s not a very good movie, largely boring, but occasionally Christopher Lee or Boris Karloff pops out, and that’s nice.