I watched 5 movies last week:
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- It’s tempting to call State of Grace a forgotten gem, but it’s also a tarnished one, whose flaws I suspect have become more pronounced as even more films have trafficked in the same cliches. “What’s best about [the movie],” Roger Ebert wrote at the time, “is what’s unique about it,” while acknowledging that it “gets less and less original, the more complicated it becomes.” There is a lot to like about it, from the complicated characters to the strong performances, which is why it’s all the more disappointing when it falls apart in a hail of gunfire.
- “Mike Leigh’s films realize,” wrote Roger Ebert about the touching but low-stakes Career Girls, “that for most people, most days, life consists of the routine of earning a living, broken by fleeting thoughts of where our efforts will someday take us–financially, romantically, spiritually or even geographically. We never arrive in most of those places, but the mental images are what keep us trying.”
- I don’t know if Under Capricorn is Alfred Hitchcock’s worst movie, but it’s a strong contender. Decent performances mired in long, talky shots and largely uninteresting characters.
- At first, We Who Are About to Die seems like the only thing it has going for it is that title. But then it goes surprisingly hard on the prison scenes, making you actually care about these men society has condemned and thrown away.
- There are a few moments when The Astronaut builds tension and suspense…and if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all of those moments. You’ll almost certainly clock the twist ending before it comes, and the fact that it only works as a twist robs it of the weight the movie tries to place on it. Kate Mara tries her best to create some kind of character from her performance, but the movie itself never works.
I also rewatched 1977’s House, which I always remember is going to be weird, but always forget just how weird. This is my third time watching it, and while I’ve never used psychedelics, I always feel like I have after I’ve watched the movie. “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)?” asked the Criterion Collection. “As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava? Any of the above will do for this hallucinatory head trip…”