I watched 5 movies last week:
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- Kundun doesn’t necessarily approach its story as a believer, and isn’t necessarily hagiography either—a fundamental belief of Tibetan Buddhism is that the Dalai Lama is a man, albeit the reincarnated spirit of the enlightened bodhisattva—but it is very much a lives of the saints portrait of that man and his biography, and as such keeps the audience very much at a distance. The movie is quiet and contemplative, often gorgeous and very well made, but it lacks the energy of so much of Scorsese’s other work, even his other religious movies.
- Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend had a well-documented troubled production, with test audiences demanding a bloodier horror movie than what Craven delivered, and then the studio demanding cuts when Craven made those changes. The result is an awkward mess. The plot holds together better than might be expected, with only a few spots of clearly missing characters or scenes, but it’s not a plot that’s handled particularly well, and which ends in just the most ridiculous way possible. I haven’t seen all of Craven’s movies, and the ones I have seen admittedly weren’t all perfect—they can’t all be Elm Street or Scream, right?—but I think I can safely say without fear that Deadly Friend is easily the worst one I’ve seen.
- “Sometimes you can feel the artistry in a movie that doesn’t work,” Matt Zoller Seitz wrote about Sacrifice, and boy howdy was he not wrong. It’s too weird and ambitious and stacked with talent to not be interesting, with some occasionally very funny or clever beats, but it never remotely works as a movie.
- You may be shocked to learn that a movie with a title like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is more than a little dated. The three leads—Grant, Loy, and Temple—are all charming, but it’s very much a movie stuck in late 1940s social norms and slang, and as such the comedy hasn’t aged quite so gracefully.
- How you feel about Anguish may depend on how clever you think its piled-on, nesting-doll meta narrative is. Personally, I found it almost immediately tiring, when it became apparent that was all the movie was going to do.
I also rewatched 4 movies:
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- Silver Bullet: I liked it a lot less than the version I hazily remember watching when I was maybe ten or eleven. Some of that was the makeup and effects, which aren’t the worst I’ve seen but aren’t very good, but it’s also because it holds together better as a collection of scenes—hence the hazy memory—than as a narrative plot.
- Halloween III: Sure, it isn’t a good Halloween movie, but really, only the first Halloween is a good Halloween movie. This entry is sometimes ridiculous, sweaty and low-budget, but it’s really creepy and always a lot of fun.
- Contact: I’ve probably rewatched this more than once before, but it’s still a great movie, probably one of Zemeckis’ best, and certainly his best movie from the 1990s. At the same time, it is very much a ’90s movie—integrating real television news and media personalities, to say nothing of then president Bill Clinton, lends the film a real verisimilitude, one of its key strengths, but that also makes it feel weirdly dated, or at least out of time, in some respects.
- Night of the Living Dead: Just a great horror movie, one that feels so much like a turning point in the genre, modernizing the zombie or ghoul, while also birthing a subgenre and everything that was to follow.