I watched just 5 movies last week.
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- The Wrecking Crew doesn’t always dig deep as a documentary, but there are some interesting perspectives—I particularly liked hearing from Brian Wilson and members of the Monkees—and, if nothing else, there’s a lot of really fantastic music.
- When I watched Napoleon Dynamite a couple of years ago, I mused, “There’s got to be a term for a movie this rich in quirky detail that also manages to not be funny in any meaningful way. Maybe ‘Less Anderson’?” Anyway, I watched Nacho Libre, and my opinion of the this writer/director team has not changed. It’s a very unfunny movie.
- Night Train to Terror is maybe the most confusing horror movie I’ve ever seen. You can almost understand why the people who tried to make the three original films thought they were on to something before it all fell apart, and you can almost see why somebody else thought it was worth trying to salvage what they had into some kind of low-rent anthology film. But what they had was laughably unfinished, so it never holds together in any coherent way. And the framing device, in which God and the Devil debate the nature of mankind while a teenage band of breakdancers parties around them on a train bound for parts unknown…hell, even just saying that, I can’t imagine what they were thinking.
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- Beast does exactly what it says on the tin. It doesn’t waste any time getting to the action, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and gives you just enough of the “dad trying to reconnect with his kids” storyline to make you care a little when things get tense. It’s unremarkable, but it’s not unentertaining.
- Made it, Ma! Top of the world! In a review of White Heat, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that the movie “feels less like a traditional gangster or cops-and-robbers picture than a criminal cousin of an old Universal Studios horror picture, about a dangerous creature for whom you feel pity, but only up to a point, and who can only roam the countryside for so long, because society can’t abide a threat of such magnitude.”
I also re-watched Moonraker, for no particular reason. It’s hardly Roger Moore’s best outing as James Bond, but Michael Lonsdale is good as the villain Hugo Drax, and the movie is at its best when it embraces the camp.