I watched 6 movies last week:
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- A Touch of Zen is a lush and beautifully shot movie, full of fantastic stunts and wirework.
- To Be or Not to Be is such a clever and well-constructed satire, walking such a fine line between pathos and laugh-out-loud jokes, with a phenomenal performance by Jack Benny.
- I think I can safely say I have never seen a movie quite like The Color of Pomegranates before. This is not a narrative so much as a collection of images—vivid, striking, and strange.
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- There is a lot to appreciate about The Brave Little Toaster, but there’s also a lot to reveal how much feature animation changed just two years later with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Not everything here works, or works well together, and while the movie is certainly a gem, it’s a very rough one.
- I don’t know that I necessarily wanted a longer movie from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but I absolutely wanted a lot of the character beats, conflict, and plot that was obviously excised to hit its current run time. There’s a lot to like here, from the retro-futuristic set design to the cast themselves, but there’s a lot more than feels underbaked and not given enough room to breathe.
- Sister Midnight isn’t the movie I expected it to be, and that’s in no way the movie’s fault, but I’m not entirely sure it’s successful as the movie it finally decides to be. Still, I can’t fault the movie for not making bold choices, and it’s largely held together by Radhika Apte’s strong performance.
I also re-watched Trilogy of Terror, which I think succeeds largely on the strength of Karen Black’s different performances. While I agree that “Zuni fetish doll” of the final sequence likely would have freaked me out if I’d seen it on 1975 television, none of the movie’s stories, including that third one, are especially well developed. There are some fun twists, some more telegraphed than others, but the whole thing is mostly just slightly above average for a TV movie of the week.