I watched another 7 movies last week:
- Hamnet is a wonderful, often excruciatingly beautiful exploration of grief. It takes quite a while to get there, though I can’t decide if that’s by necessity, if that last hour of grief and loss would work as well if you didn’t frame it within the larger love story. The movie has some genuinely incredible performances, not least by the child actor playing the title role, and some of the most beautiful shots I’ve ever seen, especially in that final hour—so much so that I can forgive it for feeling like it’s just waiting for that hour from its very first one.
- I don’t know if I kept waiting for Smiles of a Summer Night to become more, or less, like A Little Night Music, the musical which was based on it. Still, it has several playfully fun scenes and performances, even if there’s nary a clown to be sent in anywhere.
- Oh, Nighthawks is bad. Some of that, I’m sure, is the editing, which chops out whole characters and scenes, but what’s left is so boring and dumb that it’s difficult to see how the movie might have worked even in its original cut. The movie doesn’t even make a compelling case for its title. The Washington Post movie review at the time reportedly panned the movie by calling it “what The Day of the Jackal might have looked like if filmed by the producers of Baretta.” Rutger Hauer is only occasionally compelling, Sylvester Stallone is almost purposefully not, and everyone else gets lost by the wayside.
- Dust Bunny could do with a little more inventiveness in its story and characters to match its production design, but there’s a fun visual flair through most of the film. It’s hardly the best of Bryan Fuller’s work, but he at least acquits himself reasonably well in the transition from TV to movies.
- Pete Hujar’s Day isn’t necessarily profound, beyond finding profundity in the mundane, in the simple act of two people talking to one another, its glimpse of a brief moment of 1970s New York.
- Videoheaven makes a number of interesting observations, but none that it doesn’t belabor or support with too many clips. You could easily sharpen the film’s focus by editing out a full hour of the film’s three, without sacrificing any of its history, connections, or critical appraisals.
- I can’t really recommend Lady Frankenstein—it’s a shoddy mishmash of the Mary Shelley story and some Italian gothic horror—but if you are going to watch it, you could do a lot worse than the version hosted by Elvira.
