I watched 5 movies last week:
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- Force of Nature: The Dry 2 repeats all the same problems I had with the first movie—an unsatisfying mystery too slowly pieced together through conflicting memories—but repeats fewer of the things that I thought worked well there—a sense of place, buried trauma, and a reason to care about any of the characters.
- Roger Ebert gave Robert Altman’s A Wedding three and a half stars, Gene Siskel gave it one and a half, and for the life of me I still can’t figure out which one of them I agree with. Even splitting the difference with two and half stars feels wrong, but it’s such a strange and confusing movie, juggling scenes that sometimes feel simultaneously inspired and awful, that it’s hard to know what to make of it.
- “[H]ere is a film that feels incomplete,” Roger Ebert wrote about Dead Presidents, “as if its last step is into thin air. Scene by scene you feel its skill, but you leave the theater wondering about the meaning of it all.”
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- There’s undeniably high energy in True Romance, but it grows tedious very quickly, this collision of Tony Scott aesthetics and early Quentin Tarantino shoot-em-up. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it “aesthetically corrupt,” as the Washington Post did at the time, but it is definitely a whole lot of ’90s style and over-qualified cameos in search of anything interesting to say.
- Hoppers is a little weird, in the ways it plays with anthropomorphizing (and not) the animals in it, but it’s very sweet and funny and clever.
I also rewatched both The Guest and From Russia With Love, both of which were fine, though maybe not as good as I remember either. Dan Stevens has a lot of fun playing evil in The Guest, and Maika Monroe is good playing off of him, but the movie does a lot less with its premise than I remembered. Meanwhile, From Russia With Love is almost the prototypical Bond movie a little slow in places, but it’s a little slow in places, and I don’t think it’s where they perfected the formula.