I watched 6 movies last week:
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- The sadly departed Sam Neill is easily the best thing in The Final Conflict (subsequently known as The Omen III), but I’m afraid I can’t go as far as to say that his performance in it is good. There are brief moments in the movie, and in Neill’s performance, when it feels like maybe something interesting is going to happen, but nothing interesting ever does, and the movie just peters out at the end.
- The violence in Is God Is isn’t cathartic in the way you might expect a revenge thriller to be—indeed, as Cortlyn Kelly of Roger Ebert.com put it, “it looks so warm, playful, and inviting outside, but the air is chilled and urges us to retreat to where we came from.” And yet the movie is sharp and unflinching, and the performances are really great.
- I had a lot of fun watching Demons 2, but that’s not because it’s a good movie—because it is most decidedly not. It’s deeply silly, though I’m not sure how much anyone involved in making the movie understood that. I think I had more fun with it than the first movie, which I don’t remember liking much at all, but really only in the “so bad it’s good” kind of way.
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- Forbidden Fruits has some genuinely clever and funny bits scattered throughout, and a terrific cast, but it does not come together as anything in the end. There’s some really great writing here, but also some really bad writing as well.
- Obsession does exactly what it says on the tin, but it does it in some really unexpected and often uncomfortable ways. By turns darkly funny and deeply disturbing, with a fantastically unsettling performance by relative newcomer Inde Navarrette.
- Penny Serenade takes some surprisingly depressing turns, and risks careening off into melodrama, but both Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are very good in it.
I also rewatched They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, which is a bleak but fantastic movie, and Mothra, which is fun but, honestly? Could use more Mothra.