I watched 6 movies last week:
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- I Love Boosters is wonderfully weird and biting and constantly and colorfully inventive.
- An unconvincing and dated melodrama, Madame X nonetheless offers an often very strong lead performance by Lana Turner.
- There were moments, even along the way, even when it was being a sly and well-observed comedy, when I was concerned that I wasn’t going to end up liking The Invite, when I was worried that comedy wasn’t going to be service of anything, or we were just going to watch these characters be awkward with one another. But as the movie went on, it took unexpected turns, revealed surprising depths, offered genuinely affecting performances, and I really liked it a lot by the end.
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- Trapped sometimes feels like a weird mix of film noir and 1950s educational film, but it’s relatively short and leans more heavily (and more interestingly) towards the noir.
- The Christophers is a little slight—and there are moments, particularly close to the end, when it could probably stand to be a little less so—but stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel are good together, and there are moments of unexpected tenderness and humor between their characters.
- The Dr. Kildare movies are all a little hokey and dated, but, for me, that might be part of their charm. Dr. Kildare Goes Home is no exception, but it benefits enormously from having a single, simple story to follow and a couple of genuinely good jokes.
I also rewatched The Curse of Frankenstein, which is fun Hammer Horror, with a strong single-minded performance from Peter Cushing.
I also rewatched all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which are great fun, and probably still some of the best movies that the MCU has produced. James Gunn does rely on some of the same tricks, like unexpected needle drops to sell the emotion of a scene through music, but he’s very good at that. It was also a little weird watching the third one without any of the crossover stuff in mind. There are three years between the first two movies, but six between the last two, and a whole lot of plot shakes out in the Infinity War/Endgame movies, which I didn’t rewatch. (Though I did finally watch the Holiday Special, which came out the year before Vol. 3.) It’s not a weirdness that really affects the final movie, which remains a lovely end to Gunn’s short tenure at Marvel and to the little universe he created, but I’d have been completely lost if I’d only ever watched these and none of the rest of the MCU.