I watched another 6 movies last week:
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- M?rama is intense, at times very dreamlike, a beautifully shot debut from writer/director Taratoa Stappard and a fierce performance by Ari?na Osborne.
- At the time, the New York Times wrote that The Car “has all the ingredients of a parody, although someone has made the mistake of doing it straight.” It’s so very bad—not because the premise is inherently ridiculous, but because it tackles that premise in the least interesting ways possible. The effects are bad, the acting is worse, and the story hews so closely to the Jaws formula without coming close to understanding why Jaws worked.
- The Naked Kiss is incredibly frank about some very difficult subjects for a movie made in 1964. But at the same time, because it was made in 1964, it doesn’t always tackle those subjects in convincing ways and strays much further into melodrama.
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- Veronika Voss is a fascinating movie for anyone who thinks Sunset Boulevard is too much of an upper.
- Mademoiselle Fifi is a simple tale of resistance with a strong performance by Simone Simon.
- I hated The Car so much that I of course decided to watch another movie by the same screenwriters made just five years later. Murder by Phone is marginally better—if only because the effects, while ridiculously bad, are at least not cheap, and because the acting, while trapped in poorly formed characters and a confused and nonsensical plot, is at least mostly consistent. But it’s still a very lousy movie.
I also rewatched The Shawshank Redemption, which I’ve seen a bunch of times, but not start to finish recently; Halloween II, which benefits by probably being the least bad of the bad Halloween movies, but which is still very bad; and The Night of the Hunter, which is just a really fantastic, sometimes almost surreal and dreamlike, thriller.