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Things went a little sideways a couple of weeks ago, and while they seem to be returning to as close to normal again as can be hoped, in the last two weeks I’ve watched only two movies, and re-watched a couple more.

• There are a lot of really lovely performances and moments in The Heiress, but Olivia de Havilland is especially fantastic in every scene.
• While it’s true that Marie Antoinette isn’t the place to look for historical fact, doing so seems to be missing not just the point of the film, but also the joys of Kirsten Dunst’s performance. These sorts of criticisms, Roger Ebert wrote, “would alter is fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.”
• For whatever reason, Escape from New York didn’t really click for me the first time I saw it. I don’t know if it’s that I’ve grown to appreciate John Carpenter as a filmmaker even more since then—or if it’s just that I’ve now seen what happens when this idea goes really wrong, in Escape from L.A.—but it worked a lot better for me on re-watch.
• The Muppet Movie remains a joy from top to bottom. One thing that struck me, on this re-watch, is that, as a child, I wouldn’t have recognized the wall-to-wall cameos as cameos. They were just other characters in this fantastically fun movie.

I watched 6 movies last week.

• Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is a lot of fun and talks to a lot of really interesting filmmakers—John Waters, David Lynch, George Romero, etc.—about a type of movie that doesn’t really exist anymore.
• Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist is genuinely fascinating, especially given that it’s almost nothing but an hour and a half of just Friedkin talking about the making of the movie and his career.
• I liked Memory: The Origins of Alien a lot more when it focused on the actual making of the 1979 film than when it let critics and commentators wax pretentious about its deeper meanings.

• Being Mary Tyler Moore is built largely on archival footage, so it may not offer too many surprises, but it’s nevertheless a very fond and engaging look back at a phenomenal career.
• Any insights that King on Screen has to offer seem largely accidental. The documentary lets some interesting filmmakers talk, but it also seems a little muddled about its central thesis, and it’s often more interesting in the people it doesn’t talk to—most notably King himself—or in the many adaptions it doesn’t discuss. There are interesting moments scattered throughout, but more often missed opportunities.
• Pretty As a Picture: The Art of David Lynch can’t help but feel a little dated, built so heavily on interviews conducted around the filming of his 1997 movie Lost Highway—and I’ve seen a lot of this filtered through other interviews—but it’s nonetheless an insightful and amiable look at the director’s creative process and philosophy.

I also re-watched Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables—which is an undeniably entertaining movie, but also almost complete inaccurate as a piece of historical fiction. That, along with the movie’s dubious “all you need is a cop who’s not afraid to break the law to uphold it” stuff, seemed to hit me a little more the wrong way upon re-watching.

Another week, another five movies. Here’s what I watched:

• Night Tide is a fever dream of a B-movie—some interesting visuals and a very early performance by Dennis Hopper, but not especially memorable.
• Its oddly generic title notwithstanding, The Incident is tense and unnerving, and it has a pretty remarkable, varied cast.
• Right up until its huge swing and a miss of an ending, Come True is a really effectively creepy little movie.

• Ben is bad, but also bad in very perplexing ways. I don’t remember a lot about Willard, but that at least was understandably a horror movie, whereas its sequel is all over the map. It’s not so much that the movie is never scary; it’s that it’s hard to even tell what it’s trying to do, and the movie is never interesting enough to really care.
• I wanted to like Self Reliance a lot more than I did. I like the cast a lot, and the movie plays with some smart ideas, but it’s usually more amusing than outright funny. I think the script also has some fundamental structure problems, with whole characters I’d excise or combine, for a much sharper focus. I’d like to see Jake Johnson write and direct more comedies after this, but this initial outing left me a little flat.

I also rewatched The Court Jester, in memory of Glynis Johns, who died earlier this month and was the last of the movie’s surviving main cast. It’s a movie I know I saw most, if not all, of as a child, but which also holds up remarkably well as an adult some four decades later. It’s just a pure, silly delight.

Just one week into 2024 and I’ve watched 5 movies.

• I don’t know that Living has the emotional weight of the Akira Kurosawa original (Ikiru), but it gets a lot of the details right and has a moving central performance by Bill Nighy.
• Pusher maybe seemed more daring and gritty in 1996, but even if the look and approach of the film haven’t aged perfectly well, the movie is very effective at building tension as things spiral out of control for its main character.
• There are some incredibly good performances in Foe, but only because the whole thing feels like a bunch of acting exercises gone awry and left to drag on too long. As a narrative, as any kind of cohesive story, the movie is absolutely terrible, even before it starts explaining itself like a bad Black Mirror episode or layering ending upon ending. There are some good thoughts in the film—I hesitate to call them anything as fully formed as ideas—and I can only imagine that’s what Ronan and Mescal were responding to when they offered the movie two performances it very much does not deserve.

• The Kentucky Fried Movie is just embarrassingly not funny.
• I’m not the biggest fan of The Equalizer film series—I remember almost nothing about the first one and remember only actively disliking the second—but the third one plays to the franchise’s strengths, telling an engaging and straightforward story. Maybe a little too straightforward, since the movie often feels slow and generic, and its stakes often feel more than a little low, but Denzel Washington is good in the role, as is Dakota Fanning opposite him. It feels very much like a movie I won’t remember a year from now—and I still think they missed a trick by not calling it The Threequalizer—but it’s an entertaining enough ride while you’re on it.

Here’s the roundup of the last nine movies I watched at the end of 2023:

• The 2006 Black Christmas remake is extremely bad, leaden with confusing flashbacks and indistinguishable characters, and it’s easily the worst of the three movies that bear that name.
• Oppenheimer is incredibly cinematic for a movie this long that’s largely built on testimony and public hearings.
• Polite Society is a lot of frenetic fun.

• There are some pretty good performances in Maggie Moore(s), even if it kind of feels like everybody is there as a favor to somebody else, and a few decent enough laughs, even if the whole thing feels more likea mild diversion than anything else. It often feels a lot like Fargo-lite.
• The Holdovers is a melancholic, sometimes bittersweet holiday delight.
• Dream Scenario didn’t quite come together for me in the end—and might need a repeat viewing—but it’s fun and strange, and it’s got one of the better recent Nicolas Cage performances.

• You have to give Martin Scorsese for continuing to stretch himself as a filmmaker, and for continuing to ask really difficult questions, as he does in Killers of the Flower Moon, about the nature of evil. It’s also great that he centers the film more around the Osage people—although he probably could have done so even more, not least because Lily Gladstone is fantastic in the film.
• For a movie that very deliberately offers no conclusive answers, Anatomy of a Fall is very satisfying. It’s a smart and tense puzzle whose point is that it can’t be solved.
• A Haunting in Venice is a little much at times, as Branagh plays way into the horror movie motifs and odd angles, but it’s also pretty entertaining.

I also re-watched the other two, much better versions of Black Christmas—the 1974 original and the 2019 remake. I’m maybe a little more fond of the remake, which I think does some really interesting things above being a slasher movie and has a real point of view, but the original has a really great creepy scuzziness to it. You probably couldn’t ask for two movies with ostensibly the same subject (if not plots) but with such incredibly different philosophies. Both are well worth your time, while the middle 2006 child should be locked away and forgotten.