• The music in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is pretty great, on the rare occasion it’s given a chance to play. Problem is, there’s this whole movie and plot that keep getting in the way, both of which feel like they’ve fizzled out before they’ve even attempted to build up any steam. And it certainly doesn’t help that most of that plot is taken up by maybe my least favorite Jennifer Jason Leigh performance ever.
• Roger Ebert called Full Moon in Blue Water “such a likable film in so many little ways that you want to forgive it for being so bad in so many big ones.” He wasn’t wrong that the movie has a few very modest charms, in spite of itself—namely, its two leads—but it’s such a confused and contrived mess, no matter how much Hackman and Garr struggle desperately to pull three-dimensional characters from the wreckage. By the end, I had almost no idea what was supposed to be happening, nor did I want to.
• I think The Shrouds is the best movie David Cronenberg has made in years—maybe one of his best ever. It’s strange and unsettling, obviously deeply personal and informed by the grief over his own wife’s death, both elegiac and absurd, and playfully exploring some very deep and interesting ideas, with a fantastic central performance by Vincent Cassel.

• There’s a sadness that hangs over La Strada, almost from the very first frame, and certainly to the last.
• Opus is tense fun for a while, keeping your interest for as long as you don’t know where any of it is going—until you realize the movie is going only exactly where you think it is, and until it stumbles badly at the end and you realize it doesn’t know where it’s going whatsoever. It’s buoyed by some good performances, particularly from Malkovich, but the weirdness ends up just being weird for its own sake, and the movie is very confused about what if anything it’s trying to say by the end.
• Jaws is one the best movies ever made, which is the main thing that makes Jaws @ 50 watchable. Despite archival and some more recent interviews, the documentary hardly feels like “the definitive inside story” it bills itself as. Full of as many aimless digressions as amusing anecdotes, it’s not particularly revealing or novel and mostly just makes you want to rewatch the original film. Which is probably the only reason it exists in the first place.
• The Breaking Point does what it says on the tin, but it does so with tension and style and several good very performances.

I also rewatched Bubba Ho-Tep, because after rewatching Phantasm last week, I was in the mood to revisit a good Don Coscarelli movie. This one is very silly, but also good fun.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. Insofar as the movie earns anything, it earns that reputation. Roger Ebert was too kind when he called this incoherent, sleepwalking tedium “an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem, occasionally surfacing for cliches.”
• Even if I didn’t know Terry Gilliam had ever seen The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I probably could have guessed it. The movie—which, for the record, he said “captured the real spirit of the character”—is like the most Gilliamesque thing he never made. It’s delightfully silly and visually inventive in so many unexpected ways.
• Vamps is not without its cornball charm, but that’s thanks to the cast, not to any of the movie’s tired jokes or cheesy effects or shambling plot. The cast fully commits to the bit—no vampire pun intended, although that’s about the quality of the humor on display here. It’s not enough to save the movie, but there is an amiable, if somewhat halfhearted, charm to the whole thing.

• The Great Bank Hoax is exceptionally dull. There’s a decent enough idea for a comedy of errors in the basic setup, but the movie is all errors, no comedy, and there are a lot of good actors stranded in bad performances. A real waste of everyone’s time, my own included.
• There’s nothing particularly original in Ash‘s story—it would probably be a spoiler just to say what sci-fi horror movies it’s most indebted to, if not ripping off—but it’s handled with no small amount of visual style.
• Fritz Lang’s Fury isn’t necessarily subtle in what it says about mob violence, but it’s well acted and very well shot.

I also rewatched White Sands and Phantasm, although a week apart from one another, not as a double-feature. White Sands I had watched sometime in the early 2000s, when I was on something of a Mickey Rourke kick, but I remembered almost nothing about it. It’s pretty good, if a little overly complicated and not entirely satisfying, but also very much the kind of movie I could see myself completely forgetting about again for another twenty or thirty years. Meanwhile, I’d seen Phantasm a little more recently, though still almost twenty years ago at this point, and I remembered really disliking it then. I still think it’s a very bad movie in a lot of the things that matter, like story and acting and effects, but as a weird low-budget meditation on grief and nightmares—almost a surreal art piece? There’s something almost compelling there.

Another week, another six movies:

• They don’t make a lot of movies like Hooper anymore, partly because they don’t make a lot of movies the way they make movies in Hooper anymore. There’s a laid-back, if not shaggy and drunk, charm to the whole thing, but also some real pathos in Reynolds’ performance, which was one of his best.
• You can see its twists coming a mile away, and there’s more than a little cheesiness to the whole thing, but despite that—or maybe because of it—Spellbinder is an enjoyable enough little supernatural thriller.
• I had been led to believe that Punisher: War Zone was the good Punisher movie, but honestly, I’m just not seeing it. There’s a lot of over-the-top, comic-book-style violence, but it doesn’t lend itself to much of anything and isn’t entertaining in its own right.

• An early, Dutch-language war film from Paul Verhoeven, Soldier of Orange is often tense and thrilling.
• I might have enjoyed Days of Thunder more if it had anything like characters, a story, or even particularly interesting (and not just fetishistically photographed), racing. It’s such a vague gesture at a movie, not even silly fun.
• Belfast doesn’t dig especially deep into its narrative or characters, but it’s affectionate and well acted.

I also really enjoyed a rewatch of The Royal Tenenbaums.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• For a movie without a single likable character—and a fairly unlikable title character—Listen Up Philip is a fun and intelligent character study.
• Love & Basketball does exactly what it says on the tin, but Lathan and Epps are just wonderful together, and it’s a genuinely lovely love story.
• There is a chasm between how clever Lucky Number Slevin thinks it is and how clever the movie actually is. Every now and then, a scattered line of hyper-stylized dialogue halfway lands, usually thanks only to an actor’s delivery, but each one of those moments is a very long time coming.

• You may be shocked to learn that the 1960 comedy Sex Kittens Go to College has not aged well. Although I suspect it was never very good to begin with. Dated and sexist, but also confused and never particularly funny, grasping for zaniness but never more than a strange relic from the past—and that’s even before a ten-minute sequence near the end in which a robot and a chimpanzee watch four women in a row do topless stripteases in a dream sequence. (This is a thing that actually happens in the movie, even if it was apparently never included in the American release.) The best I can say about it is that Mamie Van Doren remains reasonably likable.
• There are scattered moments of inspired beauty in The Last Time I Committed Suicide, and I think some decent performances. But it’s difficult to say how true it is to Neal Cassady’s life, and the disjointed way in which it’s told—intentionally, I suppose, mirroring Cassady’s drug-fueled writing style—makes it difficult to connect with any of it. It’s a little like being on a lazy bender with someone, occasionally surfacing for a brief moment almost like profundity.
• Cleaner is hardly the worst Die Hard knockoff, but it is very, very far from the best. Daisy Ridley gives it a fair go, and director Martin Campbell is an old hand at action movies, but there’s nothing particularly clever, well staged, or memorable about any of this.

I watched another 6 movies last week:

• I’m not sure what I can say about Parthenope, besides that yes, Celeste Dalla Porta is very bewitching in the title role. There are moments of strange and luxuriant beauty in the film, but it’s not altogether clear if the movie goes too far or not far enough into the unreal, or what it’s even trying to say with its languorous meditation on beauty and desire.
• A Different Man is a strangely absurd dark comedy, with a lot of interesting ideas swirling around it.
• Last Breath has some tense moments, but fewer than you might expect, and what it doesn’t have is any kind of propulsive forward momentum, which seems critical for what’s supposed to be a nail-biting survival movie. As Simon Abrams writes, “not every inspiring tale of heroism can be reduced to processed cheese without losing most of its flavor.” The cast does their best, but the script turns an inspiring real-life rescue into stock characters and trite dialogue.

• The Asphyx is an interesting idea, just not entirely well realized.
• The Tall Target just never hit its mark for me. On paper a compelling idea, I just couldn’t quite connect with it.
• Sinners is remarkable not just for the wildly audacious chances it takes, both stylistically and narratively, or the unflinching way it addresses questions both of racism and grief, but for how genuinely and unapologetically entertaining it is. This is blockbuster genre filmmaking at its absolute best.

I also re-watched The Terminator, which I don’t think I’ve seen it is entirety in several decades. And you know what? Still a pretty damn good movie.