{"id":12823,"date":"2023-04-02T10:20:28","date_gmt":"2023-04-02T14:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=12823"},"modified":"2023-04-02T10:20:28","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T14:20:28","slug":"weekly-movie-roundup-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=12823","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Movie Roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched a half dozen movies last week:<\/p>\n<table>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0045758\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Fear and Desire\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12824\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1-682x1024.jpg 682w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1-768x1153.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1-1023x1536.jpg 1023w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/1.jpg 1066w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0039224\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/2-199x300.jpg\" alt=\"Brute Force\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12825\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/2-199x300.jpg 199w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/2.jpg 580w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0051720\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/3-212x300.jpg\" alt=\"Equinox Flower\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12826\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/3-212x300.jpg 212w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/3.jpg 722w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 212px) 100vw, 212px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s too much that&#8217;s interesting in Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s first film, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0045758\">Fear and Desire<\/a>, for it to be completely terrible, but there&#8217;s not enough for it to actually be any good. It&#8217;s almost certainly an urban legend that Kubrick himself was so displeased with the film that he destroyed the original negative, but it&#8217;s not impossible to see how such a legend got started.<\/li>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0039224\/\">Brute Force<\/a> is sometimes a little overly melodramatic and heavy handed\u2014the multiple flashbacks that feel almost like different movies, for examples\u2014but there are some great performances throughout.<\/li>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0051720\/\">Equinox Flower<\/a> feels very reminiscent of other Ozu films, not least because he casts many of the same actors and touches on many of the same themes. (He was also famously a director of very simple scene compositions, some of which here seem almost duplicated from other films.) And yet there&#8217;s also a feeling of transition here\u2014to color film, to post-war Japan\u2014and there are beautiful, touching moments in that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<table>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0023213\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/4-198x300.jpg\" alt=\"Merrily We Go to Hell\" width=\"198\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12827\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/4-198x300.jpg 198w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/4.jpg 450w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0144120\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-202x300.jpg\" alt=\"Bride of Chucky\" width=\"202\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12828\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-202x300.jpg 202w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-689x1024.jpg 689w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-768x1142.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-1033x1536.jpg 1033w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-1377x2048.jpg 1377w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/5-scaled.jpg 1721w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 202px) 100vw, 202px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt9601220\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/6-208x300.jpg\" alt=\"Black Bear\" width=\"208\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-12829\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/6-208x300.jpg 208w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/6-709x1024.jpg 709w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/6-768x1109.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/6.jpg 831w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 208px) 100vw, 208px\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s no doubt that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0023213\/\">Merrily We Go to Hell<\/a> is a pre-code Hollywood film, from its depiction of alcoholism and infidelity, but Sylvia Sidney are both really great Fredric March, even if their characters are so terrible together.<\/li>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0144120\/\">Bride of Chucky<\/a> does everything you&#8217;d expect a movie with that title and premise, but it does it in some odd and unexpected ways. It&#8217;s a strange, killer-dolls riff on <em>Natural Born Killers<\/em>, which I&#8217;m not sure always works\u2014much less 25 years later\u2014but you can&#8217;t claim it doesn&#8217;t have personality.<\/li>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s a lot going on in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt9601220\/\">Black Bear<\/a>, and a lot of it&#8217;s very interesting; Aubrey Plaza&#8217;s often fantastic, and there&#8217;s a lot of very well observed detail. But it&#8217;s not impossible to shake the feeling that it&#8217;s two different films, approaching the same ideas of jealousy, identity, movie-making, marriage, bears, et cetera from slightly different angles. It&#8217;s often electric, especially in that second film, but I&#8217;m not sure it always fits together well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also rewatched both Lawrence of Arabia and Critters 2, which makes for an interesting double-bill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched a half dozen movies last week: There&#8217;s too much that&#8217;s interesting in Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s first film, Fear and Desire, for it to be completely terrible, but there&#8217;s not enough for it to actually be any good. It&#8217;s almost certainly an urban legend that Kubrick himself was so displeased with the film that he &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=12823\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12823"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12835,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12823\/revisions\/12835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}