About Fred

• Monday “crackles with energy and stings with honesty” (to quote Screen Daily, with terrific performances by both Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan.
• Tuesday feels very strange and personal, but it’s also a deeply moving meditation on death and grief.
• Any Wednesday is surprisingly unpleasant. Audiences in 1966 could be forgiven for thinking its premise ought to be funny, but less so for thinking that it was funny. The movie is backward and dated in its gender politics, but it also feels weirdly miscast (particularly in Fonda’s role), and none of its characters are especially likable.

• A Thursday has a premise that’s interesting until you learn what the movie plans to do with it, until you notice the cheapness of the production, the overly melodramatic music and direction, and the didactic points the movie is trying to make. I could absolutely stand to watch more foregin films, Hindi films in particular—and I do think some of what didn’t work for me here was just my own cultural disconnect—but this didn’t seem like a great place to start.
• Next Friday lacks the heart and charm of the first movie, and it’s mostly crass, intentionally offensive, mildly racist, stoner half-jokes, but it has its amusing moments.
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a remarkably frank kitchen sink drama, with a very compelling (if frequently unlikable) performance by a young Albert Finney.

I also rewatched The Fisher King, which feels very much of its time, but also still very much a fable outside of time.

• There’s nothing about Young Dr. Kildare that isn’t more than a little dated, but it’s also pleasantly entertaining.
• Gena Rowlands is very good in Gloria, but I am inclined to agree with Roger Ebert, who wrote, “Rowlands propels the action with such appealing nervous energy that we don’t have the heart to stop and think how silly everything is.”
• 1970’s Count Dracula is fun enough, especially when watched with a group, what with a mustachioed grand vampire. And it’s often faithful to the original book. But it does lack the gothic atmosphere and bloody heart of something like the Hammer Dracula films.
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx is a lot of fun.

I also re-watched David Lynch’s The Straight Story, which is as simple and effecting as I remember it.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• All the Colors of the Dark—also, and much less interestingly, known as They’re Coming to Get You!—isn’t necessarily a good movie, but it is a lot, with the giallo really cranked up to eleven in some very entertaining ways.
• Headcount is a lot more effective when it’s content to be quietly unsettling, leans into awkwardness and uncertainty and finds the unnerving terrors there. It’s a lot less effective when it tries to resolve things, introduces lore, starts behaving like any of a dozen other forgettable horror movies.
• Night Creatures is fun enough, thanks largely to its cast, and even then largely to Peter Cushing.

• Vincent Price gives it a good try, but Cry of the Banshee feels cheap and shoddy, making up for what it lacks in a coherent plot with gratuitous nudity and sexual assault.
• V/H/S/85 has some good horror stories running throughout it, and if none of those stories are more than half-formed, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of its creepy aesthetics.
• ‘Salem’s Lot is bad. I’m not sure it’s “bury for two years in movie release purgatory” bad, but it does seem to fundamentally misunderstand what made King’s original novel so effective, that slow and quiet creep of a small 1970s American town dying off. It doesn’t matter that the movie very clumsily speaks those themes aloud at one point late in the game, it moves at too fast a clip to generate any real scares, much less dread. It’s not difficult to see why the previous two adaptations, whatever their own faults, were miniseries, or why Gary Dauberman, the director of this one, reportedly first turned in a three-hour cut. But it is difficult to see how one extra hour would make up for some of the dumb plot changes the movie makes, the misguided decision to combine some characters, change motivations, and re-stage the final confrontation. That the movie doesn’t take its time is only the greatest of its numerous problems. All that said, there are some nice, mostly visual, touches to the film—very creepy uses of light and color, fog and shadow. It seems well enough directed, and most of the actors at least acquit themselves well. But it’s a fundamentally bad adaptation of the source material and not very entertaining because of that.
• The Substance is not subtle, nor are the things it has to say about women and beauty and aging especially revelatory. But it’s bold and audacious and features a fearless performance by Demi Moore, which I am certainly not the first to suggest might be a career best.

I also re-watched the thoroughly enjoyable House on Haunted Hill.

I was traveling in Italy recently, so it’s been a while. But I’ve watched 12 movies since the last roundup:

• It maybe is a victim of all its own hype, but I found Longlegs to be somewhat oddly disappointing. Exceptionally creepy and well made, to be sure, with plenty of very good and unsettling performances, but a little thinner in the story, both in terms of plot and thematically, than I might have hoped.
• The number of times Exhuma feels like it’s reached a safe and satisfying conclusion only to fully ramp up and reveal new scares is genuinely impressive.
• Thelma is delightful, both silly and tenderhearted. A lot of that is due to an incredibly winning performance by June Squibb, but the supporting cast is also universally good—particularly Richard Roundtree in his final feature film.

It’s What’s Inside plays with some interesting ideas and takes some clever turns, but it doesn’t quite hold together as well as I might have liked.
• Maybe as quiet and understated as a spy thriller can be, The Human Factor boasts some very good performances, notably by Nicol Williamson.
• Woman of the Hour is remarkably assured for Anna Kendrick’s first film as director. If it doesn’t say anything especially novel about violence against women, the film does a fantastic job of placing its focus on the victims of that violence, and not the man who perpetrated the crimes. The framing of the story is a little odd—in reality, Rodney Alcala’s appearance on The Dating Game is not much more than a weird footnote to this true crime story—but this is a very effective film, and I look forward to more from Kendrick as director.

• At best fitfully amusing, Brothers squanders the talents of Brolin and Dinklage in what is somehow both an overwritten and entirely predictable pale imitation of a Coen Brothers movie.
• Crime Wave does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a simple but effective noir.
• Laurel and Hardy are amusing, but there’s maybe not enough of that for a full-length feature, even one as short as Way Out West.

• An underrated gem, The Night Digger owes a lot to the central performance by Patricia Neal.
• Creature from the Black Lagoon never feels like anything other than a man in a rubber suit, but it’s a well designed rubber suit, and there are some genuinely creepy moments in this otherwise silly and dated monster feature.
• The less you know about Strange Darling going in, the better. But it’s a fun and wicked ride.

I also re-watched George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. They’re coming to get you, Barbara!

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert called The Milagro Beanfield War “a wonderful fable, but the problem is, some of the people in the story know it’s a fable and others do not.” I’m not sure he’s wrong about that. There’s a lot to like about the movie, with some very agreeable characters and amiable pace, but it does seem a little uncertain what kind of story it wants to be.
• Start the Revolution Without Me has some goofy charm, but not enough to be more than passingly amusing.
• Wolfs is entertaining enough, buoyed by the two leads bouncing gruffly off of one another, but it feels like a movie designed to be forgotten.

• Someone’s Watching Me! feels like a TV movie, but John Carpenter does bring a certain creepiness to it, and Lauren Hutton’s off-kilter performance keeps things interesting. Too bad about that very anticlimactic ending, though.
• At the end of Will & Harper, the pair joke about hitting the road again and doing their road trip again in reverse. Reader, I would watch that movie. There’s a wonderful warmth, honesty, and empathy to their journey together, even when things get difficult or the world around them gets ugly and cruel.
• Alison’s Birthday is not without its share of creepy moments, and that ending, though belabored, is interesting. It’s just never entirely satisfying.

I also re-watched Murder by Death, which was more than a little dated—Peter Sellers’ Charlie Chan impersonation really only works because the movie calls him on it, and that’s the point of it, but even then it’s a little cringe—but it’s still very fun and silly fun.