About Fred

Here’s last week’s #nowplaying music playlist:

I watched a half dozen movies the first week of 2023.

• The Thin Man Goes Home can’t match the earlier films in the series for wit and charm, but William Powell and Myrna Loy are still wonderful together, and this one has a pretty decent mystery.
• Plots don’t come much more threadbare than the one in Girl Crazy. There are brief flashes of some kind of fish-out-of-water, boy-meets-girl, “hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” story around the edges, but it’s a flimsy excuse for some passably entertaining musical numbers and light comedy.
• The Reluctant Astronaut probably wouldn’t be half as much fun and winning if it didn’t have Don Knotts, but it does have Don Knotts, so there we are.

• There’s a nice little noir with some interesting twists in The House on Telegraph Hill.
• Irene Dunne is charming and fun in Theodora Goes Wild.
• As a satire, The Menu is maybe a little toothless (that’s a pun), but I don’t think it’s really trying to be a satire. What it actually is, is a lot of fun, thanks largely to the performances

I also re-watched The Wizard of Oz—probably the first time I’ve watched it in decades, and certainly the first time, in full, without Pink Floyd accompaniment. It’s still pretty delightful.

Here’s last week’s #nowplaying music playlist:

In the last two weeks of 2022, I watched a dozen movies. Some of them were among the best films I saw all year. Some of them…were not.

• It’s like they always say: if you’re going to get someone to sell the conceit of the same actress playing dual roles in the same film, get Tilda Swinton. The less you know about The Eternal Daughter going in, maybe, the better, but it’s a haunting mystery, and Swinton delivers two very distinct, yet very connected, performances.
• The Automat is an interesting, and arguably exhaustive, documentary on the once-popular vending machine restaurants. It’s benefited enormously by its selection of celebrity interviews, notably with Mel Brooks.
• Glass Onion is more than a little self-indulgent, and it spins much further outside of reality than its predecessor. But it’s also enormous fun.

• I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from The Banshees of Inisherin. I generally like Martin McDonagh movies—and I really enjoyed his previous outing with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson but I also hated McDonagh’s last movie. This is definitely a return to form, a quiet and darkly comic meditation on kindness and what we’ll be remembered for, with some wonderful performances and beautiful Irish scenery.
• This kid Spielberg, he might be on to something here. I don’t know if The Fabelmans is necessarily his best work, just by dint of it being the most autobiographical, but I really enjoyed it a lot.
• Bros is just a really great romantic comedy. It’s also not one in which the characters “just happen” to be gay—an idea Billy Eichner’s character pointedly refutes early in the movie—which is refreshing, because then the movie is actually about these characters, not just fitting them into some other characters’ story. It’s really funny and a lot of fun.

• You know what there isn’t a lot of in Smile? Smiles. And I don’t mean laughs, because the movie is obviously by design a tense and creepy little horror story. But the central conceit, of terrifying smiling strangers only the protaganist can see, is in surprisingly short supply. Maybe they just couldn’t get anyone to do it as well as Caitlin Stasey—the one you see in the trailer and on all the posters—but creepy visuals are kind of all the movie has going for it, certainly the only original things, and I really wish it had leaned more heavily into that.
• Tár is a fantastically engaging character study and has a phenomenal central performance by Cate Blanchett. It’s probably my favorite movie of the year.
• Strange World is a strange movie, whose premise feels both over- and underbaked. There’s some lovely visual animation, and the movie is mostly very good about how it treats representation, but it also follows very formulaic story beats.

• Aftersun is a lovely and heartbreaking coming-of-age story.
• Armageddon Time is obviously a deeply personal film for director James Gray—if not his own The Fabelmans, then certainly semi-autobiographical—and there are some really great and nuanced performances in it, particularly from Hopkins, Strong, and Hathaway. It’s a period piece not tinged even a little with nostalgia, which is refreshing…just not exactly enjoyable. It’s a movie I may need to revisit, but one that didn’t fully work for me in the moment.
• Decision to Leave is a hypnotic neo-noir with continually inventive editing and visuals.