About Fred

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying this past week.

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• There’s a tight little thriller with some nice character moments and awkward comedy in Windfall, but it never entirely comes together. The movie has good performances, but it never quite shakes its staginess, or the feeling of being a movie made during lockdown, with those limitations.
• All Quiet on the Western Front is a lot more bloody and visceral than the 1930 adaptation—there’s more than a little Come and See peppered throughout this version—but both are equally concerned with the brutality of war, how it’s not a thing waged by nations but a thing done to soldiers. It’s unflinchingly honest and incredibly effective.
• You almost have to admire What Lies Beneath for how absurd it’s willing to get, and for the camera tricks that I’m sure are no less technically impressive than any Robert Zemeckis has ever committed to screen. But there’s not much fun to be had in that absurdity, or its execution. It would be easier to pine for a time when Hollywood made big-budget adult thrillers like this if this one was actually any good.

• Michael Bay’s Ambulance is often entertaining, with a pretty fun Jake Gyllenhaal performance, but I was constantly reminded while watching it of this Every Frame a Painting video deconstructing his style. When everything in your movie is spectacle, eventually none of it is spectacular. Ambulance is a thrill-ride, but it’s an exhausting one by the very end.
• We Have a Ghost has its moments, but it overstays its welcome and is mostly a disappointment, especially given how much fun I’ve had with director Christopher Landon’s previous movies.
• The Naked Spur has a lot of really great performances, not least by a devilish Robert Ryan.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is an experience, one that invites you to be bored—by the character, on her behalf, by the slow pace of her days and how long we just sit and watch them play out—and yet also a film that rewards patience, that needs that pace and length to reveal its rich depths. Roger Ebert called “one of the great formalist gambits of the 1970s,” and it’s a strangely fascinating film.
• The dream logic of the series means that A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is at least visually more interesting than equally later sequels in other ’80s slasher movies. But even here, the wheels are starting to come off just a little.

I also re-watched The World According to Garp, which might seem a little random—and is a film adaptation that I haven’t seen in a very long time—but which has for whatever reason been rattling around in my memory bank for a little while now. It’s not a perfect movie, or even a perfect adaptation of the novel, but I remain rather fond of it.

Here’s my #nowplaying playlist from last week:

I saw a half dozen movies last week:

• In the Shadow of the Moon is a real disappointment—some interesting, if extremely shopworn science-fictional ideas, but they never quite come together, and its characters never feel anywhere close to fully developed.
• Creed II doesn’t do anything unexpected, but what it does, it does very well and with a lot of entertaining style.
• Sharper has its moments, thanks to some decent direction and a game cast, and none of its individual vignettes overstay their welcome. But it also feels very much like a watered-down version of much better capers and con movies.

• Beau Travail is strange and languid—to the point that you wonder if this even is a movie you’re watching.
• M3GAN is very dumb, but not in the fun way I think it needed to be. Maybe that’s the inherent silliness of the material, maybe that’s the (very obvious) cuts that got the film a PG-13 rating, or maybe it’s just that it’s the kind of film you can only enjoy with a crowded theater. Whichever way, I very much didn’t enjoy the movie. And while I’m pleased that Akela Cooper has been named a screenwriter to watch, I don’t think I actually like watching the movies she writes.
• Ticket to Paradise is entertaining enough, but I think that’s only because it has such an exceptionally charming cast and is so pretty to look at. (Though, as an aside, I do note that none it was actually filmed in Bali, where the movie is set, and Billie Lourd’s part seems slightly truncated.)

I also re-watched (and re-enjoyed) 2012’s Lincoln for Presidents’ Day.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying last week: