About Fred

I watched 5 movies last week:

• Operation Mincemeat is surprisingly tedious. It’s a fascinating story and well-stocked with talented actors, but it’s also desperately padded, even without the wholly invented characters and love triangle, even without the wink-wink of knowing what will happen to some of the real-life characters—like Ian Fleming, who for no good reason narrates a chunk of the film—after the fact. Maybe because we’ll never know the full extent of the operation’s success, but the resolution here seems awfully muddled.
• Real-life characters also play a significant role in The Pale Blue Eye, but I found myself enjoying that a whole lot more—maybe because Harry Melling is genuinely very good as the young Edgar Allan Poe. There are a number of good performances here, and while the plot twists might strain credulity by the end, this is a nice, winter-bound murder mystery.
• Beyond the Black Rainbow isn’t (always) uninteresting, but writer/director Panos Cosmatos would do a much better job of marrying plot and characters to his cosmological horror and aesthetic fixations in his second film, Mandy, almost a decade later. If this first film wasn’t almost two hours long, it might be easier to be forgiving of its faults, but it’s hard not think this wouldn’t have worked much better as a short film.

• It’s striking that Lady Macbeth was only Florence Pugh’s second feature film role, because it really is a star-making turn, a chilling and mesmerizing performance. Because of that performance, you deeply empathize with the character even when (spoiler) she does terrible things—which is good, because otherwise this could become nothing but a portrait of a woman punished for her desires and sexuality.
• John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara are often delightful together in The Quiet Man—which is good, because I’m not convinced their relationship is as endearing today as it might have seemed to a 1950s audience. There’s a lot to enjoy about the movie, down to the beautiful Technicolor of the Irish countryside, but times sure have changed.

I also re-watched The Lost Boys, which can’t help but feel like a very 1987 movie, but which mostly holds up as pretty good stylish fun.

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: