About Fred

Last week, I watched 8 movies.

You wouldn’t expect a movie with a title like CRY TERROR! to be quite so boring. But despite a strong cast, a theoretically tense plot, and a literal ticking time-bomb, the movie is mostly undone by voiceover narration and slow pacing.

ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME is often wickedly, uncomfortably well observed and funny—a horror movie played as comedy, or vice versa.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is beautiful, elegiac, sometimes a little dull, and a touching story about the stories we want to tell ourselves.

Elvis Mitchell’s documentary IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!? occasionally meanders a little, but it has a strong central thesis—namely, that representation matters. There are interviews with a lot of great black filmmakers, and I defy you to walk away without a long list of other films you now want to watch.

Florence Pugh is fantastic in THE WONDER, but so is everybody else. There’s not really a false note in the movie.

SLUMBERLAND has its…I want to say charms, but that might be a bit of a stretch. It does have some cute and clever moments, and is even occasionally touching, though it does feel a little cheaply made and under-populated, and it grates more than a little by the end.

There’s an argument that MOONAGE DAYDREAM doesn’t tell us anything new about David Bowie, but that doesn’t feel like the movie’s intent. (It also assumes that every viewer knows the same things.) It’s more an hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic, patchwork celebration of an artist’s life—not definitive, or even necessarily revelatory, but beautiful and substantial all the same.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY is beautiful and sweet, even if it’s also arguably slightly lesser Studio Ghibli.

Here’s my #nowplaying playlist for this past week.

Last week, I watched another half dozen movies.

I agree with most everything Mark Kermode says about DON’T WORRY DARLING here. The movie is nothing but a waiting game, to see which twist they’ve decided on, but it’s not an interesting twist, and it could just as easily have been half a dozen others. Florence Pugh turns in a good performance, but there isn’t much else to recommend it, and you could drive a vintage car through all its plot holes and unanswered questions.

If you want a movie where Amazons riding unicorns to fight robots and a space princess isn’t even close to the goofiest thing that happens, then THE ICE PIRATES is definitely for you. The New York Times described it at the time as “a Star Wars spin-off made in an underdeveloped galaxy,” and while there’s some charm to that and its cheapness, the movie isn’t exactly what you might call good.

There are a lot of good performances in DEEP COVER–which manages to feel only a little overly ‘90s–but Laurence Fishburne is especially good in it.

ALONE IN THE DARK does some interesting things with its slightly odd premise.

BILLY ELLIOT has its charms.

I don’t know that I love all of the songs in FUNNY GIRL, but it’s hard not to find something to love when Streisand and Sharif are on screen.

A sampling of the songs I’ve listened to this week, posted to Twitter (for now) under #nowplaying.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: I had high hopes for this but was left mostly underwhelmed. There were a few stand-out exceptions, but I think only one truly great episode of television: “The Autopsy.” That single hour was everything I wanted the series to be—scary and clever and weird, keeping me guessing until the very end. Nearly all of the other episodes, meanwhile, did basically everything I’d expect from an anthology show. (The stand-out exception to that, of course, was “The Viewing, “probably my second-favorite episode, which is mostly just a vibe of never knowing what to expect. The thing is, though, I don’t think there were any particularly bad episodes, even I could have done without the double helping of Lovecraft and would have liked a better experience overall.

Inside Man: I don’t know that I’ve been actively avoiding Steven Moffat’s work in recent years, but after the excesses of his Doctor Who and Sherlock—and that one terrible episode of Dracula I made myself endure—I haven’t exactly been seeking it out either. His new miniseries, Inside Man, isn’t likely to change that. It’s more like two very underbaked shows Frankensteined together, wildly chaotic in tone and built on a knot of implausibility and contrivance. What the show demonstrates, more than anything, is that for all his good qualities as a writer, Moffat simply doesn’t know how to stay out of his own way. His impulse to appear clever above all else occasionally works—his characters do sometimes say clever and funny things—but it’s more often at odds with the dark and serious subject matter, the interesting questions he’s asking about morality, and it undercuts much of the empathy we have for any of those characters. By the end of the four episodes, I kind of hated it…and yet it was strangely compelling, carried largely by strong performances. Indeed, if there’s one thing I hated most about the miniseries, it’s that I think I might actually watch a second one.

Prime Suspect: I watched the first two or three series of Prime Suspect when they aired on PBS in the early 1990s, but there were four subsequent series, including two made in the early 2000s after an extended hiatus, so I decided to watch them all. (I like Helen Mirren and I have a BritBox subscription.) It doesn’t exactly work as cohesive whole, maybe thanks to that hiatus (or just the nature of British television), but each of the individual stories are fairly compelling, and Mirren’s unsurprisingly terrific even when they’re not. The final series, in particular, isn’t afraid to show the cracks and flaws in Jane Tennison as a character, and, not to spoil anything, but it gives her as satisfactory a send-off as she could probably ever get.