About Fred

• Thirst feels like lesser Bergman, a little disjointed in its narrative, but there are compelling moments throughout.
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a high-octane thrill-ride with a lot of great set-pieces and performances…and yet it’s not altogether difficult to see why the film so badly underperformed at the box office. If you’ve seen Fury Road, a lot of this prequel can feel redundant, fleshing out Furiosa’s backstory, but not in any meaningful, much less necessary, way. Fury Road felt like a huge cultural moment, maybe the best movie of its type ever made, and this one, while thoroughly entertaining, can’t help but feel like just another movie made in that style.
• Blood and Wine was almost certainly a re-watch, though I say that only because it felt so incredibly familiar, not because I actually remember watching it before. (But it feels like the kind of movie I would have gone to see in theaters in the late ’90s, or rented on Netflix.) That said, there’s a lot to like here, from the committed performances to the way the movie takes its plot (and increasing desperation of its characters) seriously.

• In a Violent Nature is such a weird inversion of the slasher movie—fascinating as an experiment and intriguing as a meditation on violence, but not particularly entertaining as a film. It’s more upsettingly gross than scary, especially as the violence ratchets up to brutally cartoonish levels; and while I respect what the film is trying to do with horror movie tropes, by its (long-approaching) end, it was just kind of tedious.
• Jeremiah Johnson probably wouldn’t work half as well without Robert Redford’s performance, but it’s a nice, understated, and old-fashioned Western.
• The Day of the Triffids is cheesy and dated, and often feels less interested in the triffid part of its apocalypse, but it’s also pretty good fun.
• Wicked Little Letters is a lot of fun, mostly because the cast is incredibly game, though it is pretty slight as a story.

I also re-watched Go, which is a very 1999 movie but otherwise holds up pretty well.

I watched five movies last week:

• I’m not altogether sure what to think about Civil War, but I absolutely agreement with Matt Zoller Seitz on the fact that it’s “a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you’re watching it.”
• The Tall T is a lean, mean, often bare-bones Western with some strong performances.
• I went into Born to Win not sure what to think. George Segal was a great comedic actor, but many of his better-known ’70s comedies—Bye Bye Braverman, A Touch of Class, Fun With Dick and Jane—have left me pretty cold. But I really liked this one, which is by turns clever and cynical, stumbling along the highs and lows of Segal’s character, with some terrific scenes along the way.
• Ellen Burstyn is terrific in Resurrection, which treats its subject in such a quiet and understated way.
• There’s definitely some pointed social commentary going on in Monkey Man—the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, if nothing else—though by the end, it might be swallowed under a little by bloody, John Wick-esque style. That style is often a lot of fun to watch, though, and Dev Patel brings a lot to the screen as both director and star.

I also re-watched The Legend of Hell House, which I have to admit doesn’t have the greatest of scripts, but has so much atmosphere and great performances that you can easily overlook the shallowness of its actual story.

I’ve been very busy reading submissions for Kaleidotrope, and then my television unexpectedly, so I only watched three movies last week:

• I’m “George Lucas”: A Connor Ratliff Story is probably only of interest if you’re already a fan of the weird and often hillarious The George Lucas Talk Show. But if you are, it’s a genuinely interesting look behind the curtain.
• Abigail is fun, but it might have been more so if it hadn’t revealed its one twist in all its marketing, or if it hadn’t gotten to that twist a little earlier. The cast are good, but I kept waiting for the movie to do something more clever with its premise.
• The fun, but very forgettable, musical numbers and in Mean Girls notwithstanding, this remake doesn’t bring a lot that’s new to the table and shows some really lazy storytelling near the end. There are some clever moments that play up that it’s a musical adaptation, and the performers themselves are often very good, it’s mostly just a weak copy, of a movie that was just kind of okay to begin with.

I also re-watched Out of Sight, which was as good, if more violent, than I remember it.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• I watched The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun because I’d heard Quentin Tarantino sing its praises recently and had never even heard of the film before. He compared it to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage—which is maybe apt, given that that’s hardly my favorite Dario Argento movie. This one isn’t, strictly speaking, giallo, but I can see the parallels Tarantino draws to it. Maybe it’s my more hesitant appreciation for the genre, though, that kept me from really enjoying this strange, often confused haze of a movie.
• The songs in 1776 aren’t particularly good, much less memorable, but the movie itself has a fun enough momentum, thanks largely to the cast, including William Daniels. It’s a little weird reading contemporary reviews of the film, like from Roger Ebert, who thought the movie was somehow an insult to the great men of history and “emasculated our founding fathers in story and song,” when the fact that it treats these men as incredibly flawed and often petty, squabbling people, nonetheless in pursuit of an ideal, is probably the best thing about the movie.
• For a legacy sequel, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is pretty good, and it manages to recapture a lot of the fun of the original. That’s about all it captures—its own plot is largely forgettable, sometimes feeling a little like a xeroxed copy—but it’s also genuinely a lot of fun when Eddie Murphy is on screen. And if nothing else, it’s hands-down better than the third movie in the franchise.

• Martin Scorsese’s sophomore effort, Boxcar Bertha, doesn’t necessarily herald the arrival of a great filmmaker—and it maybe feels less representative of his later work than his first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door—but it does some interesting things.
• Late Night with the Devil gets a lot of the ’70s-period detail right, which is why it’s kind of a shame that it’s otherwise it’s a mostly bland, by-the-numbers horror movie.
• By the end of The Deep End, I was convinced I’d seen it before, which may explain why it never really connected with me, despite a good performance by Tilda Swinton.

I watched just 4 movies last week:

• Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution benefits enormously by being filmed backstage during a night of celebratory comedy—a 2022 Netflix special I haven’t seen, but which this documentary very much makes me want to watch. The documentary is fun and informative, warm and welcoming, and not afraid to take Netflix to task (by name) for frequently airing non-welcoming, particularly anti-trans comedians.
• Trouble in Mind is an odd movie—one “that takes place within our memories of the movies,” as Roger Ebert wrote, but I feel like I was immediately on movie’s strange wavelength.
• Poolman is an odd movie…and I feel like I had a much tougher time getting on its wavelength. The movie does a lot of interesting things, often very amiably, but it’s not difficult to see why a lot of critics absolutely hated it.
• The Beast…is an odd movie… but also a hauntingly, terrifyingly beautiful one, with a fantastic performance(s?) by Léa Seydoux. As critic Glenn Kenny writes:
  

  “There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tries to reassure the movie’s scariest version of Louis at one point. Bonello, and this movie’s, greatest dread is that someday a terrible order will emerge, one that will make whatever beauty remains disappear.