Month: September 2024

I watched 8 movies last week:

• The best you can say about Empire Records, which is not a very good movie, is that it stars a lot of young actors who seem like they’re going to go on to bigger and better things—and some of them even did. It’s barely a comedy, more an excuse to hang together a decently eclectic but also forgettable mid-’90s soundtrack.
• And Justice for All is all over the map, and likely would be unwatchable with a different actor at its center, yet Pacino somehow makes it feel like it all works even when it very clearly doesn’t. “These subplots are all thrown into the story’s way without much regard as to whether they’re serious and subtle or broad and comic;” wrote Roger Ebert, “the movie is a compromise involving various approaches to the material. But Pacino’s performance forces a kind of logic on the events.”
• Serial Mom feels more like a goof than an outrageous satire, but it’s a fun enough goof.
• Fiend Without a Face has been described as “tepidly macabre,” which seems an apt description. There are some interesting moments, and fun late ’50s special effects, but there’s a lot that’s memorable here.

• Tucker: The Man and His Dream is maybe a little too enamored with that dream for its own good, but Jeff Bridges is fun on screen as the man.
• Maggie Smith is the chief reason to watch The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
• My Darling Clementine is often hailed as the best Western John Ford ever made, and it’s not difficult to see why.
• As a writer director, Tilman Singer “might still be finding his narrative footing,” as critic Jeannette Catsoulis writes, “but there’s a playfulness and novelty to his weirdness that deserve encouragement.” There’s more of a coherent story, certainly, in Cuckoo than in Singer’s first film, Luz, but that’s not always to the film’s benefit. There’s a lot to really enjoy in his follow-up—though he remains more of a talent to continue to watch than a fully successful filmmaker.

I also re-watched 25th Hour, which is still really terrific.

I watched 10 movies last week:

• There’s no one you wish would watch Sorry/Not Sorry so much as Louis CK himself. Such a wasted opportunity, to have such a genuinely phenomenal comedic talent, be undone by your own inexcusable abusive behavior, and then not only refuse to own up to that behavior in any meaningful way, but to frame your return to stand-up as some kind of vindictive “fuck you” to your accusers, and to frame what you did as just some embarrassing kink rather than years of systematic abuse. It’s great to see his victims actually get a say, and to see others in his orbit talk openly and honestly about what he did, but it also feels like such a waste. He could have chosen to grow as a comedian and a person, to at least try to atone for what he did, and instead he chose to just dig in and be an asshole about it. And they gave him a fucking Grammy for it.
• There are a few moments when That Cold Day in the Park seems to be doing genuinely interesting things, but it also doesn’t even seem aware that it’s doing them, much less doing them intentionally.
• Summer of ’42 isn’t a very good movie, but you can see how movie audiences at the time were waylaid by nostalgia—even if the movie isn’t even a particularly good delivery mechanism for that. It’s is too lazily plotted, its characters get such little development—or even just flat-out disappear—and the central conceit is a kind of icky boyish fantasy.
• I’ve never read Dahl’s original book, or seen either the 1996 movie adaptation or the later stage musical, but Matilda: The Musical is delightful.

• It’s the warmth and empathy that the cast and director bring to Ricki and the Flash that make the otherwise slightly unwieldy thing work.
• I’m not entirely sure why, but Jean-Luc Godard movies tend to leave me a little. Tout va bien was not going to be the movie to change that.

The Woman in White may be a little overly complicated as a mystery, but there are some really great performances in it.

The Silencers is very silly, probably a little too much for its own good, but it’s charming enough that it doesn’t just feel like a dated spy movie parody.

• The Narrow Margin is a fun and tense noir.
• Caveat has some creepy moments—the rabbit toy, chief among them—but they don’t really add up to much of anything in the end.

I also re-watched Luz, which does such interesting things with lighting and sound design to create a remarkably creepy horror movie.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The UFO Incident isn’t particularly convincing one way or another on the subject of alien abduction, or on Barney and Betty Hill’s real-life claims, and it’s definitely far too long. But at the same time, James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons bring a real warmth and honesty to the married couple in this TV movie.
• I feel like if I had seen Adventures in Babysitting back in 1987, when I was ten years old, I might have absolutely loved the movie. Seeing it for the first time almost forty years later, however, the movie is just fine—not infrequently amusing, with a very charming breakout performance by Elisabeth Shue, but often pulling its punches, betraying a lack of ideas, and very dated in its handling of race.
• The Kill Room has its moments, but far too few of them. There are moments when the cast are very good, Samuel L. Jackson in particular, but then also moments when they’re very bad.

• I didn’t expect Bloodsport to be high art, but I did expect the fight scenes to be more impressive. There’s a lot of very good fight choreography and athleticism on display—particularly by Van Damme, who isn’t even that terrible an actor in the movie—but it’s amazing how little the blows actually seem to land. I wasn’t surprised that the movie around the fights was mostly boring, but I was surprised the fights kind of were too.
• Koyaanisqatsi, Roger Ebert wrote “has been hailed as a vast and sorrowful vision, but to what end?” There are some impressive images in the film, which I imagine would have felt even more impressive 42 years ago on a big screen, but the film is a little empty beyond that. As Ebert says, “There is no overt message except the obvious one…”
• Rebel Ridge feels like it’s going to be a slow burn, until the fires, sometimes quite literally, start raging. The movie isn’t fantastically tense, with some really well-matched performances.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• “Conversations about what ties the films [in Kinds of Kindness] together thematically,” writes Brian Tallerico “may end in frustration. Still, the one thing that undeniably unites them is Lanthimos’ mastery of tone, making another film that’s alternately hysterical and terrifying, even when it puts up walls against interpretation.” There’s a lot going on here, and it’s hard to argue that all of it is successful, but it’s oddly compelling.
• Oddity is very creepy and frightening, although decidedly less so once you understand what’s actually going on. The narrative becomes a little unfocused, even as plot reveals itself.
• There’s still a little of the Masterpiece Theatre television movie it was originally intended to be about it, but Mrs. Brown has two wonderful standout performances by Judi Dench and Billy Connolly.

• There’s a little of giallo to The Evil Eye, hence its reputation as the first giallo film, but it feels much more indebted to Hitchcock, right down to its alternate title, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. It’s a very stylish, sometimes very silly, Italian Hitchcock knockoff. And if it’s story doesn’t really hold up under a lot of scrutiny, it’s still a lot of fun.
• Paul Blart: Mall Cop isn’t entirely unsalvageable as idea; just because that idea is dumb and derivative doesn’t mean it couldn’t also be fun. But the movie isn’t any fun. It has barely one joke and it runs that into the ground. James is a likable enough sad sack, and the movie has some heart (or at least sentimentality), but what it doesn’t have very much of is laughs.
• Seize the Day is exceptionally bleak, but there are good performances in it, particularly an early dramatic role by Robin Williams.
• Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is an enjoyable enough sequel, and I’d genuinely like to see more films that pick up these strands in the new series.

I also re-watched a couple of movies:

• Do the Right Thing—which is no less electric now than it was thirty-five years ago, which makes its having been shut out of the Oscars in favor of Driving Miss Daisy all the more shocking
• To Catch a Killer—technically a miniseries, but short enough I think it qualifies. One of the things I like about it is that, while Dennehy’s performance is very compelling, it’s never about John Wayne Gacy, about who he was or what made him a killer, but about the pursuit to arrest him and finally get justice for his victims.

I watched 5 movies last week:

• It’s not hard to see the promise in Stereo, especially when you’ve already seen that promise realized in later Cronenberg movies. But taken on its own terms, as a feature, as a narrative, it’s exceedingly dull and disappointing—full of intriguing images and compositions, but none that are put to any real use, with its slow stretches of silence broken up only by underbaked ideas expressed in often near-incomprehensible voiceover.
• Despite its overly generic, and not terribly descriptive, title, Kansas City Confidential is a fun, occasionally inventive, certainly surprisingly twisty little noir.
• The Haunted Strangler is helped enormously by Boris Karloff’s…well, let’s be charitable and call this a performance, although it’s far from his best work and—minor spoiler warning, only if you fail to see the movie poster—mostly just involves him contorting his face. A “ludicrously improbable plot,” in the words of the Monthly Film Bulletin, “which peters out into a series of tediously repetitive chases…”

• Monolith doesn’t resolve in a completely satisfying way, but that seems at least partly by design. What the movie is, is terrifically creepy, very effective given its small budget, limited space, and single on-screen actor.
• The Watchers isn’t what I would call an especially well directed movie, but it’s more than competent. It’s in the writing, however, where Ishana Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a filmmaker really emerge. Because the script is simply terrible. By turns both a rush and a slog, both under- and over-explained, it’s a deeply unscary, uninteresting, and unsatisfying mess.

I also enjoyed re-watching Five Easy Pieces.