I watched 10 movies last week:
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.