Month: November 2024

• My Old Ass is an often very touching and very funny.
• The very strong performances in A Thousand and One—particularly from Teyana Taylor, Aven Courtney, and William Catlett—really elevate the movie’s very simple story.
• If you loved Inside Out…well, Inside Out 2 is also a movie. It’s not without its moments of cleverness and sweetness, and there is something to be said for taking seriously the complicated emotions of growing up, especially as a young girl, but the movie feels a lot less essential than the first one.

• Magic Mike’s Last Dance has a lot of charm and several very good dance performances—which is good, because you’ll arguably see too much of those.
• Son of Frankenstein doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table (or, er, slab), but with Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi around, it’s good fun.
• Things Will Be Different doesn’t quite stick the landing or do enough with its intriguing time-travel premise, but it’s a tense ride while it’s happening.

I also re-watched Private Benjamin, which is like three or four movies tacked on to each other, not just the funny boot camp comedy I remember. It is funny, thanks largely to Goldie Hawn and Eileen Brennan, but it’s also a little patchwork.

• Monday “crackles with energy and stings with honesty” (to quote Screen Daily, with terrific performances by both Denise Gough and Sebastian Stan.
• Tuesday feels very strange and personal, but it’s also a deeply moving meditation on death and grief.
• Any Wednesday is surprisingly unpleasant. Audiences in 1966 could be forgiven for thinking its premise ought to be funny, but less so for thinking that it was funny. The movie is backward and dated in its gender politics, but it also feels weirdly miscast (particularly in Fonda’s role), and none of its characters are especially likable.

• A Thursday has a premise that’s interesting until you learn what the movie plans to do with it, until you notice the cheapness of the production, the overly melodramatic music and direction, and the didactic points the movie is trying to make. I could absolutely stand to watch more foregin films, Hindi films in particular—and I do think some of what didn’t work for me here was just my own cultural disconnect—but this didn’t seem like a great place to start.
• Next Friday lacks the heart and charm of the first movie, and it’s mostly crass, intentionally offensive, mildly racist, stoner half-jokes, but it has its amusing moments.
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a remarkably frank kitchen sink drama, with a very compelling (if frequently unlikable) performance by a young Albert Finney.

I also rewatched The Fisher King, which feels very much of its time, but also still very much a fable outside of time.

• There’s nothing about Young Dr. Kildare that isn’t more than a little dated, but it’s also pleasantly entertaining.
• Gena Rowlands is very good in Gloria, but I am inclined to agree with Roger Ebert, who wrote, “Rowlands propels the action with such appealing nervous energy that we don’t have the heart to stop and think how silly everything is.”
• 1970’s Count Dracula is fun enough, especially when watched with a group, what with a mustachioed grand vampire. And it’s often faithful to the original book. But it does lack the gothic atmosphere and bloody heart of something like the Hammer Dracula films.
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx is a lot of fun.

I also re-watched David Lynch’s The Straight Story, which is as simple and effecting as I remember it.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• All the Colors of the Dark—also, and much less interestingly, known as They’re Coming to Get You!—isn’t necessarily a good movie, but it is a lot, with the giallo really cranked up to eleven in some very entertaining ways.
• Headcount is a lot more effective when it’s content to be quietly unsettling, leans into awkwardness and uncertainty and finds the unnerving terrors there. It’s a lot less effective when it tries to resolve things, introduces lore, starts behaving like any of a dozen other forgettable horror movies.
• Night Creatures is fun enough, thanks largely to its cast, and even then largely to Peter Cushing.

• Vincent Price gives it a good try, but Cry of the Banshee feels cheap and shoddy, making up for what it lacks in a coherent plot with gratuitous nudity and sexual assault.
• V/H/S/85 has some good horror stories running throughout it, and if none of those stories are more than half-formed, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of its creepy aesthetics.
• ‘Salem’s Lot is bad. I’m not sure it’s “bury for two years in movie release purgatory” bad, but it does seem to fundamentally misunderstand what made King’s original novel so effective, that slow and quiet creep of a small 1970s American town dying off. It doesn’t matter that the movie very clumsily speaks those themes aloud at one point late in the game, it moves at too fast a clip to generate any real scares, much less dread. It’s not difficult to see why the previous two adaptations, whatever their own faults, were miniseries, or why Gary Dauberman, the director of this one, reportedly first turned in a three-hour cut. But it is difficult to see how one extra hour would make up for some of the dumb plot changes the movie makes, the misguided decision to combine some characters, change motivations, and re-stage the final confrontation. That the movie doesn’t take its time is only the greatest of its numerous problems. All that said, there are some nice, mostly visual, touches to the film—very creepy uses of light and color, fog and shadow. It seems well enough directed, and most of the actors at least acquit themselves well. But it’s a fundamentally bad adaptation of the source material and not very entertaining because of that.
• The Substance is not subtle, nor are the things it has to say about women and beauty and aging especially revelatory. But it’s bold and audacious and features a fearless performance by Demi Moore, which I am certainly not the first to suggest might be a career best.

I also re-watched the thoroughly enjoyable House on Haunted Hill.