Month: December 2024

I watched 8 movies last week:

• Blitz very effectively captures the tension and fear of living under the German’s bombing of London during World War II. The movie is perhaps a little too episodic, and not necessarily Steve McQueen’s best work, but it’s beautifully shot, with some very good performances.
• Violent Night maybe isn’t as clever as it could be, but it is a little clever, and everyone involved is committed enough to the bit that it kind of works. “Let’s literally make Die Hard a Christmas movie” is a weird and wonky premise, but it’s surprisingly fun.
• There’s probably a way to take the ridiculous premise of Juror #2 and turn it into a fun legal potboiler—or even a more serious discussion of our courtroom system and personal ethics—instead of the interesting but dull story Clint Eastwood chooses to stage here.
• They really don’t make movies like The Towering Inferno anymore. That might be for the best. It’s occasionally entertaining, and the special effects are good for 1974, but there’s not much of a movie here.

• Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is not exhaustive. It talks only a little about the duo’s films together before they started their production company, and not at all about the two films they made together a decade after its dissolution. But it’s an interesting look back, through the very personal lens of Martin Scorsese’s memories of the films.
• Topper is effervescent—both charmingly bubbly and also instantly forgettable.
• Nightbitch has such a strange tone—it’s a horror and a comedy, but it’s decidedly not a horror comedy—but it walks that odd tightrope well, thanks largely to Amy Adams.
• Saturday Night can’t entirely shake a sense of smug self-importance, but it never goes full Studio 60. The performances are all fairly good, capturing the qualities of the early SNL cast without ever feeling like impersonation—even if that does mean it’s not always clear who someone is supposed to be until they’re introduced by name. Likewise, the film’s biggest strength—its near-realtime structure—is also its biggest weakness, because while it has a fun ticking-clock, behind-the-scenes energy, the movie is very superficial.

I also re-watched 1989’s Batman, which I hadn’t seen in years—maybe not in its entirety since I was twelve and it was in theaters—and it was somehow both a lot more, and a lot less, silly than I remembered it.

Last week I watched a dozen movies:

• Foreign Correspondent isn’t Hitchcock’s best, but it’s decently suspenseful.
• There are several good peformances in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the best may be from Charles Laughton, who’s perfectly hateful in his role and plays all the weird subtext with a gleam in his eye.
• Son of Lassie is surprisingly dark, a proper trapped-behind-enemy-lines war film.
• There’s a reason why every film production of it since has been compared to Olivier’s Hamlet. It’s not the only way to take the play, and it’s arguably too theatrical and stage-bound, but it’s evocative and haunting.

• Quicksand starts out a little silly, and Rooney’s voiceover is sometimes a distraction, but when the movie starts racking up twists and starts tossing Peter Lorre into the mix, it gets a lot more fun.
• The Sea Wolf is a tense sea voyage, with some great cinematography and a terrifically menacing performance by Edward G. Robinson.
• Anyone who thinks an over-reliance on movie sequels is a recent phenomenon should be introduced to early Hollywood series like the Dr. Kildare movies. They made nine of these things in the span of just five years, then another half dozen spin-offs in the six years after Lew Ayres left the series and the title role. (And that’s to say nothing of the television series a decade later.) Calling Dr. Kildare, the second film in the series, is no less dated and hokey as the first, but it’s still genuinely entertaining.
• William Powell and Myrna Loy are, no shock, terrifically charming together in I Love You Again. The movie has a very silly, but nevertheless clever, premise, but it’s mostly worth it just to see these two on the screen again.

• The Devil Commands has some fun mad-scientist shenanigans, along with a sad and haunted Boris Karloff.
• Vacation from Marriage is (probably intentionally) a little slow to start, but the cast is just so good.
• I don’t want to say Lon Chaney Jr. is no Boris Karloff, because the makeup and his performance in The Ghost of Frankenstein are at least well done. It’s just a case of diminishing returns, with both this and Son of…, the two sequels post-Bride of Frankenstein. That’s probably to be expected, following two of the very best monster movies ever made, but still.
• Okay, so Die Hard is absolutely a Christmas movie if Meet Me in St. Louis is one. The movie is good fun, with some decent songs—including, of course, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—but it just as easily be called a Halloween movie, since there’s a much more extended sequence set at that holiday, and that’s also where the movie’s vibrant Technicolor truly comes alive.

I watched 9 movies last week:

• In Tim Burton’s defense, I don’t think I could have come up with a compelling story reason to make a Beetlejuice sequel either. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has some fun moments, mostly thanks to Michael Keaton’s manic energy in the role, but it also has way too much plot—most of which gets waved away more than actually resolved or connected—and too many sequences that feel like tepid retreads of the original. The movie at least (mostly) understands it’s supposed to be a wacky comedy, which is more than you can say for some legacy sequels, and the cast around Keaton is at least (mostly) good, but its less funny and less wacky than the original, and that absolutely shows.
• I think, overall, I prefer Ozu’s quieter and more contemplative non-silent films, but Dragnet Girl is a lot of fun, and if nothing else, it’s fascinating to see this glimpse of 1930s Japan.
• The People’s Joker is incredibly rough around the edges—and it’s arguably all edges—but it’s also a deeply personal exploration of gender identity, that’s by turns both thoughtful and silly.

• It’s a little remarkable that they made ten movies in a series, in less than ten years, but the first Maisie film is good fun, thanks largely to Ann Sothern’s spitfire performance.
• While it’s obviously indebted to 1950s and ’60s Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation, and to even early Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, The Primevals very much feels like a movie of the 1990s, when its principal photography was completed. It’s decent enough fun as that—a Sci-Fi Channel-caliber movie—and Juliet Mills is actually quite good in it.
• Brian Tallerico describes MadS as “George A. Romero’s ‘Run Lola Run,'” which perfectly describes the film’s propulsive and bloody energy.

• Captains Courageous feels oddly dated in ways I can’t quite put my finger on—though it does feel like the kind of boy’s adventure movie you wouldn’t remake nowadays—but it’s still reasonably moving, and Spencer Tracy’s good in it.
• Carry-On is fine, not completely unenjoyable as a diversion. But it’s also over-long, and nowhere near as clever or suspenseful as a movie like this needs to be. Mostly, it’s the kind of movie you forget you watched almost immediately after doing so.
• Hugh Grant is a lot of fun in Heretic, but the film wouldn’t work half as well without strong turns by both Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher. The movie doesn’t have as many surprises as you might expect, but I enjoyed it quite a lot.

I also enjoyed rewatching Barton Fink.

Last week, I watched 7 movies:

• Queen of Earth can be challenging, occasionally a tough watch, as these two (frequently unlikable) characters spiral inward and around one another.
• I’ve never seen the heavily edited version of Ikarie XB-1 that was released in the United States as Voyage to the End of the Universe, but I have to presume it was an attempt to transform the movie into much more typical early ’60s sci-fi fare. However, in the original Czech version, you can easily see a film that would influence later ’60s science fiction, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the set design to the slower, more philosophical pace.
• The performances in Wildlife are all really great. I initially worried that Carey Mulligan’s Jeanette descends too quickly into reckless, sometimes hurtful behavior, but then I understood the movie is almost exclusively told from the perspective of her teenage son, who would only understand what’s happening as sudden and disruptive.

• Beatles ’64 isn’t a documentary, it’s a confused assortment of interviews, both new and old, and archival footage. There’s kind of a central thesis at play, but it’s not much deeper than “the Beatles arrival in America was an important cultural moment,” and moreover, it only sometimes puts that moment into (earlier or later) context. It’s occasionally interesting—like when someone like David Lynch randomly pops up to talk about his joy in the Beatles’ early music, or Ronnie Spector jokes about them looking like “Spanish dorks” when she took them to Harlem—and I don’t want to fault the film too much for not being an exhaustive document. But it’s far too disjointed and rambling to really say anything about the band or that moment in 1964.
• The Artifice Girl arguably doesn’t have anything especially novel to say about artificial intelligence, but the questions it does ask—what is intelligence? what will owe self-aware AI if we ever manage to create it?—are handled so thoughtfully, with such a simple script and fantastic performances, that I didn’t care. I thought it was a genuinely great movie.
• The Ray Harryhausen stop-motion effects in Mighty Joe Young have a real charm…which is good, because the other effects around them look a lot more shaky nowadays. In fact, Harryhausen’s effects give the giant ape a real personality, and bring some genuine pathos to what’s otherwise a fun but more than a little hokey movie.
• Burnt Offerings is hokey as heck too, and it’s hard to understand why these characters stay in the haunted house—even discounting the supernatural, they seem to be having a miserable summer—but the movie is also pretty fun.

I had the week off from work, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday (but also a dentist appointment right before that), so I ended up watching 9 movies:

• It’s a little strange, watching Love Affair without ever having seen the much better known remake An Affair to Remember. Still, Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer are charming enough together.
• The Last Dragon is cheesy but fun.
• Invaders from Mars is pure ’50s-era science fiction: more than a little corny, bordering on camp but never aware that it’s doing so, but still pretty fun.

• The first twenty minutes of Alien: Romulus, before the movie really lets on that it’s a legacy sequel, are kind of interesting, suggesting an originality that the rest of the movie seems to be actively fighting against. But if the remainder was just another stale Alien knockoff, I think I could have still handled that—even after the unnecessary AI deepfake of Ian Holm shows up, and even after the movie starts directly (and nonsensically) quoting previous films in the franchise. But when the movie reveals itself to be a Prometheus sequel as well, and insists on unconvincingly tying every last bit of continuity together, that’s when my waning interest turned into active annoyance. There are still some things to like about the film, some able direction and a couple of decent performances, but it feels more like a wasted opportunity to bring anything new or interesting to the table.
• You won’t learn much from Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of The Dana Carvey Show if you weren’t already familiar with its history. But it’s also hard to imagine why you would watch it if you weren’t already familiar with it. There are some interesting, if not revelatory, interviews with nearly all of the principals involved—head writer Louis CK being the notable exception. (It’s easy to imagine interviews with him having been filmed, but then scrapped in the wake of the allegations around him.) This soft doc doesn’t necessarily make a case that the show should have lasted, or that there’s even something to learn from its failure, but it’s an entertaining enough.
• Almost everything that works about Drive-Away Dolls is thanks to the actors, who give every weird line reading and wink-wink-isn’t-this-kooky plot twist their all. (Margaret Qualley in particular is a lot of fun.) But it’s all a bit too much, really. Even if you didn’t already know this was directed and co-written by one of the Coen Brothers, the movie would feel like one of their collaborations but warmed over and therefore half-baked. There’s a lot going on here—too much, honestly—and it never comes together in a particularly satisfying way.

• Sorry, Wrong Number is a little convoluted, and Stanwyck’s performance teeters almost constantly on the edge of silly hysteria, but there’s a lot to like here.
• They Call Me Mister Tibbs! is no In the Heat of the Night. I appreciate the attempt to give Poitier’s character more life, and both he and Landau are pretty good, but the movie itself is a little dull.
• Troll Hunter does exactly what it says on the tin. Unfortunately, that’s kind of all it does. The workmanlike CGI has aged well enough, likely because it’s mostly hidden in shadow, but the truth is the movie just doesn’t do a whole lot and then kind of peters out. A late attempt at a surprise reveal can’t really change the fact that this feels like a short film padded unnecessarily. There’s a good short film inside it, but that’s kind of all there is.

I also re-watched Double Indemnity, which I hadn’t seen since my college film class, and which is just a pitch-perfect film noir.