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.
