Last week, I watched 6 movies:
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- The marketing for Pieces proclaimed the movie to be “exactly what you think it is.” And if what you think it is, is bad, then you’d be right. Poorly dubbed, lazily plotted, not even a little bit fun or surprising—not even if all you want is an “exactly what you think it is” no-brain slasher movie.
- The Passenger is slow, almost meandering, and I never really got a handle on why Jack Nicholson’s character was doing the things he was doing. But I also feel that’s deliberate, that his motives are alien even to himself, and I was nevertheless pulled into the quiet rhythms of the movie.
- A Quiet Place Day: Day One has no right being any good, much less as good as it is. A lot of that’s the very simple take it has on this story, not trying to reinvent what we already know, or even necessarily add to it, but letting us see it through other characters’ eyes. It’s helped enormously by the performances, particularly by Lupita Nyong’o, but it’s also a really well directed film about human connection even in the face of inexplicable fear and tragedy. I would never have expected the director of Pig to make a Quiet Place prequel, but this is everything I could have hoped for from that venture.
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- It’s difficult to talk about Magpie without talking about the twists—even hinting that there are twists might be going a little too far—but they’re clever and fun, even if the film maybe doesn’t do entirely enough to earn them or its ending.
- The Tuskegee Airmen can’t entirely shake its TV movie budgets, especially in the aerial dogfights, and there is occasionally the “well, we cured racism then” feel you can sometimes get with movies like this. (If only the filmmakers had known.) But it remains a really important story, and the movie has some very strong performances, especially from Laurence Fishburne and Andre Braugher.
- The Order left me a little cold, despite some terrific tension and strong performances.
I also rewatched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which I saw much too late for it to be one of my own go-to cult movies, but which is delightfully strange and silly nonetheless.