Last week, I watched 9 movies:
- It’s not so much that Gladiator II can’t escape the shadow of the first film, it’s that it has no apparent desire to ever do so. Denzel Washington seems to be having fun, and Paul Mescal acquits himself well, but it’s difficult to see what, if anything, is the point of it all.
- Crossing is told with real compassion for its characters, even when we don’t understand, or even necessarily like them.
- I found it a little difficult to really connect with Kurosawa’s High and Low, at least as a suspenseful police procedural, but the film puts its main character, played by incomparable Toshiro Mifune, in an interesting ethical dilemma.
- Belle de Jour perhaps seemed more shocking in 1967 than it does almost 60 years later, but there is almost a quaintness to it now. That said, Catherine Deneuve remains coldly captivating, and there are intriguing surrealistic touches throughout.
- There are some interesting cinematic choices in The Picture of Dorian Gray—is it a spoiler to say that the portrait, when it’s finally seen, is photographed in color?—that I’m not entirely sure work. But the movie is always engaging.
- The Gorge is just so incredibly boring. The movie takes a ludicrous, but potentially fun, premise and does practically nothing with it, squandering also whatever chemistry the two leads have together.
- Cecil B. Demented works better in concept than execution, though there are amateurish charms to any John Waters movie.
- Of the “guy dies but returns to Earth as a guardian angel or ghost” subgenre of romantic comedy, I think I’ll take Her Comes Mr. Jordan (and its remakes) or A Matter of Life and Death over A Guy Named Joe, which is pleasant enough, thanks largely to Spencer Tracy’s charms, but takes much too long to get going, and doesn’t have much of anywhere to go when it finally does so.
- Return of the Living Dead III isn’t perfect. All of the real character development is left to the actors, and the movie is much grimmer in tone than the other two films in the series. But there’s some good creature work, interesting body horror, and at least a couple of surprisingly good performances.
I also rewatched both The Blues Brothers and The Warrirors, instead of watching the Super Bowl, which, the halftime show notwithstanding, feels like the better choice.
