Month: March 2025

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Laurence Olivier is terrific as the sad and selfish title character in The Entertainer, but everyone around him is also quite good, and the movie is a terrific example of the “kitchen sink realism” of ’50s and ’60s British film.
• Waitress has a lot of tender and funny moments—and it’s difficult for the viewing not to be colored by knowledge of writer and director Adrienne Shelly’s tragic murder—but good-hearted whimsy only carries it so far.
• There’s a character in Totally Killer who says, “I hate time travel movies. They never make any sense.” I feel like the writers on this movie took that way too much to heart. There’s promise to the movie’s central idea—which is essentially Back to the Future meets slasher movie—and some occasionally clever moments, but it all falls apart in lazy and confused storytelling.
• I’ve seen worse movies, by far, than Transylvania 6-5000, but I have rarely seen one this unfunny, one where every single joke simply fails to land. (One film comes to mind, Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which just so happens to have been written for Brooks by the same guy.) There are so many bits in the film—you will rarely see a movie trying this hard to be funny—and yet not a single laugh to be had.

• There’s a lot to like in The Shoes of the Fisherman, including some very good performances, particularly from Anthony Quinn and Leo McKern. And there are plenty of interesting ideas about faith and the role of the Catholic Church, particularly in the era the film was made. But it’s also overlong, with too many side stories, and it’s never as epic as its overture, intermission, and length would suggest.
• Executive Decision is a better than serviceable ’90s B action movie. It’s slightly corny and dated, not least because it’s a pre-9/11 airplane hijack movie, but it’s also reasonably entertaining.
• A Complete Unknown is actually quite good. A lot of that’s down to Timothée Chalamet, whose Dylan always feels like a real character, never an impersonation or caricature, but the rest of the cast around him is quite good as well. And then there’s the music—Dylan’s own, the folk music scene he exploded into, and the rock and roll that split them apart.

I also re-watched Possession, which in some ways felt like a first watch. (I don’t think the version I saw a few years ago was the heavily edited one they tried to release in the United States as a straight horror movie, but it was YouTube-quality.) The movie is a lot, and not what I would describe as a fun watch, but it’s a powerfully intense and often upsetting film. As a reviewer in Time Out wrote, “There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. Possession may be the only film in existence which is itself mad…”

I watched 6 movies last week:

• A music biopic where the band members play themselves sounds a little dodgy on paper, but the members of Kneecap acquit themselves well. The movie is goofy and pointed and entertaining.
• There’s something of a critical consensus that the first Venom movie is kind of lousy and the second one, while not necessarily great, is easily a step up. I would one hundred percent reverse that—I did not enjoy Let There Be Carnage even a little—but I would definitely agree with corresponding consensus that Venom: The Last Dance is the worst of the three movie. It’s full of callbacks to plots and characters I remember not at all from the first two installments, back-stories for new characters who otherwise get no development, whiplash shifts in tone, unexciting CGI, and a metric ton of attempted world-building. Tom Hardy sometimes seems like he’s having fun, but that’s about all I can say for it.
• There’s a lot to admire in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, not least of all Richard Pryor’s bravery in making it, his sincere willingness to examine his own self-destructive behaviors. The movie is often audacious and imaginative, and if it has a fault, it’s that you often want it to go even deeper.

• The Outrun doesn’t have anything novel to say about addiction, but I’m not sure that anything novel needs to be said. Sometimes all you need are the quiet truths like “It never gets easy, it just gets less hard.” Saoirse Ronan is as good as she’s ever been, as a young woman struggling to find happiness somewhere other than the places that also bring her misery, and the movie never feels anywhere close to trite or cliche.
• Hi, Mom! is interesting—it’s one of Brian De Palma earliest films, and one of Robert De Niro’s earliest performances—but it’s difficult to say what most, if any, of it is in service to.
• The second, visually more audacious half of The Congress is a lot more interesting than the first—especially now that the idea of replacing actors with digital copies seems less prescient and just something studios are actively trying to do—but I’m also not sure it all coalesces or connects in a fully satisfying way. The movie plays certainly with a lot of interesting ideas, though.

I also rewatched the pretty terrific Amadeus.

I watched just 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert described Radioland Murders as “all action and no character, all situation and no comedy.” There’s simply too much going on here, and almost none of it is particularly funny.
• There are several movies competing for attention in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The best of them is the one starring Wynona Ryder, but none of the movies are very good, and they collide against one another in bewilderingly unsatisfying ways.
• Its satire has lost more than some of its bite, but Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is still often amusing.

• Thunder on the Hill may not have the lush Technicolor of later Douglas Sirk movies, but it has all the exciting melodrama you expect.
• Roger Ebert called Into the Night “a fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.” I would argue only with the “funny” part of that, not the “fitfully.” I can’t remember the last time I was this bored and confused by what’s ostensibly a comedy.
• There’s some question about how the movie treats its other real-life characters, most notably reporter Kathy Scruggs, but Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is well crafted and features a legitimately breakout performance by Paul Walter Hauser.

I also somewhat randomly re-watched Runaway Jury. It isn’t the best Gene Hackman movie. It isn’t the best John Grisham adaptation. It isn’t even the best John Grisham adaptation starring Gene Hackman. But it’s a dumb freight train of a movie, and surprisingly still fun on rewatch even when I knew exactly where it was headed.

I watched 9 movies last week, and thank goodness not a single one of them was a Pink Panther film:

• “If ‘Eureka‘ is not completely successful,” wrote Roger Ebert, “if, indeed, it is sometimes merely silly and often confusing, maybe that’s the price we pay for Roeg’s intensity. At least it is never boring.”
• If Stage Door and now Kitty Foyle are any indication, I need to watch a lot more Ginger Rogers movies.
• Sing Sing is simply told, but with some fantastic, unshowy performances, and honest surprises.

• There’s too much world-building in Battle Beyond the Stars, but that’s a better problem to have than its opposite. The movie can’t ever shake off being a low-budget, over-stuffed Star Wars knockoff, but there’s just enough silly weirdness in the whole thing to be entertaining.
• John Ford’s The Informer is extremely melodramatic, but it’s grounded by Victor McLaglen’s conflicted performance.
• I love that the Adams Family make horror movies together, though Hell Hole is maybe my least favorite so far. As Brian Tallerico writes, “it’s kind of a disappointment” and “drain[ed]…of some of the DIY charm of the other flicks by Adams and Poser.” There are things to like here, some fun things the filmmakers get to do with their obviously bigger budget and some funny performances, but it also feels a little hollow, and the ending is a huge disappointment.

• There’s not a lot to say about The Great Dictator that hasn’t already been said, but there is nonetheless a lot to say for Chaplin’s bravery in making this film when he did, the bite of his satire, but also the lovely silent gags throughout. By his own admission, it’s not a movie he could have made only a few short years later, when the true horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were revealed, but for the moment in time it was made, it is an enduring masterpiece.
• Richard Harris is good in A Man Called Horse, and there’s something to be said for how much the film centers around the Sioux, given the time it was made, though it’s still a little a little disappointing. Not for nothing, as “a trashy, b-movie version of Dances With Wolves.”
• Pamela Anderson gives the best performance of her career in The Last Showgirl, which I think I’d be saying even if I had liked any of her past performances. It’s revelatory not just because we (maybe unfairly) don’t expect it from Anderson—she’s genuinely very good in this sad, complicated movie.

I also re-watched the thoroughly delightful My Fair Lady.

Last week, I watched 11 movies—the entire run of The Pink Panther, sequels and reboots included.

It all started innocently enough, when I thought I’d maybe rewatch The Pink Panther, only to discover that I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever actually seen the movie before. But I enjoyed it well enough, even if it was a little dated and Clouseau-light, so I decided to carry on with the sequel, A Shot in the Dark.

That’s maybe where I should have ended things, because the next film in the series, Inspector Clouseau, is not good at all. Alan Arkin is clearly trying. What he’s trying isn’t always clear, but he definitely is. It’s just that there isn’t a funny moment to be hand in the movie.

For some reason, though, I pressed on. The next three movies—The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Revenge of the Pink Panther—are each okay enough. They’re also quite dated, to the point of some very unfortunate yellowface, but they’re often also silly and amusing. I think my favorite was probably Strikes Again just for how silly it gets, with Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus becoming a full-out Bond villain, but they all have their moments.

I wish I could say the same for the next two films that followed. Trail of the Pink Panther is little better than a clip show, stitched together from deleted scenes and out-takes after Peter Sellers unexpectedly died early in the movie’s production. Some of those deleted scenes are kind of amusing, but most of them look like they were deleted for a reason, and the whole thing just falls apart as a narrative. Sellers’ estate reportedly successfully sued the filmmakers, and the whole thing just feels patched-together and sad. Even sadder is the very real possibility that this is the only one of these movies I had actually seen before. (I can’t say for certain, and it’s a Frankenstein of the whole rest of the series, but released in 1983, it is the first one I could have conceivably been taken to in theaters.)

Still, as bad Trail is, it can’t hold a candle to the absolutely dire Curse of the Pink Panther. If Trail was a misguided attempt to honor Sellers and the franchise, then Curse is a lamentable attempt to extend it with a spin-off nobody wanted, a complete miscalculation of a movie, just fundamentally flawed in its concept and desperately unfunny in execution. I don’t blame Ted Wass for being very confused about how to play this character, but his attempts do reveal the heart of the problem: Inspector Clouseau isn’t a funny character, Peter Sellers made him funny. Every attempt to play this material with someone else, first with Arkin and then with Wass, simply was never going to work.

Peter Ustinov was reportedly cast in the first film, before it eventually went to Sellers, and that I can see. I think Ustinov could have very successfully played the character as written in the first Pink Panther, where Clouseau is just one element of many. I don’t think the series would have carried on with that character, however. The series’ longevity owes everything to Sellers, and it was a fool’s errand asking anyone else to play the role.

So of course, that’s what they did for three more movies. Son of the Pink Panther is not as bad as Curse—and, in all fairness, I think Roberto Benigni is more under-used than miscast—but it’s also never very funny. It doesn’t even particularly feel like a Pink Panther movie, more like warmed-over James Bond. It’s a sad place to end the series, on its thirty-year anniversary no less, but it’s stumble of a step up from the movie before it.

The two Steve Martin remakes are a little better, but that’s not saying a whole lot. I did like the second one more, so it was nice to end this mad exercise on a high(er) note, but neither film was especially funny. We’ve now gone sixteen years without another attempt at the series, so hopefully that’s where things remain.

Honestly, the whole Pink Panther series is pretty checkered, with some fine but not necessarily remarkable entries, and with some utter garbage. I can’t necessarily recommend any of them, and certainly can’t in good conscience recommend running the entire series like I did.

Oh, but I did also re-watch 1972’s Asylum. I don’t think it’s the best of Amicus horror anthology movies, but it has a lot of fun moments.