I watched 8 movies last week:
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- There seems to have been a small effort, in recent years, to reclaim The Long Kiss Goodnight as an unfairly forgotten perfect action movie. And I’m here to say, no, I think the reaction at the time—this is a well made, largely fun, but also mostly forgettable movie—was more or less the right one.
- I Am Cuba employs some of the same camera techniques that amazed me so much recently in The Cranes Are Flying, and yet I found this all a little too dizzying, too disconnected, and too much.
- For better or worse, Maniac Cop gives you everything you expect from a 1980s Troma-produced Larry Cohen=written movie about a killer cop in New York City.
- The simplicity of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, in its story of female friendship and empowerment, is to be admired, and I like the characters. Would it have helped if I liked what the one of them sings more?
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- Eminem is good in 8 Mile, a genuinely compelling screen presence, but it’s also not hard to see why he hasn’t gone on to act in anything else, any movies where he plays a character further from himself.
- Havoc is surprisingly bad. “Even if you discount how utterly formulaic Evans’s screenplay is…” writes Peter Sobczynski, “in regards to its clunky story in which nothing ever seems to be at stake and unsympathetic cardboard characters or how it wastes such charismatic performers as Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant or how the whole thing has an ugly and unconvincing faux-gritty sheen that looks like a ‘Grand Theft Auto’ knockoff designed on a computer in need of debugging and focus entirely on the action beats, ‘Havoc’ still comes up short.
- First Time Caller is surprisingly great. It isn’t a perfect movie—it maybe could have done more to tie what’s happening to this character, why it’s happening specifically to him—but it’s incredibly effective and creative for such a simple premise and bare-bones indie film.
- I saw Blithe Spirit on Broadway once, with Angela Lansbury in the Madame Arcati role. I think I liked that version slightly more—even Noel Coward reportedly felt David Lean’s direction of the film version was a little too static—but there are things to enjoy about it, from its droll wit to Margaret Rutherford’s own turn in the Arcati role.
I also re-watched Twins of Evil, which proved to be even more fun than I remembered it.