I watched another 7 movies last week.
- They had to know it was time to hang up the series when the jokes started to become how uncool Nick and Nora Charles were, right? (They’re real squaresville, daddy-o.) Still, Song of the Thin Man is a more than decent enough send-off for the pair.
- This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is filled with indelible joy and sadness and an incredible final performance by Mary Twala Mhlongo.
- Extra Ordinary is a very goofy and charming horror-comedy.
- You might be wondering, how is there a movie starring Paul Newman, Ed Asner, and Pam Grier that I’ve never heard of? And it’s because it’s a really lousy movie called Fort Apache the Bronx. Newman’s the best in it, creating something almost approaching a character, but he’s almost as wasted by the scattershot script as everyone else.
- Black Panther: Wakanda Forever works best as a meditation on grief, and if the movie had sat with that more, it might have been less of an unfocused mess. Alas, the demands of the Marvel machine are all over the film, which is therefore all over the map.
- Performance is an interesting film—maybe a little dated and cluttered with stylistic touches, but interesting nonetheless.
- The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies, and it somehow rode that gimmick all the way to multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It’s not without its charms and cleverness—and is arguably no worse than any of the other movies nominated that year—but it’s also very, almost instantly, forgettable.
I also re-watched Blue Velvet and, not remembering that I’d seen it once before until I was a little ways in, The Rapture. They’re both really good movies. Although it occurred to me, as I re-watched him in Blue Velvet that Dennis Hopper was in four other films the same year it came out, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Hoosiers. The ’80s were weird, man.
