Weekly Movie Roundup

I watched 6 movies last week.

Your Name Cleopatra Jones Basic Instinct
  • Your Name gets a little weird—it’s not difficult to imagine a Western version that simplifies the timeline a little and tries to provide an explanation for what’s happening—but it’s also often stunningly animated and a lovely story about connection.
    • Cleopatra Jones is a little rough around the edges, and the movie can’t help but betray its ’70s sensibilities and budget. (It’s not great, for instance, that Shelley Winters’ character is often villainized specifically because she’s a lesbian.) But it’s also often a lot of fun, with engaging performances throughout.
      • Basic Instinct, which I’d somehow managed to avoid watching until now, feels more than a little like sleazier Brian de Palma. (Which is saying something, considering that the last de Palma movie I watched was Body Double.) I don’t mean that as a dig at Paul Verhoeven, whose direction I think works here, even if he doesn’t really match de Palma for over-the-top set-pieces. But the film is tanked by its terrible script and its wrongheaded belief that its (as Roger Ebert put it in his review) “trimmed-down would-be hard-core” is actually sexy or erotic.
      Footprints on the Moon/td>

      		The Rose John Wick: Chapter 4
      • Footprints on the Moon is peculiar and hypnotic but also always intriguing.
        • Bette Midler is often very good in The Rose, as are several of the extended musical numbers, even if the film itself maybe doesn’t have a whole lot to say.
          • There are problems with the second two John Wick movies—not least the way they take a very simple, stylized actioner and layer it with increasing mythology—but John Wick: Chapter 4 might be the first time I was actually bored by the series. That boredom didn’t last through the movie’s nearly three-hour running time, and it really rallies with some fantastic set-pieces near the end that probably played even better on a big screen. But it was easily my least favorite of the four films, and I’m actually kind of disappointed that a fifth is in development.

          I also re-watched both Born on the Fourth of July and Jaws over the long holiday weekend. I think they both easily hold up, but the former more for the intensity of Tom Cruise’s performance than anything else.