I watched a half dozen movies last week:
 |
 |
 |
- To quote Roger Ebert—one of several times I’ll do so in this post—Playtime “is one of a kind, complete in itself, a species already extinct at the moment of its birth.” It’s not so much a movie as a strange marvel of production design and observation. It’s often delightfully clever, and this “peculiar, mysterious, magical film” deserves to be seen, but it’s a weird trip all the same.
- Demon Seed is pretty dreadful. The Criterion Channel wants you to believe the movie is “[p]acked with suspense, surprise, and special effects,” which leads me to wonder if they know what any of those words mean. Julie Christie is a better actress than the movie deserves—and it’s arguably an interesting footnote to fans of AI horror movies, or Dean Koontz completists—but it’s a lousy movie all on its own.
- What passed for popular action movies in the 1970s, I’m starting to think, maybe just aren’t for me anymore. Case in point: The Getaway, which I found mostly boring, even amid its bank robberies, car chases, and shootouts. Then again, maybe it’s not ’70s movies’ fault; Roger Ebert at the time called The Getaway “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy…[that] functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything.”
 |
 |
 |
- The Beast Must Die isn’t a bad movie, though it does sometimes almost seem like it’s trying to be one, from the constant day-for-night shoots to the laughably terrible werewolf effects. The movie never really works, but it’s interesting and has some surprisingly good performances.
- Not to give Hedda Hopper too much credit—because I suspect she disliked Keeper of the Flame thanks in no small part to its anti-fascist politics—but she wasn’t entirely wrong when she called it “Citizen Kane with all the art scraped off.”
- Dogville is an unpleasant movie—Our Town re-conceived by a misanthrope—which it might have gotten away with if it wasn’t also three, very slow hours long. It often seems on the verge of saying something interesting, a talented cast struggling to bring nuance to a script that fights it at every turn. “Few people will enjoy seeing it once,” wrote Roger Ebert, “and, take it from one who knows, even fewer will want to see it a second time.”
I also re-watched a double-feature of vaguely remembered 2011 science fiction action thrillers with Source Code and The Adjustment Bureau. I think the former holds up much better, even if it loses a lot when you know where it’s headed, while the latter is mostly as meh as I remember it, though Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have genuine on-screen chemistry together.