- What’s Up, Doc? is a lot. Even by the standards of the screwball comedies it’s imitating, the movie is aggressively madcap—though maybe that’s it’s strength, since you never have a chance to exactly get bored even if you also never exactly laugh out loud at anything on screen.
- Don’t Let Go has a strong cast, and a neat (if somewhat familiar) time-travel concept, but it gets bogged down by a formulaic plot that wastes a lot of its actors and potential.
- If you can forgive the not very good makeup effects, the cliched plot, the padded running time, and the cultural appropriation that extends to unconvincing brown face, The Ghoul is a midlly interesting footnote in Boris Karloff’s career.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows isn’t an amazing movie—even if ten-year-old me would strongly disagree—and it probably is for the best that they discontinued this Michael Bay-produced series. But it also isn’t terrible, and like the movie before it, it has some fun moments. I paid ninety-nine cents to rent the 2014 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and remember thinking that was about right for what I got. I didn’t pay anything to rent the sequel, and I feel like I got a real bargain.
- Roger Ebert described Crash—favorably, I need to add, in a three-and-a-half star review—as being “like a porno movie made by a computer.” It’s a deeply unenjoyable movie, but I don’t think Ebert was wrong in also calling it “challenging, courageous and original” in the things it has to say about sex and fetish and compulsion.
- Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap isn’t necessarily an informative documentary, even if it does talk at length to many of the pioneers and grandmasters of hip hop. But there is something to be said for simply listening to smart people talk about their creative process, and letting them just talk about the art that they love. It’s a scattershot history of the musical genre, but there are a lot of interesting, fun, and even insightful moments that arise in its conversations.
I also re-watched Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which I remember liking the first time around, but which I actually think I liked more now, having just recently watched the first season of Andor.
