Weekly Movie Roundup

I watched 6 movies last week. There was something like a theme to them:

One Crazy Summer Two Lovers Three on a Match
  • One Crazy Summer sometimes feels like an ’80s teen comedy, sometimes like a spoof of one, and sometimes like a cheap cartoon. It’s silly enough and sometimes fun but largely forgettable.
    • I’m struggling to decide if Two Lovers has a happy ending. Along the way, it’s a well-acted drama about damaged people trying to find something that will make them feel whole.
      • Three on a Match is interesting, if only because it’s so very much a pre-Code movie, but it also feels overly melodramatic, with several good performers struggling to give good performances.
      Four of the Apocalypse Five Graves to Cairo Six-String Samurai
      • I’ve never really been a fan of Lucio Fulci’s horror movies, so it was something of a shock to discover how much I enjoyed Four of the Apocalypse, one of only a small handful of spaghetti Westerns the director ever made. It’s a surprisingly poignant film, with the low budget and questionable dubbing you expect from the genre, but with a lot to recommend it.
        • I’d have cut the last ten or fifteen minutes of Five Graves to Cairo, which I think do a little worse than gild the lily. But it’s otherwise it’s a very smart and tense little spy thriller, with good performances, particularly by Erich von Stroheim and Akim Tamiroff.
          • If Six-String Samurai was maybe a third as long, you’d say it was a promising enough student film, with some occasionally clever moments, and then probably never think about it again. At an hour and a half, though, it’s really tedious and repetitive—well shot, for such an otherwise no-budget affair, but with almost nothing even approaching a script.

          It was a silly theme—you’d be surprised how few, good, movies there are that start with some numbers—but because of it I wound up watching at least a couple of movies I might never have even heard of otherwise, and which I quite enjoyed.

          I also re-watched Trainspotting, which I don’t think I’d seen since it was in theaters. I don’t think it’s as shocking or original as it seemed some thirty years ago, but it really does hold up.