I watched 8 movies last week:
- I know this is going to upset some people of a certain age, millennials just a handful of years younger than me, but Hocus Pocus is not a good movie. I understand how someone might think it is, if they’d watched it repeatedly as a child on VHS, and it’s not mean-spirited in any way. But Roger Ebert was right when he described watching it “like attending a party you weren’t invited to, and where you don’t know anybody, and they’re all in on a joke but won’t explain it to you.”
- None of the ten Tales of Halloween are abjectly terrible, but not a single one is in any way remarkable or worth seeking out on its own. Horror movie anthologies are almost always hit and miss—I’m not even that big a fan of what’s supposed to be the best of the modern lot, Trick ‘r Treat—but I’m already having trouble even remembering any of these particular tales.
- Reptile is smart and tense and suspenseful…until it just kind of isn’t. The cast is good throughout, particularly Del Toro, but the mystery never comes together as anything more than boilerplate, isn’t shocking in its revelations, and in retrospect isn’t much of a whodunit at all. As A.A. Dowd writes, “the movie often plays like the work of someone who caught Zodiac or Gone Girl on cable years earlier and is trying to recreate it from memory, getting some of the sickly sleekness down but remaining foggy on the specifics.”
- Showing Up is understated and low-key, flirting with many big moments that would probably be the centerpiece of—or even threaten to overwhelm—other movies but never making more of them than they are. It’s a lovely character study, and another terrific collaboration between Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt.
- I really enjoyed Thelma, which marries horror tropes to the European art film, and which, as Manohla Dargis wrote, has “a great talent for making loneliness visceral and visible, for showing how pain can make the world disappear.”
- Superman and the Mole-Men is corny and dated, but I think Steve Shives does a good job of detailing its charms (and its limitations), even if I didn’t like the short movie quite as much as him.
- Lynch/Oz makes the occasionally interesting observation—and lord knows it’s full of interesting film clips—but it’s hard to be convinced by any of its surface-level film criticism, none of which rises above the (already well-established) fact that David Lynch likes The Wizard of Oz and has referenced it in his own work.
- I like the cast a lot, and the movie dances around some interesting thoughts about love and loneliness, but Fingernails is pretty underbaked as a story.
I also re-watched Videodrome, which I probably haven’t seen in something like thirty years—back when VHS was still a going concern and James Woods was a bankable movie star. The movie is admittedly a little dated, and it’s never been my favorite Cronenberg. But for all his faults as a human being, Woods is a compelling screen presence, and the movie pokes around at a lot of the fascinating body-horror pre-occupations in a lot of Cronenberg’s work.
