I watched a half dozen movies last week:
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- The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion is your quintessential giallo, from the lurid subject matter to the convoluted plot, from the overly complicated title to the occasionally (maybe even accidentally) stunning shots.
- I wasn’t too fond of Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal’s first team-up (What’s Up, Doc?), so I don’t know why I thought the rematch (The Main Event) would be any better. But it’s significantly worse. Whereas the former was too aggressively madcap in its attempt to recreate classic screwball comedies, trying way too hard to ever be laugh-out-loud funny, it was at least trying. The same can’t be said of the latter, which is rarely funny at all. Roger Ebert called it “a Meet Cute from beginning to end, forced smiles, smarmy dialog and all.
- Amistad rightfully gives the African characters real agency in their own story, and Djimon Hounsou’s Cinque never feels secondary to the white characters. (Indeed, Hounsou’s is probably the best among several good performances.) The movie maybe overdoes it a little, by overplaying the historical significance of the trial and creating Morgan Freeman’s freed slave character from whole cloth. But even it’s not necessarily Spielberg’s best, it’s a more than solid historical drama.
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- It takes surprisingly long for the dolphin to even show up in Flipper, and when it does, the movie probably over-estimates how cinematic just watching it swim will be. But the whole thing is not without its innocent charms.
- Romper Stomper is a bleak affair—turns out it’s not exactly fun watching skinheads run riot—but as a portrait of broken people inflicting violence on themselves and others, it’s often quite compelling.
- Clockwatchers starts out almost like an Office Space-like comedy and then takes some dark but never unexpected turns. It’s often bitter but wickedly funny and honest.
I also re-watched (I think for the second time) Pontypool. I really love all the weird ways it finds to be both really scary and strangely funny.