Another week, another five movies. Here’s what I watched:
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- Night Tide is a fever dream of a B-movie—some interesting visuals and a very early performance by Dennis Hopper, but not especially memorable.
- Its oddly generic title notwithstanding, The Incident is tense and unnerving, and it has a pretty remarkable, varied cast.
- Right up until its huge swing and a miss of an ending, Come True is a really effectively creepy little movie.
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- Ben is bad, but also bad in very perplexing ways. I don’t remember a lot about Willard, but that at least was understandably a horror movie, whereas its sequel is all over the map. It’s not so much that the movie is never scary; it’s that it’s hard to even tell what it’s trying to do, and the movie is never interesting enough to really care.
- I wanted to like Self Reliance a lot more than I did. I like the cast a lot, and the movie plays with some smart ideas, but it’s usually more amusing than outright funny. I think the script also has some fundamental structure problems, with whole characters I’d excise or combine, for a much sharper focus. I’d like to see Jake Johnson write and direct more comedies after this, but this initial outing left me a little flat.
I also rewatched The Court Jester, in memory of Glynis Johns, who died earlier this month and was the last of the movie’s surviving main cast. It’s a movie I know I saw most, if not all, of as a child, but which also holds up remarkably well as an adult some four decades later. It’s just a pure, silly delight.