I watched 6 movies last week.
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- Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is a lot of fun and talks to a lot of really interesting filmmakers—John Waters, David Lynch, George Romero, etc.—about a type of movie that doesn’t really exist anymore.
- Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist is genuinely fascinating, especially given that it’s almost nothing but an hour and a half of just Friedkin talking about the making of the movie and his career.
- I liked Memory: The Origins of Alien a lot more when it focused on the actual making of the 1979 film than when it let critics and commentators wax pretentious about its deeper meanings.
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- Being Mary Tyler Moore is built largely on archival footage, so it may not offer too many surprises, but it’s nevertheless a very fond and engaging look back at a phenomenal career.
- Any insights that King on Screen has to offer seem largely accidental. The documentary lets some interesting filmmakers talk, but it also seems a little muddled about its central thesis, and it’s often more interesting in the people it doesn’t talk to—most notably King himself—or in the many adaptions it doesn’t discuss. There are interesting moments scattered throughout, but more often missed opportunities.
- Pretty As a Picture: The Art of David Lynch can’t help but feel a little dated, built so heavily on interviews conducted around the filming of his 1997 movie Lost Highway—and I’ve seen a lot of this filtered through other interviews—but it’s nonetheless an insightful and amiable look at the director’s creative process and philosophy.
I also re-watched Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables—which is an undeniably entertaining movie, but also almost complete inaccurate as a piece of historical fiction. That, along with the movie’s dubious “all you need is a cop who’s not afraid to break the law to uphold it” stuff, seemed to hit me a little more the wrong way upon re-watching.