I watched another half dozen movies last week:
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- I have no particular fondness for—or even, strictly speaking, memory of—the original Road House, so I didn’t know at all what to expect from the remake. But it’s very bad. The trailer promises nothing more than some laidback charm, well-choreographed fights, and the occasional fun action set-piece. But the movie delivers very little of that, and none of it especially well. The plot is a muddle that grows increasingly uninteresting, even as it becomes needlessly complex, and the movie throws way too many characters on the screen, very few of whom ever make any impression at all. (A few of the actors who do make any impression might have wished afterwards that they hadn’t.) I’d like to think that the sped-up CGI that’s employed so heavily in the fight scenes was simply a misguided attempt to make those fights look frenetic and wild, but it’s all just janky as hell, and instead makes them look fake and unreal. That’s actually a problem with the movie as a whole; its stakes are confused, its characters are under-baked, and its plot seems chopped up and hastily reassembled in post—despite still clocking in at just over two hours. Jake Gyllenhaal’s charisma keeps things afloat for a little while, but even he feels desperately lost by the end. Honestly, the best thing about the movie is the live music that frequently plays at the fictional, titular bar. They could have saved everyone the trouble and just filmed those bands playing.
- Beau Is Afraid…is a lot. But a lot of that is strikingly, even startlingly, strange—a horror movie where anxiety is the monster and unreality unspools across the screen in totally unexpected ways. It’s off-kilter and self-indulgent but also incredibly compelling.
- Would The Last Voyage of the Demeter be better if it played coy about its source material? (“Dracula? What’s a Dracula?”) I’m tempted to say no, but it is interesting to wonder if the movie could have evaded the sense of anticlimactic inevitability that hangs over it from the very start if it didn’t so repetitively hammer in exactly which horror novel it’s supposed to be spun off from. There are no surprises here, but it doesn’t help that the movie doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it does have, though, are some impressively grisly kills and a vampire whose mean streak makes him at times genuinely frightening. That’s only in flashes, of course, and under cover of darkness; by the light of day, there isn’t very much to sink your teeth into here, and while the movie is passably entertaining, it’s also more a forgettable footnote than anything else.
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- You Hurt My Feelings is warm and tender, perceptive and funny.
- I wasn’t wildly impressed by 2022’s X and didn’t hold out much hope for its immediately announced—and, to my mind, totally unnecessary—prequel. Now, however many months later, Pearl arrives to exceed my expectations, but only barely. The movie feels more like an emotional endurance test for its lead actress, especially in its final scenes; and while it’s ostensibly an origin story and character study, if there’s any character development, it’s only through the sheer force of Mia Goth’s will. The movie has very little to say, and certainly nothing that connects it in any meaningful way to its predecessor, and so just feels like an empty and slapped-together exercise in style.
- Friedkin Uncut doesn’t offer any surprise revelations about the late man or his work, especially if you’ve seen other documentaries about them, but he was an incredibly erudite and entertaining storyteller. This film offers Friedkin, and several others, the opportunity to talk at length about his impressive filmography.
I also re-watched the still-uplifting Rudy.