I watched 6 movies last week:
- I watched The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun because I’d heard Quentin Tarantino sing its praises recently and had never even heard of the film before. He compared it to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage—which is maybe apt, given that that’s hardly my favorite Dario Argento movie. This one isn’t, strictly speaking, giallo, but I can see the parallels Tarantino draws to it. Maybe it’s my more hesitant appreciation for the genre, though, that kept me from really enjoying this strange, often confused haze of a movie.
- The songs in 1776 aren’t particularly good, much less memorable, but the movie itself has a fun enough momentum, thanks largely to the cast, including William Daniels. It’s a little weird reading contemporary reviews of the film, like from Roger Ebert, who thought the movie was somehow an insult to the great men of history and “emasculated our founding fathers in story and song,” when the fact that it treats these men as incredibly flawed and often petty, squabbling people, nonetheless in pursuit of an ideal, is probably the best thing about the movie.
- For a legacy sequel, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is pretty good, and it manages to recapture a lot of the fun of the original. That’s about all it captures—its own plot is largely forgettable, sometimes feeling a little like a xeroxed copy—but it’s also genuinely a lot of fun when Eddie Murphy is on screen. And if nothing else, it’s hands-down better than the third movie in the franchise.
- Martin Scorsese’s sophomore effort, Boxcar Bertha, doesn’t necessarily herald the arrival of a great filmmaker—and it maybe feels less representative of his later work than his first film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door—but it does some interesting things.
- Late Night with the Devil gets a lot of the ’70s-period detail right, which is why it’s kind of a shame that it’s otherwise it’s a mostly bland, by-the-numbers horror movie.
- By the end of The Deep End, I was convinced I’d seen it before, which may explain why it never really connected with me, despite a good performance by Tilda Swinton.
