What movies did you see last week? (6/21-6/28)

The Bodyguard - 6 / 10

Hail Caesar - 7.5 / 10

Y Tu Mama Tambien - 9.5 / 10

Some Kind of Wonderful - 7 / 10

Bone - 7.5 / 10

Fire in The Sky - 6 / 10

Toostie - 7 / 10

She's Gotta Have It - 7.5 / 10

Mixed Nuts - 3.5 / 10

The King of Staten Island - 7.5 / 10

The Usual Suspects - 7 / 10

Honeydripper (2007) 7.5
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) 7.5
The Third Secret (1964) 6.5
Hedda Gabler (1963) 7
Les Miserables (2019) 7
Zombi Child (2019) 6
Eurovision (2020) 6+
A Night in the Show (1915) 7
The Bank (1915) 7

Thoughts? Always been a favorite of mine, and Redford shows such great skill with physical comedy and facial expressions here. The "Be a beacon" scene is so wonderfully performed by him.

Superman II - The production history of this movie is fascinating and weird but the end result didn't feel like a product of a troubled production to me (I watched the theatrical version, btw). It did however feel like a bit of a letdown after the terrific first film. The new director Richard Lester explicitly stated that he didn't really respond to Richard Donner's attempt to make Superman grand and epic and that he wanted to make a stripped down sequel. Well, I'm more on Donner's side here. What works in the sequel is its humor - the whole thing is essentially a comedy ripe with silliness and one-liners which I enjoyed. But what "Superman II" lacked for me was the excitement and the action. I do appreciate its comedic pull though and some of its storypoints clearly influenced later (and better) superhero flicks.

La Luna - A very peculiar Bertolucci film about the clash of two very troubled people who happen to be mother and son. They torment each other, they long to connect and eventually find some very strange ways of doing that. But what works so well in the film is the unpredictability of these characters. The movie is a bit baggy and a bit overlong but it always kept me on the edge because I was genuinely curious as to where these characters would lead me next. A really unusual experience with Jill Clayburgh giving a magnificent performance.

The Meaning of Life - This Monty Python film almost won the Palme d'Or! Crazy stuff. What can I say - it's a good comedy. A bunch of funny sketches stitched together not by a story but by a question: 'What is the meaning of life?'. The answers are presented in a typically funny way. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Phenomena - Another terrific Argento piece, this time with a young Jennifer Connelly who has an unusual relationship with insects. Lots of classic Argento elements - a murderer of women on the loose, a girls school as the main location, a main character who may have the key to resolving the mystery but has her mind working against her, wonderfully staged operatic murder sequences. It's all just awesome. The vivid colors of "Suspiria" and "Inferno" are replaced by an incredibly strong palette of blue and silver which is just as striking. As usual, a lot of it doesn't make logical sense but I ain't watching Argento for that. In fact, I like him best when logic gets thrown out of the window.

The Great Debaters - My least favorite of Denzel-directed films. I found it to be pretty typical and maudlin awards bait - handsomely presented and well acted but not particularly interesting overall. I wish the movie focused more on the actual debate preparations and competitions - it could've been an excellent film about the power of words. Instead it comes up with all this relationship stuff between the main characters (he loves her, she loves another guy, another guy is a loose cannon) which just overshadows the more compelling material. It's watchable but ultimately a bit disappointing.

Fail-Safe - Simply fantastic. One of Lumet's very best films for me. "Dr. Strangelove" came out the same year and spoke on the same subject with a comedic edge, and while Kubrick's film is wonderful, I found Lumet's dramatic suspense take on the topic to be even more exciting. Truly nail-biting hard-hitting cinema with an ending for the ages.

Demons - Crazy blood-splattery fun. You gotta love how no-nonsense this is - no explanations, no preludes, no backstories. Just mayhem. Very silly and very entertaining. Although I'm not too sure why the segment with the car-riding drug addicts was really there - seems that it was just an excuse to show off the songs that they bought for the movie.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Classic 1950s paranoid sci-fi. I suppose this is what "The Vast of Night" was trying (albeit not too hard) to be. Well, this movie doesn't stretch out its running time - it finds actual ways to always move the story forward and make it entertaining. Good old Cold War paranoia presented in grounded sci-fi form.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage - Argento's debut feature left me a bit cold. Sure, it started off a path for a wonderful filmmaker and influenced many giallo thrillers to come, but I guess I'm just not that big on the classic giallo formula. The suspense episodes are fine (far from what Argento was coming up with later though) but the stuff in-between is just pretty boring. The movie is just too down-to-earth and I like my Argento to be as out there as possible. The best thing about it is probably the Morricone score.

The Catered Affair - A fairly small but enjoyable dramedy about a very simple human issue which is exactly what makes it work. No overly dramatic plotpoints, no exaggerated character development - just a little story about everyday life with a central conflict that is very relatable. Good performances too, except maybe for Barry Fitzgerald whose character was a bit annoying and felt disconnected from the more-or-less realistic tone of the rest of the film.

The Girl with a Pistol - I expect my comedies to be funnier than this was but I enjoyed Monica Vitti's performance (nice to see her do something wacky after all the Antonioni dramas) and I liked the premise. It just wasn't as fun as I wanted it to be.

Swing Time - It's a joy to watch Astaire and Rogers dance and perform together, no doubt about that. Although I'm sure this movie will be cancelled some time in the future because of the Bojangles sequence. Anyway, I enjoyed the film, it was decently enjoyable but I must say that I'm not too excited about black-and-white musicals. Color just seems like such an essential part of the genre to me, an ultimate tool of expression to go along with the songs and the dancing. Unless it's deliberately stylized, a B&W musical just doesn't have the same excitement to me.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga - The movie's very mediocre but as someone who's enjoyed Eurovision in all its ridiculous glory for many years, I'm willing to give it more of a pass than I should. To be fair, I like the parts of the movie that are directly about the show itself (although everybody always calling it 'The Eurovision Song Contest' sounded very phony, as if to always remind the US audiences of what it's all about) and I particularly appreciated how well the music supervisors worked with the songs for the film. I enjoyed the multiple Euro cameos as well. However, all of this has to exist within a lame Will Ferrell comedy with repetetive jokes only some of which are funny and a dull as nails storyline. What's also weird about it is the lack of comedic energy - silly comedies need to have a pace and a snap to them while this movie was just blandly plodding along. It could and should have been much sillier. For instance, Pierce Brosnan is utterly wasted in it, spending most of his screen time just sitting on a chair with an unappreciative face. Why not amp up the story by, for instance, having him be a former Eurovision contestant who failed (this could work well as a joke on "Mamma Mia" too) and who is thus afraid of his son repeating the same mistakes? Brosnan would've killed in a funny old-timey campy music number. Instead he just sits there doing nothing. Dammit. Oh well, the songs are a lot of fun, the love for Eurovision is thankfully palpable and Rachel McAdams along with Dan Stevens are pretty good.

Cross Creek - Very good Martin Ritt movie where the setting truly becomes the character - I felt transported to those Southern swamps, I felt the heat on the dusty ground, I could almost sense the smell of the place. I also appreciated how unexpected the behaviour of the main character was presented - the way she always felt on-guard with people around her, the way she consciously distanced herself from them when it was so easy to fully embrace them. All of that worked very well for me.

Proxima - Didn't expect to like it as much as I did. We've been seeing a lot of epic space movies lately but this one smartly ditches the grand ambitious and stays grounded every step of the way, despite the story literally leading up to Mars. It works both as a thorough portrayal of what a person goes through while preparing for space travel, and as a quiet piece about a character gradually realizing what she will have to say goodbye to. Eva Green is magnificent in the main role, flawlessly jumping between languages (another strong aspect of the movie is its interplay of cultures which never becomes a big deal - it's just something that is there) and expressing the emotional being of her character beautifully. There are some cliches, of course, and one crucially Hollywood-like development which I wasn't too on board with, but overall it's a really solid film.

Phantom of the Opera - The 1943 Universal picture. The Oscars for color photography and art direction are quite well deserved - the movie sure looks good. Felt like something that could've inspired Tim Burton, for instance. A couple of problems: a bit too much opera singing for my money (more focus should've been put on the suspense episodes and not on the opera) and some unnecessary attempts to lighten up the tone when more darkness would've been more interesting. But all in all I quite enjoyed it.