What movies did you see last week? (11/20-11/26)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015 rewatch) -- One notice of the script here: How can anything that is put together so seamlessly, without one unnecessary scene or piece of dialogue, be considered the weakest part of the movie? Every decision matters to the plot, particularly the "human/thing" decisions. Every time a character is given a choice between treating another as a utility or as a person, treating them as the latter will come back to pay for them further down the line. Consider Angharad sparing Nux from Furiosa's wrath. Furiosa persuading Max to join her by saying "Do you want that thing off your face?" and thus reaffirming his status as a man instead of a tool. Capable allowing Nux passage on the war rig. Compare these to the villains, like Joe who treats all as tools and loses them for his arrogance, or the bikers who are only interested in Furiosa so long as she has their fuel (which they lose, of course, because that is all she is to them). What I'm saying is that this is as tight and lean thematically as it is anywhere else. 10/10 forever and ever and ever

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) -- It isn't bad, per se. But it is painfully average and Marvel, destroying the character interaction of the first movie by splitting the party, and also making the plot far more diffuse than it had any reason to be. On the other hand, we have Groot complaining about hats. I could watch two hours of Groot complaining about hats. 6/10

Hidden Figures (2016) -- The moral of the story is that White Males are Evil. Unless the White Male is Kevin Costner, because he's Kevin Costner, dammit. Cheap, sentimental Oscar bait at its worst. 3/10

Dr. Strangelove (1964 rewatch) -- I never liked this movie all that much before, and I like it even less now. It just isn't funny. It's a super serious setting filled by a population of goofy characters. The goofy characters demand laughter, but they're demanding too hard when Kubrick is just letting the camera record everything in the most serious manner. 5/10

A Ghost Story (2017) -- Yeah, I'm kind of in love. I'll see what I think further down the line, but this is at least 9/10 for me.

Boiling Point (1990) -- This was disgusting. Random violence between stone faced characters for 90 minutes is supposed to be funny? I think the point that Kitano was trying to make is that gangsters are just small children that still treat the world as a sandbox, but if he was, I got that within the first ten minutes, no need to keep replaying the same jokes ad nauseum. 1/10

The Bedroom Window (1987) -- Thanks to Cheesecake for putting this in her horror list. A great bit of fun that plays out as a good wrongly accused Hitchcock thriller once it really gets going, although it drags getting there. I wish this was made in the 40s/50s and we could see actors like Marlene Dietrich in Huppert's role (Huppert was the weakest link of the cast) or Claudette Colbert in McGovern's, with someone less bland than Guttenberg playing lead (I think George Sanders would be excellent). A fun thriller to end the week on. 7/10