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Don't Look Now (1973) - ★★★★1/2
It’s always cool when a movie clicks perfectly into focus only at the very end, and it’s amazing that a movie as unusual and even deliberately ramshackle as Don’t Look Now manages to pull it off.
Some of the symbolism beats you over the head a bit (for example Donald Sutherland pulling a doll out of a canal, as he pulled his dead daughter out of a pond) but there are so many images being piled on top of each other (corpses, canals, breaking glass, the color red, fakes, drawings, statues, tiles, crucifixes) that the ultimate effect is kind of intoxicating and magical.
I can’t think of another film where the ending is simultaneously so out of left field yet feels completely and totally earned.
Safety tip: if someone is drowning do not take Donald Sutherland’s efforts to save his daughter as your example! A) chest compressions are more important than breaths B) continue performing CPR until someone is able to call an ambulance!
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The Watchers (2024) - ★★★
Kicking off the M Night Summer of Nepo Daughters with a bang, we have this deeply idiosyncratic debut from Ishana Night Shyamalan.
The movie starts off strong with our hero, a muted and traumatized Dakota Fanning, being drawn into a hellish and supernatural forest where she and several others are forced to entertain the mysterious titular Watchers every night from a bunker with an enormous glass window. During this chunk of the movie it admirably refuses to give us basically any information on the Watchers or context for the situation our heroes find themselves in. This part of the movie is straight up good! It feels dreamlike in a nightmarish way, the characters are thinly sketched but that works fine, as does the constant near-murderous tension.
Unfortunately the more information the film reveals the worse it is. By the halfway point of the movie we’ve learned a ridiculous amount of detail about the Watchers through the most improbable “information revealed in a series of vlogs” sequence I’ve ever seen in which the guy vlogging casually mentions killing 13 laborers a day for the Advance of Science.
From there the film rapidly loses its grip, descending into more or less complete nonsense by the end. However, it’s honestly a promising debut, and I hope we see more from this particular nepo baby!
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Mr Arkadin (1955) - ★★1/2
Watched the 06 cut. First Welles flop I’ve seen, sorry Orson. There’s fun stuff happening here - the flea circus, all the fun camerawork, the spectacle of Europe - but it doesn’t give you any time to care about the characters at all, which is what the climax of the film rests on. It also delivers most of the exposition in a way that is both too fast and too dry. Not a particularly good one!
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The Garfield Movie (2024) - ★★★
Consider how fraught the very concept of a Garfield movie is. Garfield the comic strip is exclusively interested in the mundane, the ordinary, and the banal. Its protagonist hates Mondays, loves coffee, embraces laziness. Garfield as presented in the newspaper comics is also the very definition of static, unchanging, and archetypal. We do not know how Garfield, Jon, and Odie became intertwined, nor do we need to know. The strip is utterly free of character development and progress.
Kids movies as a genre are not a hospitable home for these attributes; they’re more often products of the “Save the Cat” (ha ha) school of scriptwriting, with carefully formulaic adherence to the Campbellian monomyth. Our hero must feel the call to adventure, leave everything they know behind them, and return home transformed by the experience. So it is that in order to make a Garfield movie as a contemporary kids movie, everything that makes Garfield Garfield must be rejected.
As such we get a tragic backstory for Garfield: he is a foundling, abandoned (or so it seems) by his father as an adorable orange kitten and adopted by Jon Arbuckle after eating his way through an Italian restaurant.
The adoption is followed by an exhilarating sequence in which the film recreates at breathtaking speed a number of classic Garfield strips. It goes on for so long that I began to wonder if the movie simply didn’t have a plot and was just disconnected CGI hijinks for 90 minutes.
Alas, it is not to be. The film succumbs to the crushing pressures of the kids movie format. Funny pages aficionados will note that it accomplishes this by cribbing heavily from the other orange cat - Heathcliff. Like Heathcliff, Garfield is given a crafty, weathered old thief of a dad, complete with a gang of Catillac Cats. He becomes embroiled in a revenge scheme and a plot to reunite two cows separated by an evil corporation. He learns that his dad really did love him all along. And he learns the value of friendship, acting to help those you care about, and serving Justice to those who deserve it. In short, he ceases to be Garfield.
This works surprisingly well for most of the film’s runtime. Garfield as a fish out of water attempting a heist alongside his streetwise dad is a far better idea than anything from the execrable 2004 film (which Roger Ebert loved) and the Emperor’s New Groove crew manage to cram a surprising number of effective gags into the movie. Given the brief of creating a workable Campbellian film out of a profoundly non-Campbellian narrative, they just about manage to do it.
There are, however, two crucial things that prevent the film from being anything more than a moderately enjoyable kids movie.
The first is the extremely saccharine attitude with which it treats Garfield’s relationship with his dad. There is simply too much schmalz here, especially galling considering cynicism is one of the few attitudes the Garfield comic strip is willing to adopt.
But this is nothing compared to the film’s Achilles heel: Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt quite simply does not have the vocal character to play America’s favorite lasagna loving cat. His voice is white bread, characterless, featureless. This isn’t his fault, nor is it necessarily a problem; his vocal homogeneity is why he is perfectly cast in the Lego Movie. But Garfield shouldn’t sound like an annoying guy you run into from your high school, and the film is worse for casting him.
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A Wrinkle in Time (2018) - ★1/2
Paced like a late stage Malick movie but with the style and depth of a Dreamworks production. Cannot bear the weight of its gonzo source material so is simultaneously tediously conventional and feels like it’s throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and none of it is sticking. What the hell is Zach Galifianakis doing here. This movie’s casting is so goddamn weird the only adult who fits the role is Chris Pine as a Science Dad. Throwing on an extra half star for some moderately interesting design in the back third.
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Candyman (1992) - ★★★★
Strong argument against going to grad school
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Poor Things (2022) - ★★★★
Works as a companion piece to Dogtooth, but where Dogtooth is a nightmare Poor Things is a fairytale—specifically Pinocchio, with Willem Dafoe as a fucked up surgical Gepetto. However, while variations on Pinocchio usually plays out as a didactic morality play, Poor Things is more interested in Bella as a naïf who is capable of turning the conventions of the world upside down. Emma Stone is fascinating in this. Her hyper-mannered performance of someone learning and growing constantly is pretty spectacular. But the performances are honestly pretty remarkable across the board, with Mark Ruffalo playing dramatically against type and Willem Dafoe doing classic Willem Dafoe shit.
This movie is full of incredible bizarre details, like Alfie’s extremely wet dining room, the inexplicable medical experiments throughout, and the dreamlike cityscapes of Lisbon, Alexandria, Paris, and London. Loved it! Had a blast!
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Irish Wish - ★
AI is the future of cinema
- The Amityville Horror - ★★★
Kind of speeds through the least compelling parts of the Shining, but salvaged by the bizarre mid-00s color grading and editing and the fact that this was shot in location in beautiful Silver Lake, Wisconsin
- Madame Web (2024) - ★★★★
Yes!! B-movies are back!!!!!
This has everything an underdog blockbuster should have:
- the evil guy’s only weakness is getting hit by a car a lot of times
- a lead actor legitimately doing great work with some of the toughest dialogue I’ve ever heard
- an it girl (Sydney Sweeney) delivering the worst performance I’ve seen in a movie in the past 5 years
- an embarrassing amount of ADR
- The best pop songs of 2003
- Pepsi product placement in 2/3 of the shots
- Adam Scott is there
Give me 5 of these over anything from the MCU any day. This is some truly delicious garbage
