Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2023)

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne

Have I Seen It Before: Nope!

Did I Like It: I struggled with it for a good long while, not unlike I struggled with Mad Max Fury Road (2015). I know I am supposed to like it. A lot. I’ve gotten the memo. And yet… The craft of the stunts are pretty great (although my memory is telling me that the CGI here is a little wobblier than its predecessor) but the bombast and supposed hopefulness of the characters always leaves me detached from the proceedings. I’d be absolutely useless in a real apocalypse; I’m pretty useless when they’re depicted on screen.

But still, after a bit of slow going, I found myself oddly charmed by this one. I might be the perfect audience for the series as it continues. Apparently the series doesn’t even care about continuity, so for a long stretch I just assumed Praetorian Jack (Burke) was Mad Max—Burke is more of a dead ringer for a younger Mel Gibson than Tom Hardy ever was—and had fun with it. I guess I was wrong, but I’m not entirely sure Miller cares how I have fun with these movies, as long as I do.

Then there’s the ending, where I really think the film becomes special. Any number of revenge epics—sci-fi or otherwise—come to a head where the protagonist finds the object of their, well, fury. The story can really only go one way from here, but this movie acknowledges that, makes that part of the character’s struggle, and then finds a surprising and just fate for the evil that men do. I’ve honestly been thinking a lot about that ending since walking out of the film. Action movies have a hard time doing that these days.

Oddly enough, with that in mind, I now have a hankering to watch Fury Road again. That’s probably a pretty good endorsement for this, all things being considered.

Wildcat (2023)

Director: Ethan Hawke

Cast: Maya Hawke, Rafael Casal, Philip Ettinger, Cooper Hoffman

Have I Seen It Before: Funny story, that. I keep teetering on the edge of writing it all down here but let’s leave it at this: If you see me out in the world, ask me about the time Ethan Hawke specifically and directly wasted 105 minutes of my time.

But no, I’ve never seen the film before today.

Did I Like It: Any kind of artists probably spends a large part of their existence hoping that no one will see the seams in their work. That’s infinitely complicated by the fact that those seams are likely the only thing the artist can see anymore.

I think Ethan Hawke would admit, if pressed, that he didn’t on the page have much of a movie here. That’s not fair. Every moment in the movie is telling me that; we didn’t have to press him at all. There is no narrative in the life of O’Connor (Hawke), and the rest of the movie is filled in with imaginative vignettes depicting O’Connor’s work with the cast re-packaged as the characters.

There are moments, though to really recommend it. I viscerally feel one of the opening scenes where O’Connor bristles at her disinterested editor contorting himself to similarly warp Wise Blood into a more conventional package by outlining the thing before it is done. Several other moments rang true, which is impressive enough when I often have trouble relating to the—one doesn’t want to say “excessively” but the gentler correct word escapes me—religious. Several of the vignettes of O’Connor’s world are evocative and would make astonishingly good short subjects, but they aren’t. Admittedly, the film accomplishes that goal that I often look for in biopics like this: It made me want to seek out the author’s work. Unfortunately, here, it is only because I feel like I got short shrift in the process.

It is all as if the elder Hawke might have really wanted to make a documentary about O’Connor with those fictional interludes spliced throughout, and just… didn’t. An admirable disappointment, but still a disappointment.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Amiah Miller

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: I’m a little resentful at myself for having seen Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) before re-watching this one. I probably would have been a little less forgiving of Kingdom had this one been fresher in my head. On the other hand, this one hits just a little bit harder because it is not only the final entry in Caesar’s (Serkis) story, but also the likely (but not definitely) last time we will see Serkis in the series*.

While I was still writing The Once and Future Orson Welles I did a blog post reflecting my own anxieties about how trilogy finales are always a tough nut to take in (to say nothing of cracking it in on the part of the creator). I didn’t include this film in those posts. Now, that’s largely because the film hadn’t been released then, but is also much more because this one sticks the landing. Shedding the need for exposition outside of a few brief (and they are brief) title cards, we’re able to tell a ruthlessly simple story with Caesar. Even references to films in the original series are kept to a bare minimum, and are oblique at that. To my count, only the Alpha-Omega regiment and the human girl’s (Miller) being named Nova, this is an almost completely original journey into the world of the apes, even if the general plot is roughly similar to the much, much worse Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

Serkis has brought the character so far in a short amount of time, flawlessly playing the coming-of-age Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) through to the old man having to confront his own well-earned hatred here. It’s rare that a high-genre movie released in this century can really grapple with these kinds of questions, and then come to grips with the fact that the answers might not be nearly as important as coming to peace with the questions themselves. His tragedy and—if primates might forgive the expression—humanity come through to culminate this series on its strongest note, not just managing to save itself from the natural embarrassment of a part 3.

*I always got the sense that Serkis could certainly play his own descendants, especially as Roddy McDowall did so in the previous series, but alas, as Matt Reeves moves on to Gotham City, this series may truly be over here.

Talk to Me (2022)

Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou

Cast: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Is it possible for a a movie review to become an impassioned plea? We’re about to find out.

Aside from an opening scene that anyone would be hard pressed to describe as anything other than surprising, we’re introduced to another crop of teenagers doomed for some degree of misfortune or carnage, which are not unlike any other crop of teenagers which enter a movie doomed to misfortune and carnage.

Maybe that’s the big reservation I have about the film. Coming from A24 and with every choice the filmmakers implement, I get the impression of someone wanting to produce elevated horror. But with a thin metaphor for drug use fueling the proceedings, and that aforementioned stock crop of teenagers, I wonder if the filmmakers themselves aren’t entirely sure they know what they want.

That’s not to say that there aren’t pleasures to be found in the film. Practical effects abound, and just when the film threatens to err on the wrong side of boring with its genre trappings, it times a jump scare pretty well. Not wanting to spoil the ending entirely, there’s also a depiction of death from the point of view of the dying that will probably stick with me long after anything else in the film dims in my memory.

All of the best parts in the movie, though, lead me to one inevitable conclusion. This is—for any faults I may have found with it—a lean 95 minutes of a movie. Mythology is dispensed at a minimum, and mythology is usually what will remove any effectiveness for a horror franchise. So, to go back to the beginning of this review, and I may already be too late for this request: Please, A24: don’t make a sequel. You’ve got a thing that mostly works here, and more of it will just explain how that blasted hand came to be. I really don’t care how that happened.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

Cast: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Fred Durst

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. I’ve had a recent rash of catching all of the indie movies just as they are beginning to leave this year. I really need to get further ahead, although Circle’s smaller rooms do have their charms. I also need to eat less popcorn. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep more.

Did I Like It: And that should quality permeates the film, in a very strange way. The entire affair is positively Lynchian in its inability to be pinned down, and there’s at least one way to read the entire movie as if nothing other than watching some TV happened throughout the film, but for anyone who feels like the person living inside of them is different than the person everyone else sees, there’s plenty to chew on.

Normally, a film that threatens nothing happening is enough to make me turn my nose up at the whole affair, but this is different. The language the film uses is probably what interested me most. Nostalgia, and nostalgia subtly done permeates every inch of the film. From long, loving shots of a 1996 ballot (they may have only been long and loving in my own memory), high school décor blandly insisting students “carpe diem,” and VHS tapes as a way to connect with people*, this is speaking a language I understand, even if I am ultimately a guest in the conversation. This doesn’t even begin to dwell on the film’s fixation with a particular TV show languishing on the Young Adult Network, possessing an unearned reputation as “for girls,” and ultimately possessing a mythology far richer than it has any right to, without ever saying the name of the show they’re really hinting to.

*I was a little perturbed by this, as anyone knows you could have fit 6 hour-long episodes with commercials on a VHS tape, made all the worse by the realization that The Pink Opaque is a half-hour… I just now realized that the show may have been more akin to one of the Nickelodeon shows, given how cheesy it ended up being when characters sobered up and turned thirty.

Mars Express (2023)

Director: Jérémie Périn

Cast: Moria Gorrondona, Kiff VandenHeuvel, Josh Keaton, Sarah Hollis

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Damn near missed it in the theaters, to boot.

Did I Like It: The film has ambitions, but I can’t help but feel as if those ambitions just aren’t met. I know I’m supposed to be so thrilled that any independent—to say nothing of foreign—animated film, but I can’t quite co-sign here.

It’s animation style is anything but revolutionary, and in fact at several points drifts into the sloppy territory of a less-than-stellar video game or early computer animation effort meant for 90s television. Characters—yes, including the human ones—occasionally glide as if they were programmed, less than walk in a believable fashion. I might even be able to get over that—as it is a relatively rare occasion—but in a film that is this focused on who is a robot and who isn’t, I’m surprised more people weren’t distracted.

I’ll be the first to admit that complaint is more than a little bit picking at nits. but the story that’s delivered to us by the animation is wanting. A melange of warmed over Philip K. Dick tropes can be entertaining enough, but it is unfortunate that its most intriguing sci-fi concept is the least examined portion of the whole movie. People can copy themselves into various types of of robots after they die, and those robots can carry on their lives. There is no Blade Runner-esque uncertainty as to who is a robot and who isn’t, but the questions of the uniqueness of the self is buried under an avalanche of self-driving car chases. Ultimately, the film’s inner core of warmed over noir-isms left my attention—and consciousness—wandering, and I did so want to enjoy this film more than I did.

Without Warning! (1952)

Director: Arnold Laven

Cast: Adam Williams, Meg Randall, Ed Binns, Harlan Warde

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Up until a few minutes before it started, I hadn’t even known it exited. Apparently, it had been thought lost up until about twenty years ago.

Did I Like It: Yeah, you know? I did. The film is slight, it’s cheaply made, but there’s never a moment where the film doesn’t know what it is doing. That would usually be more than enough to say, “Sure, if Without Warning! comes across your radar, give it a look.”

But there’s more than a few things here to recommend it beyond those basic requirements. First, its use of a semi-documentary format only occasionally distracts with an overreliance on voice over narration. Other films of the era would be content for the controlled antiseptic quality of a soundstage, but here the killers and the cops enter the real world of the time. Verisimilitude may be cheap sometimes, but it’s worth its weight in gold.

Second, the film is far funnier—without completely descending into parody—than I might have given credit to it on spec, as a lurid crime b-picture. Detectives and police support staff—between using crime lab equipment to make coffee and trying to find new and interesting ways to strangle a mannequin—have a certain manic delight in their jobs. Were this same creative team to produce a crime procedural today, it might have really been something to see.

Third, branching out from what one might think of as the noir genre, the film is more content to embrace what would become the slasher genre. Between smoky bars and dames who know all the angles, there’s a pinch of criminal pathology thrown into the mix. This isn’t the story of someone who drifted into violence as a means of dealing with the immediate situation in front of him. This is ugly violence for the sake of it, which admittedly can be more than a little bit fun.

Cujo (1983)

Director: Lewis Teague

Cast: Dee Wallace, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I know.

Did I Like It: Well, I really disliked the novel in my attempts to read it. It belongs in that depressing realm of summer beach reading where the story isn’t so much about the terrifying-bordering-on-the-supernatural terror that looms on the horizon , but more about how brave a bored housewife is for sleeping around on her marriage. Peter Benchley’s Jaws was the same way. It was such a chore that I half wonder if the legend around King not having any memory of writing the novel is only part of the story, and he was so impaired that some lesser author completed the novel under the King brand. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to a novel.

Unfortunately, this film is a far more faithful adaptation of the source material than Jaws (1975) . There’s a dog who’s kind of scary—or at least meant to be scary—and a rather simple set up that really tries its best to ratchet up the tension, but fundamentally this is a story about infidelity, and not a very well-considered version of that story, either. Matters come to a conclusion, and it is made abundantly clear that the spurned spouse (Hugh-Kelly) is the most vestigial character a plot could possibly handle. He has a dream that something wrong is going on back at home, perhaps beyond just the domestic difficulties. By the time he comes home, gets out to the farm cum mechanic, his wife (Wallace) has already dispatched the dog in question.

Where does that leave the film? Mostly with some mild special effects, some violence, and nothing. Unfortunately this is not one of those cases where we can say the book is worse than the movie. The book and the movie are one and the same.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Director: Wes Ball

Cast: Owen Teague, Kevin Durand, Freya Allan, William H. Macy

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Brand new…?

Did I Like It: On spec this film has a lot working in its favor, and a lot working against it. For one, the previous trilogy of Apes films took a moribund franchise* and infused in with more than enough good will to go around. In my review of those films, I struggled to find anything that might not have been up to snuff, even with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) my least favorite of those three films.

On the other hand, the fundamental engine which made those films as special as they are—spoilers, it is Andy Serkis—is nowhere to be found.

Where does that leave this film? Mostly fine. I think Owen Teague especially equates himself rather well, when he could have been overwhelmed by the legacy of the truly great performance which preceded him. He has a certain sensitive quality which brings to mind Roddy McDowall, and feels perfectly at home in this story taking place as the titular planet is more fully taken over by the titular apes.

The film that surrounds Teague’s Noa isn’t quite as good as its predecessors, although tis certainly a fair sight better than most of the movies for which the aforementioned Roddy McDowall had to politely show up. The larger portion of the first half of the film drags interminably, and feels like it is borrowing too heavily from the Serkis-led films. Each of the predecessors felt like a different from each other, which is enough of a small miracle from a modern blockbuster series. Once things pick up and the goals of the still-verbal humans out in the world become clear, things are a bit more interesting, but ultimately not as well-crafted. War brought the human race even lower, but this one seems to insist on retconning that to the point that almost most of the humans are behaving as if the Simian flu had only broken out last year as opposed to 300 years ago. It makes the saga all a bit murky, although, again, not nearly as murky as the time-loopy stuff of previous films…

Although if there are more Apes to come, maybe they’ll come around to that stuff too. More than a few characters do spend more than a little amount of time looking out through telescopes during the film, if you catch my meaning.

*For once, I’m not specifically trying to drag the later work of Tim Burton. For all of the charm that the latter entries in the original Apes films have, they weren’t exactly the big-time awe-inspiring experience of the original.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell

Have I Seen it Before: Yes.

Did I Like It: One doesn’t want to give themselves over to the auteur theory, but I am tempted to say that most of the qualms I had about Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) are alleviated here, and I wonder if that can be laid at the feet of Matt Reeves. Callbacks (callforwards?) to the original Planet of the Apes (1968) are kept to a minimum. The pandemic storyline somehow went from the too-close-to-home ominous undertones in Rise to the hey-at-least-it-didn’t-end-up-that bad on display here. Most importantly, the human element is a real part of the movie, as opposed to the afterthought that is James Franco. And if you think that was easy to say with Jason Clarke in the film, you’re nuts.

The special effects may show their seams the most when those humans and the apes show up in the same frame, but that’s a forgivable problem. Any Apes film that completely conquers the uncanny valley when Ape shares the screen with human really wouldn’t be an Apes movie at all. Now, when the Apes are alone, it’s a different matter all together. They are still the far more interesting characters in the film, and I only say that because they are more interesting than human characters of practically any film of the era. Serkis is once again the master of acting through a digital effect, the same way Chaney or Karloff were the master of the physical prosthetic. There was more than a little chance that a new set of Apes movies would be something silly to behold even in the best of circumstances (I’m looking in your direction, Tim Burton). The fact that he alone not only brings a complete, often heartbreaking performance to a character in this setting, but he managed to do it twice (and in a forthcoming review, is likely to have completed the hat trick). You might see this review and think that there are too many Apes movies, but you owe it to yourself to see Caesar’s full arc…

And on that note, I really ought to give War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) another play through.

The Majestic (2001)

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. There was something always romantic about throwing away everything that had been holding you down before and just running the neighborhood movie theater for the rest of your days (I know… I know…) but like with most people, the movie sort of disappeared from my mind.

Did I Like It: This movie exists in a weird nether-region. It is unashamedly patriotic, and one would think it lucked out and came out at a brief, relatively impossible to predict moment where the national mood was similarly patriotic, but somehow it landed with an absolutely thud. Darabont’s other films didn’t exactly do gangbusters at the box office, but found their audiences later on after repeated airings on cable. TNT didn’t want anything to do with this film?

It’s a barely remembered footnote in Darabont’s career*, especially coming off of two of the more transcendent Stephen King adaptations in the canon, but it has that same trait that made those two earlier films such a success. It’s unabashedly the kind of movie that Frank Capra would make, if he were still making films in the 1990s or 2000s.

And still, America wants nothing to do with the film, TNT wants nothing to do with the film, and even I kind of lost track of the thing over the years. Why? Maybe some people were turned off by dramatic turn from Carrey that doesn’t default to his normal antics (even The Truman Show (1998), probably his best performance, has him occasionally tapping into the energies which made him a star in the first place), but I certainly wasn’t. I think it might be more to do with the fact that for all of its charms, it has none of the transcendent moments that made The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) the classics they were.

It’s just a nice little movie, and when you judge those by comparison, there’s always a bit lacking.

*By the way: Why doesn’t he get to work anymore? He gets booted from after making in my mind the only watchable episodes of The Walking Dead, Mob City doesn’t capture the imagination, and then he’s gone forever? The man made Shawshank and we just have no use for him? Now that I type that, I wonder if there is some larger problem keeping his work from us. Maybe I don’t want to know.

Wagon Tracks (1919)

Director: Lambert Hillyer

Cast: William S. Hart, Jane Novak, Robert McKim, Lloyd Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I get it. I’m supposed to like every silent film equally, owing to the fact that the most nostalgic one person can be is being wistful for things that happened decades before their own birth. That’s why I’ll show up to pretty much any silent movie projected for a crowd…

But this? I don’t know. I really don’t. The few westerns I’ve seen from the era at the very least are possessed of the breathless action that can make silent films just as watchable today as it was when they were released. Here, though, the proceedings are glacial. One might be able to forgive that, but the cardinal sin in this film is that for some reason its nearly obsessively talky. Why make a film at all prior to The Jazz Singer (1927) if you’re just going to talk to me the whole time? Were people just so starved for entertainment immediately after World War I that they would take just anything? No wonder we couldn’t just keep things together for more than a few years.

All right. Maybe this film isn’t for me. There are going to be any number of westerns that fail to garner my interest. If you’re one of those types that… I dunno… do the absolutely insane thing of purchasing a horse, you may be prepared to dismiss my opinions and seek out the film for yourself. I’m sorry for most of your life choices, but I’d be remiss to not tell you that this film is only barely a Western. Most of the first hour is obsessed with a murder mystery in which even the characters themselves are not all that interested.

Do better, the past. I keep trying to defend you, and occasionally you make it more difficult than you need to.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Director: Rupert Wyatt

Cast: James Franco, Frieda Pinto, John Lithgow, Andy Serkis

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: There are three elements of this film—probably the weakest so far of the rebooted Apes series—that stand out to me on this viewing. First, the weakest part of the film is certainly the human element. Franco runs through the movie, vaguely embarrassed to be a vessel for exposition, and the less said about his relationship with Frieda Pinto, the better, if for no other reason than the film itself is absolutely disinterested in the relationship itself. It also doesn’t help that every time the film loses its self control and becomes content to fall into typical reboot tropes of bringing out lines from previous entries, it is usually coming from the incidental human characters. If memory serves, each time it was Tom Felton.

Any film that has a great and growing pandemic as one of its central plot pillars is going to play a little bit differently ten years down the line than it did in those halcyon days of Obama’s first term. That can’t be blamed on the filmmakers, but it can’t be ignored, either. Even odder still, the particular Typhoid Mary in this case—the neighbor (David Hewlett) is played (or at least I react to it) as a perpetually put upon comedic character.

And yet, the film works. Why? Serkis. Better than any other actor in existence, Serkis is able to transmit so much pathos through layers of special effects. He is able to make the childlike Caesar believable, and then subsequently sell Caesar’s journey from trying to join the world of his own kind, his fury at losing everything, and the honest temptation he feels to try to put things back the way they were, regardless of how much that can never happen by the time the film ends. It was the smartest decision to make Serkis’ performance the centerpiece of this trilogy.

The Crow (1994)

Director: Alex Proyas

Cast: Brandon Lee, Rochelle Davis, Ernie Hudson, Michael Wincott

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Somewhere along the line, Lora became convinced that I hated the film, and I distinctly don’t remember that.

Did I Like It: A movie that is trying to harness (or, really, glom off) the cultural ubiquity that came with Batman (1989) has to have something going for itself. More than a few viewers at the time of the film’s release might point to the film’s art direction and special effects. I’m not so sure that holds up. The special effects strain any credulity now (I can’t imagine they worked all that well in 1994), the editing is frequently so frenetic that it becomes slapdash (at least the movie has a valid excuse), and the sets are all easily identifiable as any backlot ever built. The film was shot in North Carolina, so it wasn’t that same backlot that appears in practically everything that isn’t so lazy as to put the clock tower from Back to the Future (1985), but it does have a blandness to it. Ultimately, that’s more of a virtue than a fault. When you shake off the extreme 90sness, the entire affair has a far closer relationship to the noir films of the 50s it is trying to emulate than either the aforementioned Batman or other imitators like The Shadow (1994).

The real strength of the film is also its greatest tragedy, though. Lee had been puttering around in B martial arts pictures (and, by extension, his father’s shadow) for the first several years of his career, and here he is really letting us know what he can do. He’s sincere, charming, and even funny in a role that might not be giving him much to work with in those arenas. He could have had a truly magnificent career, but it was not meant to be.

Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Director: Stephen King

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, Laura Harrington, Christopher Murney

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, but there’s an odd story there. At press time, we’re getting ready to do an episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods on the movie, and I vaguely tried to put the kibosh on such a thing, not because the film positively reeks from beginning to end, but because I have the strongest, clearest memory of not only watching the movie, but discussing it on the podcast. The forensic evidence is clear. We have no episode on the movie, but the memory persists.

Did I Like It: Of course not, who would? Not King, not Estevez, even the inevitable re-evaluation period that all bad movies are seemingly owed now is half-hearted, at best.

The film is excessively talky, and badly written (you had one job, Steve). It’s not enough that it opens with a title card that reads very boring, but the film ends with another one (you would think that the text of the thing would rise above, but no; Steve had one job).

The performances are all over the place, the special effects are practically non-existent, and the editing is such that I’m reasonably sure that the late, great Pat Hingle was just about to be shot to death by a sentient machine gun (really), the shot cuts away, and then we’re not only treated to a stunt double when the film cuts back, but the stunt double has splashes of red paint on him. It wasn’t like they were concerned about injuring the future Commissioner Gordon with squibs.

All of this—maybe intentional?—camp might be forgiven or enjoyed for what its worth, if it weren’t for the fact that the film groans from tis own sense of boredom with itself. King himself fights an ATM in the early goings, AC/DC keeps the tempo up, and one thinks some measure of fun is ahead. Not so, all that we’re left with by the end is a semi-truck nudging (really) Emilio Estevez into cooperating with their demands. One wonders if that is what coming down off a cocaine high is really like.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. Hell, there was a stretch there in the early 2000s where watching the movie, or listening to the score (that carried over to the 2020s, now that I think about it) were just about the only thing that could get me through any sort of brain freeze on a school project. That’s probably less than healthy, now that I’m really thinking about it.

Did I Like It: The odd thing about revisiting media that you know well but haven’t taken in more than a few years, there are things you never noticed before that now you can’t help but fixate on. Think Danny Pudi being one of the Santos campaign staffers in the last season of The West Wing, like the whole show was a Community prequel this whole time, and I never noticed. Here, Anthony Rapp—not the wide-eyed kid from Adventures in Babysitting (1987) mind you, but a discernably grown Rapp—runs around as one of Nash’s (Crowe) mathematician colleagues, and I’m left wondering someone is going to break the Prime Directive before everything is said and done. It really shouldn’t be difficult to separate an actor from the role with I most identify them, but when they were stealthily there the whole time, it’s just spooky.

Is that a sufficient criticism of the movie? Probably not, but it is the “new thought” I had to share, to be sure. Howard does tend to be the most journeyman among his elite level of filmmaking peers, and this is one of those examples. Strip away the James Horner score, the Roger Deakins cinematography, and most of the performances, and what you have is not much more evolved than a TV movie-of-the-week from days of old.

But how can you strip that many elements away from a film before you make assess it. Time may have been altogether kind to it, but it still tugs at all of the emotions that it wants to target.

The Dead Zone (1983)

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen

Have I Seen it Before: Yes… It’s been a number of years. I love me some Walken, Cronenberg, and don’t get me started on Martin Sheen…

But Sheen playing an evil President of the United States who brings the world gleefully to its destruction? That’s something that makes one feel unwell and relegates the film to the not often re-watched list.

Did I Like It: Prepping for an episode on the movie for <Beyond the Cabin in the Woods> I read the King novel as well as screening the film, and I’m torn about how I feel about the adaptation. On one hand, the novel is of that era in King’s work where he claimed he could work while coked out of his gills, but it wouldn’t be controversial to say the resulting book is a bit cluttered and overlong. The movie does a stellar job of paring down the story of Johnny Smith’s (Walken) into its most essential elements.

On the other hand, there are some strange choices. One can’t help but wonder if Cronenberg was less auteur than hired hand here, as aside from one errant pair of scissors there isn’t a lot to suggest the Cronenbergian motif as we have collectively come to understand it. That’s a mild complaint, at best, as the film still works despite the lack of the artists touch. Other idiosyncratic filmmakers don’t work out so well when they go off that idiosyncratic path and lend their name as brand to a film. I’m looking in your direction, 21st century Tim Burton.

What’s more, I think the casting of Walken is at best a partial success. Scenes that show him as an increasingly isolated loner are so in his wheelhouse that it almost doesn’t seem like a challenge, but early scenes where he is asked to be a romantic lead, naturally attracting the affections of Sarah (Adams) are a little giggle-worthy, as Walken is not quite able to tune down his fundamental Walken-ness. The rest of the cast is almost too well cast, though, perhaps even unintentionally*. I’m looking in your direction, Mr. Sheen.

Which reminds me. If you’ll excuse me, I now have to mainline as many West Wing episodes as I can possibly stomach to get rid of this icky feeling I’ve been having since I finished watching the film..

*Jordan Peele would one day make great hay out of quite pointedly co-opting cast members of The West Wing to keep white liberals like your humble correspondent off balance.

From Here To Eternity (1953)

Director: Fred Zinnermann

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I mean, I’ve seen that one shot any number of times, but there’s a whole dynamic movie outside of those waves!

Did I Like It: And one that really puts into sharp relief just how stupid an undertaking Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) really was. The film might be a bit weighed down by the trappings of a Hollywood product of the era, but any film that tracks in the inevitability of a looming historical event and still manages to milk tension out of that dread is worth a look. Even in the film’s climactic act, the production does not cheap out on the scope of the attack. There’s a little bit of stock footage—and it works well enough—implemented, but there’s more than enough Zeroes actually being shot from the sky to make it all credible as if it was actually taking place in December of 1941.

People might get bent out of shape about Lancaster or Clift not winning the Best Actor Oscar that year, but I think this is another example of a great film clearing the big awards only for its best elements. The two leading men may be wielding the most dynamic acting craft then available for the screen, but they are fundamentally just accomplishing the pedestrian task of being romantic leading men.

One might even bring themselves—and apparently even the Chairman himself thought he was more deserving for later work—to say that Sinatra isn’t doing much more than being comic relief. But to watch a man whose entire iconic image is so far from a comedian thoroughly fight every instinct he must have is worthy of at least some hardware. The fact that nearly any time some one is singing in the film, he just stands there at the edge of the frame, likely seething at a bunch of amateurs taking the focus away from him only clinches the deal.

Act of Violence (1948)

Director:  Fred Zinnemann

Cast:  Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: It’s a perfectly formed movie for what it is, so much so that I worry I may not have any greater insight about it. It offers no easy answer as to who might be considered heroic and who might not, and it is sort of jarring to see anyone have the same kind of reservations and angst about fighting in World War II that one would assume didn’t enter American life until the second half of the 20th century, but you take all of that in from reading a below average plot summary of the film.

But presentation is worth more than what we sometimes think it is. Displayed in 35mm is automatically a feature that will make the film appointment viewing for me, I think my record is pretty clear on that. But something dawned on me during this viewing that hadn’t really crystalized in other 35mm screenings at Circle Cinema. Sometimes their projection is a little wonky. A reel will change, and the new reel kicks in not quite aligned with the screen, taking a moment to re-orient itself. A flaw, sure, but a charming one. This screening did remarkably well in this regard, but the frame was still not quite right. The top of the frame bled ever so slightly into the ceiling. When, as tends to happen in a black and white noir film, a wobbly light fixture dangles from the ceiling and the movie, and causes the light to dance inside the room. I look around in these moments and something dawns on me. When a film is projected in black and white, the theater itself is reflected in those same shades of grey (minus an emergency exit sign or two). The border between the unreal and the real became thinner in that moment. Even when a little wonky, film is just better than any digital format you might be able to find.

That all may sound like the film couldn’t hold on to my attention, but it did. The flaws in the presentation only ensnared me further into the film.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Director: George A. Romero

Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross

Have I Seen it Before: Somewhere in the deeper corners of my mind is a half-remembered lazy weekend afternoon in college where I watched it. I thought it was sort of fine, back then. This, of course was before The Walking Dead managed to beat out of me any possible enjoyment I could have for the zombie genre.

Did I Like It: But, against all odds, I liked it even better this time. Maybe I’m mellowing as Walking Dead no longer has its cultural ubiquity that it once did, and I can just sit back and enjoy such a story without having to roll my eyes at the army of people out there who fancy themselves Daryl Dixon.

First of all, the film is legitimately funny, while still maintaining the tension of the threat that surrounds them. The echo of the emptiness of contemporary American life in the 1970s—spoiler: it’s only gotten worse in the 2020s—permeates every moment of the film, even the ones you wouldn’t necessarily think about. This leaves one—and it might be cliché to even mention this—with a zombie story that is not only immensely entertaining, but with something to say.

Even if the message somehow got lost over time or by the medium, one still can’t help but marvel at the singular focus of Romero. Some filmmakers got stuck in a particular genre due to commercial constraints. Maybe this happened to Romero a little bit, but I also tend to think he kept making zombie films—and didn’t terribly stray terribly far from the zombie path when he did branch out—because he truly loved them and wanted to try and do new things with the form. This is the masterpiece of a true artist at work.

Just please don’t make me watch the Zack Snyder version. There’s only so much I can take.