So, I took off the week between Christmas and New Years--a notoriously unproductive time, anyway--and committed to watching some of my movie backlog. A lot of it is from the Criterion Collection (of which I am a cultist) but a few are recent releases or popular older films. Herewith, my list and reactions. Amores Perros - early Iñarritu film already displays the mastery celebrated in his Oscar-winning Birdman and The Revenant. Three loosely interconnected tales--involving a young man mixed up in dogfighting, a successful model dealing with a potentially career-ending injury, and a hitman trying to reconnect with the daughter who thinks him dead--all detail the heartaches that often attend loving another. Superbly acted and very involving, though inevitably episodic and lacking narrative closure; reminds me a lot of a Robert Altman film. 7.0/10. The Matrix: Resurrections - unnecessary, low energy sequel recycles a lot from earlier films..and cheekily satirizes such recycling. Watchable, but threatens to collapse under the weight of its philosophical musings. Doesn't break any new ground and adds nothing to the established mythos. Skip it and just rewatch the first one. 5.5/10. Bitter Rice - Giuseppe De Santis' Italian neorealist film about Francesca (Doris Dowling), a woman hiding out as a farm worker while holding onto some stolen jewelry for her low-life boyfriend. Complications ensue when hot young Silvana (Silvana Mangano, ka-pow!), a fellow worker, catches on to Francesca's secret. Maybe the handsome soldier (Raf Vallone) can help? Don't expect a happy ending; Italian neorealism is all about the hopeless plight of the working class. Solid drama with some action in the finale, but I thought the McGuffin should've stayed a McGuffin; it gives the film a soft reset feel at the midpoint. 6.5/10 Parasite - Finally got around to watching Bong Joon-Ho's Best Picture winning black comedy. One by one, the members of a poor family fraudulently gain jobs within a rich family's household. Takes a very dark turn at the end. Even with the big tonal shift, this is a pretty terrific film. 7.5/10. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! - Pedro Almodovar's controversial tale has a very young Antonio Banderas playing a mentally unbalanced man who kidnaps a sexy starlet and ties her up. Romance eventually ensues. Quite funny and strangely touching. 7.0/10. The Final Countdown - this is Blue Underground's newly remastered 4K and it looks... miraculous. The detail in many shots is so good, I had to pause and admire. Anyway, this Twilight Zone episode cum 'Murica porn is a fun time travel tale of a modern American aircraft carrier transported back to the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Can history be changed? Should it be? Think about it while watching the terrific aerial photography of F-14s and Japanese Zeros. Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and James Farentino star. Movie: 7.0/10. Video quality: 10/10! Nightmare Alley - Guillermo del Toro's splendid and stylish update of the classic noir about a carnival mentalist who realizes there's money to be made convincing rich people he can communicate with the dead. A little overlong, but fantastic on the whole. Great cast. Cate Blanchett is wonderfully icy as the femme fatale. 7.5/10. Ride with the Devil - Ang Lee isn't content to confine himself to a single genre. This one, a tale of a pro-Confederacy guerilla soldier (Tobey Maguire!) set in a fiercely divided Missouri on the margins of the American Civil war, is eventful and beautifully shot, but narratively a bit unfulfilling. Maguire's character does develop through his relationship--and ultimately friendship--with Holt (Geoffrey Wright, terrific) a freed slave fighting on the Southern (!) side. Singer Jewel does a fine job in her acting debut. 6.0/10. Evil Under the Sun - a rewatch of my favorite cinematic Hercule Poirot outing, which sees the great Belgian detective (Peter Ustinov, terrific) using his "little grey cells" to solve a murder at an isolated Mediterranean resort island. The mechanics of the murder are--as they must be--absurdly complicated, but I find the resolution very satisfying. These movies depend strongly on the impression made by the supporting players, and Diana Rigg, Nicholas Clay, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, et al, are all in fine form. 7.5/10. Before Sunrise Before Sunset Before Midnight - watched Richard Linklater's entire trilogy which sees the romance between American Jesse (Ethan Hawk) and French Celine (Julia Delpy) develop over the course of three memorable days: the first, spending a night walking around Vienna after the first meeting of the young twenty-somethings on a train shows undenible chemistry; the second, a decade later, strolling around Paris, rediscovering their chemistry; the third, spending a night at a hotel in Greece, the two--now a couple with children--discover that each harbors some unspoken resentment against the other. I really got into this and found the characters and the dialog--created with input from Hawk and Delpy--engaging. Taken as a whole, the trilogy paints a portrait of a romance from first attraction to middle age dissatisfaction. I hope the series will continue. 7.5/10. The Manchurian Candidate - gripping Cold War tale of a Korean War hero (Lawrence Harvey) unknowingly brainwashed to be an assassin by evil commies, directed to a sinister purpose, and followed by his fellow brainwashing target (Frank Sinatra) trying to unravel the truth that haunts them both. Angela Lansbury is absolutely chilling as the hero's mother, who has an agenda of her own. Janet Leigh co-stars. Excellent. 8.0/10. Jurassic Park - Steven Spielberg's VFX-heavy cautionary adventure tale of technology running ahead of ethics holds up. Jeff Goldblum became indelibly Jeff Goldblum in our collective consciousness here. The film looks great in 4K. 8.0/10. 3 Women - Robert Altman film about three women: Millie (Shelley Duvall), a talkative geriatric health spa worker who doesn't sense how she annoys others; Pinky (Sissy Spacek), a shy, soft-spoken woman who becomes Millie's co-worker and roommate; and Willie (Janice Rule) who says little but with her philandering husband runs the saloon every one in the story frequents. I think there's a deeper meaning behind the events of the story, but I'm not up to figuring it out. In the commentary, Altman says the setup of the story came to him in a dream. 6.0/10. Devi - my first (but not last!) Satyajit Ray film! This tale of a 19th Century Indian family has the patriarch becoming convinced that his sweet young daughter-in-law is the embodiment of the goddess Kali. The rest of the household is forced to join in and tragedy ensues. A none too subtle attack on dogmatic religion. 7.0/10. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - you've seen it. Probably a million times like me. The 4K transfer looks fantastic! 8.0/10. Chronos - this early Guillermo del Toro film seems like a vampire movie made by David Lynch. An old antique dealer comes into possession of a device which can confer immortality. But the device is being sought by some sinister people (one is del Toro regular Ron Perlman). Some decent horror and makeup effects and a satisfying resolution make this feel like a really good episode of Tales from the Crypt. But it's clear del Toro was going places. 6.5/10. Andrei Rublev Part One - the first half of this story about the great painter of church icons is everything I've come to expect from director Andrei Tarkovsky: dreamlike visuals, sweeping shots in, through, and around action set pieces, and dialog that waxes philosophical. I'm very surprised at the quite graphic nudity in places. I'll score it after I watch the second half. Soul - another winner from Pixar, though I think its message is ultimately a little muddled. A middle school band teacher (voice by Jaime Foxx) gets his shot to play piano with a famous jazz band but has an accident and winds up in the afterlife. But he won't let a little thing like death stop him, so with the reluctant help of an unborn soul (voice by Tina Fey), he attempts to escape back to Earth to chase his dream. Delightful, but undercuts the importance of having a dream (goal, plan, ambition, etc.) in the end. Uh, okay. 7.0/10. Edit: Correction: The Final Countdown 4K is put out by Blue Underground.
One of my favorite movies. I served onboard Nimitz from '95 to '99 and they played The Final Countdown fairly often on the ship's TV channel when we were underway. Also, if you blink you'll miss him, but my cousin (by marriage) can be seen in one of the scenes on the bridge (he was on the ship as a crewman when this film was being shot). I've always wanted to see some kind of "alternate ending" where the Battle Group wasn't sucked back into the present at the crucial moment and they wind up succeeding in dusting the Japanese fleet.
I've always loved this movie. I saw it when it was first run on cable when I was about 13. I'm astonished so much effort was taken for the 4K disk. This isn't a super high-profile film. The price (around $35) initially put me off, but I saw a YouTube video that named it one of the best 4K releases of the year, so I went for it. I'm glad I did; I can't imagine it's possible for this film to look better.
