Third week, third lot of movies.
15. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - January 15th
The first movie of the week is a classic, and one that I found out while doing a bit of reading was not the most well-received upon release, getting several mixed reviews along with the positives. To be honest, I can sort of see why. It's strange for a Western, at some times lionising the anti-heroes and the way of life of the time, at others feeling like a serious meditation on the way things actually were at that time, and still at others almost devolving in to farce. At the same time, the duo of Paul Newman and Robert Redford is dynamic; the two play off each other so masterfully that even when the film drags out their time on the lamb it's not a problem because it's just more of an excuse to see them interact. I also do appreciate what the film was going for, a sort of mix of older Westerns of the John Wayne era with a hint of the Spaghetti era, a little like what Leone did himself with Once Upon a Time in the West, except here it's heavily influenced by Wayne Western ideals and only nods to the Spaghetti. The film seems a little conflicted, wanting to be Unforgiven before its time but influenced by the era's notion that Westerns should still carry the hope of the Old West. In retrospect, it's quite brilliant in this regard, at least at the prototypical stage. Still, this is the sort of film where its place in film canon is rote at this point, so it's in a strange place where I'm tempted to doubt my own observations, so once again a rating feels oddly pointless. That said - 8/10
16. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) - January 16th
This film is a loving tribute to both cartoon and noir by way of satire and it pulls it off so well. Neither aspect of the frame is a gimmick; they fully employ both here, with a keen self-awareness and humour that go a long way, and incredible effects work that has aged extremely well. It's all highlighted in the opening scene, transitioning from cartoon to joke noir with a literal cut to reality, only to pass by a heavy-drinking Bob Hoskins as he says "Toons" with great ire. The can use the serious nature of Hoskin's Valiant's gritty backstory while still ending up with him doing a vaudeville number because the film knows how much humour there is just in the dissonance of mixing the two genres. A chilling scene of cronies tearing up an apartment looking for a guy is right at home in noir, but it's just funny when the cronies are cartoon weasels and the guy their looking for is a cartoon rabbit hiding in the dishwater. - 8/10
17. The Post (2017) - January 17th
I was originally going to watch The King of Comedy today, but somehow I ended up at the cinema watching this, the review for which can be found here. It's about as well-made as you can expect from a film that's directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. - 8/10
18, Chicago (2002) - January 18th
Chicago is another excellent movie in a string of excellent movies I've managed to finally watch lately. It's sexy and stylish, but also slimy; the burlesque angle of the musical numbers captures the idealised image of the era it's emulating, and I love how that gets juxtaposed against the reality of the situation. The way the numbers interlace the events depicted with an flashy version of themselves are inspired moments that both make sense in terms of narrative and musical structure and display admirable choreography and jazzy design. It's all very elaborate and exaggerated and enjoyable, in between clever (if, once again, aggrandised) story turns that satirise the ridiculous nature of giving media spectacle to criminals. As for my favourite number, as much as I loved "Cell Block Tango", the gaudy imagery of Flynn using Roxie as a dummy puppet completely sold me on "We Both Reached for the Gun". - 8.5/10
19. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017) - January 18th
The new Netflix anime Godzilla movie just came out and it's... pretty bad, to be honest. My full review of it can be found here. - 4/10
20. Ferdinand (2017) - January 19th
Ferdinand was decent, but it never really tries to be more than that. My full review for it can be found here. - 6/10
21. Jigsaw (2017)
Jigsaw is a dirty trick of a movie. It's hardly the low point of the series, shedding all of the bloat and excess of both story and gore built up by its predecessors in favour of a more streamlined narrative; but its twists are so painfully duplicitous it seems the filmmakers are more interested in messing with the audience than telling a story. This isn't particularly new for the franchise; they've stretched credulity from the very start, and have re-written the lore with every other entry in the series. However, with Jigsaw, the convoluted twist is made that much worse by the contrasting streamlining that preceded it. It starts out like a soft reboot; the traps are far simpler, the gore is turned way the heck down, and by Saw standards there's basically no blood. The plot is also simple: no mention of any of the films that came before, bar the fact that Jigsaw was a guy who died, and it's just a handful of people being put through torture for their sins. As the film goes on, it gets more and more gory and violent, and the plot becomes more and more unnecessarily convoluted. It's like a meta-commentary on the progression of the Saw series itself, even drawing inspiration from previous traps and twists, without directly ripping them off. Unfortunately, that's not really a good thing, and by the time the film has revealed its fake twist and then doubled over backwards trying to accommodate its real twist, the film finds itself where the series ended up: overloaded with pointless characters and subplots, collapsing under the weight of trying to explain how its so clever for not revealing anything to the audience until the very end, and entirely unsure of why it went on for so much longer than it had to. 4/10
Re-watches
None this week
Published January 21st, 2018
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