Movies
You might easily be fooled into thinking this movie—one involving torture, dismemberment, murder, ritual abuse, and body mutilation, for the record, so watch out—is the most violent, brutal American horror movie since the Saw franchise went into decline. It's certainly an entirely skeevy, horrific watch. But the more you think about it, the more you realize just how little violence there actually is in the film—at least, violence shown explicitly on screen—and what becomes clear is that The Eyes of My Mother, rather, is the best American horror movie in forever at making you feel that brutality and violence. The way to do so, it turns out, is not to bludgeon us viewers in the face with gruesome, sausagey imagery but rather to utilize fantastic sound design and some of the most beautiful cinematography from any movie period of the past decade and use that to construct an alien, claustrophobic viewing space. It's rattling and masterful. Grade: A-
This film has a reputation as one of the good Pulp Fiction wannabes, but honestly, it's at its worst when it's at its most Pulp Fiction-est: namely, the lengthy "Simon" sequence involving digressive, quippy discussions, crime hijinks, black comedy, etc. It's dull and trying way too hard. The rest of the movie fares better as two different pieces of edgy indie comedy involving either side of a drug sting, wherein both Katie Holmes and Scott Wolf both turn in not just passable but actually interesting performances, which is sort of a miracle on its own, even if the rest of their sections are more just "passable" than actually engaging—the self-congratulatory cleverness that puts a turn of phrase and structural gymnastics over real emotions and dramatic stakes is least objectionable outside of Simon's section, but it never really goes away. And passable doesn't hold a lot of water with the gaping hole of bleh sitting right there in the middle of the film, vis-a-vis Simon. So that's a net loss. Grade: C
Look, there's nothing particularly "wrong" with Valley Girl, a relentlessly wish-fulfillment-y teen romantic dramedy in that pre-John Hughes mode that makes angst unlikely and nudity basically a given. There's just not anything particularly "right" with it either. Well, nothing significant, that is; the soundtrack is pretty neat, a collage of poppy new wave tunes that do a lot to drag its "he's a greaser, she's a prep" archetypes into the plastic '80s. And speaking of the he and she: the male lead here is Nicolas Cage, giving a pretty nice performance as the love interest from the other side of the tracks, while the female is Deborah Foreman, who, while she doesn't quite have that Cage charisma, turns in an alright performance of her own, at least enough to make the romantic chemistry seem at least a little plausible, right up to the admittedly lovely final few shots that feel everything like the happy ending version of The Graduate (and I mean that in the best way possible). But outside of these small pleasures, there's just not a lot going for this movie. The plotting is generic, the dialogue is tepid, and the direction and camerawork is that typical Hollywood invisible style, which is great for showcasing crackerjack plotting and dialogue, but well... you know. Grade: C+
This movie subverts expectations in at least two significant ways: 1. It is a purportedly "erotic" film without so much as a frame of nudity or sex, and 2. It is a Luis Buñuel film with only a hint of surrealism. The first can probably be explained by the release date of the movie, in the supposedly simpler time of 1967, when I'd imagine that plots involving prostitution and sexual fantasy were erotic, even without explicit sexual content. And honestly, I care very little about how erotic a movie is; it's #2 up there that gives me pause. Maybe it's an issue of expectation vs. reality, but I couldn't help missing the high-concept shenanigans of the two other (wilder) Buñuel movies I've seen. But taken on its own terms—those being, for the record, a psychologically inflected rumination on monogamy and perversion, told from the perspective of an aimless and vaguely discontented woman (though of course actually told from a male POV, given that sterling set of testosterone in the production credits)—it's decently successful without being anything that really lights my world on fire. Grade: B
This being directed by James Wale, the guy behind the all-time-great 1931 Frankenstein, it's no surprise that this is tightly and supremely directed. Unfortunately, the rest is a bit of a mess, from the haphazard characterizations of its broad and genial cast right up to the fact that the plotting here doesn't amount to much but an almost comically exaggerated atmosphere to a relatively mundane situation. Given that Wale went on to direct The Bride of Frankenstein a few years later, a film that pretty much invented camp as a device of self-aware horror, the way Old Dark House tip-toes its events right up to the line between scary and silly shouldn't be a strike against it—and I guess it isn't, in the end. It's just clear that Wale is stuck between idioms here, between the dark, tortured classicism of traditional horror and the theatrical, hammy spookiness of Elvira, etc. And being stuck in the middle is frustrating—it's all good, but without completely committing one way or the other means that it's never great. Grade: B
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