Movies
The Big Sick (2017)
Cutesy to a fault and, as with about 10,000 other modern American comedies, the direction and editing are on life support (ha...). There's a much better movie that's got just a tad more of a visual sensibility and is about 8 minutes shorter—and not 8 minutes of content either, just enough of the slack between lines of dialogue to tighten up the timing and quicken the verbal pace. But this is pretty much every modern American comedy; the real news is that so help me, the movie is charming anyway—stratospherically charming, in fact. Biggest kudos to the actors, I think. Nanjiani and Kazan are fun, but the real MVPs are Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as Kazan's character's parents, and when they're onscreen, the movie comes alive. So much so that you almost forget about the slack timing and visuals. Almost. Grade: B
Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)
Yikes, what a boring movie. It didn't have to be this way. The filmmakers were handed a compelling true story on a silver platter in the form of the friendship between Ron Hall and Denver Moore (an art dealer and a homeless survivor of an abusive sharecropping background, respectively), but bafflingly, they throw all the most interesting material out in favor of the blandest inspirational movie pablum possible, complete with the whiff of white saviorism. This is perhaps no better summed up in the film's ostensible emotional climax (if this movie was actually, you know, capable of rousing strong emotions), when Greg Kinnear's Ron informs us in a brief monologue that he actually abandoned Denver in the storm of the doubt and anger he felt after his wife's death; the film does nothing to dramatize either the doubt or the anger, and instead jumps us forward to the returned status quo in the very next shot. Credit where credit is due, I suppose: in the Pure Flix pantheon, it's no God's Not Dead. But that's a mighty generous rubric that I'm not willing to extend. Grade: D+
Personal Shopper (2016)
The lesson here is that Kristen Stewart is a bona fide star (in case any of us Twilight haters needed any more convincing) and needs to be paid diligent attention to. Personal Shopper is no slack of a film, a strangle, transfixing little genre mashup (50% supernatural drama, 50% thriller, and 100% European arthouse), but Stewart absolutely carries it. Even when the movie gestures just a bit too literally (as it does in the aftermath of its remarkable climax), Stewart is never less than great, and thanks to that, the film is never less than very good. Grade: A-
Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫) (1968)
It doesn't quite hit the depths of supernatural horror of Onibaba (the only other Shindo film I've seen), but it shares the dreamlike folktale vibes that makes that other film so entrancing. It also has one of the most devastating variations on "sex=death" I've seen in a horror movie. So you can look forward to that. Grade: A-
The Seventh Victim (1943)
I thought I had run out of Val Lewton masterpieces (especially having seen all his Jacques Tourneur collaborations), but lo and behold, here comes The Seventh Victim to prove me very, very wrong. It lacks the dreamlike ink-blackness of Cat People, instead favoring a slightly less baroque noir aesthetic, but on a screenwriting level, The Seventh Victim is even that early opus's superior, spinning a remarkably complex and deeply felt mystery within a blistering 71 minutes. It's a compellingly odd tale that features not just secret spouses and shady business dealings and all your regular noir trappings but also a coven of devil worshipers who all seem just a bit sorry that they're serving Satan, which is kooky and fun right up until the minute it isn't and instead reminds you that at its core, this is a film about what it feels to experience utter remorse, to look both life and death in the face and not know whether you prefer one or the other. It's that mix of the bizarre and the tragic (dare I say a Lynchian forebear?) that places The Seventh Victim proudly alongside both The Wolf Man and Lewton's own Cat People as one of the great American horror movies of the 1940s. Grade: A
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