Saturday, January 30, 2010

Viewing log: 29/1/10



New Releases

Better than Chloe, but a plausibility nightmare; gets plain silly

Lordy, I loathed this -- ugly, amateurish and intolerably overextended

A hot mess, barely intelligible, with some (almost) redeemingly weird scenes

Not Zoo 2. Somewhat faux-naif, but engagingly sad and gently whimsical

Wondrous colours and a fascinating relationship with urban modernity

Temple explores the backstreets of music history with addictive flair

Plenty of mistakes, but the movie's half-deranged empathy can't be denied

Lovely visuals when it's in New Orleans; the bayou bits drag, unfortunately




Other Adventures

An old favourite I still love for its implacable, paranoid logic and the perfs

The Lodger (1927)
A–
Hard to beat for clockwork build-up of suspicion and eroticism

Neeson's quite good, but Nesbitt's terrible, and the script flails conceitedly

Georgia (1995)
B+
A sublimely complex sisterly relationship; the occasional duff note elsewhere

Bananas (1971)
B+
Irresistible nonsense: surely one of the funniest of the "early, funny ones"

Billy Bathgate (1991)
B+
Elegantly muted, nobly adapted and way-underrated. Steven Hill is superb

4 comments:

Guy Lodge said...

Meanwhile, I can't help looking to my right and noting your deliciously low rating for "The Lovely Bones" ... can't wait for you to rip into that one.

Guy Lodge said...

And interested to see you got round to "Billy Bathgate" after our conversation the other day ... really intrigued to hear if you have as much time for Kidman in it as I do, since this is the first performance of hers I ever gave a second thought. And that production design is something else.

tim r said...

She gets better as it goes along... at first she seemed to me like uncertain window-dressing, but that's a pretty apt take on the character, in that situation! And from the first scene where she undresses in front of Billy, she seemed totally in charge to me -- it reminds me of a certain unabashed early-90s eroticism in movies that's sorely lacking 20 years later. I'd give her third prize after Hill and the admirably contained Hoffman (though John Costelloe is also terrific as Lulu). Really, more than a pleasant surprise, all round.

tim r said...

(but it's a shame about Bruce)