A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Plot plot plot plot talk talk talk talk and then a muppet with knife fingers shows up. Does almost nothing right. D

The Mummy (1999)

I hesitate to say that Stephen Sommers made Universal’s best Mummy movie (since I haven’t seen them all) so I’ll just say it’s easily my favorite. There’s certainly a lot it gets wrong (an overabundance of action sequences that get less and less inventive as the film goes on, tons of shoddy CGI, and Brendan Fraiser’s wobbly performance which alternates between great and terrible from scene to scene) but it’s made with such a spirit of fun, such a wonderful pace and with such wonderful characters that you can’t help but get swept up in it.

Dual MVPs go to Rachel Weisz, who plays Evy in a wonderfully dorky place (“I am…A LIBRARIAN!”) between heroine and damsel in distress, and Kevin O’Connor, whose Beni is fantastic, and probably inspired Chang in Community. Basically, this film is everything I want out of light summer entertainment because you can tell that time and care went into it’s construction, from script to shooting to editing. Shame about that sequel. B

The Demon (1981)

Pretty inept slasher flick. Most of the scares are too poorly lit to see and it spends an INSANE amount of time developing a pointless romance between two supporting characters that never goes anywhere. I can count the good parts of this film on one hand, and will do so now.

Thumb. It’s the kind of inept storytelling that almost passes for surreal and nightmarish if you watch it late enough. There’s a really bizarre subplot about a psychic private detective that goes nowhere at all, almost hilariously so, and all the acting in those scenes is “off”, in that nearly-creepy-but-mostly-silly kind of way.

Index. The final climax (which the survivor girl is topless for almost all of) is shockingly effective, in part (but not entirely) because it rips off Halloween’s.

Middle. There’s plenty of nudity.

Ring. It’s maybe the first South African slasher movie ever made, so there’s history there.

Pinky. The director’s name is Percival Rubens. Percival Rubens! How great a name is THAT? C-

Sabrina (1954)

Here is where I learned something about myself: I really hate Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think she’s cute, I don’t think she’s funny, and I find her emaciated form actually kind of unsettling. In the big moment when everyone at the party is oohing and awwing over her in that dress, I couldn’t stop staring at her mantis shoulders. She’s the original manic pixie dream girl (the way she plays her suicide attempt is almost excruciatingly adorable) but I find her even less tolerable than Zooey Deschanel. At least Zooey has that super-dark eye make-up I’m into because I’m dumb and like women who look like raccoons (shout out to that one shot of Sissy Spacek in Badlands). It doesn’t help that her character here is almost irredeemably stupid. I LOVE YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU is one of my least favorite conceits in films like this, and it’s her main driving force for a good majority of the film. It’s hard to root for someone to find happiness when you know that the root of their desire for the person is basically “I want to be rich, and they have money”.

Thank God for Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, who are pitch-perfect. Bogart in particular gives an astonishingly ambiguous performance, making you think he could either love or not care about Sabrina at any time. He’s a totally lovable character (with his childish glee over his new plastic formula, I might even say he’s adorkable?) and the film definitely gets better when it begins to shift perspective from Sabrina’s character to his. It’s minor Wilder, one I can’t see myself revisiting much, but it features one of Bogart’s greatest ever performances. B-

Blade Runner (1982)

There’s still a ton of hurdles I always have to jump before I find myself actually engaged, but I’m at least a lot more willing to accept it as an moody meditation on death instead of a sci-fi noir. Because as the former, it reaches real moments of poignance and power, but as the latter it’s a borderline torturous slog. I think the incredible art design ends up hurting it because the film is at it’s best when it feels like a tone poem or a nightmare, but the incredibly detailed and completely realized world Scott built grounds it too much to be either that often. The final confrontation is so great that it almost completely redeems all that came before it, but it’s still a film that I appreciate more than I like it.

Also, as for whether or not Deckard is a Replicant: who cares? It doesn’t really change the film’s reading either way, and I’d go as far as to say the fact that it doesn’t matter IS the point of the movie in the first place. C+

Gladiator (2000)

They try to make you hate Joaquin Pheonix by piling every negative trait a character can possibly have into one person, but it only serves to make him pathetic and less of a worthy foe. It’s a shame that the Gladiator spin-off sitcom “Everybody Hates Commodus” never made it past the pilot status, because he’s accidentally the only one in this film with an intriguiging premise: what do you do when your emperor is bad at EVERY POSSIBLE THING? He’s so hapless and talentless, making him the villain almost feels cruel, like putting a “kick-me” sign on a mentally disabled person’s back.

Less intriguiging is Maximus’ boilerplate revenge story, or the tiresome way they try to make the story not just about one guy with a grudge, but saving ROME ITSELF. The rah-rah “save our country” speech at the end has the same flavor as something you’d hear in a propaganda war movie from the 40’s, which is so ridiculous in this context I actually fell on the floor laughing (sorry, but I never got as far as rolling). It’d be enjoyably old fashioned entertainment if it were shorter and the fight scenes were worth a damn, but it isn’t and they’re not and I doubt I’ll remember much about it in a week’s time. C-

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Rewatch made some of the film’s problems stand-out all the more (the Willis-Murray-McDormand triangle is ludicrously underwritten, and it’s existence is only justified in one great scene between Willis and Jared Gilman) but the pure joy of remains firmly intact. And if Willis, Murray and McDormand are underwritten, than Norton’s noble scoutmaster is a lesson in how to fully flesh out a minor character with well-observed details. I didn’t even notice that he had a romantic sub-plot with the switchboard woman until this second viewing. And I’m still hoping that Wes Anderson continues in this direction. It feels like he’s truly found himself here. A-