Watching
My last 10 watched from Letterboxd.
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Black Bag
On second watch I picked up a lot of clues I missed the first time around. This movie is a brisk 94 minutes and doesn’t waste much time. All of the spycraft stuff is just set dressing and an excuse to watch a bunch of smart, sexy people in beautifully-lit environments verbally spar with each other. More movies like this, please!
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Ripley
I finally got around to finishing this sublime adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Robert Elswit’s cinematography is stunning. Picturesque Italy is captured in gorgeous black-and-white and nearly every shot could be a painting. I loved Andrew Scott as Ripley, a much more calculating take than Matt Damon’s version. And Mauricio Lombardi is delightful as Inspector Ravini, who always seems to be both a step ahead and a step behind Ripley at every moment. The pacing may seem slow as the series likes to luxuriate in every detail, but I loved every minute of it.
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Subservience
This movie features more broken glass than Die Hard. If there’s a lesson to be learned from movies like this and Companion it’s stop having sex with your robots.
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Under Suspicion
This movie is so incredibly awful that even two of the greatest actors of our time couldn’t elevate it. How Hackman and Freeman read this script and agreed to do this movie I’ll never know. The whole thing builds up to some noir-like twist and then it just ends with a whimper. I’d expect something at least a bit more entertaining from the director of Predator 2 and the writer of Point Break. The production looks like a bad network TV procedural, complete with overlays of the cast’s photos over the opening credits. If I had to guess I’d say that Jeffrey Epstein wrote this, or at least someone who had been to his island. Yeesh.
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Michael Clayton
I am Shiva, the god of death.
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1917
The oner is like a high-wire act. Difficult to pull off but leaves its audience breathless when it’s pulled off successfully. It’s been popular in recent series like Adolescence and The Studio, and while 1917 uses some trickery to achieve the illusion of one, long continuous shot, its sheer ambition tops any oners in recent memory. The logistics that must have gone into this to make it work are mind-boggling. The film is gorgeously shot by Roger Deakins and George MacKay gives an impressive and physically challenging performance.
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Sicario
This popped up on Netflix and my immediate reaction was “I guess I’m watching Sicario again!” God, this movie is incredible. Just a perfect storm of directing, acting, writing, cinematography, scoring. There’s very little downtime in its 2+ hour runtime. Del Toro is especially restrained and badass here. And a great, vulnerable performance by Emily Blunt.
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Riff Raff
Squanders a fun cast with a dumb script, unfortunately. I enjoyed the scenes with Bill Murray and Pete Davidson but they were few and far between. The entire last half hour is completely nonsensical. Billed as a comedy but the entire movie barely elicited a single chuckle.
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Drive My Car
Re-watching this it hit even harder this time. There’s been a recent batch of films like Ghostlight and Sing Sing where the characters are performing a play that connects to their life experiences and this may be my favorite of them all. The line between the characters in the film and the characters they are portraying in the play is often blurred, especially in that powerful ending. A beautiful film.
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Dark Angel
For the longest time I thought I hallucinated this movie. They tried to gaslight me into thinking this movie wasn’t called I Come in Peace when it was released in US theaters in 1990. I distinctly remember the ad where the alien villain says the name of the movie, “I come in peace,” to which Lundgren replies, “and you go in pieces” before blowing his ass up with his own space gun. But here it is, in glorious 4K all these years later and BOY, is this movie dumb. I love the subgenre of alien bad guy who has to be thwarted by a cop that doesn’t play by the rules (Predator 2, The Hidden). Bonus points if they team up with an alien cop (played here inexplicably by ESPN’s Jay Bilas, of all people). But this movie is just not good. I gave it two and a half stars out of pure nostalgia and because the human bad guys are a bunch of preppy white boys called, well, the White Boys, which seems pretty appropriate given the current state of affairs. Somehow Brian Benben went on to star in HBO’s Dream On, married Madeline Stowe and then basically fucked right off the planet Earth as far as I know but good for him!