Remake of a 1971 movie, starring professional eccentric Crispin Glover as a sort of proto-incel who lives in a nice Victorian house he has, at least temporarily, inherited from his parents which gets taken over by especially vindictive rats. It's pretty terrible and disgusting. The non-rat parts of it, the character's inability to function in the workplace or the modern world in general, and his anachronistic house, held my interest briefly, but they were minor aspects of the plot. At the end of this movie I determined that it wasn't necessary for me to watch anything that wasn't a widely renowned classic all the way through any more if I didn't want to. Some stuff is really irredeemable, but it took me a long time to come to the point where I felt myself entitled/qualified to say so.
Casino (1995)
Famously interminable Scorcese movie about the mob in Las Vegas. Everything that happens in this is completely morally repugnant, with no redeeming qualities. You probably knew that, but there are films with similar overarching themes that manage to be more interesting. Sharon Stone's performance in this was pilloried at the time and marked at least the beginning of the end for her as a headlining star, but I have to say her acting did not stand out to me as any worse than anyone else's did. I know I am not differing much from consensus opinion on this movie. My recent belief, or at least curiosity, garnered mainly from reading the movie blogs of very clever film fans, is that there are infinite delights to be mined from films that are comparatively uncelebrated by the critical consensus. Doubtless there are many instances where this is the case, however my somewhat random approach to trying to find examples has hit a cold streak lately.
The first sound movie from the great Danish-born, but really pan-European director Carl Theodor Dreyer, made in France but with dialogue primarily in German. The style decidedly shares characteristics with the scary German expressionist movement that was coming to its final culmination at the time. With this at least I had the comfort of knowing I was watching a real European classic of impressive age from a master artist. The dialogue, such as it is, is minimal, and it is a little difficult to follow and sleep-inducing to watch at home. The most memorable scene is shot from the point of view of a corpse looking out through the window of his coffin at the sky, branches, steeples, etc, as he is being carried to his burial. That is what stands out to me about this film.
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2013)
For reasons that I am still trying to tease out, because the plot and the characters don't have any particularly outstanding appeal in themselves, and in fact are rather depressing, I quite liked this at the time that I saw it. Annoying and neurotic and over-privileged as most of the characters are, the general level of intelligence, cultural references, topics of conversation and so on which permeates the atmosphere of the picture is in the range where it holds my interest, which is something you know is increasingly lacking in my regular life. Most of the people in this movie belong to the higher end of the academic/well-traveled/urban liberal class, which is the class I certainly for better or for worse identify with, mainly because my IQ and general education level are commensurate with the average for this group I think, though I don't really belong to it, especially in the judgment of its actual members. Of course that none of these people are happy, their relationships are all disasters and they are inevitably professionally unfulfilled and disappointed, albeit their failures occur at a higher level than mine do. This is all true. There is nonetheless a relief in being in the company of people with mental outlooks and experiences that one can somewhat relate to.
The Vanishing (1988)
Oh boy. They (actually, my wife) told me not to watch it, but naturally I said, 'it's a 5-star movie. I have to watch it.' I'm not sorry I watched it--the chance to revisit the scenes and pastimes of late 80s France alone make it worthwhile for me (this is the Dutch version, not the Hollywood remake that came out a few years later and apparently was not very good)--but the ending is definitely a downer. While I realize now that the movie is full of all kinds of creepy foreshadowing, it has the kind of languid pace and pointed, unfrenetic construction that I like when I see it, though if too many movies were made in that way I would grow tired of it. And as noted above, the atmosphere is congenial to me.
As someone who at least went through a phase a few years back where I really went in for silent movies, with the works of Buster Keaton (naturally) prominent among my favorites from that period, I was anticipating this, considered by many to be his masterpiece and which I had never seen before, with considerable excitement; however my attempts--for I made two--to watch this and absorb something of the frisson that often accompanies a viewing of such a universally-acclaimed classic, were failures on this occasion. As with so many similar experiences of late, I am chalking it up in part to where I am currently in life, in which my constitution as well as my brain are undergoing another transitional period with regard to how they process and respond to things like art. I have at present no other time to see movies but in the evening--my family doesn't allow me to get through so much as a football game when they are awake--and I simply cannot stay awake, at home anyway, for something like this at that hour, with the only sound being repetitive silent movie music. Besides this though, any resemblance of the old thrill that I would at times feel when confronted with a film of this class and stature was lacking entirely. At no point was I pulled in in any aspect. Perhaps (hopefully) this phase of my sensibility will pass and a future version of myself will be able to encounter this again and be moved by it in the way that its acclaim promises is possible. It has happened before.
I have not been averse to certain of Ron Howard's crowd-pleasing films, namely Cocoon and A Beautiful Mind, and thought at the least that this mini-saga about Irish immigrants in America might share some similarly comforting qualities, but I found it to be emotionally flat and distant on top of a story that was oddly un-engaging and pedestrian. I've never been enamored of Tom Cruise in any movie that I've seen; his longtime stardom, even accounting for his handsomeness, is a mystery to me. Nicole Kidman I never generally liked either, though once she stopped appearing in so many movies with Tom Cruise and occasionally wore her hair in an appealing style, she grew on me, a little. My opinion of this duo has further doubtless been colored by a wild story about them told to me by a woman I worked with back in the 90s who had gone on a vacation to a resort where, she said, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were also staying and that it was "known to all the other guests" that Nicole went to bed every night in her trainer's room while Tom was shacking up with a younger gentleman friend. Of course I completely believe this. Anyway this movie was a dud. It had top end Hollywood production values and a reasonably competent team working on it, but it never picked up or came alive.
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