As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I’m revisiting mostly just because it’s been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that’s about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I’m now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly changed or something new occurred to me.)
Antitrust (2001, Peter Howitt): 24/100
Previously seen: 8 January 2001, New York, NY (press screening, probably at the MGM screening room).
Original opinion: D. Reviewed it for Time Out New York.
Now: Only other Howitt film I’ve ever seen is Laws of Attraction (37/100), so I can’t speak to his general ineptitude with any authority, but the moment in this film when our hero realizes its Bill Gates figure is evil (via hearing him repeat something said by the hero’s recently murdered buddy) achieves new heights of hilarious overemphasis. Or, since this is such a blatant Firm rip-off, compare their respective hero-tells-his-wife-what's-going-on scenes: Pollack stages it with no words, just Tripplehorn's increasingly alarmed expression as “M-O-N-E-Y” drowns out Cruise's whisper, whereas Howitt somehow manages to take overwrought dialogue and make it 100x worse via overwrought performances and overwrought camera movements. I will allow that Chekhov’s Sesame Seed Allergy, though set up in the clumsiest way imaginable short of Forlani turning to camera and telling us “File that information away for later,” does sorta kinda wind up being subverted, albeit in a way that only makes sense if there’s an audience (a common problem in thrillers seeking to fake us out). And I laughed when Milo asks the random security guard “You want to be a part of history?” and just gets “Not really,” necessitating a bribe. That’s about it for cheesy fun, though. Last time I ever saw Rachael Leigh Cook. (Well, she starred in Josie and the Pussycats later that same year. Nothing since.) Forlani did a cameo in For Your Consideration, then that was it for her too.
D.O.A. (1988, Rocky Morton & Annabel Jankel): 37/100
Previously seen: ca. March 1988, San Jose, CA (Century 23).
Original opinion: Unrecorded, don’t remember. Worth noting that this was my first encounter with the story, didn’t see the original version (which I don’t much like either, 46/100) until nearly 20 years later, which is now 20 years ago. (Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’...)
Now: Huh. I remembered this as being super-flashy, just a surfeit of empty style from the Max Headroom creators...which is really not so, apart from the black-and-white opening. (Same hook as the original: Dude walks into a police station, says there’s been a murder. Who was murdered? “I was.” If only either version of the movie went anywhere remotely interesting with that. Slow-acting poison, ooo.) Body of the film’s visually unexceptional apart from Meg Ryan (who’s basically doing a less exaggerated DeDe from Joe Versus the Volcano) sporting one of the all-time ugliest ’80s haircuts, amazing that they got her looking so adorable for When Harry Met Sally... just a year later. Can’t remember whether the killer’s identity is so painfully obvious in the 1950 film, or whether his motive for committing multiple murders is so utterly inane—if so, that explains my uncommonly low rating for an ostensible noir classic. One small touch I liked: Dexter gallantly offers to lend his jacket to Sydney, who’s wearing nothing but a slip (intended for a costume party)...but his hand is krazy-glued to her wrist, so he has to do so in a way that ends with her wearing it inside out. Kiss-off line would be an all-timer had Schwarzenegger said it. “Isn’t that what it’s all about? Publish or perish?” [shoots him out window] “Perish.”
Airport ’77 (1977, Jerry Jameson): 56/100
Previously seen: ca. March 1977, San Jose, CA (Century 24).
Original opinion: Unrecorded on account of my being nine years old at the time. (Also I was busy anticipating Star Wars.) This is the one Airport movie I clearly remember seeing theatrically as a kid—being on a plane fully underwater seemed terrifying, and I was unaware that this amounted to just tacking a couple of wings onto The Poseidon Adventure (which I still haven’t seen, though I did see and review its mediocre 2006 remake).
Now: Maybe it’s my love for submarine movies saying “eh, close enough,” but this doesn’t seem all that bad to me—notably superior to 1975, though it likewise assembles a cast of aging heavyweights (Olivia de Havilland! Joseph Cotten! Jimmy fuckin’ Stewart!) and then gives them little or nothing to do. Jack Lemmon, on the other hand, commits to the nonsense with such sturdy professionalism that it’s almost moving. Could’ve watched him exude forthright competence all night, especially if that might have shifted attention away from Lee Grant as the ensemble’s Designated Awful Person (who eventually gets punched in the face, which I dimly recall inspiring applause in my ’77 theater, though that may well be a false memory). Other than that, ’77’s main problem is just a lack of complications, as every survival plan works more or less as intended (even if there are a few casualties). Third act’s a snail-paced engineering problem, which I appreciate on some level but exciting it definitely ain’t.
Le Franc (1994, Djibril Diop Mambety): 59/100
Previously seen: 17 April 1996, New York, NY (at the New Victory Theater in Times Square, which primarily stages plays for children but had just been renovated at the time and I guess held some special film screenings).
Original opinion: Very favorable. From an email to a friend: “Le Franc: One more ’95 NYFF film down. I liked this even better than Hyenas; it’s a hilarious and inventive featurette (45 minutes—I’m counting anything that long as a feature, since that's how long Sherlock, Jr. runs when properly projected. I had to change my 34-minute+ rule, which I borrowed from Ephraim Katz via you, when most of the Academy-Award-nominated shorts ran about 40 minutes) about a guy who wins the grand prize in the lottery, but has, well, a bit of trouble collecting. Highly recommended.”
Now: In truth, this is a short, irrespective of length. Has no ambition to be anything more, and runs as long as it does solely because Mambéty (who for some reason omits the accent in his credit here) creates musical interludes that serve no particular function other than to be immensely pleasant. (I can't find much information on an odd Senegalese musical instrument variably called the congoma or kongoma, but it produces a beguiling percussive sound.) All that happens narratively is: Dude behind on his rent buys a lottery ticket and pastes it onto his shack's front door (inside) so as not to lose it, then discovers, after he wins, that he can’t collect unless he can figure out how to remove it and show officials the serial number not currently visible. This involves a lot of comical stumbling around whilst carrying the entire large wooden door all over creation, and then a solution that this time failed to satisfy me, mostly due to its obvious insanity. (That it works is pure wish fulfillment, owing to something that realistically would never happen.) Also unsure whether there’s meant to be something pointed about our hero letting his Yaadikoone Ndiaye poster (celebrating Senegal’s equivalent of Robin Hood) get washed away by the sea. Related to the monetary concept of devaluation? Too much of a trifle for me to be sure.
The Watermelon Woman (1996, Cheryl Dunye): 48/100
Previously seen: 12 March 1997, New York, NY (Film Forum).
Original opinion: 2½ stars out of four. Reviewed it “IN BRIEF” on my site.
Now: A for ambition, C– for execution. Few performances feel natural, even with Dunye giving herself a handicap by frequently narrating directly to camera, and zero thought has been given to how scenes will cut together—the entire film’s clumsily modular, a series of self-contained scenes connected mostly via amateurish ultra-quick fades to black. Plus nearly half of it was shot on consumer-grade video, which is theoretically justified by fictionalized Cheryl’s project but pretty obviously was intended to keep the budget manageable. Still easy to admire, because Dunye’s concept (researching an invented African-American actress from the early sound era) is quite strong and interracial lesbian relationships still rarely get handled this casually/erotically, even today. Just wish it weren’t so blatantly a first feature made by someone with little experience and few resources. (Sadly, Dunye’s 2004 sophomore effort, My Baby’s Daddy, has 6% on Rotten Tomatoes and a critics’ consensus that begins “Full of poop jokes…” She’s worked mostly in TV since then, including a couple of Bridgerton episodes.) Bizarre meta aspect: Guinevere Turner gets name-checked early on (Go Fish being a major inspiration for Dunye’s aspiring filmmaker), then shows up, not as herself, to play the love interest.
State of Grace (1990, Phil Joanou): 50/100
Previously seen: ca. October 1990, San Jose, CA (Pruneyard).
Original opinion: Unrecorded, no memory whatsoever.
Now: And that’s because goddamn there is absolutely nothing memorable about this rote fucker. Actually, that seems to be untrue for some actors (e.g. DiCaprio) who speak reverently of Gary Oldman’s performance, and I can kinda see how his live-wire energy as a sort of Irish Johnny Boy (Danny Boy?) might be something a kid starting out would seek to emulate (though I found Oldman’s American accent here a distraction). But the script and the direction and Sean Penn’s sullen moodiness in the lead and Robin Wright’s function as the movie’s sole female character, on hand to represent Escape...it’s all so competently boilerplate. I can think of two mildly interesting elements, both notable for what they don’t do: (1) It’s rare to see an undercover-cop movie wait this long (about 50 minutes into a needlessly prolonged 134) to reveal itself as such, and (2) this is the only example I can think of in which the cop’s never at any point in danger of having his cover blown—he finally just blows it himself out of anger. Otherwise, I dunno, nobody embarrasses themselves or anything. It’s totally watchable. I expect complete evaporation again by late next week.
After the Rehearsal (1984, Ingmar Bergman): 64/100
Previously seen: ca. late 1986 or early 1987, San Jose, CA (vhs). Pretty sure I watched this because it was the first 4-star movie (alphabetically) I hadn’t yet seen in what was then the most recent edition of Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion; my memory is of renting it from Tower Video, during the period when I worked next door at Tower Records. (They were separate entities, at least w/r/t employees—being hired by one didn’t entail staffing the other.) I then watched Being There, the next 4-star film I hadn’t yet seen. Think that was it.
Original opinion: Unrecorded, no memory. Which is too bad as this was my very first Bergman! (My second was Sawdust and Tinsel, which remains a favorite. Didn’t get to the biggies for a while—the video store I worked at for some reason had Sawdust but nothing much else.)
Now: Bergman’s peak as a writer might be the climactic scene in which Henrik and Anna jointly narrate their hypothetical love affair, his cynicism undercutting her optimism (though they occasionally swap places, preventing it from feeling too schematic); Lena Olin wasn’t yet 30 but already boasts an uncanny ability to seem at once precise and spontaneous, holding her own against a veteran like Erland Josephson. She’s so phenomenally good that I almost got angry when Bergman has her freeze for half an hour (still onscreen but motionless, a highly theatrical conceit) so that Ingrid Thulin can swoop in as poignant middle-aged counterpoint. That sequence has its merits but pales beside the Olin-centric bookends, indulging much more in Bergman’s trademark recriminations. Also, it’s implied, subtly but unmistakably, that Anna might in fact be Henrik’s daughter, which makes it quite hard not to be skeeved out by his willingness to fantasize (not in sexual detail, thankfully) about becoming romantically involved with her, even if that’s a creative means of face-saving polite deflection on his part. More a short theater piece than a movie, really, but worthwhile.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001, Chris Columbus): 56/100
Previously seen: 18 November 2001, New York, NY (Union Square).
Original opinion: B–. Doesn’t look like I wrote a word anywhere. (Which means reviews were quite good, otherwise I wouldn’t have felt obligated to see it sans professional assignment.)
Now: Checked the time when someone finally mentioned the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone: 98 minutes in! They should’ve just called this extended intro Harry Potter and the Hog Warts, though a quarter-century later it’s unfortunately metamorphosed into Harry Potter and the Roster of Now-Deceased Acting Legends, with not just Richard Harris but also Maggie Smith, John Hurt and Alan Rickman all gone. (Cleese, who played a ghost, is ironically still hanging on.) Gotta say I never thought the two Columbus films were notably weaker than what followed—even Cuarón wound up mostly paying obeisance to Rowling—and still find this one perfectly fine, admittedly devoid of any purely cinematic magic but squarely hitting all of its marks. (Note that I hadn’t read the books then and still haven’t now. Was already over 30 when Pottermania hit the U.S.) Fun to go back and revisit the three leads at their youngest, each one perfectly cast; Watson embodies Hermione so fully from her first appearance that it’s nearly impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. (Her desperate eagerness to be called on in class!) This was the only one I didn’t rate /100 in real time, and I have no desire to rewatch any of the others; looks like Half-Blood Prince wound up being my favorite (61/100), which I assume to be highly unusual if not outright unique.
The Land Before Time (1988, Don Bluth): 46/100
Previously seen: ca. November 1988, San Jose, CA (Town & Country Village).
Original opinion: Unrecorded, don’t remember. Wasn’t likely my thing; I was already 20.
Now: Way too cute for me, though my plan to complain in particular about Ducky and her incessant wacky “Yep! Yep! Yep!” has been derailed by discovering that Ducky’s 10-year-old voice actor was murdered by her father before the movie was even released (and that “Yep! Yep! Yep!” is chiseled on her gravestone). So let me instead focus on how much stronger Land Before Time seems early on, when dialogue is minimal and Bluth’s team devotes most of its energy to making prehistoric Earth look like another planet altogether. (Also notable: the degree of optical distortion underwater, which I believe was unprecedented at the time. For all Pixar’s innovations, they’ve yet to attempt anything that gutsy.) T-Rex attack’s exciting and likely influenced Spielberg a few years later. And you could probably improve the film for me like 15% just by erasing the dinosaurs’ fucking eyelashes. Once it becomes a comic ensemble road movie featuring occasional interludes of pathos, I pretty much lose interest.
Night and Day (2008, Hong Sang-soo): 71/100
Previously seen: 3 October 2008, New York, NY (NYFF press screening, Walter Reade).
Original opinion: 71/100. Wrote a short review on my site at the time.
Now: Always a pleasure to revisit these early films in which Hong still cared about aesthetics. (While this was his first time shooting digitally, Night and Day still looks orders of magnitude better than anything he’s done over the past decade-plus. Which is not how that should work, given the major improvements that digital cameras have seen since 2008.) Watching this particular blinkered dude ignore Paris while lazily half-pursuing various other Korean expats remains very funny, and I’d completely forgotten that he’s “on the lam” from what’s probably a nothing drug charge, which magnifies the absurdity of his extended trip. Surprised my original review makes no mention whatsoever of the closing dream sequence, which I misremembered as concluding on that pig(?) cryptically knocking on the bathhouse window. (Thought that was the movie’s final shot, actually, when in fact it’s not even the end of his dream, and there’s a subsequent return to reality.) Can’t honestly claim to find that epilogue(?) satisfying, or even a coherent culmination, but neither is it actively destructive (like the tonally jarring finish of, say, Dumont’s Twentynine Palms). It’s just kinda there, defying expectations. Grateful that Hong’s never again come close to this excessive length.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994, Kenneth Branagh): 33/100
Previously seen: 7 November 1994, New York, NY (Loews Village).
Original opinion: Unrecorded, and surprisingly I didn’t have a clear memory. Having rewatched it, though, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t have felt then more or less as I do…
Now: Ugh. Might’ve been kinder to Del Toro’s adaptation had I first reminded myself of how over-the-top Branagh had sailed. Gotta give Ken credit: He’s going for broke here, pushing every scene to its most operatic level—even when people are just dancing, they dance with a sprightly manic glee that’d make the seven brothers and their seven brides blanch. Dramatically, it’s an entire movie of Vader bellowing “NOOOO!” (“Do not want.”) I respect the heedless abandon but it’s an approach that risks silliness and in this case all too frequently achieves it. Guffawed at the beginning when Branagh draws out “My name…..is Victor……..Frankenstein,” as if that would have any meaning to some random ship captain out in the Arctic. Cackled when he whips his shirt off for the reanimation sequence, so that we can be distracted by wondering how this scientist driven nearly mad in an effort to play God has time to hit the gym for at least three hours daily. Sadly, there’s little entertainingly campy about De Niro’s very Shelley-faithful version of the Creature—it just confirms how wise Universal was to re-conceive Actually It’s The Doctor Who’s Named Frankenstein as a nearly mute, truly inhuman-looking monster, rather than just someone who appears to have miraculously survived a very bad auto wreck nearly 100 years before cars were invented. Upsides: Cleese quietly excels in a rare non-comic role, and Bonham Carter has the ideal porcelain-delicate face to be grotesquely Cuisinarted—she makes a magnificent Bride.
Fallen (1998, Gregory Hoblit): 42/100
Previously seen: 25 May 1998, New York, NY (vhs).
Original opinion: C–. Entertainment Weekly capsule: “In which stalwart Det. John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) must contend with (a) a murderous demon capable of inhabiting any human body it likes, moving from one host to the next simply by touch; (b) a big-city police force convinced that he, Hobbes, is responsible for the demon’s handiwork; and, most challenging of all, (c) a plot that makes no sense whatsoever. [JUL 2026: I would almost guarantee that I wrote “no damn sense whatsoever” and EW cut the “damn.”] Here’s one head-scratcher: The demon attempts, early on, to mosey into Hobbes’ body, only it can’t. Why not? Well, frankly, because if it could, there’d be no movie. Ditto if it made the obvious move and took possession of Hobbes’ beloved nephew, which it does—for about 10 seconds. Too easy? Demonic Alzheimer’s? The first-rate cast manages to lend this late-millennial nonsense some gravity, but not enough.” [JUL 2026: That last phrase likely got trimmed for space.]
Now: Crappy ’90s thrillers are becoming real comfort food for me—the stupidity, which overwhelmed everything else back then, now seems more like a reasonable price to pay for the pleasures of mid-budget, star-driven studio filmmaking. Washington does heroic work with very little (even mostly survives the truly terrible voiceover narration he’s required to deliver) and spends much of the movie bantering with Donald Sutherland, John Goodman and a badly-mustachioed James Gandolfini in scenes that recall Sea of Love (in part ’cause Goodman played the partner in that one too). Body-hopping menace worked better in The Hidden, if I can trust a dusty memory, but boasts enough inherent sturdiness to hold your attention, with “Time Is on My Side” a suitably creepy refrain. Still galling that no attempt whatsoever is made to explain why Azazel can enter every single person it encounters except the protagonist, and I’d love to sit Nicholas Kazan down and have him to try to explain how the schoolteacher-firing-blanks setup could possibly have worked, given that it requires Mr. Demon to inhabit the guy, acquire the gun and blanks, park him in the right spot, and then I guess just hope that he’ll stay put of his own accord, bewildered but for some reason disinclined to leave that area, while Azazel’s off possessing various others to lure Hobbes. Strong contender for worst dialogue exchange ever: “Can I ask you something personal?” “Everything’s personal if you’re a person.” I’d like to believe Davidtz tried not to say that.
There were originally two quick W/O explanations here, but I apparently accidentally deleted them somehow. They are in fact saved, I believe (ever since losing a big hunk of one of these suckers, I’ve copy/pasted everything into a separate note, just in case), but at home, where I still won’t be for another week. So I’ll include them next month. Pillion basically failed to overcome my longstanding non-interest in conventional BDSM; André Is an Idiot got me more interested in the backstory of André’s marriage than in anything involving his cancer.