Here are some movies I've watched in the past few months, and some thoughts about them. This is mostly a way of clearing up a large folder of screenshots I've accumulated, because for a while I got really into taking screenshots as I watched (all for the blog), and then I didn't end up writing about every film because some of them were less interesting in the moment or whatever. Please enjoy my personal screenshots. They were taken with love.
1. The Great Muppet Caper (1981)
This is, as should be obvious, a joyous watch. Miss Piggy is a wonderful shy freak, inexplicably pretending to be a famous woman, until Kermie figures out the truth. The thing about The Muppets is that the jokes are constant and good. The effective humour really propels us through the narrative, and there's so much texture. Peter Falk is here. We're into gangster and newspaper stuff, as was the hot trend in 1981, and it's great. Just delicious.
★★★★☆
2. Marty Supreme (2025)
There's a real sizzling feel to this. Timothée Chalamet's Marty is an insane schemer, a ball of energy and rage who nevertheless maintains a certain winsome charm. He's a little weirdo and I hate him. But I love to see both the awful predicaments he finds himself in and the dizzying highs he achieves. What the fuck.
★★★★★
3. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)
This is a weird movie that annoyed me, but it does reach a point at which it becomes sort of intriguing. At first, and really for quite a long time, the movie lingers on Marilyn Monroe's excruciatingly ditzy protagonist. We see her balk at the idea of romance with the stuffy royal bloke she's sent off to, but after a few shots she falls blissfully in love with him. So far, so bland, but once we move past this and into the murky, daytime cartoon politics of the thing, it becomes a sort of crunchy, weird little movie. Marilyn becomes a political actor and it all feels oddly absent. Weird movie.
★☆☆☆☆
4. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
This is a reverent movie about the noble flighty spirit of men at arms. A new woman falls in love with an absent, traumatised pilot and essentially has to come to terms with the fact that he will not commit to her or like, express things to her. It's very of it's time in the worst way, illustrated best by the scene in which Cary Grant dumps water over his ex-gf to extinguish her emotion and put her back in her place as a stoic woman stalwartly deferring to a stifling masculine atmosphere of repression. Truly miserable.
★☆☆☆☆
5. Chutney Popcorn (1999)
I watched this because I wanted to know more about the director of Freakier Friday - Nisha Ganatra - and this was her directorial debut. The plot here is that a lesbian decides to act as surrogate for her sister and her husband, but then their plans change. I thought the movie was sort of tonally weird, a bit trance like. The comedic elements weren't very strong, but neither were the dramatic ones, so I was left feeling kind of miffed. I enjoyed the little group of lesbians always hanging out and doing henna on each other, but I really felt that the emotional severity this film seemed to want was lacking.
★★☆☆☆
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