I watched various movies on Criterion and Hulu last month.
Bell, Book, and Candle, a light 1958 romantic comedy where Kim Novak is a witch who casts a love spell on James Stewart to break up his engagement, and feels remorse about it. It was cute, I liked the Greenwich Village setting, seeing Elsa Lanchester (aka the Bride of Frankenstein) in a later role as a charming and quirky older witch, and a young Jack Lemmon as an adorable warlock. It was like the alternate version of Vertigo in which it isn’t a tragic mindmelt of a movie.
The Quiet Family, a Korean dark comedy from 1998 about a family running an inn whose guests keep dying in macabre ways and they are trying to cover it up and panicking. It was silly and fun, with some future Korean movie stars who would be in Oldboy and Thirst.
You Cannot Kill David Arquette, a 2019 documentary in which the actor David Arquette is trying to make up for being shunned by the wrestling community after he won a belt while promoting Ready to Rumble in 2000, as because he’s not an actual wrestler that it shouldn’t count. So he decides to go back into wrestling, but training for real, and digging his way up through backyard wrestling and lucha libre. I liked his enthusiasm and genuine interest in making amends to earn the respect of the industry, and was surprised that for being out of shape at 46 in the beginning, he quickly took to doing stunts in the ring and got into it quickly. There’s also a sweet tribute to Luke Perry at the end, with David and Luke’s son, the AEW wrestler Jungle Boy. Also, his current wife looks like a younger version of his ex Courteney Cox, it was pretty funny to me.
Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a 2017 documentary about the early years of Basquiat, in which his friends mostly talk about him as a funny and quiet artist who crashed around their places, was an incorrigible flirt, played in a band with Vincent Gallo, and how he developed his artistry and broke into the art industry as a young man of color. It was pretty cool, and I always like learning about the artsy scenes of past New York City that were before my time.
Broken Arrow, a 1996 action film by John Woo in which John Travolta and Christian Slater are Air Force pilots in Utah, then Travolta goes rogue and turns on everyone and is selling nukes, and Slater and park ranger Samantha Mathis have to stop him. It was decent, nice seeing a role reversal with the actors against typecasting, and it felt like a warm-up for Face/Off, with Travolta clearly having fun playing the villain even if he does overact his line delivery a lot. I especially liked the train finale, I thought it was one of the best sequences of the movie.
The Naked Kiss, a 1964 noir by Samuel Fuller that I hadn’t seen in years, that still held up as a great film. Constance Towers is a former sex worker who left her life behind to live in a small town and work as a nurse with children with disabilities, and her past is dogging her, from the head cop being outraged by her former life, to seeing young women get suckered into the sex industry with naive eyes. She’s so headstrong and powerful in this movie, and fantastically blunt about not having regrets about her sex work while being honest about the ugly side of it. This film went a lot further than I expected, especially with her potential new husband, and I was impressed by how much balls this movie had in the 1960s, it still holds up really well as a B-movie noir.
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