Yeah.
The Duchess - Middle-of-the-road for Keira Knightley's "period" period: a damn sight better than Anna Karenina but not to the level of P&P and certainly not Colette, which might be her best movie aside from Never Let Me Go. There are a few scenes with some staying power, but mostly it's one of those films that makes you wonder where they stash all the crap needed to decorate these things. Guess they'll keep making British stuff like this in perpetuity just to pay the overhead on all the museums. Peggy Carter and Howard Stark are here, too, but they do not fondue.
Boys on the Side - I'd seen chunks of this over the years due to it being another heavily-edited, high-rotation TBS movie, but never the full thing. Whoopi Goldberg is supposed to...be a singer in this? And then she sings fucking JANIS JOPLIN, not known as the hardest-to-perform stuff in the world, and it's completely mediocre??? That's how you START? Eck.
I'm also not sure a movie qualifies as 'feminist' just because the three leads are women and the Indigo Girls play a set. Not with a production crew that's still men calling all the shots, not with the ridiculous amount of violence against women that's simply brushed off in the pivotal early scene, not with wisecracks about wanting to fuck preteens. Do better (thankfully, we have. Sort of). Some of the lighting and cinematography is nice, though.
The Amateur (1981) - This was on Hulu, not TUBI, as it turns out. It's...eh. If you've seen post-70s/post-Pakula pot-boilers, you've seen things just like this. It's not anything special, though the computer involvement is at least a little interesting considering the era. Not entirely sure why this warranted a remake, except they thought they could do some wackier stunts or something. Pretty skippable. Not necessarily an actively bad movie, but just assembled from stuff that's rote and not the least bit original.
On the Waterfront - Hoo boy, I watched this, oh, probably 20 years ago? Maybe more? Back when I had precious little appreciation for the craft of movie-making or the failures in craft that sometimes lead to films getting made. What do I mean by that? Well, Elia Kazan can go fuck himself if he thought he was half the victim Terry Malloy was. That isn't just "Death of the Author", it's "Zombification of the Author."
The performances are, in fact, great, but considering what some of them have to work with - poor Eva Marie Saint playing a role written as the flimsiest possible cardboard cutout dame, for example - it's practically a miracle the film hangs together at all. And oof, that brassy fucking score is awful. *That* was Leonard Bernstein? Really? All that "Do ya get it? It's supposed to be tense now! Because the music's loud! Get it?!?" nonsense? Yeesh. When I watched this in my 20s, though, there was plenty I missed (like the pigeons & hawks symbolism), so it was worth the revisit anyway. But as much as this moved acting away from the older style and towards naturalism, it reminds me that the production and direction wasn't there yet, and those feel at odds with each other nowadays.
How to Train Your Dragon - Hey, man, I was rocking the Hiccup style a good 15 years before it was cool! That said, it's a good thing I didn't see this when it came out, because I got my now-dearly-departed cat about a year later, and I totally would have named him "Night Furry" since he looked like, and behaved like, Toothless so much. Who knows if "Night Furry" is an improvement or not over "Mister Jerkface". Yes, that was my cat's name. And anyway, yes, I am now a Hell of a lot more interested in seeing the live-action version of this, because this probably should have been on my 2010s list, or certainly deserving of a viewing at the time. I don't think this is the best non-Pixar from the decade - I think Kubo still takes that pretty cleanly - but it's better than a lot of Pixars by a wide margin.
Companion - Honey, we already have Ex Machina at home! And we did a version of this in the 90s with Bruce Greenwood, so why'd you steal so much from that and then pretend it never happened?? Always amazed at how things like this can get some level of cultural grip on people and yet, yeah, it's lifted from about a dozen other things. But hey, I'm not going to 100% object to movies that want to make this many jokes about Tesla owners. I do think Sophie Thatcher - unlike Ayo Edebiri - should really get her front teeth fixed, though, because she's beautiful to the point that that stuff is distracting. Oh, you expected me to talk about the movie? No, no, no, go watch those other things where they got all their ideas.
The Way of the Gun - Having just rewatched From Dusk Till Dawn and having been reminded I don't care for that, this was, to say the least, a welcome bit of grim, ugly, violent, twisty stuff. The Anti-Tarantino, and one I can appreciate. I don't always dig del Toro as an actor the way some do - not a huge fan of Sicario or Traffic for instance, though the latter is probably due for a rewatch - but here he just gets morsel after morsel of great dialogue and drills every one of them out of the park. Phillippe is probably as well-cast here as he was for anything, where you realize the only reason he's narrating and the only reason he's presented as an anti-hero is so his prettiness is constantly thrown into contrast with how shitty all the events are. Just grimy and consequence-laden and heavy like the better Peckinpahs, not so much the misogynist Peckinpahs (though this isn't exactly lacking in its own awful treatment of women). A low-end entry on a Top 100 of the 2000s list, I'd think.
