The Goods: Film Reviews
Breezy, watchable, charming… I’m surprised more people haven’t seen this one. I found it to be a well made movie: sturdy script (if low on laughs with some undernourished characters), excellently cast, masterful early 60s summer soundtrack, and — most memorably — gorgeous pastel palette in every frame.
Lynch does more with a Lumiere cam and 1 minute than most filmmakers do with cutting edge CGI and 2.5 hours.
The set designs on this MF are absolutely bananas. Truly Dr. Seuss come to life.
A remarkably attractive cast plays a group of nice people in an intensely-early-90s Seattle. It has the signature Cameron Crowe warmth and generosity of spirit towards its characters, and also his weird pacing/narrative tics that I can never quite articulate but always bug me a little. Overall, it holds up quite well as a loosey-goosey ensemble romcom, and also as a period piece of a simpler time when you had to worry if your answering machine would eat its tape or playback your message.
Reviewed on The Goods here.
A marvel: creepy and endlessly inventive, with great worldbuilding and coming of age themes. A couple portions drag.
Hannah and Her Sisters, the second drama by Woody Allen after a long string of comedies, is a fantastically crafted slice-of-life drama of three sisters with interlocking lives.
A twisted Japanese noir with one of the greatest femme fatales committed to celluloid.
The visuals are astonishing (especially the colors! holy crap!), and the story doesn’t lack for scope or invention or polish. But a polished turd is still a turd, and this script is pretty rough.