The Predator. Shane Black. 2018.

So it’s a reboot? What’s the change going to be?

“This time… She’s nice!”

But no: Doesn’t take many minutes for the predator to disembowel some soldier types.

This is sooo bad. All the characters are boring cliches, every camera angle is what you’d predict, every line is predictable. And there’s a kid! An autisticish kid! That’s the final insult in an action movie.

But then… as it develops (perhaps that’s putting it too generously), it’s kinda growing on me. It’s not a horror movie, but instead a group buddy movie. With lots of violence. It’s kinda amiable?

But oh so stupid and oh so predictable.

… OK, the space ship action scene I didn’t see coming. It’s fun!

This is a difficult movie to throw a dice on. I mean, it’s got a it’s-so-bad-it’s-good kinda vibe going on, but half the movie is rather tedious. But then there’s bits that are (while embarrassing) pretty entertaining.

So: It’s not a good movie, but… But.

The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later. Agnès Varda. 2002.

So, this is a thing she did two years after the smashing success of The Gleaners and I, and it’s about the reactions to that movie.

The movie was kinda meta already — both about the gleaners, but also about Varda and her filming the gleaners. This one has that guy from that movie talking about that movie and how he didn’t like the bits about Varda herself, which makes it so super-meta that that.

This could have gone south really fast. I mean, a movie about people’s reactions to her previous movie? But it is it’s own thing; it’s great in a totally different way than the previous movie was.

However, there’s a couple of sequences here that don’t really work, like with the psychoanalyst.

Topaz. Alfred Hitchcock. 1969.

Just… what… what was Hitchcock aiming for here? This late-60s thing about Russian spies is just beyond tedious. The actors are leaden and the storyline is without interest. The 2K restoration looks nice and colourful. There’s some striking scenes in here where that certainly helps.

But it’s just … portentous and boring. It seemed to go on forever… and it’s one of Hitchcock’s longest movies at 2 hours and 5 minutes.

I wonder what the story behind this turgid mess was. Was he paid to do a propaganda piece or something?

:

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.”

Indeed.