Nightmare Alley

Just like a carny sideshow, this flick is filled with obvious humbug. The story takes its sweet time getting into the meat of the matter, mostly through creating a number of set ups that will have rather clear payoffs in scenes down the line. On the plus side, this film is visually fine to look at, both from a design standpoint and in terms of cinematography (both typical strengths of any Guillermo del Toro movie). Overall, there’s enough entertainment here to let you watch it without feeling like a total mark, but one has to suspect that this could have been a more dazzling show, without resorting to any sideshow tricks.

Back to the Future (Original, Part 2, and Part 3)

I watched all three movies of the trilogy in short sequence, and, having had that experience (which was impossible upon first release), it makes a lot of sense to treat them as one long movie, though in fact--unlike today's planned trilogies--it is unlikely that the whole thing was planned as a three-movie sequence from the start. That's a pertinent perspective, because that fact of lack of planned vision comes through when you watch everything all together. The first movie is a certified classic at this point; there's little point in denying the accomplishment of the original piece. It's fun, smart, and it's time-bending is relatively under control. That's the strength of going through time in the backwards direction: you know what already happened, so you just have to recreate what you already know what was there. In contrast, the vision of the future presented in the second part is largely just silly. That is especially so when you're watching it in the midst of a year that is already past its putative setting. Nothing as outlandish as presented in the Hill Valley of the mid-twenty-teens has come to pass; in fact, today looks way more like 1985 than a lot of people would care to admit. By the time you get to the Old West portion of the proceedings, the future-problem is solved, but a lot of the spark and imagination seems to have gone out of the production. Most of the third part is relatively lifeless, and more than a just a little bit stupid. (Doc Brown, a scientist with a strong mechanical bent, has no clue how to distill gasoline in 1885? Petroleum was being pumped out of the ground at least twenty-five years earlier.) Nothing in the sequels is all that bad; they're just not close to the quality of the original work. Perhaps today's epics owes a debt to this franchise, if for nothing else than the clear example that, if you want to make a sequence of movies that are good from start to finish, you'd better plan it ahead, and not just respond to unexpected box office. (The MEOW is for the overall sequence of films; the original merits a PURR for sure.)

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

This is a comedy; it says so right in the title. A sex comedy, no less. It's also a Woody Allen movie, from back in his more consistent days. So why is it so banal? The writing is occasionally funny, and it's gorgeously shot, but it never really catches fire. In fact, the most amazing thing in this movie is Tony Roberts's helmet-like hair.