I like these weekly projects like the Friday 10 or posting my Letterboxd recent activity. But I’ve gotta find some to do that aren’t on Fridays. This day is starting to show some strain under the weight of carrying this blog.
Here’s the recent activity for this week, with brief thoughts to follow. (Just to be clear, these weren’t the only movies I watched this week, just the most recent four.)
Night Swim (2024)
[Peacock]
All of my horror movie-loving friends had split reactions on Blumhouse’s Night Swim. Roughly half thought it was an amazing horror movie that proved the genre still has new territory to explore, and the other half thought it was the most ridiculous movie they had seen in years. My own reaction was… well… split. On the one hand, I think it had a lot of great ideas and some great examples of execution in terms of acting, writing, directing, cinematography, et al. But something about the execution of its core ideas never quite clicked for me.
But while it didn’t work for me, I admire that it took an idea that sounds funny on paper — a haunted swimming pool — and turned it into a serious exploration of family trauma and sibling rivalry.
Quasi at the Quackadero (1976)
[NightFlight+]
This quirky animation is a lot of fun packed into 10 minutes. The style is reminiscent of 1968’s “Yellow Submarine,” as director Sally Cruikshank employs every classic animation trick in the book. (That book, by the way, being Preston Blair’s Animation.) While it’s definitely not a kid’s cartoon, it steers clear of a lot of the excesses of Ralph Bakshi’s work from the same period and plays a lot cleaner as a result. Quasi has the feel of a labor of love, reveling in weirdness and cartoon slapstick as anthropomorphized ducks and a robot driver enjoy a day in a surrealistic fantasy theme park.
Cruikshank’s other animated work would appear in the 90’s MTV anthology “Liquid Television,” and she also picked up work creating animated opening titles and sequences for movies like Mannequin (1987) and Top Secret! (1984). But one of her longest-running gigs has apparently been producing animation for “Sesame Street.”
Nightlight (2015)
[Moviesphere+]
Nightflight takes the standard story of “teenagers go into the woods and never come back out” and films it all from the POV of a malfunctioning flashlight held (most of the time) by star Shelby Young, who’s better known for her voice acting work in cartoons and video games.
It all comes off a little Blair Witch-adjacent, but it’s another example of a movie that just didn’t click for me. It did, however, give me lots of thoughts about finding unique storytelling perspectives and fresh takes on tried-and-true scenes.
Let’s Live Again (1948)
[VCI Classics]
Behind a title that today would accompany a creepy, potentially gore-splattered A24 film sits a nifty little comedy from the 1940’s. Larry Blake, played by Rocketship X-M star John Emery, is a nuclear physicist who helped create the atomic bomb. Despite his instrumental work on the most devastating weapon in the history of mankind that helped launch America’s Atomic Age, he still feels like he’s living in his brother’s shadow. But when his brother dies suddenly in a tragic plane accident, the distraught Larry finds a dog sitting next to him in a bar and suddenly realizes — this is his brother, come back to Earth just to tease him!
It’s actually a sweet if sometimes slow romantic comedy with some shades of Topper (1937) and Harvey (1950), and it’s worth a watch if you’re looking for something quick and fun.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-dvd-case-lot-on-shelves-276005/