things i've been watching: march edition

the Orphanage: (2008, dir: Juan Antonio Bayona)
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, it's got Del-toro-philia all over it: the thick, viscous atmosphere and startlingly creepy images, as if it rose up from the same troubled sleep as the Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. It works best if you think of it as a night-time journey through the underworld or a fairy tale. It's got too much filler to be entirely successful as a horror film, but it'd be a good one to watch late at night whilst in the throes of a fever.

the Heart is a Lonely Hunter: (1968, dir: Robert Ellis Miller)
Alan Arkin is the single extraordinary thing in this paint-by-numbers soap opera about how people try to connect, fail, succeed, keep trying or give up. Miller was mostly a TV director, which may explain how you can squeeze a movie-of-the-week out of a Carson McCullers classic... or it may be that the novel's quality lies mostly in its prose and not in its story. There's some fun to be had in watching Stacy Keach back when he was fresh off the farm and still filled with youthful enthusiasm.

Malice: (1993, dir: Harold Becker)
Unpretentious, twisty little thriller that weaves two mysteries into a clear, suspenseful narrative with happily menacing results. It's an early Aaron Sorkin project, which may explain why plot-turns which in lesser hands would have been barely credible are so easy to swallow. I believe the word "Hitchcockian" was evoked in most reviews at the time, and it feels a little like a gleeful tribute to the master. Great cast. This was back at the beginning of that five-year period when there was a law that Bill Pullman had to be in absolutely everything and Nicole Kidman was still stubbornly proving that she had what it takes to be A-list. Plus it's got a single-scene star-turn from Anne Bancroft that'll knock your socks off.

the Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor-Kings: (1976, dir: John Badham)
Man, I loved this movie when I was a kid. I remember sitting in my bedroom weeping... yes! weeping!... when my mother wouldn't take me to the drive-in to see it a second time. It taught me things, like what would happen if you stuck a candy bar in a gas-tank, which I thought was fascinating. The politics of it are surprisingly tame,--a sign of the times, I suppose. In retrospect, I guess twelve is about the right age to see it, because as an adult the plot is simplistic and the humor embarrassingly puerile. No James Earl Jones performance ever gets old, though.