10.25 movies

I haven't been watching too many movies lately, and I kind of overcompensated yesterday.

Rush (Ron Howard, 2013) - theatrical

A very colorful movie, but not an exciting one.  Ron Howard's biopics kind of leapfrog from one major event to the next and end up feeling pretty hollow, or maybe that's something endemic to biopics in general, because I seem to have trouble getting into a lot of them.  I dug some of the Niki Lauda stuff though, Daniel Bruhl killed it.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971) - theatrical

Feels like somewhat of a companion piece to I Only Want You to Love Me, and the protagonists of both feel like rough drafts of Fassbinder's ultimate antiheroic dunce Franz Biberkopf.  It took me a while to get into, but it's pretty rewarding, especially once the eponymous character has his existential crisis.  The finale with the flashback to Morocco is fantastic.  Also nice to see Irm Hermann in a lead role (with dialogue at that).  Not one of my favorites, but strikes me as one of his most mysterious.

Fear of Fear (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975) - theatrical

Figured this would go either the Bigger Than Life route or Le feu follet route.  It tended more toward the latter but there were definitely some nice absurd moments reminiscent of the former.  Loved the use of diagetic music and the crazy guy, but on the whole my least favorite Fassbinder by a good margin.

The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)

Made me nostalgic for middle school Spanish.  This wasn't the ideal setup -- we had to play the audio off one computer and the visuals off another, and we never got them quite in synch -- but it was still fun.  Unfortunately I went to get some food and missed the monkey scene, which I remember being the highlight.  The photographer's still the illest and I dug those locations Peck was visiting on his quest to uncover the truth (that's where the movie finds its footing).  All things considered it's not as good as I had recalled but it's not bad.

So a lot of screen time without anything too exciting, but it whet my appetite.  There should be a lot of good stuff coming up at the PFA and I'm gonna try to start watching more noirs again.