Welcome to the Second Annual Sacred Walloween! I’m pleased to report that this month, on top of the weekly Halloween-based lists (and hopefully a few Greatest Movies Ever lists), I will be posting the blurbs of my 31 Days of Horror viewings on Facebook, Twitter, and in a full article here at the end of the week. I will also be watching Twin Peaks for the first time, culminating in a review of The Return. This will begin later tonight. In the meantime, reviews will continue as per usual as we enter Oscar season, with reviews of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Battle of the Sexes, and Wind River coming later this week. I won’t spoil too much for the reviews, but one of these films I was fairly negative on, one was good with some caveats, and one I wholeheartedly loved. You’ll have to wait for the reviews to see for yourself!
In the meantime, I spent most of this week watching classics. I started with The Black Stallion, which I found to be a strong, well-made movie, although a little bit boring. I also watched Out of the Furnace, out of excitement for Scott Cooper’s upcoming Hostiles. It’s not a truly great film, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, and Christian Bale and Casey Affleck are great in it. Speaking of prepping for later 2017 films, I watched The Last Detail in the wake of the great reviews for Last Flag Flying. I found it a good film, if not the best from the New Hollywood-era, but it is centered by great performances from Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, and Randy Quaid. However, if there’s one film I truly loved that I watched this week, it’s Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. It is a smart, sexy, funny thriller in the vein they don’t make any more, and it has one of the best ensembles of all time, not least of which from George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. It’s a film that everyone needs to watch before they die. From 2017, I watched Wonder Woman for the second time, this time with my parents. As it turns out, they seemed pretty much in agreement with my review from June, although they hated the first act more than I did and liked the last act a bit more. Still, despite my criticisms, it is still a great addition to the 2017 lexicon. That’s the opposite of how I feel about Transformers: The Last Knight, which I am barely an hour into and hating myself more and more each passing minute. It’s the worst edited movie I’ve ever seen, and yet still isn’t quite as bad as Age of Extinction. My God, I hate these movies.
On TV, I’ve been enjoying the return of Saturday Night Live and Modern Family, although I didn’t quite love the premieres. Family had a couple of laughs, and Ryan Gosling tried his hardest to make the premiere work (without laughing), but neither reached its full potential, and I hope they recover quickly. Meanwhile, American Horror Story has finally gone from average to great, delivering a truly frightening sequence in this week’s “11/9.” And You’re the Worst continues to plow ahead in a good, but fairly disappointing fourth season. However, no show is exciting me as much Rick and Morty, which just completed its fourth or fifth truly spectacular episode in a row. That’s a show you need to be watching.
What about you? Did you watch anything good or new this past week? What about the returning TV shows? Let me know in the comments!
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