2016 movie viewings #4: WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

2016 movie viewings, #4: WR: Mysteries of the Organism. THREE STARS. When I first added this to my queue I thought it was a traditional documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the influential but ultimately nutjob psychology innovator of the early 20th century. But this turned out to be a lot different than that; shot in 1971, it's not exactly a documentary, but a documentary-style look at the small New England town where Reich set up his operations after World War Two, but then is cut together with what can only be called a pornographic communist propaganda film, shot in Soviet Yugoslavia with all Serbian dialogue, which is then itself cut together with random shots of hippies walking down sidewalks in New York City acting deliberately outrageous, which is then topped with a few minutes of interviews with such famous '70s San Francisco "sex artists" as Cynthia Plastercaster and Betty Tompkins. Utterly worthless as a traditional film, and you owe it to yourself to be aware of that before renting it; but as a historical document of the early 1970s it's AMAZING, an indispensable look at the most radical fringe of the countercultural era, one that gives a much better understanding of why people back then were so tolerant of such dangerous quackery as encounter groups and other such "let your freak flag fly" psuedo-science.

2016 movie viewings #3: Adult World.

(For all my 2016 movie reviews, click the "movies2016" label at the end of this entry, or just "movies" for every movie write-up I've ever done.)

2016 movie viewings, #3: Adult World. ONE STAR. A movie about a 22-year-old girl with a poetry degree who gets a job at an adult bookstore to make ends meet, written by someone who apparently has never read a poem, has never been inside an adult bookstore, and has never met a 22-year-old girl. Featuring characterizations so bad as to be actively embarrassing to even watch -- including a poetry-major college graduate who has never done drugs, has never met a gay person, and is so embarrassed by adult toys that she throws them in the air and runs screaming from the building when she accidentally picks one up -- how this POSSIBLY attracted the likes of Emma Roberts, Evan Peters and especially John Cusack is way beyond me.

2016 movie viewings #2: Mystic River.

(For all the movies I reviewed in 2016, click the "movies2016" label at the bottom of this entry, or just "movies" for every review I've ever written.)

2016 movie reviews #2: Mystic River. THREE STARS. This wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was going to be, essentially just another Hollywood crime thriller with a plot that relies on a particularly hard-to-believe coincidence; and the once celebrated performance by Sean Penn which got this movie so much attention when it first came out (this was the movie that garnered him his very first Oscar) is now even just 15 years later already looking shrill and histrionic, kind of like watching an old Charlton Heston film these days and thinking, "How could people once be so impressed by this overacting ham?" There are great lines here and there, showing hints of the hugely admired Dennis Lehane novel this was based on, which is so well-loved precisely because it brings such a deeper and more complex sense of character than most crime thrillers; but this by-the-numbers adaptation by the usually much better Clint Eastwood flattens all that to the usual dull sheen of Hollywood movies-of-the-week, a disappointment but one that really makes me want to read the novel now.

2016 movie viewings #1: Magic Magic

(For all my 2016 movie reviews, click on the "movies2016" tag at the bottom of this post.)

2016 movie viewings #1: Magic Magic. This was advertised as an emo/indie psychological horror film in the style of It Follows, so imagine my disappointment to learn that it was nothing like that at all -- this is instead simply a character study about a young mentally unstable woman who goes on a vacation to South America with acquaintances, stops taking her meds, and has a serious anxiety attack in the jungle when there are no Western doctors around to help her, exacerbated greatly by the local voodoo hillbilly "cures" forced on her by their neighbors actually harming the situation much more than helping. No, seriously, that's the entire movie; and while that might have been all right if I had gone into it realizing such, it was a huge letdown when thinking this was going to be some Funny Games ripoff with Michael Cera playing a cackling psychopath (see above trailer for more). Disappointing in about the most profound way possible.