Synapse
The Weekend Watch is an open thread where you can share what you’ve recently watched, offer suggestions on movies and TV shows we should check out (or warnings about stuff to avoid) and discover queue-filling goodies from other FSR readers.
The comments section awaits. I’ll get the ball rolling with the movies/TV my eyeballs took in this weekend.
The first of two Fantasia Fest films I watched this weekend, Gun Woman is also the least successful. It’s a revenge tale that leaves you disliking almost everyone up to and including the man pursuing revenge. The only real exception to your distaste is the titular character who’s bought, abused, trained to kill and then subject to a surgery that leaves pieces of a gun sewn into her flesh. The plan – an unnecessarily elaborate and poorly conceived effort involving a necrophilia club at a nuclear waste facility – unfolds with a level of crass exploitation requiring she be completely naked for the film’s final twenty minutes or so. If any of this sounds sexy then I apologize.
I also finally got around to watching Noah, and while it works better as a stand alone adventure than a biblical adaptation it’s still an immensely dumb tale. There are some admittedly nice visuals in the morally suspect story, but none of it really works on the whole. But there are some highlights I’d like to share. Like when they roofied all the animals. And when the bad guys pulled out their rocket launchers. Or when Anthony Hopkins fingered Hermione to magically grant her ovaries. And when Ham eyeballs his infant nieces knowing in a few years he’ll be making one of them his wife. Here endith the highlights.
Curtains is an early ’80s slasher thriller from Canada most notable for the image above. I thought I had seen it before, but I gave the new Synapse Films Blu-ray a spin and discovered that I actually never did. It’s an oddly structured film consisting of an underbaked script and a slapdash feel to its editing/camera work. The disc actually comes with a new “making of” featurette consisting of various interviews with cast and crew, and it quickly becomes clear just why the movie looks and feels so thrown together. Still, there are a few nice moments including the skating scene above, a creepy doll sequence and the legendary John Vernon playing a real ladies man.
The One I Love also played this year’s Fantasia, and it definitely deserves some attention once it opens in limited release next month. It’s a relationship dramedy about a couple struggling to keep their love alive and fresh, but the story is fused with ideas that would feel right at home in an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass play the couple, and they both do fantastic work dealing with both the typical relationship dramas and the something extra they encounter along the way.
A recent NPR interview with Chris O’Dowd turned me onto “Moone Boy” in a way that all of Hulu’s incessant advertising efforts failed to do, but regardless of how I got there I’m happy to have arrived. The show follows a young boy in ’80s Ireland, and in addition to being incredibly funny it’s spot on in hitting topics that are universal to anyone who ever grew up. (The episode featuring Martin Moone getting in trouble for taking Eucharist wafers out of church to treat them as snacks struck very close to home.) O’Dowd is great in it as the boy’s imaginary friend, but it’s really David Rawle’s show and he kills it episode after episode with some perfect comedic delivery and expressions. I’m only on the first season, but I’m loving it.
What did you watch this weekend?