Movie Journal: July

The Witch

Another late entry into this series, though one which is at least slightly less late than the June journal was. It's a shame, really, because July was easily the best month of the year for me in terms of the quality of movies I watched, so much so that I struggled to narrow this list down to just ten. For the record, films which just missed the cut include: Ghostbusters (2016), No Home Movie (2015), L'inhumaine (1924), Call Me Kuchu (2012) and Real Life (1979).

The worst film I watched in July was The Trip, Roger Corman's 1967 dalliance with psychedelia and LSD that is most notable for featuring such soon-to-be luminaries as Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, and for being written by another future legend, Jack Nicholson. Any film with that pool of talent at its disposal is going to have some worthwhile stuff in it, and the last twenty minutes or so, when Fonda's character descends into a prolonged and disjointed acid trip that possibly destroys his mind, is visceral and brilliant in its use of abstract, associative editing. But it's a long and dull road to get to the one good part of the film.

I also watched Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I didn't think was as bad as most of the Internet did. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot more fun than Man of Steel (it would almost have to be, admittedly) and it has the courtesy to be bad in interesting ways. Taken as a whole, it's an awful mess, but there are some individual scenes and sequences - most of them featuring Ben Affleck's Batman - that work really well, and I could see myself rewatching it dozens of times before I sat through even one minute of Zack Snyder's first Superman story again.

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Here are the ten best films I watched for the first time in July.

Movie Journal: June

The Lovers on the Bridge

I think it's fair to say that I've fallen off a little bit when it comes to these monthly journals, and this blog in general. In my defense, the last month or so has been pretty hectic with work (not to mention that I've spent way too much time delving into the ins and outs of the Presidential election, an occupation which is much too stressful to do without being paid), but that's not really much of an excuse considering I still managed to find time to watch a lot of films during that same time period, and these posts generally don't take that long to knock together. Here's hoping that I can finish the year off strong after this summer stumble.

I watched 33 films in June, and the worst of them was Stanley Kramer's On The Beach. Aside from the fact that the title caused me to constantly think of this sick guitar lick, which was a distraction even if it wasn't the film's fault, it was such a drab, dreary experience. Even for a film about people waiting to die from radiation poisoning, which has never been the perkiest of sub-genres, it proceeds at such a ponderous pace that it bores long before it has a chance to lecture on the absurdity of nuclear war. Kramer more ably balanced social commentary and genre filmmaking with The Defiant Ones and Judgement At Nuremberg. Here, the results are too turgid to contemplate.

Right, on to the good films I watched in June.