The Diary of a Young Girl (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank.  I had never read this famous book before, but when I signed up for a vacation trip to Amsterdam I figured I should read it first.  I got about halfway through before my trip rolled around, but that was enough to help give me some context when I visited the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam.  I finished the book over the course of the trip.  Anyway, it is an interesting book, and Anne comes across as a lively, spirited, and strong-willed teenager.  It does get a little repetitive, perhaps, but how could it not, given that Anne lived in hiding in a tiny space with the same group of people for two years?

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night  (B-).  Somehow I missed this 2014 black & white foreign-language vampire flick during its original release, but happily a friend invited me to a special showing last night at the Alamo Drafthouse.  (Actually I tried to talk her into seeing Logan instead, but she wasn’t having it.  She’s been a big vampire fan ever since New Moon.)  It’s a weird movie, but interesting.  Our hero is some ordinary guy living in a bleak industrial town called Bad City.  His father is a junkie, and a drug dealer takes our hero’s beloved car because dad can’t pay his debts.  Then the drug dealer abuses a prostitute who works for him.  This draws the ire of our vampire (Sheila Vand, Argo), an ordinary-seeming woman who ghosts around town at night and can sprout fangs in a jiffy.  Later she menaces a little boy and takes his skateboard.  After that she meets our hero after he has gone to a costume party (as Dracula!), and instead of making a meal out of him she actually seems to start liking him.  But you’re never really sure if she’s eventually going to chomp on him or not; her affect is pretty flat.  More stuff happens after that, in a slow, moody, artsy kind of way.  It held my interest.

(I’m categorizing it as a foreign film because it’s in Farsi, but I have read that it was actually shot in California.  The director, Ana Lily Amirpour, is Iranian-American.)

This was my first trip to an Alamo Drafthouse, and it was a pretty interesting experience.  We got to our theater pretty early, and before getting to the real previews they showed a bunch of film clips and trailers from cheesy old horror movies back-to-back.  It was fine to set the mood, I guess, but it made conversation difficult.  I got food, which I seldom do at movie theaters, and got a mediocre Royale Burger with Cheese and some cold fries out of the deal.  The seats were comfy, though.

Kong: Skull Island

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Kong: Skull Island (C).  If my records are correct, this is the 1,600th movie I have ever seen, so I wanted to celebrate the milestone with something big.  This incarnation of Kong is plenty big, but overall the movie was disappointing.  The year is 1973, and an eccentric guy (John Goodman, 10 Cloverfield Lane) somehow persuades a senator (Richard Jenkins, The Cabin in the Woods) to authorize military assistance for an expedition to an uncharted South Pacific island that looks kind of like a skull.  Goodman borrows a tough-as-nails colonel (Samuel L. Jackson, Unbreakable, at his Samuel L. Jacksonest) and a few more good men from the winding-down Vietnam War.  There are several other members in the expedition, but only Tom Hiddleston (Thor) and cute Brie Larson (Short Term 12) make any impression, as a British ex-special-ops guy and an anti-war photographer respectively.  The assembly of the team and the initial foray into the island are the best parts of the movie; once the monsters started to show up, I lost interest in a hurry.  It’s a long two hours.  Stay through the interminable end credits for a bonus scene.

The Lifeboat (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

The Lifeboat, by Charlotte Rogan (2012).  This is a pretty good novel.  It’s a first-person narrative by a young woman named Grace.  In the short prologue, we find out that (1) she survived some sort of oceanic disaster in a lifeboat, and (2) she and two other women are about to be tried for a murder allegedly committed on said lifeboat.  The rest of the book is her account of the disaster.  She spins a pretty convincing tale, but she’s clearly someone who always looks out for Number One.  Can we trust her account of events?  I found the book well-written and even hard to put down.

Split

The Movie Snob is creeped out—but not in a good way.

Split  (F).  I had not seen an M. Night Shyamalan movie since Lady in the Water, but it sounded like many critics were hailing this as a return to form, or at least the director’s best work in a long while.  And I was curious to see good guy James “Professor Xavier” McAvoy (X-Men: Apocalypse) play the villain.  So I decided to give it a try.  I found that I agreed with the minority of critics who have criticized this movie as a nasty, icky, exploitative piece of work.  McAvoy plays a fellow with multiple-personality disorder.  At the beginning of the movie he kidnaps three teenaged girls and locks them up in some sort of industrial-looking subterranean labyrinth.  He takes some of their clothes.  He ominously warns them that they are going to become “sacred food” for “the beast.”  In short, the threat of sexual violence is omnipresent.  Making matters worse, child abuse and child sexual abuse are alluded to in some very unpleasant flashbacks.  I hope the young co-stars (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Witch; Haley Lu Richardson, The Edge of Seventeen; Jessica Sula, TV’s Recovery Road) find better movies to star in.  Much better.

P.S. I always like to make a note when I am the only person in the theater for a movie, and I think that was the case with this one.  It was a few days ago, though, so don’t quote me on that.