Three Films Make A Post: It's not important where we are going. I just want you to drive.

Drive All Night (2021): Night-time cab rides (or new-fangled ride share rides, aka cab rides with worse paid, less insured drivers) with more or less mysterious passengers are still a nice set-up for movies in quite a few genres, though not one always used as well as you’d wish. Peter Hsieh’s film featuring Yutaka Takeuchi as the cabbie and Lexy Hammonds as the mysterious passenger doesn’t quite hit every note right for me. There’s sometimes too vague a quality surrounding this mix of noir tropes, Lynch-inspired weirdness, and hallucinations even for my ambiguity positive taste. However, Hsieh clearly understands the beauty of night rides, so there are quite a few good scenes of people in cars. This is not me damning with faint praise.

Cracked (2022): This piece of Thai horror directed by first time filmmaker Surapong Ploensang is rather too generic in its building of scares and shocks to ever quite work for me, particularly since the film seems actually afraid of getting deeper into its less generic aspects. So, not surprisingly, its characters never do much of emotional or intellectual interest either despite their trauma load. Plus, there’s some really bad possessed child acting in here in an era where I suspect that playing possessed is one of the first things they teach kids on the child actor clone farm.

On the positive side, like with a lot of ultra-generic horror, this is still a perfectly decent way to while away ninety minutes or so. Just don’t expect any emotional impact, or really anything you’ll remember about the film a week after you’ve seen it.

The Awful Truth (1937): One of the reasons why screwball comedies often land in these clean-out posts is not that I don’t love them (I really, really do), but it’s that this kind of comedy is particularly difficult to write about, unless you want to get into historical and sociological analysis, which seems to run counter to the actual experience of watching these films. Because watching Leo McCarey’s movie does not really see me thinking about its representation of male-female relationships, nor how its portrayal of marriage sheds light on the mores of its time. Rather, it distracts me from these more worthy proceeds by making me laugh, repeatedly and heartily.

Three Films Make A Post: Meet The Gayest Lady Who Ever Went To Town!

Theodora Goes Wild (1936): This screwball comedy by Richard Boleslawski with the great Irene Dunne (and Melvyn Douglas, though he’s not really Dunne’s equal here) is still a joy to watch. Of course, the joyless puritanism and churlish conservatism it argues against does tend to get in style again and again – and too many progressives can get as badly infected by it as the reactionaries do – so it felt unexpectedly topical from time to time. The film also puts a nice bit of emphasis that enjoying one’s life as much as one can and being a good person towards others are not in opposition. Still news to some today.

This being a great bit of screwball, it does not use its message to bury the fun; instead the film’s an absolutely joyous mixture of the slightly frivolous, the just plain silly, and the sort of absurd set-pieces the genre is well known for.

Choose or Die (2022): I found this very low budget Netflix horror effort by Toby Meakins rather frustrating. There are several really cool set-pieces here – particularly the diner scene is excellently disturbing – but there’s also a clear ambition to do more than just set-pieces. And it’s here where the film falters for me: while it is pretty clear what it is trying to achieve thematically, namely talk about matters of race and class, of the lack of hope you get when you’re black and poor and how it buries one, it does so in a manner that’s so blunt and flat, and has so little to do with how most of the horror scenes play out, the whole film falls flat on its face, even before the godawful ending.

Infinite Storm (2022): At times, this survival movie with Naomi Watts in a fine acting mood, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, about a grieving woman saving a suicidal young man (Billy Howl) by literally dragging him down a mountain in terrible conditions, is surehandedly, quietly human, using the usual and typical tropes of this kind of wilderness survival affair to explore the fine lines between grief and hope, will to live and will to die. It is sparse (the right kind) and rather beautifully shot, as well. This good impression is regularly marred by moments where the film suddenly seems to lose trust in its own – and Watts’s – ability to express what it is trying to say, and suddenly swerves towards the cheese of badly used licensed music and badly written monologues that are meant to explain what the film is already expressing, but only turn it banal.