It seems just about every major film takes it turn as an offering presented on the tiny viewscreen located on the back of your neighbour's headrest. On my recent travels I watched four films; three were pretty good, one was rather forgettable.
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) is an adaptation of a play I hadn't heard of, which was itself adapted from a novel by Herman Wouk. I haven't read the novel either, but I knew the story from the 1954 film (The Caine Mutiny) that starred Humphrey Bogart as the commanding officer of the USS Caine, who is persecuted by his subordinates and finally driven into a breakdown during a military court martial. The 2023 version stars Kiefer Sutherland as the officer; it was directed by William Friedkin, his last before his death; sadly it was also the final film appearance of actor Lance Reddick.
As I wrote above, I wasn't aware the book had also been designed to serve as a stage play. I assumed this movie would be a full dramatization of the events leading to the mutiny; instead, it's a courtroom drama with characters discussing their versions of the events in question but with no flashbacks to them. I wonder if Friedkin took an interest in adapting the play because during the pandemic it wouldn't have been too risky to film. I should also note that the story is set in contemporary times, rather than the World War II setting of the original book, play and film.
The film has all of three sets and zero action scenes - it's carried entirely by performances and the performances are very good. This was easily the best of the films I watched; how nice that Friedkin's final picture was such a good one!
American Fiction (2023) was not quite what I was expecting; it's an adaptation of Erasure by Percival Everett and stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated literary professor who writes a novel he intends to use as a satire of the works he sees written about black lives and is then shocked when his satire is accepted as a worthy novel by the people whose respect he'd been unable to earn.
I thought American Fiction would be a pretty biting film, but while it is concerned with satire it's not particularly funny. There is a funny sequence where Wright imagines a scene from his book (Keith David turns up as one of the characters), but this is not Spike Lee's Bamboozled, it seldom tries to be funny. It's ultimately about Wright's character and his family and all their personal baggage, with the sensationalized novel creating a plot for the character scenes to hang from. I liked it but it's difficult to recommend.
The Beekeeper (2024) is a Jason Staham action film directed by David Ayer. Surely I've been disappointed by enough Statham movies in the past that I would avoid this, right? And given how vulgar I've found Ayer's films this surely wouldn's be for me, right? Yet I heard a bit of talk about this film on the internet indicating that it was a very satisfying revenge film because Statham's character is being pit against online scammers who cheat people out of their money. And yes, all of that does feel very cathartic to watch.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) is a horror film derived from the sequence in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula where the vessel Demeter ferries Dracula to England while he picks off the crew one by one. I thought isolating that sequence from the novel was a pretty choice for a horror film, but this film doesn't so much adapt the novel as obtain inspiration from it; they don't follow the events as recorded in the ship's log from the novel. Also, the film's rules about vampires are fairly typical Hollywood rules, such as sunlight causing them to burst into flames (which isn't in the Stoker novel). Surprisingly, the movie depicts Dracula as an inhuman creature inspired by Nosferatu even though it's a Universal movie - meaning they could draw from Universal's own history of visuals. It gets pretty ridiculous at times but I suppose I wanted a more restrained movie, faithful to the original text; this film, which features a CGI Dracula with immense bat wings who comes swooping down upon people is many things, but not restrained.
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