Gemko Quibi: October 2025

As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that's about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I'm now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly changed or something new occurred to me.)

Like Water for Chocolate (1992, Alfonso Arau): 43/100

Previously seen: 24 February 1993, New York, NY (Angelika). Snuck into John Turturro's Mac afterward. (I was very broke.)

Original opinion: Unrecorded, mixed at best.

Now: Was so relieved when the protagonist's tediously cruel mother died around the midpoint...only to discover anew that she then continues to hang around as a scolding ghost. I'd remembered this movie as food porn but that aspect kinda fizzles out after a while, and is in any case less about the meals themselves than about everyone who eats them magically feeling whatever emotions Tita was feeling (sorrow, lust, etc.) as they were prepared. Which is a cute idea, but not cute enough to sustain an entire feature. (Can't speak for the source novel.) Was briefly surprised by an apparent shift toward romantic maturity, with Tita appearing to recognize that she has a deeper relationship with the husband she "settled for" than with her youthful crush—but no, false alarm, it's absolutely committed to a rancid notion of One True Love. Lumi Cavazos is very appealing, at least—you can see why Luke Wilson's character in Bottle Rocket falls in love with her at first sight. But that's a goofy comedy, not a dramatic "fable." My low opinion of Like Water (which was wildly acclaimed at the time, one of that year's big foreign hits) has since been vindicated, as Arau subsequently made the unloved Keanu Reeves vehicle A Walk in the Clouds and then more or less disappeared, at least from American arthouses.

Hannibal (2001, Ridley Scott): 51/100

Previously seen: 29 January 2001, New York, NY (press screening, MGM screening room).

Original opinion: C+. Reviewed it for Time Out New York.

Now: Solid adaptation of a shitty novel. (I love Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, but Harris apparently got swept up in fan adulation for Lecter and lost his way.) Julianne Moore flat-out stinks, playing Clarice as almost robotically closed-off; there's zero continuity with Foster's much more vulnerable performance, which is a huge problem since this particular hunter-hunter (no prey) dynamic isn't remotely comprehensible unless you've seen Silence (which Hannibal clearly and understandably assumes that you have). Granted, it's ten years later and some post-traumatic hardening makes sense, but Moore pushes it to a clipped Joe Friday extreme that robs Starling of any interest whatsoever. Thankfully, there's plentiful grotesquerie to distract you, from Gary Oldman's hideous makeup job to the literally thoughtful pièce de résistance at Lecter's dinner (which I still can't believe made it into the movie, would've bet money at the time that MGM would chicken out). And I quite like the entire Inspector Pazzi subplot, which closely follows Harris and allows Scott to indulge in atmospheric suspense. Still don't much care for Hopkins' interpretation of Lecter, but at least he serves up fewer slices of glazed ham. Detail that wouldn't have jumped out at me the last time I saw this, 7½ months prior to 9/11: Bin Laden's mug shot (or equivalent, I guess—anyway, that familiar full-face photo) as someone scrolls through the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

The Loveless (1981, Kathryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery): 53/100

Previously seen: 22 October 2000, New York, NY (MoMA).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, don't remember.

Now: "I ain't as white as I look," Willem Dafoe's biker-gang captain (more or less) tells a black dude, unaware that he's articulating the modern-day lefty credo. Bigelow's debut (co-directed with The Cowboy! Lynch hadn't yet made Mulholland Drive the last time I saw this, so I'm only discovering/realizing that now) mostly just positions the young Dafoe as an avatar of cool, which was itself pretty damn forward-thinking; I'm not in love with the early bit that arguably qualifies as sexual assault, but otherwise he looks fantastic with slicked-back hair, clad in a leather jacket and wifebeater and wide-arm shades. (My introduction to him was Streets of Fire, which I haven't seen since '84 but recall as making his retro getup here explicitly monstrous.) The movie has no narrative to speak of, simply observing as the gang takes over a small-town diner and hangs out, lightly poking the locals. What little plot there is concerns a young girl whose little red Corvette attracts Vance (Dafoe's character), and that's by far the least convincing or interesting aspect, especially when it provides a violent conclusion that feels much more obligatory than cathartic. The whole thing plays like a creative exercise that never progressed beyond its initial concept. Wondered about the songs, which I assumed were obscure '50s singles—turns out co-star Robert Gordon wrote and performed 'em. On the Best Actor/Character Credits Ever shortlist: Tina L'Hotsky as Sportster Debbie.

Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997, Kirby Dick): 85/100

Previously seen: 5 April 1997, New York, NY (MoMA, screened in New Directors / New Films); 31 October 1997, New York, NY (sneak preview, theater unknown but likely the Angelika); 19 July 2010, Oxnard, CA (dvd).

Original opinion: 3½ stars out of four in '97, then 85/100 in '10. Reviewed it on my site around the time of its theatrical release, addressed it again briefly on that year's top 10 list.

Now: Gonna keep this short because I watched this film (and the next entry) for my forthcoming third appearance on the Unwatchables podcast, which previously invited me to discuss Irreversible and Sleeping Dogs Lie. Most of what I'd've noted here came up there, including the most amazing tidbit: At one point, Flanagan talks about a posthumous art project he wants to do (but didn't), and it's exactly precisely totally The Shrouds. He came up with that idea more than 30 years before Cronenberg. Anyway, episode's coming in mid-November, I'm told—will alert you when it drops.

In My Skin (2002, Marina de Van): 74/100

Previously seen: 10 March 2003, New York, NY (Walter Reade, screening in Rendez-Vous With French Cinema Today); 11 March 2003, New York, NY (Walter Reade again; I went back the next night because it had no U.S. distributor at the time and I was afraid there might never be another opportunity); 27 October 2003, New York, NY (dvd); 23 January 2022, Oxnard, CA (still my ancient dvd; this time I watched the new Severin Blu-ray, which on the one hand looks terrific but on the other hand does not feature an adulatory blurb from me on the cover like the DVD does).

Original opinion: It's always been 74. Keep hoping I'll like the ending more this time, but I never do. It actually did get a NYC theatrical release, to my surprise, and one of the cool things about working for Time Out New York was that they let me go long on whatever movie I liked. (The Matrix Revolutions, Love Actually and Elf all opened that same week, but In My Skin was our full-page, 1000-word film section opener.)

Now: When Marc proposed that we talk about Sick for the podcast's 100th episode (I'm honored—though apparently somebody beat me to first threepeat), I suggested that pairing it with In My Skin might be a good idea, since both are about self-mutilation (albeit of very different kinds). One thing I didn't know the first four times I watched that film—something I would not have guessed, and find downright horrifying—is that it's highly autobiographical. Yeesh. But it made the pairing seem even more apposite. Again, I'll let you know when you can listen to me blather about them.

Baby Boom (1987, Charles Shyer): 46/100

Previously seen: ca. October 1987, San Jose, CA (Century 24).

Original opinion: Unrecorded, but definitely not positive.

Now: A good choice for the night Diane Keaton left us, as she almost singlehandedly makes this formulaic pap tolerable. As I've noted many times before, "uptight adult gets involuntarily saddled with a child" ranks among my least favorite scenarios (love movies like Bad Santa and Zonca's Julia that subvert it), and the Yers, as I choose to assume Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers were known, lived down to my expectations with lame jokes like J.C., distracted by the baby at a business meeting, asking "How long have you been in diapers?—town?" Hilarious! Yet I did laugh despite myself, earlier in the same scene, at Keaton holding an actual (and admittedly adorable) baby slumped prone across her outstretched arms, as if it were a sack of grain or a half-inflated kiddie pool. And the film improves considerably in its second half, after J.C. accepts motherhood, moves to Vermont, and starts a gourmet baby food business—it's still not good, most of the time, but Keaton gets the chance to e.g. hurl invective at Sam Shepard while violently changing a flat tire. Is it a problem that I'm rooting for J.C. to accept the big corporate deal at the end? Seems like it. Biggest laugh for me was the cut to a close-up of baby James Spader right on the final word of "I really think the rat race is gonna have to survive with one less rat." (He exclusively played this sort of slimy yuppie prior to sex, lies.) No credits at all until the end, didn't think studios did that in the '80s.

Let's Do It Again (1975, Sidney Poitier): 49/100

Previously seen: ca. October 1975, San Jose, CA (most likely at the Pruneyard). Wasn't 100% sure which of the three '70s Poitier/Cosby films I saw theatrically as a little kid (might even have been all of 'em), but one look at these outfits and I no longer had any doubt about Let's Do It Again.

Original opinion: Obviously unrecorded, and all I remember was the pimptastic costume design. Not that I knew that adjective at age seven.

Now: This seems to be a bit more highly regarded than Uptown Saturday Night (which I possibly saw as a child, definitely saw at Film Forum in 1995, but don't recall my opinion of) and A Piece of the Action (history pending, need to [re?]watch), but it's pretty lackluster comedy, with Poitier looking a bit lost onscreen and demonstrating little prowess at orchestrating a gag behind the camera. Cosby (obligatory: bad man) gives some desperate-improv juice to the movie's best scene by far, which sees our heroes get caught breaking into a hotel room and ineptly pretend to be a house detective and his assistant; that's about it for inspiration, though, and I was quite surprised by how little Jimmie Walker is given to do, as he was (I'm pretty sure) already a phenomenon via Good Times by this point. Always refreshing to see a Hollywood film with no white characters of consequence that just treats that world as natural, sans any racial commentary—if nothing else, it must have registered on my pre-adolescent psyche. Had no idea that Notorious B.I.G. got the name Biggie Smalls from one of the villains here, and figured it must have been a coincidence. Nope!

Stealing Home (1988, Steven Kampmann & Will Aldis): 38/100

Previously seen: ca. August 1988, San Jose, CA (Century 22). '88 was the year that I saw practically every movie that opened near me.

Original opinion: Unrecorded, don't remember.

Now: Alternates between shamelessly maudlin nostalgia (in the present day) and risible wish-fulfillment fantasy (in the flashbacks). And even when there's an occasional decent flashback scene—courtesy mostly of Jodie Foster, who can't redeem the script but doesn't embarrass herself and so still got to win the Oscar that year, unlike e.g. Eddie Murphy with Dreamgirls + Norbit)—we get a shitty Syd Field-approved callback in Mark Harmon's timeline, retroactively spoiling it. Nadir's probably the ostensibly hilarious sex scene initiated by a teenage girl in her living room while her mom's fully awake upstairs (Mom then wanders down looking for something, walks right past them fucking but doesn't notice, hilarious!), though I also cringed hard at the entire seduced-by-an-older-woman subplot, which properly belongs in Penthouse Forum ca. 1982. (Don't ask me how I know or arrived at that specific year when I was 14.) Few of you have likely seen this forgotten turkey, nor should anyone seek it out, so let's move on.

subUrbia (1996, Richard Linklater): 54/100

Previously seen: 12 October 1996, New York, NY (at the New York Film Festival, Alice Tully Hall); 2 August 1997, New York, NY (vhs).

Original opinion: 2½ stars out of four. Reviewed it on my site at the time, later wrote a capsule for Entertainment Weekly.

Cannot stress enough: I was paid $200 for writing those three sentences, two of which are straight description. Equivalent to $400 today. Sigh.

Now: R.I.P. Nicky Katt, who's easily the toast of this ensemble (with Steve Zahn at his most hyperactive a distant second, though he originated the role of Buff onstage). You don't often see a performance that's both sarcastically cruel and deeply depressive; Katt excels at being abrasive, as we already knew from Dazed and Confused, but my favorite moments here are the ones that see him just shut down when the liquor-store clerk tries to reminisce about Tim's glory days on the high school football team. Suddenly he can barely summon the energy to be a dick. Linklater does a solid job shooting Bogosian's iffy script, which features some choice lines (Nazeer, when Buff brags that he's gonna move to L.A.: "That's nice. They have many convenience stores there for you to stand in front of") but frequently gets bogged down in lame speechifying and at one point engages in risible alarmist misdirection that's not remotely credible in any of several respects, from what Tim confesses and when to Jeff conveniently finding Erica's cellphone but not looking inside the van. Had forgotten that I originally saw this with no end credits—just a bleak fade to black and lights up.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005, Mike Johnson & Tim Burton): 55/100

Previously seen: 15 August 2005, New York, NY (press screening, most likely at the Warner Screening Room since I saw it a month before it opened).

Original opinion: 66/100. Never wrote a review—my Esquire piece pegged to it and Curse of the Were-Rabbit was filed before I saw either one. And that was my sole outlet at the time, I believe. Maybe I'd started freelancing for Nerve.com by then. [Five minutes later.] I had, and mystery solved.

Apparently we just let it go.

Now: Always makes me sad when I revisit a movie I'd quite liked, decades later, and am badly underwhelmed. Did not expect that to happen here! (War of the Worlds rose in my estimation, so 2005's still doing okay overall.) Apparently my love of stop-motion animation and Burton-esque design was still strong enough back then for me to ignore Corpse Bride's weak songs (note: I adore Elfman's songs for Nightmare Before Christmas), bland characters (apart from the Corpse Bride herself) and weirdly dissatisfying resolution (who wants to see Victor end up with Victoria?! that's practically anti-Burton, thematically). No less dazzling to look at, of course, with the use of monochrome for the living world and rich color for the afterlife at once simple and highly effective, plus those microscopic pupils centered in enormous white eyeballs allow for some wonderfully unsettling stares. And it's entirely possible that I'd enjoy the film more were I to see it on the big screen again. At home, however, a fair bit of it was faintly dull, and I found myself focusing even more than usual on shapes and textures. That it runs a brisk 77 minutes with end credits definitely helps.

What Lies Beneath (2000, Robert Zemeckis): 58/100

Previously seen: 13 July 2000, New York, NY (press screening at UA 64th St. & Second Ave., which had previously been the Gemini Twin and which I now learn was torn down in 2012; as far as I know, this was the only film I ever saw there).

Original opinion: C-minus. Reviewed it for Time Out New York, but I only created a link to my informal website version. (I'll probably transcribe the TONY review onto Letterboxd at some point; it's pretty much all the same phrases in a slightly different order, plus added plot summary.)

Now: Relatives sometimes ask me why film critics like myself have dramatically different taste from "regular folks." My simplified answer has long been that seeing a metric fuckton of movies, as critics do, allows for more refined discrimination—if you have little or no basis for comparison, it's tough to determine how good or bad something is. Example: 25 years ago, I saw medium-budget, star-driven thrillers like What Lies Beneath practically every week, and found it a poor example of same; today, with such films all but extinct (has there been a notable one since The Invisible Man?), all that sturdy professionalism is suddenly a goddamn tonic. My contemporaneous criticisms remain totally valid, but they seemed much less important this time; I was too preoccupied with luxuriating in Zemeckis' superlative control of pace and tone, including "steal from the best" stuff like that Rear Window binoculars jolt. Even in the home stretch, when things get very stupid indeed, we still get amazing shots like the rear-view mirror reflection that "pans" (via the car door opening) to witness [SPOILER] getting up inside the house and then "pans" back to show Claire running away. Spent nearly the entire film thinking "Why did I dislike this?" By the end, I remembered, but still, what hath we wrought and so forth.

The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner): 58/100

Previously seen: very roughly ca. May 1991, San Jose, CA (vhs). Brought it home from the video store I then worked at.

Original opinion: Unrecorded, don't remember.

Now: Man, what a stacked cast. Had forgotten that in addition to Chaney Jr. you get Lugosi (gratifyingly restrained), Ouspenskaya, Bellamy, and one of those magnificent Claude Rains performances that commits to hokey material as if it were Eugene O'Neill. This remains, 34 years after my initial viewing, the only Waggner film I've seen (though he directed a bunch of '60s Batman episodes, always credited as "george WaGGner" for some reason that even Wikipedia doesn't know), and horror doesn't appear to have been his forte; apart from pumping a lot of dry ice through some nicely atmospheric fake woods, The Wolf Man never really flirts with spookiness, much less with the uncanny dread that Frankenstein and The Mummy had achieved a decade earlier. (Or even Dracula, though I'm happy to see more and more people recognizing that, Lugosi's hypnotic stare aside, that movie kinda stinks.) And while audiences obviously wanted to see anyone named Lon Chaney in elaborate makeup, (a) it makes little sense that Bela the fortuneteller becomes a full-fledged wolf whereas Talbot transforms into a largely humanoid hybrid (do werewolves gradually get more lupine over time, à la Brundlefly?), and (b) said makeup looks less like an animal than it does just a dude sporting a well-trimmed beard and a carefully coiffed pompadour. The dramatic stuff actually works best, as Talbot gradually realizes that his nearly middle-aged entitled bullshit has a body count. Did Waggner and Siodmak and Chaney mean to make the guy a pushy asshole with Gwen, or was that just the era? It's genuinely hard to tell.

As a supplement, some brief notes re: movies I bailed on last month.

All of You (William Bridges): Never got even a little interested. Others rave about the chemistry between Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots; either that doesn't kick in until after the ⅓ mark or I just plain didn't see it. Should note that I watched this late at night (not in itself unusual) following 14 hours of tedious work processing tax returns (highly unusual), so it's possible that I just wasn't in a receptive mood for much of anything. But a really good film would've penetrated that stupor, and this one looked dismayingly like a recent mediocre Futurama episode ("Fifty Shades of Green").

Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland): Another film everyone seems to like that repelled me almost immediately. It's so obvious that Bob Belcher is her son, and that she's suffering from dementia; I resented Friedland's strenuous efforts to make that some kind of Big Reveal, with Steve never once calling her Mom until we're at the assisted-living center and the penny has supposedly finally dropped (at which point it's "Mom" every other sentence). Knowing her condition, would he not bring a photo of them together and at least try to jog her memory? No, because then we wouldn't briefly wonder whether this is some sort of May-December Tinder date. What I saw of Chalfant's performance was first-rate, but still, no thanks.