The Royal Tenenbaums: I used to hate this movie, mostly because of the cutesy factor, but now that just comes across as a bunch of cutesiness for cutesiness’ sake–shallow and a bit annoying, but nothing I really felt like hating. What happened instead was that after about an hour the movie started to get more serious and sombre in tone and I just plain tuned out. Wes Anderson cannot get serious to save his fucking life. When he has to kill somebody off or do something sad, he usually bombs. I also wonder if some of the characters in this movie could be cut from the damn thing entirely without any real loss, like Bill Murray’s lamely named “Raleigh St. Clair” (did Anderson not know that “St. Clair” had already been used as a joke name in several other movies?) Still not a very good movie but at least I don’t revile it any more, mostly because I just plain don’t have the energy to.

I saw Korine’s Spring Breakers. It was average. More amusing for the James Franco performance (made in the middle of that bizarre period when Franco was indulging in all sorts of crazy half-assed artiness and writing novels and appearing on soap operas and making a movie based on outtakes from Cruising and sleeping through college courses he took and all sorts of other crap) than for anything the Disney Princesses did. That’s the last I recall hearing about Harmony Korine in any capacity. I still plan on watching Kids, but I probably won’t like it–it’ll be about checking off a box, just like most movies I watch these days.

It’s weirdly not that well remembered today, but Korine made a string of bizarre Letterman appearances that should be up there with Joaquin Phoenix and Crispin Glover and all the other loopy Letterman appearances there have been over the years.

I did see the remake of Straw Dogs. It wasn’t really an improvement, though the contrast to be made is that the moral ambiguity in the original film is an artistic failure, whereas the remake didn’t even bother with the moral ambiguity at all, as I recall. At least the marriage between the two main characters was more believable and they didn’t give James Marsden the lame lines they gave Dustin Hoffman. As for the redneck Southerners…well, that probably is a liberal-leaning screenwriters’ prejudice, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they really did act like that around a guy like the main character of Straw Dogs. Especially now in the age of Trump.