Grizzly Man: This is still really good, but with two slight caveats: 1)I wish there was less Timothy Treadwell and more Werner Herzog in it (although his opinion on the goings-on is not a head-scratcher, I would have liked a little more exegesis), and 2)people often claim that this movie pulls back to reveal how troubled Timothy Treadwell really was, but I think it’s obvious within like 30 seconds that he was a mess. I also think he was, frankly, a fucking fruit–not in the “homosexual” sense of the word, but in an overemotional, thoughtless, self-aggrandizing narcissist-neurotic sense. I mean, Crispin Glover couldn’t have dreamed up those scenes where he gushes over bear poop, or cries at God to make it rain for the bears. He didn’t deserve to be decapitated and eaten by wild animals, obviously, but how is anybody still under the impression that he was really doing anything for those bears, or really, anything at all, aside from trying to position himself as a saint and believing his own bullshit? Best scene: Herzog listening to the audio of Timothy being eaten and telling that woman never to listen to it, which is the classiest scene of its type I can think of in any film, fiction or nonfiction.

Saw II: I remembered thinking this was a significant improvement over the original Saw, and it’s pretty great that it kills off the most annoying character in the movie almost right away with a shotgun-blast booby trap, but it’s still nothing great in its own right. I guess I like watching Tobin Bell play the killer, and at least the acting doesn’t go to shit like in the original film. Still, “best of the Saw movies” is like “best Kansas album”: it’s still mediocre.

Saw III: Ooof, this was kinda bad this time. I wish I’d thought so back then! I remembered thinking it too was an improvement over the original film, but whatever positive things I can say about it are pretty overwhelmed by the negatives. I’ve never forgotten the completely over-the-top double-set-piece of Robert the Bruce from Braveheart stumbling upon a naked woman chained up and being sprayed to death with frozen water, followed by him entering a room with a guy who has been tied down so that pig carcasses on a conveyer belt can be shredded up into a mulch to drown him in. The film is also miserably overlong and blows it all to hell with one of the crappier “twist” endings this side of M. Night Shyamalan. Begone, Saw movies, I’ll never watch any of you ever again (probably!)

Mad Max: For me, any fascination with this film mostly stems from it seeming like the world’s most high-dollar drive-in movie. The ravaged (but not yet post-nuke) Australian world we see in this film isn’t terribly well sketched out. Should it be? Would lending itself to a lot of “mythology” have helped a series like this? Maybe not (they tried that with Furiosa after all, and God knows it didn’t work) but I do know that most of the good scenes in this movie don’t really show up until young Mel Gibson (who doesn’t give a bad performance, but don’t tell me he gave a particularly great one either) and his nice frizzy haired wife go on that fateful vacation. You get the deaths and the chase and Mel getting nasty revenge on those hairy crazy bikers and that stupid bedwetting crazy guy who Mel gives the saw to. That’s what the movie is worth sitting through for. Frankly, there isn’t even that much evidence here that there’d be sequels, let alone that they’d have feral kids and Thunderdome and psycho chases in them. “A few years from now…”

Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior: With Roger Ebert (world’s biggest Thunderdome lover) dead and gone, it’s now universally agreed that this is the best of the three original movies, but mostly for just the last 20 minutes or so. That is indeed the best stuff in the original series, but I think this film manages a decent start, with the Gyro Captain and the Dinki-Di bit and the opening monologue and whatnot. It does hit kind of a lull in the middle though and I wish the supporting characters were a little better sketched out, but I just got done saying I wasn’t sure that extra mythology would make these movies better. Four stars out of five, though at this point I’d probably prefer Fury Road…which wasn’t really better at mythologizing at all.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: This is the most expensive Mad Max movie, the best-looking Mad Max movie, the most ambitious Mad Max movie, and for the first 30 minutes or so, when we find out about Bartertown, Master-Blaster and Thunderdome, it seems like it’s going to be the best Mad Max movie. But it’s not the best of the trilogy, it comes in second, and why? I used to think that it was the “cutesy” “Spielberginess” that took the wind out of this movie’s sails (God knows a Mad Max movie shouldn’t feel family-friendly), but now I think it’s really just that I find the midsection of the movie that’s the weak link. The teenage girl who leads the feral kids’ colony is handled awkwardly and I know it’s a fantasy but how on Earth those kids have been surviving out there is really stretching the suspension of disbelief to a breaking point. Also, one of the kids drowns in the sand, which I’d forgotten twice, and it has like barely any emotional impact at all, just an obligatory death-of-an-innocent in a series that otherwise handled that sort of thing better (Max’s wife and kid, and the female warrior in Road Warrior come to mind). The chase at the end redeems it somewhat, and you get those haunting shots of post-nuke Sydney (I wish we got to spend more time with those), but it’s not as good as Road Warrior’s chase and then there’s the weird handling of Tina Turner’s character, less because she wasn’t really an actress than that she never seems terribly evil or villanous. Hell, she decides not to kill Max at the end just to be nice (and really, can you picture Tina Turner killing anybody?) Spielberg, is that you?