Three Films Make A Post: Think fast. Drive faster.

The Man Who Saw Too Much aka El hombre que vio demasiado (2016): I find Trisha Ziff’s documentary about Mexican tabloid photographer turned elderly art scene darling Enrique Metinides, and the relationship of Mexican mainstream culture to violence, utterly fascinating. Particularly, I love the film’s willingness to leave questions open, to accept that there are no absolute keys to understanding a person and what drives them; instead of providing solutions, it introduces us to the man and his work from all sides, leaving interpretations open and diverse, suggesting a man who might be a kind of folk hero, simply a commercial artist, a parasite on other people’s suffering, or a man who has seen way too much.

The only element of the film that rubs me the wrong way are the interview snippets of people from the US art scene, who provide little insight in many words, blithely ignoring the actual suffering in Metinides photos, replacing it with their half-baked ideas about suffering.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003): This one’s the final entry into the actual Timm/Dini/Reaves universe of Batman: The Animated Series but without Timm or Dini and little of the spark of what made B:TAS so great. The animation, while technically probably better than in the post B:TAS films that came before, is curiously lifeless, the design feeling as if the animators were going through the motions of reproducing a style without thinking too hard about what it’s there for. Reaves’s script is flabby and unconvincing, full of jokes that fall flat, and aiming for the detective side of Batman without constructing a decent mystery for him to solve.

There’s a sad lack of personality to the whole affair, so once again something great ends on something of a whimper instead of a bang. But then, the animated Batman has never quite left B:TAS behind even after this part of his world was officially closed.

Overdrive (2017): This mainly French production directed by Antonio Negret quite desperately wants to be a (The) Fast & (The) Furious film from the second half of that franchise’s run. Alas, it can’t actually afford the kind of effects and stunt work it would need for this, and nobody involved seems to have much of a clue about how to go about staging the kind of action the production can actually afford. But, hey, Scott Eastwood and his perfectly horrible screen presence was in the budget, as well as poor Ana de Armas.


The script is dire, too, as if it were written by people who mistakenly believe that making formulaic movies is easy; that’s only the bad formulaic movies nobody wants to see.