Three Films Make A Post: It's not important where we are going. I just want you to drive.

Drive All Night (2021): Night-time cab rides (or new-fangled ride share rides, aka cab rides with worse paid, less insured drivers) with more or less mysterious passengers are still a nice set-up for movies in quite a few genres, though not one always used as well as you’d wish. Peter Hsieh’s film featuring Yutaka Takeuchi as the cabbie and Lexy Hammonds as the mysterious passenger doesn’t quite hit every note right for me. There’s sometimes too vague a quality surrounding this mix of noir tropes, Lynch-inspired weirdness, and hallucinations even for my ambiguity positive taste. However, Hsieh clearly understands the beauty of night rides, so there are quite a few good scenes of people in cars. This is not me damning with faint praise.

Cracked (2022): This piece of Thai horror directed by first time filmmaker Surapong Ploensang is rather too generic in its building of scares and shocks to ever quite work for me, particularly since the film seems actually afraid of getting deeper into its less generic aspects. So, not surprisingly, its characters never do much of emotional or intellectual interest either despite their trauma load. Plus, there’s some really bad possessed child acting in here in an era where I suspect that playing possessed is one of the first things they teach kids on the child actor clone farm.

On the positive side, like with a lot of ultra-generic horror, this is still a perfectly decent way to while away ninety minutes or so. Just don’t expect any emotional impact, or really anything you’ll remember about the film a week after you’ve seen it.

The Awful Truth (1937): One of the reasons why screwball comedies often land in these clean-out posts is not that I don’t love them (I really, really do), but it’s that this kind of comedy is particularly difficult to write about, unless you want to get into historical and sociological analysis, which seems to run counter to the actual experience of watching these films. Because watching Leo McCarey’s movie does not really see me thinking about its representation of male-female relationships, nor how its portrayal of marriage sheds light on the mores of its time. Rather, it distracts me from these more worthy proceeds by making me laugh, repeatedly and heartily.