Look at all the movies I'm watching!
LOOK AT THEM.
First off, I’m stunned at how good the restoration of the technicolor version looks. I’ve never seen a fully color movie that’s this old before, and it absolutely pops off the screen, which feels perfect for the pulpy sci-fi crime story. There’s a part of me that wishes the whole movie was Xavier just opening rooms at his institute for the detectives and saying, “And here’s another weird guy doing questionable science experiments.” But I like where this one goes even if I think Lee Tracy makes for an awkward comic/heroic lead.
Maybe it’s because when you’re Jewish you tend to learn about the Holocaust at a younger age and you keep learning more as life goes on, and maybe Glazer is trying to reach a gentile audience that can’t grasp the banality of evil without seeing it play out. But for me, the banality of evil is the only way to understand such atrocities, and depicting that banality for 100 minutes doesn’t add anything beyond Arendt’s famous and straightforward assessment of…