Movies

This will soon be a weekly feature, telling you what movies I watched over the weekend. I'm a movie fanatic and usually rent four movies a week on two-for-one Tuesday at a local video store I won't mention because the employees are sarcastic hipsters. Why four? Because two is not enough and six is too much. So, like clockwork, it's always four. Sometimes, I may give a review of each one, but I don't feel like it today, so you're only going to get a few short comments.
Here's what I watched over the weekend (director in parentheses):
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Bernardo Bertolucci)
I'm not a huge Bertolucci fan. I thought "The Dreamers" was one of the worst films I've ever seen, "Stealing Beauty" was a silly trifle, "Last Tango in Paris" was good but overrated, "Before the Revolution" was pretentious and suffered from a wooden lead actor, and "The Last Emperor," despite its many strengths, was too much of a "well-made film." This one, however, really captivated me and is now one of my two Bertolucci favorites, along with "The Conformist."
Germany, Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms)
Eva Mattes plays the lead here. I love Eva Mattes from her work with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, especially "Stroszek." The first half is pretty great, too, but the pacing starts to flag at about the halfway point, and the tragedies pile up in such bleak, grim succession that the film comes close to self-parody. Still worth a look.
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou)
This is a beautiful movie. See it.
Hotel Room (David Lynch, James Signorelli)
This is an anthology of the first and only three episodes from a failed HBO series. Lynch directs the first and third, Signorelli the second. The first two are interesting, but just okay, though the first is helped by Harry Dean Stanton and the second by Griffin Dunne. The third segment is pretty great, though, with Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt as Oklahomans stuck in a NYC hotel room during a blackout.
 
I'm done being pretentious now.