What I've Caught Up With, July 2025 Part 1

July was a month of two halves for me. The first half of the month, I watched a lot of movies, but I hit a wall and watched almost nothing in the second half. In fact, I barely looked at this blog (I’ll catch up on comments, I promise). I won’t bore anyone with reasons for this. Ultimately, I just never felt in the mood to spend that much time watching something. I’m at just under 200 movies on the year, which is off the pace I wanted, but I’m deciding that’s okay and I’m not going to pressure myself to catch up.

What I’ve Caught Up With, July 2025 Part 1
Film: First Blood (1982)

In the world where Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo became a steroided monstrosity who single-handedly went back to Southeast Asia and won the Vietnam War for us after the fact, it’s easy to forget that Rambo’s beginnings on screen were as a drifter who was unfairly hassled by the police because he looked like a hippie. While the sequels lose the plot, First Blood is surprisingly still relevant, perhaps even more now than it was more than 40 years ago. Solid performances from Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna help establish the film’s credibility, and the story, while extreme in how it escalates, feels on the edge of believability. I’d forgotten how ugly this film is when Rambo is set off on his crusade for, honestly, nothing more than wanting to be treated like a human.

Film: Proof (1991)

A blind photographer named Martin (Hugo Weaving), takes pictures and has other people describe them to demonstrate to himself “proof” of what he has experienced. As someone blind since birth, he has trust issues, starting from his belief that his mother regularly lied to him about what was going on around him. He has a love/hate relationship with his housekeeper Celia (Geneviève Picot), and starts a new friendship with a restaurant worker named Andy (a very young Russell Crowe). Celia is jealous of this new friendship, and takes the small tortures she inflicts on Martin to new levels because of it. This is a small movie and oddly moving, in part because of the bitterness of Martin and the rather sweet innocence of Andy—an odd thing to say about a Russell Crowe character.

Film: Kill Your Darlings (2013)

Based on a true story, Kill Your Darlings is about the aborted college career of Allen Ginsburg (Daniel Radcliffe) and the beginning of the Beat movement at Columbia. Along with Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), Ginsburg starts to rebel against the literary establishment. In constant trouble, things come to a dangerous head when Carr kills his former lover/mentor David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall). Radcliffe has made a career of weird and small projects, and this one is loaded with talent, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick, David Cross, David Rasche, and Elizabeth Olsen. This is probably the most I’ve liked Dane DeHaan in anything, and while that doesn’t say much, at least it’s something.

Film: Marwencol (2010)

A fascinating look at the world of Mark Hogancamp. Hogancamp was brutally beaten outside of a bar and essentially needed to relearn how to do everything. As a sort of therapy, Hogancamp created an alter ego and an alternate world. His world is a fictional town in World War II-era Belgium called Marwencol. Built to 1/6 scale, Marwencol is an entire world unto itself, with a complete backstory for all of the characters and developed to intricate and meticulous detail. There’s a beauty to it and a sadness at this life that has dealt with horror and tragedy in this way. There’s something fascinating about a personal project that is this overwhelming and all-encompassing.

Film: The Maids (1975)

Based on a stage play that itself was based on the true crime story of a pair of sisters who worked as maids and murdered their employer and her daughter, this is a film that does not even attempt to hide its stage origins. Maids Claire (Susannah York) and Solange (Glenda Jackson) take turns roleplaying as their mistress and pretending to kill her, but always running out of time—it’s critical to the ritual that it never is actually fulfilled. It’s a very weird, almost sexual ritual of humiliation that gets covered up when their employer (Vivien Merchant) returns home. This is an odd, disturbing film very reminiscent of The Servant. In a weird coincidence, The Servant was adapted to the screen by Harold Pinter, who was married to Vivien Merchant. This borders on horror, and with a couple of tweaks, it would dive face-first into genre.

Film: The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

Hester (Rachel Weisz), the wife of an influential judge (Simon Russell Beale) falls in love with an RAF pilot named Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). Hester finds herself in the position of being caught between a marriage with a man with whom she has no real attraction, but who can give her a comfortable life, and with a man she loves, who is both poor and who doesn’t really love her back. It’s a small story, and a good romantic drama. Weisz, as always, is worth watching in anything she does. The tragedy here is the tragedy that everyone experiences at some point—we can’t have everything we need, so we have to decide what we need more.

Film: St. Martin’s Lane/Sidewalks of London (1938)

Busker Charles Staggers (Charles Laughton) and his sometime partners Gentry (Tyrone Guthrie) and Arthur (Gus McNaughton) catch a thief named Liberty (Vivien Leigh) stealing from songwriter Harley Prentiss (Rex Harrison). Charles decides to incorporate her into the group’s act, and returning the case gets them a meeting with Prentiss, who is immediately taken with Liberty. St. Martin’s Lane, also called Sidewalks of London, is the story of someone who uses others as a stepping stone for her own success, regardless of the heartbreak she causes. It’s clearly a musical in a lot of places, but a far more depressing one than expected, given the third act. Leigh is fine, but this is Laughton’s picture. Of course, most films that starred him ended up being Laughton’s picture.