Another week.
Movies
I've long considered the book Dune to be unadaptable for the screen, and I think this movie pretty soundly proves me wrong; Denis Villeneuve's Dune manages to make a tentpole film that, based on the experiences of my Dune-newbie friends I saw this with, is broadly accessible and coherent while sacrificing very little of the plot or multi-layered complexity of the novel, which is honestly a legendary feat of screenwriting and editing. The tradeoff, I think, is that a little of the novel's psychedelic mysticism is sanded off—the film rarely colors outside the lines of what we've come to expect from "prestige" blockbuster sci-fi, with sleek and immaculately rendered but ultimately familiar world designs depicted through thoroughly conventional (albeit hugely portentous) film style. But if that's the cost of making a mainstream sci-fi blockbuster of this caliber, I'll take it. This may be somewhat conventional in style, but it's also the best-case scenario of that style, and the film is exceptionally clever in its use of that palette, even finding a few cool shorthands to improve upon what we're used to in this type of movie (I'm a big fan of the color-coded shields that turn what might have been the usually chaotic fight scenes of modern blockbusters into really precise and simple collages of red and blue). And above all, this movie just feels so palpably huge; a lot of movies and TV strive for the feeling of epic grandeur that this movie delivers, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a recent work that delivers so consistently on the lizard-brain metric of "Whoa, those things on the screen are so big and cool!" Going in, I was prepared to cross my arms and harrumph about the tics of modern blockbuster screenwriting or the hollowness of franchise filmmaking, but I just can't do that about a movie that 1. mostly avoids those things, and 2. so effectively makes me smile when the space things go "vroom vroom" and "pew pew." Grade: A-
The animation is technically "better" than the other Shrek movies, which means that it's actually worse, given that we've become familiar with these characters at much lower renderings—I cannot begin to describe how skin-crawlingly weird it is to see every individual fur on Donkey. But on top of that, this movie is completely lifeless on a screenplay level. It's just so dumb and self-defeating for a franchise that began with such seething contempt for the treacly storytelling tropes of animated kids movies to take a gigantic belly flop into those same tropes in its final feature. This is kind of an issue even as far back as the final act of the first movie, but it's a total dealbreaker when it comes to movies whose ostensible appeal is the emotional stakes: I simply Do Not Care what happens to these characters outside of their role as a delivery system for jokes and satire, so any storytelling choice that hinges exclusively on some assumed affection I have for Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, etc. is a major misfire. Shrek Forever After is constructed entirely from those type of storytelling choices. By 2010, DreamWorks Animation had started to leave behind the ultra-snide, too-cool-for-feelings mood that the original Shrek inaugurated, and I don't really have a problem with that, as that attitude basically soured on arrival, but to retroactively graft that newfound sincerity onto the very property that started that attitude is just queasy and boring and uncanny. Also, all that aside, I'm supposed to care about Shrek getting back to a family life that we viewers were introduced to in like the last five minutes of the previous movie? Who thought this was a good idea? Grade: D
If you're interested in me and others drag this movie for an hour, here's the Cinematary podcast episode I was on where we talk about it.
Not sure if this is trying to be edgy or is just swimming in the gross early-2000s water of R and F slurs (not to mention N slurs, albeit more lampshadedly ironic), but this certainly is a Product of Its Times in that regard. It's also one of the most clear-eyed attempts I've ever seen (along with the original The Hills Have Eyes) at underlining just how awful the "audience surrogate" characters tend to be in these "city folk vacation in sinister rural backwater" movies. The most aggressively I've seen a movie root against its own principal cast in a long while, and there's something kind of profound about that. Grade: B-
Going from easily the best entry in the series to easily the worst is a disappointment I wasn't quit ready for even within the measured expectations I keep for Friday the 13th movies. A boring, acrid mess that kinda sorta wants to be a satire of its own series without ever fully committing. I'm usually okay with the cruelty in these movies (and in slashers in general) because the teens are usually The Worst, but there's something really off-putting about the mean-spiritedness of this movie mostly foregoing irritating, entitled teen victims in favor of teens who are at a mental health camp. Like, to whatever extent that it's fun to see fake people get hacked to pieces by an axe at all, there's absolutely no fun in having a clearly disabled dude get hacked to pieces by an axe. I'm sorry. Grade: D+
The beginning of this movie, where they dig up Jason's maggot-ridden corpse, is fantastic, consciously playing into the impression that this series has just been a James Whale tribute all along (oh, if only)—easily the best scene in the whole franchise. The rest of the movie cannot hope to live up to that beginning, but unfortunately, it kind of just nosedives into mediocrity after that scene ends. I like the underwater finale (a Creature from the Black Lagoon allusion?), and somehow this movie has a precocious kid who is the best character here (Reggie forever!). But for the most part, this is just a slightly smarmier, more knowingly comedic version of the same Friday the 13th tropes the series has beaten into the ground five times already at this point. I suppose making this more intentionally funny is something new, but in truth, most of this is only theoretically funny rather than funny in practice. On to The New Blood, I suppose. Grade: C+
I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is a much more bizarre and fascinating movie than I was ready for. Starts where I expected it to (a rape-revenge thriller) and ends up still basically being that on paper while in execution becoming this ethically thorny, nearly unclassifiable art object that's as esoteric as it is pristine and cold. Also, unexpectedly a great Halloween movie, given the prominence of a costume party to the plot. The Driller Killer didn't do a ton for me, but if Abel Ferrara movies are more like this, I think I could get into them. Grade: A-
Books
Already a big fan of the Scorsese movie and being aware that that film was pretty faithful to the source, I mostly knew what I was going to get with Endō's novel. And I got it. But that doesn't mean it's not also great. Its central questions about the egocentrism of martyrdom and what it truly means to be a follower in Christ when the act of declaring the name of Christ Himself causes harm to those around you remain extremely potent for me, and the book's epistolary first half, in which we're entirely encompassed in the central priest's POV puts an even finer touch on it. There is a deep arrogance in envisioning ourselves as "Christlike," even as our faith itself calls us to be such, and the way Endō first immerses us in a sympathetic perspective of that arrogance before then pulling the rug out from us by whipping around to a third-person limited POV is masterful and gut-wrenching. As so often happens when those of us in positions of power and privilege read the Bible, we identify with the wrong people; we are all Judas, not Christ, and our faith should start from that place of humility. Grade: A
