Only a week left of Spooky Movie Season! Bummer!
Movies
Yikes. Shrek the TURD. It isn't even as gleefully crass as the first two—I don't know how, but a frog chorus singing "Live and Let Die" feels less devil-may-care than the magic mirror randomly playing "The Piña Colada Song" or Puss and Donkey singing "Livin' la Vida Loca." Like, if you're going to sell out, go for it, man. Grade: D
The plot connections to the original Carrie feel pretty forced, and I think this movie would have been much better suited by simply being content to have thematic overlap with the Stephen King source/Brian De Palma source. But when the movie allows itself to be its own thing, it's pretty cool: a ferocious exploration of the ways in which traditional masculine signifiers rely on the objectification of women and the (in this case literal) commodification of sex. Great gore effects, too. Grade: B
I was going to make this one the last I'd watch in the series (it's right there in the title!), but then it turned out to be good. It's not a monumental departure from the first three, but the important difference is that this one actually seems to care about the details. It's a wonderfully textured film, not just in terms of the cinematic style, which is certainly the richest in the series thus far, but also in terms of characters, who finally get the dignity of being not only differentiable from one another but also of being interesting at all beyond their roles as meat sacks for Jason. The standout is, of course, Crispin Glover's sexually insecure dweeb (none of the previous entries in this series would have made room for that wonderfully strange dance scene with him, and that's just the tip of the iceberg), but there's also some great character work from Camilla and Carey More as the sexually available twins and Lawrence Monoson as the stoner dude who spends what seems like half the movie watching a silent-era porn reel. Like, the fact that these characters have actual beats instead of just "have sex, then die" feels revolutionary within this series (or maybe reformationary, since they do still have sex and die), and this feels like the only Friday the 13th movie that actually is interested in making the formula engaging rather than assuming that the formula is in and of itself engaging. A weirdly compelling movie and honestly just plain weird. Uh oh—I'm going to watch the rest of these, aren't I? Grade: B
Based on the beginning, I was kind of hoping this was going to be Only Lovers Left Alive but starring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. It doesn't really pan out that way, and honestly, the movie is a little worse for sidelining Bowie so soon, but it at least makes up for that by being surprisingly philosophically curious—it's a film that takes its ideas about vampirism pretty seriously and as a result ends up being about some pretty heady concepts about life and death. It doesn't really hang together, and this movie screeches to a halt and changes gears several times in ways that never really end up feeling organic or like they're in service of what's come before. But it's at least interesting—not to mention incredible to look at, with Tony Scott taking the stylistic proclivities of MTV and bending them into the full-blown arthouse sensibilities that early music videos always gestured at. Pretty cool stuff. Grade: B+
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