I'm not ready for my horror movie month to be over because I'm still looking for good horror movies instead of the trash I've been watching.
Movies
"Oh cool, the Cabin Fever sequel is directed by Ti West! Guess I better check that out!" I cannot stress this enough: do not fall for this bait! Beyond the fact that it's not really a Ti West movie in the proper sense, as West himself disowned the film and it was cut to shreds by producers apparently, it's just awful, awful stuff. Mean-spirited, putrid garbage going through the motions of a really ungainly, try-hard horror-comedy screenplay in such an unfinished state that it just kind of ends and has a cheap-looking animated montage wrap up the film's loose ends. I guess if you're a gorehound, you might find something to like in the truly disgusting body horror on display here, but mostly I found it sad and off-putting. Grade: D-
It's a real blast from the past seeing this movie all these years later. As best I can tell, 28 Days Later jump-started that whole zombie craze where everyone of a certain temperament was reading The Zombie Survival Guide and playing Left 4 Dead and that eventually culminated in things like The Walking Dead making us all thoroughly sick of everything to do with zombies. But looking back at this movie, it's easy to see why that craze happened to begin with. It's a pretty striking movie, merging that early-DV cinematography all the cool directors were playing with at the turn of the millennium with some very propulsive and grimy plotting and a savvy approach to the lore. Plus, typical of Danny Boyle, the soundtrack is aces. More Brian Eno and Godspeed in zombie movies, please. I will admit to still being somewhat burned out on zombies, especially the grim-realism version presented in this film, so it's not like this was the hair-raising revelation for me that it must have been to people in 2002. But it's still a solid time. Grade: B+
It has a lot of the cool stylistic flourishes of its predecessor sanded off: for example, there are no inspired needle drops (or any needle drops to speak of, electing to exclusively use an original score this time around), and most of the cinematographic experimentation is gone, being fully immersed in the era of chaotic shaky cam being merely a tic of mainstream action filmmaking rather than an attempt at finding something new at the margins of narrative film style. So I dunno, this definitely feels a lot more generic than 28 Days Later. But it's still got some cool sequences, and the rightful cynicism of American military occupation feels 100% in line with the themes of the first movie. It just doesn't quite have the verve that buoyed that original. Grade: B-
I've had a pretty bad October in terms of the horror movies I've watched; a lot of that is my own fault for deciding to go through a series as dopey as Friday the 13th, but even besides that, I've seen a lot of bad movies over the past month. I'm tempted to say that I've now seen yet another bad movie, but to be honest, the lighting in this movie is so bad that I'm not sure if I can truly say that I've "seen" it. I'm only being mildly hyperbolic; this movie is nigh unwatchable. I'm hard-pressed to think of a mainstream American movie with this big of a technical blunder. It actually sounds like some good, dumb fun, so I wish I could have seen what was going on. Grade: C
On the rubric of Friday the 13th movies, this was pretty fun. People make fun of the telekinetic girl, but honestly, she was cool? She has a real character arc, which isn't something you can say for most Friday protagonists, and the final showdown between her and Jason is unironically good. The usual caveats apply—this is still largely formulaic and suffers from the usual laziness that plagues these movies. But it's got some good highlights, which is more than I can say for some of these movies! Grade: B-
Criminally boring, given its premise. It's not just that, infamously, Jason doesn't arrive in Manhattan until the final 30 minutes; Jason murdering people on a cruise ship could be cool if: 1. the cruise ship didn't look like a rust-bucket second-hand trawler, and 2. there was actually any attention at all paid to the plotting/pacing. The interminable and nonsensically organized cruise ship sequence makes one long for the clean simplicity of the old "sex, then death" formula of the franchise's classic films—just something, anything to hang these random pile of incidents on so it can take a coherent structure. It gets a little better once Jason reaches Manhattan, but not much. There is one part where he has a really long boxing match with a guy, culminating in Jason punching his head clean off, a scene whose sheer length and repetitiousness has an offbeat "rake joke" feel to it that I found hilarious. Honestly, this movie's unapologetic absurdity has a lot more potential for humor than the more explicitly humorous films in the franchise, but it's completely squandered by the near-total incompetence in construction. I'm pretty tired of this series by now. I just want to get to the space one. Please, let the space one come soon so I can go free. Grade: D+
Television
I really need to break this completionist habit of mine. I didn't get anything out of finishing the long-delayed final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and in fact, doing so may have taken the shine off a show I was only ever moderately amused by. It's not that the final season is so much worse than the previous seasons; in many ways, it remains at about the same level of quality in terms of jokes (they're funny! but not extremely so) and character development (it's sweet, but never in a way that gets you too invested). But nonetheless, I found this final season irritating for long stretches because it indulges in my least-favorite of the show's occasional tics, where it feels compelled to try to make this goofy workplace sitcom/cop show into a show that acknowledges the Serious Issues surrounding policing today. Rosa quits her job and becomes an activist following the George Floyd protests; Amy and Holt create a "police reform" plan to fix the NYPD; there's an episode that wrings its hands about the effects of incarceration on people; there's an evil police union character who forms the antagonist for most of the season. There's a joke in the first episode of the season about how "woke" cops fall back on the same scripts of insisting they are "one of the good ones" when they are confronted about the systemic issues of their profession, and that joke would be a lot funnier if the show itself weren't so dead-set on unironically ensuring us that its central cast are "the good ones." It's honestly just embarrassing. Look, you decided to make your show about goofy, cuddly cops; if you aren't going to have the courage to go all the way with your critiques of policing (which would result in a far darker show than B99 has ever even pretended to be), then just have the self-awareness to accept that goofy, cuddly cops have no place in real-world commentary and let them be consequence-free goofy cops. Seriously, I'd rather a show that took place entirely in an alternate universe of utopian policing (which is what B99 is most of the time!) than this sort of nonsensically applied liberal piety. Anyways, that's just my own hangups. Otherwise, if you enjoyed the other seasons of the show, you're probably going to enjoy this one. Grade: C+
Books
Lovely. A lot less story-driven than I was expecting it to be; it's mostly just a collection of vignettes about a young Mexican-American girl's relationships with her neighbors on the titular street in Chicago—closer in feeling to a book of poetry than a novel (or a short story collection). Cisneros's prose is great, using the simplicity and whimsy of its child's narration to depict some pretty complex things about the world she inhabits. Plus, it's just beautifully crafted on a sentence-by-sentence level in a way that a lot of literary fiction aspires to but often fails to achieve. Grade: B+
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