Just vibing at my house after a week of cleaning up children's vomit, 'cause the stomach bug hit our home this week, baby!
Movies
Oddly forgettable on the whole, but it at least has some cool imagery, especially toward the end. It loses completely the folkloric alchemy of the original film by relentlessly explaining any possible metaphor at every turn, which really highlights how gossamer good horror actually is, for all its grotesquery. Grade: C+
I'll have to watch this again when: 1) I've seen the movie Dragon Inn, and 2) I'm not drifting in and out of sleep the whole time, though on the latter point, this strikes me as the kind of movie where my somnolent reaction is more of a feature than a bug: a nearly dialogue-free exploration of a historic movie house's final screening, with characters floating in and out of each other's lives and in and out of paying attention to the film screening as they wander the crumbling halls of the theater—my being lulled to sleep making me basically a participant in the characters' similarly diffuse attentions. Regardless, pending a rewatch, this has the feeling of a masterpiece, an elegiac ode to cinema that feels all the more poignant in the post-COVID world in which theatrical distribution seems to be in its death throes. I still love going to the movies, but the palpable emptiness of even the suburban multiplexes makes me sad. I worked at a theater for a few years in college, nearly a decade after this movie's release but, importantly, right before the digital-projection takeover that I associate with the end of the theatrical era I have nostalgia for, and it is unnerving to see how pared down the staff has become: no more projectionists, far fewer ushers, box office and concessions combined into one job description—there is literally just blank space where I know some of my coworkers used to be. In one of the few lines of dialogue in this film, one character mentions that the theater has ghosts, and while there's a lot of ways to take this, what strikes me as particularly ghostly when I walk into a theater is that lack of staff. This film absolutely nails what's so haunting and melancholy about that. Grade: A-
A western so spare and opaque that it almost becomes metaphysical. Like Monte Hellman's similarly ambiguous Two-Lane Blacktop, this feels a lot more akin to existential literature than it does to its genre peers, though there's something about the wide-open emptiness of the western setting and the broadly sketched archetypes of the typical western story that makes the pivot into existentialism feel not so much a disruption as a logical conclusion for the genre. Grade: B
While The Shooting, Monte Hellman's other anti-western released in 1966, has a really cool, slippery ambiguity that gives it an existential, even spiritual component, Ride in the Whirlwind has none of that. Instead, its approach to being an "anti-western" is to strip a number of western storytelling archetypes to the bone, and the result is a film that is strikingly spare but also strikingly boring. I feel like a doofus saying that, but I must speak my truth. Grade: C
Pretty goofy and insubstantial on a plot/character level, which is kind of by design, being a horror-comedy, but also, you gotta make something interesting, even if you're being goofy, right? Anyway, though, the main draw here is the film style, which is very cool. The movie has these terrific haunted house vibes directed with panache by Paul Leni, who was fresh out of the German Expressionist movement. It also does a lot of really fun things with its title cards, which are usually animated or visually punched up in some way, and I gotta say, I can't believe more silent films didn't do this. Title cards are usually a drag, but I actually looked forward to them here. If your characters are boring and the things they say are trite, you can at least make their dialogue look interesting! Grade: B-
P.S. I was on the Cinematary podcast this week talking about this movie. Here's the link, if you're interested in listening!
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