Nothing new to report up here. Here's an obligatory link to the podcast episode my wife and I released last week.
Movies
A perfectly serviceable (and no more than that) piece of family entertainment that is directed by Eli Roth for some reason. There are some fun, distinctive bits (I liked the evil pumpkins!), but I'm finding it hard to have much to say about a movie that is mostly pretty anonymous. Still, if you'd like to hear me try to say something about it, I was part of Episode 426 of the Cinematary podcast, which discussed it as part of the "Horror for Kids" series. Grade: B-
This movie opens with a hilarious premise that had me hoping for the best: it is ten years in the future, and Freddy has killed literally every teenager in Springfield except one, and he's out to get that one. Gold. The rest of the movie is really dull, though; a weird mix of unbearably try-hard goofy (Freddy trapping a dude in a video game and then killing him using an actual Nintendo Power Glove) and incongruously dark (the protagonists are all kids from a shelter for homeless or troubled teens, and they have some too-real, un-fun issues, e.g. one of them is suffering from PTSD after having been raped by her father repeatedly as a child). Nothing here is scary, and it's really hard to care about anything that happens, given how the movie can never decide how much contempt it wants to regard these characters with. And the effects aren't even that fun or inventive either. Definitely earns its reputation as the series low point. Grade: C
The only one of this franchise after the first one that's even remotely scary, and there's no way not to attribute this directly to the presence of Wes Craven again. I do miss some of the sillier, go-for-broke bonkers setpieces that animated a lot of the sequels, but the consummate professionalism and virtuosic control of tension on display here really can't be beat, especially after so many of the other sequels feeling cinematically complacent outside of the elaborate death scenes. The meta stuff obviously begs comparisons to Scream, and while the latter movie is certainly more clever, I've always found its commentary to be smug and vaguely irritating (despite film being solid overall); New Nightmare is a lot messier and probably not as good holistically, but it's also a lot more lovable—the regard the film has for Heather Langenkamp is genuinely sweet at times, which does a lot to endear the film to me. Anyway, I'm glad the Nightmare series got this little coda, because it would have been a bummer to end the series on a stinker like Freddy's Dead. Grade: B+
A pretty big step down from the first two entries in this series. Andy goes to military school—pretty boring! I really liked the opening credits (we get to watch Chucky unmelt, which is very cool-looking), and Chucky himself remains a fun presence. But I just am so bored with Andy. Too bad Kyle didn't show up in this movie, because I liked her! On top of that, the movie is pretty tepidly staged—I guess military schools are by-design bland environments, and it feels like even the filmmakers realized they picked a bad setting because they set the climax in a random carnival that appears out of nowhere. Grade: C
I had heard about the gnarly body horror in this movie, which is indeed gnarly (and if I were slowly turning into metal, I would probably rip up my flesh picking at the metal, too, so it's oddly relatable). But I don't think I was prepared for how stylistically out-there this is, which was a fun surprise. I was ready for a lo-fi gross-out, but the way the film has one foot in the avant-garde makes this a lot more engaging than it would have been for me otherwise. Also, terrific sound design—some just incredible squishy noises. Made my skin crawl. Grade: A-
Books
As one of the seminal postmodern novels, I expected this to be a little more out-there than it was, and so reading this fairly dry, sardonic book grounded in middle-class alienation caused by the absurdities of postwar American consumerism required a little bit of a mental readjustment to get into. It still wasn't exactly my thing, but I had come around to it by the end. At first, the wry narration, which felt like DeLillo was smirking or rolling his eyes at every sentence, was a little grating to me, but eventually, I felt in on the joke, e.g. the "Hitler Studies" professor whose most pressing concern is whether or not the fact that he doesn't know German undermines his credibility to talk about the fascist leader. Everything is surface and self-presentation. By the end, the book finds a melancholy groove in the hollowness of everything the characters do, until that hollowness has become an abyss with the grave at its bottom. That's the good stuff. I'm curious how I will feel about this book if (when?) I read more Don DeLillo. Anyway, for now: Grade: B
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