Mini Reviews for February 7 - 13, 2022

Busy week for me this week, hence a small post.

Movies

Jason X (2001)
At long last: The Space One. It didn't disappoint, to the extent that I can even be disappointed by a Friday the 13th movie at this point. It's definitely a significant step up from its immediate predecessors by virtue of its ability to completely let itself go. So many sublimely stupid little tidbits: the fact that it's in space; the part where a person gets turned into ground meat by being sucked through a grate; the part where a guy who got stabbed by Jason twice wakes up from unconsciousness and is all like "What's going on here?" and someone has to remind him that Jason Voorhees is running amok; the part where two characters make out and then say how much their survival chances have increased; the sadly unresolved Pinocchio-esque subplot in which a femme-presenting android wants real boobs; the "we love premarital sex" line, and the part almost immediately after when Jason is just swinging sleeping bags against one another; the fact that Earth 2 apparently has a Crystal Lake, too. I kinda wish the movie had the wherewithal to recognize how golden these moments are and just leaned into them, jettisoning some of the more tedious direct-to-video-esque parts, but maybe that level of self-awareness would make this one lose its ingenue charm as a accidentally awesome cash grab. Also, I love that this movie premiered in Spain a solid six months before its American release, like it's some kind of prestigious festival film or something. Incredible. Grade: B

The Ninth Configuration (1980)
Sure, some people have mental health struggles, but what if the real insanity is... American Imperialism?? I'm not sure how much I'm actually behind the premise of this movie, which is kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by way of Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Catch-22, wherein men in the throes of psychosis are actually just victims of the unspeakable evils of the 20th century and, moreover, prophets capable of both hilarious incongruity and profound insight into metaphysics and religion—a premise that seems at least a little bit dismissive of the conditions of neurodivergence and especially mental illness, which is kind of true of any work of art that uses "insanity" as a metaphor for Society, Man. That said, the singular vision of this movie is truly something to behold, and the way that literally all the characters speak in often very funny, mind-bending stream-of-consciousness non sequitur that, for all its absurdity, builds to a fairly serious interrogation of the existence of God in the face of American Imperialism is impressive and utterly unlike anything I've seen before. Plus, for as potentially ableist as its premise can be, there's something to the mythic undercurrents of it: the Bible talks about how Moses couldn't see the face of God and live, and there's a perverted version of that here, wherein these men, through their experiences in Vietnam, Korea, NASA, and beyond, see the true face of their god (i.e. America) and come away with their brains fried. There is no rational solution to the Problem of Evil that maintains a benevolent, omniscient, interventionist God; there is no rational way to comprehend the abject evil of the American machine and remain devoted to your identity as a subject of that empire. Grade: B

Multiple Maniacs (1970)
Kinda dull and meandering for stretches in a way that I've never felt in other John Waters movies, but also, the scene in the church was maybe the best thing I've ever seen in a John Waters movie (give or take "Surfin' Bird" in Pink Flamingos)—I don't know if this would make John Waters sad or happy to hear this, but watching a passion play cross-cut with Divine being anally pleasured with a rosary was so sacrilegious that it wrapped way back around to being sacred again. Good, unlikely thematic pairing with Benedetta. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for November 15 - 28, 2021

I'm back, baby! One day late, admittedly. Life's busy these days.

Movies

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Mostly trash. Tries to shake up the incredibly stale formula of the series and ends up with something even worse and more generic. I do appreciate the (comparatively to the previous couple movies in the series) goofy characters, but the charm wears off fast. Once you're about thirty minutes in, it becomes clear that this movie doesn't know at all what to do, and so it just starts making up this bizarrely convoluted mythology that the series never needed (though it does finally explain how Jason is alive in Pt. 2 after being dead in the first movie, if that was the discontinuity in this series keeping you up at night). Anyway, full disclosure, I basically checked out of this movie about halfway through and started watching a video of some dude speedrunning Dark Souls in under an hour, which I guarantee was a video that took more skill to make than anything in Jason Goes to Hell. THE NEXT MOVIE IS THE SPACE ONE, THOUGH. I'M ALMOST THERE. Grade: C-

Impolex (2009)
Nobody's going to mistake this for a movie not inspired by Gravity's Rainbow: a dude named "Tyrone S." is wandering around looking for a bomb, and there's an octopus and stuff. But it's more like pieces of the book thrown into a blender with mumblecore tropes, which is already a lot more interesting than a lot of mumblecore movies by virtue of having something going on besides disaffected twentysomethings just shooting the breeze, and there is a kind of logic in distilling the spirit of Pynchon's digressive sprawl into the rambling, improvised dialogue of, like, a Joe Swanberg movie. It really snaps into focus at the end as mumblecore as seen through a Pynchon-shaped lens rather than the other way around, which squares with the scene Alex Ross Perry came out of. That said, it would be interesting to see a fully matured ARP with a modern ARP budget taking another stab at Pynchon, given that the writerly and filmmakerly tics he ended up developing into his signature style would lend themselves to some interesting results when given Pynchon material—both Tom and Alex have a penchant for cramming as much information as possible into every moment of their work, and it would be fun to see those things bounce off one another. As for the Impolex we actually got, it's basically a really talented amateur film that is way more "hmm, this is theoretically interesting" than "hmm, this is actually pretty good," unfortunately. I was ready for ARP to take me on a journey here. Grade: C

La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000)
I've been chewing on this movie for over a week before writing this review. Which makes me wish I had something more profound to say about it after all this time, given that I found the movie pretty profound. But I dunno, bursting at the seams even as it clocks in at six hours, the movie kind of speaks for itself. A breathtaking, comprehensive re-enactment of the Paris Commune, with the meta gloss of having the whole thing being told via pastiche of various forms of news media, which makes the film as much about how we talk about radical politics as it is about radical politics itself. Really, really worth the watch if you're at all interested in those things, or are just interested in learning about one of the most unsung pivotal moments in Western Europe. People are always like, "Michael, you gotta watch this limited series, it's only like seven episodes!" and while I don't have anything against TV series (or especially limited series/miniseries), and I usually justify not watching more TV because "I don't have time." But somehow, I parceled out this movie's six hours into episode-length snippets over a few days and completely knocked it out without any struggles with my schedule, so I guess I'm just a liar. But I found this thrilling. Grade: A

Lord of the Flies (1990)
Clearly made by people who either didn't understand or didn't care enough about the political parable of the original novel to know what particulars of the book were important to keep vs. throw away in the adaptation process. Which would be fine except that the movie is still too attached to the big particulars of the book to allow it to be just an engaging survival thriller outside of the portent of the book. As a result, it's fundamentally boring, though the score is okay and there is some good nature photography. Grade: C-

 

 

American Revolution 2 (1969)
An often chaotic, hard-to-follow document of Chicago leftist organizing following the '68 DNC, but it's ultimately all the more exciting for it as the bones of what would become the "Rainbow Coalition" arises from the disorder by the film's conclusion. I'm ultimately happy that I watched this after its chronological follow-up (the vital, monstrously depressing The Murder of Fred Hampton, the titular action of which happening just a few months after the release of American Revolution 2), since viewing this last ends it on an ellipsis that gives the illusion that that beautiful, tragically short moment in American leftism could last forever. An exquisite vision of what could have been. Grade: A-

The Haunted Palace (1963)
Most of these Corman/Poe adaptations are fundamentally good because at the very least they feature one great Vincent Price performance. The Haunted Palace is a step above the rest in this respect because it features two great Vincent Price performances. The rest of the movie is kind of unremarkable, other than the fact that it's apparently a Lovecraft adaptation, despite billing itself as a Poe adaptation, which is hilarious to me. But with two Vincent Price performances, the scales balance out to a net positive. Grade: B

 

 

House of Usher (1960)
For once, a more or less faithful adaptation of a Poe story from Corman, and it makes sense: "The Fall of the House of Usher" is one of Poe's most visually rich works, conjuring some of the most exquisite gothic imagery in the history of English letters, so you would be a fool to diverge too much from that when adapting that to the cinema. Corman's no fool, and he's also no slouch—the story's iconic setting is evoked magnificently, and everything here just feels so terrifically spooky and portentous, weighted with a palpable sense of history and eons of time. A lot of these Poe/Corman adaptations have a kind of low-budget charm to them, where you can see the seams and that makes it all the more captivating that they're as competently done as they are, but House of Usher is different; it feels like the genuine object, immersive in ways that the "really good community theater" vibe of the other films could only dream of being. Part of this is obviously pretense; it's only 80 minutes long, but its first four minutes are occupied by one of those "Overture" screens that you might see in Ben-Hur or some other classic Hollywood epic. But the fact that that feeling of watching something epic and arch doesn't disappear with the overture is a testament to how honestly the rest of the movie comes by that effect. This is just top-to-bottom great. Of course, an all-time-great Vincent Price performance doesn't hurt—but that already goes without saying in any of these Poe adaptations, right? Grade: A

Mini Reviews for November 1 - 7, 2021

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

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)
"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-

 

28 Days Later (2002)
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+

28 Weeks Later (2007)
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-

The Relic (1997)
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

 

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
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-

 

 

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
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

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 8 (2021)
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

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)
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+

Mini Reviews for October 4 - 17, 2021

Sorry for skipping next week; these past two weeks have been super hectic. But here I am! I'm back, baby!

Movies

Trick 'r Treat (2007)
Trying to stitch together the pieces of an anthology films into the veneer of a single narrative film doesn't ultimately help the problems of inconsistency that plague almost all anthology films, but the good parts here are very good, and this has a really long, impishly mean streak that I thought was great. Maybe a tad over-hyped, but in the context of most anthology films, this is up there. Grade: B

 

 

 

Light Sleeper (1992)
Another one of these Paul Schrader movies. The climactic violence isn't as steeped in irony as the climaxes in the best of his movies in this format tend to be, but Susan Sarandon is, as always, such a force to be reckoned with on the screen that she handily becomes the best iteration of the "pure-hearted woman is a redemptive foil to the troubled man" trope that Schrader trots out in every one of these. That trope is a problematic one that Schrader consistently has trouble making work, so it's no small feat what Sarandon does here with her role: fierce, believably kind, and, incredibly, able to own a scene alongside Willem Dafoe's animal sexuality and cavernous face. I cannot fathom the power of a person who can go toe-to-toe with Dafoe and not just crumble. Grade: B+

A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)
This is pretty dumb, and the series mythology is just leaden at this point, five movies in. But I dunno, the main draw for me to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies is the gonzo effects and surreal framing of the kills, and this movie pulls out all the stops here. Characters jumping into comic books and becoming animated? Freddy using his own severed arm as a seatbelt? A girl getting food shoveled into her face until she inflates like a balloon? Weird, wild stuff, and a supercut of the dream scenes in this movie would be a pretty good experimental film. Grade: B-

 

Sans Soleil (1983)
This movie's narration is full of some of the most nonsensical of French philosopher nonsense, while also being surprisingly orientalist—like, half of it is basically the philosophy grad student's version of "the Japanese sure are different, amirite?" What makes this movie hard to dismiss is that this narration is set to some absolutely stunning montage footage. It maybe would have been something on the level of Koyaanisqatsi if it had simply been scored rather than been tied to these insufferable words. In fact, the score we have here is pretty spectacular: full of textured ambient sounds and kosmische musik style early electronic atmospherics. Shame about the spoken word. Grade: B-

 

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Marginally better than the original, which isn't hard. This is a fairly competent retread/revision of the first one, tightening up the first movie's amateurism somewhat into a decent parade of sex and kills involving admirably irritating teens. But the flimsiest of the Big Three slasher franchises remains flimsy, and I remain only slightly interested in continuing after this point. Grade:C+

 

 

 

Friday the 13th Part III (1983)
People keep saying that this movie is a huge step down from the first two, but I dunno, this just seems in the same ballpark of "meh" to me—though that being said, I kept falling asleep during the back half, butI'm not sure if that was my fault or the movie's (I was pretty tired!). Also, I don't know why this bothers me any more than the litany of other stupid things in this franchise, but why does the title switch from using Arabic to Roman numerals in this one? I'll excuse plot inconsistencies, but typographical inconsistencies? You gotta draw the line somewhere. Grade: C

 

The Howling (1981)
This fits snugly alongside Piranha as a Joe Dante/John Sayles collab that sneaks social satire and a smirking sensibility into a movie that uses its low budget to impressive ends. It's not quite as ambitious or as funny as Piranha, nor is it as balls-to-the-wall gonzo as other Joe Dante projects, but the effects are very, very good—some really gooey werewolf transformations and some really tactile gore. And the pitch-black cynicism of the ending is delicious. Of the wave of werewolf movies that hit theaters in 1981, I definitely prefer An American Werewolf in London, but this is solid. Grade: B