Mini Reviews for November 21 - 27, 2022

Yes I was without internet for part of this week and had to watch random movies I had on my laptop—why do you ask?

Movies

Bones and All (2022)
It's a lot of things, maybe too many things: a YA romance, a road-trip movie, a cannibal movie, a Badlands / Bonnie and Clyde "one step ahead of our past catching up with us" sort of thing, an '80s nostalgia movie (if what you're nostalgic for in the '80s is heartland rock, wood paneling, and everything smelling like cigarettes), a philosophical inquiry into the most ethical way to eat people if you are biologically compelled to do so, maybe a queer metaphor, maybe an addiction metaphor. I'm not sure if the extremely bummer ending satisfyingly ties up any of these threads or modes, but like a lot of road trips, the interesting part is how you get there, and this movie is certainly a journey: parts of it deeply unsettling with unexpected moments of terror, other parts evoking a profound loneliness, others a deep well of pathos. Whether or not this completely holds together thematically, it's able to make all of these disparate threads feel like a cohesive whole through a confident stylistic hand as well as some terrific performances (the entire principal cast is great). There's a strong emotional throughline, if nothing else, and some of these scenes are going to stay with me for a while. Grade: B+

Rosaline (2022)
A worst of both worlds situation: neither the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by way of Romeo and Juliet that I was hoping for, nor the sugary-sweet rom-com-revival fun that this movie thinks it is. It has the feeling of being written by someone who hasn't touched Romeo and Juliet since they read the SparkNotes summary in 9th grade English class; Tromeo and Juliet has a better literacy of the Shakespeare play than this one does, which is theoretically fine: so what if Paris is now Rosaline's gay best friend and that famous lines are misappropriated by characters in nonsensical contexts? If you're not trying to be deconstructive, there's no point in actually caring about your film's relationship to its source material. But you gotta give us something in the source material's place, and the watery gruel that we receive is a bunch of warmed-over rom-com clichés employed with a flimsy gloss of girl-power and sarcasm, not to mention a completely empty love interest. As uninterested in Romeo and Juliet as this movie is, it seems even less interested in the elements it's added, and I'm not sure why we're supposed to care about anything going on in Rosaline's life. Kaitlyn Dever is pretty good here, at least—a performance in search of a movie that has any idea at all how to use it. Grade: C-

Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)
It's basically unwatchable, but it's also fascinating because it so clearly is a product of evangelical Christianity while also being a work of outsider art, something you can't say about a lot of more visible evangelical media, which usually comes from a fairly large industry with established tropes and modes of discourse, almost none of which this movie even bothers with. For example, it's not uncommon for evangelical media to use the post-parting-the-Red-Sea stories of Moses and Joshua to justify genocide, but there's usually some tact or rhetorical sleight of hand that makes it seem like it's not justifying genocide. Like, Focus on the Family media has definitely said genocide is okay, but you usually have to analyze it a little to understand that that's what it's doing. This movie doesn't have the guile for that kind of decorum and literally just states outright that it's okay to exterminate a people group if God tells you to, and it does so by using some of the most amateur CG animation I've ever seen as well as some of the most head-scratching decisions in character modeling (if they're supposed to be lions, where are their tails??), which is kind of an out-of-body experience. There's such an incredible purity of vision here, a vile, cancerous, eye-melting vision. I'd love to hear what Phil Vischer thinks about this. Grade: C

Song of the Miraculous Hind (Ének a csodaszarvasról) (2002)
I know so little of Hungarian history and folklore that this film's plot (a telling of ancient Hungarian "history" as seen through its mythology) quickly lost me. Basically the only parts I understood were the pieces that had widespread mythological tropes like the "cosmic hunt" that makes up one early section of the movie. So I would probably have a drastically different reaction to this movie if I were Hungarian or even just knew anything at all about Hungarian history—I dunno, I would definitely have some strong opinions about a movie that tried to dramatize the national mythology of the United States, so this seems like the kind of movie that is fraught with political implications that I have no access to. But from where I sit, it doesn't matter that I couldn't follow the plot, because the film is directed by Marcell Jankovics, which means that it has dazzling animation. It's a lot more stylistically experimental than his masterpiece, Son of the White Mare, which makes sense given this movie's episodic format, and not everything is a home-run here; in fact, there are sections with animation that is surprisingly prosaic for Jankovics. However, other pieces of animation here are incredible in ways that aren't exactly superior to White Mare but also are far more intricate and complex than anything that the other movie attempts, sequences that are overtly psychedelic or even strobe-like, playing around with kaleidoscopic color variations and unstable character forms in a way that is as mesmerizing as it is bewildering. The early sequence with the cosmic hunt is pretty great in this regard, as is the final sequence of the film when Jesus Christ appears to a medieval king. There's something about this kind of stylistic kitchen-sink that, when it works, approaches the sublime when paired with mythological storytelling that I don't understand. Again, I'm sure I would have a much different reaction if I actually did understand the mythology. Grade: B+

Rock and Rule (1983)
The kind of movie that is probably best reviewed by listing out its component parts and just basking in the miracle of the existence of something this bizarre: a nuclear war has destroyed the human race and in the human's place grow a society of animals mutated into character designs I can only describe as "edgy Goof Troop," among whom is the rock star Mok, who needs to find the magical voice that can release a demon who will help him rule the world and gain immortality. This story is told as a rock musical with a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense and with compositions and performances from Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Earth, Wind & Fire, and assorted configurations of Cheap Trick, and it's visual style has a blending of the kind of squishy character animation you might see on children's programming with a less-abrasive form of Ralph Baskshi's urban mixed-media approach for the backgrounds, plus another technique I can't quite identify for Mok's demon that reminds me of Yuri Norstein in its earthy textures. Everything in this movie has these smirking comic-book naming conventions, e.g. Mok Swagger, Carnage-y Hall, Nuke York, etc. A real stew, this movie. A complete meal. Grade: B

The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
This is an amazing story about a man's sociopathic drive to destroy his marriage on his honeymoon, and as a depiction of monstrous self-destruction, it's about as hilarious as something like that can get (which is: very). Truly one of the great evocations of masculinity at its most pathetic and loathsome. But also... also... the incredible coup that this movie pulls is that by casting Cybill Shepherd as the object of this man's desire, there's a part of me, not a significant part but a part nonetheless, that watches her in this movie and thinks, "You know, I get it." Audience-implication sometimes feels like a cheap shot, but this one totally got me. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for November 14 - 20, 2022

This week I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about the 1931 Ernst Lubitch film The Smiling Lieutenant. Here's the link if you're interested!

Movies

Barbarian (2022)
It spends a good portion of its first half pretending to be a much more serious movie than it is (the movie it pretends to be: a slow-burn thriller about two strangers accidentally booked at the same Airbnb), but after a particular point, it drops the mask so quickly that the abruptness in and of itself is hugely entertaining. It does this a couple more times, and by the end, Barbarian is thoroughly goofy, albeit of the grimy, ugly sort that characterizes the work of, say, Wes Craven. This isn't anywhere near as clever as a Craven movie, but that veneer of seriousness barely containing a mean-spirited glee at others' misfortunes definitely feels like it's in the same wheelhouse. I found this thoroughly entertaining, though by the end, as it's become clear that the film is kind of a one-trick pony in terms of how it doles out its reveals, there are diminishing returns to what it's attempting on a thematic level (some muddled ideas about gender and motherhood and morality). But it's a masterclass in executing that one trick, and I had a great time hootin' and hollerin' at the screen with my wife as we watched this. Grade: B+

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Really, shockingly good. I don't hate Martin McDonagh, but it's been a while since he's done anything I particularly cared for, and this far surpasses the distant, pleasant memories I have of In Bruges. Moreover, this is the first McDonagh screenplay (I've never seen one of his stage plays) that doesn't feel like it's bending over backward trying to prove something with its cleverness; the screenplay here simply is clever in this understated yet confident way that bowled me over. If I'm not mistaken, there's some Irish political history metaphor going on with the plot that I am unequipped to unpack, but that's okay, because it's also just a very human story of pain and loss as two former friends drift apart. Whatever the allegory that's happening here, McDonagh does the very graceful and very difficult task of also making it not feel like an allegory, and the entire thing works just as well (perhaps better) if you assume that Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters are real, psychologically complex human beings instead of simply being analogs for the sides of the Irish Civil War or whatever is supposed to be going on there. Career-best work from Ferrell, too. He takes his "affable goofball with hidden complexity" thing and imbues it with a deep well of sadness and vulnerability that ends up pervading the entire film. I can imagine having a good, cathartic cry over this movie if it caught me in the right mood, and I mean that as a compliment. Grade: A-

My Father's Dragon (2022)
The first half of this movie, which is split pretty evenly between the social-realist(ish) beginning involving the struggle of a mother and her son to make it in a new city and the wildly inventive fantasy of the boy's flight from the city to a magic island, is terrific, utilizing a dream logic undergirded by a strong emotional core in a way reminiscent of the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The back half of the movie unfortunately falls apart as it fails to maintain the emotional clarity through the dream logic, and the climax hinges on an emotional epiphany that is almost completely unearned. Narratively, it's the weakest of the Cartoon Saloon features, and it's not even close. Visually, however, this is as stunning as any of the studio's other work, maintaining the rich texturedness of Wolfwalkers as well as the luminous use of color present throughout the studio's work. In the face of that, it's hard to feel grumpy about the film. Grade: B

 

Cult of Chucky (2017)
My least-favorite, I think, of the "...of Chucky" stage of this franchise, but Mancini continues to have a tight grasp of fundamental horror mechanics as well as the specific idioms that make his Chucky movies special—at this point, watching these characters and tropes return is something akin to watching a soap, and it's great fun just to see, for example, Jennifer Tilly show up again in some new, ridiculous role. Some great practical gore effects here, too. The psychiatric hospital setting isn't nearly as evocative or well-deployed as the old mansion in Curse, and the film relies just a little too much on movie-crazy-people-isms in fleshing out the secondary cast, and as a whole, the movie lacks the verve or the mad-scientist coherence that animates the best in the series. But I guess in the short span of time I've been watching the series, I've become a lifer with these movies, because I still had a good time and can't wait to hop into the TV series. A cult indeed. Grade: B

 

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
If I wasn't already familiar with the source material, it would be unbelievable that a movie this smutty and this mean came out of the stuffy '80s costume drama world. The closest thing I can think of to this is The Favourite, which of course arrived from a much different milieu in cinema. But here's this movie, a brutally spiteful satire of 18th-century ruling class with only a few of the edges sanded off from the French novel on which it is based (I'm unfamiliar with Christopher Hampton's 1985 play that is the more direct source for this movie). This is probably the best I've ever seen Glenn Close and John Malkovich, two actors I'm not overly fond of, and the way they slowly reveal the utter despair that they cloak in the abject evil of their actions is kind of masterful. The film's pacing gets a little dicey by the end as the plot turns from being outrageous to being just bleak, and as with basically every other version of the story, I'm not sure how to feel about its treatment of sexual assault. But on the whole, this is pretty good. I want to live in the alternative universe in which all Masterpiece Theatre-ish productions are this cruel and sick. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 31 - November 13, 2022

Sorry I missed last week. I had such a busy few days that I neither watched anything nor did I have time for blogging even if I had watched anything. I made up for it this week, as you can see.

Movies

Wendell and Wild (2022)
Henry Selick and Jordan Peele made a movie for the freaks and the weirdos and the people who care about the prison industrial complex and the people who don't care if your movie is too overstuffed to have structural or dramatic integrity. Really terrific stop-motion animation, of course. Nice to see that Selick is still making icky-looking movies after all these years. Grade: B

If you'd like to hear me (and some friends) talk about this movie at length, you can check out Episode 428 of the Cinematary podcast.

TÁR (2022)
Enigmatic, and photographed with obvious deliberation, TÁR is likely to be one of the most "Cinema with a capital-C" movies that's going to get wide distribution this year, and there's something inherently exciting about that in a world where even my local "arthouse" Regal is blocking out several screens of Wakanda Forever. It's also deliciously perverse in its depiction of Lydia Tár, its central problematic genius, a figure who, we're assured, is more than deserving of the stratospheric accolades she has received and whose prickly personality and nastily barbed speech is so compelling to watch that we as viewers might be tempted to take her side even when allegations much more serious than the distilled assholery we've witnessed come to light. The movie has a real impish glee in its depiction of both the ways that Tár brutally humiliates those around her and also the eventual indignities that come for Tár herself (right up to the sublime cosmic joke that lands in the final scene), and in doing so, the movie becomes a seriously mean black comedy of a sort that reminds me of Phantom Thread before that movie's unexpected pivot (Cate Blanchett's wiry, feral performance here is every bit the equal of Daniel Day-Lewis's work with PTA). TÁR never really pivots, though, and even given the extent to which it's such a hugely entertaining watch (especially for the kind of art film it presents itself as), there's something maddening about the central arc of the film, too, that makes it a much more slippery watch than a lot of the self-destructive anti-hero media that the film's logline evokes. Some of the film's provocations are obvious (insert your favorite charismatic-but-morally-dubious celebrity comparison here), but there's a much more insidious provocation in the sense that the film withholds just enough information from basically every single plot development here that there's a plausible deniability to any interpretation you could have—not just interpretation in the sense of what it means but also in the sense of what actually, factually occurred. The most obvious example is how the film shows us just enough of Tár's behavior around her protégés that we know she's capable of the #MeToo-esque accusations leveled at her but not enough that we can be absolutely sure how much she's responsible for the catastrophic depths those accusations indict her in. But that "just enough to be suspicious, not enough to be sure" approach holds for everything in the film, right down to a fairly minor plot point involving an alleged attack against Tár that may in fact have merely involved Tár tripping on stairs. So much of this film's plot is related via people's personal accounts that we simply have no window into beyond their own words. It's a genuinely ballsy move to make a film about an over-enabled star accused of abusing their position and then make the fundamental building blocks of its reality this opaque and inscrutable (forming an accidental, instructive juxtaposition with the trailer for that Harvey Weinstein movie that played before my screening of TÁR), but whether or not this is constructive or merely a smokescreen for something more hollow and reactionary is something I cannot parse and gives me pause. I suppose there's something possibly profound about how the act of interpreting this movie mirrors our lived reality in the real-life versions of these "celebrity accused of bad behavior" scandals in which we're invited to make decisions about the guilt or innocence of people based entirely on personal accounts. As is the case in real life, this process in the film obscures the presumably real pain of the alleged victims, instead focusing on how such accusations might undermine the elevated position of the accused, and TÁR is so deliberate in lampshading the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the victim here that I have to imagine that this effect is intentional. To what end? I dunno. Maybe once the dust settles, I'll have a clearer idea of what's supposed to be going on here. But for now, I can't think of a film with an enigma this opaque wrapped in a character study this watchable. Grade: A-

Night of the Creeps (1986)
Pretty fun, store-brand-Joe-Dante-style movie involving some gross little leech-looking things that turn people into zombies. Some really great line readings, especially from Tom Atkins, who gets to go delightfully arch in the film's climax. There's not a lot to the movie besides these simple pleasures, though, and the more the movie gestures away from them—for instance, in the middle section that is curiously focused on college Greek life politics—the less interesting it gets. Luckily, it's mostly focused on the good stuff! Grade: B

 

 

 

Dead of Night (1977)
I put this on thinking it was the 1945 movie of the same title (I didn't realize the 1945 movie was made in 1945 or I would have recognized my mistake instantly), and by the time I realized it wasn't, the sunk cost fallacy had already gripped my brain. A near-complete dud of a TV-movie—it's an anthology film, and only the last segment works (the last one is pretty good, though—a mother raises her son from the dead, and he's a terror). But overall, a waste of time. The first movie I had time to watch in over a week, and I mess it up! Grade: C-

 

 

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
I thought there would be more songs in something the early-'30s called a "musical," but the songs here are super charming. I also wasn't prepared for just how unabashedly dirtbaggy Maurice Chevalier's character is, but that's pre-Code Hollywood for ya! A highly relatable film: I, too, would be frustrated if I was winking at Claudette Colbert but instead some stuffy monarch thought I was winking at her, so I had to pretend to be in love with her so I didn't get punished, so then we got married, but then she turned out to be a total square, which is a real turn-off, so I can't consummate the marriage until Claudette teaches her how to smoke and be all cool and sexy, and then oh boy, it's off to the races! Could happen to anyone! Grade: B+

 

I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ich möchte kein Mann sein) (1918)
An interesting, sharp comedy exploring gender fluidity. It's always amazing to see a film from 100 years ago dealing with ideas that would have been considered progressive within my own lifetime. A little bit depressing, too—liberation is not a linear or inevitable arc, I guess. Anyway, I don't know anything about anything with gender, but this movie gets one thing absolutely right about gender, which is that men's formal wear sucks. Grade: B

 

 

 

Television

How To with John Wilson, Season 2 (2021)
The second season of How To is basically more of the same, though there are some subtle differences. Conner O'Malley is now part of the writing team, and while I can't say so for certain, some of the visual gags accompanying Wilson's narration seem to have his fingerprints—whatever the case, this season is slightly more jokey, but not in any way that changes the basic experience of watching an episode. You've got the same narration, the same video-essay conceit, the same out-of-left-field moments of profundity, the same commitment to finding the most absurd extensions of each episode's central idea. Still a fun and special little piece of the modern TV tapestry. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for October 24 - 30, 2022

My wife and I released a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here if you're interested!

Movies

Lightyear (2022)
I went into this expecting it to be bad, and it was, but I think this actually would have been a tolerable, if forgettable, piece of children's sci-fi if it weren't for the fact that it's about the "real" Buzz freaking Lightyear. It's a weird bind that I'm sure the filmmakers found themselves in making this movie: scrubbed of its forced connections to the Toy Story franchise, the screenplay is not nearly good enough to make this movie be notable as a standalone film, but the Toy Story connections that make it notable unmistakably flag this movie as a piece of cynical corporate brand management as opposed to the sincere work of middlebrow family entertainment it wants to be. I'm sorry, but I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough that I can hear the characters in this movie on multiple occasions saying word-for-word memorable lines from the first Toy Story and not come to the conclusion that some middle-management Disney husk with an MBA ghost-wrote the film. It's like watching that unbearable pre-show Regal ad where everybody just says random famous movie lines, only at feature length. Also, on the animation front, this is a major step back from the past few Pixar films' attempts to broaden the studio's style outside of their familiar aesthetic. We're in mildly cartoony photorealismville again, baby, and it's boring. Complete dreck. Almost certainly the worst Pixar movie—or at least the most dispiriting. Grade: C-

Bride of Chucky (1998)
Easily the best Chucky movie up to this point in the series. Chucky as an entity was never particularly scary to me anyway (even when I was a kid), so this movie's abandonment of any semblance of "scary" plus its commitment to weird camp and outsider sensibilities helps it sail past every previous movie in the franchise. Explicitly tying itself to The Bride of Frankenstein should be a movie-ruining bit of hubris, but it's absolutely deserved here, as it embraces that early classic's penchant for the playful and absurd over the spooky. Plus, my god, the voice acting of the central duo: the addition of Jennifer Tilly as functionally the lead is an incredibly canny move, and Brad Dourif puts in his series-best performance. Also, barely related, but I just happened to click on Dourif's Wikipedia page when writing this up, and I realized he plays Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, which is kinda blowing my mind at the moment; I should have made that connection before the fourth entry in this series. Grade: A-

Seed of Chucky (2004)
What an absolute blast. Some of the running bits don't really work (e.g. the "Made in Japan" thing or Jennifer Tilly's eating disorder), but for the most part, this is intoxicating and ridiculously fun and has the good sense to realize that two Jennifer Tilly performances are better than one. Whereas Bride of Chucky explicitly presents itself as the Chucky analog to The Bride of Frankenstein, Seed openly claims to be the Glen or Glenda of the franchise, which is 100% the logical conclusion to the camp flourishes of the previous film. Along the same lines, I gotta hand it to this movie for having the guts to evoke one of the most repulsive parts of Pink Flamingos (the kidnapping/insemination plot). Speaking of insemination, people talk about weird Hollywood synchronicity like the time there were two Snow White movies in the same year, but I've never heard anyone talk about the much more improbable parallelism of 2004's duology of CGI sperms (i.e. this and She Hate Me). A true unicorn pairing. Grade: A-

Curse of Chucky (2013)
A soft reboot after the franchise reached the delirious heights of Bride and Seed was not at the top of the list of things I would want to see out of the follow-up. But allowing for that, this was really solid—probably the most overtly "scary" (relatively—Chucky's not very scary) Chucky movie since the first one, and it does a lot of good with that aim to return to the series's horror roots. It's set in a big, spooky house, which is a tremendous setting, and appropriately, the direction is the series's most baroque, filled with moody lighting and sweeping steadicam shots (maybe my favorite direction of the series). And for us lovers of post-Child's Play 3 Chucky, the last ten minutes or so does let us know that Don Mancini hasn't forgotten about us. So, a good time, if not the great time delivered by its immediate predecessors. Grade: B

 

Books

A Gathering of Days; A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos (1979)
What if a children's book looked exactly like a child's journal from the 1830s? Impressively committed to its conceit, to the point that it's willing to be extremely boring in the interest of looking like a historical document. If that sounds cool to you, you can listen to my wife and I talk about it on our podcast. Grade: D

 

 

 

 

Music

Taylor Swift - Midnights (2022)
I've heard people call this album a "grower," and it certainly has the hallmarks of that: low-key production, murmured melodies, few open bids for radio play. However, after having spent a week with this album, I'm feeling like it's the opposite... a shrinker? I'm sad to report that the more I listen to it, the thinner Midnights feels. Everything on here is something that Taylor Swift has done elsewhere (and better): the nocturnal Antonoff production hearkens back to the simmering, weary back-half of Reputation and the warmth of the Lover deep cuts; the semi-ironic self-critique of "Anti-Hero" is a less sardonic revision of "Blank Space"; "Vigilante Shit" and "Karma" again evoke Reputation, but this time the cringey, forced "bad girl" camp villainy. I wouldn't mind as much if the writing on these songs were actually good, but a lot of these lyrics feel like first-drafts, with a main idea only barely developed (and certainly not as idiosyncratic and nuanced as I'm used to hearing from Swift). That's to say nothing of the outright howlers, like the already infamous "sexy baby" line on "Anti-Hero" or how Taylor Swift still seems to employ the word "fuck" like a middle-schooler giddy about saying grown-up words. The melodies on the tracks fare better, but there isn't a single song where I enjoy both the melody and the lyrics, which is disappointing coming from Taylor Swift. It's disappointing after folklore seems to usher in a new phase of maturity and hindsight for Taylor Swift that she's come up with an album that feels like ersatz Taylor Swift, mimicking the rhythms and themes of past successes without the spark of what made those earlier works cook. I guess we'll see how I feel after spending a little more time with this—maybe this will prove to be a true grower after two weeks, or ten. But right now, this strikes me as one of Taylor Swift's weakest album, if not her outright worst. Grade: C+

Mini Reviews for October 17 - 23, 2022

Nothing new to report up here. Here's an obligatory link to the podcast episode my wife and I released last week.

Movies

The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)
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-

 

 

 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
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

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
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+

Child's Play 3 (1991)
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

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男) (1989)
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

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)
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

Mini Reviews for October 10 - 16, 2022

Horror movies! Also, if you're interested, my wife and I have a new podcast episode out, this time about Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

 

Movies

Don't Worry Darling (2022)
Exactly the movie, no more, no less, you would imagine if I told you to picture the intersection of The Stepford Wives and the first act of The Matrix. There are very few—if any—surprises here if you have seen the right antecedent movies, and given that those antecedents are super popular, you probably have seen them. Obviously the problem with so openly aping such famous movies is that you're inviting comparison, and there's nothing about this movie that's better or even just more interesting than the movies it calls to mind. Nonetheless, it's not bad, assuming you aren't expecting it to be great. Olivia Wilde continues to be a director with an eye for striking imagery, even if she still doesn't let herself (isn't allowed?) to let that instinct fully flourish into something more striking; the production design, especially the costuming, is very good; Florence Pugh is, per usual, selling the crap out of her performance and probably carrying the whole movie in terms of acting, but the rest of the cast is no slouch either—I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Harry Styles, but he's good at playing a dude who is clean-cut and handsome enough to scan as vaguely menacing (though I do wonder what welcome chaos the originally planned Shia LaBeouf casting would have brought). It's just weird to see this level of prestige and budget brought to the kind of movie that probably would have gotten like $4 million and a late-January release like fifteen years ago. Grade: B-

Knock Knock (2015)
A "happily married" dude is coerced (maybe?) into sex with two strangers, who then spend the rest of the film refusing to leave his house, which they are intent on trashing. I wish I had written this review before watching the 1977 film it's based on, because I'm already forgetting how I felt about this without the '70s context. But anyway, I guess when I get to Death Game I'll talk about the rest, but what stands out as distinct about Eli Roth's remake is the absolutely sublime Keanu Reeves performance. Like the other Roth films I've seen, the film style of this movie feels premeditated and precise to an extreme degree, this time to a fault that undermines the chaos of the two female leads (this is my experience with the '70s one bleeding in already, sorry). But as a counterpoint, the technique of Keanu's acting here is really wacky in a way that is kinda surreal and unpredictable. Whether or not this is an intended effect I have no idea, but the feeling I got was that as Keanu's character has more and more of his "good guy dad" persona stripped from him by the physical and psychological humiliation he experiences, the further out of Keanu's acting range he goes, to the point where by the time he's giving the absolutely demented "free pizza" monologue, he's in some really dicey territory in terms of the actor's ability to even match what the movie is asking of him, which is bizarrely compelling in the context of a movie that is very much about taking a genteel presentation of masculinity and baiting it further and further outside of its self-satisfaction until it transforms into something feral and raw but also deeply silly and humiliating. I don't feel like it's a coincidence that this is the funniest movie I've seen from Roth, and more so than anything else of his I'm familiar with, this one has this really impish sensibility that is constantly tip-toeing around boundaries before bludgeoning those boundaries completely all at once, and that centerpiece Keanu performance feels key to that sensibility. This movie is a perfect encapsulation of one of the things people find so infuriating about Roth, i.e. the way it dances around big political topics (in this case, a bevvy of issues regarding gender, sex, age, and power) while defying clean, safe thematic readings outside of its obvious provocations—its '70s predecessor is a lot clearer in intention, and it's a fascinating effect that Roth is able to stay almost entirely faithful to the plot of the original while muddying the waters considerably in terms of what it actually means. There's at least a 50% chance that this movie really is as gross as it seems to want to bait us into thinking it is, but also, I thought it was very funny, so I dunno what to do with that. Grade: B

Death Game (1977)
A completely deranged movie on virtually every level. I'm not sure it's fair to Eli Roth to say that his remake is weaker for not having captured the pure chaotic spirit embodied by this film, because that clearly wasn't what he was after (maintaining the dirtbag ethos of grindhouse films while replacing their taped-together cheapness with a clean precision impossible in an earlier era seems to be a big part of Roth's thing, and godspeed to him on that quest, I suppose). But of the two films, this one is absolutely the superior one thanks to the ramshackle energy. Part of this seems like a happy accident of the era and the occasion of its production—as I understand it, this was stitched together from a reportedly unpleasant shoot in which nobody got along and which was plagued by money issues, and the result is a film that takes the typical amateurish messiness of exploitation films and, probably out of necessity, cranks it up to a ludicrous degree to the point of accidental psychedelia. Out of that haze come screaming the two central performances by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, and what proceeds from there is a bewildering kaleidoscope of extreme human behavior that feels almost otherworldly as it dementedly mixes camp with sadism. Even if Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo had had any interest and/or ability in recreating that tone in Roth's remake (as they are, their performances are merely serviceable, probably the biggest liability in the remake), I can't imagine that working well within Roth's smirking, detached mode, and what Camp and Locke achieve here feels like something that could only be achieved within the specific era of smut/fringe cinema that birthed this film. Both Roth's film and this original are playing with the idoms of porn from their respective eras, and while there's something to be said for the way Roth takes a porn premise and uses Keanu's goofy mannerisms to explore the shame and puritanical impulses of a modern masculinity that nonetheless is willing to indulge in erotic play, this movie's invocation of porn feels way more productive in the end, ironically because of the lack of Keanu (the one element of the remake that is unequivocally better than this version). Seymour Cassel's character here is such a nonentity, both as written and as performed, and in that relative emptiness, it's much clearer that this dude's self-satisfaction in his station in life is a character flaw, an icky dude who has won the game of life (probably at the expense of others) to such an extent that he has lost all understanding of the precarity that exists in most people's lives, and as such, the Bugs-Bunny-esque madness visited upon him by Camp and Locke has the feeling of an uprising, a kind of youth in revolt picture, a vestige of '60s counterculture cinema only with the perspective flipped, and the only way this gross man can interpret a youth revolt is through porn and the sexual pleasure it can bring to him. I saw a bunch of people comparing this to the Czech New Wave film Daisies, and before I watched it, I felt like that had to be a stretch, but I'm shocked to report that it's really not a stretch at all. We gotta get Eli Roth to watch some Věra Chytilová. Grade: A-

Hard Boiled (辣手神探) (1992)
I haven't seen a lot of John Woo movies, but I do know that I'm supposed to get swept up in the melodrama. That didn't happen to me here; the friendship (romance?) between the two cops was fun enough, but I mostly felt distant from the movie when guns weren't blazing, which is probably a Me Problem. When the guns are blazing, though, this is of course a blast, and once they get to the hospital, this movie is basically nonstop blazing guns. This John Woo guy knows how to film gunplay, huh? Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play (1988)
This movie's a lot of fun and much more patient in doling out the camp than I was expecting. Honestly, though, as good as the doll effects are, the best part is when an unattended six-year-old kid is able to skip school by getting on a train that takes him from his bougie neighborhood to some bombed-out hive of villainy across town, which is really the kind of future us transit advocates dream about for American cities. Grade: B+

 

 

 

Child's Play 2 (1990)
About as much fun as the first one, even if it sweats just a little bit to try to reset with a new family at the beginning of the movie. The foster care angle pays off pretty well, though, if only for the addition of Kyle and her very sweet dynamic with Andy, and the movie in general does a great job of basically revisiting the most memorable beats of the original, including Andy almost taking the rap for Chucky's mayhem, without it ever feeling stale. The finale at the factory is pretty cool, too, and I like that it gives the kids the tools to dispatch of Chucky in some fun, inventive ways (multiple times, of course, since "He's dead—no wait, he's back again!" fakeouts seem to be a staple of this series). It makes sense that the series eventually juked into kookier territory, though, because I'm not sure how much more juice this formula has. Grade: B+

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
When everybody says that Rob Zombie based his career on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I guess I thought they meant the first one, but this one is definitely the germ of stuff like The House of 1,000 Corpses. Cranks up the waking nightmare element of the first movie until it wraps around to being overtly goofy but also still kinda scary. Weird, bonkers stuff that, aside from the central family, only feels of a piece with its predecessor by virtue of having this ineffable thisness about it that is hard to describe but nonetheless makes it feel weighty and sinewy in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for October 3 - 9, 2022

Busy week, so there's not a lot here. But if you're just craving more, don't forget about the new podcast episode from my wife and I.

Movies

The Final Destination (2009)
Dumb even for one of these movies, and the deaths aren't nearly as elaborate as the best in the previous films. But I got a real chuckle out of the part when the guy's guts got sucks out of his butthole by the pool drain, so it's not as if this is irredeemable. Grade: C

 

 

 

 

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
I have nooo idea what to do with this. It's all kind of ugly and dumb and nonsensical, but on purpose? You don't just have Joe Berlinger direct and co-write something and have it accidentally end up like this. There's something here about how this purports to be a dramatization of real events, as opposed to the original Blair Witch Project's claims of being actual footage of real events, and it's theoretically interesting the way that the film is littered with scenes presented through viewfinders and screens until finally the "reality" of the film breaks with what is presented on those screens. But I just don't know, in practice this movie is so joyless and dull, and whether or not it's purposeful, it looking like a cheap TV movie just never works for me. It's beside the point that this lacks the primal, cursed power of the first movie, but well... Grade: C

 

Threads (1984)
I guess one of the central questions with any eschatological story is whether humanity will ultimately fall back upon its communal tendencies for mutual aid or instead resort to isolating, resource-hoarding shows of strength and dominance—i.e. will the "good" or the "bad" human psychologies survive. But one of the things that is so deeply horrifying about the prospect of nuclear war (and, to a not dissimilar degree, the climate crisis) is that the very premise of there being powerful nation-states in possession of weapons with the capability of making our planet unlivable for vast swaths of the population means that those in global power have on some level already given up on the idea of a collective good. In Threads, we never see these powerful people, who presumably have already retreated to their Dr. Strangelove bunkers. Instead, the first half of the film is focused on the predominantly working-class population of Sheffield watching helplessly (and in some measure of denial) as the United States and the USSR escalate toward nuclear conflict over proxy control of the Middle East—nations these poor people are neither part of nor can control. It's obvious what's so horrifying about the second half of the film, after the bombs have been dropped and we are subject to possibly the most graphic visual account of the effects of nuclear war ever put to film (if there's a more graphic one, don't tell me about it, please—this one at least has the levity of the slightly goofy way that human beings apparently forget to speak in full sentences a decade into the nuclear apocalypse), but I actually found the first half of the film even more sickening because it takes that all-too-familiar feeling of panickedly watching world leaders act with impunity as they ruin the lives of millions and cranks it up to nightmarish levels with the literal threat of nuclear annihilation. Only the worst part is that it's not a nightmare. The madmen who control nation-states are still sitting on a stockpile of nukes, and if that doesn't get us, there's the game of chicken the wealthiest nations are playing as they watch the climate crisis wrecking the formerly colonized world as they wait for the bottom to fall out for the rest of us. I don't think I'm an anarchist, but I've never so profoundly felt what anarchists mean about the ethical illegitimacy of the modern state than I have contemplating, as this movie forces you to, that every single world government with nukes knows that holding onto their arsenal means leaving the door open to a future like the one depicted in this film, and yet they keep their nuclear weapons anyway. I'm not sure how healthy it is to mildly traumatize myself with movies like this, but there is a kind of catharsis in seeing my absolute worst fears put up onscreen, which I suppose is one of the roles of horror media. Yay, October? Grade: A