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