directed by George Miller, George Ogilvie
Australia
107 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
I know, I know, this is the one everybody hates because it has children in it or whatever. But I so badly wanted to see more from the Mad Max universe that I wasn't satisfied with the first two, and I had to know if this one was really as bad as popular opinion holds it to be. I'm aware that this statement won't make me any friends, but to be totally honest: This is a really good movie and I love it.
I guess the issue that people take with this one is how dramatically it shifts from the depravity and chaos typical of the first two Mad Max movies. It shows a colony of children and some adults who seem to have broken off from the scrum and formed a society built not on the backs of other people, but on telling stories and keeping hope for the future alive. This message is not in keeping with the Mad Max series' overall philosophy, obviously, as they're all furiously hopeless, nihilistic films, but to me the break with its typical setting is not a change in aesthetic. I don't know if anybody but me kept wondering during the first two films what life was like elsewhere; surely this wasteland where everyone gave up on rebuilding and instead entered into a 24/7 hybrid between a violent riot and a party couldn't be all there was. And when we see a different, more peaceful approach to rebuilding, it isn't any weaker or less interesting than everything the previous films had built, it's just another facet of the post-apocalyptic world this series constructs.
I also have to commend this film for having fairly realistic children. I get that the kiddies are why everybody dislikes this movie, but honestly, they don't act like typical irritating film children, who are only irritating because they're so obviously written by adults who are trying too hard. They seem like full people, being raised in a full society, with fascinating traditions and stories of the past developed over an alarmingly short period of time.
A huge part of why I watched this in the first place was because somebody at my book club brought it up when we were discussing my favorite-ever book, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. George Miller is very, very obviously a fan, because the dialect the colony of children speak literally is what Riddley speaks in the book, as close as you can get without lifting it line-for-line. And for somebody who is utterly enthusiastic about that book, hearing people do their tel and talk about the knowing and the membering of things filled me with joy. I'm sorry and I know the Mad Max films are not made for joy, but I'm declaring that you can get joy out of any film you like.
So what I'm trying to say to everybody who hates this just because it departs stylistically from the others is that it really isn't such a stylistic departure- it's just the camera panning left a little, looking at a different perspective on the same thing. Mel Gibson is almost ridiculously unimportant, to the point where he seems to be the bad guy. When he arrives at the colony he seems confused that everyone thinks he's some kind of messiah but certainly doesn't mind ingratiating himself to the people, and in fact he gets so comfortable there that he straight-up decks a girl in the face for trying to go against his opinion. I spent most of the movie hoping he would get killed so everybody else could come up with a better survival plan without him. Yeah, there's plot-holes and absurdities, but where would this series be without those? It's still a dusty, dirty, grimy joyride through a hot, sweaty, post-atomic desert waste. And just because this has children in it certainly doesn't mean it's a children's movie, like a lot of people seem to be complaining about.
Friday, February 28, 2020
Monday, February 24, 2020
After Midnight (2020)
directed by Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella
USA
83 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
I'd been looking forward to this due to Jeremy Gardner's pretty much perfect track record with Tex Montana Will Survive! and The Battery, but for me personally, watching After Midnight made me realize that I don't like either this film or The Battery as horror movies. Gardner has a style that makes for a good story-oriented film that just so happens to have genre elements, but if you're like me and you prefer a more straight-forward approach to horror filmmaking, this might be off-putting.
So the gist of it is that a lonely man lives in a ramshackle house after his wife leaves him and also there is a bizarre, hulking creature living in the forest outside his house that tries to break his door down every night. Only that really isn't the gist of it, because as I implied in the first paragraph, the monster ultimately has little to do with the movie as a whole. I think that I and anybody else tasked with creating a synopsis for After Midnight tend to focus on the monster because it's the one part of the movie that's something, for lack of a better word- this is kind of a thing with Jeremy Gardner, he has long stretches of time in his films that are taken up by nothing but characters monologuing (or being stuck in a car surrounded by zombies) and yet somehow it works. For the most part, After Midnight is just about self-loathing and reckoning with the past. It also happens to contain a monster.
That all being said, I liked this movie a lot. Don't go into it expecting monstery goodness because you won't get any satisfaction. Go into it because you either know something about or have heard about the filmmakers already. I can imagine people stumbling onto this and getting super disappointed that it's more of an introspective, self-pitying, get-drunk-and-shoot-at-stuff-and-listen-to-banjo-music type of affair than something that prioritizes its monster. However, like any movie that exercises restraint in how much it shows its monster onscreen, the payoff is really good whenever we do see the monster. I'm not sure how I felt about the CGI in this particular case, but the design of the monster was really unique and I'm happy it didn't just look like a werewolf (or were-panther). It felt like a beast from an urban legend, something sort of unspecific but with a lot of attributes that lent themselves easily to getting exaggerated secondhand. Its first appearance is jarring, its second- and final- appearance is absolutely pitch-perfect and maybe the best moment of the film.
This movie isn't really breaking any new ground in terms of movies about messy relationships- though I do like its moral about how you have to get out of your own head sometimes and realize your partner enjoys things too, and stop making your relationship about your identity because if your partner doesn't like every single thing you like, they're gonna be really bored a lot of the time. But it's an original and interesting movie nonetheless and I do recommend it if you're patient and open-minded.
USA
83 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
I'd been looking forward to this due to Jeremy Gardner's pretty much perfect track record with Tex Montana Will Survive! and The Battery, but for me personally, watching After Midnight made me realize that I don't like either this film or The Battery as horror movies. Gardner has a style that makes for a good story-oriented film that just so happens to have genre elements, but if you're like me and you prefer a more straight-forward approach to horror filmmaking, this might be off-putting.
So the gist of it is that a lonely man lives in a ramshackle house after his wife leaves him and also there is a bizarre, hulking creature living in the forest outside his house that tries to break his door down every night. Only that really isn't the gist of it, because as I implied in the first paragraph, the monster ultimately has little to do with the movie as a whole. I think that I and anybody else tasked with creating a synopsis for After Midnight tend to focus on the monster because it's the one part of the movie that's something, for lack of a better word- this is kind of a thing with Jeremy Gardner, he has long stretches of time in his films that are taken up by nothing but characters monologuing (or being stuck in a car surrounded by zombies) and yet somehow it works. For the most part, After Midnight is just about self-loathing and reckoning with the past. It also happens to contain a monster.
That all being said, I liked this movie a lot. Don't go into it expecting monstery goodness because you won't get any satisfaction. Go into it because you either know something about or have heard about the filmmakers already. I can imagine people stumbling onto this and getting super disappointed that it's more of an introspective, self-pitying, get-drunk-and-shoot-at-stuff-and-listen-to-banjo-music type of affair than something that prioritizes its monster. However, like any movie that exercises restraint in how much it shows its monster onscreen, the payoff is really good whenever we do see the monster. I'm not sure how I felt about the CGI in this particular case, but the design of the monster was really unique and I'm happy it didn't just look like a werewolf (or were-panther). It felt like a beast from an urban legend, something sort of unspecific but with a lot of attributes that lent themselves easily to getting exaggerated secondhand. Its first appearance is jarring, its second- and final- appearance is absolutely pitch-perfect and maybe the best moment of the film.
This movie isn't really breaking any new ground in terms of movies about messy relationships- though I do like its moral about how you have to get out of your own head sometimes and realize your partner enjoys things too, and stop making your relationship about your identity because if your partner doesn't like every single thing you like, they're gonna be really bored a lot of the time. But it's an original and interesting movie nonetheless and I do recommend it if you're patient and open-minded.
Friday, February 21, 2020
Alien Outbreak (2020)
directed by Neil Rowe
UK
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
I watched this because I had nothing else to do and I expected it to be total trash, for two reasons: The first is that there's such a ridiculous amount of Alien Whatever movies that you can never be certain if they'll be generic nonsense or genuinely good movies. The second is that it has the kind of poster that a lot of straight-to-the-Walmart-discount-bin science fiction films have where you almost never see the actual aliens depicted on the poster, or if you do, they look nothing like the poster. Alien Outbreak rendered me wrong on both of these assumptions.
I'm going to talk about the second of the above points first- the aliens- because it's the reason why I fell in love with this movie. The aliens literally do look exactly like they do on the poster. Actually, they look even better in motion. When we see the first alien craft fly overhead it's a great moment, almost totally silent and relatively unexpected, and then when it starts dropping mechanical creatures from itself it gets even better. I should throw in a disclaimer here that I'm not an expert in CGI, I've never personally tried to computer-animate anything, so I don't know whether or not the CGI in this movie is good on a technical level, but I do know that it passed the basic test of making me unable to distinguish it from physical objects. The aliens just looked like they were there when the camera was shooting. I particularly loved the way the four-legged robots would wiggle & waver when they were shot, it looked so realistic. And the fact that there's a variety of different aliens with wildly varying appearances and they all look good and all make me desperately want to know their backstory is icing on the cake.
Because the main characters are police, I also expected this to be full of cheesy bravado and heroism, but it's not. The characters being officers is important to their identity, but really, it's just their job; they just happen to be in uniform and conveniently equipped with more weapons than usual. They don't feel any less isolated for it, and that isolation is where Alien Outbreak differs slightly from a lot of other "country under alien siege"-type films. The people in this feel so small, even when they're grouped together. Maybe that's why the towering scale of some of the aliens was so well-fitted to the atmosphere of the film, or vice versa. It isn't a "let's blindly murder all the invading aliens because we're the ultimate supreme life-forms on this planet" movie, either; it's a "skirmish and fight for our lives because we physically have to... unless?" deal. We the viewers, like the people in the movie, never find out anything whatsoever about the aliens, why they're here or what they're doing.
It's a shame that the acting is pretty bad because otherwise this could have been a perfect film, but in a way, I feel like the bad acting helped it to be more enjoyable, even if that meant it took a hit quality-wise. I don't think I could have connected with this the same way if it had had a main actress who totally threw herself into the role, crying and emoting like her life depended on it. The flatness of the main character and her lack of emotional outbursts made me able to focus on the movie itself more. I'm not saying this movie isn't without its flaws, but the creature design and unique tone gave me that feeling of joy that I get whenever I watch something with genuinely well-thought-out monsters that I've never seen the likes of before.
UK
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
I watched this because I had nothing else to do and I expected it to be total trash, for two reasons: The first is that there's such a ridiculous amount of Alien Whatever movies that you can never be certain if they'll be generic nonsense or genuinely good movies. The second is that it has the kind of poster that a lot of straight-to-the-Walmart-discount-bin science fiction films have where you almost never see the actual aliens depicted on the poster, or if you do, they look nothing like the poster. Alien Outbreak rendered me wrong on both of these assumptions.
I'm going to talk about the second of the above points first- the aliens- because it's the reason why I fell in love with this movie. The aliens literally do look exactly like they do on the poster. Actually, they look even better in motion. When we see the first alien craft fly overhead it's a great moment, almost totally silent and relatively unexpected, and then when it starts dropping mechanical creatures from itself it gets even better. I should throw in a disclaimer here that I'm not an expert in CGI, I've never personally tried to computer-animate anything, so I don't know whether or not the CGI in this movie is good on a technical level, but I do know that it passed the basic test of making me unable to distinguish it from physical objects. The aliens just looked like they were there when the camera was shooting. I particularly loved the way the four-legged robots would wiggle & waver when they were shot, it looked so realistic. And the fact that there's a variety of different aliens with wildly varying appearances and they all look good and all make me desperately want to know their backstory is icing on the cake.
Because the main characters are police, I also expected this to be full of cheesy bravado and heroism, but it's not. The characters being officers is important to their identity, but really, it's just their job; they just happen to be in uniform and conveniently equipped with more weapons than usual. They don't feel any less isolated for it, and that isolation is where Alien Outbreak differs slightly from a lot of other "country under alien siege"-type films. The people in this feel so small, even when they're grouped together. Maybe that's why the towering scale of some of the aliens was so well-fitted to the atmosphere of the film, or vice versa. It isn't a "let's blindly murder all the invading aliens because we're the ultimate supreme life-forms on this planet" movie, either; it's a "skirmish and fight for our lives because we physically have to... unless?" deal. We the viewers, like the people in the movie, never find out anything whatsoever about the aliens, why they're here or what they're doing.
It's a shame that the acting is pretty bad because otherwise this could have been a perfect film, but in a way, I feel like the bad acting helped it to be more enjoyable, even if that meant it took a hit quality-wise. I don't think I could have connected with this the same way if it had had a main actress who totally threw herself into the role, crying and emoting like her life depended on it. The flatness of the main character and her lack of emotional outbursts made me able to focus on the movie itself more. I'm not saying this movie isn't without its flaws, but the creature design and unique tone gave me that feeling of joy that I get whenever I watch something with genuinely well-thought-out monsters that I've never seen the likes of before.
Monday, February 17, 2020
Come to Daddy (2019)
directed by Ant Timpson
Canada, Ireland, New Zealand
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----
I'm not even going to try and keep this review objective because this is a case where I was really looking forward to something and it didn't work for me, not because it was a bad movie, but because it was not my speed. Even though they're two totally different films, it put me in mind of Knives Out: another recent and critically acclaimed film with lots of twists and turns that I just couldn't get up the excitement for that other people seemed to have. I'm also going to be discussing plot spoilers and it is best to go into this without knowing anything about it.
So the general idea that Come To Daddy starts you off with is the fear of facing one of your parents and finding that they're someone totally different than the picture you had of them all your life, although in this case it's complicated because the main character hasn't seen his father for thirty years and has no idea what to expect. For plot reasons, Stephen McHattie is billed as having a much bigger role than he actually does, when in reality, as is fairly typical for him, he's there for a little while, does and says some wild stuff, and then leaves. In my opinion he's the real MVP of this film and is the reason why I bothered with it at all. His character is just so absurd and so far beyond any of the others that he honestly doesn't fit in with the movie, because they set us up for this bizarre cat-mouse game between the protagonist and McHattie as his "father", and then drove off in a different direction and left the potential for a good and darkly humorous film in the lurch.
This is a funny movie, but I felt like it tried way too hard. Elijah Wood is inherently a funny actor, I think he's got a great sense of line delivery and is very good at deadpanning jokes, so I'm not placing blame on him here, but there's too many lines that come off like the writer/s were trying to think of the most over-the-top statement they could throw in and never revisit again. There's a long and gory fight scene between the main character and a large man with no pants on that's just... deeply bizarre and surreal in a way I can't quite describe; there's something about it where I couldn't tell how serious they were trying to be, and if it was meant to be comedic, it went WAY too far. This movie is like one of those people you meet who says weird stuff all the time and you can't tell if they're joking or not, and then later you find out they did something horrible in the past, and you're like "oh, now it all makes sense".
I really don't think that this is a bad movie, it's just that I expected something much different because it was discussed fairly heavily in horror circles despite being what I would not consider a horror movie. It has that flavor of being tailored to the now, to the particular sense of vaguely offensive, explicit humor that's currently (unfortunately) very popular in mainstream film. It doesn't commit to any particular emotion but instead ranges wildly between them and seems to go "HAHA! Just kidding!" any time it looks like it's going to finally pick a direction and stick with it. Also, I know this isn't real life and all, but I'm supposed to believe the main character never saw any pictures of his dad? He didn't have ANY memories of him that were clear enough to make him able to tell his father from a random stranger? That was a nearly insurmountable plot hole once I started thinking about it too much.
Canada, Ireland, New Zealand
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----
I'm not even going to try and keep this review objective because this is a case where I was really looking forward to something and it didn't work for me, not because it was a bad movie, but because it was not my speed. Even though they're two totally different films, it put me in mind of Knives Out: another recent and critically acclaimed film with lots of twists and turns that I just couldn't get up the excitement for that other people seemed to have. I'm also going to be discussing plot spoilers and it is best to go into this without knowing anything about it.
So the general idea that Come To Daddy starts you off with is the fear of facing one of your parents and finding that they're someone totally different than the picture you had of them all your life, although in this case it's complicated because the main character hasn't seen his father for thirty years and has no idea what to expect. For plot reasons, Stephen McHattie is billed as having a much bigger role than he actually does, when in reality, as is fairly typical for him, he's there for a little while, does and says some wild stuff, and then leaves. In my opinion he's the real MVP of this film and is the reason why I bothered with it at all. His character is just so absurd and so far beyond any of the others that he honestly doesn't fit in with the movie, because they set us up for this bizarre cat-mouse game between the protagonist and McHattie as his "father", and then drove off in a different direction and left the potential for a good and darkly humorous film in the lurch.
This is a funny movie, but I felt like it tried way too hard. Elijah Wood is inherently a funny actor, I think he's got a great sense of line delivery and is very good at deadpanning jokes, so I'm not placing blame on him here, but there's too many lines that come off like the writer/s were trying to think of the most over-the-top statement they could throw in and never revisit again. There's a long and gory fight scene between the main character and a large man with no pants on that's just... deeply bizarre and surreal in a way I can't quite describe; there's something about it where I couldn't tell how serious they were trying to be, and if it was meant to be comedic, it went WAY too far. This movie is like one of those people you meet who says weird stuff all the time and you can't tell if they're joking or not, and then later you find out they did something horrible in the past, and you're like "oh, now it all makes sense".
I really don't think that this is a bad movie, it's just that I expected something much different because it was discussed fairly heavily in horror circles despite being what I would not consider a horror movie. It has that flavor of being tailored to the now, to the particular sense of vaguely offensive, explicit humor that's currently (unfortunately) very popular in mainstream film. It doesn't commit to any particular emotion but instead ranges wildly between them and seems to go "HAHA! Just kidding!" any time it looks like it's going to finally pick a direction and stick with it. Also, I know this isn't real life and all, but I'm supposed to believe the main character never saw any pictures of his dad? He didn't have ANY memories of him that were clear enough to make him able to tell his father from a random stranger? That was a nearly insurmountable plot hole once I started thinking about it too much.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Into the Dark: My Valentine (2020)
directed by Maggie Levin
USA
79 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----
This was in no way a bad entry in the Into the Dark lineup in terms of quality (especially acting) but I have some issues with it. I guess I appreciate the basic concept, that it's trying to use Valentine's Day to acknowledge and bring attention to the toxic side of relationships and "love", but a lot of the time I feel like the semi-recent effort to bring visibility to abusive relationships is part of an uglier trend of commodifying self-care. Makeup and skincare companies realized they could bring in big bucks if they used models who aren't skinny and gave them scripts with lines about loving themselves to say while they slather on blemish cream. I'm just afraid those same people are going to start co-opting the experience of being in an abusive relationship and spitting out faux-empowering, borderline harmful "just leave him girlfran!!!!!!" messages that wholly ignore the systemic causes of abuse.
So what we have in this episode aesthetics-wise is something that seems like it's trying to be Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and doing a pretty good job of it. The stream I was watching was in horrible quality so I couldn't fully appreciate the touches of neon, but- although everybody and their amateur filmmaker aunt is doing neon these days- I still thought it looked good. The original songs written for the episode are genuinely good too, which is absolutely crucial to any film or TV series with a fake pop star. The performances of said songs are also worth an A for effort even though it's really obvious the actresses are all lip-syncing. The acting in general might actually be the best I've seen from an Into the Dark episode- I'm kind of amazed that the most popular thing Valentine Fawkes' actress has been in is a Halo movie of all things.
But I just didn't get a lot of this. I thought I understood its basic message but things kept happening that seemed to be totally out of line with that message, especially the ending. Is... is murder supposed to be empowering? I'm not talking about killing your abuser, but killing a woman who is in the same situation as you, because her brainwashing was so thorough that she turns against you instead of instantly snapping out of her conditioning? I can see how maybe the final death was supposed to be a metaphor for killing your past self, but... I feel like killing an actual character who was real and not an aspect of another character just counts as murder and not a metaphor. I don't know, this was more confusing than it should have been for a 79-minute episode of a horror TV series. It's one of the better episodes when it comes to acting and production, but I have to give the side-eye to a lot of stuff about it.
USA
79 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----
This was in no way a bad entry in the Into the Dark lineup in terms of quality (especially acting) but I have some issues with it. I guess I appreciate the basic concept, that it's trying to use Valentine's Day to acknowledge and bring attention to the toxic side of relationships and "love", but a lot of the time I feel like the semi-recent effort to bring visibility to abusive relationships is part of an uglier trend of commodifying self-care. Makeup and skincare companies realized they could bring in big bucks if they used models who aren't skinny and gave them scripts with lines about loving themselves to say while they slather on blemish cream. I'm just afraid those same people are going to start co-opting the experience of being in an abusive relationship and spitting out faux-empowering, borderline harmful "just leave him girlfran!!!!!!" messages that wholly ignore the systemic causes of abuse.
So what we have in this episode aesthetics-wise is something that seems like it's trying to be Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and doing a pretty good job of it. The stream I was watching was in horrible quality so I couldn't fully appreciate the touches of neon, but- although everybody and their amateur filmmaker aunt is doing neon these days- I still thought it looked good. The original songs written for the episode are genuinely good too, which is absolutely crucial to any film or TV series with a fake pop star. The performances of said songs are also worth an A for effort even though it's really obvious the actresses are all lip-syncing. The acting in general might actually be the best I've seen from an Into the Dark episode- I'm kind of amazed that the most popular thing Valentine Fawkes' actress has been in is a Halo movie of all things.
But I just didn't get a lot of this. I thought I understood its basic message but things kept happening that seemed to be totally out of line with that message, especially the ending. Is... is murder supposed to be empowering? I'm not talking about killing your abuser, but killing a woman who is in the same situation as you, because her brainwashing was so thorough that she turns against you instead of instantly snapping out of her conditioning? I can see how maybe the final death was supposed to be a metaphor for killing your past self, but... I feel like killing an actual character who was real and not an aspect of another character just counts as murder and not a metaphor. I don't know, this was more confusing than it should have been for a 79-minute episode of a horror TV series. It's one of the better episodes when it comes to acting and production, but I have to give the side-eye to a lot of stuff about it.
Monday, February 10, 2020
Color Out of Space (2020)
directed by Richard Stanley
Malaysia/Portugal/USA
111 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----
There's something deeply satisfying about seeing Lovecraft done as directly as this film renders him. The majority of his typical themes- cosmic horror, incomprehensible alien entities from beyond the stars, bodily transfiguration- are all there, but instead of being dressed up with his usual obscure prose, the point is shown to us clearly and horrifyingly.
That all being said, this movie has some tone issues. I'm giving it five stars because to me personally, sitting there in the theater watching people get their souls blasted apart by alien beings was an absolutely fantastic time and I enjoyed it. But it's got some quirks. The biggest of these is a double-edged sword in the form of Nicolas Cage: his presence in the film is distracting, but he's also its sole source of humor, bringing his singular vibes to every scene he's in. I wanted to start this review off talking about how there's so much about Color Out of Space that genuinely sounds ridiculous if you isolate it, for example: Nic Cage shooting mutant alpacas, Nic Cage slam-dunking tomatoes into a trash can, and the most chilling monologue of the entire film being delivered by Tommy Chong after his physical body has died. Somehow, though, despite the occasionally jarring humor, this manages to be possibly the best depiction of Lovecraftian horror on-screen that I've seen yet.
Like I said, it's not subtle. You will see the unfathomable depths of the alien landscape the Color hails from and it will be super freaky. I'm still on the fence about some of the Color-infected CGI animals, like the cat and the weird praying mantis that the youngest son sees, but I guess we had to have some visual reference for an intermediate stage between "normal life-form" and "unrecognizable meatbeast".
The other weird thing about the movie is that it's thoroughly modernized. I do like to see Lovecraft done with at least some measure of self-aware purple prose- I think he just demands a certain level of darkness, a certain seriousness, even if you acknowledge that it's all kind of corny while you're doing it. A typical nuclear family who just so happen to have a chunk of incomprehensible terror land in their front yard is a far cry from the isolated backwoods folk Lovecraft typically wrote about. After a while the setting doesn't matter so much, because the story becomes more and more about how deeply the Color is affecting everything around it, but the bland normalcy of a sort-of rural farm only slightly removed from suburbia isn't the backdrop I'm used to for this kind of thing.
I really can't help but love this, though. It explores so much that previous adaptations have been afraid to (or possibly just didn't have the budget to). It goes to truly nasty places. It has Nicolas Cage milking an alpaca. I sure hope Richard Stanley is back for good.
Malaysia/Portugal/USA
111 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----
There's something deeply satisfying about seeing Lovecraft done as directly as this film renders him. The majority of his typical themes- cosmic horror, incomprehensible alien entities from beyond the stars, bodily transfiguration- are all there, but instead of being dressed up with his usual obscure prose, the point is shown to us clearly and horrifyingly.
That all being said, this movie has some tone issues. I'm giving it five stars because to me personally, sitting there in the theater watching people get their souls blasted apart by alien beings was an absolutely fantastic time and I enjoyed it. But it's got some quirks. The biggest of these is a double-edged sword in the form of Nicolas Cage: his presence in the film is distracting, but he's also its sole source of humor, bringing his singular vibes to every scene he's in. I wanted to start this review off talking about how there's so much about Color Out of Space that genuinely sounds ridiculous if you isolate it, for example: Nic Cage shooting mutant alpacas, Nic Cage slam-dunking tomatoes into a trash can, and the most chilling monologue of the entire film being delivered by Tommy Chong after his physical body has died. Somehow, though, despite the occasionally jarring humor, this manages to be possibly the best depiction of Lovecraftian horror on-screen that I've seen yet.
Like I said, it's not subtle. You will see the unfathomable depths of the alien landscape the Color hails from and it will be super freaky. I'm still on the fence about some of the Color-infected CGI animals, like the cat and the weird praying mantis that the youngest son sees, but I guess we had to have some visual reference for an intermediate stage between "normal life-form" and "unrecognizable meatbeast".
The other weird thing about the movie is that it's thoroughly modernized. I do like to see Lovecraft done with at least some measure of self-aware purple prose- I think he just demands a certain level of darkness, a certain seriousness, even if you acknowledge that it's all kind of corny while you're doing it. A typical nuclear family who just so happen to have a chunk of incomprehensible terror land in their front yard is a far cry from the isolated backwoods folk Lovecraft typically wrote about. After a while the setting doesn't matter so much, because the story becomes more and more about how deeply the Color is affecting everything around it, but the bland normalcy of a sort-of rural farm only slightly removed from suburbia isn't the backdrop I'm used to for this kind of thing.
I really can't help but love this, though. It explores so much that previous adaptations have been afraid to (or possibly just didn't have the budget to). It goes to truly nasty places. It has Nicolas Cage milking an alpaca. I sure hope Richard Stanley is back for good.
Friday, February 7, 2020
Monolith (2016)
directed by Ivan Silvestrini
Italy
81 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----
Boy, when I'm wrong about movies, I am wrong. When I started this I noticed a sneaky little watermark in the corner that the streaming platform didn't remove: Lifetime Movies. I don't know how it evaded me that this was a Lifetime Original, but it didn't evade me for long, because this is basically a handful of typical Lifetime tropes blended together and transplanted onto a vaguely sci-fi backdrop; a backdrop which I had thought would be much more pronounced, hence why I even watched it in the first place.
So it's basically super obvious that this is Lifetime's attempt to cash in on the whole concept of Black Mirror. It's about a mother who receives an ultra-advanced (and ultra-ugly) smart car with a Siri/Alexa-type personal assistant in it. The car works against her unintentionally when a series of events combine to leave her stranded in the middle of a desert while her young son is trapped inside, in temperatures that quickly reach over 100 degrees. Like I said, there's a lot of tropes rolled into this: the mom is nervous about her man possibly cheating on her; she's got doubts in the back of her mind about abandoning her youthful, wild lifestyle for settling down with a child; she's a little bit absent-minded as a parent sometimes; all that stuff the networks stick in to be relatable. And I admit, a lot of my distaste for this is because I am very far outside its target demographic, I was only watching it because I thought it'd be sci-fi. For moms channel-surfing with no particular desire to see a genre film, it might be fun.
And I have to concede that it isn't that terrible. It gets extremely cheesy sometimes and it's unrealistic in terms of what a person reasonably could handle while being in a hot desert for hours and hours (and shouldn't it have become nightfall or dusk at some point during this film?), but it's also got a car that can drive straight up a cliff so I'm not concerned about realism. It's just that the overlaid tropes are obvious and would have been the same no matter what scenario they were in. They're just going through the motions, but aping Black Mirror this time.
It's also kind of funny the way it seems to have been written so that this random able-bodied white mom is being persecuted just for being. Like, she has encounters with needlessly rude millennials who only are there to taunt her with their young bodies and free-loving lifestyles. The millennials are combative and giggly at the same time, and really they could have CGI'd a little angel and devil on the protagonist's shoulders and it would have accomplished the same effect the random young people did.
I'm curious to know how successful this was commercially because it would be interesting to have Lifetime go in a more genre-oriented direction, although I have no doubt it would all be the most watered-down form of science fiction or horror they could possibly come up with, and I personally would still have no interest in seeing any of it. But Monolith is a nice experiment, and it's a nice movie if you like that kind of thing; it builds good tension and gets you invested in it while all the while you know everything will be just fine in the end.
Italy
81 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----
Boy, when I'm wrong about movies, I am wrong. When I started this I noticed a sneaky little watermark in the corner that the streaming platform didn't remove: Lifetime Movies. I don't know how it evaded me that this was a Lifetime Original, but it didn't evade me for long, because this is basically a handful of typical Lifetime tropes blended together and transplanted onto a vaguely sci-fi backdrop; a backdrop which I had thought would be much more pronounced, hence why I even watched it in the first place.
So it's basically super obvious that this is Lifetime's attempt to cash in on the whole concept of Black Mirror. It's about a mother who receives an ultra-advanced (and ultra-ugly) smart car with a Siri/Alexa-type personal assistant in it. The car works against her unintentionally when a series of events combine to leave her stranded in the middle of a desert while her young son is trapped inside, in temperatures that quickly reach over 100 degrees. Like I said, there's a lot of tropes rolled into this: the mom is nervous about her man possibly cheating on her; she's got doubts in the back of her mind about abandoning her youthful, wild lifestyle for settling down with a child; she's a little bit absent-minded as a parent sometimes; all that stuff the networks stick in to be relatable. And I admit, a lot of my distaste for this is because I am very far outside its target demographic, I was only watching it because I thought it'd be sci-fi. For moms channel-surfing with no particular desire to see a genre film, it might be fun.
And I have to concede that it isn't that terrible. It gets extremely cheesy sometimes and it's unrealistic in terms of what a person reasonably could handle while being in a hot desert for hours and hours (and shouldn't it have become nightfall or dusk at some point during this film?), but it's also got a car that can drive straight up a cliff so I'm not concerned about realism. It's just that the overlaid tropes are obvious and would have been the same no matter what scenario they were in. They're just going through the motions, but aping Black Mirror this time.
It's also kind of funny the way it seems to have been written so that this random able-bodied white mom is being persecuted just for being. Like, she has encounters with needlessly rude millennials who only are there to taunt her with their young bodies and free-loving lifestyles. The millennials are combative and giggly at the same time, and really they could have CGI'd a little angel and devil on the protagonist's shoulders and it would have accomplished the same effect the random young people did.
I'm curious to know how successful this was commercially because it would be interesting to have Lifetime go in a more genre-oriented direction, although I have no doubt it would all be the most watered-down form of science fiction or horror they could possibly come up with, and I personally would still have no interest in seeing any of it. But Monolith is a nice experiment, and it's a nice movie if you like that kind of thing; it builds good tension and gets you invested in it while all the while you know everything will be just fine in the end.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Videodrome (1983)
directed by David Cronenberg
Canada
88 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----
It's been a very long time since I first watched this and I've never written a review to do it justice- I probably still won't- so I figured it was time to revisit it. Upon re-watching it I was reminded all over again why this is one of my favorite movies ever. I think it gets better every time.
Cronenberg really tapped into something with Videodrome, which is ironic because it is essentially a movie about tapping into something. There are themes in this film that were highly relevant at the time it was released and are still highly relevant today, and will continue to be relevant as long as technology continues to advance and bring with it our appetite for shock. To me personally, it's surprising that I enjoy something with themes like that because generally I find criticisms of technological progress and warnings of the merging of the human and the inhuman to be extremely heavy-handed, but this is largely because most media with that intent go about it the wrong way. Videodrome doesn't particularly feel like it's trying to advance a moral or make a point about how technology isolates us, à la Black Mirror- it's the opposite, actually; the whole thing is a frenzy of bringing-together, of the Videodrome infection trying to spread to as many people as possible until we're all together in front of and inside the eye of the television screen. The technology used may be many years out of date by now, but the idea of it continues to last.
I was trying to figure out the specific difference between Videodrome and the wave of films that began to emerge when computer technology became cheaper and more available, because in my opinion almost all of those films suck even though they may explore virtually the same elements of human-inhuman fusion as Videodrome. I think it has something to do with autonomy. In the "digital age" and the bad sci-fi movies that came with it, the prevalent fear is that computers are going to take away our individual rights and ability to control our own decision-making and run the world without human input. Videodrome is frightening because it does have that aspect of human input to it, but the input is vanishing and questionable: Who is broadcasting Videodrome? Who is physically on the screen performing the acts, and who is behind the camera filming them? Where the movie gets deeply unnerving is in the possibility that the divide between "who" and "what" is no longer there, that Videodrome may be broadcasting itself and that, as heavily implied by the fleshy camera placed on the main character's head to capture his hallucinations, there may be no significant boundary between the cameraperson and their camera.
The reason why this movie persists as a warning and doesn't feel like an empty "Hey kids, more like dumb-phone, am I right???"-type statement is because its message is that people and things out there will use our desires to control us. They'll use our want for more flesh, more extremity, and easier access to whatever we desire to rope us into being complacent and not paying attention to who's using us. Videodrome uses visuals of disturbing, biological growths and sadism to convey this metamorphosis into a being inseparable from the content it consumes. I think this is probably David Cronenberg's best movie and certainly my personal favorite. It's not free of problems especially in the misogyny department, but it has a message at its core that it gets across perfectly.
Canada
88 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----
It's been a very long time since I first watched this and I've never written a review to do it justice- I probably still won't- so I figured it was time to revisit it. Upon re-watching it I was reminded all over again why this is one of my favorite movies ever. I think it gets better every time.
Cronenberg really tapped into something with Videodrome, which is ironic because it is essentially a movie about tapping into something. There are themes in this film that were highly relevant at the time it was released and are still highly relevant today, and will continue to be relevant as long as technology continues to advance and bring with it our appetite for shock. To me personally, it's surprising that I enjoy something with themes like that because generally I find criticisms of technological progress and warnings of the merging of the human and the inhuman to be extremely heavy-handed, but this is largely because most media with that intent go about it the wrong way. Videodrome doesn't particularly feel like it's trying to advance a moral or make a point about how technology isolates us, à la Black Mirror- it's the opposite, actually; the whole thing is a frenzy of bringing-together, of the Videodrome infection trying to spread to as many people as possible until we're all together in front of and inside the eye of the television screen. The technology used may be many years out of date by now, but the idea of it continues to last.
I was trying to figure out the specific difference between Videodrome and the wave of films that began to emerge when computer technology became cheaper and more available, because in my opinion almost all of those films suck even though they may explore virtually the same elements of human-inhuman fusion as Videodrome. I think it has something to do with autonomy. In the "digital age" and the bad sci-fi movies that came with it, the prevalent fear is that computers are going to take away our individual rights and ability to control our own decision-making and run the world without human input. Videodrome is frightening because it does have that aspect of human input to it, but the input is vanishing and questionable: Who is broadcasting Videodrome? Who is physically on the screen performing the acts, and who is behind the camera filming them? Where the movie gets deeply unnerving is in the possibility that the divide between "who" and "what" is no longer there, that Videodrome may be broadcasting itself and that, as heavily implied by the fleshy camera placed on the main character's head to capture his hallucinations, there may be no significant boundary between the cameraperson and their camera.
The reason why this movie persists as a warning and doesn't feel like an empty "Hey kids, more like dumb-phone, am I right???"-type statement is because its message is that people and things out there will use our desires to control us. They'll use our want for more flesh, more extremity, and easier access to whatever we desire to rope us into being complacent and not paying attention to who's using us. Videodrome uses visuals of disturbing, biological growths and sadism to convey this metamorphosis into a being inseparable from the content it consumes. I think this is probably David Cronenberg's best movie and certainly my personal favorite. It's not free of problems especially in the misogyny department, but it has a message at its core that it gets across perfectly.
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