Steve Jobs

Saw Steve Jobs, another rat-a-tat film scripted by Aaron Sorkin.  Due to the writer and subject, I couldn't help but compare this to yesterday's Social Network.  This one is much more dense and less simplistic, I feel, but also somehow a weaker film.  It's very information-dense and wordy (of course) but I found it hard to care very much about the intense family and business struggles of Steve Jobs.  My opinion is colored somewhat since I'm very much outside of Steve's cult of personality (I've never even used a mac for more than a few hours in my life I think) and he struck me as a person who doesn't deserve their accolades (but then, who does?)

Anyway, it also doesn't help that the film constrains itself to three real-time vignettes of backstage drama during three product launches over Steve's career.  Each time, Steve is visited by the three ghosts of business (in the form of long-time Apple CEO John Sculley,) technology (Steve Wozniac,) and family (his daughter, Lisa.)  As with Social Network, the girl is posited as the key to the riddle and while this feels simplistic to me, Steve is a more accessible person than Mark Zuckerberg, so it may be closer to the mark.

The film, to its credit, fully explores each of these angles on the Steve-ian enigma, and each provides some great shouting scenes where the actors can show off their chops.  The film is fairly chilly and kind of claustrophobic.  Because he's having these conversations literally minutes before a product unveiling, when hoards of people are literally baying for his presence, everything seems heightened, dramatic, and tense.  It's tough to tell the jerk side of Jobs from the stage jitters side of Jobs.  It's a small thing.

So, this film was alright.  I feel I was not the target audience and that the target audience was in fact Apple/Jobs fan-boys or folks who are just interested in the glitzy big-business/advertising side of things, but the film delivered histrionics and tense show-downs that require attention and I liked that.  I liked The Social Network a little better, even as I think it's a somewhat sillier film, but this one was a bit too chilly/intellectual.  I would have preferred some more time and some more conventional storytelling.

The Social Network

Saw The Social Network, a slick film about the founding of Facebook and about the founder Mark Zuckerberg.  The film is written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, so the vibe is very nerd-masculine.  Not worshiping physical violence, but loving a clever, quippy sort of sarcasm.  The film is very slick and yet felt sort of glib to me.  The rise of Facebook and the autistic genius of Mark Zuckerberg are fun to watch but ultimately the film reveals that it was all done for very simple emotional reasons and that the Zuck is just a human being after all.  This is annoying to me.

The film is mostly about Mark.  He's played as somewhat neurodivergent (OCD?  Aspergers?) however he's smart enough to pull off this stand-offish misunderstood genius act.  More than that, he realizes that gathering power and money through business is orthogonal to making useful or new things.  He starts out in Harvard where social currency is prized more highly than actual cash.  He starts out wanting to join a frat in spite of being unlikable and generally exhausting to deal with.  He soon realizes after an experimental precursor to Facebook crashes the Harvard network that frats are just a means to networking and that he's capable of just leapfrogging the whole frat system.

I feel the film suggests that he's sort of a normal person in an Asperger-shaped disguise.  He wants acceptance, he wants The Girl, he wants friends but he just somehow can't (how tragic!)  It does nail the way that Silicon Valley (and the world in general) rewards social manipulation, clout, and access to moneyed folk.  There's an investor (Sean Parker who founded Napster) who takes an interest in Facebook and freezes out the previous CFO (Mark's college dorm-mate.)  He's not smarter or objectively better, but he is more experienced and better connected and the first thing he does is isolate Mark as his own privet money-making pet.  This is, ladies and gents, how it works.

I feel this sort of cynicism puts the film in the realm of Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street: dark, miserable films that worship success and excess and which seem to show life as it really is, behind the curtain.  Because this film deals with tech it feels sort of inspiring to me, but it still tastes poisonous.  I did greatly enjoy it however and one man's cynicism is sometimes another man's inspiration, so who knows.  I loved the out-of-nowhere tilt-shifted regatta.  I also enjoyed the seductive revenge of the nerds angle.  Wimpy coders take down buff frat bros (two Adonis-like twins are completely steamrolled by The Zuck in a few satisfying scenes) and pull all the prettiest girls.  Go, nerds.

In the end however, I feel the film is a snarky, grim little thing that sure loves a cutting remark but which feel pat and overly simplistic.  The point is to create a satisfying narrative arc however and so the film must ultimately resolve into broad easy emotions that are relatable.  They may not be true, but they may be close enough to count.  Anyway a good, mean film.

I'm Thinking About Ending Things

Saw I'm Thinking About Ending Things, a complex, ominous film by Charlie Kaufman.  This film is focused on a woman who is thinking of "ending things."  The film implies she's thinking of breaking up with her incel-like boyfriend however, Charlie Kaufman not being one for half-measures, explores the other common use of that phrase: death and suicide.

The film starts with the couple travelling to the guy's family farm.  It's heavily coded as a place of death and entrapment.  The barns are rotting, the screen door is torn.  The girl is dressed in bright reds that fade to pinks and blacks and then to blues the longer she stays.  There is a dog who is only shown in isolation, forever shaking its head - disconcertingly disappearing between cuts.  The film is intentionally dream-like and off-putting.  Netflix bills it as a horror, but it's a creeping, baffling kind of horror, like a David Lynch film.

The ending of the central relationship is linked to the ending of life - a destruction and dissolution, making everyone increasingly confused and foggy before the end arrives.  Then again, of course, being trapped in a bad relationship is another sort of death - a living death of embalmed stasis.  Again and again the girl pleads with the boy to leave the farm house.  She lists many different reasons to leave: she must work on her essay, she has to do research, she has an early shift, but still they linger and linger as the storm gets worse outside and his parents keep aging.

The film also brings up notions of consent and agency.  This girl seems to be kept against her will, imprisoned in the farm house and later in the car.  In a relationship is either party (can either party) be fully aware of what they're consenting to?  And what about the larger, echoed theme?  None of us consented to be born, you know.  The big and small anxieties of life and relationships keep echoing and reflecting each other, making big questions small and small questions big.  Later in the film, a pig explains a little: everything is like everything if you look closely enough.  Pigs are often used as a symbol for death in this film.

The boy in the film is deeply creepy and the source for most of the horror in the film.  When rabies is brought up, we focus on a fleck of foamy spit on his mouth.  He endlessly corrects the girl and pedantically explains references that she makes, coming off like an insecure internet troll, defending a balloon-skin-thin ego and perhaps suffering from some slight autism (he shows and aversion to touch.)  He is grunting, fat, and ogre-ish and sullenly shouts at his fragile mother.  He's pathetic and abominable.  A great villain!

The film was really interesting.  It's kind of dream-like and eerie.  Very evocative and fascinating.  It's not the sort of film you can "solve" exactly so be ware.  You never get the solutions to all of the questions (or at any rate I didn't) and that's OK (like the setting of the film, or the musical they keep referencing: Oklahoma.)  The film is full of interesting twinning and imagery however and is a rich source for speculation.  Are we watching is boy's memories or fantasies about a relationship that never was, or are we seeing an amalgamation of all the previous girls he's known?  I have my theories (see above) but yours will be different.

Crash (1996)

Saw Crash, not the more recent and famous film about race relations but the 1996 one about car crash fetishism.  It's easy to confuse the two, I know.  Anyway this film is a fine, lurid, perverse film by Cronenberg based on a book by J G Ballard who made a career of inventing and pursuing strange obsessions to their insane conclusions.  This film follows a filmmaker named James (named after J G himself) who collides with a woman's car on the highway.  It turns out she is a member of a bizarre group of car-crash fetishists who induct him into their fold.

The film is very over-sexed.  James' girlfriend is constantly nude and gyrating on his lap.  The car crash cult is run by this heavily scarred guy who everyone fantasizes about having sex with (James included.)  There's like 12 sex scenes in this 90 minute long film.  Watch it alone if at all, yeesh!

Anyway, I loved how the insane fetish hung together.  No one has this fetish but car culture permeates American society strongly.  The cult leader is regarded as extremely virile because of his giant car.  He is obsessed with celebrities who died in car accidents and at one point rattles off like six of them.  He recreates the death of James Dean in a car wreck.  No one has this fetish in real life, but it seems almost plausible: a sadomasochistic version of car worship.

The film is pretty good. There's a ton of sex scenes which must be (for me) endured, however the obsessions of the film are interesting in their connection to real life.  Like the Matrix, there's a suggestion of a shadowy nether world which runs in the shadows of this one.  It's also morbid good fun to see how far the characters take their obsession.  This is such a fascinating, lurid, filthy little film.  I feel some of the sex scenes ideally would be removed, but as it is, they serve to underscore the decadent, pleasure-seeking nature of the main characters.  It got a bit slog-ish at parts, but the concept is so good and so crazy, I feel that I will love it more in retrospect.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Saw Beasts of the Southern Wild, a beautiful, poetic, fable of a film which follows Hushpuppy, a girl living with her father off the grid in the outskirts and wetlands of (I think) Louisiana.  She is taught and minded by a gang of dunks and weirdos who teach her that the icecaps are melting, freeing old extinct monsters that the cave men fought off.  These beasts become associated with water and storms to young Hushpuppy, a fitting nemesis in a post-Katrina New Orleans.

The film is shot sort of magically and sort of realistically.  The girl is abandoned by her father for a while (for example) only for him to show up again in a hospital gown.  When she asks where he went, he just yells at her.  Earlier in the film, she puts her head to a hog's side to listen to its heart beat.  It's a strange mix of touching innocence and harsh reality colliding in this one girl's head.

The image of water is potent as well.  They live in a watery land, but also a land where too much water, thundering down like the hooves of those large beasts, spells doom for the floating community.  Rain is reason to be scared but, during deaths, the community sheds no tears, instead drinking clear, vodka-like spirits.  Water is life but also it is death.

Hushpuppy is made tough by this world and while her toughness is admirable, it's also poignant.  I wish she could have been allowed to grow up in the dry world where she maybe didn't have to be so tough.

This film was very lyrical and interesting.  I enjoyed it even as I felt I didn't fully understand it.

A Few Good Men

Saw A Few Good Men, rounding out this courtroom drama kick I've been on.  This film follows a murder trial where two marines are accused of hazing a fellow marine to death.  Over the course of this trial, the defense shall show that the marines were acting on the explicit orders of their commanders and that, howsoever we desire the truth, yet we cannot handle the truth.  The film was made in 1992 but the central hazing event happened in Guantanamo.  In a wonderful example of life imitating art, this film revolves around the incongruity of American ideals vs the methods used to uphold them - a theme which is now intimately connected with Guantanamo.

The film is fairly taught.  It starts off as a sort of mystery, with the main characters collecting evidence and searching for the cracks which will make the prosecution's case fall apart.  There's character growth as well, but it's very on-the-nose stuff.  We're not meant to discover that this character has grown: we are told it in montage and in that character soulfully gazing out into the ocean.  Like I say, the first half is a mystery that we're uncovering.  The themes of honor and the importance of a moral code are set-dressing to the court case.

Then the court case comes and the formula is reversed.  We have no last-minute surprise evidence or witnesses, just men screaming at each other about ends and means and, yes, that great line "you can't handle the truth!"  The second half works to drive both the thematic and plot elements to a climax in the same scene.  It's some great stuff!

The central philosophical struggle concerns doing what's right vs doing what's expedient.  The truth that we cannot handle is that the front lines of national borders are brutal, dehumanizing places where barbarity quickly sneaks in.  Americans would learn this lesson in real life during the W Bush years when it was revealed that, yes, America tortures its prisoners too and that, no, they're not going to stop.  Although the lawyer wins the battle in this film, they loose the war.  The film however imagines a seductive world where virtue is rewarded and that noble intentions are recognized and rewarded.  Incidentally, this film was inspired by a real-life hazing case in Guantanamo.

The film is good - it has a lot of dynamite performances by an excellent cast.  The script is good and clever, and the plot portrays a seductive world where clever people catch evildoers and put them away for the sake of the greater good.  It deals with complex, real-world issues which indict our existing world.

Q:The Winged Serpent

Saw Q:The Winged Serpent, a film as strange as its title.  It's about a series of mysterious murders in NYC which turn out to be caused by the reincarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who is living in the Chrysler building.  The film is a B-movie romp crossed with a 1970s gritty realism crime thriller.

The film is interesting in its mix of influences.  Made in 1982, it bears the gritty look and naturalistic, semi-improvised performances of the 70s, but the monster is all Jason and the Argonauts-style stop motion and aging green-screen.  I feel this film would have worked better as a book or something.  Almost everything involving the monster is not worth it.

The bits that are worth it are the scenes reveling in the bizarreness of the situation.  Instead of having some audience stand-in character become aware of the monster and get a good look at it, we follow sweaty, pudgy cops who are trying to solve these mysterious beheadings and gruesome disembowelings suddenly plaguing the city.  It's a gritty-realistic-style approach given to an utterly nutty concept.  Very interesting if nothing else.

As you might expect, this film is really more strange and outlandish than it is entertaining.  After the premise is revealed, everything else seems sort of plodding and pedestrian in comparison, especially since we're follow a cops-eye view.  I feel like this is the sort of film to watch and react to with friends.  It keeps the weirdness coming at a reasonable pace, the performances are fairly serviceable, and it's relatively short.  Watched alone it's a bit of a slog by the end however.

Legally Blonde

Saw Legally Blonde, a cute, goofy movie about a stereotypical, air-headed sorority girl who gets into law school to impress her ex-boyfriend who dumped her for not being "serious".  It's mostly a fish-out-of-water comedy about this pink-clad, high-heeled blonde woman being perky and bubbly and receiving withering gazes and sneering one-liners from stuffy law profs.  The film is very satisfying however, because you know the pretty girl is going to show them all and the profs' wry smiles will slowly become genuine smiles of quiet approval.

The film is a lot goofier than I expected.  The bassoon is heavy on the soundtrack and all emotions are broadcast loudly.  It's not a "smart dumb" movie, just a dumb-dumb movie.  I was hoping for more nuance and frankly hoped that the film would honor some her of "silly" girl-world problems and skills.  Perhaps there could be a scene showing how keeping a sorority-full of women happy requires some very complex management and diplomacy.  No such luck, alas.

Of course the film isn't just one-note or totally straightforward either.  There's scenes where the main character doubts herself, or where she buckles down and achieves greatness, but often it's in spite of her self that she does this, not because of it.  I wish it were otherwise because as the film is, it reinforces the opinion of the ex-boyfriend: that her life is a frivolous waste of time.  Only something serious like Law is worth spending attention on.  I'm not sure what about Law makes it more important than (say) fashion or public relations, but the law school has some very distinguished professors and some very fancy buildings, so...

The above grousing aside, the film is totally a fun guilty pleasure.  The main character, although dumb, is incredibly hard-working and seems to be a genuinely nice person.  She helps a couple of side-characters and, when a former mean girl tries to make up with her, she quickly forgives and forgets.  Snide law students make fun of her but she is nothing but nice and assertive.  The final court-case show-down is ridiculous and God help her future clients, but she's a fun person to watch for a while and a good person to root for.

Phantasm

Saw Phantasm, an interesting but kind of mixed bag horror film about two brothers and a spooky funeral home director.  The film contains eerie, fascinating scenes that still feel fresh and novel, and also strange, dated scenes that feel moldier than a year-old corpse.  The film is interesting on the whole and goes to some very strange and interesting places, but it's a mixed bag in the end, containing as much bad as good.

The film is apparently based on a dream the director had of a chrome sphere chasing him through marble hallways, intent on drilling into his head.  That sequence exists in this film and is great.  A lot of the horror sequences in the film dip heavily into sci-fi imagery, with chrome and machinery so advanced it is like magic.  All of these scenes are marvelous and feel like something out of Beyond the Black Rainbow or something.  The mixture of dread with high-tech magic is fascinating and ripe for the modern time: there is a toxic ghost in the machine, animating it to terrible ends.

The film does show its age in most other scenes however.  There's a lot of scenes with the younger brother in particular, delivering lines like "You gotta be shittin' me, man! That mother's strong!" in a pipping little-boy voice.  The older brother isn't saddled with such cumbersome lines, but he spends a lot of time playing guitar and driving a muscle car and being a cool dude.

There's some other scenes that are not so much dated as just kind of clumsy.  At one point the younger brother is locked in his room but MacGyver's his way out.  We watch him slowly and thoughtfully assemble the door-unlocking mechanism.  The scene kind of drags.  At other times characters are abruptly introduced only to be killed off-screen shortly after.  Allegedly the original cut of this film was 3 hours long, so perhaps that's to blame here.  Even at its current modest runtime of 90 minutes, it kind of drags at the end.

The film is worth seeing, but set your expectations low.  There's a lot of stale 70s-ness going on, but there's glimmers and flashes a much more interesting, much stranger movie in there.  This film leaves a ton of stuff unexplained or vaguely hinted at, with enough dangling material for several sequels and comic books.  There's a happy lack of zombies and an abundance of strange imagery.  It's worth a look, just be forewarned.

Wall Street

Saw Wall Street, another film about high finance daring-do.  It's very similar to Wolf of Wall Street, however this one sides more a little more clearly with the good guys, despite the bad guy being rich, powerful, and kind of the main character.  The plot is this: a neophyte stock broker is trying to break into the Big Leagues.  He impresses a Big League-er named Gordon Gekko by passing him some inside information.  Impressed with his willingness to bend the rules in the name of making money, Gordon takes this stock-lad under his wing.  Things go well for a while, but then they do not go well.

Finance films seem to follow the same beats as drug films: the beginning is innocent dabbling, followed by induction into the bigger/harder stuff, followed by the bad times as the money runs out, and then the denouement which usually involves prison.  I guess they're supposed to be cautionary tales, warning us not to let addictive substances such as money and power cost us our souls and autonomy.

I think this film's main motive is to agitate.  Gordon Gekko has a lot of pithy one liners that express an extreme self-serving attitude.  Greed is good.  Money is not created, just moved around.  Finance is a zero-sum game.  He's the self-righteous avatar of lawless finances.  We are supposed to despise him and want him to no longer be capable of existing.  Several times he's shot from waist level, towering over the Manhattan skyline.  The implication is that he is crooked, yes, but he runs this town.  What are you going to do?

The film's ending (not to get too spoiler-y) feels a little unearned.  The slide into increasing corruption and increasing success is fun in a wicked way.  The denouement feels disappointing in comparison - a removal of rascally fun and return to moralizing normality.  This kind of undercuts any agitation the film might hope to inspire.  The film is good and enjoyable to watch, but it flirts a lot with the evil it portrays.  An interesting film.

12 Angry Men

Saw 12 Angry Men, a tense and frothy courtroom melodrama which follows the jurors in a murder case as they retire and deliberate.  They start off with a vote and find that they are not unanimous: they find they are 11 for guilty and 1 not guilty.  Alas, the biggest star of the film, Henry Fonda, is the lone hold-out and thus he begins to work on changing the other guys' minds.

The film is fairly fun.  Quickly the guilty-voters are whittled down to a core of folks who think the defendant is guilty and each has his own (fairly ugly) reasons.  One is racist, the other clearly lacks empathy, and a third collapses on the table, sobbing, as he reveals his motivations.  Fun stuff!

The film is very melodramatic, but it mostly feels realistic.  There's a few very telling scenes that reveal actual human frailties and flaws and they're not always the big scenes.  There's two moments where one of the juror's change their minds: one because he wants this to be over and goes with the majority, and the other because he's not certain any more and must admit a reasonable doubt.  Neither can say precisely why they changed their mind but it is clear that one just does not care and that the other cares but has become muddled, confused, perhaps cares all too much.

I also loved a moment in the final scene where, as they're all leaving the jury room, one juror runs up to Henry Fonda, wanting to continue the emotional experience they were on, only to find that the moment has evaporated after they gave their verdict.  He winds up just lamely asking for his name and then they go their separate ways.  It's a little moment that feels very true-to-life and which also reflects our experience as the film ends: we want to go on feeling and reacting, but it's over now.  See you around!

The film is pretty good.  It's a bit frothy but that suits my taste just fine.  I enjoyed it!

My Cousin Vinny

Saw My Cousin Vinny, since it was in the news a lot lately.  It was pretty good.  The plot is that two college-aged dudes are road tripping across the US and are accused of murdering a quickie-mart employee.  It's now up to their cousin Vinny, an outrageous New Yorker who barely passed the bar exam, to get them acquitted.  The film is a comedy and court-room drama.

The film's humor revolves around the fish-out-of-water experience of Vinny showing up in a podunk town with his leather jacket and shades, his girlfriend in a form-fitting spandex dress.  There's a running gag where he tries to find somewhere (anywhere!) to sleep.  Every hotel is right by the train tracks or by a hog farm or has wild screech owls or something.  I was happy how even-handed this was.  Vinny never seemed to sneer at the small town but he is also not shown to be too fussy - just out of his element, that's all.  There's moments of small-town hick-ery, but also Vinny is sometimes shown to be fussy, so I feel it evens out.

Anyway, once the court case starts, the movie shifts into a courtroom drama with witnesses becoming emotional, recanting their testimony and late-breaking facts being uncovered.  It's all fun stuff.  It's consistently fun to see Vinny interact with the incredibly imposing judge.

The film is fun and breezy.  It's satisfying and amusing.  It won't stick with you or stick in your mind too much, but you'll enjoy the time spent with it.  It's not mean and it's not crude, just a light little snack.

Skatetown USA

Saw Skatetown USA, the first film Patrick Swayze appeared in.  It was enjoyable but not very good.  The film is mostly about roller disco skating and jokes, however the plot is that the good guy and the bad guy are competing for the top prize at a roller disco.  The good guy is good because we don't get to know him at all.  The bad guy is bad because he's in a gang. Swayze plays the bad guy.  It's deeply 70s in style and execution.  It's a trip.

Because roller disco is only interesting to watch for so long, the film tosses in a lot of outrageous but mostly pg-13-rated humor.  We are always jumping from comic relief to comic relief.  There's a pair of idiot chefs who start off insulting each other but wind up throwing dough into each other's faces and pouring popcorn down each other's pants.

Meanwhile, the evil Swayze is plotting sabotage of all kinds at all levels to stop the good guy from winning.  He blackmails the judges, he seduces his dance partner for the couple's dance, he even tries to murder him by rigging his skates!  (How much does he need this prize!?)

The film is very strange.  It's got a lot of attractive people, which is nice, but not a heck of a lot else, which is not so nice.  The comedy is very broad and comes at a rat-a-tat pace which wearies after a bit.  The over-the-top lunacy on display is a lot of fun, but relatable and clever it is not.  It was basically a porn film, only instead of sex it's disco dancing and broad jokes.

Road House

Saw Road House, a winningly stupid film about a cooler (which seems to be some kind of super-bouncer) being hired to work in the saloon of a small town.  He drifts into town like a Kurosawa samurai, all cool restraint and manly stoicism.  Later on, the bad guy drives a monster truck through a car dealership.

The film follows the main character's attempts to clean up this dirty small town and in the process get himself a girl (of course) and impart some stirring, half-nonsensical pearls of wisdom ("pain don't hurt.")  The film stars Patrick Swayze at his Swayziest.  Attractive, stoic, friendly and lackadaisical but ready to give a kick to a bad guy.  I found it all very winning.

I really hate action movies that celebrate asshole behavior.  Late-series Die Hard did this a lot, with John McClane transformed from put-upon every-man to growling, caustic thug.  Similarly with the awful Walking Tall, the noble sheriff fighting cartoonish bad guys with a 2x4 of justice.  In this movie, in contrast, I sympathized with the character a lot more.  I felt like he was slow to violence, preferring it as a tool to shut down conflict than as a pastime.  The ending of course has its share of violence and deeply questionable vigilante justice, but then again they do establish that the sheriff is on the take, so what can one do?

The film is fairly fun.  It's deeply ridiculous and treats women as smiling dolls who all desire a taste of the Swayze.  Swayze's character has its share of stupid myth-building (he has a phd in philosophy!  And yet he's a bouncer?  This guy has layers!) and unnecessary father figures as well.  It's fun though.  The bad guy is smug and bad, Swayze is attractive and good.  It's a cheese-fest but still I liked it.

Uncle Frank

Saw Uncle Frank, a film about a gay uncle of a southern family in the less-tolerant time of 1973.  It's a fairly touching drama which never quite reaches above being just a frothy drama, but it does involve gay people and doesn't involve AIDS, so that's nice.

The film is told from the perspective of Beth, the niece of the gay uncle.  She feels ignored and taken for granted by her sprawling family.  Only her quiet, gentle uncle from New York listens to her and urges her to make her own way, to embrace her own destiny.  She travels to NYC for college and visits the uncle constantly.  Soon his lie is exploded and his equally perfect-in-every-way boyfriend is revealed.  Then the family patriarch dies and the gay uncle is called home one more time to say farewell.

The film then comes to life.  It revolves around the struggle to come out or to stay closeted and let sleeping dogs lie.  This is complicated by the poisonous effects of homophobia and internalized homophobia.  This film deals with those issues fairly frankly without making the family come off too badly.  I feel there's an element of rose-colored glasses here (it was only the 70s after all) but the focus of the film is self-destructive hatred and so it has other things on its mind than intolerance.

I enjoyed the film.  Most gay films either focus on AIDS or on intolerance.  These are usually proselytizing films which are pulling the heart strings of straight audiences.  This one seems more focused on the gay guy and his struggles.  He urged the niece to choose her own life in spite of her family's opinions, but he's not totally comfortable with the life that was forced onto him.

The film is sweet and touching, sad at parts of course, but generally interesting to watch.  It's a solidly alright film about a gay guy which is something of a rarity.

Men in Black 3

Saw Men in Black 3, a much-improved sequel to Men In Black 2.  Once again, an alien baddie must be stopped by the human protagonist alien-police.  This time the evil alien has a hive of insectoid creatures living inside of him which do his bidding (ew).

This film contained many call-backs to the previous films.  We get to see old characters again, we see more celebrities who are revealed to be aliens, we literally travel back in time to the far funkier 60s.  It's a very backwards-looking film.  It came out in 2014, in the nostalgia-heavy times of the early 2010s when it seemed everyone wanted to go back and revisit their childhood.  This conservatism would of course eventually find its way to the ballot box.

Anyway, this film indulges in some nice past-revisiting.  Being also a prequel, it allows the mythos of the Men In Back-iverse to be deepened a bit.  There's some fun in-universe twists that are revealed.  Also, the effects are a lot better now.

Generally a good film!

The Beyond (1981)

Saw The Beyond (1981), an Italian horror film about a woman who inherits a hotel only to discover that this hotel is actually built on top of one of the seven entrances to hell.  Sometimes a gal just can't catch a break!

The film is interesting but a bit lumpy.  I enjoy haunted house films generally and I liked the malevolent, seductive way that the house welcomes the main characters deeper into creepy shit.  I liked the bizarre, futuristic morgue that bodies wind up at.  There's some nice strange, unusual creepiness to be had.  There's a theme of sight and vision throughout this film.  Few eyeballs make it through the film un-popped!

Some of the creepiness is more bewildering than creepy.  There's a blind girl, for example, who plays creepy music in an abandoned house who may be a ghost.  She's a sympathetic character and gives the protagonist many clues throughout the film, but there's no explanation of where she comes from.  Is she a ghost?  Is she homeless?  This ambiguity comes off as slightly clumsy, but I like the ambivalence of it - this is a world in chaos, falling apart.  Maybe a blind girl just slipped through the cracks?

Unfortunately, I could only find a dubbed version to watch online, so I had to put up with the main character's inconsistent southern accent and he film was made a while ago, so there's some unexpected shittiness from the main character's boyfriend (on first hearing of these infernal shenanigans, he scolds her to stop lying to him.  Dude, why?)  There's also a fairly inevitable zombie scene.  Zombies are completely boring to me now and I actively resent their presence in this otherwise original and quirky film.  I'm not even a zombie fan and I must have seen like 20 of those movies by now.  Enough!

So the film is not stellar, but it's very original and interesting.  The effects have aged a fair amount and for my viewing experience, the dubbing was the cause of much frustration, but the idea of a house with secrets appeals to me, and the sinister, magical effects are still fun to watch.  It was not great but interesting.

Men in Black 2

Saw Men in Black 2, a not-very-good sequel to the original hit from the 90s.  Here's the plot: there's a shadow society of aliens who walk among us normal humans and a police-force armed with amnesia-rays who police this shadow society.  In the original, they had to deal with a very mean alien who was killing everyone.  In this one, they again have to deal with a mean alien who is killing everyone, but this time it's a girl.

The movie is alright but very inferior to the original.  It feels more like we're watching a sitcom season finale than a movie.  The protagonist pairs up with a talking pug dog.  The antagonist extends plastic-looking CGI tentacles.  In one scene these tentacles poke into someone's ear and emerge out of his nose.  It's a fairly wacky movie for wackiness's sake.  It passes the time.

The movie is an effects-driven film.  Those are nice, however CGI-heavy, but the rest of the film is clearly a distant after-thought.  There's a love interest that doesn't really go anywhere, there's a Bourne Identity-style series of clues to keep the plot moving.  It's not unpleasant, but a completely forgettable movie.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Saw The Wolf of Wall Street, a biopic about the rise and sort-of-fall of Jordan Belfort, day-trader.  The film depicts grotesque excess and outrageous law-flaunting.  It was fairly depressing for me.  I felt like it wasn't very satisfying but it was evidently reasonably accurate and the real world, alas, is often depressing.

The protagonist is this dude who only cares about money.  He parties and has sex with super-model ladies, stays high on the finest drugs, and lives in the biggest yachts and the biggest houses.  His life looks like a lot of fun, however the character is constantly staying just a hair's breadth out of trouble that his own excesses get him into.  He is tacky and empty.

I found the film depressing in its depiction of big-money excess.  The way the characters take pride in their foul mouths, in their lack of taste, in their willingness to lie and cheat to get a stock sale.  This is a life that, if I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't turn down, but one that's pointless.  The drugs they take short-circuit any need for meaning or fulfillment in their lives: just take another pill, you'll be fine.  This is a sour sort of dream that's being promoted, a boring sort of excitement that wears on you after a while.

So yeah there's that, but I also feel like there's an element of sour grapes in what I've written above.  His life looks a lot more fun than mine does if nothing else.  In the en of the film (spoilers here) he never really faces consequences, but that's true to life, I feel.  I think this is one of those films where if you're kind of upset and made uncomfortable by it, that means you were paying attention.

Then again, if the point is for us to be outraged, why is the outrageous behavior so entertaining?  This film came out in 2013 and in those happier times, I think no one really took the poisonous impact of greed and narcissism seriously.  The puckish protagonist is much less fun when he's the president.

The real life person that this film was based on apparently styled himself after Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) who was himself based on an amalgam of stock brokers Oliver Stone knew.  Thus the culture celebrates and perpetuates itself.  Nowadays of course stock brokers are quaint relics of the 90s - replaced by high-frequency trading algorithms that don't even need cocaine.  The culture of Wall Street excess however has stayed alive in Silicon Valley and in those trading companies and whereaver money is to be made.  How depressing.

From Hell

Saw From Hell, a Johnny Depp vehicle (of all things) based on the comic book of the same name by Alan Moore.  It follows the Jack the Ripper murders in London.  Whereas the comic was much more about making obscure connections and following the why of what was done, this film focuses much more on the mystery of it - the who and how.  This makes for more compelling watching, since we get to see a mystery unfold, but it sort of removes the point of the story for me.

The film is very nice to look at however.  It's one of those films set in Victorian times that goes overboard in bucking the trend.  Instead of everything being seemly and lovely, everyone's a prostitute addicted to opium and most unseemly.  There's a nice ugliness to everything however it is a bit excessive at times.

In keeping with the darkness of the material, the setting is similarly smokey and dark, obscure and shadowy.  The filmmakers are clearly making a mystery film.  Because we're more interested in following the thread of clues that leads to the killer, we spend less time on metaphysical freak-outs.  We get some, but nothing compared to ravings about the fourth dimension and occult architecture.  We get some nice opium visions, but these are fast, flickering montages.

The film, while not bad, doesn't hold up to the dry creativity of the comic book and I didn't really enjoy it.  I feel like I wasn't trying very hard to be objective here, and you may have a different feeling about the film, but it left me sort of cold.

The People Under the Stairs

Saw The People Under the Stairs, a particularly appropriate film on this, the day after the 2020 election as results come in.  The film is a horror movie directed by Wes Craven about a distinctly Ronald Reagan-ish looking dude and his sister-wife who steal children and who are landlords for a nearby slum which they're sucking dry and gentrifying.  The whole thing comes crashing down when a plucky black kid sneaks into their house and unleashes their basement monsters.

The film was a created as a pointed allegory/criticism of Reagan-era economics.  The wife raves about God and purity while the husband take barely-restrained sexual enjoyment from torturing others (he hunts the plucky protagonist in a full-on gimp suit.)  To outward appearances, they are wealthy and quietly elegant, but as soon as the cops leave, they drop the act and start snarling and shouting all over again.

As a caricature of reactionary politics, they have not aged super well.  I feel like the current avatars of subjugation and repression are not self-described decent people with sundresses but shouty fat men wearing camo and playing soldier, not the ultra-wealthy but the just-barely-not-poor.  Someone with a sneaking suspicion that they are being laughed at.  It's fairly depressing to see this caricature and to think how much tawdry and obvious it would become.  People now proudly video themselves doing things that are completely beyond the pale, that are self-parodying.

Anyway though the movie was alright - it reminded me a lot of Nothing But Trouble in as much as there is a gorgeous and sinister house.  The plot and characters are a lot better here of course and the conclusion is more satisfying.  I was a little annoyed at the involvement of the Community at the end, but it was the 90s and mobs didn't yet have a bad name.  Not a bad movie.

Lord of Illusions

Saw Lord of Illusions, another Clive Barker film.  It was really good!  It followed a private eye who becomes mixed up in the sinister aftermath of a dissolved cult.  The cultists have mostly gone into lives of sort-of-magic; stage magicians, palm readers and such.  Of course, this being a horror film, the cult was actually on to something supernatural and the evilest twink in the world is trying to resurrect the dead cult leader.

The film is very lush - full of gorgeous colors and satin and mahogany.  The private eye gets his fair share of noir-y stakeouts and melodramatic drawing-room scenes.  Of course, the bulk of the film is taken up with supernatural doings and murder and such, but what mystery there is is given a fair shake.  There's a David Lynch-ish mixture of the bizarre and the mundane.

This film seems to be about love and coupling mostly.  There's only one fairly chaste sex scene, but the main motivations of the characters wind up being mostly about other people: wanting to spend eternity with them, devoting their lives to them, staying together out of gratitude (and explicitly not out of love!)  Characters are almost never alone.

I enjoyed the movie.  The cult stuff is great - the art on the walls in particular.  The baddies were strange and off-putting and the heroes attractive.  The visuals were interesting and the antics of the cult worrying.  It was a good movie which I think only didn't do well because the antagonist evil twink was given so much screen time.

Nightbreed

Saw Nightbreed, a strange and convoluted film about a dude who is being framed for murder by his serial killer psychologist.  Guided by dreams, he flees to a cemetery on the outskirts of a nearby town where he discovers a city of monster-people who have lived there secretly for many years.  There's a lot going on.

This is one of those films that has a dozen differently edited versions.  I watched the "director's cut" but it was sometimes a bit choppy.  I found myself sort of wishing someone had given it another edit, just to clean up the sloppy bits.  Even as-is, there's a ton going on in the film and a lot of world-building.  This feels like the first in a series or something.

Anyway, this is a film where the "monsters" are sympathetic and turn out to be the good guys.  I was impressed that the monsters actually are fairly monstrous however.  They have children and make jokes and are scared of humans, but they also cavort with rotting corpses and are grotesquely deformed.  Some are even regarded as dangerous and uncontrollable by each other.

The monsters can easily be read as a minority group which has been shunned and marginalized by society.  It's interesting and sort of uncomfortable that the film seems to acknowledge that mixed in with the "monsters" there are also actual monsters.  It's also sort of uncomfortable to see the monsters attacked by over-armed and trigger-happy cops and by a convoy of good ol' boys, piled into trucks and looking remarkably like the Trump caravans of today.  

The film is very dense.  It's not bad, but very busy and fairly messy.  I sort of wish they'd stuck only to the serial killing or to the monster town - both at once is a lot.  Add on top of this the varying levels of world-building and sequel-setup the different cuts provide.  The film blossoms in all directions at once, like a chrysanthemum.  If you dig it, this is maybe a plus, but it seems excessive.  Maybe it's ripe for a remake?

Speed

Saw Speed, a much-loved blockbuster film that, while it doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, it does have a bus jumping over 50 feet of missing interstate, which is probably enough.  The film starts Keanu Reeves as a sort of meat-head.  He's still got the doofiness of Bill and Ted but is here spouting one-liners and generally being a softer John McClain.  It's an interesting alchemy and I guess that's why he's now in action movies a lot.

The film is alright.  I prefer hysterics generally so this was not quite my cup of tea, but there's plenty of action-movie hijinks to keep you entertained.  The soul of the movie is in watching Keanu struggle against some new obstacle, the odds ever-lengthening against him.  After a while, it does get a hair contrived however.  For example (and I don't want to give anything away but...) after they get off of the bus, they then get onto a completely different out of control vehicle which they can't stop!

The film has a slow-burn romantic sub-plot to keep the film some momentum and stop it from descending into a meaningless challenge/solution series.  The struggles of the cops, also, to stop the out of control bus is fun to watch, as is the cat-and-mouse of the mad bomber vs Keanu and the cops.  A lot of it is transparently for the sake of spectacle however which I didn't like.  The famous gap-jumping scene is one of the more egregious in this regard.

Before the bus happens, there's a 20-minute elevator rescue sequence which I feel is a better version of this film: tight, taught, and exciting with the spectacular set pieces (that crane) deftly woven into the action.  I guess bottom line: this was a good film, just not meant for me.

Christmas Evil

Saw Christmas Evil, a fairly bananas Christmas film which follows a man who works in a toy shop.  He wakes every morning to some Christmas music and sleeps in a pajama Santa-suit.  His house is decorated with Christmas stuff and he spies on his neighbor's kids, writing down their crimes ("negative personal hygiene") and their virtues ("is just adorable") he's clearly far off the deep end into some Santa-psychosis.

This is the film that I thought Silent Night Deadly Night was.  Whereas that one was plenty unusual on its own, this one is truly inspired.  It's full of strange, art-house flourishes involving the soundtrack and the plot.  Although the film is set in modern times, for example, the climax comes with an angry, torch-wielding mob.  This film is John Waters' favorite Christmas movie.  It has to be seen to be believed.

The plot basically is that the main character has decided to become Santa this Christmas.  He steals toys and rewards the good and punishes the wicked.  He drives about in his broken-down white van, being swept up in jolly corporate holiday parties but also being taunted by snobby church-goers (to their grave misfortune!)  The film has a nice sense of pace and progression, with the good times fueling his madness and the bad times revealing it.

The film is more strange than anything else.  It's not a great movie, nor bad.  The main character has some great philosophy that he shouts out near the end.  His feeling is that although the idea of Santa is just an idea, it's a good idea: a magical vigilante meting out justice to the masses.  This is high camp and needs to be taken almost seriously, you know?

Mother of Tears

Saw Mother of Tears, the last of Argento's Three Mothers trilogy.  This one was made much more recently, in 2007, and follows fight against the last of the witches (or "mothers" as they are called here.)  The plot follows a art historian woman whose museum receives a mysterious urn which, when opened, predictably lets loose a lot of troubles on the land.

The film is less colorful than the previous films in the trilogy.  It's get the standard palate, which is to say plenty colorful but not gratuitously so, as the previous films were.  This one also has the overdubbing that the previous ones did, leading to some truly grating English voice acting.  This I think is what made the previous films feel so distant and alien: the acting is just dead with the dubbing.

Anyway, once the box is opened, there's a montage of senseless violence erupting in the city which is great but which goes on a bit too long and becomes ridiculous.  Similarly, gangs of witch-women start showing up in the city.  The film depicts these witch ladies as obnoxious, punky, woo-girls cackling and strutting around the city.  This is a nice choice, happily wedding the traditional depiction of witches with something modern without it seeming stupid or put-on.  And it also allows Argento to show lots of boobs.

The film is generally like that: it's full of interesting ideas but always a little undercut, a little clumsily executed.  Amazing atmospherics ruined when one of the characters rhythmically dubs their lines.  A montage that goes on a little too long.  It's a mixed bag of hit-and-miss.  As with the previous films, this one goes on a bit too long, even as it is the shortest of the films.  It's morbid and interesting and has some definite moments, but it has some dead keys as well and is sometimes tough going.

Inferno (1980)

Saw Inferno (1980), a sequel to Suspiria, made to expand the Suspiria-verse to include two other powerful witches.  I had seen and not really enjoyed the original, 1970s version of Suspiria and this one is similar to my recollections of that film: very lurid and colorful, fairly sinister but too otherworldly and strange to be really scary or even that interesting frankly.  I kept getting distracted by the clearly plastic sets, the strange way the killers all wear black and red gloves.  Sometimes it works, but other times it's just too mannered.

So, whereas Suspiria was apparently loosely based on Snow White (or, more specifically, on whatever Jungian archetype is exhibited therein,) this one is based on Hansel and Gretel.  Appropriately, it focuses on a brother and sister - the sister writes a letter to her brother begging him to come visit her in New York because she's convinced her apartment building is haunted.  He arrives to find her dead and the apartment building full of sinister and tragic women, either stone-faced or wilting, and the apartment house with walls of screaming red, trimmed with black.  It's so over the top!

Apparently this film was somewhat inspired by Last Year At Marienbad - a film whose idiot director believed that the setting, not the plot or the character, made the film great.  As such, that film spends many tedious minutes creeping over sumptuous wallpaper brocades and carvings and carpets and doorways and mirrors.  Like that film, Inferno also lavishes much attention on the building involved.  Its a gorgeous setting, but I got so bored watching the characters diaphanously glide down the hallways and the slow zooms on air vents.

I don't want to give the impression this is a terrible film, but it's challenging.  There's a scene near the beginning where the sister drops her keys into a puddle in the basement.  It turns out the puddle is quite deep and, diving into it, she discovers a whole submerged room down there, full of floating corpses, with a doorway leading off god-knows-where.  That's so evocative and fascinating to me.  What's down there?  What's going on?  We never find out.  The movie is full of stuff like that.  The trouble is it's very slow and oddly cold and inhuman.  The actors portray no emotion apart from fear which just gets dull after a while.  Sometimes I feel there's a gap separating me from the characters in the movie and this time the gap was present and quite large.

Fair warning to animal lovers by the way: there's a few scenes where cats are mistreated.  There's some scenes where they're clearly fake cats and all is well, but other scenes with some frankly unhappy cats.  I felt bad for one cat who did not want to be carried by its scruff, than you and for another scene where a woman just has cats pelted at at her from off-screen for a while.  Poor woman, sure, but poor kitties!

Anyway, the film is sort of slow and sort of ominous.  It's an interesting, oppressive film, but more interesting in retrospect.  It's so strange though - just bursting with slow strange imagery.

A Cure for Wellness

Saw A Cure for Wellness, another film (like yesterday's Shutter Island) about a spooky psychological institute and a protagonist who all the doctors say is crazy.  This time it's a hydrotherapy institute in the mountains of Switzerland where the waters have healing and healthful properties.  The protagonist is a hot-shot business-boy who is searching for his company's CEO for obscure, business-y reasons.  The film is not bad but very over-long and as focused on style over substance as a Tim Burton film.

The film is very pretty.  There's lots of great, eerie little touches.  A woman cuts up newspaper crosswords and pastes them into her own puzzles, a pretty girl in a gauzy dress, standing on the battlements of a castle, fat women swimming through water like fish in a tank.  It reminded me a lot of Tim Burton's alternately subdued and flamboyant images.  There's a fair bit of gore and violent scenes as well however and I found all of that very off-putting.

It really is over-long however.  It reminded me the most of a video-game, pushing the main character from check-point to check-point, showing days passing in an out-of-character montage before giving you control back.  There's papers that must be collected and scoured for clues, often circled in red pen for some reason.  The whole thing seems lumpy and over-stuffed in a very video-game-ish way to me.

The film is not bad, but it's strange. There's a lot of pieces that don't make sense except in a tonal sort of way.  We establish that the main character is an ex-smoker, for example, but this is only important for a scene where he lights a cigarette and sees something spooky.  Why waste our time like this?  There's other times where this sort of dreamy, abruptness works, but sometimes I feel like we're suffering from sub-plots unevenly cut out of the film.  It either needs to be longer or shorter, I think.

Anyway, it's a style over substance kind of film.  A sort of Tim Butron-ization of Shutter Island.  It's not bad, although I frankly think it would have been a better video game.  The imagery is beautiful, the tone is sinister, the old mansion and accented orderlies are great - just start it with plenty of time to spare.

Shutter Island

Saw Shutter Island, a fascinating, knotty puzzle of a film following Leonardo DiCaprio as a US Marshal investigating a disappearance on an island-institute for the criminally insane.  He suffers from migraines and bad dreams however, and keeps flashing back to his time in the military, when he liberated Dachau, and remembering his wife in a burning apartment.  Something, clearly, is up.

The film gets more and more complex as time goes by and the mystery of the escaped prisoner and Leo's dark past intertwine.  The film shows dreams and contains weird, jarring, intentional continuity errors, such as when a woman is given a glass of water but clearly only mimes drinking it.  This is a slippery film which, although I feel it comes to a definite conclusion at the end, is slippery enough that I'd bet folks argue, Inception-style, about what the end of the film really means.  Delicious!

I really enjoyed this film.  In addition to the complex mind-games, we get to see lots of strange imagery: rats inexplicably swarming the beaches, dead bodies flowing out of train cars, frozen in ice, Ben Kingsley calling Leo "baby."  I also really liked the island locale.  It's small and claustrophobic enough that, as one character puts it, "they'll always find us" but large enough that someone can believably go missing for a few days.  It's like a really high-budget version of The Prisoner.

The acting was solid, but I was mostly there for the plot.  The locale was a nice surprise and everything is shot just gorgeously.  It's got some nice histrionics, but it's a puzzle-film first, like Inception.  If you're not in the mood to pay close attention give it a pass, but if you like mysteries and can stand some ambiguity, give it a shot.

Night of the Creeps

Saw Night of the Creeps, a fun movie which obviously inspired Slither (hat tip Stephen for pointing it out!)  This one is less about small-town America, and more about the college Greek life of the 80s.  As with Slither however, this film follows slug-like, parasitic creatures who make the dead to walk.  This one is way campier however.

The main characters here are teen freshmen, looking for girlfriends and generally for a good time.  Whereas most films cast 30-somethings as "teens" these seem like actual, uncertain children.  They're paired up with a grizzled goofy cop who goofily wants to kill himself.  That character is very strange.  He's written like a hard-boiled, alcoholic monster but is played like Oscar from the Odd Couple: grouchy but more avuncular than mean.  I feel that part was miscast, but then maybe it wouldn't be as fun if there were a sincerely depressed central main character.

Anyway, this film lampshades itself a lot more.  Characters are named Romero and Cronenberg, old ladies watch Plan 9 From Outer Space, and the cop character says things like "what is this, a crime scene or a B-movie?"  Delicious!  Like I say, this is much goofier, much more campy.  The climax takes place not at prom (college remember) but at a prom-like "formal dance".  There's some great scenes of a girl in a prom-dress wielding a flamethrower.  It's not Tarantino-levels, but it's plenty self-indulgent.

I liked the movie okay.  I was worried I'd be annoyed at the teenage main characters but they seemed believably out of their depth and never became the obnoxious Buellers that they might have been.  It's a little dubious at parts (we open on the extremely dubious back-story of the parasites, with baby-like aliens shooting them into space) but it's a fairly fun romp.  It also has a lawn mower, predating Braindead by 4 years!  Also also, I think the roommate is supposed to be kind of bro-mantic, but I read him as sincerely gay, which made me happy.

The Dead Zone

Saw The Dead Zone, a film based on a Stephen King novel which revolves around a New England school teacher (as King stories often do.)  This teacher falls into a coma and awakes five years later with psychic powers: if he touches someone sometimes he sees visions of things that are important to them, often involving deaths.

The film is solidly alright.  It has twists and turns and a chilly, clinical atmosphere.  It was directed by Cronenberg, and there's institutions and doctors (both recurrent elements of Cronenberg's films.)  A mystery is being understood and explored, however we are humans first and are moved by sudden romances or losses.  In this case, the psychic gift also comes with a cost: a physical weakening and a dilemma about seeing the future: how to try to change it without seeming like a crazy person.

The weakness however, is the plot.  We sort of meander from hiding out from the press to helping the cops to tutoring the sullen son of a millionaire.  When the end comes I sort felt let down, like "that's it?"  I mean, I guess that was it.  There's no arc however, sort of a series of vignettes.  Perhaps I'm missing the thrust, but I don't see it.

So the film is alright.  It's interesting and exciting (I loved the house he goes into with the cops - that sequence is great!) It was made into a show more recently and I suppose that makes more sense.  The psychic's adventures don't have a lot to do with each other, aside from some escalation.  It also featured a horrifying, Trumpian politician which made it feel oddly topical.  Apart from that though, it feels like something you'd see on cable and suspect why they cut the last part off.  It's not bad, just … alright.

V/H/S/2

Saw V/H/S/2, the sequel to V/H/S.  Like that film, this one is an anthology film, with four mini-stories plus a frame story.  As anthology films often are, this was hit-and-miss.  Thankfully, the filmmakers learned from the previous movie and this movie is improved in two ways: fewer obnoxious douchebag guys, and more editing.  I pointed out in my review of the last one that they slavishly stick to the idea of found footage and thus do no editing or soundtrack addition (at least none so obvious that I noticed.)  Paradoxically, this only exposes the artificiality of films in general and makes things somehow feel more fake than a conventional film.  With this one, they just embrace editing and soundtrack however.

Ok, so here's a little mini-review of each the films:

• Phase I Clinical Trials
• This film was the weakest of the bunch.  It was about a guy who gets an experimental digital camera eye which we 'see' out of.  It features some truly CD-ROM-tier acting at one point and, although it was the only film to make me jump, it was not very original or interesting.  Pass.
• A Ride in the Park
• This one follows a guy with a go-pro on his helmet who gets zombified.  I think the idea for this film started and ended with "zombie with a go-pro" or possibly just "zombie-cam".  This one was not interesting to me.  There's some playing around with the zombie concept which is somewhat interesting but not enough to save it for me.
• Safe Haven
• We follow a news crew investigating what is clearly a cult.  I loved this one.  It dips into the supernatural (and zombies why not) at the end, but up to that there's creepy, smiling tour guides and loudspeakers barking speeches about Heaven and God.  All that's much more interesting to me because it's real, you know?  People actually drive themselves to murder and suicide because of faith and belief.  That's very sinister, very fascinating to me.
• Slumber Party Alien Abduction
• Alas, we couldn't wholly avoid the douche-bros.  This one features some very clumsy aliens who bedevil a slumber-party of teenagers and pre-teens.  It's interesting in its own way.  I liked, for example, all of the non-alien threats.  The loud bangs and lights are effective.  I believe the escalating prank war between the kids.  It's an inferior Incident at Lake County
• The Frame story
• This was serviceable but uninteresting connective tissue footage.  There was one scene I loved: when the woman's head and hair passes by the camera, he fingers scrabbling dumbly against the floor.  That shit was gold.  The rest is fairly limp though.  The main characters here are investigating a missing college kid.  They find an abandoned creepy house full of TVs and VHS tapes.  They then keep popping VHS tapes into the player in spite of quickly mounting creepiness.  Their VHS obsession quickly becomes unsustainable.  You just saw a monster dude, don't pop in another tape!  Oh well.

I don't really see a unifying theme of this film (other than zombies perhaps) but it's serviceable.  It delivers some scares but not ones so bad that I can't handle them.  The cult short was my favorite, but they're all okay at least.

Vampire's Kiss

Saw Vampire's Kiss, a ridiculous Nicholas Cage movie.  It follows a strange, valley-accented, vapid, psychiatrist-visiting publisher (Nick Cage) who stars unravelling after he imagines a hookup with a vampire.  The film is billed as a dark comedy, so there's a lot of high strangeness about and a lot of surprising cruelty.  It's basically not a great movie, but there's a few amazing scenes which I quoted for a few days.

One of the hits, in this hit-and-miss movie, comes near the end, when Cage's vampire-obsession is reaching a fever pitch.  He tries to buy fangs, but can only afford the white plastic Halloween fangs.  Using these, he does a shot-for-shot imitation of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu in a night-club.  The image of him, pop-eyed and staring with a mouth full of plastic and slobber is hilarious.  Ditto for the following scenes of Cage accosting random (actual, non-actor) strangers on the street, gesticulating and slurring "I'm a vaam-piah!  Kill meee!"  There's a lot of Cage-inflected insanity which is worth the price of admission.

Alas, there are some misses as well.  Particularly, one of the ways he's unravelling manifests with him tormenting some poor secretary.  There's one or two scenes involving this which are fun, but I have too much sympathy for the secretary and a lot of it is just awful.  This poor woman should have quit after verbal abuse session number two at most.  Good lord.  A window into the hiring conditions of the 80s I guess.  All of that stuff is fairly unpleasant.

The film is hit and miss.  It's making fun of its own characters, so feel free to join in with an MST3K quip.  It picks up steam, but it starts off sort of a slog and even the frenetic ending is marred by the business with the secretary.  I want to either feel bad for the main character or laugh at him, but the film wants me to do both, and it's hard.

Random fun fact: Christian Bale allegedly based Patrick Bateman's weird manic/formal behavior on Nicholas Cage in this movie.

M. Butterfly

Saw M. Butterfly, a film based on the play of the same title.  It follows a French diplomat who falls in love with a diva of the Chinese opera in proto-communist China.  She takes advantage of his love to steal state secrets.  This is a reversal of the classic Madame Butterfly opera, which depicts the perfect, stereotypical submissive oriental woman.  Here that trope is subverted - the seduction becomes a trap and the masculine conqueror is himself conquered.

There's a fairly major twist which deepens and complicates all of this however.  It's obvious if you know anything about Chinese opera and in this film they don't go out of their way to hide it, but it's really why I wanted to see this film and it's a prerequisite to all of the things I'd like to say about it.

So, here's the rest of the review in white font.  There's a lot of it.  Highlight to read, as usual:

The Chinese opera diva is of course a man.  This makes the theme of deception deeper and more troubling.  It leads to one of the killer lines of the film, when the diplomat says "I loved a woman who was created by a man."  In the context of the film, the diplomat is talking about the female persona of the opera singer, but it is equally true of the submissive Madame Butterfly archetype which is itself an invention of male writers and artists, inventing the ideal woman who never was.

But then again we now start running into trouble with the plot of the film.  The film is set in the 60s, when transexuals were unheard of.  The nature of opera singer's sexuality is left semi-ambiguous.  He may even be cis and straight.  Now look at my words in the first paragraph: the crafty opera singer "traps" the diplomat with his beauty.  This is a cruel way to talk about what may the doomed, impossible love of a gay man (or perhaps a trans woman) for a close-minded man in an intolerant age.

The film suggests in the end that the opera singer really did love the diplomat, and that helps some, but there's so much manipulation in the relationship that the opera singer still feels predatory to me.  The film was made in the 90s and I think is somewhat Problematic in this day and age, but then again ... then again ... there's something just so neat and satisfying and queer about the arrogant man wanting a submissive woman to obey his orders and stand, naked and exposed, before him only only to be exposed and humiliated himself - his secrets on display to the world.  Perhaps, just as a man can both love and exploit a woman, a gay man can both love and exploit another man.

Whew ok - no more spoilers - but really they're not that major and it's only once you know what's going on that film opens up.  I liked this film a lot.  Much of the power of it comes from the script and the concept alone.  It's directed by Cronenberg and echoes some of his obsessions with identity, but anyone could have produced this and I'd like it just as well.  It was competently made and well acted, but the ideas are the real treasures.

Basic Instinct

Saw Basic Instinct, knotty little mystery film about a cop with a troubled past investigating a cool, bisexual, maneater of a novelist.  The film is clearly evoking Hitchcock throughout, particularly vertigo.  The novelist is a typical Hitchcock blonde and doubles, mind-games, and hair dye feature heavily as plot devices.  There's a hit-tip to Double Indemnity's famous staircase scene early on, and some inspiration from the noirs in the form of the central cop's semi-crooked-ness, but this is a Hitchcock film all the way.

The central engine of the film is the cat-and-mouse, is-it-or-isn't-it game that the cop and writer play with each other.  She's always one step ahead of him, manipulating him and others perfectly, making them dance her tune - or is she?  Maybe she really is just at the unfortunate nexus of stalkers, obsessions, and unfortunate accidents.  This ambiguity is teased until the very last shot of the film.

I found myself getting wrapped up in her mind games myself.  I was so put off by her messing about with the cops (uncrosses legs, re-crosses them) that I didn't trust her at all, but by the last scenes I wasn't so sure.  I wondered how she would have handled a gay detective.  On that note...

This is a very sexy film.  There's many sex scenes of various intensities, there's that infamous leg-crossing scene, and many pretty ladies smooching each other.  There is, alas, one of those basically-rape sex scenes where the girl shouts "no no" but I guess men were expected to be men back in those days, god help us.  That aside: apparently, the central cop was originally supposed to be a lesbian.  That would have been very interesting and might have side-stepped all of this.  This was filmed during the AIDS epidemic when homosexuality and sex in general was becoming much more serious again.  It's nice sometimes to see a film which clearly wants to titillate you and which is so interesting to boot.

This is a good movie.  The sex got a little tedious for me, but it's not intended for me of course.  I enjoyed the mental jousting the main characters do and the subtle interplay of who's acting, who's lying and about what now?  There's a lot of double-negative joking about serious matters and talk of "well if I were a murderer …" which is just delicious.  A nice knotty mystery in the spirit of Hitchcock.  Go see it!

Splice

Saw Splice, a sci-fi horror which is sort of light on horror but long on creature-effects.  It's a Frankenstein-like story about two rockstar geneticists who splice human and animal DNA to create some kind of fast-growing mutant which seems to be female, which seems roughly humanoid, albeit with double-joined legs, and whose blood is a cocktail of beneficial enzymes and chemicals.

The film was made the mid 2000s and although it was apparently inspired much earlier by the photograph of a mouse with an ear on its back, it feels inextricably linked with the start of the internet land rush and the dot-com boom.  The scientists especially reinforce this for me.  They talk about breaking the rules and pushing the envelope.  They get sweetheart deals from accented investors and drift into their lab at noon, listening to heavy metal and wearing hoodies.  Their homes are decorated with anime stills, band posters, and Munny dolls.  They feel like the arrogant techs turned capitalists who are on to something big.  Of course, rather than making mincemeat of our notions of privacy and information, they are hard at work on genetics and notions of humanity.

So, apart from silicon valley, the other inspiration here is Frankenstein - we have a creation, created in hasty exuberance, getting out of control of the creators.  In this case, the creators are a boyfriend-girlfriend pair of scientists, making the connection to parenthood inescapable.  Indeed, parenthood is brought up explicitly in the film, and that's clearly it's overriding theme.

The film gets quickly Cronenbergian once the creature shows up.  There's the self-destructive obsession and body-horror that he returns to over and over, and icky sexual bits.  The film is a lot of chilly fun.  It's most interesting of course just seeing what new mutation the creature reveals, or what new extreme the couple is pushed to, as they try to protect and contain their awful spawn.  The film is fairly dark and ultimately fairly nihilistic-capitalist, once the money-men get involved.  There's many interesting notions to think about but the film is well made enough that you don't really think about these until it's all over.  A good, gripping, interesting film.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Saw Silent Night, Deadly Night, a ridiculous slasher movie about a boy who is terrified of Santa due to a Santa-costumed guy killing his parents in front of him.  The boy grows up to complete the cycle by going on a Santa-themed rampage as an adult.  The film is fairly sleazy, features many tits, and generated enough controversy that it got pulled from theaters and Phil Donahue devoted an hour-long show to it.

The film is a bit tedious.  The premise is pure camp, but the film doesn't play this up very much.  The central story of this orphaned boy succumbing to his demons is much more tragic and hokey than it is funny or imaginative.  I have a really hard especially believing that the main character could go from a quaking little boy cowering in corners begging Santa to spare him to a cold-blooded killer shouting "Naughty!  Naughty!"  I just don't buy it.  I call bullshit on this unrealistic depiction of Santa-psychosis!

Anyway, the film has a lot of breasts bared, so don't see it with your parents.  It's fairly tasteless and tacky but that's sort of fitting for a film about a killer Santa, I guess.  Indeed, a lot of good imagery is gotten out of manically smiling Christmas ornaments and blinking lights.  The Christmas traditions are very bizarre when you get down to it.  Imagine explaining to an alien why nutcracker soldiers are involved, for instance.

So, bottom line, I think this film is sort of a curiosity.  It's not really worth seeing unless "Santa-themed slasher film" tickles you for some reason.  I found my attention wandering often to the Utah winter, and how cold and nasty and dry it looked.  That was sort of nice to think about, but then this Santa guy kept getting in the way.

Basket Case

Saw Basket Case, a strange and low-budget horror film about a pair of conjoined twins.  One of them looks like a normal lanky dude (apart from a big scar and a giant-ass white-guy 'fro) but the other is just a head with flipper-like arms.  They were separated against their will at a young age and now they hunt the doctors who performed the operation, the normal-looking guy carrying his deformed brother in a wicker basket at his side.

The film is firmly rooted in camp and shlock - it's not making any grand statements, it just wants to shock you with the ghastly deformed brother and for you to be repulsed by the kill scenes.  It's more in the vein of Driller Killer or Studio Troma films - schlock first, but as a second thought, it's also weirdly a kind of subversion as well.  It takes the main characters surprisingly seriously.  It's not actually enlightened (the deformed brother is just a monster) but it's believable, how the normal-looking brother does kind of want a normal life and although he feels bad for the deformed brother, he doesn't share his rage and blood-lust.

It's billed as a horror/comedy but I found nothing to laugh at.  Most of the memorable scenes are shockingly gory or strange or even Cronenberg-ishly fascinating/repulsive (the last scenes of that one doctor's secretary - yuck.)  The mounting exasperation of the brothers' landlord is pretty funny, but it feels like set-dressing for the lawless land of 1970s New York.

I liked the film alright - I was happily surprised by the depth of emotion displayed by the characters, when they're not murdering doctors, but mostly they are just murdering doctors.  It got fairly tedious by the end for me.  It never really overcomes its premise, although it does do that premise justice.  This isn't just craziness for craziness's sake, it's craziness taken seriously and explored.  Net negative for me still, but it had bits of value in there too.

Dead Alive

Saw Dead Alive, an incredibly bloody and surreal horror/comedy from Peter Jackson.  Pre-Lord of the Rings, Jackson was mostly known for effects-heavy trash horror movies and this is one of them.  The Spanish title apparently translates to "Your Mother Ate My Dog" which I feel captures the spirit of this film a lot better than "Dead Alive".  This one starts out slow but gets truly nuts.

The plot follows this dweeby, Norman Bates-like dude who lives under his mother's thumb in a giant mansion.  One day, much to the displeasure of his mother, he goes on a date with a convenience store clerk to the zoo.  The mother follows to spy on them and is bitten by a hideous, stop-motion animated Sumatran monkey-rat.  She dies from this injury but doesn't stay dead (which happens sometimes when Sumatran monkey-rats are involved.)

The film is heavy on gross-out comedy/horror.  Zombie bites suppurate and fester, pus bursting wildly, sending strawberry custard flying onto the faces of horrified onlookers, or into the soup of oblivious gentlemen.  The film keeps ratcheting up the insanity up to dizzying heights until the climax, when a bunch of partiers descend on the mansion.  The final few scenes have got to be seen to be believed.  Let me just say, it takes the metaphor of the controlling mother trying to keep her child hers forever very literally.

There's so much craziness in the film though.  At one point a zombie's entrails fall out of him body.  The entrails get up and start running about, using the lungs as legs and intestines like an octopus's tentacles.  It's like The Thing, but with less budget.  Even before the final climax, there's plenty of nuttiness: there's a karate priest ("I kick ass for the Lord!"), drooling Nazi veterinarians, and zombie sex followed by zombie babies.  It's so over the top!

The humor is quite broad and although a few jokes landed, most of the time I sort of endured them.  I really didn't think the zombie baby stuff was very funny and I kept wondering why on earth the main character guy needed to keep his zombie mother secret.  Surely events have escalated out of your control, dude.  The craziness of the zombie biology is worth it however.

So, this is one of those films you put on for your unsuspecting friends.  They're expecting a campy good time that they can chat through, but they'll get all of this high-grade insanity, some tedious jokes, and five gallons of blood per second during the climax.  This film is an absolute trip.

Suspiria (2018)

Saw Suspiria (2018), a remake of the classic 1977 Itallian film which brought color to horror movies for years to come.  In this remake, gone are the eye-searing pinks and reds, and instead we have a muted, chilly, east German palate.  I saw the original a long time ago, and I remember thinking it was sort of too gaudy and not very scary, and this film is similar and opposite in many ways.  It's quite gaudy in its own way (lots of spooky CGI to be seen, although not as much as you'd think apparently) and although it's not terribly scary, it's sinister in its own way and plenty evokative.

The film draws its horror-energy from the creepiness and magic of performance art.  The film takes place in a modern dance theater ruled by a gang of hard-working, terrifying, passionate and charming women, swanning about in their chunky jewelry and patch-work dresses, they are weaving a kind of magic together.  They draw lines with tape on the ground and speak of energies and lead the girls in strange chants and ancient rituals.  Theater women may well be some kind of witch in real life.  Acting is a kind of possession after all.  I loved thinking about this as the film went on.

The film has an all-female cast and is heavily feminine.  Masculinity is ridiculed and actively rejected when it dares to show up.  The favored weapon of the baddies is a skewer, it's true, but one that's bent like a cat's claw or a surgical needle or a sickle, giving it a kind of earthiness and coyness.  Similarly, the intense dedication and weirdly intimate cruelty of women features in the film's scary scenes.

I really liked this film.  It's true I think this was largely for subjective reasons, given my happy memories of performing myself, but that can be said about any film.  This is an interesting, chilly, intense film that's worth a look.  So look.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Saw Beyond the Black Rainbow, another film by Cosmatos, the guy who directed Mandy.  His movies are really interesting.  Definitely ominous and dismal, but packed with color and a refreshing lack of monsters and aliens or whatever.  This film is set in a futuristic, 2001 Space Odyssey-style psychiatric lab run by gaunt, pale dude who looks like Supreme Leader Snoke.   His paleness however allows him to soak up the lighting like a sponge, becoming green or orange or (most often) deep red.  He speaks in a slow, serious, intense, mocking kind of way to everyone.  He sounds sarcastic but stays with this strange, sensual, writhing energy that's very off-putting.  It's only major drawback is that it's terribly slow however.

As with Mandy, this film derives its magical horror from psychedelics.  In a flashback to the 60s, we see some strange, drug-powered psychiatric experiment on consciousness go wrong, resulting in otherworldly horror and strange spectacle.  I feel this is a sort of update to the Cthulhu mythos: a man drives himself to edges of sanity and there finds inspiration or possession perhaps that wrecks a terrible evil on the land.  In this film, nothing's fully explained, but there's a lot of sinister shit and strange imagery.  Even though everything comes from ordinary drugs and sensory deprivation, it feels like aliens or demons or something.  It's very mysterious and purposeful - dare I say eldritch?

So but the main drawback is that it is quite slow.  You get to soak in every frame of strange imagery, but it crawls by like a snake.  The main character is full of pregnant pauses and long silences, punctuated by spasmodic twitches. The strange imagery does come, but slowly.  The film was interesting to me, but so slow that I don't know I'd want to see it again.  It kind of has to be seen alone because otherwise I think jokes and half-baked speculation will start filling up the pregnant pauses.

Lastly: here's a random head-cannon of mine you can use to blow your mind: what if this film was the prequel to Carrie?

A Night at the Roxbury

Saw A Night at the Roxbury, the comedy about two idiot brothers who are all about the 90's partying and catch-phrases, moronically spouting off pickup lines and spastically flapping about on the dance floor.  I found it pretty winning.  I thought it was roughly a spoof of Saturday Night Fever but, outside of a parody of that famous strut down the street to The Beegees, it's not really.

It's more like Bill & Ted.  The idiot heroes are well-meaning and slack-jawed, smilingly bemused by the world.  They do bother women a lot, but when they finally pick up some ladies and find a quiet bedroom, they still just can't stop saying pickup lines.  They've never gotten this far before and now don't know what to do.  It's sort of cute.

The film is winning, and I laughed a few times.  The humor mostly derives from absurdist, empty-headed TV-quoting and a bizarre running joke about a club owner who thinks his assistant is grabbing his butt.  I only really laughed at bits of outrageous physical comedy - when a pair of border collies dash inside, jumping up on the table, plates and glasses flying everywhere "be good, boys" casually shouts the owner.  I love the violence of it!

Also it's neat seeing the peak early 90s fashions.  I was too young for all of this of course, but the mesh shirts and the plastic visors and flip-phones seem so familiar.  It's too bad it was still considered nerd stuff, but I can imagine these guys getting some tunes off of napster and charging up their mp3 players and heading to raves!

I don't think I learned any big lessons, and I don't think there was a deeper meaning to puzzle out, but the movie was a harmless goof and I enjoyed it anyway.  It's a good way to spend 90 minutes.

Saturday Night Fever

Saw Saturday Night Fever, expecting a Grease-like romp but actually getting a The Outsiders-style harsh look at the desperate lives of kids who hang out in dance halls, their bodies aging and their dreams drying up.  It was a bit of a surprise.

The film follows Travolta, the Dancehall King, who works at a paint shop and dances every Saturday.  He falls in love with a fancy dancy lady who disdains him and his life.  "You're a cliché!  You're nowhere on your way to no place."  She's getting out of there and improving her life, but even she only works in a talent agency and brags constantly about getting movie stars coffee.  Yeah, she's trying to get out of the slums, but she dances the nights away on the weekends too.

Outside of dancing, Travolta hangs out with a gang of tough kids who get into turf wars and get girls pregnant.  There's a theme of people not really having direction - bumbling into marriages or jobs, as though that will bring their lives meaning or give them direction.  It's ultimately pretty sad.

The film is teenage-focused.  It's tough to remember sometimes because Travolta's character claims to be 19, despite Travolta being 23 (and likely only in movie-years) but these are kids, preoccupied by feeling good and looking good.  They're having fun but they're seeing the unfairness of life and slowly recognizing that their dreams are hollow.  But maybe the doomed pursuit of a dream is enough.  They're not going to get fulfilling jobs and they're likely going to get trapped into marriages if they don't die in shootouts first.  So why not just dance?

The film is surprisingly melancholy.  It's not a total bummer.  It dwells in desperation, but there's joy there too.  The film is subtly about a search for meaning in life, and thus is a very adolescent kind of film.  I wish they'd gotten actual teenagers to play these parts, but this is alright too.  You do have tolerate a lot of disco however.  This film loves its dance and musical interludes.

Contagion

Saw Contagion.  I added it to my list of films to watch during the first days of Covid.  It was made in 2011 but eerily echoes what we went through in reality.  The wonky terms "social distancing" and "R-naught" are brought up.  Bodies are tossed into mass graves dug hastily on public land.  It was most interesting to see how the film did and did not predict the future accurately.

The film has an all-star cast.  It tells little intertwining stories spread all over the globe and at all levels of government and medical science.  By bouncing between these stories, we get a sense of what's going on in the world and are also kept rushing along.  We don't get bogged down in the race for the cure but we also don't get too lost in the weeds of the average day-to-day.

The film interestingly overestimates our leadership and underestimates the general public.  Gangs of thugs are seen robbing houses and looting grocery stores.  The army is deployed and crowds of feral, shouting people swarmed them for food.  None of that happened in real life.  In real life there was a run on toilet paper that was left mostly to the groceries to deal with and the leadership, far from deploying the military, largely ignored the virus - saying it was overblown if it was brought up at all.

There's a truly despicable Alex Jones-type character who peddles snake oil to his internet followers and casts doubt upon the well-meaning powers that be.  That's spot on accurate, but I view that man as a kind of avatar of the internet as a whole.  In reality of course, our president was the one pushing a quack remedy (hydroxychloroquine,) and Covid denialism and a refusal to wear masks is now rampant.  The film did completely miss the economic upheaval and of course the quirky Zoom-centric socialization we all indulged in for a while.

The film is fairly chilling, really.  It ends with the virus being repulsed at last and there's some high drama involving the search for the cure, but the scenes that stick with you are the early ones, of a doctor from the CDC trying to set up quarantine only to be interrupted by squashy small-town leaders demanding to know who's going to pay for this, or the finger-pointing over the source of the virus, as though nationalistic face-saving were more important than human lives.  When it originally came out, I suppose the film was ultimately uplifting, but mid-pandemic as we are, it feels sort of comforting and sort of depressing.  Definitely an interesting viewing experience.

Purple Noon

Saw Purple Noon, an early adaptation of the novel Plein Soleil which was more recently adapted into The Talented Mr Ripley.  This film therefore follows Tom Ripley who is sent to Italy to fetch Phillipe, the idle rich son of an American tycoon.  In Italy, Tom copies Phillipe's mannerisms, his way of talking and writing, even wears his clothing.  There's a strong queer undercurrent to all of this of course which is made more explicit in the modern version.  In this version however, all of that is sublimated and Phillipe's girlfriend is made into the goal of Tom's designs.

This film is very understated.  The story works best as a kind of mystery or thriller.  It's fun to watch Tom change identities and swap names and lie and contort and always manage to stay just one inch out of danger.  It was hard for me to follow who he was to different people however.  There were times he told lies or changed clothing and it was clear to me why.  Surely more than one guy has a pin-striped jacket in Rome, right?  Also the backstory is explained through dialog with little preamble.  I was grateful that I kind of knew the story beforehand.

The other drawback of the film is that although Tom is supposed to be a forgettable, chameleon-like, non-entity, he's played by Alain Delon who is one of the most beautiful people to have ever existed.  Tom is supposed to be taken with and fascinated by the "beautiful people" that he encounters through Phillipe.  This dude is so freakin pretty, they look like frogs in comparison.

Anyway, the film showed its age a bit, not only in the elaborate rules of hotels and police, but also in the moral tone of the film which is far less dark and muddy than the modern version.  This is a pity, but whatever.  Mostly I wanted to see this because it had Alain Delon in a queer-coded role, and that it delivered on.

Zathura

Saw Zathura, a strange, space-themed Jumanji rip-off (although to be fair, it's also based on a Chris Van Allsburg book, so "rip-off" is probably too strong a term.) Anyway, I had low hopes going in.  Like Jumanji, I just hoped this would be fun and episodic - the main character kids dealing with each little challenge as their house crumbles around them.  Since this is space-themed, I expected them to ultimately be playing on a little scrap of floorboard, floating in space, perhaps a whimsical lamp to keep them company.

The film is pretty much that.  Each little challenge is dealt with as the next one arrives.  There's a lot of Buck Rogers ray gun iconography, but this is a modern kid-friendly comedy, so everyone has to act laconic and eye-rollingly bored and arch and sarcastic.  This is a little sad, but that's kid's movies for you.  The Zathura game is a great prop however.  The pressed-tin tech looks great and is a neat aesthetic to explore, rather than the by-now-trite clockwork or the carved wood of the original Jumanji.

The central conflict of the film, apart from the whizzing meteors and such, is the rocky relationship between the two brothers, who fight and scream and wish that the other had never been born.  It's fairly sad stuff, more-so for being broadly played.  The older brother is supposed to be a sort of jock bro but he comes off as cruel and aggressive.  The younger boy is clearly the protagonist, and he's supposed to be aggravating, but once again the director can't bring himself to actually make the kid aggravating, so instead everyone else comes off as mean to this poor little moppet.

There's also something near the end that happens that I thought was very weird.  It feels spoiler-y to me so highlight if you're interested: One character turns out to be another one from another dimension or a different timeline or something.  It's fairly confusing to me.  Nothing else that high-concept happens in the movie - it's all Buck Rogers whiz-bang.  I guess the reality-warping game itself could compare, but one thing at a time you know?  It feels like a hat on a hat.

So anyway, the film is exactly what it looks like: an inferior duplicate of Jumanji which was itself not an amazing film.  I have huge nostalgia for it (Jumanji) but that wasn't quite enough to carry me through this film.  It's not terrible and I enjoyed it alright, but it was a little tedious.