Late Stage Films

 Some premises which require some level of buy-in for this to make sense:  Kathryn Bigelow was always a talented director in the action and thriller spaces. Kathryn Bigelow was largely ignored by the film world until she started making action thrillers out of "important" true stories.  It turns out the gap between a silly cop thriller and multiple Oscar wins is having the silly cop serve in the Iraq War! This is half a joke. The other half is criticism of Mark Boal's writing. Boal is a journalist, and probably a very good one, but as a screenwriter his characters are as boring and vague as his scenarios are thrilling and specific.   "The Hurt Locker" is easily the best thing he's wrote, probably because it was an adaptation of his own on-the-ground journalism, but even that feels quite poor at times. I have two opposing feelings on "The Hurt Locker". Firstly, if you use the Ebert rule and grade the movie on what it is and not what it isn't, it...

 I do not have an especially interesting Take™ on Olivia Wilde's new sci-fi thriller "Don't Worry Darling". After months of intense drama involving Ms. Wilde possibly fighting with her female lead and definitely dating her male lead, the end result is a film that I think it basically decent. It's much stronger in the peripheral parts of moviemaking (set design, sound effects) than it is the parts that most people will pay attention to (the script is not great, and neither are most of the actors). It's a mess, but a watchable one.  The main twist is a good idea for a movie. I'll avoid saying exactly what it is, because the only level the film works on is one of a pure suspense thriller. Instead I'll say that the execution felt lacking, because the film is so deeply uninterested in everyone's backstory. It should be obvious to everyone that Chris Pine is hiding some evil secret. The "why", both why he is evil and why he feels the need to hi...

 I got so comfortable with the idea that we can assume Netflix original movies are terrible unless they're from trusted name-brand auteurs and/or play at a trusted name-brand festival. And here comes Jennifer Kaytin Robinson with what is instantly one of my favorite films of the year. The set up is perfect for a tacky thriller: "Riverdale" star Camila Mendes and "Stranger Things" breakout Maya Hawke hatch a plan to "do revenge" on each other's bully. It's a deliberate Hitchcock bite, in a movie that is absolutely full of deliberate bites from "Heathers", "Mean Girls", "Cruel Intentions", and just about every high school movie from 20+ years ago. So what makes "Do Revenge" work? Simply put, when I expect it to go one way (scoring easy layups by updating those earlier movies to 2020s standards of feminism), it goes the opposite way (a full embrace of how evil its psychotic characters can be).   The plot is ...

 Aren't people tired of these movies yet? I think "elevated horror" is a very silly thing in itself, but some people happen to be really good at it! Jordan Peele makes great elevated horror. The 2020 "Invisible Woman" is a solid entry. "Barbarian", which was dumped by the Disney-owned corpse of Fox a few weeks ago, is a gross monster movie with plenty to say about sex, race, and capitalism. This makes it the second dumped Fox horror film to pull that off in recent years, after "Ready or Not", directed by the guys who made a decent "Scream" remake that skewered elevated horror.   None of these carry the A24 logo. Other than "Hereditary", I don't see anything interesting about the lot of their horror releases. It's so formulaic. An A24 horror film is going to be well shot, but probably too interested in showing off the nature of its rural setting, and aggressively in love with having the camera zoom in very slowly to...

 First, a preface: I watched the new horror movie "Barbarian" knowing nothing about it except that it's a new horror movie that a lot of people liked. I like it too. I don't love it. I think it's worth watching, and if you are going to watch it, I think it's best done with little to no knowledge of what's going on here. With that being said, I'll be going into detail about the movie's reveals, and what it's trying to say with them.  We start with a potentially interesting set-up of a rental house booked by two strangers. This does not have an interesting pay-off. The scares in the first half hour or so are dumb and bad and cheap, and that's my main issue holding back full praise for the film. It is the laziest kind of jump scares, where nothing is actually happening but there are music cues telling you things might, and fell-on-the-keyboard stings accompany innocent situations. Eventually, eventually, there is a pay-off in the form of under...

 The Toronto International Film Festival is unique among film festivals because, bluntly, studios actually release the movies that play there. It has a reputation as a top tier fest, but unlike Cannes or Venice, it enjoys plenty of attendance from the general public, and over time this has sort of caused it to play more mainstream and perhaps less good films. So let's do some data!  The 2021 version of the fest saw 6 films that got a wide release - a relatively low number that was probably artificially deflated by both the pandemic and the rise of streaming services as platforms for prestige dramas. "Belfast", "The Eyes of Tammy Faye", and "Spencer" are exactly the kinds of films that would play a prestige festival and not get a wide release if reviews were bad, while "Dune" and "Last Night In Soho" are well-funded mainstream films that were deemed of high enough quality to play at the fest, and "Dear Evan Hansen" is our t...

 Giallo: An Italian subgenre of proto-slasher movies that were also crime mysteries. It's that thing that Dario Argento got famous for. You know. It's a fun movie genre with a cult following, which I consider myself a part of, but it's never really been a mainstream fixture. For whatever reason, in 2021, quite a few English-language films directed by A-list talent with major giallo influence came out. I'm not interested in Edgar Wright's "Last Night in Soho" for the purposes of this, but rather the giddy silly-on-purpose thrillers from James Wan and, oddly enough, Joe Wright.   I'm not sure if I've ever seen a film be quite so obvious in its influence as "Malignant", which brazenly copies everything from Argento's lighting to, uh, Argento's murder weapon. I, for one, think this is super cool and fun! That Italian horror lighting is mostly distinct reds and blues, which are especially out of vogue these days, when all horror movies...

  This will be a quicker, bloggier bit, a brief reaction to my screening and then a sort of brief review of the movie. I saw "Jaws" in my local AMC Imax theater on Saturday for $3.20. The promotion that movie theaters were doing for very cheap tickets in all formats was neat. I'd actually never seen a film in Imax there, because I was pretty confident that the presentation wouldn't be impressive enough to pay extra for it, and I was definitely right on that instinct. The screen was a little bigger than others in that building but nothing special, and the sound was squarely in the realm of "fine, I guess". The movie specifically looked...  fine - it's a really good transfer outside of a few (I'm talking literally 3 or 4) establishing shots that were noticeably lower quality, but it seems so silly and pretentious to hype up a 40 year old movie playing on a fancy format that it wasn't made for. I'll balance that by saying the famous shooting st...

  The first thing going through my head while watching "Heavenly Creatures" is... why was it this hard to watch "Heavenly Creatures"?? This is an Oscar nominated, Venice Film Festival prize winning film. Released in 1994, it was the mainstream breakthrough for bona fide A-list director and Mr. Lord Of The Rings, Peter Jackson, as well as the debuts for Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet. On paper, that is more than enough names for a film to get DVD distribution. And yet! The thing isn't available to stream anywhere, or buy/rent digitally anywhere, and Blu-ray and DVD discs are functionally out of print. DVDs are reasonably available on eBay, but Blu-rays are not and will probably run you upwards of $50. Why exactly this is, is not super clear to me. Yes, it's a Miramax film that got edited for American release, same as the similarly unavailable "Velvet Goldmine". But there are plenty of Miramax films that are  in circulation. Even some of the notori...

 It's somewhat wild to think about how much re-releases just... aren't a thing anymore. They were of course the main thing that a movie would do to make money for most of the existence of movies. They come back every X years and make a little bit more money over time. Something like "The Exorcist" gets released in a few theaters in 1973, weaves its way in and out of theaters over a year because wide releases weren't invented yet, comes back into some theaters every few years for week-long residencies, and then gets an earnest wide release in the 21st century with a bit of new stuff, becoming a genuine hit.  A 40 year old horror movie made more money in the year 2000 than Adam Sandler pic "Little Nicky" or Cameron Crowe's masterpiece "Almost Famous". Since the DVD era around the turn of the century, it's generally been true that a theatrical re-release needed some kind of additional content to get butts in seats: 2001's biggest re-re...

 David Cronenberg made a funny career for himself, where he's destined to be forever known as the body horror guy despite not making all that much body horror. "Crimes Of The Future" is sold as kind of a back to roots picture by him - something akin to "Videodrome" or "The Fly", which along with "Crash" are probably his 3 most famous films still, despite them all being very old and except for "The Fly" not being all that popular when they released. His recent interest in abstract dramas and Viggo Mortensen thrillers will end up as his so-called forgotten era, I would think.  I would certainly say this new film feels very "Videodrome"-y in its structure. Like "Videodrome", the movie is trying to work on at least 3 different levels. You have the gross out horror right on the surface. Here's the first spot where "Crimes Of The Future" feels good, but weird: this stuff is all more cool than horrifying....