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Movie Curiosities — Alien: Romulus
August 21, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
This movie had everything going in its favor. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Didi
August 20, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
To start with, “didi” is a Chinese term — roughly translated, it means “little brother”. Hence Didi, the semi-autobiographical picture from writer/director Sean Wang, here making his feature debut after a short but respectable tenure in documentaries and music videos. And due to the autobiographical nature of the movie, it bears mentioning that Wang is a Taiwanese American who came of age in Fremont, CA, which is where this film was shot. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Skincare
August 19, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Say what you will about Elizabeth Banks, but she’s certainly not boring. Charlie’s Angels (2019). Cocaine Bear. Brightburn. Rita goddamn Repulsa in Power Rangers (2017). The Happytime Murders. I didn’t even like all of those movies (some of which I actively hated, in fact) and not all of them panned out with general audiences, but I can respect each and every one of them as a bold swing on Banks’ part. Banks may look like your typical dime-a-dozen Hollywood generically pretty blonde, but she takes interesting parts and makes interesting movies like few others in her class consistently do.
So here’s Skincare, in which Banks stars and also exec-produces. I hasten to add that Austin Peters is writing and directing here, alongside co-writers Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, all of whom make their feature debuts with this picture. With Banks involved, it’s certainly not boring. But with so little experience at the helm, it’s not coherent either.
Banks stars as Hope Goldman, an internationally renowned aesthetician running a massively successful skincare practice in Los Angeles, weeks away from launching her own bespoke line of skincare products. Unfortunately, because she’s sunk all her assets into her upcoming skincare line, she doesn’t have any money for this month’s rent on her studio.
Compounding the bad timing, an up-and-coming rival aesthetician (Angel, played by Luis Gerardo Mendez) opens up his own dermatology practice across the way. Worst of all, Hope’s e-mail and social media get hacked and she’s subjected to all manner of unspeakably horrific acts of online sexual harassment and assault. Her reputation and business are being actively sabotaged at a delicate point in her career, and the timing leads Hope to suspect that Angel may be involved.
On paper, it’s a decent premise. In practice, there are a number of reasons why it doesn’t work.
A big one is that even before shit hits the fan, Hope is hyped up by herself and others as the American Dream personified, a woman whose world-conquering success in a cutthroat business is enough to justify whatever petty backstabbing it takes for her to get ahead and stay ahead. We see this for ourselves in our first interactions between Hope and Angel, as Hope takes all manner of passive-aggressive swipes at this bright young up-and-comer. So it’s not much of a sea change when Hope vents her paranoid anger at Angel, with zero evidence that Angel is responsible for anything.
Put simply, Hope starts the movie as an entitled two-faced bitch and she ends the movie as an entitled two-faced bitch. Not much there in the way of layers or introspection or a development arc.
Granted, Hope is justifiably upset about the competitor setting up shop in her own backyard, an outrageous lapse in professional courtesy. And yes, Angel is a bit of a pompous dickbag. But that’s another huge problem with this movie: Everyone is an asshole.
Hope is a duplicitous bitch whose only response to any problem is to escalate matters beyond all control. Angel is an egomaniac with no respect for the shoulders he’s standing on or the feet he’s trampling. Their landlord (Jeff, played by John Billingsley) can’t utter a single sentence about anything other than the month’s rent. Jordan (Lewis Pullman) is a preening coked-up “life coach”. A local newscaster (Brett, played by Nathan Fillion, of all people) is a womanizing bastard. Armen (Erik Palladino) is a violent street tough who’s inexplicably devoted his entire life to Hope with no questions asked.
The only character in this movie who’s a hundred percent sympathetic is Hope’s assistant (Marine, played by MJ Rodriguez), and the character has so little agency or plot impact or independent motivation, she might as well be Hope’s smartphone. These characters are all so flat and cartoonishly unsympathetic, it’s impossible to take the film seriously as any kind of critique against superficial self-centered showbiz types. It’s a shallow movie about shallow people, and the filmmakers are nowhere near savvy enough to spin that into any kind of intelligent commentary.
Even as a parable about online harassment and character assassination, the movie doesn’t quite work. For one thing, it makes a huge difference that Hope is a public figure whose image is freely and readily accessible. That takes a lot away from the central point that this sort of online harassment could happen to anyone. Especially since there’s never any explanation as to how Hope got hacked in the first place, or any kind of constructive advice on what to do in response to online attacks. (There’s “change your passwords,” but that’s it.)
Things get even worse with the big reveal as to what’s going on. One of my top dealbreakers with any movie is idiot characters who make their own problems for no reason whatsoever, and that’s more or less exactly what we’ve got here. It’s the protagonist, the antagonist, and the supporting characters all escalating the conflicts and fucking each other over for no reason whatsoever. Even in Hope’s case, she consistently takes the most destructive and least sensible option long past the point of squandering all sympathy.
The upshot is that with so many despicable actions between so many unlikable characters who act with little if any apparent motivation, it gets difficult to track who deserves what. Given the simplistic plot, the simplistic characters, and the convoluted morality, it’s tough to parse out any kind of coherent theme or message that’s worth a damn.
Watching this movie, I kept thinking back to I Care a Lot, another movie with a ruthless and deeply unsympathetic blonde shark as our protagonist. But that movie had a smarter and more capable protagonist, it was always abundantly clear why she was being made to suffer, and it was all done to advance a unique and timely statement about U.S. healthcare with regard to the elderly. This movie also compares unfavorably to Nightcrawler, which actually works as a scathing satire of Hollywood superficiality and the American Dream. In large part because it had an unsettling and ruthless protagonist who did in fact develop over the course of the film, achieving his goals and rising to the top of his industry by virtue of being a total psychopath.
But all we get in this movie is an unlikeable protagonist who becomes her own undoing by being unlikeable. While half the other unlikeable characters die and the other half lives. Nothing new, nothing intelligent, nothing that makes any kind of sense. Nothing worth a damn at all.
What we’ve got here is an unfortunate case of naive newcomers punching way too far above their weight class. Banks and Pullman and Fillion are all entertaining to watch, but they deserved a better script and better direction than this. Skincare is a waste of a good premise, something that could’ve and should’ve been done justice by more experienced filmmakers. As it is, the movie hates its own characters so much that it fails to make any point beyond the fact that these people are awful. Which isn’t exactly a novel statement or a useful one for anyone who doesn’t live in SoCal.
Sorry, but this one’s a hard no for me.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: Borderlands
August 14, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Sometimes, the problem with forgettable movies is that everyone forgets they ever happened. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Cuckoo
August 11, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
A short time ago (in fact, the movie is still playing in some theaters), Neon released a prestige horror movie called Longlegs. Savvier film critics than I made the connection to “Daddy Longlegs”, an archaic term from back when we needed euphemisms to call people groomers or pederasts. Anyway, the basic gist is that “Daddy Longlegs” was an anonymous benefactor who helped to raise an impressionable young girl until such time as she was old enough and presentable enough to openly court. And the film did indeed tap into that reference… in a manner so twisted and weighed down with bullshit that it became almost unrecognizable. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Trap
August 5, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Ah, Manoj Night Shyamalan. What the blue blazing hell are we going to do with you? Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Twisters
August 4, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Twister was a big-budget disaster movie that came out in 1996. It was produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Michael Crichton — alongside Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time — shortly after Spielberg and Crichton redefined blockbuster cinema with Jurassic Park in 1993. Also, Twister was directed by Jan de Bont, coming fresh off his action classic Speed.
The end result was a series of aggressively stupid set pieces punctuating a gossamer plot with annoying paper-thin characters. All sizzle and no steak. The product of a studio chasing trends in the vain hope of rebottling some lightning, without any clue as to what made those prior films such classics in the first place.
The film was about Jo and Bill Harding, but the filmmakers were Jonas.
So here we are with Twisters, a film made and marketed as a legacy sequel to the ’90s guilty pleasure. Even though — except for a few Wizard of Oz shout-outs — the “sequel” has exactly fuck-all to do with the prior movie. But hey, things have changed in the past thirty years and climate change has made the premise of continuous and simultaneous mega-cyclones into something terribly plausible. There’s so much potential for the franchise to comment on… wait, what’s that? The movie doesn’t even mention climate change? What a spineless son of a motherless goat.
Well, now you all know why I kept dragging my feet getting to this one.
Daisy Edgar-Jones headlines as Kate Carter, an Oklahoma farm girl with the preternatural ability to read weather and chase tornadoes. We meet up with her as a Ph.D. student who’s come up with some kind of pseudoscientific magic bullet that should theoretically cause tornadoes to dissipate near-instantly. Unfortunately, Kate goes in with a team of five — including her boyfriend, played by Daryl McCormack — and only two survive the attempted test: Kate and Javi (Anthony Ramos).
Cut to five years later. After some time in the armed forces, Javi started up a new business chasing tornadoes with all the latest tech. Specifically — with help from some rich investors and his connections in the military — Javi got his hands on a new prototype radar system that can image tornadoes with unprecedented clarity. But he needs Kate, who’s now analyzing Doppler data from a desk in NYC. Kate grudgingly agrees to come back to Oklahoma to consult and we’re off to the races.
But wait, there’s more!
Enter Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), ringleader of a motley crew out to chase tornadoes for YouTube views and cheap thrills. Reckless assholes putting themselves in harm’s way, interfering with the scientists working to collect potentially life-saving data, all while selling their own merch.
Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. As with the original movie, we’ve got a romantic pairing between the reluctant tornado whisperer and the reckless tornado chaser, but the genders are swapped. More importantly, Kate’s PTSD and survivor’s guilt are far more thematically potent with regards to overcoming fear and loss. I need hardly add that the Kate/Tyler interplay doesn’t come with the baggage of a failed marriage, so watching the two of them move past their first impressions and drift together feels much more engaging, and the Powell/Edgar-Jones chemistry is strong enough to sell it.
Incidentally — as with the first movie — this is very much a conflict between the scrappy independent tornado chasers versus the corporate drones. Except this time, the corporate drones are the good guys. Well, that’s certainly an interesting moral subversion… oh, wait. No, scratch that — there’s a second-act twist to show that the corporate drones are indeed the villains and our scrappy underdogs aren’t the assholes we’d been led to believe.
Gotta say, I applaud the filmmakers for how well they sold the heel-turn. Sure, the filmmakers ended up with the predictable binary morality, but the path to getting there was much more dynamic and layered. It certainly helps that our Jonas analogue isn’t some smarmy prick, but someone Kate has a shared traumatic history with. Kate and Javi deeply care for each other, despite all their differences. Of course, I need hardly add that if we really were supposed to hate Javi, he wouldn’t have been played by Anthony Ramos. The guy couldn’t play a heel to save his life, that’s not a card in his deck.
Elsewhere, we’ve got the nebbishy fish-out-of-water audience viewpoint character (Ben, played by Harry Haden-Paton), who proves to be far tougher and more useful than the Jami Gertz character who played a similar role in the prequel. We’ve got Maura Tierney on hand to play Kate’s mother, running a quiet farm where our main characters can get some BBQ and catch up on romantic drama, as a counterpart to the previous film’s Lois Smith character. The whole film is like this: All the parts from the previous film are here, but they’re all put together in a different order. And they’re better for it.
We have characters with some legitimate degree of pathos and layering, with genuine development arcs. The central romance isn’t shrill and ungodly annoying to sit through. While it’s never in doubt as to who the good guys and bad guys are, it’s shockingly easy to buy into the first impressions with the understanding of exactly what both sides are trying to do. Even so, when we finally get the big reveal as to the characters’ motivations, it turns out the good guys are trying to make a difference in their own deeply moving way, while the villains are truly evil in a predatory way that goes far beyond “because they’re plagiarist dickheads.”
Unfortunately, the supporting cast is nowhere near on par with that of the first movie. It makes a difference that our charming crew of underdog misfits doesn’t really get a lot of screentime or development until the third act, and their counterparts were easily the best part of the previous film. (RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman.) The best we get is probably Maura Tierney, who turns in a nicely sweet performance without overselling the mother character.
And of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention David Corenswet, here playing a greedy and snooty corporate asshole. I honestly appreciate the chance to see Corenswet play a supporting character as a two-dimensional spineless heel before watching him play Superman. It’s a nice reminder that this particular actor has enough range to make you totally forget that he’s a square-jawed Adonis. I’m now more certain than ever he’s going to crush that role. But I digress.
What about the effects sequences? Well, we’ve got more of the same attempts to chase a tornado and get the necessary data before the tornado disappears and/or our characters die. We’ve got more abuses of plot armor, as characters survive the literal wrath of god through laughably insufficient measures. But this movie showed us a tornado on fire, so the sequel definitely cleared that particular bar.
Even so, it’s a major, MAJOR sticking point that this film didn’t even mention climate change. I can’t for the life of me understand why this movie did so much to make the science plausible, working so hard to get people interested in meteorology, without ever once mentioning climate change. It’s like making a scientifically plausible movie to get people interested in biology without ever mentioning evolution. What the fuck are you doing, you cowards?!
That said, if the filmmakers weren’t going to focus on that, at least they focus on the very real human cost of these unpredictable catastrophes. This is very much a movie about the kind of poor rural folk who typically live in Tornado Alley, the kind of people whose entire lives are destroyed by these disasters because they didn’t have much to lose in the first place. Those affected need our sympathy, and the well-being of our fellow human beings matters more than our personal wealth. It may not be a message about climate change, but it’s a potent and highly relevant humanitarian theme nonetheless.
Twisters is absolutely better than its predecessor, but that’s a low bar to clear. This is still ultimately a big dumb disaster movie in which the main characters survive because of plot armor and the central plot device is a machine that can literally kill tornadoes. And again, it’s a film so aggressively simple and non-offensive that climate change was left out entirely.
With all of that said, at least we get a conflict with some degree of nuance and characters with engaging development arcs. We get stronger thematic statements about science and humanitarian aid and how much more we could be doing for our poorest neighbors in the rural red states. Hell, for how awesomely stupid the tornado-killer is, it raises the stakes by a considerable margin over mere data collection. For that matter, the opening prologue — killing off three characters in one stroke — raises the internal stakes of our protagonist in a huge way.
It’s big dumb fun, but there’s a beating heart to it. There’s some actual substance here to go with the spectacle. I don’t think this would’ve been worth an opening weekend ticket, but waiting a couple weekends to go see it on the big screen worked out nicely.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: Deadpool & Wolverine
July 28, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I’ve been saying for a while now that MCU burnout isn’t happening because we’ve gotten so many of them. It’s happening because we still expect every single one of them to be an industry-smashing billion-dollar world-conquering must-see event. For whatever reason, the world simply refuses to adjust to a new status quo in which Marvel films are normal, and should be judged by normal standards.
Take Deadpool & Wolverine, for instance. It’s the third movie starring Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, after two straight home runs playing the character. We’ve got Hugh Jackman coming back to play Wolverine. It’s the first time either actor has played their signature roles since Disney bought out Fox.
On a certain level, this feels like it should be a big deal. But it bears remembering that we’re talking about freaking Deadpool here. His whole deal is self-aware wisecracking comedy making fun of himself, the fans, the greater Hollywood system, and everything around him. And on top of that, he’s been firmly established as a blood-soaked, sex-fueled, over-the-top action lead who could never be done justice with a four-quadrant PG-13 movie.
If the filmmakers are going to throw a game-changing curveball at us to deliver some huge seismic shift in the MCU, Deadpool is the absolute last character you’d want for the job. This was never going to be some pivotal event. We never needed it to be a pivotal event. We only needed it to be a raunchy, funny, irreverent action comedy like what made the last two movies so successful.
And it is certainly that… but it’s not only that.
In terms of the greater meta-narrative, this movie only really had one major job: Close the book on the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel on film. And with the exceptions of Fantastic Four (2015) and The New Mutants (But seriously, who even wants to remember those?), pretty much every Marvel film and franchise under Fox’s late stewardship gets a shout-out at the very least. Some characters are brought back with their original actors, a few old characters have been recast, there’s an actor who finally gets his shot at playing a character he tried to get on the screen for years, and we even get a “John Krasinski” moment with a fan-favorite actor auditioning for a rumored role. Hell, Wesley Snipes’ Blade gets a mention, and those movies were with New Line Cinema!
And yes, we even get a sight gag in tribute to the late Stan Lee.
I know everyone was expecting this to be some massive crossover that finally clears the way for the mutants to join the MCU. That’s not what we get. Instead, this feels more like Black Widow: A film that was made to pay a debt. It doesn’t serve much of any purpose in the grand scheme of things, but this is a movie that Marvel needed to make and it’s a film we all needed to see. Say what you will about the Marvel films that Fox cranked out over two decades (and I’ve said more than my share), but for better or worse, that was a hugely influential and prominent stretch of superhero cinema history.
So many movies and characters of the time got short shrift, cut prematurely short by corporate incompetence and/or the Disney merger. And for all the many times Hugh Jackman put on the claws, we never got to see him in the gold and blue. We never got to see him in the classic mask. There’s a very real possibility that Hugh Jackman will always be the most iconic performer to play one of Marvel’s most iconic flagship characters, but there are so many iconic aspects to Wolverine that Jackman never got to play. That just ain’t right. And we all know it.
You might call it fan service, but I call it closure. Marvel Studios could only go so much further without directly addressing the Fox merger and paying tribute to half the films that cleared the way for the MCU as we know it. And considering that there are people of legal drinking age who weren’t alive when X-Men first hit screens, I think every single one of us needed to see the mainline MCU gracefully pick up the torch and pay homage to what came before. We got that for Sony’s Spider-Man films with No Way Home, and it’s only fair we should get something similar for the Fox movies.
(Side note: Speaking of closure, I’m happy to report that the spiteful deranged bigot Ike Perlmutter has finally cashed out all his Disney shares. After so many decades, the fuckwit is totally gone at long last. One last time, all together now: One, two, three, FUCK YOU, PERLMUTTER!!!)
I’m not even gonna bother recapping the plot because it’s contrived bullshit. Even the film itself seems to know that the plot is contrived bullshit. The filmmakers openly defy all internal logic, and the only reason it works is because this is freaking Deadpool. The villains are pathetically weak, in large part because their actions are dictated entirely by the needs of the premise. Hell, I could think of at least one fight scene that ends with a pathetically lazy deus ex machina because the story needs to get back on track.
With the exception of Deadpool himself, pretty much all of the established supporting characters from the first two movies are only present for a brief scene in the beginning and that’s it. We see Deadpool applying for the Avengers — with no explanation as to how that’s supposed to work — and the scene is only there to introduce the themes of the film. It all adds to the perfunctory nature of the film, and the general feeling that everything possible got shunted into the picture out of obligation.
That said, this is still a movie made by extremely talented people, with a cast populated almost entirely of actors who’ve been playing their respective parts for years by this point. I might add that some of the fight sequences are legitimately brilliant — that opening credits sequence had me in stitches out of the gate — and the Wolverine/Deadpool fights are every bit as stupidly awesome as you’d expect. Speaking of which, I like how this movie continues the second movie’s trend of contrasting Deadpool’s physical invulnerability with his emotional vulnerability. I particularly love how Deadpool is going through all of this to try and save his friends, and then Wolverine points out that Deadpool is most likely going to outlive all his friends and loved ones by a couple centuries anyway. I kinda wish more had been done with that.
As with most MCU movies by this point, Deadpool & Wolverine is critic-proof. By now, you already know whether you’re going to see it and whether you think it’s any good. But honestly, I think that asking whether the film is good or bad is immaterial — what’s important is that this movie was necessary. We needed to see this movie, and Marvel needed to make it.
And now that it’s finally out, we need to move on.
It’s time for other actors to play these characters. It’s time for Marvel Studios to introduce and integrate their own versions of the flagship characters that were blocked off to them for so many years. And yes, it’s time to retire this iteration of Deadpool.
What sucks about the character is that he always has to be the center of attention. When he’s not onscreen, everybody has to know where he is and what trouble he’s getting into. When he is onscreen, nobody else can get a word in edgewise. We can’t move forward with Reynolds and Deadpool — or Jackman and Wolverine, for that matter — taking up all the oxygen. These characters — and so many others from the Fox era — were given their well-deserved endings with this picture. Let them have it and we can all move on.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: Oddity
July 21, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Oddity is yet another another shoestring prestige horror flick. It comes to us from writer/director Damien Mc Carthy, who’s effectively making his feature debut after his first movie, Caveat, got lost in the merciless sewage drain that was the year 2020. So, let’s see what we’ve got this time. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Longlegs
July 15, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I’m sincerely pleased and relieved to see that Maika Monroe landed on her feet.
Monroe hit a bit of a rough patch, after The Guest and It Follows opened so many doors that The 5th Wave and Independence Day: Resurgence promptly closed. She could’ve easily washed out as another dime-a-dozen pretty young blonde, and Monroe has been absent from mainstream attention for quite a while. But then COVID reset everything. And Monroe struck gold when she played the lead in Watcher, which got her no shortage of praise from those who found it among the year-long dogpile of 2022.
Monroe seems well-positioned to re-introduce herself as a prestige horror icon, going back to what put her on the map in the first place. (Quite literally — there’s an It Follows sequel in development and she’s firmly on board.) And now she’s in a prestige horror film alongside producer Nicolas Cage, coming in hot off his own horror reinvention with Renfield and Dream Scenario. The both of them are working with a script and direction from Osgood Perkins, who last delivered the bugfuck Gretel & Hansel in 2020.
Longlegs is set sometime in the ’90s, and somewhere in Sweet Home Oregon. Where exactly in Oregon? No, I’m seriously asking, where exactly in Oregon is this supposed to be? The film was shot in Vancouver B.C., and I don’t know of anywhere in Oregon that would be consistent with the plot and production design. But I digress.
Monroe plays Lee Harker, an FBI agent who caught such an extremely lucky break (I’ll spare you the long story) that she may in fact be some degree of psychic. Thus she’s reassigned to help Agent Carter (no, not that one, this one’s played by Blair Underwood) to help with a cold case.
All that’s known is that a string of families were brutally slain with no signs of forced entry, and all the murder weapons came from inside the house. There’s nothing to connect these various murders except that all these families had daughters whose birthday fell on the 14th day of the month. There’s also a string of letters found at each crime scene, each one written in such a basic substitution cypher, you’d think the FBI would’ve cracked it long ago. Regardless, the case inexplicably breaks open just as soon as Harker comes on and we’re off to the races.
It’s said as much in the opening credits, so I can safely spoil that Nicolas Cage is playing our serial killer, name of “Longlegs”. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the exact nature of Longlegs. No, seriously, I can’t tell. Even after I’ve seen the entire fucking movie, I still don’t have any idea what this guy’s deal is. Longlegs is a straight-up no-dimensional homicidal lunatic, literally too stupid and manic to function. You’d be amazed his mother had any children that lived. It’s Nicolas Cage doing his most outlandish Jared Leto impression under twenty pounds of makeup. Even taking into account that the film is set in the ’90s, this is some outdated and tasteless threadbare third-rate Silence of the Lambs knockoff bullfuckery.
I hasten to add that the setups and payoffs are all quite elegantly constructed. It’s really quite impressive how the enigmatic statements and ramblings reappear as devastating callbacks in the third act. This only compounds my amazement as to how so much method was wasted on so much crushing madness.
This is a film in which devil worship, black magic, and ESP are all foundational plot elements. The entire plot would literally fall apart without paranormal bullshit to hold it all together, and none of it is deployed in any consistent manner. This is not a movie built to make any kind of logical sense. These filmmakers are not interested in coherent plotting, plausible world-building, or relevant thematic statements.
With this film, Osgood Perkins has firmly established himself as a filmmaker who’s trying his best to operate on an emotional level, rather than a logical one. This movie was solely and aggressively built in pursuit of building mood and atmosphere, throwing metric tons of half-baked Satanic bullshit and obnoxious jump scares at the screen in the hope of getting a visceral reaction. And if the defiant lack of sense makes the audience feel like they’re going insane, so much the better! To quote an old lawyer truism…
If the facts are on your side, pound the facts into the table. If the law is on your side, pound the law into the table. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.
This is the cinematic equivalent of pounding the table. Perkins and his team are trying to be so shocking, so transgressive, so uniquely and memorably over the top that we don’t notice or care how bullshit this is. Unfortunately, this is a crime thriller. And a crime thriller is expected to make some kind of logical sense. I can’t believe I have to explain this, but any halfway decent crime thriller should have consistent logic and a trackable plot so that the audience can feel smarter for playing along.
Going back to the Silence of the Lambs comparison, that movie is a masterpiece because even with an antagonist void of any sense or humanity, it was still a whip-smart and fiendishly clever crime thriller that clearly showed the crime’s solution while also serving up some remarkable feminist commentary.
And lest we forget, as I’ve already stated quite a few times on this blog, there is no shortage of horror films or prestige horror films. The market is oversaturated to such a relentless degree, and this is what these filmmakers are bringing to the table? They’ve got nothing else to offer but a few hamfisted jump scares and transparent sacrilegious imagery? A serial killer plot run by a D-list Zodiac Killer wannabe? By today’s standards of the genre, this shit is embarrassing. Hell, I might even go so far as to say that it’s insulting. Take it back and go the fuck home.
I know from experience that there are certain moviegoers who are happy with a film just as long as it makes them feel a certain way. Longlegs was made for them to the exclusion of all others. It’s hard to sufficiently express how proudly and aggressively nonsensical this film is, how oppressively and comically bleak the atmosphere is, how obnoxious and gratuitous the jump scares are. It’s a film that prioritizes creepiness to the exclusion of any intelligence, novelty, subtlety, or coherent statement.
If you want to see what Maika Monroe can really do in a work of prestige horror, go try Watcher. Hell, I didn’t even like Dream Scenario, but that movie was vastly superior as a prestige horror Nicolas Cage showcase. This one’s a hard pass.
For more Movie Curiosities, check out my blog. I’m also on Facebook and BlueSky.
Movie Curiosities: Fly Me to the Moon
July 14, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
The moon landing was not faked. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Kill
July 9, 2024 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
It’s a blood-soaked action movie set on a train, and the title is Kill. Nothing else, just the one word. Kill. I can’t tell if the filmmakers are crazy or stupid, but they’ve sure got brass. Read the rest of this entry →
