Freaky. How much mileage can you get out of Vince Vaughn as a serial killer and Kathryn Newton as a victim, who end up swapping bodies? Not very much, it turns out. The tiny amount of juice you can squeeze from Vaughn pretending to be a teenage girl in a large man’s body is done in about five minutes.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A delight.
Oddity. A very neat, tight little ghost story. Particularly enjoyed how tight it was, essentially encompassing only two locations. Good atmosphere, good writing, sharply honed.
Alien: Romulus, streaming on Hulu or purchasable on iTunes.
Do you like the Alien series? Watch this.
Do you not give a fuck about the Alien series? Watch something else.
People on a predictably abandoned space station fuck with shit they should’ve left well enough alone and get face hugged. You won’t gaf about any of the characters and it definitely isn’t going to win any awards for anything other than best Alien movie released this month.
Adds nothing new to the canon or series overall but was entertaining for fans of the series or genre.
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Clu Gulager doing his best knockoff Lloyd Bridges is brilliant here in Return of the Living Dead, a pitch-black comedy about zombies eating peoples’ brains. Has withstood the test of time.
I honestly hate that movie. The zombies don’t work. If zombies are both fast and smart, to say nothing about how tough these ones were, it takes away the stakes. Of course they’ll win. How could they lose?
It doesn’t take away the stakes for the humans; it just means they’re going to have a bad time. The point of the film is that it’s extremely amusing because nothing really works, and the humans are almost certainly completely fucked. There’s a tragicomic element to it.
“Vier Minuten”. Amazing German movie in my book. Watched it a few years back and just rewatched it last week. I am not aware if there is an English version, but I found the full movie with English subtitles on YouTube. Don’t miss it before it gets removed…
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Conclave. Some perfect casting, with Fiennes, Tucci, and Lithgow all doing a grand job, and Sergio Castellitto chewing some scenery. A neat little film that is ultimately about a meeting, but still decently enjoyable. And it’s always nice to get a look inside such an old tradition.
The Crow. Just a hypothetical here, but if I was making a film that was 110 minutes long, I would not wait 75 minutes for there to be any real action, and I would not have that action be Bill Sarsgard walking towards a succession of men with a sword, who each shoot him to no result, and then he stabs them with his sword. That is literally it. Danny Huston playing the same slimeball he always does is the best thing in this. Unmitigated fucking shit.
Blink Twice. One of the most obvious reveals in quite a while. Painfully so. And a pretty bad ending, to boot. Everything else was okay, it looks sumptuous. Decent soundtrack.
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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, purchased on iTunes.
Introduced 11 and 9 to it this afternoon.
Still a goddamn classic.
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Starve Martin losing it at the rental agency is too good. The whole movie is great, but that scene makes me lose it.
Speaking of John Candy, we watched Home Alone again this year and I just had a hunch that the funeral story was improved. I looked it up and it was, indeed, made up on the spot by Candy. I know they are professionals but I don’t know how they don’t all completely lose it when he tells the story.
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We watched Home Alone with my 8 year-old for his first time this year (and he loved it of course), and I was also wondering about that scene. I hadn’t watched the movie in many years and had forgotten how much John Candy is in the movie–I remembered him as having a cameo. So that was a pleasant surprise : )
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Genuinely funny, not afraid to smash the cheap puns, and perfect viewing for the family on Christmas Day.
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Home Alone is arguably my 11-year old’s favorite movie. Has been since we introduced it a couple years ago.
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Woman of the Hour. A good directorial debut from Anna Kendrick, who takes an ensemble approach to what could have easily been another also-ran crime film. Kendrick doesn’t hog the limelight, either, with a knockout performance from Autumn Best stealing the show.
Heretic. An interesting if flawed premise, leading to a cliched resolution. Much like organised religion, amirite? Watch this just for Hugh Grant being a freak.
Worth it for Dan Stevens’ German, Cuckoo is a conventional little film that nevertheless moves at a decent pace and remains interesting. Hunter Schafer as the ill-at-ease teenage lead is very good. Nice genre film, good treat for my brain.
Little Bites. Apart from the air of constant menace, there’s not much else to this. Good atmosphere, passable central performance, weak ending. Both Barbara Crampton and Heather Langenkamp popping up are distractions.
Strange Darling. The days when merely being non-linear could carry a film are long gone.
Love Lies Bleeding. I could watch Katy O’Brian get ripped all day, quite frankly, and Kristen Stewart is good too. Ed Harris can still act when he wants to. Some nice magical realism in an otherwise grimy crime film.
Exhuma. Choi Min-sik, looking much older here despite the fact he was in Oldboy (2003) perhaps ten years ago, plays a geomancer specialising in burial plots, and gets involved in a complicated burial. Some fantastic Korean and Japanese superstition and mythology, and a decent cast, can’t quite it from feeling a little bit too long.
What do you do after your last film (“Stand-up is too woke.”)? Make a musical.
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Well made behind the scenes for “The Substance”. 30 minutes of the director (Coralie Fargeat) talking about the making of the film, with significant detail into how the many practical effects were achieved. Released today presumably off the back of Demi Moore winning her first ever golden globe for this film.
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Nosferatu. Eggers definitely has the sort of vision that most directors lack, this is a good thing in most respects, but I do wonder how well it all works. The lighting and cinematography is beyond perfect, use of shadow incredible, but there’s also a lot of actors doing their stuff straight to camera, which is a bold choice. The fact they’re all up to the task (Simon McBurney gets to grizzle some scenery, among other things, which is great) is surprising and fortunate; the style of the acting and the script means this could easily not have worked, certainly whether it works for you will be a matter of taste. Hoult has never really sold me on much, but he’s very adept here, and Depp is honestly quite impressive.
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I can’t make up my mind whether I want to see this or not. I am a big fan of the silent film original, which I am under the impression this barely gives a nod to. Which I guess is potentially a good thing? Also, is it scary? Or is it just weird and eerie? Like on a 1-10 scale, where is it in terms of a terrifying horror movie?
It’s surprisingly faithful, actually. I think you can see Eggers loves the original. It has a very foreboding feel and an ominous, doom-laden tone. It definitely has its moments, and it goes for atmosphere over jump scares. But the use of light and shadow, the way certain things are revealed and hidden, is masterful, and the scares are competent. The overall ambience of the film is incredible. In terms of how terrifying it is, I’m not a fair judge, as I’m fairly desensitized at this point.
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I had some time to waste so I watched Alien Romulus (strangely streaming on Disney+, which really seems out of place). When I was done, I felt like I had, indeed, wasted my time.
I’m a fan of the original Alien movie and its sequel. I don’t know if I am no longer the target audience or if I’ve changed my tastes as I’ve aged (or likely a combination of both), but Romulus kind of bored me. I’m not great with review language and I’ll try to avoid spoilers but here are a couple of notes:
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First, the most horrifying thing about this movie was Rook. That could not have been more unnecessary and couldn’t have looked worse, especially when the rest of the movie looked pretty good.
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I get that Geiger’s art was highly phallic, but this movie leaned into the phallic and yonic (had to look that one up) imagery a little too hard, in my opinion. I get it; they are creepy. I probably don’t need to spend what felt like 10 minutes looking at a very vagina-like cocoon only to have the xeno head very slowly rise out of it like a scene from PornHub. Something about the way the imagery was portrayed in this movie made it seem juvenile.
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Everyone is always a redshirt. Yeah, yeah the Alien movies are about body horror and the terrible things an apex predator can do to its prey. And I understand that in order for there to be tension, we need to know the stakes. But how can there be tension when you are watching yet another Alien movie where you know going into it exactly who is going to come out of it alive?
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Maybe I’m in the minority, but I don’t need Alien lore. I know this is not the first movie to make the Alien story a deeper and more far-reaching thing, but I’ve always been fine with the idea that we don’t know what the xeno is, or where it came from, and frankly it doesn’t matter because it’s out to kill us. Tying this one in to the Prometheus lore dump was lame to me.
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Finally, this movie - and this series - suffers from the Henry Wu syndrome. In the Jurassic Park movies, they continually reinvent the threat by essentially creating new hybrids that are more deadly than the last. I get how from a storytelling perspective it may help to have bigger/better threats, but it makes my eyes roll every time I see it as explicitly as in Jurassic World and here in Romulus. To go further would probably put me in spoiler territory, but again, I’m happy with Xenos.
That’s a lot to say about a movie I’m completely ambivalent about, but I know the series in general has a huge following and the foundations of this cinematic universe are masterpieces. This one is not.
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