Category Archives: Movies

Remaking the Exorcist

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After the box office failure of Exorcist: Believer, which Universal, who had acquired the rights from Warner Brothers had hoped to revitalize the franchise and launch a new horror trilogy, the project was taken away from its director, David Gordon Green.

A new film currently known simply as The Exorcist has been handed to the reigning prince of cinematic horror, Mike Flanagan.

While there are some Flanagan projects that I have found to be inspired and masterfully crafted, in particular Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining that manages to honor both the original source material and the cinematic legacy, I have serious doubts about yet another Exorcist project. The Exorcist, in my opinion, should have never had any sequels and the concept of a ‘franchise’ is utterly repellant.

 First off, a horror franchise is a deeply difficult thing. Oh, there are tons and tons of them about and every studio dreams of having a run that is like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Scream, but what horror existed in those movies quickly vanished with the sequels. To me those movies ceased to horrify and only titillated with more and more elaborate methods of murders combined with advancing practical effects. I can’t remember ever being disturbed by these sequels and horror should disturb you emotionally not inspire cheers from gore as spectacle.

The second reason I am highly skeptical of an Exorcist franchise is that this story, this tale, was never constructed for that sort of open-ended treatment. The Exorcist, both novel and screenplay, was William Peter Blatty’s method of dealing with his own crisis of faith.  It was not a cash grab, but a work produced by a devoted Catholic who found his own way thorny and used fiction to explore answers to his deep theological questions. While the rest of the world considered The Exorcist a horror novel and film, Blatty and director William Friedkin, did not, treating the material as a theological mystery. With the exception of Blatty’s work with the novel Legion adapted into The Exorcist III, none of the sequels possessed the deep questioning nature of the original source material, they pursued effects and shock value, making them ultimately forgettable. yet another sequel to The Exorcist is the last thing cinema requires.

Little is actually known about Flanagan’s project and rumor has suggested that instead of a sequel he may be remaking the original film, a new adaptation of the novel.

This too would be a mistake.

Since its publication I have read the novel the Exorcist three or four times. I do not count it among my favorite books, but it is fascinating and an interesting glimpse into the time it was written. The script and motion picture are excellent adaptations, some of the best. Nearly all of the novel’s core story and more importantly questions are there, particularly with the final revisions later released. If this is a re-adaptation of the novel I fail to see what they can include that wasn’t in the original film’s take. What was left out deserved to be left out. Audiences, even in the 70s and more so today, would laugh at Father Karras’ quest to prove that it was telekinesis that moved the objects and not demonic possession. (Really, in the 70s psychic powers were all the rage in fiction and in the culture.)

The 1973 film was a miracle of adaptation, in script, in direction, and in casting. It was lightning in a bottle that I doubt even Flanagan can recreate.

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Classic Movie Review: Little Caesar (1931)

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Last week I watched a YouTuber movie reactor watch Soylent Green for the first time. That film was the very last movie with Edward G. Robinson a film star whose career stretched back to the very start of the sync-sound era of motion pictures. After viewing the reaction, I had a hankering to watch another film with Edward G. Robinson and instead of pulling Double Indemnity from my collection I decided to go with the movie that launched Robinson as a star Little Caesar.

Warner Bros Studios

Released in 1931, Little Caesar is most definitely a pre-code movie. We meet Caesar Enrico ‘Rico’ Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) as he and his buddy Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) rob a gas station, in the process murdering the attendant. Unlike Joe, Rico has no traces of remorse as they eat supper in an isolated diner following the horrid crime. Ambitious for more than petty robberies, the murder isn’t even on his mind, Rico drags Joe to the ‘big city’ where he quickly joins a mob and begins his meteoric rise (isn’t it ironic that we use ‘meteoric rise’ when meteors are most known for falling) to the top of the city’s organized crime community followed by his equally swift downfall.

Little Caesar is part of the Blu-Ray boxed set The Ultimate Gangster Collection. With its release in 1931, this film is an example of just how quickly Hollywood adopted synchronized sound into their productions. While the quality of the sound still needed improvement, the production capability was there and aside from the occasional use of title cards as deployed in silent movies, Little Caesar looks and sounds very much like the films that would follow for the rest of the decade. As a ‘pre-code’ movie, Little Caesar is a bold tale that follows its lead character as he murders his way to fame and fortune with a downfall that was not engineered by the police forces of the ‘big city’ but rather by betrayal from a friend.

Of course, this was the movie that made a star of Edward G. Robinson, and while he did play gangsters again, most notability in Key Largo, Robinson escaped typecasting and his career stretched from the 1930s into the early 1970s. If you watch classic Looney Tunes cartoons and see Bug Bunny facing off against a gangster, that gangster is a parody of Robinson’s performance in Little Caesar, which set the template for the genre.

At an hour and seventeen minutes, Little Caesar had little time for a ‘realistic’ climb to greatness for Rico and instead swiftly moves the character along, only stopping for an occasional bit of detailed action. Aside from Rico and Joe, the characters are flat, serving more as elements of plot than living breathing people and one should not go into watching this film with modern sensibilities about writing and psychological realism, but one should watch Little Caesar.

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Movie Review: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

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The newest installment in the 28 Days Later, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DeCosta, opened this weekend, and my sweetie-wife and I attended a Sunday matinee.

Bone Temple picks up just a very short time after the ending of the previous franchise entry with that film’s protagonist, 12-year-old Spike, a captive of the ‘Jimmies,’ a tiny, deranged band of sadistic marauders led by Jimmy, a man who survived the outbreak since childhood and now believes himself to be the embodiment of Satan’s will on Earth.

Sony Pictures

In a parallel plotline the movie follows Dr. Ian Kelson, also a character carried over from the previous movie, as he continues his isolated life amid the grand ossuary of towering bone that he constructed to honor the dead. Kelson’s experiments with the infected lead him to a sort of friendship with a massive, infected man. When a member of the Jimmies spies Kelson, dancing with an infected, they mistake him for Satan himself setting the two forces into conflict for the film’s final act.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a fine and perfectly serviceable follow-up to 28 Years Later. It is competently directed by Nia DeCosta and with a script by Alex Garland, the originator of the franchise, that has no serious plot holes, consistent believable characters, along with moments of action, horrific violence, and humor. And yet, for all that the best praise I can give this production is that it is ‘fine.’ Garland, who so often explores large ideas and questions with his writing, think 2024’s Civil War,Ex Machina, or the mind twisting Men, does very little of that with this movie. The deepest theme I can pull out of The Bone Temple is that some people are good and try to be of service to others, some are bad and seek pleasure in the pain that they can inflict on others, and many, if not most, are simply trying to survive a cruel and indifferent world. This is hardly the sort of statement one would expect from the scriptwriter of Annihilation.

As a horror film, whatever that phrase might mean to you, The Bone Temple, for me, does not deliver. I enjoyed the film, but more as a drama and character study than a genre film. Mind you, a genre film can be a great drama and character study while delivering the terror, unease, and apprehension that makes for a great horror film. Midsommar is a terrific example of the film that does that, as does The Haunting (the original not the action movie remake.) The real horror that is presented in The Bone Temple is the horror that people do to each other, that people are the real monsters, but that has been a subtext of the zombie movie since its inception with Night of the Living Dead and this movie breaks no real ground in that regard.

The performances in the film are competent. Alfie Williams (Spike) is given far less to do this time around than in the last movie where his character and his choices drove the narrative. Jack O’Connell (Jimmy) delivers a perfectly by the book portrayal of the sadistic psychopath, but Garland’s script aside from a minor trait of actually believing he is the son of Satan gives Jimmy nothing that steps outside of the well-trod path of the cinematic psychopath. It is in Ralph Fiennes’ (Kelson) portrayal of the kind doctor lost in a mad world that gives the film its depth. It is from Kelson that we see humanity and humor and a truly unforgettable musical video performance.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is worth seeing, particularly if you are a fan of Ralph Fiennes, but I doubt that the film will linger long in your memory.

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A Thematic Problem with The Red Shirt Issue

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Yesterday evening, I came across a post from a friend online that expressed their middling reaction to del Toro’s Frankenstein prompting a return of my own thoughts that del Toro had worked so hard to make his monster sympathetic that no one of consequence died at its hands, a major deviation from the source text.

del Toro’s use of nameless crew to be killed in a thrilling and exciting opening combat scene with an unstoppable monster makes for a great opening to his luscious film but becomes hollow when the rest of the time the monster is presented melodramatically sympathetic and without emotional or ethical flaws. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie opened with mass murder. After all, they were literally nobodies.

Now, I have written about this before calling it his ‘Red Shirt’ problem. For those who are unaware, ‘red shirts’ refers to the often unnamed and wholly uncharacterized extras presented as security officers in Star Trek. These day players came onto the scene and in popular (but exaggerated) opinion died in droves.  The essence is still on target, they were essentially nameless characters brought on to dramatize the danger of that episode, a necessary evil of the time as no network program could go about killing its major and central characters. (This was decades before Game of Thrones would make it a drinking game.)

Western literature and oral tradition stretching back into prehistory is corrupted with a nasty little idea, that some people are simply born better than the rest of us. The nobility deserves their castles, their rich food, and the product of our labor, our bodies, and our lives because of the blue blood that courses through their veins. The ‘Chosen One’ narrative so popular in everything from religion to Star Wars is a product of this form of thinking. Luke and Aragon are good people because they were born to it, not from choice, not from making a decision to be good, but by their very blood. The force and the right to rule flows from their heritage and not their choices. We, the non-chosen, need to step aside and let out betters make the choices that will rule our lives. Our duty is to serve and to be thankful.

And here is the poisonous subtext in the ‘red shirt’ problem, it perpetuates this division of people into those worth and deserving of sympathy, consideration, and ultimately power from those lower, nameless people of the great ‘unwashed masses’ whose existence only matters in the moment that it impacts the monied and good-blooded people worthy of names. There are your ‘betters’ to whom you must defer with titles such as my lord, sir, mister — and to whom you must pay your obedience or suffer the lash and then there is everyone else, ‘red shirts’ to be used and discarded either on the battlefield or the factory to advance the lives and lifestyles of their ‘betters.’ The subtext of nameless victims in horror and action movies is that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

“Red shirts” are not only a lazy and cheap play for a short cut to dramatic stakes, the practice subtly subverts the egalitarian ideals that all lives are valuable regardless of the accident of their birth or their importance to any particular narrative by regulating some characters to nameless and forgettable disposal.

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A New Motion Picture From the Creator of ‘Chernobyl’

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Craig Mazin, the writer, producer, and show runner of the hit shows Chernobyl and The Last Of Us who has proven his ability to shock, horrify, and unsettle even the most steadfast of viewers with stories of humans caught in circumstances that test them to the limits of their endurance, often with dreadful deaths along the way.

The podcast Scriptnotes is hosted by John August and Craig Mazin and is  heaven for scriptwriting and things interesting to scriptwriters. It actually covers much more than that. I have set aside any dreams of scriptwriting but still I am devoted to the podcast as a weekly dose of sanity in my ears.

For years Craig has mentioned obliquely a script he and a producer have been working on, a challenging one to crack its story and its voice. This week the man who gave us the technological terror of Soviet Nuclear design and the uncanny horror of fungal possession released the first look at his newest project.

Here is the trailer.

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Wicked: The Jenga Tower of IP

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While I was unwell this past weekend and too dizzy for my usual activities, I sat in my large recliner and watched Wicked on Amazon Prime.

Now, Wicked, the 2024 film, is an adaptation of Wicked the Stage Musical, which itself was an adaptation of the 1995 novel Wicked, which was a retelling of the classic book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but reimagined with the “wicked witch” of the West as its protagonist.

I am not a great fan of musicals, though there are a few in my library of DVDs and Blu-rays, so I had no burning desire or need to rush out last year and see this in the theaters. That said, it made a perfectly fine way to pass the time as my head spun with some sort of sinus issues.

Universal Studios

The story centers on Elphaba, a young woman born with two very powerful traits: one, a wild magical ability that manifests when she is emotionally upset—not quite a wizarding Hulk but close—and the second, bright verdant skin. Scorned by her father for her complexion, though the suggestion that she is a bastard is slid into the story, it is not made explicit. Ridiculed by everyone, Elphaba develops into a withdrawn and defensive young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. (Personally, I found the overt and powerful prejudice towards Elphaba a little difficult to square in a land with such a variety of strange and unusual lifeforms as Oz possesses.)

Elphaba’s life is turned around when, escorting her younger and disabled sister Nessarose to Shiz University, her untrained magical talent is noticed by an instructor, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and she is instantly enrolled and forced to room with the popular and utterly self-centered Galinda (Ariana Grande). The two women start off with a strong dislike towards each other but become friends. Elphaba comes to the attention of and is honored with an audience with The Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), where the two friends learn a terrible and life-changing truth about the land of Oz.

Wicked in all its iterations has a large and loyal fanbase, but I have never counted myself amongst them. Now, having seen the film, I can say that I liked it but did not love it.

The central performances are compelling enough, with Ariana Grande’s coming as a bit of a surprise to me. Pop stars and singers are often thrust into acting roles, and far too often they have neither the temperament nor the skills for nuanced acting performances. Some may think that because Galinda is a vain, self-centered, and not-too-bright woman, that it would be an easy role to play, but it is a truism that playing dumb is much more difficult than playing smart. Add to the challenge that all the characters, save Elphaba who anchors the production, play heightened and exaggerated versions of themselves, and Grande’s challenge is magnified.

Cynthia Erivo delivers another stunning performance both in her singing talents and in her acting ones. She is the emotional heart of the story, and if her performance doesn’t work for you, then the entire film will not either.

Wicked is colorful, over-the-top, and fun, but it is also, not barring that this is only half of the stage musical, overlong, with beats and songs that could be excised without any appreciable change to the film.

For example, when Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) convinces the student body to break the rules and visit the club “Oz Dust,” there is a substantial and elaborate number. The Prince is a “bad boy” and they are breaking the rules. However, nothing comes of the rule-breaking, not even when “caught” by Madame Morrible, as the plot needs to progress. What matters in the club is the beginning of Galinda’s and Elphaba’s friendship. The entire song and dance served no narrative purpose.

That said, even though the film is too long, it was fun to watch, and I do not feel that I wasted my time with Wicked.

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My Weekend, My Fears, and Rob Reiner

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I spent the weekend with a mysterious sinus condition that, while principally asymptomatic, left me with loss of appetite, light-headedness, and a touch of vertigo whenever I walked or stood or even sat up straight at my desk. This was nasty enough that I called in sick Monday and lost out on 2 hours of overtime. Luckily, the novel was done and I could coast being a waste in my easy chair while the issue ran its course.

I became aware of Rob Reiner’s death in bits and pieces over the course of a few hours on Sunday. First, tweets from the film side of my Twitter feed started posting RIPs and other acknowledgements of his passing. When they popped up, I noted them. It was sad to lose a talent such as his, but I had no particular reaction of concern—not because I was heartless or opposed him for some political or artistic stand, but because I tend to have no parasocial relationship with celebrities. The people we see on our screens are not who they truly are; it is their public face. Mourning, for me, is for those close to me personally and for the truly tragic.

Then more details began surfacing: Reiner and his wife had been murdered in their home.

Fear crept into my thoughts.

In these terribly heated, hateful, and charged political times, it was not at all beyond the realm of imagination that some demented, disturbed, and misguided individual had taken some form of revenge on perceived enemies. I posted nothing though, because early reports are the least reliable and it was always best to wait for more information.

Fear transmuted into sorrow when news emerged that the couple had been slaughtered by their adult son, whom the authorities then pursued and captured Monday. The murder became a terribly tragic affair that echoed the murder of performer Phil Hartman, also killed by a family member. Naturally, our egotistical and childish president could not resist making such a tragic event about himself, but fortunately he appears to be the exception and not the rule.

I came to Reiner as a director through his debut feature film, This Is Spinal Tap. Despite my indifference to heavy metal, I found the film fantastically funny and accessible. His next feature, The Sure Thing, though under-loved among his catalog, is another of my favorites and one I may watch this week both as tribute and as my holiday film.

Reiner was by far not a perfect director—the faults in The American President are Sorkin’s, not his, and the sexism in Sleepless in Seattle is mild but could have been easily avoided. When we paint traits for people with a wide racial or sex-based brush, it is nearly always an ‘-ism.’ (Hint: a movie that “no man gets” was written, produced, and directed by men.)

I have a number of Reiner films in my library, and in all our collections, he continues to live.

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Movie Review: Wake Up Dead Man

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Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out mystery, opened to a limited theatrical release on Thanksgiving, the day my sweetie-wife and I saw it, and will be available on Netflix, the service that produced the project, on December 12th.

Netflix

Daniel Craig once again stars as Benoit Blanc, a private detective noted for solving perplexing and intricate cases of murder. Blanc has been drawn to a small New York town where the local Catholic priest, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), was murdered, with suspicion falling on the parish’s junior priest, Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), whose troubled past—which includes a short, fiery temper and killing a man during a boxing match.

As is standard for murder mysteries of this sort, there is a large cast of characters all with seeming motive to murder Wicks, despite at one time being devoted to him. Being a Knives Out mystery, the case is stacked with notable names all thoroughly enjoying themselves.

I enjoyed the movie, felt it clipped along at a decent pace, but my sweetie-wife felt there were moments in the middle where it slowed too far and that it could have been cut. The story does present a number of reversals where you believe a solution has been presented and then that answer is demolished. Perhaps one of those false resolutions could have been removed without damaging the film, but if so, this is a very minor fault in the production.

It is a shame that Netflix won the bidding war 5 years ago after Knives Out surpassed $300 million at the box office and thus required that the sequels be primarily streaming affairs with brief—too brief—runs in actual theaters. Wake Up Dead Man, unlike Glass Onion, is much more of a traditional murder mystery and doesn’t engage in a restart of the story halfway through the run time like Onion did. (Do not get me wrong, I loved Glass Onion, but I don’t feel it’s really all that much of a mystery as it is Johnson having fun playing with the tropes of a sequel.)

If you get the chance to see Wake Up Dead Man in the theater, take it; otherwise, it will make a fine evening’s viewing at home on Netflix starting December 12.

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Streaming Review: Eye of the Devil

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I was listening to one of my many horror movie podcasts the other day when during a discussion of folk horror films one of the hosts mentioned such a film starring David Niven.

David Niven? Horror movie?

That’s a pairing of words I had not expected at all. This was one folk horror I had to see. Unfortunately for me in their discussion the podcast did give away the turn in the movie so it was less impactful than it might have been.

MGM

Adapted from the novel Day of the Arrow, Eye of the Devil stars David Niven as Philippe de Montfaucon the Marquis de Bellenac at an old and isolated French estate where the people hold strange rituals and customs. Philippe is called back to the estate as the grape harvest has failed for the third year in a row and he implores his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kerr) to stay behind in the city. Catherine, of course, does not stay behind but follows her husband, bringing along their two children, to the estate. Almost immediately upon arrival Catherine is terrorized by a pair of apparently psychotic siblings, Odile (Sharon Tate, here credited as ‘Introducing Sharon Tate) and Christian (David Hemmings). With her husband’s behavior growing odd and the country folk of the estate apparently intent on frightening her away, Catherine engages in an investigation to discover the truth behind those strange customs and secrets of the ancient estate.

I did not dislike this movie, but it is very hard for me to judge the film since the secret that Catherine, our true protagonist, is seeking to discover is the very thing revealed by the podcast. This is a movie whose engine turns on a single question, What is Going On, and if the answer is known ahead of time, or guessed accurately too soon, then there is little to no narrative weight or momentum keeping the viewer’s attention.

Niven and Kerr are fine in the film, turning in decent performances, but Kerr’s Catherine begins to have repeated scenes making the film feel dull and expanding the sense of its running time which is a mere 96 minutes. Sharon Tate is quite good here as the mysterious and dangerous sister. With very little dialogue Tate conveys menace with a look and her bearing.

I find it hard to recommend Eye of the Devil but it’s also hard to disentangle how much of my non-enjoyment stemmed from the ‘spoiler’ versus how much the film’s pacing simply plodded.

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Movie Review: Sisu: The Road to Revenge

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I am taking a break from working overtime at the day-job this week, and so I have a little more time to write for my blog.

2022 saw the release of the Finnish action flick Sisu, which followed the story of Finnish gold prospector and former special forces commando Aatami Korpi slaughtering a number of fleeing war criminal Nazis during the ending days of World War 2. The action was comically over the top, defying physics and reason but immensely satisfying. Apparently satisfying enough for a second movie, Sisu: The Road to Revenge.

Screen Gems

The sequel ignores Korpi’s (Jorma Tommila) lucky gold strike and takes place in 1946. Following the end of the war, Finland surrendered significant land to the Soviet Union. Korpi has returned to his home, now in Soviet territory, in hopes of bringing his simple cabin that he shared with his deceased wife and child back to Finland to rebuild it. Having killed numerous Soviet soldiers during the war, the Red High Command has decided that the living legend should live no more and pulls one of their war criminals out of Siberia, the military man responsible for the massacre of Korpi’s family, and assigned him the task of killing Korpi The Immortal.

What follows can best be described as a Finnish Fury Road but with far less adherence to any recognized laws of physics or biology. Korpi, with a large flatbed truck, attempting to return to Finland with his disassembled home, encounters numerous Soviet units intent on killing him.

How over the top is Sisu: The Road to Revenge? Well, the 1985 action movie Commando is a grounded and gritty portrayal in comparison.

If one can suspend all their understanding of the physical world and accept that this is a live action but bloody cartoon, then Sisu: The Road to Revenge is a very enjoyable feature, a perfect popcorn movie for a brainless bit of fun watching impossible action as vengeance is visited upon well deserving monsters.

If you cannot set aside physics, then the movie will only be a series of ‘oh, come on!’ exclamations as more and more impossible feats are performed by Korpi The Immortal.

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