Category Archives: Movies

Streaming Review: Mayhem

 

Okay, I’ll give everyone a break from the political posts and do another film review. This past weekend a friend and I watched the 2017 action/horror/comedy Mayhem starring Steven Yeun and Samara Weaving.

Derek (Yeun) is a rising corporate lawyer in the mega-firm of TS Consulting whose career is ruined when he is selected to take the fall for legal fumbles he had nothing to do with. Melanie (Weaving) is a woman desperate to save her family home from foreclosure by the faceless sociopathic firm. When a virus that fully inhibits inhibition and impulse controls permeates the towering building that houses TS Consulting the facility is quarantined for 8 hours to allow a neutralizing element to eradicate the infection. Due to legal precedent already established by TS Consulting itself no person is legally responsible for any of their action while infected giving Derek and Melanie, now improbably teamed up, a ticking clock to fight their way to the boardroom when the nine partners can change their doomed fates.

Directed by Joe Lynch and written by Matias Caruso Mayhem is a *fun* movie. Notwithstanding the copious amounts of blood, sex, and brutal violence, the tone of the film is light and satirical. Yeun and Weaving give us personable characters to empathize with and to root for while the corporate baddies sitting in their corporate offices doing corporate-y things are perfectly serviceable stand-ins for the faceless, joyless, and scruple-less bureaucracy that destroys lives in a mindless pursuit of profit and power.

Filmed in Serbia with a limited budget Mayhem through the excellent craft of director Lynch, cinematographer Steve Gainer, and production designer Mina Buric it has the appearance of a film with a much more substantial budget. Particularly impressive are the invisible visual effects. The virus causes infected people to have one terribly bloodshot eye and throughout the film everyone’sbloodshot eye is a CGI effect.

Unlike the previous Joe Lynch movie I have watched Knights of Badassdom Mayhem finds and nails the right ending for its tone making the experience of watching it quite enjoyable.

Mayhem, including a version with a commentary track featuring Lynch and Yeun, is currently streaming on Shudder,

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Annual Re-watch: The Wicker Man (1973)

 

With the coming of May it is time for me to re-watch one of my favorite horror films 1973’s The Wicker Man. Starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee The Wicker Man in so many ways of quintessentially an early 70s film, low budget, stuffed with ideas and deeply cynical. Because I was already comfortably nestled in my overstuffed chair instead of using my Blu-ray edition of the film with the most recent edits and restorations, I watched the version currently available for streaming. This is the abbreviated edit compressing the events into just two days from three and with several scenes deleted.

Scottish West Highland police, and deeply devote Christian, Sergeant Neil Howie (Woodward) arrives by seaplane to the isolated island of Summerisle following am anonymous letter that a young girl has gone missing. The residents lie, misled, and confuse Howie with shifting narrative from there is no such girl to the girl had died. The islanders are also fervently pagan worshipping the old god of pre-Christian Europe offending the pious policeman. Lord Summerisle (Lee), the island’s leader, is convinced that Howie’s suspicions of murder are misplaced as they are a deeply religious people. Convinced the girl’s disappearance is tied to the pagan practices and with his seaplane sabotaged Howie is forced confronts the conspiracy alone in a desperate race again time and the coming May Day celebrations.

The Wicker Man is a unique film, simultaneously inhabiting the genres of folk horror, art house film, and musical while maintaining a consistent tone of dread. The production was troubled and the sale of the studio before completion led the final product being hacked down to 88 minutes without any real regard to story or quality. Over the decades various versions of the film have surfaced and been restored but the original edit has never been found and the original negative are believed destroyed, making The Wicker Man an enduring cinematic myth. Lee long maintained that he loved the script so much he appeared for free and that it was his favorite screen performance. Director Robin Hardy returned to Summerisle decades later for the sequel The Wicker Tree but failed to recapture the glorious magic of early seventies film. 2006 witnessed a remake of the film starring Nicholas Cage as the investigating officer but the sly and subtle conflict of culture theme was replaced with what many consider to be blatant misogyny.

No matter what version you watch The Wicker Man remains one of the most interesting, unique, and enigmatic movies.

The Wicker Man is currently streaming on Shudder and Amazon Prime.

 

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Chekov (Chekhov – corrected) Would Be Very Disappointed

 

I recently watched about a third of a horror movie, Game of Death, currently streaming on Shudder and it is a perfect example of how not to construct a story.

This movie has the very brief running time of a meager 73 minutes. Given such a short length this is the sort of movie that needs to hit the ground already sprinting at full speed perhaps in mid-action with flashback to fill in the audience on how the set-up was established.

But that is not how Game of Death (2017) starts. No, the movie wastes 8 full minutes more than 10 percent of the entire film watching the seven ‘characters’ party at rural home. This extended sequence does very little to reveal character, I honestly couldn’t tell you any of the defining elements of any of their personalities, present no dramatic tension or conflict, and carries no foreshadowing of doom. It is fully wasted time.

Eventually the characters take a break from drugs, swimming, the least erotic sexual scenes I have witnessed in a long time to play the titular board game and get the plot moving. Naturally they do not understand the ‘rules’ of the game and when they fail to make their first kill before the timer expires, a timer I might add that display no countdown so neither the characters nor the audience can judge how dire the situation is, the first of the seven has his head explode. The cast misinterpret this as someone shooting at time and when a neighbor appears concerning about the vast amount of screaming coming from the home. They take him hostage assuming that he was the shooter. To do this one of the guys produces a pistol and I asked the same question the rest of the cast voiced, ‘where did you get that?’ Yup, a gun that proves to be vital as that character, and his terrible trigger discipline, force the others to kill random people to sate the game’s appetite, appears wholly unestablished not even in those wasted 8 minutes from the start.

People do not do this in your films, short stories, or novels. Vital and critical elements of your story must be established before they are employed.

I switched off the movie and removed it from my Shudder queue. There are far too many decent and great films to waste my time watching something this spectacularly bad.

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Streaming Review: A Nordic Nightmare: Koko-Di Koko-Da

 

Of late I have been watching a lot of Nordic Noir television programming with my Sweetie-Wife and then stumbled across this Swedish horror film Koko Di Koko Da. (The nonsense title is a sung refrain from a nursery rhyme.)

Married couple Tobias and Elin, three years after the sudden death of their daughter, camp in an isolated wood trying to repair their relationship. While camping they are besieged by three murderous characters from the nursery rhyme that inspired the film’s title and are killed. The sequence of events repeated in a Groundhog Day style loop with only Tobias remember each repeating cycle.

I am sorry to report that this movie simply did not work for me. There are two major factors why I found this movie unsatisfying.

First off, Tobias is a thoroughly unlikeable character, and his treatment of Elin is abominable. It is clear that she does not want to camp but he ignores her feelings entirely for his own desires. In addition to neglect and thoughtlessness Tobias after he is aware of the time-loop that they character are trapped within more than once abandons Elin even before the murderous characters appear. By the midpoint of the movie, I wanted nothing more than for him to die terribly and for Elin to escape. Mind Elin is not a very pleasant person either but as a character she is far more sympathetic than Tobias.

Secondly, more than once the film shatters its point of view with animated intermissions and unmotivated shifting to another character. I think the filmmakers were going for a more stylized and symbolic approach but instead of crafting emotional responses that created only confusion.

The ending holds no catharsis and no resolution but simply terminates the story without explanation or rhyme or reason. This may work for some but for me it was a disappointment.

Koko-di Koko-da is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

Wants, Needs, and Character Arcs

 

StudioBinder is a computer application for film production but they also host a YouTube channel about film that can be very enlightening into all aspects of cinema including story structure. Recently I came across a series of video they made on story endings and how they break down into 4 large categories. That has spurned a lot of thought some of which I’m sharing here.

First off, the core concept they put forward is that characters have wants and needs. I would describe wants as what drive plot and needs as to what fulfills story.

The want is the character defined objective and its associated obstacles. The wants are malleable and often change as the plot progressed. In Moonraker Bond starts out wanting to know who stole the missing space shuttle but by the third act his want is to prevent Drax from killing humanity. The want is what the character is actively trying to achieve.

The need ties directly to character and their growth or fail to grow across the story. Need is the elements of the character that changes and what they need defines the nature of their change. In Moonraker as with many movies in the Bond franchise, Bond has no need. Psychologically and emotionally, he is complete and exits the story as exactly the same character that entered it. However, setting aside episodic story telling most characters have an arc, a change that transforms them in the story and that is tied to their need. Often a character is blindly unaware or in denial of their need. It is the lack of self-awareness about their need that hobbles the character and holds them back from achieving a more well-rounded emotional level.

If you follow the link, you’ll see that the people at StudioBinder define a happy ending as one where both the character’s wants and needs are fulfilled but I will voice an objection to that. Yes, it can be true, but it can also be true that meeting the need alone makes a happy ending. There are stories where what the character wants is wrong and the need when fulfilled supersedes the want and it is something that the character no longer desires and so failing to achieve it is not bitter-sweet or semi-sweet, but actually sweet. A good example of this is The Sure Thing an early romantic comedy from Rob Reiner. In it Gib’s, John Cusack’s character, want is to have commitment free sex with a blond bombshell, his need is to learn to have a deep emotionally adult relationship. Being a rom com, he achieves this when he learns to truly love and never has the free sex he chased after. His want is unfulfilled but satisfying his need changed his character so dramatically that the want simply sublimated away.

In Iron Man Tony Stark’s wants change and evolve with the plot, starting out he wants to party and have fun, then he wants to escape, and he wants to stop selling weapons and eventually he wants to stop Obadiah. His need is to find a purpose to his life and that is fulfilled by becoming Iron Man.

The results are flipped for Steve Rogers Captain America: The First Avenger. Steve’s want is to do his part in the war, and he does, spectacularly. His need is to ‘find the right partner’ the woman that loves and understands him as he is. Peggy is that woman but to fulfill his want Steve has to sacrifice his need, placing his duty before himself, because the need is tied to character not plot, and puts the plane down into the artic to what he believes will be his death.

Wants, Needs, characters and plots, there is a lot to think over here.

 

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Streaming Review: Operation Finale

Saturday night, along with a friend, I watched 2018’s historical drama Operation Finale a dramatization about the covert mission to capture Adolf Eichmann, the man principally for the design, implementation, and operation of the NAZI extermination camps. Let us be absolutely fucking clear on one point, Eichmann is not solely responsible for the Holocaust, he contributed his skills, talent, and abilities to make the systemic murder ‘efficient’ but the entire rotten NAZI system from the top down was responsible.

Not covered in the film is that Eichmann was captured by the Allies but escaped and after surviving on the run for a number of years in occupied Germany, slipped out of the continent fleeing to Argentina with his wife and family.

Operation Finale focuses on Mossad agent Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac, who was also a producer on the production) whose reputation is less than sterling when he caused a low-level NAZI to be executed in the field after misidentifying him as Eichmann. When Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) is discovered in Argentina because his son Klaus has an unlikely encounter with a holocaust survivor, Israel authorizes a covert mission to verify, capture, and extract Eichmann for trail. The team infiltrates Argentina and despite tensions about brining Eichmann back safely for trail versus extra-judicially executing him, they capture Eichmann only to discover that their plan route out has been delayed by ten days and now must keep him confined as local NAZIs with assistance of the authorities search for Eichmann.

The film never found either the box office or critical love that I think it deserves. The script is tight remaining credible in its depiction of spy craft and finds tension both the dangerous situation the agents work in and the emotionally charges air between captor and captive never losing its focus on Peter and his haunted visions of people lost in the Holocaust. The filmmaking is restrained without overly showing camera moves or cinematography surefooted in its character-based approach. The only production element that nagged at me while viewing the movie was the use of 75 yar old Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann who was 51 at the time of his capture, make-up, and a light digital touch during WWII flashback attempt to maintain the illusion but are never fully convincing.

That said Operation Finale is a damn fine film and well worth the investment of two hour.

Operation Finale is currently streaming on Netflix.

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Streaming Review: Ragnarök (2013)

 

As I have commented on with two posting here, I am currently and thoroughly enjoying the Swedish/Danish television co-production of the Nordic Noir series The Bridge. Particularly impressive has been Sofia Helin’s performance as Detective Saga Noren and I went looking for other projects that she appeared in to compare her performances there and that lead me to Ragnarök.

Released in 2013 Ragnarök is a Norwegian monster movie about an archeologist, Sigurd, that follows clues about a Viking voyage to Finnmark in the extreme north of Norway and an abandoned fenced off zone between Norway and Russia where he finds not only the archeological evidence to support his theories but an ancient aquatic beast. Trapped with his two children and a couple of associates Sigurd must discover the nature of the beats and with little supplies and no weapons see everyone safely out of the dark and dangerous forest.

Sofia Helin plays Elisabeth one of Sigurd’s companions and is in a supporting role in the production. While she is given little actual character work to do, she displays that her work in The Bridge is actually from a great deal of range.

Ragnarök itself is a middling film. It is not bad, and it is not great. The action sequences of tense and taut, the plot takes turns that moved it away from predictability. (When they were trapped in the caverns, I fully expected the rest of the film to take place underground, but both the characters and the writers were more inventive than that.) The cinematography is lovely, fully capturing the deep and isolating wilderness the characters find themselves trapped in while the special effects for the monster are credible and still hold up eight years later which cannot be said about many higher budgeted productions.

The film’s failings are that as a dramatic story there is not enough meat on the bones of the character’s conflict to drive a full feature and as a monster movie the beast arrives too late in the story. The ‘monster movie’ elements of Ragnarök takes place entirely in the films third act and while well-paced and well thought out the late arrival of the film central premise damages the final product.

Still, I do no regret taking the time to watch this film and at a scant hour and a half it doesn’t require a massive commitment.

Ragnarök in Norwegian with English subtitles is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Streaming Review: The Howling

 

It has been nearly 40 years since I last watched Joe Dante’s werewolf feature The Howling. My last viewing was either videotape or a pay channel during the early 80s only a few years after the film’s release in 1981. Based upon the novel of the same name Gary Brandner the movie along with An American Werewolf in London, released the same year, presented a radically new approach to werewolves in cinema that The Howling, despite a slew of sequels, failed to make the same level of cultural impact.

The film, departing heavily from the novel, centers on journalist and local news anchor Karen White who survives a traumatizing encounter with serial killer and as part of her therapy, along with her husband Bill, secludes herself at a rural facility known as ‘The Colony,’ administered by notable psychiatrist. While living at The Colony Karen discovers that not of her co-residents are exactly what they appear to be and there may be a connection to the serial killer.

There is a reason why The Howling is not as well known as its sister werewolf film An American Werewolf in London, and that is far fewer interesting things happen in it. This film takes a great deal of time establishing its characters and its environment while providing precious little dramatic tension or conflict. With a brief running time of just 91 minutes, it has little room for leisurely establishment. The cast is good and well positioned, the cinematography has a glow to it that enhances the unnatural world of the colony and the transformations by Rob Bottin are groundbreaking, but the complete package fails to get over the top and aside from an ending sequence that is stellar the film is largely forgettable.

The Howling is not a bad film nor is it a great one but rather exists in that uncomfortable middle ground of being basically serviceable. While it has logic and character motivational problems that are left wholly unresolved or explained its novel approach to the cinematic werewolf makes it worth at least one viewing.

The Howling is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Werewolf Transformations

 

Sunday night I watched The Howling first the first time in decades, long post about that film to come, and it got me thinking about the changing nature of werewolf transformations in cinematic history. My thoughts are guided by the films I have actually seen and should not be construed as an exhaustive study.

1935’s Werewolf of London preceded that other Universal werewolf film by six years. It shares almost none of the mythology that the next film planted solidly into popular thought and in many ways plays more like a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. The transformation from man to hybrid wolf and man takes place during subtle cuts. The character passes behind foreground objects such as pillars and emerges partially transformed going through successive stages until fully changed in a werewolf in tails and top hat.

1941 changed werewolves forever with Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man. This is the film that introduced silver as a werewolf’s bane and many other lasting tropes. Talbot’s transformation, unlike Werewolf of London, happens on-screen by way of lap-dissolves where in succeeding shots, dissolved into each other to create the illusion of a single take, hair and appliances are added to the actor until the change is complete. The process was time consuming and difficult for the actor and never fully convincing but remained the method of onscreen werewolf transformations for the next 40 years.

1981 witnessed the release of two werewolf films, The Howling, with transformation effect by Rob Bottin, and An American Werewolf in London whose transformations were designed and created by Rick Baker, both men would go on to produce some of the most legendary make-up effects in the last sixty years.

Both men utilized bladders, puppets, and vanguard make-up techniques and appliances to create on-stage, in-camera, transformations that had never been seen before. Audiences watched as body parts swelled, extended, pushed out from human to wolf proportions, in elaborate and minute detail. However, it was Baker’s An American Werewolf in London that changed the paradigm not only for film but for literary werewolves.

While both transformations achieve similar on-screen effects, Baker’s imbued the changes with bone cracking agony for the tragic character afflicted by this curse. David’s first and most elaborate transformation in the film is a grueling, painful, and terrifying ordeal because nothing about it appears even remotely tolerable. He suffers, and the audience along with him, through every moment of the change.

And just like that the agony of transformation became canon. To this day I read werewolf stories where the author takes the time to describe the breaking and reforming of bones and he painful shift from human to wolf. Authors I am sure that have never seen An American Werewolf in London follow the template that Rick baker laid out 40 years earlier.

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Reading Dune

 

In fits and starts I have completed a re-read of the classic Science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert. I had to work in fits and starts because a growing cataract situation in both eyes has limited my reading hours and much of those have been devoted to my current work in progress novel. I have read Dune before and wanted to revisit the material ahead of the release of the latest adaptation coming in October of this year.

Dune, set in a distant far-future, concerns the bitter and lethal rivalry between feuding noble houses, a treacherous emperor plotting against his own kin, a suppressed people on a harsh and unforgiven world, ecological transformation, and cartel powers all centered on a planet where deserts are the entirety of the surface area.

On one level the novel can be read as an adventure story as Paul Atreides having survived the destruction of his noble house plats, plans, and takes revenge on the forces that killed his father and exiled both he and his mother.

Another reading is as a warning about the power of charismatic leaders and religious fanaticism with Paul’s quest illustrating how even ‘just’ causes often lead to horror and injustice. The work can also be interpreted as treatise on the interconnectedness of life and the dependence everything shares with everything else in an ecology.

The theme one comes away with from Dune, adventured story, prophetic warning, or ecological explainer depends entirely on the read and what they brought with them to the process.

Published in the early 60s, Dune reflects much of its period and how prose fiction has changed in the intervening nearly sixty years.

By today’s writing styles Dune is a novel that engaged in a lot of head hopping. In the middle of a scene the point of view will shift from character to character revealing their inner unspoken thoughts. This is frowned upon current fiction where it is expected that each scene is recounted from a single character’s point of view. For modern readers Dune can appear to be frenetic, choppy, and uneven.

More out of step with current culture is Dune’s approach to homosexuality. The principal antagonist of the novel Baron Harkonnen is presented as a corpulent, greedy, vile person without any redeeming qualities and it is clear that his sexuality is meant to be a mark of his evil nature.

The novel also appears to support the concept of eugenics without expressing endorsement for the result. The Emperor’s elite troops and the Fremen of the planet Dune are both, in the eyes of the novel, superior to any other fighting force because of the harsh and unforgiving nature of their home-worlds, which is a simplistic and naïve understanding of what makes a superior fighting person or force. In addition the novel presents us with the Bene Gesserit a faction devoted to a secret plan to breed a superior human with psionic abilities that unifies the masculine and feminine natures of humanity. Even for the early 60s this is a very binary view of human gender with men reduced to ‘takers’ and women to ‘givers’ without acknowledging the subtleties and overlap even within a binary viewpoint.

Dune is very a product of its time and even given its period the basic premises were already considered quite conservative challenges that the filmmaker will have to overcome in craft a cinematic experience that will be acceptable to modern audiences.

Here’s a reminder that my own SF novel, Vulcan’s Forge is available from FlameTree Press and can be purchased wherever to by fine books.

 

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