Category Archives: Movies

Deliberately Watching a Bad Movie: Sleepaway Camp

 

One of my recent podcast discoveries, Junk Food Cinema, recently dedicated an episode to the 1983 slasher movie Sleepaway Camp. Near the start of the episode the hosts recommended if you had not seen the movie to watch it before diving into the podcast and since I knew it was currently streaming on Shudder that is exactly what I did. It should be noted that the hosts do not consider Sleepaway Camp  a good movie, in fact they were covering it per a patron request, but they praised it final 10 seconds.

Sleepaway Camp is very much like Friday the 13th in that people at a summer camp are being killed by an unknown person and part of the film’s twist is who is the killer. Much like that original Friday film the killer’s motivation is tied to events years earlier seen at that start of the film. Unlike Friday every single person killed is a horrible human being which in many ways places audience sympathies, if there are any, smack on the killer’s side.

Save for the final shot the film has no originality in the cinematography with flat lighting, uninspired composition, and no real use of depth of field. The writing is terrible with some of the least lifelike dialog that has ever assaulted my ears and with character actions and reactions utterly disconnected from any semblance of actual human behavior. None of the performers have the skill to make the lines sound even close to credible.

In an unusual twist for this sort of production the women and girls are not filmed in a fetishistic manner but there is certainly the impression that men and boys are.

I have heard that this film has become a cult staple among the gay horror film community and on one level I can understand it. The killer’s eventual motivation is revealed to be in part revenge for gender identity bullying and that sort of revenge fantasy could be enjoyable in a power claim manner. However, the revelation of the killer and their motivation walks the familiar ground of transphobia.

Sleepaway Camp is not a film I can recommend other than as an exercise in understanding aspects of cult cinema. If you decide to watch it you may want to have twitter or a book handy to read while you wait for the next kill to take place.

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On Killing Your Darlings

 

There’s an adage on writing that says you must ‘kill your darlings.’ What it means it that you must be ruthless in your editing. That scene, that sub-plot, that turn of phrase that you can’t believe you wrote, that you love to read and admire, if it doesn’t belong, if it leads the reader astray, if the spoils the pacing, then it must be excised out.

While I have had a brushing encounter with this concept, I can’t say it has ever really hit me hard emotionally.

My novel Vulcan’s Forge was adapted from a novella version of the story. (A novella was far too short for what I wanted hence the book that is now out in the wild.) The novella ended on a particular line, a turn of phrase I thought perfectly summed up the character’s emotional arc. ‘I still dream of Pamela.’ But when I was doing the edit on the novel about half a page from that final line the story ended.

Yes, I really liked that line it was the point and objective of the novella but it no longer fit. That last half page vanished from the manuscript and I did not hesitate or look back.

The entire post credit scene thing that Marvel Movies love to do came about from a similar situation. The Original Iron Man was supposed to end with Star going home and have that encounter with Fury but in the editing the filmmakers instinctively understood that ‘I Am Iron Man’ was the end of the story. Under normal condition that extra scene would have been discarded much like the deleted scenes of Lewis in hopsital that would have ended the film Robocop but Marvel Studios need to promise and tease The Avengersand so the post credit scene tradition was born. Before that these scenes often called buttons did occasionally exist but held no plot meaning but were mere bits of fun such as the ‘cursed monkey’ after the credits of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

The real lesson of kill your darlings is understand your story, know what fits, what is essential and what is not.

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First Thoughts on WandaVision

 

I’m a little late to the game but here are my first impressions of the Disney + new MCU series WandaVision.

‘It’s okay.’

Admittedly this is a nine-episode storyline and trying to judge it from the first one or two is unfair but that’s all we have so far. I have been an MCU fan from the first Iron Man feature film though I was never a collector of comics themselves so things like ‘Is this an adaptation of The House of M storyline go right over my head. However, as a fan I have thoroughly enjoyed the MCU and think overall it has been a spectacular success.

The first episode of WandaVision didn’t really strike me as a solid entry. They did a very good job recreating a classic late-50s sitcom but it suffered from the ‘it’s all a dream’ trope. We know what is happening isn’t reality, and to be fair the show never expects you to accept it as reality but rather part of the mystery, so the ‘impress the boss or lose your job’ stakes are meaningless filler. The first episode doesn’t give us enough stakes or even hints of stakes outside of the illusionary sitcom to create meaningful tension.

The second episode with more unmistakable intrusions by other realities and with an ending that questions who is pulling the strings does a much better job of creating the tension that the first episode lacked and is probably the reason the pair were dropped together with the rest of the series being released one the week-by-week format favored by the streaming service. Though it was nice seeing one of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer favorites, Emma Caufield now credited as Emma Caufield Ford, back on my screen even if the role is likely to remain quite small.

I will stick with WandaVision as I intrigued by the plot but at this time I have not been wooed by the series.

 

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Streaming Review: Prospect (2018)

 

Prospect is a 2018 feature length adaptation of the a 2014 short film of the same title and concerns an adolescent Cee, her father Damon, prospecting for valuable biological gems on a toxic planet and the bandit they encounter, Ezra, played by Pedro pascal.

Having learned that this is a feature-length version of a much shorter work goes a very long way in explaining the film’s defects.

Deus ex Machina, which literally means the gods from the machines, is the writing sin of having spontaneous external events resolve the characters troubles, usually saving their lives, that arise from no action, pre-planning, or establishment. The gods intervene and force the happy ending. Prospect is actually an example of the opposite of that, perhaps you might call it Demons ex Machina. Throughout the run time of the film Cee encounters new and wildly unexpected troubles that have no rational set-up beforehand but exist solely to create conflict where there wouldn’t be otherwise. Just as resolutions must arise naturally from the characters, their natures, and their talents, so much the obstacles that hinder their progress and test them. In Role Playing Games there is the concept of ‘the wandering monster’ an encounter with a hostile force that is unconnected the characters’ central storyline. An attack by trolls in the middle of the night while camping. These encounters add excitement and deplete the players’ resources for later pre-plotted fights and make a good element to well-balanced games but they make a poor substituted for a well-crafted narrative and that is exactly what Prospect feels like, a series of random encounters and then a final boss fight, decent gaming but poor story telling.

Setting aside the random nature of the troubles Cee encounters the movie is decent. The actors are all good, the production values look great, with a very limited budget the filmmakers managed to craft a movie that doesn’t look limited. The dialog at times is very reminiscent of Firefly with a pseudo-western cadence but delightfully not all the characters speak in that manner creating a sense of people from very different backgrounds.

While flawed I did not regret the time spent watching Prospectand for others, I have no doubts it will work far better.

Prospect is currently streaming on Netflix.

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A Failure of a Film: The Siren

 

Last night was to be my first horror film of 2021 with The Siren which promised to be a moody small character pieces set on a mountain lake and the siren that inhabits drowning her victims. The film shattered by ability to suspend disbelief and I abandoned it, to explain what happen will be very spoilery for about the first 30 minutes of this short 80-minute movie.

The protagonist is a Tom a mute but not deaf church going man who has rented the cabin on the lake. We get in his backstory that a swimming accident nearly killed him and rendered him mute and he doesn’t go swimming any more. Ok, that’s a reasonable set up and a character that is different from the normal cookie cutter approach to scriptwriting. He meets Al a friendly neighbor but who knows of the siren and is hunting her for drowning his husband Michal.

In the middle of the night Tom is awaken by sounds of water splashing and when he goes to the dock, which is connected to his bedroom, he meets Nina, swimming and fully clothed in the pitch blackness of the mountain night. She explains that she thought the house was empty and that she often swims to it from the far side of the lake but not a word not a hint as to why she does this fully freakin’ clothed. Nor does Tom has the slightest curiosity about the matter either.

The next day after buying oars for the rowboat Tom rows onto the lake and against encounters our Siren Nina, who, because she has been enamored with Tom, has stolen fresh street clothes to swim in and is now wearing earrings from her stash of jewelry and watches presumably from previous victims. Again, Tom displays not the slightest hint of bewilderment that this attractive young woman swims fully clothed and wearing jewelry.

Nina convinces Tom to come into the water and to remove the life jacket he was wearing, which he does. His trauma seems utterly negated by a pretty face. At first things are pleasant but there is tension because we know she is driven by a lust to kill and sure enough with both hands she pushed him under the water and holds him there with her great strength that was demonstrated earlier with her crushing a stone in one hand. Tom struggles and fights but he can’t break free or get to the surface. At this point I thought perhaps he wasn’t a protagonist and perhaps it was Al who would take over the story much like Psycho. But then Nina because she is so enamored with Tom relents and pulls him up repeating over and over, ‘I’m Sorry.’

Cut to the next scene Tom and Nina on the rocky shore, sitting together. I stopped the stream right then and there. Tom’s inability to notice that a woman swimming in her street clothes is something odd that can barely be ignored but to sit beside her in a friendly after she has held you for a prolonged period under the water and you have a traumatic past with drowning is simply beyond the boundaries of credibility.

The Siren is a well photographed, slowed paced horror film that had the characters acted even the slightest bit more like actual people might have been very engaging. I love a good slow burn horror that isn’t about ‘kills’ but I do expect the characters to behave in a manner that is somewhat consistent with humanity in general.

The Sire is currently streaming on Shudder and I do not recommend.

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American Cinematic Morality

American Cinematic Morality

Here’s a clip from the classic film Casablanca (1942) where Victor and Isla escape while Rick makes sure no one interferes.

What I find fascinating is that Rick doesn’t shoot Major Strasser until Strasser has pulled his own piston and it even looks like, at least from the twin clouds of smoke, that the major even got off a shot but being a villain naturally missed.

This is a perfect example of the morality that used to permeate American movies. The hero could never shoot down anyone, not evil a NAZI, who was not armed and directly posing a threat.

Another film from a decade later High Noon (1952) displays a similar take on this morality with the vicious Frank Miller, and you know what kind of man Frank Miller is, and his gang of three coming back to town for vengeance the Marshall who has been unable to rouse any help from the frightened townsfolk can’t lie in wait and pick Miller and other off from concealment with a rifle but must forcefully and frontally confront Miller before the gunfight begins.

By the 70’s this morality was fully abandoned. The Production Code, a self-enforced code of censorship from the studios was finally scrapped in the late 60’s and replaced by the first version of the modern rating system though the code had been largely ignored as early as 1960 with Psycho.

The Godfather (1972) is a clear rebuke of American Cinematic Morality it’s protagonists Michael Corleone while denying that he is like his family embraces the criminal life, personally murders his enemies without the cliche of letting them arm themselves or with even any warning and by the end of the tale has orchestrated events so that he is the undisputed crime boss of New York City becoming a greater gangster than his father had ever attained. No justice is ever delivered to Michael, his victory is a defeat of classical film ethics and a direct violation of the historic production code.

With the adoption of the rating system in 1968 I wonder which film was the first to have its hero shoot someone who was either unarmed or unaware of the coming attack?

 

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First Noir of the Year: The Killers

First Noir of the Year: The Killers

There are so many lauded classic noirs that I haven’t yet seen and on Sunday evening one more was scratched off the list with The Killers.

Directed by Robert Siodmak and debuting Burt Lancaster The Killers is adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway though as is par for the industry the screenplay differs significantly from the source material. With additional stars Edmund O’Brien and Ava Gardner, The Killers is a taunt exploration of a man’s life following his violent murder. With its fragmented flashback construction, the film is very nearly a noir Citizen Kane but with a more definitive conclusion.

The film opens with a pair of hired killers, including a wonderfully menacing performance by William Conrad, arriving in the early morning hours into the town of Brentwood New Jersey.  Locating their target, the ‘Swede,’ they gun him down in his boarding house room and though warned of the assassins’ approach Swede neither flees nor fights for his life but seemingly accepts his murder as punishment. The rest of the film follows Insurance investigator Reardon (O’Brien) as he tries to discover the murdered man real identity and the reason for his killing. An investigation that reopens old crimes and romances prompting fresh threats.

Released in 1946 The Killers is a wonderful example of film noirwith its morally ambiguous central character played by then unknown Burt Lancaster, its dark moody cinematography, and its sharp punchy dialog the films deftly explores the underside of American life and how closely intertwined the criminal world was with the rest of society. In addition to launching Lancaster’s career the film also propelled Gardner from relative obscurity to star with her compelling and captivating performance as Kitty, the obsessive interest of both the Swede and one of the city’s gangland bosses.

Nominated for a slew of Academy awards in 1947 including best Director, Editing, Screenplay, The Killers has been included in the National Film registry.

The Killers is available for rent via VOD and is currently streaming for free on the Roku channel Film Movie Classics.

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First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

It is said that every movie is made three times, first when it is written as a script, second when it is photographed, and third when it is edited. In principle the stages allow for revisions the bring the final film closed to the ideal that had propelled the project but often diverging voices, power struggles, and a lack of focus allows the stages to muddy the waters and create chaos instead of coherence. This appears the be the case with Wonder Woman 84.

Except for a prolog set in the indeterminate time when Diana was a child, and really this sequence would have been better and easier to suspend disbelief for had they portrayed her as a young teen instead, the film takes place 66 years after the close of the previous entry in the franchise. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) lives as a historical expert at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. still mourning the loss of her love Steve Trevor in 1918. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva a cliche version of a woman overlooked and ignored by the world while Pedro Pascal plays Max Lord the central villain of the piece conman and television personality the propels what passes as the central plot of the movie.

Drowning itself in the period’s clothing and style, Wonder Woman 84 is a mess. Elaborate and expensive sequences take place that have no function in furthering the plot or developing the characters. No thought is present for the actual consequences of the choices the writers made when they crafted the script. The special effects suffer from the issue that the digital characters seem to lack weight and float when they should not and perhaps worse of all the plot suffers from that most horrid comic book trope Powers ex machina, with Wonder Woman developing sudden abilities that exist solely to resolve an immediate plot complication and are then discarded.

I found it impossible to surrender myself to the story and was constantly reminded the artifice with repeated errors of the type. Wonder Woman I found to be charming and fun though far from perfect and its sequel, though far from the dour, depressing, Objectivist works of the Snyder Batman and Superman films, I cannot recommend at all.

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Season’s Review: Rare Exports

Season’s Review: Rare Exports

There are loads of traditional Christmas films that people watch each year, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard to name just a few but in our household one of the movies on the season’s playlist is the charming Finnish Horror/Comedy Rare Exports.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rare Exports is a Christmas film from which Christmas cannot be removed without destroying the story and yet the film in absolutely not about the story or moral of Christmas in either the religious or secular senses. There is no learning to love your fellow man, no hearts grow three sizes larger, no understanding of the value of your life and all that it touches but rather to the simple tale of a young boy who discovers that origins of the winter holiday is much darker, much more fearsome, than the fairytale he had been told and that the Americans digging in the mountain are about to awaken ancient spirits that will descend upon the naughty.

Set in an isolated Sami border town in the frozen reaches of Lapland Rare Exports follows Pietari a young boy in the days before Christmas. Explosive excavations atop the nearby mountain of Korvatunturi has upset the local ecology and the reindeer herd that the Sami rely upon for their income is devastated threatening everyone’s livelihood including Pietari’s father Rauno. When Rauno’s illegal wolf pit captures something else the films turns from family dram to horror and the discovery of something monstrous in Mt. Joulupukki threatens more than just income.

Rare Exports is that exceptional film able to blend comedy, drama, and horror seamlessly into one story. Some have found the film to have jarring tonal shifts but that is not my experience. Each development of the story leads organically into the next as the characters are drawn into more dire and desperate actions trying to save their town and themselves. With gorgeous cinematography by Mika Orasmaa the film looks stunning and the now dated CGI effects match the tone and style of the photography perfectly. Director Jalmari Helander manages to make his budget of 1.8 million Euros look like a much more substantial production.  The bulk of the film is in Finnish with subtitles that as is common with Finnish production anytime characters of different nationalities are speaking English is the default tongue spoken.

I heartily recommend Rare Exports which is currently streaming on Shudder and Hulu.

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Thinking About Stakes

When crating fiction a common bit of advice to ‘raise the stakes.’ This is a suggestion of magnify the penalty for failure for the protagonist making the eventual success or failure that much more impactful for the reader or audience. However, this is usually or at least often interpreted as threaten more lives, make the potential explosions larger, the potential death toll higher but that is too simplistic a way to think about stakes.

In franchise material there is what I call the ‘Bond Effect’ where each adventure has to have more on the line than the previous adventure. Very quickly the writers find themselves in the situation where Bond has to save the entire world, from nuclear annihilation, a murderous madman with a secret orbiting space station of death, what have you, and once he has saved the world saving it again has less entertainment value We know there is never going to be a Bond film where the world dies, not even the 70s got that bleak so the combination of an assured outcome and devalued victory makes each world save less thrilling until they become boring. For this effect magnified beyond look to the UK program Doctor Who where the stakes have been repeatedly raised to the entire universe sometimes destroying and recreating the universe as their climatic conclusions.

What all this misses is that stakes are most potent when we are emotionally invested in them. Setting aside the ‘save the world or universe’ trope the protagonist is they fail should suffer deep emotional coast and or loss. This is a lesson well learned in dramatic fiction and too often not in genre stories. Marvel studios did this particularly well in a couple of films, notably Captain America: The Winter Soldier where after saving the world we got to the real stakes for Steve Rogers, saving his friend Bucky Barnes from Hydra’s mind control and Captain America: Civil War where the world was never in danger but rather at its heart it is the friendship between Steve and Tony Stark that is in danger and in that story ultimately lost. The cost of failure is the emotional damage to the characters, these are very high stakes that are intimately personal and emotionally compelling for the audience.

It’s easy to craft plots with larger and larger death star threatening planets and entire star systems it is harder but more satisfying into dive deep into character and find the thing that matters most to them as a person and make us the readers and the audience share in the terror of losing that thing. Then you will have stakes that really matter.

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