Monthly Archives: October 2021

The Film That Almost Got Away

 

Wednesday when I posted about all the movies and films, I plan to see in theaters during October I missed one that had nearly passed by unnoticed in the crush, Lamb.

Lamb appears to be a folk horror film set among the windswept terrain of Iceland. It stars Noomi Rapace and Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson as a grieving farming couple who discover and adapt a strange and unsettling changeling in a desperate attempt to assuage their sorrow.

I fully expect Lamb to be a film that deals in symbolism, imagery, and the power of what is left unsaid rather than a run-and-scream sort of horror. Rotten Tomatoes is currently running a 40 point deficit between critical and audience response a pattern most often seen with artistic, experimental, and challenging films. (As an example, Robert Eggers’, The Witch (2015) one of my favorite recent horror films runs a 31 point deficit.)

Lamb is an A24 Studios release. A24 has released a fair number of interesting, thoughtful, and challenging films including such unusual fare as Under the Skin, Locke, Ex Machina, Moonlight, Uncut Gems, and Midsommar to list just a few from their quite eclectic catalog. I am quite looking forward to Lamb, which opens this weekend, but we are seeing next Sunday.

 

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The Potential IATSE Strike

 

IATSE is the union that covers nearly all of the ‘below the line’ workers in the film and TV industry, from Editors Make-Up artists to carpenters the Union’s force is absolutely essential to production. Without IATSE’s workers there are no productions. Everything stops. For the first time in its more than a century span ITASE may go on strike and we should support them.

They are currently battling for better pay and better working conditions. Here’s one example of those working conditions that are wearing down the workers.

It is not unusual for a production day to go 14 or more hours. There’s a rule, for safety, that a production must allow 12 hours between the end of a day and the start of the next workday. So, if you start on Monday at 7am and end at 9 pm, then Tuesday starts at 9am, Wednesday at 11, Thursday at 1pm and Friday at 3pm with your workday ending Saturday morning. You then get Sunday off and start it again on Monday.  Mind you this can be worse because 16 hours days are also not uncommon.

Writers, Directors, Actors, and Producers, who have spent perhaps years prepping a project see the production as something to ‘power’ through and then rest when the shoot is done. This is not the case for the production staff, they go from one pressure cooker to another, burning through their stress and bodies.

It is time, no it is far past time, for the studios and producers to treat the ‘below the line’ workers like people and not resources to be exhausted.

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Cinematic October

 

First off, sorry about not posting yesterday. I awoke with aterrible migraine and between the pain and the light-headiness after the medication took effect very little creative brainpower remained.

October 2021 is shaping up to be quite a cinematic one for me. I kicked off the month with Venom: Let There Carnage, wasn’t great wasn’t terrible. Tonally uneven and bit choppy like the previous film in that franchise.

This weekend it is No Time to Die the final Daniel Craig James Bond film. Craig started with Bond in Casino Royale and is hands down my favorite Bond. While some in his series have been disappointments other have been stellar.

The weekend after Bond will belong to The Last Duel a medieval story inspired by actual events starring Jodie Comer, Matt Damon, and Adam Driver. Directed by the incomparable Ridley Scott if the script is up to snuff it will be a masterpiece otherwise it will simply look terrific.

After the blood and guts of medieval combat we swing to the blood and guts of far future combat with Dune and Denis Villeneuve’s attempt to bring this massive and dense novel to the screen. After his SF films Arrival and Bladerunner 2049 I have some faith that this director can approach the material with the intelligence.

October will close, as it should, with horror and the release of Last Night in Soho, a horror film from celebrated director Edgar Wright and starring Thomasin McKenzie and an actress famous for portraying a Thomasin, Anya Taylor-Joy. From the trailer is appears the film splits it time between swinging 60s London and the present day in a disturbing tale of possession.

All in all, this month looks to be exciting.

 

 

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Spooky Season I: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

 

I kicked off Spooky Season 2021 watching 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a foundational film in the slasher genre and one that I had never seen before. (I must confess of the various sub-genre of horror slashers are among the least like by me.) Made for the equivalent of 700,0000 dollars today, TTCM is a very low budget exploitive movie that had surprisingly little gore or explicitly depicted violence/ It is also in my eye quite dull, uninteresting, and generally unworthy of viewing.

Five young adults, couples Sally and Jerry, Pam and Kirk, along with Sally’s brother Franklin, a wheelchair user, drive is rural part of Texas after reports of graverobbing to ensure that Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s grave is not among the violated. afterwards they visit the family homestead, long abandoned, and after becoming separated one by one fall victim to a local family of cannibals one of, Leatherface, murders and dismembers the victims with a chainsaw.

Directed, produced, and co-written by Tobe Hoppe, TTCM makes the most of its limited budget, shooting locations, and cast and could have been a far more interesting movie. Its essential flaw is that the five central characters lack any real sense of character. Of these young people in peril the only defining characteristic I can recall from last night’s viewing is that Pam believes in astrology. Beyond that I can’t tell you anything about each of them as a person, other than the cinematic cliches of being quite dim about entering strange buildings uninvited and refusing to go to authorities when people go missing in the wilds at night. This lack of character or personality ultimately means a lack of caring as people stumble blindly into their doom. Rather than a sense of tragedy from unforeseeable events I experienced only boredom and irritation at their actions and dialog. Luckily the movie runs a brief but seemingly interminable 83 minutes.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is currently streaming on Shudder as one of their ‘essentials.’

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Another Reason What the GOT Ending Doesn’t Work

 

When HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones ended after 8 seasons many fans were disappointed. After leaving the source material behind because they had simply run out of novel to adapt the series changed in tone and pacing with the vast distances now seemingly crossed quickly with ease, the complex social/political dynamic reduced to dispatched plot points, and a final resolution so rushed it failed to build to the emotional punch required and instead felt to many as a disrespect of one of the story’s most beloved characters. (How’s that for summing it up without spoiling?)

I would argue an additional trouble came from the sequencing of the plotlines. Two massing concurrently running plots were, How to Deal with the Army of the Dead and Who is going to take the Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms?

The Army of the Dead seek to extinguish all life. The Iron Throne while consequential is a lesser issue. If everyone is dead no one is going to sit on that throne and whoever sits on that throne is only going to be there for a few decades and can be removed by revolt if needed. A bad person sitting on the throne is a resolvable issue being dead cannot be fixed. No matter how you slice it the Army of the Dead is the much more important issue. It is the issue the series resolved first.

Once the Army of the Dead is defeated and life preserved in the world the issue of the throne just doesn’t carry the same weight. Mind you they didn’t treat the Throne Issue as a denouement, something to resolve as the story ended but rather of the final six episodes of season eight half are after the more serious issue has been solved. Hours and Hours dealing with badly with a lesser problem. It just one more reason why the series left the rail and crashed.

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