Category Archives: Movies

Streaming Review: Hatching (2022)

Hatching is a family-drama/horror film from Finland.

Siiri Solalinna plays 13 years old Tinja, a girl trying desperately as a gymnast to please her

Nordisk Film

mother, a former gymnast herself and now creating content for the internet presenting her life and family as a model of perfection.

When a stray bird ruins one of mother’s video shoots it ends up dead and feeling guilty for the animal Tinja finds the bird’s nest and begins incubating its egg.

Kept secret from the rest of the family Tinja egg’s grows to enormous size and reacts directly to her presence and touch. Once hatched the chick, nearly as large as Tinja herself, displays a deep emotional connection to Tinja and begins acting upon her repressed feelings and anger.

Sadly, Hatching is not a very engaging picture. It is a prime example of a plot-driven structure. Aside from taking the egg to begin with and hiding it Tinja, our protagonist, does very little to drive the action of the story or even make meaning choices in her actions. Tinja reacts to the bird’s death, reacts to the strange egg, reacts to discovering her mother’s affair, but rarely is proactive making for a passive character. This is a shame as Siiri Solalinna is a terrific young actress and, in my opinion, gives the most compelling performance of the film. I certainly hope to see more her as she matures and continue her career.

The special effects of the film are quite good. I believe that for most of the ‘monster’ effects the production utilized puppetry and make-up effects rather than digital visual imagery and their choice was correct. Hatching doesn’t feel or look cheap The cinematography is lush and vivid, the sets and design inviting and create a real of real places and locations. It is the script that fails the production giving as an interesting premise that never fully mature into character driven story.

Hatching is currently streaming in the US on HULU.

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Movie Review: Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller, a filmmaker whose filmography is so eclectic as to encompass both the Mad Maxfranchise and Happy Feet, released last week, Three Thousand Years of Longing a story about Djinn (Idris Elba) and scholar of stories (Tilda Swinton.)

Alithea (Swinton) while in Istanbul for a conference where she delivers a talk about how stories once explained the natural world, but the gods and heroes are reduced to simple metaphors. (With a sly visual reference to the D.C. Property of comics, possibly a nod to the never made George Miller’s Justice League.) While shopping for a memento in the famous Grand Bazar she

Filmnation Entertainment

purchases a delicate glass bottle that she later learns contains a trapped Djinn (Elba.) the Djinn desperately wants Alithea to speak three wishes from her heart as that will free him from his imprisonment but Alithea as well-versed in the dangerous nature of wishes as any experienced D&D players is reluctant to make any wish fully expecting once fulfilled it will twist and transform from benefit to bane.

The deadlocked characters are the heart and soul of Three Thousand years of Longing with each trying to discover the truth of the other’s nature. Is the Djinn really a trickster seeking to twist her wishes for malintent? Is Alithea as fully contented with not heart’s desire as she professes with nothing that she truly wants to wish for? To answer these questions the characters tell each other their stories transporting each other and us to distant lands and peoples rich with tradition and astonishingly lovely, and yet the throughline for both is loss and yearning.

While director and co-writer George Miller and Cinematographer John Seale has composed a visually stunning film rich and vibrant with color and texture the real reason to watch Three Thousand Years of Longing is Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in a room, acting off each other. Strip away the special effects and the fantastical elements of plot and the story reduced down to two characters talking and eventually exposing their true selves to one another. With actors as massively talented as this pair that becomes compelling far beyond fantasies of djinn and magic.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about stories, the power of stories as well as the fantasies we tell ourselves when reality proves too harsh to face. It is a film about loneliness, betrayal, and how in the end we can never be sure when that magical touch will appear and transform our live and ourselves.

Three thousand Years of Longing is currently playing and theaters and while it has none of the action of Mad Max: Fury Road it deserves every inch of the big screen as Miller’s thrilling post-apocalyptic fables.

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Streaming Review: Glorious

Streaming Review: Glorious

Released last week to the streaming services Shudder as an exclusive the cosmic horror film Glorious is a very different take on universe spanning threats.

Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is a man in the midst of an emotional crisis. Driving alone and distraught far from freeways and large cities and after a night of drunkenness at a lonely rest stop he finds himself trapped in the bathroom with an ominous voice (J.K. Simmons) speaking to him from the other side of a stall’s ‘glory hole.’ (If you do not know what a ‘glory hole’ is in reference to public spaces I strongly suggest that you do not Google the term from your work computer.) Wes endures horrors, physical and revelational, as the voice implores and compels him for a favor.

Directed by Academic, Scholar, and filmmaker Rebekah McKendry, and co-written by her spouse David Ian McKendry and Joshua Hull, Glorious is a small film that utilizes all of the potential of its limited location and cast in a spare but efficient 79 minutes. McKendry and cinematographer David Matthews continually find inventive ways to frame and shoot their film with a bare handful of locations, keeping clear of the trap of boredom within such a confined space. Like many ‘cosmic horror’ films following in the wake of Stanley’s The Color out of Space the film leans heavily into the purple and violet to convey the unworldliness of Wes’ plight and the looming threat over existence.

Even with its brief running time the script carefully doles out Wes’ backstory and the source of his emotional trauma, judiciously avoiding rushing in to explains too quickly, leaving revelations for the audience as well as the characters.

While the film is not sexually explicit, see above the term you should never Google from work, it is violent, bloody, and not lacking in gore but does not lean into those elements to achieve its effect, but rather uses them to enhance the story being told. One should not watch Glorious if the sight of on-screen blood is disturbing to you.

I very much appreciated that the film did not linger or lazily get to its point. There is nothing wrong with a massive satisfying 3 hour epic but there is also beauty in a story that flies without need for rest breaks.

The standout star of Glorious is J.K. Simmons. While audio manipulation has been employed to enrich the timber of his voice and enlarge its presence it is Simmons’s delivery that make the unseen character come alive with power and menace. Had a lesser talent been engaged here the product would have suffered terribly.

Glorious will not be to everyone’s taste. It is dark, it is disturbing, and its humor, where employed, though effective can be nausea inducing if that is your inclination. That said the 79 minutes I spent watching the film were thoroughly enjoyable and if this sounds remotely appealing to your tastes then you should surf over to Shudder and give it a go.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Movie Review: PREY

1987 saw the release of Predator itself inspired by the 1980 wholly lackluster low-budget movie Without Warning, both films used the premise of an alien hunter come to Earth for the sport of hunting humans. Unlike the 1980 movie Predator exploded at the box office quickly becoming a massive success spawning 4 direct follow-on film and melding it with the studio’s other Sf/horror franchise Alien.

Prey, the latest franchise entry, is set in North America during the early 18th century as a band of Comanche deal with a predator-hunter come to Earth. The film’s central character, Naru, (Amber Midthunder) a young woman skilled in healing arts but with a burning desire to a tribal hunter, finds herself struggling to survive the alien’s stalking while navigating the difficult waters of both her tribal politics and the further encroaching of the Europeans into the continent.

There are many who are praising Prey as not only a great sequel but superior to the original 1987 film. This is overly enthusiastic. Granted compared to the lackluster Predator 2, The Predator (2018), or any of the Alien v Predator entries Prey stands out as solid, enjoyable filmmaking. Only it and 20103s Predators took the central premise and did anything more than simply copy the form with cut-and-paste caricatures. That said I think none of the subsequent movies surprise the surprise, tension, and thematic depths of the original film. Predator’s commentary of the emptiness of bravado, and as Lucifer in Sandman might say, the traps of tools, is something that rings true today 35 years later. Prey like all the other films in the Predator franchise has its moments that shatter disbelief. However, it does not layer these issues repeatedly and thus audiences can recover their acceptance of the story as it unfolds. The incongruity that has stayed with me is that any herbal concoction that lowers your body’s temperature to background is simply lethal. No mammal gets to survive that experience.

That is not to say that Prey is a bad film, it is not. Prey boasts interesting characters, who act and react with authenticity. Something that is far too often lacking in popular genre media. (Yes, I am looking at you X.) The tribal characters are engaging, realized human beings with the writers avoid both the cliche of the ‘noble savage’ wise in all things, and the ‘brutal savage’ untamed and untamable. Little can be said for the French fur trappers that who make a brief appearance in the film as all of their dialog is un-subtitled and your humble reviewer speaks no French. Jeff Cutter’s cinematography capture the scale, scope, and beauty of Canada doubling as the American wilderness reminiscent of the fantastic vista often found in John Ford’s best westerns. Director Dan Trachtenberg, previously best known for 10 Cloverfield Lane a tight, confined thriller with a fantastic performance by John Goodman, delivers on the action and tension inherent in a Predatormovie. Naru’s escape and refuge in a beaver lodge is a particularly powerful if short sequence that displays both the character’s quick intelligence and Trachtenberg’s confident directorial skills.

The visual effects are competent and largely invisible. (That pun fully intended.) With CGI creatures and beast flawlessly integrated into the picture. The grizzly is particularly well executed. Prey unfortunately has no theatrical release, and it is possible the VFX would not survive on massive screens but on my 55″ 4K television is worked perfectly.

Prey is well worth watching and is currently streaming on Hulu.

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The Muse Has Returned to Olympus

Yesterday the word spread officially that singer, actor, and activist Olivia Newton-John has died. With a performing and philanthropic career that spanned five decades ONJ left an indelible mark on popular culture by far not the least of which was her role as Sandy in the feature film production of the musical Grease.

I cannot remember the first album I purchased back in the 70s, but it was almost certainly either Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits or Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits. As a fan of easy listening, great vocals, and romantic songs, her music has been with me since adolescence. It was not easy being a teenage male in the 1970s and preferring love songs and pop when the rest of the world seemed consumed with rock and hair the coming of the hair bands.

Those who know me know that my favorite film was one in which she starred, Xanadu. Now, Xanadu is in fact a terrible movie. Starting production to participate in the brief roller-disco craze of the late 70s it suffered constant and extensive rewrites throughout filming and lacking in strong central narrative or character growth the film bombed at the box office while igniting

Universal Pictures

the musical charts with its soundtrack of Electric Light Orchestra and ONJ songs. The feature found additional life as a cult movie and eventually an Ironic stage musical. Underneath the trashed production, inconsistent plot, and truly ineffable ending the film touched hearts due to it sincere adoration of dreams and dreamers wrapped up in its theme that ‘Dreams don’t die. Not by themselves, we kill them.’ Like Tinkerbell, the dream survives as long as you believe. Olivia has passed, her dream and ours remain.

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Sunday Night Noir: Hell Drivers

Joe ‘Tom’ Yeatly (Stanley Baker), a drifter who has learned of an open position as a driver delivering loads of gravel due, after passing an interview from the company manager (William Hartnell) and a test run to verify that he is reckless enough for the demanding pace, is hired as the driver for truck 13. Tom, a loner who isolated from the rest of roughneck drivers, quickly
becomes friends with the other outcast Gino Rossi (Herbert Lom) and Italian POW who remained in the UK after the war and Lucy (Peggy Cummins) becoming entangled in a romantic triangle as Lucy’s fascination with Tom grows. In addition to the dangerous pace required by the manager, to meet their trip quotas the all the drivers speed and endanger themselves and other cars on the road, Tom must also contend with the bullying and cruel driver foreman ‘Red’ Redman (Patrick McGoohan.) Protecting the secret of why he is a drifter and without a recent employment record, Tom has to navigate the treacherous waters of a love triangle and the distrust and hostility of his fellow drivers.

All the elements of a decent-to-good noir are present in Hell Drivers and yet the actual assembly leaves much to be desired. Most of the character motivations are simply too rudimentary to inspire much engagement. The truckers are crude lot, drinking and squabbling without anything to define them as characters and not caricatures. I commented to my sweetie-wife as we watched that all of the men could be used as example of ‘toxic’ masculinity. Without any actual depth to the characters, it is less a story more just a plot. It is late in the film’s running time that we see what is motivating Tom’s need for money and had that been hinted at earlier as a mystery it could have provided a hook upon which to hang the audience’s interest.

Another element of the filmmaking that it difficult to suspend disbelief is the reliance on ‘undercranking’ the camera to simulate the speeding of the dump trucks. The motion was speeded up artificially it was impossible to accept that these trucks were cornering without rolling side-over-side.

That said, an additional bit of interest in Hell Drivers is the numerous future stars that appear in small roles. Beyond the actors already mentioned in my review this film also boasts, pre-Bond Sean Connery, Pre-Man from Uncle David MacCallum, and Jill Ireland. With a slightly tighter script this could have been a 1st class noir instead it is closer to a melodrama and at that it is merely serviceable.

The entire film can be found on YouTube.

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Movie Review: The Black Phone

From the Writer/Director team that brough us Sinister and Doctor Strange comes the cinematic adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story The Black Phone.

Set in a Denver suburb in 1978 The Black Phone focuses on a pair of siblings Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeline McGraw), their abusive alcoholic father, (Jeremy Davies) and the child abductor/murder dubbed ‘The Grabber’ (Ethan Hawke.) Things turn dire for the brother

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and sister when Finn is the next victim of the serial killer, trapped in a soundproofed basement while The Grabber taunts and terrifies the young boy. In the basement a disabled telephone, it landline wires severed, rings and voices of The Grabber’s pervious victims attempt to help Finn survive and escape his ordeal.

The Black Phone is the second horror film I have watched this year with a nostalgic view of the later 1970s, the other being Ti West’s A24 release X. While X felt like someone had been told about the 70s and reproduced the period from that secondhand dissemination The Black Phone is more authentically accurate without the jarring anachronisms, Adult as missing persons on milk container, 24-hour UHF stations, and the like, of X. This film is peppered with beloved detritus of the 70s, the TV show Emergency! and if you look closely issues of Starlog Magazine. The only real violation of the period is Finn’s miniature penlight Saturn V which was far too bright and lasted for too long for the incandescent flashlights of the era.

The performances are consistently good to outstanding. The children characters are both written and directed as realistic children avoiding the ‘overly adult’ manner often found in child protagonists. Thames and McGraw are particularly standout as actors, giving performances that make both ends. terrified and determined, of the actions credible.

Brett Jutliewicz’s cinematography is unsettling and naturalistic, capturing the gloom and cold of the killing basement while just slightly off from reality that supports the supernatural aspects of the story. C. Robert Cargill’s and Scott Derrickson’s script is tight with little wasted time, moving the story along with a clean pacing that carries the audience through the story. Not everything established is critical but everything critical is established in the film’s first act showing a proper deference to Chekov without smashing the elements over the audience’s head.

The Black Phone is a solid entry in the horror genre and well worth seeing either in theaters or at home.

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The Strangest James Bond Film

Since the release of Dr, No in 1962 EON production’s James Bond films have taken the character on wild adventures. Some were smaller in scale, From Russia with Love and For Your Eyes Only, some have threatened the world and have seen the character in orbit above the Earth. For my money that most unusual entry into the franchise that introduced the wildest element was Live and Let Die.

Released in 1973 and riding on the cycle of Blaxploitation cinema this movie presented a new

Eon productions

Bond, Roger Moore, and small threat. Instead of a world ending or dominating plot Bond works to stop a Caribbean criminal from dominating the New York heroin trade.

Now, none of this, while different from many Bond adventures, is terribly unique but there is an element in the film that had not appeared in previous movies would never be revisited.

Magic is real.

The villain, Kananga, has a virgin priestess Solitaire, a strangely non0suggestive name for a Bond Woman, who, with tarot, can accurately predict the future and far see distant events. This is not a delusion or cold reading trick. Solitaire repeatedly and correctly advises Kananga of coming threats and dangers. her prescient powers are tied to her virginity and when Bond seduces her, as he is wont to do, and her life is no endangered by Kananga, Solitaire flips and aids Bond.

Just to make sure that it is not missed that magic and the occult are real in the Bond-verse, one of Kananga’s henchmen costumes himself in the manner of Baron Samedi a supernatural being of Haitian culture with association over the dead and resurrection. During an action sequence near the film’s end Bond throws this particular henchman into a coffin of venomous snakes where he is killed.

And yet at the end of the film the character, played by the same actor, Geoffrey Holder, appears laughing and very much alive at the front of a speeding train. Apparently, we are to assume that this was not a henchman costumed as Baron Samedi but actually Baron Samedi himself.

While Bond has broken free of the constraints of physics and natural law before and after Live and Let Die, the films have never again addressed that they take place in a universe with magic and supernatural spirits.

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Movie Review: NOPE

This weekend Jordan Peele, writer/director of get Out, and US, released his third feature film again playing in the fields of horror with Nope.

The film centers on brother and sister Otis Jr (Daniela Kaluuya) and Emerald (Kiki Palmer) as they struggle to save their ranch and film horse training business following the sudden, tragic, and bizarre death of their father Otis Sr (Keith David.) Between encroaching visual effects

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wizards rendering live horses almost inconsequential and a local western themes amusement park seeking to expand by buying up the failing property the survival of Haywood Hollywood Horses is in grave doubt. It is in this dire situation when a threat descends from the clouds that both threatens the inhabitants of the ranch and simultaneously offer the possibility of financial salvation.

If you saw the previews for Nope you might be tempted to think that Peele was moving into the alien invasion sub-genre of horror and science-fiction and to enter the theater with that fixed as an expectation is to invite disappointment. Nope is closer akin to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, individuals isolated and under threat than the grand global menace of War of the Worlds. Modifying your priors and you are far more likely to enjoy Nope than if you expect the film to be something it is not.

That said Nope doesn’t entirely gel. It has ideas, characters, and settings, the backstory and subplot of Steven Yuen’s Ricky Park, a former child star and now owner and proprietor of the western-themed amusement park, is tragic and horrifying but only symbolically belongs in the same film as the threat hanging over the ranch. It was the sequences where we see the source of his trauma and its repercussions that truly unnerved me and produced the most tension. Uts failure to fully integrate into the main plotline left me unsatisfied.

However, there is a lot to praise Nope. Kaluuya continued to demonstrate that he is a terrifically talented actor able to inhabit with utter authenticity his characters. Palmer is more manic in her performance which is an excellent choice for Emerald and her willingness to push and chase a dream beyond the bounds of reasonableness. The visuals of the film can be spare in a manner that accentuates the isolation and vastness of a distant and secluded California Ranch. Perhaps once of the greats slight of hands in the film’s cinematography is the way Peele, Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, and VFX artists capture fleeting glimpses of something in the skies that is enough for the audience and the characters to know that something was there but not enough to describe the thing.

Nope was an enjoyable if somewhat scattershot movie with enough character and threat to carry most audiences through the rougher patches but not achieving the heights of his debut film Get Outwhile avoiding the too fantastical ‘rationalist’ explanation of Us.

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It’s Not ‘Mary Sue’ It’s J.J. Abrams

I was recently wandering through some YouTube comments on a reaction video to someone wh0 had just watched for the first time the original trilogy. Naturally there were comments from those who dislike the sequel trilogy complete with ‘woke’ as a pejorative and declarations of ‘Mary Sue.’

Now, I am not going to wade into the Rey debates, people can make up their own minds on the character and frankly heated debates over imaginary characters are dull and boring.

What I think is worthy of observation is the idea that it’s not a ‘Mary Sue’ problem but rather a J.J. Abrams has no concept how the world works problem. Abrams seems to think that skill acquisition and mastery is something that ‘heroes’ do quickly, easily, and magically. It is what happens with Rey in The Force Awakes progressing from utterly obliviousness of the Force to influencing weak minds with ease but it’s not Abrams first display of this sort of ‘easy to be the best’ mentality.

in the 2009 reboot Star Trek James Kirk enters Starfleet Academy as a cadet proclaiming he will be a captain in four years. And then doing so by the end of the movie. Ensign, Lieutenant Junior Grade, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, these are just words to Abrams and not the ladder of ranks once must climb to reach Captain. All that doesn’t matter because Kirk is the hero and an Abram’s story that cloak of heroism confers all abilities required of the plot regardless of training, work, and history.

Abrams is a competent filmmaker and director, albeit with a habit of copying others’ styles, but he is a terrible crafter of story and character.

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