Category Archives: Movies

The Desperation of the Oscars

 

I am not going to talk about violence at the 94th Academy Awards but rather about the Academy’s pitiful attempts at popularity with its fan voted unofficial categories.

Viewership, interest, and respect for the Oscars has been waning for a number of years. As massively popular films, nearly always genre franchise movies, fail to achieve artistic recognition while smaller quieter films, nearly always dramatic films with a historic or social commentary goal, are showered with accolades. With the collapse of the mid-budget film leaving theaters with small artistic projects and massive franchise spectacles the Academy’s bent toward the dramatic while sidelining the genre opened a chasm between the films it honored and the ones beloved by the viewing audience it desperately wanted.

In 2018 the Academy announced its plans for a new category, Best Popular Film, a brazen attempt to have their cake and eat it too by giving blockbuster franchises a ghettoized Oscar. The backlash to the patronizing proposal proved as predictable as Newton’s laws of motion and the new category never appeared.

Instead, this year that unveiled the brilliant idea for a twitter poll drive for Fan Favorite Film and Fan Favorite Moment. Not actually new categories mind you, but a pat on the head for the comic book fans, a seat at the kiddie table while the real films are recognized elsewhere.

Had the Academy looked to the recent past with Fan driven award, particularly when there is a small but devoted and determined coordinated base of individuals, then they should have seen the outcome of their twitter voting.

Sunday, the Fan Favorite Film went to Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, and the Fan Favorite Moment went to ‘The Flashe enters the Speed Force.’ (Mind you I go to comic book movies, and I have seen both versions of the Justice League movies and I had absolutely no concept of what scene won this momentary award.)

The Academy’s desperation for acceptance while remaining elite and aloof doomed the entire enterprise to failure. There are already several fan voted awards and it is wrong for the Academy to dilute their brand by trying to be popular.

Either widen you voting audience so the nominated and winning film appeal to a wider population or stay in your elite rarified air, but you cannot win trying to do both.

 

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An Abominable Adaptation: Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

 

Before the essay gets rolling the subject and point of this piece is not to debate Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers and whether it is or is not fascist. If your comments are about the novel and politics, save them. That’s not the issue at hand.

Verhoeven’s 1997 film is a piece of political satire, a cinematic tradition with a distinguished and proud linage including the likes of Doctor Strangelove” Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Satire has a rich history and can be a great tool for arguing a case and it is not always about humor and laughter. Swift’s A Modest Proposal isn’t funny, but it is excellent political satire. So, the fact that the film Starship Troopers isn’t a comedy does not remove it from the category of satire.

What makes this adaptation abominable isn’t that it isn’t faithful to the novel threadbare and nearly non-existent plot or that the film is a satire where the novel is not. The issue is that it targets its satire directly on the novel’s argument while presenting itself as an adaptation of the novel’s argument. This is disingenuous and a perversion.

Consider a hypothetical counter example. Let’s stipulate a satirical adaptation of Orwell’s classic novel 1984. The setting is already very close to satire and Gilliam used it as a jumping off point for his own comedic satire Brazil but importantly created his own work rather than abuse another artist’s. So, in this 1984 adaptation we not only make it satire we make the target Winston Smith and ridicule his character and his outlook, raising Big Brother to a benevolent force concerned with the happiness and safety of its citizens. This would be a perversion of Orwell’s work and in my opinion it would be immoral. I think it is wrong to take another artist’s creation and twist it, mutate it, and abuse it to make it attack itself. We could do the same thought experiment with countless classic works, sch as transforming Fahrenheit 451 into a defense of ignorance and illiteracy but I think the point is made.

Obviously not only can you attack viewpoints itis good to challenge other ideas and themes. My understanding is that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is in part a direct answer to Heinlein’s Starship Trooper. Verhoeven often returns to the idea of fascism and the dangers it presents. I applaud him and his stand as an anti-fascist but inverting another artist’s work is a dishonest and disrespectful method. It is far better to craft your own piece and argument such as with The Forever War or Brazil than to engage in blatant distortion.

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Streaming Review: Black Crab

 

I’ve been busy the last two weeks looking after my sweetie-wife and her hip replacement but now I am back for regular updates.

Saturday evening, we watched the Swedish film and debut feature from director/writer Adam Berg, Black Crab.

Noomi Rapace stars as Caroline as woman impressed into military service in the near future and on the losing end of a bloody atrocity filled war in the far north of Scandinavia. She joins a small squad and their near suicidal mission to cross frozen seas carrying mysterious cannisters that will determine the fate of the war. However, her motivation isn’t from duty or patriotism but rather to reunite with the daughter she lost at the start of the war and who is now at the location the cargo must be delivered to.

The cinematography and sound design of Black Crab are impeccable. The beauty, stillness, and constant danger of their quest is captured in image and sound that resonate even on the small screen. The squad tactic and firearm utilization look at appear grounded and realistic with Berg avoiding cliche displays of impossible skills but rather turning a more harrowing portrayal of what a firefight must actually be like. Rapace delivers a subtle and nuanced performance that always remind the viewer of his conflicted and troubled character without a need scenery chewing.

Ber and co-writer Pelle Radstrom made some interesting choices that I think were done to keep the piece apolitical. The characters speak in Swedish, but their location is the far northwest coast of Norway, and the ‘enemy’ is never seen clearly or is their nationality identified. The greater political motivations of the war are utterly irrelevant to the Rapace’s character and are therefore absent from her story.

Halfway through the film a mild science-fictional elements is introduced and drives nearly everyone’s motivation from that point onward save for Rapace and her absolute need to reunite with her daughter.

Black Crab’s greatest weakness is the film’s final act. The set-up and action unfolds in a manner that makes the story ultimate resolution both predictable and cliche. The film’s message appears to be that war is a stupid suicidal affair both for individuals and humanity in general. Hardly an original premise. However, I do not regret the less than two spent watching Black Crab, and your mileage may of course vary.

Black Crab is currently streaming on Netflix.

 

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Revisiting The Night House

 

August of 2021, I returned to the theaters for the suspense/horror film The Night Houseproduced by and starring Rebecca Hall. Over the past two weekends I have revisited the movie on Blu-ray. (Amazon had a sale with the disc over half off its retail price.)

I am pleased to report that the film works perfectly well on a second viewing as it did on its first.

Rebecca Hall plays Beth a public-school teacher and skeptic who is dealing with the sudden and inexplicable suicide of her beloved and devoted husband. After events prompt her to investigate his cell phone, she discovers that Owen took hundreds of photos of women, all strangers to Beth, who bear an uncanny resemblance to her. Plagued by nighttime visitations and visions that may be the product of overwhelming and suppressed grief Beth gradually moves from Skeptic to a believer in the supernatural with the possibility that Owen’s spirit has returned from beyond the grave to her.

The Night House is a sterling example of how a horror film can have real tension, real stakes, without requiring a body count or a monstrous example of violence every ten minutes. This is not to slag on those movies that work that way, the beauty of the genre is that it is wide and deep enough to welcome as film such as The Night House where an ambiguous ending leaves open the possibility that everything was the product of a grief shattered mind to the nine films of the Texas Chain Saw franchise that exists on its devotion to blood and violence. Personally, I am more drawn to films like The Night House where slow building dread drives the terror but far be it from me to denigrate what works for others.

 

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Learning to Watch Episodic Television

 

Not me mind you, I grew up watching TV in the 60s and 70s. Episodic TV was normal for most of my life, but it is a relic of a time now past, and some people have trouble engaging with it.

I follow a number of podcasts where younger people watch movies and television and hearing their interaction with an episodic series like the original run of Star Trek is interesting.

Having known pretty much only serialized story telling where the events of earlier episodes influence or even drive the events of later episodes they are sometimes befuddled when the character don’t reach back and use solutions that they have already discovered. Or when the characters act surprised to learn some fantastic historical fact more than once. Such as ancient Greek gods were in fact visiting aliens, such as in original Star Trek episodes Who Mourns for Adonais and Plato’s Stepchildren. It is unnatural to their story consuming habits to treat each and every individual episode as a unique story independent of the others.

This is not a slight on them. Art changes and the art forms of earlier generations are rarely consumed or interpreted the same by following generations.  I have seen people perplexed by Rick in Casablanca waiting so long to shoot Major Strasser unused to a production code that forbade the hero for shooting a man, even a Nazi, who had not yet pulled his weapon. Strasser must try to shoot Rick before Rick is justified in shooting Strasser.

It will be interesting to see what new evolutions in story telling confound and confuse future artistic consumers.

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Nightmare Alley (The Novel) — First Impressions

 

With del Toro’s recent release of Nightmare Alley, which is fantastic, and being a fan of the classic and also great 1947 production starring Tyrone Power, I thought it was time to read the source novel that both films adapted their screenplays from.

I am only a few chapters into William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley, but I have already seen some fairly interesting and fundamental changes that both productions effected.

By far the most consequential change has been the age of Stanton Carlisle the story protagonist. Tyrone Power when he played the charming but doomed Stan was 33 and Bradley Cooper the star of del Toro’s production was 45 when filming started. However, in the novel, at least at the start of the story with Stan already a member of the 10-in-1 midways show, that character was a mere 21 years old. When Zeena seduces Stan because Pete’s alcoholism has rendered him impotent, it is Stan’s first sexual encounter. Stan’s naïveté in sexual matters and in life is already key elements in the novel’s construction.

That said it is clear that both adaptations paid serious respect to the novel, and I look forward to finishing the book.

 

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Movie Review: Death on the Nile

 

2022’s Death on the Nile is the second Hercule Poirot adaptation directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh as Christie’s famous Belgium detective.

After a brief prolog set during World War I, supplying some details of Poirot’s background, and a short sequence in a London Jazz club establishing some of the central characters the story starts off in earnest along the Nile river where, by seeming chance, encounter Poirot meets with an old friend and is soon entwined with a wealthy heiress’ wedding celebration. The heiress, Linnet Ridgeway and her husband are fearful a jealous ex-lover is stalking and may do harm to Linnet for stealing away her fiancé. Also aboard are a collection of eccentric characters who later all are revealed to have possible motivations for murder.

A good half of the film is dedicated to the set-up, giving the audience plenty of time to learn about the characters from their actions before Murder starts the tension climbing. After the murder and with suspicions quite high life aboard the chartered steamer turns dangerous and with its body count Death on the Nile does a far impression of a slasher where the kills are not graphically on screen.

Unlike the previous film in the adaptation series, Murder on the Orient Express, the resolution is quite believable though pushed the edge of credibility. The screenplay retains Christie’s hobbit of withholding some clue and revealing them only in the detective monolog but aside from that aspect the movie is quite enjoyable. Apparently invented for this film the background on Poirot gave the story some added depth and emotional resonance.

Death on the Nile is a decent film, better that Murder on the Orient Express and worth a watch.

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Near Noir: The Shadow on the Window

 

Noir Archive: Volume 3 a collection of Columbia film noirs, kicks off with The Shadow on the Window, a movie that might be better called noir-adjacent rather than an actual film noir.

Petey, a little boy, is traumatized after witnessing the murder of an elderly farmer and an attack on his mother. Nearly catatonic he runs/wanders off until through a few concerned citizens he is delivered to the police station where the audience learns he is the son of a detective, Tony Atlas, recently separated from his wife. Aware that his wife would never carelessly loose Petey, and that some traumatic events has unbalanced his son, Atlas and the police force begin search for the mother and attempt to unravel the mysterious event in a race against time.

The Shadow on the Window is a straightforward narrative with no unexpected reveals and twists in the plot. Linda Atlas is being held by three thugs who hadn’t intended on murder as part of their robbery and who now argue over how to deal with their captive. Detective Atlas follows leads and clues as he attempts to track back Petey’s course aware that his woofer is in danger but ignorant of enough specifics to effect an immediate rescue. With a short running time of 73 minutes Shadowdoesn’t lag or waste screen-time, always moving forward which helps considerably with its lack of mystery. In my opinion the best noirs often have a reveal in the third act that recontextualizes the previous story elements without that aspect Window plays more like a procedural drama than a murky noir of concealed motivations and alliances. Still, it entertains for the hour and a quarter it plays and the filmmakers throw enough obstacles into Detective Atlas’ investigation that the film has sufficient tension despite its production code enforced ending.

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The Downside of Easy International Media

 

The internet gives us access to news and popular culture from around the globe and sometimes that access prompts frustration.

This morning as I ate my customary breakfast of toast and eggs, yes, I live such an exciting life, one of the social media sites threw up the news that this year there was going to be a Norwegian werewolf movie, Vikingulven (Viking Wolf), complete with trailer.

Man, that looks good, and it had a Norwegian release date of August 27th but as of the time of this writing no US distribution. (Disappointed werewolf whimper.) There are few really good werewolf movies and this looks promising.

I guess I will have to wait and hope that one of the streamers picks it up. (Yes, I am looking at you Shudder.)

 

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More thoughts on Nightmare Alley (2021)

 

Given that I had appointments to keep today I took the day off from my day-job and that provided me the opportunity to head out to the cinemas and see Nightmare Alley: Vision in Darkness and Light which is the Guillermo del Toro production presented in black and white.

First off let me say that the feature was absolutely fabulous in B&W. There have been other feature films in recent years that have released monochrome editions, Mad Max: Fury Road Black and Chrome and Logan Noir, and neither of these alternative versions were as beautiful or as fitting as Nightmare Alley’s. I think del Toro envisioned the feature in black-and-white, with all the production design aimed at that target. Also as a period piece we movie lovers are so used to seeing that era in monochrome that it feels more natural and strangely more realistic without vibrant colors. That is not to say that the production design suffered in color. It was beautiful and captivating and a true testament to the artistry and skill of the team.

Where The Tragedy of Macbeth in Black and white feels stagey, unreal, this film feels grounded because of it.

Watching the film a second time it grew on me more and I was even more deeply immersed in the story and the characters.  The film is layered and the performances at time quite subtle. With a repeat viewing I became more aware of symbolic establishments that foretold the eventual end for the charlatan Stanton Carlisle. It was also clear in subtle moments when characters had committed themselves to irrevocable courses of action. I enjoyed the movie the first time, last night I loved it.

 

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