Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review (Spoiler Free): Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness

Six years, and after several appearances in other franchise properties, Doctor Strange has its the sequel in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (MOM).

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), master of the mystic arts, grappling with lost years dues to snapture (Hat tip to NPR’s Glenn Weldon for that) and lost loves as Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) marries another is drawn into a multi-universal threat rescuing a teenage, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), witchcraft summoned demons intent of capturing the young

Disney Pictures

woman for their master’s plan. Recognizing that this is witchcraft and not sorcery Strange seeks out Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) for assistance kicking off a chase across parallel universes, cameos from Marvel characters yet established in the MCU’s cannon and director’s Raimi’s long-time collaborator Bruce Campbell, with homages to their cult classic The Evil Dead, climaxing in CGI saturated battles but with a resolution that ultimately turns on seeing oneself as you truly are rather than how you think you are.

MOM is not the worst MVU films to play the silver screen, but neither is it the best. While heavy handed with some exposition it doesn’t fully its narrative momentum in the second act as did Eternals nor is it as light in character drama as The Incredible Hulk, but Strange’s emotional arc is flat, nearly absent, and with minor script changes that could have been corrected without signification plot deviations. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez does an impressive job holding her own in the presence of such acting talents as Cumberbatch, Olsen, and the film’s other Benedict, Wong, selling her character’s emotional truth without big expansive expressive displays

That said the film’s MVP actor is Elizabeth Olsen. In addition to playing variants of her character she excelled as the displaying depths for these individuals, giving a natural realism that penetrated the plots incredible nature and the CGI’s attempts to steal attention with spectacle. While Strange’s name is in the title the film is really her and I do wonder what viewers who have not seen WanaVision, whose theme composer Danny Elfman slipped into the score, made of Wanda’s principal motivation?

I did find the visual effects not quite on target, but I do not think it was primarily a failure of good rendering or models but rather the final composting left a disquieting disconnect to the varies elements harming the verisimilitude.

Overall, I would rank this MCU entry in the 3rd quarter with about half of the franchise better than and about a quarter not as good.

Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness is currently playing theatrically.

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My Upcoming Geeky Artistic Weekend

Which artistically is starting tonight, Thursday.

Tonight, I plan to go out and see the foreign language Finnish horror film Hatching before it vanishes from theaters in my area. (I must admit I adore my AMC A-List subscription that makes rolling the dice on movie so much easier.)

Also tonight is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My sweetie-wife and I will be giving the series a try. Now, I’ll confess that lately the trek shows have not been working for me but hope springs eternal.

Saturday evening I plan to venture to San Diego’s Balboa Park for more experiments in night photography. Last weekend when I left the secret morgue I spied the California Tower lit by colored lights and thought it would be a good subject for my meager photographic skills.

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I will go out and catch the new Doctor Stranger movie.

All in all I am looking forward to this weekend.

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Secret Morgue #3: Final Report

The Secret Morgue, hosted by Film Geeks San Diego, is a one marathon festive for themed horror films with 12 hours of movies, munchies, and madness where the titles of the presentations are secret until actually screened.

Returning after a two-year pandemic hiatus the theme for Secret Morgue #3 was ‘witches.’ IN addition to the films and catered food we were treated to a lecture on the history of witches and witched in Comics.

Film #1: HAXAN (192) From Sweden this silent film, in a beautifully restored edition, if part ‘history’ and part narrative focusing on the myth of witches in the Middle Ages. I had never seen this movie and it was a pleasure.

Film #2: The Witchfinder General (AKA The Conqueror Worm) (1968) Vincent Price stars as Mathew Hopkins self-proclaimed Witch Finder General dur the English Civil war of the 17th century. The story presents no actual witches but the very real terror of unchecked power and prejudice. My sweetie-wife reminded me that we had watched this on DVD together but somehow I had forgotten it entirely.

Film #3: City of the Dead (AKA Horror Hotel) (1960) A flawed film with a bunch of brits pretending to me Americans as a small New England town is beset by a witch burned there in the 17th century. College students and professors arrive searching for a missing friend and unravel the mystery. With a better budget and script the core concept could have been quite good but a lackluster production and meandering script undercut what works.

Film #4: Inferno (1980) Written and directed by Dario Argento this is the middle film of Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, between Susperia (1977) and The Mother of Tears (2007). The narrative of the movie is quite fractured, split among several viewpoint characters, most of whom come to grizzly ends, and as is typical of Argento’s work, mood, image, and style supersede story. It doesn’t quite have the dream logic of a David Lynch film nor the defined narrative of a typical story leaving it somewhere in a no man’s land between the two.

Film #5: Black Sunday (AKA The Mask of Satan) (1960) Director Mario Bava worked in a number of genres, mystery, Giallo, and of course horror. This film stars Barbara Steel in two roles as the 16th century witch, condemned along with her vampire lover, and the 18th century princess destined to be the witch’s vessel to revivification. Set in the eastern European country of Moldova, Black Sunday is a stylish gothic horror with impressive in camera transformation effects.

Film #6: Lvx Aeterna (2019) Written and directed by Gasper Noe of Irreversible fame this film is in a mock documentary style following two actresses, playing fictionalized version of themselves, who are about to portray witches burned at the stake. It is a short film, 50 minutes, but the late hour, my exhaustion, the foreign language soundtrack, and promised intense flashing sequences cause me to fear a possible migraine trigger and I instead left early but this is in no way a comment on the film’s quality only my own self-preservation in face of possible intense agony. (Driving into headlights at night with a migraine is not recommended.)

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The Three Lorraines of Back to the Future

 

In this essay I am going to look at the three representations of the character Lorraine Baines-McFly presented in 1985’s Back to the Future and what might be suggested about the character and her history. This piece will not deal with subsequent variants presented in the two sequels.

Lorrain — Prime

Lorraine McFly as she first appears in the film is a woman struggling with alcoholism, a prudish defensive approach to sexuality, and who is deeply unhappy. She doesn’t give voice to the unhappiness, having long ago surrendered to her despair with all traces of self-confidence and agency vanished from her personality. She is in short, a broken person. Adding to the tragedy is that her pain, her shattered nature is invisible to the men in her life. Her husband, George McFly, blindly laughs at the dinner table while watching re-runs wholly unaware of his wife’s grief. Neither of her son appear to notice. the painful evening, the large amount of alcohol is so routine as to be invisible. This suggests that Lorraine’s fractured psyche is decades old.

The only other male present in the prime timeline that has any notice of Lorraine is the bully Biff Tannen. While the two characters have no direct interaction in the establishing scenes of the film Biff does tell Marty, Lorraine’s youngest son and the story protagonist, ‘tell your mom I said hi.’ An innocuous statement but actor Thomas F Wilson’s line reading fills it with menace and meaning. There is a clear implication of a deep and unsettling history.

Lorrain — Base

Lorraine Baine, Marty’s mother before marriage and a lifetime of crushing pain, in 1955 is a vibrant, outgoing, and bold teenager. She is unafraid in her risk taking, groping crushes under the dinner table with her parents present, venturing to a stranger’s house in pursuit of that crush, and adventurous in her dating, willing to make confident first moves rather than wait on her partner. It would seem to be inconvincible that this self-confident teenage loses all her fire and vitality simply from the confines of matrimony.

Lorraine — variant

After Marty’s excursion to 1955 and his interference with his parent’s courtship and lives, including alteration that prompted to his father to interrupt Biff sexually assaulting Lorrain, Marty returns to discover that his entire world has changed.

Lorraine now is fit, healthy, and confidence. Vanished has all traces of her sexual prudishness and defensiveness as she exhibits both an open sexuality with her husband, a George variant that is successful and confident, and accepting of her son’s sexual life. The Lorraine variant is logical progression of the teenage Lorraine the audience was introduced to. Marty’s meddling has dramatically changed both his parents.

What broke Lorraine prime?

It would seem to be down to two possible explanations. Life with a George that never found his self-confidence or success drained Lorraine of his own agency and vitality. This explanation reduces Lorraine to simply an extension of George and would seem to be tension with the Lorrain that existed before George entered her life. It also ignores the relationship between Biff and Lorraine. 30 years after their high school days Biff still feels the need to make vague and unsettling comments about Lorraine.

Everything seems to suggest that Lorraine suffered a deep and shattering trauma that psychologically damaged her and coming to adulthood in an era that disparaged psychological health and treatments she was left to suffer, dealing with her trauma by self-medication with alcohol.

The alteration of history with George interrupting Biff’s sexual assault in a manner that forever reduced Biff to simpering subservient character is the also the event that prevented Lorraine’s trauma, providing her with the space to blossom into the woman she always had the potential to be.

Perhaps not the night of the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ dance as it happened in the Marty altered timeline, but it would seem likely that at some point in the original timeline Biff completed his sexual assault on Lorraine, and bereft of resources and mental health treatments, she shattered.

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Movie Review: The Batman

There have been quite a few feature films of DC’s ‘The World’s Greatest Detective’ Batman, 1 quickly rushed production derived from the campy television series, 4 in the franchise launch in 1989, Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, 1 where he shared titular billing with Superman, and another 1 or 2, depending on how you count Justice League, where is a driving force and a major character and now Director and Co-writer Matt Reeves brings us The Batman, another relaunch of the character and continuity, and perhaps my favorite Batman film yet.

The Batman brings us into the story two years into Bruce Wayne’s ‘Batman experiment,’ as Bruce is suffering doubts about the effectiveness of his vigilantism. Despite his nightly patrols crimes seems not only unabated but growing. When the mayor is brutally murdered days before the election by a mysterious madman obsessed with riddles Batman’s investigates pull

Credit: WB Studios

him in a dark web of conspiracy, corruption, and crime entangling Gotham’s political and economic elites. The trail of clues in his hunt for The Riddler leads Batman through the city’s organized crime, its police force, and crossing paths with a dangerous cat burglar on her own path of vengeance. The answers to the Riddler’s horrific murders and his motivation erodes Batman’s sense of self and history leading him to finally understand himself and what his experiment’s actual results.

The Batman delivers on the promise Matt Reeves made when he took over the project to redirect the character back to its detective roots. Tim Burton’s films luxuriated in a brooding Gothic aesthetic, Schumacher’s run were neon and gaudy, Nolan’s trilogy attempted a realism never before seen with Batman, and Snyder’s tone can be best described as brutalism with The Batman Reeves has reached back into Hollywood’s classic era for a film noir interpretation of a superhero movie. Very little of the film takes place in daylight and nearly none of that involves the Batman. As the character narrates himself into the experiment’s logbook, he is not in the shadows, he is the shadows. And unseen by himself, there is a shadow over his heart that is the story’s psychological center. The three characters close the Batman provide the emotional and psychic tension to pulls at him, Alfred with the debt of family and history, Gordon with the drive for justice, and Selina Kyle with a thrust for vengeance. resolving these competing tensions is the real story of The Batman.

Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Greig Fraser and with deliciously detailed production design by James Chinlund The Batman creates a Gotham that feels real, feels lived in, while preserving the epic scope required for our modern mythology that is the superhero movie.

The Batman is still currently playing in a few theaters and is now streaming on HBO Max.

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Streaming Review: All Night Long

The United Kingdom’s All Night Long is a jazz-infused noir-ish retelling of Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy of a Morish warrior manipulated into a lethal jealous frenzy by the trusted Iago.

Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough), a wealthy patron of London’s jazz scene, throws a one-year wedding anniversary celebration for band leader Rx and his retired singer/wife Delia (Paul Harris and Marti Stevens.) Rex’s drummer Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) wants to found his own band but he can’t do it without backing from Rod and Rec’s talent agent, neither of whom will support him unless Delia comes out of retirement as Johnny’s lead singer. Because Rex doesn’t support the idea of his wife returning to the business Johnny begins a campaign of rumor and innuendo to break the marriage.

All Night Long transpires over a single evening’s party set in a single location. In addition to a find cast of actors the film boasts an impressive number of the UK’s premier jazz musicians along with American Dave Brubeck. In fact, the film’s chief flaw in my opinion are the jazz breaks where the story slams to a halt while the movie lingers on, albeit exquisite, musical performances that for the most part neither advance plot nor illuminate character.

McGoohan’s turn as the Iago-like Johnny is at times charming, sociopathic, and pitiful. Johnny is a man who has plotted and planned big dreams and on the cusp of realizing one of them breaks nearly everyone around him.

Paul Harris, whose physical stature and commanding voice is reminiscent William Marshall, delivers a subtle performance as a man seemingly confident of his place in place but subject to the erosion of self-doubt and jealousy.

The film is captured in black-and-white helping to create a noir sensibility but without the exaggerated stylistic impressions barrowed from German Expressionism. Here the monochrome, though perhaps a budgetary restraint, helps ground the film in a stormy night’s realism.

The soundtrack is naturally jazz but unlike many films that utilized jazz as a cost-cutting tool here some of the greats of the era are on display giving lovely performances, even if they did not always serve the film well.

All Night Long with a brief running time of an hour and a half is an enjoyable drama with noirovertones and worth the time. It is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

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Movie Review: X

 

Well, it has finally happened A24 has released a film that utterly disappointed me.

X, and man I would have worked for a better title, is the story of five twenty-somethings and one

A24 Studios

forty-something traveling to a secluded rural Texas farm in 1979 to film a pornographic film and the night of terror, violence, and murder that ensues.

The sub-genre that X best fits into is hicksploitation, represented by such diverse films as Deliverance and Gator Bait and of course the movie X is most often compared to, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, X has been overly praised.

The characters of X are sketched in only the barest contours and what is there that passes as characterization does little to endear much sympathy. I do not believe that this is the fault of the performers but rather of the script. There is little to recommend this film beyond Mia Goth’s dual performance as characters separated by more than 60 years in age. (From this point onward, I will be revealing spoilers, though not the ultimate ending, for the movie.)

The movie repeatedly shattered any suspension of disbelief I might have possessed. The character RJ has artistic aspirations of making a ‘good dirty movie,’ referring to avant-garde French Cinema and yet he is making a movie without any lights, reflectors, or even a single tripod. The movie hangs a hat on this incongruity when Wayne, the old man and producer, yells at Maxine for being absent and that RJ is ‘losing the light’ as the sun sets but then everyone rushed into a darkened barn to film, where there is no fricking light.

Later in the movie, after RJ feels betrayed and has attempted to abandon everyone his girlfriend and sound recordist enlists Wayne’s help in searching for him. Wayne wanders out into the Texas brush, at night, wearing one underwear and no shoes. Because apparently not one of the native Texans has ever heard of ‘chiggers’ (bush-mites), snakes, fire-ants, or even just thorns.

In addition to displaying a lack of any concern about insects or plants the film to hampered by situations around the character of Jackson Hole, the sole male performer in their ‘dirty movie.’ As a black man, engaging in interracial sex, and deep in rural Texas, with a shady elderly white man prone to brandishing a shotgun showing little more than antipathy towards these young people, he acts far too cavalier about his own safety to be anything other than a cinematic ‘professional victim.’

X boasts one really nicely crafted scene of dread and suspense amid it jarring editing and reliance on jump scares. When Maxine goes skinny dipping in a pond and is hunted by an alligator the entire sequence plays out beautifully but ultimately only serves to establish the ‘gator so that it can be used later in an attack that possess none of the slow stalking dread exhibited earlier.

X proved to be a waste of my evening but at least with the AMC A List subscription it cost me no extra money. My advice is to wait for streaming or cable and then miss it.

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My Latest Blu-Ray Acquisition

 

Last week I purchased Shout Factory’s 4K Blu-ray release of 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer a low budget fantasy movie of warring kingdoms, evil sorcerers, and a muscle-bound hero there to set everything right.

Produced on a budget of just 4 million dollars and grossing nearly 40 at the box office The Sword and the Sorcerer was, despite perhaps cinema’s silliest sword design, a very successful independent feature. Upon its release, I adored the film, not because it is great cinema, no one will ever count it among cinema’s masterpieces, but rather because no film before or since has captured so perfectly the mood and fun of an over-the-top Dungeons and Dragons adventure like this movie did.

Yes, the film is a complete mishmash of culture from medical England to the middle east, yes, it had anachronisms galore, and yes, the characters exist only to move the plot along, but it is also fun. At a spare 99 minutes the movie doesn’t waste it’s time and for such a limited budget, even by 1982 standards, every penny they spent is up there on the screen.

This release, mastered in 4K from a fresh negative, and packed with bonus feature is a joy and I am quite happy to add it to my library.

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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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