Category Archives: Movies

Scary Season #4: Angel Heart

 

There aren’t very many films that blend horror with film noirbut 1987’s Angel Heart is one of them.

In Post-war New York Private Detective Harry Angel is commissioned by French Client Louis Cyphre to discover if pre-war Big Band Singer Johnny Favorite, who has debt to Cyphre, is alive or dead. Angel’s investigation leads him from New York to New Orleans and at seemingly every turn vital witnesses are brutally murdered implicating Angel. Johnny’s trail leads Angel into a web of Satanism, Black Magic, sensationalized and sexualized depictions of ‘Voodoo,’ and the truth behind Johnny’s mysterious disappearance.

Angel Heart fails to fully realize its premise and never succeeds at either its Noir nor its Horror aspirations. As a Noiris doesn’t provide enough twists and turns in the narrative with each link in Angel’s investigation leading to the next without much detecting or discovery required by Harry. Rather than key pieces coming together after his diligent work the solution to Johnny’s disappearance to given as an expository dump by the final witness. Speaking to its horror aspect the story again fails to lay out a foundation prior to the reveal that recontextualizes the murders and the truth that had been hidden. The very same expository dump that explains the mystery also serves to reveal the black magic at its heart and that is simply too much for one scene of exposition to lift.

The greatest failing of Angel Heart is that until the very final moment of the film it is all plot and not story. Harry is hired to find a missing singer. This is just another job for Harry without emotional and personal importance. The dangers become personal as the murder pile up and he becomes more and more implicated but that seemingly has little or nothing to do with Harry’s character. When a story involves a character enacting their profession it needs to transcend those requirements of the job and become personal to have emotional weight. A doctor working to save a patient’s life is a plot, a doctor who has become hopelessly in love with his patient and cannot live without them and now must save them is a story. To price of failure rises above the routine. Harry, until the final scenes, has no personal stakes in the investigation and thus has no personal story to tell.

With the film’s flaws there are reasons to watch Angel Heart. The cinematography is luscious capturing the grime and grit of New York city equally well with the heat and humidity of New Orleans. Director and screenwriter Alan Parker leans into symbolism and a fractured narrative that foreshadows Lynch’s own exploration in Noir horror with his Mulholland Dr. giving Angel Heart an almost dreamlike logic.

I watched Angel Heart on my own Blu-Ray Disc.

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Scary Season #3: The Raven (1935)

Poe has for a long time been a source for Hollywood to mine in search of new horror properties. 1935 the year the production code went into full effect Universal released The Raven very loosely adapted from Poe’s poem and starring the two biggest stars at the time in horror, Lugosi, and Karloff.

Lugosi plays Dr Vollin a brilliant but vain and arrogant surgeon. After saving the life of a daughter of a local judge Vollin becomes infatuated with the young woman and then mad when his ‘affections’ are not returned. In a plot contrivance of convenience Edmond Bateman, played by Karloff, an escaped convict under a death sentence attempts to force Vollin to perform plastic surgery so that he might escape the law. Vollin turns the tables on Bateman and intends to use him as part of his revenge on all who have denied him his true happiness.

The Raven (1935) is not very good but with a runtime of just one minute over an hour it doesn’t take up much if your life either. Karloff delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance that has echoes of his portrayal of the creature in 31’s Frankenstein. Lugosi, in the calmer more deliberate moments of his character is quite good however when the final act rolls around and he goes big his performance turns comical and appears even more so in contrast to Karloff’s in the same scenes where his understated delivery steals the moment. The movie may be unique for its second act interpretive dance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, but that itself is not enough to save this picture.

The Raven is currently stream in on The Criterion Channel as part of their Universal Monsters Collection.

 

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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Movie Review: No Time to Die

 

Ever since the release of Dr. No in 1962 there has been a new entry in EON Productions James Bond film franchise every two and a third years culminating in this year’s No Time to Die, the fifth and final film to star Daniela Craig as the cinematic superspy.

From Dr. No thru The World is Not Enough there has been a very loose, nearly non-existent, continuity to the franchise. Two films that I recall make direct references back to a central and tragic moment in the series’ long run, both to Bonds marriage and loss of his wife on the same day, The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. After the change from Moore to Dalton there was never again any attempt to maintain the fiction that this was the same person but rather his history was left unexplored and unspoken of.

With Craig’s Bond beginning in 2006, just 2 short years before the juggernaut of the MCU transformed filmed franchises, this run was treated differently. Everything that came before was abandoned and the character began fresh, even earning his 00 status on screen before our eyes. The five films of the Craig Era made a seriously, if sometimes flawed, attempt at maintaining internal consistency and continuity for this version of Bond and with No Time to Die they have ventured where no Bond film has gone, recognizing the actor’s departure, and giving his character an emotional close to this five-film arc.

No Time to Die opens with Bond and his new love Madeline, (From the previous entry Specter) enjoying their freedom on the shore of the Mediterranean. In the longest pre-title sequence of the franchise Specter attempts to assassinate Bond who survives but his trust in Madeline is shattered. Years pass and Specter in a daring raid steals the movie’s McGuffin. The retired Bond is recruited by his old Friend Felix Leiter to recover to stolen tech working against her majesty’s government. The mission brings Bond heartache and ghosts as he discovers the truth long hidden and faces the consequences of his life.

Despite four credited writers director Cary Joji Fukunaga and Producer Barbara Broccoli kept the film fairly tightly focused and even a running time of two hours and forty-three minutes there isn’t a lot of fat in the plot and the pace is quick without becoming confusing. Hans Zimmer as the scores composer makes fin use of previous Bond themes including from what is in all likelihood the least seen Bond on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The films actors are all in fine form with Craig radiating on his face the weariness and hurt that Bond’s life has taken on him. He is a man close to breaking but not yet fully broken. He is fractured and knows that this mission may finally allow him redemption and absolution.

My ranking of the Craig Bond movies run in this order.

1) Casino Royale

2) Skyfall (A very close second)

3) No Time to Die

4) Quantum of Solace

5) Specter (Which I had forgotten nearly all of the film.)

 

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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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Bucking the Genre: Promising Young Woman

 

After the dissolution of the studio system and the abandonment of the Production code the 1970s witnessed an explosion of subgenres of film that had previous been forbidden more graphic sexuality, violence, and nudity changed cinema from studio productions to exploitive independent movies. Perhaps the most exploitive subgenre to emerge from this cinematic chaos was the rape-revenge movie.

In this subgenre a woman after surviving a sexual assault discovers hidden reserves of strength and becomes a force for vengeance, sometimes solely against her assailant and sometimes against men in general. The movies often ended with final showdowns where she triumphs, often lethally, against her original attacker. Rape-revenge movie is different from movies that utilized a woman’s sexual assault to motivate the protagonist to finally act against the story villain by centering the woman, or sometimes women, experience instead of using her trauma as mere motivation for someone else. Often these movies are very exploitive, using social commentary and feminism as excuses for onscreen explicit violence and nudity.

Promising Young Woman is without a doubt a rape revenge film, the trailers made that much clear, but unlike the vast majority of the genre PYM doesn’t promote the trope that trauma instills growth but rather unflinching it depicts trauma as it is so often in reality, something that shatters lives and personality leaving the person broken and incomplete.

At the film’s opening Cassie, the protagonist, spends her weekend nights playing at being too drunk to stand and when some man takes her to his home to, let’s be blunt, rape her, she drops the sham intoxication and confronts him. Cassie’s life is devoid of friends and joy, she is already broken by the experiences of her backstory. Everything changes after a chance encounter with a former classmate who brings the knowledge that the assailant that escaped any form of justice has returned to town. Cassie switches from random revenge to precise, calculated vengeance against the people that enabled the assault. However, in the course of her revenge Cassie discovers new information that set her on a much darker much more violent path.

In most rape-revenge movies the filmmakers are caught between two terrible paths when forced to depict the sexual violence at the heart of their story. They can depict the terrible events more faithfully and risk traumatizing and repelling their audience or, and this is the case is the exploitive side of the genre, they can titillate with the violence, playing to dark male fantasies. Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman‘s writer and director did neither. Rather than show us she restricted our experience to hearing the attack. A brilliant move that sidestepped and exploitive titillation and provided the audience with the horror of what we are capable of imagining. Fennell kept her film and script grounded with a reality we can believe in rather than one of glorified and improbable violence. The ending, fitting with her approach of the subject matter, is dark and with only a glimmer of catharsis. The film’s second act is perhaps is greatest magic trick, inducing in Cassie and the audience a false sense of security that so perfectly mirror the real-life experiences of far too many.

Cary Mulligan’s portrayal of Cassie is nuanced and even when Cassie’s life seems happier with a new dawn possibly breaking her performance contains the tragedy that always exist just under her skin. Like her namesake Cassandra, Cassie is living a tragedy with an inescapable fate that bears down on her like a freight train.

Promising Young Woman is currently playing on HBO.

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Why I Prefer the Theatrical Cut of Aliens

 

Seven years after Alien burst upon the scene and spawned countless imitators and knockoffs the James Cameron helmed sequel Aliens arrive for a fresh round of terror and action.

The version released to theaters in 1986 ran a total of 137 minutes, that two hours and 17 minutes making it a very long film for theatrical distribution. The more over two hours a film runs the fewer screenings a theater can screen in a single day. In 1991 an extended version running twenty minutes longer was released on laserdisc with both editions available on the Blu-ray boxed set collection. Writer/Director Cameron has stated that his preference is for the extended ‘Director’s Cut’ version of the film.

When I first saw the extended cut on DVD/Blu-Ray I agreed with Cameron but over time I’ve found that my preference has become for the theatrical cut.

In the making of documentaries packaged with the Blu-ray release Cameron reports that when the film came in longer than the studio preferred time and technology hampered going through the entire film and trimming scenes here and there to shorten the running time. In 1986 editing was still a physical processed of cutting and splicing film as non-linear editing had not yet become the industry standard. His producer and at the time wife Gale Anne Hurd suggested and entire reel of the film depicting the colony of Hadley’s Hope and the discovery of the alien vessel, and the parasite eggs could be dropped without damaging the narrative. That’s exactly what Cameron did.

It’s the introduction of the reel that I find doesn’t really work and it all comes down to Point of View.

In Alien it is not clear at all that Ripley is the protagonist of the story until late in the film. Perhaps as early as Dallas’ doomed foray into the airduct but certainly by the reveal of Ash’s true nature do we understand that Ripley is our real focus. Part of the terror of Alien is because we haven’t had the protagonist clearly defined, we are uncertain who is ‘safe’ due to storytelling conventions.

Before the first frame flashes past our eyes, before we have gotten our popcorn and taken our seat in Aliens, we know that Ripley is our hero and our eyes into the world. It is he struggle with PTSD and survivor’s guilt that drives the emotional heartbeat of the story. It is her pain that we empathize with and her restoration we are hoping for.

Given that to leap away from our protagonist, our viewpoint character for 15 or more minutes to meet the colonist is a violation of the story’s point of view. We don’t know these people and save for newt, who drives none of the deleted scenes, we will never meet them again. Leaving Ripley for these throw away characters saps emotional investment from the audience and wastes time. With this reel excised from the movie the story remains tight on Ripley, and we ride along with her, knowing no more than her as this fresh horror unfolds.

 

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Excited About Dune (2021)

 

First let me get this confession out of the way, I have never been a devoted uber fan of Dune. I have read the original novel a few times, I see the deeper ecological and sociological warnings Herbert infused into the narrative, but it has never been one of my favorite books but simply an enjoyable one with something to say. I have read the immediate sequel and none of the other books, neither the one by the original author nor the expended one by others, so my interest in the upcoming movie is not from sense of awe about the source material.

I did see the David Lynch film back in the 80s and I even own it on Blu-ray, it is a lovely, strange, and confused mess that is less like Lynch’s filmography that every other movie he has directed. It missed the novel’s core themes but is enjoyable for the train wreck it is.

Denis Villeneuve, a film maker with a track record of interesting and intelligent science-fiction films, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, is an artist who might be able to crack the titanic trouble that adapting a novel primary about ideas into a visual medium. I am heartened to know that he is not attempting to cram all of the novel into a single film but without the sequels already ‘green lit’ we are in danger of being left hanging with an incomplete story. This Dune has an impressive cast, not that Lynch’s didn’t but I always have issues when family member for no discernable reason speak in radically different accents, and benefits from 21 century visual effects. (I really like the look of the ornithopters, the dragonfly-like wings at least feel credible. I confess to never having successfully visualized the craft while reading the novel.)

Next month I will learn if my excitement is justified.

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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