Category Archives: Movies

Gaiman, Hero Worship, and Human Frailty

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Numerous people throughout fandom are shaken to their cores as allegations are leveled at yet another beloved icon this time Neil Gaiman. I will not be going into the accusations as I have too little knowledge of what is precisely asserted to have an educated opinion.

Neil Gaiman has been a beloved writer in the genre spaces for some time. There have been numerous stories of his kindness and repeated examples of how he has brightened the darkness for other, often with wise comments on this mad industry and its often heavy psychological toll.

However, I am reminded of a bit from the MCU series Loki when the titular character comments that ‘No one good is truly good and no one bad is truly bad.’

We are all shades of gray. Darkness and light lives in every person’s heart. We all have an impulse to be compassionate and caring and we all have impulses to hurt and dominate.

It is now likely that Gaiman will join a terrible list of former artistic talents such Joss Whedon, Roman Polanski, or Kevin Spacey. What are we to learn from this?

I think Frank Herbert, a beloved writer in his own right may have already tried to teach us something about this with Paul Atriedes. Heroes are dangerous to your health.

There is a school of criticism where it is considered critical to separate the artists from the art. Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains an outstanding example of writing with an empowering message about feminine strength told through the lens of superheroes and monsters. Gaiman’s writing about love and the fantastic remain unchanged, the text of the stories and novels are precisely the same as they were last month before this knowledge came to light. Polanski’s adaptation of Macbeth or his cinematic genius directing in Chinatown still speaks truth the corrupting nature of power despite the man’s vile actions as a rapist.

I am not here to tell you to not read or consume any particular artists work because of their reprehensible personal nature. That is a decision each person must make for themselves. It is the personal moral quandary of the audience. What I can say is that the work does not change.

What we should strive to do always with the artistic products we adore because they speak to our very souls is to never forget that all artists are human. All humans are flawed and never construct fantasies of perfect for the flawed people of this planet.

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The Importance of the Denouement

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Once the story and plot have concluded all that remains for your prose or film is the denouement. This is a vital element of storytelling and one that if missing can seriously unsettle a reader or audience.

The purpose of the denouement is that it provides the space and time for the emotional climax of the tale to flower. If the story is a tragedy, it allows the audience to feel the weight of the loss or the futility of the character’s resistance to their fate. If the story has a conventionally ‘happy’ ending, then the denouement allows the audience to bask in the victory and empathize with the characters journey.

A denouement can be extremely short, sometimes in film a single freeze-frame can provide the emotional closure a story requires. Most are short segments that simply allow the reader or audience to cool down from the heat of the climax. An excellent example of this in film is Ripley’s recorded message in the original Alien. After igniting the engines, she has defeated the monster and there is no more plot to complete. However, ending the film with her watching the Zeta Reticulian parasite ejected in the void would have been unsatisfying. Our hearts were beating too fast to end it there, the denouement was absolutely essential.

Of course, a denouement can be overdone, creating a sense that a story or film never ends. The best example of that is the conclusion of The Return of the King where it felt as if the film had ended several times because the director was insistent on getting to the novel’s final line. That extended denouement did not work for everyone.

And when the denouement is all together missing the ending feels abrupt often leaving a reader or audience confused and shocked.

An American Werewolf in London has no denouement and nearly everyone the first time that view it are stunned by the unexpected and nearly slap in the face manner in which the film goes to credits and end song.

Think about your denouement and what you need it to do and how you will achieve it.

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Movie Review: The Bikeriders

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Exploitation movies are ones that often focus on outcasts and other characters not part of ‘mainstream’ culture usually with an emphasis on violence, drugs, and sexual activity.

Slice of Life Movies are a genre that are more staid, calm, and depict the day to day living of a set of characters usually family or close friends without a plot that presents some existential danger.

By Focus Features – IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74764749

The 1960s and 1970s saw a marked growth in exploitation cinema including the ‘biker’ subgenre and the withering of the Slice of life genre so one might expect 2024’s The Bikeriders to be a modern interpretation of exploitation but in reality it is a slice of life where the family is the chose family of the motorcycle club The Vandals.

Inspired by the photobook and interviews found in The Bikeriders as photojournalist and author Danny Lyon and his immersion into the real-life motorcycle club The Outlaws, The Bikeriders is fictional with fictional characters closely modeled on reality.

Told primarily by way of interviews that narrate flashbacks the film follows the growth and eventually degeneration of The Vandals as its nature and membership changed during the late 60s and early 70s. The story’s principal point of view is that of Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer), her love and marriage to Benny (Austin Butler) and the man that divides Benny’s loyalty the club leader Johnny (Tom Hardy).

While there is some violence in this film it is not exploitative and it is not glorified. The Bikeriders at its heart seems to the be about the hole at the center of modern masculinity. Johnny starts the club on a whim and Benny’s deep laconic loyalty is never fully explored. For both these men and most of the members The Vandals fills some missing emotional need, a need that neither man ever explores or voices but drives them to lethal dangers just the same.

This is not a film that wears its thesis statement on its sleeve. The message is left entirely up to the audience for interpretation. Life and death seemingly come at random without reason or meaning throughout the story and there is scarcely any plot. It is a character study of particular people in a particular time, one that will play quite well on streaming at home.

The Bikeriders is not for everyone, but it is an interesting film with vividly drawn characters that remain with after the reels have stopped spinning.

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John Grant: a Study in Masculinity, Arrogance, and Self-Loathing

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Last night in preparation to listening to the podcast The Evolution of Horror‘s discussion I re-watched 1971’s Australian social horror Wake in Fright.

Spoilers

The film, based on the novel of the same title by Kenneth Cook, follows young schoolteacher John Grant on his scorching Christmas vacation. After losing all his money gambling Grant is stranded in the town of Bundanyabba in the parched Australian outback. He descends into a multi-day drinking binge with local men, partakes in a cruel, vicious kangaroo hunt that is more slaughter than hunt, and a likely drunken homosexual assignation. After failing to kill himself and spending the rest of his vacation in hospital Grant return to the even smaller town where he teaches and rents a room answering queries with, yeah, he had a good holiday.

From the moments we meet Grant silently waiting out the end of the school day so he can flee just like the children he teaches it’s clear that he harbors a deep disdain for the people of the outback. This is not alienated by the somewhat larger town of Bundayabba ‘The Yabba’ and he treats these townsfolk with similar condescension. Grant’s action however reveals him to be no more intelligent and in fact less so that the locals enjoying their drink and gambling when he loses all of his travel funds playing ‘Two-up.’ The ancient saying is that pride goes before the fall is concretely fact for the character of John Grant.

While the character displays a deep abiding disdain for the locals, he is shown repeatedly lacking the internal will to resist their peer pressure. He introduces himself as John Grant but when the local cop more than once calls him ‘jack’ a common enough nickname for people named John, Grant never corrects him, despite never during his staying introducing himself that way. Again and again Grant when pressed by other men caves to the pressure to drink, a strong indication that internally Grant is incomplete and possibly at war with himself.

During an evening of binge drinking Grant is led for a nighttime stroll by the adult daughter of one his mates. Janette in a direct and forward manner attempts to seduce Grant into sexual intercourse but after wordlessly and timidly complying he is unable to perform, scrambling off the prone woman to vomit. It is interesting that in a film that stays with John during his multiday alcoholic binge and takes to the effort to deal with going to the toilet the only depiction of retching is when he is sexually engaged with the film’s only substantial female character. Even after his same-sex drunken encounter where many movies would insert a reference to the character vomiting, Wake in Fright does not. John Grant’s sexuality is left an unanswered question with a very reasonable interpretation being that he is deeply closeted and in the hyper-masculine world of the Australian Outback quite self-loathing.

Masculinity plays an important element in Wake in Fright. It is always men who insist on John joining them in drinking. It is men who question why John would prefer talking with a woman to drinking. It is to men that John seems always trying to prove himself with boasts of his skill with a rifle and eventually with his attempt to match their physical prowess wrestling with and slaughter by hand with a knife an injured and immature kangaroo. John’s holiday plans had apparently been to travel to Sydney and be with Robin and yet the entire time he is stranded in ‘the Yabba’ he never attempts to call her for assistance. In the novel is apparently clear that the phot he carries is of a woman he has seen, knows somewhat but is not romantically involved with. The film never directly touches on this fantasy of a romantic relationship, but his visions of ‘Robin’ are never full scenes but something more like a teenager’s imaginings. It is what John Grant thinks being masculine is and something he can’t achieve.

Wake in Fright ends ambiguously on the nature of Grant’s character. The audience has no clue is his comment that he enjoyed his vacation was simply a polite but meaningless response or if in retrospect he did enjoy his sojourn to ‘the Yabba.’ There are dramatic gestures such as tearing up the photograph of Robin or any overly emotional reaction to the town on his return. Any change, revelation, or acceptance of Grant’s character by Grant is purely internal for John Grant alone.

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The Most Unlikely Movie I want to See This Year

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It’s not The Bikeriders which looks fascinating though I suspect I am going to have trouble with the accents. No, the movie I am almost certain to make a trip to the cinema to watch is MaXXXine the direct sequel and third film in the ‘X’ franchise.

A24

When X originally debuted in 2022 I had little interest in seeing it. Slashers are my least loved genre of horror films and nothing in the advertising gave me any reason to suspect that X would pierce that disinterest. Then a number of horror cinema podcasts began touting the movie’s style and quality and I relented taking in a late-night screening at my local multiplex.

X bored me with cliche character acting in stupid manners that no actual person would. It was repeat with the tropes and worn-out ideas from countless other slashers with only the barest of novelties.

Fine. The movie was not for me, and I chalked it up to learning where my tastes differed from those on the podcasts. The prequal film Pearl came and went without sparking any interest in me and this year we get MaXXXine which follows the sole survivor of X and her quest for fame in Hollywood.

Something in these trailers have hooked my attention and curiosity. The cast looks fantastic and despite my utter disappointment with X and its illogical script I am being pulled into MaXXXine’s orbit.

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The Birds is Overrated

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The podcast The Evolution of Horror for its current season is covering horror films in which nature is the source of horror with Nature Bites Back and last week’s episode reached Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.

Universal Studios

While I am familiar with the movie and even have some vague memories of it playing on the television while I was present, I cannot actually say that I ever watched the film in its entirety. Now I have and my verdict is that it is vastly overrated.

I am a fan of slow-burn horror which is what The Birds should have been but there is slow and there is full stop dead in the water. The first half of the film is socialite’s Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and her jesting infatuation and meet cute with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). She follows him to his weekend home in the idyllic coastal village of Bodega Bay just north of San Francisco. Meets his former flame, his little sister, and cool, aloof mother. It is nearly 50 minutes into this film titled The Birds before the first bird strike occurs. There had been no real build-up to this, no ominous images of avian observation, in short from the master of suspense there had been no suspense.

The second half of the film is the building level of bird attacks that comes in widely spaces waves with the attack at the restaurant and gas stations providing the most dramatic clips. (It also displays Bodega bay’s fire department as incompetent as they attempt to use direct water sprays to fight a class B fire.)

The films 3rd act retreats to a siege story as the principal characters become trapped in a house, boarded up tight against the flocking fatalities. Then after suffering one last massive valley from the birds the characters in the lengthy pause between waves get into a car and drive away.

I am not bothered by the fact that the cause of the attacks is unknown. I am not bothered by the fact that there is no clear indication that the attacks actually ever end. That sort of ambiguous ending is something I can very much get behind. I am bothered that the characters’ survival and escape has nothing to do with the characters and the choices that they make. There is no moment of decision. No moment of insight. No moment when someone is terribly torn between what they want and what needs to happen. The birds pause and the characters drive away, utterly and completely devoid of agency on any of the characters’ part.

The Birds is a film I shall not watch again.

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The Watchers are Best Unobserved

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I am most intrigued by horror films and stories that swing for unusual concepts and ideas. When the trailer for The Watchers dropped it peaked my interested but cautiously.

New Line Studios

The Watchers is the story if Mina (Dakota Fanning) an American woman living in Ireland avoiding the traumatic memories of her mother’s death. While transporting a Sun Conure to a distant zoo Mina becomes stranded in a deep and threatening forest. One that voice over prolog has already painted as not appearing on any map and that draws damaged souls. As night falls Min discovers a concrete structure and warned to flee inside before the daylight is gone or she will die.

Inside she meets the other people trapped by the forest. Ciara (Georgina Campbell) the surviving spouse of a couple that had become stranded in the forest. Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) a rebellious local and Madeline (Olwen Fouere) an older woman who holds the knowledge of the rules that keep them alive. Each evening ‘they’ strange unseen creatures come to the structure and spend the hours of darkness observing the people on display. No one has ever seen the creatures and to be caught outside after dark is to die, as what happened to Ciara’s husband.

This premise, adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine, holds tons of intriguing promise. There are mysteries to uncover. Who are the watchers? Why do they spend their hours watching the trapped humans? What is the nature of the forest and where did the shelter come from?

A premise such as this lives or dies on the answer to those questions and how those answers are discovers. The Watchers fails on both counts. The answers are inconsistent even within the story’s own logic and most are vomited at the audience by way of ‘info dumps.’ when your 3-act movie has a massive info dump in the third act you know that it has failed at the most basic level.

In addition to the supernatural elements The Watchers expects the audience to accept situations that are utterly beyond credibility. There is no way in hell a professors University office remains untouched, unused for 14 or 15 years so a character as go there and discover the story’s final twist.

The greatest failing of The Watchers is not the clumsy exposition or the bluntly illogic f it backstory and construction but rather that the characters are flat, uninteresting, and devoid of any characteristic for which someone forced to endure a screening might find some form of emotional engagement. I never once cared what happened to anyone in this movie. Throughout the screening I was more concerned about getting some sleep unreservedly uninterested in any of these people’s outcomes.

I can find no reason that anyone should endure this movie.

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A Non-Believer’s Fascination With Religious Horror

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Yesterday I wrote about faith being a critical and essential component in the success of 1973’s The Exorcist. Today I am thinking about the other religiously themed horror film that also work for me and how strange it is that an atheist enjoys these Christian stories.

In addition to The Exorcist the other massively successful and franchise inspiring ‘devil movie’ of the 70’s is The Omen. This film’s theology is not as well sourced or faithful The Exorcist playing much more directly as the genre intended for it, horror. It doesn’t raise question but presents the inevitability of the ‘End Times’ and the futility of humanity’s position in the grand scheme. A perfectly positioned movie for its decade The Omen is the bleak and cynical counterpart to The Exorcist’s questions of faith and love.

Two months ago, I went out and watch the pair of religiously themed horror films release in the spring of this year, Immaculate and The First Omen, the latter being a prequel to the aforementioned 70s film.

Of the pair it has been Immaculate that persists in my thoughts. I have a review of the film here on my blog, but I am going to expand on my thoughts a bit. There are by necessity spoilers.

Seriously — spoilers for the big reveal.

Black Bear Pictures

Immaculate unlike either The Exorcist or The Omen is quite subtle in its relationship with the supernatural aspects of religion. It is an easy interpretation of the film that absolutely nothing that occurs is beyond normal accepted reality. A perfectly valid way to view the story is that the fanatical faithful of the convent are deluded. The ancient and rusted spike is not from the crucifixion and the genetic material is not that of Jesus. That their cloning attempts are of some random person and the deformed products are just tragic miscarriages.

It is also possible that the spike is exactly what they believe it to be and that the convent’s repeated attempts to clone the son of god will, if successful, produce the opposite, the ‘anti-Christ.’

A third interpretation is that the convent and its faithful are doing precisely what they believe, bringing about the second coming of the Christian savior by cloning and producing him by way of a virgin birth.

Side note, it is a common misconception that the phrase ‘immaculate conception’ refers to Jesus’ conception without sexual intercourse but theologically it is about Mary and her being born without ‘original sin’ and thus possessing the purity to bear a god.

The film gives no clues if any of the three interpretation I have presented are the ‘correct’ way to view the events of the film. From the story as presented one cannot determine is Cecila is a young woman abused by fanatics, the savior of humanity, or the vessel through which it is damned.

This week I obtained Immaculate on Blu-ray disc and I look forward to listening to the director’s commentary.

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Faith is What Makes The Exorcist Works

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For nearly five decades Warner Brothers studios have been trying, desperately, to make The Exorcist into a successful franchise. The original film released to mind-blowing box office in 1973 and none of the follow-on sequels, prequels, or re-imaginings have come close to the bright hot fire that was the original. Bot even when William Peter Blatty returned for Exorcist 3 ignoring the disaster that the second film had been both commercially and artistically.

The Exorcist works because of a couple of factors. One of course is the tremendous talent that was William Friedkin. Though he may have been an abusive ass to his performers the filmmaking is unequaled.

But perhaps more important than a visionary director is the commitment to faith that is evident in the novel and the screenplay.

Before I go further let me states clearly that I myself do not hold to any religious teachings or faith. This universe is governed by physical laws, and nothing exists beyond it. When the subtle chemical reactions that power my flesh end so will I.

William Peter Blatty held to a different philosophy. A devote Catholic he accepted the Church’s teaching and lore as truth about the universe and humanity’s place in it. It is important to note that Blatty did not see the novel or the film The Exorcist as an exercise in the literature of horror. He wrote the novel while experiencing a crisis of faith and the themes are his own personal explorations into the questions that pestered him. Blatty has saif that the book and script are religious detective stories not horror.

A critical element to understanding Blatty’s approach and explorations is that there is no clearly defined cause and effect that explains Regan’s possession. Yes, she played with a Ouija board but that is never detailed as the cause. Father Merrin unearthed a token to the demon Pazuzu but that reminds Merrin of his earlier encounter with the demon and does not ‘release’ it.

The vast majority of supernatural horror films have a clear cause and effect relationship. The wrong incantation is read, the fierce anger of a wrong death powers a vengeful spirit, a priest commits an unspeakable sin in a church yard, something makes the evil events begin. This is very much a modern rationalist worldview. Something makes something else happen. It is Newtonian a supernatural version of For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is not at all what happens in The Exorcist but very much how all the sequels and prequels operate.

The reason what it is absent is because cause and effect by its very nature supplies answers. Often in these types of horror stories understanding the cause and effect leads directly to resolution and the restoration of order. The Exorcist is not interested in answers it is concerned with questions.

The friendship between Blatty and Friedkin had been damaged for decades due to the director’s edit of the film. Friedkin deleted a scene that Blatty consider absolutely essential to core theme and message of the script. Fathers Merrin and Karris while on a short break from the spiritual combat with the demon sit on the stairs outside of Regan’s room and Karris asks ‘Why’? Merrin speculates that the demon’s purpose is to show humanity as ugly and animalistic, unworthy of God’s love. It doesn’t provide a cause and effect for why Regan become possessed but only a motivation for the demon and ultimately it comes back to faith in God and the Christian belief that his love is real.

The Exorcist is a work of faith by a person grappling with their own doubts and questions. The sequels and prequels do not have such questions and are for the most part nothing more than dressed up monster stories with scarcely any more purpose than to goose the audience in the side and be quickly forgotten.

One does not have to have faith to feel its power in the novel and the script. While I do not believe in any supernatural eternal being I can feel Blatty’s faith and belief and that provides a reality that all other versions lack.

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Movie Review: Furiosa

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I took a few extra days off around this holiday weekend and pretty much did nothing except go to a movie and make progress on the next novel. The movie of course was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga the prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

Warner Brothers Studios

Furiosa is the story of the character Furiosa introduced in Fury Road as she assists the escape of the warlord Immortan Joe’s wives from their sexual slavery from the Citadel. Fury Road drove into blockbuster status scoring on target hits with both audiences and critics.

As recounted in the earlier film the story of Furiosa is of her abduction from ‘The Green Place,’ an oasis of rich fertile lands with within the Wasteland and her eventual life in the Citadel as one of Joe’s Imperators, a trusted driver, warrior, and lieutenant. In Furiosa we discover that between her abduction and gaining the status of Imperator, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) was the captive of another, but lesser warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the bulk of the film is comprised of her struggles to both survive and wreck vengeance upon Dementus.

Furiosa suffers from some of the trouble typical to a prequel. An audience member familiar with the following story knows that the character can’t die because there is another story to tell, and many elements exist to ‘explain’ why things are the way they are in that earlier released but later in the timeline tale. Why does Furiosa have only a single arm?

While the action in Furiosa is exciting and thrilling, with impressive stunt work performed by skilled professionals, the story is lesser to the one rendered in Fury Road. The major challenge in prequels is the character arc of the protagonist. The character’s nature is what drew in the audience originally and caused them to love the person so in the prequels there is the temptation to make the character as close as possible to the already adored version and that stunts any characters growth. They have nowhere to go because they start out in the final form by which we have already known them.

Furiosa in Fury Road is a woman who is risking everything to save other women, what we needed in the prequel is seeing her as a woman who doesn’t two fucks for anyone else and the transformation as she becomes a person willing to risk it all for others. This should have been the crux of the scene between her and Dementus when he intones she’s like him.

The other issue with this fil is that at the onset we are given her overriding goal, return to The Green Place but that is a goal she cannot achieve in the film because it’s the next story. So, the character and the audience can only be frustrated.

Furiosa was a lot of fun but ultimately it is not a movie that I will add to my collection as Fury Road is a better film on every measure.

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