211. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014) - July 30th
This was some joyfully silly exploitation; the whole film is built on the cruel irony of mistaken identity leading to the main character getting a Nazi zombie arm transplant. It's enough that this is a sequel to a film that's essentially Russian Night of the Living Dead with Nazi zombies, but this film appropriately ratchets everything up a few notches. The film throws a kid out a window and then guts him for a joke; it's the definition of hilariously bad taste, taking advantage of its ridiculous nature to work out a lot of shock value. I can't see this being worth repeat viewings, but for the way the film executes comedic irony over and over with its premise and uses it to build up to a truly insane finale makes it worth the one time around. - 6/10
212. Geostorm (2017) - July 31st
This is exactly as terrible as I expected it to be. I mean, a movie where the US Secretary of State hacks a super A.I. to control the weather and cause a global mega storm for the purpose of assassinating the U.S. President and the line of succession so that he can take over the world might just be the most FUBAR idea I've ever heard, but if the movie had gone all in on the cheesiness of it all the film might have worked. As it is, the overly self-serious tone takes all the energy out of the film. Geostorm tries to have environmental and political messages, which as an idea is fine, I've seen B-movies like this get away with being more than they appear before, but the complete lack of self-awareness makes everything that the film tries to say feel obnoxious; the film doesn't want to bring up an idea so that you think about it, it wants to beat you over your head with its ideas so hard I'm surprised that Ed Harris' character wasn't wearing a Make America Great Again hat. I'm all for environmental messages, but putting them forth poorly can be damaging; I'm okay with what the movie wanted to do, but to represent it with such a lofty, sci-fi scenario and then fail to understand why people might not take that completely seriously is the core reason why the film doesn't work. There are other things that the film fails at, the acting is bland despite some of the talent involved, the pacing is slow enough that the story would drag between action beats even if it wasn't trite, and the editing and direction fail to make the action in any way engaging, even as the completely insane combinations of extreme weathers unfold on the screen. To top it all off with making this a Gerard Butler vehicle involving saving the President and then not only not having him be the one to do that but to also have him waste away on a space station makes all of this an unpleasant bore. - 2/10
213. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - August 3rd
It's about par with the last few installments, with some of the best action you'll see this year and a plot that actually tries to build upon the previous installments for once. My full review can be found here. - 7/10
214. Badlands (1973) - August 4th
Malick movies are the sort of things that make me want to abandon the daily journal entry approach altogether, because the work is dense enough that I feel like it requires several viewings and a few weeks of meditation before I can say anything coherent about it. I felt the same way about The Tree of Life, which is still one of the best and yet on of the hardest movies I've ever had to watch. Badlands isn't quite that dense, but its perspective on American youth culture or perhaps the romanticising of ideas and the maturation out of them juxtaposed with the dwelling within them is at once something that feels universal and something that requires me to read up on the culture of America in both 1973 and 1959. All of this packed alongside fantastic stylistic work from Malick, with cinematography and music so beautifully intertwined as to create a movie with its own visual rhyme scheme. I love the growth of Holly juxtaposed against the arrested development of Kit, I love how that growth comes through understanding the dangers of romanticising an ideal, that is in and of itself shallow, beyond reason, I love the obsession with attention as an expression of psychosis in Kit's character, and I love how all of this plays out with clever repeats of musical cues and visual callbacks that give this film a poetic touch. In short, I love this film. - 9/10
215. Edge of Darkness (2010) - August 4th
I suppose now is a good time to say that I agree with the idea of separating art from the artist.
This movie starts with a hard hit and never lets up, dark to a fault and carried by the genuine grit of Mel Gibson and the intrigue of Ray Winstone. The movie gets by on suggesting that there's more to it than what's shown; implying, if not quite succeeding at conveying, the idea that the characters here go beyond this story here. There's also the dark nature of the film, which sometimes treads in to unintentionally hilarious territory; force-feeding the bad guy radioactive milk is no doubt fitting given the context, but the imagery is just excessive enough to be funny. At least it gives the film points for being memorable. - 6/10
216. Night of the Living Dead (1968) - August 4th
Here I am, watching all of these horror franchises week in, week out, and I've not even seen one of the great classics of the genre. Film buff, indeed.
I love Horror; I love Classic Horror most of all, the progenitors of all the genre's greatest tropes, where the jump scares are more charming than annoying, and you can see the influences of a more patient style of filmmaking. Night of the Living Dead may have plenty of false scares backed by blaring music, as is a staple of the genre, but the stuff that makes this movie great (aside from, you know, literally spawning a sub-genre all to itself) is all of the quieter moments. That hard cut to a zombie walking through the graveyard after the the jesting spookiness from Johnny is a brilliant reminder of how much horror can be conveyed just with a single shot, no sound necessary. Beyond that, I love just how hokey this all is, the musical cues of chorus mimicking theremin and that slow drum beat are pretty much essential for a movie of this genre and era; this movie is a time capsule of culture and genre. Of course, part of what makes this a classic is its focus on the characters; it's not the zombies that matter, but the people who react to them, and for a horror to take the time to justify why we should care or indeed feel anything towards these people is enough to elevate this film above even most of today's horrors. Ben is a really good protagonist, pragmatic but not perfect, doing his best given the situation and the tools available to them, and in such an early movie the rest of the cast behave really appropriately for people with no cultural reference for what zombies are. I said that Badlands was the best movie I watched this week, but this is absolutely a contender. - 9/10
217. Detroit (2017) - August 5th
Nothing like the gut-wrenching grit of dramatised reality to finish the week. It's not just the grim subject matter, but the nature of its presentation; Detroit makes things appropriately all too real and it's all the harder to watch because of it. The technique is incredibly effective; the use of handheld cameras and tight focus on faces, with raw and dark natural colours that keeps the whole thing dirty yet enthralling. It helps that the film's writing is so good. The film is nuanced in its expression, at once aware of the systemic nature of the events at play as both trigger and escalation, and of the way it's expressed at the individual level by a combination of maliciously corrupt power and emotional rationality. The people in power here are unstable and tripping on their position, but at the same time they're people enabled by the system that gives them their power, never sure of the right decision and everyone making poor, irrational choices. There's these strange little moments, as tension rises and Veteran Greene is abused and accused with no precedent, but as is breaks there's split seconds of humanity, where the officers momentarily realise again and again the monstrosity of their actions and vainly try to save face or cover their hides, before doubling down on their horrible actions as they see nowhere else to go, and feel no repercussions for their actions. It's excellently presented, and it's only made to hit harder by the way the first act builds the character before bringing them all together. Ensemble pieces with multiple story threads are complex, difficult to handle, but here each one is given their due, and it makes everyone more complete as people before they tear down or are torn down by each other. Even the perpetrating officers don't come out of nowhere, the shifting of their perspectives and ineptitude made explicit. This film is dark, difficult, and tense. - 8/10
Re-watches
49. Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) - July 31st
This is my trash and I love it. No matter how many times I watch this movie, the incredible pointlessness and ineptitude juxtaposed against pure energy and style keeps me the whole way through. From the cheap retcons for the sake of conveniently ignoring bad ideas from previous movies to the plot developments of cliffhangers going nowhere to the cheap plot devices like amnesia to theinclusion of video game tie-ins for no discernible reason (other than the characters and monsters being from the video game, of course) to the to the almost exclusively terrible acting, this movie has so much terrible movie stuff, and yet I love it completely. The film even shares these traits with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, and I generally hated all of them in the case of that movie, but here I find them at least bearable (or, at least, I can stomach all of the crap in this movie for the sake of the things that I can't help but love about it, even the amnesia, which is by far my least favourite plot device in storytelling). Both Afterlife and The Final Chapter have these problems, but what makes Afterlife bearable to me is the distinct style, laden with enthusiasm, throughout the film. Anderson overuses the heck out of the slow-motion in this film, but between that and the 3-D, as well as the fight scene at the end, this whole thing is campy as hell and all the more entertaining for it, as opposed to its follower which trades hilariously overdone slow-mo for headache-inducing quick cuts. Speaking of the final fight scene, that alone is enough to get me through even the most boring part of the rest of the movie for how blatantly it is both an homage to the Resident Evil 5 game and a rip-off of the matrix, made all the better (or worse, it's the same thing with this movie) by Shawn Roberts' performance as Wesker. That moment during his back and forth with Alice when he lowers his glasses to reveal his glowing red snake eyes and utters "you should have brought more (friends)" before hurling his glasses at Chris and Claire behind him is probably the worst thing I've watched repeatedly. The film is just so sure of its own sense of style, so these moments are executed with such confidence that it's borderline experimental, and the flimsiest stuff comes right back around to being cool again. - 5/10
Published August 6th, 2018
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