This week's been busy, and I can feel my brain leaking out of my ears, so apologies in advance if this isn't my best. As always, if you need a reminder of any of these movies' plots, check out the links in the titles.
280. 48 Hrs. (1982) - October 8th
This feels like a "Seinfeld is unfunny" moment for me, because I know that this was critically acclaimed and basically started the buddy cop genre and Eddie Murphy's career, but this basically blew straight past me as I watched it, none of the comedic moments hitting me with any particular memorability and not even the chemistry between Murphy and Nolte standing out to me. I want to give this the benefit of the doubt, more for what it is than what I make of it, so for now I'll hold off on saying more until I watch it again.
281. The Spirit (2008) - October 8th
This was kind of terrible outside of its distinct sense of style, but part of me loves it a little for how ridiculous it all is. The plot is an incomprehensible mix of noir send-ups and Greek mythology, from love triangles with femme fatales to underworld beings and the blood of demi-gods. It fits together about as well as you'd expect, in no small part due to how the film seems to have no consistent idea about how it wants the audience to feel. The ludicrous nature of it all seems to be for comedy's sake (how could it not be in a movie where Samuel L. Jackson pulls out increasingly silly sets of guns in a firefight?), but it's all weighed down by one plot non sequitur after another: I feel like I'm supposed to be laughing, but the film keeps ruining those chances with so much convoluted nothing. Still, it's really nice to look at; the obvious Sin City vibe may feel like parody at times because of everything else, but it's still incredibly striking, beautiful even, a pure stylistic adaptation of comic book fare that feels ripped from the page. It's a shame that's not enough to make the film worth watching. - 4/10
282. The Wicker Man (1973) - October 9th
This film is excellent, a horror classic even, but I'm now forever distracted by several questions I have about how and why the Nicolas Cage version exists as it does; I can't think about how good this is without thinking about how bad the other is. Still, at least for the next few minutes, I'll try to think about only this version.
The Wicker Man has some of the best aspects of classical horror, refined to the point of being a sort of 'last gasp' of the style as films like The Exorcist gave way to modern horror. The film has an eerie atmosphere and a subtle pace that coalesce to create a constant sense of paranoia that is intentionally made to seem unjustified until the tragic final moments of the film. That idea that everything's a little bit off is made plain; the culture divide between Neil Howie, played with complex empathy and appropriate strain between logic and irrationality by Edward Woodward, and the residents of Summerisle, makes the unease from Howie's close-minded perspective seem excessive. At the same time, the fluctuations between kindness and obtuseness from the people around him as soon as the topic of the missing girl Rowan comes up keeps you on constant edge: they just seem odd until they become deceptive, and seem to do so almost as second nature. The effect of all of this is maximised by Christopher as Lord Summerisle, who is the very image of a cult leader, with the right mix of nice and uncomfortably forceful in person before becoming positively theatrical in front of a crowd. All of this builds to such an excellent finale that just forces you stay with an entirely helpless man as he burns, his last words that of the faith that with such irony led him to this point. - 8/10
283. Insidious: The Last Key (2018) - October 9th
One more entry takes this film series from extremely middling to extremely middling. The Last Key has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses as its predecessors, with Lin Shaye's performance holding up her material and the interesting designs of the demons at work at least being memorable enough to make up for every cheap jump scare abused to build them up, but those same cheap jump scares coming about largely unearned and much of the horror set so cartoonishly that it seems more like unintentional dark comedy. Giving Shaye's Elise Rainier a backstory that ties in to the main plot through some time shenanigans is as interesting as it is ridiculous and insular, but that's par for the course with Insidious, so credit to the film for trying to make a cohesive thematic throughline about abuse, even if it takes an awkward route to get there. It's very slightly more than more of the same, and at least an improvement upon its predecessor, but that's it. - 5/10
Re-watches
57. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) - October 14th
This is hardly the worst film in the franchise, and is still an improvement on its predecessor due to tighter direction, but another dose of Colin Trevorrow's writing just serves as another reminder of why I'm glad he's not working on Star Wars: Episode IX anymore.
Jurassic World: FK is so dumb and cynical that the story regularly distracts from the emotional roller coaster the film tries to take you on, and while the cinema allowed for the film's strengths to be far more emotionally engaging, here at home, even after weekend so busy that 'turn your brain off' is more of a given than a choice, the film's contrivances took away far more from my experience than they did the first time around. It's not without impressive spectacle, it's just that it feels so empty; it reminds me how much mood can affect the experience, because here I only needed noise, and it's exactly what I got out of the film. The problems I had with the film were the same problems I had last time, so stuff like the movie acknowledging the existence of Isla Sorna but then ignoring all of its implications because extended material may or may not remove it as a concern for the plot, or how poorly the film's message was handled by muddying its own potential for nuance, or how the cynicism of Jurassic World seems to have blend in to this and become callous at times for the sake of easy emotional manipulation, all of it becomes amplified when I can't engage with the movie. It doesn't really change my overall perspective of the movie (although I noticed a couple of set-ups in the writing that I missed the first time around, neither of which make their respective payoffs less stupid, just stupid with context), and it's still the third-best Jurassic movie (not that that's meant much since the 90s), so I still feel about the same as the first time. - 6/10
58. Mandy (2018) - October 14th
This is my third time watching this movie in a month; it's not the best I've seen this year, but it might be my favourite just on style alone. At this point I could just start mentioning things that happen in the film, and if its kind of crazy suits you, you should watch it. Nicolas Cage lights a cigarette on the burning, severed head of drug-psycho he murdered with an axe he forged himself when a crossbow bolt to the throat wasn't enough. Nicolas Cage wordlessly intimidates a chemist in to releasing a pet tiger. Nicolas Cage crushes a cult leader's skull with his bare hands after declaring himself that cult leader's god. This all sounds metal as hell, but it's nothing compared to the experience of watching it. Outside of the style, three times over and I'm still not entirely sure what the film has or is even trying to say. There's some stuff about religious perversion of love through declaring ownership over it, and an ungodly amount of phallic imagery (particularly dis-empowerment of it; one of the earliest shots is a collapsing tree, one of the last is a perverted cross falling flaccid before falling apart, followed by the cult church building doing the same. There's also the chainsaw fight, which makes the whole exercise positively comedic). It's all very interesting, but I'm not sure how deep I want to dig in to it; I love this movie for its aesthetic above all else, its use of colour and lighting to be utterly hypnotic before becoming frantic and destructive with only the smallest of changes, with consistency to every chosen motif. - 8/10
Published October 14th, 2018
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