MaXXXine (2024)

Director: Ti West

Cast: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Finally managed to catch a new release on opening weekend. What a luxury. It was appended to an all-night marathon with a series of other films with similar settings and themes. I had the ambition to make it the whole night, but you can imagine how that went.

Did I Like It: I had a little trepidation going into this. I’ve seen X (2022) but haven’t gotten around to watching Pearl (2022), and I figured I would be more than a little lost. Thankfully, you dear reader will really only need X to follow what is going on. Pearl—the villain of the first film—is an incidental presence in the film, which only makes me worried that Pearl is something of an incidental film, but that’s an issue for another review.

Where X was a straight-ahead (if well-crafted) slasher, this trucks in a lot of the same trappings of a slasher film, but ends up being a fairly serviceable mystery as well. You might be saying to yourself that such a description doesn’t really distinguish itself from Scream (1996) or any of its sequels. But there’s an undercurrent of tension in this film that I really think sells the possibility that Maxine herself is the killer, and makes that possible ending not a complete betrayal of everything that has happened before. That uncertainty alone makes the film worth a watch.

I won’t spoil what is happening in the film here, but it certainly helps matters that by the end of the film anyone who survives is not going to have any degree of innocence. Everyone has blood on their hands, and almost none of that blood owes itself to madness, but instead to ambition, ruthlessness, and a reflexive, compulsive desire to keep things “the way they ought to be.” This is Hollywood, after all.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Cast: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Sure… Probably? iTunes had a sale on all 8 of the films in the series released by Paramount Pictures (before the property was sold to New Line, making Freddy vs. Jason (2003) sort of inevitable.

Did I Like It: No one alive and/or aware on any level over the last 45 years will try to tell you this is a good movie. Avowed fans of the series—an odd bunch, one can only imagine—would even view this one as something of an aberration, as everything they claim to like about the series doesn’t even start to enter into the mix until Part III (1982).

It is, fundamentally, an imitation of far better movies, imitating the sounds, but not the language in those better films. Almost nothing in this film isn’t trying to make the same kind of money that Halloween (1978) harnessed, without endeavoring to make an actual movie in the process.

And yet, of all the lame imitations of movies that exist, this one at least has the advantage of being a cut above those rest. The score is not bad (although it gets a lot more schmaltzy in the film’s final minutes; did we really need a love theme?), owing more to Bernard Hermann scores (Psycho) and less like the synth tracks of John Carpenter.

Betsy Palmer chews the scenery at just the right level, but her performance may only be that good when stacked up against the barely animate cardboard cutouts which surround her.

So, did I hate it? No. But I can’t say I’m all that thrilled with the prospect of being compelled to watch seven more of these? Not quite.

Also, why does she take that canoe out at the end of the film, other than to give us that final shot? Doesn’t make a damn bit of sense… Granted, it was all a dream, but that has its own problems.

Apollo 13 (1995)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Kathleen Quinlan

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. In fact, taking the movie in at 11 on VHS* feels like the first—or at least one of the first—movies meant for grown ups that really captured my imagination. It sent me into one of several periods over the last thirty years where I became obsessed with the space program, or at least that era before NASA decided to putter around in low Earth orbit for all eternity**.

Did I Like It: I’m smack dab in one of those periods where the Apollo program absolutely fascinates me. It’s entirely the fault of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which has rapidly become one of my favorite television series ever. By its very nature, the show guarantees that we’re never going to know what’s going to happen at any given moment.

Even if I hadn’t already seen the movie several times over the years, I’d know exactly what happens by the end.

And yet, it is still thrilling. That may be partly because the story—without any Hollywood embellishments (of which there were few, judging by the Jim and Marilyn Lovell commentary track on the DVD—is just that thrilling. Everything that could have gone wrong on humanities third attempt to land on the moon did go wrong, and yet astronauts Lovell (Hanks), Haise (Paxton), and Swigert (Bacon) still return home at the end.

Also, and I really didn’t think this was going to be the case nearly thirty years after the film, but the special effects still work. The launch sequence is still insanely thrilling, and there isn’t even any inherent tension at that point in the film. The journey for the free-return trajectory to the moon depicts a lot of subtle details of the flight (chiefly debris from the explosion following the spacecraft through most of its arduous journey) that I honestly hadn’t noticed on previous viewings. Lora indicated one shot didn’t hold up as much as the others, where Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) watches the launch. She was right, but it didn’t even occur to me until after we were done watching that the film might have any technical flaws at all.

*How did we ever live like such animals? It boggles the mind.

**I know we’re trying to get back into the actual exploration of space beyond our planet, but as I type this Artemis I failed it’s second launch attempt in half as many weeks, I’ll believe it when I see it.

They/Them (2022)

Director: John Logan

Cast: Theo Germaine, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new!

Did I Like It: Nearly each—perhaps even every—moment of the film feels forced, mannered, and stiff. It’s truly a wonder that a directorial debut from an Oscar winning screenwriter would be forged of this much leaden dialogue. It’s an after school special at its core, even if it has its heart in the right place.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the perfectly obvious way in which the story unfolds. Movies like the recent <Scream (2022)> embrace the inclusivity of the moment, but also manage to make me invested and guessing about the mystery behind the violence on display. Here, I figured out the entirety of the plot by halfway through the runtime, and I think you will, too. It’s plot is on the complexity level of a police procedural, and not a very good one, at that.

The film also feels like a false bill of goods. Advertising points to the movie being a slasher flick wherein the horror of a gay conversion camp is what ought to be truly scary. It’s only kind of about that, and only in the last few fleeting moments of the film.

In short, I didn’t care for it.

And that’s okay!

Ungainly, mostly frustrating slasher movies fueled by heteronormativity are legion. It’s sort of encouraging that a film fueled by an honest attempt at inclusivity isn’t very good. It doesn’t need to be. I might be talking out of my depth here—but then again, more people may need to say it—but a bad movie will add to the normalizing of the LGBTQA experience. If this movie fails, it doesn’t mean that inclusivity—especially in horror—will wither on the vine and die.

Unless that’s where the discourse about the film leads. That would be the worst part about the whole enterprise, but it also would not be the film’s fault. It would be ours.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Again, sure. I’ve been watching a lot of film adaptations of stage plays lately, and incidentally the film an television work of Aaron Sorkin as well. Now, the Venn diagram collapse in on itself, and I’m thinking it may be the best of both worlds.

Reiner does the needed work to actually adapt the material for the screen. Far too many plays turned into films never rise above their claustrophobic trappings, but I never feel that way watching this film, even in the courtroom scenes, where it all could have been forgiven. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a live production of the story, and it’s been several years since I’ve read Sorkin’s original stage play, but my faint memory seems to think there is very little lost in the adaptation, and the scope of the story is somehow increased.

Sorkin’s work here is superlative as well. It’s terrible to say, but I do wonder if the author had ever recovered creatively from gaining sobriety nearly twenty years ago. The TV and movies he has written since then have had a very similar quality, with him even repeating certain turns of phrase as if he’s trying to strike the match of his true genius without poisoning his body at the same time. This effort, however, is Sorkin at his hungriest. While the stage play had enjoyed some positive reviews during its broadway run, he was far from the go-to man for Oscar bait screenplays. He wrote this on cocktail napkins during bar tending stints for La Cage Aux Folles. There was no guarantee of success. No sign of future writing work. He was hungry, and it showed.

It’s probably impossible to make him hungry again. He can run slightly afoul of his glory days in television, but he simply chooses not to write for television anymore. I don’t think he should go back on cocaine, but there’s got to be a better way to harness what he had before.