The Final Girls (2015)

Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Åkerman, Adam DeVine, Thomas Middleditch

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had it not been on the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule, I might have missed it entirely.

Did I Like It: The movie was going to have a hard time screwing things up, as I am a sucker for most pieces of meta entertainment, and horror or genre meta entertainment even more so.

Where meta horror movies can sometimes not live up to their ambitions—while still winning me over—is in a question of gravity. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) (the granddaddy of them all), and even Scream (1996) and its various sequels all can pull apart both their various tropes and the meaning of reality itself, but eventually those films become just another entry in their genre. They are eventually compelled to be the type of movie that they were selling in the first place.

Here, though, there is a surprising amount of pathos in the relationship between Max (Farmiga), and both her late mother (Åkerman) and the character she plays in the Camp Bloodbath movies. Max tries to reconcile both the memory of her mother, the image of her in the film, and her own grief to great effect. This is made all the more poignant when one realizes that Joshua John Miller—one of the film’s two credited screenwriters—is the son of Jason Miller and used his experience of watching his father in The Exorcist (1973) to inform that character arc. This makes the entire affair not merely a commentary on form and genre, but also an example of an artist trying to work through some type of feeling through the art. Very few horror films, even fewer meta horror films, and even fewer horror comedies can lay claim to the same ambition.

What’s more, when the film reaches some degree of catharsis on this element, it is content to go right back to being as meta as possible in its final moments. A supremely satisfying array of choices right at the end for a film that could have been content to be merely amusing.

Watchmen (2009)

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, and Malin Åkerman

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. I mean, I’ve read the comic book, so there’s not a lot that doesn’t cover both spheres of that particular venn diagram.

Did I Like It: Well… It’s not my least favorite Zack Snyder movie. It may even be my favorite Snyder film. But I’m quickly realizing that this doesn’t answer the question. 

Here are some things I really like about Watchmen:

• I’m eternally a sucker for alternate histories set in the 1980s. Ultimately, this is going to be granddaddy of that very niche genre.

• I’m eternally a sucker for characters who can’t/won’t see time in a linear fashion. Billy Pilgrim, The Doctor, Doc Brown, Doctor Manhattan. They are all my kind of folks.

• The Owlship is a neat vehicle unlike anything seen before or since in comicdom.

• It’s always worth engaging in a story with no easy answers. Morally reprehensible characters have a point. Likable people make awful choices.

• The costume choices made in the film subtly hints at the costume design of the Batman films in the 1990s. The armor Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) even has nipples.

Look at that, I eventually got to something I like about the film. There isn’t much there, sadly.

While reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen comic, I was struck by how good the work is. How comprehensive. How fully-realized. How dense, but in a good way. 

And I remembered how much I didn’t think the movie lived up to that promise. However, now that the film has no sense of anticipation hover around it, it must have improved with age, no?

Sadly, no is right. I went for the Ultimate Cut in this viewing, rationalizing that perhaps with more of Moore and Gibbons’ work injected into the proceedings, things will have improved even more still. Not so, as Snyder’s insistence on transcription is only offset by some his truly baffling choices when he takes a swing at adaptation. Snyder probably shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame for the misfire, as Moore really intended for the work to be unadaptable and appears to have largely succeeded. It is entirely possible that there isn’t a cinematic version of this story that works. The forthcoming HBO series may or may not prove me wrong on that one

Also, I have a confession: I have never quite understood why Tales of The Black Freighter is such an essential part of the story in any format, beyond driving home the fact that in a world where superheroes were real, people would search for escapism in some other kind of story. Sure, there are some parallel qualities to the two stories, but beyond that it just added some depth to frames including Bernard (Jesse Reid). Now with all of the side story cut into the film, everything is just a longer and feels that way, with two feature-length movies fighting for screen time. Even the comic realized a little bit of Black Freighter goes a long way.

I’ve never seen a filmmaker who so wildly veers between tone deaf musical choices, and cues that are way too on the nose. In one of his better sequences—incidentally, the one where there is the most adaptation over transcription—over the montage opening credits, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” pins the tail right on the donkey. On the other end of things, Wagner blaring over the conclusion of the Vietnam War makes me feel like I’ve seen this movie before, because I have. The less said about Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” over the Owlship sex scene, the better off we all are*. I’m not sure why “99 Luftballoons” or “The Sound of Silence” are in this movie, other than they are both catchy and at least one of them would have gotten some serious FM play in 1985.

The cast is all over the place, sadly. Haley does yeoman’s work holding the movie together as what turns out to be the protagonist. Jeffery Dean Morgan—a good actor—is so earnest in every scene he inhabits that the earlier moral ghoulishness never comes across. Billy Crudup is supposed to be sleepwalking through the film, but I can’t quite figure out why everyone else decided to do the same thing.

Snyder may be a good director, but until he makes a film that isn’t irritating at its core, I’m not sure anyone is going to believe it.

*Okay, you want to talk about it? I challenge you to find a more awkward, uncomfortable sex scene in a movie. I don’t want to sound like a prude, but I just got embarrassed with its wanton earnestness. The comic book didn’t have that, I assure you.