Saturday Night (2024)

Director: Jason Reitman

Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve heard all the stories before, if not quite in this combination. I’ve seen the documentaries, and I’ve read Live from New York*. I know all about everyone hating the Muppets, and Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) almost being a part of show one, and even Milton Berle’s (J.K. Simmons) penis*.

One might wonder why I watched a new release right in the middle of catching movies at a film festival. I may have really wanted to go see the 70th anniversary revival of Seven Samurai (1954), but as it turned out, so did everyone else at the festival. We had to make quick changes, and this was a pretty good consolation prize.

Did I Like It: That is all to say, I generally liked the film very much.

The casting is unassailably great. I struggle to find a weak link in the entire ensemble. Matt Wood is the embodiment of John Belushi, to the point where I wondered if they somehow resurrected him. Others may not be quite as spooky, but Cory Michael Smith’s channeling the soul of Chevy Chase, and Dylan O’Brien’s mastering of the Dan Aykroyd cadence are certainly highlights. I love any opportunity to see Lamorne Morris at work, and having him play Garrett Morris is maybe the only obvious note of casting in the whole affair, but all is forgiven when its a running race between him and Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun, who also plays perpetually put-upon Jim Henson) for which depiction I like the most. While Matthew Rhys’ performance as George Carlin (the first guest host of the program) is serviceable, the makeup job to make Rhys look like Carlin is more than worthy of some Academy attention in the spring.

The story’s breakneck pace guarantees that certain liberties are taken with the fall of 1975, but many, many of them can be forgiven. While the show existing in the first place as a byproduct of a Johnny Carson powerplay is true, it wasn’t like it went up to the last minute before they were going to decide to even air the show, but it feels right. The moments that ring less thematically true pile up in the film’s final act. Hunt is tragically underused as Gilda Radner (especially as he performance taps well into the manic sweetness that made Radner a star), chiefly musing with Belushi about how they might look back on this night in twenty years, when neither of them were going to make it that far. This, shortly after Lorne Michaels (LaBelle, little Sammy Fabelman no longer) hires longtime writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) minutes before showtime. It’s a one-two punch of supreme based-on-a-true-story bullshit. If we had gotten to see Zweibel already a part of the writing staff, we could have seen the truly lovely friendship between him and Radner. It’s a huge missed opportunity for the movie.

*Although I am reading the recent revision. There’s probably some good stories in the last few years, not the least of which would include the absolutely lame horror of having certain politicians (you know who you are…) hosting in the new millennium.

**In the movie, he shows it to Chevy, but I’m almost sure he actually showed it to one of the writers, probably Zweibel. Thematically, it somehow feels right to show it to Chase.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis. John Williams

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m not very happy with myself, either. Luckily, tripping over it during a rainy Santa Fe day (they exist, I assure you) on vacation recorded from TCM was something of a coup, as this one is somehow missing from all the Hitchcock collections I can’t help buying.

Did I Like It: Even the master has to have a weak one, right? I start a Hitchcock film expecting it to be a finely tuned plot machine designed to deliver thrill after thrill. That’s just not the case here. Grant and Kelly are nice to look at, and nice to see play off of one another. The locations are the kind of pure movie escapism that usually keep the worst of the James Bond films from being complete bores. But is the movie thrilling? Does it insist you look at the story without blinking for fear of missing something key to set up the surprises that are to come? Is there even that much jewel thievery going on?

The film is charming, but low on thrills. One wonders how Hitchcock got through the exercise, relying solely on the charms of his two leads to get the film over the hump. I would say watch the film, but marshal expectations. Or maybe opt for North by Northwest (1959). It’s got all the charm and all the thrills. You don’t have to settle for one or the other.

And now I would be remiss if I didn’t say a word about motion blurring. As a movie seen at my parents’ house, the movie played less like a Vistavision wonder of the 50s, and more like an Eastern European soap opera shot sometime earlier that afternoon. Normally, I would have made a stink about the matter. I merely asked if they knew about motion blurring, they said they didn’t, and I let the matter lie there. Be nice to your parents, but if they’re not involved, turn off your motion blurring, would ya?

The Piano Lesson (2024)

Director: Malcolm Washington

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler

Have I Seen It Before: No. This was the first film I saw for the Santa Fe International Film Festival this year. A full-week pass to a film festival is a strange thing. You look at a list, see a quick description of a film (or a series of films, if it’s an exhibition of short subjects), see if tickets are still available (they often aren’t, I missed a few things over the week to this struggle), see if it conflicts with anything else that you’re wanting to see or support, and then see if you’re interested in the film.

Did I Like It: A stage play adapted to film is always a tricky thing. Something like Dracula (1931)--which has far more to do with the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than it did Stoker’s novel—came so early in the era of the talking picture that the camera just sort of sits there while the play is performed in front of it. The big musicals of the turn of the centuries knew they had to embrace the trappings of the big screen and delivered their spectacle. I can’t help but watch this film and feel as if the act of adaptation was not fully fulfilled. Pointedly cinematic scenes are added that I can’t imagine existed in the original August Wilson play—mainly depicting the creation and heist of the titular piano—but these feel somewhat tacked on.

The cast is terrific, but the majority of them are transplants from a recent Broadway revival of the play.

The themes are well constructed, and I’ve been thinking about them for most of the week since screening it. Are the ghosts real, or is the metaphor of being haunted by your past more potent? The film manages to not conclusively answer the question, while at the same time not feeling as if the story is cheating in the ambiguity.

And yet, would I have been better off watching a staging of the play? I wonder.

Sisters (1972)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, Bill Finley

Have I Seen it Before: Never. The film always exists just on my periphery, being a fan of De Palma’s later work as I am. Always on the lookout for more movies to cover on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, but I have long since learned that I probably need to see the movie before I actually recommend it to the others.

Did I Like It: So, then this review attempts to tackle two questions. First, am I going to push for it to be covered by the show, and do I recommend it for the movie viewer at large. It’s entirely possible for a film to not quite live up to the horror genre entirely, but still be a necessary film, or even a film worth your time.

I’m of a somewhat conflicted mind on both questions. The film plays with slasher conventions—indeed, before the genre really exists outside of Psycho (1960)—in a way that keeps things interesting, especially for the film’s first half. If that first half had been the whole movie, you’d probably be hearing a charming back and forth unpacking the film sometime next year, but I would have already told you to go watch it.

But, unfortunately, every film that has a a strong first half has to be judged at least partially on the basis of its second half as well. The really great thrillers sell themselves on their second half, and this one becomes too jarringly unfocused to really get behind. When the film is less about a man meeting a woman to whom he’s attracted, only to find her home life to be a horror show is good. The investigative journalist who just happens to see the murder take place might feel a little clockworky, but it does deftly set up her challenge to get authorities to believe her. Then things become a little less Psycho and a little more some variation of later Halloween sequels. That might ring a little unfair, and while the final scenes are visually interesting, they can’t help but weigh down the thrills by buttressing them with excessive backstory.

Totally Killer (2023)

Director: Nahnatchka Khan

Cast: Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt, Charlie Gillespie, Lochlyn Munro

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Feels like I’ve been spending most of the last year having everyone I know recommend the film, but never quite making the time to get it done, outside of the tail end of our Beyond the Cabin in the Woods season.

Did I Like It: I’m going to start the review by saying I liked the film very much, but I recommend you stop reading this review and take that recommendation before I let loose with any of the film’s surprises.

Now I know why everyone has been recommending the film. I’ll admit that somewhere along the way I got this film conflated with Mandy (2018) or more likely Freaky (2020) and had no idea what I was going to be in for as things unfolded. That all being said, being surprised that a film is actually about time travel is one of my personal favorite experience to have a with a movie. To construct a movie whose pitch almost had to be Back to the Future (1985) meets Halloween (1978) not only feels like a winner, but would have guaranteed I would have forked over whatever resources I had to get the thing made, were I in that position, or I’d be secretly mad that I hadn’t come up with the idea first. I can only hope that I didn’t spoil the surprise for you.

That begin said, I think it wouldn’t be terribly controversial to say that the film succeeds more as a teen time travel fantasy-comedy, and less as a slasher. While the Sweet 16 Killer* has a better mask than Michael Myers does in most of the Halloween series, the killings often feel perfunctory. I never once feel the dread that Carpenter and company wield with such deceptive ease. This would doom the whole affair to be just another bland entry in the slasher genre, classier than anything spawned from Friday the 13th (1980), but less enjoyable than Scream (1996) or its sequels. Thankfully, it does wind up being one of the more satisfying time travel comedies in recent memory, more than living up to its obligations to be a riff on Back to the Future.

*Form dictates I identify the actor in the role here, but that would constitute at least something of a spoiler, to say nothing of the fact that I’m not sure I can succinctly answer that question at any given moment in the film.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The thing I remember most from seeing this one in the theater is that it was shortly after I bought a used PT Cruiser which I drove for two years, despite the film never working right.

That’s probably a bad sign, right?

Did I Like It: Whereas the original Tron (1982) managed to use the limitations (both then and now) of computer animation to great effect depicting a world that, by its very nature, was never meant to look natural.

That film wasn’t nearly as successful as Disney might have hoped, but became a cult favorite over the years, hence someone somewhere in the Mouse House thinking that a sequel might be warranted, if not urgent. By the time they got things together, something had happened with movies. CGI became ubiquitous, but it didn’t become better enough to have viewers view it through anything other than jaundiced eyes.

With those cards stacked against it, does a Tron sequel have any kind of hope of wowing—if even to the point of becoming only a cult film like its predecessor, to say nothing of capturing the public imagination at the level one probably needs for a movie costing over 100 million?

Maybe, almost… But not quite. The computer realities Sam Flynn (Hedlund, sort of unmemorable) find himself in are not the simple geometries his father dealt with, but instead a myst filled laser-tag arena that fails to feel either clever or believable.

I’m not even willing to give the special effects the benefit of the doubt for depicting artificiality. Clu (Bridges) looks like an animatronic for most of the film, which might be forgiven as he is a computer program, but the same effects work is used to portray Kevin Flynn (also Bridges) in 1989, and that works a fair sight less. That doesn’t even begin to cover that Bridges’ main level of performance as Flynn is to do a warmed-over riff on his work in The Big Lebowski (1998), which feels roughly right, if a little pat.

I will say though, that the film is helpfully titled. This is a legacy sequel through and through, but an imminently average one, at that. It fails to capture the ingenious quality of the original, and seems designed throughout to satisfy a list of elements studio executives would want in a film, fi no one else.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. You don’t live in the dorms for any stretch of the mid-2000s without taking in all of the Tarantino library.

Did I Like It: This is probably the Tarantino film I’m least inclined to re-visit, but I think I’ve spent more than a few years being unfair in that regard. My memory of the film is that it was always a bit simplistic. That isn’t necessarily a mark against the film. Given the resources Tarantino was working with, the film didn’t really have any hope of being more of a prototype for what Tarantino would eventually have in store for us.

The film is infinitely more complex than my memory gave it credit. Tarantino introduces himself to the movie-going world with the same kind of unhinged, borderline-bonkers plot construction he would later perfect* in Pulp Fiction (1994).

You may be like me and mostly remember the opening diner scene where the characters disassemble Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” or the torture scene complete with a needle drop of “Stuck in the Middle with You.” But the entire story keeps its secrets from us for as long as it wants to, and not a second longer, and only reveals them not when the flow of the ill-fated heist demands it, but when it will mean the most to us in our journey with the characters.

You might be like some of the critics of the age who are irretrievably turned off by the use of language and the violence. The immediate answer to those complaints is that you’re likely to have a devil of a time with the rest of Tarantino’s films, but I would add on to say that every line of dialogue is built to reveal character, even when those characters are helplessly awful. As far as the violence is concerned, I suppose I understand the complaints about violence in Tarantino’s films, but whereas light PG-13 depict violence as bloodless, barely notable events, it is difficult to say that Tarantino treats his violence blithely. Every drop of blood is bled from wounds that hurt, and that means more than finding a character amidst a maelstrom of bullets and blades only to come out with a scratch.

*And subsequently abandon, It’s a little disappointing that Tarantino never really continued his experiments with non-linear narratives, but then one supposes that if you start experimenting, and then perfect it in the next outing, are there really any experiments left to do?

The Big Chill (1983)

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Cast: Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A part of me has always had a vague ambition to write something like this that is divorced from genre and is just people existing.

Did I Like It: And yet another part of me has resolutely refused to do anything of the sort*. The dialogue on display here is almost uniformly great, the performances are pitch perfect (Kline and Goldblum especially are naturally living in their eventual screen personas during their nearly first at bat), and the soundtrack is so perfect that it’s hard to think of “Joy to the World” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”** without thinking about the film.

But, and I say this with absolute sincerity and honesty: I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Facebook oozed into existence while I was still in college, so the idea of losing touch with the people in your life at that moment is as technologically quaint as the VHS camera treated like the Monolith throughout the film. I can see the need to show up for a funeral, but the motivation behind staying for an entire weekend with people, as Nick (Hurt) correctly points out, “a long time ago knew each other for a short period of time” absolutely mystifies me. This, even more so when I realize I am not older than the characters at the time the story takes place.

This doesn’t even begin to cover the problem solving and attempts at emotional maturity here. Apparently allowing Harold (Kline) to impregnate Meg (Mary Kay Place) resolves all of the other infidelity? Everyone’s fine now? What about when Meg has a kid and they have to explain to Harold and Sarah’s (Close) current children that they’ve had a younger sibling this entire time, and that the origin of how their father came to father another child out of wedlock will only invite more questions than answers.

Maybe its just a generational thing. Boomers, man. I just don’t know.

*I’m not going to give up the ghost on doing a story about college friends reuniting years-plus later, only to find that Kevin Kline is deeply deranged and wants to wear them all as coats as soon as possible.

**Which somehow isn’t included in the soundtrack album, which is either a sign that the label was legendarily dumb, the Rolling Stones are infinitely greedy, or some mixture of both.

Tron (1982)

Director: Steven Lisberger

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I would imagine that I kind of missed the film at that moment when it really had the ability to burrow into a person and become a part of their personality.

Did I Like It: Aside from the always charming presence of both Bridges and Boxleitner—to say nothing of the always reliable presence of David Warner—the film could really start to smell. How many live action adventure movies from Disney are anything other than the pits? A few Pirates flit through my mind, but one really has to wonder how much those are going to hold up as we’ve generally decided—guilty or not—that we’ve decided we don’t want to hear anything further from Johnny Depp.

The film’s real strengths lie in its simplicity. Lisberger and company looked at the still embryonic technology of Computer-Generated Imagery and realized something that I wish other filmmakers and studios might have kept close to their heart: It looks like crap. Still does, usually.

So, it looks like crap. What do you do with it then? Let it be the backbone of every opening title to a movie of the week? Let it sell tchotchkes in commercials for the rest of eternity? Or is there a story to tell using this tool?

Telling a fantasy adventure story—equal parts The Wizard of Oz (1939) and gladiator films—that takes place in the midst of the computer itself makes the images make the kind of sense that seems obvious but only occasionally happens in the world. Artificiality can work—can save itself from being jarring—if it exists among more artificiality. It was the first time they were able to do that, and for my money, it might be the last.

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener

Have I Seen it Before: I can’t say I’ve ever even heard of a film like this one. Which, I suppose, with that sentence taken on its own truly counts as something of a course correction for the original Joker (2019), which can’t help but recommend better, more original films at its core.

Did I Like It: Now the question really remains: should this film exist? As I type this there seems to be a growing consensus around single answer to that question, with a seemingly infinite number of reasonings to get to the answer that this film should not have been made.

None of those reasonings matter, really. Nor would mine, except for my inescapable conclusion that the filmmakers themselves really would have preferred that the film wasn’t made in the first place. I have never seen a film try desperately to be some many different types of films, and yet somehow be desperately ashamed of each attempt.

In its opening minutes, it tries to be an anarchic sequel, almost calling to mind Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) with an animated opening. This is abandoned as rapidly as possible.

As the film progresses, it occasionally—and under protest—does some things that one might expect from a sequel to the original film. We get a layer or two more awareness of the characters from the original film, both those that survived and otherwise.

It understands—or at least acknowledges—that there is a DC logo at the top of the film and continues to try to give us a take on Gotham City, and an origin story for characters we’ve already seen have their origins displayed on film. Harley Quinn (Gaga) is here, and their deeply unwell romance might light up a movie—and have a fair shot at reclaiming what went wrong with Suicide Squad (2016)—but when the runtime gets a little long, even she anxiously waits for the next train out of the film. We also get Harvey Dent here, and sure enough half of his face is blown off by film’s end, but how can we care when the film is desperate not to dwell on the fact?

It tries to be a commentary on serial killer celebrity in the 1980s (I get notes of the Gacy capture and trial). That’s probably where the film is it’s most interesting, but guess what? It’s barely about that.

Yes, Virginia. Despite what you might have seen in the film’s trailers, what you have heard is correct: This film is a musical. Sort of. It flails at attempting to be a musical, before quickly giving way to the film(s) Warner Bros. probably thought they ordered. Following up the Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982) of it all with a little bit of New York, New York (1977) might have been the exact thing that the glassy-eyed fans of the first film deserved for their trouble. But that didn’t happen. They lacked the gumption here.

It is a court drama. A psychological drama. A dark comedy. A prison movie. All of these it tries, but abandons before we the viewer can decide if Phillips succeeded or not.

What else is left? Can the film just be about the Joker? Who he is and how he came to be? Maybe, and maybe that film might be released one day, but not to spoil the ending of the film, but as a “rise of the Clown Prince of Crime” film, it almost forgets to be that, and rushes that note in at the last moment. We wouldn’t have a hope to assess (to say nothing of enjoy) a film like that if it adds things like that in the last minute.

Blow Out (1981)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I’m horrified, too. The Criterion Blu Ray* has been sitting on my shelf for months.

Did I Like It: Oh, very much so. I’ll admit that I’m at something of a loss for what to say about the film as I get into the meat of this review. It’s extremely well made. It is likely the movie I would point to when someone either looks at me blankly or turns their nose up when I say that De Palma is** the heir to Hitchcock.

It’s a perfectly formed thriller. Beyond merely being laser-focused on the things a thriller needs to be to work, it is witty and surprising at every turn. De Palma got his first big break in horror through Carrie (1976), but he has a lot to say about the state of horror in the 80s, and the opening sequence says it all without saying a word at all. De Palma makes a passable Friday the 13th (1980) clone in the film’s opening minutes, only to ensure us very quickly that’s not what this film is about at all, and the film doesn’t care for those types of movies all that much, either. This is a movie that loves movies, even when they’re terrible, and I definitely feel a thematic connection to the material before I even kind of get to know Jack Terry (Travolta).

Which reminds me: you probably came here for some kind of deeper insight. I know I did. The one element I can’t quite get over in this film is Travolta himself. I’ve always found him to be far too mannered of a screen presence, as if he were preening like a peacock every time the camera finds him. Even in my favorite of his performances, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Primary Colors (1998) there’s a showiness on display that never feels quite fully authentic. Here, though through highs and lows, obsessions and boredom, Travolta just exists in the film, and it is a richer exercise for that restraint.

It’s just a good movie. If the collective aversion to any film older than 30 years is what I think it is, then you may not have seen it. You probably should.

Turns out I had more to say about the film than I thought.

*Actually the 4K/Blu Ray Combo pack, so I’m moving one step closer to eventually relenting the final frontier of physical media, even if I’m not completely certain that every motion picture was built for the highest possible resolution.

**Or, I suppose, was. I’m sure somebody has what they think is a cogent explanation for why De Palma can’t seem to get a picture together anymore, but I’m already dubious of it.

Ready or Not (2019)

Director: Matt Betinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Elyse Levesque

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Feels like it has been hovering on the perimeter of the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule for years, but for some reason we’re only just now coming around to it.

Did I Like It: Let’s get the unqualified great stuff out of the way first. The film is equal parts funny and gory, and Samara Weaving is an engaging presence who, along with her turn in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) is turning out to be an excellent screen actress. My only fear for her is that her career will be plentiful, but may be limited by the fact that people will jump at the chance to cast her simply because Margot Robbie passed. It’s a gift to the movies that there are two of them around, but unfortunately, Robbie became the bigger star first.

Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s talk a little bit about the ending. As much as I was enjoying the film as it proceeded, when it seemed like the movie was heading towards a conclusion that there is nothing supernatural going on, Le Bail (portrayed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment by the film’s producer, James Vanderbilt) and the surviving members of the cast have to leave the house with only the pedestrian comeuppances of the justice system waiting for them.

That ending would have been deeply funny, and kind of preclude any sort of real attempt at a sequel. It might have become one of my favorite movies with that sort of managed anti-climax. The ending we do have is fine, and likely more in line with the gore-fest aesthetic to which the preceding film commits, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.

Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.

I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place:  The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.

And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.

A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.

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.

Daredevil (2003)

Director: Mark Steven Johnson

Cast: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. For reasons I can’t possibly even fathom, I even bought the soundtrack (in those final years when people went out and bought soundtrack albums on disc after seeing a movie). This is why I can karaoke Evanesence’s “My Immortal” without looking at the words*.

I’ve seen it more than a few times, and even went straight from getting a paycheck at Staples once twenty years ago to pick up a copy of the director’s cut—now with 100% more Coolio—but I can’t imagine I would have ever watched the film again, if it weren’t for Jennifer Garner being thoroughly charming in her more-than-a-cameo role in this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

Did I Like It: I knew I wasn’t going to like it even before I pressed play. While the moment when the movie came out was when I was most into the Matt Murdock (Affleck) character that I was ever going to be, I remember thinking that the meet-cute/fight scene between Affleck and Garner was one of the most awkwardly staged sequences ever shot.

I had somehow forgotten that almost every other element of the film doesn’t work, either. There are a few moments where the film seems fleetingly interested in depicting the challenges a blind man (regardless of how much he can actually see) might face. Far too many plot lines from decades worth of Daredevil** are included here for this to have any hope of being anything more than an unappetizing mystery loaf of a movie. One gets the sense that the filmmakers tend to agree, hence why leaden voice over narration from Affleck permeates the film like a fart that just won’t dissipate.

Every performer either seems like they want to be almost anywhere else, or trying their best to be a good sport, as this will hopefully lead to some other, better films. The entire affair seems blithely designed to get a reasonable return on the investment at a time when few movies are expected to do well, and to be able to make a few extra bucks on that aforementioned soundtrack album. It accomplished both of those modest goals.

*Okay, fine. You twisted my arm. It’s only partially how I’m able to do that.

**Also, and I can’t imagine I’m going to find a venue to express this deeply held thought anywhere else. Shouldn’t the billionaire, ultimately thrill-seeking man who uses fear as a weapon be called Daredevil - The Man Without Fear, and the blind guy with sonar powers be called Batman? If Affleck is capable of learning lessons—and there is evidence to suggest that he cannot—then maybe he has finally worked this one out.

The Set-Up (1949)

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: What really makes a noir possess the qualities of a noir? I’m tending to be of the opinion that it will usually involve some down on his luck fella (maybe, sometimes it’s a dame, but it’s almost always a fella) comes into an opportunity to make some real dough. Like, the kinda dough that’ll change him from a two-bit to a real somebody.

Only, our guy here doesn’t have all the angles figured out, see. Bad people start comin’. Bad people with guns. Things go upside down, and our buddy is going to be lucky* to get out of this with his girl and his guts intact.

On that front, I can only vaguely commit to the notion that The Set-Up** is a noir at all. Stoker Thompson (Ryan) is as down-on-his luck as one can get and still have food in his stomach and a leading lady on his arm, but he’s absolutely unaware that there’s money to be made and schemes to be hatched outside of the ring until the last possible moment. He’s not even a part of the scheme. He’s just a boxer who everyone thought had long since landed his last punch, even if he knows different.

It’s a different kind of movie, ultimately, one influenced less by noir trappings of the era, and more prepared to influence films to come like Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

*Read: the movie has sort of a soft, artificial ending.

**The cynic in me may want to say that Robert Wise is the journey-man director to end all journey-men directors, but is there anyone who has made more classics in as many different genres? The Haunting (1963)? The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)? West Side Story (1961)? That’s not even going to cover him editing Citizen Kane (1941).

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Director: Ben Stiller

Cast: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. What else was there to do in the summer of 2008 but see whatever Robert Downey Jr. movie was coming down the pike?

Did I Like It: At the core, its a pretty funny comedy that manages to actually channel the scope and energy of the movies—chief among them Apocalypse Now (1979) and Hearts of Darkness (1991) with more than a little bit of Platoon (1986) thrown in—it mocks.

Obviously, there’s going to be some things in the film that don’t age well. The lengths to which Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) tries to get into the head of Lincoln Osiris is not something that would pass the smell test today. Tugg Speedman’s (Stiller) futile attempt to reach for respectability in Simple Jack got a fair amount of guff at the time of release. But both of those elements are more about the foolishness of movie actors blindly reaching for those portrayals without really thinking about the limits of their own believability and good sense.

While whispers still exist that Les Grossman (Cruise) will get his own spin-off film one day (it doesn’t really feel like the kind of film that Cruise could possibly be talked into anymore; then again, it didn’t really feel like that back then, either), I’d submit that his is the character which ages most poorly. He is a riff on Hollywood assholes like Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein, but never is he played as a fool. Quite to the contrary, he’s a brash villain one can’t help but wish they were more like. He’s an ugly little man who has commanded every room he’s entered since the 80s. The film loves him in all his reprehensibility, and I admit I even like him.

But I probably shouldn’t.

Speak No Evil (2024)

Director: James Watkins

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, James McAvoy, Aisling Franciosi

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Honestly, I would have let this one slip by if we hadn’t made a last minute change to the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods.

Did I Like It: Which would have been a shame, because I can’t readily remember the last time I was so thoroughly unnerved by a horror film. It likely helped that the film wasn’t at all on my era, as any amount of trailer probably would have given me at least some level of context going in. But really, I was probably more profoundly impacted by the fact that I was brought up by compulsive vacation befrienders, and I can easily imagine—with just a few wrong rolls of the dice—myself suffering the same fate as Ant (Dan Hough).

But the unnerving quality is there. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that the conceit of the thriller is not earth shattering in its originality (Hitchcock would have been able to make the hell out of this), and when one starts to realize that the two parents (Davis and McNairy) might be the dumbest couple in genre fiction since and Seven of Nine’s parents on Star Trek: Voyager. They keep climbing to the second floor in the third act, they really shouldn’t be surprised that the climax end up taking place mostly on the roof of Paddy’s (McAvoy, proving that he really can have some range in horror, as there is nothing of his character in Split (2016) to be found here) fact that I just happened to be in the middle of my third or fourth re-watch of Halt and Catch Fire and I had to spend more than a few minutes getting over my incredulity that Davis and McNairy are playing a—even unhappily—married couple.

The Last Command (1928)

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Jack Raymond

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I want to reflexively like every black and white movie I see, to say nothing about silent movies. I may be the last guy on the planet who isn’t entirely convinced that color and synchronized sound were an unassailably good decision.

And this film has some things to recommend it. It has some things to say about the movies that are equally profound today as they would have been nearly a century ago. When the film is about these observations in its early scenes, it is quite good. Although you may be getting the sense that I’m not 100% behind this, the film is also beloved enough to have gotten quality treatment over the years leading up to and including its release via the Criteron Collection. Not every silent movie gets treated so well, up to and including no longer existing.

And yet I couldn’t help but find the whole exercise a little bewildering. Spending much of the story focusing on an extended flashback thoroughly fleshing out why Alexander (Jannings) is so sad and bewildered in the years after Czarist domination. Even when flashback and main narrative inevitably intertwine, what was so trenchant and engaging about the earlier scenes gets absolutely vaporized in the chase for melodrama.

While I can’t completely dismiss the film, the story ultimately doesn’t play to its strengths. But my problems with the film run a little deeper. The scope isn’t epic enough to make it memorable with the great dramas, nor is it clever or energetic enough to put it with and of the truly great comedies. It is imminently average, and it may be unfair to look too harshly at an average film of the silent era, but I was told only the great ones would survive to the present.

Psycho (1998)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Anne Heche

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Why I watched it again—when there may not be a film in all of history that more desperately begs you to watch another film—I’ll never know.

Did I Like It: The film is ultimately a cheat, but a fascinating cheat. What would possess someone to make a film this way? I don’t think I’ve yet to be able to wrap my head around that one. It works, but that’s because it was made right the first time. Comparisons are natural, and this film was destined to suffer in light of its predecessor, but Van Sant honestly thought Vaughn was the right guy to put in that role? He can’t help but display the personae he was honing and continued to hone in light comedies. I mean, Keaton might have been a little too old for the role, but if you’re going to do something crazy, reach for something that works. I’m also more than a little annoyed with Elfman’s similarly carbon copying of Bernard Hermann’s score. He suddenly got the idea that he can just plug in old themes and not do any of the off-the-wall work he did earlier in his career, a quarter of a century later he’s phoning in the orchestrations for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).

I’d mention something—really, anything—else, but again, the film is ultimately a cheat. I always promised myself that I would write a minimum 300 words (I’m real close) for each of these reviews, but if Van Sant can cheat, so can I. So, without further adieu, here’s my review of the original film. Feels appropriate.

Title: Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin

Have I Seen it Before: Please... Is it weird that I view this movie as cinematic comfort food? I’m reasonably sure Hitchcock didn’t mean it to be so.

Did I Like It: I don’t think there’s enough written—<except by me>—about how Psycho is, at it’s core, the greatest B movie ever produced. The budget is nearly non-existent, especially in relation to Hitchcock’s immediately preceding production, North By Northwest (1959). The biggest star in the movie (and one hopes this isn’t exactly a spoiler) is killed before the plot truly gets running.

And that plot is, objectively, a muddled mess. In any other circumstances, a story that begins about a woman (Leigh) making a run for it with thousands of dollars of her employers money, only to veer wildly into the events after her sudden murder.

In another time, and another place, and most importantly, with another filmmaker at the helm, the film would have become a salacious, forgettable thriller that would have dropped off the face of the earth the instant drive-in movie theaters became all but extinct.

But we’re talking about Hitchcock here. In his hands, it single-handedly launches the slasher genre, inspiring an army of lesser sequels, homages, and echoes. The plot that shouldn’t work is a pure mis-direction fueled magic trick. We trust Hitch to tell us a story of the woman on the run, and after everything changes, we can never feel settled for the rest of the picture, or for any movie ever again.

Or, maybe, it has nothing to do with trust. Hitchcock works on a level few, if any of us, can fathom. This film is arguably his most famous, and he makes the whole thing seem effortless. It is a marvel to watch each and every time I have spun it in my Blu Ray player.