Author: Ben Siler

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Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Photo: Morfydd Clark stars as the elf Galadriel on a path for vengeance for her murdered brother. (Courtesy Ben Rothstein/Prime Video @ Amazon Studios)

Reviewing a film or TV series can be elitist because the production value which causes you to rate it highly can be heavily influenced by the money in the film’s budget. You might unconsciously thrill to a large makeup staff or better camera lenses, an expensive soundtrack or locations, and only know about the movie due to the size of its advertising coffers. While threadbare productions made with only skill or love are passed by for failing to meet your standards in a single area, a worse film might earn your praise by the power of the purse. More films and books are written and forgotten in a year than are possible to know. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is by its PR-friendly number worth a billion dollars, adding up its over $250 million five-season order, and is by that standard guaranteed to succeed and morally bankrupt at the same time.

This is unfair. Money is relative. Fantasy films require large set design departments. Art loses its financial context, and I can’t remember bills from years ago, only that they hurt. Like HBO’s House of the Dragon, Rings of Power is a state-of-the-art recreation of the feel of a blockbuster based on ancillary material by the author of the original hit. Fantasy god J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings appendices were mined to produce the adventures of the early years of ancient beings Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron.

Lloyd Owen plays the warrior-turned-king Elendil. (Photo: Courtesy Prime Video)

The two episodes which premiered last Friday tell the story of the search by Galadriel the elf (Morfydd Clark) for Sauron and the Orcs that murdered her brother, her friend Elrond’s (Robert Aramayo) ominous construction project, an elftstar-crossed love with a human, and a Harfoot, a Hobbit ancestor, meeting a mysterious comet-delivered Stranger. Shot in New Zealand like Peter Jackson’s original series, the televisual approximation of that trilogy works and is only hampered by the TV mold into which it is poured. Things are a little less epic with A, B, and C plots.

This reviewer’s relation to the series is at a remove: A family copy of Fellowship of the Rings was torn in half (it had no cover and started with the Council of Elrond, I turned away). From this sundering I was sent down a dark path, fated to become A Song of Ice and Fire fan, with its more grimdark but down-to-earth sensibilities. My main relationship to Rings is cinematic. As a projectionist for a Malco multiplex out east, I screened all three films for thousands of people, over and over. My favorite thing opening weekend of Return of the King was being able to look out the back of a theater and watch people wipe their eyes in unison on cue to Aragorn’s “You bow to no one.”

Fellowship’s best part was its intro, where Cate Blanchett’s voice-over gave a touch of angry finality to a rundown of a complicated history. The sullenness of her line reading comes across in Clark’s Galadriel, who has an action hero-like vengeful need to kill all Orcs. But without its compression, the dark wondrous tone of that opening dissipates. As with House of the Dragon (whose re-use of Game of Thrones’ theme song is an accidental mission statement), a good thing re-spread gets a little thinner.

The second episode was more my speed. It was less mythic. Anti-elf racism was accentuated by sea-wyrm attack, which was followed by silently moving past that once most of the humans were eaten. The wyrm or dragon behaved like a real-life ocean predator: You could only see the fins. (Wonderfully, it wore its previous boat snack as a shroud.) It and a single Orc refashioned as a slasher-movie monster in a cabin in the woods were shot in ways faithful to the horror elements of Jackson’s originals, and better for it.

Likewise, the mystery of angry dwarf Prince Durin IV forcing Elrond into an entirely too fanciful rock-breaking contest resolved in a believable, mundane way: He was eager to banish his friend from his kingdom because Elrond had missed his wedding. Suddenly, dwarf and elf awkwardness was relatable. I can respond to awkwardness, cringe, horror. Grandeur is harder.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Three Thousand Years of Longing

Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba star in this mumble of a movie.

George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing attempts to be a master class in the art of film narrative at the end of Miller’s long career, a reflection on his work. Instead, like most movies and human endeavors, it is an exercise in what not to do and shaggy-dog in nature. The story has all the weight of a hummingbird. There are pleasures to be had in its misshapen structure, but they are fleeting.

Lonely asthmatic narratologist (a professor of stories and legends) Alithea (Tilda Swinton) goes to a mythology conference in Istanbul, where she buys a bottle containing a genie, or djinn, in a thrift store. She opens it and discovers Djinn (Idris Elba), who grants her three wishes and heavily pressures her to make them now. Having read every story about djinns, Alithea is suspicious and notes the ill fate of most magic lamp users: “There’s no story about wishing that isn’t a cautionary tale.” The pair hang out in her hotel room and trade tales about their lives, Scheherazade-style. Elba is composed of magical CGI dust ­— he notes accurately that djinns are not powder but “subtle fire.” The plot is based on the much better The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt.

Stories about storytelling put the audience at a precious remove. Everything is in quotes to serve as examples of frequently expounded precepts. (“Mythology is what we knew back then. Science is what we know so far.”) Even the sensory details (the djinn’s bottle pulled out of fish guts, a spear stuck in a horse’s haunch clotheslining a soldier on a battlefield) feel a bit too considered. The stage-bound nature of the sets and CGI add to this, as does the retro fairy-tale treatment given to the medieval Middle East.

Alithea’s love of stories is born of childhood isolation. Her overcompensation then led to her job now, but the problem remains: loneliness. Djinn is a dignified ancient creature who speaks with new-to-English pauses and has red palms and a vermillion dot at the center of his chin. The tension should come from Alithea’s unique preparedness for Djinn’s possible traps, but instead we get some sad tales of random hereditary monarchy succession drama seen from his perspective. The movie is about stories yet does not succeed at that part of them that edges butts on seats.

The real oddity begins when it winds down and seems to be about to end about a half hour before it does. It posits that the march of science, from Einstein to the ubiquity of media and communication, now is at odds with myth-making and therefore storytelling, as myths were ways to explain the world, giving gods quarrelsome attributes as placeholder explanations for what science lacked. There’s a whole scene devoted to the djinn’s bottle being X-rayed by airport security and fear over the damage.

Myth and science can coexist. The universe is unexplored. You and I will rot beneath the ground before humans know half of what there is to know. Our opposing capacity for irrationality is boundless. The film’s suggestion (via Djinn’s allergy to contemporary Britain with its “raucous air” filled with wireless signals) that modern tech is killing our imagination makes sense insofar as social-media manipulation might have added to the xenophobia of Alithea’s racist neighbors, but only there.

Wonder positioned against science as something to be traded off in return for learning about how the world works is always silly. (The Sandman’s recent adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s Hob Gadling and “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” stories are much better intersections of the mythological and modern.)

Life is more unpredictable than stories, and it’s a Luddite impulse that shuts out advances, rather than addressing their positives and negatives. The film does have Djinn witness brain surgery and the Large Hadron Collider, and it does compromise in a realistic way with Alithea’s intense need for love, extending via a series of fade-outs past a fairy-tale ending into a more regular one, a romantic compromise emphasizing consent. It’s just that those fade-out segments have the narrative consistency of melted butter, the coherency of a mumble, and are gone from the mind as soon as seen.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

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Game Of Thrones Ends With A Meditation on the Horrors of War

Drogon is silently judging you.

Game of Thrones was a great show that grew to love the wrong thing. Its early adopters worshipped how it fully realized its alternate universe. Its increasing budget to film battle sequences (off-screen in the manner of a stage play at first) became what its makers thought its true worth. Seduced by the dark side of their production schedule, spectacle became their master, writing their afterthought. Details grew fuzzy, their beautifully constructed dollhouse fell apart, as its audience watched not with desire but light hatred, not in fire but ice.

But even in its death throes, the penultimate episode took time to be true to itself and deflate its heroes. It numbed the viewer with endless shots of medieval civilians running from dragon firebombing by former savior, Daenerys Targaryen. Innocents ran down corridors, caught on fire, and turned to ash. Modeled after U.S. and British massacre of German civilians in Dresden during World War II, it was disgusting. All-powerful ninja Arya and stern-faced warrior Jon Snow ran around helplessly while Daenerys and lieutenant Grey Worm went mad. It may be garbled Cliff Notes for an ending George R.R. Martin may never write, but I’ll hold onto it the way a housecat does a dead mouse: long past the point of usefulness. I loved this show.
[pullquote-1] It is not normal for TV shows to end well, especially sci-fi fantasy. Lost and Battlestar Galactica adopted religious smokescreens for their inability to come up with secular answers to long-posed riddles. Game of Thrones didn’t, completely abandoning the lore of its competing in-universe faiths. Instead, it built to tough-guy nihilism, followed by happy outcomes for the majority of its action heroes and some light Tolkien-style epiloguing. Bran is king, for some reason.

There are many popular theories about why, outside of outpacing their source material, the writing quality of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss has gone from more thoughtful than most fantasy to exactly as loose and empty as much of it. Cocaine and burnout are solid options, as is a desire to move onto their recently-announced Star Wars trilogy, or the cosmic injustice of a cruel god. I think that, just as they relied on assistant-turned-writer Bryan Cogman for heavy lore lifting in the first seasons, they are relying on a different one now, Dave Hill (who helped elevate the character of Olly), and he’s just not as skilled at helping them craft sturdy plots.

A victorious Daenerys Targaryen addresses her troops in the ruins of King’s Landing.

As many have pointed out, the series dilutes the antiwar message of the novels by its sometimes glorification of the hard-bitten warrior. How cool the Hound looks fighting the Mountain with a dragon flying behind them registered more strongly than his late assertion to mass-murderer Arya that revenge is hollow. (Likewise the online cry of “Cleganebowl!” was initially ironic: people mocked treating a death fight between brothers like an organized sport, until repetition made them sincere). The point shouldn’t be that Daenerys went crazy and killed civilians: it should be that all mass violence leads to noncombatant death, and warriors and states use it far too freely, with increasingly meaningless justification.

Director Miguel Sapochnik and Emilia Clarke did excellent work selling that slaughter. But the lack of characterization in Dany’s turn from a protector of the common people to their mass murderer made the moment nonsensical. Her reasons work when written out: a need to rule by fear, losing advisors and dragons, and numerous surrender bells frustrating or stimulating her bloodlust. Onscreen it creates a disconnect, that does clumsily get the nature of being bombed right. One minute you’re following the propaganda of a government at war, the next you’re being indiscriminately killed. Violence does not resolve character arcs. It just ends you.

Iron Throne? Not so much.

Martin’s ongoing suggestion is that this would happen with any king or queen in the right circumstances. The show’s unfortunate implication is that Dany is worse than her formerly gray, also-murderer co-heroes because she is female, from a foreign land and rides magic lizards. It’s special pleading that the other warriors suddenly care so much about collateral damage.

For the American audience, the use of Dresden as source material is a quiet self-indictment. Your tax dollars prop up one of the most powerful militaries in the world. My favorite show is saying that all war is immoral. If only the comfort and catharsis its audience found in that message could translate into peaceful action by us.

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Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

CREDIT: courtesy HBO

courtesy HBO

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) rides Viserion into battle.

How I feel about my longtime favorite show, Game of Thrones, crystallized recently when I saw a behind-the-scenes promotional video featuring George Lucas’ visit to the set. The show has journeyed from Star Trek to Star Wars, from science fiction carefulness about its worldbuilding to fully realized mythic fantasy. And within that, another movement: from the revelatory appeal of the original trilogy to the bloated nature of the prequels. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were adept at adapting George R.R. Martin’s novels, cutting the excess and creating momentum from the morass of detail. But having run out of novels to adapt, they now make up material whole cloth. They favor sudden reveals of plot and character development, twists which pay off simultaneously with half-convincing explanations of how they occurred.

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

Now it’s unclear where characters’ foibles end and where their stupidly for the sake of plot movement begins. The political bickering is nonsensical, the speech less thoughtful and more modern. The pleasures of the show are that of any well-made spectacle. Dragonriders Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have fallen in love with the all the conviction of bored real estate attorneys in a late afternoon deposition. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) gets chided for his lack of cleverness, in a retcon of how TV has softened him from the novels, where he is a more murderous and angry drunk. A long-awaited battle has come and gone.
courtesy HBO

Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Wildu) and Ser Brianne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) prepare for the undead onslaught during the Battle of Winterfell.

Because the second half of this season is yet to air, I cannot say whether these storylines will pull together into a beautiful meditation on all that comes before (online spoilers work like prophecies in the books—vaguely and inconsistently). They still could. I still worship the show even as I criticize it, and spend free time discussing and studying it. But always at my back, I hear my snobbery toward sports. How am I different from a casual football fan? Where the avid sports watcher admires the skill of athlete, I admire the production craftsmen who make this extravaganza. Both are fundamentally passive relationships. The only difference is when the show was better, I was using my brain to work out the mechanics of a fictional world. Now I just receive it, like dictates from the Pope.

The battle between the living and the dead in episode 3 of this season was wonderfully tense. I like director Miguel Sapochnik’s continual stress on the confusion of violence, and how one’s personal narrative gets lost in the chaos of battle. Jon Snow again unheroically flounders through combat. His dragon collides with his lover/aunt’s, foreshadowing what I suspect will be the real conflict post-White Walker. However, that the series’ demonic threat would be defeated in one moment after a single battle with many survivors, felt like a cheat and a mistake.

Criticisms of the episode’s lack of battle geography and dark cinematography miss Game of Thrones’ current strengths. In large setpieces, it gets the feeling of small horrific or supernatural details right. Commenters pointed out that it was an incorrect use of cavalry for the mounted Dothraki to charge into blind darkness and a zombie horde from an opening defensive position, but the visual of soldiers watching their comrades’ fiery swords go out in faraway silence communicated the ebb and flow of hope in a battle. You get the sense of how it feels to be an individual swept up in a mass event.
courtesy HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark

As a fan of this one, sometimes my only recourse to imaginatively engage with a story is to criticize how it fails my expectations. At worst this can be criticism similar to a shoe-buyer complaining about a tight fit: the consumer and his product, in a swan song as their life goes by. But at best the simple act of discussion can engage with communal storytelling, and the ideas stories communicate. Two here are that might makes right, not honor, and that the upper classes focus on increasing their power instead of dealing with threats to the lower classes. I would say this is a general condition of humanity. How can the majority of us be truly free when the powerful always corrupt whatever structure contains them?

Where before describing these ideas was exciting, the show is now something like America’s Most Photographed Barn in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I can feel the meaninglessness of my voice among the din. But the ritual is a balm, and the central allegory is still there, and still important.

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Glass

“How much of human life is lost in waiting?” is a line by Emerson quoted in one of the worst movies of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could not help but think of it while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the capper to a trilogy that took 20 years to make. It started with 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama whose ending twist explained that it was really the prologue to the adventures of a superhero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and a mad genius, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 2017’s Split was about James McAvoy’s dissociative identity disorder-suffering villain, The Beast, with an ending twist that this took place in the same universe as the previous film, with the director resurrecting earlier characters. Glass is here to let these superbeings finally be unbound, which it tries to accomplish by stranding them in an insane asylum and locking them in cells for most of the film.

Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind after The Sixth Sense. He quickly fell into self-parody: His twists strayed to left field, his quirky dialogue turned odd. I prefer his films when they got weird. The Village has so much craft and prestige wrapping its silly, trashy plot. The Happening had none, and I love it the most: the cast speaking entirely in non sequiturs about a world taken over by angry plants, who in the end are defeated by love. Pure, glorious schlock.

Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is good at dramatizing neurotic childhood fears of loneliness and abandonment, but when the emotion becomes positive, it gets manipulative. Orchestral music tells you to feel happy, but you might feel alienated instead. Shyamalan is great at showy long takes. He loves to hold on a medium or close-up reaction shot well past the point most movies cut. It’s both economical and unnerving.

I watched all of his unclassifiable trilogy in one day, like a child forced to smoke a pack of cigarettes in order to hate them. Unbreakable is a dour retread of The Sixth Sense, enlivened by Jackson in a purple jacket and shock hair dramatizing the nightmare of brittle bone disease. Split is buoyed by McAvoy.

Unfortunately, Glass is horrible, but it’s as odd and idiosyncratic as his other films. Psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures Dunn and The Beast and moves them into an asylum with Glass. She tries to convince them that their superheroic abilities are just delusions. When Dunn believes her, he does so because the story needs to sideline him, and the seams of threadbare writing start to show. Most of the budget may have gone to the salaries of the three headliners, and their schedules might not have connected, as they rarely share the same screen.

For half the runtime, Jackson is in a comatose state, staring emptily from a wheelchair, and when he wakes he says meta lines that might have been fresh 20 years ago, when Unbreakable opened with text explaining what comic books are.

Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton has pointed out that Shyamalan is a religious storyteller. He often shows characters needing to believe in themselves, their family, and the afterlife. This is usually expressed in a spiritual way and affirmed with an inspirational twist. This faith serves an additional role of keeping expensive special effects to a minimum.

In what other superhero movie would the final fight between good and evil (in a parking lot) cut away at first punch to the viewpoint of nameless extras looking at a van? Or be preceded by Jackson pointing at a skyscraper where the fight would have occurred had the film had more money? Shyamalan is interested in not just twists, but delayed gratification.

In the theater on opening weekend, you could feel the excitement slowly go out of the audience. The final twist here is a conscious wrongheaded choice that is bugfuck in its disconnection from viewers’ enthusiasm, yet lovely for its wrongness. Marvel is sleek and sometimes great, but when it doesn’t fire on all cylinders, it smothers you like a committee-made sitcom. Glass is terrible but at least feels personal.

The finale doesn’t work as storytelling, but it might make sense as an accidental middle finger to the idea that superheroes are inherently inspirational, when the reason for their omnipresence is monetary, as with westerns and Roman movies before them. Remove the money, and you lose the faith.

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Halloween (2018)

Jamie Lee Curtis returns as the original Final Girl Laurie Strode in David Gordon Green’s new Halloween sequel.

Michael Myers has always been the more streamlined and stately of hallowed movie murderers. His simple mask, his silence, the emptiness of his suburban streets, and the score: they all promise the thrill and nothing else. You will be scared, and there will be no entanglements. Like many franchises, repetition mocks that simplicity, and the films chase the dragon of their initial good. David Gordon Green’s new sequel Halloween gives Myers the treatment he calls for: this is a slasher film that looks away. It is restrained, comparatively.

Myers’ victims are photographed faraway, through glass, through windows, with non-diegetic sound in montage, with blurred lights dotting the night sky around them, through chain-link. The film rearranges the same images in impressionistic combinations to tell the same slasher story we’ve seen so many times. Green, an art film director whose career detoured into large budget comedies, does some of his stronger work here. He tells an archetypal stabby killer story in an almost tasteful manner. Many of the deaths happen out of sight, minority characters are introduced not just to be killed off, and character psychology makes sense.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has reacted to Michael Myers killing her friends in the first film (the many sequels are ignored) by becoming obsessed with him. She hoards guns and boobytrapps her house. Her Myers-centric doomsday prepping has estranged her from her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), which in turn drives a rift between Karen and her own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). It’s realistic, but a little dour: as their grandmother’s almost-murderer escapes from the local insane asylum, the family sulks and lashes out at each other. But a generational sisterhood reacting to murder is a corrective to a lot of slasher horror, which continually offers up female bodies to be isolated, considered as objects and metaphorically raped. The reaction the films often deny them (because they disappear after their assaults) is the ability to work together to protect themselves and emote a different note than fear.

The original Michael Myers, Nick Castle, reprises his role opposite Curtis. Castle later co-wrote Escape From New York with John Carpenter.

“Have you ever really liked a girl and you just couldn’t have her?” the film’s requisite nerd character asks Michael, thinking he’s a neighbor dressed for Halloween. Later his crush Allyson finds Laurie’s albino target practice dummies and freaks out over their idealized male and female forms in the dark. Awareness of the subtext of slasher films is great, though it does not necessarily make a great movie. Possibly over the next decades discomfort over subtext will mutate slasher films until they’re just about consensual sex with role play. Gorehounds will go somewhere else.

Or rather the confusion between scares, real-world misogynist violence, and sexuality will separate. Pointedly, most of Michael’s victims are older, unobjectified males.
Michael is effective, killing in the background of shots, moving slowly like the mundane nightmare he is. He smashes heads, rips open jaws, and opts for a hammer and fire poker. Characters implore him to “Say something,” but he resolutely does not.
Laurie is frazzled. Curtis is underwritten but good. After a movie full of characters framed through windows, when Laurie finally sees The Shape (as Michael Myers was referred to in the original Halloween script) staring at her from afar in this film, she immediately shoots at him, breaking glass, ruining his gaze. Green does well with scary buildup, specifically in the ending sequence and an encounter on the highway. He peppers the film with his trademark loose-ended conversations, here between a babysitter and her charge, a hunter and his dancing aficionado son, two police officers discussing Vietnamese sandwiches, and cemetery visitors talking about the graves of Bernie Mac and Muddy Waters. But these conversations don’t really tie into the main plot, they just highlight the humanity missing from the murder spree.

Perhaps it would be better if the film followed those conversations, and forgot to ever check back in on the killings. As slasher films repeat, and their checklist of jump scares and gore becomes secondhand to the viewer, excess is own reward. What sticks out in my mind from other Halloween sequels has nothing to do with John Carpenter’s original success. I love the satirical Silver Shamrock song of Halloween III, and the bone deep silliness of Busta Rhymes using martial arts to defeat Michael in Halloween: Resurrection.

That’s why between Jason, Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger, I prefer the Friday the 13th series. Its continual incompetence at telling even the most basic story results in a borderline absurd and surreal mishmash which doesn’t scare, but is always more fun for it.

Halloween (2018)

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Venom

By virtue of an odd look or a silly voice, Tom Hardy has been the best thing in event pictures like The Revenant or The Dark Knight Rises. In that context he’s the triumph of mannerism, of the strange and idiosyncratic winning out over supposedly epic but mostly empty things. In the former he delivers a strange monologue about how his Dad ate a squirrel that was God, and it’s the most sincere thing in the movie. In the latter he is so resolute while wearing a bondage mask in an otherwise contractual Batman trilogy ender that people have imitated his voice for years.

It is unfortunate that Ruben Fleischer’s Venom repeats the pattern, and doesn’t craft him a better vehicle. Venom sprang from Spiderman’s rogues’ gallery, which was divvied up to make a buck. Spiderman has been licensed back to Marvel Studios, but Sony still owns his nemesis. So we get a formulaic hero origin story for a nightmarish monster.

Venom is one of three alien Symbiotes (or parasites, as they don’t like to be called) brought back from space to merge with involuntary human hosts. Defined by his evil Spiderman look, lusty tongue and large number of teeth. Venom infects investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy) when Brock gets too close to Steve Jobs/Elon Musk amalgam Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) and his alien experimentation on the homeless.

Tom Hardy (right) in Venom

In the opening minutes Brock loses, in the manner of an 80’s movie or a comic you bought and finished in 15 minutes, his job, his girlfriend Anne and “everything I ever cared about.” Michelle Williams, who plays Anne, has had a career similar to Hardy. She’s associated with sincere arthouse dramas, but like Hardy’s beginnings in Star Trek, she started in the Halloween franchise and Dawson’s Creek. Fleischer uses both actors well. He doesn’t try to chain their sincerity to the bargain basement blockbuster plot (color graded dark blue and green, so you know the world is tough), but instead plays up their sense of humor, emphasizing their mundane reactions to terrible and ridiculous things.

As Brock, Hardy’s built an entire character around the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo stammers “We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?” He is constantly interrupting his own apologies and muttered explanations, his voice breaking in a transplanted New York accent that Williams matches. Once infected, he’s wonderful, apologizing to henchmen as his CGI self disembowels them, sating parasitical hunger with gross meals of chocolate and tater tots, going to a restaurant and bathing in a lobster tank, then eating the lobsters. He also voices the interior Bane-like voice of Venom, who is everything Eddie isn’t: Suave, powerful, and prone to wax eloquent about how delectable pancreata are.

The tone doesn’t gel. The action scenes, when they get away from the comedy of a mild-mannered guy apologizing for his uncontrollable urge to violence, are the same ones that you’ve seen all your life, and which will continue after you’re dead. There is a long car chase with black SUVs, and a de rigueur end fight between two identical visual effects. San Francisco is mainly defined here by inclined streets and the homeless, though photographed at night so that it looks like cinematic New York. Paul Thomas Anderson muse Melora Walters shows up in another downtrodden role as a vagabond with grime on her face. Jenny Slate plays a scientist whose thick glasses define her non-character.

Michelle Williams on line one.

Another way in which it reminded me of a colorful 80’s movie: Poverty is just a fact of life, and the homeless are punchlines or plot points. The evil CEO is God-like. Or if not the 80’s, it’s like a 30’s B-picture: fun and funny in small bits, but unable to have the plot follow the choices of its characters in unexpected directions.

The scary images of the Symbiotes entering people’s skin and undulating beneath are just gatekeepers to a power fantasy, one the movie cops to when a character muses on how nice it was being possessed. The problem is there are more modes of being in the world than idiotic idealists and omnipotent CEOs. For example, the corporations that have messed with the Spiderman universe are not run by evil geniuses. They’re just part of a system that perverts art for money.

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Hell Fest


For most of us, death will come by organ failure, cancer, accident, or stroke. Our bodies will wear out, and in the boredom and bureaucracy of hospitals we will get misplaced, be forgotten, fade out. “In headaches and in worry vaguely life leaks away,” as the poet says.

Like most slasher films, Hell Fest posits a much sexier and sudden end for audience identification characters in their prime. They will be perforated by a psychotic masked stabber of innocents, specifically during a horror-themed carnival in which they cannot tell real terrors from fake. This carnival is called Hell Fest. It’s a good conceit. The callow youths of generic temperaments are constantly taunting the actual killer, thinking he’s a carnie, and once convinced he’s truly homicidal, are alternately overly afraid of thrill ride jump scares or completely ignore them as they try to escape.

To buy in, you must accept that the actual Hell Fest is a seasonal attraction that has the budget to pay for hundreds of costumed performers and smoke machines, and that our college-age characters, led by friends Natalie (Amy Forsyth) and Brooke (Reign Edwards), are not too old to rhapsodize about scary mazes and know them by name.

Amy Forsyth (center) dodges a deranged killer in Hell Fest

At first Hell Fest seems like a rave, but as the killer, wearing a mask like a Greek chorus member with unaligned eyes, follows them deeper and deeper, it becomes as large and well-funded as Disney World. The dialogue is banal (“VIP, bitches!” is how the characters express joy at getting free passes), but at times naturalistic, when the actors talk too quickly and over each other in the improvised manner of real people. When murders happen, the film takes care to slow down and emphasize Bear McCreary’s soundtrack and a lack of chatter.

A tiny highlight for me was a long buildup of the assassin approaching a photo booth where, instead of killing the shy couple inside, he steals evidence of their first kiss. It plays on the main character’s nervousness over her date, casting the villain as her worry.

But mostly the characters are on rails, behaving like horror characters do. Natalie is a virginal brunette, Brooke her devoted best friend, and everyone else jokey satellites. Tony Todd (horror vet and star of Candyman) appears onscreen as emcee for a guillotine, and also aurally in pre-recorded safety warnings. It’s unclear at times how scary the mazes are supposed to be, if our fatigue with repetitive rooms filled with dummies is supposed to mirror that of the characters.

Similar groups have been slaughtered countless times in other movies in similar ways. I did like that the heroine learns to “look at their hands” to distinguish mannequins from performers in hiding, then uses this, like Paul Atreides learning to walk irregularly to avoid sandworms in Dune, to overcome fear later. It’s a how-to: Establish the rational dynamics of a situation, and follow them methodically.

Slashers eventually will evolve different ways to express fear of death, sex, and the Other (the name of the killer’s mask here according to the credits, a nod to film theory). I think the future is Cronenbergian: body horror should take the place of the slasher film as the latter’s gendered emphasis on murdering women becomes embarrassing. But body horror takes latex and money. Fake knives cost less.

On a personal note, I played a zombie clown in a haunted house horror once, local filmmaker Jim Weter’s sequel At Stake: Vampire Solutions: Back in Business. I marveled how sections of the haunted house were like premade film sets, how we could change from a bloody doctor’s office to a spooky hallway in a few steps.  

This film makes me feel no such frisson. The director, Gregory Plotkin, did well as an editor on movies like Game Night and Get Out, but here any sense of humor or satire is drowned in blandness. The actors are fine. They pantomime the sense of the uncanny as they notice the stagecraft around them turn real, and head on into exhausted fright. Toward the end, there’s the driest of all character development: Natalie and Brooke bond in a bathroom by planning to go to Spain. Realistically mundane, they joke about the word “tapas” sounding like the word “topless.” But it leads nowhere and feels empty. Here are youth. Watch them die. The earth swallows us all, but it shouldn’t feel boring.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Predator

As a child, R-rated horror films were terrifying to me. The thought that any of the generally tense, unhappy people onscreen might explode in a mess of organs and blood meant not averting my eyes was an almost spiritual ideal. I felt utter dread. A movie that caused this frozen quality was 1987’s Predator. Balanced on the knife edge of horror, Schwarzeneggerian self-parody, and a sci-fi Most Dangerous Game, it showcased director John McTiernan and writer/actor Shane Black at their best.

Like most movie monsters, the Predator has been watered down in repeated attempts to wring cash from the intellectual property. McTiernan went to jail for perjury in the Pellicano wiretapping case, and Black ascended as a director (despite his own scandals, including a new one during this film’s release) making well-received action comedies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys.

Is it a reboot? A sequel? Whatever its relationship to the original, The Predator honors its sci-fi action formula.

With screenwriter Black now in the director’s chair, the dialogue in The Predator is quippy and witty, and the people being split open onscreen spill unusually chunky blood. Characters in life-or-death situations share his trademark concern with the nuances of language, debating when to use the term galaxy or universe and whether the Predator, who hunts for sport and not survival, should really be called the Hunter. (“What you described sounds more like a bass fisherman.”)  

But it can’t be as urgent as it once was. The original was about a team of mercenaries slowly being revealed not as ultra-macho badasses, but horror movie victims, killed off one by one.

Here, a Mexican jungle encounter with the dreadlocked alien leads to sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) being sent to an insane asylum, but not before mailing the Predator’s gauntlet and helmet to his ex-wife and autistic son. Another Predator chasing the first converges on their suburban town, along with a busful of mercenary soldiers escaped from a mental ward, an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), and an amoral special ops guy (Sterling K. Brown). The arenas of battle include an elementary school, a nicely lit suburban house, and a street full of trick-or-treaters. The resulting tone is more like Monster Squad, Black’s previous partnership with co-writer Fred Dekker: relatively cute and light.

While the dialogue is quirky, the action is less idiosyncratic. There’s less of the perversity that had Kiss Kiss Bang Bang‘s Robert Downey Jr. accidentally peeing on an innocent person’s corpse or shooting someone in the head when trying to interrogate them. Acknowledgement of failure in the realm of murder makes an important moral point: Small physical actions have big consequences when it comes to violence, even if they don’t always lead to ethical, grandiose, or climactic outcomes. 

Some actors get better material than others. Sterling K. Brown, who was in Memphis recently filming for This Is Us, does great as the gum-chewing CIA fiend. Keegan-Michael Key sings out dirty jokes as Black’s character did before. Thomas Jane plays a character with Tourette’s, which results in the non sequitur “Well fuck me with an aardvark! I want to be famous!” when someone points a gun at him. He seems more like Jane yelling than an actual character.

Though out of place, I liked the moments with Jacob Tremblay as the autistic son, holding his ears during a fire alarm and facing off bullies. “I’m sorry I didn’t grow up the way you wanted me to,” he tells his father, and the movie responds with Munn’s reassurance that being on the spectrum is “the next step in the evolutionary chain.” In a movie filled with puerile, nostalgic vulgarity, it’s a moment of cutting-edge progressivism: It reflects the modern neurodiversity movement of those of us labeled mentally ill who denote themselves more positively.

But such things are about building people up, while The Predator is mostly about dramatizing neurotic fears over an inability to be macho. Our lead, Holbrook, barely suffers any qualms. His team befriends a giant mutant hunting dog the Predator brings with him, and everything is copacetic.

One idea the movie does dramatize is Stephen Hawking’s warning that we should not send messages into space for aliens, for fear they might be malevolent. Humanity is just in its childhood phase now, able to develop tech that expands into the universe, punchdrunk with the idea of being able to talk. Freezing, turning invisible, usually negatives when it comes to Predators and autism, might be a good idea.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Three Identical Strangers

David Kellman, Robert Shafran, and Eddy Galland are the subjects of the documentary Three Identical Strangers.

The documentary Three Identical Strangers tells the story of three college-age kids in 1980 who discovered they were triplets by accident. It covers their initial dream-like excitement, then unravels the reasons for their separation at birth.

Told in modern documentary style, no head is ever onscreen for an entire sentence, cutting multiple times away to re-enactments with faces tastefully obscured, stock footage, home videos, and slow zooms into old pictures. Emotive instrumental music puts the viewer into the mood of these disembodied quotes: Things must be understood immediately, and rushed along. Every further explanation is presented as a shocking reveal.

The material rewards this approach: The story is compelling. The three brothers got to fulfill the Cinderella-like fantasy of having a new family and a secret history. And then, over the course of their lives, the fantasy darkened.

The triplets, David Kellman, Robert Shafran, and Eddy Galland, initially became famous upon the discovery of their connection. We see them joking with Donahue and Brokaw on talk shows, cameoing in Madonna’s Desperately Seeking Susan, and opening their own New York restaurant named “Triplets” (scored to “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel, of whom they all look like a younger version).

Director Tim Warble’s style works best at conveying their euphoria, savoring the details of Shafran’s first day at college, where everyone already knows him and calls him Eddy. The fast cutting widens to include the viewpoints of his entire tripartite extended family, and beautifully sells the idea of being caught up in an unexpected reunion.

Strangers nods to more idiosyncratic documentaries. The surviving siblings look into the camera in the manner of Errol Morris’ Interrotron, while almost everyone else has a traditional, off-camera eyeline. We see sped-up, tilt-shifted New York crowds set to a Phillip Glass-ian score. But the film’s dominant style is of its production company CNN Films — that of a televisual newsmagazine. To emphasize points, the film recycles its own footage and sound bites, apparently not expecting viewers to remember things said less than an hour before.

Since the documentary presents itself as a mystery, I won’t offer any spoilers. Centered around the Louise Wise Services adoption agency and a study by the psychologist Dr. Peter Neubauer, the movie builds to a shocking reveal that never quite comes, like it would in a Morris doc. Without a face for its villain, the film parlays its vagueness into attempted heartwarming support for “nurture” in the nature vs. nurture argument — the triumph of family over genes. It then concentrates the viewers’ ire on anonymous, bureaucratic sources of power: the adoption agency, researchers, and the modern custodians of that research. What ultimately weakens the film isn’t its efficient style but an unhappy ending. It creates a tension but can never release it. It’s a call to action that partially works.

Hierarchical structures concentrate power at the top, and when they do wrong, it takes great effort by individuals at the bottom to right the wrongs. This film has resulted in the release of some files, while alleging there are adoptees who still don’t know they were separated at birth from siblings they’ve never met. It makes one long for a Panopticon showing everyone’s misdeeds, for transparency in all things. While such openness would make life uncomfortable, with every institution and person’s awful pasts on display, it would prevent any past, like that of these brothers, from being irretrievable.

Three Identical Strangers