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American Horror Stories (2021)
Same Wine, Smaller Bottles
A series of stand-alone episodes that maintains all the strengths of the AHS brand, but uses the short-story format to do it. Much of the best horror writing has always been the genre's short stories, from Poe to Bradbury to Bloch to Beaumont, and the series successfully applies the AHS formula (take a traditional horror trope and add contemporary humor, sexual angst, tons of pop culture references, sly nods to genre masterpieces, and an O. Henry ending twist AFTER the FIRST O. Henry ending twist) to the classic short-story situations - the demon baby, the bullied new girl, the cursed film clip, the evil Santa. It works very well, and I sense the writers enjoyed the opportunity to produce these self-contained stories without the weight of a complex, season-long plot line to worry about.
Stowaway (2021)
Serious Spoilers for a movie that deserves to be seriously spoiled.
Don't read this if for some reason you're contemplating watching this turkey anyway.
- We're supposed to accept that within twenty four hours of a Mars mission liftoff, some guy randomly loses consciousness and somehow gets bolted inside the spacecraft wall - and nobody notices? Or misses him? Or notices that this carefully calculated payload is somehow two hundred pounds overweight on the pad? Who on earth sealed him in there? And why isn't the crew even curious about that?
- On a two year Mars mission, nobody thinks it would be a good idea to pack a spare CO2 scrubber?
- This "spacecraft" is so shoddy that removing a CO2 unit means you see through the module out into space? Who built this thing, Elon Musk??
- To achieve centrifugal gravity, they attach the module to a dead and useless booster with cables, then set the whole thing spinning? Why not simply spin the module on its own axis, ditch the booster and save roughly 2/3 of the mass?
- So solar flares look like glowing green dust particles in a mild breeze. Huh. Who knew.
- Yes, it makes perfect sense that the ship's doctor, the only source of medical expertise on a two year mission, should sacrifice herself instead of the useless stowaway whose contribution to the team, apart killing everybody, is measuring mushrooms.
Science fiction films involve a pact with the viewer. We'll suspend our disbelief up to a point; but if you introduce a mysterious absurdity, you'd better resolve it before the end. I suspect the writers of this one looked at each other blankly around page 200, shrugged, and said: "To hell with it, I can't figure it out either. Let's just kill her off."
Legionnaire's Trail (2020)
Rare that a film can be so bad at EVERYTHING.
A) The dialogue is wooden and stilted throughout. Every line is clumsy exposition in awkward prose.
b) The characters are one-dimensional sketches that exist only as cogs to forward a flat narrative. The much maligned Mickey Rourke is at least amusing as he slurs and glowers his way through his horribly overwritten lines, but there's no hint of a an actual character in there, just a tissue of tics and mannerisms stitched together. And he's the MOST interesting of the lot.
c) The directing and editing feel like the work of a not especially gifted film student; pedestrian, unimaginative, and designed to drain this flat narrative of any possible interest or excitement. Long minutes of a guy walking/running across hills/mountains/rivers/deserts.
d) In several scenes, the director lingers on a shot or a location in a way that suggests that something interesting is finally going to happen. And then...it doesn't. Not an ounce of excitement in the fights or the chase.
e) Spoiler: here's a plot summary to save yourself ninety minutes for squeezing blackheads or something less painful than watching this movie.
Scene: Grumpy Roman General, mumbling to self: Boy, I sure am pissed at Nero. He shoulda just sent me to Armenia. I hope those guys that he DID send all die.
Scene: Trapped Roman General to hero: Look, we need you to climb a cliff, run across mountains and deserts, and get Grumpy Roman General to come and save us.
Scene: Hero climbs cliff with much tribulation, runs and runs and runs and runs, meeting a few uninteresting characters who never actually get developed, and gets to Grumpy Roman General's palace.
Scene: Hero: Hey, come and rescue our guys.
Grumpy Roman General: No.
Grumpy Roman General's cute mistress: Oh, come on. Go rescue them.
Grumpuy Roman General: Oh, ok.
End.
Hero: Okay.
The Eagle Huntress (2016)
This is not a Documentary
The visuals were beautiful, the characters endearing, and the story uplifting. But this movie seemed to me to consist almost entirely of carefully designed and staged pieces. Just a couple of examples: a) The capture of the egret from the nest. It includes shots from multiple angles, including a several shots from what seems to be a go-pro mounted on the huntress's hat. However, in the wide shots, no camera positions are visible, and there's certainly no camera on the huntress. Staged. b) The "interviews" in which the dubious elders initially express their skepticism, then their tolerance, then final grudging acknowledgment, were all shot at the same time, one after another, even though they're supposedly responding to events that happen at various stages of the movie. The lighting, costuming, and staging are clearly from the same recording session. c) The climactic competition sequence includes multiple ground level closeups of the action, which would require several cameras on the field. However, in the wide aerial shots of the same sequence, no other cameras on the ground are visible.
I could go on, but you get my drift. It's a beautiful feature film: but when the scenes are faked, one can't help but wonder how much of the story is true.
Westender (2003)
Heroic Attempt, Terrible Movie
I love fantasy and SF in film, from cheesy Japanese rubber suiters to big budget Spielberg. Bad films have their own peculiar charm. It pains me to report that "Westender" is a bona fide bomb that fails on just about every level.
It's an attempt to combine several genres, which as we've all seen can work pretty well. The problem is, it does all of them badly.
The "Heroic Quest" forms the basis of the plot. Without giving too much away, the story line is as formulaic and generic as you can get...MINUS the final moment of resolution/redemption that usually caps this kind of film. It didn't really end...it just sort of...stopped. Roll credits.
But there are a few other film styles that waft through this stinker like farts on a breeze. They include:
- The "Metaphysical Journey of Exploration", exemplified (and much parodied) by directors like Bergman and Antonioni. This accounts for the interminable sequences of the sun-baked hero staggering across vast wastes. This is Symbolic, you see, of his Inner Emptiness: and the grass on the far side of the desert is Symbolic of his Newly Awakened and Heightened Spiritual Consciousness. Phew. Pretty darned mystical. With all due respect to the reviewers who found profundity in this excruciating exercise in undergrad angst...there isn't an interesting idea to be found in the whole nine hours of the film. (Yes, I know what the duration on the label says. But it FEELS like nine hours. At least.)
- "Revisionist Medievalism" (in the style of "Ladyhawke" or "Princess Bride") wherein people in Middle Ages costumes and settings exhibit contemporary characters and language. It can be funny. Here, it's just inconsistent and annoying.
- "Hommage", in which characters and situations borrowed from other films pop up, presumably to show us the director is aware of them. So we have little moments that resemble low-budget Kurusawa, Boorman, Fellini, and others. If the film worked, these might have been amusing. It doesn't, and they're not, except as a mild distraction on your descent into torpor.
And one final comment for folks who have commented on the "stunning beauty" and "epic grandeur" of the scenery: you know, if you take a camera somewhere beautiful and shoot a wide shot, you're going to have a nice looking shot. There's not much trick to it.
Bad Santa (2003)
Perfect Form, Twisted Content
The most amusing thing about "Bad Santa" is the fact that the storyline follows a perfect "Christmas Movie" plot arc...the same narrative used in every Christmas film from "Christmas Carol" to "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". A sad, twisted, misfit meets an innocent, is slowly redeemed through the encounter, is driven to commit a kind act, is transformed, and poof...happy ending. But Zwigoff pulls it off without making his strange characters, or the stock plot situations, any less twisted...in fact, they all stay quite unattractive. Quite the accomplishment.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
The Problem With Dreamcatcher
Stephen King writes two kinds of books, both of which I enjoy. Some are focused, tight narratives that follow a single thread...Cujo, Christine, Salem's Lot, Carrie, Pet Sematary, and others. Then occasionally he produces a multi-tier extravaganza like It or Tommyknockers, with dozens of characters (often multigenerational) and plot threads. Dreamcatcher, the novel, is one of the latter...it tries (with only modest success) to be a horror novel, science fiction, coming-of-age story, thriller, conspiracy theory, and a few other genres as well.
A director and screenwriter faced with the challenge of turning a stew like that into a film have two choices.
a) They can drop most of the plot threads and concentrate on two or three key narrative lines, or; b) They can try to keep most of the plot threads intact, and drop most of the character development.
Donner and Goldman have chosen plan (b) in this case. What's left is an almost incoherent roller coaster that shifts time, pace, location, mood and characters with virtually every scene, without strong characters to tie it together. I can't imagine in makes much sense to anyone who hasn't read the book: and those who have will be disappointed at the absence of everything that made the book worth reading...the well developed childhood friends, the psychotic Kurtz (Morgan Freeman is much too humane), and mostly, an interesting and credible Dudditz.
Bob Roberts (1992)
Bob Roberts as Parody
I confess I did not read the other 58 comments on this film (as of Sept. 2003) in detail. But one element of this film that appears to have escaped most peoples' attention is that it is, among other things, a very clever parody of the D.A. Pennebaker Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back", with several scenes and shots structured reflect scenes in the Dylan film. Most chilling parody...in the Dylan film, Bob D. is typing lyrics in a corner while Joan Baez sings "Pretty Polly"...in Bob Roberts, Bob. R. is checking his stocks online while his girlfriend sings about right wingers Marching For America.
There are dozens of other parallels (the "Bob on Bob" album cover, the parody of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video, and the motorcycle crash)...rent Don't Look Back, then watch Bob Roberts again and enjoy.
Microwave Massacre (1979)
A strong candidate for worst movie of all time
Some friends and I used to gather every month with the worst movies we could find in an attempt to uncover the indisputable stinker of the ages. We worked our way through most of the obvious ones...the entire Ed Wood canon, Herschel Gordon Lewis, rubber suiters and bad creature features...and for a while it looked as though The Creeping Terror might take the prize.
Then we saw Microwave Massacre. It prompted more discussion than any film we had screened. We just couldn't fathom the truly astonishing depths of its awfulness. It failed on more levels than we could count. Technically inept (boom shadows in every shot, appeared to have been lit with a single weak fresnel, sound recorded on a used radio shack cassette recorder), funny when it tried to scare and horribly unfunny when it tried to amuse, pornographic without being the least bit stimulating...it led us to posit a universal theory of Anticulture, in which a parallel universe transferred particles of anticulture in our world. Microwave Massacre is one such particle.
The group broke up shortly after that screening. There was really no point in going on.