Kicking off a horror comedy October

Two years ago I watched 70s horror movies in October. Never having followed a Halloween viewing theme before, I was inspired to do so following a second viewing of a gem I'd discovered some 15 years earlier, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Last October, there was no theme. I felt the absence of it. My viewings were random strays selected only after multiple stultifying marches through my streaming options, and ended up being about as satisfying.

So I decided to do a theme again this year, knowing that'll really only mean five to eight movies, as I will probably only watch them on the weekends while trying to keep up with my normal obligations during the week. 

I don't know how I landed on this year's theme, but this is the upshot of it:

My quest for watching horror is always to be scared out of my mind. I regularly consult lists of the scariest horror movies of all time, though sadly, by this point I've seen most of them, and many of them don't earn the designation. At least I'm comforted by the fact that there are some out there I just haven't been able to access due to their rarity, but hope to do so at some point in the future.

Sometimes, I hit. I saw one of the scariest movies I've ever seen earlier this year when I watched Skinamarink, an experience I may repeat this October if I can convince my wife to bunker down for that film's unusual and patience-requiring approach.

But since being scared to death (like Jessica) is, in fact, such an infrequent occurrence, I decided just to set aside that ambition this October and go for some laughs.

So this year, I will be aiming to watch what others have considered the best horror comedies I haven't yet seen.

After having gone through a few less than ten different online lists yesterday, I compiled a Letterboxd list of 48 potential candidates. Seven or eight of these titles came up multiple times, so they are the ones I'll most likely be targeting, with the understanding that some of even the most popular options may elude me.

In my part of the world, for example, I was a little surprised to find I have no easy access to Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also known as Braindead. I searched both versions of the title on all my streaming services yesterday, even Disney+, and came up empty. There was not the option even to rent them through iTunes or Amazon. 

I hope to find Dead Alive before October is over, but in the meantime, I've started in on the films I can access for free or for only a $3.99 rental.

Wes Carven's 1991 film The People Under the Stairs was a case of the latter, and also a mild disappointment in how the series started.

The disappointment didn't come from the movie itself, which I found demented in ways that pushed the boundaries of 1991 mainstream horror. It has a great teenage hero in Poindexter a.k.a. Fool, played by Brandon Adams. And it contains only the eighth screen appearance for Ving Rhames, which would be the second earliest among those I'd seen (he's also in 1990's Jacob's Ladder, a personal favorite).

No, my problem is that I didn't really find the movie funny -- nor did I think it was particularly supposed to be. 

The villains are a pair of racist, sadistic slumlords, played by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, and their villainy approaches glorious levels of camp. And there's a world-weary, put-upon aspect to the characters played by Rhames and Adams, which are in the neighborhood of the mildly humorous "I'm too old for this shit" perspective of Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies. There's an overall lightness of tone, I suppose, that prevents it from seeming as though Craven's primary goal is to scare you -- even though plenty of grisly things happen. (The journey of one particular corpse, as it gets increasingly torn apart, is particularly gruesome.)

So I think more than being disappointed by the "comedy" aspect of the genre title "horror comedy" for The People Under the Stairs, I have to adjust my perspective to understand that this genre title is employed in a sort of "know it when you see it" manner. The standard should not be whether you produce guffaws when watching the movie, since honestly, I don't really think that's what I'm going for with the movies I watch this month. I'm not looking for the next Scary Movie. (Not that this is an example of hilarious comedy, just obvious comedy.) I'm probably really looking for movies where horror genre tropes are occasionally leavened by absurdity, world-weary gallows humor or, yes, camp.

I also enjoyed The People Under the Stairs for its role as social satire, another way you can interpret comedy as insinuating its way into horror. Get Out was one of the titles that appeared regularly on these lists, and I don't really think of that as comedy. However, both of those films do interrogate and incorporate the racism of whites in a specific sort of horror as it would be experienced by Black people. The People Under the Stairs joins Candyman as early 1990s horror that brought familiar horror tropes to the projects, and though this one isn't quite the success that Candyman is, it was close enough to be mentioned in the same breath.

There's one other funny thing I wanted to mention about Craven's movie, which gets into the camp angle of the villains. McGill's "Daddy" character -- he's known as "Daddy" on Wikipedia and "Man" in the credits -- periodically dons a full-on Gimp costume, three years before we would learn to think of it as such in Pulp Fiction. So that marks twice in the early 1990s that Ving Rhames was forced to tangle with a Gimp.

Okay, probably try to watch a second one of these tonight, and write about it tomorrow. 

My cooperative bowels

I have only ever had to leave one movie, in my entire movie-going history, because I had to go #2.

I thought The Creator might be the second.

The infamous first time came during Mulholland Dr. in 2001. I went to see it with my friend PJ, which, incidentally, is the only time I can remember the two of us seeing a movie without anyone else. I think we might have had Mexican beforehand, though whether that had anything to do with it, or was just a coincidence, I don't remember at this point.

I like to joke that this was the reason I didn't get Mulholland Dr. the first time ... sort of still don't, though nowadays I like it despite not getting it. As if missing any one five- to ten-minute period of that film is going to be the key to unlocking it. (Probably closer to five. Even though I was not nearly as obsessed with movies as I am today, I would have been horrified at the prospect of missing any of it, and would have been racing to complete my business as quickly as possible.)

My condition going into The Creator last night did not seem promising. There was a familiar unstable gurgling in my stomach and bowels. I knew what was coming, it was just a matter of when.

And yet I didn't quite have enough time to take care of business before the movie started.

I left my house earlier than I sometimes do, but that meant arriving at the Sun in Yarraville five minutes before showtime, rather than right as the trailers were starting. And the Sun is particularly customer-focused in that it usually plays exactly two trailers, and one two-minute "film" made by a guy who works with the Sun, showcasing some aspect of the community. It's cute and I enjoy watching these films. 

So you really only have maybe six to seven minutes after the scheduled start time before the movie is actually playing. 

If you are going only by the times I listed above -- where I talked about quickly wrapping up my business to get back to Mulholland Dr. -- I probably had the time to do what I needed to do. 

But I never liked to rush a bowel movement, and I like that even less as a nearly 50-year-old. Then there's the fact that for all the Sun does wonderfully, their bathroom is gross. It has to do with maintaining the original bathroom from when the theater first opened more than 80 years ago, but that also means the ventilation is poor and there always seems to be a sheen of urine hanging over everything, its smell quite potent. Not the ideal circumstances for any more than getting in and getting right back out again.

This story has an anti-climax that I already previewed with the title of the post. Despite eating a box of Swedish fish and drinking a Pepsi Max, I was no closer to needing to relieve myself when the movie ended than when it started. In fact, it quite clearly went in the opposite direction, as the gurgling stomach completely calmed itself, the crowning BM climbing further back up into my guts. (Sorry, that was gross, but I couldn't resist. It wasn't really crowning, which is a lot more of an urgent situation.)

In fact, I am only remembering to write this post because it took until 9:30 the next morning, after coffee and cereal, to finally do this business that I thought might become impossible to suppress as early as 9 o'clock last night.

So if there's a difference between the me of now and the me of 2001, I think it might be bowel maturity. I have noticed that I almost never have to take a shit in a situation where it's highly inconvenient for me to do so, and then it will suddenly become incredibly urgent at the exact time that all the necessary creature comforts in terms of time and facilities are available to me.

There may be no greater example than watching a movie. In the theater is the greatest potential danger, of course, since you have no way to pause, and will inevitably lose some of your experience. But I don't think I can even recall a time at home when I was watching something and had to stop to run off and take care of my needs. It's like movies just complete anesthetize my bowels.

Oh, and unfortunately, I didn't really care for The Creator, and I found it overly long, so having missed part of it wouldn't have been a significant detriment. (Though maybe I would have wondered if I'd missed the best part while I was gone.) Here's my full review in case you're interested. 

And with that, I return you to reading about less gross things. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Celebrating baseball victory with The Great Gatsby

This is the penultimate viewing in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the six feature films of Baz Luhrmann. 

I won my fantasy baseball league on Monday morning my time.

It's my second win in three years, after I took home the trophy in 2021 as well.

Woo hoo.

I obviously don't talk about it a lot on here -- this is a movie blog, in case you weren't aware -- but fantasy baseball occupies a sizeable percentage of my brain from early March to early October each year. (Early October if I'm lucky and make it all the way to the finals, as I did this year -- otherwise I begin the weaning off process starting as early as mid-September, depending on how quickly I'm eliminated.)

The end of the fantasy baseball season, in fact, usually begins the transition to my obsession with movies (and the NBA) that takes me through to my year-end rankings. At which point -- lo and behold -- it's almost time for baseball again. (Nice to have obsessions that fuel you year-round, I've found -- it means you always have something to look forward to.)

To celebrate my win, I decided to watch The Great Gatsby on Monday night for Baz Jazz Hands.

That might seem like a disconnect, but hear me out.

The scenes I remember most from my first two viewings of The Great Gatsby, which both occurred ten years ago in 2013, are the lavish party sequences taking place at Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion. Their celebratory atmosphere seemed just the thing to crown my fifth fantasy baseball championship in 30 years of playing fantasy baseball. (Of course, I forgot that a lot of the rest of the story ranges from mildly to very depressing.)

As I was watching these scenes again, it struck me how they are similar in time period and bacchanalian excess to the party scenes depicted in last year's Babylon from director Damien Chazelle. The feeling of the scenes, though, couldn't be more different, and points up the essential underlying optimism that characterizes Baz Luhrmann's work and continues to make him -- I think I can now say it with confidence -- a favorite director.

Those scenes in Babylon feel like Chazelle smearing our faces in the dog shit of the characters' lurid deviance. The Gatsby characters, while probably getting equally drunk and engaging in similar shenanigans, feel like innocents, people having the time of their lives as they are seduced by the grandeur of Gatsby's orbit. 

I prefer the latter -- not always, but certainly given the mean-spiritedness with which Chazelle depicts these scenes, and their comparative lightness in Luhrmann's film. (I should add that my first viewing of Gatsby was in 3D, which just made this stuff all the more delightfully delirious.)

Watching these Luhrmann films back to back has made me even more aware of a Luhrmann Template that I continue to enjoy. Gatsby is just his latest example of a movie told by a writer in recollection of a period of ecstasy in his life, one that is now sadly in the past and out of reach. Its most obvious corollary in his filmography is Moulin Rouge, with the slight difference that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is more of a third party in this film whereas Christian (Ewan McGregor) is the central figure in the earlier film's featured romance. Luhrmann is big on song and dance as a means of showing his characters at the height of their happiness and glory, though because he's a romantic, we know these films also have to end in tragedy. Romeo + Juliet is certainly another example of that tragic ending. 

Strictly Ballroom and Australia both end happily, but are no less effective for it. Especially since I reacted so positively to Australia this time, I'm starting to think that Luhrmann is effective in any mode, and I have yet to find a film of his where his missteps are any more than minor.

I do have one humorously significant complaint about The Great Gatsby, but it can be chalked up more to an idiosyncratic tic than anything I really want to criticize about the filmmaking.

Namely: Was Leonardo DiCaprio paid by the number of times he used the phrase "old sport"?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's original novel, "Old Sport" -- probably more appropriately capitalized, because it functions as a nickname -- is what Gatsby calls Carraway whenever he speaks to him. He uses it when speaking to a few other people, but we see him speak to Carraway more than anyone else.

And I say "whenever he speaks to him," I mean "whenever he speaks to him" -- at least in this film, if not the novel. 

If your name was Nick and you had a conversation with someone where they said "You know, Nick, I was thinking about an idea I had. Nick, I thought I would throw a party tonight. It's because I'm celebrating, Nick. You see, Nick, I just won my fantasy baseball league." You'd think that was weird, right? Everyone knows your name is Nick. You don't need to say it every sentence.

It's even weirder when it is a goofy, quaint, awkward nickname like "Old Sport."

Was this Luhrmann's idea? DiCaprio's? Is the frequency of this nickname established in the book and they are just trying to be faithful in their adaptation?

I don't know. But it's annoying as hell. Next time I watch The Great Gatsby -- maybe another ten years from now -- I will make a drinking game out of it. Or at the very least, count the actual number of occurrences.

But as I said, this is a humorous complaint that does not detract from another excellently conceived vision by Luhrmann. It's not just the unparalleled attention to design details, resulting in a luxurious production design. It's not just the wistful feeling that suffuses the film. It's not just the incredible ability of Carey Mulligan and Elizabeth Debicki (who I first discovered in this film) to play flappers. It's not just the hissible villain, this time played by Joel Edgerton. 

It's all of it, which wraps me up in its spell, even though its second half is a downer compared to its first. The complete package leaves The Great Gatsby jockeying for position around the middle of my Luhrmann rankings, with the likes of Strictly Ballroom and my newly appreciated Australia. (As much as I did enjoy Romeo + Juliet on this viewing, I think it may now be looking up from the bottom.)

Where will Elvis fit into all this on my second viewing? We'll find out in December. 

King Darren: mother!

This is the fifth in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Darren Aronofsky in the year after he became the first to repeat as director of my top film of the year.

This was my fourth viewing of mother! in the only six years it has existed, so you know I like this one -- or at the very least am still trying to work out my feelings toward it. If it were the latter, though, I'd probably stop at two viewings. I'm up to four, with more coming probably every three years if I had to guess, because I do enjoy the exquisitely excruciating experience of this movie so much.

It also makes an appropriate way to kick off October, since this is, for all intents and purposes, a horror movie. There are no jump scares, no ghosts and goblins, just constant senses of unease, stress, anxiety and life unraveling out of your control. It may be one of the best psychological horrors of the 21st century.

Not everyone agrees with this. In fact, a cultural critic I respect immensely, Stephen Metcalf of the Slate Culture Gabfest, thought it was one of the worst moviegoing experiences he had ever had. He's ten times the intellect I will ever be, but he just doesn't get it on this one. And I don't think he's a squeamish guy who doesn't like to be confronted when he's watching a movie; far from it. He just thought it was garbage, and I don't think he could have been more wrong.

That said, I can understand why a person would feel assaulted by this movie. That's entirely the point. If you thought you were buying a ticket to something with a conventional narrative, and you got this, you might be disappointed.

But even if you did think it was a bait and switch -- I can't remember whether the ads suggested something more straightforward, though that seems likely -- I don't understand how you don't get oriented to what this film is doing and become enthralled by its assaultive nature. 

With some obvious exceptions, my favorite sorts of art at the ones that have so much to say that they become a veritable explosion of ideas. mother! is such a movie. So is Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. So is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. So is Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (You get the idea.) 

A movie like this can obviously be sloppy. You might generously call Beau is Afraid that kind of movie, but I didn't care for Beau is Afraid. The key -- and what I think Aronofsky does so well -- is to have a grand design for this chaotic explosion of themes, ideas and images. mother! is a veritable symphony of thought-provoking notions.

Is it a version of the creation story and the fall from the Garden of Eden?

Is it an environmental parable?

Is it a study of new fame and the horrors of the paparazzi?

Is it a contemplation of the creative process?

Is it a consideration of depression and/or a mental breakdown?

Is it the pre-pardom anxiety of how children will destroy the house and the life you worked so hard to build?

Is it a more general sort of horror of manners where everyone you meet will say inscrutable things and sit on your unbraced kitchen sink?

Is it one of my beloved "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies, where events are speeding past you without any ability to slow their momentum?

The answer is: yes.

mother! is all of these things, which is why I think it's such a vital document, with such a terrific performance by Jennifer Lawrence at its center, requiring her to push herself to the physical limit and threatening to overwhelm her mentally and emotionally. Just like any great acting performance should do.

Of course, in this series I am focusing on how Aronofsky's works speak to each other and reveal themselves in each other, and I think this is a rather obvious corollary to the last film I watched for this series, Noah. Although I don't think that film is bad by any stretch of the imagination, Aronofsky seems to have realized he'd prefer to work out those themes in a less literal sense. mother! explores many of the same ideas about the toxic, irredeemable human species through set pieces that are in some cases explicitly biblical, but it doesn't have to stick sacredly to that most sacred of texts. It is enough that we understand the fall of man rather than needing to watch the literal beat-by-beat points of that fall.

There isn't another perfect partner within Aronofsky's work for mother!, though visible here are some techniques from Requiem for a Dream and the scope and scale of metaphor from The Fountain. 

In fact, it's occurring to me that Aronofsky may be split in his filmmaking identity in a way similar to Steven Soderbergh, for example, in that Soderbergh alternates between idiosyncratic personal choices and bigger budget popcorn movies intended to attract mainstream audiences. Except that I think neither version of Aronofsky is laid out on the same sort of platter as audience pleasers like Ocean's 11 and Logan Lucky. With Aronofsky you have head trips like The Fountain and mother!, and then you have fundamentally realistic movies like The Wrestler and The Whale, and never the twain shall meet. (Actually, they do sort of meet in Black Swan.) But neither mode is especially expected to rake in the dough at the box office.

It's interesting to me to note that given how much I love Aronofsky in mother! mode, the two films that have been my favorite of the year have been his two most extreme on the realistic end of his personal spectrum. This versatility just makes me value King Darren all the more.

The final film for this series in December will be the only #1 I watch for this series, my first reckoning with The Whale since I crowned it #1 in January. (You may recall that I didn't rewatch either The Fountain or the previous #1, The Wrestler, for this series, since I had seen them both for other reasons within the past two years.) 

There are a lot of people who really dislike this movie -- it wouldn't be Aronofsky if they didn't -- so it should be interesting to see if my views on it change at all with a year's distance from my first viewing. 

Thoughts on only my second viewing of Face/Off

I went into Friday night, the second night of a three-day weekend, knowing I was going to watch something I'd seen only once before, but not knowing what it would be.

I figured to make this determination by browsing a streaming service at random, and then a second if the first didn't yield any results that I was feeling on this particular occasion. As it turned out, I made my ultimate determination because the movie in question was playing on the free-to-air channel that came on when I turned on the TV.

This was earlier in the evening, when the family and I were going to watch something different during our dinner. So I didn't sit and watch it right there. I did, however, decide it was finally time to revisit John Woo's Face/Off, which I'd seen only once, and it was available for streaming on Disney+.

The fact that I have not revisited this film in the 26 years since it was released is a strange one. I always think of it as Woo's best film, and in 1997, it finished as my #3 film of the year. Number three! 

To give you some idea how odd it is that I haven't reconsidered it since then, I have rewatched every other film in my top 15 of 1997 at least once. That includes, in the following order, Titanic, Contact, Starship Troopers, Waiting for Guffman, Liar Liar, Donnie Brasco, Boogie Nights, Private Parts, U-Turn, L.A. Confidential, Hercules, Men in Black and Breakdown. (The order of these films' significance to me may have changed since then, but I still like all these films quite a lot.) Only at #16 do you get the second best movie of 1997 that I'd never rewatched, which is Neil Labute's In the Company of Men.

So why the hesitation on rewatching such a fun popcorn movie with such a high likelihood of playing similarly for me on a second viewing?

Well I'll start by saying I don't think I've avoided a second viewing. Repeat viewings tend to have an element of randomness to them, dependant more on mood and availability than as a correlation to your feelings about the film. 

If there's a subconscious part of me that's avoided the second viewing, however, it could be for the reasons stated here. Yes, that post was called "One-timers I worry won't hold up," and it included the top ten films I'd seen only once on Flickchart that I was concerned might not survive the scrutiny of a second viewing.

With Woo in particular, it's because the signature elements of his filmmaking -- doves, absurd double-fisted gunplay -- became so ripe for parody so soon after Face/Off that I worried they would curdle my appreciation of that film.

And that's exactly how Face/Off started for me. There's an opening shootout that is just as dumb as dumb can get in these movies, which inclined me to cast aspersions over a whole era of action filmmaking. Yes, it's certainly "cool" to watch someone shoot with a gun in each hand, but has there ever been a less realistic form of combat? I'm sure there are skilled shootists out there who could withstand the recoil of the shot and keep their aim enough to potentially hit a target, but it wouldn't be a very efficient way to face your enemies -- better to just get a really good shot with one gun, and then another really good shot a half-second later. Add to that the fact that in these movies -- it was by no means limited to Face/Off -- the person toting the guns is also leaping out sideways while shooting at their opponent, and sometimes engaging in superfluous forward rolls that look kind of like they are tripping themselves to land on their own back before bouncing up again. It's hard to imagine the strategic justification for such moves.

I even went so far as to tell my wife, when she entered the room, that this movie was "terrible." (We had discussed earlier that we both really liked it in 1997.)

But after the opening scene ended, Face/Off started to remind me why I enjoyed it so much. And it occurred to me that though the action was certainly the thing that was sold to us at the time, Woo being an apparent expert in that arena, it's everything other than the action that I like so much about this movie.

The existential anxiety both characters experience, wearing the face of their enemy, is pretty good, considering that the story was probably first and foremost considered an armature on which to hang the explosions and gunplay. But what really surprised me was how invested I become in the journey of John Travolta's Sean Archer, who of course presents to us for most of the movie as Nicolas Cage. The climax -- first when he is addressed as Archer by the agents arriving on the scene, a triumphant proof that his face-swapping story has been believed, and then when he brings home Castor Troy's child to live with him after both of his parents were killed in the film's final set piece -- really got to me, such that I felt an actual lump in my throat.

I don't even necessarily think this was my reaction in 1997. I think I probably just thought "Wow, a guy holding two guns!" I mean, I did always think the absurd face-swapping story was a stroke of gonzo genius, but I'm not sure I appreciated all the nuances at that time, or the fact that the film genuinely tries to imagine what it would be like for these two men and the people who love them. 

I don't want to go through and pick out all the individual details -- actors I noticed that I might not have known at the time, funny lines of dialogue, etc. -- but there was one thing I wanted to call attention to because it relates to the recent news. And it does happen to involve an actor I wouldn't have known at the time.

There's a scene where Sean's daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain) is brought home by her date, and before she gets out of the car he begins forcing himself on her. Like not just flirtatious touches he hopes will go somewhere more, but actual grabbing and fondling and trying to penetrate orifices with digits. Castor, in the body of Sean, may not care inherently about the safety or purity of Jamie -- rather, he's probably more likely to consider it an infringement on his property. So he kicks the guy's ass all over the driveway.

That guy is played by Danny Masterson.

That's right, the former That 70's Show star who was just sentenced to 30 years to life after being convicted of rape. Talk about life imitating art. (We weren't actually talking about it -- I hate how people use the phrase "talk about" when they aren't actually talking about something.)

I always thought that guy was a prick, and apparently the Face/Off casting director could see it coming off him in waves as long as a quarter century ago.

Airplane movies make a comeback

I guess if you don't have actual live baseball playing during a flight, the temptation of the internet is not a death knell for airplane movies after all.

You may recall that last week I discussed taking my first flight on which free WiFi was available. I followed that up on Sunday with my second such flight, where I doubled my single movie from the first flight, narrowly fitting in two to what was described as a 3 hour and 45 minute flight. (It took a little bit longer than that, as it turned out, because air traffic control had to slow us down to avoid congestion above Melbourne. Or so I am told that's what the pilot said. I could not hear him over the general white noise of the aircraft, in his typically calm and quiet pilot voice.) 

And because it was after all the day's baseball had been completed, I resisted the apparently irresistible pull of in-flight internet and got back to the basics of what I usually do on flights: watch movies.

Here are my thoughts on the two I watched.

How to set up 199 sequels

Will we ever tire of movies about exorcists? I suspect not. There's another Exorcist reboot coming this fall as well.

Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist was a fairly traditional example of such a movie, which is not to say it was bad. Actually, I quite enjoyed Russell Crowe's performance, injected as it is with a bit of humor.

But the movie apparently thinks we are ready for as many as 199 more in the Pope's Exorcist series. 

Spoiler alert -- Crowe's character, Gabriele Amorth, emerges alive from his tanglings with a demon, or the actual devil, or whatever it may be. So does his colleague, Father Esquibel, played by Daniel Zovatto. It is revealed that the place they do their battle is one of 200 such sites on earth where fallen angels turned to demons are waiting to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting people who happen to live nearby.

In discussing that their may be 199 more places where they are needed, the two characters give each other that knowing glance and say things like "We have been put on this earth for a purpose" and "Okay, but I can't do it without a partner" and "Let me check with my agent to see if I am available to shoot the sequel." Okay maybe not that last one.

When you see this familiar setup occurring at the end of a movie that is hopeful of giving birth to multiple subsequent franchise instalments, it doesn't usually expand the potential field of future engagements so infinitely, and with such a precise number. It felt rather comical. 

Also a bit comical: The family whose son gets possessed isn't checked in on before the closing credits, except for one priest telling another "The family returned to America and the boy made a full recovery." Now granted, this is supposed to be Crowe's character's story, not a portrait of the family, but it was almost as brief and hand wavy as "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet," albeit with a happier ending.

One possible limiting factor, at least in terms of the apparent intentions of the filmmakers, is that The Pope's Exorcist ends with a postscript about how Gabriele Amorth (a real person, apparently) continued performing exorcisms in service of the church until his death in 2016. Would you include such a postscript if you wanted to make 199 sequels? Perhaps it was a hedge against the film performing poorly and this being the only one.

However, the internet does confirm that a sequel is already in the works. Plus the story takes place in 1987, 29 years before Amorth's death, so that still indicates the possibility of numerous other demon-exorcising adventures in the years to come -- whether they be real or fanciful. Hey, it's worked for The Conjuring's Ed and Lorraine Warren, hasn't it?

Donnie Darko for the astronomy set

My wife started to watch BlackBerry on my recommendation, as I finally broke down her unfounded objections by telling her it would remind her of Silicon Valley. But she had to stop because she was enjoying it too much yet finding it too hard to hear all the dialogue over the aforementioned ambient white noise. We'll watch it together at home, which is good because I am looking forward to my second viewing. 

She had wanted to watch Cocaine Bear, which had been promised to her when she'd looked up online what might be playing on the flight. But either she checked in the wrong place or it had just hit its expiration date for available content. 

So I steered her blindly toward the second movie I planned to watch, Colin West's Linoleum, thinking she might get a few laughs from it because it stars comedian Jim Gaffigan, in addition to featuring Rhea Seehorn, recently of Better Call Saul.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that sort of movie.

And the sort of movie it was was, like, almost exactly Donnie Darko. 

I won't spoil too much about the plot, but I'll give you the general setup. Gaffigan plays the host of a science TV show like Bill Nye the Science Guy, focused specifically on astronomy, who gets booted from his show in favor of a younger man who looks almost just like him (also played by Gaffigan). So he considers trying to build a rocket to live out his failed astronomer dreams. Seehorn plays his wife and co-star on the show.

The number of allusions to Richard Kelly's 2001 cult film, a personal favorite, were so many that I had to stop counting. I'll do my best to recall them all here, two days later.

1) Both movies feature an object of unknown origin falling from the sky into a suburban neighborhood, displacing the family who lives in the house where it lands. It's part of a plane in Darko, a rocket in Linoleum.

2) Both films climax in a Halloween party at which someone is either run over or almost run over by a car. (Apparently, Linoleum is more hesitant in converting than Darko, as its car accident and rocket are both near misses, while the plane engine and the car are hits in the earlier film.)

4) Both movies present a high school setting in which an oddball boy and an oddball girl connect with one another, one of the two of them being new arrivals at the school. 

3) Both movies feature suburbia and high school as mild satirical targets, including the usage of bullies.

5) Both movies feature a mysterious white-haired woman, who they call Grandma Death in Donnie Darko and whose identity is not immediately revealed in Linoleum. (We find out Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, who wrote a book about time travel.)

6) Both movies feature a shot set to music where the camera follows several characters through a setting, the excellent "Head Over Heels" high school montage in Darko and an example at the TV station where the science show is produced in Linoleum. Both sequences even feature a character meeting another character and shaking hands. 

7) Both films want to fry our noodle with metaphysical and existential quandaries, with astronomy substituting for time travel here. But suffice it to say there are elements of the story that are not presented straightforwardly that imitate the notion of time travel.

8) Both movies try to get you in the end with an emotional denouement, with pretty different levels of success. 

I have no doubt Colin West would own up to all these moments as intentional allusions, not just thefts. But their sheer quantity becomes embarrassing, even if you are doing it as a form of flattery to an obvious influence.

Linoleum gets to some semi-interesting places, but falls well short of its predecessor, as well as mildly short of a recommendation from me.

And with one plane flight, order is restored in my movie-centric world. 

The world's oldest picture gardens

I've whiffed on some of my recent attempts to see a movie in the theater while on vacation. In a town that boasts "the world's oldest operating picture gardens," I wasn't going to whiff again.

The cinema in Broome is unique in a number of respects, as you will see with the pictures I'm including below in the post. But I'll list them here as well:

1) It's old as f**k. Sun Picture Gardens was opened in December of 1916, and has been operated continuously since then. It was converted for sound in 1933. Apparently it was regularly flooded under, which did not stop them from showing movies. Legend was that you could catch fish during a movie.

2) It's partially inside, partially outside. About half the seats are outdoors while the other half are under the protection of the beams above. This unique exposed situation must mean that you can hear the movie from the neighboring businesses, which doesn't really matter because most businesses in town close before the 6 p.m. start time of the first movie. Yes this area is dead as dead can be at night. Something about the layout of the place reminded me of a makeshift cinema for troops serving in Vietnam or something like that. In addition to playing during floods, the movie plays rain or shine. 

3) It is basically directly under the landing strip for the nearby airport, so planes fly over during the movie. Unlike most major cities -- and Broome only qualifies as such by the local standards of the northern part of Western Australia -- the airport is basically right next to downtown. When planes land, they fly over the town's main street just before landing, a sight which never ceases to be awesome. Because Broome is not a common destination for travellers, these planes are only landing at most every 30 minutes by this time of the night, but several did land during the movie, a truly enthralling spectacle.

A friend of mine told me he'd seen Jungle Cruise in this theater when he and his wife travelled around Australia in 2021. That seemed especially appropriate, given what I've already said about the theater reminding me of a ramshackle Vietnam War cinema. Their friend, my friend told me, had seen Dunkirk here, and the planes landing made for a mind-blowing three-dimensional experience for that particular film. 

Both great choices. Ours was not as great, on the surface. You may recall I posted last week that I hoped The Blue Beetle would be playing, but had already determined that it was not. I guess I didn't look enough further to determine that an equally satisfactory kid-friendly option, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, was playing during school holidays instead. Not thematically fortuitous, perhaps, but a movie my kids could see that I also was curious about. From what I had seen of the trailers, the animation reminded me of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, always a good thing.

As it turns out, only one of the two kids wanted to go. The older one would have watched literally any other movie playing there -- which included Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Meg 2 and The Equalizer 3 -- so much is he over "baby things" like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So he opted not to go at all. Same was true for my wife.

But the nine-year-old and his auntie both were thrilled by the idea of watching a movie here, and the best of two TMNT showings while we were in town -- the other being programmed for the later, rather than the earlier, of two nightly time slots -- was that very evening, Wednesday evening.

The experience was great, all the more so because the movie was really fun. It is a bit Into the Turtle-Verse, but to be honest, it was pleasantly uncluttered when compared to this year's Spider-Man sequel. And there's some really respectable talent behind the camera, so to speak, including writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Plus a great array of vocal talent, from the unknowns who played the four turtles to stalwarts among recognizable names, particularly Ice Cube as the villain, Superfly.

In short, see the damn movie. It's way better than you might expect.

And there was even an appropriate thematic element. No jungle setting, no planes flying through the movie to play off the air traffic overhead, but early on in the movie, the turtles do go see a movie screening outdoors in their New York neighborhood. (They watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, one of only a few parts of the movie that isn't animated.) 

The experience of watching the movie was a real vibe, too, to quote my absent older son. There were plenty of kids there, some of whom were twirling around down front, with only a little bit of running up the aisles, minimal enough to come off as charming rather than annoying. They were able to drag down big beanbag chairs to sit in the front if they so chose. (One group was a camp, we found out while the group leader was buying tickets in front of us, and sent her colleague off to get 22 cans of soda from the snack bar.) 

A pair of less-TMNT-enthused adults in the row in front of us considered the setting informal enough to start chatting at normal volume near the climax of the movie, which threatened to really annoy me. In such situations I'm only willing to make increasingly louder "shhh" noises, but still quiet enough that the hope is they don't identify where exactly the shushing originated, and would get it almost subliminally. My sister-in-law had no such concerns. She basically openly told them to shut up, and to their credit, they did.

It was a beautiful night and easily one of the most memorable experiences on the trip. I think my sister-in-law and I even liked the movie more than the nine-year-old.

Oh, here are the pictures I promised:

Please note the plane landing in the upper right-hand corner of this next shot. This was the better of two attempts to capture how close the planes are as they are landing.

A locally themed 6,500th viewing

It seemed likely that my 6,500th viewing would be the new movie Joy Ride -- not to be confused with the 2001 movie Joy Ride, which I quite liked. I had rented it on iTunes and downloaded it to my computer, ostensibly to watch it at a time when the internet was too weak or non-existent to stream -- or then just to watch it at my first opportunity when that wasn't the case.

Of course, in my first opportunity that wasn't the case, there's a nice big TV on the living room wall of the villa in the resort where we're staying, so that attracted my attention more.

And so I went scrolling in the Netflix account that was already logged on.

In one particular section of movies, I was laughing at how I had seen literally all of them. I kept scrolling to the right as my wife, who was not planning to watch the movie with me, and I both played a game of naming off the titles we had seen.

The first one I got to that I hadn't seen, but she had -- the only such movie on the whole list, in fact -- was the Australian film Red Dog, which is beloved enough that they made a sequel. I knew even before this that she was favorable on it, which had put it on my list, albeit distantly. But the next thing she said clinched it for me:

"And that's set in this part of the world."

I needed no further encouragement to click into it, especially for a milestone movie on holiday.

Indeed, I am in the northwest of Australia -- as opposed to the southeast, where I usually spend my time -- and indeed, Red Dog is set throughout this area, but primarily in a port mining town called Dampier. On the map it doesn't look all that far from my current location of Broome, but Google tells me it is more than 850 Ks, which will take you almost nine hours.

Movies about beloved dogs, perhaps especially those based on a true story, have a built-in eyeroll factor, if you are a cinephile -- probably even if you are a dog lover cinephile. They tend to be precious and the standard for the filmmaking is pretty low. 

Red Dog gleefully upends most of those assumptions, especially in the filmmaking. The director with the highly suspicious name of Kriv Stenders has a real eye for putting together an image, as this is a truly crisp-looking picture with a lively sense of visual wit. (Cinematographer Geoffrey Hall has a long history in Australian projects, the only one of which that stood out for me was Chopper -- not a movie I remember having noteworthy visuals.) Even the tug-at-your-heartstrings dog stuff is, though, fairly muted by the standards of such a movie.

The movie looks at this shaggy community of miners in the 1970s, who have blown to Dampier from all corners of the globe and stayed where the work was. Other locals look down on them and doubt they have the capacity for the sort of kinship that forms between them, in large part due to a dog found in the middle of the highway by the two credited with starting the ramshackle community, one of whom is played by Australian character actor Noah Taylor. This serene canine seen in the poster above takes a shine to their group, available to anyone for a pat and a dose of being adjacent to the dog's intrinsic sageness, but allowing no one to call him his master. Until an American one day saves him from a game where the miners are betting on things like how quickly the dog will eat a bowl of food, before they can change up the stakes to eating a live chicken. Like I said, these guys are rough around the edges, but not incapable of a little personal growth when they're in the vicinity of Red.

Given that I knew this was a beloved Australian film, I was a little surprised that the lead is played by Josh Lucas. Most Australian films keep it local. Then again, this was based on real facts, and I imagine the real John Grant was American, so there you go. 

Anyway, the story is basically a portrait of this community throughout the life of the dog and John, though spoiler alert, it was the 1970s so the dog is not still alive. However, I wouldn't consider this the sort of "tragic dog death movie" that triggers dog lovers, and potentially gets the eyes rolling among more cynical cinephiles. 

In fact, for me it was just pure pleasure. It would have made a great 6,500th viewing even if it weren't set in the place I am currently spending my vacation. 

Stiff competition for airplane movies

I had a four-hour flight from Melbourne to Broome on Sunday. It was plenty of time for two movies, as long as they were short-ish -- or maybe not even so short, considering that we were on the tarmac for an extra 30 minutes at the start, with access to the entertainment system, as they fixed something wrong with one of the cargo straps.

I was lucky to get in one.

Granted, Benjamin Millepied's Carmen was 116 minutes, but the bigger obstacle -- and the cause for numerous pauses throughout the movie -- was being on my first-ever flight on which free WiFi was offered.

Free WiFi, of course, meant messaging people about my free WiFi -- "I'm sending you a message -- FROM AN AIRPLANE!" -- as well as what seemed like a true luxury for me: watching live baseball during a flight.

One of my fantasy pitchers was pitching during the flight, making it all the more special. (And potentially nerve-wracking on the second-to-last day of the matchup, had I not earned the bye week in my fantasy baseball playoffs.)

Fortunately, the baseball was laggy enough that I only watched it in little pieces here and there. But then I was also checking other scores, reading baseball news ... in short, all the things I usually have to do as soon as the plane lands.

If this is going to be the standard going forward, airplane movies may be in trouble. 

Now, it may not be. These circumstances were somewhat unusual. We flew Qantas, our preferred airline and one of the most consistently generous on in-flight options, but we flew it domestic, which we almost never do. In fact, we only rare fly domestically anyway, as international travel is more common for us. To my knowledge, you still don't get free WiFi on the international flights, though it's been a year since I've taken one of those on Qantas. (Our flight to Vietnam earlier in the year was a different airline.)

But if I do have free WiFi, especially on an international flight, I think the days when I collect four or five new movies on a flight may be gone. It's just too much of a temptation to resist, even if it is only things like playing Lexulous and Wordle, or checking Facebook.

And how much did an internet distraction impact my feelings on Carmen?

Well I can't say I would have liked it a lot more without pausing, but I liked it quite a bit. And since I obviously missed its theatrical run, it was going to be a paused viewing regardless.

Yeah, you should definitely check out Millipede's movie -- I mean, Millepied's movies. Does having a thousand feet make you a better director? Whether that's the case or not, I really liked his modern-day take on the opera, starring Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera, though I did check Wikipedia after the fact and determined the actual story here (a border town romance) only has a very few things in common with Georges Bizet's work. Having a thousand feet does apparently make you a better dancer, as Millepied is a dancer himself and dancing features memorably and romantically in the film.

I suppose I could have checked Wikipedia during the movie, but what can I say -- I have not worked out all the advantages of in-flight WiFi just yet.

A bold vision of the future

 Um, that's a joke.

I went fishing for something old and campy last night, on the night before I leave on my trip to Broome -- and most of all, something short.

Amazon has a ton of really marginal crap, stuff Netflix would never consider offering, and that's one of the reasons I love it as an alternative. You don't really want the streamers to be indistinguishable from one another, do you?

I thought I was in the mood for cheap horror, and I guess the movie I ended up choosing was technically given that genre. But it was the prospect of seeing the 1969 idea of what the future looks like that caused me to land on Larry Buchanan's In the Year 2889 after passing over some other good contenders.

And you know what? The year 2889 looks pretty much like the year 1969.

It's a very quaint notion that it would take the human race all the way until 850 years from now, and more than 900 years from when it was made, to destroy itself via nuclear holocaust. In a way, that is a very idealized version of our trustworthiness with nuclear weapons, especially at a time when the cold war was blazing hot. 

Then again, I guess everything just develops very slowly in the mind of Larry Buchanan, given that there is not a single design detail in this movie that suggests a modicum of scientific advancement in those 900 years. 

Buchanan does not even remotely try to update the fashion, the architecture (what little of it we do see, just a single house) nor the speech patterns of his seven characters, which dwindle as the narrative progresses. To underscore the dwindling, the most sinister character sings "Ten Little Indians," which is apparently the sort of enduring classic that is still on everyone's lips nearly a millennium later.

Look, we should not expect much from a movie like In the Year 2889, which distinguishes itself from a movie like Manos: The Hands of Fate only because the story and the dialogue represent a slightly better application of competency. Technically, it's almost just as shoddy, with the camera repositioning itself in the shot if it wasn't positioned correctly, instead of just starting the shot over, and editing that might have been performed by an epileptic. 

I do think, though, that if you are imagining an ominous future for the human race, one that current audiences feel might be closer than they feared -- and you also plan not to do any envisioning of the changes wrought by 900 years on this planet, if only because you don't have the budget -- then you are probably better off calling it In the Year 2116, or some other comparatively close future. 

(I did wonder if the title was chosen to evoke a very distant future because the song "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)" by Zager and Evans was also released in 1969. It would be like that year's version of The Asylum. I found myself singing the song all night, at the very least.)

In fact, the only thing that makes In the Year 2889 slightly entertaining from a genre perspective is some of the makeup and mask effects used to offer us human beings mutated by radiation. You get some Creature from the Black Lagoon vibes here and there.

For the most part, though, you just get 1969 humans wearing 1969 wardrobes and 1969 bathing suits talking like people from 1969 would talk, not to mention singing songs that were considered relevant in 1969.

Bold, ideed. 

I just don't want it

There's nothing wrong with Disney's live-action Little Mermaid remake.

"Nothing" is a bit of an exaggeration. You can quibble with casting choices here, flat-looking CGI there. But it's basically exactly the movie you would expect it to be.

But I discovered another reason to reject it as I was watching it:

I just don't want it.

As a critic, I operate under the assumption that every film has the potential to be the very best version of itself, and as such, has the ability to be a good or even great movie, full stop. That perspective assumes that every genre or type of movie you can find out there has the potential to yield up a five-star experience, if they get every detail exactly right.

It's a helpful perspective when reviewing movies because it allows you to look for the strengths even in genres that aren't naturally your thing. As critics, we have a responsibility to be as blank a slate as possible when coming in, open to every experience and poised to consider any film a candidate for your favorite of the year. 

But when faced with movies like The Little Mermaid, which are pretty much the exact realization of what you expect them to be, it's valid to say "I just don't want a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid."

Some context here: I don't consider the original Little Mermaid from 1989 some sacred text that should not be remade. In fact, I've seen it only once. That's not the argument I am making. 

The argument I'm making is that it's possible to say a movie is handled just about as competently as you might expect within its basic anticipated parameters and yet you still just don't care for it.

I think maybe the key phrase there is "anticipated parameters." These Disney remakes are only rarely capable of straying outside certain predetermined dimensions. David Lowery's two Disney remakes, Pete's Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy, are good examples of movies that allow some of the director's own creative instincts to breach Disney's controls. It's kind of like when a Taika Waititi is able to shake up the Marvel formula, only to prove that this is really the exception as scads more basic bitch Marvel movies follow it.

It occurs to me that there was a chance, at least in unsubstantiated internet rumors, for The Little Mermaid to be that truly special exception. Before the spate of Disney live-action remakes really took off, Sofia Coppola was linked to the original Hans Christian Anderson material. Actually, now that I google it, these rumors are substantiated, as there is even a cast list for this project that never was. (AnnaSophia Robb was to have played Ariel.) Absolutely she would have deviated from the rigid template offered up by the screenplay of the original 1989 movie, as every movie made by Sofia Coppola -- with the possible exception of On the Rocks -- is very evidently a Sofia Coppola movie.

Disney never would have allowed such deviations, and so instead, The Little Mermaid was made by Rob Marshall -- who does not have the same directorial signature. Yes he was the director of Chicago, which I love, but beyond that he has felt more like a director for hire, and The Little Mermaid feels like a movie lacking in vision.

(As a side note, given all the other ways this movie succeeds in terms of representation, I'm a bit surprised they let a man direct the movie, having options within their own family of someone like Niki Caro, who directed Mulan for them a couple years ago. That's especially the case with material that has traditionally received criticism for failing to give agency to its heroine, who literally does not have a voice for much of the movie.)

So am I really saying anything other than the fairly standard complaint of "The Little Mermaid could have been better if they were willing to just take actual risks and did a slightly better job with the CGI?"

Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But the reason I'm writing this post is that I did have sort of a revelation while watching this movie, that flies in the face of my previous critical assumptions:

Some movies can basically tick all the boxes and undermine your critical nitpicking and still just be something you don't, and maybe never did, want.

Perhaps this is the very example of the modern definition of mediocrity.

A long wait for The Dry 2

I'm going to be in Broome in Western Australia next week on vacation. Naturally, I did some advanced scouting of the movie theater there. (It's pretty small so I assume there's only one.)

I was hoping The Blue Beetle, which opens today, might be playing, because that's something I can see with the kids. But it doesn't look like it at this particular theater.

Just to be sure, I checked out the coming soon movies, and followed it to the end of the listings, which is where I found something really funny.

Now, Force of Nature: The Dry 2 was supposed to already be out. But cascading consequences of the writer's strike -- something I need to write about at some point -- has pushed forward the release date.

But I didn't think it would be pushing it out this far:

In case you're having trouble reading that, I thought I would blow it up for you:

I think they might have gotten the release year of The Dry 2 confused with the year in which its neighbor, Dune 2, takes place.