A helpful defense against stupidity

There have been a disappointing number of my Friday the 13th movies available through my streaming services. In fact, I believe I've paid to rent every single one since Friday the 13th Part III. I rented one or two through my American AppleTV, but then got wise to the fact that renting through Amazon with Australian dollars was slightly cheaper.

And on the last two, I noticed what you see to the right. Look specifically to the bottom of that image, since I didn't do any thing to highlight it. 

Even though you have to click once to start the rental process, and then a second time to confirm you want to do it, the nice people at Amazon -- I mean, I assume the ones who aren't Jeff Bezos are nice -- have given you yet a third strike before you're out. 

And I'm not sure how long you have to do a change-of-mind cancel, but I can tell you that the window was still there when I went to take this screenshot of my Jason X rental, the morning after I'd watched the movie. Probably that's just the screen not refreshing, because I have to imagine they're at least smart enough to prevent you from returning a bottle of soda you've already drunk. 

It's good customer service that they could probably get away without offering.

The change-of-mind cancel is something I first noticed on Snapfish a few years ago. After submitting one of your photo books, they give you an hour to go in and change it -- though maybe not cancel it, I don't know, I've never tried. That's really nice, because it's very easy to imagine, with a complex order like that relying on so many individual decisions, that you could easily forget that you meant to change out one photo, or move a two-page spread to later in the book.

The Amazon rental cancellation is a bit more for the thick-headed, who somehow misclicked two different times to actually process such an order. 

Then again, maybe they figured they don't have to use it very much, but at least they get the positive press from people like me, taking notice of it and writing about in on their blogs. 

Future Jason

Ho hum. These Friday the 13th movies are so predictable. Jason awakens from cryogenic freeze in the 25th century and fights an android on a spaceship. When are they going to start coming up with something actually new?

Ha.

Right up until just before I rented Jason X on Sunday night, I was under the impression this tenth entry in the series, which came nine years after the last entry, was just another standard reboot, that put Jason Voorhees in just another series of standard Jason Voorhees situations.

Lo and behold, this is a Jason that has been dormant for 450 years, meaning that everyone who was originally charged with dispatching him did, finally, successfully end the Jason Voorhees threat, at least in their lifetime. And then in the lifetimes of about 20 other generations. So, for all practical purposes, forever.

In fact, Earth itself died before this Jason came back to life. We learn fairly early on in Jason X that the planet is no more, at least as a practical home for human beings, having become unable to sustain life. The ship our characters are aboard is en route to Earth 2, though not for the first time, I don't think. These may be the last humans remaining, but I don't think the movie ever says that, and if so, they are certainly not a collection of Earth's best and brightest. Then again, once again I started watching too late at night, and would not be able to verify every little detail of what happens in this movie.

Before we get too far in, I want to make a random observation about this series in terms of its cast.

I've enjoyed pointing out, every once in a while, when a "real" actor makes an appearance -- in other words, someone who has gone on to do something else after this. Those sorts of actors were plentiful in the Halloween movies; Paul Rudd is in one of the worst of those movies, if you recall. Such actors are very much the exception in this series, such that in some movies, there aren't any to be found. There is one in this movie, and it's a funny one: David Cronenberg in an acting role. He exits during the cold open. 

But by the late date of 2002, I thought for sure they'd try to get someone with some name recognition in the movie -- beyond a guy known more for his directing than his acting -- even if they had a mandate to keep the budget low. I thought 2002 was close enough to our current era, when they would absolutely include someone recognizable. Nope.

And the names of non-famous actors just sound made up, don't they? Like names you'd only see in a straight-to-video movie. Consider some of the names that appear in the opening credits of this movie:

Lexa Doig
Dov Tiefenbach
Melyssa Ade
Peter Mensah
Barna Moricz

Who are these people?

Even the director, James Isaac, sounds made up. But my favorite made-up name in the credits is the director of photography: Derick V. Underschultz. Underschultz? That's a thing? He doesn't even spell my first name in one of the two most preferred ways. 

While we're talking credits, for some reason at the very end I noticed the name of a person in a role called "fact checker," which is a simply hilarious concept in any film, let alone this one. We all know that films have creative license and are not bound by facts, especially when they include all those disclaimers about coincidence resemblances to persons living and dead. But that's especially true in a film set in 2455. Anyway, man with this title is called Morris L'Explicateur.

And yes it's a joke. Apparently, there is an old industry trope of a character known as Morris the Explainer, whose only role is to advance the plot through exposition. I'm not sure why someone decided to assign him to the role of "fact checker" in Jason X, though it does appear to be unique to this movie, at least according to Google's AI. 

So how the hell did Jason get into cryogenic freeze? 

It's certainly not as a result of anything that happened in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which I watched on Saturday night and wrote about yesterday. You may recall, if only from reading my post about it, that Jason gets dragged down by the hands of Hell at the end of that one, though given the supernatural element of that, maybe that's a less definitive rather than more definitive final resting place for him.

Most of these movies have at least connected the dots between where Jason ended up at the end of the last movie and where we find him at the beginning of this movie, but not Jason X. And part of that might be a rights issue. I'm mentioning my viewings to my team of writers in an ongoing messenger chat, and one of them told me that the words Friday the 13th don't appear in the title of Jason Goes to Hell because they didn't have the rights to use them. That's also true here. So if you're just trying to make a buck on IP, maybe you don't care if the internal logic of your mythology -- such as it is -- is sound. 

But yes, they've got a neutralized, though very much alive, version of Jason at the start of this movie. He's suspended in air and chained up in a secret laboratory, but we do see an eye flickering around behind the mask as proof of life. This is only the near future, not the distant future, and in this secret research facility, they are experimenting with cryogenics. Why they want to use the world's most notorious serial killer as a test subject is beyond me. I'm sure they did explain it and I nodded off for a second.

Anyway, just before he's put into freeze, he escapes and kills a bunch of people, including David Cronenberg, but then he and another woman are both frozen, to awaken in the 25th century. Because why not?

It's funny to watch this just on the heels of watching Idiocracy on my birthday earlier this week. I didn't mention this on the blog, because I didn't have anything really new to say about Idiocracy on my fifth viewing. But yes, my wife surprised me with a birthday viewing, also a first-time viewing for our kids, at least the older of whom seemed to like it. Anyway, a cryogenic freezing from the early 20th century to the 25th century is, indeed, what happens in Idiocracy also, though I hardly think Mike Judge took inspiration from Jason X. 

So yes, entirely new setting, entirely new technologies (including those that can keep reviving Jason as he gets blown up and torn apart again), and yes, androids! An actress named Lisa Ryder -- still not someone I've heard of, but maybe not with such a made-up-sounding name -- plays this android, and she might have been one of my favorite parts of the movie. She's a good android, in the mold of someone like Bishop from Aliens ... and I wouldn't be surprised if these filmmakers did take inspiration from Aliens. Anyway, there's some decent humor related to this character, like the time she is trying on artificial nipples for her shipboard boyfriend as a way of being more human. (Otherwise she's smooth like a Barbie doll.) Her perky good humor keeps things lively enough.

The rest of the plot is probably not worth going into. It's not as ludicrous as I'd hoped it would be, outside of the general premise. I did find there to be one or two interesting bits of sci-fi technology in it. 

And Jason does get a makeover near the end, to a new, more badass version of his character design. Though this comes pretty late and isn't as satisfying a reveal as you would hope.

There's only one more movie I have to watch, which is Freddy vs. Jason, and which came only a year later in 2003. I'd say that this being a mashup movie, it's likely not beholden to the narrative in either series. I'll wrap up this epic project on Friday night, one night before Halloween. 

Hell is other people

You really didn't expect me to get all highfalutin and start quoting Jean-Paul Sartre in the ninth (!) post this month about the Friday the 13th series, now did you?

Well it wouldn't be the first time. In fact, the series already did it once itself. 

In my favorite entry of the series so far, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, one of the jokes -- yes, this series had finally started figuring out how to be funny -- was that a young camper, who couldn't be more than ten, falls asleep with Sartre's No Exit open on her chest. That's the actual play where that quotation originates.

But although the series may not be making an explicit nod to Sartre in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the use of the word "hell" in the title gives me an avenue to do so -- and I wonder if they weren't also hip to what they were doing. 

You see, in Jason Goes to Hell, the movie is not really about Jason, or not the visual incarnation of the Jason we usually expect. In Jason Goes to Hell, Jason literally is "other people."

Before I talk about that, let me just say that this is now my second favorite film in the series, though not to the level of Part VI. The second best movie only means it gets an actual recommendation, albeit a marginal one: three stars on Letterboxd. And it's truly different from the other movies, as I sort of expected it to be -- though not at all in the way I expected. 

When I heard that title, and figured by the ninth movie they had given up any semblance of taking themselves seriously, I imagined this movie might literally be a trip through Hell for Jason. He'd be in a typical rocky red environment with pools of lava and random bursts of flame, and he'd be slitting through the throats of all-time jerks in world history, maybe even doing battle with the devil in the final act.

The fact that this movie doesn't literally have anything to do with Hell -- until, perhaps, the final shot or two -- just makes me wonder all the more about the intentionality of the Sartre allusion. 

See, we only get to see Jason with his usual mask for about three minutes in the first ten minutes of this movie, which leads to the most intentionally comical scene in the whole series thus far.

We've got what we think is our typical horny teenager opening, with a woman disrobing for a bath and eventually running through the woods for her life. But this is no hapless, unwitting victim. It turns out she was a plant, to set a trap for the world's most famous aspiring hockey player. And once he does spring, she does a professional gymnastic roll out of the scene, having done her bit. Now it's time for the others to do theirs. And these others are about 20 military men with guns who were all in hiding around this spot where Jason gets baited. How they knew that was exactly where he would appear is pretty unclear, though you won't want to complain about that given the reward of what happens.

And what happens is that they open fire en masse, riddling Jason with bullets, then blowing the ever-loving shit out of him with a grenade. 

It's hilarious. There's no way it was meant to be taken with a straight face. And that pleases me considerably. The movie hasn't succeeded in being funny since Part VI, but now it's done it again. 

The men celebrate. In fact, the world celebrates. And this is the first time, I think, that it is acknowledged a) what Jason's actual body count is, and b) how that translates to worldwide fame.

Even when he went to Manhattan in the last episode, there was no sense of any of the bystanders saying, or even thinking, "Hey, that's Jason Voorhees!" They just look on stupidly and shake their head: "Another Tuesday night in New York."

But when someone is responsible for 83 deaths -- that's the number given by a newscaster in the reporting of the likely actual death of Jason Voorhees -- you better bet the world knows about him. All the serial killers we know by name didn't even get halfway to that count. 

The detonation leads to an autopsy of the strewn body parts that used to be Jason Voorhees, which is also kind of hilarious, because the cause of death should be pretty obvious. But I think the police can't believe they actually have a certified Jason Voorhees corpse, or what's left of it, and in another funny bit, one forensic specialist gets the chance to say what he wants to say to this corpse responsible for so many deaths. The short diatribe of insults is funny, dripping with schadenfreude, but of course, these will be this man's last words.

See, the other coroner performing the autopsy has just been mesmerized by Jason's suddenly beating heart, and taken a bite out of it, at which point, little bits of Jason from around the room have flown into his body, completing with vapor trails of magical lasery light. This man -- known character actor Richard Gant -- is now the reincarnated Jason, only he's still performing the usual Jason mayhem in his own body.

Jason's soul/spirit/whatever get passed around between carriers in this movie, and the way it's transferred is through a long, grotesque worm-like object emanating from each throat, which you would not be blamed for mistaking for a blackened tongue. That's just some of the really quite good makeup and other practical effects, which are also essentially making their debut in the series. See, that's one of the things that's been so shoddy about this series -- it has barely even required anything good in terms of gore effects. Well, that all changes with this movie, where we also gets some good bits like partial beheadings and melting faces. 

Want to know what else is in this movie? A split diopter shot! I know, I was as surprised as you are. That's when two extreme depths of a shot are in focus at the same time due to a trick that's performed on the lens to split it. I thought only really ambitious directors involved in pretty distinct properties would use one of these shots, but apparently, director Adam Marcus (who?) is up to the task. And it looks really good!

I wonder if the passage of four years, from 1989 to 1993, was enough to sort of consider this a reboot of the series, even though such a thing did not really exist back then. (Heck, your average person might not even know what rebooting a computer was in 1993.) Nowadays, series are always trying to inject new life with new creative talents bringing new perspectives to the material, but this series had so rarely done that, it genuinely surprised me when they did with this one.

The story itself is also pretty interesting. Although there's a bit of disappointment from seeing "Jason" not in his classical form, but in the bodies of other actors who aren't wearing masks, that's more than balanced out by this film's conceit. And it's not a great conceit necessarily, but at least it's something, and it reminded me a bit of all the family stuff in the Halloween series. 

We learn that the only way to really kill Jason dead is for him to be killed by a blood relative. Because why not, this is also the only way he can be fully revived. So you can bet there's one of each in this movie, a blood relative who can revive him (Erin Gray, in an early role) and one who can kill him if given the chance. I did enjoy this because it felt like good effort in the right direction, especially since they seemed genuinely interested in wrapping up the series at this point. 

Oh and if there were not enough interesting things going on in this movie, we even get a mercery played with a lot of fun and gusto by Steven Williams. He specializes in tracking down serial killers and has a grand old time interacting with the other characters with a devilish glint in his eye as he circles his prey. There's a great scene in a jail cell where he breaks the main guy's fingers one at a time as a price for getting information about Jason. I don't totally get the function of this scene because this guy is supposed to be a hero, sort of, but he's the sort of hero who's not above breaking the fingers of a good character just for sport. 

Anyway, the whole thing moves along quickly and of course we do get a proper Jason again by the end. 

And I guess I'm spoiling this movie, so if you don't want to know what happens at the very end, you should avert your eyes now.

Actual Hell finally comes into the movie at the very end, when Jason is finally delivered the fatal -- really, permanently fatal, we swear -- blow by said blood relative, resulting in more shooting lasers from the sky, the kind of thing that tells you something outside the ordinary is really happening. Oh there's also a magic dagger. Why not? To let us know that he's really, truly, we swear, permanently dead, arms emerge from the ground and pull him down to Hell. That's it for Jason. All that's left is the hockey mask left slightly submerged in the dust. 

But of course it can't really be it. They knew it even at the time they made this movie. The last thing we see is Jason's mask pulled under the ground by ... Freddy Krueger's claw!

I thought this was great, but now that I've gone back to the franchise page on Wikipedia, I'm confused. The next movie in the series is not Freddy vs. Jason. It's actually 2002's Jason X, which I plan to watch later on today. But both most have been in the works simultaneously because Freddy vs. Jason -- the final film of this series, which I will watch at some point before Halloween night during what figures to be a busy week with at least two nights out -- came only a year after that, in 2003. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Misery

Welcome to the only remaining of my two bi-monthly 2026 series appreciating the career of Rob Reiner in the wake of his passing. The other series, devoted to the films of his I haven't seen, was cut short by the lack of availability of one film and the lack of an expected release of the other. This series, which reviews six of my favorite Reiner films, still continues and still has one final entry in December.

The ability to watch Misery, Rob Reiner's only horror movie, during the month of Halloween cause me to scramble a few things about the chronology of this series. Given what happened to the other series, as you just read in my italicized intro, a scrambled chronology is the least of our worries.

Only two things about that:

1) Because it is set in a wintry Colorado, the movie makes me think more about winter than it makes me think about Halloween;

2) I'm not sure it's actually a horror movie, really. 

Because Misery was written by Stephen King, we easily lump it into the category of horror. Horrifying things happen in it, to be sure. But as I was watching it this time, I wasn't getting the horror vibe from it I thought I'd get. In fact, with the wintry setting, the vibe might have been more similar to another wintry classic from the 1990s I watched earlier this month, Fargo, especially with the similar role and similar  folksy vibe of the small-town police officer bringing himself too close to danger. Unlike Marge Gunderson, though, Richard Farnsworth's Buster does not emerge from the experience unscathed.

Of course, whether or not it's a horror -- which it certainly is in the most obvious forms of its categorization -- has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. Which I still found to be quite high, unsurprisingly, in this, my first viewing in almost exactly ten years. 

It's certainly more of a horror movie than the first King adaptation Reiner directed, Stand by Me, which I also watched for this series back in June. Although Mike Flanagan has lately taken huge strides in making himself the preeminent King adapter, at least in terms of quantity -- it might be too much, really -- guys like Reiner and Frank Darabont were who we associated with King for a while there. 

I was reminded that this is also a script by the great William Goldman, which is one of the reasons it's so good.

Another major reason, so obvious it's barely with stating: the yin and yang performances of Kathy Bates and James Caan in the primary roles. Since Bates won an Oscar for this performance, let's take her second and start out with Caan.

How understated is this actor? Caan obviously had some showy roles in his career, such as The Godfather, but let's credit both Caan and Reiner for the way he underplays Paul Sheldon. As we might expect from a writer with a keen intellect, Paul always clocks exactly what he's up against in Annie Wilkes, even before he discovers she was responsible for actual murders in the past. There is, in fact, some amount of trial and error in the way he tries to manipulate her, but none of it involves histrionics of any sort. With certain types of psychos, you know raging at them will be wasted energy, and will worsen your situation significantly. We believe that he is ultimately able to manipulate her to the extent that he is because he hasn't frittered away too much good will on false avenues that were never likely to bear fruit. Paul experiences tremendous loss in this film, and not just the use of his feet when Annie hobbles him. As a person who is obsessed with making backups of my data, I am most impacted by the burning of his sole copy of the book that may be the best he's ever written. But even in this scene, he doesn't resort to naked pleading, and there's only a single line of dialogue in which he tries to appeal to her better nature. He knows this effort is likely to fail, and the harder he tries, the more likely it is to fail. Instead we just see, in small adjustments of his expression, what the stakes are for him, and the new levels of despair to which he's sunk.

What's so incredible about Bates' performance is how far off the reservation she's willing to go. She is the opposite of Paul in that she's constantly going big -- big happy emotion, big angry emotion, big sad emotion. The big sad emotion is perhaps the scariest, even more than the yelling and the brandishing of furniture, because this is one form of bigness that's underplayed, if that makes any sense. We think of it as "big" because it's such a shift from her prior demeanors, but it has a certain suicidal deadness, perhaps the most determined of any emotion she shows in its utter inability to be negotiated. But what I really enjoy about Bates here is how weird she's willing to be, like when she scrambles around the room, oinking like a pig. There's zero vanity in this role, and that's what Academy voters recognized when they honored her with an Oscar. She was giving us a real person -- a scary, incredibly unhinged real person, but a person who struck us as so real because of her complete psychological profile. We believe she would imprison her favorite writer in her house, making it up as she goes along, because despite her ability to see the next move in how to keep him here and avoid discovery, her long game is flawed, incomplete, and likely to end in disaster for the both of them. Just as it would be for most normal people in this situation -- or maybe I should say most "real" people, because Annie Wilkes is not normal.

What makes their final brutal fight, complete with eye-gouging and screaming and the use of any available objects, so cathartic is that we finally get a reversal not only of their power dynamics, but of their personas. Paul finally lets loose in a way he knows there's no coming back from, and Annie has finally left herself open to attack. It's a really satisfying climax for the film.

One thing I wanted to say about Goldman's script, that I find very interesting, is that it contains no family for Paul Sheldon -- not even any whiff of a backstory related to a family. It's one of the things that keeps the script so clean and focused. Today, there would be a daughter or an estranged wife looking for him, and maybe that person would even be imperiled in the climax. Goldman didn't see any need for that. We don't have to have maximum empathy for this man in the form of a family who would suffer from his loss. It should be enough that he's in a terrible situation that he doesn't deserve, even if he's a bit of a prick, and may not be the kind of person who treats people with the right amount of delicacy or deference. And Goldman was right to think this because Misery doesn't need it. 

In terms of Reiner's contributions, Misery is pretty dissimilar to anything he'd made previously or would make again. It may be the best example of how Reiner was, at his core, an extremely competent technician, maybe not possessed of a particular look or filmmaking flourishes, but just an excellent studio director capable of turning out a tight and exciting finished product. Misery is that and then some.

I'm hoping I'll wrap up this series with The Sure Thing in December, but you may recall that this was supposed to be the movie I watched way back in February, when I had hoped to go in chronological order for this particular incarnation of the bi-monthly series. When I couldn't do that, I then started to go in order of the films' rankings on Flickchart, but I ultimately threw that out too. I think I might have a lead on getting a copy of The Sure Thing, but if I can't, there are other options. I won't let this series flicker out like the other one did, anyway. 

A failure to enter comedy mode

I've watched the first eight Friday the 13th movies now, which means I only have three left, not counting the reboot, which I watched only last year and will not be watching again.

It also means I've finally watched all the Friday the 13th movies made in the 1980s. It was, informally, the most movies made in any franchise in any decade in history. (Let's not look too closely at the really old series, like the Charlie Chan movies, where they probably made three movies a year.)

With a series that has announced its return multiple times, with such suggestive subtitles as A New Beginning, Jason Lives and The New Blood, I might have reasonably expected Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan to be the first real reimagining of the core elements of the series. 

For one, the location would be wholly different than anything we had experienced before. Nary a tall building had been seen at any point in this series thus far. 

Secondly, it figured to be -- it should be -- a comedy, with that title. 

Yes on the former, not so much on the latter. 

Yes I certainly expected the ludicrousness of Jason Voorhees appearing in New York City to be played for laughs, at least on some level. And I guess you can say, it barely attains that "on some level" designation. But this movie is mostly told with a straight face. None of the absurd jokey bits, the kind you might in Gremlins 2, were present here. Jason doesn't chase anybody up the Statue of Liberty. He doesn't appear at the end of a line of Rockettes, kicking out his legs in the same manner as they do, before cutting the nearest Rockette in half. He doesn't shove a particularly large slice of pizza down someone's throat.

He does chase someone through the subway, and the presence of this subway was the first real evidence that they actually shot in New York. For a while there, I wasn't sure, but the subway and the long escalator into the subway station confirmed it. Later on you get a Times Square shot that also confirms it. Being on location in New York City is more budget than I would have given this film credit for. 

Let's pause for a minute to consider this film's perspective on New York, which is funny, and which reminds us this was just before New York got its first big clean-up under Rudy Giuliani. They still considered it to be a bit the 1970s hellhole we saw on screen in films of that era. The opening title sequence, before the action returns to the obligatory opening at Crystal Lake, features a man getting mugged in an alley, and his empty wallet getting discarded by the muggers in a barrel of what appears to be toxic waste. A rat emerges from the liquid, suggesting maybe this waste isn't as toxic as we thought, or at least the rat is impervious to its toxicity. As if to drive home the specific mis-en-scene of this shot, director Rob Hedden holds on this shot that contains the rat, the empty wallet and the barrel of toxic waste for like ten seconds. 

We have to get Jason back to life, again, so there's a return to Crystal Lake, where a couple horny teenagers are on a houseboat, ready to get freaky deeky. Some odd combination of a lightning strike, an anchor, and a high voltage line once again resuscitates Jason, who was once again successfully dispatched in the previous movie and has been sunk to the bottom of the lake. But as we know, Jason never stays dead.

How the hell does he get to New York, you ask? Did we even know Crystal Lake was in New York state? Maybe we did.

So he hitches a ride with a boat that's going to New York City by water, though I don't totally understand the logistics of that. It's some sort of school field trip, chaperoned by two bickering teachers, one of whom I recognized from other things. Look I was already sort of falling asleep near the beginning. It's been a busy week. 

Speaking of people I thought I recognized from other things, there's an aspiring rock musician on this boat who gets dispatched pretty early on, who I could have sworn was Chrissy Hynde from the Pretenders. It isn't, so never mind. 

So then there's a lot of killing on the boat, and finally, about five of them make it to New York, where the stuff we really came for starts happening. And it's pretty disappointing. Not a single Rockette to be seen.

The thing that I did find sort of funny is to see Jason doing his thing with a million random New Yorkers as witnesses. It kind of undercuts the supposed menace of a serial killer, who tends to be alone with his prey in the lead-up to their death. If there are 75 other people looking on, in various states of bemusement/disbelief, in theory, they'd be able to gang up on the killer and neutralize him. Of course, that they don't is consistent with the film's take on New Yorkers and the city itself, as underscored by the toxic waste barrel with the rat. These people might as well just be parts of the scenery for how willing they are to intervene to help somebody other than themselves. 

Oh in terms of the rest of the plot, the Final Girl this time is the aquaphobic niece of the male teacher chaperone, who has some kind of kinship to Jason due to her uncle throwing her in Crystal Lake as a child, knowing she couldn't swim but trying to create a "sink or swim" moment in her development. Jason, at that point taking the form of his child self, grabbed her leg but did not drown her, so this girl continues to both "see" and actually see Jason throughout the movie. Hey, it's at least an attempt to give some extra soul to some otherwise pretty soulless proceedings. 

Jason gets drowned? melted? dissolved? in a flood of toxic waste at the end, or at least I think that's what happened. If so, it's the first existential threat to his corporeal form in the series. And maybe there will be some sort of weird afterlife depicted in the next film, which took four more years to make, by far the longest drought in the series to that point. It's called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and I'll watch it at some point this weekend. That would be -- could be, at least -- a true reimagining of this series. 

And of course, it's not actually the final Friday, again. There will be two more movies after that, bringing me up to the end of the month. 

Incidentally Irish

Why does it bum me out so much that in order to make a new movie, John Carney had to make an "Irish" movie about two immature Americans fighting over a song credit?

It's not the first time Carney has "gone Hollywood," whether he thought, in his heart of hearts, that it was a good idea or not. 

The director of Once took six years to follow up that singular hit, and when he did so, it was with the movie Begin Again, set in New York and starring -- well, not Americans in all roles, I guess, because the headliner is probably Brit Keira Knightley. But Knightley shares the screen with two very American people, Mark Ruffalo and Adam Levine, with Catherine Keener and Hailee Steinfeld in supporting roles. (And James Corden, as regrettable as that may seem now -- so I guess Carney was trying to represent the British Isles as much as he could.) I'd have reason to complain about that movie just as much as Power Ballad, but I did like Begin Again -- more than most people, anyway.

So maybe it was just the specific construction of Power Ballad, which I saw on Tuesday night, that bothered me. More than I would have been bothered if the whole thing was just set in the U.S., as Begin Again was. 

Carney is trying to stick to his Irish roots, which he also did in the other two films that I haven't mentioned yet, Sing Street and Flora and Son. He's set most of the action in this movie in Dublin. But the plot revolves around one ex-pat and a graduate of a boy band, played by Paul Rudd and real-life boy band graduate Nick Jonas. I can imagine the conversation where he tried to get a mick into one of the roles, but whoever was controlling the purse strings said no. (A friend of mine reasoned that it would have been a great role for Colin Farrell, though probably not up to Farrell's usual highbrow standards.)

It's weird seeing so many Irish actors clearly playing second fiddle to these two Americans. We're talking bandmates in the wedding band, Rudd's wife and daughter, even some neighbors sprinkled in for good measure. None of whom feels the least bit essential to the plot, even when there are specific plot points that revolve around them. 

Interestingly, the most famous Irish actor in the cast, Jack Raynor, actually plays an American. He's Jonas' asshole manager, never for a moment trying to fool us that he might be a redeemable character. (Unlike Jonas' character, who is written to have a redemption arc and then just winds up as a weaselly little shit -- one of a number of problems with this movie, which I did otherwise like enough to give three out of five stars.)

We are at such a vulnerable time for film, with great risks like Digger failing, and studios conglomerating in a way that can't mean good things for the finished product. So it's all the more disappointing to be confronted with these specific examples of the business rearing its head so prominently. 

Power Ballad could not be made with Irish actors. It had to have two baby-faced Americans, both with a history of selling real tickets, in order to receive its green light.

And this is no shade on Carney, though I might have some shade on the specific choices he made. Of the only five movies he's been able to direct in the 19 years since Once, three have been steadfastly Irish, even if the last one did have some star power of sorts in the form of Bono's daughter, Eve Hewson, who has proven her rizz by getting cast in Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. If Carney could make another Once, he would do it in a heartbeat.

But Once was a singular film. You could only make it once. 

So instead we get Power Ballad, incidentally Irish, and probably better if it just been zero percent Irish rather than a weak 30. 

Back to mid

As you know, two years ago during October, I watched all the Halloween movies I hadn't seen yet, which was all but three of them, and the first one I rewatched just to put myself back in the mindset. I didn't rewatch Halloween III or the Rob Zombie remake, though I did watch the sequel to that remake.

So naturally, I'm inclined to compare the experience of watching all those movies with the experience of watching all the Friday the 13th movies (except the remake) this October. 

It seems that Halloween had higher highs but lower lows. There were a handful of movies in that series that I have positive feelings about, and the original and Halloween III are surely better than any Friday the 13th movie I've seen. But the Halloween stinkers? I think I gave at least four movies in that series only a one-star rating on Letterboxd. I really, really disliked them. 

Nothing has gotten that low in Friday the 13th. Maybe I'm two years softer in my ratings tendencies, but I haven't gone as low as one star on any of the seven movies I've watched. I've gone 1.5 stars three different times, but the two lowest ratings -- one star and the dreaded half star -- have thus far been avoided.

When I really liked Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, I thought maybe, just maybe, the series was steering itself into positive territory. I thought this could be the kind of streak of good ideas and interesting filmmaking that sustained itself for a couple movies.

Nope. We're back to mid with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. But at least it is mid -- two stars -- and not just plain bad.

While we're on the topic of Letterboxd, I just wanted to say the series is starting to get janky about having any consistency with its naming conventions. Since I'm looking at them back to back on my Letterboxd diary, I can see that the last movie is called Jason Lives - Friday the 13th Part VI, while this one, as the poster above will confirm, is Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood. Not only is there the switching of whether the franchise name comes first or second, but I swear they used to use colons rather than dashes. For now, I'm just using the convention I've written above, which involves a colon. I'll sort the rest out with my personal List Gods later on. 

It's not that they didn't try to do something new with this movie. As the title promises, there is indeed new blood, and you can see half of her face up there alongside Jason's mask. That's Tina, played by Lar Park Lincoln, an apparent replacement for the protagonist of the last three films, Tommy Jarvis. Tommy did not die, by the way, so either they gave him a happy ending, or he'll be back in one of the four more movies I still have to see. 

The thing about Tina is that she's telekinetic. Her backstory is that after her parents had an argument when she was young -- I think her father actually hit her mother -- she goes out into a boat on, you guessed it, Crystal Lake. When her father comes to the dock to try to bring her back in, with apologies and promises never to do it again, Tina's emotions get so heightened that she destroys the dock with her mind and plunges her father into the lake. Where, I suppose, we're meant to believe he sustained a head injury and didn't resurface, though I have to say, it's the sort of event that shouldn't have necessarily killed him. 

Some number of years later -- the actress was 27 at the time -- we follow Tina as an adult, though I think she's supposed to be a late teen or early twentysomething with how they treat her and the fact that the father's death is still weighing on her enough to talk about how much she misses him. (Her abuser father, who hit her mother when he got drunk. Maybe he had some other good qualities.) Anyway, the funny thing about this is that her therapist, who is always doing tests to bring about her telekinesis so she can control it better, is played by Terry Kaiser -- none other than Bernie Lomax from Weekend at Bernie's. (And yes, he does ultimately become a corpse here.) 

The problem with this conceit for the movie is that it creates a second supernatural element that has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees. Generally speaking -- and this is something recent superhero movies have exploded -- you want the main supernatural element in the film, the thing that distinguishes it to begin with, to be the one thing that's different from our normal world. Generally speaking, you don't want a movie about vampires where there is also time travel. 

You could argue, though, that they already threw the rules out in some of the previous movies, maybe nowhere more notably than the movie I liked most in the series, Jason Lives. Not only is this a world where people can return from the dead through unexplained posthumous reanimation, but it's also a world where a specific action -- the strike of a lighting bolt into a conducting piece of metal -- can create reanimation, like it did for Frankenstein's monster.

Then again, those are variations on the same theme. Telekinesis is entirely different. 

And naturally, Tina's telekinesis is going to factor into the finale. But I was pretty disappointed with the way they used it. For one, she has to use it about four different times, with each one creating the impression that Jason might be, could be, really dead. The most comical of these is when she brings the roof of a house down on him and then tells another character that she's killed him, when that is about the least likely thing to kill Jason of anything that has occurred to him in these seven movies. We get to the point, with these multiple fake-out endings, where we just don't actually feel optimistic that anything she's doing has any hope of ending the Jason threat. 

I will say, though, that there's a fun bit at the end that I won't spoil that works as a callback to something earlier in the movie that we've basically forgotten, and that this was one bit of true cleverness in the script.

Everything else? Not so hot. We're back to horny young people (calling them teenagers, as I have been doing, is probably aging them downward by five to ten years) getting coitally interrupted by a Jason sharp object. Ho hum. Enough characters are introduced to give the film its requisite body count, but as usual, we can't distinguish them and they are generally not killed in interesting ways.

So I'd say that basically all the oomph, related both to Jason's character and to the filmmaking, that Tom McLoughlin brought to the previous film is gone. This is back in the mold of the uninspired first five movies of the series, with the telekinetic providing a few flickers of interest but generally not adjusting the core dynamic of the series.

The thing I might mourn the most is how Jason reverts to having no personality. The personality he shows in the previous film was subtle but evident; not enough to make the film actually jokey, but enough to give him a presence other than what I called him in a group chat with some friends, a "transitional basic brute." He did transition to something else in the last movie, but he's lost that momentum in this one.

I suspect I'll have an entirely different comic sensibility to grapple with in the shock to the system that will likely be Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. 

Friday the 13th lives!

Long-running series with the same recurring killer always play with the notion of how dead he really is. Like, they've got to kill him off at some point, because they need to give the audience that satisfaction, and possibly they thought they weren't going to make any more movies. (Ah, such innocence.) 

But is he really dead? Is he dispatched and presumed dead, but never actually dead? Or was he temporarily dead but not immune to revival? Unless we see a proof of "permanent" death, we don't know. (Michael Myers, in the Halloween series, famously came back from having his head chopped off. Then again, that was just a copycat.) I mean, Jason Voorhees himself starts the series being dead. 

Proof of permanent death is what the character of Tommy Jarvis, back for his third Friday the 13th movie (and look at them actually developing a real mythology), is seeking at the start of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Which I watched on Thursday the 15th, as close an alignment with Friday the 13th as I'm going to get this October. (I couldn't watch it on Friday the 16th because we're going camping tonight.) 

And at the start of this movie, Jason is dead as fuck.

Tommy (Thom Mathews) and a friend, played by Welcome Back Kotter alum Ron Palillo, go to the woods to dig up his grave to confirm there's actually a body in there, and, to the best of their knowledge, that it's Jason's body. The friend is not sold on this plan and, well, he pays the price for it.

And so the grave site we saw in a dream sequence at the beginning of the previous movie, where the gravestone was done in a slapdash manner with paint, was the actual site of Jason's burial, after all. It's just it looks like an actual gravestone, though it still, appropriately, only has Jason's first and last name. I mean, what's the inscription going to say? "Jason Voorhees: He killed a lot of people, though only after he himself was already dead."

When Tommy does the digging -- way quicker than anyone has ever dug out a grave in the history of cinema -- he does indeed find a coffin, and when he prises it open, he sees this:

I couldn't find a close-up of the space where his head should be, which is so ill-defined that you aren't even sure it's a head, though it's notable for having the worms crawling in and out of it.

Like, that is the deadest thing you've ever seen. Which I really respected. How much more interesting is it to see a truly dead Jason Voorhees corpse, than to see either an empty coffin, or to see Jason just loaded and ready to spring as soon as the lid was removed?

Of course, this is not the end of the line for Jason -- though to be clear, it would have been if Tommy hadn't come to disturb what was at rest. Because what happens next drives this series into the realm of at least some level of comedy, and finally, into my good graces: A lightning bolt comes down from the sky to strike a metal post Tommy has driven through Jason's corpse, prior to his planned burning of said corpse. And, like with Frankenstein's monster, this reanimates Jason and restores all of his bodily integrity. And because Tommy brought along the mask, he even has that, too.

Then this cold open, which results in the death of Tommy's friend but Tommy's escape, leads into a quick James Bond riff, in which instead of turning at us and shooting us through the iris, Jason turns and throws a machete at the screen.

And I was all "I'm going to like this movie." 

And I did. 

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is by far the best of the half-dozen Friday the 13th movies I've endured this month, and though I stopped myself short at 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, I could have gone four.

It's also the first one where I was inspired to take notes, so let's just work from those notes for the rest of this post. In no particular order:

1) This is the most Jason version of Jason Voorhees we have ever seen. While the previous version was seen mostly in flashes, and he had sort of a brute stupidity in most of his actions, this Jason is cool and confident and actually looks like he's enjoying himself. And in that one decision he's actually sort of moved into the realm of us liking him a bit. He's got a personality. Finally. 

2) We almost get the classic scene I said previously that I was looking for. In fact, we almost get it twice. There are two moments when we see Jason walking determinedly after someone and that person running, with cross-cutting between them, while Jason makes up the ground despite going at the slower pace. The only thing missing from both sequences was the fleeing potential victim running into Jason's chest at the end, but maybe they're saving that for a future movie. 

3) This movie is finally set during a time when camp is actually in progress. The reason they can actually have a camp again at Crystal Lake is that they've renamed the town. Now it's called Forest Green, and I guess that's enough to convince a bunch of parents to send their kids to camp here. I enjoyed the tension between the menace posed by Jason and the safety of a bunch of children, which this series has never previously played with despite how obvious it would have been to do so. 

4) And the presentation of these children showcases this film's sense of humor. There's a scene, for example, where we see an eight-year-old? ten-year-old? girl lying in bed, asleep, with an open copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit on her chest. (I looked it up, and this is where the line "Hell is other people" comes from.) Then there's two boys who are a little bit older who are always making sort of funny asides to each other as everyone else is panicking, who reminded me of the kids sarcastically watching the fight between Superman and the Kryptonians in Superman II. ("Superman didn't even do nothing!") At one point, as things are escalating, one says to the other "I think we're dead meat," like he's reporting dispassionately on something that doesn't actually involve him. A few minutes later they go back to him and he confirms: "Really dead meat."

5) The visuals by director Tom McLoughlin, who somehow only directed two more features after this (neither of which I've heard of), are outstanding. Not only does he have an eye for iconic imagery, he also has an eye for oddball, heightened elements that are something out of a fairytale. One scene involves the children diving under their beds for safety in their dorm, and you literally see them diving -- not going down on their hands and knees to crawl under the bed, but with their bodies fully parallel to the ground mid air. 

6) Then the entries by Jason deserve their own separate bullet point. There's one brilliant shot where he opens the door to a cabin, and we only see him from the knees down, but we see a a plume of leaves blow in around him, like it's laying down a carpet for his entrance. While this is a relatively suave entrance for the killer, it's done as a contrast to a later entrance where he essentially explodes through the doorway, through obliterated chunks of wood left and right. It's all part of a presentation of Jason that truly sings. 

7) And the kills are better too. I specifically enjoyed one scene involving two characters in a car -- one played by Tony Goldwyn! -- where the woman who is trying to escape him is left on her back, trying to crab walk her way through a trench of muddy water, which I already felt was a positive just for its small variation in the conditions that usually precede the death of a Jason victim. He's above her, and then he disappears, and then he materializes again on the other side to shove a pole down through her face. It just feels kinetic in the moment. 

8) I said the film was funny. Well, I laughed out loud a number of times. One of the main characters -- played by an actress named Jennifer Cooke, who reminded me of a young Joanna Kearns and who also basically didn't work after this film -- had a number of great lines, one of which I jotted down but which probably doesn't work out of context. She talks about how someone is "in the can draining his lizard." I told you it wouldn't work out of context. Anyway, she's also an example of the lively characterization in this film. 

9) She's the daughter of a sheriff played by David Kagen, and I thought this character was worth highlighting as well. Unlike with the cops in most movies, I found his actions believable at every step of the way, especially his attempts to dispel Tommy from the town for trying to stir up worries that Jason is back. I think this is another one I'm not going to be able to describe very well. The character just works. 

10) I also really liked where we leave Jason. Spoiler alert if you want to avoid the next sentence. He's chained to a rock at the bottom of the lake, but we know he's not dead because the last shot goes to his open eye, a throwback to the open eye when he was resuscitated by the lightning. It's part of a lot of lake action for Jason in the movie, which inspires this great riff on Jaws:

Anyway, obviously this film invigorated me and I have nothing but high hopes for the next one ... though I also do not expect that this lightning in a bottle can be recaptured. Why didn't they just let Tom McLoughlin direct it? 

End to a year of movies ruining books

About a year ago, I struck out on what I thought would be a useful venture, which had to do not only with my movie life, but with my reading life. 

Eager to deepen my appreciation of cinema beyond what I was taking in on the screen, I said I'd make every other book I read a book about movies. Then when, for example, someone started talking about a Frank Capra film, I'd also be able to tell them stories from the set, why Capra made this certain choice, or what notable film observers thought was Capra's place among his peers and within the scope of cinema history.

Like most well-intentioned things, it hasn't turned out very well. 

It seems I want a lot more freedom in my reading than what this venture has given me.

Before I review the actual itinerary for the past year, which I've touched on through posts on this blog, allow me to describe some of the problems with this plan.

1) I usually like to select my next book from those I have on hand, which have built up through gifts and sometimes my own purchases, though those last are usually driven by a specific desire to read a particular thing. As it turns out, I did not have a lot of film books already on hand. 

2) I sometimes have obligations of what I must read next, either because a friend of mine wrote it or because it relates to some other specific thing I'm doing, and adding an additional obligation only removes me a further level from reading something I just want to read.

So I started well enough last November with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, which had been given to me as a gift, and which I first mentioned here, while touching on it again a few more times after that. This was a pretty enjoyable trip through Tarantino's conversational style, film geekdom, and a dozen or so films he really likes from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, some of which I had seen and some of which I hadn't. Because a whole chapter was being devoted to each movie, I quickly determined that I would either need to have these unseen films spoiled, skip the chapter altogether, or just watch the movies. I opted for that last choice, which was a useful exercise but which slowed my overall progress through the book. I ended up watching eight films as part of this read -- during one of my busier times of the movie calendar, mind you -- and the whole book took nearly two months to read, even with Tarantino's conversational style. 

I dove into a piece of fiction that I loved in December and January, the summer months here in Australia, but then February it was time for one of those aforementioned obligations, which I wrote about here. A friend had sent me two treatments of one of his favorite Star Trek episodes -- basically, everybody's favorite episode -- one as graphic novel and one in script form, with angry side commentary from a writer with gripes about everything. Because I had been sitting on reading this for quite some time, I decided to make it part of my venture, stretching the rules a bit but thinking it would make a valuable consideration of the fine art of adaptation for the screen.

Then I read a friend's book, which was quite good, but did fall into the category of an obligation. Following that was my second consecutive cheat, when again the way I justified the inclusion of this particular book was because of my interest in its adaptation. I had long wanted to read Henry James' What Maisie Knew because of my love for how this was made into a film, set in the modern day, in 2012. I finally sourced a copy at the very book reading for my friend's novel that I read immediately before this. Contributing to the way this series was starting to disappoint me, I didn't really like the novel version of What Maisie Knew, but at least it gave me the excuse to revisit the still-beloved film. I wrote about this whole experience here. 

After this I read another piece of fiction that disappointed me, because the writing was not very good -- I described it to my wife as what it would be like if Netflix wrote a book. And then it was on to the book I just finished yesterday, having been working on it since July. This one was most certainly not a cheat. Hitchcock/Truffaut, which I first mentioned on this blog here, is considered one of the seminal books about film, frequently voted among the top three ever written -- if you consider the extended transcript of an interview between two great filmmakers to be "writing." In terms of simply consuming useful information, this was top notch, even though it isn't "writing" as such, or at least, not until the very end. But this was also an experience I thought would be enhanced by watching some of the films being discussed. I could not watch all of them, because they discuss every film Hitchcock had ever made, and I'd only seen maybe 20 of the 50 coming in. I did watch six more, at approximately four-year intervals within Hitchcock's career starting in 1936, which was rewarding but which also slowed down the reading process. As you now know, because I just told you earlier in this paragraph, this consumed nearly two-and-a-half months of my time.

And so we see how I've only been able to read seven books since I began doing this, and some of them were not even really what we would call a proper book. Only one of them was a book I truly loved, and it was one of the pieces of fiction that cleansed my palette between movie books.

You might want to know how many books I might normally read in a year. It's actually not that much more than seven. I'm a slow reader, but the real problem is that I usually get stuck on at least one book that I don't like very much and that I drag out reading over as many as four months. I (almost) always finish what I start when reading a book, so instead of just abandoning it for something better, I trudge onward until one day I've finally gotten to the last page. 

But even if seven books is not exceptionally low for a nearly 12-month period, the fact that only one of these books brought me the sort of transcendent joy I want from a book suggests that this project is not worth continuing. 

And so I'm stopping, effective immediately. 

(There's a reason why 2027 would make a particularly bad time to continue this project anyway, but I'm not ready to reveal that until we get to 2027.)

This does not mean I will never read another book about film. Of course I will, though I've exhausted my surprisingly small supply, so I'll have to start acquiring them purposefully. Actually my wife will have many, specifically about screenwriting, so I can dive into those whenever I want. I haven't perused them yet, to get any candidates in the back of my head.

I just don't need to force myself to do it. I want it to arise organically. And if I want to organically read a lot of fiction, both obligations and pure pleasures, then that's what I will do instead. 

I ceremoniously closed out this year with a viewing last night of the 80-minute documentary Kent Jones made about the book in 2015, whose poster you see above. In addition to engaging with the text, the film also includes interviews with great modern filmmakers on the influence of the book specifically, and on the two directors generally, on their desire to become directors. Among the luminaries interviewed are Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson and Olivier Assayas. 

I enjoyed the film, though I don't consider it particularly well made as a film itself. And I did want to reconfirm that I did quite enjoy the book, even if it was ultimately the straw that broke the camel's back of my year-long initiative. 

One thing I liked in particular was the way Truffaut didn't retreat into his shell any time Hitchcock pushed back on him. The nature of their interaction was quite cordial, and if one person insisted on a point strongly enough, the other would concede it in the name of the conversation proceeding peacefully forward. But Truffaut was unafraid to tell Hitchcock which of his decisions worked like gangbusters (most of them) and which were minor misfires. Truffaut was deep enough in to his own career at the time this conversation took place that he was operating more like a peer, rather than his former life as a journalist, but obviously, the idea for the book itself came from a place of reverence that underscored the essential journalist-subject aspect of their relationship. Because the interview occurred over an entire week, you'd expect a lot of softball questions, but Truffaut preferred honesty over comfort at all times -- as we might expect he would.

The book, a tome the size of a coffee table book, includes a lot of great stills from Hitchcock films, which reminded me of the films I'd seen long ago so I didn't need refreshers. I also appreciated that the greatest plot spoilers were generally confined to footnotes which I could easily skip, which would sometimes outline, in about 150 words, the entire story of the film, if the plot was not sufficiently touched on in their conversation. I did have some movies spoiled for me, I suppose, but there were so many of them that I've already forgotten which ones were spoiled and what those spoilers were.

I also, of course, appreciated the chance to move closer to Hitchcock completism. Earlier in this piece I estimated I'd seen 20 of his films coming in -- well, it turns out I was quite close, as it was 19. Add the six more I watched in the past couple months, and I'm now almost halfway to finishing his whole filmography. The majority of those I haven't seen were from his prolific first ten years of his career, from 1925 to 1935, when he made 20 films, only three of which I've seen. People churned out movies much faster in the early days of the form, and Hitchcock was not really making "Hitchcock films," as this book thinks of them, until his first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934.

And so I stick a pin in Alfred Hitchcock for a bit, knowing I still have some good movies ahead of me but also some forgettable ones that may be harder to find. 

And I stick a pin in my commitment to reading movie books. Though maybe this will mean that the ones I do read, I really want to read, and will get a lot more out of them. 

Lowest

One of the weirder miscalculations I've seen this year is Animals, the latest directorial effort by Ben Affleck, in which he plays an independent mayoral candidate in Los Angeles. 

As if anyone other than a Democrat would ever win the election for L.A. mayor, but the Democrat must have been really bad in this case. That's not the miscalculation though.

The weird thing about Animals is that it is yet another remake of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, only a year after Spike Lee did it with Highest 2 Lowest. 

Clearly the two projects must have had overlap in their gestation, but it's never a good thing when you're the second one out of the shoot, by about a year at that.

I wasn't a huge fan of Highest 2 Lowest, but I can see on Letterboxd that I gave it a positive rating of three stars. That will not be the fate of Animals.

If you want to read more about my specific problems with the movie, I expect to be reviewing it, possibly as soon as today. So check to the right to see if there is already a link up. 

So now that there are three, we can indeed rank them relative to Lee's naming convention for his movie:

High and Low = highest

Highest 2 Lowest = middle one

And I think you know where that leaves Animals. 

A new setting (sort of) for a Friday the 13th movie

I've said the Friday the 13th movies I've watched so far this month -- my fifth last night -- have been essentially interchangeable. The fifth one finally gives us something (sort of) new.

But before we get to that, I thought instead of giving you another interchangeable movie poster as the art for the post about Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), I'd go for this funny t-shirt design, which I almost bought except I've been adding a few too many t-shirts to my collection in the past year. (While refusing to get rid of the old ones, leaving my closet perpetually overstuffed.)

I mean it's funny for obvious reasons, but it also gives me a chance to talk about one of the most interesting elements of the whole franchise: the date Friday the 13th really has nothing to do with anything.

Friday the 13th was, of course, the date on which the first massacre of innocent camp counselors occurred, back in the first movie. Or was it also the date Jason drowned? I can't remember, but they would have had to incorporate it into the first movie to justify calling the movie that, since there was no previously existing property they were drawing on.

Since then? It means bupkis. 

If this franchise were being created in the 2010s instead of the 1980s, the screenwriter would hold him or herself to more rigorous standards. There would be something ritualistic about the Friday the 13th date and it would be incorporated into each narrative. It might be similar to the Halloween series, where there is, in fact, one day they are trying to continually avoid related to Michael Myers: October 31st.

You usually get a handful of Friday the 13ths every year, so indeed, these stories could all take place on that date. But as far as I can tell, they do not. In fact, I only remember Friday the 13th being invoked one other time in the whole series, though it may have been the same footage in multiple movies, because it's someone telling a campfire story to scare people, and this footage comes back a couple times. 

I just thought that was interesting.

Well Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the first since the original that does not begin with recycled footage from the previous film. And they easily could have gone with that, because despite the promise of a fresh start, it does begin with a character from the previous film, who was played Corey Feldman there. His name is Tommy, and Feldman does play him again just for the length of the dream sequence that opens this film.

I was not, at first, sure if it was a dream sequence, but I'm certainly glad it was. 

The film begins with Feldman in the woods, where he's gone to visit Jason Voorhees' grave. This grave looks comical; it just has Jason's first and last name on it, scrawled hurriedly in paint, like you might do if you were making a quick and dirty cemetery scene for your front yard as part of your Halloween decorations. It looked like a kid would have done it. And when Feldman's Tommy is scared from the scene by a couple older teenagers who plan to dig up Jason's corpse to gawk at it, we see Jason in the grave, still wearing his mask. Which is just an absurd way to imagine a funeral home burying someone, to add to the absurdity of the writing on the grave stone.

Of course, after Jason rises from the tomb, slaughtering both of the older teens, he starts to come for Tommy, frozen to the spot. And this is when an older Tommy -- at least five years older, maybe more -- startles awake in the backseat of a car, where he had been dreaming.

We soon learn Tommy is on his way to a halfway house. Although he's still somewhat timid by nature, the trauma of surviving the original interaction with Jason, as portrayed in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, has left him susceptible to bouts of rage and other antisocial behavior, which has led to joining a group of others who are similarly unable to thrive in a mainstream setting.

Finally. Something different than a bunch of teenagers going to the woods near Camp Crystal Lake to have sex.

Oh there's still people having sex in this movie. And the halfway house is still in the woods. But at least, as far as I can tell, these woods are not adjacent to Camp Crystal Lake. Though they may be, I certainly may have missed the reference. (If so, that's a pretty cruel thing to do to poor Tommy.)

And at this point I should tell you something about my viewings of these movies. Because they are so short, and because my younger son is staying up later and later (and refusing to abandon the living room until he's forced to go to bed), I am getting a later and later start on watching them while still maintaining optimism that I can finish at a reasonable hour. The "reasonable hour" last night was close to 1:45 after several naps during which I paused. This is a familiar tune, I've sung it before.

But this does mean my perception of the events in these films is becoming a bit foggy. And because the screenwriters have not earned my attention through a complex mythology, smart dialogue or clever twists in the plot, I've determined my loose grasp of the series isn't something to mourn. It's just a reality.

Though I should say, I do reward this film for doing something a little bit different. Does that make it a good film? Heck no. But at least they're trying. Sort of. Maybe.

One thing about the Tommy character that is clearly different is that we follow him for this entire film. The survivor of the previous films has always been summarily dispatched at the start of the next film, though in some cases, they may just be gone from the proceedings. I'd be lying if I said I could remember for sure. But they/we are quite clearly following Tommy for A New Beginning, and because it's the same character who looks different (played by a different actor), we are also conscious of a time jump in the way we weren't in previous films.

The other thing I'll say about A New Beginning is that it appears to stay true to a nominal notion of  "science." Jason was as clearly dead at the end of the last movie as he's ever been -- well, at least as he's been since he originally drowned. So his continued existence was never actually "scientific" in the first place. But at least in this case, the person wearing the Jason mask is not actually Jason Voorhees -- spoiler alert -- but rather, a copycat killer who gets to have the same impact as Jason because Jason is really just a hockey mask anyway, isn't he? Anyone can look equally menacing behind that hockey mask.

I assume it'll be the actual Jason again, somehow, in the next film, which is subtitled Jason Lives, and again comes out just one year later. I'll watch it later this week. 

Audient One-Timers: Glory

This is the tenth in my 2026 monthly series in which I'm rewatching my highest ranked dozen films on Flickchart that I've seen only once.

I'm including not only the poster for Glory, but also the poster for Fargo, at the top of this post. Not because this post has anything to do with Fargo, but because I thought it was funny that the two movies -- set about 120 years apart -- use essentially the same typeface on their posters. Which I never would have noticed if they had not been consecutive rewatches. 

Unlike with some of the movies in this series, I remember the exact peculiar circumstances of my first and only viewing of Glory, my current #90 on Flickchart. 

I mean, I don't suppose they are any more peculiar than other movies I would have seen for the first time when I was in college. I watched it in somebody's dorm room. I think the thing that was peculiar was that I don't think I was friends with the person whose room I watched it in -- it was on the third floor of my freshman year dorm, while I lived on the first. I was definitely friends with people on the third, but this was not one of their rooms. I also feel like I was standing in the doorway of their room watching it. Is this possible? Anyway I clearly saw the whole movie, no question of that.

And obviously it made a huge impression on me. 

And that was the only time I saw it.

Having watched it a second time, I still find it a very good movie. It might still be a great movie. But now it has a problem attached to it.

In 1991 or 1992, which is the two years I was living in that dorm, the idea of the white savior was not yet problematized. And Glory is very much a white savior movie.

I have no doubt that a large part of what I loved about Glory was the notion that this man, Robert Gould Shaw -- played by Matthew Broderick -- would throw down his life alongside Black soldiers in pursuit of a goal that most notably benefitted them. This white man. Who was from Massachusetts, no less, my own home state. 

I am presenting that in an intentionally reductive way, an oversimplified way. The Civil War was not about the single issue of slavery, or even if it was, it was such a gigantic human rights issue that it was not possible to look at it in terms of a "disinterested" person's own individual stake in it. You couldn't actually be disinterested. You fought slave owners because what they were doing was monstrous and inhuman, not because you yourself thought you would benefit from there not being slaves. 

But there's no doubt that the core principle of a white savior movie is that a white character sacrifices their own comfort in some demonstrable way in order to help a person who can't help themselves as well without that external help. And dying for that cause is the ultimate white savior move. 

Now I should say, Glory does this in a sensitive and sensible way. Any time a character seems to be too infatuated with Shaw or one of the other white characters, such as Cary Elwes' Major Cabot Forbes, or one of those Black characters is too eager to fall in line and just accept what they get, Denzel Washington is there to put a stop to it. He's there to call them an Uncle Tom or to give a heightened mimicry of a slave saying "Yes massa!" Even in 1989, this movie knew it had to tread carefully in lionizing these white characters too much, in having the Black characters look at them with tears of gratitude in their eyes.

One of the ways it does this is it gives Shaw a journey from cowardice to courage, which I think might have been as satisfying for me, back in the day, as the white savior aspects of his role. Sure he ends up demonstrating bravery, but that's not how we first meet him. In an opening battle, we see Shaw freeze up on the battlefield, and effectively pretend he's a corpse when the fighting gets too intense for him. This goes unnoticed by anyone but us, the viewers. But we know that when Shaw is given lead command of this new Black regiment, a position he gained mostly by nepotism, there's a risk here. This man has not yet proven -- to us, at least -- that he can lead, and that his instinct in battle is not to play possum.

One thing Glory really gets right is the ways the Black soldiers are differentiated from each other, and their own internal conflicts. I of course remembered that Washington and Morgan Freeman were in this movie, the only cast members I could have definitively named outside of Broderick. But I didn't remember that this was also an early role for Andre Braugher (R.I.P.), who plays the definitive response to any tendency to portray the Black soldiers in any one single way. Braugher's Thomas Searles is the ultimate egghead, wearing spectacles that at this time would have pegged him definitively as a nerd. He drops the names of the great writers in literary history, and he's also a bit of a wimp, which is his own journey he must go on as Shaw's lower ranked officers try to harden him. The fact that he has a relationship with Shaw from their childhood adds dimension to this character, because Shaw is caught between interacting with him as a friend and as a superior officer. Braugher's emotions are full in this film and it just made me miss him all the more. 

If there was one thing I was a little disappointed in, it was -- not the performance of Washington, but Edward Zwick's decisions in how to direct him. Washington is great, but I feel like they go a bit soft on his character just when you think he should be reaching his greatest moments of "fly in the ointment" status. Even the scenes I remember most about Washington's Private Trip in this film -- as when he doesn't break eye contact with Shaw while being whipped for desertion -- are undercut slightly by the emotion Zwick asks of him. To be clear, I think it's incredible that Washington can maintain this eye contact while pressing out a single tear that rolls down his cheek, and that single trick is a defining element of the sort of performance this is. But, maybe just looking at this from a 2026 perspective, I didn't want his defiance to be intermingled with trauma and grief. I wanted him to be completely above the fray, to take his whipping without demonstrating how it was tearing him apart mentally.

Of course, his character is also the single embodiment of the legacy of slavery. In this scene where they remove his shirt to whip him, we see the scars of the thousand lashes he's already received previously, reminding us in a single image of the brutality of slavery -- which we are otherwise spared from seeing in this movie. 

I did find the final scenes rousing, and this film ends on an image that, in itself, gave me the emotional wallop that has led to this film being in my top 100 on Flickchart despite the fact that I haven't seen it in 35 years. I don't need to spoil that image for you if you haven't seen it. Let's just say it still works. It still gives you a surge of pride about what human beings will do for each other, how they will fight and die alongside each other even with their different skin colors and with societal strictures that have placed them in opposition to each other for their entirety of time sharing U.S. soil. 

But I can't ignore that we now rightly live in a time where we should look askance at any film in which white people are meant to congratulate themselves for the progressive ways they can help those in need who have different skin colors than they do. And so in the course of natural ranking -- not a forced re-rank in this case -- I do expect Glory to drop outside my top 100, possibly well outside of it over time. 

Only two films left in this series. November's choice is Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd., on which I was late to the party, only seeing it for the first time in 2012. It's just a single spot ahead of Glory on Flickchart.