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. 

A hilarious underestimate of longevity

I have this notion of the ideal Jason Voorhees sequence, developed from snippets of these movies seen on cable back in the day, and just the other ways he's been used in the popular culture. 

In this sequence, Jason is walking through the woods at a determined pace, maybe even a little less determined than it should be. Serial killers don't rush, remember. They are propelled on by supernatural powers that allow them to be where they need to be without hurrying there, remaining all the more ominous for their unflappable calmness. 

Meanwhile, there is a prospective victim running through these same woods. She is crying and looking behind her to where she knows Jason is, having already come face to face with him and bolted in the other direction. She may trip every once in a while, but it's not a permanent stumbling block, and she's back on her feet after just a moment, in theory putting an ever larger gap between her and her assailant with her every second more of her panicked scurrying.

The film cross-cuts between these two about five times -- Jason walking slowly, this girl running and looking back and crying.

And then finally, out of nowhere, he's right behind her -- or even better, she runs right into his chest, as he's somehow gotten on the other side of her.

After four movies, I haven't gotten this sequence even once. 

No, every time Jason appears, it's through some jump scare, smashing through a wall or window to stab or grab someone. The suddenness of his appearance, and often the direction of his appearance, is just as baffling for physicists as in my ideal example, but what it lacks is any sort of build-up to the kill.

And the more of these Friday the 13th movies I've watched this month, the more I've felt that the victims are "wasted." 

One thing that's developed over time with slasher movies is that they've learned to milk the death of each victim. That might mean with a short pursuit of the type I'm describing above, or it might mean the victim takes several smaller cuts, smaller injuries, before the blow that finally removes him or her from the pool of available victims. Each victim is worth a two- to three-minute section of the running time for a modern slasher movie. In the Friday the 13th movies, and in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in particular, a victim can go from not realizing they're in harm's way to having an axe through the head in less time than it takes for one iteration of the sound design's "J-j-j-j" effect.

I've started with a macro look on these four movies I've watched, but let's return to this, ahem, "final chapter" of the saga.

Now, I don't know for sure and I'm not looking it up right now, but it's absolutely hilarious that they would have been considering closing up shop on the Friday the 13th series in 1984, only four years after starting it and while the box office clearly seemed to support continuing it. It may have always been a gambit to goose the box office just a bit more with a title that suggested the series was ending, or maybe they just thought that four movies was already a lot and they were really pushing their luck. Or maybe they really did think that there were only four movies to reasonably tell about Jason Voorhees. Of course, having seen these movies now, I know there was actually only one movie to tell about Jason Voorhees, they just told it four different times.

But the movie starts with a sense that it's really wrapping everything up. I've talked about how these movies spend as many as five minutes recapping the events of previous movies with actual footage from the endings of those movies. Well The Final Chapter takes that to the next level, rivaling modern reality TV in terms of the thoroughness of its recapping. We get scenes from all three previous movies that basically tell the story of those movies -- such as it is -- to bring us to this point in time. And while I stand by the notion that all four of these movies are just slightly different versions of each other, there is, in theory, some slightly new situation in which Jason finds himself at the end of each movie, a little more "actually" dead than he was at the end of the previous one.

One thing I do want to say is that I was glad to see that the hockey mask still has the machete cut from the end of the previous movie. I was sure they would just give him a pristine mask to start the new movie, because the mask is now an iconic part of his representation, even though it was only just introduced in the second half of the previous movie. Score one minor victory for realism.

There are no other victories for realism in this movie, though of course that's not really what it's going for.

I've described the victims in the previous movies as horny teenagers, but in reality, the teenagers were never as horny as I assumed they would be. Each movie has, I believe, one couple having sex who experience the ultimate form of coitus interruptus. 

Well, this is the movie where they decided to get really horny. There were so many interchangeable couples off having sex that I could swear each new one I came across had already died in the previous scene. All these characters are white and otherwise undifferentiated, perhaps only slight variations in their hair color causing them to stand out from each other -- though nothing in the actual writing or dialogue. At least by now this series was finally realizing the need to maximize its R rating with T&A. 

Actually there are two differentiators in this movie in terms of character. For the first time since Kevin Bacon appeared in the original, we get some actual cast members we recognize. Crispin Glover is one of the teens here -- he gets a knife through the face in one of those previously described abrupt deaths -- and I don't think I've ever seen Glover be more normal than he is. Remember, this was still a year before Back to the Future. 

Then there's Corey Feldman. He has a more central role in the film than the rest of the disposable characters, and he's also far younger than they are. When the movie was released, he wouldn't turn 13 until two months later. They haven't yet figured out Feldman's verbal strengths that would characterize his usage in his future films, but it was nice to see him. 

I realize I'm barely giving any synopsis of the actual plot in any of these movies, but truly, what plot? You can summarize it as follows: Horny teenagers find yet another reason to go to Crystal Lake in defiance of the fact that the area is cursed. They are all together in one space and they get killed off one by one, leaving one character -- or in the case of this movie, two -- alive to tell the tale. Jason apparently dies at the end. Ho hum.

I want to mention that while I had limited respect for some of the actual filmmaking by Steve Miner in the previous two films, that has gone entirely out the window now. Joseph Zito -- who? -- is the director of this film, and the whole thing looks cheap and rushed. 

It's definitely time for something new to happen in these movies, and I think that almost can't help but happen in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the fifth movie that hilariously came out less than a year after the movie that declared the series was ending. That was proof either that the gambit was always planned, or that the box office was just so overwhelmingly positive that they did an immediate about face and began cranking out another sub par script. 

For the record, there were still six further movies in the series, even after the next one, prior to the 2009 reboot. All of which -- except the reboot -- I will watch as this month of Halloween rolls onward.  

My latest hill to die on

Last week when I wrote a short post about the cute method the Sun Theatre had of ticketing for Digger, I mentioned I would likely be writing another Digger post to talk about my first experience with the Sun's VistaVision projector, one of only five in the world and the only one in the southern hemisphere.

Little did I know that this would soon feel very secondary in the discussions of this movie. 

At the time we bought our Digger tickets, I had an inkling that it was not doing well. An article I read about what Rotten Tomatoes portends for various Oscar contenders listed the 52% fresh rating that you are now familiar with. Which, I suppose, is likely to fluctuate a bit and might not be exactly that at the moment.

What I didn't know until after we saw it was that it was also a certified box office flop, and possibly one of the worst flops of all time, in terms of prospective box office relative to the costs of production and promotion. A break-even point for Digger has been listed as $350 million globally, but this movie will be lucky to make even a quarter of that. 

What I also didn't know was that I would love it.

I wasn't sure at first. There were a few things that, as they happened, I questioned, unsure how they would pay off. But then, they all paid off. All of them. 

In fact, this is one of the rare movies that is best in its final 15 minutes, when it reveals the full scope of its design, none of which was revealed in the trailers and only some of which starts to be revealed at about the 30-minute mark. A friend of mine who didn't like it even said the closing credits are the best part, not because they signify the end of the movie, but because of a creative choice that ties in with the whole structural reveal. I don't need to get into any of this in greater detail, because I want you to experience it like I did, if you do experience it at all. 

Which I hope you do. If you want to read my rave, it's here. 

As soon as I began circulating in my movie groups that I'd seen it and that I loved it, I received incredulous responses. Now mind you, these were all from people who hadn't seen it. I've still only spoken to one person who's actually seen it, which yes, explains the bombing. But those people objected to the possibility of it being good on the grounds of the word of mouth, on the grounds of the box office failure, and on the grounds of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's ego or Tom Cruise's participation in Scientology. (Which, it seems, is not a problem for them when it's a Mission: Impossible movie.)

So now, if I want to continue expressing my true opinions of Digger, I'm planting my flag in a big mound of dogshit. 

That's what one movie friend said he'd heard it was: "dogshit." Now granted, this guy also disagreed with me on The Odyssey. So now he must think I'm really full of it.

Going to bat for a divisive film -- that is a kind way of characterizing the reaction to Digger, but an accurate one, as I will explain in a moment -- is always a painful experience. You have to be true to yourself and to the movie you saw, but you know you are losing credibility everywhere you turn, every time you pipe up in defense of that film. It happened for me with Don't Worry Darling. It happened for me with Emilia Perez, though at least that was a best picture nominee. It happened to some extent last year with my #1, Together, which some people liked fine, some people did not like, and no one liked as much as I did. 

The thing is, you aren't prepared for these things to happen to you. You don't go into these movies expecting to love them, and then loving them is some sort of confirmation bias. You don't know that this movie you innocently see, one of more than 150 you see that year, is going to rise up well beyond the affection level of anyone else you know, and suddenly your own affection for it makes you seem like a pretty suspect person from whom to take movie advice.

But maybe there's hope for Digger yet. 

I mentioned the 52% on Rotten Tomatoes earlier. I mentioned the horrific box office, though not in actual numbers, which I will spare you since they are so paltry as to be shocking. But I didn't mention a couple opposing data points.

The first of these I noticed was on Letterboxd. The cumulative rating for Digger on Letterboxd currently stands at 3.8 out of 5. That's damn good. And that includes more than 31,000 five-star ratings, 13% of the total. In fact, there is no rating under 3 stars that has more than 11,909 ratings, and that's 2.5 stars that has that total. Anything below that is just a pittance relative to the total percentage. 

Then you have IMDB. As you know, I am suspicious of IMDB when it involves trolls taking down the ratings of movies with subject matter they don't like, or propping up subject matter they do like but that progressive-minded people don't like. But I see no reason why Digger is in conversation with any of their ideological bugaboos, either in a positive or a negative sense. In fact, with its environmental message, trolls would be more likely to be against it than for it, I would think.

Well, the collective user rating for Digger is 7.3 out of 10. And holding steady since the first time I checked it. 

What does this all mean?

A future as a cult classic for Digger, very likely. But is there a possibility of redemption within the current year? A positive backlash to the negativity?

It seems unlikely that enough people will even see it to move the needle in that regard. 

But publishing posts like this, as well as publishing my review, will confirm that I am true to my own impressions of this movie, and that I can contribute, in some small way, to other people seeing it. My wife and I talked about the movie for our entire 20-minute drive home, and then continued after we reached home. That simply doesn't happen with most films. I think even a conversation-starter like Obsession might run dry before then -- though that could be because the two people have had a differing take and they don't want to make this schism any worse.

My wife and I, we had the same take. She might have even liked it more than I did. And there will be others out there. They will come, eventually.

I suppose I should comment on the VistaVision projecton, while we're here. I guess this might have been the only thing about Digger that disappointed me.

It started with the fact that the projectionist did not come out to speak to us beforehand, as he had done when we saw The Odyssey in the same auditorium. (That wasn't the VistaVision projector. Apparently this auditorium can do double duty.) We got a program when we came in (it's beautiful) as well as gratis chocolate gold coins, so they had set it up for the same sort of "event" as The Odyssey. (Which also came with a program, but that time the candy was a gummy eyeball for the cyclops.) But then the projectionist never emerged, and the film started ten minutes late -- so maybe there was some last-minute thing that prevented him from coming out, or maybe he had the chicken pox. Who knows. In any case, it could have also been an ominous portent of the way some critics have savaged Digger. Maybe he was just too ashamed of the movie he'd seen to come out and do a positive song and dance about the new projector and this film in particular. 

Then the actual projection? Well, it had a square aspect ratio, but I know that was the case even for people who didn't see it in VistaVision, which is most people throughout the world, and includes my one friend who has seen it, who was able to confirm this. 

And though I certainly liked what I was looking at, it was not possible to identify this as being bolder, more clear, more detailed, or any of the other things you usually expect when you see a movie using a projection system that cost a fortune and that only four other places in the world have. 

What I really needed was some sort of side-by-side comparison, so I could identify fine differences in the picture quality. Obviously, no such thing was available.

I will say this, though:

I loved Digger, and if the projection played any role in that, then I'm glad I saw it the way I did. 

I hope you see it too. To leave you with the line that finished my review: 

"If you are going to see Digger, do yourself a favour and leave your baggage about Cruise and Inarritu at the door, and be open for a wild and woolly journey that ends in just the right spot."

Watching the movie after the podcast, not before

When it comes to movies I know are going to be discussed on a podcast, my conventional wisdom has always been that I should prep for the podcast by watching the movie -- or more to the point, that I should avoid listening to the podcast until I've watched the movie. 

Of course, this is not always possible. They talk about a lot of movies on my movie podcasts and I'm not going to be able to see each one before I listen to the episode. Some would skip the episode in this situation, but I'm too much of a completist to do that. I like to tackle them in order, even if I'm sometimes operating a couple months behind. (My incessant fantasy baseball podcasts throughout the baseball season put me way behind on other sorts of podcasts.)

Just yesterday, for example, I listened to an episode of Filmspotting in which they made mention of Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, David Wain's new movie. Now it isn't usually possible to spoil a comedy, and Filmspotting tries to avoid spoiling any movie it's talking about. But as a result of listening to that episode, I now know which celebrity Gail Daughtry's husband sleeps with, setting in motion her quest to sleep with her one celebrity she gets to sleep with. (Think Ross Geller and Isabella Rosselini if you want to get the gist of the sex pass.) It doesn't spoil the movie but I would have preferred to be surprised by that. Still, I'm not going to hold off listening to the episode because of one five-minute segment of the show devoted to this one movie. 

The thinking is a little different, it turns out, when it comes to a classic movie you've already seen. On this same episode, they were also doing a 30th anniversary Pantheon project review of Fargo. Just quickly, for context: "The Pantheon" is the show's movie hall of fame, where if they assign a film to it, it means they don't discuss that film anymore on the podcast. It means it's too great and it would come up in too many discussions, so it is effectively "retired." Many of these films never got an initial discussion on the show, so now they're going back to do their one discussion and, in some cases, deciding that the movie is not Pantheon-worthy. Let's just say the worthiness of Fargo was wholeheartedly confirmed by hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen. 

As I was listening, and getting a ton out of the discussion, I thought "It's too bad I didn't watch Fargo beforehand in order to maximize the richness of this conversation." I should mention that Fargo is a top ten movie for me (#8 on Flickchart) and it has also been fourteen years since I've seen it, which is longer than possibly any other movie in my top ten. (Nope, not quite. I haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark since 2011.) 

Then I realized a couple things:

1) It's streaming on Netflix, which they mentioned at the end of the discussion (I own a DVD copy, but no longer a DVD player); 

2) It's only 98 minutes, which is the kind of thing you know about a movie but don't immediately remember if you haven't seen it in a decade and a half;

3) I could just watch it after their discussion, rather than before.

So I did, that night. 

There are some clear benefits to this. When Adam and Josh go in depth on a movie, they talk about it for maybe 45 minutes -- nine times as long as Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass -- and they get down into the nitty gritty, such as minute details of the facial expressions of the actors in certain scenes. As well as larger thematic elements that I wouldn't have considered, such as the fact that this movie shows three different versions of mildly unhappy domesticity, down even to the parody of a marriage between the two kidnappers played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare. 

If I were to have watched Fargo prior to this discussion, I might have said "Oh yeah!" during a couple of their observations. But by watching it afterward, I could make sure to sharpen my focus as certain moments in the film arrived, since my memory of their discussion of those moments would be fresh in mind. I could pay attention to facial expressions by William H. Macy and Frances McDormand at the moment they made those expressions.

Another thing their discussion revealed to me? That it takes more than a half hour for McDormand's Marge Gunderson -- the role that won her her first of an eventual three Oscars -- to even appear in the movie. I couldn't believe that was true, just based on my 14-year-old memory of my last viewing. But sure enough, during this screening I paused the movie to check the time stamp during the first pan over to Marge as she's sleeping and gets the phone call about the roadside murders. It's not only after 30 minutes, it's after 33 minutes.

The other thing the podcast did is it gave me a taste for watching Fargo again. It's weird to think that it would take any sort of external stimulus to get me to watch my eighth favorite movie of all time, but there's evidently something about Fargo that prevents me from revisiting it with any regularity. It's a notable contrast with the other Coen brothers movie in my top ten, Raising Arizona, which you would know is my favorite movie of all time, and which I watch at least every four years. My most recent viewing was after only two years. Fargo? This could be as few as my fifth viewing overall. 

So I wouldn't have rushed to watch Fargo just because I knew it was coming up on Filmspotting, if I did even know that. (I can't remember if I knew it or not.) However, the deep podcast discussion made me want to run and watch it, even during my afternoon slot of availability, before my late night one. (And even though I started around 10:20, I was in no danger of falling asleep, as I do during almost every new movie I start at that time. I've written before about how you don't fall asleep during movies you love, no matter what time it is -- and even though there are no stakes to falling asleep because you've already seen it.)

And I think it certainly won't be another 14 years before I watch Fargo again.

I could get into some of Adam and Josh's other shrewd observations about this classic, but that's not the sort of post this is. This is the sort of post that reminds you, if you are in the same position, that you haven't missed the boat if you listen to the podcast but haven't rewatched that classic in preparation. Sometimes, watching afterward is just as good, if not better. 

3D movies lost to time

For my third Friday the 13th movie of this month, Part III from 1982, I got to be reminded of the era when people made 3D movies specifically with an eye for what could jump out from the screen at you -- and little else. 

Yes, 3D movies in the 1980s were not good movies that were specifically fitted out for 3D -- or failing that, retrofitted, the way they were during the form's return to prominence earlier this century. They were movies that existed only to make their audiences recoil from the screen so they were not hit by a spear that appeared to shoot right out at them. 

I remember two very terrible ones in particular that came out very close to each other, only the first of which I saw: The Treasure of the Four Crowns, and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. Both of those movies came out in 1983, just one year after the 3D Friday the 13th entry. (I definitely saw Treasure of the Four Crowns in the theater, and I remember being shocked by some of the deaths in it. I was only nine when I saw it. Then again, the body count must have been way worse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) 

The funny thing about such movies is they have basically no life after their initial moment of 3D presentation is gone. As I was watching Friday the 13th Part III, I was wondering: would there be any way to recreate the experience of watching this in 3D nowadays? Just to see if the 3D effects were any good? Would having one of those 3D TVs, which we used to have in Los Angeles, be enough? (The internet is a bit unclear on that. The answer seems to be "maybe.")

The other significant thing about Part III, the second consecutive film in this series directed by Steve Miner, is that it's the other movie in the series that I have always given myself credit for having seen. I knew for sure I'd seen the original, but then this one was sort of "I'm pretty sure I saw another movie in this series. Let's just say it was Part III."

Well, that would have been so long ago -- before I saw the original I'm pretty sure -- that I cannot, now, look at this movie and say with any certainty whether I'd already seen it. But just to be on the safe side, I'm not going to add it to my list of rewatches. It's just now a confirmed one-time watch. 

One of the things that makes judging this so difficult is that this is yet another movie in this series that has essentially the same structure, essentially the same setting, and essentially the same dramatis personae as every other movie in the series. I know this series at least has to diverge by the time of Jason Takes Manhattan, but I'm expecting several more carbon copies of the same movie before we get to that point. 

But at least Jason finally gets his mask. It takes until the 57-minute mark of the movie for this mask to appear, and the actual manner of its first appearance is, I suppose, of some historical interest.

At least the last two of these movies have featured a prankster, a guy who scares all the other teens by pretending to be Jason. I suppose this is a trope across all slasher films where the characters know that such a slasher exists, and the mere act of pranking his friends is surefire proof that this guy is going to die, likely with extreme prejudice. 

This time the guy tries to punk his friends about three times, and the last involves him emerging from the water with a hockey mask. How did he get the idea to use a hockey mask, given that this is not one of the known things about Jason? Who, you may remember, ran around in the previous movie with a burlap sack over his head?

Well I suppose we can just credit this guy -- let's call him Shelly, because that's the character's name -- with a little bit of ingenuity. I don't know where got this hockey mask in a summer camp setting, but that's for wiser minds than mine to ponder. 

When we see Jason wearing the mask a few minutes later, having finally assumed his finished form after nearly three movies, it's our clue that Shelly is no longer with us. Though I do wonder at the choice to have Shelly die off screen. I suppose you benefit somewhat from the "surprise" that one of the characters you thought was alive is actually dead, since one of his cohorts has to stumble across him. I guess it's meant to be a bit of a prank on the audience, because we've seen Shelly crying wolf so many times that we're initially supposed to think the gore on his neck is more makeup. But no, this time he actually got his throat slit. Still, in a slasher movie with a limited number of characters, I wouldn't think you'd want to waste any kills off screen. 

So the origin story of Jason's mask is that he got it from a kid who looks like this:

A bit more disappointing than if Jason had reached down into the depths of hell to pull it up through a pool of molten rock, but what are you going to do. 

I don't have a lot more to say about this movie from a plot perspective. There are more teenagers in basically the same lakeside setting as the first two movies. Some of them get killed while having sex. Others die in other ways. One survives until the end, just as one survived until the end in each of the previous two movies. And yet again, someone jumps out at this Final Girl in the final moments of the film, this time it being the mother, Pamela Voorhees, who somehow has her head attached again in order to fully inhabit the form of a decomposing corpse in a lake. Which was never her final resting place, but whatever.

And I'll be curious to see how the hockey mask makes a comeback, given that it got a machete part of the way through it.

I should mention that once again this movie starts with footage of basically the whole ending of the previous film. For a series that is not very interested in making its mythology more complicated -- at least compared to what was happening at the same time in the Halloween series -- these movies are sure determined for you to be fully caught up on what happened in the most recent one.

Oh yeah, before I go, I do need to tell you a bit about the things that appear in 3D. I should have scribbled them down at the time. There's a pole at one point. There's a crazy drifter who holds a very fake-looking eyeball at the camera. Nothing struck me as particularly clever, nor were they present in the quantity you'd think they should be, given that the 3D was the movie's whole gimmick. (And maybe the reason they thought they could take another movie off before getting more clever with the story?)

One thing I did note is that I am definitely becoming an old softie. Since I had already said I'd seen this movie, that means the movie already had a Letterboxd rating from me, which was 1.5 stars. Without knowing my previous judgment until after the fact, I was prepared to go as high as two this time. 

Then again, considering that I can't prove my first viewing ever actually happened, that 1.5 stars doesn't mean a whole lot. 

Friday the 13th Part 2: Jason Doesn't Get His Mask Yet

So, um, yeah -- that happened.

I watched the entirety (only 87 minutes) of Friday the 13th Part 2, and no hockey mask.

How is it that the thing we know most about Jason Voorhees does not even occur until the third movie in the series? Though at this point I'm wondering if I can even expect it then.

So what does Jason look like in this movie?

Well he runs around with a burlap sack on his head, a little bit like a murderous scarecrow. And yes, that is more than a little bit funny. 

It makes me wonder if they got notes on this movie. It was still popular, still making money. If the sequel took only a year after the release of the original came out, the third followed the second by only 15 months. But something was missing to take this to the next level.

It took an extra three months to think of the hockey mask and to factor it into the script. 

But let's talk about what's actually in this movie rather than what isn't in it. 

As you will recall from my first Friday the 13th post, in which I explained that I am going to watch this series all Halloween month, this was actually the movie I started watching first on Thursday night, for only five minutes before I decided it would be better to just start over and totally refresh myself on what had happened in a movie that I hadn't seen in probably 30 years. Well, I don't know that I really needed to do that. There is so much recap of this movie in the opening minutes of Part 2, it puts the "previously on" segments of modern TV shows to shame. Like, there might be four whole minutes of footage from the first movie, spliced in while the girl who survived that movie tosses and turns in bed as part of a post traumatic nightmare. You really needn't have watched the first movie at all.

Well, spoiler alert, she doesn't survive for long. Jason comes to stick an ice pick in her head. End of the road for previous movie's Final Girl.

Now obviously we haven't built up a huge amount of affection for that character, such that her death is a shock to our system. But I do wonder if this was one of the first times that we saw a character survive the previous movie at great paints to her psyche, only to be offed in the first few minutes of the sequel. I suppose such disposability would become something of a genre staple.

Really, this whole film is disposable. If I said I thought it would be basically a remake of the first movie, that's pretty much correct. The distinction, plotwise, is that the horny teenagers -- who don't seem to be quite as horny this time -- are not actually trying to reopen Camp Crystal Lake. They are attending a school for camp counselors on another shore of the lake. As if a maniac like Jason Voorhees would confine himself only to the actual grounds of the camp. 

I don't want to suggest that this movie is horrible. There were some touches I liked, especially some filmmaking choices by director Steve Miner. His camera setups are generally good, and it doesn't look as cheap as its predecessor in some important ways. I thought there was some clever dialogue too. One moment I remembered is that after two of the prospective counselors are caught by local police breaking into the condemned Camp Crystal Lake on a dare, the guy running their counselor school, who is not as concerned about the legend of Jason, says he will punish them by preventing them from having seconds on dessert that night. Anyway, there are a few things like this that elevate it somewhat. 

Though I do think it is quite disappointing to go through another Friday the 13th movie without the hockey mask. We do get the "J-j-j-j" sound affect, another Jason trademark, but without the menace of the man in the hockey mask, it just feels lacking. Let's just say I'm ready for some classic Jason Voorhees nonsense in the next film.

I also think it's funny that the movie ends in almost exactly the same way as the first, except this time, it's Jason, sans burlap sack, jumping through a window to grab somebody, rather than jump from out of the lake. Let's just say the effect is lessened considerably. 

This Final Girl also awakens, not dead, to survive to the next film. 

But, I'm guessing, not for long. 

Spot the one that isn't a horror movie

Because you are a cinephile, yes, of course you can do it. 

But I thought this screenshot of my most recent five rewatches, taken from a personal Letterboxd list called "Rewatches" (as you can plainly see), was illustrative of the sorts of movies I've been rewatching lately. And it's only just now the month of Halloween. 

Only Greed, as you know, isn't actually a horror movie. It's an epic social drama about life in the early 20th century in which the theme of greed factors in heavily. It was made in 1924, when I think the only horror movie in existence was The Phantom Carriage (1921). Okay I guess also The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

But it's funny how much it looks like a horror movie poster, isn't it?

What if Halloween fell on Friday the 13th one year?

The subject of this post is a dumb joke I like to make. I don't know if I would quite call it a dad joke. It doesn't rely on puns. It doesn't make you groan. It's more in the category of what I call "dumb guy humor," where you say something earnestly that you pretend you don't know contradicts itself or is disprovable in some obvious way. Though of course you have to be careful because you could slip into what I call "double dumb guy." (I'll explain the distinction some other time.)

In any case, to spell it out laboriously, Halloween can't fall on the 13th of the month because Halloween always falls on the 31st of the month. It's actually fun sometimes to watch people listen to this joke, because for a second you see them thinking "Oh yeah, I wonder if that's ever happened?" before it clicks in for them.

Well, this year, Halloween may not be falling on Friday the 13th, but Friday the 13th is falling on Halloween. The month of Halloween, that is.

That's right, I'm back to consuming an entire series of horror movies, just as I did two years ago, when I watched all the Halloween movies I had not yet seen. Which in that case was 10 movies, though I also rewatched the original just to lay the groundwork. I only skipped one movie in the whole saga, which was Halloween III, because I'd only just seen it for the first time in the year or two before that. As it happened, in that series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not part of the larger chronology anyway. Michael Myers isn't even in it. (It's also the best movie in the series after the original.) 

In 2026, I'll be applying the same treatment to the Friday the 13th series, with just about the same number of viewings, again starting with a rewatch of the first and again skipping one movie I'd seen recently (the 2009 remake, which was part of last year's Halloween viewings). 

I was actually going to start with Friday the 13th Part 2 from 1981, and even watched a few minutes of it last night. Enough to note that it starts with a kid singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," which I thought was funny because I had just listened to Carly Simon's version of that song earlier in the day. 

After that I was going to skip Part III (yes they switched to Roman numerals at this point), because my records say I've seen it. However, I'm highly skeptical of any records when it comes to this series. Even when I originally compiled my list of movies way back in the 1990s, I suspect I had said "I've seen one of the other Friday the 13th movies" and I just decided on Part III, remembering that I'd had a fascination with that one because it was presented in 3D when it was in theaters. (Not that I would have been in the position to see in this in the theater, being only eight years old at the time of its August 1982 release date.)

Incidentally, did you know that not a single of these movies was released in October originally? They go May, May, August, April, March, August, May, July, August, April, August, February. 

But after five minutes of Part 2, when I realised that my memory of the original was decidedly rusty, I decided to start with the original, to also watch/rewatch Part III, and to just go on the whole damn journey from start to finish. Excluding the aforementioned 2009 remake, of course.

Good thing I started on the first of the month.

So my entire journey will consist of this:

Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (as if!) (1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Jason X (2002)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

I'm not sure whether that last should be part of this franchise, part of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, or whether they get to share it.

By the way, how crazy is it that this series cranked out eight movies in one decade? That's gotta be some kind of record, especially since to even qualify for it, a series would pretty much have to start with the first year of the decade, which this one did.

That's 11 movies, the same as with Halloween. It worked out okay then, but I had to be persistent with it, obviously. Also, that year, I didn't get started until October 3rd, plus I had a five-day trip to Singapore, during which I took a break from watching Halloween movies. This year my only weekend away is a camping trip, though I still won't be able to relax at any point. 

So let's get right into discussing this first one, shall we?

It's not really much of a movie, to be honest with you. In fact, it was so different from what I thought the first Friday the 13th was, that I had to keep checking to make sure I wasn't still watching the second one. In any case, it's a bit of a surprise that it even engendered a series with this sort of longevity. 

For starters, you would probably know that Jason Voorhees is not even really in it. You do see him once in the brilliant jump scare ending, in which he jumps out of the water to overturn the canoe carrying The Final Girl. (Who, I should mention, does not die here. I had remembered that this was the last shot of the film, but the next shot is her sitting up in bed, sometime after she's been saved by police officers from a watery grave. Disappointing.) But the hockey mask is not even established as a series trope until the second film. This I did remember.

Who is the killer, then? Well Jason might actually be the killer -- I'm unclear on that -- but the person with equally murderous intentions is his mother, still grieving even though I believe it's been two decades since her son drowned, as one of the things that put a curse over Camp Crystal Lake. (Wikipedia confirms that the unseen killer is meant to be the mother. It could be Jason, in theory, because for the majority of the kills, the killer is not seen at all.)

So that makes a good transition into the next thing I expected from this movie: actual camp life.

I was under the misapprehension that the movie takes place with camp actually in progress, but it's entirely before the potential reopening of the camp, which had closed due to the high number of previous tragedies. (One of which is the murder of two counselors the summer after the drowning, which we see in this film's cold open.) And because the camp isn't even open yet, it does not really feel like a camp at all. It could be any woodsy setting where a murder might take place. No children around, only horny teenagers. 

The thing I found funny is how many of these teenagers -- who include Kevin Bacon by the way -- are actually killed before a single one of them discovers the dead body of a single other of them. It might be 30 minutes of screen time from the actual first death to the point that any corpse is discovered and any horny teenager screams in fear. In other words, a highly improbable amount of time within the world of the film, where these teenagers are all basically together on one night at the camp, some of them prepping for the season, some of them playing strip Monopoly, that sort of thing. The way it's staged, they had to be wilfully dumb and wilfully avoid seeing each other's corpses -- which probably just solidifies this as the template for the whole slasher genre, along with Halloween, which was released two years earlier. 

Because the action, such as it is, is all very samey, with at least three different brunettes who I could have sworn were the same brunette that had already been killed a few minutes earlier, the film has quite a lack of narrative momentum for most of its running time. It just feels like one after another pair of teens having sex or doing solo prep projects, meaning they are isolated enough to be killed by Mrs. Voorhees. And because they take so long to discover that their other friends have been killed, the stakes take a very long time to progress. We don't even meet Mrs. Voorhees until there are only about 30 minutes remaining in the movie, which I think is also the first time we hear the name Jason spoken. At this point I was really relieved to have some sort of plot taking shape and giving a definitive direction to what I was watching.

Of course, we have to note the contrast in quality with a series like Halloween, which is naturally a far superior entertainment product. (Though I suspect some of the later movies in both series will be equally bad.) While that series was launched by horror master John Carpenter, this film's creative voice is a guy named Sean Cunningham. Sean S. Cunningham, to be exact. This was his sixth film directed, but I haven't heard of any of the movies that came before or it, nor any that came after. He didn't direct another Friday the 13th film after this one. 

And yet the slasher movie, even when executed at this basic level, was such a relatively new thing that viewers ate it up, such that it launched an unprecedented production schedule for sequels, enabling them to crank out another seven films before the decade was over. You have to put yourself back in 1980 to really be able to understand the attraction, because none of it holds up particularly well today. Then again, Halloween itself is far more sophisticated and predates it by two years, so it's not like it would have been impossible to make something better. 

Noted special gore effects guru Tom Savini has a credit on this film, so you'd think the gore effects would be a bit better. There were one or two clever effects, but overall it feels quite pedestrian.

I do think the final jump scare, and the appearance of the waterlogged and horribly deformed Jason, was the kind of thing that was propulsive enough, in itself, to keep this series running. However, if even the first one is not very good, well, I'm a bit concerned where we go from here. 

Hey, I've been watching too many movies that I like lately, bringing my overall percentage of movies I've given a thumbs up -- which, yes, I track in my big movie spreadsheet -- all the way up to 68.48%, an all-time high. Maybe this October can throw some cold water on those numbers. 

I don't know if I will be writing about each movie as I see it, nor that I will have a huge amount to say about each movie. I think this might differ from Halloween in the complexity of its mythology. I'm expecting many of these movies essentially to be a remake of the previous movie. 

However, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, because in October of 2024, I got really into the weeds with the Halloween series, analyzing all the internal contradictions and other failings of the series. I wouldn't mind if the Friday the 13th movies were more a case of going in one ear and coming out the other.  

How cute are they?

It's October 1st, and I feel like that is the beginning of Oscar season.

How do I know this? The first film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in four years, and the first one with any heat since The Revenant 11 years ago, opens today. This after a very transitional September in which I only got out to the theater four times, two of which were in the same night, due in large part to a dearth of anything worth seeing.

Well, there will be things worth seeing from here on out to the end of the year, starting with Digger. 

Will Digger be any good? I don't know, but it will be worth seeing, if you are considering that to be only a proactive judgment about a film. After the fact, we may think it was not worth seeing, but beforehand, it passes the test. 

I expect to write more about Digger after my wife and I go to watch it on Saturday night, because it will be the first movie I see -- maybe even the first movie they play? -- in which The Sun in Yarraville uses its new projector capable of projecting in VistaVision. 

I'm not even going to pretend I am speaking about that in a technically accurate way. I'm pretty sure the projectionist will give us a little intro to explain it, because that's the kind of theater this is. I do know that this might be the only camera like this in the Southern hemisphere, because that's also the kind of theater this is.

But for now, I just want to talk about the experience of buying tickets. (Due to the special presentation, I didn't think I was capable of using my critics card. And since this is a date night with the wife, you want to take greater precautions than just rocking up and trying to score a free ticket. Plus if a movie theater is going to put in a VistaVision camera, I want to give it some of my money.)

And now you understand my subject, and the screenshot above.

In another example of what kind of theater this is, The Sun has gone to the trouble of showing occupied seats with a little shovel, just for Digger. 

They had to care enough to have someone reprogram the functionality of their core ticket-buying system just for this one movie, and just to bring a smile to the face of someone who was already about to buy a ticket anyway. 

In other words, it isn't something promotional with a calculated intention of increasing sales. It's just fun.

I hope the movie will be too. I'll report back.