Is every movie dedicated to somebody?

This isn't necessarily the post I imagined writing on Halloween, but at least it involves a scary movie -- a movie that is legitimately scary at times, unlike all the Halloween movies I watched this month. (Plus, I've been writing about Halloween and Halloween all month, so I've done as much themed programming as you could possible want.)

Those Halloween movies do factor into this post, though, as that's where I first started noticing this phenomenon.

After Donald Pleasance died in the Halloween movie timeline, I noticed that at least the next movie was dedicated to him, as it obviously would be. There may have been more than one.

Then later it was producer Moustapha Akkad who died, and he may have been remembered in the credits of more than one movie, as the time I noticed it was in 2018's Halloween, 13 years after he died.

But as I've been sticking around for the entire credits in these movies -- which always yields interesting insights -- I saw that near the very end, there was usually an additional dedication, one that is more likely to disappear into the larger flow of credits. For example, the second David Gordon Green movie, Halloween Kills, was decided to a Halloween superfan named Anthony Woodle, whose wedding ceremony Jamie Lee Curtis performed an hour before he died of esophagael cancer.

When I noticed another dedication at the end of Oddity, one of two Halloween-themed movies I watched on October 30th, I got the idea that it might make sense to dedicate any and every movie to some person connected in some way to the production. (I can almost be bothered to go back into the movie and note who it was, but it was not someone famous -- possibly a family member of one of the cast or crew.)

When you think about the sheer hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved with the making of most movies, there is a good chance someone connected to the film will have lost a father or sister or close friend at some point during the 2+ years from pre- to post-production, especially for larger films. It's almost as though if you are not including a dedication -- or an "in memory of," if those are not exactly the same thing -- you are just wasting an opportunity. 

Does this weaken the gesture?

It's hard to say. The last few examples I mentioned were sort of buried in the credits, close to the end, so you'd only see it at all if you'd stayed to watch, like I usually do. I think if every film had a prominent dedication, on the screen by itself very soon after the final shot, then we'd notice it and maybe call it out. When it's buried, it's really more for the crew, and the reality of the situation is, it will make those most affected by the loss of that person very grateful for the thought.

We most often see this, of course, when a major creative talent involved with the film -- like one of its stars, or maybe a producer -- has passed after shooting was finished but before the film was released. The "For Brandon" in The Crow seems like an obvious example.

But what if you are fortunate enough not to have any prominent losses like that? How deep to you dig to make sure someone is filling the requisite dedication slot, even if it is the cousin of one of the gaffers?

This does give me a reason to continue paying the attention I pay to credits most of the time, to get a sense of just how common this is. I may report back on my findings at an unspecified future date.

As for Oddity, I chose it as the option to start way too late (about 10:25) after we had finished the movie we were watching with my ten-year-old, Nightbooks on Netflix, which was actually more intense than we would have originally expected and therefore just about the perfect thing for every kid's desire for slightly aspirational viewing. (I now see it was directed by Brightburn director David Yarovesky, which explains some of the intensity.) I considered All Hallows' Eve, the 2013 film that introduced Art the Clown, now the star of the Terrifier series, the second of which I watched just before October started. It was 14 minutes shorter too. But then I thought, I've been watching movies about a serial killer all month. Let's switch it up a bit. How about a good ghost story?

And Oddity was that. It's shot very well, it's got a good story, and it does have some moments that made the hairs on my arms stand up -- something they did not do once over the course of 11 previous Halloween movies.

The insanity ends now

It was probably a pretty insane undertaking to try to watch all ten of the Halloween movies I hadn't seen, plus to kick off the series by re-watching the first one, in a space of only 31 days. Really it was more like 28 or 29 days since I didn't watch the original Halloween until October 3rd.

It has undoubtedly affected my impression of the movies, at least a little bit, whereas spacing them out naturally across the course of my viewing life would have been a better way for me to take them on their own terms, and not be entirely sick of the whole experience. (But, I'd argue, I probably wouldn't have bothered to get to many of them, if those were the conditions under which I'd do it.)

But the question remains, how much has it affected my impression? Did it make me that much more likely to nitpick, or did it put me in the unique position of being able to submit these movies to their best possible analysis? The analysis they deserve?

"You are too close to it," a friend of mine said as a response to one of my observations about the catastrophically poor continuity of the series. "This would only bother me if I were watching them all in close succession."

That may be true. But just because a typical viewer is likely to have only a hazy memory of the previous film in the series they watched, it doesn't mean the movies are relieved of their responsibility of tying into one another in a way that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence or take his/her loyalty for granted. Because there are, indeed, some people who would watch them all in close succession, like I have done.

As I reached the final installment of the franchise last night, Halloween Ends, I'll say that I have to hand it to David Gordon Green. I expected one thing from his final film and I got quite another -- though the other thing I got is almost as much of a failure as his first two movies, in the end.

Now is the time for my final Halloween SPOILER ALERT.

The way Green left off the previous film, Halloween Kills, was to have a rage-filled Laurie Strode stride out of the hospital carrying a bloody knife, ready to hunt down and kill her brother, who had just killed her daughter. 

So I thought this movie would pick up straight at that point -- yes, a third straight Halloween movie taking place within a single 24-hour period -- with a protracted final showdown between Laurie and Michael Myers that somehow ran to feature length.

Instead, this movie picks up four years later, though only after picking up one year later. I should probably explain them in order.

Our cold open takes place in the home of a family we've never met before, involving a non-family member we've never met before, one year later. The non-family member is Corey Cunningham, a frizzy-haired 21-year-old overplayed by Rohan Campbell, who is a bit reminiscent of Patrick Dempsey in his Can't Buy Me Love days. He's babysitting a young brat who seems to be delightfully precocious, jumping out at his mom to scare her on Halloween, but might actually just be a little dickhead. After the kid locks his babysitter in a room upstairs right as his parents are about to get home, which means the babysitter will get in trouble for not having put his charge to bed earlier, Corey kicks down the door after repeated requests to the kid to let him out. The kid is on the other side of the door, and is knocked over the railing of a three-story spiral staircase, where he falls to his death. This is when John Carpenter's score kicks in and we are treated to the credits.

I didn't at first have any idea where this story was going to go, and I thought it was a promising attempt to break out of the formula that has plagued both the lesser (many) and greater (few) entries in the series. (There are only two movies in the series that actually feel fully fresh, which is the original and Halloween III: Season of the Witch.)

But then maybe the bigger surprise is that the movie jumps forward four years to the time of its release, 2022. Instead of Laurie having angrily tracked Michael down that night -- she tried but he disappeared -- she's started over in a calmer, apparently happier, more typically grandmotherly manner than she'd been displaying for the 20 years of her granddaughter's life. That granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichuk) now lives with her after the death of both of her parents over the course of the previous two movies, again apparently happier, in the quite large and traditional house Laurie bought in the wake of burning down her previous one in her attempt to kill Michael.

Okay let's stop here for a moment. It occurs to me we have no idea what Laurie does, or did, for a living. The series tried to give her a job in one of my "favorite" previous entries, Halloween H20, where she was serving as headmistress at a private school in California. But when those events were stricken from the record by Green's movies, that left us with no idea how Laurie managed to amass any income over the course of her shell-shocked life.

Especially not enough income to purchase a quite beautiful, quite large for two people, home in the suburbs. (Still in Haddonfield. Some people never learn.) Not after she was guilty of burning down her own home in Green's first Halloween, thereby voiding any provisions in her insurance policy that would pay her for that loss. Maybe this movie teaches us that Laurie is someone who commits insurance fraud? Okay that's probably too nitpicky. 

So it's almost like Green -- and more to the point, his collection of writers, who include actor Danny McBride -- is trying course correct on his own movies. If you have set up Laurie as a hair-trigger survivalist type, it seems weird to abandon that. It's almost like Laurie is more calm in the four years since Michael reappeared for the first time since 1978 -- and then disappeared without a trace, meaning he's still out there -- than she was in the previous 40 years, when she had no reason to believe Michael would ever return to bother them again. (There's a humorous line here as part of her occasional voiceover, where he says "And just like I predicted, Michael escaped 40 years later." Um, you don't get credit for predicting something as a real danger when it takes four decades to finally happen.)

So back to this Corey character. He starts out as mildly sympathetic, maybe not an awesome guy but clearly not liable in the accidental death of this child who had locked him in a room upstairs. He's tormented by the locals, particularly a trio of stereotypical movie bullies (who at least have the benefit of appearing on screen in 2022, so they are diverse by gender and race). It's clear this guy should just get out of Haddonfield, but like Laurie, he does not either. (That's because he has a creepy (s)mother at home, who at one point in this movie tries to kiss him.)

Inexplicably, Laurie's granddaughter, Allyson, falls for him, despite no evidence whatsoever that this guy would be any fun to be with or that even has many of his marbles left. I think we're supposed to think that Allyson is attracted to him because she's also damaged, but Matichuk depicts her damage only very inconsistently. In fact, this script requires her to regularly change attitudes with no notice or antecedent in the action, which feels more like bad writing than true character beats.

Anyway, Corey has some sort of interaction with Michael in the cave where Michael has been hiding -- again I wonder how he has been feeding himself all this time -- and the experience causes some sort of transfer of Michael's evil to Corey. So now Corey is effectively an unstable Michael Myers clone, eventually doing his own killing and using Michael's mask. Of course, Michael is also still around and also uses his own mask. It would be really useful if they could get another mask, then they could each have one. 

When this movie is clearly framed as the final chapter -- like maybe for the whole franchise, though someone will obviously make another one, probably before 2030 -- it seems unusual to spend so much effort on introducing this new character. It's not the first time in this series that someone has introduced the notion that Michael's evil is contagious, but it seems more to be setting up the idea of Michael's evil being eternal, when this movie ends definitively enough in that regard (he's ground up in the gears of some kind of junk yard compactor at the end).

Again Green is trying to say something profound here, about the persistence and immortality of evil, and he has Laurie deliver these thoughts a number of times in some pretty bad dialogue. (Laurie is writing a book, which I guess excuses the voiceover.) But again he fails, and the ending of this movie feels very flat. Along the way there has been a bunch more random killing -- don't get me started on the mildly racist portrayal of a Black DJ who seems to be right out of the 1970s, who has no purpose in the narrative than to get his tongue cut off so it can ride around on the vinyl and interrupt the song every time the tongue passes the needle -- and really not a lot else in terms of anything that makes us think.

So while I am slightly more positive on this final entry than I was on the previous two, the movie still falls a full star-and-a-half short of a recommendation. 

I think I thought I was going to talk about more ridiculous things from this movie -- best not even to get into the Laurie Strode suicide fakeout -- but after a month worth of outrage, I'm all outraged out. 

And super relieved to not be watching any more Halloween movies, though I must say, I actually kind of enjoyed the experience in a weird way. Only one of the ten new movies I saw this month actually earned the minimum star rating for a recommendation, and it was from a movie -- Rob Zombie's Halloween II -- that I would have given a pretty low chance of attaining that distinction before the series started. But the experience definitely stimulated me, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of words I've written (not doing an actual word count here) over the course of ten different posts. That's right, I originally thought I would write combined posts in which I discussed more than one movie, but the one time I tried that, I found I had way too much to say, and was already forgetting things I wanted to say about the first of those two movies. I suppose for a blogger, it is better when you want to write more rather than less.

And so I have two more nights to watching a scary movie that is not a Halloween movie. (Not that any of the Halloween movies actually scared me, which might be their biggest sin.) I'm hoping to get to the  point of beingt scared with whatever I watch on Halloween night with my wife, but tonight I'll probably fall short as we watch the kid-appropriate movie Nightbooks with my ten-year-old.

Laurie Strode spends another night in a hospital

Last post, I vowed to try to take David Gordon Green's last two Halloween films, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends (oh don't tease us with the promised finality of that last one), on their own terms. 

Nope. Can't do it. I'm still hung up on Laurie Strode and the wretched continuity of her character.

I won't rehash everything I talked about it in my last post. It's the last post, so you can find it without a link if you want to catch yourself up to speed on the minutia. (And I'll put the requisite SPOILER WARNING in now.)

But I will say that Halloween Ends, the penultimate (to date) Halloween film that was released in 2021, definitively does the thing that I feared Green's first Halloween film from 2018 was doing: It wipes Halloween II from existence. The original Halloween II, not Rob Zombie's Halloween II, which looks like a masterpiece compared to these films.

I didn't like Halloween II. In fact I thought it was quite bad. But it is a part of the Halloween chronology, for better or worse, and at a bare minimum should serve a function in establishing why Michael Myers is considered a legendary killer you should fear with every fiber of your being. 

Nope. Never happened.

I had thought that was what Green's first Halloween was saying, but now I'm sure. Why am I sure? Because in Halloween Kills, we get something that, in and of itself, is sort of interest twist in this series in that we haven't really seen it before. We get a full flashback scene set in 1978, buttressed by a few other callbacks to that full scene. For good measure, this scene includes the actor-director Jim Cummings and Thomas Mann, star of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. 

Promising enough start, and the flashback is interesting in and of itself. In this scene we learn that Sheriff Hawkins -- played by Will Patton, who I mistakenly thought was killed in the previous movie -- blames himself for not allowing Dr. Loomis to execute Michael on that night, when he was a young officer. (He also shoots Cummings in the neck while Michael is holding him hostage. Not a good night for young Hawkins.)

However, it's clear from this sequence that Michael was taken into custody right after Loomis' failed assassination attempt. He didn't go to the hospital to have another showdown with Laurie. In fact, now I'm even wondering if the end of the original Halloween, when Loomis shoots him and he staggers off the balcony, itself even happened. In any case, the stuff about Loomis blowing himself and Michael up, and Laurie's second ordeal of the night at the hospital? No, those things never happened. 

This confirms the thing that annoys me most about this trilogy, which is now two-thirds completed: That this is the FIRST TIME Michael has come back since he was taken into custody in 1978. He killed a mechanic and three teenagers, he I guess also was responsible for the death of the Cummings character (which Laurie apparently never knew about, else she might have mentioned it) and then he was taken into custody, where he remained for the next FORTY YEARS.

What's so great about a guy who stuck a knife into a couple people and then wasn't heard from again until he was a senior citizen?

And yet they continue to talk about Michael as though he has come back several times before, as though the town of Haddonfield, Illinois has lived in fear of his next inevitable return. They continue to tell stories about that night in 1978 when he killed those people. The grown Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) even has a lifelong bond with two other kids, also now grown, who saw Michael that night. And he whips the whole town into a frenzy chanting "Evil dies tonight!" just from this one episode from a mentally impaired man who has been sitting quietly in an institution for four decades.

It's just complete and utter bullshit. 

Halloween is just a bad serial killer movie. (Green's, not John Carpenter's.) Halloween Kills is a bad serial killer movie with a message in it, which is much worse.

And that message is: mob rule and mob vengeance is bad.

I'd be tempted to credit Halloween Kills with being very timely, if it was wagging its finger at the mob who tried to overthrow the government on January 6th. But I doubt the script was written in time to capture that, since the movie was released nine months later and they would have been working on it for a couple years, considering that its predecessor was released in 2018. Plus even if that was the intention, it does so badly.

So Tommy Doyle enlists a riot of crazy townspeople to go after Michael with whatever blunt instruments are nearby. He himself carries a baseball bat. I guess since Michael has never returned before and is only known for sticking a knife into a few people, maybe they figure they can get him with the blunt instruments. Maybe this also explains why non-professional vigilantes frequently pursue Michael into dark houses without any backup. (Talking about other scenes here, where they branch off from the mob.)

Idiotically -- I find I am using the word "idiot" or one of its variants a lot in these posts -- they spend a good deal of time chasing a different mental patient who escaped in the same crash of the prison bus that freed Michael. The guy they are chasing is about 5'1" and has long hair and looks a bit like an elongated hunchback. Green devotes so much time to this pursuit through Haddonfield Memorial Hospital that we are already laughing by the time the man decides to jump off the building to take his own life before the crowd can get him. I suppose this is slightly better than showing them beat the man to death, but given how little concept this guy has of what's going on around him, I'm hard pressed to understand why he would jump off a building to his death. 

So this mob also factors into what may be the most ridiculous scene in any of these movies, and that's saying a lot. They do corner Michael Myers and go at him with their various blunt instruments, and it appears to be working. Michael is subdued and Laurie's daughter Karen (Judy Greer) appears to finish him off with a final knife in the back. You'd think the worse injury was when she stuck him through with a pitchfork earlier, but this is Michael Myers we're talking about -- you and I know what he's capable of even if these people don't. 

Of course it's a fake death. But I can't believe Michael would allow himself to be subdued to the point of near death only so he could troll this mob by rising up and killing them all. 

But that's what he does. He rises up, and in a series of slow-mo one-on-one moments, he slaughters each and every one of the dozen? two dozen? people who were just surrounding him, apparently without any nearby cops noticing, or any of the people fighting back like they were doing so effectively just a few minutes before. No, they just stand there and spurt large quantities of blood from their mouths and necks.

Did I mention that Michael also slaughters a whole team of firefighters, a pair of random Black characters who appear in a number of scenes but whose function in the narrative was never clear to me, and the two gay characters who are currently living in the old Myers house, who called each other Big John and Little John? 

As if there has not been enough slaughter in this movie, especially compared to the original five people Michael was meant to have killed 40 years ago, the movie has to add one more in. Karen, Laurie's daughter, goes up to the second floor of the old Myers house so she can look out through Michael's old bedroom window. So she can see what it felt like, I guess? And then of course Michael's there, and kills her by stabbing her repeatedly.

So now Laurie's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichuk) has lost both of her parents in this long night, as her dad was killed in the previous film, and all the previous survivors of Michael Myers from 40 years ago, which include a nurse who has inexplicably appeared in like five Halloween movies now, have also been killed. Is more more, Green? I counter that it is not.

So where has Laurie been in all this?

At the hospital, of course. The place she spent parts of both versions of Halloween II, once when she was played by a different actress. And since this is, in its own way, another Halloween II, I suppose it makes sense that she's there.

But in all the ways this film and its predecessor -- and I assume the film that comes next as well -- are unrealistic, the one way they choose to resemble reality is that Laurie needs to go to the hospital and spend basically the whole movie in a hospital bed because she got stabbed in the stomach? Is that really the best way to go with Laurie, or for that matter, with Jamie Lee Curtis?

Maybe so. Curtis is pretty bad in these movies. It's hard to believe she was only a year away from winning an Oscar.

So she finds out Karen is dead because she calls her phone and Michael picks up, just breathing into it. She doesn't seem fazed that this means that her daughter is likely dead. She just tells Michael she's coming for him and then walks out of the hospital with a very purposeful look on her face.

God I can't wait for these movies to be over. 

Revising Michael's body count (again), making Laurie crazier

I have been looking forward to the end of this Halloween viewing marathon, for the obvious reason that it would no longer involve me watching a Halloween movie every 2.8 days on average this month. But the second reason is that it would finally bring me to the recent trilogy directed by David Gordon Green, beginning with 2018's Halloween, the third such movie in the franchise to be so named, which would also end the series' longest dry spell of nine years since the previous entry.

There were three main reasons I was looking forward to it:

1) Green is a director of genuine talent who has made some movies I like very much. He's also made some movies I don't like, so his involvement was no guarantee of success, but it did stack the deck in his favor.

2) With these three movies having been made in the past six years, there would be no distracting choices that could be tied to the age of the film, which, whether fair or not, have biased me against certain entries in this series. (I've mentioned in previous posts not liking the look and feel of the movies made in 1995 and 2002, for example.)

3) Jamie Lee Curtis would be back again. Although Curtis stars, or at least appears in, two films in this series that I really did not like (the first Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection), more often than not, her presence brings credibility to this franchise.

Well, there were so many things I ended up not liking about Halloween that they overwhelmed the presence of Curtis and the generally good filmmaking of Green.

It starts with this line of dialogue -- given by Curtis' Laurie Strode to a pair of British podcasters inquiring about Michael Myers, who represent the series' latest attempt to tie this material to an entertainment trend, after Resurrection was set in the world of live webcasting -- which is dripping with incredulity:

"Michael Myers killed five people, and you want to try to understand him?"

Maybe the incredulity should be ours.

FIVE people? What the f is all this "five people" talk?

I could scarcely believe there was any single movie where Michael killed only five people, let alone in his entire history as a famous serial killer.

Because she can't have forgotten his original murder of her older sister, Laurie either has to be terrible at math or can only be talking about a single night of killing, which was stretched out over the first two Halloween movies. But even in those two movies, he has to have killed way more than four additional people. 

Before I get into actually counting, I have to say what enraged me most about this. It means that after Halloween H20 had already definitively wiped out three movies worth of killing by Michael -- which included the whole existence of a Laurie Strode daughter named Jamie, who starred in the first two of those films and appeared briefly in the third -- this Halloween also wipes out H20 and the movie that followed it, Resurrection, in which Laurie also appeared just a briefly as Jamie had. 

This I cannot tolerate, and it just doesn't make any sense.

If we think of the James Bond series as a comparison, we have all comfortably come to the conclusion that each individual incarnation of James Bond remembers all the other events in the life of that version of himself. So the James Bond who left the series after A View to a Kill, when Roger Moore exited, would remember all the way back to the events of Moore's first film, Live and Let Die. That's not to say that each Bond graduated the 00 academy when his first movie started, just that if we're trying to understand the experiences the character has had, we can limit them to those movies. 

So now Laurie Strode does not even have all the memories and experiences of Jamie Lee Curtis' time as Laurie Strode? WTF?

I understand why they wiped away the Jamie Lloyd trilogy with H20. They decided, perhaps correctly, that it was a bit of a non-starter and they should just get back on track with Laurie Strode once Curtis decided to return. But why now wipe away certain parts of Strode's history? Why not write Halloween 2018 within the constraints of what has already happened to Laurie, which is her moving to California to become the headmistress of a private school, her beheading what she thought was Michael Myers when Michael (we learn after the fact) put his mask on the face of a paramedic who'd had his larynx crushed, and her suffering a breakdown and going into a mental institution?

I get that each new screenwriter who comes to the series may not agree with all the choices made by previous screenwriters. But when you have all this stuff out there, you have to "yes and" it, to use the improv terminology. You have to take what's already on the record and figure out a way to turn it into what you want to write now. I suspect the trio who wrote this -- one of whom is John Carpenter, so respect where respect is due -- just decided that these previous movements by Laurie didn't fit into their conception of where they wanted to take the character now, so they just discarded them, rather than giving themselves the slightly tougher challenge of explaining it. Then again, it's only slightly tougher. A single line of dialogue accomplishes it, usually.

There are two main reasons this does not work for me at all:

1) This now makes the second reconfiguration of Laurie's descendants, though this one was not even necessary. In H20, Jamie Lloyd was written out of existence as a Laurie Strode offspring, replaced by Josh Hartnett as John. Okay, fine. You get one do-over. Now in 2018, John has also been written out of existence. That's fine if you didn't want to use Hartnett again, but why not replace him with another actor and keep the John character in existence? The reason, I suppose, is that if you are disavowing the events of H20 and Resurrection anyway, then you are not committed to any of their logic. So now Laurie has a daughter again, Karen, played by Judy Greer, who has her own daughter, making Laurie a grandmother. Never mind that Laurie was already a grandmother back in 1995 in The Curse of Michael Myers, when Jamie Lloyd gave birth before being killed. (Incidentally, watching these movies in close succession has allowed me to identify their steaming piles of bullshit like no one else probably can.)

2) This now makes Laurie certifiably crazy. Because I haven't told you the type of Laurie Strode we meet here. She is a gun-toting survivalist in the mold of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, stockpiling weapons in her basement and triggering her house with traps in preparation for Michael's arrival. 

Why is this crazy? Because it means it has now been 40 YEARS since her one and only interaction with Michael Myers. Anyone who tailors 40 years of her life toward something that you have no evidence for believing will ever happen is a certified lunatic. And even if she's ultimately right, and all those guns and booby traps play into the finale of this movie, that doesn't make her any less crazy. If I won't ride in a car for 40 years because I am worried about dying in a car accident, then die in a car accident after finally riding in a car, that does not make me smart for not riding in a car. It just means I did way too much walking or riding on horseback for 40 years.

This also has a major impact on the idea that Michael Myers is a legendary serial killer in this world, his name mentioned in hushed tones only. If you killed five people over one night -- actually four people, since you killed your sister 15 years before that -- then you are not a serial killer. You are a guy who had a bad night. (Though I suppose, not as bad a night as those four people had.)

This Halloween wants all the accumulated kills of the previous ten Halloween movies -- I would not be surprised if they approached 100 -- in its consideration of Michael as an iconic member of the all-time pantheon of killers, without any of those things actually having happened. And that is a major problem. Do you really do a podcast 40 years later on a guy who killed four people in one night? Does anyone care, or even remember him?

Okay now let's get back to fact-checking even this film's own logic about the number of people Michael killed. And for this I will go to Wikipedia in the hopes that it will mention each of the kills individually.

We know it started with Michael's sister in 1963. So that's one.

Michael's first murder as an adult is of a mechanic after he escapes the mental institution, whose coveralls he steals to help comprise his iconic outfit. For the benefit of the doubt, let's say that murder was not definitively tied to Michael or that Laurie doesn't know about it. (Or that, Laurie doesn't consider a mechanic a person. Such a snob.) For our count, though, that's two.

Once Michael is in Haddonfield proper and begins stalking Laurie's friends, he kills three of them: Lynda, Annie and Bob. This gets us to the five that Laurie mentioned, as he does not manage to kill anyone else in the first Halloween, though he does kill a dog.

The problem with getting to five after a single Halloween movie is that it means that even the events of Halloween II have now been scrubbed from the record, which just makes any continuing fixation Laurie has with Michael, to say nothing of his enduring place in popular consciousness, all the more absurd. According to Wikipedia, he kills another eight people in Halloween II. 

Idiocy. Idiocy that ruined much of the movie for me with just one stupid line of dialogue. 

Oh but there are plenty of other things I didn't like. So many that I'm not sure I can comprise a logical order for presenting them, so I won't even try. I haven't yet issued a SPOILER WARNING so it is probably time to do that now.

1) The British podcasters are bad characters, but they are killed unceremoniously quite early on in the film. It's just one example of an idea the movie starts but doesn't see through to its logical conclusion. If we are meant to despise them because of their opportunistic interest in, and usury of, the Haddonfield locals, doesn't it make more sense to carry them around until the end, when we can really get behind their inevitable slaughter? Instead, they are dispatched in a random scene in a bathroom after they stop to get gas. 

2) Another idea not seen through: the randomly cheating boyfriend of Laurie's granddaughter Allison. Trying to be current or topical, I suppose, the movie has these characters go to a Halloween party dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, only she's Clyde and he's Bonnie. His name is Cameron and he's played by Dylan Arnold, an actor with a very definite good guy face. Yet despite the fact that these two seem to be quite gaga for each other, including a cutesy joint Halloween costume, at this party he randomly kisses another girl, and then throws Allison's phone into a bowl of punch. (It's supposed to be because he's drunk, but this is quite a ludicrous interpretation of drunkenness.) Even though this seems like completely unmotivated behavior, it's the kind of thing we might expect when a movie is trying to undercut a character so we aren't so heartbroken when the killer slashes their throat. You know, the traditional role for the teenage girl who dies because she had sex. Instead, Allison walks off on Cameron and we simply never see Cameron again. Huh?

3) WHEN IS SOMEONE GOING TO TRANSFER MICHAEL MYERS BETWEEN HOSPITALS AT A DIFFERENT TIME OF THE YEAR? For what seems like the fourth or fifth time in this series -- including all the movies that apparently no longer exist in the chronology -- Michael gets an opportunity to escape because he's being transferred. Why not just transfer him in April? June? February? September even? Why does he have to be transferred on October 29th or 30th every single time?

4) We have to talk about this movie's Dr. Loomis surrogate, a former student of Loomis' named Dr. Sartain, who is played by Haluk Bilginer. (I could have sworn it was Rade Serbedzija, but it was not.) This character represents the single dumbest bit of plotting in the whole movie. He's doing Dr. Loomis-like things, presiding over Michael's transfer and then arriving on the scene to help provide a pop psychological profile of Michael to the local police, so they will understand what they are up against. (But if Michael is such a famous serial killer, shouldn't they know this already?) Anyway, the thing about Dr. Sartain is that it turns out he's so fascinated by Michael from studying him all these years that he actually wants to see what it's like to kill someone, as well as keep Michael alive in order to keep studying him and to see if Michael will ever utter a word. So after he's riding in a police cruiser carrying Allison that hits Michael with a car -- which makes the six or seventh time in this series either the actual Micheal Myers, or the wrong Michael Myers (both Halloween II and H20), has been hit by a car -- Dr. Sartain pulls out a scalpel-like knife and stabs the officer in the neck, killing him in order to keep Michael alive. He then temporarily dons the mask himself. This was just dumb.

5) We need to say something about this police officer because it is another of the film's half-baked ideas. He's named Officer Hawkins and is played by Will Patton, and he's supposed to be a link to the original Halloween -- he says he reported to the scene the night of Michael's 1978 killings. That isn't a problem in and of itself, but the way the film introduces him, it's like it's a bit of fan service. We see him playing pinball, being razzed about his prowess by some black dude who never appears again and is probably in this movie only for tokenism, and then he finally turns so the camera sees him. It's the kind of shot you use when you want to reveal that this is a character we know but were not expecting to see, and we're supposed to say "A-ha!" when we see him. But I checked IMDB just now, and Patton was not in the original Halloween. Even if the character was -- which I doubt -- revealing him in this way only works as a surprise if we know the actor, since we wouldn't at this point know who the character was. As with the podcasters, this character is dispatched in a manner that does not seem to fully play out his arc before it gets rid of him.

6) We have to talk about Laurie Strode's house. She lives in the woods behind a gate with all kinds of security measures. I won't go on and on about how this is stupid because she interacted with Michael Myers on only one night 40 years ago, because I've already done that. What I will say is that she uses her security measures in a truly idiotic fashion. 

So Laurie has this cool device in her kitchen where she can use a remote control so that the island in the middle of her kitchen moves to the side, revealing a hidden compartment in her basement that is basically like a panic room. That's where all her weapons are. Presumably, this was created just for the purpose of the arrival of Michael Myers, since she would not have any reason to believe any other serial killer was stalking her. Yet when Michael does arrive, and she does safely get her and her daughter Karen into the panic room, she completely blows the entire purpose of having a hidden chamber by taking a shot at Michael with her shotgun through the floor boards. Since Michael has never been to this house, we have to assume he would not know about the panic room and would walk around fruitlessly for a while before deciding to leave and go do something else. But by taking a random shot at him, now she has revealed that there are people under the floor, and now Michael knows that he should start ripping away the island to try to get down there. 

What's even dumber about this is that Michael actually does leave for another part of the house -- I can't remember why -- even after Laurie has shot at him, which suggests that their hiding place is still safe. Saying she has to "finish this," Laurie then opens the door and goes back up, risking that Michael would see the island moving aside and know where they were hiding. Why have such a thing if you are not planning to properly use it the one time you actually need it??

But without a doubt the most idiotic part of Laurie's plan is that she has rigged her panic room and other areas of her house with gas and an ability to ignite flame, so she can burn down her house as a means of killing Michael. This includes bars that cross the exit of the panic room if she hits a particular switch, meaning she was already planning for the hypothetical scenario where Michael would be in the panic room but she and her family would not be. You'd have to figure things had already failed pretty spectacularly if you got to that point. But let's set that aside. Let's also set aside that Laurie plans to burn down her whole house, where her daughter (who is now about 38) lived when she was a little girl, in order to hopefully kill Michael, sacrificing any comfort and sentimentality from 40 years of her life for this purpose. The biggest problem is that in the events of Halloween II -- which, granted, may not have even happened in this version of the timeline -- fire was a means of killing Michael that notably did not succeed, as getting caught in an explosion and burning to a crisp were apparently survivable injuries for him. 

I have to stop at this point due to the sheer quantity of words. But I could go on for quite a long time.

One thing I did want to mention, though, is that I was interested to note that this movie is dedicated to the memory of Moustapha Akkad, the longtime series producer who died in 2005 and who I assumed would have been memorialized in Rob Zombie's 2007 movie Halloween, when his son Malek took over as producer. This means they either didn't dedicate the Zombie movie too him, which I find odd, or they did dedicate it to him, but still felt that it was appropriate to dedicate this version of Halloween to him too, even though he died 13 years earlier. Which is also odd. 

And so it is that, to my great surprise, at least one of David Gordon Green's Halloween movies gets as low a rating from me as the series' previous lows, The Curse of Michael Myers and Resurrection, each of which got only a single star on Letterboxd. I have a system of recording my favorite and least favorite new movie I watch each month, and it will truly be a dogfight between these three to see which gets the latter for October.

It is my sincere hope that after getting all these story complaints out of my system with this movie, I can just focus on the movies on their own terms for the final two movies, to date, in this franchise. 

Correcting the mistakes of the original Halloween II

I was not looking forward to Halloween II -- the second Halloween II, not the first one from 1981, which I also watched this month -- because I did not enjoy Rob Zombie's original Halloween remake. I saw that only two years ago so I didn't watch it again this month.

Two years has been enough time to forget exactly why I didn't like that movie, though I suspect I found it gratuitously violent and otherwise glum. (Whereas some of the other movies I've watched this month have tried to be sort of "fun" within the context of a slasher movie about an unkillable psychopath.)

So I was a bit surprised that I am handing out three stars to Halloween II, which means it is the most number of stars I have given to any movie I saw for the first time this month, just barely. Halloween: H20 earned almost that many at 2.5 stars.

I think the passage of those two years has also seen me become slightly more generous in my star ratings, as I see I gave the 2007 Halloween only 1.5 stars. And though I don't totally remember the particulars, it couldn't have been that bad. I gave Halloween 4 and 5 two stars apiece, and I'd think Zombie's movie has more artistic merits than they do.

Before we get started, my standard SPOILER WARNING. 

The 2009 Halloween II starts off as though it might be a straight remake of the 1981 Halloween II, before veering off in a manner that corrects one of my primary complaints about the original sequel to the original Halloween.

As you will recall from this post, I didn't care for the idea of picking up directly at the end of the first movie. I thought Laurie Strode deserved the chance to take a breath after not quite vanquishing Michael Myers, rather than running another gauntlet of misery at the hospital only a few hours later. 

In fact, here is my exact comment from that post:

"Most supernatural serial killers would take the near-death experience to regroup and recover, and return stronger than ever at some later point -- you know, exactly a year from now, that sort of thing -- with the element of surprise in their favor."

And this is in fact what Michael Myers does in this movie.

At first, we don't think that's the case. In fact, the action picks up at the hospital, much as it did in the first Halloween II. Michael is there and he is eager to chop up anyone who stands between him and Laurie, now played by Scout Taylor-Compton. (I say "now" not because there is a different actress in Zombie's original Halloween, but because this is the first person to play Laurie Strode not named Jamie Lee Curtis.) One of those he chops up is poor sweet Octavia Spencer in one of her earliest roles, playing a nurse. This is a pretty bloody and gratuitous scene, which prepared me to file away Halloween II with Halloween as Zombie going a bit too far.

After about 15 minutes worth of hospital stuff, though, Laurie awakens from a nightmare in her bed at home. It appears the hospital stuff must have not happened at all -- so Octavia is actually alive out there somewhere -- because at the moment she awakens, he'd been just about to bear down on her once and for all. Then on the news we hear that Myers was thought to have been shot dead by Laurie, which must have been the ending of that movie I saw two years ago.

To me, this was Zombie basically saying "No, I did not think it was a good idea to set Halloween II in the hospital either." He felt the need to reference the setting of that movie, before pulling out the rug from under us and saying "Nope, that didn't happen."

And indeed, this is a year later from the original film, as we see Tyler Mane's Michael making a slow and steady track back to Haddonfield, Illinois, that begins on October 29th. 

Should mention Mane here. I can't remember if Zombie made this choice in his first movie, but he is more interested than the series' previous directors have been in showing Michael without his mask. I do think there's something a little deflating if we see Michael too much sans mask, but fortunately, Mane looks quite disturbing in the role, and he does always don the mask again even if it gets discarded for a few minutes. 

While the other incarnations of Michael always favored a knife, this Michael does as much bashing (a stripper repeatedly against a mirror) and crushing (someone's head under his boot) as he does slicing. It's consistent with Zombie's unflinching sense of 21st century brutality, one of several aspects that make the movie more realistic than its predecessors. Another is that Michael still takes a licking and keeps on ticking, but in the short arc of these two movies, he isn't required to survive any episodes that would have 100% surely killed him. Zombie likely correctly believes that he's more frightening if we understand that he's a real human being with major brain malfunctions rather than an actual spawn of the devil who can survive anything. 

A character really worth commenting on here is Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasance in five previous Halloween movies. Although Loomis was a bit nutty and often overplayed by Pleasance, as I've talked about several times already, we never doubted that he was a good guy with the best of intentions. That's not at all the case with Malcolm McDowell's version of the character. The time lapse since the first Halloween has allowed Loomis to release a book on Michael Myers, which is of course coming out on Halloween itself. During the promotion we see him doing for this book, it's clear this guy is a craven asshole who has contempt for his fans and his assistant. What's more, the parents of the girls Michael killed the year before blame him for his culpability, which is exacerbated by the fact that he's profiting off it with this book. Loomis does have a moment of redemption, or at least attempted redemption, in this film, but it's a "too little, too late" sort of thing. The shift in perspective reflects Zombie's cynicism that a heroic doctor would just keep showing up and trying to thwart Michael Myers. Instead, he'd probably be a craven asshole profiting off the experience. 

I enjoyed the other familiar faces that popped up here, from the sheriff played by Brad Dourif, to Bill Fagerbakke as his deputy, to Howard Hesseman and Richard Riehle in "blink and you'll miss them" roles, and even a single scene by Margot Kidder as another psychiatrist. Then of course since it is a Zombie movie, there's Sheri Moon Zombie, playing Michael's (and Laurie's) dead mother, who often shows up in Michael's visions dressed all in white and leading a white horse. 

Even though Zombie's take is darker than that of his predecessors, he does seem to be a leader in the 21st century trend to get into the minds of villains and reveal what made them what they are. Chase Wright Vanek plays the young Michael Myers, also part of the visions with his mother, and we do see some scenes of Michael doing ordinary things like missing his mother. It's consistent with a career-long interest by Zombie in, shall we say, flawed protagonists, as you have to remember that movies like The Devil's Rejects and Three From Hell are told from the perspective of sadistic killers.

I wanted to mention one other name that has not gone mentioned at all this month: Moustapha Akkad, who is the first name seen in the credits of every Halloween movie I've watched this month. This producer was, as far as I can tell, the single consistent creative force behind all the previous movies in the franchise, as each one began with "Moustapha Akkad presents." Well, Akkad died in 2005 -- killed in a bombing, shockingly -- meaning that Zombie's 2007 movie probably had a dedication to him. And that also means that his son Malek inherited that producing credit from him, which I can see he has continued to carry through the recent David Gordon Green films.

One other thing I noticed from the end credits: The stunts were coordinated by Danny Aiello III. Yes, that's Danny Aiello's son. Unfortunately, he also died, the very next year, of pancreatic cancer, meaning his father outlived him by nine years.

In the end I can't really put my finger on why I liked Halloween II enough to give it a mild recommendation. Part of that seems to stem from comparing it to the other movies I've watched this month. If I'd watched Halloween II in a vacuum, maybe I would have felt less enthusiastic toward it, like I did Zombie's first film. But as a change of pace from the sameness of many of the preceding entries that I've watched this month, it may have been just what I needed.

I will finish with the three David Gordon Green movies, scattered in whatever manner I find most tolerable over the remaining six days before Halloween. 

Time to reboot Halloween again

The eighth movie in the Halloween franchise is notable for a number of reasons, and again, there will be SPOILERS to follow:

1) It was the first one made in the 21st century, and it shows.

2) It was the first time in the series a second movie was directed by the same person. Rick Rosenthal, who directed Halloween II, is back for more with Halloween: Resurrection, but hasn't improved in the 20 years since his first franchise appearance. (Incidentally, the remaining five films in the series to date would be directed by two different directors, neither of whom directed fewer than two films.)

3) It definitively clarified something I was starting to get an idea about in the last new movie, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, that being that this franchise is now treating Halloween 4, 5 and 6 as if they never happened. How do I know this? Early on we meet a mental patient who is obsessed with serial killers -- knows when they're born, knows how many people they killed, etc. When he recites the litany of Michael Myers' crimes, he conveniently skips straight from the events of Halloween and Halloween II to the events of Halloween H20, with no mention of what can now be considered the ill-fated Jamie Lloyd side trilogy. I'd argue that without the dozen to 20 deaths in those three movies, Myers is not nearly the legendary serial killer we know him to be, as his crimes are essentially limited to the initial murder when he was six, the murders across one night covered in the first two movies, and the murders 20 years later. That is certainly impressive, but in terms of sheer body count, it's got nothing on the other killers this guy mentions, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. It also makes it curious indeed that Laurie Strode was so worried about his return in Halloween H20, because it means he had been gone for a full 20 years at that point, and was not reasonably considered a threat to anybody. 

4) It is sort of trying to end Jamie Lee Curtis' commitment to this series? She's in what essentially functions as a cold open in this mental institution, where she is fooling the nurses into thinking she's catatonic. Of course, she's hiding all her pills in a stuffed teddy bear, just waiting for this night that she somehow knows Michael is going to return to torment her? She's right, and she again has him where she wants him -- this time, the right him, though having to check by removing his mask forfeits her upper hand. (When she beheaded him at the end of the last movie, it turns out it was a paramedic with Michael's mask pushed over his head. He couldn't tell her this because Michael crushed his larynx. As ridiculous explanations go, it's not as terrible as it could be.) Anyway, she gets stabbed in the back and falls from the roof of the institution. We don't see her dead close up, so basically it's Curtis getting to decide whether that's it for Laurie or leaving open a plausible door for her return. Which we know she took since she's in the last three movies that I'll get to this month.

5) In a series that is mostly bad, this might be the worst Halloween of them all.

If I found the look and feel of the one two movies ago, The Curse of Michael Myers, stultifying because of the particular moment in time it was made, I might find Resurrection even more so. It's got a sort of Dawson's Creek look to it, which I suppose makes sense, as it was contemporaneous with the last few seasons of that show. (And don't forget, Michelle Williams was actually in the most recent Halloween movie before this, which coincided with the beginning of Dawson's Creek.)

But far more dated is the central conceit of this movie, that six college students are chosen to wear body cameras to spend Halloween night in the original Myers home, still looking as it did nearly 25 years earlier (which is more evidence that those three middle movies did not happen), for a live telecast broadcast over the web. Some of this perspective is not the fault of the movie. Technology that seemed cutting edge 22 years ago in 2002 can't help but feel a bit silly now. But the cheap production of the whole thing is what really grates.

The masterminds of this venture, called Dangertainment, are played by Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. Rhymes is a passable actor. Banks is not. Fortunately, she has less to do. 

Other cast members of note are Sean Patrick Thomas, Thomas Ian Nicholas (this was the era when everyone had three names, though Jamie Lee Curtis did it first) and Katee Sackhoff, though it should be noted that she is credited here as "Katee Sachoff." I could not figure out the reason for this spelling of her name, considering that her birth name does appear to be "Sackhoff." Maybe at that time she was too worried about its similarity to Jack Off?

Everything about the way this movie is made is slapdash and perfunctory, which includes both the logic and the choreography of the kills. Any apparent "cleverness" is supposed to be contained within the use of these web cameras. Don't forget, this was the first few years after found footage became a thing with The Blair Witch Project. And while some of the movies inspired by Blair Witch did interesting things with it, Halloween: Resurrection does not.

One of the funniest things about it is that there is a disconnect between even the advertising and the movie itself. The poster above makes it look like Curtis interacts with the other people who appear on Michael's knife, but she does not. And her hair doesn't look like that, as it's worn long in this film. Just a lazy and uninspired effort all around. 

And so it is time to reboot Halloween again with the Rob Zombie movies, only the second of which I will be watching since I just saw the first one in 2022. Depending on how you define it, this could be considered the fourth reboot of the series already. Here are the previous ones:

1) Halloween III: Season of the Witch, to take the series away from anything having to do with Michael Myers, albeit only for one movie.

2) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, bringing Michael back but making the protagonist for the next three movies Jamie Lloyd, who was at that time supposed to be Laurie Strode's daughter.

3) Halloween H20, to erase the previous three movies and bring Laurie back.

Since we know there is one more coming after Zombie's movie's with the David Gordon Green trilogy, in a very real way this is a series that has been rebooted five times already. And when they inevitably make some future Michael Myers movie -- even though the last one of Green's is called Halloween Ends -- that will make it an even half-dozen. 

Even smaller Horizon, Abbey Lee's range, and neither the robots nor animals talk

On both legs of my flight to Singapore, I committed the sin of watching a movie set in the dusty American west on a screen that tended to diminish its grandeur.

George Stevens' Giant was on a seatback screen, as discussed here, while Kevin Costner's first chapter of his Horizon saga -- which looks as though it's going to be at least four movies (!!!) -- was on my phone.

You see, Scoot airlines does not have seatback screens. I'm not sure I fully understand this as a choice by a budget airline. Yes you are saving on a one-time cost in the building of the airplane, but then you are also limiting its scope to a small range of very budget uses. What if you one day decide that Scoot is going to be the industry leader in refinement and luxury? You can't. (Plus, it's one of those airlines where once you pay for any extras that you would get for free on a slightly less budget airline, like seat selection, you are paying just as much if not more than the less budget airline. We won't be flying it again.)

But we did know about the lack of seatback screens beforehand, so I had prepped two downloaded movies from Stan, both of which I ended up watching during the 6:30 flight, and both of which are encapsulated in the subject of this post. 

Unlike Giant, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is not a classic, so it's clear that watching it on the plane was the only way I probably would have felt satisfied taking it in. In fact, now that I know that there are at least four installments planned -- which I learned just now adding it to Letterboxd -- I feel a bit resentful that I watched it at all. When you are talking about 12 hours worth of movies, assuming the same three-hour length for the others, you are talking about more like a TV show than a series of movies, especially if they come out in relatively short succession rather than over a period of ten years. (The second chapter is currently available, though not yet on Stan, while the remaining two do not yet have release years.) Costner has already been making an actual TV show with what I assume is very similar material in Yellowstone. It's unclear why he felt he wanted to treat this material at least superficially differently.

The even funnier thing, especially in retrospect, about there being so much future Horizon planned is that Chapter 1 ends with a time lapse montage that might encompass another five years in these characters' lives that we aren't seeing play out in real time. Some of the events portrayed in this dialogue-free montage are the standard "you don't need to see this dramatized" stuff, like the building of towns, but then there's also stuff that seems like it could have fit into a Chapter 2 and benefitted from some exposition, characters being separated and in some cases maybe even dying. Although Costner certainly commits the sin of indulgence here, one sin he does not commit is excess exposition, as it takes quite a while to get our bearings within the many stories and characters, in part because Costner trusts us to pick things up and determine for ourselves what's important. It's probably the only example of commendable restraint in the project. 

Other than the all-star cast that kept popping up throughout -- including the likes of Sam Worthington, Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Will Patton and Giovanni Ribisi, the latter of whom is fourth billed in the end credits even though he does not appear until just about the final moments of the film -- there was one noteworthy element, but only as it relates to what my wife was watching next to me.

She'd tried to watch Don't Breathe -- it was a film that she didn't get to on the first leg of the trip, when we had seatback screens on Jetstar -- and found it was available to download from Netflix. She also found that she'd already seen it, soon after she started watching. See, this is why I keep lists.

So instead she watched multiple episodes of Florida Man, in which actress Abbey Lee gets second billing to Edgar Ramirez. I saw her pop up there first, so was then quite surprised when she showed up in 19th century western garb on my own screen. (Based on screen time only, she deserved to be among the top four billed, but lost out to Giovanni Ribisi for his 15 seconds of screen time.)

Ever since she made an impression on me with her intense appearance in The Neon Demon, I've been quick to pick out Lee. I always think of her as a model first and an actress second, which is the correct chronology for her career, but she's not one of those where the modeling is obviously a better fit for her than the acting. (We'll get to one of those when we talk about Tyra Banks in Halloween: Resurrection, the third movie I watched on Monday after I got home, which we will not otherwise discuss in this post.)

And though I suppose this is only "range" on Lee's part in terms of the time periods of the two pieces of content -- she seems to play a woman of loose morals in both movies, an actual prostitute in Horizon and maybe just a woman who dresses provocatively in Florida Man -- I did consider her appearance in both of the things we were watching to be some sort of confirmation of her arrival as an actress, and not just a model that people were giving work because she has such arresting peepers. 

The final third of my subject relates to Robot Dreams, the Pablo Berger film that worked its way into a surprising Oscar nomination for best animated feature in 2023. And like Horizon with Giant, this spoke directly to something I had watched earlier in the trip.

You may recall that I saw The Wild Robot while on the ground in Singapore, and in a very short appraisal of its quality at the end of a piece that was mostly about differences in attending movies, I said that I wished the animals had not talked. 

Well, Robot Dreams is also about animals and robots, and neither of them talk.

In fact, I wasn't sure if 103 minutes was too long for a movie in which no one talks. Because film is first and foremost a visual medium, it is of course possible to understand everything going on in Robot Dreams without any dialogue, and certainly preferable. Not only can you show it in any country without alteration, but it removes the temptation to rely on famous voices and silly shtick as in The Wild Robot. Much more profound this way, though likely far less accessible to children. 

Still, it's possible -- though I'm not going to say certain -- that Robot Dreams would be better as a 25-minute short, or 80 minutes if it was Berger's dream to make it feature length. You get up to 103 and there's definitely filler, which I felt while watching it.

But this is indeed a very pleasing movie, one which charmed me regularly. Its similarities to The Wild Robot, at least on the surface, do not end with the blending of animals and robots (the primary relationship being between a dog and his robot). Both movies in fact contain a newborn bird -- or three in the case of Robot Dreams -- hatching from eggs and imprinting on the first robot that they see.

It's just one of those coincidences, but I'm glad the more creative Robot Dreams got there first.

I have a problem with this headline

No, not the one about Japan or the vice principal, though I suppose that could be considered problematic behavior.

Rather, the one about this Netflix movie I'm just hearing about, Woman of the Hour, being "already" 92% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Um, an approval percentage is not something that accumulates over time until it reaches its highest point. It's not like a box office. It's not like a statistical milestone for an athlete.

In fact, it could be argued that a movie is likely to have its highest RT rating at the beginning of its run. Somebody has to be the first person to submit a review, and what if that person goes gaga for it? Instant 100%.

All I'm saying is, hyping a movie is fine, just think about the logic of your hyping.

Takeaways from seeing The Wild Robot in Singapore

As you know, I like to get to a movie when I'm on vacation, particularly if it doesn't inconvenience anyone I'm travelling with.

That was easy on this trip to Singapore, as my wife was spending the first two days at a convention all day, and we passed a theater on the taxi ride in from the airport, meaning I didn't even have to do any research. 

But because I'm on vacation and there's, like, seeing the country to do, I will keep this short and organized by numeric bullet points. The items will also be listed in no particular order.

1) Although some things in Singapore are quite expensive, movies are not. My ticket was $11.50, which is only a little more than that in Australian dollars.

2) Sweet popcorn is a standard movie concession in addition to salty popcorn. For the novelty of it, I was going to get just sweet, but the man at the counter helpfully offered to blend them. It was yummy. I also got some lemon icing encrusted sticks.

3) Village is a chain here, just as it is in Australia.

4) I was actually going to see Smile 2 on the first day of its release rather than The Wild Robot, but I got the time wrong and the next show wasn't until 2:50. Given that it's also 127 minutes, I opted for the 12:45 Wild Robot, which also had the benefit of getting me out in time to go on the Singapore Flyer, this city's version of the giant ferris wheel that has become a status symbol for big international cities the world over.

5) Ticket takers, the longevity of your jobs is finite. I got my ticket from the kiosk and as far as I could tell, the man who sold me the popcorn and lemon icing encrusted sticks was the only person working there. That's because when you are actually going to your auditorium, you are granted admission by scanning a QR code on your ticket like you were entering a train station. If you have a valid code, the doors part for you. Never seen that before.

6) Before the ads started, this was on the screen for several minutes:

Seemed a bit not quite ready for primetime, but otherwise the projection was flawless.

7) I was interested to see that all the ad copy readers clearly spoke in an American accent. I'd have thought British, but maybe the Singaporeans have had enough of British rule, even 60 years after getting their independence.

8) There were Chinese subtitles.

9) I thought the movie was okay. Still a bit too Dreamworksy for me. I wish the animals had not talked, and had run into each other a little less often.

Small Giant, and 34 years to James Dean completism

James Dean made only three movies before he died in a 1955 car accident, and two of them were released posthumously. But you wouldn't know it from how long it took me to watch them.

Seeing East of Eden (1955), his first film, in my Art of The Film class my senior year in high school coincided with starting to think of myself as a cinephile. I can't say for sure if we watched it before Christmas (which would have been 1990) or after (which would have been 1991), but let's just round up and say it was 34 years ago.

Continuing in chronological order of their release with Dean's first posthumous film, I don't know exactly when I saw Rebel Without a Cause (1955) because it predates when I started keeping track of that stuff in 2002. But I have a feeling it was just before that, because I think I remember watching it in the apartment I moved into in May of 2001, the beginning of more than a dozen years living in Los Angeles. The viewing might have been sort of a cinematic rite of initiation to my new home, since the film is set in LA and I would have been geeked by the famous scene filmed at Griffith Park Observatory.

More than 20 years later, I have finally finished Dean's filmography with a viewing of Giant (1956), and it took being a captive audience on a plane to Singapore to do it.

Oh I considered watching it before now. But if I ever got close, I quickly veered away when I saw its daunting running time: 3 hours and 19 minutes.

Which happens to be a perfect way to kill nearly half of a seven and a half four flight.

Normally I watch new releases on international flights as it is a good way to goose my numbers before closing my rankings in January, and I did start the flight with Minhal Baig's We Grown Now. But my 2024 numbers are actually ahead of last year's pace (or at least were before I started watching all the Halloween movies this month), and the other options weren't really doing it for me (sorry Tarot).

So I was going through the A-Z listing of all movies (and have a second post I might write inspired by that perusal) and there was Giant, daring me to take this opportunity to watch it.

My Art of the Film teacher, Mr. Brown, would likely be horrified to hear that I watched a film of such expansive Texas vistas on a screen the size of a paperback novel, but at least I didn't watch it on a phone. And at least it wasn't shot in 70 mm, which would have made the crime all the more perverse. 

The thinking was, though, that I didn't know when else in my normal life I'd say "Okay, I am devoting the next 199 minutes of my life to this movie," especially since when you're watching such a long movie at home, you'll need to take breaks and will be lucky to finish the whole thing inside four hours. So if the options were watching Giant on a plane or never watching it, I think I made the right choice.

Especially considering how much I ended up liking it.

I have to admit I was a bit impatient in the first hour. The knowledge of the length of time that lay ahead of me felt onerous, even without many other alternatives to distract me, and at that point, I thought I had this movie worked out. Elizabeth Taylor is in a bad marriage with Rock Hudson and feels isolated on his Texas cattle ranch. Lo and behold, there is the steamy ranch hand played by James Dean, ready to restore passion to her existence - apparently over the course of three hours and 19 minutes.

This is not what Giant is in the slightest.

Imagine my surprise when Dean is not her savior, but rather, an eventual miserable oil tycoon who is a racist and all around bastard.

In fact, it would actually be a decades spanning story of perseverance and change between the 1920s and 1950s, where Taylor's character soldiers through what is a bad marriage for most of the time - until Hudson's character finally finds a form of redemption at the end, all the more realistic for the fact that he is essentially the same old world curmudgeon he's been all along.

Suffice it to say that the movie entirely reframed what I thought I knew about James Dean, starting with the fact that he's not even actually in all that much of this movie.

Knowing as I do that Dean became one of the most iconic movie stars of the 20th century, seen posing in Rebel Without a Cause on posters in the poster racks in department stores even when I was a kid in the 1980s, I imagined this was the 1950s version of a modern pop star, his every movie dictated by a publicist and calculated to make teenage girls swoon. Giant returns the opposite verdict entirely.

If I remembered East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause a little better, I'd probably already know Dean wasn't as superficial as that. I do know that he certainly was not a paean to machismo in those films, at least not the way the posters would have you believe. I seem to remember a fair bit of anguished crying in both movies.

But at least in both of those films he was the hero, or at least heroic. There is absolutely no way to characterize what he's doing here in those terms.

In that first hour, even though you could barely see his eyes under the brim of his ten-gallon hat, I figured this movie was prepping for us an image of the kind, studly hunk who is going to save Taylor's Leslie Benedict from her prematurely old husband. But then I started to notice that his attentions towards her are at least a little bit lewd. And then he disparagingly refers to the Mexicans working on the ranch as "wetbacks." And then before long he is revealing a dastardly vindictive and gloating side that is essentially his default condition for the remainder of the film. When he turns his romantic attentions to Leslie's daughter - her younger daughter at that - any idea of him as a man choosing roles in order to cultivate a particular public image is long gone.

So while I have had, to this point in my life, a sort of snide response to the ongoing cultural cache of James Dean, now I find myself wondering in how many fabulous ways he would have continued to challenge himself in a career that might have lasted another 50 years. Heck, if he led a healthy life, which was probably never in the cards for him, he might even be alive today. He'd be 93, and in theory might still be working.

George Stevens' film impressed me in other ways. The way it fully takes on white racism against Mexicans seems almost transgressive for 1956. That was surely in the source novel, but they could have sidelined it a lot more than they did.

In the end this feels like an essential American document of epic scale and importance, capturing a defining period of American history through gimlet eyes rather than rose-colored glasses.

And watching it on a screen the size of a paperback novel didn't make it any less so.

Welcome back, Jamie Lee

If it seems like the Halloween movies have been lacking something since Jamie Lee Curtis exited the series after Halloween II, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later seems to confirm that is the case.

There is a sudden shift to professionalism under seventh franchise director (out of seven movies) Steve Miner, and it's not only being anchored by Curtis -- and not only because she was the original star of this franchise, alongside Donald Pleasence. (You may remember Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was Pleasence's last Halloween, since he died before it was released. That movie was in his memory, and so is this one, which may be the first time I've ever seen an actor memorialized in two different movies in the same series. I don't think even Paul Walker got that.)

No, it's because Curtis is an actual competent actress -- more than that, a movie star, at least to some degree. The flotsam and jetsam that joined Pleasence in the other movies didn't do much before or much after (other than Paul Stephen Rudd, from the last movie). 

Halloween H20 is further stabilized by a nearly all-star cast, if not maybe at the time they made it, then what they've gone on to do since then. Here we get the likes of Michelle Williams, Josh Hartnett (in his film debut), LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Adam Arkin and even Psycho scream queen Janet Leigh in a small role, though I must admit that after seeing her name in the opening credits, I forgot to look out for her in the movie. After the fact, I do remember who she played.

So does this all add up to a good movie?

Almost.

I'm still not quite giving a recommend on Halloween H20, as it is still a little beholden to the standard structure of a Halloween movie. (I'm starting to think there may be no other way to make one of these movies.) But the 2.5 stars I'm giving it are easily the highest number of stars I've given since the original Halloween. Halloween III is also better, but I didn't watch that this time around, having just seen it for the first time back in January.

SPOILERS to follow.

The clear advantages of this particular film:

1) It feels like more of an adult movie, perhaps because the final girl is an adult. There are some good, character-building scenes between Laurie Strode and her love interest, played by Adam Arkin, the kind you realize the other films did not have time for. (Though H20 doesn't add on extra celluloid to accomplish this as it is still only 87 minutes.)

2) There is finally a Black character in a Halloween movie! Welcome, LL Cool J.

3) We finally get out of Haddonfield, Illinois, where all but one of the previous movies (thanks again for being something different, Halloween III) were set. Laurie we now learn faked her death in a car accident in order to throw Michael Myers off her trail, which has worked for two decades now. Somehow she took the wreckage of her early life and turned it into a false identity serving as a headmistress for a private school in California. Just changing up the setting did wonders for this movie.

4) Laurie finally, really, truly, tries to take definitive action against Michael. Not only does she go on the offensive against him, once setting aside an opportunity to escape so she can actively seek him out on the campus of this school, axe in hand, but after "killing" him several times -- knocking him off a balcony, hitting him with a car, and rolling that car down a hill, where it pins him against a tree branch -- she takes that axe and chops his head off. I guess that's why the next film is called Resurrection.

5) I also really liked the straightforward approach to Miner's filmmaking. It seems that only the previous film was mired in 1990s serial killer "slickness," which was anything but slick in the hands of previous director Joe Chappelle. 

One big qualm I did have: The lack of mentioning of Laurie's daughter Jamie, who was in each of the past three movies, dying in the last one. There is no attempt to make reference to her, why Laurie took her son (played by Hartnett) to California but not her daughter, or even that she exited. It's almost like the movie -- the first movie in the series that feels sort of like a reboot -- just said "Eh, that was a mistake. Let's just forget it happened." With Jamie Lee's return, the other Jamie -- who is now dead anyway -- had become superfluous. There can be only one. 

I'm sure I should say more about the film that gave me a little hope for the second half of this viewing series, but the truth of the matter is, I'm writing this as quickly as I can before I head out the door on vacation and don't take a computer with me. See you when I return early next week, refreshed and ready for the final five movies I haven't seen in the Halloween series. 

Blaxploitaudient: Ganja & Hess

This is the tenth film in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.

Blaxploitation and the arthouse don't often collide, but they have for at least the second time this series, though you could make an argument for three of the ten films I've now watched.

Ganja & Hess definitely put me in mind of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss (not checking the correct number of S's right now) Song in terms of its narrative approach, though you could argue it has more in common, thematically, with Lord Shango, which showcases a slightly inferior version of that approach.

Either way, this was an eerie affair that immediately jumped into the top couple movies in the series, a spot it shares with Sweetback but not Shango.

I'd saved Ganja & Hess for October, knowing that it was considered to be horror as a result of first hearing about it from the blaxploitation marathon they did on Filmspotting. I remembered little else about it from the Filmspotting discussion -- and continued to know little else about it for the first third of its running time.

It was then that I made the key decision to check on Wikipedia to see where I'd failed to properly orient myself, and that at least gave me some bearings. Wikipedia clarified for me that the movie was about an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant stabs him with an ancient cursed dagger. I suppose I saw the stabbing occur, but given the abstruse presentation style of many of the narrative beats of this film, I failed to recognize it for what it was at the time it occurred. 

Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind being lost within Bill Gunn's film. There are certain films you watch where you have don't fully know what's going on, but you know that's not because of clumsiness by the filmmakers. Rather, they are making a mood more than a conventional movie, and sometimes, that mood is all you need.

The mood of Ganja & Hess was indeed carrying me along, but to repeat a refrain that has become a little boring to me, I started watching this movie too late at night, and my new couch is too comfortable. I didn't succumb to any involuntary sleep -- as in, sleep without pausing -- but I did have to take a nap or two. I probably should have saved it for another night, but I'm trying to cram in lots of Halloween movies this month, and will potentially lose some key viewing hours as I go on vacation from Wednesday to Monday. Gotta fit in things when you can.

The good news is, even if you are totally alert or on some kind of uppers, Ganja & Hess is not the sort of movie that lays things out for you. From the jump it is clear this is a movie of gestures, canted camera angles, half-seen images, and particularly, chilling sound design. There is a repeated incantation of sorts in this film, accompanied by what sounds like the ominous humming of a guitar amp not being used properly. Any time this entered the narrative, which was a lot, I found myself going to a place in my mind that the other "horror movies" I'm watching this month (more appropriate to undercut the Halloween movies by calling them merely "slasher movies") were not taking me.

The anthropologist is the Hess, and he's played by Duane Jones. I saw the name in the credits and I saw the man on screen, but it still took me a little while to put together that I was looking at a true horror icon. Jones plays the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which I have to imagine was a factor in Bill Gunn casting him five years later for Ganja & Hess.

The Ganja is the widow of Hess' assistant, whom he killed after the vampiric stabbing. (Some of the sequence of events in this part of the film was a little lost on me, since it's the kind of film that might not be playing in chronological order.) She's played by the very charismatic and naturalistic Marlene Clark. Clark is an actress I recognized, though the only other things I would have seen that she was in -- Sanford & Son and a very small role in Enter the Dragon -- I doubt I would actually know her from, given the size of the role or the amount of time since I've seen it. She does a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half of the film, when she comes under the spell of Hess at his mansion, as she tends to be verbal and he tends to be not.

Again, this movie is more a vibe than a strict story, exploring sex, religion, power dynamics and other provocative isms. It's no coincidence that Hess is an anthropologist, as his studies of native peoples and their iconography also factors into the proceedings.

But again, Ganja & Hess is one of those films where the less you try to analyze it, the more you get out of it. Just letting it wash over you is the best way to go, and wash over me it did.

Just two more months to go. In November I will watch Coffy, and then December is TBD.