Violation (2020)

It is difficult to talk about, and in fact difficult to want to talk about, Violation. This is not only, and perhaps not primarily, due to the subject matter. It is not only because I don’t want to accidentally reveal virtually any spoilers, although that may be the primary reason. It’s not only because I’m still not entirely certain what happened, although I’m not.

See, the movie is presented completely out of order of events. There are two sisters, one in the final death throes of her marriage, one moved to off the grid and learning how to be a survivalist. Over the course of events, which were legitimately difficult for me to piece together not because they were out of order so much as because they were fragmented so badly that it was difficult to tell where any given moment might fit even in retrospect, and not only that, whether any given moment had actually happened; over the course of those events, I was saying, a violation of trust occurs, with the result being the slowest burning, most intimately shot revenge story I’ve ever seen. I mean intimate in almost every sense of that word, but I will focus on the facts of how small the cast is and of how nearly every scene is shot in close frame, suffocatingly close. It’s almost impossible to separate the act of viewing the events from the events themselves. I’m used to a comfortable distance, as an audience member, and it was absolutely impossible to achieve that distance.

I am impressed by this movie, and I should probably watch it again, only I find that I don’t want to. It’s just too raw.

Thunderbolts*

Here’s how you know something is rotten in the state of Marvel: we made plans to see a movie on June 1st, just thirty days after a May 2nd release date. And no Alamo Drafthouse in the DFW area had even a partial screen for the movie in its fifth week of release. That just hurts.

And it’s also sad, because after six years, Marvel seems to be getting back into a groove. What I mean by this is not that their stories have improved, although I think they have. I mean that it feels like all of the movies I’m watching this year are tied together. It’s not the spaghetti test approach of throwing each new thing against the wall to see whether it sticks, there’s an actual throughline to the flicks being released. It’s exciting!

After the harrowing events of the movie I watched last week[1], the Contessa[2] Valentina Allegra de Fontaine is on the run from Congress and cleaning house as far as her various special projects. You could, but probably do not, recall her recruiting a varied group of powered individuals across multiple movies and TV shows that have aired since Nick Fury went into space to hang out with his cat[3] and therefore nobody was around to think big picture anymore. Well, Director de Fontaine has been here to swoop in and fill that blind spot in our collective foresight.

Except, well, her hands are not as clean as we might wish them to be, both in terms of the kinds of projects she has supported and most likely in terms of the gains experienced by her investment portfolio, if you know what I mean. So as I said, she’s cleaning house, which involves sending Yelena[4] (among her other recruits) to prevent the theft of dangerous and classified material (among the Contessa’s[2] other clean-up missions). In many ways, what Yelena finds there is not what she expected. And I don’t just mean because she’s been feeling burned out and has asked that this be her last mission. (I don’t not mean that, it’s just not the only thing I mean.)

Two or three action set pieces later, Yelena, John Walker[5], and a handful of other misfits and/or one-time criminals are facing off against an existential threat[6] to the city of New York, and possibly to the world. I can confidently say that this will not go the way you expect it to.

Anyway: I liked all the characters (though I could wish Ghost had been provided a little more development), I found the story beats to be novel  or at least adjacent to novel, and I want to go back to my first point, which is how much I loved seeing aftershocks from Brave New World and foreshocks from Fantastic Four: First Steps. Many individual movies since the end of Phase 3 have been good (and many have been, ahem, not so good), but this is the first time in those six years where it has felt like they’re all connected.

If they can keep doing this, the MCU might be able to come back from limbo.

[1] No link, it’s literally one review back. Just click the “previous” button, or scroll down.
[2] Technically not (as far as I know) a countess in the MCU, but what’s a title or two between friends?
[3] Technically not a cat
[4] Who you may remember as Natasha Romanov’s sister and fellow Red Room Widow
[5] Who you may remember as Captain America, for at least 10 minutes before he got fired
[6] I might go so far as to say an existential terror

Captain America: Brave New World

The bad thing about the post-Endgame MCU is that the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you need to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier[1] to understand where this new Isaiah supersoldier character came from or why he should matter. On the other hand, that means you will have seen Sam Wilson spend six episodes coming to grips with whether Steve Rogers made the right choice about if he should even have a successor, nevermind if it should have been the Falcon. It’s not that I object to people having more than one crisis of confidence. But if you’re going to do it in the long form exploration of the character first, then it isn’t worth wasting three minutes on a slimmed down conversation covering the same beats during the movie second. At the least, reverse the order so it’s not a recap, it’s an expansion! Either way, don’t pretend like you must cover this ground again in case I didn’t see the TV show you already made it mandatory for me to have watched to understand different ground you’re covering.

But honestly, that was the only thing about the movie that rang hollow. Brave New World is a solidly middle of the road MCU movie, which makes it noticeably above average for what they’ve released in the past six years. The deal is, there’s an enormous statue made out of a new thing that we’ve never heard of before[2] called adamantium, which is kind of a big deal. Might even be better than Wakandan vibranium, once people figure out all the applications. So once general, then later Secretary of Defense, and most recently President Ross[3] is trying to broker a treaty with several other nations to freely share “Celestial Island” and the adamantium, instead of fighting wars over it.

…unless of course he’s the same dick he has always been, and has a whole other agenda. That, ultimately, is the pivot on which the entire movie turns. That, and whether Sam can unravel the truth in time to save his cool elderly mentor and/or the world.

I think I liked it because it was good, but I will admit that I may have liked it because there was basically no noise about a multiverse. I’m not saying multiverse bad, but I am saying Something Else Once in a While good.

[1] One of the first couple of MCU TV shows they made, which also means it’s been a minute, unless you’re the type of person who rewatches everything for the tie-ins, in which case you’d have needed this, the first (or possibly second) Hulk movie, probably Civil War, and Eternals, at the minimum. But I’ll come back to this point.
[2] Well, we the residents of MCU Earth at least. We the viewers just maybe have.
[3] So that thing from footnote 1 where you have to be familiar with an ever-expanding, ever more intricate web of knowledge to even follow what’s going on in these movies? I’m sorry, but I can only say good things about this. I eat that shit up. It is awesome with a capital A++. If you want to say that’s a weakness of the movies, then you do not understand comics in the first place.

Jigoku (1960)

This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha

A Plague Tale: Requiem

A couple of years ago [let’s say], I played a game set in medieval France wherein a teen sister and young brother are on the run from deadly swarms of rats and the Church, because of alchemists. The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, picks up some short time later, with the reminder that. yep, younger brother Hugo’s affliction is not resolved.

Except for the plot, this is basically the same game, so don’t come looking for innovations. The sling is still pretty cool as weapons in games go, and the mechanic for creating and removing light as a means of progressing under various circumstances is a clever one that never got old. As far as the plot, though… I guess the best way to look at it is as a fantastical re-imagining of the Black Plague, and to then not be surprised, in either this or the previous game, when just absolutely loads of people die. Inevitably, some of them are people you care about.

The goal of the game is to cure Hugo, whether via alchemist or following his dreams[1] or delving into the history of previous small children who have been afflicted with the Macula, a word which may have some meaning outside of this game that I have not researched, but probably doesn’t[2]. There are, as you might expect, lots of soldiers stalking around, lots of rats, lots of nooks and crannies to find secret story beats for completionist achievements, and a few too many “trapped with multiple waves of enemies” scenarios for my personal tastes, but on the other hand, I did finish the game, so.

It wanted me to play again on highest difficulty but with all my unlocked abilities. I will not be doing that, but I can imagine past me, with access to many fewer games, giving it a go.

[1] I mean, dreams he is having when sleeping, not like dark ages self-actualization.
[2] It turns out to be a part of the retina, which seems completely unrelated to anything in the game. Beats me!

The Howling (1981)

I’m supposed to remember what the randomizers are that lead into the movie my podcast bids me watch, but I really very don’t. Werewolves and something else. ’80s? Could be that, for sure, but it sounds wrong. Either way, I had somehow never seen The Howling, and so here we are.

I imagine, had I known it was a Joe Dante film, I might have put in more effort.

So there’s a serial killer[1] stalking the streets of Manhattan, and that isn’t the only reason by a long shot that I felt this movie had strong giallo elements, despite being a creature feature. Dee Wallace who you may remember as the mother from Poltergeist a year later[2] is a TV reporter engaged in an implausible sting operation where since he’s been calling her and breathing heavily, they have a connection and she agrees to meet him in an adult arcade[3] on Times Square (probably), where he is promptly shot by police. Well, not I suppose promptly enough, since she is emotionally scarred by the whole ordeal first.

Therefore, she (and her husband) are sent off by Patrick Macnee[4] to one of those peaceful outdoor psychiatric retreats, where she can be regressed through hypnotherapy to remember what happened and ease her burdens, except instead of that her husband is being constantly seduced by a hot brunette while she is being tormented by one or more creepy dudes and meanwhile for no obvious reason her friends back in town are researching werewolves, and before you know it, the moon is out of the bag, if you catch my drift.

The effects were pretty decent, one or two literally animated transformations aside. We really lost something, when CGI came to horror. It’s great for action and sci-fi and whatever genre superhero movies are, but for horror and probably fantasy? Practical effects are just where it’s at.

To be clear, this was not a good movie, and I’m not recommending it or anything. But at the same time: monster movies are cool, you know?

[1] played by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, but I could never see him well enough / in sufficient lack of makeup to recognize, and definitely didn’t by voice
[2] or from not confusing her with Dee Snider because nobody besides me does that
[3] I went to an adult arcade in downtown San Jose in the late ’90s, and it was one of the greatest disappointments of my life to learn that they just meant you could watch movies there, when I was expecting to play porn-themed video games to a bitchin’ ’80s soundtrack.
[4] Best known (to me at least) as Count Iblis in the original Battlestar Galactica show, which meant I immediately distrusted him.

Slaxx

On paper[1] (and to be 100% fair, influenced by my experience with Rubber), Slaxx is nearly the perfect movie for me, and I’ve been waiting for it to come up in my Shudder queue for years, while also being halfway afraid that whole time it would leave the service and I wouldn’t notice the doom approaching. So maybe that is just too much pressure?

The barebones plot is, there’s a new hire at a clothing store (like, the Gap but higher end / bigger name), and she’s extremely excited to be joining the company family. They have all natural, fair trade, non-exploitation branding, and a Steve Jobs type at the helm, and she’s exactly the kind of idealistic final girl type who wants to be all in on that. So naturally on her first day, she is exposed to that store’s staff, and they are all pretentiously adversarial, with a manager who is far too focused on his own career to worry about doing anything for his employees, and by the time the situation is firmly established, you’re already rooting for the killer jeans to arrive.

But the thing is… it just never lands. Despite, or possibly because of, the underlying cause of the bloody spree, I never felt what the movie wanted me to feel. Like, perhaps if the retail peon level people had not mostly been despicable in the first place, I could have latched onto the “real” story, but since I already wanted to see a comeuppance, the one that was offered just didn’t fit. It’s like in Friday the 13th. Pamela Voorhees hits differently if this batch of counselors actually deserves her wrath, versus if they’re just playing out roles in the play in her head that has no bearing on reality.

Despite all of that, the murder jeans were pretty cool. Which is not nothing.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to indict an entire industry, you murder the people who created it and the people who support it, instead of spending most of your time murdering the people who just work there for minimum wage. And if you’re going to make your targets a bunch of jerks that you root for dying, then don’t pivot into indicting an industry. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit.

[1] I mean this metaphorically, yes, since there’s no literal paper on which the plot and details of Slaxx are written down for me, but I also mean it literally, insofar as see the poster.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered

It has been much longer than it should have been before I played the sequel to The Last of Us, especially when you consider how very much I love that game. I’m not sure why I didn’t get it in the first place, but not long after that it was Playstation 5 time, and I waited until I had one because why play it on the old busted graphics? ….and that turned out to take maybe longer than one would expect. But when I got one for Christmas this year, I also knew the second season of the show was coming down the pike, and I had to hurry up if I didn’t want spoilers[1].

The Last of Us Part II is (mostly) set about 5 years after the events of the previous game, which I will continue to not spoil, even though it perhaps hamstrings me a little for this review. It is, as the last one was, an intensely character driven narrative, with themes of parenthood still present, but being replaced by themes of… there’s not a word for this. When one says parenthood, one envisions the responsibilities of the parent to the child. This game is first about the responsibilities of the child to the parent.

The second thing it is about by chronology, and the first thing by weight, is vengeance. There’s a Chinese(?) proverb that advises if you embark upon a quest for revenge, dig two graves. Whoever said that I think underestimated the volume of digging needed by possibly more than one order of magnitude, but then again, many video games of this type are violent by nature. Still, there is an obligation and a cost associated with revenge, and the narrative provides an exemplary portrayal of both.

Also: it’s beautiful. This may of course be my review of the PS5 more than of the game qua game, but nevertheless. Also, the controller is the best game controller since the XBox 360.

All in all, it was a great story and a great experience, and I look forward to watching it play out on the small screen over the next few weeks via HBO as well as to any future game sequels that I think I expect to be coming sometime soon in the next year or two. Of course, at some point I’ll be obligated to talk about these in terms of plot, lest I get too abstracted. But not today! …unless forced, which seems unlikely.

[1] As it happens, I got spoilers, but nothing too intolerable. A scene in the first episode of the show was a flashback from the last 2-3 hours of the game, which, well.

Smile 2

Remember Smile? Demony thing stalks and/or possesses a hospital trauma therapist who has just witnessed a horrific act of self-harm, and the main symptoms of said possession, prior to gruesome death, are losing time and seeing people oversmile creepily at you everywhere you go?

Smile 2 is very much like that movie, only instead of a deep metaphorical dive into the personal costs of providing mental healthcare, it follows a Taylor Swift-level superstar who lost everything to drugs and alcohol and is staging her comeback. Only, she makes a single impulsive (and low-key bad) decision that puts her in the wrong place at the extremely wrong time, and now people are smiling creepily at her.

Where the first movie was deeply horrifying and also an unpredictable mindfuck, this one is… well, the mindfuck part is gone because we know for sure that it’s real even if the afflicted character doesn’t, and the horror is not precisely gone, but it just feels mean-spirited this time. Not like it could happen to anyone, but like it is happening to this character because she deserves it. (Wondering whether she actually does deserve it or not honestly misses the point.)

In conclusion, not every horror movie needs to be a franchise.

But, if you’re into body horror, there was some stuff with hair that was really making me squirm.

Exile to Hell

I have reached the point in the Deathlands series where it has become two series. Which is weird. Now, if I understand the release schedule correctly, I’ll be alternating between the two series. It is very clear that Outlanders is in conversation with the original, but less clear if it will be a two way conversation. We’ll see, I guess!

Exile to Hell is set another hundred years in the future. That is to say, two hundred years after World War III all but wiped out humanity and gave rise to monstrous mutations both within and outside of humanity. And one hundred years after Ryan Cawdor, Mildred Wyeth, and friends have been striding the so-called Deathlands that are what remained of the United States.

So, what’s different? A lot of things, as it happens. Most importantly, the mostly horrible Barons who run the mostly horrible various settlements have come together and consolidated their power[1]. They have nine much larger fiefdoms in which all of the healthy, happy, neatly contained and regimented and let’s be honest controlled people live, while everything outside the barons’ control is known as the Outlands. Yes, another hundred years means that much less radiation and associated horrors, but it’s still not great out there, Bob.

Also, our characters are pretty different. Okay, is there a main character, his military buddy, a redhead, an old dude straight out of the past, and an albino? When you put it like that, you’re undercutting my point, fine. But my point is, the main character? He’s one of his baron’s secmen, now called magistrates. They have the tech and the firepower to be nearly invulnerable. We’re talking hardcore body armor, the best guns[2], black freaking helicopters. You go up against them? You lose. Kane really could not be more different from Cawdor, viewed through the lens of the latter’s adventures so far. And Krysty Wroth’s ginger mutant has been replaced by Brigid Baptiste’s ginger historian who Knows Too Much(tm). (The other characters, it’s too soon to tell yet.)

But the biggest difference is the environment. This is not (yet at least) a survivalist series. Civilization has begun to return. The redoubts full of teleporters are still a feature of the series, but it turns out they’re the tip of the iceberg. The old questions were “where are we going next using this tech we barely understand, and who will we have to kill to save people and then get back to the mysterious tech and jump to the next place?” The new questions are “where did this technology come from, really, and once we know the answer, are we content to live with it? Or should Something be Done?”

So, as I said, I’m really interested in seeing whether the Deathlands are in conversation with this series, and what secrets each will reveal going forward.

[1] Does this make future Deathlands volumes feel a little less hopeful than they had up to now? Prospectively, it does. All the work they’ve been doing to free people and wash away the human horrors, and, a generation or so later, it was for nothing? Yikes.
[2] I mean, obviously. Whatever else these books are, they’re still in the genre that glories in describing gun models, ammo types, and what that ammunition does to a body.