Category Archives: Film

Moana 2

Exciting milestone: we successfully took the kids out to see a movie! The boy was entranced from start to finish, and only had one or two moments of “nope this is too scary I need to yell ‘stop!'”, which is tolerable in the scheme of things, especially for a kid-friendly showing with nobody else in the theater. Likewise, the girl was entranced, but not so much that she wasn’t also mobile. However, the furthest away she got was two seats down and on the floor peeking through the next row’s seats. Which, again, entirely tolerable under the circumstances.

Anyway, the movie we saw was Moana 2, as the original is a pretty big hit in the house. I don’t know whether these movies are based on any specific Pacific Islander legends, or a mish-mash of them, or made up from whole cloth to look authentic to people who are willing to shell out money to Disney. (Probably the second one?) What I do know is a) they are convincing and b) they definitely have that quality of good fairy tales and mythologies where you want to know what will happen next and it doesn’t turn out the way you’d expect.

But what I’m really here to talk about is the music, and there this movie was disappointing, albeit not in the way you might expect. Yes, obviously, whoever they hired to do the lyrics did not live up to Lin Manuel Miranda. Yes, obviously, the song they put at the end of the credits is the song that in the movie most closely evokes the main song of the first movie. (But honestly, it’s a little too much like Into the Unknown from Frozen II for my taste.) There was maybe only one song I did think I’d be excited to hear when the kids are listening to the Disney music station on Sirius for years to come, honestly. But none of that is my point.

My point is, usually Disney movie sequels are aggressively mid, so you’re allowed to not care much about what the music even sounds like in the first place. But Moana 2 is not only actually pretty decent (except for the music), but it’s also clearly setting up a trilogy. And if I have to care about the movie, then why couldn’t it have had either comparably good music or else not been a musical in the first place?

Knowing the answer to both forks of that question does me absolutely no good.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure

It turns out that even though they are not necessarily plot-destroying, this review has a big spoiler for both the prior movie and this movie. You have been warned.

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La noche de Walpurgis

It’s so weird that I nearly watched a movie named Walpurgisnacht. I have some regrets, now, about how it was sold to the English-speaking world instead.

My horror podcasts’s requirements this time were 1970s as the setting and werewolf as the monster. Thusly, I have now watched The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, which is…. well, honestly, it was very silly, is what it was. See, these chicks named Elvira and Genevieve are looking for the grave of a vampire countess, but they find a guy that we-the-audience just learned in the opening scene of the movie is a werewolf who was good and dead, until the coroner removed the silver bullets from his body. So now he’s back to living in a castle with his crazy and more than a little non-consensual lesbian-grabby sister, but it turns out he’s also looking for this vampire woman, because she’s supposed to have a silver cross that he wants, for reasons of his own[1].

Later, a sequence of events loosely based on Dracula plays out, and later still the werewolf and the vampire woman have a versus, if you know what I mean, and I think you would have if I hadn’t used this particular phrasing to describe whether you do. Honestly, it’s all very boring and I’m not sure I can figure out how the podcast people will fill an hour of air time on the topic.

There’s basically nothing to recommend here[2], unless you are a long time fan of the series of movies in which this werewolf character appears, and are also a completionist.

[1] I will never tire of that ambiguously-badguy phrase.
[2] I wonder how much of my disdain for the movie is based on it being 4×3 aspect ratio and unrestored. At a guess: more than zero, less than would be relevant to turn things around.

Smile (2022)

Based on the year of release[1], I wonder if this was a late in the game victim of Covid? I ask this question because the first time I learned there was a movie called Smile was when I saw the previews for Smile 2 in the theater earlier this year. Which is weird; I don’t often completely miss the existence of horror movies. (Of course, maybe I missed it because of how few previews I see anymore, too.)

Anyway, the setup for the movie is as follows. There’s this ER psychiatrist who is asked to handle a newly intaken woman who has had a really bad few days since she watched one of her professors beat himself to death with a hammer. Over the course of their conversation, the patient claims to be entirely sane but hunted, and describes the nature of the hunt. Then she suffers a really spectacularly dramatic seizure, after which she stands up, smiles widely, and slits her own throat. Then, the movie’s title card appears.

The remainder of the film follows our psychiatrist as she gradually begins to break down, while the viewer is left to wonder whether anything is actually happening beyond her own deteriorating mental health. I mean, other things happen too. But mostly trauma, and trauma response, and a shameful lack of empathy from the majority of the characters. As a psychological horror movie, it really is outstanding, and all the moreso horrific as you come to the dawning realization that, yep, this is what would happen. Way more adversaries than helpers in the world, you know? Alas.

[1] In fact, there is a second horror movie named Smile that came out in 2022. I cannot do much about this, except never watch it I suppose, because how then would I differentiate?

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

Some time ago, before October 2018 in fact, I saw The Maze Runner, which is a movie (and also prior to that a book) about some teens in the middle of a maze, who are tasked with solving that maze, because… well, it’s a secret. To them, at least.

The problem with that movie is, it’s often on streaming, but its sequels never are. (And I don’t own the other books.) The result of this fact is I’ve seen the first movie three times now, but, good news citizens! I accidentally discovered The Scorch Trials were on Max until the end of November. So, I was all ready to watch it, until Mary says hey, I don’t remember the first movie. (I was pretty sure she’d seen it, but either I’m wrong or she wasn’t paying attention, which is why I’ve seen it thrice instead of twice.)

That still left us with enough time to watch the second movie before it got delisted, whew. I will say straight up, this is not as good as the first movie, for the simple fact that nobody is running in any mazes. (Not 100% true facts, okay, but it’s true that nobody is running in any mazes that were specifically purposed as mazes.) See, our escapees are rescued by some other group led by the always eminently trustworthy Petyr Baelish, and they along with a lot of other kids from a lot of other mazes[1] are all gathered together and being processed by batches out to safety.

Unless, you know, it’s just another trapped cage to be escaped.

In the end, there’s a lot more running, a lot more fighting, a lot more rage zombies, a lot fewer cyborg monstrosities, and a metric fuckton of sand covering at least two post-apocalyptic hellholes that used to be cities with skyscrapers. Oh, and Alan Tudyk, who is as ever a delight.

At the end of the movie, I’m once again excited to watch the next chapter. (This time without waiting 6+ years and multiple viewings in between, though.) I am left with one question that I have no idea if it was answered by either this book or the previous one, but that I’m pretty sure was not answered by the movie: how can we tell which kids are immune to the Blaze virus[2], and which ones are not? Or why? Because I’m highly confident that some of the boys in the glade were not immune, which indicates that escaping the maze doesn’t prove everyone is immune, even if it proves someone was (and I’m not so sure whether that was proven either).

[1] One of which was all girls and one boy, resulting in my apology for back when I said we’d never learn why this maze was all boys. Apparently they just tried a bunch of different combinations.
[2] Not a spoiler for this movie per se. It’s what the cyborg Grievers were injecting people with in part one, which the kids called “getting stung”.

Creep (2014)

Shudder just started a new series called (I want to say) The Creep Tapes, that I decided to take a look at, because why not. And then I learned it was based on a movie from ten years ago, called Creep. The show was good enough for me to say (again), why not, and here we are.

So this guy named Aaron has been hired via Craigslist by this guy named Josef, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, to be his videographer for a day. Josef explains that he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and has an unborn or very young child[1] that he wants to leave a remembrance for. And that’s it, that’s the whole set up.

The only thing worth knowing from here forward is that Josef is incredibly awkward. His sense of humor is almost but not quite mean-spirited, his sense of boundaries is non-existent, he gets way too emotional with a complete stranger way too fast… it’s more or less one of those embarrassment / shame / The Office (British) style of scenarios.

….or is it?

I have a feeling this is more worth watching if you’re not spoiled, and I also have a feeling that the TV show might actually be better than the movie in some ways, mostly relating to improvement via shortened run time. All that to say: both are pretty good, if you’re okay with the premise.

[1] I forget, for the justifiable reason that these are the only two characters in the movie. Hmmm. I guess there are two and a half, but the half also isn’t the aforementioned child, so.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

I really do not understand how this movie got made. It’s just so so so implausible.

In the third Fast but also let us not forget Furious movie, a young drifter moves to Tokyo, only to discover that the title was actually a pun. See, he’s a drifter because he keeps getting into trouble for doing dumb high school racing things, and got sent to live with his father in Japan as a last ditch effort to keep him out of jail for driving through a house under construction and being assaulted by another high school car guy. None of which is how any of that would work, as far as I can tell?

Anyway, he drifts into Tokyo, I was saying, only to learn that it’s also called drifting if you left the back of your car skid ahead of you as a way to make 0 point turns instead of 3 point turns. Did drifting really not exist outside Japan before this movie popularized it? No clue, though it seems unlikely somehow. But so anyway, this kid gets mixed up in drift racing and the Yakuza, because of course he does, and that’s the rest of the movie. (Also, there’s a girl.)

Except for a brief cameo in which a previous character says he used to hang out with the only character in the whole movie who was worth the time of day, there’s nothing that would make you think this should have been tagged as part of the series. In fact, if I were to make a gamble on today of all days when my gambles in general are not going so well as I’d prefer, I’d bet that the secret cameo actor heard about this movie and thought, hey, if I can tie it into my series, maybe I’ll still have a series and get to make a third, no wait, it would be fourth now, wouldn’t it? movie.

That does not help me understand how such a gamble paid off, to be clear. Tokyo Drift isn’t a bad movie, but it is extremely paint by numbers, and I am once again left scratching my head as to how these three (now) movies could have resulted in a powerhouse franchise.

But, as I intimated already, tons of things I don’t understand today, aren’t there?

Il racconto dei racconti – Tale of Tales

They are still making fairy tales, you know. There’s The Princess Bride, of course. And Moana. And my personal favorite at the time, Stardust[1]. But thanks to my horror podcast, I have learned about another one: Tale of Tales[2].

Man is this hard to talk about without spoilers, though, so I will stick to brevity. See, there are these three neighboring kingdoms. In the first one, Salma Hayek wants a kid, and goes to rather extreme lengths to get one. But then she is not perfectly happy with either the cost nor (especially) the secondary results. This story features an enormous sort-of axolotl, which is how the podcast settled on this movie as a gothic story with an aquatic monster. Other than by volume, this was a fair assessment of meeting the stated requirements.

In the second kingdom, a horny king and a youth-obsessed woman run afoul of each other, with results that are extremely predictable, right up until they aren’t, and then boy howdy do they keep not being. And in the third kingdom, a princess in want of a husband becomes the prize of a pretty implausible marriage contest, albeit with, again, predictable results. Until they, also again, aren’t.

This movie, if all goes well, will win my personal 2024 awards for worst father, worst mother, and worst sister. Also, it’s at least a middle of the pack contender for both best brother and best husband. But did it need to be three stories, if they barely at all intersect with one another? I guess the answer is this: while two hours and fifteen minutes is a little long for a movie so focused on being slow and dreamlike and cinematic, three movies of forty-five minutes each would have been just ridiculous. So.

[1] No idea if it holds up. I just know I was the only one who thought it might be its generation’s Princess Bride.
[2] Apparently these are pulled from a 17th century Italian fairy tale collection, and thus do not I suppose count as “still making”, in the strictest sense. Goes a long way toward explaining why the “skin of a flea” story seemed familiar, though.

I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine

I did not care for the sequel to the remake of I Spit on Your Grave, which to be clear is an outstanding movie, and I will not be taking any questions on the topic. So anyway, there was a 3, and I’ve known there was a 3 this whole time, but after how down I was on 2, I never bothered. Until earlier this week, when I just bit the bullet and went for it. And you know what? It’s an actual sequel to the remake, not just another story about a different woman taking different revenge.[1]

I Spit on Your Grave III finds our heroine some years later, with a new identity and haunted by both what she went through and maybe a little by what she did. She joins a rape survivors support group thing, and makes friends with one of the other members, who is tough and brash and has some ideas about how to get justice. Then, when something goes wrong, the main character finds herself going deeper and deeper down the “justice” rabbit hole.

I said the last movie was a cross between the original and one of those European torture porn movies. This was more like a cross between the original and Death Wish. Which, both being movies from the ’70s, is clearly the better fit. The main thing I cannot figure out is if we’re supposed to root for the murders despite several lines of dialogue being way, way over the top, or if we’re supposed to think she’s gone too far and that’s why the dialogue is quite as silly as it is. Either way: man, that’s some rough dialogue.

But if she wanted to make more rape-revenge features, I’d probably get around to watching them.

[1] Also, it appears there may be a sequel to the original as well?! I’ll need to look into that.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight