Fright Night (2011)

Leave a reply

A number of years ago, I declared Fright Night to be the best vampire movie. I’m glad I did this, because it would be implausible to just make the claim now. “No, seriously, you guys, I totally always thought so!” Plus, of course, I stopped thinking so just recently, because Let the Right One In was downright incredible; that said, I do not mind drawing a line between film from the vampire’s point of view and film from the slayer’s point of view, and letting them therefore split the honor evenly. Completely different movies, and while the Swedes made the objectively better one, Chris Sarandon has a lot going for him on the non-art-house, specifically vampire-focussed front.

None of this would be worth hashing out, of course, except for how someone (apparently, Marti Noxon! Who knew?) decided to remake Fright Night. So, I was pretty ambivalent about that[1]. On the one hand, it’s been better than a generation since the original came out, so there are upsides to modernizing the characters and the effects. But on the other hand, man, I loved that movie, and since when does Hollywood ever do a good job of reinterpreting something that was itself originally good? Since now, I guess!

‘Cause, yeah, the modern Fright Night? Still in my top five vampire movies, I suppose primarily on the strength of the core story, which is by and large unchanged. See, there’s this kid living with his single mother, and strange things start to happen. Before very long at all, he narrows them down to his recently moved-in neighbor Jerry, who he believes is a vampire. And then, you know, hijinx ensue! Just like in the original, the show stealer is the mentor character, a late night TV host played by Roddy McDowall in the original and a Las Vegas magician played by David Tennant this time out. People call the movie part comedy, but I never really thought that was right. It’s just excellent at the tension relief that most horror movies aspire to, without ever actually removing the fear. I guess it’s that I can’t believe that any movie this good at providing a scary and realistic portrayal of  modern vampires[2] can be a comedy. But yeah, it’s pretty damn funny. Sometimes. The rest of the time, it is creepy, or scary, or awesome.

[1] In the torn way rather than the barely stirring myself to care way.
[2] I mean, actually scary vampires in modernity, as opposed to the angsty, misunderstood, paranormal romance vampires that have taken over the landscape. You know, I might like this movie just as much without nostalgia, simply by virtue of being about an honest, straightforward, hungry vampire, who isn’t in love with anyone and isn’t trying to reform himself. Seriously, guys, we get it, it’s played out! (I am all the more surprised this was Marti Noxon, now that I’m really thinking about it!)

Final Destination 5

Leave a reply

The Final Destination series is in its own way every bit as comfortably broken in as Friday the 13th was by this point in the ’80s (which is to say, apparently, 1991); I know all the rules, better than the characters do, and even though of course there are new twists and turns, there is a fair amount of comfort in being able to settle back and enjoy the upcoming squirm-fest unencumbered by analysis about how things may or may not work. Is there more to say about Final Destination 5?

Nah, I guess not.

Powers: Anarchy

Leave a reply

The thing that is sad about my review of Anarchy is that it will sound like I didn’t like it, when the worst I have to say about it is that I didn’t love it. The characters are still top-notch, or I should probably pass that through my filter of liking things too strongly and say instead that I continue to find them compelling. But the plot of this particular issue was really just forgettable. It was tasty forgettable, don’t get me wrong, but like when you eat light popcorn and then later you suddenly want actual food? It’s like that. I know that there were some superhero murders that tied back into the comic’s earlier days and that may well become very important later for that matter, but in the moment, it was just a glimpse of places we’d been before with people I’m happy to accompany, sure; and restoring the status quo (which had been really strongly upset by the end of the last book) was probably a good idea, but I could wish it had been more exciting to get there.

On the bright side, the book isn’t a thousand pages long and I didn’t have to wait two or more years to read it, so the standard complaints really don’t apply.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I caught a movie last night with an outsider / coming of age theme. The young, unusually intelligent student (played by Andy Serkis) is befriended and mentored by surrogate father figure James Franco, but despite all of their efforts, the student’s outsider status reigns supreme as he is gradually shuffled through a system that understands him no better than the inhabitants of the various locations into which he is placed by it. Can he find a way to make himself understood and grab onto happiness somewhere in the world? Can Franco make the student understand his own connection, his own love, and can that connection be enough?

Oh, also they tacked on a science fiction framework around that basic storyline, based as a prequel to a classic movie with Charlton Heston that you may have heard of[1], and also some really significant special effects and a pretty cool actiony climax. So that part was alright too.

[1] Hint: it’s not “people”.

Ultimate Captain America

4 Replies

It’s funny[1] that I was just talking about the clever storyline from the Marvel universe where they explained how Captain America could have been both frozen in the Arctic Ocean after World War II and also fighting Communists in the 1950s. Because Ultimate Captain America tells an analogous story, albeit without the need to justify the continuity issue the original guys had. Only, you know, quite a bit darker, as Ultimate Cap has always been. I shan’t say any more, because there isn’t a whole lot of story in there. But I definitely liked what there was well enough, and I’m still definitely in the mood for short-form fiction right at the moment.

[1] Although not that surprising, since it was during my review of the character’s recent movie.

Blood Noir

Leave a reply

I’ve had a revelation. It may not be a new revelation, but I can only read books in this series so often without my brain turning to cottage cheese, so forgive me if I’ve lost track of the various ones over the years. No, see, my revelation is about the true irritant of this series. It’s that every now and again, if I can manage to scrape enough of the crap off the pages, there’s something like a decent storyline buried in there. I mean, yes, she’s been padding things with the hypersexed “relationship” plots for a long time now, and that squeezes out all but about usually 30 pages of story. But okay, that’s the book she’s writing, and if it wasn’t for the sheer gall of the packaging, I think I’d have gotten bored and moved on a long time ago. So I can accept that for what it is, it’s not the crap I’m referring to.

Let me explain. So, here’s Anita, and her good friend Jason is having a family crisis, and needs help, which is to say, a visit home with a girlfriend so everyone will stop calling him gay (which would not be as bad as all that, except he isn’t, so it’s annoying that nobody believes him). And she agrees to go, except they get caught up in (for once) human politics, and things quickly blow out of proportion, and all of that is before the vampires get involved. And sure, you could write a whole book about that, but our author cannot because she has to leave room for the porn scenes[1] and the random friend and/or stranger (but always at least one stranger, and always at least two people) that Anita will accidentally bind to herself metaphysically[2] in this particular book.

And my point is… well, it’s this. I’m not trying to say that the actual pornography and the implausibly repetitive growth of “power” and were-menagerie via sex don’t grate on my nerves. I’m not saying that the constant mentions of things tightening low in her stomach and what just does or doesn’t do it for this or that person don’t also grate after a while, but if I’m being honest with myself, all long-form authors eventually have turns of phrase that get old. I’m saying, reluctantly, that the kernel of mystery still remaining in most of these books would be enough to keep me going in the series; well, that combined with certain intangible benefits that I get from complaining about them, volume after volume. Except, well, the writing is getting objectively worse, by leaps and bounds. It’s not enough for people that she’s been friends with for a long time to have the same thought processes as she does. Well, no, that’s not true. As written, it’s easily bad enough.

“He looked like he was thinking about ponies. ‘I’m thinking about ponies!’ he suddenly declared inexplicably for no obvious reason besides the fact that all of us have exactly the same brains and the same voices, and I wanted to be sure you noticed that by showing how my thoughts and his words match up, for some reason even less explicably than the last thing that happened earlier in this sentence. And then we talked about how ponies make me angry (if Richard was the person who was talking earlier) or about how much common love we share for ponies (if anyone else was talking earlier) or about how I’m not sure sure that ponies should be involved in my sexual life, but they flat did it for him, so I would keep an open mind (if Nathaniel was talking earlier).”

But now it’s happening with perfect strangers, because writing more than one voice is really, really hard. Unless it says things in French sometimes, I guess. There was a literal, real, I’m not making this up even a little bit moment, wherein over a span of three pages, Anita makes a metaphorical leap about the situation feeling like the Twilight Zone, then a random new chick character makes a similar metaphorical leap about an unrelated situation feeling like the Twilight Zone. (Hold on, I’m nowhere near done yet.) Neither of these situations was in any way actually creepy or inexplicable or even subtly twisted, it was just the way people talk about things outside their experience. So these two different people make the connection to the Twilight Zone from two completely different experiences, and then, in the same three pages I mentioned earlier, Anita thinks to hrself about how she and this other chick are of diametrically opposed types that could never understand each other in any way.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. It could be that when the series ends, we’ll learn that she’s been captured via vampire magnetism for a dozen years or more and that all of these adventures are things her subconscious mind came up with while it had nothing better to do. That would justify almost every ridiculous thing that has happened, you know? Except Auggie the ancient master vampire that everyone has a ton of respect for and also they call him Auggie. Nothing will ever excuse that.

[1] No, seriously, at this point you could only film these books with a porn script, with the expectation that people would need to fast forward through maybe 15 minutes of plot to watch all of the sex in the maybe 70 or 80 minute movie. Seriously.
[2] And by “metaphysically bind to herself ” I mean have a non-puritanically excessive amount of sex with, which by fiat means they are tied together forever, and that is a twisty maze of passages through LKH’s psyche, all alike, if ever I saw such a maze.

Friends with Benefits

Leave a reply

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes Friends with Benefits such a good movie, in spite of looking on paper like every other date-friendly romantic comedy on the block. It’s not that they subvert Hollywood clichés, despite an effort in that direction early in the film whose sole benefit was Jason Segel hilarity. It’s not that the lead actors (Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis) have any especial talent or affability above and beyond the common crowd, either, although both they and the supporting cast are all quite good, and nobody is wasted or overused. It’s… you know what I think it is? It’s consciously adult, in concept, theme, and humor. Mainly the humor, as there are plenty of romance-themed dramas that cover the other issues well enough, but most romantic comedies don’t really try to do anything bigger than a middle-of-the-pack sitcom would do, I suppose because they know they don’t have to. This movie, though, tried to be a real, full-on comedy every bit as hard as it tried to be a romance. I don’t think I knew that hardly ever happens until I saw someone try. Good for them!

Captain America: The First Avenger

[1] You know what made this movie better than it had any right to be? It was the Captain America they wrote into it. I know that sounds painfully trite, but stay with me for a second here. I’ve read the ultra-patriotic Captain America of the 1950s[2], the reflective, uncertain, self-consciously apolitical Captain of the 1970s, and the hyper-capable, overly superior (in thought, word, and deed) Ultimate Captain of this past decade. There are things to like and dislike about each of them, but none of them made it into the movie. This guy, from his abortive attempts to enlist during World War II as an asthmatic, archetypal 98-pound weakling through his confrontation with the chillingly and somehow never cartoonishly villainous Red Skull, and at every moment in between, is just an all around average joe who happens to be the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. That he’s brave, intelligent, and acquires super-powers is almost beside the point. The heroism, explosions, and cool stunts were certainly worthwhile too, don’t get me wrong. But mainly, it’s how damn likable Steve Rogers is that carried me through the movie. Everyone has shades of grey these days, and they should, because that’s the real world. But it’s refreshing to know that sometimes the good guy really can just be, y’know, the best guy.

It’s not fair to compare him with the Captain America who was frozen in the Arctic Circle for a variable number of decades since World War II and wakes up with his whole life left behind him in the blink of an eye. Of course that guy is going to have a harder time of it than the one who asked for a chance to fight and was given everything. But it really is going to be hard to go back to angsty and/or superior Cap after liking this one so very, very much.

[1] Just to get it out of the way, my intent was not to see the movie in 3D, but events conspired against me. It’s, y’know, fine?
[2] This is true from a certain point of view, at least.

The Walking Dead: No Way Out

2 Replies

Here’s the thing. For the last few books, Kirkman has been losing me. First there was a big mislead about the possibility of resolving the zombie threat, and then he started exploring themes he’s already explored before. Yes, he finds ways to invert them and make them new, I admit that, but if he’s already holding mirrors up to his thematic territory, I can’t help but notice that the plotting has dragged for a long time. And as the herd comprising his original characters has thinned and new characters join up, only to be lost to the rightfully dangerous environment themselves, I’m having an ever harder time even recognizing the characters; and that only makes it harder to care about them. But back to my main complaint, about the dragging plot: for instance, in No Way Out, the characters find themselves threatened on all sides by a) rampaging evil humans looking to take advantage b) a horde of zombies c) weather-based food shortages, I guess?, just when things were starting to feel safe and human again. Whichever one you pick, we’ve been here before. A few people die, the threat passes and/or the survivors pick up and move on, and soon we’ll be back here again.

And yet, every damn book there’s either a huge cliffhanger or else some kind of plot- or character-based epiphany that makes me think he’s finally gotten the story to turn a corner and something new is on the horizon, or in this case both, and either way, I have to at least find out what happens next to decide if the series is worth it anymore. You’d think I would learn.

Ultimate Doomsday

51iy4c9sUqLSomething like a year ago (in graphic novel time; longer ago in single issue time, you understand, but I bet that the ratios work out about the same), the Ultimate universe came to a crashing halt or I suppose more appropriately was swept away on a tidal wave. I may have mentioned it. And then new stories began to trickle in, from Spider-Man, the Ultimates, and their black ops cousins the Avengers. Notably missing were the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, though in the latter case the fact of worldwide mutant hatred due to their ongoing terrorism made sense of that part at least. So, in the meantime, Amazon had this link to a book called Enemy that was meant to be coming out last fall, and it was the next big event in the Ultimate universe. I pre-ordered it, as you do, and then watched in dismay as it was pushed back further and further and further still.

Then, sometime in May or June while I was waist-deep in both ice and fire, suddenly I get a shipping date. Only, now the book is selling for $40 list under a new name, even though my cost never changed from $13 or so. So that was weird. Then Doomsday arrived, and it turns out to be a collection of three separate never-published graphic novels making up the entire story of which Enemy was to be the first third. I appreciate your commitment to low prices on pre-orders, amazon.com! And now, months after that, I have finally come up for air long enough to read something new. Which is nice.

So, anyway, the Fantastic Four are back, more or less, although they’re by no means the only people around. This is one of those stories like the Ultimatum or the big Galactus trilogy a number of years earlier where just about everyone gets a piece of the action. The story starts with a bang, almost moreso literally than metaphorically, when many different heroes and also, somewhat inexplicably, the occasionally nefarious Roxxon corporation are all targeted for destruction on the same day at the same time, with varying degrees of success. Then the survivors must come together to solve the mystery of who is out to get them and what to do about it.

I shan’t say more, except to allow as how I’m really suspicious of the outcome being the real end of the story. We’ll see, though! Eventually.