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First of all, I think it’s adorable they made Nosferatu look like Friedrich Nietzsche in this new version. That actually’s great. He looks nothing like Murnau’s waking nightmare with rat teeth, nor Herzog’s sickly poet. 

Anyways. To my surprise, I actually mostly liked this new one, even a lot in some ways. It’s the first time I’ve ever sensed Robert Eggers—who, along with David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), invented this sort of new(er) wave subgenre of cinema literate “art horror” that’s sometimes obnoxious, sometimes fantastic, sometimes obnoxious and fantastic all at the same time—having fun. Though there’s a lot of love and artistry in every moment of the new movie’s mise-en-scène (sorry/not sorry), this is not an art film in the way Herzog’s somnambulistic , unforgettable masterpiece is quintessentially an art film, or how Murnau’s is required viewing in any film theory class. 

This new one is super, unapologetically commercial, and I sorta loved it for that despite the film’s imperfections. Like all Dracula movies, even the really good ones, it tends to lose itself in its last act, going on too long, meandering into redundancy, until it picks up again in the last few minutes; the new movie’s ending staying true to Murnau and Herzog’s versions with Ellen/Lucy/Mina (her name is different in all the versions) sacrificing her life to end the plague. This new film isn’t a mashup of Herzog’s faux-documentary otherworldliness where everyone’s walking around and hypnotized like they’re in a weird dream and Coppola’s Dracula’s lavish, over the top, super watchable goofiness. It’s something else. That’s cool. If anything, the new movie’s story owes more to The Exorcist than Bram Stoker. 

I was mostly just disappointed in the music score. It’s a letdown. Lots of modernist string shrieks lifted right from Penderecki (which have been either used directly like in Kubrick’s The Shining, or just plain ripped off into horror movie music cliches since forever.) If they were going to radically redesign how Orlock/Dracula looks (which I’m all for with the Nietzsche mustache and everything), then they could’ve at least given us a memorable music score. 

So, is the new movie scary? I’m not sure because as much as I love horror movies, I don’t get scared in them like most people. Like, I don’t scream during jump scares because I can see them coming way before they happen, etc. Is the film effective, though? Like does it have a real sense of dread and atmosphere? Certainly. It being shot on film is a giant PLUS in my book. Are there questionable, unintentionally hilarious performances? Yes, but it wouldn’t be a true Dracula movie if some of the acting and dialogue wasn’t sometimes laugh out loud. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven The Hunter himself, gives hands down the single most hilariously shitty performance in a major mainstream motion picture of 2024.

There are those who will lament and whine about there being too many remakes out there, that maybe Eggers’ Nosferatu is just like one of those Disney remake things like the new Lion King but for snobby artsy nerds (like me.) Maybe they’re right. However, something like Dracula is like Romeo and Juliet to me. It can’t be remade enough. It’ll always be cool to me like that. It’ll always be undead undead undead.

I’m always impressed by how strangely colorful the art direction and cinematography are in The Thing as much as I'm amazed at how effective it is as far as its creepiness and tense paranoia are. The atmosphere of dread is real. There are noir-y shadows and moody, spooky corridors. Yet this film is full of rich blues, purples, pinks, and oranges. It’s not monochrome.

Though l'll always feel a little let down by the final monster reveal (it's pretty anticlimactic compared to all the other big, incredible creature moments that precede it), the film more than makes up for that by having one of the very best endings/final moments ever in the history of science fiction cinema, and cinema in general. 

Are they both just going to die? Is one of them The Thing? Are they both The Thing? If they're both The Thing, then is The Thing such a good mimic that maybe it wouldn't recognize itself since human consciousness is the weirdest, most complicated, most insecure, most paranoid, most uncertain, most neurotic consciousness it’s encountered and absorbed in all its travels? Would The Thing be paranoid of itself since the humans it’s absorbed are so paranoid?

Wonderful questions that only a director as good as Carpenter (when he’s at his very best) would be so generous to let us use our imagination and intelligence to ponder long after the movie's over for years to come. The best, smartest directors assume we are as smart as they are, and we love them for it.

I’ve come to like this movie more and more over the years, though I still kinda hate the way it looks. It’s way too digital looking, and the digital fx look really cartoony as a result of them being rendered to match the harsh, artificial, awful look of the native digital image of the overall movie. Most of the fx in the movie are not purely practical which a lot of people still mistakenly believe, which is fine. It’s just a bit annoying running into people who love the film chiefly for all the fx being practical fx (special effects done live on the set in front of the camera with no postproduction interference added after the fact, digital or otherwise) when the truth is there’s hardly a single shot in the movie that isn’t touched with CGI somehow. Pretty sure those nuclear tornadoes are not “practical fx”!

Design wise (as opposed to the fidelity of the imagery), I like the fact Fury Road is more a fantasy looking post-atomic apocalypse than a gritty looking real one (like Mad Max 2) since Fury Road seems to be intentionally inspired by video game worldbuilding more than cinema or comic book worldbuilding. That actually works in spite of the ugly digital cinematography, mostly, even though some of the bad guys and their vehicles look like the idiotic desert festival kitsch straight out of Burning Man. Sometimes the character designs look even dumber than that, like something from a Slipknot video. But, the whole idea of the movie, the story, the characters, are so strong that it actually makes you forgive those other potentially movie-killing aspects.

Oh! And the movie has a surprisingly rousing music score by Hans Zimmer clone Tom Holkenborg, too. Who knew the guy who made a fortune off of that annoying A Little Less Conversation remix could deliver a dirge-y, pulse pounding action score that’s better than what his teacher Zimmer has done in years?

This was the film I saw this year that baffled me the most, I think, and WOW.  It’s DEFINITELY NOT for everyone… but I’m not everyone, so I loved it. I don’t know how to write about a film like this or even know what to say. I wouldn’t know where to start. Yet it is a great work of art, whatever it is.

I love this film so much. A dark, creepy, surprisingly timely dystopian horror film  (of a sort) that’s so absolutely me. The best “this makes no sense/this makes perfect sense!” film I saw all year, and definitely one of my favorite films of the year. Like top five “best.” An instant fav. 

I usually hate the term “Lynchian” since it’s a very lazy way to describe something of a certain eerie, dreamlike mood by people who barely understand the world of David Lynch, or by hacks trying to copy him in a very superficial way, so I hesitate to use it in relation to this film since it’s not “Lynchian” in of cinematic style, or even thematically. I mean it more in the sense that it works on you kinda like how something like Lost Highway or Inland Empire works on you in that you just get so taken away, like you’ve been hypnotized or a witch put a spell on you or something. 

The film has more in common, story wise, conceptually with the best dystopian science fiction. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, too, but instead of aliens, it’s a network of AI consciousness trying to make everyone happy by erasing their most unpleasant of memories, including ancestral memories from their past lives… I think? Yeah, it’s wild. And that’s not even a spoiler! That’s just the setup. The film’s a spiderweb that keeps getting exponentially wider as the film goes on. It’s also a tragic love story and just such a beautiful, eerie as hell film. Lea Seydoux gives my favorite performance of 2024, too. The whole film is gorgeous. The story. The idea. Everything.

Boy with godlike powers who isn’t the real GOD must pretend to be the real GOD in order to keep the economy of the universe going, resulting in (spoiler alert) warfare and genocide for generations to come. There’s a smarty pants 16 year old boy vision of the world at work in Dune that’s just not all that imaginative or interesting anymore (if it ever was.) Many would say the cold brutality of the Dune universe is a metaphor for our real world with its endless wars, wealth hoarding, and class(ist) structures. Ok. But so what? That metaphor is a pretty lazy one, and the very best science fiction that I love the most aspires to transgress and transcend that sort of obviousness.

The big issue for me with these new Dune movies is as much with the films themselves (Part Two, though flawed and seriously edging on tedium, is an improvement in some ways over the somewhat irable, but not classic, actually tedious Part One) as it is with the fact that I’ve just outgrown and gotten over whatever Dune (its story, its themes, its characters) is supposed to be about.

Why would an intergalactic society whose citizens have, through rigorous discipline, learned all sorts of exotic mental and physical methods to such a degree that it’s like they possess supernatural abilities, have such barbaric concepts like an economy? They can see through time and space. They have the power over physical matter. They can ostensibly read other people’s minds through close observation of the subtlest of facial cues and ticks and the little unexpected pitches in speech. They can even control people through the use of weird voices. And on and on. So, why would such a culture even have the need for money and conventional warfare at all? Why would they be fighting each other in ground battles using daggers and swords along with their laser beams? 

The best science fiction tries to envision not only a world where these kind of goofy discrepancies are considered and ed for, but also tell us an interesting story with that consideration and ing in mind that isn’t just “this group of people don’t like this other group of people and then they fight each other over and over again,” which is pretty much what Dune gets down to amidst the pretty cool, weirdo world building going on, populated with witches with poison needles on the their fingertips, human computers, and all sorts of androgynous servants, advisors, concubines, and courtesans, etc. Dune’s a world where human beings are what robots and aliens are in other science fiction stories. That’s such a beautiful, wonderful idea which David Lynch actually got perfectly in his version. Yet there’s a frustrating lack of otherworldliness in the new film. 

And about those ground battles. Why does such a far future civilization even have them since their massive spaceships can zap enemies from orbit easily and instantaneously? What’s with all those sneak attacks? I thought all these people were telepathic and could see into the future? What, they don’t have radar in the future, too? Come on. Yes, I know, that’s an issue with Star Wars, also, obviously. But Star Wars’s heart and imagination are geared toward the playful, toward the bedtime story, the fairytale, so we forgive it (when Star Wars used to be good), whereas Dune wants so badly to be some kind of profound geopolitical allegory, not epic escapism with a mythological flourish. 

Though I wondered about a lot in Dune: Part Two, there’s very little if any sense of wonder in the film itself. For a film that’s supposed to take place tens of thousands of years in the future, the art direction and color palette is oddly grayish-brown to brownish-gray to brownish-grayish-yellow to yellowish-brownish-gray. The Harkonnen planet of Giede Prime orbits around a black star, so their daylight is literally black and white during that world’s outside scenes, yet those parts seem somehow way more vibrant to me than the rest of the film!

There’s no interesting looking vehicle or ship designs, either, really. The main attack vehicles look like helicopters. The spice harvesters look like those giant tractor things you see when you drive past freeway construction. Mighty Shai-Hulud looks like… (well…) Where’s the visual imagination? As wacky and incorrect as Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune might’ve been, at least it would’ve been fun to look at. A Dune movie should be anything BUT modest looking. But there it is: Villeneuve’s gray, brown, brownish-grayish-yellowish, austere, “functional” future. And Dune as a story in general just feels super dated. Its sensibilities are stuck in The Cold War. I mean, House Atreides’ big secret weapon is… “atomics.” Okay. Whatever.

Dune isn’t “Star Wars for grownups” as it’s often obnoxiously described by its fans, even Villeneuve. It’s Star Wars for people who like to pretend they’ve grown up. At least Star Wars tries to make us crack a smile.

The big message at the end of Interstellar, which, at its best, is a sort of condensed (albeit accidental) Best Of ideas beamed directly down from Star Trek (that’s actually a strange, unintended complement because I love Star Trek), is: “All you need is love.” Ok. I’m fine with that. All you need IS love. TRUE… But do we really need to watch Nolan’s corniest, way-too-long movie to be reminded of that? “All you need is love” is also the heart of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. So the big cosmic mystery for me doesn’t have anything to do with time dilation, wormholes, black holes, tidal wave planets, or gravitational singularities, but rather: Why is it The Tree of Life makes me weep every time, yet Interstellar makes me roll my eyes?

The good parts are wonderful, but the bad parts are awful (the last act is absolutely abysmal), so the whole movie just sorta cancels itself out. Alien isn’t a cinematic universe. It’s one outstanding film with a bigger than life, highly entertaining (but not better) quasi sequel. All the other Alien movies are like watching someone doing karaoke after they’ve learned they’ve been fired from their dream job. 

By the way, THE Alien itself isn’t supposed to be called a “xenomorph.” That was just James Cameron being a smartass (like him using “unobtainium” in Avatar) so he didn’t have to have the characters say “alien.”

I liked Romulus’s Goldsmith-esque music score by Benjamin Wallfisch a lot, and I basically liked the Alien itself because it’s pretty much a guy in a suit instead of a raptor thing doing ninja moves like in Resurrection and AvP, though design-wise the forehead’s all wrong (it’s too bulbous, like one of those bulbous-headed whales), and so is the mouth/teeth area (too gorilla-like.) Why do they keep modifying Giger’s original design? Romulus’s Alien is the closest to the 79 original (they’ve changed the design of it a lot starting with Aliens) it’s looked in a while, but they still kinda changed it some in annoying ways. The climactic hybrid alien thing (or whatever it is) looks really stupid, though. 

All the lore about the androids is great in the movie. That’s the best part. All that stuff should’ve been expanded upon.

In a Violent Nature answers that question I’m sure no one who’s watched a classic slasher movie has ever asked themselves: What is the deformed, deranged killer doing when he’s off screen in between kills? Answer: He just wanders around in the woods stealthily with just the ominous, monotonous huffs of his breath (not unlike the breathing of the astronauts in 2001 encased in their spacesuits), the thump-thump-shuffle-shuffle of his footfalls stepping, strangely graceful, quiet, yet emphatically audible, there on the soundtrack, not getting louder or faster, the tension ramping despite no change in his breathing or his walking, until he hears sounds of human activity, attracting him like a shark sensing splashing and playing in the far off water, or a bear, downwind, smelling the BBQ and Doritos floating on the summer’s breeze. 

Yes, like Longlegs, that other big summer art horror film with stunning, flawless mise-and-scène and a killer ad campaign, In a Violent Nature is “Art Horror” with an effin’ capital “A” and “H.” But where Longlegs may fall short by the time the credits roll by not exactly tying everything up from its zany, perhaps too-imaginative plot, its too-ambitious artist statement, satisfactorily, In A Violent Nature keeps things super simple. Rudimentary. Stripped down. Minimal. All reduced into an art project that feels far more radical than whatever Longlegs is up to; a reduction in plot and character that functions at times as laugh out loud parody (when the horny campers show up, especially), and at other times, an unforgettable meditation on the deranged killer in the spooky woods cliche that we’ve seen a million times before, yet not quite like this. Imagine a Jason movie, but done with all the artful, silent, slow profundity of The Zone of Interest, or Gus Van Zant’s Elephant, maybe even any given Terrence Malick movie a little, too. The result is something that will bore a lot of people to tears, or lull them into a deep nap, while others, like me, will be completely mesmerized by. If Longlegs is the final word on baroque plotting and satanic cliches, then In a Violent Nature is the final word on simple as pie rural slasher cliches. I was pretty blown away by it. I didn’t blink once. 

The funny (perhaps most annoying to some) thing is, when the slasher-ing starts to happen in earnest, the kills are every bit as gory and laugh out loud outlandish as the kind of thing In a Violent Nature is trying to be above and comment upon. So here you have this pretty effective art project lurching along in measured slowness and painfully perfect cinematography that would make Tarkovsky himself perk his eyebrow… and then when it becomes a goofy-gory slasher movie, it’s “that” too. So you’re kinda sitting there going “Wait a second… I thought I was watching a post-Jonathan Glazer MFA-y thing, but it’s also a gross out killer on the loose movie, complete with rubbery makeup FX and everything?” 

That sort of  stylistic “this AND that” film festival crap will bug most horror movie people, for sure, but I loved it. The film really works, especially if you grew up in an era where you’d stumble upon Friday The 13th Part II (or Part III, or The Final Chapter, or A New Beginning, or Part VI: Jason Lives, or any of those kinds of movies) and were really freaked out by their bizarro, super scary (at least when you were a kid) hyperrealism and then found yourself falling in love with Bergman and Tarkovsky and Chantal Akerman and whoever else movies’ later on. Adored by you, but boring as hell  to all your other friends once you got to high school and started to expand your cinematic palette. And that deep woods that’s somewhere between fairytale horror and found footage realism that goes on and on forever and forever has never looked so good as here. It’s a dream of a movie as much as it is nightmare scary. Its starry nightscapes with stygian pine tree silhouettes are primal movie memories from way back (to even ET!), the big bad woods being as scary during the day as night, maybe more so, is the very essence of the sublime, romanticism’s wellspring. 

So when I say “Tarkovsky” in relation to all this, I really mean TARKOVSKY. Sunlight beams through branches and twigs and fern leaves like the light of Heaven, ripples of water twinkle and expand eternally, slowly, achingly, towards the lens, the whole scene becoming pure cinema. No plot. No character development. No story. Just image. Then a figure. Movement. Moving. Birds sing. Breeze blows. A twig snaps… maybe. Gasp. Maybe a scream if there’s still time. A yell. Then nothing. Next scene. No music score. Everything vivid and foggy. A paradox. All at once. Repeat. True Horror. 

Now I know this sort of art flexing that a film like
this is trying to flex is always essentially impressive, at least for me, but I also know it can be pretty irritating, boring, and pretentious to others (even me while simultaneously iring it, like I did with Longlegs); an excuse to not really have the balls to make the thing a film like In a Violent Nature is riffing on and instead do some meta mental masturbation art piece thingy. I’ll have to see how it plays after the fact. I’m not sure yet if it’s going to end up like something like Glazer’s Under The Skin (which I lean more towards) or just another Shudder something with a cool logo that stares at us in our cues and watchlists until electricity goes extinct. In a Violent Nature does give me hope in a movie culture of too much horror everything all the time, a time of too much “too much.” It’s a rare standout. 

And finally, I gotta say, as a life long lover of 80s horror films and that particularly iconic 80s subgenre of slasher movies, movies which scared me to death, fascinated me, and disturbed me as a child, that those horrendously (in retrospect) crass, cynical, and brutal trashy movies ALWAYS had a peculiar cinematic poetry to them for me, however purely accidental that artfulness was at the time. Perhaps stuff like The Friday 13ths are more artful because they weren’t ever intended as such, their no apologies cash grab honesty and unpretentiousness revealing the dark id of a culture completely lost in itself, distracted from the actual horrors of reality, their film legacy being more like Duchampian found art than obnoxious self-aware auteurism as is often the case with all this reactionary art horror stuff, pop artifacts of attitudes that have devolved and mutated into other (shittier) things. Perhaps things like In a Violent Nature are just pure aesthetic indulgence, not so much revealing anything profound as the low-low-low brow of its antecedents did so well by accident, but rather throwing it in our face that our too-much-of-everything culture is running out of shit to retell us, more vending machine food, nonstop. 

Whatever the case, those long, slow as all hell, achingly hypnotic SteadyCam shots of Johnny wandering around in the woods sure seem to be wanting to be in The Museum of Modern Art than in a movie theater. After all, style, especially good style, is always indulgence, and indulgence is always style.

I’m conflicted about this one. There’s a lot to be impressed by, but also a lot to be annoyed about. More “art horror,” or, more accurately, “late-stage art horror.” Overloaded, maybe, but also underloaded. If Ari Aster bothers you, wait till you get a load of Oz Perkins. I’ll have to see it again. I keep thinking about it despite my misgivings, and if you’re thinking about a movie you didn’t quite like after you’ve seen it, then that means there’s probably something powerful about it that makes it stick in your mind. Paul Thomas Anderson tends to make movies that are like that for me, too. Like, I won’t really like one of his films right away, but I can’t quite stop thinking about it. Then I’ll see it again and think it’s good. Maybe Oz Perkins’ Longlegs is like that. We’ll see. If anything, it does make me think art horror is an over-done/overdone subgenre. Makes me want horror movies to just be dumb and gross again and not some super stylized art project.

Watched on Tuesday June 4, 2024.

Watched on Wednesday January 31, 2024.

Watched on Tuesday January 23, 2024.

Watched on Saturday December 30, 2023.

Watched on Saturday December 30, 2023.

Watched on Friday December 29, 2023.

Watched on Tuesday December 26, 2023.

Watched on Friday December 22, 2023.

Watched on Friday January 27, 2023.

Lynch’s ultimate masterpiece. I guess like a lot of great things, David Lynch is one of those artists who you could say The Internet might’ve ruined—The Internet rendering all that is poetic, personal, and profound into something that’s not novel or special anymore. Instantly meme-able, instantly clickable, instantly forgettable. Ubiquitized into digital ether. The one of a kind cinema experience that is “Lynch” no longer cinema but posts, poses, and gestures. His films’ wonderful moods and atmospheres no longer moody. All that fog and glitter now hashtags and endless reposts. A dead end that never ends…

HOWEVER, Lynch is the only boomer filmmaker of that kind of religious movie cult stature of who has REALLY embraced the The Internet in an amazing way. It’s because his films are still one of a kind and not easily imitatable (unlike some other great like Scorsese whose style can be imitated successfully), but also because the out of place yet fluidness of Lynch’s best films (and the man himself, incidentally) is a lot like the internet itself. The horrid and the gorgeous, the fantastic and the banal, the luxurious and the cheap, the exciting and the dull all happening simultaneously, “Did that really happen, or am I dreaming… Am I asleep or am I daydreaming… What’s the difference?” If that isn’t THEE Internet, I dunno what is.

It’s interesting that Lynch isn’t a “horror” director, nor “sci-fi” (excluding Dune, of course), really, but all of his stuff is like the best example of both those things for me in the greatest way possible. He’s like Ray Bradbury for me in a lot of ways: nightmare eeriness happening in situations nightmare eeriness should not be happening. Plus he’s one of the few people who can make daytime seem terrifying. 

Keep daydreaming, David.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I think it’s mainly because of Bob Odenkirk who’s revealed himself to be a Dustin Hoffman caliber actor in recent years. The movie’s shamelessly violent and actually pretty funny, and I think it’s better than the somewhat overrated, similarly themed, and equally ultra violent John Wick movies (some of the same creative people involved with John Wick are involved in this movie, and I can already see crossover dollar signs in their eyes), but not quite as fun, imaginative, and downright bonkers as the unusually lavish Kingsman movies. I’d rate Nobody higher if only the music choices that play over the action sequences and montages weren’t so predictable and banal (a problem I have with James Gunn’s otherwise entertaining kitsch, too.) And while I really enjoyed the ending where the always wonderful RZA and the legendary Christopher Lloyd show up and fight alongside our main hero, Rio Bravo style, the climactic showdown doesn’t quite reach the grand Renny Harlin heights the film so truly deserves to reach. But Nobody doesn’t drag on and on (an issue I have with John Wick), and despite the ludicrous graphic violence and gore, the film feels light, funny, even sweet thanks to Odenkirk’s humble charm.

There’s a conceptual lesson I’m grateful to Come True for giving me. The film’s pretty awful in its totality even though it contains so many surface elements that I’d otherwise love (Michael Mann wannabe showoffisms, moaning synthesizer drones, sleep labs, a ridiculous twist, so many things!), but which I completely enjoyed on another level separate from the crappy movie playing before me because it inspired an involved critical dialogue with myself having to do with my tastes, aesthetics, and why the film itself and so many post-Beyond The Black Rainbow horror movies infused with that kind of secret laboratory, synthy science fiction-ness just do not work anymore: Come True tries too goddamn hard to be cool. 

From its longing, beautifully photographed shots of the main character riding around town in a pensive, dreamy state of mind on a 10 speed bicycle ripped directly from Donnie Darko, to the downright annoying scene of her buying a Philip K. Dick book for no other reason than for the director to say, “I know who Philip K. Dick is,” to the WAHOON WAHOON WAHOON retro synth pulses on the soundtrack, to the foggy “atmosphere,” to the cheesy venetian blind haze of the Michael Mannered sex scene, to the dream sequences that look like the director saw a Tool video once, to the horrifyingly dumbass twist ending, Come True made me think about how all these things might not have come across so dopey and irritating if they’d been handled better and if that kind of cult of VHS thing wasn’t so done to death… Jacob’s Ladder meets Philip K. Dick directed by Michael Mann… Sounds amazing, right? Wrong. It isn’t. Beyond Fest reject stuff. 

There are other things, technical movie things, having to do with story, pacing, plot, and acting that get in the way too. In addition to all the hip film nerd waxing, it doesn’t help that the main character plays every scene like she’s on the verge of tears, or on the verge of yelling “FUCK YOU!,” or full-on bawling and actually yelling “FUCK YOU!” as a tear or a stream of them flow down her cheek(s) at just the right moment as a haunting synth wahoon wahoon arpeggiating flutter fades in, or that the mysterious experiment she’s involved in turns out to be something Mr. Silly Dean Koontz would think was too silly and generic even for him, or that the big twist that might’ve been fun in a goofy B movie way if only the movie wasn’t taking itself so seriously. Too much verging. Too much nervous breakdowning.

Dream movies are tough to pull off, and the dream sequences within those type of movies are nearly impossible to pull off convincingly without coming across as stupid. For anyone who’s seen the Brothers Quay’s haunted dollhouse, flickering lightbulb curiosities and all of the 90s MTV derivatives, or stumbled upon the half-profound/half-dorky/somehow always amazing paintings of Zdzisław Beksiński whilst instascrolling, or played Silent Hill and its many copycats, or just glanced at any number of pop culture media that has ripped all those things off, you’ll probably think the dream scenes in Come True aren’t very dream-like at all, but rather cliched movie dreams conjured by the mind of a teenager drained by mall angst with Slipknot posters all over the bedroom wall.

Movies are really the opposite of dreams since actual dreaming and their accompanying mental states are so personal, so amorphous, so intricately tied into our deepest emotions that they go far beyond a look, an aesthetic, a mere mood, or a weird image. Movies are all about specific images and moods that we can go back to and review and even watch with others, again and again. Yes we may feel and interpret those cinema moments and images quite differently from one another, but there is still a shared source that we can return to. Dreams, frustratingly, aren’t like that, buried instead so unfathomablely deep within us that they’re impossible to share adequately or completely with another, unlike the cinema experience. 

So if they invented some way to create a photograph or video of someone’s dream, like in Come True (yes, Wim Wenders made a movie about that same thing, though his movie isn’t a video store throwback), I hope the manifested photographic evidence of our dream worlds is cooler than just another movie directed by someone who only watches their old VHS copies of Ken Russell’s Altered States, or Michael Mann’s The Keep and Manhunter over and over. Yes I love all those movies with all my heart… Tangerine Dream. Fog machines. Palm leaf shadows. Venetian blinds. Sunsets. Synthesizers. Laboratories with wires attached to people’s heads. All of it… It’s just the over-fetishism of that style has gotten so, so old. And after all, if we could see literal, physical documentation of our dreams, would they even be dreams anymore? They’d now be a photograph, a video, Instagrammed and TikToked into insignificance. 

We need new movies, not new movies dreaming about being older movies.

Always loved this film, its feeling, its visuals, its story, and its overall vision/message (which was always the most criticized element of this otherwise generally well-reviewed, well-ed film.) It works because it sticks to being a cold war thriller at heart, so when the moral of the story, or big revelation moment or whatever you wanna call it happens, it actually works better as visionary science fiction than the overrated sappy bullshit in Nolan’s Interstellar because it just sticks to the nuts of bolts of mystery and thriller filmmaking. Tom Clancy in space, just without Clancy’s anti-Soviet saber rattling. 2010 is an all time personal fav of mine with some of the best outer space imagery since, well, you know...

(Side note: the swirls in Jupiter’s atmosphere were created with early CGI and it still looks amazing.)

I liked this film a lot more than I was expecting, and it’s a lot better and more entertaining than it has any right to be since it contains just about every single tendency and stylistic cliche of internet era horror filmmaking that have become so tiresome and annoying over the past ten or so years—at least since Beyond The Black Rainbow came out and made everyone graveling worshippers upon the feet of “retrostalgia”’ (my term for a style of filmmaking that I paradoxically love and hate for its celebration of things that I always thought were great and special, yet were also always, until very recently, underrated at most—John Carpenter, Dario Argento, et al—and, at least, dismissed as genre cult fodder piling up on the lonely VHS fetishist’s shelf.)

But that neo-retro style is one I’ve come to sort of hate too due its recent overabundance where every scene is trying to out-Michael Mann itself, and whose stories, plots, themes, and mise-en-scène are derived unapologetically and directly from John Carpenter and Dario Argento (with obvious and blatant Michael Mann flourishes), complete with pensive, anxious, rhythmically tonal, yet non-melodic arpeggiating synthesizer music. 

So how come I had so much fun watching Bloodline since it's overflowing with all of those things? I don’t know. It’s gross and trashy, but with its pinky ever so raised with orange and blue lighting over everything, even during the daytime scenes, and venetian blind shadows on people’s faces in closeups where venetian blinds aren’t even on the windows, and stuff like that. All those usually strained cliches felt cute and loving rather than “Oh brother…” to me like they do in so many post-Beyond The Black Rainbow kind of horror movies. And the plot is kinda dopey and unoriginal (it’s pretty much Dexter, but instead of being a cop the main character is a social worker for high school kids.)

But because it is so well paced and edited, I stuck with it all the way to the end. Lots of fun! The type of thing you might’ve caught on Cinemax at like 1am on a non-school night back in 1990… Nicolas Winding Refn, just with a lot less Winding.

The other “Lamb” movie which came out a few years ago and not to be confused with the more recent film titled “Lamb” that’s actually called “The Other Lamb” is a knockout in of its cinematography and atmosphere, and as a collection of moods and images, it’s definitely amazing (usually a powerful, evocative mood coupled with haunting imagery are enough for me to love and endorse a film outright even when the story is, ummm, shall we say, elusive.)

However, the heavy moods, the grave wanderings through anodyne, yet ominous woods, the eternal waterfalls, not to mention all those emotional slow zooms, created a relaxing, lulling effect upon me to such a degree that I couldn’t keep myself awake at a certain point. It’s not “boring,” per se, but I found myself irresistibly drawn under by the sandman’s somnolent spell nonetheless. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for cinematography. ⭐️⭐️ for story.

I thought about a lot of things while watching the new Dune movie. I’ve listened to my friends whose opinions I ire talk about how much they loved it. I’ve listened to some other friends whose opinions I also ire talk about how they hated it because they thought it was boring. I thought about my relationship with the book, its story, its themes, its ideas, Jodorowsky’s unmade oddball (and probably wrongheaded) version with its glorious Euro comic book concept art of models unmade and matte paintings unpainted, and Lynch’s misunderstood and under-appreciated version.

I thought about my Dad and how much we’ve talked about the book, all our references and in-jokes about it, and just how much all these things have profoundly inspired me and shaped me over the years. 

I also thought a lot about how my tastes and attitudes have changed in regards to this genre, and how a story that’s about a civilization which has developed all these incredible mental techniques, instantaneous interstellar travel, and mind-body wholeness, all without computers or artificial intelligence is still, somehow, illogically, concerned with the myopia of land disputes, political pettiness, and feudal power grabs, might be dated and limited in its imagination now that I’m a grownup. 

I asked questions while watching, questions which one probably shouldn’t ask when watching a not-as complicated-as-everyone-thinks would be epic about a desert planet inhabited by giant worms that produce hallucinogenic dust from their bodies. Like, why would such a weirdly advanced civilization find it necessary to mount World War II style ground and arial battles when they have laser guns, forcefields, massive energy beams, and huge star cruisers? Wouldn’t those things make ground warfare and hand to hand combat obsolete? And why is it no one sees these massive scale sneak attacks coming when everyone seems to have these paramental precognitive abilities? Also, don’t they have radar in the intergalactic future? That Harkonnen fleet of attack ships seemed pretty enormous to me! No one saw that coming? (I guess it’s a trick of “folding space”— a key concept in the Dune Universe that’s barely mentioned in the new movie.) 

There are things I did like about it and some things I didn’t. I can see why some people don’t like it and find it boring. Some of the performances and characterizations in particular bugged me. Lady Jessica (my favorite character in the book) seems weepy and fragile in ways that she just isn’t in the book. Paul is ok, but he often verges on Anakin level acting weirdness by under-acting and overacting in the same scene. Duke Leto is solid-ish, but he’s not in it very much. Neither is The Baron, nor his creepy henchmen, all of whom I liked. Aqua Dude sucks, as always, but I found him kinda endearing in a funny way as Duncan Idaho amidst all the prophecy angst. Gurney Halleck is fantastic and (spoiler alert) I actually can’t wait to see him return in Part II. So is Stilgar who, unfortunately, only gets his main screen time when the film starts to slow down to an absolute crawl during the awkward nap time feeling of the last act. 

The music score is a gigantic letdown. More
dirge-y Zimmerisms sprinkled with the same world music cliches he’s been recycling for years. The House Atreides Theme even sounds like the Celtic new age kitsch heard in Mike Oldfield’s “The Flower of The Forest,” wailing bagpipes and all. It’s an awesomely uninspired music score.

But for all these problems, there’s also a lot of magnificence. Though I thought all of the trailers were oddly unexciting and visually drab, everything looks and feels ominous, creepy, impressive, even religious in a wonderful way when you see the film in its entirety (except for the dorky looking imperial space commandos which look like some kid’s Laser Tag party from 1986, or even crappy Metroid cosplay.) Visually it’s pretty incredible suggesting a grim space goth grandeur that’s both opulent and minimal at the same time—closer to how I imagine the dark medieval future of Gene Wolfe than the fantastical soap opera of Frank Herbert. 

The film’s more visually powerful than I was ever expecting, and all of the loving shoutouts to the Biblical sunrises of Lawrence of Arabia, and the wonderful, obvious references to Apocalypse Now with its immense bald villain rubbing his head in darkness and steam, its Valkyrian helicopter formations, and its palm trees ablaze in crepuscular flame were deeply felt and appreciated by this mega nerd. 

I’m glad they’re making Part II.

Sometimes before work you just gotta watch the incredible life changing masterpiece Ghoulies II. 5 stars.

I want to make one thing clear: Dune IS A DAVID LYNCH FILM. 

Giant floating heads, lots of closeups of eyeballs rolling around and nostrils flaring, whispering, drop dead gorgeous looking characters right next to terrifying looking characters in the same scene, air conditioning sounds, wind sounds, breathing sounds, ambient silence one second followed by deafening cacophony the next, crazy hairdos, strobe lights, steam, pipes, tubes, tunnels, ominous hallways and corridors… I mean, seriously. It’s all there! It’s totally David Lynch world, and people who think his Dune is not “a David Lynch film” need to just sit down.

It’s funny that a film as flawed and sometimes outright infuriating and annoying as Spielberg’s A.I. stays with me so profoundly years after I first viewed it (I think about it more than Kubrick’s more revered and ired Eyes Wide Shut, a film that was similarly debated upon its release.)
Those who think the film should’ve ended with the robot boy at the bottom of the sea in the helicopter submarine thing are WRONG! It’s correct for the film to hurtle us thousands of years into Earth’s frozen dead future where hyper evolved robots (which look like alien sentinels made out of liquid glass) discover the boy frozen in the helicopter and awake him from his ancient slumber. I love all that, and it’s really the only time a filmmaker has tried to do the sort of eerie aloofness combined with a grandiose sublimity that’s terrifying and beautiful all at once which Kubrick did so well regularly and nail it (whereas Zemekis at the end of and Christopher Nolan at the end of Interstellar blow it big time.)
Where Spielberg does screw up, however, is in drawing it out, ladling on the syrupy piano music a bit too thickly, and wrapping up an ending that really is as dark and depressing as ever an apocalyptic science fiction movie ending has been as a sweet bedtime story complete with soothing narration. That’s a shame. The film is a nightmare about the death of humankind that instead ends like a lullaby. I’ve often thought about doing a fan edit taking out the narration and piss-tinkingly piano music.

Much better than the last American CGI Godzilla movie which was great in parts but shitty in others, and VASTLY better than Gareth Edwards’ boring as all hell, Nolanified, serious Godzilla movie from 2014, but not quite as good as the insanely fun Skull Island, Godzilla vs Kong works because of its great B movie pace and CGI monsters rendered and lit so we can actually see what they’re doing for a change.
Mechagodzilla makes an unwanted appearance at the end what actually kinda sucks (I never liked Mechagodzilla since he’s not a real Kaiju, but an artificial one controlled by humans—a kaiju poser.) But he’s defeated pretty quick, thankfully, so that the film finishes with just Kong and the real Godzilla, both of whom live, thank goodness.
One thing that does kinda bug me is Godzilla’s head design. They got his body right, all burly and cuddly, but his head looks hilariously teeny tiny! I hope they make more of these new kaiju movies. If you do CGI right and don’t make the monster action scenes too dark and blurry, then these kind of movies can be fun in the way they’re supposed to be.

Great in some ways, awful in others. It’s the only Kubrick film that doesn’t get better with age. I still like it for its Kubrickness, though, despite it having one of the thinnest stories of any Kubrick movie. The controversial cult scene is pretty tame and about as shocking as 90s softcore porn from late night Cinemax. 
The film is still fascinating, however, in its depiction of the various spheres of wealth which seem to operate on the sort of delirious pop occult level of some neogoth kid’s Tumblr when Tumblr was still a thing. There’s rich… there’s very rich… there’s very very rich…then there’s VERY VERY VERY RICH.
The characters are rare reptiles lurking in a tank at the zoo, their eyes unblinking and glazed over, their dialogue more like prehistoric hisses and acrid pheromones than actual talking (a very Kubrickian trait found in all his stuff, just a lot more evident here, somehow)—weird and creepy, but intriguing nonetheless in a Ballardian way. 
Unlike Barry Lyndon which is long for a reason, Eyes Wide Shut is long for no reason. It really doesn’t know what it wants to be, which is so rare for Kubrick. Spielberg’s deeply flawed A.I. sticks in my mind more than Eyes Wide Shut. But I still recommend it. Great moods and a surprisingly effective ending.

Not nearly as  insane, oddball or punishing as Housu, and not as good or as funny as Evil Dead II (released about a year after House), House does however have a few great moments, rad rubber monsters, and a cool stop motion demon thing (House II: The Second Story, on the other hand, goes full Harryhausen with all sorts of dinosaur creatures and skeletons), but it’s not a classic. Great art on the poster, though!

Watched on Saturday July 3, 2021.