Movies – Spectre Collie

One Thing I Like About Alien: Romulus

The best sequence in the movie also serves as an illustration of how Alien movies are best when they keep the lore and world-building in service of the cinematic moments. (Spoilers for Romulus and potentially the entire Alien franchise).

When Alien: Romulus first came out, the buzz around it was so good that I was sure I was going to have to do the rarest of rare things in 2024: go see a movie in a theater. But after the initial wave of good vibes, the mood on the internet seemed to sour, with more and more people complaining that the movie was too derivative of Alien and Aliens without significantly improving on the formula.

I finally watched it last night (it’s streaming on Hulu via Disney+), and I thought it was excellent. I can’t say that I loved it, though. There were lots of baffling edits and confusing scenes — I still don’t know exactly how Bjorn or Tyler died, for instance, and it often cut to an odd angle or a weird shot at exactly the wrong moment. Plus there were some clunky moments late in the movie as things started to go off the rails. By the time they hit the inevitable “get away from her, you bitch!” it felt that they’d already exceeded their quota. For whatever reason, the clunky moment I found the most jarring was that after a scene of efficient action movie exposition, Rain stares off into the distance and quietly says to herself, “Andy? Are you there?”

But I disagree with the criticism that it’s too derivative of the other movies. I don’t disagree that it’s derivative; it absolutely is. It feels like the first half is a 2024 take on Alien: it sets up a bleak horror movie inspired by 1970s “hard” science fiction, centered around a bunch of miserable working class people sacrificed to terrible monsters by a terrible corporation. The second half feels like an attempt to plus up the Aliens template, a relentlessly escalating action movie with multiple simultaneous countdowns to doom. In the middle is an exposition-heavy bridge filled with (half-baked) ideas from Prometheus. But I don’t see this as a bad thing. To put it in the most obnoxious way possible: it’s not a bug hunt, it’s a feature hunt.

That’s because Alien: Romulus feels like it’s made by people who understand exactly what makes an Alien movie work, and even more importantly, what doesn’t. This might piss off the hard-core fans of the franchise, but I think the trick is understanding that the Alien universe just ain’t all that deep.

Top. Men.

Reconsidering the Indiana Jones movies through the male gaze of the male gays

Today I responded to a gag on Bluesky which said that it was insane to make the new Indiana Jones game first person, since a huge part of the appeal of Indiana Jones was looking at Harrison Ford shirtless with a whip.

“Ah yes ha ha I can relate to this as part of my shared experience as a gay man,” I thought as I nodded and smiled along in… wait hang on! Have I been wrong about the Indiana Jones franchise my entire life?!

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite movies, easily, and is usually what I’ll say if you ask me point blank what my all-time favorite is. I’ve seen it an awful lot. I had the poster for Raiders on the wall of my bedroom, the one with Indy in the center, cracking his bullwhip, his shirt half open. I also had the teaser poster for Temple of Doom on my wall for a while, the one with Indy standing in an archway with half his shirt missing.

I never thought much about how much of the imagery of Indiana Jones is bare-chested. Actually, that’s a complete lie; I thought about it a lot. What I mean to say is that I never thought much about the implications of it.

After all, these are some of the most heterosexual movies ever made, right? Not like Roadhouse or Commando by trying so hard to prove that they’re heterosexual; the Indiana Jones movies always felt super-straight to me because they didn’t have anything to prove. These are action movies all about recreating a long-lost archetype of a Man’s Man from the early 20th century. Women want him; men want to be him — and if the connection weren’t obvious enough, they made it explicit by casting Sean Connery¹ as his dad. And even though the second movie started with a fabulous musical number, it felt less like a musical number than like a man going out of his way to look at his hot new girlfriend in a tight dress.

I’m so used to things being “queer-coded” — whether it’s secret messages hidden in a work by sly artists speaking to a subsection of their audience, or oblivious artists making art that queer people will spend the next several decades furiously re-contextualizing and reinterpreting. I always just assume by default that I’m watching or reading any work “the wrong way,” appreciating things that the filmmakers never intended.

But now that I think about it, I’m no longer sure it was unintentional. The thing that’s become abundantly clear is that the Indiana Jones movies are super horny, and they’re super horny exclusively for Indiana Jones. And although I’m sure they exist, I can’t personally recall ever hearing a woman name anything in the franchise as their favorite movie. But tons of men do. So we have a group of heterosexual directors, writers, and actors all working to make a film franchise for men that’s about how impossibly sexy the male lead character is.

That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy it, of course. I still remember seeing Raiders for the first time as a middle school birthday party. Our chaperone, a young woman in her 20s, was silent throughout, until the scene in which Indy gets off a submarine, punches out a Nazi, and takes his hat. At which point she said, out loud, “He’s so fine!”

I’d even say that the spark of the movies directly correlates to how sexy Harrison Ford can be. Crystal Skull has a lot of issues, but I think the bulk of it comes down to the feeling of being a kid watching your parents at a dinner party with a bunch of other grown-ups. And Dial of Destiny kind of drives the point home with its extended opening sequence saying “remember when Harrison Ford used to be impossibly hot?” I read an interview that said he insisted that he appear in his underwear after the extended flashback, to drive home the idea of how much Indy (and he) had aged. And I respect that a lot, especially for a movie that is primarily about regret and vainly wanting to turn back the clock. But it’s an entirely different vibe from the earlier movies.

None of this is at all unprecedented, either. I can still remember seeing an interview with Robert Conrad as a retrospective of The Wild Wild West, in which he made a joke about how the producers of the show were always putting him into impossibly tight pants.

My conclusion from all this is that I should be less hung up about target audiences and whether or not I fit. There is a long tradition in commercial entertainment in making money off of attractive people looking sexy and doing exciting things while looking sexy. It was happening long before anybody started over-analyzing it, and before anybody realized how much money you could make by having stuff explicitly marketed towards queer people with disposable income.

The entertainment industry has never cared whether I was watching stuff “the right way.” They only cared that I was watching it.

I kind of prefer to think that I wasn’t alone in some weird silo watching Indiana Jones cracking his whip at Nazis² and swooning that he was cracking that whip for me. Or even finding community from other gay kids whose formative movie-watching years were in the early 80s, like how I discovered so many other guys who vividly remember the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant had his shirt off. That’s all fine and good, but it’s somehow even more comforting to think that all of us were part of an even larger community, transcending gender and orientation, all sharing the universal human experience of being super horny for Indiana Jones.

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Even though he’s cleverly cast against type
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Or every character, male or female, in all of Bull Durham

One Thing I Like About Ready or Not

Ready or Not is a black comedy/suspense movie that feels completely like an independent production

I just learned tonight (from the Dead Meat channel on YouTube) that Ready or Not, along with Abigail and the new Scream installments, were made by a group called Radio Silence. I think that’s worth pointing out for a couple of reasons: first is because this movie is so similar to Abigail that I would’ve accused the latter of being derivative. Second, both movies feel like stubbornly independent original projects.

It’s possible that I’ve just stopped going to theaters except for big franchise installments, but it does seem increasingly rare to see standalone, self-contained movies get much popular attention. No doubt the production companies would like to be able to turn them into long-running, profitable series, but Ready or Not seems to reject any attempt whatsoever to continue the story.

There are a lot of aspects common to both Ready or Not and Abigail: A premise that could work as the “twist” that sells the movie, but it’s given away in the trailer. A protagonist trapped overnight in a huge gothic mansion. A combination of comedy and pretty extreme violence. And a few gory specifics that would be spoilers if I gave any more detail. It almost feels like Ready or Not was a kind of first draft for Abigail, because I think the latter is quite a bit better.

One sequence I liked — or I guess it’s more accurate to say admired — in particular: main character Grace has been found and gets wounded by a bullet. She ends up falling into a horrific pit (something that also happens in Abigail), and after being fully traumatized by what she sees down there, she has to climb back out, wound and all.

The reason it works so well is because it’s excruciatingly suspenseful, in the way the best horror movies are suspenseful. You’re not wondering what’s about to happen; you know exactly what’s going to happen, because there is a single shot of an exposed nail that the camera lingers on for just a second too long at the start. And after sticking that image in your mind, the movie makes you wait an eternity for it all to play out, as if it were a Final Destination sequence. When it finally ends, it’s made a hundred times worse, because we’ve had to imagine the pay-off for so long.

That pay-off is also a good example of my biggest problem with the movie, though: the tone is all over the place. The studio lists it as a “horror comedy,” but there aren’t enough scenes where it’s both at the same time. Once the action starts, it feels like it’s spending most of its time either putting its protagonist through horrible and not-particularly-funny situations, or trying to draw out too much drama from the characters who are supposed to be sympathetic. It seems to take itself too seriously for what the trailers and screenshots implied.

But I thought it all came together satisfyingly in the end, even if I wished more characters had gotten their comeuppance earlier on. (I haven’t seen You’re Next, but from what I know about it, the structure is more like what I’d been expecting from Ready or Not). And I liked that it felt almost old-fashioned, for telling a complete, original story from beginning to end, with no hint of a sequel.

One Thing I Like About Abigail

Abigail is a mean, gory, often funny, action/horror movie that I hope never becomes a franchise

The completely spoiler-free premise of Abigail is this: a group of mercenaries are hired to kidnap a 12-year-old ballerina and guard over her until the ransom can be delivered. But they quickly discover that the girl’s father is a legendarily powerful crime boss, and he’ll be sending his most ruthless hit man to kill them all.

If you’re completely spoiler-averse (and that seems like something you’d be into, of course), then I recommend watching it without knowing anything else about it. Including this post, of course. The larger premise is “spoiled” in every trailer and every description of the movie, so good luck avoiding that! But also, there’s enough going on that it’s still interesting and surprising even if you think you know what you’re getting into.

My overall take: it is the horror/action/black comedy mash-up that I’d been hoping it would be, in a similar spirit as Orphan: First Kill, Malignant, and M3GAN, although not quite as good as any of those. It’s comedically mean-spirited, full of violence and blood and gore and people being nasty to each other, but keeping all of it just enough over the top that it’s still fun.

In fact, I was enjoying it enough that I wondered why it seemed to just disappear with little mention; I suspect that’s because the third act is a mess. It goes on too long, stops doing anything interesting with its premise and just becomes one fight scene after another, tacks on at least two unnecessary endings plus a Teachable Moment, and overall just feels like the result of extensive rewrites and studio intervention.

Until that point, though, it had a great “they don’t make them like this anymore” energy to it. It had the feeling of independent filmmakers working with an original premise and a big studio budget, gathering a cast and crew who all seemed to understand exactly what they were making, and put out into the world as a standalone project with no concern over franchises or tie-ins or “lore.” Considering that it’s already being called a “flop,” it seems unlikely that Universal will try to turn it into anything that it’s not¹, and that may be the best thing for it.

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Except maybe a Horror Nights house? That could work.

One Thing I Like About It Follows

It Follows lays all of its metaphors out in the open, but rarely feels as if there’s no room for interpretation

I always like it when movies contain a line of dialogue that serves as a perfect review of the movie.¹ It Follows does exactly that, with “it’s slow, but it’s not dumb.”

The movie has had so much buzz around it for so long, with some people calling it one of the best horror movies of the past decade, that I knew I was going to see it eventually. But it’s hung out in my periphery ever since, with a kind of dreadful certainty, just waiting until the time that I’d be in the right mindset to watch a horror movie that didn’t seem particularly “fun” in the slightest.

As it turns out, it’s very good. It’s absolutely a horror movie, but it plays out more like a suspense thriller: relatively bloodless and honestly not all that scary, but full of relentless tension and a kind of numb despair. The performances are all natural and completely believable. The soundtrack is perfect. It feels very much like an independent horror movie: not in that it’s low-budget, or in that it’s overly pretentious, but in that it feels as if the filmmakers had the freedom and confidence to do exactly what they wanted.

One thing I like in particular about It Follows is that it’s confident the audience will be able to figure out what’s going on without a ton of hand-holding. Some significant plot details are left ambiguous, mostly because knowing the specifics aren’t important to understanding the story. And while there are a few scenes with poems or quotes that are on the nose, they’re delivered as punctuation to themes that the movie assumes the audience has already figured out by that point.

It feels like a perfect introduction to cinema studies, which normally would be a severe insult, but here I mean as a compliment. When I had to take cinema studies, the most influential movie in my classes was Rear Window. Its theme of audiences-as-voyeurs seems like an obvious interpretation now, but for me, it completely changed the way I watch movies. I’m not claiming that It Follows will be the classic that Rear Window is, but it is excellent at inviting you to figure out its themes, while neither being too obtuse nor too direct.

There’s one scene in particular in which Jay and her friends are sitting in a field, listening to more details about how the entity works, and what are her options for escaping it. It’s a scene of exposition, functionally leading into the next act, but it doesn’t really play as one. Instead, the camera focuses on Jay — who at this point seems numb to everything that’s happening to her — as she picks individual blades of grass and lays them on her bare leg in rows. It’s a perfectly child-like thing to be doing, suggesting that she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’ll never be care-free again.

Once you pick up on the theme of the loss of innocence, the metaphors start coming fast and furious. Jay runs to safety on a swing set. A young man has left a well-used stack of porn magazines, the kind that Jay and Paul had been laughing about earlier. Two times, the gang runs for safety to a place that had been important to them as kids with their parents. And while we see the enemy frequently, it’s rarely made the focus, instead hanging out in the frame in a way that makes it feel not so much terrifying as it is inevitable.

In fact, a lot of It Follows feels like a (slightly) more bleak version of a Charlie Brown holiday special. The kids more or less fend for themselves, trying to make sense of things while the adults are rarely shown at all. That’s emphasized in the climax, where they come up with a plan that’s based on a sketchy understanding of how things work.

I don’t want to make it sound as if It Follows had no room for subtlety; it does, and its confident sense of style is what makes it work so well. I liked that for their date, Hugh took Jay to a screening of Charade. And I really liked how there was a mix of modern and dated throughout, with teenagers hanging out watching black-and-white movies on a CRT television in a very 80s-feeling living room, while one of them used a compact e-reader that doesn’t yet exist. Old and new cars co-existed without comment. Even the porn magazines seemed like the platonic ideal of 1980s porn (not to mention that a teenager in 2015 was still using printed magazines). The sense of timelessness gives it a feeling of universal nostalgia, the sense that no matter when you grew up², it looked and felt like this.

But mostly, It Follows invites you to interpret its meaning while staying just shy of spelling it out for you directly. I can understand audiences who were expecting something like Scream or, even more appropriate, Final Destination would be disappointed that it was so slow and relatively non-violent. But I liked that it told audiences how the monster works without (too) directly telling them what the monster means. It’s somehow not all that scary, and simultaneously full of dread about the most primal fear there is.

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My favorite is a review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that called out its line: “Do not see me.”
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As long as it was in the American suburbs after the 1970s

Trainwreck Revisited

Reconsidering my take on a mostly-forgettable movie from 2015 that is still depressingly relevant

After Trainwreck — the movie written by Amy Schumer, directed by Judd Apatow, and released in 2015 — was released, I wrote an overlong defense of it on this blog. I’m reluctant to link to it, partly because so many of the images and links are now broken.¹ But mostly because reading old posts on here often has me thinking, “Who the hell is this asshole?” My last post was mostly responding to two reviews of the movie that I feel completely missed the point, and I was needlessly hostile and argumentative.

But I still agree with the points I was trying to make, even though I don’t like the post itself. Similarly, although I thought the movie itself was middling-to-forgettable, the ideas in it were more nuanced and mature than most people gave it credit for. And since it was released during the Obama administration, and we’re still suffering from the ultra-right-wing backlash to that, I think it deserves a revisit.

My interpretation of Trainwreck is that it’s a rejection of any form of feminism or progressivism that’s more prescriptive than inclusive. It’s presented as a gender-swapped twist on romantic comedy cliches, where this time it’s the woman who’s the slutty one! Can you even imagine?! But the more meaningful twist is how it flips the notion of conforming to society’s expectations.

It sets up the story with two sisters listening to their father go on an anti-monogamy tirade while telling them that he and their mother are getting a divorce. He has them repeat: “monogamy isn’t realistic.” Years later, one of them has taken that to heart and done everything expected of her: she drinks and parties as much as she wants, she has sex whenever and with whomever she wants, she refuses to be tied down to a committed relationship, and she still has a successful career. The other sister Kim is the “bad sheep,” in that she’s chosen to have a quiet life in the suburbs, married and expecting a baby.

When the movie was released, Schumer went onto Twitter and said explicitly what it was about: “I hope you see it. It’s a love letter to my little sister.”

Because it takes the format of a conventional romantic comedy, which implies a level of earnestness and taking everything at face value, it’s easy to see why so many audiences interpreted it as conservative. By the time you get to the end, it might seem like the message is, “Women need to reject single life, stop drinking, stop sleeping around, and devote themselves to a life of Traditional Heterosexual Monogamy to truly find happiness. Victory Through Conformity!”

But the movie isn’t a celebration of monogamy, or conservatism, or heterosexuality, but instead a celebration of self-determinism and mutual respect.

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Especially since the studios are now insisting on removing so much of their content from the internet.

Breakin’ Necks With Kal-El & Zod

Reconsidering a now-mostly-irrelevant superhero movie, and the dangers of meeting a story halfway

Last night, Instagram was doing what Instagram does, serving up never-ending sets of short videos in an attempt to hone in on what’s going to get me hooked on the app even more.

One of those was a video of clips from the climax of Man of Steel, with some unidentified narrators explaining how Kal-El straight-up murdering Zod [spoiler?] was not only perfectly in character for Superman, but it was necessary. Superman had no choice! Saving a defenseless family from getting heat-vision obliterated by a mad Kryptonian was the most Supermanest thing that Superman could do.

Because Instagram only cares about views and not context, I don’t have any idea of how old the clip was or who was doing the talking. Was it cobbled together from Bluray special features? Is it a fan video essay? Is anyone anywhere still talking about this movie, now that the “Synderverse” has pretty much fizzled out completely? Is it at all relevant?

I say it’s at least a little bit relevant, because I was dead wrong about the movie after I saw it. Reading back on my review 11 years later, I’d classify it as “charitable” more than “effusive,” and the things I mostly liked about the movie then are the same things I remember fondly about it: great cast, great final line from Lois Lane, and lots of Henry Cavill with no shirt on. Plus I like that it leaned into the idea of “Superman is an alien,” dildo-shaped spaceships and all, instead of “being an alien is Superman’s back-story.”

But the rest of my review hasn’t aged well. At the time, I said I was looking forward to seeing more in the series, which was clearly false because I still haven’t seen any of the other DC movies apart from Wonder Woman and Aquaman.¹ And those only because they suggested a novelty and weirdness outside of Snyder’s interpretation of the characters.

Most of all, though, I was wrong about the climax of Man of Steel. Like the people defending it in that aforementioned Instagram video, I said that the moment made sense in the context of everything that came before it, and with the overall premise and tone of the movie. Which is bizarre, because it absolves the filmmakers of having any control over the premise and tone of the movie. It values being tonally or thematically consistent, over being tonally and thematically appropriate for one of the most well-defined characters in popular culture.

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I’m not sure if The Suicide Squad and Black Adam are in the same universe? Also I’m not sure if I care?

Dead Meat and A Coward’s Guide to Horror Movies

Recommending an extremely popular YouTube channel that happens to be exactly what I’ve been looking for

It feels odd for me to be recommending a YouTube channel that has 6.5 million subscribers as if I were the first person to discover it. But it’s not the kind of thing that I’d normally recommend, and I only just found it recently, even though it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

The channel is called Dead Meat, and the bulk of the content is the “Kill Count” series, which gives a recap of a horror movie, calling out each time a character is killed, and then tallying them all up (with a pie chart!) at the end.

This is perfect for me, who’s got a fraught relationship with horror movies. I really, deeply want to love them. They’re interesting to pick apart, especially since all of the dynamics are often blatantly playing out across the surface, letting you find as much or as little depth as you want. At the same time, the entire genre is designed to refuse that kind of over-intellectualized analysis. They work best when they bypass all of the critical parts of your brain and go for an immediate reaction. As somebody who overthinks everything, I love watching something like Malignant or Orphan: First Kill, and not “turning off my brain,” but letting it target my brain directly and just enjoy it.

But that’s also why I can’t handle so many of them. I used to just say that I was a coward and leave it at that, but I think there’s actually more to it. When a horror movie clicks with me, I absolutely love it. But there’s a narrow window of tone, subject matter, violence, gore, performance, verisimilitude, and a dozen other aspects that, if a movie veers even a little bit out of the zone, it becomes completely intolerable for me.

Paved with some sort of intention

Follow-up post about Late Night With the Devil, with a few spoiler-filled questions and criticisms

I was content with my take on Late Night With the Devil for a while. I was happy to declare it as a movie that worked on its own terms, even if it didn’t work completely on mine, and I could appreciate it as a lurid haunted house-style throwback. I was even a little proud of myself for watching a movie and for once, not overthinking it.

And then I started overthinking it.

I thought that this was a movie that didn’t feel any need for subtlety. The characters tell you exactly who they are, the performances are broad, the effects are over-the-top, and it was overall intended more to be fun than genuinely scary. (Even I, as one of the biggest scary-movie cowards, never felt my heart rate go up even a tick except for a scene where a man intentionally cuts his hand with a knife). The thing I ended up liking the most about the movie was that it knew what it wanted to be.

But I read a few reviews — a couple from outlets I’d expected to be a lot more cynical and less charitable than my take — that were so effusive that I started to wonder if I’d missed something while being condescending.

The main question I had — and I won’t go into details until after a spoiler warning — was whether the movie was intended to be surprising. And I think it’s kind of interesting, because my initial takeaway was that it didn’t matter.

I’m definitely not a proponent of the whole “death of the author” line of thought. Even if it did have value when it was coined, it has no place now, and it does nothing but promote shallow and overly-literal takes on art. (And occasionally, get used by people who want to use progressive ideas like diversity, inclusiveness, and cultural sensitivity as a bludgeon).

But here, it seemed to me, was the rare case where the intention of the filmmakers didn’t actually matter, since it works fine either way. I thought I understood the story from the opening montage, so I spent the movie enjoying the tension of watching that story play out. That’s the main difference between horror and something like suspense or mystery stories: it’s not about the twists, but about watching the inevitable descent, knowing that you can’t do anything to stop what’s coming.

So I was initially confused that the ending of Late Night With the Devil spent so long belaboring the details that I’d just assumed the audience already knew. Eventually, I figured that it was a case of the movie having it both ways: if the ending surprised you, good. If it just showed you a horrific take on what you already knew had happened, also good.

But it still doesn’t fit with some aspects of the movie that I thought were unclear or just plain didn’t make sense, and for that, I need a spoiler warning.

One Thing I Like About Late Night With The Devil

The story of a 1970s late night talk show that aired a live demon possession

The moment Late Night With the Devil clicked with me is when I stopped comparing it to the movie I’d been expecting, and started watching it for what it actually is.

The intriguing premise suggests a period piece found footage horror movie: a narrator¹ sets us in the late 1970s, recounting the story of a late night talk show called Night Owls that can never seem to compete with Johnny Caron’s Tonight Show. Against the back drop of the political and cultural turmoil of the late 70s, and the satanic panic, the show’s host Jack Delroy spent years trying to build popularity for his show and get out from under Carson’s shadow. What we’re seeing is the “master tape” from the Halloween night broadcast, which featured a stage psychic; an Amazing Randi-style skeptic; and a parapsychologist with her troubled patient, a 13-year-old girl who survived a cult worshipping the demon Abraxas.

For a while, it does seem like they’re going for verisimilitude. The set direction feels spot-on, not just for a 1970s talk show, but specifically one made in New York. (It’s good that the money went into perfecting the set, since almost the entire movie takes place on one set). There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the opening montage showing a character who looks a lot like Orson Welles in his 1970s talk show era, and for those of us who watched those shows during our formative years, that one image establishes the setting perfectly.

But as the movie continues, it becomes apparent that Late Night With the Devil is more interested in telling its story than in being a pitch-perfect found-footage movie. The performances are pretty broad, always hovering in the zone between realism and camp. There are minor, nit-picking anachronisms; shots that wouldn’t have happened in a live broadcast; cross-fades that weren’t in style even if the technology to do them was available for live TV; “behind the scenes” shots that simply wouldn’t have been possible; and a bunch of other things that imply that whenever the filmmakers had to choose between reality and setting a mood, they always chose the latter.

In the end, the tone of the movie is much more like a Hollywood Horror Nights house than a modern found footage movie. It has a ton of ideas about theme, mood, character, and story, and it throws them out like an interconnected series of funhouse horror vignettes. The commercial breaks and behind-the-scene moments are more like transitions between broad story beats than like actual behind-the-scenes footage.

And when I say the performances are broad to the point of being camp, I don’t mean that disparagingly. David Dastmalchian as Jack Delroy has to be the most nuanced, managing a performance-within-a-performance that has to shift from corny to sincere to craven to haunted within the same scene. I was even more impressed by Ingrid Torelli as the young possessed girl Lilly, especially for perfectly playing the eeriness of someone who won’t stop staring directly at the camera. On the whole, though, the performances felt more like those of the scare actors inside a modern horror house, shouting out their lines every 60 seconds to make sure the audience gets the point of the current story beat.

Ultimately, that horror house feeling is what I liked² most about Late Night With the Devil. It feels like a fiercely independent movie³, where the filmmakers had a very specific idea about the tone and the mood and what they believed was important, even if it didn’t fit into the modern Blumhouse mold. Even more than the sets and costumes, it feels like a throwback to the late 1970s. Especially the pre-1980s horror that valued creepy and scary moments over intense realism.

If on the other hand, you’re interested in an independent film that does commit completely to its premise, I’ve got to give another recommendation for Deadstream. It goes much more for horror-comedy than Late Night With the Devil, and in my opinion does more with its modest budget. The movies have very little in common apart from a single set and a nod to live broadcast (and both being on Shudder, I guess), but that shows how much room there is for creativity in horror movies without big studio intervention.

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Michael Ironside!
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But didn’t ever quite love
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It feels odd calling it “low budget,” considering how aggressively it’s been marketed, and how there’s an almost comically long series of production company logos at the beginning

One Thing I Like About Poor Things

The best moments in Poor Things are the ones you can appreciate empirically

I went in hoping, and fully expecting, to love Poor Things, but it never really clicked for me. So it’s a good thing I’ve got a series called “One Thing I Like,” because there’s an awful lot to like about this movie.

The art direction is outstanding, delivering on the promise of the trailer and then some. It’s full of fantasy versions of cities (and a ship) that are beautiful and familiar, but just surreal enough to suggest that you’re seeing them for the very first time, and just sinister enough to suggest that there’s always danger lurking just outside of your field of view. The beginning calls back to The Bride of Frankenstein and Metropolis, just directly enough to make sure that we make the connection, but not so directly that it feels just like a reference.

And Emma Stone, obviously, gives herself so completely into this character that any trace that it’s a performance disappears within a few minutes. There’s no way the movie would’ve worked without her commitment. Mark Ruffalo is also excellent, acting as if he were a character borrowed from an entirely different movie, which is exactly what’s needed for the character. Willem Dafoe is at the stage in his career where yet another exceptional performance from him isn’t all that exceptional. And I think Ramy Youssef deserves credit for playing the straight man against so many showy performances; he has to function as the audience’s guide into a Victorian horror story, but one in which the story abandons its narrator a third of the way through.

Also, there are brief black-and-white interstitials when the story moves to a new location, each seeming like we’re getting a peek into Bella’s bizarre and beautiful dreams. But none lasts long enough to make any sense of them. Like a real dream, they seem to leave an after-image on the mind, even if we can’t reliably recall details.

One Thing I Love About Wonka

My favorite thing about Wonka is how it effectively chooses songs from the original, and then goes off to do its own thing

When I first saw a link to a trailer for Wonka, a 2023 prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Timothée Chalamet, I was prepared for the worst. And I was pleasantly surprised when I could find nothing wrong with it; it looked perfectly charming.

After seeing it, I was happy to see that it is charming (albeit far from perfectly) from the start. It begins with the three repeated notes from “Pure Imagination” — which work so well because they are vaguely creepily discordant — before launching into an original opening song confidently introducing Chalamet as a young Willy Wonka.

I should admit from the start that I was almost hoping to find fault in Chalamet’s performance, and by the end of the first song, I gave up and just resigned to having to acknowledge that sometimes famous people are just good at stuff. I think he did an exceptional job creating a version of the character that is at the opposite end of Gene Wilder’s version — all of the optimism and kind-heartedness and almost-compulsive showmanship and eagerness to make people happy, but before decades of seeing people’s greed (and excessive gum-chewing and TV-watching) put a darker and more melancholy spin on it.

Which is, more or less, my most significant criticism of the movie: it delivers exactly what is promised on the poster, wonderfully, but no more than that. It’s an often-delightful and imaginative children’s movie about imagination and hope, with tons of people doing excellent work to sell every moment, but there’s little sense of a unique voice.