Birds of Prey (And the Subtitle I Refuse to Type) Review - SPOILERS

It is now 2020 and many of us are probably now looking back on the things we did in 2019 and wondering what might have been if we had just done that one thing differently. Maybe you shouldn't have quit that job, maybe you shouldn't have married that woman, maybe you shouldn't have left your wallet next to the shallow grave where they eventually found her bod....

*Ahem* 

So anyways it's not just New Years Resolutions here, people, it's New Years Regrets; and I sit here the very definition of such.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, out of the two DC movies to be released these past few months; I chose to see Birds of Prey. 

Yup, drink that in. After all the rave reviews and scathing indictments by YouTube commentators and woke critics respectively; after warnings of mass shootings and incel uprisings; after all the hype surrounding this one particular film... I ended up not seeing "Joker" in the theaters, and instead opted for Deadpool's retarded feminist sister. And make no mistake, that's what this is. DC's attempt at their own Deadpool. And, imagine my shock, it doesn't doesn't turn out quite as well.

Gee, DC, I'm starting to see a pattern. Aren't you? 

So the story begins with Harley Quinn - ex-therapist, partner in crime and lover to the Joker - relaying her past to us through a cutesy animated segment narrated with her oh so quirky and thick Noo Yoik accent and if you find that shit annoying, get fucking used to it. It continues incessantly throughout the entire film. 

So Joker, rather uncharacteristically, makes a sane decision and kicks her to the kerb (presumably for not being the Harley Quinn in the Animated Series) and so she reacts by ramming a conveniently placed tanker filled with petrol into the ACE Chemicals factory where she and the Joker consummated their relationship by quite literally becoming pale imitations of the characters they're based on. 

TITLE CARD: 4 Minutes Earlier - Detective Renee Montoya investigates the multiple slaying of a group of gangsters (which will later turn out to be the work of another comic book character, "Huntress", also effectively bastardised by this film) and expertly and bravely fends off the brutal mansplaining inflicted upon her by her partner. You go girl! That's got to be the worst thing that's ever happened to a latino lesbian in Gothman City and you handled it with aplomb. 

I mean she did get kidnapped by a love-sick Two-Face in the comics but whatever.

Meanwhile Roman Sidonus - AKA Black Mask - (played by Euan McGregor and yes, I'll cool it with the parenthesis from now on) is after some diamond in order to fund his vague City dominating gangster bullshit and ends up hiring a pre-vigilante days Dinah Lance - AKA Black Canary - who looks nothing like she does in the comics and I'm guessing that's the case because they already had a blonde white woman in the film and Hollywood nowadays does casting by picking out colors in a Dulux chart. 

I mean we wouldn't want Neo-Nazis to accidentally like our movie or anything.

If it sounds like I'm having trouble explaining the plot to you, it's probably because I am. Throughout most of its first hour the film jumps back and forth in a non-linear style that really doesn't lend anything to the film other than confusion. Yes, I know it's because its being narrated by Harley and she's a scatterbrained lunatic, I get that; but it isn't helped when pretty much all the character's backgrounds are explained in this overly rushed and spoon fed fashion.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mean between the female writer, female director and generally female cast, it figures that this film would take something relatively simple and make it needlessly complicated. 

Thank you, thank you. So a black woman and a Jew walk into a Chinese takeaway....

Okay, I'm gonna try and explain this. Please bear with me. 

Roman Sidonus, the villain of the film, wants a diamond that used to belong to a crime family known as the Bertinellis (Huntress's family, who are dead). He sends Black Canary off to get the diamond but it is pickpocketed from her by a 12 year old Cassandra Cane (one of the Batgirls from the comics) and then promptly swallowed, foreshadowing jokes about shitting and laxatives from here on out. Harley, just as she's about to be killed by Sidonus, claims she can find the diamond because she's "good at finding things". Roman, for some reason, decides to take her up on this offer. This results in Harley storming the police station where Cane is with a grenade launcher filled with paint, overpowering multiple officers in the process. When she finally finds Cane (locked away in a cell next to a bunch of hardened criminals because that's Gotham for you) she accidentally releases all the other prisoners who, instead of attempting to escape, try to beat up Harley for no adequately explained reason.

(There, that wasn't so hard. And I managed to get rid of all those extra parenthesis I had lying around.) 

Now I personally was never under the impression that Harley was all that great a fighter. I don't know what the new comics are making her out to be but, honestly, fuck the new comics. The only Harley that exists to me is the version in the Animated Series created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm; the Harley that was actually a funny, charmingly insane and often tragic character that actually had an interesting relationship with the Joker. Here they've made her into a mess, a parody of 90s Grrl Power chique with more STDs than charm, devoid of any and all sympathetic traits. 

Now this is a woman I would sleep next to with one eye open 
and a gun under my pillow.

They can't even seem to get her fighting prowess down. One minute she's taking on the Gotham PD single handed, the next she's having trouble with a drunk five foot tall latino dyke with no weapons. And don't get me started on Gotham PD here. This is Gotham fucking City. Every officer here should be decked out to the tits in body armour, grenades, firearms and SPARE fucking firearms. Hell, they should each have their own mini-nuke. And even if they don't, it's Harley fucking Quinn! You mean to tell me you can take a black kid with a flick knife on a crowded subway with a .357 bullet at mid-range but you can't take down a 90Ib white woman in booty shorts and a midriff top, armed with nothing but a grenade launcher that fires confetti, AT CLOSE RANGE? 

I have problems with all the fight scenes in this movie but we'll get to that in a moment. 

The villain, Roman Sidonis, is portrayed as the oft warned about 'manbaby', spoilt beyond belief and prone to flying off the handle at even the perception of having not gotten his way. In other words, it's the "Last Jedi" method of male villain writing. As a result he isn't anywhere near as intimidating as he should be, even as he orders his right hand man Mr Zasz (one of the only things I feel this film got right) to slice people's faces off while their still alive.

Victor Zasz; a role model to men everywhere.

The aforementioned 'mansplaining' in the film was actually copped to by Euan McGregor, who in an interview promoting the film said:

“What interested me with ‘Birds of Prey’ is that it’s a feminist film. It is very finely written. There is in the script a real look on misogyny, and I think we need that. We need to be more aware of how we behave with the opposite sex. We need to be taught to change.”

Maybe you do Faux Bi Wan, but the way I deal with women is perfectly appropriate. And how do I deal with them, you may ask? Simple: With great emotional distance. But please, carry on:

“Misogynists in movies are often extreme: They rape, they beat women… and it is legitimate to represent people like that, because they exist and they are obviously the worst. But in the ‘Birds of Prey’ dialogues, there is always a hint of everyday misogyny, of those things you say as a man you do not even realize.”

Euan, you misunderstand. I am perfectly aware of the things I say around women. If you are not then it is you who needs to reevaluate your communication skills. I empathise though. Women are scary, what with the cooties and the turning into a werewolf once a month and whatnot. But given time you will soon see them as I do: The thing that occasionally comes up and talks to you and attempts to hug you while you're trying to write a review of a bad movie. 

“(The film takes on) mansplaining… and it’s in the script in a very subtle way. I found that brilliant.”

You know what Euan, I actually agree. It was subtle. In fact it was probably the most subtle thing about this movie. Not that I am bregrudging what is essentially a Harley Quinn movie (and really, that's what it should have been, just that) for not being subtle. That would be stupid. What I do bregrudge it for is being a largely incomprehensible, hamfisted feminist pander-flick that never really manages to establish any connection between its female lead characters beyond the superficial "I got boobs, so do you, grrl power" one. 

By the time the end of the film rolls around and Sidonus lays siege to Harley and Joker's old pad with his army of incels, the girls finding themselves backed into a corner, it honestly feels like they've all been in separate movies for an hour an a half. Especially Huntress, whose running gag throughout the film is that she calls herself Huntress but everyone else calls her Crossbow Killer and she gets annoyed at this. Way to rip of "Guardians of the Galaxy", movie. Huntress has a fairly interesting if not generic revenge driven back story but here they turn her into a clown for lolzorz. Nick Fury Syndrome strikes again

Never Forget

After a series of annoying fight scenes (again, I'll get to it later), Roman Sidonus is blown up with a grenade in a wet fart of a villain death. In the denouement we see the girls hanging out at a local burger joint, high fiving and chatting away like they've been friends for ages. Excuse me, movie, but you didn't earn this. It really says something when the end of "The Expendables" had Dolph Lundgren's character hanging out and drinking beers with the guys after he got high on drugs, fucked up a misson, got kicked out of the crew and then defected to a bunch of enemy mercs to try and kill his old friends, and that was STILL more realistic than this shit. 

I think the message is supposed to be that women just get along or something. Sisterhood and all that. But this leads me to the final point of this already overlong review. Sitting comfortably? 

Good.

So it took me a little while to realize what it was that really bothered me about the fight scenes in these kinds of movies. It's not that they're unrealistic. It's a movie. Of course it's unrealistic. The problem is that feminist writers don't understand film violence. Specifically they don't understand male film violence. 

Look at Bruce Willis in "Die Hard". And I mean really look hard at him while he's fighting. Is he enjoying himself?

NO.

Jackie Chan. What's he doing throughout most of the excellent fight scenes he himself often choreographs? 

RUNNING AWAY.

John McClane is not enjoying himself. He's having a shitty time. Even as he bombards the villain with Yippi Kay Yays to keep his spirits up and mock his opponent, he's still bleeding out his feet. The bruises and blood and sweat are what makes a fight scene powerful. The fact that McClane is hurting makes it more believable, even as he drives a car off a ramp into a chopper. You can even see this in the recent fantastic Daredevil fight scenes. 

With every hit you can see he's hurting. So when he finally beats them all and saves the kid it feels like he earned it. And this is the problem I have with the kinds of action scenes I see in pander fests like "Birds of Prey". None of them ever seem like they're hurting. They all just get up and flip around like its nothing. 

This is because they don't understand: People don't enjoy violence as such, they enjoy watching people overcome adversity. 

"But Glenn!" I hear you cry into your waifu body pillow, "'Birds of Prey' is a comedy film! It's not the same as 'Die Hard' or 'Daredevil'!" Okay, true. But the same rules apply. The violence is made funnier in a comedy film by the reaction, just as its made more believable and powerful in other films. The Three Stooges show this. Hell, HOME ALONE shows this. 
But here you just end up with a bunch of people flailing around with blood splatter and bone cracking and ultimately nothing is gained. Nothing is earned and you're left sitting there wondering where your 10 bucks went; why Renee Montoya, a GCPD detective, is somehow on the same fighting level as someone like Huntress or Black Canary; and why, after all the explosions, gun battles and assorted violence that's been going down over the course of the day has BATMAN NOT SHOWED UP. 

Overall everything about this film is unearned, forced, compressed, muddled and generally a chore to watch. The characters display no chemistry or connection to one another and the villain is a Last Jedi style manbaby strawman for the writer to live her power fantasy through alongside all of the dumb as fuck "MEN BAD" moments sprinkled throughout. Avoid this film at all costs.

    
Also watch "The Villainess". It's way better. 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Bargain Basement "IT" - SPOILERS

Full disclosure; I have not read the books of short stories "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" by Alvin Schwartz and thus cannot compare the adaptations of the tales with the source material. I am familiar with some of the artwork however and the influence that the books have had on culture at large. Unfortunately I didn't have these as a kid but just by looking at the artwork I can assure you I probably would have fucking loved them.

My girlfriend started drawing these. Not sure why.

I think the basement's starting to get to her.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get on with reviewing the movie. 

I think that the art of the anthology horror movie has almost been lost. You don't really get movies like "Creepshow", "Body Bags", "Two Evil Eyes" or "Quicksilver Highway" anymore and when you do it tends to be direct to DVD fare, not theatrical releases from big studios. So when I heard about this movie coming out, being vaguely aware of the "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books, I thought this could be it. The film that brings back the anthology horror film. I mean it's a book of short stories. What could they possibly do? Set it in the 60s in some attempt to associate themselves with the recent "Stephen King's IT" adaptations and slam hamfisted social commentary down our throats through some predictable story about a book of tales that come true? 

You already know that's exactly what they did. 

"When we started talking about this about five years ago, I had to think about it ... Anthology films are always as bad as the worst story in them — they're never as good as the best story... I remembered in Pan's Labyrinth, I created a book called 'the Book of Crossroads'. I thought it could be great if we had a book that reads you, and it writes what you're most afraid of. Then the theme became stories we tell each other."

- Guillermo Del Toro (2019, San Diego Comic Con)

So first of all, there was absolutely no reason to set this story in the 60s. None whatsoever. I know Guillermo has a tendency to make horror films with a historical war back drop, a la "The Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth", but those movies were orchestrated (by Del Toro for one thing) specifically to cater to those time periods. Here it feels like the filmmakers are trying to ride on the coat tails of the recent "IT" adaptations by shoehorning in the period setting. Which I'm sure the writers were fine with because fuck me did they have it out for Richard Nixon.

Seriously, if you come away from the film thinking Nixon was the villain that's probably because he was. Forget spiders bursting out of a girl's face or weird smiling fat demons in hospital hallways; the ghost of Tricky Dick is living rent free in the minds of the screenwriters. 

I am NOT a spook

From Nixon campaign posters defaced with swastikas (yes, comparing each other's candidates to Nazis is not a recent development by any stretch) to the periodic intervals in the film where we're treated to black and white broadcasts of the presidential campaign Nixon eventually won, it's clear that this film feels like it needs to remind you that, yes, we are indeed in 1968 and that war is bad and Nixon was worse.

It's kind of reminiscent of "Atomic Blonde" in that sense. The filmmakers don't have the talent to immerse you in the year of 68 and so they have to slam it in your face once every so often. Oh look, here's some footage of Nixon talking about not wanting to bomb anyone unless it's absolutely necessary with an afro-sporting black woman sassily opining "Tricky Dick? That ain't no name fo' a president!" And here's a radio presenter with his hourly reminder that war is bad and shit, just in case you forgot. It has little if anything to do with the plot but we're desperate for critics to finish on our faces with a shower of good reviews and we don't know how to do it any other way.

Actually that's not totally true, it does kind of have something to do with the plot but we'll get to that later.

So the story starts off with Stella Nichols, a miserable nerd whose mum left her and her dad because she's a miserable nerd which only makes her more of a miserable nerd and this situation doesn't really change at all throughout the film. She goes out trick or treating with her two, possibly friend-zoned, guy friends Auggie and Chuck; despite the fact that all of them are in high school and should not be knocking on stranger's doors in costumes asking for candy. No, that kind of potentially dangerous activity is relegated solely to elementary school aged kids, thank you very much. 

"Okay everyone, it's time for the yearly cull. Survival of the fittest."

So Auggie is basically Sheldon Cooper from "Big Bang Theory" but more tolerable and Chuck is a raging retard (who we first see fishing turds out of the toilet with the bathroom door wide open). This being a Stephen King rip off, naturally there are one dimensional, psychopathic jocks armed with baseball bats roaming the streets and Chuck thinks it would be appropriate to tempt fate for both himself and his friends by setting a bag of the aformentioned turds on fire and chucking it into the jock's car while he's driving.

No doubt shocked by the jock's reactions to almost being burned alive in their own vehicle the group escape to a nearby drive-in cinema where they meet the most sensitively named latino character since Chico Gonzales from "Dirty Harry", Ramon Rodriguez, as he sits quietly watching "Night of the Living Dead", making everyone in the audience wish they were watching "Night of the Living Dead". It's at this point that I start placing bets as to how long it will be before Ramon Sombrero Burrito is racially abused.

It didn't take long. After all, anyone in a movie nowadays who isn't white in an R rated movie has to at some point be racially abused because writers nowadays cannot think of any other way to make an audience sympathise with a brown person. As I ponder as to how Ramon managed to get his car over the border fence the jocks are shooed off and Stella suddenly decides that she's got a craving for dark and swarthy meat and so, out of nowhere, suggests that he join them on an expedition to a haunted house that no one has mentioned up until this point. 

Upon them entering the house they find a book of horror stories written by a girl who was held captive in a secret room because her family were a bunch of rich fucks. One by one Stella's friends are made victims of the book as it writes stories about each of them based on their worst fears.

This film is bargain basement "IT".

It has the elements: Period small town setting, group of friends, thing that imitates your worst fears, psycho jocks/greasers, shit parents, racism, etc, etc. The problem is the characters are slasher movie tier, the visuals are the same blue tinted, almost day-for-night shit that we're accustomed to nowadays, predictable jump scares abound and its all framed with some of the worst social commentary I've seen in a recent movie. 

It didn't even have to be bad. Ramon, you see, turns out to be a draft dodger and so when the book cottons on to this it sends a fucked up looking creatures that builds itself out of various body parts, no doubt in reference to Ramon's brother being sent back home from the war "in pieces". Naturally when the cops catch him they brand him a coward and shove him in lock up. The idea actually isn't bad and the "Jangly Man" creature (From the story "Me Tie Doughty Walker") is one of the best parts of the film, putting aside the un-scary CGI.

What it would be like if Willem Dafoe melted.

Again though, the filmmakers don't have the talent to execute the idea with any kind of subtlety. Maybe it would have been better if the police officer sympathized with Ramon, perhaps showing him a scar from when he himself was drafted to fight in Vietnam, thereby getting a more in-depth look into the lives of the people in the town and how this war on the other side of the world has impacted them. But no, police man bad, so he kicks the Mexican into a jail cell yelling "YER GONNA DO YER DUTY TO 'MERICA BOAH!" as cannons blast, eagles cry and Star Spangled Banner blares out in the distance.

The positives? Like I said, putting aside the CGI, some of the creatures are pretty cool, some of the photography is interesting and there's a least one scene, in a hospital, that does manage to almost hit the mark in terms of horror. And it's the scene that almost completely eschews any jump scares.

Either Honey Boo's Boo's mother had become an albino

or Sadako had really let herself go.

The negatives? Everything else. Aside from some interesting camera moments it's dreary to look at and becomes a chore to watch. It's largely humourless and whatever humour does come across tends to be groan inducing Whedonisms that not only fall flat but feel anachronistic for the period it's set in. The characters are largely 2D and so it's hard to really care about any of them. 

Del Toro was wrong. They should have just taken some of the more popular stories from the books, fleshed them out a bit and released it as an anthology movie. Set it in the same town by all means, even have the stories linked with common characters and settings. "Trick 'r Treat"  did it back in 2007 and I remember that movie actually being pretty great. 

As naked female werewolf orgy attests.

Top it all off with shit tier social commentary and a confusing ending that seems to gun for a sequel and you have yet another crappy modern horror to throw on to the ever growing pile. Despite this it hasn't made me lose interest in reading the old books so I'll be picking them up soon to see what they were like when they were, hopefully, good.

It honestly would have been better if they had made a movie about a small town where people are murdered one by one in gruesome fashions and it turned out the killer was literally Richard Nixon with a sack over his head. At least that would have been funny.

I'd call it "The Town that Dreaded Dick."

Bird Box: Remake? What? No!

Imagine, if you will, a sequel to the famed Friday the 13th films in which Jason doesn't actually have to chase his victims. He just shows up and the moment everyone sees him they zombie-walk over to him whispering something vague about their dead mother, call him beautiful and headbutt his machete until they collapse in a gory mess. Sounds a little bit shit doesn't it? Well let's take it further. In order to combat this phenomena his would be victims blindfold themselves whenever they go outside and not only can Jason himself not go inside houses, he can't actually harm you as long as you have your blindfold on. But he can jump up and down and make noises.

That would be my enormously uncharitable description of the film "Bird Box" starring Sandra Bullock as Malorie; a thirtysomething, unemployed artist with daddy issues and the spunk of an invisible truck driver rattling in her womb. After a visit to the doctor with her sister the effects of a mysterious global crisis involving mass, unexplained suicides washes up at her doorstep, resulting in the death of her sister, her joining up with a group of survivors and John Malkovich being mildly annoyed. 

It is suggested that various beings with the ability to take the form of your worst fear/dead relatives have practically taken over the world and the only way to defend yourself from them when outside is to don a blindfold and attempt to navigate roaring rivers in old rowboats with children in tow.  

First of all, it's a Netflix movie, so it looks like a glorified student film with the budget of half a shoestring and a Congolese slave child. Secondly it's written by Eric Heisserer (albeit based on a novel) who was responsible for the atrocity that was The Thing Prequel and the overrated snorefest that was "The Arrival." Thirdly, am I the only one who got flashbacks to "The Happening"? Seriously it does feel like someone watched that film and decided to try and remake it, but do it right this time. From the deadly entity manifesting itself as a living gust of wind to the hilarious suicides it provokes plus the verbatim use of the classic "WE'RE NOT ASSHOLES" line directly from "The Happening", this honestly did seem like a covert attempt at a remake. And apparently (having just looked it up) I wasn't the only person who thought so.

Outside of these elements the film follows a fairly typical post-apocalypse drama formula. Main character teams up with a rag-tag group of people, one of them is a cynical, selfish, loudmouthed arsehole (who invariably ends up being right later in the film), at some point they run out of food and have to go on a supply run that goes horribly (and in this case, hilariously) wrong. This film however decides to break up the cliche ridden backstory with glimpses into the future with Sandra Bullock guiding two largely personality bereft children down a river and their subsequent encounters. It's not boring by any stretch but it vacillates between passably standard and unbridled silliness.

One attempt at serious emotional drama here, a fat woman diving head first through an unopened window there. This film is like attending a funeral where every now and then a clown on a unicycle crashes the party and sets itself on fire in front of the guests. But then the funeral just continues on its original path as if nothing happened. If this film was indeed an attempt to remake "The Happening" then clearly they were unable to shed the aformentioned film's notoriety for unintentional humour through slapstick suicide. And quite frankly why would they want to? This stuff is classic.  

Is it all bad? Not necessarily. The performances are solid if occasionally cheesy (John Malkovich chews the scenery as usual) and it holds your attention well enough. The trouble is that whatever serious intention it may have had is scuppered by the unintentional hilarity of the death scenes and I think they probably should have played up the threat of the unblindfolded people who force others to gaze upon the creature a little bit more. Beyond that the story is predictable and there's really not enough real horror elements to satisfy the "28 Days Later" crowd. 

All in all, this is a silly film that tries to take itself seriously and fails for the most part. Recommended for drunken parties with your mates. But at that point you could just as easily watch "The Happening". It's shorter, funnier and has Mark Wahlberg going "What? No."

      

Godzilla II: King of the YAWNsters

I'll make this quick.

Whilst the original Godzilla film from 1954 was an allegory for the death and destruction inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the American A Bombs - something that was still very much fresh in people's memories at the time of production - the movies that followed were colourful, fun, prosthetic pro-wrestling with little human drama to speak of. 

Not that there was no human drama, but in the case of one of my favourites "Destroy All Monsters" a lot of that drama is relegated to men running around in ridiculous space suits chasing after alien nuns. 

And that's pretty much what you want out of human drama in a Godzilla movie. Make it interesting enough for it to drive the movie forward and for the audience to relate to what's going on. Just make sure there's a lot of people in costumes wrestling and boom, you've nailed it. It's a hard formula to fuck up. 

Well apparently not, because our American friends never really seem to get it right. The Roland Emmerich Godzilla film in 1998 mixed bloated "Independence Day" story-telling style with a monster that in no way resembled Godzilla and the 2014 film was so unmemorable that all the legacy it was able to spawn was in the form of a semi-regularly seen meme.  

So how does its sequel hold up?

It's been a long time since I saw the 2014 Godzilla film. In fact I think I only ever saw it in the cinema. I remember Godzilla's design being a marked improvement over the Emmerich travesty but story-wise it wasn't much better. There was a dreariness that one should never see in a Godzilla movie and it had a habit of cutting away from monster fights to focus on the uninteresting exploits of uninteresting human characters. 

Unfortunately the new film hasn't changed much in that regard. There are nice shots here and there punctuating the otherwise horrid visuals and some of the monster designs, particularly that of Mothra, are quite beautiful. It's just a pity you barely get to see them. 

Most of the film, particularly the fights themselves, are awash in a hazy bukkake of special effects only exacerbated by the fact that the studio clearly hired a man with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease to do the camera work. With all the rain, tornadoes, shaky cam and extreme close ups you'd be forgiven for thinking the movie was trying to induce the audience into some kind of seizure; which would have been welcome since all it did was induce sleep. I don't know who it was that decided that making absolutely sure the audience can't see a damn thing that's going on was the height of action movie-making but their vivisection should be livestreamed to every film school on the planet as an example of what happens when you ruin cinema as an art form. Action movie makers in the past didn't do this for the same reason people who run carnival haunted houses don't lock you in a dark room and beat you with hammers. There's a line between genuine thrills and genuine discomfort. 

Speaking of genuine discomfort, there's only one word I can use to accurately describe the human drama in the midst of the glorified video game cutscenes this film calls monster fights; pretentious. The moment Vera Farmiga's character willingly allowed Ghidorah to be unleashed on the world (up until this point its assumed she's doing the villain's bidding unwillingly) I knew exactly what her motivation was going to be. 

Right after Ghidorah is released she makes contact with Monarch (the kaiju management corporation that her husband is working with) and we are treated to what seems to be some kind of live edited lecture on how humans totally suck man cuz climate change man; because let's face it, screenwriters don't want to write movies nowadays, they want to write TED Talks, and they'll do it in the middle of Godzilla movies and we'll pay to see them like fucking suckers because our culture is based on masochism and Hollywood is the dominatrix cracking the whip of nostalgia. 

Godzilla on his way to give a TED Talk on Fat Acceptance in the Kaiju Workplace

    
Charles Dance's character, the former MI6 and British Army Colonel Alan Jonah, is relegated to a background character responsible primarily for providing a good line for the trailer (Long live the King) and it's a shame because despite his own motivations being largely the same he's far less pretentious about it all and probably would've made it more palatable as such. "Yeah, yeah, I don't like humanity, it sucks, no I don't care that's it's a three headed murder dragon, can get we get this done please? I have to attend a convention panel so I can watch David Benioff and D.B. Weiss grovel for forgiveness from a horde of angry GoT fans."

He's basically there to set up the sequel. And that's essentially what this is. A set up for a sequel. There's little of lasting value to this film and it will most likely be forgotten just like its predecessor.

Avoid like this film's cameraman avoids tripods.  

Captain Marvel Review - A White Male's Opinion (Spoilers)

Well if the incessant Comic Book Resources and Screen Rant articles hadn't alerted you already, "Captain Marvel" has been released finally to an audience already so polarized their immediate vicinity has become an officially protected penguin habitat. Why you may ask? Well we can thank Brie Larson, the WOMAN lead, for that. And I put the word WOMAN in all-caps because good lord, I don't know about you but I've never ever seen a woman in the lead role for an action film so it pays to emphasize this fact. Which, in all fairness to Brie Larson, is what the ad campaign for this film did. 

Still Larson's own remarks haven't exactly helped things. I mean who would've thought alienating a good portion of your potential fanbase with race and gender politics would garner you some kind of backlash? Not to worry though, corporate entertainment media and Rotten Tomatoes are here to help by reflexively defending you and your product by denouncing dissenters as misogynists and trolls and redesigning their website in an attempt to silence said misogynists and trolls respectively. 

Because it's not about whether the product itself is any good, it's about how many people you can convince you don't hate women. 

Speaking of the product (Full Disclosure: I have not read any of the comics), I'm going to borrow an expression from a friend of mine who attended the screening with me, as I feel it describes it pretty well; "Aggressively Average".

At least one can say that about most of the movie. In fact generally speaking it's so average that one could even wonder what all the fuss was about; not necessarily from those who hyped the movie but from those who were all but ready to piss on it from a great height. I honestly had trouble feeling anything for it throughout my viewing other than a few moments where my hands gripped the armrests of my cinema seat in spasms of pure uncut cringe. In fact those moments are probably what kept me awake. 

In spoiler free summary; it's formulaic, the story has very little weight or lasting effect in terms of the MCU, those who telegraphed Brie Larson's performance being akin to a corpse on marionette strings just by watching the trailer were directly on the money and the aforementioned cringeworthy moments of horrendous propaganda were nowhere near funny enough for me to even recommend it as a "so bad it's good" affair. In fact I'd hazard to say that you probably wouldn't even need to see it in order to understand the upcoming "Avengers: Endgame" film.

As for the moments of horrendous propaganda, well....

Look, there's nothing wrong with having a message in your film as long as you have the skill and nuance of mind to put it across without making your product ultimately come off didactic or unsubtle. The people who made Captain Marvel do not have this ability. Very early on we are privy to a set of scenes which honestly would not be out of place in a feminist ad campaign. Carol Danvers taking on some military obstacle course as a group of chortling men heckle her from below, a scene where her father chastises her as a young girl after she careens off of a go cart track (right after ignoring the advice of a boy on the track to "slow down" as she comes up to a turn - insert woman driver joke here); seriously there were times where I thought the film hadn't even started yet and Cineworld were showing Gillette's latest marketing travesty. There's even a part later on where a biker dude randomly tells her to smile and we all know THAT'S a hate crime akin to a man asking for your phone number. 

Fake news, you never smile.

It can also be seen in the way that the film treats characters like Nick Fury, turning him into an outright joke of a character. I get it, he's younger in this film, not yet the director of S.H.I.E.L.D and as such less experienced, but he honestly comes off as a totally different character and ends up doing very little. This, I'm afraid is a hallmark of this kind of Mary-Sue-centric storytelling. Don't believe me? There's one particularly hilarious moment when Danvers sends Fury out of the room so she can sit and have a chat with her friend, Marie Rambeau (mother of Monica Rambeau who was actually the SECOND Captain Marvel way before Carol Danvers, a black woman too - naughty, naughty Brie Larson, deplatforming a WOC like that), just so that the film could pass the fucking Bechdel Test.

I was probably the only one who noticed that but my mind is trained to home in on feminist bullshit like a heat seeking missile. It is my gift and my curse. 

Going back to Fury himself and how they turn him into a joke.... the scar over his eye was from a cat scratch. 

I'm not kidding. 

To be fair, it's an alien cat that proves to be deadly. But it's a cat scratch nonetheless. But I'll give it this, the jokes surrounding the cat are some of the only ones that landed for me. The MCU is often praised for its sense of humor and for the most part this film manages to fuck that up also, and a large part of it comes down to Larson being an extremely humorless actress (and let's face it, probably person). She has two settings; neutral and smug. Either way it inspires anger and/or boredom more than it does mirth. Despite the film's other failings I feel it would have been drastically improved with a different actress. Both performance wise and PR wise.  

Ultimately her character has the same problem that Rey from the latest Star Wars movies also has. She starts off awesome and ends godly. She has very little flaws and whatever flaws she does have are negligible, making her unrelatable and a chore to watch. Compare her to, say, Miles Morales in the recent "Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse" film, which I had my problems with, but is a vastly superior film with a vastly superior main character. 

As for villains... I can't really say much. The film has one of those "omg they were the bad guys all along" twists that anyone with a functioning frontal lobe can see coming from a hundred miles away. One villain is basically a space SAS commander and the other is the "Supreme Intelligence", the central AI controlling the Kree world, which, I have been informed by my friend, in the comics looks like a giant green gorgon face.

"... AND I'M GOING TO MAKE MEXICO PAY FOR IT."

"Yes Supreme Intelligence."

   
Which is awesome. They don't do this in the film of course but I understand, adaptations need to be made. 

So, is this the film that's going to "set the stage" for women leads in superhero movies? Well, aside from the action films with female leads that already exist, we had Wonder Woman before this. Ideally the stage was already set. Women CAN be action heroes. We know this. It's been done. But you see... those movies were not orthodoxy approved. As was proven by Wonder Woman being generally well received by the public and critics but chastised by ideologues for not being feminist enough. 

And for the record, I thought Wonder Woman was okay. It's certainly the best of the DC movies. But no one ever talks about it as though it's this groundbreaking event that sets the stage for female fronted action/superhero movies. And yet Captain Marvel - THIS - with it's boring story, unmemorable villain, unrelatable hero and generally fucking insufferable lead actress is the one that's being reflexively defended from hordes of "manbabies" and "fragile males"? The one that Rotten Tomatoes is actively changing aspects of their website and deleting reviews for? THIS?

My prediction is that Captain Marvel will forever be remembered as the Amy Schumer of comic book flicks. Not merely because it similarly got a website to change due to its horrible ratings. But because it wouldn't stop shoving its cunt in our faces. 

Pic unrelated

Halloween (2018) Review - MODERATE SPOILERS

Halloween.

It may not be, as some claim it is, the first slasher film (that distinction may belong to either Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or Bob Clark's "Black Christmas") and it isn't even the best film John Carpenter would ever make; but it most certainly is the definitive template for the slasher genre going forward. It created the concept of the indestructible masked slasher killer, it created the concept of the virginal Final Girl and it also created the concept of the endless slasher movie franchise. 

Speaking of which, they finally made another one. Yay?

Yes, after multiple sequels of varying continuity (one not even featuring the Michael Myers character) a remake and a sequel to the remake set in some bizarre universe where retarded hillbilly rapists outnumber the general population to the point where they are hired as orderlies in mental institutions, we finally get a direct sequel to the original that has absolutely nothing to do with ridiculous cults, long lost relatives or old Irish tycoons distributing evil masks to children to fulfill an ancient occult ritual. 

Seriously though, Halloween 3 is actually pretty great, go watch it.

Forty years after Michael Myers originally escaped from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and wrought havoc on Haddonfield, Illinois - in particular the life of Laurie Strode who witnessed the butchery of her friends - Michael once again escapes to Haddonfield to terrorize the area with a new spate of killings. But this time Laurie, a traumatized survivalist living essentially as a hermit in a fortress-like house, is ready for him.  

Firstly I have to say; what is it with the modern film industry that they can't come up with names for their sequels? The fact that they've called this film "Halloween", only differentiating it from the original with (2018) next to it, gives me serious flashbacks to the "The Thing" prequel. And this is something you do not want to do. I mean it's not even a remake, it's a sequel. They couldn't put a "Rebirth" or a "The Vengeance" in there? Cliché yes but I'd rather that than having to constantly clarify which movie I'm talking about by specifying the date it was released in. It's already annoying enough that I have to specify "the original" whenever I'm talking about a movie that some coke-addled Hollywood sex offender decided to remake because to these people "taking a risk" means paying a child star's parents to keep quiet, not actually trying anything new.  

(Ed Note: Okay Glenn, Hollywood is filled with sexual deviants. We get it. Back to the review)

As for the film itself.... not bad. 

I mean we're talking about slasher movies, the fast food of the horror genre. The bar was already incredibly low so when I see one that's actually tolerable to watch I tend to take note. Is it as good as the original? Well... no, but just look at it. The original was all about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. This film... is about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. Cut, print, they nailed it. Congratulations, you managed to keep me awake with a modern slasher movie.

Okay to be fair there's a little more to it than that and it actually sports one or two fairly clever, if not fan-servicey as hell, moments. If we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of the thing then realistically the only characters who really matter in this film are Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. The other characters, like in almost any slasher film, are expendable. But slasher films don't need characters, they need lemmings. They need hollowed out automatons whose only settings are "fuck", "do drugs", "fuck whilst doing drugs" and "walk into that dark room with the creaky door and flickering light that you just heard someone's scream followed by a death rattle and meaty stabbing sounds come from mere moments ago." 

Slasher films are not horror, they're schadenfreude.

So what do we have in terms of characters? Well at the beginning we're introduced to a couple of true crime podcasters who visit Michael in the sanitarium and then engage in a short interview with Laurie, only to then be killed almost immediately. They're generally set up to be prominent characters so one could argue that it's a tribute to Janet Leigh's shock death in "Psycho". But at the same time Psycho was going against narrative norms of the time, here it just seems like the writers (yes, this slasher film required multiple writers) just couldn't think of anything to do with them and so just dropped them. 

In terms of teenage characters, our main one is Allyson, Laurie Strode's granddaughter. Her and her friends are simply what you'd expect, hormonal, dumb and prone to drama. They're not annoying and they don't actively court death with their very presence so I have little to complain about. Again, they benefit from the fact that the slasher film bar is already pretty low, but still nothing as memorable as PJ Soles punctuating her sentences with the word "totally" or the famous "See Anything You Like?" scene, in which I most certainly did. 

Totally.

But as was said, the only character other than Michael who really matters in the long run is Laurie Strode, and she is by far the most interesting thing about this movie. Why? Because in the intervening decades she has gone completely batshit insane.

This is where this film's strength lies. As stated previously Laurie is, for all intents and purposes, a hermit who lives in a woodland fortress that is both surrounded by and filled with bullet hole ridden mannequins. She has a basement hidden by a moving kitchen worktop that's filled with an arsenal that would make Burt Gummer from "Tremors" feel inadequate, she has the reflexes of a Vietnam veteran when someone sneaks up on her and just about any time she's on screen she's doing something insane; like showing up at her granddaughter's graduation dinner babbling about wanting to kill a man, or appearing inside her daughter's house with a revolver just to scare the shit out of her. 

"BOOM! You're dead.... You're fucking dead."

To top it off, she is 100% the manliest character in this entire film. Allyson's boyfriend Cameron certainly can't compete (his name alone has a low T count), you have Oscar who strikes out so hard with Allyson it's amazing her womb didn't shriek like a banshee the moment she met the guy and her dad, in conjunction with being generally useless, has the shittiest, least memorable death in the entire film; proving once more that the institution of the Western Male has become a shadow of its former self and women have had to pick up the mantle. 

"It's time to go Ray."

"Was I useful?"

"No. I'm told you were basically furniture."

Laurie basically lives for the moment that Michael finally escapes, just so that she can kill him. And it's here that the film has some of its cleverer moments in scenes like the one where Laurie's granddaughter is looking out across the road from her classroom window and seeing Laurie standing there waiting, mirroring the same moment in the original Halloween when Laurie spies Michael standing across the street. Something similar happens later when Michael tosses Laurie off a balcony, turning away and then looking back to find that she has disappeared, again perfectly mirroring the same moment at the end of the original. 

Yeah it's obvious and fan-servicey but I dug it. It's clear that they are trying to do a sort of "they aren't so different" thing, which is a bit of a cliché in its own right but again, slasher movie. The fact that this had any kind of symbolism in it, let alone decently done symbolism, is a miracle to rival Britain actually leaving the E.U in March 2019. I'll take it for what it is. 

That doesn't count.

I mean even as fan service it sure as shit beats the "leave the axe" scene in "The Thing" prequel. It actually makes sense for one thing. 

"Don't, leave it."

(Awkward silence)

But I'd say some of this film's flaws other than it's largely uninteresting characters lies also with it's camera work at times. John Carpenter is quite well known for his sparing use of his camera, and here for the most part they pay homage to that style. However it gets somewhat annoying when they make use of shaky cam technique during more violent moments. On top of that you have the unfocused plot since, I think we can all agree, this entire film should have been called "Laurie Strode" and should have been about her generally being a paranoid nutcase waiting for the moment when Michael inevitably breaks out. 

Overall, not bad. I might even watch it again. I know I forgave it a lot for the mere fact that it's a slasher film that didn't bore me shitless but if you've seen as many as I have, you'll understand. Plus getting John Carpenter back to co-write the soundtrack is a stroke that I very much appreciate since Carpenter's soundtracks are part of the reason you watch Carpenter.

So I'd like to say Happy Halloween but I took forever to review this so it isn't Halloween. 

Oh well.

…...

Bye.

BOO! Hahaha... I'll go now.