The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Parts 1 (2014) and 2 (2015)

…Too Many Colons: The Rise of the Colon Army

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore, and a disturbing drought of Stanley Tucci

Have I Seen it Before: No. Honestly, I’m not sure why, after I genuinely liked The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), but in the current flood of media, it just never came up on the radar.

Did I Like It: I mean… I think I still have some problems with all of the proceedings, but sure.

I’m going to review both of the final movies of this series in one entry, because—and this isn’t exactly a hot take—that’s the way this story should have been presented. 

Since filmmakers split up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010 and 2011), we’ve been having to endure the unnecessary elongation of an epic’s final act. Scenes go on forever, fan service is turned up to eleven, and an artificial cliffhanger is injected into a story that never needed or wanted one. 

Now, if I’m being completely honest, patient zero for this phenomenon was actually Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Part III (1990), although those are two films that—when someone derides them—I get irrationally irritated. The splitting—or culling, to borrow a term from this franchise—makes business sense, I suppose. If you have a hot property, why not get two big opening weekends out of your last hurrah, when you can get two for the same price? Good for the shareholders; have yet to hear an argument for why it might be good for the story.

Moving on from the artificial elongation, what we have here is your Typical Part III™, feeding off the momentum of the predecessor, and marching toward and end you can see coming a mile away. It couldn’t possibly be a spoiler to tell you that the Capitol as run by Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) is brought to its knees and Katniss Everdeen, the titular Mockingjay (Jennifer Lawrence) is at the center of the social upheaval. 

The film delivers on these intrinsic promises, and then succeeds and fails where it tries to play with these expectations. It soars when Katniss sees the sliding standards between Snow and his self-appointed successor Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and diverts her arrow. It’s less great when she and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) are all of a sudden on board with a new batch of Hunger Games that would instell cull rich Capitol kids. And it’s even more of a thin attempt to make us feel something out of the blue when it is revealed that Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) retreat back to a life in the Victor’s Village, raising their kids, and Katniss appearing  as if she’s become completely numb to the world she helped save.

It could be worse: the werewolf kid could have decided he was madly in love with his jilted lover’s infant daughter. That’s a ridiculous plot line. I’m not sure where I heard that one…

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and all your cartoon pals.

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, again, strangely I’m not sure under what circumstances.

Did I Like It: Yes, and that much was pretty surprising. Honestly, halfway through the series, I’m not sure why I’m so skeptical about the proceedings on spec.

Not much to say about the film itself, aside from the fact that it suitably raises the stakes (if not the believability, but more on that later) on the character’s plight in slightly predictable ways, and ends with a cliffhanger that propels the action forward in ways I actually found surprising on first blush. General critical consensus would indicate that the film is more self-assured than the first, but I don’t know if I buy this as a particular evolution among the filmmakers, or more of a general byproduct of sequels freeing themselves from large swaths of exposition.

But I have a few more thoughts on my Big Questions(™) regarding the mythology behind these stories.

So, if the world of Panem our future, or some fantasy land about which we’re not supposed to think of the origins? This has led me to some moderate Wikipedia surfing to find that the general consensus is that Panem is, indeed, future America, with the heroic District 12 located in the coal country of West and Regular Virginia, and the Capitol apparently being built over what was once Salt Lake City, Utah. 

This only serves to aggravate my skepticism about the proceedings. Why has anyone thought the actual Hunger Games—except for maybe the exception of Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci)—were a good idea? I mean, fear, sure. That always helps the bad guys, but the rules were always going to break the whole damn thing down. Does anyone think ahead anymore? Also, and again a question renewed from my Hunger Games review: how does Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) accomplish living this long? He’s a baker and constantly in danger. I’m getting the sinking feeling that there is a possibility the story might illuminate my first question, but have little hope that there’s ever going to be an explanation for Peeta’s longevity.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, A Hemsworth, Woody Boyd, and a well-paid Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks

Have I Seen it Before: Yes? Did I see it in the theater? I can’t honestly remember.

Did I Like It: I guess, but… Well, we’ll get to that later.

The cinematic adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ first novel in The Hunger Games series is stylishly directed, and the cast is better than one might expect for the material and genre, benefiting from casting a still-unknown Jennifer Lawrence before she became a bona fide movie star, and other performers like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and even Stanley Tucci who might otherwise seem like they were slumming it a bit, appearing in such a YA yarn, but are actually amiable screen presences and professional performers, that you never get the sense that this was anything other than the roles they were meant to play.

And yet…

Here’s my problem, and it actually stems from the books, I suppose, so it’s entirely possible that the filmmakers should get a pass. It is a matter of believability. 

I mean, I think I get that the story is supposed to be a parable tying in elements of the gladiators of ancient Rome, the antebellum south, and thorough reading of the Cliff’s Notes of 1984, but like nobody is happy about the Hunger Games taking place. It puts the powers of the Capitol in doubt, and it’s not like anyone who lives in a District lower than 2 is thrilled with the idea of having to go and fight these things. Why did they agree to all of this? Is there some kind of better explanation for this as the films/novels go on? Maybe I’m in for the whole ride now to find out. Maybe, in that respect, it is less of a flaw than a virtue. I imagine I’ll have thoughts on this issue as things progress.

Also—with a similar level of dubiousness—how did Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) live that long. He should have been out in the initial rush for supplies.

Beetlejuice (1988)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael (f’ing) Keaton, Winona Ryder, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, Jeffery Jones, Glenn Shadix, Robert Goulet, Dick Cavett… Christ, the cast on this picture is bonkers.

Have I Seen it Before: It is a core member of the “VHS tapes I wore down to the point of evaporation during childhood” association. 

Did I Like It: It’s a weird movie, but that’s more of an objective statement, isn’t it?

Beetlejuice—Tim Burton’s second feature—is about death. Again, that seems like a pretty objective statement. Perhaps it is about death in the same way that Young Frankenstein (1974) is about neurosurgery. And yet, over dozens of viewings in the late 80s and early 90s, that never seemed to be what the film was about. If you were to ask me in my first decade of life what the story of the film actually is, and I would probably tell you that some people wander around a movie for the better part of an hour before Michael Keaton shows up and the real movie begins. This may be because a) I was more familiar with the ensuing cartoon series based on the movie, that transformed Beetlejuice (Keaton) and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) from the lecherous demon in search of a suicidal child bride into a pair of wacky pals and b) I wasn’t quite ready to comprehend the idea of death at the age of five.

And yet, I can kind of get where I missed the idea way back when. The whole movie attaches itself to a pointedly nebulous aesthetic. The football team is out of left field, especially when they’re in the last shot of the picture. Why do dead people get sent to Saturn? Why is it a huge public health issue in the deceased community? Why has no one noticed Sand Worms traveling the surface of Saturn? Why did the sandworm appear out of nowhere at the Maitland/Deetz residence? That one’s a bit of deus ex machina, right? Don’t get me started on the fact that this may be the only film in existence which is regularly uncertain about the spelling of its title.

And so the film exists in a state of contradiction, often bewildering, but just as frequently charming. It might be the key case study in my Michael Keaton Theory. (Which postulates that a film is automatically ten percent better than it would have been otherwise. It works wonders in cases like Robocop (2014), and brings the rottentomatoes score of a movie like Multiplicty (1996) into the mid-eighties).

Another thought that only just now occurred to me on this screening: So odd that Burton directed this as sort of a warm up to Batman (1989) and didn’t cast Baldwin as the Dark Knight the next year. I mean, I’m grateful. Baldwin at this point in his career is too-on-the-nose for the “dance of the freaks” Burton was intent to bring to the screen, but the fact that the studio didn’t insist—or, in the alternative, Burton was able to bypass their insistence—is sort of freaky.

Halloween (2018)

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Motherfuckin’ Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, and Will Patton (my new best friend)

Have I Seen it Before: How could I?

Did I Like It: I loved it, but stop asking me questions about my objectivity.

On spec, the new (and eleventh) film in the Halloween franchise has the potential to be the greatest fan film ever made. Bring Jamie Lee Curtis back. Check. Bring back Nick Castle to play The Shape*. Check. John Carpenter is willing to do the score. Big check. 

Thankfully, the film is even more than just the sum of it’s parts. The Carpenter score is transcendent, not content to merely rehash the themes he wrote 40 years ago, Carpenter and the members of his band add much to the proceedings, and in the process make a soundtrack just as memorable as the original.

With nine movies of obnoxious baggage—sorry, that should read “mythology”—serving only to weigh things down, this new story pointedly ignores (and more often, repudiates) every previous sequel. The Cult of Thorn is gone. Laurie and Michael are not related. Dangertainment is nowhere to be found. Tyler Mane is nowhere to be found. It allows the movie, surprisingly, to not be a Carpenter clone (which, in their own feeble way, every other movie in the franchise has tried to be), but actually becomes a movie that someone not plagued by a completionist’s compulsion might want to watch. There is plenty of fan service to be sure, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was an enjoyable movie in there.

The film also manages to shake itself free from the Weinstein’s grip in both spirit and practice. This film is a direct result of Dimension Films losing the rights to the franchise (and that had all worked out awesome), but where those mid-90s to late-00s films went willingly into the trap of a film that hates women, this new movie is boldly, and with a goodly degree of wit, opting for the other direction.

It’s recently come to my attention that some are upset that the movie ignores the continuity of the other films. Ugh. Let me explain something to those of you out there who might be upset by this. These films have been notorious for throwing away continuity. So by being upset that the other movies aren’t being deferred to, you’re actually ignoring what those other films have been about. Deal with it. This movie is great. Not, Carpenter’s original great (few films are) but definitely one of the better times I have had in the theater with a horror film in recent memory. I think there is a possible context where a reasonable person may not like the film, but dismissing it because it is trying to blaze a new trail (and still celebrate the past) is not that context.

* And, according to some sources, Tony Moran for scenes with Michael Myers unmasked, but at press time the internet has not provided a final answer as to whether he is actually in the film. 

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)

In my nearly fevered anticipation for the forthcoming rebootquel Halloween (2018), I thought I might re-watch all of the original series(es). My gushing in this entry leads me to think that I may not have the strength to suffer through Rob Zombie again, to say nothing of Paul Rudd. We’ll see.

Director: John Carpenter’s John Carpenter

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, and (ahem.) P.J. Soles.

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve at least seen it as many times as Anchor Bay has released it on either DVD or Blu Ray, so that’s got to put it somewhere in the 100s.

Did I Like It: Oh, how do I count the ways?

It will be supremely difficult to write thoughtful reviews about some of my greatest-of-all-time movies. John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of them. The acting is sublimely modulated cheese, especially with the world’s supreme scene chewer Donald “I SHOT HIM SIX TIMES” Pleasance. The cinematography is perfect. Each frame harnesses a perfect sublime banality, that when the horror really kicks into high gear, the tension is there, but there’s also a palpable sense of tragedy at the same time. The music is so beyond perfect that it a) completely removes any pretext at criticism I might hope to reach for, b) makes the film without this music unimaginable, and c) elevates the sequels and (ugh) remakes into (on average) watchability.

And all of it was made with next to nothing. It is an unbelievable achievement that no amount of sequels, copy-cats or (again, ugh) remakes could hope to replicate, nor ruin.

Now, the long arm of legacy is what this film consistently has to fight against, but if you can put yourself in the mindset of someone living in a universe where the other films don’t exist (a feat which I think is going to become significantly easier in a few weeks), the film is even more unnerving. Here Michael Myers (Will Sandin as a child, Tony Moran unmasked as the adult Myers, and Nick Castle as the form commonly referred to as “The Shape”) isn’t the Freshman Abnormal Psych paper of the latest Rob Zombie films, the scion of the Cult of Thorn, Laurie’s brother, Jamie’s uncle, or budding Dangertainment star*. He was purely a kid—and he could have been any kid you knew growing up—who one day picked up a really sharp knife and never looked back. He slithers through the vast majority of the movie simply watching his prey, and when the moment comes, he zeroes in to take what he wants, simply because he wants it, and should therefore be entitled. He is every man, and if we’ve learned anything recently, he cannot be stopped.

That’s the movie I love, and if you don’t… Well, then fuck you, Rob Zombie.

That may be harsh, but it’s not like I don’t totally mean it. Totally.

*God, when you really unpack Halloween: Resurrection (2002), the more of a headache it becomes.

Carrie (1976)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, Pig’s Blood Travolta*

Have I Seen it Before: I’m almost sure that I have, but I can’t point to when I might have done so. I definitely remember reading the book, if that helps.

Did I Like It: Well, clearly the memorability of the book over the movie should tell us something.

I like Brian De Palma. I really do. I think The Untouchables (1987) is about as great a movie as is ever to exist. Once one has worked out just what the hell is happening in Mission: Impossible (1996), it’s a pretty enjoyable spy thriller. 

And I want to like Carrie. I really do. I get the feeling I wanted to like Carrie just as much as De Palma himself wanted to like the film. Unfortunately, he only seems to be interested in certain parts of the film. 

The climax is the kind of confluence of conflicting POVs that have become De Palma’s bread and butter. While through cultural osmosis, we’ve all seen the moment when Carrie (Spacek) is brought to her semi-final humiliation, but it’s the Rube Goldberg machinations that lead up to that moment and eventually tear everything apart that makes the sequence worth remembering.

Everything else tends to play out with the subtlety and wit of an after-school special. The score—by Pino Donaggio—is all over the place, when it isn’t shamelessly and artlessly aping Bernard Hermann’s score for Psycho (1960). 

And of course, De Palma does seem to be awfully interested in footage of naked women, and there is plenty of it. I’m not a prude, but the tableaus De Palma puts together makes me think that he may not have been the one to properly understand and tell this story. To be fair, King may not have been either, but I digress. I have not seen the 2013 remake, the fact that a woman directed the film does tend to recommend it on at least one level.

*Little known fact, the blood dumped on Carrie during the film’s infamous climax was played by John Travolta’s cousin.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, I think Topher Grace wandered into the movie, and some Black Goo as Himself

Have I Seen it Before: Sure, but certainly fewer times than the rest of the Raimi series.

Did I Like It: Almost uniformly no.

It’s 1995 and I’m seeing Batman Forever for the first time. While I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly why the film wasn’t working for me (I was, after all, only 10 years old, although with my full-beard you’d never be able to tell), but I knew part of it was that the film was poorer without Danny Elfman’s score, and Elliot Goldenthal’s efforts weren’t measuring up. Why couldn’t the melody of the original theme still be used?

While that is still true, with the jarring addition of Christopher Young’s scores on top of Elfman’s, I am now of the conclusion that keeping the original themes but adding new themes in a hybrid score is kind of a bummer. The music in this movie never quite works. It is, however, not the only thing that doesn’t work.

The movie is so packed with plot (and, for that matter, villains), that the story falls apart under the weight of its own coincidence. The symbiote just happens to crash to Earth not from Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary-Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) sharing a quiet romantic moment. Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) just happens to wander into a weird sand-based particle accelerator (the movie’s not terribly interested in having me follow what this thing is) at the same time they are testing it. And Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) just happens to wander into a church to beg God to kill Parker at the very same instance Spider-Man is trying to rid himself of the symbiote. Stories have a tendency to trade in efficient happenstance, but this beggars all belief, even in a movie about black alien goo.

Which brings us to Venom. Poor, sad, maligned Venom. Actually, I don’t suppose he is that maligned. He’s too beloved by the Spider-man fan base for his own good. Hence, the studios insistence that Raimi include the character in this film, and it is clearer than most things in life that the director is not into this particular film. In his defense, I too am about as interested in the alien symbiotes (in fact, I’m getting a little tired of typing them in this piece) as Raimi. It also feels like Raimi is by this point sort of done with Spider-man as a whole, and would much rather make a musical romantic comedy. I have no problem with that, and wouldn’t mind watching Raimi’s unfettered spin on such a film, but I kind of wish he had actually found a way to make that movie, instead of offering this half-baked mishmash of conflicting studio memos.

The special effects are improved from the previous entries, however. What's more, they still largely hold up today, much more so than for Raimi’s original outing, Spider-Man (2002). The Sandman/Marko concoction is a pretty impressive creation, keeping his pathos even in amid a torrent of CGI and motion capture, easily much better than the weird kabuki show that surrounded the first film's Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Even the sort of awkward creation of Venom may not work in its own right, but still manage to be of a piece with the rest of the trilogy’s visual vocabulary. Unfortunately, all of this refinement in technology isn’t adding up to much.

And yet, still, I may miss Maguire and company in their roles. I would have liked to see a Spider-Man 4, even if it wasn’t to be directed by Raimi, that would have followed the doomed friendship trio of Maguire, Dunst, and maybe Franco, if Harry had lived. I buy them as long-time friends about to be torn apart by lives going in different directions, even here in a movie that doesn’t do them many favors and may tarnish the memory of their better, prior outings. I might miss them a little less in the years since Tom Holland has become a sort of Iron Robin to Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, but still, even with all of this film’s problems, Tobey Maguire may still be my Spider-man, if for no other reason than he when he was not the smoothest high school student, or the in-over-his-head college kid (still not terribly smooth), or the man who realizes life is only going to get harder as time goes on, because when he was all of those things, I was right there with him. A fourth movie might have continued that journey, and led to this entry being an outlying downbeat, instead of a disappointing finale.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, James Franco, Kirsten Dunst, Alfred Molina

Have I Seen it Before: I’m a man in my 30s. Let’s just assume that I have dutifully seen every film featuring Spider-Man and probably will for the rest of my life.

Did I Like It: Sometimes you just need to work the bugs out before you can really swing.

I’m wondering about my sort of down opinion on Sam Raimi’s first effort with the character, Spider-Man (2002). Is it truly that the first film’s special effects don’t work as well as we may have once thought? Is it true that the superhero origin story never quite translates to the most thrilling movie possible? Or is it the case that when I first saw the original film I was having a bad time in life, and that colors my reactions to this day.

All of them could be a little bit true, and all of those elements are different here in Raimi’s second outing. The special effects are more refined. Rarely do I think of Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) as an animated character injected into some background plates, and Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) is a nearly-perfect blend of puppetry and performance for most of his shots. The story is more self-assured, even as its protagonist spends much of the film plagued by doubt. And, ultimately, I was in a much better head-space in the summer of 2004 than I was in the spring of 2002, but that should hardly matter for this type of analysis, and yet, it does occur to me.

Some would say this is the best superhero movie of all time, and certainly the best Spider-Man movie to date. I would put it in that same pantheon of best movies, along with Superman (1978), The Dark Knight (2008), or any of the number of the best MCU movies. And yet, I think I may have had an even better time during the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), although this could be attributed to the Michael Keaton factor™ that I am sure will become an ongoing theme in these reviews. 

The performances are all finely-tuned. Maguire, for all his reputation as a callow Hollywood party boy in real life, manages to bring Parker’s pure-nerdiness to life believably. Alfred Molina brings real humanity to the diminished mindset and tragedy of the film’s villain. Kirsten Dunst doesn’t get a whole lot to do other than be damsel-ish and frequently in distress, which is a shame that only time passing can really illuminate.

But it’s the little moments that work, too: The scene with May and Peter where he confesses (most of) his culpability in Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson) death is quiet and unnerving. In the years that follow the release of these summer blockbusters, the special effects can age rather annoyingly, the pyrotechnics can fail to awe by the time of a second viewing, but a good quiet scene between two good actors will stick around with you, and it’s good that this film has them.

This comes pretty tantalizingly clear in the film’s choice of a final shot. In the original film, we have Spider-Man jumping around the city, off to another adventure. While this film has a certain reprise of that motif, the true last moment is of Mary-Jane, having just run away from her wedding and watching as her true love leaps into danger once more. The look is wistful, and aware. The happiness she felt just half a minute before is already starting to wilt. It’s one of the few times Dunst gets to really go for some acting, and it is the image that remains in my head all of these years later.

Spider-Man (2002)

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Tobey Maguire, WIllem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Dafoe’s Costume

Have I Seen it Before: 

Did I Like It: It’s an incredibly likable movie, no doubt about that. And yet, if it ages this poorly in only 16 years, I worry if the whole thing really holds up as well as I want it to.

Been playing a lot of the new Playstation 4 Spider-Man game. It may yet be one of the greatest open-world games ever produced, and it fills my mind in a way that makes me want to re-watch the web-slinging stories of my youth. That does not—in any sense—mean watching a movie with Andrew Garfield. No offense, but I watched The Social Network (2010). Get it? Web-slinging?

Ahem.

So I proceeded to watch the first foray of the Spider-Man roughly my own age, Tobey Maguire. It is such a well-meaning film, with its lovingly fraternal depiction of just-post 9/11 New York may never fail to reach for the heart of a viewer who was alive and sentient at the time of its initial release. Aside from a few annoyingly studio-locked scenes—and even just a few shots in otherwise fine scenes—the film is refreshingly a New York Movie™, with the city feeling fully a part of the movie, and not just Vancouver trying its damndest to be EveryCity, USA. 

The cast is near perfect. The direction from Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead (1982), Army of Darkness (1992), For Love of the Game (1999)*) is an artist using all of his tools at their peak. Honestly, I think he’s perfected something beyond a montage, where several pieces of disparate footage can play so quickly—and in some places directly on top of each other—that the effect will forever be Raimi-ian.

And yet, watching the movie now, I can really only be consumed with the nitpicks.

Did he dream an animated representation of his DNA re-writing? Was he missing his own DNA for a little bit there? What would that even do to a person?

How do the students of Peter’s high school not put together that the kid who accidentally webbed a cafeteria tray onto Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello) and the web-slinging hero that soon introduces himself are the same guy?

These are the kind of things you think about when it has been sixteen years since you first see a movie, I guess. But gosh, you can’t dismiss some of the janky CGI this film is filled with, and the less said about the Green Goblin’s (Willem Dafoe)… armor…? the better.

* No, seriously. Look it up.

The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, the stuntman for Anthony Hopkins (who I think we can all agree deserves a lot more credit than he’s gotten so far)

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: I like it a lot. Had it not been followed by one of the most indifferent sequels in history with The Legend of Zorro (2005), it might be remembered as a more seminal film today.

Anthony Hopkins might not be just a great actor, but also one of the more underrated movie stars in the history of cinema. Sure, he can play Hannibal Lecter and various near-Hannibals with aplomb, but the fact that such a pointedly English actor could convincingly the wit and swashbuckling bravura of Mexican California’s greatest hero. Antonio Banderas as his heir presumptive is pretty intuitive, but the star of Remains of the Day (1993)? On spec, I don’t see it, and yet, he delivers. He delivers so well that the movie lives and dies by his presence. Just see the aforementioned Legend to see how such a film without Hopkins can only generate a lifeless quality.

And yet, while he is the strongest link in the chain, there is one part of the conceit of Hopkins-as-Zorro that takes one out of the movie. At the time of filming in 1997, Hopkins was already 60. It’s pretty clear in the early goings—when Diego’s Zorro is repelling the Spanish oppressors— that he isn’t doing his own stunts.

It’s a minor quibble in movie that works by its own standards. The plot actually tracks for the most part. The bad guys are dastardly. The good guys play out their revenges in a gallant sort of way. The action is all of the firey explosion and clanging saber variety, with nary a pixel of computer generated imagery.  Which also puts it in that rare breed of films that ages in such a way that—without further context—you wouldn’t necessarily guess when it was made*. What more can really be expected of a movie?

* Unless of course you count the obligatory love ballad over a James Horner melody that places it firmly in the shadow of James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), but that is only over the end credits, and should hardly count against the film as a whole.

Stephen King's IT (1990)

As long as Beyond The Cabin In The Woods is doing their Stephen King run, I’m thinking entries around this period of time will all have a certain theme. We will re-join our other program already in progress just as soon as we can.

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Cast: Tim Reid, Tim Curry, and some White People

Have I Seen it Before: How much time do you have?

Did I Like It: Well…

The TV Movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel clocks in at 187 minutes (depending on what version of the story you watch) and, in the sober, clear-minded reality of 2018, maybe 6 minutes of unquestionably work. The unfathomable demon that most often appears as Pennywise The Dancing Clown (Tim Curry) only appears for about 20 minutes of the production, and while his performance is the one culturally resonant part of the proceedings, even his returns diminish to the point where the last time we see him as a ghostly apparition just before the Loser’s Club descends to face IT’s “true form,” I am less filled with a sense of dread, and more marveling at Curry’s performance, which is manically magnetic, even when he isn’t given much to do.

But those six minutes, though…

I’ll admit, when this film works best it is merely reaching back into disparate memories I have of catching moments of its original broadcast in 1990. The image of Pennywise instructing the now-adult Henry Bowers (Michael Cole) to “kill them all” particularly did me in. To this day, I’m convinced the evening sky of November 20, 1990 possessed a full moon, and forever ruined me as a human being, and continues to give me just a jot of an adrenaline spike whenever I see a clown, including Bill Skarsgård’s performance in the more recent 2017 adaptation. In truth, the almanac insists that the date in question was waxing crescent. To be frank, the truth only disturbs me more. Was I imagining it? Or was something else happening?

Anyway.

The rest of the performances are made up of slightly mis-cast but amiable presences, made all the more precious by the fact that many of them have since passed on. Harry Anderson doesn’t quite connect with me as the slightly cynical adult Richie Tosier. Honestly, at that point in his career, Bob Saget would have been great in the role, and probably destroyed the American Broadcasting Company, Lorimar Television, and all of Western Civilization in the process. John Ritter is nice to see also, but I can’t help but look at him and feel as if he’s trying to some sort of farce in the piece to play. Jonathan Brandis is just so damned earnest, that I could practically hear the producers of Seaquest DSV typing the phrase “Wesley Crusher of the Ocean” into their Wordstars. 

A few years ago I couldn’t have imagined that I would prefer a new adaptation of King’s story, but here we are. The “original” IT is overlong, but a few chunks of gold are in there for the discerning viewer.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, the triumph of the human spirit

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve got two eyes, a heart, and a cable package that has TNT. What do you think?

Did I Like It: See my answer to the previous question.

It’s pretty preposterous to try and write any length of criticism for a movie that subjectively is perfect, and objectively might hit that level as well. If you’ve seen it, you know that the thing works. I don’t need to tell you that. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, well Gosh… You should. But again, you probably don’t need me to tell you that.

I’ve seen the movie dozens of times over the years. I can’t think of a mark against it. Maybe it’s become clear that the “fresh fish” guy is also the same guy who appears in a photograph in the file of young Red (Morgan Freeman). He’s also Freeman’s son, and receives an additional credit as his assistant. Maybe—if you’re not hip to the idea of letting film work for you—that one little element might beggar suspension of disbelief.

It shouldn’t.

It’d also be pretty preposterous to try and list all the things the film this does well. There are likely plenty of other reviews that can offer similar insights, so I will offer you only one that stands out at me above the others during this viewing. Nearly any time a film defaults to voice over narration, I have almost always instantly decided that whatever virtue the film might have had, it has disappeared under the shadow of such an egregious dramatic crutch.

Not here.

With Shawshank, I never once judge the film for having a high amount of V.O. Maybe it’s the fact that Morgan Freeman offers the narration. I like to think that the film as a whole works so well, and in this one instance, the film actually demanded a tool that would destroy a lesser story.

It is in that rare pantheon of movies that you begin to forget its greatness the longer you go without seeing it. And then, when you are exposed to the film again, it’s almost as if you are viewing it for the first time.

That Frank Darabont is not in the pantheon of the great directors for this entry alone, I’ll never know. I just looked back on my review of The Green Mile (1999), and I said the same thing there. I must really mean it.

The Nun (2018)

If you’re trying to break your Kubrick bender, sometimes you just have to pull the band-aid right off.

Title: The Nun (2018)

Director: Corin Hardy

Cast: Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet

Have I Seen it Before: Just opened this weekend, so that would be pretty impossible… Now, as to the question of whether or not I would ever see it again…

Did I Like It: To be as nice as possible, it didn’t annoy me nearly as much as I thought it might.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe works, and works massively well. Every other attempt to make a shared universe in film has been some degree of a failure. Universal’s attempt at a “Dark Universe” now has two confirmed failures to launch (although, to be fair, their stable of monsters formed a fairly functional and successful shared universe before that was a thing that studio shareholders looked for). Sony/Columbia’s attempts to make something larger out of Ghostbusters is not really talked about anymore, even though Ghostbusters (2016) largely works as a movie (fight me).  Even Warner Bros. and their DC stable of heroes had many of the same ingredients as Marvel, but instead neglected to make an undeniably good movie until their fourth attempt with Wonder Woman (2017).

Which brings us to The Conjuring. I actually have never seen the original film (or for that matter, any of the others). So any connection to a larger tapestry meant absolutely nothing to me. The heroine of the movie, Sister Irene is played by Taissa Farmiga, the younger sister of Conjuring main stage heroine, Vera Farmiga. Is this casting supposed to be significant? The movie doesn’t attempt to answer or even address the question, so I will put it out of my mind. In fact, aside from a ham-fisted framing device which is merely footage from the original The Conjuring (2013), there is little that I picked up on connecting matters to a larger mythology. That sounds like a criticism, but it isn’t, necessarily. The best of the Marvel movies aren’t terribly focused on connecting to the large tableau. If only they had omitted the bookends, this might have been an average affair.

And average is a little charitable. Very little dread permeates the film, which would seem to indicate that the filmmaker would default to jump scares. Indeed, much of the criticism of the film thus far lambasted the reliance on merely startling, not terrifying the audience. But, in reality, I counted the amount of jump scares and attempted jump scares in the film. In the entire  movie, there were five jump scares that worked, and three that never quite got off. Assuming we give half-credit to the failed attempts, that gives a grand total of five and a half total jump scares. With a run time of 96 minutes, that allows for one jump scare roughly ever 17.5 minutes. Even allowing for the notion that there is a refractory period between periods of being genuinely startled, that’s pretty anemic.

It should probably should bare mentioning that if I had the presence of mind to count jump scares, than the movie isn’t probably firing on all cylinders.

Had The Nun stuck to its own story, or really reached for the effects for which it might have been aiming, it might have been a passable B-movie. Unfortunately there’s just too much in the movie that loses the audience, thus it was not quite possible for me to lose myself in it.

2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984)

A Note Before We Begin: I actually went a whole week without seeing a single movie. That may have not ever happened in my lifetime. I thought I’d break the Kubrickian run I’d been doing lately, but…

Title: 2010: The Year We Made Contact (1984)

Director: Peter Hyams

Cast: Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Keir Dullea

Have I Seen it Before: How else could one claim to “get” 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) without having large swaths of it explained.

Did I Like It: Yes, if I go any further, I’d probably start dipping into the main text of the review.

Peter Hyams’ 2010 is the best sequel to an absolute classic you could hope for. Better than Psycho II (1983), The Two Jakes (1990), or Citizen Kane 2: Still Rosebuddin’ After All These Years (not a real movie, but now that I think about it…) This is, of course, excluding those rare sequels that have become classics in their own right, like The Godfather Part II (1974), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), or Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)*.

It’s almost a shame that this movie exists in the context that it does. Had it existed in a world without Stanley Kubrick or his seminal classic (which I only fully “got” in <a recent 50th anniversary screening>), then it might have rightly gained a reputation in its own right. But then, we wouldn’t be living in a world without a movie like 2001.

The cast is dynamite. Keir Dullea brings an intriguing presence to the proceedings, all the more impressive given that his character rather notably is fresh out of elements of the human experience to explore. Douglas Rain accomplishes the feat of turning an unnerving murderous mechanism into a well-meaning bad guy before Arnold Schwarzenegger tried the same trick in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, and Bob Balaban bring suitably different personas to the Americans on the trip to uncover the mysteries of the monolith and HAL’s malfunction. And then there’s Helen Mirren. Sweet, miraculous Helen Mirren. Wait? You didn’t realize Helen Mirren is in this movie. You’re forgiven. She plays the captain of the Soviet Alexei Leonov. She does it so perfectly that you forget that Helen Mirren is even there. The performance is so good that you might forget that Helen Mirren ever existed, but that is impossible.

Peter Hyams deserves plenty of credit. He didn’t try to out-Kubrick Kubrick, because therein lies a fool’s errand. Just see Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) if you don’t believe. Hyams has made his own movie, and it’s a good movie, even if it didn’t somehow live up to the highest possibilities of its progenitor. It’s a virtuoso A herculean feat, and an accomplishment not tried by the current generation of filmmakers, or even reached for by Hyams contemporaries…

Unless, of course, you’re Stanley Kubrick. Ah, well. There are worse ambitions to reach for.

*Yes, I’m kidding about that last one. No, I do not need to get my head checked. About this, anyway.

The Shining (1997)

Director: Mick Garris

Cast: Rebecca De Mornay, Steven Weber, Melvin Van Peebles, Courtland Mead, some truly awful mid-90s CGI.

Have I Seen It Before: The mere notion of watching it up until my deep-dive into Shining-ology this week seemed ridiculous. And yet, here I am.

People often complain when a filmed adaptation is released, if the subsequent work doesn’t strictly adhere to the source material. Those who adore Stephen King’s original novel The Shining decry Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the same name. King himself is among the most prominent of this ilk. I tend to disagree with them, both in general and specifically in this case. There’s something interesting about a true adaptation, that a transcription just can’t quite accomplish. See Watchmen (2009) for a pretty perfect example of this phenomenon.

But, King was unhappy with the Kubrick film and he thought he could do better. So he tried. He managed to retrieve the rights to his own novel from Kubrick (for a price that various sources indicate was 2 million dollars, and an agreement that King cool it with his criticism of the original film), wrote a 4 1/2 hour teleplay, and had the company film the thing in Stanley Hotel, the same inn that had inspired him to

It’s a TV miniseries from the 90s. Thus, it has what you would think for production values (to say nothing of the special effects), and the acting to back it up. One particularly egregious example is a series of helicopter tracking shots following the Torrance’s to the Overlook. Kubrick already mastered such a shot with the opening of his movie. Inviting the comparison by trying to work in the same milieu isn’t doing your movie any favors. It is not of quality anywhere near the Kubrick original, even if it is occasionally slavish to the novel.

But that shouldn’t surprise you. What might surprise you is the points where King actually diverts from his novel. An extended epilogue is attached, showing Dick Hallorann (Melvin Van Peebles) very much a part of the surviving Torrance’s lives. Young Danny (Courtland Mead) is graduating from High School, and as it turns out, he looks exactly like his vision from many years ago of his imaginary friend, Tony (Wil Horneff). Yikes.

Elsewhere, the smoky wreck of the Overlook is being rebuilt. Dun dun dun. Sorry, Mr. King. Your old friend Kubrick had the Overlook still standing at the end of his version of your story. It may work better, but the complaint of a poor adaptation rings false with this decision. You desperately want Jack Torrance (Steven Weber) to be something of a sympathetic figure, but negating his sacrifice by rebuilding the hotel is a little like those helicopter shots of the VW Bug: It’s been done before.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain, William Sylvester, and Star Child (who looks at us from the cosmos and judges us with his big, second-hand Dullea eyes)

Have I Seen it Before: Can one truly see this movie? Is it more important to experience it…? These are the questions I have now. The answer is, yes, it must be experienced. So there. One less question.

Did I Like It: Over the years, I have to come to appreciate the movie, but until now I don’t think I ever truly got it.

We are all Star Child.

Wait, wait. Come back. I’m going somewhere with this.

I’ve often felt that my own movie-watching experience has been wildly warped by never seeing a vast majority of films in the way they were intended to be viewed—on the largest screen possible, and with a crowd engaged in a shared experience. Indeed, until the wide availability of DVDs in the mid-90s, VHS probably ruined most movies before they had a chance to breathe. I first saw Blade Runner (1982) on a Blockbuster-rental cassette that had already lived past its usefulness before I pressed play, and I don’t think I’ve yet to properly appreciate the movie for what it is. Movies like Independence Day (1996) or Armageddon (1998) are especially vulnerable to showing their flaws when stripped down for presentation on a TV. Even Star Wars (1977) was a wildly different movie seeing it in the theater in its 1997 special edition than it was over dozens of times on tape. 

When I first saw 2001 as a kid, I similarly didn’t get it. In fact, I kinda hated it. Nothing happens for long stretches of time, and that intermission? Give me a break. In those intervening years, I read the concurrently-developed novel by Arthur C. Clarke and gain at least a semblance of understanding as to what Kubrick was showing us. As I grow older still, I can appreciate that an array of special effects—that were then still in very much a beta-version back then—still hold up today.

But until the planets appeared to align in the opening titles, I became a believer. This movie was never meant to be merely watched, it was meant to be experienced. Everything has been a lame pretender to the intent of Kubrick and co.

The movie is far from boring, as is often the case of criticism leveled at it. It just hasn’t been experienced correctly. Even the intermission—maddening on spec for a not quite 2 1/2 hours in length—the glowing ethereal quality of the black screen didn’t indicate the absence of material, but instead (I shit you not) almost resembled a monolith.

Kubrick knew exactly what he was doing. That being said, he is a filmmaker in every sense of the word. He’s never been terribly interested in working as a dramatist; if he had, he would have eschewed movies for the stage. Thus, the few and far between scenes that involve people talking to one another are probably the least interesting. That’s okay, because there’s a good forty-five minutes (I think, I didn’t actually time the thing) before any human as we understand them speaks. By the time Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea approaches Jupiter and takes his trip beyond the infinite, I nearly had a panic attack form the breathtaking images presented to me in such a new fashion. 

I’m a believer in this movie now, but it must be seen in the proper context.

If you happen to read this while the movie is still in its limited re-release, or if by some miracle you have the opportunity to see it in 70MM in one of the few venues equipped for such an exhibition, please go. Honestly, I don’t think you’ve really seen this movie yet, even if you’ve watched it a dozen times.

My only complaint? To this day, I don’t understand why Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester)—a reportedly experienced space traveller stares at the instructions for the zero-gravity toilet for what seems like an entire reel of film?Minor quibble. Do with it what you will.

The Shining (1980)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve always been the watcher of this movie…

Did I Like It: What’s not to like? Yes, Mr. King, we’ve already heard from you.

Before making films, Stanley Kubrick was one of the premiere still photographers in the world. As a filmmaker, he never seemed particularly interested in being a dramatist, and stayed firmly entrenched in his roots. Thus, as a director he ends up being more of an impressionist, if one can be such and still make studio pictures. Thus, the film is a Rorschach test, providing any watcher with exactly what they want to see (see Room 237 (2012)). And thus, it’s only partially an adaptation of the original King novel.

Kubrick, though fills his movie with general dread for as long as he can, and then erupts the film King throughout his work has been very interested in mythology, perhaps at the expense of actual horror. Kubrick just wants us to feel the horror, and for my money, he mostly succeeds, while at the same time giving us far more (although perhaps not as much as some others would have us believe) to chew on.

Much has been made of King’s displeasure with the book, and beyond the reality that Kubrick’s movie is not a faithful adaptation, I just don’t see it. He has—at times—complained about how he believed Jack Torrance as played by Jack Nicholson appears to be a madman from the first frame, making his transformation to axe-wielding maniac more of a tragedy. Aside from a simmering hostility that Nicholson seems to have as part and parcel of his film persona, I just don’t quite see it. 

King’s book is a fine book, but not his best. Whereas with the film—with the sheer depth of analysis that can be made about the movie is staggering—is a far more memorable experience.

Room 237 (2012)

Director: Rodney Ascher

Cast: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m curious to see if I have the same reaction to it on the second go around.

Did I Like It: To ask that question, you almost have to reckon with whether or not you believe anything in the movie. I land somewhere in the middle of this question (which I’ll get to in a minute), but thus I land somewhere in the middle of the question of whether or not I like it.

“Now, if you’ll allow me to make a little bit of a link here…”

And with that quote, we’re off to the races.

Okay. So. Room 237. A lot of ideas in the film. In some case, I may be using the term “ideas” loosely in some cases. 

Visually, I think the film is by and large lackluster. Aside from some rather standard b-roll, and a few bordering-on-clever weaves into other works of the Kubrick oeuvre, the film plays out largely like a podcast (which seems like a strange criticism coming from me, but I’m not putting my stuff out on Blu Ray). It floats along on its ideas, and the ideas only occasionally enthrall, and even more rarely fully persuade.

The theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) put forward include: 

• That the film is Kubrick’s attempt to deal with mythological idea, specifically that of the Minotaur (I think)

• That the film is a dissertation on the Holocaust.

• That the film is a dissertation on the genocide of Native Americans.

• That the film is Kubrick’s confession (for lack of a better term) for having participated in some level of fakery surrounding the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

Naturally, that last claim is the hardest one to swallow, but each seems to be grasping at straws. 

And yet…

The fundamental knowledge of Stanley Kubrick as such a particular, exacting filmmaker, forever possessing the still photographer’s eye for every detail in the frame, some of the things these various interviewees bring up are thought provoking. To illustrate the general arc of my thinking on some of these questions, I present the rhetorical process I went through on the question of lunar fakery:

1. Do I think that the moon landing was faked? Of course not.

2. Do I think that it’s possible that some of the footage (especially the near-live footage of Armstrong) might have been goosed or sweetened with the assistance of Hollywood magic? Possibly.

3. Do I think that Stanley Kubrick would have had the skills to get such a job done? Sure.

4. Do I wonder why Danny (Danny Lloyd) is wearing that Apollo 11 sweater? Hey, yeah. That is weird. Why would Kubrick put such a specific thing in the movie?

5. Is it possible that Stanley Kubrick was just fucking with us? …Yeah. That seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation.

The Green Mile (1999)

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan, Bonnie Hunt, Sam Rockwell

Have I Seen it Before: Several times, but not nearly as much as that other prison-set Frank Darabont-directed movie based on a Stephen King story.

Did I Like It: I think it’s objectively a depressing movie, so why do I always feel a little uplifted by it the end. Must say more about me than about the movie itself.

There is—to my mind—only one problem with this film. I don’t for one second believe that Dabbs Greer is an elderly Tom Hanks. That being said, somewhere out there in the multiverse is a version of me who watches this film and wishes that they hadn’t put Tom Hanks in old age makeup. So, in the end, art is often about living with imperfections.

Beyond that, the film is great. A year before Patrick Stewart relented to play Charles Xavier in X-Men (2000), Michael Clarke Duncan had the rare distinction of being born to play a particular role in John Coffey. Hanks is Hanks, which may sound like slightly damning praise, but who doesn’t want to watch Tom Hanks in a movie. The rest of the cast is perfection, right down to the slimy Doug Hutchinson playing the odious Percy Wetmore. Between this film and Galaxy Quest being released in the same year, I am struggling to find a one-two punch that introduced a screen persona more efficiently than Sam Rockwell.

A well-cast movie is one thing, but in truth not much of anything if the writing and directing aren’t there. See Justice League (2017) (minus the tag scene) for a pretty good example. Here, Frank Darabont’s skills are unassailable. It’s a shame that he hasn’t directed a movie since The Mist (2007). It’s an even bigger shame that he was fired as showrunner on The Walking Dead after its first—and only watchable—season. It’s yet a bigger shame still that George Lucas relegated Darabont’s draft for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull (2008) to the scrap pile. 

It’s a pretty miraculous film that deals with the guards of death row, and still make me want to somehow know these people in real life. They are decent, and in a time with little decency to show for it, that is uplifting, even in the face of tragedy.

Also, and on a slightly unrelated note: I think this book informs this first season of Castle Rock more than any other King work. At press time, there are still a few more episodes left to air. Let's see if I'm right.