Tron (1982)

Director: Steven Lisberger

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I would imagine that I kind of missed the film at that moment when it really had the ability to burrow into a person and become a part of their personality.

Did I Like It: Aside from the always charming presence of both Bridges and Boxleitner—to say nothing of the always reliable presence of David Warner—the film could really start to smell. How many live action adventure movies from Disney are anything other than the pits? A few Pirates flit through my mind, but one really has to wonder how much those are going to hold up as we’ve generally decided—guilty or not—that we’ve decided we don’t want to hear anything further from Johnny Depp.

The film’s real strengths lie in its simplicity. Lisberger and company looked at the still embryonic technology of Computer-Generated Imagery and realized something that I wish other filmmakers and studios might have kept close to their heart: It looks like crap. Still does, usually.

So, it looks like crap. What do you do with it then? Let it be the backbone of every opening title to a movie of the week? Let it sell tchotchkes in commercials for the rest of eternity? Or is there a story to tell using this tool?

Telling a fantasy adventure story—equal parts The Wizard of Oz (1939) and gladiator films—that takes place in the midst of the computer itself makes the images make the kind of sense that seems obvious but only occasionally happens in the world. Artificiality can work—can save itself from being jarring—if it exists among more artificiality. It was the first time they were able to do that, and for my money, it might be the last.

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Director: Todd Phillips

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener

Have I Seen it Before: I can’t say I’ve ever even heard of a film like this one. Which, I suppose, with that sentence taken on its own truly counts as something of a course correction for the original Joker (2019), which can’t help but recommend better, more original films at its core.

Did I Like It: Now the question really remains: should this film exist? As I type this there seems to be a growing consensus around single answer to that question, with a seemingly infinite number of reasonings to get to the answer that this film should not have been made.

None of those reasonings matter, really. Nor would mine, except for my inescapable conclusion that the filmmakers themselves really would have preferred that the film wasn’t made in the first place. I have never seen a film try desperately to be some many different types of films, and yet somehow be desperately ashamed of each attempt.

In its opening minutes, it tries to be an anarchic sequel, almost calling to mind Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) with an animated opening. This is abandoned as rapidly as possible.

As the film progresses, it occasionally—and under protest—does some things that one might expect from a sequel to the original film. We get a layer or two more awareness of the characters from the original film, both those that survived and otherwise.

It understands—or at least acknowledges—that there is a DC logo at the top of the film and continues to try to give us a take on Gotham City, and an origin story for characters we’ve already seen have their origins displayed on film. Harley Quinn (Gaga) is here, and their deeply unwell romance might light up a movie—and have a fair shot at reclaiming what went wrong with Suicide Squad (2016)—but when the runtime gets a little long, even she anxiously waits for the next train out of the film. We also get Harvey Dent here, and sure enough half of his face is blown off by film’s end, but how can we care when the film is desperate not to dwell on the fact?

It tries to be a commentary on serial killer celebrity in the 1980s (I get notes of the Gacy capture and trial). That’s probably where the film is it’s most interesting, but guess what? It’s barely about that.

Yes, Virginia. Despite what you might have seen in the film’s trailers, what you have heard is correct: This film is a musical. Sort of. It flails at attempting to be a musical, before quickly giving way to the film(s) Warner Bros. probably thought they ordered. Following up the Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982) of it all with a little bit of New York, New York (1977) might have been the exact thing that the glassy-eyed fans of the first film deserved for their trouble. But that didn’t happen. They lacked the gumption here.

It is a court drama. A psychological drama. A dark comedy. A prison movie. All of these it tries, but abandons before we the viewer can decide if Phillips succeeded or not.

What else is left? Can the film just be about the Joker? Who he is and how he came to be? Maybe, and maybe that film might be released one day, but not to spoil the ending of the film, but as a “rise of the Clown Prince of Crime” film, it almost forgets to be that, and rushes that note in at the last moment. We wouldn’t have a hope to assess (to say nothing of enjoy) a film like that if it adds things like that in the last minute.

Blow Out (1981)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I’m horrified, too. The Criterion Blu Ray* has been sitting on my shelf for months.

Did I Like It: Oh, very much so. I’ll admit that I’m at something of a loss for what to say about the film as I get into the meat of this review. It’s extremely well made. It is likely the movie I would point to when someone either looks at me blankly or turns their nose up when I say that De Palma is** the heir to Hitchcock.

It’s a perfectly formed thriller. Beyond merely being laser-focused on the things a thriller needs to be to work, it is witty and surprising at every turn. De Palma got his first big break in horror through Carrie (1976), but he has a lot to say about the state of horror in the 80s, and the opening sequence says it all without saying a word at all. De Palma makes a passable Friday the 13th (1980) clone in the film’s opening minutes, only to ensure us very quickly that’s not what this film is about at all, and the film doesn’t care for those types of movies all that much, either. This is a movie that loves movies, even when they’re terrible, and I definitely feel a thematic connection to the material before I even kind of get to know Jack Terry (Travolta).

Which reminds me: you probably came here for some kind of deeper insight. I know I did. The one element I can’t quite get over in this film is Travolta himself. I’ve always found him to be far too mannered of a screen presence, as if he were preening like a peacock every time the camera finds him. Even in my favorite of his performances, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Primary Colors (1998) there’s a showiness on display that never feels quite fully authentic. Here, though through highs and lows, obsessions and boredom, Travolta just exists in the film, and it is a richer exercise for that restraint.

It’s just a good movie. If the collective aversion to any film older than 30 years is what I think it is, then you may not have seen it. You probably should.

Turns out I had more to say about the film than I thought.

*Actually the 4K/Blu Ray Combo pack, so I’m moving one step closer to eventually relenting the final frontier of physical media, even if I’m not completely certain that every motion picture was built for the highest possible resolution.

**Or, I suppose, was. I’m sure somebody has what they think is a cogent explanation for why De Palma can’t seem to get a picture together anymore, but I’m already dubious of it.

Ready or Not (2019)

Director: Matt Betinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Elyse Levesque

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Feels like it has been hovering on the perimeter of the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule for years, but for some reason we’re only just now coming around to it.

Did I Like It: Let’s get the unqualified great stuff out of the way first. The film is equal parts funny and gory, and Samara Weaving is an engaging presence who, along with her turn in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) is turning out to be an excellent screen actress. My only fear for her is that her career will be plentiful, but may be limited by the fact that people will jump at the chance to cast her simply because Margot Robbie passed. It’s a gift to the movies that there are two of them around, but unfortunately, Robbie became the bigger star first.

Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s talk a little bit about the ending. As much as I was enjoying the film as it proceeded, when it seemed like the movie was heading towards a conclusion that there is nothing supernatural going on, Le Bail (portrayed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment by the film’s producer, James Vanderbilt) and the surviving members of the cast have to leave the house with only the pedestrian comeuppances of the justice system waiting for them.

That ending would have been deeply funny, and kind of preclude any sort of real attempt at a sequel. It might have become one of my favorite movies with that sort of managed anti-climax. The ending we do have is fine, and likely more in line with the gore-fest aesthetic to which the preceding film commits, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

Big Top Pee-Wee (1988)

Director: Randal Kleiser

Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.

Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.

I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place:  The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.

And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.

A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.

The Final Girls (2015)

Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Åkerman, Adam DeVine, Thomas Middleditch

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had it not been on the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule, I might have missed it entirely.

Did I Like It: The movie was going to have a hard time screwing things up, as I am a sucker for most pieces of meta entertainment, and horror or genre meta entertainment even more so.

Where meta horror movies can sometimes not live up to their ambitions—while still winning me over—is in a question of gravity. The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) (the granddaddy of them all), and even Scream (1996) and its various sequels all can pull apart both their various tropes and the meaning of reality itself, but eventually those films become just another entry in their genre. They are eventually compelled to be the type of movie that they were selling in the first place.

Here, though, there is a surprising amount of pathos in the relationship between Max (Farmiga), and both her late mother (Åkerman) and the character she plays in the Camp Bloodbath movies. Max tries to reconcile both the memory of her mother, the image of her in the film, and her own grief to great effect. This is made all the more poignant when one realizes that Joshua John Miller—one of the film’s two credited screenwriters—is the son of Jason Miller and used his experience of watching his father in The Exorcist (1973) to inform that character arc. This makes the entire affair not merely a commentary on form and genre, but also an example of an artist trying to work through some type of feeling through the art. Very few horror films, even fewer meta horror films, and even fewer horror comedies can lay claim to the same ambition.

What’s more, when the film reaches some degree of catharsis on this element, it is content to go right back to being as meta as possible in its final moments. A supremely satisfying array of choices right at the end for a film that could have been content to be merely amusing.

Daredevil (2003)

Director: Mark Steven Johnson

Cast: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan, Colin Farrell

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. For reasons I can’t possibly even fathom, I even bought the soundtrack (in those final years when people went out and bought soundtrack albums on disc after seeing a movie). This is why I can karaoke Evanesence’s “My Immortal” without looking at the words*.

I’ve seen it more than a few times, and even went straight from getting a paycheck at Staples once twenty years ago to pick up a copy of the director’s cut—now with 100% more Coolio—but I can’t imagine I would have ever watched the film again, if it weren’t for Jennifer Garner being thoroughly charming in her more-than-a-cameo role in this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

Did I Like It: I knew I wasn’t going to like it even before I pressed play. While the moment when the movie came out was when I was most into the Matt Murdock (Affleck) character that I was ever going to be, I remember thinking that the meet-cute/fight scene between Affleck and Garner was one of the most awkwardly staged sequences ever shot.

I had somehow forgotten that almost every other element of the film doesn’t work, either. There are a few moments where the film seems fleetingly interested in depicting the challenges a blind man (regardless of how much he can actually see) might face. Far too many plot lines from decades worth of Daredevil** are included here for this to have any hope of being anything more than an unappetizing mystery loaf of a movie. One gets the sense that the filmmakers tend to agree, hence why leaden voice over narration from Affleck permeates the film like a fart that just won’t dissipate.

Every performer either seems like they want to be almost anywhere else, or trying their best to be a good sport, as this will hopefully lead to some other, better films. The entire affair seems blithely designed to get a reasonable return on the investment at a time when few movies are expected to do well, and to be able to make a few extra bucks on that aforementioned soundtrack album. It accomplished both of those modest goals.

*Okay, fine. You twisted my arm. It’s only partially how I’m able to do that.

**Also, and I can’t imagine I’m going to find a venue to express this deeply held thought anywhere else. Shouldn’t the billionaire, ultimately thrill-seeking man who uses fear as a weapon be called Daredevil - The Man Without Fear, and the blind guy with sonar powers be called Batman? If Affleck is capable of learning lessons—and there is evidence to suggest that he cannot—then maybe he has finally worked this one out.

The Set-Up (1949)

Director: Robert Wise

Cast: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: What really makes a noir possess the qualities of a noir? I’m tending to be of the opinion that it will usually involve some down on his luck fella (maybe, sometimes it’s a dame, but it’s almost always a fella) comes into an opportunity to make some real dough. Like, the kinda dough that’ll change him from a two-bit to a real somebody.

Only, our guy here doesn’t have all the angles figured out, see. Bad people start comin’. Bad people with guns. Things go upside down, and our buddy is going to be lucky* to get out of this with his girl and his guts intact.

On that front, I can only vaguely commit to the notion that The Set-Up** is a noir at all. Stoker Thompson (Ryan) is as down-on-his luck as one can get and still have food in his stomach and a leading lady on his arm, but he’s absolutely unaware that there’s money to be made and schemes to be hatched outside of the ring until the last possible moment. He’s not even a part of the scheme. He’s just a boxer who everyone thought had long since landed his last punch, even if he knows different.

It’s a different kind of movie, ultimately, one influenced less by noir trappings of the era, and more prepared to influence films to come like Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

*Read: the movie has sort of a soft, artificial ending.

**The cynic in me may want to say that Robert Wise is the journey-man director to end all journey-men directors, but is there anyone who has made more classics in as many different genres? The Haunting (1963)? The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)? West Side Story (1961)? That’s not even going to cover him editing Citizen Kane (1941).

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Director: Ben Stiller

Cast: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. What else was there to do in the summer of 2008 but see whatever Robert Downey Jr. movie was coming down the pike?

Did I Like It: At the core, its a pretty funny comedy that manages to actually channel the scope and energy of the movies—chief among them Apocalypse Now (1979) and Hearts of Darkness (1991) with more than a little bit of Platoon (1986) thrown in—it mocks.

Obviously, there’s going to be some things in the film that don’t age well. The lengths to which Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) tries to get into the head of Lincoln Osiris is not something that would pass the smell test today. Tugg Speedman’s (Stiller) futile attempt to reach for respectability in Simple Jack got a fair amount of guff at the time of release. But both of those elements are more about the foolishness of movie actors blindly reaching for those portrayals without really thinking about the limits of their own believability and good sense.

While whispers still exist that Les Grossman (Cruise) will get his own spin-off film one day (it doesn’t really feel like the kind of film that Cruise could possibly be talked into anymore; then again, it didn’t really feel like that back then, either), I’d submit that his is the character which ages most poorly. He is a riff on Hollywood assholes like Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein, but never is he played as a fool. Quite to the contrary, he’s a brash villain one can’t help but wish they were more like. He’s an ugly little man who has commanded every room he’s entered since the 80s. The film loves him in all his reprehensibility, and I admit I even like him.

But I probably shouldn’t.

Speak No Evil (2024)

Director: James Watkins

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, James McAvoy, Aisling Franciosi

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Honestly, I would have let this one slip by if we hadn’t made a last minute change to the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods.

Did I Like It: Which would have been a shame, because I can’t readily remember the last time I was so thoroughly unnerved by a horror film. It likely helped that the film wasn’t at all on my era, as any amount of trailer probably would have given me at least some level of context going in. But really, I was probably more profoundly impacted by the fact that I was brought up by compulsive vacation befrienders, and I can easily imagine—with just a few wrong rolls of the dice—myself suffering the same fate as Ant (Dan Hough).

But the unnerving quality is there. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that the conceit of the thriller is not earth shattering in its originality (Hitchcock would have been able to make the hell out of this), and when one starts to realize that the two parents (Davis and McNairy) might be the dumbest couple in genre fiction since and Seven of Nine’s parents on Star Trek: Voyager. They keep climbing to the second floor in the third act, they really shouldn’t be surprised that the climax end up taking place mostly on the roof of Paddy’s (McAvoy, proving that he really can have some range in horror, as there is nothing of his character in Split (2016) to be found here) fact that I just happened to be in the middle of my third or fourth re-watch of Halt and Catch Fire and I had to spend more than a few minutes getting over my incredulity that Davis and McNairy are playing a—even unhappily—married couple.

The Last Command (1928)

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell, Jack Raymond

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I want to reflexively like every black and white movie I see, to say nothing about silent movies. I may be the last guy on the planet who isn’t entirely convinced that color and synchronized sound were an unassailably good decision.

And this film has some things to recommend it. It has some things to say about the movies that are equally profound today as they would have been nearly a century ago. When the film is about these observations in its early scenes, it is quite good. Although you may be getting the sense that I’m not 100% behind this, the film is also beloved enough to have gotten quality treatment over the years leading up to and including its release via the Criteron Collection. Not every silent movie gets treated so well, up to and including no longer existing.

And yet I couldn’t help but find the whole exercise a little bewildering. Spending much of the story focusing on an extended flashback thoroughly fleshing out why Alexander (Jannings) is so sad and bewildered in the years after Czarist domination. Even when flashback and main narrative inevitably intertwine, what was so trenchant and engaging about the earlier scenes gets absolutely vaporized in the chase for melodrama.

While I can’t completely dismiss the film, the story ultimately doesn’t play to its strengths. But my problems with the film run a little deeper. The scope isn’t epic enough to make it memorable with the great dramas, nor is it clever or energetic enough to put it with and of the truly great comedies. It is imminently average, and it may be unfair to look too harshly at an average film of the silent era, but I was told only the great ones would survive to the present.

Psycho (1998)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Anne Heche

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Why I watched it again—when there may not be a film in all of history that more desperately begs you to watch another film—I’ll never know.

Did I Like It: The film is ultimately a cheat, but a fascinating cheat. What would possess someone to make a film this way? I don’t think I’ve yet to be able to wrap my head around that one. It works, but that’s because it was made right the first time. Comparisons are natural, and this film was destined to suffer in light of its predecessor, but Van Sant honestly thought Vaughn was the right guy to put in that role? He can’t help but display the personae he was honing and continued to hone in light comedies. I mean, Keaton might have been a little too old for the role, but if you’re going to do something crazy, reach for something that works. I’m also more than a little annoyed with Elfman’s similarly carbon copying of Bernard Hermann’s score. He suddenly got the idea that he can just plug in old themes and not do any of the off-the-wall work he did earlier in his career, a quarter of a century later he’s phoning in the orchestrations for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).

I’d mention something—really, anything—else, but again, the film is ultimately a cheat. I always promised myself that I would write a minimum 300 words (I’m real close) for each of these reviews, but if Van Sant can cheat, so can I. So, without further adieu, here’s my review of the original film. Feels appropriate.

Title: Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin

Have I Seen it Before: Please... Is it weird that I view this movie as cinematic comfort food? I’m reasonably sure Hitchcock didn’t mean it to be so.

Did I Like It: I don’t think there’s enough written—<except by me>—about how Psycho is, at it’s core, the greatest B movie ever produced. The budget is nearly non-existent, especially in relation to Hitchcock’s immediately preceding production, North By Northwest (1959). The biggest star in the movie (and one hopes this isn’t exactly a spoiler) is killed before the plot truly gets running.

And that plot is, objectively, a muddled mess. In any other circumstances, a story that begins about a woman (Leigh) making a run for it with thousands of dollars of her employers money, only to veer wildly into the events after her sudden murder.

In another time, and another place, and most importantly, with another filmmaker at the helm, the film would have become a salacious, forgettable thriller that would have dropped off the face of the earth the instant drive-in movie theaters became all but extinct.

But we’re talking about Hitchcock here. In his hands, it single-handedly launches the slasher genre, inspiring an army of lesser sequels, homages, and echoes. The plot that shouldn’t work is a pure mis-direction fueled magic trick. We trust Hitch to tell us a story of the woman on the run, and after everything changes, we can never feel settled for the rest of the picture, or for any movie ever again.

Or, maybe, it has nothing to do with trust. Hitchcock works on a level few, if any of us, can fathom. This film is arguably his most famous, and he makes the whole thing seem effortless. It is a marvel to watch each and every time I have spun it in my Blu Ray player.

The Paper (1994)

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I did go through a period—I think it was early in the days when I started getting DVDs from Netflix (kids, ask your parents)—where I watched all of the movies Keaton made instead of Batman Forever (1995). Essentially this and Speechless (1994)*. It felt like it might be therapeutic, but it really wasn’t.

Did I Like It: This does a great job of doing that very simple thing which films aren’t all that interested in anymore: allowing a film to live or die by showing as authentically as possible people at work. Aaron Sorkin trucks in this and almost exclusively this. Mid-budget dramas and comedies used to make this sort of thing an art. Historical implications aside, All The President’s Men (1976) is an absolute symphony of this quality. There may be something to setting the film in a Newspaper that really makes the whole thing come together.

It’s a quietly thrilling thing to see in this day and age, when the most frequent job I get to imagine myself having (I do greatly enjoy imagining myself in some other job) while watching modern films is to be a superhero. It’s not so much that the Marvel movies are ruining cinema, it’s that there is something to be said for inspiring people to do things actual human beings do.

That said, the film might be just a bit too slight for its own good. Is Ron Howard ultimately the most breezy of his contemporaries that—aside from a stray Apollo 13 (1995) or A Beautiful Mind (2001)—any film is going to feel thinner than it might from another director? Is it the fact that a Randy Newman score just makes things so light that I can’t help but think we should be looking at something computer animated? Is it the fact that Randy Quaid is here at all? Probably a mixture of both.

*The true film for which Keaton abandoned Gotham City. Keaton and Geena Davis play political speechwriters who fall in love only to have Christopher Reeve cause them problems? Why isn’t that my favorite film of all time. Probably because its more than a little hard to find. But this review isn’t about Speechless.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega

Have I Seen it Before: Clearly, never. I did once have a dream when I was kid that I had lost my VHS copy of Beetlejuice 2, and was bereft to have the film leave my life. There was a time* when I wasn’t even sure I wanted a sequel to Beetlejuice (1988), but the Michael Keaton Rule** does prevail.

Then, I got more and more excited about the whole thing. Couple that with the odyssey that it took to actually get me into a theater on opening weekend, and I would have liked any old thing projected on the screen.

Did I Like It: I’ve seen the movie twice now—once to let it all wash over me, and a second to take more diligent notes for the soon-to-be-recorded episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods—and I’m happy to report it is not only pretty good, it is largely very good, and I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s easily Tim Burton’s best film since they started beginning years with the number “2” and likely his best film since Ed Wood (1994). Keaton is brilliant again in the role, this time completely game for the prospect of re-visiting his 80s triumphs***. Ryder is a delight as Lydia, perpetually bewildered by the scope of her life thirty-plus years after first deciding she can see ghosts. O’Hara can do almost anything, and once again does effortless work to steal every scene she graces. Newcomer Jenna Ortega does something I didn’t think the film would be capable of and creates a new character out of Astrid, when the film would have likely been forgiven for just making Lydia’s daughter a 1:1 translation of the mother.

That’s the most delightful surprise in the film: for being a legacy sequel, the film is largely disinterested in fan service beyond the obligatory. Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” makes the briefest of appearances, but the needle drops are all trying to forge something of a new path. The original film’s secret strengths were its army of strange and unusual**** dead people, and the fact that its depiction of the afterlife is a near Kafkaesque exploration of the bureaucratic. Both elements are in full force here.

In fact, the only real complaint I have about the film is one I didn’t think I was going to have going into the theater. Elfman’s score is just a rehashing of tracks from the original, with a menu of new noises added into the mix. I wanted more here, but then I realized it has been a very, very long time since Elfman wrote a really memorable score. Burton stepped up to the plate here, but it’s just a bit disappointing that Elfman didn’t do the same thing.

*It was never more profound than immediately after seeing The Flash (2023), around the time this film was already in production. I probably had that thought more than a few times during the endless series of stops and starts in the process. I am happy to report that the film doesn’t end with Betelgeuse being exorcised and being replaced by a different kind of Betelgeuse played by George Clooney. Had they pulled that trick again, I would not have been okay, and I said so.

**Sometimes called the Multiplicity (1996) amplifier, wherein a film is inherently better

***Man, the more that I think about The Flash, the more I have problems with it, huh?

****Apparently I tripped into more fan service in that sentence than the film is interested in for its runtime.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner

Have I Seen it Before: Probably?

Did I Like It: That’s likely the problem. It definitely doesn’t feel like it would be a movie I would watch twice. In fact, I only started running it because after running through the entire Alien series in the lead up to Alien: Romulus (2024), I found myself re-charmed by those acid-filled critters. Where else was I going to get a fix? Playing Alien: Isolation, the most frustratingly hard game created in recent times*? Suddenly start getting into expanded universe novels and comics? That seems like a crazy move, especially when my life is already filled to the brim with barely coherent EUs**.

And yet, I probably have seen it before, although most of the film has disappeared into the ether of being unmemorable. The entire film has a familiar sameness throughout, and any surprise—the only one I can readily point to is the inclusion of Henriksen as the pater familias of what would one day become the Weyland Yutani—I met with less of an “Oh, really?” and more of a “Oh, that’s right.” Maybe it’s a film made up of dim references to other things that work. Great films can do that, even in this series. Aliens (1986) is just a war movie in space, but it feels like a great war movie in space. This is just a list of films I wish I would have watched instead.

I just wanted some sci-fi cheese, and even on that level I found the endeavor to be a little bit underwhelming. Limiting the scope to the then present day of 2004 and keeping things limited to Earth tries desperately to harness <The Thing (1982)>, but that also just adds one more tepid reference, and limits the scope of a film series whose main attraction is easily the gnarly, fucked up things you’re likely to find in the vast, unforgiving abyss of the cosmos.

Maybe I should just start re-watching the Predator films. That’s probably the most sensible way forward.

*I have been watching a lot of Youtube videos of people eating it in Isolation. And, yes, I am thinking of getting back into the game.

**I did start picking up EU novels and comics. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.

As Good as It Gets (1997)

Director: James L. Brooks

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Everyone loved it when it came out, pulling of the The Silence of the Lambs (1991) trick of sweeping both of the lead performers awards at the Oscars. No film has ever done it since. It’s occasionally heartwarming, often very funny, and there’s no reason why everyone wouldn’t have loved it.

I suppose the question in 2024 is, can it possibly hold up? Other celebrated films from the era—I’m mainly thinking of American Beauty (1999), but it isn’t precisely a 1:1 analogy—have been thoroughly dismissed as celebratory of our worst impulses. One would imagine that this film isn’t going to be immune from such considerations, when it is frequently both willfully and gleefully politically* incorrect.

And yet, I think there’s something telling in the fact that while the film did win those acting awards, it was completely cut out of any other attention in favor of Titanic (1997). The performances are key here. I’ve always said that more than any other movie star, Nicholson excels at portraying awfulness and charm simultaneously. He certainly had it as The Joker in Batman (1989) (although that would be a bit of a pre-requisite for the role), and I can only imagine what The Shining (1980) would have been without that quality**. So even now Melvin Udall (Nicholson) says and does deeply terrible things, you can’t help but be charmed somehow.

That wouldn’t be much to hang an entire film on anymore, though. The quality that makes the film still largely work when it might otherwise gone sour is the same quality that likely kept it from unqualified praise in the 90s. Yes, the role is tailor made for Nicholson’s talents, but the film does reach for a redemption for its characters, if even in small measures. Even if it wasn’t for love, Udall wants to be better. Will he succeed? Probably never nearly as much as the people around him might want, but if the horrors of the current age are ever going to abate, we might need to afford the assholes in our lives the grace to improve.

*You know what? I’m not thrilled with the amount of adverbs in that sentence, either.

**Likely something approaching the TV miniseries The Shining (1997), but I digress.

Side Street (1949)

Director: Anthony Mann

Cast: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Jean Hagen

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: You’ve seen one b-noir film (or even more than a few of the a-list examples in the genre), you’ve probably seen them all. Hapless Regular Joe* wanders into a situation where a “whole lotta dough” is his for the taking. Figuring “Hey, why can’t a lucky break come my way? Why shouldn’t it?” he either takes the money outright or agrees to the scheme at hand which is the only imaginable obstacle between him and that money.

Things don’t work out. Often because a dame (see that footnote) is either too wise to be good or too good to be wise. Mix. Repeat.

This sounds like I’m about to complain that Side Street is a little humdrum. It might be. Even at 82 minutes, it feels like there may be ten minutes to cut out of the thing in the middle. There are some Side Streets featured in the film, but not nearly enough to prevent me from wanting to suggest a different title. I would really prefer the film to at least be called Side Streets (plural), but alas I wasn’t working for MGM’s publicity department in the 1940s.

But it has more than enough going for it to make one not resentful for the time spent viewing. I’m having a hard time these days not enjoying any film in black and white, even if it is a little weighed down by voice over narration. That might once again qualify as damning with faint ambivalence. The action in the film’s final minutes is quite good, but the big recommending factor? While he’ll be remembered for Strangers on a Train (1951) or even Rope (1948), I’m struggling to think of another actor who is more capable of communicating simmering guilt with a simultaneously hangdog and twitchy expression than Farley Granger. The man was built for noir.

*It is never a Hapless Regular Jane, because A) Women are incapable of haplessness in these films, unless they’re freshly (or about to be) murdered. B) They have a different role to play in these stories.

Airplane II: The Sequel

Director: Ken Finkleman

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. An extended cameo from Shatner actually led me to prefer this over the original Airplane! (1980) when I was a kid.

Did I Like It: But kids are idiots. Everything is tired here. The jokes are the same. Anything new is mostly jam-packed into the film’s opening minutes. I caught myself laughing at the courtesy van for Air Iran, even though it’s not a great joke, per se. Jokes about Ronald Reagan’s senility work now, but I can’t give extra credit for something being accidentally funnier than it had any right to originally be.

Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steer clear, and it’s not exactly like Sonny Bono is an adequate consolation prize. Those that remain try their best to keep things breezy, but they are largely repeating old gags with only the slightest variation. Hagerty understands the assignment and remains adorable, while there are several times Hays looks at the camera, as if to beg us not to make the film a success to keep him from the threatened indignities of an Airplane III.

And yet…

The parts with Shatner still kind of hold up. He’s playing a character similar enough to Kirk that we all get the joke, but different enough that Paramount would have to cut one more check to Roddenberry. It’s largely some tame gags, but he is game and understands we’re laughing at him more than with him. He’s at the heights of his cinematic charms, having also had Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) under his belt earlier in the year. I’ll be honest, my most guileless laugh in the whole movie came when Shatner’s character was gently shoved into the outer orbit of a nervous breakdown at the sight of a glass tube with an array of blinking red lights. Those things were built for The Wrath of Khan but are recognizable to any Trek fan for being reused ad infinitum for decades in the franchise.

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew and Associates (1964)

Director: Robert Drew

Cast: John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, George Wallace

A note (or, the bulk of the review, whatever works) before we begin, as I was a little unsure of how to organize these reviews, per se. Whereas each film normally warrants its own review (although Justice League (2017) and Rocky IV (1985) both managed to get two*) but this review will cover four films. Primary (1960) focuses on Kennedy’s fight in that year’s Wisconsin primary against Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Adventures on the New Frontier (1961), produced for ABC, attempts a fly-on-the-wall study of the early days of the Kennedy Administration. Crisis (1963) depicts Robert Kennedy’s standoff with Alabama Governor George Wallace as Federal Courts order the admission of black students to the University of Alabama. Finally, Faces of November (1964) is a nearly wordless few minutes depicting the funeral services after Dallas They are grouped together as a series. Footage from several of them overlap, primarily New Frontier borrowing from Primary. Some could barely be considered feature length, while Faces is barely over ten minutes**. Taken together, they are worthy of their own review.

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: After all of that? It’s a slight split decision. Adventures in the New Frontier is easily the weakest of the four entries, roping in too many disparate threads into something less than total of its parts.

Primary is exactly what you would hope for from a deep-access political campaign documentary, but there is probably a note of warning needed. The film seems to have more insight on Humphrey than Kennedy. That might be more to do with the fact that John F. Kennedy might not have had another layer to peel back.

Faces is exactly what you would expect, but it does have the virtue of letting the aftermath of the tragedy play out without even the slightest bit of commentary.

But Crisis is the one by which I was most delighted. We all know the story of the integration of the University of Alabama and Wallace parking himself on the wrong side of history. However, just exactly how this standoff was going to play out. Exactly how Wallace would have to back down. Did those kids get enrolled without any problems. The film goes through all of that in an hour that builds the tension surprisingly well.

*If you had gone back in time and told me that I would be making reference to Justice League and Rocky IV in this review, I’d believe you, because it sounds like me… But also suspicious because you haven’t used your time travel abilities to negate the need for Faces of November to be made. I was fairly sure I’d probably make a time travel reference before the review was done.

**Nearly an hour of people looking very sad is certainly an idea for a documentary.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Maria Richardson

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. I was probably in my twenties or even younger, and I felt like how I felt about a lot of Kubrick films on first viewing. I just didn’t get it. I would be a little leery of any teenager or person in their twenties why got anything out of this film other than nudity up to and including Kidman.

I was compelled to come back to the film when my festival screener duties* drifted into an inexplicable new adaptation of Schnitzler’s original novel. All it did was want me to re-visit the Kubrick of it all.

Did I Like It: It’s immaculately made—naturally—and that’s all the more mystifying when one thinks that Kubrick couldn’t possible have been in the best of health when the entire production was going through the Sisyphean task of a year-plus shoot. It’s frank and unblinking in the things it depicts, with several moments legitimately feeling like we got a peak into Cruise and Kidman’s marriage. I can only imagine what putting those moments—both banal and intense—on display did to them.

But we can talk about the sex—also both banal and intense—in the film for days, but it is only a surface reading. The sex is incidental. I’m struck in this viewing by the dynamic between Harford (Cruise) and his old medical school chum Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). You might have one read from their scenes together, but Eyes Wide Shut isn’t about those surface readings. I tend to think that if Bill hadn’t met someone at that party who rejected everything he himself had done to have a comfortable, stable life, he probably wouldn’t have gotten in nearly as much trouble as he did.

You might think I’m reading the movie wrong. I’m not, but then again it’s very hard to read a Kubrick film entirely wrong.

*No, I’m not saying which festival. You just keep submitting.