Salo Lite

Film: In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when I know I’m going to get hurt by the movie that I am watching. Sometimes, this is an experience that, as rough as it is, is something that is worth doing. Come and See is a film like that. I don’t want to watch it again, but I’m happy I watched it. Sometimes, I’m there to tick a box, as was the case with Salo, a film that scarred me enough that I remember pretty much everything about that viewing. Rarely, I get something like In a Glass Cage (Tras en cristal, a film that is unpleasant in terms of topic and characters, but felt as middle of the road as any film I’ve seen in some time in terms of quality.

There are some connections that In a Glass Cage has with other media. I’d be shocked if you told me that the film’s writer/director wasn’t familiar with the Stephen King novella Apt Pupil. While the stories aren’t identical, they are certainly similar in a lot of respects. There’s also a great deal of Salo in this movie, oddly. There’s nothing as overtly disgusting as the coprophagia scenes in that movie, but the destructive, awful hedonism is certainly in both films. It took me a bit to make that connection, but it’s definitely there.

The Wedding Shamble

Film: [REC]³: Genesis
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Rules, the say goes, are meant to be broken. There is some truth to this idea in the sense that breaking rules is how we get presented with stories that surprise us. The truth is that you need to be able to understand and use the rules to know how to break them correctly. This is true in grammar, in storytelling, and in movie making as well as just about everywhere else. [REC]³: Genesis breaks a huge rule of its genre, does it for no good reason, and ultimately suffers because of it. There’s no getting around the fact that this movie breaks faith with the audience.

To talk about [REC]³, we’re going to need to dive back a little into the previous films. The main thing that needs to be remembered is that we are dealing with something that is a great deal like a zombie virus in the sense that it apparently brings back people from the dead who immediately start trying to bite other people. The other thing we’re going to need to remember from the original films is that the virus in question is essentially a viral version of a demonic possession. This will become extremely important in the plot as we proceed.

Hungry Like the...

Film: The Wolf Man (2025)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Aside from the studio execs at Universal, there are few people who want the Dark Universe project to succeed more than I do. I love the classic Universal monsters, and have watched most of the movies and sequels, and I even have some affection for the terrible movies in the sequences. Universal has had several abortive attempts to reboot the monsters. The current attempt is five movies in. I’ve now seen four of them, since I just watched The Wolf Man from this year.

This was kind of a make-or-break for me in a sense. The Tom Cruise version of The Mummy is absolute hot garbage. The rebooted The Invisible Man is as good as the Tom Cruise movie is bad (and that’s saying a lot). Abigail isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fun one, and that counts for something. I still haven’t seen Renfield. So, the Dark Universe is (for me so far) one clear win, one sort of win, and one absolute thrashing. The Wolf Man, then, would give me either a net-good or net-negative for the entire franchise at the moment.

What I've Caught Up With, March 2025

We lost Mom on the 21st. Not a shock that I didn’t watch a lot this month, as most of it was spent dealing with her decline. As such, a lot of the movies I did watch were more of the comfort variety. I didn’t feel a need to be challenged. I did discover, though, that my Max subscription comes with access to TCM movies, and in March, the artist of the month was my classic movie girlfriend Barbara Stanwyck. So that I spent a lot of time there.

Television-wise, I watched the short Creature Commandos season, and it was fun. I also finished Boardwalk Empire, which is a dandy companion piece to Peaky Blinders. I also finished Bojack Horseman, which was surprisingly deep for a show with so many pop culture references. It does need to be said, though, that I took a break from the show for a bit, and when I came back to it, the first episode I watched was the one where our title character gives a 25-minute eulogy for his mother. Gotta love a coincidence.

Honey, I'm Home

Film: The Return
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

There’s almost always some value in looking at the true classics when it comes to making a story. There are a number of ways you can do this, of course. You can adapt a classic story into a new setting (like The Lion King is animated Hamlet) or you can play it straight (like Olivier’s Hamlet is Hamlet). With big, sweeping stories, a miniseries is more in keeping unless you go for a complete reimagining, like the Coens did with O Brother, Where Art Thou? You can also just do a piece of the story. That’s the case with The Return, a film that concerns itself with the end section of The Odyssey, the moment when Odysseus comes home after 20 years.

It's always been one of the weirder parts of the story. In the original Homeric epic, Odysseus and the Greeks have spent 10 years fighting the Battle of Troy. Odysseus comes up with the Trojan Horse ploy and ends the war and he and his men sail home to Ithaca, but because he angered Poseidon, his return took another 10 years. Naturally, Odysseus is presumed dead, and so a number of suitors arrive to Ithaca in the hopes of winning the hand of Penelope, Odysseus’ presumed widow. She delays them through various methods waiting for her husband’s return and seemingly oblivious to the abuse that the suitors are piling on her son, Telemachus.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Acts

Film: Sing Sing
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Who is the best actor working today? There are a lot of good answers for this, some who have been working for years and some up and comers who are making names for themselves. Colman Domingo might be the easiest to overlook in some ways despite two Oscar nominations in as many years. With Rustin, he was the best thing in the film by far. With Sing Sing, he is an outstanding part of an outstanding whole.

Sing Sing is a prison movie in the sense that it takes place in prison, but it’s not the sort of prison movie that you are thinking of. This is no made-on-the-cheap “sexy women behind bars” film, nor is it the story of gang vengeance or learning to live on the inside. It’s not a film about an escape attempt. Sing Sing takes place in prison, but it is about the transformative power of art. It’s cliché to say that a movie about prison is actually about freedom, but it is—and about why art matters and should matter.

Captive Audience

Film: Heretic
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Hugh Grant is in his villain era, and I am here for it. While he’s played a villain or two in the past (Bridget Jones comes to mind), lately he’s been doing more and more bad guy roles in films both comical and serious. He’s great in Paddington 2 and equally fun in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It has to be fun to reinvent yourself in this way, to go from the rom-com boyfriend to various incarnations of evil. That’s exactly where we’re headed with Heretic.

Grant, in Heretic, is having a really good time. He’s enjoying the hell out of being someone truly, diabolically evil. We are going to have to deal with the religious implications of this, because Heretic does what many movies that have a religious bent do, and even some without much of a religious angle: it’s going to make sure that the evil being done is being done by someone who will eventually discover is a non-believer, because of course he is.