Heart Eyes is an attempt to create a new slasher villain, a character with an iconic look. Our killer, naturally known as the Heart Eyes Killer or HEK, has had a two-year reign of terror. The gimmick is that HEK kills happy couples on Valentine’s Day. The first year, he killed couples in Boston; the following year, he attacked Philadelphia. Since this movie takes place in Seattle, you can guess the city that will be struck this year.
I love a good subgenre, the more obscure or personal, the better. When I say I love a good subgenre, I’m including things like “zombie” of course, but I’m really talking about subgenres that are more about finding connections between movies that are otherwise unrelated. “Good for her!” is one such subgenre—movies where the female protagonist overcomes something terrible. It includes movies as diverse as Swallow and Happy-Go-Lucky. One of my current favorite subgenres like this is “Samara Weaving covered in blood.” Based on that, you should realize that we are talking about Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (which I will be referring to as Ready or Not 2 from this point forward).
There is no way to discuss this movie without discussing the original film. So, while I’m not going to offer up any spoilers for this movie I am necessarily going to have to at least mention important plot points from the original Ready or Not. If you don’t want that movie spoiled, you should stop reading at the end of this paragraph. Or, just skip the next two paragraphs—I’ll keep the spoilers limited to that.
I’ve got a lot of feelings about Is God Is, and I’m not sure exactly where I should start with them. So let’s start with the fact that this is director Aleshea Harris’s debut film as a director. Harris is a playwright and this movie started as a stage drama, but that’s not at all obvious from the way this is filmed. Discovering that this is her first movie is not unlike learning that Get Out was Jordan Peele’s directorial debut. Is God Is is a mature effort that feels like Harris has been sitting in the directors’ chair for a decade.
This is a revenge movie through and through, but this is not like an ‘80s revenge movie where Arnold Schwarzeneggar tracks down the guys who left him for dead and kills them one by one with a quip for each death. This is an old school revenge movie, one that feels like the natural child of every Western in history where a man hunted down the gunslinger who murdered his family.
I’ve been trying to post reviews about more current movies lately. If you look at what I have been posting in general, I’ve been watching movies from this year and last year, at least in terms of what I’m putting up as full reviews. Part of this is because I want to have a more or less consistent posting schedule, even if I don’t always keep to it. Part of it is also that it’s a sort of self-defense. The more I watch from these current years, the less gets added to the list later. So, today it was the turn of Warfare to be the film of the day. This is a film that comes from Alex Garland, so I was interested based on that going in.
The truth is that you have already seen this in large part. While the events of this film come from the experiences of the men who lived through this event. In fact, co-director Ray Mendoza is a survivor of the battle in question, and is one of the only characters in the film depicted with his actual name. Warfare is every bit a modern war movie, though. There is no tearful scene where some kid from Brooklyn talks about his girlfriend before being killed by an errant shot. This is brutal, and violent, and vicious. The issue is that there’s not a lot here that feels any different from Black Hawk Down.
Bob Odenkirk has an odd career trajectory. He made his bones in comedy as one half of the two heads of HBO’s Mr. Show, then became much more of a household name with his connection to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Recently, though, Odenkirk has become an action star, but a vastly different one in a lot of ways. Odenkirk’s action characters don’t spit one-liners and walk away with a couple of scratches. His characters get hurt—shot, stabbed, beaten, and bruised. And rather than one-liners, he’s going to have speeches and moments of surprising badassery. This brings us to Normal.
It’s also worth noting that there was a film made in the early 2000s that was also called Normal. It featured Tom Wilkinson and Jessica Lange as a married couple in a situation where he realizes that he is transgender and wants to undergo sex reassignment surgery. I say this not because these two movies would ever be confused beyond the name, but because it was filmed a few miles from where I live. Odenkirk’s Normal is not a story of discovery, but an extremely bloody action comedy with a surprisingly high body count and multiple Rube Goldberg-style deaths.
