Zom-Rom-Com

Film: Life After Beth
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I went into Life After Beth with a couple of clear reservations. The first is that I’ve never been entirely sold on Aubrey Plaza. I know I’m supposed to like her; she’s been marketed as someone who is emotionally detached in a cool way, sort of the live-action version of Daria. The second issue is Dane DeHaan, an actor who has one of the most slapable faces I have seen. DeHaan reeks of smugness to me. That might be unfair, but it’s also true that the first couple of movies I saw him in, I disliked, so my dislike of him is at least there for a reason.

And yet, Life After Beth beckoned. It’s a zombie movie, one of my favorite subgenres, especially considering how much has been done with it over the years (I see you shaking your head; we’ll get there). It’s also clearly a romance that is going to end badly, something else I tend to appreciate. Finally, it’s a movie that clearly wants to have fun with the premise. This is a horror movie with a cast of comic actors. So, while the two stars are actors I don’t tend to like as much as I’m supposed to, there was a lot here that drew me in.

You Saw Me Standin' Alone

Film: Blue Moon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When people talk about very talented actors, people who are genuinely and consistently good at the craft, Ethan Hawke doesn’t get mentioned enough. Hawke feels (to me) like one of those actors who goes into every job like it’s the one that’s going to make his career. He commits, and he’s good to great in pretty much everything he’s been in, at least that I’ve seen (and I even forgive him for The Purge). I was happy to see that he was nominated for an Oscar, his third acting nomination and first for lead. Blue Moon hinges entirely on Ethan Hawke’s performance. This film is him, and he is the film, even with a good supporting cast.

Blue Moon is a memoir of sorts of Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Hawke), the lyricist half of Rodgers and Hart, who wrote a number of Broadway musicals over the course of a couple of decades. Hart’s decline came about not from rumors of his sexuality (he was what we would today probably call pansexual), but his copious drinking. Rodgers, needing a more consistent partner for his music, teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein to make the greatest musical composition team ever, starting with their first collaboration, Oklahoma!

I Think the Stripper Likes Me

Film: Anora
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

My goal was to get through my set of Oscar films by the end of the year and to save the Best Picture winner, Anora, for last. I did save it for last, but circumstances prevented me from getting it watched until tonight. There was a part of me that didn’t really want to watch it (although I was far less enthused about The Apprentice). There are only a couple of ways for this story to go, and really only one interesting one, and on the surface, the characters didn’t appeal to me at all.

To give the elevator pitch, Anora is a far more realistic version of Pretty Woman. Exotic dancer/escort Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) dances at a club and for a fee frequently has sex with her clients. One night, a customer named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) wants someone who will speak Russian with him, and Anora gets tapped. Vanya is in New York City from Russia alleged for school, but he spends most of his time playing video games and partying. How can he afford this? His father is a Russian oligarch and a billionaire.

Muscle Mommy

Film: Love Lies Bleeding
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.

I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.

It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.

Ten Days of Terror!: Fresh

Film: Fresh
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Because I feel like I am always catching up on movies, there are always movies that “everyone” watches, especially on streaming services, that I don’t see for a few years. Such is the case with the Hulu movie Fresh, which released about three years ago. This is a movie pushing a half million reviews on Letterboxd, but I’m just getting to it now.

I’m honestly surprised that this movie exists as a movie on Hulu and not a dedicated horror platform like Shudder. Fresh is a deeply upsetting movie for a lot of reasons. With a few minor changes, this is straight out of the French Extremity movement. All that’s lacking here is a lot of gore, and Fresh makes up for that in a number of other ways. So, while we’re not specifically going to see the sort of things you might in Martyrs or L’Interieur, there’s still plenty of stomach churning joy to come. It’s worth noting that it’s impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, so consider everything after this point to be under a spoiler tag.

I Put a Spell on You

Film: The Love Witch
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Camp, when it’s good camp, is almost always unintentional. Quality camp is something that happens, not something that is specifically created, although there are certainly some exceptions. The Love Witch, from 2016 is possibly an exception to that basic idea, but it may not be. This is a film that is very much an homage to horror films from the 1970s. There’s a lot of The Stepford Wives lurking here, and a good amount of giallo in the mix. As a part of that, a lot of the acting is very stilted, and I can only think this is intentional. While most of the film looks like it’s taking place in that era (including some antique cars and a lot of retro furniture), everyone seems to have a cell phone, so the confusion is clearly intended.

We’re going to be spending most of the movie in the company of Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), a witch who is both remarkably lucky and remarkably unlucky in love. Recently widowed, and the more we see the more she is clearly implicated in the death of her husband, Elaine moves to the town of Aracata, CA, a place that accepts witchcraft. Elaine is going to set up shop, looking for a new man. She meets Trish (Laura Waddell), who is happily married, which causes some jealousy in Elaine, and yes, that’s eventually going to pay off.

Everyone Needs a Helping Hand

Film: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Sometimes, the title of a movie tells you everything you need to know about the plot. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (or Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant is one such film. There’s not going to be a lot of surprises here in terms of who the main character is or who the main character is going to find. This is a story of a vampire who doesn’t want to kill anyone, and figures that it would be better to find someone who wants to die. Honestly, it takes a page out of the movie Byzantium, but it’s a good page to crib notes from.

Sasha (Lilas-Rose Cantin as a child, then Sara Montpetit for most of the film) is traumatized when her vampire family kills and drains the blood from a clown hired to perform at her birthday party. Because of this, she decides she doesn’t want to kill. Because of this, her fangs never come in, and she survives because her mother (Sophie Cadieux) and father (Steve Laplante) hunt for her, providing her with bags of blood for her to drink. Sasha is something of a scandal in the family, of course, since everyone else in the family is clearly a predator. To solve her problem, she is sent to live with Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), her cousin.

Want to Know How I Got These Scars?

Film: The Man Who Laughs
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are a few truly iconic comic book characters. One of those is Bat-Man. Of the Caped Crusader’s vast and colorful rogue’s gallery, his most infamous and deadly opponent is the Joker. Anyone with even a little knowledge of comic book history can tell you that the Joker was based, at least visually, on Gwynplaine, the hero of The Man Who Laughs, a novel by Victor Hugo and one of the most influential silent films ever made.

In the late 18th century, near the end of the reign of King James II (Sam DeGrasse), the king is informed by his evil jester Barkliphedro (Brandon Hurst) about the capture of Lord Clancharlie (Conrad Veidt), who refused to kiss his ring. Clancharlie has returned for his son, and is informed that his son has been given to Hardquanonne (George Siegmann), who has carved a permanent smile on the boy’s face. Clancharlie is executed, and to get rid of the boy, the king orders all of the “Comprachios,” people of folklore who cripple children as a way to create circus performers, ordered out of England. They leave, but the boy, Gwynplaine (Julius Molnar as a child, then Conrad Veidt as an adult), is left behind.

Steam Heat

Film: Elemental
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on various players.

I usually am pretty good about the animated features from each Oscar year. It’s often the first category I finish. The movies tend to be easy to watch, not terribly long, and easy to access. That hasn’t been the case this year, where two of the films aren’t available to me streaming, at least not yet. For whatever reasons, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on animated Oscar films this year, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and watch the Pixar entry, Elemental.

The truth is that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Elemental, but that’s not really a lot of praise for something that came out of Pixar. We’ve come to expect great things from that film studio even though they’ve had some clear missteps. As much as I would love to heap praise on Elemental, I can’t. It’s fine, but that’s all it is. It’s just fine, and in a different year, or coming from a different studio, there’s no way this gets a nomination.

A Grave Problem

Film: Lisa Frankenstein
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I was born in the late ‘60s, which means that I am a child of the ‘80s. Like most of Gen-X, I came of age with movies like The Breakfast Club. That said, those of us who liked things darker with a touch of comedy had two movies that defined a large part of who we were. Those are Beetlejuice and Heathers. Both of these movies explored some dark territory (the second more than the first) and also came with a good number of laughs. While there have been some fun horror comedies since then as well as horror romances, none really feels like it has picked up the mantle of those films like Lisa Frankenstein. It’s not a coincidence that Lisa Frankenstein takes place in 1989, the year after Beetlejuice came out and the same year the Heathers did.

In 1989, unfortunately-named goth girl Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is dealing with moving in her senior year of high school, a step-mother (Carla Gugino) who is awful to her, a bubbly cheerleader step-sister named Taffy (Liza Soberano), and the fact that a couple years previously, her mother was murdered by an axe-wielding maniac. Essentially friendless and mired in an unrequited crush with the editor of the school literary magazine, Lisa spends a lot of her time like any goth in an abandoned cemetery. One of the graves, that of a young man, is her favorite, and she frequently leaves him trinkets and talks to him.

Inyeon

Film: Past Lives
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

My default genres are science fiction and horror more than anything else. This blog is testament to the fact that I don’t shy away from much and definitely don’t from any specific genre, but most of my comfort movies are in those genres. Because of that, I don’t spend a lot of time watching what amounts to a fairly melodramatic Korean drama like Past Lives. Still, this was nominated for two Oscars that I care about, so I knew I would be getting to it sooner or later. I found it at a local library and I’m right on the edge of some off-time, so I figured now was a good time to give it a watch.

This is not a complicated movie. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a good one, but it’s worth saying that it is a very simple story, one that is easy to follow and understand, and importantly, one that is very easy to relate to. Anyone who has any level of introspection in their life at all has lived through some level of plot, even if only mentally and emotionally.

His Hair was Perfect

Film: Wolf
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!.

There’s something very teenager-y about a lot of the classic movie monsters. Nowhere is that more the case than with werewolves. Werewolves are the ultimate teenagers—they get filled with urges that they can’t control and they sprout hair all over their bodies. The fact that in Wolf it happens to a late-50s Jack Nicholson is beside the point. The fact that he becomes more or less a creature of his urges like the average horny 16-year-old boy is what makes it a classic werewolf story.

New York book editor Will Randall (Nicholson) is driving in New England and hits a wolf with his car. This is very much out of the normal range for wolves, and when he gets out to check on the animal, he is bitten. In a movie called Wolf, you can pretty much bet that the wolf that bit him wasn’t a normal wolf, and of course that’s going to be the case. We also discover that the publisher he works for has just been purchased by a billionaire named Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), who is making some changes. One of those changes is offering Will a significant demotion or no job; Will is being replaced by his protégé Stewart Swinton (James Spader). This is also where Will meets Laura Alden (Michelle Pfeiffer), Raymond’s wayward daughter.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Film: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There are a lot of holes in my viewing history, something that is certainly true of just about everyone. For the sort of bog-standard “everyone’s seen them” films, my biggest gaps are probably Home Alone and The Goonies. For horror movies, the original 1923 Lon Chaney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was probably my biggest miss until now. I’ve seen other versions, notably the 1939 version with Charles Laughton, but this one is, in the slang of a few decades ago, the O.G.

There’s a lot to unpack right at the start with something like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s one of those rare stories that everyone seems to know even if they haven’t seen it or read it. It’s kind of like Robin Hood in that respect—there’s a sort of cultural knowledge of the story that we learn by osmosis. Of course, some of that is going to come from the title. We know going in that this is going to take place in Paris and that there’s going to be a hunchback who is our main character. Of course today, people are going to associate this story with the Disney version, including plenty of songs and animated gargoyle sidekicks.

Amster-Dammit

Film: Amsterdam
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

At some point in watching Amsterdam, you are almost certainly going to wonder how in the hell it happened. On the surface, Amsterdam is a film with an incredibly cast, the sort of cast that used to appear in epic films where everyone in Hollywood took a role. I can’t begin to count the Oscar nominations in this group, nor the Oscar nominations to come in future years. And yet the film itself is so flat. If I had to guess, it’s the screenplay where all of this falls apart.

Amsterdam tells a fictionalized version of the Business Plot, a 1933 conspiracy to replace FDR with someone who would be more Nazi-friendly at the top of the U.S. Fortunately, the person tapped to take over, the awesomely-named General Smedley Butler, spilled the plot. Amsterdam wants to tell this story, but it takes a long time getting there and includes a great deal that has nothing to do with it. There’s a veneer of wackiness over the story here, and we spend most of our time with characters who are forced into the center of the story for no clear reason.

Marsh Girl

Film: Where the Crawdads Sing
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

When award season comes around, there are always those movies that are surprising in the lack of nominations they accrue. That’s very much the case with Where the Crawdads Sing, a film that got a great deal of acclaim that then vanished when awards time came. It’s a more than competently made film, a solid story with a good pedigree, and beautifully directed. It seems like it should have been a natural choice, and yet here we are.

While Where the Crawdads Sing starts with a dead body, it’s a movie that is going to invite immediate comparisons to Nell. Our main character, Kya (Jojo Regina as a child and then Daisy Edgar-Jones for the bulk of the film) lives out in the marshes of North Carolina with her family, headed by her abusive father (Garret Dillahunt). One day, her mother wanders off, and over time, all of her siblings wander away as well. Eventually, her abusive father wander off as well, leaving Kya on her own at the age of seven.

Brokeback Ranch

Film: The Power of the Dog
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I tried to watch The Power of the Dog a couple of months ago, and for whatever reason, I found myself wandering. I walked away from it for a bit until I felt I was more mentally prepared for it. And then I more or less forgot about until I realized that I had to finish up the Oscar movies from last year so that I could complete the Oscar Got It Wrong! posts over the next month. I want to be clear here in saying that my first failed attempt to watch this was on me and wasn’t the fault of the movie. I was just really tired.

There is going to be a natural inclination to make some comparisons between The Power of the Dog and Brokeback Mountain; I’m not immune to that myself, as suggested by the title of this review. First, this is a more modern Western both in the sense that it is a modern film and in the sense that this doesn’t take place in the Old West. For as much as this is at least in part a cowboy movie, this take place in 1925. Second, there is definitely a theme of homosexuality and homoeroticism that runs through this.

When You Wish Upon a Jar

Film: Three Thousand Years of Longing
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

George Miller has the weirdest IMDb page. If you don’t believe me, go check. This is the guy who created Mad Max and directed the entire series of movies and also wrote and directed Babe: Pig in the City and won an Oscar for Happy Feet, which he wrote, directed, and produced. That being the case, there’s not a lot that feels outside of his wheelhouse, so Three Thousand Years of Longing, a tale of magical realism involving a scholar and a djinn is certainly not outside of the realm of his oeuvre.

And, that’s exactly what Three Thousand Years of Longing is. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic who studies narrative. She is entirely content with her life, living alone and without a great deal of close contact with other people. But, it’s the life that she wants. On a trip to a conference in Istanbul, she purchases a small glass bottle. Cleaning the bottle, she uncorks it and releases a djinn (Idris Elba). The djinn, who is never named anything aside from “Djinn” offers her three wishes, which he says she must take. If she does not, he is essentially trapped on this world and unable to return to the land of his people.

The Measure of a Man

Films: Cyrano
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on the kid’s television.

When I first saw that there would be a new version of the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, I was intrigued. It’s a hell of a good story, and I’m always a sucker for a sad romance. The story of Cyrano is one of the truly tragic romances. The basic story is that a truly great spirit, guardsman Cyrano de Bergerac, is a true Renaissance man, a warrior poet as gifted with the pen or wordplay as with the sword. But, the story goes, he is cursed with a giant nose, which prevents him from being loved, or so he believes. The twist in 2021’s Cyrano is not that the story has been turned into a musical but that the title character is played by Peter Dinklage.

And that really is the story. We open with one of the classic scenes of the Cyrano story. We are introduced to Roxanne (Haley Bennett), who is both poor and beautiful. She is being wooed—unsuccessfully—by Duke De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who has a great deal of money to waste on her. He takes her to the theater to see Montfleury (Mark Benton), the most celebrated actor of his day, but the performance is interrupted by Cyrano (Dinklage), who dislikes him intently. While the actor runs off, Valvert (Joshua James) challenges Cyrano to a duel. Cyrano humiliates him, chants at him in rhyme, and eventually runs him through.

Shark Attack

Films: West Side Story (2021)
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on rockin’ flatscreen.

When dealing with any list of films, I’ve always made a concerted effort to knock out the longest films on the list as early as I could. So, when Spielberg’s version of West Side Story showed up on Disney Plus, I knew I’d be watching it sooner rather than later; it was the second longest film on the current Oscar list I have. It’s also the fact that I knew this would be a tough watch for me. Ten years ago, I would have told you that that was because I didn’t like musicals. These days, there are plenty that I like. No, the issue is that I don’t love West Side Story as a piece of work because I genuinely dislike the source material.

There’s no getting around that fact. I really dislike Romeo and Juliet as a play and even as a concept. There are those who look at Romeo and Juliet as the height of romance. I look at it as a story where two kids (Romeo is canonically 16; Juliet is all of 13) decide that they can’t live without each other and over the course of a couple of days, a bunch of people die for their rash stupidity. West Side Story is that with a couple of really good songs.

Party Time

Films: Small Axe: Lovers Rock
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Say what you will about what the streaming market has done to the film industry, there have been some real positives. The amount of money that gets pumped into streaming companies has created an interesting renaissance in not just television but in film and what can be done with these media. The Small Axe anthology series is a case in point. Steve McQueen, fast becoming one of the premier directors working today, created a series of five films dealing with the lives of West Indies immigrants in the UK in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. The films are unrelated to each other but are connected instead by themes. Lovers Rock is the second of the five films in the series.

These are actual films, not episodes of a television show. Evidence of that comes from the difference in running times if nothing else; Lovers Rock clocks in at a slim 70 minutes, and even that might feel a little long for the slip of a plot this movie contains. That’s okay, though. There’s not meant to be a great deal of plot here. It’s just the story of a party and of two people who meet there and begin something like a romance.