Category: One Thing I Like

I couldn’t watch Paddington in Peru without confessing that I hadn’t seen either of the first two movies, and I’m still in the process of correcting that grave lapse in judgment on my part.

I loved Paddington, as I expected to. What I didn’t expect was that I’d go away thinking I’d watched them in the correct order. Paddington in Peru was a fantastic introduction to all of these characters and their universe, a celebration of joyfulness and kindness and creativity. Many of its most magical ideas — like the tree mural withering and blossoming along with the family, the dollhouse view of the Browns’ home, and the insertion of cutaways and beautiful animated sequences — were all seeded in the first movie, but I wasn’t disappointed to see that they weren’t wholly original. They felt not like retreads, but acknowledging what makes the storytelling of these movies so wonderful, with the benefit of a decade’s worth of advancements in visual effects.

But while I still love the third movie, I at least have a better understanding of the consistent criticism that it felt slight compared to the first two. The main reason, I think, is that Paddington in Peru‘s themes are more universal takes on family, belonging, and kindness. Paddington is more pointedly about refugees, taking care of people who are different from us, and how London’s multiculturalism is something to be celebrated. All an especially important reminder in the midst of the right-wing xenophobia that led to Brexit.

What’s remarkable is how it can have such a clear and specific message — amidst countless other family movies with much more generic messages like “believe in yourself” and “family is important” — without feeling like a lecture or a sermon. It all coexists happily with everything else in the movie, never fading into the background of a kid’s wacky slapstick cartoon adventure, but never becoming such a focus that you can quickly and simply say “this is what this movie is about.”

It’s like the calypso band that serves as the movie’s Greek chorus, seen as characters pass by without acknowledging, singing a song that reflects the characters’ current mood, reminding us of not only what’s happening in the movie but also that all the vibrancy of post-millennial London was because of multicultural influences, not in spite of them.

Even the xenophobic Mr Curry, the direct mouthpiece for bigots complaining about people moving into the neighborhood and bringing their “jungle music,” isn’t allowed to become the focus of the movie’s conflict. He’s a buffoonish side character, and the movie doesn’t bother making him out to be more than a nuisance. The main conflict, in what is the movie’s most ingenious gag, is a villain trying to turn Paddington into a stuffed bear. And I hate to undermine the joke by making it more explicit than even the movie does, but come on. That is just inspired.

There’s a long trend in family movies of making sure that all of the content is carefully compartmentalized according to age, sensibility, and demographic value. It’s been going on for so long, in fact, that we’ve fallen into the habit of praising the compartmentalization itself. How many times have you read the review of a “family movie” that has a line about references or jokes that “fly over the heads of the little ones?” And it’s described as the height of cleverness on the part of the filmmakers, for being able to deliver crass, commercial, zany slapstick to the kids while still giving the grown-ups the dick jokes they crave, so they don’t have to suffer through it alone.

Paddington responds with an alternate approach: why not just make the stuff for kids actually good? So that the adults enjoy it, too, instead of having to suffer through it?

There’s plenty of slapstick in Paddington, and the trailer makes it seem as if that’s the entire movie. But even the broadest, most trailer-worthy gags are part of what is simply a masterfully-constructed comedy, packed with jokes that work for any age level. Paddington uses the family’s toothbrushes to clean his ears, pulling out huge gobs of earwax; later, Mr Brown is brushing his teeth and looks suspiciously at the toothpaste tube. Mr Brown dresses as a cleaning lady and gets hit on by a security guard, a classic that goes back to Looney Toons and further; afterwards, there’s an extended gag about his not looking like the picture on his badge that is just a perfectly-executed comedy routine.

I felt like there was nothing in the movie that was aimed solely at one part of the crowd or the other; it’s aimed at everyone, and everyone could enjoy it to differing degrees. Paddington eats a suitcase full of marmalade on his trip, he’s lying over-full in a lifeboat, the ship’s horn goes off, he looks around embarrassed to see if he’s the one that’s made that sound. That’s the kind of timeless gag that appeals to both the 10-year-old boy and the 53-year-old man who still has a 10-year-old boy’s sense of humor.

And there are just brilliantly conceived and executed gags throughout. Just a few more of my favorites: putting Paddington into a van that reads “taxi” and then closing the door to reveal it says “taxidermist.” Paddington taking the “dogs must be held” sign too literally. The Browns arriving at the hospital as long-haired bikers and leaving the hospital as overcautious first parents in a beige station wagon. Nicole Kidman’s room full of stuffed animal heads mounted on the wall, then the secret doorway that reveals all of the animals’ rears are mounted on the opposite side.

Paddington does hit all the story beats of “a kid’s movie,” but to me they felt like natural parts of an action-comedy’s structure, instead of purely formulaic or manipulative. I did cry at a few points, but it was when the movie showed an act of kindness, like when the royal guard silently offers Paddington shelter and a selection of emergency snacks from underneath his own hat.

The overwhelming feeling I get from both Paddington movies I’ve seen so far is the reminder that none of the messages we get from family movies are supposed to be just for kids. There’s nothing juvenile or simplistic about having the courage to take risks, being compassionate to other people, or being kind. Considering how many adults seem to have forgotten the basics to such a degree that we all deserve a hard stare, it’s good to see a story that doesn’t encourage us to tune out the parts we think don’t apply to us. And it’s good to see filmmakers recognize that “family movie” means something you watch with your kids, and not just in the same room as them.

The two most genuinely good and surprising aspects of Death of a Unicorn are the performances of Will Poulter and Téa Leoni as two members of the awful rich family at the center of the plot. They took characters designed to be cartoonishly broad satire and somehow found a hook to make them more interesting.

Poulter does it by taking the familiar rich, arrogant, young dimwit and committing completely to his near-total lack of self-awareness. There’s something vaguely human at the heart of the cartoon, as he makes the character truly awful but somehow understandable: this is the natural result of someone who’s never for a moment in his life wanted for anything. Plus the hilarious detail that he’s perpetually dressed in short shorts.

But I think Leoni is the star of the movie, playing the matriarch/implied trophy wife of the family as a woman who’s spent so long spinning her self-serving nature into a kind of performative compassion that she never turns it off. Her face is perpetually twisted in an expression of heartfelt concern, her voice laden with sympathy as she makes it clear that she only wants what’s best for everybody.

It’s especially neat after seeing Mickey 17‘s much more blunt take on cartoonishly awful rich people. The characters in Death of a Unicorn are clearly horrible, but at the same time personable and even friendly. There’s always a sense that their selfishness and outright evil are enabled by generating enough plausible deniability. And not just for themselves, but for the people who work for them, who can tell themselves that they’re not really that bad, as far as bosses go.

But their performances are really the only inspired aspects of Death of a Unicorn, and nothing else in the movie stands out as original or even remarkable. I definitely wouldn’t call it a bad movie, since it works okay as a violent action comedy, and there are a few genuinely funny moments. It seems like all the elements are there for a can’t-fail, effects-driven black comedy.

You’ve got Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Richard E Grant as leads, all delivering exactly on the kinds of things you expect them to bring to a movie.¹And no more, which is part of the issue. Even the casting of secondary characters is spot on to the point of feeling like overkill: Sunita Mani is always great, Jessica Hynes is recognizably likable even when playing completely against type, and I was initially excited to see Steve Park, who I know mostly from his unforgettable scene in Fargo. But of everyone, only Anthony Carrigan seems to have enough to work with to turn into an actual character.

So I was more left with the sense that I’m impressed the movie exists at all. You just don’t see this much money and talent being devoted to a comedy these days, especially not one that is violent and gory enough to limit its potential audience.²For other people as sensitive to blood and gore as I am: it’s all kept at the Universal Horror Nights level, and I never thought it felt real enough to be upsetting or nauseating. If you’re super-sensitive to animal cruelty, it’s there in the title, and probably the most upsetting scene for me involved sawing off the unicorn’s horn. (Spoiler: it gets better). I was actually reminded of Death Becomes Her, and there’s even a similar shot to the well-known one in that movie, where a character is framed looking through the gaping hole left in another character’s body.

Before anybody objects to the comparison: this isn’t nearly as good as Death Becomes Her, because it’s not anywhere near as clever, original, and inventive. Also, Death of a Unicorn doesn’t have nearly the budget, even before being adjusted for inflation, so the effects feel more like an independent film than a showcase for ILM. But it feels like the kind of project that was more common in the 1980s and early 1990s: a one-off comedy project that wasn’t fully horror (like say The Substance), or sci-fi (like Mickey 17), or action comedy (like The Author of This Blog Post Is Drawing a Blank At the Moment), but a mix of multiple genres.

It might be damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about Death of a Unicorn is that it reminded me of better movies, but I think it’s more a case of its reach exceeding its grasp. Maybe the fact that the movie doesn’t feel shockingly inventive and original is a sign that we’ve become spoiled for choice in genre fiction, and that the problem isn’t that the concepts are too weird, but not weird enough.

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  And no more, which is part of the issue.
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  For other people as sensitive to blood and gore as I am: it’s all kept at the Universal Horror Nights level, and I never thought it felt real enough to be upsetting or nauseating. If you’re super-sensitive to animal cruelty, it’s there in the title, and probably the most upsetting scene for me involved sawing off the unicorn’s horn. (Spoiler: it gets better).

I absolutely adored Nosferatu for the first hour or so.

I’d heard it was beautiful, and that was underselling it. It seems to have taken “every frame a painting” as a challenge: can you make something with a run time over 2 hours in which you can pause at literally any moment and get a fantastically gorgeous image?

But more than that, I loved that it was so gloriously ultra-gothic in just about every aspect in just about every moment. Every member of the cast was completely committed to the concept, somehow balancing a sense of overwhelming Victorian repression with a director who must’ve ended every take shouting “MORE!!!”

Lily-Rose Depp deservedly got praise for her performance, since it required her not only to be sympathetic and believable in a world in which the melodrama was kept at dangerously high levels throughout, but also to contort her body and give in to violent epileptic fits. But I was almost as impressed by Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, for making the most interesting version of Renfeld that I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t content with the stock actor’s exercise of playing a madman, but took a character that had to be visibly over the top in a movie populated entirely by batshit crazy people, and somehow made it genuinely frightening and compelling.

I was also surprised by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, although I probably shouldn’t have been, since he’s well established that he embraces weird parts that don’t just rely on his being impossibly good-looking. His part is kind of a thankless one, requiring him to be the voice of reason and skepticism in a world that is clearly irrational, and he could’ve just disappeared into the background as nothing more than the guy who occasionally drives the plot forward. But from his opening scene onwards, he managed to give off a paternalistic arrogance that matched the energy of everything else. He seemed to love playing a cartoon.

All of the performances worked because the filmmaking itself was so committed to the bit. The story shifts between dreams and the waking world so frequently, and so abruptly, that it was never really clear which was which. Is the entire story a dream, or is the world so weird that the dreams are just as real as anything else? One scene I loved is when our heroine and her husband are at their friends’ home, their hosts bid them good night to take their bizarre children up to bed, and Thomas and Ellen kiss… and it just turns into a full-on make-out session right there. The door’s barely even closed before they’re going at it!

I think my favorite thing about the first half of the movie, though, is how the filmmaking itself becomes dream-like. With rare exceptions, it’s not prone to melodramatic flourishes like cross-dissolves or dutch angles or elaborate camera movements. There are hard cuts, sometimes timed so as to be disorienting, as a scene abruptly ends. And for the most part, the camera is either static or on a slow horizontal pan, as if the viewer is dispassionately taking everything in. When the camera does do something exotic, it stands out as especially significant and unnerving — our first time seeing Knock conducting one of his rituals, for instance, in which the camera sweeps up as if we’re watching him from above.

Black Bag (alternate title: Spies Be Talkin’) is about George and Kathryn, a long-married couple who work as spies for the British government. The title is a reference to the code phrase that agents use with each other when they’re asked a question that they’re not permitted to answer. The story begins when George is assigned the mission of finding out who within the agency has been selling confidential information, and the short list of suspects includes his wife.

I spent much of the movie feeling as if I had very little idea what was actually going on. For something advertised as a stylish spy thriller, it’s extremely talky, and the combination of accents plus mostly-naturalistic audio meant that I could only make out around 60% of the dialogue. I was certain that it was seeding bits of intrigue that I was missing, and that by the time the double- and triple-crosses started happening, I would be completely lost.

Plus it has such an aggressive sense of affected cool that it felt jarring. It’s all beautifully shot, and the score is excellent. And it’s more or less a given that Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are going to be flawless and captivating no matter what they’re doing. But what they’re doing here is a whole lot of talking, and it feels at odds with the movie telling us that these characters are some of the coolest sons of bitches you ever saw. That what’s really sexy isn’t shootouts or one-night stands with femmes fatale or baccarat, but just seeing hot people being good at their jobs.

To me, it started to feel like what would happen if spy movies stopped being aspirational and decided instead to be reassuring. Aimed at a certain crowd of wealthy middle-aged people, people who’d reached a point in their lives when they had no desire to hang off of airplanes like Tom Cruise, but still wanted to feel like they had It. Yes, dammit, your quiet, conversational dinner parties are thrilling.

The movie opens with an extended sequence that was filmed as one long, uninterrupted take. It follows George through multiple levels of a crowded nightclub to meet his contact, past dozens of extras dancing, drinking and partying, at a bar and a dance floor below. And to me, it felt like a distractingly unnecessary flourish, a sequence that felt far more complicated to execute than what the movie required.

In retrospect, I could interpret it as kind of a bait-and-switch to set the tone: if you were expecting a spy thriller that would take you through the exotic nightlife of the world’s most interesting cities, this is not that. I can interpret it as setting up the conversation that follows and the theme that runs throughout the movie: the contrast between this loud, hedonistic life and the quiet monogamy of George and Kathryn’s relationship.

And I can even interpret the decision to film it all as one take as being an introduction to George’s character. It sets up the idea that he’s calm, quiet, and professional, and he relentlessly moves towards his goal, immune to any distractions. But this doesn’t read as such in the moment (because he’s not really contrasted against what any other agent would do in the same situation) and besides, the idea is explicitly stated outright by other characters multiple times throughout the movie.

Instead, it just seems like the message of the opening sequence was “Bitch, I’m Steven Soderbergh! I do what I want! Just shut up and watch!”

And really, I should’ve just listened and followed instructions. Because there’s such a confident clarity of storytelling in Black Bag that cuts through any feeling of being confused by obtuse twists and turns. The movie is explicitly about trust, and I probably should’ve trusted that Soderbergh has spent his career mastering the art of cinematic storytelling. Even the scenes that are straightforward this scene represents that idea moments are so well executed that they don’t come across as too heavy-handed.

For instance, the scenes when George is fishing, the first in particular. He’s out alone on a lake, silently processing all the information that he has so far, when his line catches. He’s methodically reeling it in as images of all the suspects flash in his mind. Just as it seems he’s about to make a crucial connection, both the idea and the fish get away from him.

But my favorite scene in the movie is earlier, and it’s a small moment but it’s executed perfectly. Kathryn has an upcoming trip out of London, and when George asks for any details, she simply responds “black bag.” George has found a movie ticket in the trash, causing him to suspect that Kathryn has already had a clandestine meeting in London that she didn’t tell him about. He asks her about the movie, and she claims she doesn’t know anything about it, seemingly avoiding making eye contact. He suggests that they see it together, and she agrees, without giving anything away to suggest that she might have seen it already.

We then get a shot of George and Kathryn sitting next to each other at the movie, filmed as if from the screen looking directly into the audience. There’s a sudden jump scare in the movie, and every single person in the audience is startled, except for Kathryn. Afterwards, George turns to look at Kathryn, and she nonchalantly offers him popcorn. Then there’s another sudden scare in the movie, and she jumps along with the rest of the audience.

It’s such a great example of storytelling without dialogue, trusting that the shot (filmed without close-up, and if I remember correctly, with almost no cuts) and the performances are going to make its meaning clear, conveying an unsettling sense of growing suspicion that George is not allowed to comment on.

It all means that Black Bag is one of the most passive experiences I’ve had watching anything in a long time. I wasn’t sorting through some complex scheme, second-guessing everything, making predictions about what would happen next, but just absorbing everything I was being shown. And when it’s this well done, that’s not a bad thing at all. It didn’t need to feel like a huge, explosive spy thriller (although there is indeed an explosion), but a smaller, character-driven story that’s simply an entertaining time at the movies.

The best thing about Opus is its casting. As soon as I heard “A24 horror movie starring Ayo Edebiri,” I was on board before the trailer even finished.

And it delivers on the promise of “A24 horror movie” just fine. It’s got an overall message that lands well enough, although it lands with a feeling of “okay, I get it,” instead of being as stunning and impactful as it was probably meant to. That’s true of the rest of the movie as well. It all works in context, but nothing punches through as an image or a moment that demands to be vividly remembered.

Now that I’ve got an Apple Watch, it means that I watch everything with a heart monitor attached, and I can tell that Opus was suspenseful because it was buzzing about elevated heart rate every few minutes. It’s a testament to the maturity and confidence of the filmmaking that so many of the horror movie moments are suggested rather than shown.

But the perfect casting throughout is really what stands out. The protagonist is so in line with Ayo Edebiri’s public persona that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it was written specifically for her.¹Especially if you noticed that the character’s initials are the same as the actress’s. Like I didn’t notice for two days. She has to be grounded enough not to fall for all the trappings of fame, but still enough of a nerd to find famous people fascinating. She’s got to read as driven, ambitious, and under-appreciated, capable of far more than she’s allowed to do. The overall message only works if she’s a superstar in waiting. And she’s got to be movie-star beautiful, but it’s something that she can put on and take off; it’s not her identity.

(Is it too obvious that I’ve got a crush on Ayo Edebiri? Even if she is a nepo baby).

John Malkovich is, obviously, excellent at being a menacing and unsettling cult leader, as well as seeming like the kind of actor who’d love the chance to play an aging glam rocker. Murray Bartlett is great at being unctuous and self-absorbed but mostly sympathetic. Juliette Lewis is Juliette Lewising the hell out of things.

Even with the smaller parts (in terms of overall screen time), it becomes clear by the end that they were played by the perfect person, the only one who could immediately read as exactly the role they’re playing. This guy looks like mostly-silent, creepy henchman but can also read as a basically normal guy who’d become a fanatic. This woman is a bad guy but is somehow still trustworthy. And so on.

I was excited to see Amber Midthunder’s name in the opening credits, because I felt like she’d proven her star power with Prey and was going to get the chance to show her range. So I was initially disappointed that it seemed like Opus had wasted her for a thankless part. But put in context of the rest of the casting, though, I think they needed exactly what she brought to the part. Even without speaking, she gives off a sense of intensity and makes it immediately clear that she could mess you up without breaking a sweat.

In fact, there seemed to be an interesting age divide across the cast. For the most part, the older actors seemed to be capital-A Acting, while the younger ones were more grounded and naturalistic. I interpreted this as subtle reinforcement of the idea that younger generations would be savvy enough to see through the bullshit, while the older characters had been pursuing fame for so long that they’d stopped second-guessing it. They all speak as if they’d seen it all, but they were the most eager to get swept up in it, and even see it as a reward.

Nile Rodgers and The-Dream are credited for the music in Opus and also as executive producers, although I couldn’t tell if that were just the featured songs, or the overall score. The score is excellent, driving home the unsettling feeling of a creepy cult. But for the songs, it feels like another case of choosing exactly the right people. They have to come across as being brilliant enough to inspire rabid fanaticism. While I didn’t fall in love with them as much as the characters seemed to, the moments when the movie turned itself over to showcasing the music seemed the closest to punching through and becoming unforgettable.

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  Especially if you noticed that the character’s initials are the same as the actress’s. Like I didn’t notice for two days.

Black Sunday (originally The Mask of the Demon) has been on my to-watch list for years, partly because of its place in horror movie history as Mario Bava’s official directorial debut, but mostly because of its amazing poster. I finally watched it last night¹As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential.

I’m by no means enough of a movie buff, especially when it comes to classic horror, to be able to put the movie sufficiently in context. Honestly, I’m more of a fan of the overall aesthetic of classic horror than the movies themselves. Often, it feels like trying to dig through the detritus of censorship, dated performances, and special effects that are still in their infancy, just to find a few moments that feel relevant to modern audiences.

(An exception is The Bride of Frankenstein, which I’d always dismissed as another famous-for-being-famous relic of the classic Universal Monsters days, until I actually watched it and realized that it’s a straight-up masterpiece).²Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.

But despite all of the aspects that make Black Sunday feel too dated to be relevant — the melodramatic and often nonsensical plot, the weird dubbing throughout, the makeup that sometimes seems more comical than horrific — there are several shots and scenes that stand out like nothing I’d seen before.

Notably, its gruesome opening sequence, which shows an unrepentant witch cursing her inquisitor brother before having the spike-filled “mask of Satan” nailed onto her face. It suggests far more than it shows, but what it shows is brilliant: the brutal spikes coming straight for the camera, a POV shot of the executioner wielding a massive hammer, and a side shot of the hammer pounding the mask into place. I found a pretty good video from the “History of Horror” channel putting Black Sunday in context with the rest of Mario Bava’s work, in particular pointing out that the more shocking moments were part of Italian cinema reacting to a long period of censorship under Mussolini and after WWII.

To me, it set the tone that anything could happen, especially when I considered that Psycho came out in the same year, and I’ve been hearing for years how shocking and scandalous it was for that movie to even show a toilet.

Not to spoil anything, but the rest of the movie feels much more conventional. We discover that its pseudo-vampires need to be killed via a spike through the left eye, which is never shown explicitly but is still traumatic for those of us especially sensitive to that kind of thing. For the most part, the creatures just seem to have some kind of skin condition. One of our vampires can only be recognized as such because his hair has turned white and he’s got a five o’clock shadow. I’d been expecting it all to be much more lurid, but overall it feels more like a few stand-out images tied together loosely by a traditional classic horror movie plot.

But some of those images are amazing. Princess Katja’s appearance, standing in the ruins of a chapel holding two black dogs, is one of the most famous. There are long sequences that feel like a big swing for a filmmaker in the late 50s, with pervasive darkness punctuated by small areas of light. In particular, there’s a pretty lengthy sequence of a man following a lantern-carrying guide through the dark catacombs underneath a castle, and the shots get darker and darker until we can see nothing but the light coming from the lantern itself.

My favorite shots, though, are just before that. A carriage has arrived to pick up one of our protagonists to take him to the castle. It’s full-on gothic. Solid black, led by two black horses driven by a partially-decomposing man-out-of-time all dressed in black. Black Sunday doesn’t use camera effects anywhere else that I could identify, but the shots of the carriage are done in slow motion. The horses gallop through a dense, pitch-black forest through fog, and it’s strikingly dream-like. Or more accurately, nightmare-like.

Mario Bava is often named as one of the progenitors — if not the creator — of giallo. I’m still not familiar enough with the genre to be making any blanket statements, but it feels as if the roots are here, even without the addition of lurid color.³Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white. Stories that fade into the background to allow strikingly stylistic images take prominence and become unforgettable.

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  As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires
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  Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.
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  Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white.

Mickey 17 is masterfully made. Just in terms of production design and special effects alone: the scenes with Robert Pattinson interacting with his clone could’ve been the showpiece of a different movie, and they were done so seamlessly that it started to feel like it would’ve been cheaper and easier simply to invent an actual machine to print a duplicate of him.

And that’s before we see the Mickeys interacting with swarms of alien creatures — in a snowstorm! — and they all feel so present that I had to keep reminding myself that I was looking at special effects.

But it was overall too broad for me to really love it. It is completely and unapologetically a comedy, almost always avoiding the temptation to deviate into clever satire when a much bigger and more obvious gag is available.

I think Toni Collette is wonderful, but as with a lot of great actors, she clearly chose this project for the chance to let loose, have fun, and go completely over the top. Still, she gets a scene at the end in which she has to be menacingly evil instead of just cartoonishly evil, and it’s so effective that you understand how so few actors would’ve been able to make it work. Mark Ruffalo seems to be feeding off of her energy, and he somehow manages to make his performance in Poor Things feel like restrained naturalism.

A detail that’s a good example of how Mickey 17 is a smart movie playing things cartoonishly broad: the scenes of a new Mickey being printed, which happens a lot, as you might expect from the premise and the title. Each time, the body does a quick jerk back into the machine as it’s rolling out, keeping it from feeling like some miraculous wonder, and instead making it clear that it’s just another ultimately clumsy and analog piece of dehumanizing technology. I loved it as a wonderfully understated gag.

But as more and more Mickeys get printed, the crew becomes increasingly blasé about the whole process, so we see Mickey’s body unceremoniously dumped out of the machine until the techs can scramble to get the bed in place. In a later repeat of the same gag, no one even notices, and he just flops out of the machine naked onto the floor. It’s really the same idea as the small jerk of the print bed, but it’s played so broad that nobody could possibly miss it.

And throughout, it felt like there was a more clever and understated movie floating just below the surface of the cartoon. I suppose it’s a virtuoso piece of filmmaking simply because it still managed to play on my emotions even though it was a cartoon.

One thing I liked in particular was a scene early on, when we see Mickey’s love-at-first-sight introduction to security officer Nasha. Ruffalo’s character is on stage making a bombastic speech, and that’s all that we hear — we can see Mickey and Nasha meeting each other, and we can guess at what they’re thinking because of their facial expressions, but we can’t hear anything that’s being said.

I thought it was a fantastic way to suggest that it doesn’t matter what was being said. For key moments like that, we often don’t remember what we said, but we definitely remember how we felt. It seemed like such a poignant way to show a key memory for someone who is nothing except for his memories.

It also didn’t go in the direction that I’d expected it to go, which was a welcome surprise. But explaining exactly how requires spoilers. To sum up my review: I thought Mickey 17 was very, very good, and I just wish that it had allowed itself to be great.

On this blog, I’ve pledged to elevate the stuff I enjoy and not spend any time writing about the stuff I don’t like. That’s not just part of the “Good Vibes Only” policy I’m more strictly observing since the 2024 election, but because a negative review is almost always worthless. Not only is our time better spent promoting the stuff we love, but it’s time wasted to dwell on the negatives. It won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade anyone who’s eager to enjoy something, and it won’t (and shouldn’t!) change the opinion of someone who’s already enjoyed it or disliked it.¹Also, tonight I’ve been reading some of my old posts where I just trashed a movie or TV show, and I invariably came across as a smug little shit.

I’ve worked on stuff that has been panned by reviewers, multiple times. And even after I got over the initial impulse to take it personally, I was left with a feeling of impotent frustration. You’re never going to like this, we’re never going to get anything out of the reviews, and it’s never going to change, so just move on, pal. There’s literally nothing to be gained by complaining about it over and over again.

So I’ll mention one thing that I genuinely liked about the new movie The Monkey, written and directed by Osgood Perkins based on a short story from Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. There’s a scene where our young protagonist Hal is sitting in his bedroom, growing increasingly convinced that the toy monkey he found in his father’s belongings is somehow the cause of the horrible misfortune that’s started to befall his family and their acquaintances.

It’s a quiet scene, and when he looks up, there’s a sudden close-up shot of the monkey at the top of the dresser, with a jump-scare stinger of horror movie music as the frame is filled with the toy’s malevolent stare. Like the best moments in Longlegs, it’s horror movie artistry perfectly timed and executed, and it’s funny because it’s so discordant and such a non sequitur.

That’s also the last thing I liked about the movie²Okay, I did like the detail that Elijah Wood’s loathsome parenting guru character was wearing some kind of sweatshirt with a flesh-colored stripe in the center that bizarrely and needlessly accentuated his nipples, which I really, really disliked.

If anyone’s been looking forward to seeing the movie, but is on the fence, like I was, about how scary and gory it would be: I won’t (and shouldn’t!) dissuade you from seeing it. It’s not at all scary, and it quickly establishes itself as going for black comedy instead of unsettling horror, and it is not at all subtle. So there’s not even the drawn-out tension of the best moments in Final Destination, which it’s frequently compared to.

I’d also heard it compared to the Peter Jackson movie Dead Alive/Braindead, which is an over-the-top zombie movie.³If it doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the one where the priest shouts “I kick ass for the Lord!” and a pack of zombies are taken out by someone holding a power lawnmower like a shield. That worried me, because I have a fairly low tolerance for gore, and Dead Alive is one of the few movies that’s made me actually feel like I was going to throw up, even though it was clearly intended to be so over-the-top that it was funny. The Monkey is very bloody and gory, but it’s all done so cartoonishly that to me, at least, it neither registers as scary nor as nauseating. There’s one bloody death scene⁴With the kids’ mother. that seemed intended to be intense, but it’s not very gory. Most of the gore moments are done in quick succession as 5-10 second punchlines.

So that’s my review. Not my thing, but if an over-the-top horror comedy seems like your thing, and you’ve been wary because of word about the gore factor, be assured that it’ll probably be fine if you’ve been able to handle any recent horror comedy.

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  Also, tonight I’ve been reading some of my old posts where I just trashed a movie or TV show, and I invariably came across as a smug little shit.
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  Okay, I did like the detail that Elijah Wood’s loathsome parenting guru character was wearing some kind of sweatshirt with a flesh-colored stripe in the center that bizarrely and needlessly accentuated his nipples
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  If it doesn’t sound familiar, it’s the one where the priest shouts “I kick ass for the Lord!” and a pack of zombies are taken out by someone holding a power lawnmower like a shield.
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  With the kids’ mother.

I haven’t yet seen either of the first two Paddington movies, although they’re high on my to-watch list since they seem to be universally beloved. The beginning of Paddington in Peru, the third installment, didn’t just quickly get me up to speed. It welcomed me into the family with a huge smile and a hug.

The entire movie is filled with so much unrestrained joy, and I hadn’t appreciated how much I needed that until I found myself at the end, sobbing in the theater from sheer happiness.

Early in the movie, there’s a scene in which Paddington receives his British passport in the mail, and a semicircle of British character actors are all around to congratulate him and to give him a gift. It’s immediately obvious that they’re characters from the earlier films, returning for a brief cameo. It also seemed obvious to me that they were all delighted to be there, and they were eager to come back. Their smiles all radiated a sense of joy and kindness that was contagious. It was impossible not to smile back. I don’t know these characters’ names, but I already consider them my friends.

In the same batch of introductory scenes, we see Paddington’s host father Mr Brown at his job in London. He’s delivering a presentation to his new boss, who is explicitly described as American, and who’s played by Haley Atwell.¹Who I learned later is of dual British and American citizenship, so maybe her casting isn’t as odd as I’d originally thought. Again, I got the sense that she’d jumped at the chance to appear in the movie, doing an accent, just so she could be part of something so delightful.

And speaking of delightful, there’s also Olivia Colman playing a singing nun at a home for retired bears who’s not at all suspicious. She never seems to be trying to steal the scene, yet she always does, proving once again that she’s one of the best living actors. With just a subtle shift in facial expression, she can take the attention from an entire pack of CG bears doing physical comedy.

My overriding sense from the movie was that everyone involved was delighted to be there, and they’d all jumped at the opportunity to come back for the third movie. So I was surprised to learn afterwards that the director of the first two hadn’t returned, and more surprisingly, that the character of Mrs Brown had been recast from Sally Hawkins to Emily Mortimer. Surprising because that character is the emotional core of the movie, and Mortimer seemed as if she’d always been there. Considering how quickly I started thinking of Paddington as a real bear instead of a computer-generated creation, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised that good actors are good at acting.

It’s such a needlessly beautiful movie, as well, with animated sequences going into Mrs Brown’s paintings, a cross-section of the house illustrating her anxiety over becoming an empty nester, and later, a series of period flashbacks showing the adventures of Antonio Banderas’s ancestors (each played by Banderas). It struck me as such a joyful expression of artistry that it made me even more disappointed that this has become the outlier, and the standard for family movies is to throw as many Hollywood movie stars into the cast as possible to disguise the fact that they’re completely soulless. During the depressing parade of trailers before Paddington in Peru, I saw one for The Smurfs that felt as if an icy spectral hand had reached out of the screen and wrapped around my heart. Then the trailer for the Minecraft movie felt like the hand squeezing.

Whether Paddington in Peru adequately captured the magic of the previous movies, I can’t say. But it’s also irrelevant, because I was completely delighted by all of it. There’s such a sense of kindness throughout that might seem overly juvenile in its pure simplicity, but is in vanishingly short supply since so many of us seem to have forgotten it.

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  Who I learned later is of dual British and American citizenship, so maybe her casting isn’t as odd as I’d originally thought.

Before I say anything else about Longlegs, I should make it clear that it worked on me. I can tell because my watch was buzzing every 5-10 minutes, warning me that my heart rate had gotten too high. It is extremely creepy, right from the start.

But it’s also bonkers. Near nonsensical. By the last act, it had given in to its goofiness to such a degree that all of its creepiness had evaporated, leaving me to wonder what I really thought of it. (But I still turned the lights on when going upstairs).

There are two highlights: one is an extended sequence where the protagonist is inside her absurdly creepy home alone at night, and she gets her first solid clue to crack the case. There is a ton that doesn’t make sense about the scene. Does she commute every day from DC to a secluded log cabin in the woods? Why does she turn on the outside light and then go out to the dark portion of the house? Why does she immediately go outside? How did an intruder get past her and into her house?

But it still all works in the moment, because it’s filmed not just like a classic suspense movie scene, but like a super-heightened version of one. The house itself is both dark and exposed. The protagonist is small in the frame in a tiny island of light, surrounded by dim spaces around the room where an assailant could suddenly appear, an open doorway to the next room that a killer could jump out of, huge windows just waiting for a face to appear in a jump scare.

The other highlight is the opening scene, a bizarre encounter between a young girl and a stranger, in a small, ViewMaster-like frame that the movie used for flashbacks. Everything is framed weird. The stranger’s car doesn’t get close enough to the house, and the camera never gets close enough for us to see what’s inside it. The girl is completely expressionless, and her mood and even motivation is impenetrable. She looks at trees around the yard, each accompanied with a discordant jump-scare stinger. The stranger is cut off by the top of the frame, until just before you can see their face, which cuts immediately to the opening titles.

It’s all so eerie and unsettling, and it sets the mood perfectly. Why is any of it scary? We don’t know, really, but it must be, because the movie is telling us that it is!

And ultimately, that’s the best thing about Longlegs. I can’t really say that I liked it very much, but I absolutely respect the style of it. It commits so hard to being creepy that you have to appreciate how much it works, even while you’re completely aware that what you’re watching is absurd.

There are a few sequences in the middle that seem deliberately arranged for sustained weirdness, and specifically to let one of the actors show just how fully they’ve committed to the movie. Kiernan Shipka as a girl still under the thrall of some kind of evil. Nicolas Cage as Longlegs (not a spoiler!) freaking out in his car. And it starts with the head of a psychiatric home who is, for some reason, over-the-top flamboyant and careless about the condition of the patients.

After that barrage of performances, I decided that Longlegs is something that I haven’t exactly seen before: a kind of camp horror. Not a horror comedy, not something over-the-top in its gore (it’s actually surprisingly restrained on that front, in fact), not a lazy slasher, and not a parody that’s winking at the audience. Instead, it’s as if they took every aspect that makes Silence of the Lambs work and turned it all up to full volume, while refusing to take any of it that seriously.

Instead of calling it style over substance, maybe it’s more accurate to say that the style is the substance. In any case, I think it’s bullshit, but that doesn’t keep it from being gloriously creepy bullshit.

I only intended to watch a couple minutes of Hundreds of Beavers last night, just long enough to verify that it was included with Amazon Prime video, but I was caught up in it pretty quickly, and I ended up watching the whole thing.

It was released in 2022, and I’ve been hearing people raving about it for the past two years. And it seems very much like something that would’ve blown my mind had I seen it without knowing anything about it. After the opening song, it’s filmed like a silent movie, in grainy monochrome, with a handful of actors and a ton of people in animal suits acting out all the parts of a hyper-violent, adult-oriented Looney Tunes cartoon.

It’s extremely clever, alternating between absurd slapstick, lowbrow humor, and ingenious gags with a rhythm that keeps you engaged far longer than you might expect. (Hence my “accidentally” watching the whole thing!) There were more laugh-out-loud moments than just about anything I’ve seen recently. One of my favorite gags was our protagonist Jean Kayak unsuccessfully using lady rabbit snowmen posed removing their bras, in an attempt to attract a couple of rabbits that turn out to be gay. Another had Kayak joining an experienced trapper with a team of sled dogs; when they camped every night, the humans would lie by the fire while the dogs would sit around a table and play poker. The dogs were picked off one by one, until the only survivor would stand at the table and play solitaire.

But possibly because I went into the movie knowing what to expect, I ended up liking it but not entirely loving it. I love that the filmmakers approached it as a real work of art, and they committed to making something that’s completely unlike anything else being made today. And I love that it felt as if they’d used everything available to get the look exactly right — cartoon drawings, video effects, puppets, overlays, some computer-generated imagery, whatever it takes. The end result is unique and completely true to itself, and also pretty damn corny.

One thing I like a lot is that as the movie progresses, it starts to embrace the absurdity of stuff that it’s spent the last hour asking you to accept as if it weren’t absurd. Throughout the movie, most of the animals are played by humans in animal suits, and as far as the movie’s concerned, they’re animals. Even though they’re walking around on two legs and doing human type stuff. When Jean Kayak manages to kill a raccoon and take it to the furrier, we see the autopsy, which includes pulling out lots of felt intestines and a heart-shaped pillow.

Later, when we meet a Native American trapper, we see that his horse is two men in an even cheaper horse suit, with the face of one of the men clearly visible underneath the misshapen head. A while after that, we see the Native American try to mount his horse, which clearly involves clumsily climbing onto a man’s back and trying to hold on.

By the end of the movie, Jean Kayak is fighting dozens of beavers, and he’s literally knocking the stuffing out of each one. A head will fly off, sending bits of padding and styrofoam peanuts flying everywhere. During one brawl, he picks up the body of one of the beavers and spins it around the room, and it’s clearly just his twirling around an empty suit. Then the beavers retaliate by throwing him into a wall, and it’s clearly an empty human suit.

There’s a rigid set of symbols in the movie, one that it establishes over time. When a character does this, that happens. When we see this shape, we know it means that. It builds up a language of gags over time, as (for instance) we learn what bait attracts which animal, which animals prey on which other ones, etc. So it’s neat that towards the end of the movie, it starts to deconstruct the language it’s been constructing this whole time. The symbols start to fold in on themselves. This guy in a beaver suit represents a beaver, and he is a beaver, except now he’s also a guy in a beaver suit. The Treachery of Furries, maybe?

I don’t think any of that was in the mindset of the filmmakers, or at least I hope it wasn’t. I just think that it’s an interesting side effect that happens when you so completely commit to the bit. From watching Hundreds of Beavers, I learned that the filmmakers have an earlier movie called Lake Michigan Monster that’s also on Prime Video. From the trailer, it seems to be almost as committed to being visually distinctive, and every bit as committed to being unapologetically silly.