Three New Movies! Would I Have Changed Them?

7 02 2023

Infinity Pool examines of the impact that wealth has on the psyche, and it doesn’t bring any new revelations. The acting is great. Direction is competent. There are two montage segments that needed shortening. Somehow it makes sex with Mia Goth boring. The ending leaves you bleak and gutted.

Writer/director Branden Cronenberg made Antiviral, which had a great premise with a confusing crime plot, and Possessor which is frigging great all the way around. Both deal with the impact technology has on identity and social responsibility. It seems Cronenberg breaks new ground here, but doesn’t provide a new path.

Infinity Pool takes wealthy tourists in a fictitious Balkan nation, allows them to bribe their way out of murders while specially created clones take their punishment. Obviously, it plays more as parable than plausible. Unlike his other movies, Infinity Pool adds nothing to their examinations. What would I change?

“Infinity Pool” would make a neat premise for the next Marvel Deadpool movie. Wade gets a blood transfusion from Lobo. Whenever Wade fights, he bleeds new Deadpools, all of them hostile wiseasses. He would enlist incredibly dangerous, absurd characters to try to wrangle the clones. Eventually, he gets help from someone telepathic to control them, then does some genetic handwavium to reset his blood, and no one learns anything. Damn thing writes itself.

Seriously…. What would I have done? First: the movie leaves you angry at economic disparity and despairing over human corruption. It keeps the story tight and close, over a month’s time following the downfall of a single protagonist. Cool. It really hits its marks there. I’d leave its intentions alone.

The problem is that “clones” are a well-worn idea. Could the author pay to create a hitman and kill the other tourists? He lacks the skills. Could the protagonist to dialogue with himself and reason his way out of his despair? He could discover, no, he could not. This could comment on “self-help” movements, but I believe that Michael Keaton movie did that.

As it stands, I lack the imagination to deepen Cronenberg’s treatment of his premise. A mini-series might allow that, but then it may remind one of the Westworld series.

SKINAMARINK

Skinamarink is bleak, too. Two children awake in the middle of the night to find their parents missing and the doors, windows, and toilet gone. It takes its premise from nightmares and should be viewed not as a movie with a plot arc, but a rendering of a child’s subconscious. When you were a toddler, remember how weird your house was in the middle of the night? How little control you had over anything? How you could just experience the moment, no matter how bewildering the moment?

So an hour and a half of that. The space of the ranch home is almost liminal and the very grain of the darkness is its own character, changing shape and pattern.

In its own way, Skinamarink makes its own statement of love versus existence. The sister’s mutilation is a jump scare. The mom vanishing before our eyes is a slow, gut-dropping shock. But when asked to join them, the boy says “no”. Because leaving known existence will probably be worse.

Knock On The Cabin

This movie examines love versus existence directly. A family must murder one of its members or the world ends. Shaymalan sets his intrinsic Speilberginess to fight his intrinsic Hitchcockiness. If you’ve watched his movies, you already know which wins.

The directing starts out labored (the extreme close ups scream “Look at the tension I’ma buildin'”), but recedes well enough.

Does anyone ask “Hey visionaries? After I’m dead, what happens next?” No, no one does.

What we have here is a dearth of style. The Hollywood releases are elevator pitches, not just plot driven but plot-exclusive. They have no space for mood. I would like to see Skinamarink handle disparity or identity, or more deeply, the value of love over existence.





Movie Reviews: “heck” and “History of the Occult”

27 12 2022

You may have heard of “Skinamarink”, the new atmospheric horror coming out January 13. Or maybe you haven’t. It was shot in the director’s childhood home on some tiny budget, but it seems ready to redefine “atmospheric dread” in cinema. Two boys wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing and that their house has no doors or windows. Here is the trailer and man its got a mood:

It’s like a ’70s cheap horror directed by Lynch.

Man-oh-Manischewitz I am primed for this! I am even more primed for it for having watched “heck”. The director Kyle Edward Ball created a short movie to test his ideas and even this short movie is a dunk in cold seawater. This is “heck”:

There are no jump scares, no soundtrack, no worn-out tropes. Just a kid not understanding how badly things have gone wrong.

I got a free trial for Screambox. for a movie I’ve been wanting to see for a couple of months. This was the most popular horror movie in South America back in 2020, “History of the Occult”.

Art creates, the artist changes, the world , and what DID Karl Rove mean by “we make our own reality?”

In a retro Buenos Aires, reporters for a newsmagazine try to suss out a cabal of industrialists who are…what? In cahoots…doing something black magic? Their live interview show goes off the air at midnight, and each minute the stakes raise from the political to the Weird.

The movie takes ALL the ’80s Satanic Panic elements, secret societies, missing children, mystical corporate logos, all of it, mixes it with today’s strongman politics. It gives new context to Argentina’s “Disappeared Ones.” It even makes the trite phrase “The End of History” chilling. It has a few dangling threads. If one was to take a second, one could guess where the plot is going, but the plot is so quick everything hits in a wonderful surprise. There are a couple of pleasant turns against cliche. No gore. Just plain creepy.

I’ve been lacking inspiration lately, but these have helped me see that Yes, I like thought-provoking and creepy.





“NOPE” Review and What Would I Would Have Done

22 07 2022

SPOILERS!

Peele’s movie has two stories brought together to make a theme. He swung for the fences with both stories, but having them together messed up the momentum of both. Their tension did explain the motives of characters in both (OJ explains Jean Jacket’s asserting its dominance, matching the chimp’s attack; while Jupe’s awe at bumping fists with the gore-covered chimp explaining Jupe’s later fascination with Jean Jacket). Peele used Tarrantino cinema style to create this Hollywood story, using graphic placards, time jumps, sudden slams to black, but the spine of this movie was weak. There was no impending doom like in “Inglorious Basterds” or “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”. The doom created impetus to keep watching while any digression was welcome relief to the presumed fates, those fates of course being twisted into the unexpected.

The cinematographer Antlers puzzled me. He was a foil for the protagonists, but his spiritual rumination seemed an attempt to add both humor and gravitas. Perhaps he was meant to harken to an earlier age, in that the video tech maybe represented the entertainment of today, and Antlers the passions of yesterday.

Maybe get rid of the video tech and have Antlers be more contemporary. One less character to juggle. Still have the surveillance gear and Antlers reverting to his antique film camera in the third act.

Let’s consider that Jupe’s encounter with the murderous chimp led to his wrong-headed trust of Jean Jacket. Let’s consider that Jupe had already brought horses for Jean Jacket to eat over several nights. Let’s consider that the second scene Jean Jacket has fed on screaming humans and their detritus plummeted onto the ranch to kill O Sr.

Maybe Jupe could have enticed some unhoused people to where Jean Jacket could eat? Jupe could have watched the chimp being trained and believed the monster could be tamed. So, finally, in the third act, Jupe could lose control and Jean Jacket could still eat everyone, and that event could have more impact.

Because this movie is filled with a lot of action, but aside from Brother and Sisters’ story arc of fidelity, there isn’t much here to care about. Forty people are eaten, as are a family of five, two additional supporting characters, several horses, and unseen other people, and frankly not much is made of it.





Ari Aster Movie FREE On YouTube, Plus Other Horror Movies

20 01 2022

It’s worth just searching stuff on YouTube to see what shows up. Like the first movie made by Ari Aster of Midsommar and Hereditary.

The Strange Things About The Johnsons was released to festivals in 2010. It introduces Aster’s recurring themes of betrayal of the family contract, denial, and society as oppressor. Unlike his later movies, his first film reveals the horror early on, and makes the plot about how the Johnson family copes with that horror.

Come And See often appears in critics’ lists for “Best Movie Of All Time”. After the German invasion of Russia, partisans recruit a teen boy. The boy finds starvation, random death, and finally an einsatzgruppen. The teen survives, but is shattered and still has the rebuilding of his country ahead. The teen is played by an actor with no previous experience, which just adds to the rawness of his emotions. Trauma therapists were on set to help all the actors. Not as intense as say Saving Private Ryan, but ten times more believable. As above, YouTube won’t let me link directly.

Wisconsin Death Trip is not as horrid as the title implies. Imagine Ken Cook documenting the rough decade endured by a rural Wisconsin county. An influx of immigrants copes with land fraud, brutal winters, an overwhelmed health care system, disease, and crime. No, it is not contemporary; this happened in the late 1800s. The stories are respectful. They remind that our current woes are truly quite old, and that our ancestors were just like us, people just trying to get through. Come for the scandals, stay for Mary the Wisconsin Window Smasher.

I don’t get why YouTub is restricting this link. You see worse on PBS, seriously.

I don’t know why I’m watching things like this. I used to write humor. I used to perform sketch and improv comedy. Comedy on TV doesn’t make me laugh anymore. There isn’t anything worth binge-watching. Improv based movies just annoy me at the moment. It’s expected that nothing will compare with what I liked as a teen, but even Monty Python is not aging well. Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are still my faves. Does anyone do smart comedy with good sight gags anymore?





Good Movies Made By People At Home

8 05 2021

These movies have different comedy to horror ratios. If you can handle “X-Files” episodes, you’ll like these movies.

Murder Death Koreatown: This movie leans hard into its Found Footage premise in that there are no production credits at the end, nor any credits in its IMDB page. What looks like a True Crime story turns to Weird Horror.

The protagonist has been laid off from his job and is producing little video projects on his phone instead of looking for work. The townhouse he shares with his sullen girlfriend has an access street behind. One night there are gunshots. A neighbor shot her husband and instead of running for help, he staggers to die near a set of garages. Our protagonist is puzzled and records his investigation. The investigation does a neat trick in riding the edge between the protag’s dissolution and a realization of a Weird Horror. The filmmaker used elements of his neighborhood: bodegas, graffiti, anonymous storefront businesses, street corner preachers, to hint at otherworldly connections.

On Amazon Prime

Leaving DC: Why don’t White people leave their haunted house? “Leaving DC” comes up with an off-beat, elegant answer.

The protagonist is a tech engineer moving from Washington DC to a rather nice house in the West Virginia mountains. Ghostly stuff happens, etc. The man’s money is tied up in the house, but that reason to stay always came up short in other movies. Why doesn’t he leave? *Because he is chronically compulsive*. We first meet him in DC with his OCD Therapy group. We watch him move into his spotless house devoid of personal affects. We watch him crater his relations with a visitor, who then leaves because his house creeps her out. Does he leave? No, he will not be bullied. He will understand what is happening by buying cameras and microphones and scrutinizing the late night flute playing, the apparitions, and the Mysterious Signs In The Woods. Then he will formulate a detailed action plan. The end is inevitable, but like I said, elegant.

On Amazon Prime.

Creep: Movies with tiny casts work if the cast is compelling. This movie’s co-writer and lead Mark Duplass radiates charm.

When his character hires a videographer to come to his remote house and record sentimental messages, you pay attention. Mark’s character reveals traumas, only to admit he lied. He takes menacing objects and gives them absurd histories. The videographer is pulled between getting paid, politeness, and fleeing Mark’s increasing menace.

On Netflix along with its sequel Creep 2.

I guess I like these stories because they are efficient. As writers we are taught to write characters who are flawed with a recent tragedy highlighting those flaws. (Note that Duplass subverts this expectation by implying then denying any tragic backstory, which frustrates and adds to the unease). Writers are told to keep the motivations simple and relatable. Last, stories are to be economic in word and action.

A common criticism in the Amazon comments is that these movies lack strong endings. That makes sense, because none of the characters are given resources for a satisfying character transformation. “Murder Death Koreatown” and “Leaving DC” remains committed to their goals to their unfortunate endings. The time constraints keep the writer from introducing a secondary plot to give impetus to transformation. Changing their minds and fleeing would also bump up their budgets. That said, the videographer in “Creep” does flee and his arc is the more satisfying for it.

Or maybe I’m wrong. The movie “The VVitch” was shot with a cabin, a farm, and a bonfire. The parents each had a heartbreaking transformation. Certainly that movie was great and had few resources, but then it comes back around to character portrayals.

Strong character voice and motive. I’d been fixated on compelling images, but I need to work on characters more.

PS: Happy Birthday, Me!





Stuck with Your Story? Why You Keep Hitting Walls and Dead Ends in Your Writing — A Writer’s Path

27 08 2018

by Lauren Sapala For the longest time I had major problems doing revisions on my writing. It seemed so easy for everyone else. Why was it so hard for me? Of course, I also had trouble writing. I hardly ever experienced that state of “effortless flow” everyone talked about, in which the words […]

via Stuck with Your Story? Why You Keep Hitting Walls and Dead Ends in Your Writing — A Writer’s Path





Deadpool Is More Edgy Than You Think. Your Writing May Benefit….

24 05 2018

 

 

 

deadpool

Does Deadpool want to be transgressive? Or does Deadpool just want a white picket fence with a beautiful breeder wife and family? Or does he want to do whatever’s funny at the time?

This article from The Guardian wonders.

Contrast it with this article from Film Hulk about creating emotional resonance.

Can Deadpool have depth? Can any horror comedy? For such questions, I make comparisons to “Shawn of the Dead”. Surely Shawn of the Dead was evocative and memorable.

But had Shawn of the Dead wanted to be a franchise like Deadpool, I could see only two options. It would have to put off Shawn’s maturing, which would have made Shawn a glib punchline like Ash from “Evil Dead”. Or each sequel would have to be a new life lesson where the character is changed, which could reduce DP’s zany energy to “The Addams Family”.

All of the movies are horror comedy, sure. But I worry that DP is going to burn out quickly cycling through cartoon shocks, like ED did. I like that DP tests boundaries, not only in breaking the fourth wall and its casual inclusiveness. What other superhero is enthusiastic about having children? What other hero fails with such spectacular realism? What hero isn’t a millionaire living in a mansion?

The DC Universe is gritty. Do you care about it? I have a hard time caring, because the heroes seem to care about so little. Is DCU’s grittiness realistic? Not when Superman destroys whole cities without carnage or remorse.

The only thing DP lacked was Negasonic and Yukio bickering. You know, the thing we never see superhero couples doing, especially teens:

Negasonic: “Just swing the chain.” Yukio: “But you like my Gogo Yubari kick!.” N: “We don’t have time!” Y: “You took like a year to power up!”

The Film Crit Hulk and Deadpool have given me a lot to think about.

  1. Back story creates empathy.
  2. Relationships must evolve.
  3. “Grittiness” is not the same as “realism”.

 





First Draft Done, What I Have Learned, and Publishing Coaches

30 11 2017

This will be  my usual post about writing, terse yet rambling, with some sundry crits at the end of movies and writers who have caught my brain.

doggo

So! Finished with draft one of Lampreyhead at 25K words. The world building was fun. The story is set in contemporary Philadelphia because I know the Northeast US well. Religious aspects appeared, were inevitable really, which added a whole new layer to the characters and conflict. The jokes are good. There may be one darling, but we’ll see if it survives (the “moist” joke I posted on my FB three weeks ago.)

How did I write the draft and what did I learn? I did a bit of an outline, but it was way too spare. I discovered a good way to outline a few weeks ago, but I also discovered that very few writers enjoy writing outlines or synopsis.  New method for outlining is like the Snowflake Method of writing novels: one line summary of each chapter, then add three lines to each summary, then add three more lines to each of those lines, etc. I’ll try to do that next time.

So, with what I thought was an adequate outline, I used Rachel Aaron’s method of speed writing, so I wrote the fun scenes first and backfilled the remainder of the plot. Writing the filler was not only a bit tedious, it exposed the gaps in my outline. Writing the draft took longer than it needed to, but this is how we learn.

I had a tough time getting a grip on the protagonist. I had behavior for scenes, I had previous short stories, but I didn’t have a deeper character profile that could support this work.

I kept his nerdiness and built around that. I considered that LH was 700 years old and that he would be a little bored. Being made Evil, he knew there is a God because religious items caused injury. However, I had him go 700 years without knowing who made him or why. His problem became the reverse of Mortality: is there a Satan to justify his existence?

Supporting characters fulfilled their functions, but they need more depth in the second draft. He meets the werewolf who will be a recurring character in the series, but the were doesn’t have a lot of agency. The Mortal in this story (needed to help bring out the supernatural world-building) became a sophisticated businesswoman thrill-seeker; can I pull off this complicated character?

I was hoping to market this series as “Erotic Paranormal”, but I have no experience in writing erotica. Besides, the plot only has one valid erotic scene. I’m now looking at the humor market.

I have to finish the second draft for my writers group, that deadline being Sunday.

I learned about Publishing Coaches on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast. My research has provided a couple of names and I will be contacting them tonight.

Recent discoveries: the movie “The Devil’s Candy” is a pleasant throwback haunted house horror that’s well made. “The Midnight Meat Train” squandered a great production on a weak Clive Barker story. “Cult of Chucky” still camps it up, but keep an eye on Fionna Dorrif, because she is excellent. Belgian horror “Raw” takes your unsettling French moodiness to a college for veteranarians, but worry not, the animals are safe from the cannibal sisters. “Demonic” takes ghost hunters to a haunted house, but even Maria Bello can’t save us from a flat ending.

 





Learn Writing From Wince Inducing Comments About “Blade Runner 2045”

9 10 2017

There is nothing wrong with loving without qualification. It opens your heart, lowers blood pressure, extends endocrine life, whatever. As I seem to be a wet blanket with in rare exceptions, I rarely have that rosy glow of fan-a-vision to distract me from a media’s problems.

How do we know that rosy glow of fan-a-vision is blocking our critical eye? Have you used these phrases?

“It was fantastic for the first two parts, but fell apart in the last third.” The last third of anything falls apart because of the first two parts. A resolution falls apart because the conflict had flaws. In Blade Runner 2045 (BR2045), the world was so complicated it stumbled over itself.

SPOILERS ON

Let’s work backwards: The MacGuffin chick was going to procreate and lead the Replicants…with a immune system that makes skin-to-skin contact impossible. Deckard’s body wasn’t going to be found…in a world where a drone can locate a box buried 30 feet. Quasi-Rachel had the wrong color eyes…after Jared Leto could have double-checked her DNA off the original’s skull. There’s more, but I’m bored.

SPOILERS OFF

You’ll note that none of these details had direct bearing on the plot. The immunity, the location technology, the skull, were all details which could have easily been fixed. But the plot was so damn complicated, the details tripped up the cohesion. One can overlook a few sparkles, but in a 2 hour 40 minute film, the sparkles become a haze.

“The artistry of (actor/director/whoever artist) stood out.” In a work of art, nothing is supposed to be a darling. The previous comment was applied to Jared Leto’s villain. Jared Leto did a great creepy job. He was a great creep. He had to be exceedingly, noticably creepy, because the script gave him absolutely nothing else to do but sit and be creepy. In the first BR, the genius scientist played chess, day-traded stocks, explained genetics, and was understated in creepiness. (In real life, company CEOs are dynamic and involved with their corporation.) Here in BR2045, Jared Leto had nothing to do except two acts of ewww, forcing the director to have Leto overact. Again, a weak script.

“Such a beautiful movie!” How much money was spent on this movie? It better damn well be pretty. Again, dazzling doesn’t help a weak script.

You know how you’re not supposed to let your darlings in, no matter how pretty? The Rachel’s Eye scene could have been a flat-out rejection of artifice instead of eye-color. The Zen CEO could have been deleted and the heavy lifting given to his henchwoman. McGuffin Chick could have been healthy.

All of those fixes would have smoothed out the wrinkles in the plot. But man, their scenes sure were pretty, SFX laden set-pieces.

I’m guessing this movie will fare better than Prometheus in movie history. But not by much.

Use darlings sparingly and avoid screwed up plots.

 

 

 

 

 





Horror Movies With Dark Endings

29 04 2017

What separates a good horror movie from a great one is the ending. Some horror films just don’t know when or how to end. But when a horror flick gets the ending right, then you have something really special. And by “right,” I mean dark and/or disturbing. But be warned: … Read More… The post…

via Horror Movies with Dark F*ucking Endings!! — AnythingHorror.com








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