MYASS in the meantime: 2018 in movies

Brief reviews of movies you already should've seen, and ones I have. End of year 2018.

TOP FIVE:
1.) Pastoral, to Die in the Country
2.) Nashville
3.) Annihilation
4.) In Bruges
5.) Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler and Get Carter were tied for 5th, then I remembered the music from Nightcrawler.

BOTTOM FIVE :
64.) AVP: Requiem
63.) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
62.) Popeye
61.) Band of Outsiders
60.) City Hunter
If we were talking pure objective quality, Exorcist II and God's Not Dead would be here, but I'd rather rewatch them than any of these five.

STATISTICS
Total - 64
Writer/director ("auteur") movies - 27
Documentaries - 3 and 3/8 (of Ken Burns' Vietnam)
Most frequent director - Boorman/Altman/Herzog (4)
Most frequent writer - Werner Herzog (4)
Most frequent franchise - A Nightmare on Elm Street (3)
2018: 4
2010s: 10
2000s: 14
1990s: 10
1980s: 16
1970s: 9
1960s: 2
1950s: 3

SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
"Much more even and likable than Man of Steel, with some fantastic saving-people (rather than punching-stuff) superheroics and a real mix of great, terrible, and fan-filmy casting"

CITY HUNTER (1993)
Jing Wong / Tsukasa Hojo, Jing Wong
"Too weird to miss, it goes more than all-in on being a live action manga, even if it ends up wasting Chan. Severely not funny for a comedy (terrible editing for punchlines), but whatever."

TAMMY AND THE T-REX (1994)
Stewart Rafill / Gary Brockette, Stewart Rafill
"Though hard to say whether this is a moronic children's comedy with way too much violence and sex or the dumbest erotic revenge thriller ever made, it's actually funny when it's supposed to be, even if largely by virtue of insanity."

GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS (2018)
Koubun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Builds a surprisingly robust world without much direct labor, quietly lacing in concepts forged in the '60s series while feeling entirely new, with a great primal setting for what limited monster action we get"

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
Terence Fisher / Jimmy Sangster
"Very easily the best version of Dracula I know, still just kinda alright. Transfixing performances from Lee and Cushing, but neither man is present frequently enough, leaving everything else to wither under overwrought production design and violence more melodramatic than scary"

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
Val Guest / Richard Landau, Val Guest
"Between an unusually outre space invader and a magnificently suspenseful opening scene, this easily coasts past some awful performances to instill genuine terror in rote genre material"

FEAST (2005)
John Gulager / Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton
"For direct-to-video horror, it has a nice grungy aesthetic and solid natural passing-of-day lighting, the practical effects are great, and the cast makes a lot out of underwritten dialogue (Henry Rollins). It also has exactly as formulaic an Alien structure as one would expect, something that goes a long way in counteracting any puckishness in the choice of deaths. Not to mention it wasn't direct-to-video."

THE ROOM (2003)
Tommy Wiseau / Tommy Wiseau
"tbh not that funny, the highlight reels are all you need"

DEADPOOL (2016)
Tim Miller / Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
"The gore's good, the humor's pleasant if not laugh-out-loud, and the characters are better developed than expected. Solid fanservice too - I'd forgotten all about Blind Al and Weasel and both get plenty of screen-time. The plot doesn't diverge too far (or at all really) from superhero boilerplate, but by god is it refreshing to have a purely personal hero/villain conflict and stakes as low as one human life."

THE DARK CRYSTAL (1984)
Jim Henson, Frank Oz / David Odell
"If the central characters weren't so off-putting and unemotive, maybe the standard fantasy beats would have some identity, but the whole thing feels in such a hurry to get through the formula that there's nothing else to attach to, and it winds up boring. The dialogue is awful too, though we learned on this viewing that's because the film was originally intended to include no intelligible language!"

ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland 
"If cancer's this fun, sign me up for chemo!"

IN BRUGES (2008)
Martin McDonagh / Martin McDonagh
"A fairy tale of conflicting moral systems, men who can't stop being boys, and calmly precise spiritual metaphor"

ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"The characters make a lot more sense the second time, and the declamatory dialogue cliches play as charmingly inept rather than hackily terrible"

PONYO (2008)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Inventive action, beautiful animation, lovable characters, and a sleepily comfortable incarnation of childhood nostalgia. At the same time, a simple, nice, and pleasant story with a deeply insufficient final third that makes the experience feel largely without substance or pathos"

BLACK PANTHER (2017)
Ryan Coogler / Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
"High fantasy moreso than superhero story, just political enough to prove it isn't stupid, and the best cast of characters in any Marvel movie short of Guardians OTG. Definitely bloated with at least an unnecessary aerial battle, but makes the most out of the requisite car chase as penance."

DUNE (1984)
David Lynch / David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
"David Lynch? More like David Crynch, because this story is so violently smashed into a 2-hour filmic suitcase as to completely lack even the slightest hint of momentum; the classic case of the film that is so busy that it can't see farther than one scene ahead, and never really starts the plot as a result."

JURASSIC PARK (1993)
Steve Spielberg / Michael Crichton, David Koepp
"The 'bergian chase scene is effective, but how many of them do we need in a single movie? And the hand-holding endless tension and sentimentality ratcheting is annoying beyond belief - fine stuff for kids' film, but I don't know how adults don't go nuts slogging through. Fun fact: the famed T-Rex Jeep attack scene is about 8 minutes long, starting from where the T-Rex is first heard approaching. The T-Rex doesn't appear for 4 minutes, and then after a minute disappears for another two."

EL MARIACHI (1993)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Sing us a song, you're the mariachi man"

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
Jonathan Demme / Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
"The best episode of X-Files never recorded, with a dash of Cape Fear here and a dash of Friday the 13th there, laced with some great face-to-face close-ups and stitched together with noticeably great editing."

BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)
Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Luc Godard
"This is probably pretentious meta-schlock made for film enthusiasts who can point out all the weird techniques and rule-breaks Goddy uses along the way, and I don't really object to that any more than to horror schlock or romance schlock - the odd thing is, when it's at its most self-congratulatory and confrontational is when it's most entertaining, like a minute of silence imposed on the audience or the awkward layout of the credits that turns out to be setup for a joke where the director is credited as "Jean-Luc Cinema Godard". I audibly chuckled at the student in English class whose only purpose is to ask the camera "How do you say 'a big, one million dollar film'?" But, like, it's also terribly boring, with barely glimpsed superficial characters whose petulant personality shifts play like more schoolyard antics rather than recognizably human intricacies, and drama that isn't given even the faintest air of gravity, with characters playing dead (or actors playing dead????, I'm probably supposed to ask), nighttime scenes shot during the day, and an escape to South America that very obviously terminates 12 inches left of frame. Is it all worth it for those few excitingly surreal moments, like the trashy plot of a Godzilla movie is worth it for the few minutes of monster rampage? Am I missing literally everything? Maybe at 29 I'm just too old for this shit."

DESPERADO (1995)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Like El Mariachi, great for its means, but not particularly high impact. Heavily leaning into the cartoonish / spaghetti western side of things now. Very fun and inventive action scenes, but hurts that the movie starts at its peak and slides down (the bar) from there."

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
Billy Wilder / Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
"A pair of titanic, one-of-a-kind character portraits paired with a pair of rote, generic ones, almost more Gothic than noir"

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Delightfully precise and frothy, yet hang on I'm not using the word 'frothy'. Is this the origin of critic-speak? Artificial brevity? Even 'delightful' is pretty bad. I gotta stop writing things that I would never say in real life. Anyway, GBH is sorta like an imaginary period piece, a salute to the passing of an era that didn't really exist, one glorified but not exactly praised. It's really the perfect use for Anderson's dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic!"

PORCO ROSSO (1992)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Pigzapoppin'"

NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki, based on the manga by Hayao Miyazaki
"As much as I enjoy Miyazaki's typical fairy tales, his fantasy epics seem more like the point, channeling the flood of dreamlike detail into boundless vessels far exceeding the scale of a motion picture, too visionary to qualify as anything as prosaic as 'world-building'"

ED WOOD (1994)
Tim Burton / Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
"Good enough to warrant a review!"

DOCTOR WHO vs. GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1974)
David Maloney / Terry Nation
"It's definitely a BBC genre show from the 1970s, and exactly as exciting as that sounds, but there are just enough unique ideas and suspenseful situations to keep your attention, with Davros naturally transcending genre expectations and Tom Baker getting enough lines to remember he exists"

ED WOOD (1994)
Same
"Greg said he's not impressed, and after I was so nice to 'Genesis of the Daleks' too"

X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, David Hayter
"Pretty clunky in the script department and not focused on any character well enough to feel like more than a TV episode, still does good service to the X-Men notion of gods among men, and even half-decent for riffing on The Once and Future King (if you know the plot of that novel. Just like the Phoenix stuff is decent if you know the plot of that comic arc - if you don't, it's like whaaat?)"

GORILLA INTERRUPTED (2003)
Mike Stoklasa / Mike Stoklasa with additional material by Garrett Gilchrist
"Going into this, I was perfectly aware - based on 1.) the remarks of the filmmakers and 2.) every other RLM film trailer or short - that it would be absolutely terrible. I also knew from those two sources that it came about very similarly to the movies my friends and I would make as teenagers, right around the same early '00s final pre-Youtube era, and that therefore it would make for a very potent injection of nostalgia. And it did. It even had a single, solitary funny joke! Perhaps the best and nostalgiaiest bit was That One Friend who obviously no one likes, no one even pretends to like, but you let them hang around because they have the camera or their parents don't care if you trash their house or whatever it may be in this case."

NIGHTCRAWLER (2014)
Dan Gilroy / Dan Gilroy
"A human experimentation project moreso than a character study, squeezing a weird near-psychopath to see what comes out. Simultaneously a black comedy exploring the evil side of Pursuit of Happyness-type rags-to-riches fables, though often more unpleasant (in a groaning, sickening way) than funny because of its hate-boner for newsmedia."

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Lot of rewatches this year. Sharing is daring."

Here begins the oft-interrupted Summer Directrospective, in which we take a decades spanning summary tour of the works of John Boorman, Robert Altman, and Werner Herzog.

DELIVERANCE (1972)
John Boorman / James Dickey
"Like Sorcerer, it's tempting to describe this as just a really great thriller, but it's also working with the same kind of primal self-destructive masculine energy that whatever"

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
Renny Harlin / Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat
"Well, things aren't completely terrible yet. A couple of the kills are kinda okay, not yet dragged into the elaborate 80-minute set pieces of the next couple movies, but the Dream Magic is now officially hardcore stupid, and the 'daring' decision to copy Psycho's mid-film twist completely destroys the story's momentum and ability to function"

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
Stephen Hopkins / Leslie Bohem
"Just the fucking worst: screechingly loud, purely redundant, moronic in concept and execution, overplotted, and nothing at all like a horror film"

FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
Rachel Talalay / Michael DeLuca
"Like The Final Friday, the '90s hurt this series bad, dragging it down to television production levels in script, scope, cast (featuring cameos by Tom Arnold and Roseanne!), and all but a handful of effects shots. Still, it's funny enough here and there to easily surpass part 5."

GODZILLA: CITY ON THE EDGE OF BATTLE (2018)
Kobun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Like Part 1, the ideas at play here are great, passing far beyond what we could ever expect to see in a live-action Godzilla (such as the bizarrely evil city of the title). Unfortunately, once this stuff is all up on screen, it fails to DO anything, feeling simultaneously uninspired and cheap, with Godzilla barely showing up on screen and M. City mostly just a bunch of gun emplacements. The third movie will have a lot to make up on the action front to compensate, and given that we know the always-tedious Mothra will be involved, it's hard to be excited at this point."

FATA MORGANA (1971)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"It is mostly just a bunch of landscape photography, but carefully selected and edited not to suggest an actual geographic space"

THE ROCKETEER (1991)
Joe Johnston / Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
"A pretty fun movie, though somewhat ironically the airplane stunt sequences are much more engaging than the unfortunately dated rocket-pack effects. Jennifer Connolly is still the hottest actress ever, so there's that."

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
Robert Altman / Robert Altman, Brian McKay
"A genre-typical story that's all weird in the details, from cases of anti-farcical mistaken identity to whores with hearts of drug addiction, despondent if not entirely hopeless, all shot with stand-up-and-notice cinematography shifting from smudgy realism to bleary-eyed nostalgia to neon lust. Not really ruined by the presence of Leonard Cohen songs, but harmed in some fairly irrevocable ways."

EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)
John Boorman / William Goodhart (rewrites by John Boorman & Rospo Pallenberg)
"The weirdest thing here isn't that the movie is patently insane or hilarious, which is plain enough to see just reading the fact-sheet, but that many of the takes, bar bad acting, are genuinely well-done, from the soaring locust cam to the harrowing cliff face exorcism. It's just that there is no such thing as a good version of locust cam or a cliff face exorcism - 'made by a demented mind' indeed."

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Isao Takahata / Isao Takahata
"It's hard to call a movie like this brilliant or perfect. Sorta feels like it's so effective on an emotional level that it would be counterproductive or disempowering to turn that off to look at how it's creating that effect. Focus too hard on why things make you sad and you raise the cynicism water level. Idk, I don't feel that way about all emotionally challenging films. Either way, to describe GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES as 'a movie that makes you sad' is violently insufficient. Gonna have to go with consensus that everyone ought to see this, especially kids."

NASHVILLE (1975)
Robert Altman / Joan Tewkesbury
"The documentary-ish, 'cross-section' style of the film lends a great deal of weight to both its darkest moments and its ultimately optimistic outlook - each event is a sort of surprise at the same time as being a lightning strike"

TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)
Seijun Suzuki / Yasanori Kawauchi
"Real light on incident and character, but to my eyes the style is hard to distinguish from a lot of what was going on in the '60s, except maybe the overlapping music and impatient editing. Uh it's kind of like Band of Outsiders, so there's that - though that's an interesting comparison, because Tokyo D. is garishly fake and set-bound (in one particular scene the stage lights change from white to red to yellow, with no internal motivation), yet carries the same who-gives-a-fuck attitude. Maybe pop art just really sucks?"

PASTORAL, TO DIE IN THE COUNTRY (1974)
Shuji Terayama / Shuji Terayama
"Painfully lonely and personal, a dream-drama that never strays from its simple, infinitely complicated theme of owning one's identity. Not to mention the pretty obvious origin point of David Lynch's entire career."

EXCALIBUR (1981)
John Boorman / John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg
"A perfect story for Boorman to tell, with his lusty bombast and skepticism of humanity, symbolic characters, and episodic structure"

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)
"The Brothers Strause" / Shane Salerno
"A pointlessly terrible film with a moronic setting, cringey human drama, and shit for brains. Good Predator scenes though, makes the character seem cooler and more competent than the previous film. Surprisingly, I'd rewatch Covenant far sooner than this, but it's too insubstantial to stoop to Prometheus levels."

POPEYE (1980)
Robert Altman / Jules Feifer
"Excruciating to sit through, though good evidence in Altman's (over)confidence in his own style, something that can't even casually be fitted to high-energy slapstick comedy. Shelley Duvall deserves an Oscar, though."

GIMME SHELTER (1970)
Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin / (documentary)
"The 'peace and love' ethos receives a challenge and shatters live on stage"

WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE (1980)
Les Blank / Werner Herzog (documentary)
"A lot less shoe-eating than could be desired, but Herzog's off-the-cuff musings about capitalist apocalypse, Coke ads, and the utility of garlic would make a lovely podcast"

FITZCARRALDO (1982)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"Kinda burns an opening hour without much to show but light comedy (and this ain't no Altman), but gets great once it arrives at the centerpiece stunt. Popol Vuh's noodling has never felt more appropriate and more unwelcome than atop the ethereal realism of the ascending steam vessel"

BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982)
Les Blank / (documentary)
"Interesting but incomplete - again, Herzog is a fascinating man to watch, but the glimpses we get of Kinski and others around him hint at parallel stories too tantalizing to ignore. The climax too skips off unobserved, leaving a giant hole in history and Herzog's story"

HOPE AND GLORY (1987)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"Boorman bends well to comedy, even if it's more often cheery than exactly funny. The dark edge of his primal obsession surfaces in teen pregnancies, destruction-happy boys, and despised senile grandfathers, but the whole thing wraps up with way too many bows on top (not unlike Deliverance, really)"

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"Well goddamn if Romero doesn't follow his convictions. A much-needed 15-minute edit is the only thing keeping us from a zombie protagonist this time, and the weird, savage world is again something to behold. The bad news is the leads are too many and too shitty, and the crumbly action highlights just how threadbare the plot is."

GOSFORD PARK (2001)
Robert Altman / Julian Fellowes
"Really interestingly structured around a weekend in the country in a way that situates us as part of the events, susceptible to the same longings and boredoms and suspicions and melancholy of each of the characters, without losing how specifically this time lapse affects each of them"

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)
Zack Snyder / James Gunn
"A decent action flick with a few really clever ideas (the birth, the billboard friendship), very solid lead performances (and very weak supporting ones), and a lot of unfunny matzoh balls in the dialogue. It's not really less scary than Romero's movies (it's tenser than any but Day), but the horror (after the opening) feels watered down, not least due to the (comparative) absence of (practical) gore. ()"

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)
Dan O'Bannon / Dan O'Bannon
"Never gets old"

POLICE STORY  (1985)
Jackie Chan / Jackie Chan, Edward Tang
"A deathmatch between Chan, half a dozen cars, a mall, a shanty town, and all the plate glass money can buy."

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009)
Werner Herzog / William F. Finkelstein
"Great first half with an oddly Evangelical second half. It is somewhat too effective at selling salvation through the grace of God and ends up at offputting, where the unsettling black humor of e.g. torturing and blackmailing senior citizens was working a lot better"

End Directrospective. And what a weird way to go.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
Frank Oz / Howard Ashman, based on a stage show by Howard Ashman
"Feels incredibly rinky-dink and stagebound, like 120% of the budget went into the monster. The dentist song is great and the (DC) ending is highly correct, otherwise there isn't much to grab onto except grating performances and obnoxious humor"

ENTER THE NINJA (1981)
Menahem Golan / Dick Desmond
"Ninja Gaiden '04 starring Luigi"

GODZILLA: TOKYO S.O.S. (2003)
Masaaki Tezuka / Masaaki Tezuka, Masahiro Yokotani
"Pretty good explosions and overall somewhat better than X Mechagodzilla"

GET CARTER (1971)
Mike Hodges / Mike Hodges, based on a novel by Ted Lewis
"Fantastic and brutal, a revenge mystery that sets up the pieces with mathematical precision and then annihilates them point blank with a shotgun"

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)
Christopher Nolan / Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
"Even less a superhero movie and even less good than the usual Batman, although Bane is kind of hilariously weird and terrible in a mostly good way"

GOD'S NOT DEAD (2014)
Harold Cronk / Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon
"Hercules time travels to the future to prove that God wasn't really there, he was just always listening"

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Movies you already should've seen:

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

PSYCHO (1960)

THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963)

BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

GREMLINS (1984)

TERMINATOR (1984)

RETURN TO OZ (1985)

COMING TO AMERICA (1988)

DICK TRACY (1990)

ROUJIN Z (1991)

BRAINDEAD (1992)

GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)

ED WOOD (1994)

GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)

PERFECT BLUE (1996)

PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997)

GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS (1999)

THE MATRIX (1999)

COWBOY BEBOP: KNOCKIN' ON HEAVEN'S DOOR (2001)

THE DESCENT (2005)

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)

CRIMSON PEAK (2015)

Summaries
2019 IN MOVIES
2018 IN MOVIES
2017 IN MOVIES
2016 IN MOVIES
2015 IN MOVIES

A review of Ponyo in the format of Jeopardy

Boy, that screenplay left me with more questions than ANNIHILATION. Although, one lingering issue there - why does Lena Kane refer to her husband only as Kane, even in private? Seems very strange. Which leads me to my first question on PONYO...

Why does Sosuke call his parents by their first names? Was this supposed to be a trick, or tell us something about their relationship? They seem kinda childish in their own right, and there's the seeds of an interesting conflict in Lisa's tantrum over her absent husband, but it never goes anywhere.

Why does Fujimoto want to destroy humans, and is he still planning that? He doesn't need a backstory, but he doesn't even learn to like humans in the end. He's just suddenly nice. And we're not going to address that Ponyo's mother abandoned her to be imprisoned, yet they're all fine in the end? Are they going to go through this crisis 175 more times as all her sisters grow up? Why is Ponyo's real name Brunhilde, and never brought up again? Her father should be calling her that the whole movie! Just a throwaway opera reference?

What's with the ship graveyard? It's a cool visual, but did Sosuke's father just turn around and head the other way? Because they said they were lost. Why bother setting up Koichi at sea if the tsunami was harmless and he just sails safely home? Shouldn't Ponyo or Fujimoto have had to use their magic to help Sosuke rescue him, after the "trial of love"? The engine magically going out and being restored in a single scene doesn't really count. And why is Ponyo falling asleep? Is that a ticking clock a la Cinderella or did Fujimoto put a spell on her (a la Sleeping Beauty)? He has a line of dialogue that kind of hints the latter, but why is it so ambiguous? I don't know how to respond emotionally when I'm this confused.

Why is the moon falling?

And how flat is that climax? "Do you love her as a fish"? They fell in love and loudly proclaimed their love at the very beginning, when she was a fish! There's no development there at all. There's not even a conflict by that point - every single character wants Ponyo and Sosuke to reach the senior center and be in love. The scene where Mad Granny catches the kids as they run from Fujimoto makes no sense, it is a moment of completely forged emotion. She was wrong - the other old ladies weren't being tricked. (also, TWILIGHT ZONE reference).

All of these reek of the same core problem, that the movie sets up conflicts and simply erases them at the end, like it would have been too mean to let anything come to a head. It's a bit ironic - Miyazaki movies are known as incredibly forgiving, yet Ponyo skips right to the forgetting, leaving an almost sinister aftertaste. Did they live happily ever after, or did Koichi die at sea, Lisa become an angry shrew who envies Ponyo's beauty and beats her at night, and the kids fall out of love by middle school, ultimately to be drowned out of existence when Fujimoto collected another few gallons of Ooze? This goes hand in hand with the overabundance of cutesy crap. It's a kids' movie, I can't criticize that too much, but I was cringing pretty hard through some of the ogling preciousness, like either of the scenes with soup. The characters are perfectly lovable without that stuff - the moment they bonk heads waking up is the perfect medium.

All that said, I did like the movie, and it was certainly never boring. The character designs are great (I loved everything with Fujimoto riding his sub), the sea adventure through the Devonian era is exciting for all 10 minutes that it lasts, the action is inventive, and the soft colored pencil backgrounds are sleepily comforting. And I'll take a story that makes no sense via omission over one that makes no sense via overcrowding, as is the case with HOWL'S MC.

Weak franchises

I was thinking that the movie franchise equivalent to Mega Man vs. Mega Man X (in terms of quality, disregarding that the two series are related) is probably Friday the 13th vs. Hellraiser. With Friday the 13th, you know exactly what you're going to get - it's never going to be particularly great or special, but it's never going to go off the rails either (except the one time it did, catastrophically, with Mega Man 8 GOES TO HELL). Hellraiser starts off genuinely great and hits one solid riff on that, takes a wrong turn but is still kind of tolerable for a few more entries*, completely jumps off a direct-to-video cliff by the fifth, and hangs around for four more things and a reboot that no one was asking for.

*I hated HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE ("in space") until I saw its pathetic shadow EVENT HORIZON.

Revisiting Jurassics Park

I guess I'm joining into the chorus of not really loving JURASSIC PARK? That's surprising. I'm a '90s kid I guess (born '88), and I remember it being a huge deal, but thinking (at that age) that the idea of a dinosaur theme park was really lame, and why not just make a real movie about dinosaurs, like LAND BEFORE TIME? As an adult I understand that the concept exists to be a lead-handed metaphor, although I can't say that adds to the appeal. On the other other hand, perhaps dinosaurs in the present day are a scarier concept that a fantasy about dinosaur world - horror being best defined as the invasion of the uncanny into normalcy.

Overall though the movie feels too much like Spielberg by numbers, and watching it fresh just a couple months ago, I was surprised how much of it I know by heart, because I went in thinking "surely there's more to this movie than I remember, because otherwise why would it be considered such a masterpiece?" The characters but for Hammond are paper-thin, and the hammed-up performances are enjoyable but don't exactly alleviate the superficiality. Then there's the fact that our protagonists are deliriously insane, declaring from the moment they hear the concept that Jurassic Park will lead to the apocalypse, unquestionably, and I think at one point I saw Michael Crichton lean into frame and wave. This will affect the sequels in both good and bad ways.

For all the quality execution, too much action is wasted on things that aren't dinosaurs (the car in the tree kinda galls me - it's an immaculately directed and edited sequence, heart-in-throat thrilling, but why are you wasting a set piece in your dinosaur movie on something that doesn't involve dinosaurs!), and even the dinosaur sequences feel incredibly limited - in a way that makes them memorable and scary, yes, but not in a way that takes advantage of the concept and makes for an exciting adventure. A T-rex attacks a car, a brachiosaurus sneezes on a little girl, velociraptors in the kitchen, T-rex smashes T-rex fossil, roll credits. Spielberg is too locked into his idea of a motion picture as a roller coaster for my taste - it works sometimes, and Jurassic Park is still good, but this formula worked a lot better with just a shark.

LOST WORLD I've only seen one-and-a-half times, because the second time I was so disinterested by the midpoint that I turned it off. All I can say is that the idea of centering the story on Doctor Ian Malcolm, a character whose prior existence was solely as a font of pop-science drivel, is a poor one that never stops feeling forced.

Which leaves JP3, the great unsung hero to come save the day and give us a fully satisfying experience. Yes it's dumb, yes it's far removed from the glamourous sheen of the first two, but it's competently and even breezily made, taking no time at all to declare what it's going to be doing with the next 90 minutes of your time. It's just actually unpredictable and fun in a way Spielberg never could be, because his entire career is staked on being The Sure Thing. Yet I can't but be amused as hell at the weird variety of second-tier dinos and the hilarious boldness of the raptor-talking-machine and the Tarzan-of-the-dinosaurs boy. Yup, the ending is dogshit, the cast is fine but forgettable, and some people will not like jokes about a kid jerking off a dinosaur (or something??). But it also has one inarguably great point, which is Sam Neill's better performance as Grant with a much better arc to permit it. Him screwing everything up and becoming a real downer is a great starting point, and we do something more interesting than reiterating the same "learns to love kids, barf" lesson. We see him correct the attitude and mistakes of the first movie and finally realize how wrong they all were at that first awkward dinner party.

(this comment prompted by the weekly podcast chat at the always great Alternate Ending)

Sonic Mania oughta take some lessons from Ed Wood (a review of ED WOOD with a clickbait title)

ED WOOD is the greatest kind of emotional storytelling: it is a film that finds joy in despair, creativity in loss, roaring success in crushing failure. It takes the depressing and pathetic life of a perennial loser and transforms it into something to admire, to be proud of, and it doesn't do it by lying, or reforming, or quibbling about facts. It is a much bolder story, one that asserts not that Ed Wood was a great artist or genius despite his achievements, but by way of his spirit and vision; if the product doesn't fit with our expectation of great art, that's only because we've defined it wrong. It dives so deep into the ocean of subjectivity as to forget the surface, yet uses this to expand the mind rather than to deceive it.

Take for instance Bela Lugosi's final filmed appearance in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. On paper, this is a rather dark, disheartening history, surrounded by the stench of exploitation. Lugosi's film career had completely disintegrated by the time he met Wood; he lived in poverty, alone and crippled by drug addiction. Wood 'revived' his legacy for a few years by throwing him in embarrassing roles in Z-grade bombs, most famously using some extremely random footage and a lookalike within PLAN 9, as Lugosi passed away during filming. ED WOOD retells this tale in all its detail, but with the focus placed entirely on the loving friendship between the two men. Bela is confused by Ed's films and doesn't see half of them, but is so charmed by the man and happy to be acting again that he doesn't care. As he points out when swarmed by reporters in a rehab center, he doesn't care if he's being exploited. He's an old man - he just wants to stop and smell the roses one last time. Of course, this is literally the scene he directs for himself as his final performance, the one that would land in PLAN 9: a quiet moment with just Ed and the camera, as the director struggles to find any excuse to give his friend something to do. Nor to Ed is it exploitation - PLAN 9 is advertised as "Bela Lugosi's final film" not because it'll sell more tickets that way, but because it is fucking BELA LUGOSI's final film, and how awesome and important is that? Ed cares for the man so dearly that to him it would be the greater atrocity NOT to let Bela have a final starring role, and he's willing to get all his friends baptized if that's what it takes to get it made.

Likewise the PLAN 9 premiere, we don't see the crowd's reaction, only their applause at the names Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi, and the hushed silence at Bela's scene. Did they hate the film? Did they love it? By now it's clear that doesn't matter to Ed ("[the worst movie you ever saw?] Well, my next one'll be better!"), it doesn't matter to Bela, so it doesn't matter to the movie. We simply rush out from the theater, Ed on the high of his life, as he proposes to his girlfriend and drives off into the pouring rain and thunder, no sunset in sight. Cue the ending titles, with a card next to Ed's glowing expression reading that he would never go on to make a successful picture, dying at age 54 after a 20-year descent into alcoholism and nudie flicks; that two years after his death he was voted "Worst Director of All Time", bringing him a new level of worldwide renown. And this plays as an extremely happy and uplifting moment! That's how much work ED WOOD has done to reverse our idea of meaningful accomplishment.

Throughout the film are peppered matter-of-fact bystanders to remind us that this isn't all a fantasy, that no delusion is taking place. This sets up a beautiful irony where someone tries to correct Ed with a genuinely helpful suggestion, he is perplexed and frustrated, yet so determined to succeed that we side with him, because if you're going to be a moron, it's better not to compromise about it. (Aside: how many of Burton's films could accurately be described as "the unwitting adventures of complete morons"? PEE-WEE, that other EDWARD picture, even Jack Skellington mostly fits). The most amusing and transparent of these reality checks are the conservative Christian producers clomping around the PLAN 9 set; the stereotypical micromanaging money-men who just don't get art slowly choking the delicate genius. The fact that they're evangelicals just gives them that extra Hollywood-ignorant edge. Yet everything they point out is perfectly rational and probably would've made a "better" movie - isn't grave-robbing kinda sordid for a kids flick? shouldn't the exposition be given to someone who speaks intelligible English? don't you want to film a take where the actor doesn't kick over that gravestone prop? Of course, the secondary joke going on here is one for PLAN 9 cultists, as these are presumably all the elements that make that film so amusing (I'm actually grateful I haven't seen it - I think this stuff could've annoyed me as pandering if I had).

So the post title (I don't know if it counts as clickbait when your blog isn't advertised and has no visitors). This all goes back to a comment I made in my review of Sonic Mania, in particular comparing it to Sonic Generations, that Mania was boxed into a boring, conservative narrative that everyone already accepts, that the Genesis Sonic games are classics, and that therefore Mania would have no legacy, because it is entirely subservient to previous successes. I pointed out that Generations overcomes this obstacle by treating the trash material (Sonic '06, Heroes, etc.) with the same amount of care and affection as everything else. And that's exactly what ED WOOD is doing, creating something new by celebrating something that hasn't been celebrated, finding a fresh set of eyes (or glasses) for viewing the past, creating history where history got it wrong. Maybe a different way of putting it is that any adaptation has a choice between recreating the execution / the product / the fact, or re-implementing the concept / the inspiration / the soul. You can guess which work falls into which category.

Average franchise running times

This is from an old email, but I wouldn't want to lose it. Given that Superman movies always have to be so fucking long, I was curious which of the all-time great franchises (and Batman) are most distended.

Friday the 13th: 92 minutes over 12 films
Rambo: 97 minutes over 4 films (the "epic" Rambo III clocks in at 101 minutes)
PotApes: 108 minutes over 8 films (97 for the original run, 127 for the reboot trilogy)
Star Trek: 116 minutes over 13 films
Die Hard: 121 minutes over 5 films (you'd figure these were shorter, but 3 is brokenly long and 4 & 5 are modern movies)
Alien: 125 minutes over 6 films (118 if you count the AVPs)
Star Wars: 134 minutes over 8 films (surprisingly - the prequels feel so insubstantial for their >140-minute run times)
Batman: 135 minutes over 9 films (142 if you exclude the 76-minute Mask of the Phantasm)

and the winner is, naturally...
Superman: at 137 minutes over 7 films. Although it was quite a tight contest for a moment there.

MYASS in the meantime: 2017

GALAXY QUEST (1999)
Dean Parisot / Robert Gordon, David Howard
"If not the best Star Trek film, certainly the most adoring of the fans and characters"

ALIEN (1979)
Ridley Scott / Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
"The detached menace of the first half roughly adjoins with the pedestrian slashing of the second, although I fear my overexposure to the franchise diminishes the impact of what on paper should be a lot more thrilling"

SATURN 3 (1980)
Stanley Donen / Martin Amis
"PFOG (pretty fucking objectionable garbage), although some of the man vs. machine chess bits are kind of hilarious, as is the ominous presence of my one true nemesis, Brainbot"

PROMETHEUS (2012)
Ridley Scott / Damon Lindelof
"If this is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore a creation that owes more to Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, and H.R. Giger than it does to Shitly Scott, it supremely achieves that goal. If it is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore intellectual science fiction brazenly pillaged to found the career of Shitly Scott, it supremely achieves that goal. If it is intended as a white-hot dump on the face of everyone ever to adore summer blockbusters, monster movies, and pulp sci-fi, it supremely achieves that goal. I will be shocked if I see a movie in 2017 that despises its audience and begs to be despised as openly as this*."

*See Star Wars: The Last Jedi

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 2 (2017)
Chad Stahelski / Derek Kolstad
"Pencil etc."

DRAGONSLAYER (1981)
Matthew Robbins / Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins
"Solid adventure that spends just enough time milking the Star Wars model before swinging into a daikaiju eiga with unique air-to-ground magic monster battles"

LOGAN (2017)
James Mangold / Scott Frank, Michael Green, James Mangold
"A reflection on Shane no more fantastic in its superhuman trappings than the fairy tale manifestation of gunslingers in the old West; successfully tragic rather than simply grim"

SCANNERS (1981)
David Cronenberg / David Cronenberg
"More fantasy than science fiction, too concerned with its concept and plot for its failure to ground them in characters, themes, or visuals worth caring about"

CLASS OF 1984 (1982)
Mark Lester / Tom Holland, Mark Lester, John Saxton
"DEATH WISH in a high school with the nastier morality that implies, effective enough as a downward spiral arc to back up the novelty of the setting"

KING KONG (1933)
Merian Cooper, Ernest Shoedsack / James Creelman, Ruth Rose
"More violent and action-packed than you'd imagine, more forebodingly atmospheric than you'd imagine, more movie in 100 minutes than you could possibly imagine"

KONG: SKULL ISLAND (2017)
Jordan Vogt-Roberts / Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly, Dan Gilroy
"Competent but impersonal and overstuffed with bland characters, reliant on far too many cliches from the wrong genre to ever pull through as the monster movie triumph glimpsed in the action sequences"

I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE (2017)
Macon Blair / Macon Blair
"A combination of indie character study and exploitation thrills that someone else reminds me is basically the idea of early Coen Brothers, still human enough to feel fun in its quiet moments and brutal in its violence"

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017)
James Gunn / James Gunn
"Visually, a perfect impression of space adventuring in a Kirby world"

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
Alfred Hitchcock / Ernest Lehman
"Status = earned. Brilliantly aggressive and precarious set pieces thrust you right in the characters' shoes"

THE HITCHER (1986)
Robert Harmon / Eric Red
"Gutting, menacing, choking, strangling"

ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)
Ridley Scott / Michael Green, Dante Harper, John Logan, Jack Paglen
"Hey look I was wrong, I saw another movie that hates its audience as much as PROMETHEUS, shockingly aping that dumpster fire in every last detail while pathetically insisting how much better we must certainly like it (but xenomorph! but riploff! but fuck you ridders)"

ALIEN 3 [assembly cut] (1992)
David Fincher / Larry Ferguson, David Giler, Walter Hill, Vincent Ward
"Bombastic performances and overbearing setting on par with previous entries, it's actually pretty excellent if you can forgive the boring iteration of the monster and a wonky second act structure"

AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson, Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
"Playful in just the right way, never taking itself seriously while still bursting with excitement at its own existence, it's only too bad they skimped on the gore fundamental to both franchises"

ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet / Joss Whedon
"Why do people hate this movie? It's funny, creepy, and innovative, building on the alien in huge ways while laughing at how far it's come"

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)
Matt Reeves / Mark Bomback, Matt Reeves
"Re-centering the apes is much appreciated, and the movie works as an action thriller, but it's criminal (both as a finale and as a film with that title, and that trailer, and that poster) that it fails to deliver any kind of war between men and apes"

The following 11 movies were watched as part of the popular social media dare, "Summer with the Seventies Auteur Challenge".

SORCERER (1977)
William Friedkin / Walon Green
"Possibly a new top 10 movie: fresh and impressive concept, grim as hell but able to establish enough character investment that you can't avert your eyes"

TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1972)
Amando de Ossorio / Amando de Ossorio
"Distinguishing imagery and concept with the skeleton vampire zombies and all, but kinda a boring movie overall, much too Mediterranean B for my taste (lesbos and all)"

ERASERHEAD (1977)
David Lynch / David Lynch
"Appreciably weird and claustrophobic for the first third, but pretty straightforward too, like a nightmare expressionist fairytale. Gets really boring once it locks itself in its room"

LANCELOT DU LAC (1974)
Robert Bresson / Robert Bresson
"More a series of Baroque paintings than a motion picture, an invitation to detail, speculation, and reflection that probably only gives as much as you're willing to put into it. But damn, for me that was a lot"

A NEW LEAF (1971)
Elaine May / Elaine May
"Pretty funny as these things go, solid premise, May herself is sorta like a Woody Allen character but adorable where he'd be pathetic. The whole thing feels a little 'off', like the timing isn't quite right or something (and Mathau in particular feels like an alien badly programming a robot as a human impression), but occasionally that pays into the dryness of the humor"

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975)
Sydney Pollack / David Rayfiel, Lorenzo Semple Jr.
"Hard to beat as a spy thriller, with just the right blend of stomach-churning disorientation and methodical intrigue, and some killer performances to seal the deal"

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"I have a hard time articulating how I feel about this movie - Herzog is, as ever, operating at a guttural level, below words; striking before thoughts can form into sentences"

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)
Robert Altman / Leigh Brackett
"For all the thrilling strangeness of this summer, this might be the finest movie, just an old-fashioned detective in over his head, conniving and broken humans everywhere he turns. The epitome of what Hollywood does right. Also, Arnold in a speedo - with a mustache"

EL TOPO (1970)
Alejandro Jodorowsky / Alejandro Jodorowsky
"Yeah I mean it's weird and all but what's the point? Of the many gruelingly nihilistic movies of Summer 70s, El Topo stood out in its unflinching desire to fuck itself up at regular intervals, interrupt any possible thematic threads or arc by supplanting the contents. It seems to really badly want me to question my reality or some shit and it's just annoying New Age junk. Too idiosyncratic to be a bad movie - just a really tiresome and unpleasant one"

ZARDOZ (1974)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"THIS is weirdness that works. It has fun with itself, it challenges the viewer by bringing them to new places rather than blowing things up. The visuals are gimmicky at times but originally surreal (shit like a guy who is old on his left half and young on his right is great); the inspiration lies far from Bresson but it's up to the same tricks, using images rather than words to convey story"

LET IT BE (1970)
Michael Lindsay-Hogg / (documentary)
"This is what it is and staunchly refuses to be anything more, a glance at the songwriting and recording process of the Beatles carefully denuded of drama or conflict, yet not manufactured or revisionist. It suggests a band past its breaking point, into the region where no one cares enough to pretend anymore, yet still honors the suicide pact and makes great - inwardly-directed - music along the way"

KWAIDAN (1964)
Masaki Kobayashi / Yoko Mizuki
"Kobayashi's penchant for bleak commentary pairs excellently with ghost story amorality, the missing lessons hanging as caustic indictments as well as playful shocks. The imagery moves from nightmarishly anti-linear in the first story to classically precise in the third, grounded in fantasy equal with history and never quite like anything else"

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1985)
Jon Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, George Miller / a bunch, look it up
"Never gels at all as an anthology (the polar opposite of Kwaidan), and Spielberg churns out some real tripe that evidences not only is he unable to get out of his own ass for long enough to grasp a concept as simple as The Twilight Zone, but that he's also willing to take a huge shit in front of people who can. Landis' segment is fine, toothless thanks to behind-the-scenes events but not a great concept to start. Dante's is bonkers, an amazing short film with a cartoon fascination unmistakable for anyone else (and some wonderfully weird performances to match). Miller's is great too, not especially close to his other work but on the Beyond Thunderdome side thanks to a Spielbudget, wringing horror and hilarity from John Lithgow's sweat and actually managing to make the gremlin scary"

HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)
Tommy Lee Wallace / Tommy Lee Wallace
"Fantastic material for bad movie night, bad in so many orthogonal ways and supremely weird and pointless - Stonehenge robots use Halloween masks to kill America? Because The True Spirit of Halloween???"

VERSUS (2000)
Ryuhei Kitamura / Ryuhei Kitamura, Yudai Yamaguchi
"A pretty whimsical diversion with some great Three Stooges slapstick that builds into something way more serious and tedious than it should've been; doesn't help that it looks like the high school adaptation of Moby Dick I shot in the woods down the street from my parents' house"

THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1921)
Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton / Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton
"It's Keaton - watching him monkey climb over a banister and slide down magic stairs is all the reward you could ask for, plus 10 manic minutes of every fake haunting gag ever done"

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)
Tobe Hooper / Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
"Still rules"

THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)
Nathan H. Juran / Kenneth Kolb
"One can never get enough Harryhausen, here all over the map for inspiration (a standard Greek cyclops, a Vishnu-snake, a two-headed vulture (Roc), a wingless dragon (?), and, of course, a skeleton), but tied to a story with just enough momentum that it never really matters"

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017)
David Villaneuve / Hampton Fancher, Michael Green
"Thankfully not at all concerned with being a thematic repeat of Blade Runner, this is genuinely heady scifi, thoroughly attached to the investigation of what identity means in a post-birth world. Indulgent but never remotely boring, and always gorgeous"

THE RAID 2 (2014)
Gareth Evans / Gareth Evans
"A lot bloodier than the first one (crushed heads, gouged eyes, ripped throats), and quite a bit more operatic too (son betrays father because he was tricked by the artist formerly known as Prince!), but also laying heavier into the exploitation (ninja baseball batman). The first one wasn't really fun, but this is pretty seriously not-fun, banking more on the awe and shock created by violence of such scale. Obviously it's Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais and it works fucking great"

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE (2016)
Taika Waititi / Taika Waititi
"Waititi has a lean way with jokes such that even when they're not hysterical, they're always doing something, developing characters or advancing the plot or carefully setting the pace - and more often than not they're hysterical. So he can actually tell a story in a comedy without diverting from the humor. It's like traveling back to the first 60 years of Hollywood cinema when this tactic was common knowledge"

CASABLANCA (1942)
Michael Curtiz / Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
"If you think about it, this is really just a run of the mill romcom. But in the tradition of the best '40s films, it projects an individual headspace into a world, an internal conflict reflected in every detail of character and mise en scene. And the dialogue is just, Christ. I don't get why we can't have dialogue like this anymore. Why do everyone have to talk like a retard now?"

MAN OF STEEL (2013)
Zack Snyder / David S. Goyer
"Kinda incomprehensible at times and so breathless none of the story gets air, but worth it for the uniquely raw, violent take on Superman, more akin to Invincible than Action Comics"

SUPERMAN III (1983)
Richard Lester / David Newman & Leslie Newman
"Not as awful as it is painfully misconceived as a comic misadventure only coincidentally involving Superman (and reality); moreover, not funny"

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
Sidney J. Furie / Lawrence Conner & Mark Rosenthal
"Ball-clutchingly terrible in spectacularly visible ways, from the horrifying wires attached to Superman's costume to Nuclear Man's silver-painted nails to Lenny Luthor's shrieking antics; an effective palette cleanser to the frustratingly wrong but competent III and a delightfully campy franchise development on the order of Hellraiser 3 or Nelm Street 2"

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)
Nicolas Roeg / Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel by Walter Tevis
"Pathologically elliptical in performance as much as plot, captivatingly mysterious if a bit overlong, with Bowie as an ineffably alien centerpiece and Rip Torn lurking around the fringes, never asking as many questions as we want"

STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)
George Lucas / Georgie Boy Lucas
"Somehow I forgot how deleterious Jar Jar is to the first half of the film, in which his antics punctuate every last line of dialogue - then again, forgotten moments work surprisingly well, like the quiet dinner before the pod race. Shame the home video edit fluffs up the pod race with boring shit that destroys the pace."

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (2016) 
Zack Snyder / David S. Goyer, Chris Terrio, etc.
"Real good, even Luthor"

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"A step forward conceptually, stepping past survival to the fight to reverse the zombie plague, though too shrill to be fully entertaining and too one-sided to work as satire. Claustrophobic underground setting is a great addition."

STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES (2002)
George Lucas / George Lucas, Jonathan Hales
"Not quite as awful as I remember, with a solitary great action scene and a great sense of color and costume"

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (2017)
Rian Johnson / Rian Johnson
"The most boring, unoriginal, contemptuous, and out of place addition to the franchise. Occasional great bits, and more tedious than awful, but a seriously trying attitude and sense of importance and rage (rather than fun) that makes the prospect of revisitation incredibly unappealing."

SUPERGIRL (1984)
Jeannot Szwarc / David Odell
"Too incomprehensible to be as good-bad as IV and a terrible slog at two hours, easily the low point of the franchise"

STATISTICS
Total -51
"Auteur" movies - 17
Most frequent director - Ridley Scott
Most frequent writer - Michael Green
Most frequent franchise - Alien (watched 6, all but Aliens and AVP2)
2017: 9
2010s: 13
2000s: 3
1990s: 3
1980s: 11
1970s: 14
1960s: 1
1950s: 2
1940s: 1
1930s: 1
1920s: 1

TOP FIVE:
The Long Goodbye
Kwaidan
Lancelot du Lac
Sorcerer
King Kong
Casablanca
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Narrowing it down any further than that would be completely arbitrary.

BOTTOM FIVE:
Alien: Covenant
Prometheus
Saturn 3
"Kick the Can", Steven Spielberg's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie
Star Wars: The Last Jedi

MYASS in the meantime: The 2016 in movies

HÄXAN (1922)
Christensen / Christensen
"Way overhyped with only a scene's worth of Slayer material, still a bizarre window into the history of filmmaking ideas"

HIGHLANDER 2 (1991)
Mulcahy / Bellwood
"In-goddamned-comprehensible, but not particularly terrible as a sword action endeavor, however pointless coming off Highlander"

THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (2006)

Miike / Miike, Sawamura, Itakura
"Pretty coolfunny kids' fantasy adventure with some very coolfunny monsters that works even better if you've played Ganbare Goemon! [this is because at one point in the movie I recognized the exclamation 'ganbare!']" - Yourself

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966)
Leone / Leone, Vincenzoni, Age, Scarpelli
"There are two kinds of people in this world: people who love this movie, and people who can suck a dead donkey dick.

Alright that was crass, I actually had a real observation on this viewing which is that the movie is more of an episodic fun-times Civil War horror adventure than a society-thoughts chockataw Western" - Yourself

EXCALIBUR (1981)
Boorman / Pallenberg & Boorman
"As visually striking a rendition of the Arthur legend as you're going to get thanks to sets defining a murky, cryptic past and the crazy armor more appropriate for Monster Hunter; the legitimizing theatrical performances include comically minor roles for the likes of Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, and Helen Mirren."

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2011)
Evans / Evans (although the idea of this having a writer is p. lol)
"Like an adrenaline shot packed with lots of smaller adrenaline shots stabbed straight into your brain" - Yourself

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
Romero / Romero
"Two Romeros deep it's hard to see the forest for the Liberal Academic's Glossary of Stereotypes; I don't know whether to blame my close-mindedness or Ebert's, but neither makes me feel enjoyment or intellectual pursuit" - Yourself

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
Kubrick / Clarke & Kubrick
"The scene on the moon is one of the genuinely scariest things in motion picture history and that's from someone watching the film for the third time" - Yourself

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (1967)
The Beatles / The Beatles
"Less than an utterly incompetent attempt to make a movie: an attempt to make an utterly incompetent movie - at no point does anything marginally resembling a point surface, and the production quality makes you feel depressed about The Beatles is a way that no such enviable group could possibly deserve" - Yourself

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)
Hooper / Henkel & Hooper
"After this faceplant into animal filth and human remains, sausage did seem gross for almost an entire day" - Yourself

Let me interject upon myself for a moment: it's interesting revisiting these horror classics with so many years of interstitial guts and gore piled upon the brain. It's always difficult to trust critical perspectives of what is transgressive or unsettling because they are built upon so many silent assumptions not just of the viewer or their culture, but the relationship between. It's not as simple as placing oneself in the 1970s - one must understand who they would be in the 1970s.

Some movies - here, CHAIN SAW - can hold up absolutely 100%, feeling like they were made yesterday and disturbing to the core, so uniformly that the only possible conclusion is that every necessary element of thought and meaning is there onscreen - that the images and sounds take complete control of your brain - while others can seem so familiar, so good-natured and gentle and puckish in their explorations that the great gulf between the conception of self and effect, despite unflinching execution, must rely almost exclusively on an ingrained personal relationship to visually portrayed fictional violence. Perhaps this is a way of qualifying a true horror film, that it entirely internally defines a reality and the gross violations thereof, where, by contrast, if DAWN OF THE DEAD is not expired, its value as horror surely was only a tool, something existing explicitly as a handle for the severity of the subtext therein.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
Craven / Craven
"

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (1985)
Sholder / Chaskin
"

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM WARRIORS (1987)
Russell / Craven, Wagner, Darabont, Russell
"

THE BEYOND (1981)
Fulci / Fulci, Mariuzzo, Sacchetti
"

AMERICAN NINJA (1985)
Firstenberg / Mielche, Amir, Kleinberger
"

13 ASSASSINS (2011)
Miike / Tengan
"

MIAMI CONNECTION (1987)
Park, Kim / Park, Kim, Diamond
"

GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973)
Fukuda / Kimura, Sekizawa, Fukuda
"

STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991)
Meyer / Meyer, Flinn
"

CONGO (1995)
Marshall / Shanley
"

BULWORTH (1998)
Beatty / Beatty, Pikser
"Warren Beatty raps about life and how white liberals aren't all they're cracked up to be, from the POV of a white liberal"

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976)
Pakula / Goldman
"Doesn't have the right stakes to work as a thriller, but as formal composition I don't know where to start admiring (or when to stop)"

GODZILLA, MOTHRA, AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL OUT ATTACK (2001)
Kaneko / Hasengawa, Yokotani, Kaneko
"

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)
Hawks / Chandler
"After this faceplant into animal filth and human remains, sausage did seem gross for almost an entire day" - Yourself

RABBIT HOLE (2010)
Mitchell / Lindsay-Abaire
"Maybe a bit too much of a feelsie-weelsie but it worked on me, and I'm not the kinda person to watch dramas"

THE IMITATION GAME (2014)
Tyldum / Moore
"While it's difficult to determine if this is more insulting to the brilliant pioneer of computer science or the world hero betrayed by his homeland, it's easy to say it sucks more dick than Alan Turing could've ever dreamed to" - Yourself

CASINO ROYALE (2006)
Campbell / Purvis, Wade, Haggis
"The new James Bond kicks major ass when it comes to it but the poker stuff is so much longer than you're ready for, every single time"

THE ACT OF KILLING (2012)
Oppenheimer
"Incredible on fiction and history, in a way everyone should be forced to process"

CASINO ROYALE (1954)
"Functional, and a neat look at television in the First Golden Age, but not much to see for a modern viewer (unless you want thorough instructions for playing baccarat)"

SHIN GODZILLA (2016)
Anno, Higuchi / Anno
"A spectacle of grim hopelessness not matched since the original film (or GMK if I'm feeling generous), this is the first movie that made me hate Godzilla, in a good way"

HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)
Mattei / Fragasso
"I was skeptical a film could ever make me uncomfortable through process alone, but that's exactly what Hell accomplishes with its shameless repurposing of genuine funeral stock footage as a zombie outbreak"

THE BLOB (1988)
Russell / Darabont
"

CHILDREN OF THE CORN 3: URBAN HARVEST (1995)
Hickox / Levenson
"

THE EXORCIST (1974)
Friedkin / Blatty
"

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014)
Russo, Russo / Markus, McFeely
"Snippets of solid Cap action interspersed with lifeless CGI battles and a plot that can't commit to the severity of its concept"

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)
Capra / Buchman
"A more fitting parable for the 2016 election you won't find, though the conclusion (of either) doesn't leave one with too many warm fuzzies"

JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)
Chaffey / Rhodios
"Damn cool movie that everyone should see"

METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER (2004)
Kojima / Kojima, Fukushima, Murata
"The series starts to seriously spin out of control as its thematic aim is raised above the personal to the global level - the earnest attempt at framing history drowns in a spluttering climax and deadly serious allegory"

FIRST BLOOD (1982)
Kotcheff / Kozoll, Sackheim, Stallone
"An all-consuming thriller, frequently discomfiting with its violence, all the obvious Vietnam Symbolism doesn't make it any less grueling for an action movie"

CASINO ROYALE (1967)
I refuse to list every credited director/writer. Like a million.
"Goddamn insane and hilarious, never even remotely boring; a feature-length insult to human intelligence, and a great way to blow it all up on New Year's Eve"

TOP FIVE (not counting re-viewings):
Jason and the Argonauts
All the President's Men
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
A Nightmare on Elm Street
The Raid: Redemption

BOTTOM FIVE:
Hell of the Living Dead
The Imitation Game
Metal Gear Solid 3
Magical Mystery Tour
Godzilla vs. Megalon
You know your bottom five is truly miserable when Casino Royale '67 doesn't make the cut.

So there it is! 2016 in movies! Lot of interesting stuff in there, lot of filling in gaps. If I took anything away from this year, it's that I should watch more thrillers, more classic modern horror, and more New Hollywood. 

The best is the rest: The Friday the 13th reboot is the best one

This has absolutely no intro or structure because it was supposed to be an email, but it's never gonna get published if I set it aside for editing, so fuck it!

The whole thing is almost exactly one third PART 2 (Jason's house), one third PART 3 (barnhouse battle), and one third PART IV (creepy "hunky" guy looking for missing sister charms final girl), obviously stitched together by the common "party kids" framework of all of them. This being a reboot and all I actually like that they reworked setpieces - it makes the references feel organic rather than like winking. The Part IV bit brings attention to just how lazy the reboot writing is though - at least the original allowed the audience to believe (however unlikely this would've been) that heroguy might actually be the murderer. The omission of that "tension" spares the insult to our intelligence and lets the movie gush with the afore-described Jason action, so I'm glad for it, but it doesn't exactly explain what that guy does for the movie. They coulda just had the final girl save the basement girl and die escaping or escape together or w/e - it's not like the final girl fakeout was effective in any capacity.

It occurred to me the reason I liked this one best: it's an action movie. Compound bow and all, this Jason is basically Rambo. He's on screen for what seems like two or three times as long as the franchise average - whether this is actually the case or whether it's that his scenes aren't all wasted on mannequin poses, the effect is that you feel the strain he's going through and the skill and cunning necessary to pull it off. From the PTSD freak-out after finding traces of intruders in his house to the calculated monitoring of the girl stranded in the lake (to make sure she drowns), Jason feels logical, unstable, and badass. It reaches the same end as the magic realism of the rest of the series - that he so far outclasses his targets that survival is utterly hopeless - but does so using action [movie techniques]. For the same reason, that's still not enough to make him scary - that would require the kind of stakes that you can't have in such a rigidly formulaic structure, let alone one established with such lazy "you don't care so we don't care" writing. And - yeah - I used too many dashes in this paragraph, but it went past the 10 second edit rule, and even if were publishing this I'd still make a "joke" here instead of fixing it. [editor's note: mission accomplished!]

There's also a TCM effect where most of the kills happen in quick bursts - it's not nearly as dramatic as everyone dying in a 10-minute span in the middle of the movie, but you're still getting kill sequences rather than individual picking off. In fact I can't think of a single kill that doesn't directly lead from or into another one - the intro blasts through four, the boating setup has a pair, and the home invasion is pretty methodical in drawing out each victim with the last, until the point where the mean guy breaks for it and gets chased down. This too feels like What Would Rambo Do.

Jason's backstory is very weird and incomplete and I almost want to say that works as a plus. He lives around the lake and kills literally everyone that comes near? Obviously people know about it - that old lady warns the kids (about her dog???). How do people live there then? It's not like Jason "protects" the lake from outsiders - he kills that hick too. And what the hell is going on with that marijuana crop? I would've turned off the movie had that been brought up again. And the kidnapping thing is pretty unacceptably stupid. Based on everything we know about Jason even in this movie I could buy at most that he'd let a girl go if she looked like his mom. Keeping her in his basement is like, what, was he bringing her Pepperidge Farm Sandwich-in-a-Box sandwiches every evening?

Friday the 13th Power Rankings

What is a power ranking? I know I've heard that term but I don't know what it means. Anyway, this is just the normal kind of ranking. Sorry power ranking fans! Sorry!

I have agonized for many sleepless nights what to do on the subject of writing up the Friday the 13th film franchise. Having spawned this rancid project with an ill-considered July the 4th marathon and proceeding to labor through all the films (over years worth of movie nights hosted on Fridays the 13th), I feel compelled to turn my PTSD into something creative. I really don't think it's possible to say anything intelligent about these movies - any intelligent man would've chosen not to watch them. So we'll have to settle for the least creative of all written forms: the countdown article.

You know I read the other day that blogging is a form of white privilege. Fax me if you can figure out that one!

Even counting down proves a difficult task when dealing with such unintelligibly abysmal quality as lies before us; at its best the series barely grasps so-bad-it's-good, at its worst it aggressively colonizes so-bad-it-causes-long-term-depression. Perhaps the only way to save face would be to count down to the most terrible, the most unwatchable and painful of these terrible, wildly unwatchable and painful movies. So here are the ten original Friday the 13th movies ranked from "tolerable" to "apocalyptically bad".

Friday the 13th movies that I enjoyed with beer and friends

It's not safe to go alone or whatever. If you were doing an in-depth head-to-toe documentary on the entire series you could just watch these.

10.) Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D

Well, here it is. The best one. If you HAVE to watch a Friday the 13th, perhaps as part of a college major on sanitary disposal protocols or Sorority Hell Week, this is the one to go to. It goes without saying that you aren't missing anything by jumping to PART 3 - in fact, this is the first one with the real franchise recipe: Jason teleporting around in a hockey mask. I don't want to heap too much praise on a basic idea, but that hockey mask is possibly the most successful and enduring single idea of any horror franchise in American pop culture. It is creepy without being contrived; emotionless yet menacing. Maybe it's derivative of Leatherface and Michael Myers, but the simplicity of Jason's makeshift mask puts it above its costume store forerunners. Hockey masks are a real thing that you can see in non-slasher contexts. You can't leave this monster behind! (actually hockey masks don't look like Jason anymore but don't tell that to my old boy Casey Jones).

The "teleporting around" aspect is more important than it seems. Jason, as the American people know him, does not chase after people like he does in PART 2. He is lazy in the stealthiest way possible. Or stealthy in the laziest way possible. We rarely see him change locations at all - he's just there when it's time for someone to die. This is what makes him feel like a force of nature and a very low-budget to film. He's got more in common with Mr. Final Destination than with Mr. Texas Chain Saw - he's not a maniac killer, he's the presence of death. You don't run away from Jason (unless you're the last girl, in which cast the rules completely change).

The movie itself is just a regular slasher. There are enough good kills (the handstand "split" being the classic) and the "haunted house" section (that thing where Jason hides the bodies to later be discovered by the survivor lady) is finally blown into a full act by this point. It is fairly impressive in its impracticality.

3 also frees up Jason from the always uncomfortable moralistic bent of slasher tradition. I don't know about the '80s because I wasn't old enough then, but teens getting killed for doing sex and marijuana cigarettes feels simultaneously goose-steppingly right-wing and awkwardly tepid (the idea of being outraged at such pedestrian activities suggests a willful facade of naivete/ignorance). So Jason's new degree of not caring who he kills or where or when (e.g. bikers, the muscley "hero", Woody Allen's disowned fat son) is relieving. He's just killing people. I can appreciate nihilism a lot better than misanthropic social politics (though you better believe I tune in to "Psycho Dad" every Thursday at 7PM EST).

09.) Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (aka Part IV)

This one has a really memorable cast of victims and somehow that's good enough. You've got Crispin Glover playing an autist who gets hella laid... BY TWINS!. You've got some weird stoner kid who pretends he's a calculator that computes what women like (genius sartrean irony: he's the only one who doesn't do sex!). You've got hot twins. You've got Corey Feldspar. There's a dog. Really, what's not to like? I enjoyed watching all of these people be oblivious to the fact that they were about to die. 

Actually I was highly disappointed that Corey "The Feld" doesn't die. Watching horror movies kill kids is always depressing (ugh CHILD'S PLAY), but this kid was a serious fuck. If I met him in real life I would punch him in the head as hard as I could, and I'm 27, which is considered much too old to be punching a 10-year-old. I get the feeling I'm supposed to relate to him because he's a horror nerd and I just don't. Zaxxon isn't even a good game. That is a game of losers and chumps. Grow some testicles and play fuckin Gradius. I don't care if it wasn't released for another 2 years. Stop pandering to me you fucks.

I lengthily debated whether this one or PART 3 should be on top, because they're the only two I enjoy even remotely. I eventually went with 3 because it's a better Jason movie. PART IV is more a Crispin Glover affair. Even the most memorable kill (the corkscrew stab) derives 50% of its enjoyability from the reaction of BACK TO THE FUTURE's favorite teen dad. The way the movie is split between plots is smart but also weird. It kinda works, in the sense that teenagers partying is not interesting to watch for 80 minutes (PART 2 I'm looking at you), but the "A" plot of Corey Feldjunior the dweeb solving mysteries doesn't feel like it's from this series. In fact it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with anything except some Mary Suing bullshit.

The way Jason is defeated (he sees a kid made up to look like him!) is a dumb payoff, and the lame to-be-continued setup of Cordog as the new killer is moronic. I kinda hate the entire ending. Luckily the subsequent two movies are spun off from it!

Friday the 13th movies that leave me with a dead, lifeless feeling

If you were locked in a theater and one of these was being projected in, I would not recommend killing yourself. I would recommend intoxication by whatever means possible, even if it means boiling your shoe and inhaling semi-deadly rubber fumes.

08.) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

This one is mostly saved by its placement in the series. After THE "FINAL" CHAPTER, things mostly got really fucking stupid as the filmmakers tried to fiddle with the formula (or more likely just stopped bothering to rewrite their borrowed scripts as Friday the 13th movies). Despite the gimmicky title, JASON TAKES MANHATTAN is a brief moment of respite from all the shitfucking we'll get to later.

It mostly gets by on a scant few s.b.-it's-g. moments, really the last time the franchise would witness that peculiar phenomenon. There is a guitar-based kill and the classic Jason punching someone's head off (of a building). There is a hot chick who draws her digestive tract on her stomach in the weirdest seduction ever. Jason is "cleansed" by drowning in sewage (yeah, yuck, kinda way too much sewage in this movie. Whatever '80s guy is responsible for toxic waste and sewage becoming a thing in movies, fuck that guy. Who wants to see that ever?).

Also it's pretty fucking strange in a hilarious way that the entire graduating class of some high school are having a party cruise on someone's dad's oil tanker which is sailing from Crystal Lake to the New York Harbor, as if any single aspect of that makes even the slightest shred of sense. "Entire graduating class" is a little misleading though, as this is either the smallest high school or the lowest graduation rate in the U.S., with only about 15 "teens" onboard. Complain about the fake-out title all you like, at least this movie has sets. The oil tanker (with disco dance floor) and back alleys and sewers and Times Square look unique from one another, and after 7 movies of straight forest/cabin/forest it's almost an embarrassment of riches.

To call these movies ill-paced would be putting things lightly, so it's good that we've come to the point where Jason is in full prowler-mode by the 20 minute mark. Back in the early days you got the cold open and then by the time Jason found a second victim the next movie was already hitting theaters. The final act transition to NYC also keeps things moving.

This is not a good movie. When we are this low on the quality totem pole, it would be insane to expect characters or attractive cinematography or continuity or plot logic or even spatial logic. All I ask is not to be bored. The greater part of this series lets me down in that regard, so I can appreciate that JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, for all its squandered potential and nonsensicality, at least goes 80 minutes without incessantly repeating itself.

07.) Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Fans call JASON LIVES the satirical one, but I don't totally see that. The franchise always borders so close to self-parody that you'd have to go a lot farther than Jason stalking a team-building paintball camp for me to see it as earnest comedy. Although come to think of it that is pretty funny. But that's the first scene, and the only other funny sequence I can think of is when Jason just stands in the middle of the road and menaces an oncoming car to death (though, again, it is quite funny). To be completely honest I got more laughs from PART VIII.

Uhhhm, it's cool that Jason is back and is a zombie now. He was clearly a zombie all along so I'm glad now I don't have to listen to Ebert complaining about it being unrealistic. As we've established, absolutely the only worthwhile thing about Friday the 13th is the nihilistic godliness of Jason being Jason, and VI, being an even-numbered entry (Star Trek rules), provides this.

06.) Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning

Ah yes, the one where Jason is actually just a guy pretending to be Jason. Considering it's technically not til PART VI that Jason becomes magic, that's not as insane a premise as it seems. Unfortunately it's not a cool premise either. Also most of the characters are like part-braindead or something? That's not a joke, that's the premise. So that feels sad. The main guy is supposedly Corey Felding's grown up from the previous movie, but it sure as shit doesn't feel like that, especially because now his trademark is that he doesn't talk and he does karate. That is not the same as making monster masks and playing computers, I don't care how many years it's been. Hence we have the first example (so far as I can tell) of a clearly-not-Friday-the-13th script being "adapted" into a Friday the 13th movie. It is weird that at this point we're following a protagonist and not Jason. Weird and stupid. And the fact that Jason gets defeated by karate, even if it is Fake Jason, is pretty unacceptable. 

Possibly the worst thing about this one, even worse than the karate, is that it pretends to be a Clue-style murder mystery. Horror movies and mysteries usually don't mix. In fact anything and mystery usually don't mix, because mystery tends to be very very boring. Introducing Fake Jason just so you can go back to having suspense in your slasher franchise in the fifth installment is kinda a slap in the face to fans, although I guess it makes sense if you're calling the movie A NEW BEGINNING. But titles don't come before scripts so fuck that. The fact that the mystery is terrible doesn't help. If you actually believed the main character, whom the movie heavy-handedly hints is the killer, actually would be the killer, congratulations. Stick around for dinner - we're having cheese souffles and freshly filleted herb-marinated red herring. If you guessed in the first five minutes that the killer was the paramedic introduced for no reason but to be suspiciously angry, also congratulations. You and me should form a Scooby Doo team.

Wait weird note apropos of nothing: Tommy, the 10-year-old from PART IV, is clearly in his 20s in this movie. So that means 10-20 story years have passed, when only 2 years passed between the release of the films. Is this science fiction?

Friday the 13th movies that make me reconsider my choices in life

It would be better for you to destroy one of these than to let someone watch it, even if it's like your dead mom's treasured VHS copy that she left to you in her will or something. 

05.) Friday the 13th Part 2

This one introduces Jason, which is good. Unfortunately this incarnation of Jason is stupid and a bad mishmash of Leatherface and the Elephant Man (? yeah). This is the main time that Jason feels genuinely mentally challenged, even if all of the movies are genuinely retarded :] sorry mom :[. This movie is mainly just party times with teenagers hanging out at summer camp or something. This is a good time to point out that at no point in any of these movies does any character feel like a teenager, so when they do something "reckless" like going to drink at a bar, it not only fails to be morally threatening, it fails to be something I notice. I am watching a bunch of 25-year-old actors go drink at a bar because that's how teenagers are cast. Maybe Hollywood can stop making movies with teenagers? That would probably be the best thing ever. I mean come on, even when you're a teenager do you want to see teenage characters in movies? What a stupid period of life.

I guess it's kinda cool when a guy in a wheelchair gets thrown down some stairs to his death. That's for being a different kind of disabled! Bold film-making! Unfortunately that's the only thing that happens in the entire movie. Seriously this is like watching a jokeless MEATBALLS where Bill Murray dies at the end.

04.) Jason X

Now, THIS is science fiction! Hahaha. That joke worked better when I had the movies in a different order. After the mind-killer that is JASON GOES TO HELL (see below), there was really no way for me to ever recover interest in the series. Friday was dead to me. Spason (Space+Jason), a once kinda chuckle-worthy concept, now felt depressing to even consider. Jason on the International Space Station would be one thing, but Jason in the future I think was one bridge over the river kwai. Here we have a confluence of the major missteps in the series: structural variation, trying to have heroes, it not being the '80s anymore, and shitty gore. And worst of all: being way, way, way too self-referential. If JASON LIVES is supposed to be satire, JASON X is a honking party clown.

The science fiction setting generates a whole bunch of storytelling dross that I ultimately tuned out. PART VIII was on a boat; even if it was a lie, that premise took 5 seconds to establish. They show you a boat. JASON X has to explain nanobots, regular bots, space professors, Earth 2.0, blah blah I wasn't listening, and space marines or something. There were probably jokes and a dire quantity of Matrix references inserted in there that I just couldn't care about, because none of it had to do with Jason.

Even when this takes place as "action", shit like "this is how future medicine work!" is just I don't even care enough to finish the sentence. For me to wake from my nap long enough to see Jason wiping out a totally trained team of space marines, or something, I need a lot more work than them looking like STARGATE extras. It is a funny idea that space marines are this movie's dumb teenagers, but not a funny reality. It doesn't help that they blast through it in a single lame ALIENS ripoff scene.

The acting has reached that level of self-aware imitation camp that dominates SyFy made-for-TV movies, something I really can't stand. Just be awful. Don't wink at each other and high-five the cameraman in between being awful, because now I know you're actors and it just seems sad. At least with the '80s kids they felt like genuine idiots. And CGI gore is, like, inherently garbage. Really. No blood is better than post-production blood.

In fairness, I watched this movie with like ten other people, and they all loved it. Even Golem said it was far and away the best F13, and he's been on-board this sinking ship since PART 3. Idk. Maybe I'm a Sour Patch Kid. In some way I wish the franchise had ended with #9, which left me feeling pissed and exasperated. Because that gave me some sense of righteousness, not like some great piece of art had been ruined, but like there actually was a way for things to get worse that we had actively been avoiding. JASON X is so late to the party that it feels like it's picking on the kid that nobody likes, and I don't like that kid either, so I'm not going to stand up for him, but it's still painful to watch idiots bully idiots.

Friday the 13th movies that signal the coming downfall of the human race

WARNING: You are willfully damaging your brain by choosing to even read about the remaining movies. Please, save your genes while you still can.

03.) Friday the 13th

You may have noticed that the movies I "like" are the ones that stick to the formula. Oddly enough, that does not include the original. While certainly a formulaic slasher, FRIDAY THE 13TH is missing the quality ingredients that lead to a tasty stew: a good-looking (and scantily clad) cast, depressingly bad acting, a cool-looking monster with an impressive arsenal, and wildly contrived violence. Instead we get: a boring looking (and heavily clad) cast (unless you're into Kevin Bacon), boring acting (unless you're into Kevin Bacon), an annoying whiny crazy lady, and tepid, mostly practical violence. The clothes hangar through the neck is the only one I can even remember, and everyone knows about that one already anyway. Plus it's more a cringe than a "cool, that's something I could do at home!". The whole thing is just so painfully boring that the only shocking moment is realizing it got a sequel. This franchise is only justified by excess. The core is totally rotten tedious soul-crushing badness. So stripping it down to the core leads to totally rotten tedious soul-crushing badness of a movie.

Sorry for the short write-ups of parts 1 and 2. I watched them years ago and wiki-p didn't remind me of much worth saying. But keep in mind it's been exactly as long since I saw 3 and 4 and I remember them perfectly well. ("One July 4th. Three Friday 13ths. Five men enter. No man leave." Actually shit it was 3-4-5 we watched that night, so it must've been a few weeks earlier that I watched 1 and 2.) 

02.) Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

I can't fucking deal with this movie. A girl with daddy issues (she killed her dad) comes to term with latent psychic abilities while her therapist is rude to her and her mom is a totally useless shitbag. NOTHING ABOUT THAT IS A MOVIE I WANT TO WATCH. Don't fucking trick me into watching it by calling it Friday the 13th you fucking asshole! By sheer coincidence, this whole stupid ordeal from a bad '70s anthology show is happening on the shores of... Crystal Lake! So Jason has to be completely not at all involved except that he kills other unrelated people until the very end, when he gets put in his place by Little Miss Psychic. We are 7 parts into this franchise. Have the filmmakers not discovered that Jason is the hero and that no one is rooting for pending soap opera actress #87?

I blame THE FINAL CHAPTER for what's going on here plot-wise and that's primarily why it can't ever rank as the least awful. There's a big difference between Last Girls and Girls with One Contrived Flaw They Need to Overcome to Defeat Jason, and the switcheroo happened right around the time ol' Corey Danielson showed up in the role. Splitting screen time between "party co-eds die" and "tacky-as-shit drama" is a cheap route to simplified scripting and auto-pilot pacing. Just go back and forth and it writes itself! Problem being that most of the movies dependent on this gimmick feel like half-movies. Only one plot ever gets any effort (/budget), which means, in for instance the case of NEW BLOOD, the memorable half of the movie is the half that doesn't have Jason.

NEW BLOOD gets extra negative points for shitting up the franchise after the "prime" run of parts 3 to 6. As you can read on the poster above, "Clearly the last thing this series needed was NEW BLOOD". Aside from my birth, 1988 didn't bring the world much good ideas. The conclusion of Ronald Reagan marked the death of the '80s dream of hyper-consumerism and hyper-futurism and reminded everybody that we're all just at war in the desert forever, and oh yeah, the evil communist empire we were fighting was fake and so America is now just this hollow thing with no scapegoat for hardship. Which, uh, is to say that the period from 1988-1992 is a weird stylistic wreck where the worst excesses of the '80s try to stick around while clearly no one is taking them seriously.

Just for completion's sake I should mention that the "NEW BLOOD" in the title is also a little in-joke about the new actor playing Jason, Kane Hodder. Shoddy Hoddy would play Jason for the rest of the series and I gotta say he very nearly ruins it for me. This is insanely nitpicky, but all this series has to enjoy are nits, so it kinda matters. He is (or at least appears on film to be) short and stout and has a really wide head (wider than his mask!) that makes Jason look far more avuncular than otherworldly. His heavy-breather approach is clearly meant to humanize Jason and I've said already that is the exact opposite of what works for the character. I've read horror fans love him and he's a nice guy; I haven't read why that makes a good Jason.

01.) Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Part IX)

Tragedy. Atrocity. Human rights violation. Holocaust. Starving Ethiopian children. These are some of the words that come to mind when considering JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY. No murder, nor compilation of murders committed by Jason even begins to approach the severity of crime that the making of this film was. I would rather arrive in a theater and have anthrax powder dumped on my head than see this abomination projected on the screen in front of me. Unleashing this filth on the American public should be a crime punishable by death, and I don't see why 22 years later we should have forgiven those responsible. I am fully advocating hunting down and murdering every writer, actor, and crew member that participated in this assault on public health and sanity (except Steven Williams, who totally redeemed himself as a true artist by going on to play Mr. X).

At the end of this movie I had the feeling of waking up in a pool of my own vomit. I knew what had happened and that it was my fault, but the mess was so permeating that I couldn't begin to formulate how I was meant to clean it up. It is inane. It is pointless. It is cynical. It has no pace. It is full of subplots and mysticism. And most of all... it doesn't include Jason! Not even a lookalike!

That's right, all of the murdering in this movie is done by some random newscaster guy that reminded me of Chris Hansen. Why? Well, of course, because he's been taken over by the iconic madman that's really been drawing fans back to theaters: the insect parasite formerly lodged in Jason's brain! No one could've been ready for how literal that poster is. We're made to believe the guy was a dick to start with, but watching him senselessly murder babies in an attempt to steal his own baby is just unpleasantly cruel. As I said at the top, Jason is so relateable because he's a force of nature. He takes no pleasure in his killings - that's how the viewer is distanced from the violence. Just having an angry looking dude in a suit sadistically hold a man's face in a deep frier is gross.

Aside from the tone of the violence being totally off, there is not a single decent "sexy" scene in this movie. I know lewd misogyny is not everyone's cup of tea, but in for a penny, in for a pounder. The "inject Friday the 13th camping scene into non-Friday-the-13th script" scene has some brief nudity and sex and that's it. No one else is even so much as attractive. The main character is a guy, for pathetic script's sake! 

And a real douchebag at that. He is channeling Crispin Glover's autistic weirdo from PART IV and yet wearing a letterman jacket that tells me he's supposed to be cool and popular. The main woman is bitch incarnate (basically a different kind of misogyny); on top of lying about her baby and dating a sleazy TV host she keeps leaving the hero to die when all he's trying to do is save her and the baby she won't tell him is his. Ironically, the rest of the characters are likeable by Friday standards... making it all the more painful that they're brutally murdered because the two main fuckheads can't get their shit together.

The only good thing about this movie is that it is so far removed from what actually defines Friday the 13th that I don't even see it that way in my head. But I still had to watch it. And now, so do you. That's right, this has all been an elaborate trick to trade my place in Hell for anyone daring to read on past the warnings. Now each and every one of your souls will know the pain of having watched JASON GOES TO HELL like 2 years ago and the everlasting torment it implies. See you in hell!

Oh wait, no I won't! >:^]