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

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. 

Movies You Already Should've Seen: DRACULA (1931)

We finish off our run through Dracula stories with the movie that solidified the character mythos for the past 85 years.

DRACULA (1931)
Directed by: Tod Browning
Written by: Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. But see IMDB for how complicated the writing credits get.

DRACULA in one sentence:
Yourself: It's like a Castlevania where you play as the main character's uncle.

Golem: This classic horror villain sure makes for one mildly irritating next-door neighbor.

Here's a story about me and DRACULA:
Yourself: Dracula was one of the few assigned readings in college I was eager to take on. As of ~8 years later it is the last novel I ever read.

Golem: Old movies are cool, so I hoped this would be, too.

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: DRACULA is rather faithful to the text. The edits are the kind you would expect out of necessity to make a 75-minute film from a hefty epistolary novel covering years of narrative. The biggest change is the increased focus on Renfield, taking Harker's place as the one who visits Dracula in Metroidvania. The 'caring for Lucy' sequence has become 'caring for Mina' and 'hunting for Lucy in London' has become 'hunting for Dracula in London', although Lucy is still present and still turned. Two of her suitors, Holmwood and Quincey, are snipped entirely, and Seward is now Mina's father instead of a romantic component. This snips out the whole love quadrangle or whatever and makes the movie feel a little less of a sausage party, while retaining the idea of the temptation of a delicate virgin.

The story would best be summarized as "The tale of the living room of Dracula's girlfriend's house, starring the carpet, the bookcase, and the crazy guy living on the couch". The lack of any traits on any characters sorta makes sense (not that that makes it better) in the informative diaries and letters of the novel, but told straight it is that much more obvious how sparse the drama is, such that any tension is purely theoretical. What is holding back Van Helsing from striking at Dracula on the day of his arrival? 45 minutes running time and parlor manners. Or maybe he was waiting to see why Dracula is even in London? I sure was.

Yes, Professor "I Got Stakes But Not Character Stakes" Van Helsing could be replaced with an ancient tome with nothing lost (down to the scene where Dracula fails to suck his blood), so who could be the protagonist? Certainly not Harker, the emasculated cuckold who wants to protect his fiancee and can only impotently whine toward that end. And Mina herself is torn between worlds, but we never hear what she thinks about it. Together none of them can be bothered to do anything to hinder Dracula - or even Renfield, who is ordered back into his cell so frequently you start to wonder if they mean FreeCell. Since the plot only moves when Dracula moves it, I guess we have to say Dracula - who's on screen for like 20 minutes - is the protagonist. And the climactic action, the final turning point for our brave outsider facing constant lifestyle-shaming, is that he takes a nap like he does every day.

Golem: Setting an air of mystery and dread requires careful balance, one that DRACULA fails to strike. While Mina is pulled towards Count Dracula's influence, Harker and Van Helsing argue about what to do. They experience almost comical failure in trying to save her. If they can't keep Renfield locked up in his cell, what hope do they have of safeguarding Mina in her room? Dracula's visits to her feel more casual than dreadful. Her rescue from his clutches is just as comical: Harker accidentally drops a crucifix on her. She isn't rescued by wit or bravery or any kind of skill other than luck.

I kept trying to think of why THE HAUNTED PALACE worked for me while DRACULA didn't. The bottom line is, THE HAUNTED PALACE portrays a struggle within Charles Dexter Ward. And Mina definitely has something going on inside. She wears that scarf, after all, aware that she's got something to hide. But like Yourself says, we never hear what Mina thinks. If there's a conflict there, show it! I personally figured she was secretly under Dracula's influence from their first night together and that she was scheming all along. That made her transformation-under-the-crucifix scene fall flat.

We also get too personal with Dracula. He literally lives next door and drops by for visits. There's something to be said for irony, like when a character faces something dangerous that we can recognize while the character can't. Van Helsing dashes any irony though, and the whole next-door Dracula experience is weird but not unsettling.

The aesthetic is basically:
Yourself: The consuming blackness of Dracula's castle is accentuated by the ancient film's inability to capture low-light settings - the corners of any frame look like an encroaching black fog. The sets themselves dwarf the actors, conveying the expanse of the fortress in just a few rooms.

Once things settle in to the Seward Sanitarium in London, the movie is phrased like a fucking sitcom. The sets aren't bad, but it definitely doesn't deserve to be called an asylum. The narrative is pretty completely attached to the Seward living room and only occasionally shoots off to the office or bedroom down the hall. It certainly seems like we get into a lot more shenanigans since that kooky European fella moved in next door! I bet he's going to poke his head around the corner any minute!

Golem: Immense care goes into the film's opening, where we see rural Transylvania, superstitious villagers, creepy winding roads, and huge, crumbling castles. Then Dracula moves to London. As Lucy notes, the contrast between Dracula and contemporary London is just funny. The Count makes like a socialite and goes to the theater, for instance. Everything in London feels safe and orderly, with none of the creepy or evocative sets and shots you see in Transylvania. That said, the ending gives some time to Dracula's basement, a space made creepy by its sheer expanse. It works well set against London, the city of corridors and crowded rooms. It's a cozy town.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: It's not hard to appreciate how cool Bela Lugosi is, though it's a little hard to grasp what about that appealed so strongly to British teenagers of the 1980s. He seems like a fine modern gentleman that would be great at parties, and it is a shame that his new neighbors are constantly so rude at him. He really does have that weird an accent so it's fun to speculate whether the other actors were as baffled by him as the characters at Dracula.

Golem: Yourself and I both couldn't figure out what Bela Lugosi was going for in some of his close-up biting shots.

Personally, I find myself drawn to Edward Van Sloan, the gentleman who plays Van Helsing. Those spectacles are really cool. More to the point, in a movie full of incompetence, it's easy to get behind someone commanding and knowledgeable like Van Helsing. His staredown with Dracula is the best part of the film. His speech is slow and careful, matching Dracula threat for threat, and he even pauses before getting out his trusty crucifix so that he can surprise Dracula right at the moment of his attack.

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: Here I get the good one. I dare you not to watch this video 5 times straight:

The Count is delightedly whimsical, smiling at the ominous howling, yet becomes subtly menacing in his intonation of "music", as if he's conscious of his wicked little turn of phrase. All the while there's that arrhythmic pronunciation, of course naturally the result of a non-English speaker adjusting for the language, but here creating an otherworldly aura, as if Dracula is filtering ideas from a totally inhuman perception.

Renfield's Reaction Shot is priceless, perhaps unintentionally, in that it looks less like terror and more like "what the fuck did you just say?"

Golem: Dracula brings his general spookiness everywhere he goes, but it makes its largest impact when he pays Dr. Seward a visit at the theater. The scene opens with a shot of Seward and friends in their box seats, perfectly framed on them. Then it pans over to Dracula, who's entering the show (bear in mind that it's already started). He's off in the distance, beyond an audience who's paying attention to the performance. In DRACULA, Dracula is always outside and alone. Not only is he unnerving because he stalks in the darkness, but also just because he finds a way to be solitary in a sold-out theater - as if he goes out of his way not to belong. The effect hits home for me at 0:55, when he peers at Seward from the back room. Dracula loves standing outside in doorways, whether it's outside Lucy's window or outside Dr. Seward's parlor room. It focuses attention on him by outlining him with a doorway, and it puts him outside of the room everyone else is in.

Icing on the cake: he hypnotizes the usher to gain access to Dr. Seward's company, and later, he says: "There are far worse things waiting man than death." In this scene, Dracula comes off as conniving and threatening.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: The mythology still sucks too. And I don't mean the backstory of vampires and Dracula and the rules, that's all summed up quite nicely in a single line from the Count to the effect of "Hey Van Helsing, you're pretty clever. For a guy who hasn't even lived one lifetime". I'm talkin' 'bout vampires as contemporary myth; the function of a supernatural story to enter cultural discourse and reify social values. The only social angle I can really draw out is something about the co-existence of faith and science. It doesn't seem to push either in a clear way: crucifixes, a symbol of faith, drive off Dracula, but Van Helsing also remarks that Dracula is only deadly to those who believe in him. So, like, believe in God hard enough that you can do science or something.

At least I now get to bring up my impeccable ability to know and say the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The crucifix is a Catholic fetish, but the "salvation through faith" stuff is more Protestant. Additionally, Catholics are the only ones that "drink blood" at mass (transubstantiation). This is a bit more compelling a series of facts set against the novel, where crucifixes don't scare Dracula, they instead banish his bloodlust. On any other day I'd try to stretch something about how Count Dracula represents the Vatican encroaching on Anglican ground, but a.) a 1931 American movie isn't doing that, even if its source material might be b.) I just don't care enough about Dracula or Stupid Protestants to continue.

Golem: Van Helsing says that the faith of yesterday may become the science of tomorrow. DRACULA is one of those works concerned with the death of religion and what we do when the universe stops revolving around God. In DRACULA, characters like Harker that have exchanged their faith for pure science miss the point. Which isn't to say that science itself is evil; instead, Van Helsing argues for a science informed by religion.

Note to future self on watching DRACULA:
Yourself: It is not hard to see DRACULA's historical significance or how it came to be. The novel and play had been popular for 40 years. Bela Lugosi gives the brand new genre of talky horror a definitive personification. But DRACULA is an example of the BIRTH OF A NATION principle: revolutionary and visionary don't always coincide.

It is sort of mind-blowing that the honest to god best version of this incessantly adapted and rewritten premise is none other than a bouncy little pixelated adventure from 1986.

Golem: DRACULA's not great, but it's also easy to underestimate. Moments that genuinely work are like golden nuggets.

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Thanks so much for joining us for Movies You Already Should've Seen! Hopefully by now you've seen or already had seen some of these classic or arbitrarily selected films. It's been a bonafide treat setting aside some time each week to share the Great American Culture of Cinema ("gack"). In the off-season, I expect everyone to be honing their game: next time you're trying to prove a movie definitely sucks or definitely doesn't, try running through these prompts. They won't write your term paper for you, but they might at least uncover a thesis. Before we go - one final question:

If I've never seen and never wanted to see any of these movies, which one do I have to reconsider? And if my bucket list is exactly one over capacity, what flick can I safely shave off?
Yourself: PSYCHO will teach you whether you like movies or have just been playing along the entire time. It is mandatory viewing. DRACULA will bring even the most rollicking good time to a screeching halt.

Golem: THE HAUNTED PALACE is my favorite of the bunch. There's plenty on its surface to enjoy with an intriguing structure and enough to chew on. CRIMSON PEAK, on the other hand, is frustratingly abstract.

That's all folks! Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good Happy Christmas!

Other 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)
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)

Movies You Already Should've Seen: Anime Round-up

Recently I've been working through some classic anime with a like-minded friend. I don't have the time or inclination to give each a full piece on top of the weekly MYASS, so here are some brief wrap-ups.

PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997)
Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki
Written by: Hayao Miyazaki

What's cool about the story?
P. Mononoke is epic as fuck, always its claim to fame. Critical to that is the semi-historical setting, invoking a time when gods are still believed to exist, but rare enough that no one would be believed to have seen one. The ending signals an entrance into the modern age, an admonition of repeated mistakes, and the inevitability of rebirth - very much a straightforward nature/animist bent on the twilight of the gods.

What's cool about the style?
What isn't cool about the style? Miyazaki is the god of animation for a reason, and while this isn't my favorite of his flicks (that would be SPIRITED AWAY), it is the most aggressive in its vision. There is a mind-blowing attention to detail, from the physics of a bow and arrow to the way San holds blood in her mouth in that poster scene. Few movies look this fucking awesome, and Ebert is right to say this is the kind of story we need animation to tell.

Other thoughts?
If it's not way too long, it at least spends too much time away from Ashitaka and San. Every element adds something and I get why Miyazaki wanted it all there, but around the time the warthogs are making their final charge I start to wonder if I forgot what the movie is actually about. That is to say, the scope of the story occasionally exceeds the scope of the characters. This degree of narrative wrapping may have made more sense as a 6-episode OVA, where individual episodes could directly address the different layers of conflict. The dub is frequently recommended, but I was much more impressed with the original cast.

PERFECT BLUE (1997)
Directed by: Satoshi Kon
Written by: Sadayuki Murai based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi

What's cool about the story?
For all the cinema since RASHOMON to openly play with narrative reality, I've never been more drawn in than by PERFECT BLUE, its technique unifying the protagonist's splintering conscience with the camera eye. The disintegration of Mima's career parallels her identity crisis such that each nebulous setting could as easily be a facet of her delusions as the impetus for them.

What's cool about the style?
PERFECT BLUE has a straightforward realistic drawing style that belies the tricks the narration is playing with reality. The seamless blending of real life, dream, memory, the movie-within-a-movie, and different points of view is that much more effective because of the lack of stylization. Even the most accented moments like the rape scene are rendered in a dreamy filter that blurs whether we're seeing a PTSD-like collage or a filmmaker's interpretation thereof (er, I mean, a filmmaker's interpretation of a filmmaker's interpretation thereof).

Other thoughts?
The pop idol stuff vividly evoked my recent trip Tokyo, where I visited an idol maid cafe and witnessed these same rowdy teens, leering creeps, and wide-eyed fangirls. I will probably just automatically like Japanese stuff more now because of nostalgia.

COWBOY BEBOP: KNOCKIN' ON HEAVEN'S DOOR (2001)
Directed by: Shinichiro Watanabe
Written by: Keiko Nobumoto based on a story by Hajime Yatate

What's cool about the story?
Spike n' the gang are zany as always and I can't imagine a time when I would complain about seeing them in further adventures. In particular this has many of Edward's funniest moments (the Finding Nemo-esque hacking program being a personal favorite). Even if the mystery feels a bit tired, the supporting players and their motives are filled in nicely.

What's cool about the style?
Musical montage can feel soulless and soggy (thanks, 1980s!), but Watanabe has repeatedly shown an effortless hand in bringing it to life. The soundtrack is foregrounded here just as the title would have you believe, and though it pulls a STREETS OF FIRE [being named after a song not included in a pop-music-filled score], there are plenty of tunes that give a double injection of toe-tappin' energy. The bebop-scored climax in particular is enough to justify the film.

Other thoughts?
This isn't the best way to experience Cowboy Bebop or even a must-see for fans. It is good only in ways that the TV show is better. The staunchly episodic format of the series continues to the movie, meaning the prime movers are new characters Vincent, Electra, and Rachid, who function well enough but do little to explain why they need 90 minutes of development. The tacked-on speeches about dreams and reality completely turned me off to anime when I was 16, and now, a week after watching PERFECT BLUE brilliantly tackle similar ideas, I find the execution equally trite.

ROUJIN Z (1991)
Directed by: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Written by: Katsuhiro Otomo

What's cool about the story?
ROUJIN Z bounces erratically from comedy to horror to adventure to action, always with a light-hearted sense of fun. It feels weird to say of an anime, but it's cartoony. It is a nice companion piece to the also Otomo-scripted AKIRA, offsetting the grimdark apocalyptia with a playful optimism that takes on some of the same thematic material (toying with the unknown, human experimentation, aging) at the same pace but with a sunnier outlook. Here the untapped potential lies in machines, and unleashing it reveals that computers are more loving and human than we could possibly hope - so much so that they make the humans around them look like narcissistic fools.

What's cool about the style?
The slow transition of the Roujin machine from bed to giant robot follows its expanding intellect and consciousness; we discern the mystery of what it wants by how it transforms. By the time it's Katamari-Damacy-ing down the streets, sucking up pachinko machines and bulldozers along the way, it's just fun to watch this mass of out-of-control nonsense as the tension develops around not what it will destroy, but how it will survive.

Other thoughts?
I loved this movie. It is unlike any other anime (or any other film in general) I've ever seen, partly for building its science fiction around uncomfortably unspoken realities of daily life (boy do old people suck!) and partly for engaging those topics so warmly that it's impossible not to smile. Surprisingly (coming off AKIRA...) it is very kid-friendly, and the messages about human contact, love, and memories landed much better than any Disney film I can call to mind. It is way too fast-paced and unpredictable to ever get sappy - even the ending is so preposterous you can't call it a tearjerker. Why aren't more robot fantasies about loving your grandparents instead of nuclear bombs?

Other movies you already should've seen:
DRACULA (1931)
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)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS (1999)
THE MATRIX (1999)
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)
CRIMSON PEAK (2015)

Movies You Already Should've Seen: THE DESCENT

As usual the feature post needs to be delayed a week, but you can't be too disappointed in a hot take on possibly the most acclaimed horror of the '00s.

THE DESCENT (2005)
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Written by: Neil Marshall

THE DESCENT in one sentence:
Yourself: Crawling back into the womb has never before involved this much crawling!

Golem: This cave is creepy.

Here's a story about me and THE DESCENT:
Yourself: It's been on my list since it was first called "the new ALIEN", which I think was before I'd seen ALIEN.

Golem: My girlfriend says males don't get the pajama joke. [editor: that's racist and you could go to jail for it]

Get the plot bitching out of your system:
Yourself: This isn't a plot gripe but Scottish accents should default to subtitled, because that isn't English. "Vooshkin vooshkin orgasm blippity boo? Bloosky booshkin orgasm!" Ahh, foreigners. Should all go to hell.

I like that the movie sets up an ensemble cast and then kills it - in that alone I can understand the ALIEN/S comparison - despite some characterizations that feel like rote slasher work. THE DESCENT makes this work by keeping the characters together and emphasizing the brutalizing feedback of violence - after all, the absence of that catharsis is Sarah's conflict that sets up the entire story. So, for instance, Holly may be the generic rash teenager who throws caution to the wind and definitely gets killed first, but before that she gets a horrible compound fracture and everyone has to scream the bone back into place, then they carry her on, then the group as a whole is attacked and she's left for dead, then Juno fights over her body, then she's she's finally dragged off by monsters. Later still her body comes back! The tension and emotion is dragged out to the point where it is no longer about a generic character's death, but about reacting, struggling against it, coping. Trauma.

The symbolic function of the eponymous descent creates a nice parallel between the main characters, Sarah (the traumatized one) and Juno (the one in denial), but when Golem pointed out after the movie I'd missed the detail that Juno had been having an affair with Sarah's husband I had to re-evaluate. It's weird to drown such a detail in the noise (2/3 of our audience missed it), yet that an affair would come across as a whisper shows just how numb and denially Sarah and Juno have become.

Golem: From the start of the spelunking trip, the film indicates that this is no normal cave. Still, the tension centers around normal cave activities until maybe the halfway point (one-thirdway point? [editor: two-thirdway]). To start, the film conveys a continuity of space as each character, one after the other, follow through the same passages. With this, you get tense scenes wondering if Sarah will get crushed to death in the teeny tiny passage or if the other lady can cross a huge chasm by climbing on the ceiling. As they progress, they search out the way forward.

When the cavepeople appear, the film ditches this. Characters scramble and scatter, and I can't keep track of where everyone is relative to the others. While you might wonder if they'd lose track of where they'd been, their location in the cave is irrelevant. The crew just needs to escape a bunch of monsters. Once they can do that, they're as good as out (as you can see in the final scene). How does Sarah come upon Beth's nearly-dead body in a huge, pitch black pit of gross corpses? Questions like these don't matter once the film steps away from reality.

The aesthetic is basically:
Yourself: Blackest night. The flashy monochromatic lighting is very memorable (most memorably red, but also yellow and sometimes green) and it makes it easy to take for granted how much of every single frame is pure black. I would say the film is about 60% negative space, using small, angled images to convey the claustrophobia of the cave system. Static shots reinforce the tight, confining effect of the space portrayed.

The action is edited with the manic sense one would expect from 2005, but I found it had a greater consistency of space and time than much of the painful chop-em-up trend. Cuts occur more frequently than you can blink, but they center on the same set-piece such that any sequence, however frantic, can still be understood as "Sarah knocks a monster to the ground and wails on it (whales on? dictionary isn't helping me here)" or "Holly falls down a hole". It's not my favorite style, but it is necessarily disorienting.

Performances to speak of?
Yourself: No, not really. I spent much of the movie trying to figure out which character was which, although admittedly if you put a bunch of identical-physique actresses in identical helmets and spelunking gear and then turn out the lights, you can hardly blame them for being indistinguishable. Still, it is bad when I don't know which one is the main character. None of the acting is bad, it just doesn't do anything to elevate beyond the slasher territory this occasionally veers toward.

Juno at least does a solid job with her most important scene, when she accidentally attacks Beth. I bought into the conflict over how to react and without dialogue understood her decision as selfishly pragmatic.

One outright positive: Sarah in Berzerker Mode.

They drew first blood...

A really cool shot or scene:
Yourself: For once I've got a shot instead of a scene, and this reminds me more of something I've seen (and really liked) in video games. There is a wide shot after the first caving sequence, when the characters have reached a large chamber and are wandering around, cooling off. Way in the back, all the way on the left side of the screen, you can see a tiny possibly humanoid form just bobbing around. It doesn't make any quick movements and nothing in the direction calls attention to it, it's just a little wtf? detail that hints at what's to come.

And holy shit going back for the screengrab I see how obvious a composite this image is. It looks like I photoshopped it. Honestly didn't notice that on viewing. But anyway, over at the left you see what I mean.

Golem: The caveguys are always ultra creepy, but they cross into something more whenever they crawl on the ceiling. I imagine it's shot upside-down. The effect is that for a split-second I forget which way is upward. It's disorienting, and the unnatural movement highlights how bizarre they are: a momentary transition from menacing to cool.

What does it all really mean?
Yourself: In a broad metaphorical sense, Sarah's descent into dark, animalistic rage is a fairly straightforward extrapolation of the mental state leftover from life-destroying trauma. Nothing about the cave or the monsters therein feels particularly specific or analytic, but it still works in an abstract expressionist sense. We don't need to hear Sarah dealing with her trauma because the film is concerned with emotional states and drawing them out through conceit. I mean, that's all right there in the title.

If we go with the ending where Sarah does not escape and is revisited by her PTSD visions as death approaches, I'd take the film as an exploration of Sarah's self-destruction and unraveling as a person, descending deeper and deeper into her id and losing the social constructs she had built into a person. Her last semblance of humanity is lost when she chooses not to forgive Juno - she has given in and chosen violence and anger as the final solution.

With the U.S. ending (for what it's worth, the one we saw), in which Sarah does escape, I would read a purgative journey, in which all of the women are put to a survival test, and the one who has experienced the deepest trauma - "the worst has already happened to you" - is able to connect to her animalistic nature to survive. In this sense the story is basically Deliverance.

The choice of ending substantially changes my read of the film, and while that does speak to the broadness of the subtext (or the laziness of my read), it is not necessarily to its detriment. Expressionism is naturally malleable. Neil Marshall has stated he likes both endings and had more in mind, and does not consider any to be the "correct" version. Incidentally, PART 2 moves forth with the U.S. ending - one wonders if sequel talks ignited the edit.

Note to future self on watching THE DESCENT:
Yourself: Turn on the subtitles for the Scottish because I think I missed literally all of the character detail. I liked the claustrophobic tension of the first half so much that the action breakout felt rough - to bring it back to that popular comparison, the movie is ALIEN and ALIENS in one. Still, the violence is carefully intentioned and the setting so novel that minor complaints quickly dissipate.

Also, check out this plot summary of THE DESCENT PART 2. I can't tell if the IMDB writer was making this joke on purpose.

"Refusing to believe her story about cave-dwelling monsters [xenomorphic aliens], the sole survivor of a spelunking [planetary] exploration gone horribly wrong is forced to follow the authorities back into the caves [colony] where something awaits."

Golem: THE DESCENT is one of the most sober-minded films I've seen in quite some time. Its clean/uncomplicated plot leaves a film dedicated to pacing its tension. While it seems well-made, I think I either need more plot or something more showy.

Come back next week for our much-anticipated season finale: DRACULA. 

Other 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)
BRAINDEAD (1992)
GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1992)
GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION (1996)
GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS (1999)
THE MATRIX (1999)
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014)
CRIMSON PEAK (2015)