Delayed Reaction: Casting By

Premise: A documentary specifically about casting director Marion Dougherty and about the role of casting directors more broadly.

 

The truth is, very few people understand the movie-making process. It's hard to separate an individual job from the final product. A great script with poor actors sounds like a poor script. Beautiful production design can look awful with bad cinematography. A great score is nothing if the sound mixing is off. Of the main title roles, Casting and Film Editing are perhaps the most discrete. In both cases, they are generally credited to the director and when they are done well, they are almost invisible. Casting By is an attempt to make people realize just how valuable proper casting is. It's like building a sports team. Just signing the best players isn't always the key to success. Sometimes there's a star who the team needs to be built around. Or maybe there's a player oozing with potential who just needs the right role. Maybe there's a specific system they have to recruit for. The same challenges are what a casting director faces. They have to know who to even suggest for certain roles or how to populate a world that fits together. I came away from this movie with three thoughts:

 

1) I have a better idea what the value of casting is.

2) Marion Daugherty is a titan who deserved more industry recognition.

3) The DGA kind of sucks.

 

The first two I expected going in. The last I did not. I can tell this movie isn't impartial, but the DGA rep sure came off like a dick. Basically, it looks like the Director's guild and branch of the Academy are pompous and don't want anything diminishing their reputation. Personally, I suspect film director is the most overinflated role on set. The cinematographer gets the shot. The actors deliver the performances. The writers come up with the words. The editor figures out the best takes and order. The director is an administrator in a lot of ways.

 

Whatever. There should be a yearly Casting Oscar and Marion Daugherty should have an honorary Oscar. The movie makes a good case for that. That is all.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Operation Condor

Premise: A treasure hunter goes searching for gold buried in the Sahara Desert in WWII that is being pursued by others at the same time.

 

Apparently, everything about how I watched this movie was wrong. I didn't even realize it was a sequel the 1986's Armour of God until looking it up to write this Reaction. I also didn't know that the 90-minute version I saw had 15 minutes cut from it. There's even a 117-minute cut out there somewhere.

 

None of that really mattered though. I still loved this movie. I guess one day Jackie Chan just decided to make an Indiana Jones movie. It's very similar in location, story, and tone. The big difference is that it has Jackie Chan's signature stunt work and choreography. This one does not disappoint. It is filled with ambitious and complex stunts. Like normal, I didn't even appreciate how difficult many of them were until the outtakes during the credits. This is also typically big on the physical comedy too. His trio of female sidekicks are a surprising amount of fun even though their ability to actually do stunts was limited.

 

I'm kind of glad I started with a dubbed version of this. I don't have a problem with subtitles, but it does make it harder to be transfixed by what's happening on screen. With this dubbed version, I got to be fully focused on the action. Maybe I'll track down a longer subtitled cut later. This is probably the most purely entertaining non-English Jackie Chan movie I've seen since Police Story.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Candyman

Formula: (Candyman + 29 Years) * Velvet Buzzsaw

 

Horror sequels are a funny thing. I can't think of another genre that regularly decides which sequels it will and won't pay attention to. It's not like Star Wars wrote off the prequels before The Force Awakens or Die Hard is like “With a Vengeance never happened”. Superhero franchises are a little confusing in that they regularly reboot and sample larger cinematic universes. At any moment, the next Batman could be a new thing entirely or tied into some other D.C. movie. But horror is the main genre that just says “only pay attention to parts 1 and 2. Ignore the rest”. Halloween has done this a lot. When the 2018 movie came out, there was even a helpful chart made to keep it straight. This Candyman sequel does this as well. This new Candyman movie is a direct sequel to the 1992 original and ignores (rightly, from what I hear) the two forgettable sequels made in the 90s.

 

This new Candyman does stand on its own. You can go in with no knowledge of the first movie. They summarize what you need to know about the original well with really creepy shadow puppet sequences in the movie. The movie effectively tells the story of Anthony McCoy, who is an artist living in the now gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood in Chicago. After he hears the story of the original movie at a dinner party as an urban legend, he decided to investigate it as the inspiration for his new art series. This leads him to the mostly forgotten legend of the Candyman. He was a man killed by police for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, if you say his name 5 times in a mirror, he comes back to kill you. Anthony’s art exhibit on it then causes a resurgence in Candyman murders and at the same time, he’s being personally terrorized by the Candyman.

 

If you know the original film well, you’ll recognize the parts of the retelling of the story in this one that are inaccurate. You’ll also recognize immediately that Anthony is the baby from the first movie. That is not remotely hidden. You don’t need to know that to appreciate the movie, but it definitely adds some nice depth to it. In ways like that, this movie exists as both a remake and a sequel. One of the lessons of the movie is that the thing that give legends their power is being passed down, so it’s very fitting that this somewhat forgotten franchise from 30 years ago gains meaning from retelling it.

 

I don’t remember the original movie that well. I forget how aware it was of the fact that it’s about a white grad student doing cultural anthropology in a mostly black housing project. That’s not great. This movie is definitely better about that. Black filmmaker. Black cast. There’s no gawking feel to the movie. Candyman is a response to a collective trauma shared by a community. The movie does a great job examining that in a way that feels timely while still being an enjoyable psychological horror movie. The Candyman franchise at its best is quite interesting in that it’s not quite a slasher and not quite a fable. It has elements of both. It’s a brain-breaker yet Candyman still finds time to hack a few people to death. Director Nia Dacosta doesn’t resort to jump scares much. She’s pretty matter-of-fact with the violence. She doesn’t always revel in the violence. She’ll often show it from a distance or through another person’s reaction to it. I’m not as crazy about her treatment of the art world in the movie. She goes after the pretention, phoniness, and opportunism of it in ways that weren’t as incisive as the cultural commentary. Despite being the new angle of this installment, it didn’t feel very fresh. Anthony could’ve just as easily been a reporter and the things I liked about the movie would all be intact.

 

This is one of those movies where the cast kind of feels secondary. Yahta Abdul-Mateen II is good as Anthony yet if he was left out of a sequel, I wouldn’t feel deprived. Same with Teyonah Parris. I like her as Anthony’s girlfriend who doesn’t know how to handle his mental breakdown. She isn’t vital to it working though. The person who makes the biggest impression is Coleman Domingo as the carrier of the Candyman legend. That dude has presence. I could listen to his gravelly voice explain local folklore to me for hours. I also have to say that Vanessa Williams as Anthony’s mother has one of my favorite reaction shots ever. It’s that moment used in all the previews when Anthony says ‘Candyman’ in front of her and she shuts it down. I’d love to know how specifically that was directed. She does about 5 different things in about 1 second that come together perfectly. It’s funny yet still captures how seriously she takes the threat.

 

I enjoyed the movie overall. What set it over though was actually the end credits. We hear throughout the movie that Candyman is a repetitive cycle of wrongly accused black men getting persecuted by society. We hear parts of the stories in the movie. During the credits, it uses the creepy shadow puppets to tell all the different stories wordlessly over simple, haunting music. It entranced me and left me with the perfect uneasy feeling when I left the theater.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Night House

Formula: What Lies Beneath * Final Destination

 

Perhaps the oddest thing to radicalize me was the MTV show from the 2000s Room Raiders. The idea of the show was that a person would choose who to date after touring the three bedrooms of the suitors. This got me thinking about the idea of what people could learn about me while I wasn't around. That changed my labeling and organization habits tremendously and arguably created a monster. Ever since, I've also been a big fan of movies that explore ideas of what can be learned in the absence of another person. Searching is one of my favorite movies from the last few years because it’s all about finding clues from a person's computer. The parts of Me & Earl & The Dying Girl that devastate me are the parts about learning something new about a loved one after they are gone. Horror uses the same idea really well. We all have secrets. What if those secrets are sinister or at least spooky? That's where all the power of Lake Mungo comes from. The same basic idea drives The Night House.

 

The Night House is about Beth (Rebecca Hall). Her husband killed himself about a week before and she's dealing with the emotional fallout. She's not handling it well, as one would expect. At night, odd things start happening at her lake house. She sees things from the window. The stereo keeps turning on for no reason. She's getting communications from her dead husband. All evidence of these things is gone by morning, and she has been hitting the bottle pretty hard lately. Maybe she is just imagining things...but that suicide note he left her was pretty weird. As she starts investigating these odd occurrences, she uncovers odd activities her husband was up to. But what does it all mean?

 

I went into this movie knowing that it was a horror movie and nothing else. That's pretty ideal, since even my formula for this gives away some of the fun of the discovery in the story. The movie is packed with creepy imagery and unsettling mysteries. It has one of the better jump scares that I've seen in a while. A few actually and they feel earned. The mythology the film builds up is fun to untangle. I do think the film runs into an overexplaining problem toward the end. It's really hard to avoid that in a horror feature though, and it's not egregious over-explaining. The amount of resolution to the story is good. There's still a big mess to clean up, but I know enough about the end of Beth's story to feel satisfied.

 

Rebecca Hall is really good while playing against almost nothing for much of the film. Sarah Goldberg does show up as a concerned friend and Vondie Curtis-Hall does yeoman's work as the concerned neighbor. So much of it though is Hall exploring a room and looking confused, terrified, or sad.

 

The Night House isn't splashy indie horror in the A24 mold like a The Witch or Midsommar. It's closer to the studio-polished horror of a decade ago. Thanks to the setting, I thought a lot about The Uninvited and What Lies Beneath when I watched this. It turns out the director previously worked on V/H/S and Southbound, so of course I'd like it. That likely explains the movie's willingness to leave some really gnarly moral questions at the end.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

 

After the Credits

The husband sure is a thorny issue. It's sweet that he really loved his wife. They also point out that he stopped himself from killing the bookstore woman when she asked him to stop. Yet, Beth does find a bunch of other dead bodies in that mirror house. So, he's not exactly noble. I wish the movie could've found a way to make Beth cope with that a little more. These women were killed in her name as an expression of her husband's love. That's fucked up, but the movie is more concerned with her own attempts to elude this dark passenger than the awful deeds her husband did before that.

Delayed Reaction: Fear Street Part 3: 1666

Premise: The gang takes a trip back to the curse that started it all.

 

That was an entertaining conclusion. As a whole, this trilogy was everything I hoped it would be. Not perfect, but very entertaining. Part 3 is a bit of a mixed bag. The 1666 stuff is OK. The movie obviously doesn't have a huge budget, so those scenes look a lot like they just rented out a Colonial Williamsburg for a week to film it. All the costumes seem starched, like they've never been worn before. The actors can't decide what a 1666 Ohio accent should sound like. It's somewhere between Mennonite and Irish, apparently. You kind of have to go with it though. I didn't sign up for perfect production design. The story of the curse is reasonably satisfying and gives context to the first two installment. That's enough.

 

I enjoyed the latter half when they go back to 1994 with fewer reservations. I'm a sucker for a good mall showdown (even if it invites even more Stranger Things comparisons). The stuff with trapping the killers in the stores and using blood-filled Super Soakers to lure them is clever.

 

Side Rant: I have serious questions about this town's building philosophies. Both the camp and the mall build on a known cave structure and even use that for their outhouse and ventilation respectively. It's a dumb detail to get fixated on, but did no one during the construction decide to check that cave out? And, I know nothing about buildings, but that cave system seems pretty shallow. Is it safe to build a giant structure like a mall on that? Is the foundation strong enough? And what's with leaving a tree alive as the mall centerpiece. I've seen that before with malls, and it's always seemed like an awful idea.

 

I do feel a little cheated about the Nick reveal. Part 2 doesn't hint at all that he's really the bad guy, so this felt like an abrupt heel turn. I wish there was a little more in Part 2 to make me suspicious of him. Because, even when they go to flashbacks after the reveal, those scenes don't show much to make me suspect.

 

The credits tag hints at them wanting to do more of these movies. I would love for this to be an ongoing thing. It fills a really underserved niche. It's an R movie that's geared toward teens and nostalgic. It has shades of anthology but distinctly not in the Ryan Murphy American Horror Story tone. I'd love a few of these movies every couple years with a new or repertory cast.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fear Street Part 2: 1978

Premise: A throwback slasher movie tied to a larger tale about a town cursed by a witch.

 

I said this with the first movie, but I think this series is such a cool idea. It's not an original idea. For decades, networks had TV movie series with recurring characters. That's what Fear Street is. It's just at a bigger scale. I feel cheated of the original plan of releasing these to theaters in June 2020 (I imagine still in the weekly format). That just isn't something you see in theaters ever. It's a clever idea though. Make the movies for cheap, with familiar yet inexpensive younger actors. Horror is notoriously frontloaded, so a decent opening week could cover the production cost. I'm a fan of any idea that incentivizes major studios to invest in anything other than $100 million blockbusters*.

 

*I love me an expensive blockbuster, but I also love variety.

 

Still, releasing in successive weeks on Netflix does make more sense at the end of the day. It's a way to circumvent the "Netflix churn" problem. Netflix made full season drops their staple with Arrested Development and House of Cards years ago. Lately though, with the amount of content they produce, shows are disappearing from the zeitgeist after a weekend. Meanwhile, HBOMax and Disney+ are dominating the conversation by sticking to weekly releases for their biggest shows. With Fear Street, Netflix can release one movie a week to spread out the attention without it looking like a retreat from the strategy they built their brand on.

 

None of this would be any fun to discuss if I didn't so thoroughly enjoy the movies too. These movies are really fun experiments with different horror styles. 1994 was an I Know What You Did Last Summer-style slasher. 1978 is more in the Friday the 13th mold*. And it's a lot of fun. Sadie Sink is a great final girl. I only even recognized 2 other people in the 1978 portion: an unrecognizable Ryan Simpkins and barely even a cameo for Jordana Spiro. The rest of the cast was unknown to me, which is always fun for a slasher. If everyone is anonymous then no one is safe.

 

*It's fun to note that the years of these movies both predate the type of movies they are pulling from. I wonder if that's intentional. Like, "we need to set Part 2 before there was a Friday the 13th so the characters don't know to reference it"?

 

What remains my favorite thing about these movies is that everything about the setup and tone of these makes me think this is for younger audiences but that doesn't mean it plays nice. Preteens are straight-up murdered in this movie. There's swearing and sex. The kills are brutal in that cartoonishly excessive way. I don't fully understand who these movies are supposed to be for and that's weirdly thrilling.

 

I worry a little bit about this third installment. What kind of vibe is 1666 going for? I'd love if it's the A24 horror style of The Witch, but I don't know if this series can handle that kind of tone. I'm not used to seeing slashers in this much of a period setting. There's thrilling potential here.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fear Street Part 1: 1994

Premise: A group of teens fight against the curse of a witch that they accidentally disturbed.

 

I don't know where to begin with this movie. It's the first of a three-part series*. The original plan was to release it in theaters in summer 2020. That was COVID delayed obviously, and in the process the production company changed their distribution agreement from 20th Century to Netflix. That's how it ended up there. I'm a little confused by that, because I thought changes in distribution like that tend to kick in for new projects, not right away: like how Dark Phoenix was still a Fox release even though it was owner by Disney at the time. Anyway, it's wild to think about this as a theatrical release. What was the plan for the trilogy? Release one in three consecutive weeks like Netflix is doing? Leave a month in between? Surely, they wouldn't make them annual. It also just feels very Netflix-y. Maya Hawke is briefly in this one. Sadie Sink is in later installments. It has a retro-period setting. It all has the feel of a project Netflix greenlit due to the success of Stranger Things.

 

*I've only seen the first movie as of writing this even though it'll be posted a little while after all three have been released.

 

Immediately, I appreciated that this doesn't play by the MPAA-mandated rules. I'm used to the idea that a movie based on an R.L. Stine book series and with this kind of simplistic mythology would be watered down to PG-13, since the target audience is largely teens. Instead, this movie is very violent with a lot of swearing. It's a pretty hard R, realizing that the young ones will find it anyway. Good for them. The MPAA is dumb. I do wonder if this would've remained R-rated had it gone to theaters, so this was a very welcome surprise.

 

It's a little hard to judge the movie on its own, since it is very clearly part of a series. The young cast is pretty good. They opted for a lot of newcomers and lesser-knowns. Maya Hawke is the only person I can identify by name until you get very far down the call sheet. They aren't all that believable as high schoolers, but they fit in the movie. I'm very curious to see how the series connects the installments despite them going back in time. I imagine 1978 will feature the surviving characters from 1994 in some way. Perhaps it'll be the survivor (Gillian Jacobs, I'm assuming) recounting her story.

 

The movie does a decent job capturing the mid-90s. The soundtrack is more pan-90s than 1994. The needle drops work for the feel of the movie, even if the songs all weren't actually out in 1994*. The movie references the 90s without being obnoxious about it.

 

*Correct me if I'm wrong about that. I really don't think all those songs were out yet, right?

 

Really fun start. I'm curious if this will encourage more experimentation in this Sherlock-style TV show/movie hybrid format.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Ophelia

Premise: A different take on Hamlet from Ophelia's perspective.

 

I love the idea of alternate takes on stories. When it's done well, it feels like a magic trick. I love how a story changes entirely when seen from that different perspective or when given additional context*. Complete creative freedom is great and all, but I'm also a huge fan of when someone is tasked with a set of sometimes insane boundaries and has to find room to make something good in its own right. I love all forms of this. Give me the multiple perspectives of the same story in a Rashomon or Vantage Point. Give me a prequel. Give me a concurrent story. Give me time-travel. I'm intrigued by all forms of it. I'll put up with a lot of half-assed attempts in search of a Hannibal (the series) that fundamentally changes and enriches the thing from before.

 

*In my teens, I spent a lot of time developing a series of stories that started as Zelda fan fiction. The idea was that there were several stories that overlapped. I was never that great at the actual writing part, but I was obsessed with the different ways that the stories could intersect and figuring out timelines.

 

So, I'm all on board for this Ophelia movie in theory. I love Daisy Ridley and Naomi Watts. Ophelia is an under-explored character in need of some nuance. I've even seen this done successfully with the Hamlet story before in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I did end up liking Daisy Ridley in the lead role. She brought a lot of interiority and strength to Ophelia. Naomi Watts is having a great deal of fun playing dual roles. The movie looks good too with great costuming.

 

The unchangeable restrictions set by the Hamlet play are quite a hurdle though. Ophelia doesn't really clear them. It fails the "Would I rather be watching a Hamlet film with this cast?" test. And it struggles to integrate the Hamlet scenes into the movie. They feel reverse engineered. Like, the only reason this Ophelia goes insane or has to fake her death are because that's what happens in Hamlet. They don't feel natural to this story. Ophelia ends up being a noble failure. Great idea. Excellent casting. It can't quite crack the story though. It's like a well-made musical with a poor songbook.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend