Delayed Reaction: Ouija: Origin of Evil

Premise: A family discovers that they can communicate with their dead father with their Ouija board, only to realize that something more nefarious is happening.

Maybe board games aren't such a bad idea for movies after all. Hear me out!

My gut reaction to hearing that a studio is developing a board game into a movie is, like most people, disgust. It sounds lazy. Creatively bankrupt even. Producers will take any name familiarity they can find and turn it into a quick buck. You know, the standard complaints. And yes, there are some games that really have no business getting made into movies. What could you do with Sorry? How about Yahtzee? But think about it. Most movies are just a gimmick made into a story. The Matrix is just "what if we were all living in a computer simulation?". That Thing You Do is just "what's it like to be a one hit wonder?"  The only thing that makes board game movies different than movies inspired by other things is the licensing fee.

The part that gets tricky is figuring out how much the gameplay of the board game needs to be integrated into the movie. Clue is a quite excellent movie because it pulls just the right amount from the game. It uses the characters with the fun names, the basic style of the game, and the general layout of the house. They took those bones and fleshed them out with proper casting, funny dialogue, and a twisty fun story. Meanwhile, Battleship was panned because it went too far. Instead of just being about battleships trying to find each out in the vast ocean (an idea with a lot of potential), it shoehorns in the grid system from the game. And, honestly, that isn't even what makes the movie bad. The bad stuff is the ridiculous characters and the decision to make the enemies sea aliens. I stand by the fact that Battleship isn't a bad idea for a movie. It just can't be the entire idea. Really, if someone made a Monopoly movie and wrote it like Wall Street, who's to say that wouldn't be good?

This all leads to Ouija. This is an obvious horror premise. The first Ouija movie was quite poorly received though. No one really cares about an evil Ouija board. That's taking the idea too literally (See: Truth or Dare). Instead, Ouija: Origin of Evil uses the Ouija board as a launching point. It's actually more of a haunted house story. The Ouija board is just a conduit for the evil spirit. I ended up liking this movie a good amount. It helps that it was directed by Mike Flannagan (Oculus), who is probably my favorite horror director right now. This has a lot of Flannagan trademarks. Confined or limited location. Discrete malevolent force. Open-ended conclusion that suggests the malevolent force has won. He basically just thinks of the Ouija board as a fun prop for a good story.

It's not perfect. The Ouija board gets thrown in a bit more than needed. I don't fully understand the logic of it all, or even the decision of who gets killed and when. But, for a PG-13 horror movie produced by a toy manufacturer, this was pretty good.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Sullivan's Travels

Premise: A Hollywood director decides to pretend he's poor for a while to better understand the downtrodden for his next movie.

I swear, most of the old movies I see fall into one of two categories:

1. They are incredibly long but I'm not sure how they filled the time with how little story there was.
2. They are short but somehow pack the story of three movies into them.

A lot of the big sweeping epics fall into the former category. The latter category tends to be comedies. His Girl Friday was one of those. Sullivan's Travels is certainly another. That story moves. Sadly, it moves at a downward trajectory by my measure.

I basically saw the movie because I've heard the opening scene quoted so much. That scene is really clever and funny. It would work word-for-word if inserted into a movie made today even. The movie never really matches that wit as it continues though. The premise also ages worse and worse by the day. It's basically a rich guy fetishizing what it's like to be poor. The message of the movie lands in the right place, but the way it gets there is downright patronizing.

I'm still working on getting better historical context for the movie. Maybe as I see more and more movies from the early 40s and before, I'll better appreciate the ways that the movie was ahead of it's time.

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake are fine. Neither are on my list of go-to "Golden Age" performers, and from all indications, this is the movie that should've sold me on them the most. Oh well.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Wall-E

Premise: Set in a distant future, a small trash compacting robot roaming an empty Earth comes to learn about the fate of humanity in space, but all he really wants to do is get cozy with a robot named EVE sent to determine if Earth is inhabitable.

I'm a stupid person.

I saw Wall-E shortly after it was released on video and I weakly hated it. I've always had a distaste about movies that run with the theory that humanity is the worst. I also have a short fuse for lazy anti-capitalist messages. So, the second half of Wall-E rubbed me the wrong way. I'm still not entirely over that aspect of it, but I have softened on it.

So, I finally got around to rewatching Wall-E. Damn, that's a lovely movie. Knowing what to expect going in made it a lot easier to appreciate all that's good about the movie. The beginning is excellent and can't be praised enough. I have a major weakness for non-dialogue story-telling. It really is crazy that Pixar snuck this into a blockbuster movie targeted at children. Wall-E manages to be funny, sympathetic, and brave without ever saying more than his name. This is A+ stuff.

The movie still loses me a bit once it moves to the spaceship, but it's still reasonably enjoyable. The best parts continue to be about the robots, not the humans.

Wall-E remains only mid-tier Pixar for me - below most Toy Stories, Up, Coco, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille at least. However, that speaks more to how much I like other Pixar movies than it does about the quality of Wall-E. It's certainly above the Cars sequels, The Good Dinosaur, and Monsters University, which I couldn't definitively say before this rewatch.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend