Quick Reaction: The Golem

It's annoying that Catholicism gets so much of the horror pie. There's plenty of Jewish mysticism out there. I'm sure Islam has that too. I know Mormon have some wacky shit. I'm sure some other protestants do too. Why is it always priests and devils though? We need more Golems.

 

I really will keep this brief because I like the idea behind the movie more than the execution of it. This has the feel of a fable rather than a horror movie. The scariest part is actually the opening. This is a high gore movie, which doesn't do a lot for me. The golem child is creepily blank-faced. I was a little disappointed that he was just a normal little boy most of the time. I hoped he'd at least be covered in mud throughout. 17th century Lithuania is a cool setting that I don't see often, especially for horror. None of the performances or actors stuck out especially. I certainly wouldn't mind more horror movies in this style, about this topic, or from these directors. This one just wasn't anything special.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Private Benjamin

Premise: Stripes, except a year earlier and with Goldie Hawn.

 

Seriously though, I feel the same way about this movie as I do Stripes. The first half (maybe 2/3s) is great. Judy's (Goldie Hawn) origin story is really funny. I enjoy all the fish out of water wackiness early on. As soon as she gets out of basic training and there's still a half hour left though, the movie screeches to a halt. Every scene people remember from Private Benjamin happens before she's assigned to the paratrooper unit. For that reason, I find it laughable that this got a screenplay nomination at the Academy Awards.

 

Now, I love that Hawn got a lead actress nomination and Eileen Brennan got a supporting actress nomination. I wish more performances like theirs got Oscar attention. Hawn is great throughout the movie. It's not her fault that it doesn't know what to do with her for so much of the final act. And, she still ends up selling the ending (ignoring the fact that it simply forgets to be a comedy by then).

 

There are more good parts of the movie than bad. I love the idea of this and 9 to 5 hitting theaters in the same year. This is an enjoyable watch, regardless of the dip.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Tillman Story

Premise: An NFL player who enlisted in the army died by friendly fire and his family wants answers.

 

I wanted to come out of this movie more bothered by injustice than I did. The documentary tells a pretty infuriating story. Pat Tillman decides to enlist in the Army a year after 9/11 despite his successful football career. He becomes a hero to many for his willingness to sacrifice lifechanging money so he could fight for his country. When he dies in action, the Army concocts a story of valor and awards him a silver star. Then, shortly after, reporters uncover that it was a senseless friendly fire death that the government wasn't nearly as interested in telling. I really wanted to finish the movie and feel the way the filmmakers and his family did.

 

Maybe I've just been too beaten down by the system over the years, but I don't know what the family expected. I hate how the military (and the government and companies) has a hierarchical structure that diffuses blame. But I don't see what the family was really trying to accomplish.  Where should the blame for Pat's death and coverup fall? The overzealous troops who shot him? The commander over that unit who didn't teach them better restraint? How high up did they really think the coverup went? I doubt Pat Tillman was more the talking point to Bush or Rumsfeld. If they did agree to cover up the story of how he died, it was probably a passive decision they made. I believe that those generals at the end really couldn't recall exactly when they found out about Pat's death and coverup. I thought the point of the hearing was to make the generals all look like cowards for not owning up to their mistakes, but the family seemed to think they'd actually get one of them to say "I masterminded the coverup". It's not clear to me by the end of the movie what the family actually wants.

 

I know this is a movie about fighting bureaucracy and the way we lionize versions of people rather than the real people. However, it feels like this movie is using Pat Tillman too, just in a different way.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Premise: A 17-year old girl travels from a small town in Pennsylvania to New York City to get an abortion.

 

This really goes without saying, but it's such a hair trigger issue, I feel the need to do so. This movie really isn't for any anti-abortion people. Regardless of how sensitively this movie treats the topic, it's really not intended to sway anyone any more than Unplanned will swing people the other way.

 

The word that keeps coming to me to describe this movie is sullen. It's not a depressing movie. It's not sensationalized. It's not casual. It's gloomy and quiet. I appreciated how comfortable it was with silence and explaining things with looks and actions rather than words. I learned everything I needed to about Autumn's (Sidney Flanigan) home life and social standing from how she was treated during her performance at school and getting dinner afterwards. I learned what I needed to about her relationship with Skylar (Talia Ryder) by her going with Autumn and sticking with her. I really want to go back and check out Eliza Hittman's previous movies after how confidently she directed this one.

 

I appreciate that they movie doesn't lay it on too thick. Autumn's attempts to induce a miscarriage are more pathetic than theatric. It makes its point about the difficulty getting an abortion by showing the lengths she has to go to rather than having her complain to someone about it. At the crisis pregnancy center, we know that they aren't really listening to her based on the tone-deafness of deciding to play the anti-abortion video. I appreciate how the movie lets us choose how to interpret the pregnancy center telling her she was 10 weeks pregnant rather than 18 weeks. The centerpiece scene - the one the title comes from - is powerful because of how little Autumn actually says. So much of what the movie doesn't outright say is what makes it so effective.

 

The movie lost me a little bit around the end when Skylar feels pressured into making out with that guy. It felt like one thing too many as I watched it. I'm curious how it will sit with me a week later though. It was meant to be a scene that made me uncomfortable. It could've gone a lot more extreme and it wisely chose not to. Perhaps that beat will feel like restraint over time. As I was watching it though, it was the only time the movie felt like it was underlining a point it had already made. That really is a small concern though. Overall, I can see why this movie got so much attention coming out of Sundance.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Premise: A local coroner and his son perform an autopsy on a woman which causes strange things to happen.

 

I love how often horror movies come down to "let's trap some people in a single location and have scary stuff happen". It's cheap, easy, and effective. The Autopsy of Jane Doe takes place almost entirely in an old coroner's workshop in the basement. It's got an old timey elevator and enough space for several dusty unused rooms. A lot of the movie is clinical. Two men perform an autopsy and get more and more confused by the conflicting evidence. Bones are broken but there's no bruising. Her lungs are blackened but the skin isn't burned. The movie escalates the oddness nicely. It doesn't have to work that hard to make a morgue seem frightening. I get worried about horror movies over-explaining things, but I thought the Salem witch idea was fun enough that I'm glad they spelled it out.

 

I'm always a little hesitant about familiar actors showing up in a certain kind of lower budget horror movie, however Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch were quite solid in this. The Brian Cox role in particular needed someone who can convince me he's seen everything before. Not many older unknown actors can do that, so I'd rather have a veteran.

 

Not all the hauntings made complete sense. Were we supposed to think the girlfriend was actually killed or was that a mind game of Jane Doe's? I hope it was the latter. Jane Doe reminded me a lot of the mirror in Oculus: an inert force that can't be explained or stopped. I'm a fan of that kind of horror villain.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Willow Creek

Premise: A couple goes hunting for Bigfoot and succeeds.

 

It's very odd to see this is a Bobcat Goldthwaite movie. He's not exactly a mainstream director, but I associate him with major studio-adjacent films. Ones from production companies I've never heard of that do their best to mimic a major studio look. He makes movies with a perverse sense of humor that never seems to age well (World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America are both nearly unwatchable now for different reasons). Moving to a low budget found footage movie feels like an odd move for Goldthwaite, especially because it doesn't feel like one of his movies.

 

If you take off the fairly distracting name in the director credit though, this is a pretty decent horror movie. It spends a long time getting to know the main couple and feeling pretty innocuous. It adds a couple creepy touches, but most of the payoff is at the very end. The two main actors are pretty good. The boyfriend did have trouble picking a lane though. Sometimes he was making fun of all the Bigfoot lore. Other times, he seemed to legitimately believe Bigfoot was real. He needed to be about 20% more obsessive.

 

The centerpiece of the movie is that extended sequence in the tent at night. I didn't clock the exact length of it, but that was a long continuous take. The actors did a great job selling the feeling of being stuck in the wilderness, hearing strange sounds close.

 

This movie is a pretty good example of doing found footage too well though. The unspoken agreement with found footage is that the audience will accept the camera catching more than it actually would in the real situation, because it helps the story. In reality, the camera wouldn't be on and focused for most of the scariest moments because "fight or flight" isn't built for cinematography. Willow Creek sticks pretty close to what would really be caught on camera, which means we get a brief glimpse of a Bigfoot then they die. That's a little underwhelming. The way to counter that is to keep the tension high throughout the movie. The Blair Witch Project doesn't have many huge scares but it works so well because it's tense for almost the entire run. Willow Creek doesn't do much to create tension early on. That means the movie is light of tension and on scares. So, it's not the most effective horror movie. I appreciated aspects of this movie, yet, it doesn't justify why it's an entire movie rather than a short on a V/H/S movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Quick Reaction: Mary Shelly

Maybe I've been writing too many of these lately (this is my 24th in less than a week), but I really don't have much to say about this movie. Elle Fanning is good (not a surprise at this point). It was fun seeing Bel Powley and Maisie Williams pop up. This is the kind of biopic that drives me to the Wikipedia page, which ends up being about as interesting as the movie itself. Mary Shelly's life just isn't very cinematic. She was a woman with famous parents and a famous husband who wrote a popular book. That's about it. She had some scandals that were more shocking for their time than now. The movie tries to spice things up by visualizing some of her inspirations for Frankenstein. That's about as interesting as it really gets though. At two hours, this is really about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be. Unless you are looking for anything with Elle Fanning in it, I'd recommend just reading the Wikipedia page instead.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Quick Reaction: Spenser Confidential

Peter Berg is my favorite director who I wouldn't call a favorite director. I like him more for the shows he's helped get off the ground (The Leftovers, Friday Night Lights) than a lot of his movies, although I've seen nearly all of the movies. He really is the working-class Michael Bay. Bay makes Pearl Harbor. Berg makes Patriots Day. Bay makes Transformers. Berg makes Battleship. I could list off his movies and probably convince you Bay directed a few of them pretty easily. There's something more grounded about Berg's movies though. Spenser Confidential is like Berg's Pain & Gain. Or maybe it's better to compare it to Stephen Soderberg's Out of Sight. It's a street level crime movie. Part action movie, part comedy. He cast characters more than actors. That's how someone like Iliza Shlesinger, who is more comedian than actress, can fit so easily into this movie. Or, why Post Malone isn't distracting in it. It's also nice to see Berg using Mark Wahlberg well again. They work together very often. Their last movie, Mile 22, was just plain awful. Wahlberg is better in something like this: effective but out of his depth; a little pathetic; a good guy but not a clean guy. This was an easy movie to leave on in the background, but it wasn't quite fun in the right ways to really pull me in.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Scheme

Premise: The FBI investigation of college basketball as told by the guy who got the longest jail sentence.

 

This documentary is very useful for anyone who isn't as deep into following college basketball as me. That's not a weird humble brag. I just follow college basketball closely. It's my biggest non-movie, non-TV obsession. I followed the news as the events covered in The Scheme were going down. I know many of the names. I understood the conflicts of interest and how weak the government's case was. So, a lot of the movie was review for me. Even still, there was a good amount in The Scheme that I learned about the FBI investigation that rocked the college basketball world in 2017.

 

I actually do recommend this even to non-college basketball fans. It's well made. It explains how this FBI investigation went down in an orderly fashion. At the end, it even spells out the larger hypocrisy of it all. At the center of it, there's the story of Christian Dawkins, who went to jail for defrauding universities. Dawkins is a genuinely impressive individual. He's a hustler since birth. Business is an actual skill for him. Even after all this, I'd be surprised if he's not a multi-millionaire at some point. He just has that drive.

 

So, this is a very slanted documentary. Dawkins surely isn't as clean as this movie makes him seem, although the irony is that what he was doing before the FBI got involved was all legal. Dishonest, but legal. I'm sure the FBI or NCAA would push back on a number of points in this movie. I don't mind the slant as much here though. This does a great job laying out an investigation that most people misunderstood from the headlines alone. More importantly, it explains why it's dumb that this was turned into a federal case in the first place.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: My Spy

Premise: A secret agent gets blackmailed by a little girl who records him on a secret mission.

 

There's an obscure law in Hollywood - leftover from the studio contract days of the 50s, I think - that says if you are a bodybuilding, wrestler type of action movie star, you a required to make a family movie in which you play on that persona. To my knowledge, only Sylvester Stallone has gotten out of this*. It turns out, winning an Oscar gets you out of this requirement. Pretty much everyone else though - Vin Diesel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dwayne Johnson, John Cena - has had to do this. These aren't particularly good movies, but you'll find defenders of all of them if a person was in the right mood when they watched it. I still remember a friend of mine in high school who swore by The Pacifier (Vin Diesel), for example.

 

*He's tangentially enough connected to Spy Kids that you could nearly count that.

 

On a more serious note, these stars make these movies because they realize they have fans who are too young to be watching their other movies. The former wrestlers in particular are aware of their young fans and feel a responsibility to them.

 

My Spy is Dave Bautista's kid movie. I'll spare you further suspense. I really liked this movie. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it, but I laughed out loud several times. It makes sense too. Unlike a lot of these action stars, Bautista has already developed a comic persona, mostly through the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. He's great at being comically sincere and even better when he's flustered. In other words, pair him with someone who's a bit of a sociopath and you'll get comedy gold. That's where little Chloe Coleman comes in. She's not the greatest child actor I've even seen, but she's really good at talking down to adults. That's perfect for this movie. Honestly, I preferred her and Bautista in this as a duo to Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani in Stuber, which didn't take advantage of Bautista's strengths as well. Also, props to Kristen Schaal, who plays a more human character than I expected, given what she's normally cast to do.

 

Don't get me wrong. The movie is dumb. There's some humor in it that's entirely for kids. The story follows the same frustratingly predictable beats. Much of the comedy worked so well because I set my bar really low. But, this is easily the best version of this movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend