Delayed Reaction: Friday the 13th: Part 2

Premise: It turns out Jason is actually killing young people this time.

 

Part 2s of horror franchises are interesting. They don’t normally make the first movie with the idea of a sequel. The sequel only comes once the first movie proves successful enough to warrant it. At that point, the filmmakers or producers have to deconstruct the first film to figure out what made it work. Unlike other genres, where it’s a protagonist that holds together sequels, with horror, it tends to be a malevolent force, not necessarily a person even, that holds the franchise together. If you notice, the second movies tend to be the messiest or poorest received sequels. Halloween 2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Paranormal Activity 2. Saw 2. These are all feeling out what does and doesn’t work. A Nightmare on Elm Street realized it needed Heather Langenkamp back for the third movie. Paranormal Activity 3 stepped back and kept it simpler than PA2. Halloween and Saw both took a little longer before figuring out more mythology-heavy formulas that work.

 

Friday the 13^th is interesting since the first movie turns out to be more of a prequel. It’s Jason’s mother that time. Jason doesn’t show up until the stinger at the end of the movie. So part 2 is the first proper Jason movie. And it’s not until the 3^rd movie that they figure out who he is and what he looks like. Part 2 ends up being an in between movie. It cements the basic structure of the movie with the dead teens and a healthy dose of sex. Jason is still pretty feral. I’m not the world’s biggest slasher fan and Friday the 13^th isn’t may favorite flavor of slasher, but for what it is, I enjoyed this installment well enough. I appreciate how the filmmakers were still trying to be a little thoughtful with the story. As fun as a Jason X is, it’s a lazier movie from a story perspective.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: JFK

Premise: A conspiracy theorist’s account of the JFK assassination.

 

This is actually my second time watching this movie. The first was when I was in high school. It’s a funny story. I had to do a book report on a JFK biography. I didn’t really want to read the book though. The Saturday when I was supposed to read the book, I noticed there was a History Channel program about JFK’s presidency then, right as that was ending, the Oliver Stone JFK was airing on HBO. So, I thought I was set without ever needing to open the book. As you can imagine, I was doing a lot of reading and writing that Sunday once I realized my mistake. I tell this story because I made the same mistake that many who watch JFK do: I thought it was trying to be accurate.

 

The truth about JFK is that it’s closer to Inglorious Basterds than, say, Schindler’s List. JFK is a confidently told fabrication*. Oliver Stone made it too well. I watch the movie and believe it all. That’s what makes it an excellent movie and a dangerous movie. Like the old Western says “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. A lie told convincingly is more effective than a truth told poorly. That’s the meta-text of JFK. The government did such a bad job of making sense of the JFK murder that people like Oliver Stone (and his source material) can construct a story of their own.

 

*If it isn’t clear, I don’t buy any of the large conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination. I think the truth of it is more mundane than the enormity of the result. That’s often how things go.

 

I’m not saying that JFK created the conspiracy around the assassination. It’s absolutely a film responding to 25 years of speculation. What I’m saying is that I’m a person watching the movie nearly 60 years after the assassination who doesn’t doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, yet I still came out of this movie checking Wikipedia just to be sure. I don’t know how I can praise this movie any more than that. It’s 3 hours that breezes by. The cast is outstanding and huge. Donald Sutherland’s scene is standout. I really just don’t have a complaint about the content of the movie. My only complaint is what the film is in service to.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Not OK

Premise: A wannabe influencer fakes surviving a bombing in Paris.

 

There’s a famous quote from Sir Edmond Hillary. He was asked why he wanted to summit Mt. Everest. Flippantly, he said the reason was simply “Because it’s there.” I remember this quote because he and Tenzing Norgay did go on to become the first documented people to summit Mt. Everest. I’m sure there were plenty of people before him with similarly clever quotes who tried and failed to summit Mt. Everest. History is favorable to those who pull something off though. I’m sure those who tried and failed (and maybe died) trying to climb the mountain were ridiculed. Why do something so foolhardy and dangerous? If you try something so crazy, you better succeed.

 

You may be wondering what Not OK has to do with climbing Mt. Everest. Well, in a way, doing what Not OK is trying to do is an Everest of a different sort. It’s an almost impossible movie, but if they could get it right, it would be incredible. I’ll save you some suspense. Unfortunately, Not OK fails, yet I respect the hell out of the ambition.

 

To its credit, the film is aware of the danger. It opens with a cheeky warning about flashing lights and an unlikable female lead. It goes on to tell the story of Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), a rather unremarkable millennial who dreams of being a social media influencer. One weekend, she decides to stage an elaborate Paris vacation from her apartment. The problem is, it turns out there were bombings in Paris minutes from where she was supposedly posting from. After initial shock leaves her speechless, she falls into then embraces a lie about being in Paris during the bombings and being close to the events. She uses this attention to start an “I’m Not OK” movement online and befriends a teenage activist (Mia Isaac) who actually was the survivor of a school shooting. As you can assume, Danni’s lie eventually falls apart, she becomes the most hated person on the internet, and she doesn’t know how to make it better.

 

I’ll admit, I’m already not a fan of stories built on a big lie like this, so it was an uphill battle to get me to like this going in. Many people are quicker to accept the conceit of the movie. But honestly, it’s not the conceit of the movie that bothers me. Sure, none of this is very plausible. My bigger issue is that I don’t think the movie has much to say.

 

The film runs from all the hardest parts of the story and is too worried about staying ahead of its criticism. Like, that opening warning the audience about an unlikable female lead. To me, that reads as the filmmaker preparing a defense that if I don’t like the movie it’s because I’m uncomfortable with an unlikable female lead. Or take the ending. Danni is desperate to make amends with Mia Isaac’s character, but after hearing Isaac’s speech, realizes that the story isn’t about her and leaves. That’s a nice sentiment, but…the movie is about Danni. So, here’s the arc of the movie. Danni is “Entitled Millennial with Nothing to Say”. She tells a pretty easy to disprove lie and becomes a celebrity in a world that apparently doesn’t have reddit sleuths. Her lie gets discovered. She’s hated and accepts being hated. What exactly is this adding to the discourse? Bad people should pay for the bad things they do.

 

I just wish this movie hit everything harder. For a black comedy, I never found myself laughing then thinking “I shouldn’t be laughing at that”. I was never conflicted about who I was rooting for and against. That’s the fun of something like Thank You For Smoking. Nick Naylor is so charismatic that I could forget that he’s technically the bad guy. Not OK never pulls off the same thing with Danni. She’d be a much more interesting character if she didn’t start so desperate. Granted, that desperation is what made her initial Paris lie plausible. I never said there were easy solutions to my critiques. Remember my opening paragraph. The satire is similarly toothless. Cool, young people are desperate for internet fame. Yeah, actual influencers are often phonies. Bold, saying school shooting deniers are bad. An interesting satire would go after some sacred cows. This could’ve gone way harder at something like Hashtag Activism. I’m just so frustrated that I felt no conflict watching this.

 

It’s a shame, because there are strong parts of this movie. Zoey Deutch is absolutely the right person for the Danni role. She’s inherently likable but is willing to get a little dirty. Buffaloed is a good example. Mia Isaac is excellent as the moral compass of the film. It’s almost like she was better than expected and the movie didn’t know what to do with it. It throws the film off balance. I love the boldness of the premise. The film starts down a lot of interesting paths that go unrealized. I wonder if the early drafts of this started a lot harsher too many higher-ups sanded down the edges by the time it went into production. If nothing else, Not OK is an interesting failure. I wish more movies would try to be interesting failures. 

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: 13 Lives

Premise: The true story of the herculean effort made to rescue a Thai junior football club and their coach from a flooded cave.

 

I hate to be a “you should read the book instead” guy, but you should really watch the documentary on this story (The Rescue) instead. Normally speaking, I see the reason for there to be a documentary and a dramatic feature of a story like this. Think of Man on Wire and The Walk. Man on Wire gives all the context and reassures you that this story is real. The Walk brings it to life. The Walk had a lot of problems, but they were all worth it to see the walk reproduced on screen in a way Man on Wire simply couldn’t. The problem with this Thai rescue story is that the documentary covers all of that. It explains all the context I need about the men involved in the rescue, the specialty of the task, and the insanity of the plan. AND it restages parts of the rescue so that the doc is also a thrilling watch. So, what’s left for 13 Lives? Not much, sadly.

 

The movie is ok. Maybe it plays better if you haven’t seen The Rescue already. Ron Howard is a technically proficient director and restages a lot the rescue and other assorted dives well. The movie looks good. Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton do their best “Norm-core” impressions. It’s a weird problem the movie has. The men doing the dives are really unassuming. They don’t look like highly skilled divers. They look like middle-aged men who still talk about that time they got SCUBA certified on vacation. So, casting movie stars to play them obscures that. I’d expect mountain divers to be physical specimens. Casting Aragorn, Alexander the Great, and Brendan Conlon from Warrior makes sense. What’s hard to make clear in the movie is that they are actually casting Tony Lip from Green Book, David from The Lobster, and Richard Loving from Loving. It’s a tiny point to make, but it’s definitely something that got lost in translation here.

 

Ron Howard does his best Paul Greengrass impression in this. He keeps the sentimentality down and really focuses on how technical it all is. The rescue itself takes place for over an hour of the film. That’s a lot of commitment to process, and he’s cutting in with the work people are doing to divert the flooding. The movie does a great job of showing how much real effort from all over the globe went into this. Just because The Rescue did it better doesn’t mean I think 13 Lives did it poorly. This is an entertaining, slightly long, harrowing but hopeful movie made by a lot of people who know what they are doing.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Yearling

Premise: A boy adopts a young deer that causes problems.

 

I don’t know what The Yearling’s reputation in pop culture history is. I recognized the title. I know it’s a running joke in an episode of Gilmore Girls. Was this an Old Yeller though? Did this ruin a generation of children? Does this hold some pure place in film history as a gentle coming-of-age story? I ask this because I don’t know how controversial it is to say what I’m about to about this movie: The Yearling is a terrible movie.

 

It’s not offensively terrible. It’s not calling me an idiot. It doesn’t have aspects that are bigoted now. No, it’s simply bad. I didn’t enjoy watching any second of it. It felt twice as long as it was. Every time a character started talking, I wanted them to shut their mouths. I felt no positive emotions toward this movie. It’s bad. It’s not good. I want a refund of any kind.

 

Since this is a flat out pan, I’m not going to be thoughtful in my examination of it. I’ve already upset anyone who holds this movie dear. Let’s see…

 

·         Every time they called each other “Ma”, “Pa”, or “Boy” I wanted to punch them in the face.

·         Claude Jarman Jr. is a profoundly bad child actor. You know how Americans will start yelling at a person who doesn’t speak English, like that’s supposed to make them understand? Jarman seems to do the same thing here. Any time he’s given direction, he just does the same thing badly, but louder.

·         The score of this movie is punishing in both its intrusiveness and intention. It sounded like they stole it from a biblical epic and arbitrarily attached it to these mundane scenes.

·         I wanted the yearling to die. It took an hour for this thing to show up, which is as inexcusable as making this over 2 hours total. It immediately is nothing but trouble. By the time the movie was ready for the deer to die, I was tired enough and petty enough to root for that, just for the film to end.

No one even needs to watch this movie. I thoroughly regret not updating my Netflix DVD queue in time to see anything else.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Movie Reaction: Bodies Bodies Bodies

Formula: (I Know What You Did Last Summer / Booksmart) ^ Very Bad Things

I’m moving into a generational danger zone. I was born in 1987 making me about as Millennial as it gets. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to the talking points on mine and previous generations. I laugh at Boomer nostalgia. I chuckle at how ineffectual Gen X has been. I rail against the “90s kid” nostalgia that plagues millennials. I have to be careful about the Zoomers though. When there’s commentary about Zoomers, I have to check myself to make sure I’m laughing at genuine critique and not a generational misunderstanding. Like when am I laughing at something about TikTok because it’s funny vs. when I’m laughing at it because I don’t understand it? That makes Bodies Bodies Bodies a relative minefield.

 

Bodies is a horror satire about Gen-Z culture. A group of mostly wealthy 20-somethings hang out in a secluded mansion during a hurricane for drugs and games until one of them turns up dead and the rest start turning on each other. It’s a dark comedy story type that never gets old. I mean, it’s basically The Thing but with a very different tone and setting. The satirical take is what keeps it fresh with healthy discussions with gaslighting, body dysmorphia, and other Gen-Z buzz words.

 

What did surprise me is that the movie is much more of a straight whodunnit than a comedy. The trailer puts the comedy front and center. I was a little concerned going in that it was going to be a bunch of pronoun jokes that people could laugh at for the wrong reasons as well as the right ones. It’s actually not that. Most of the jokes along those lines are in the trailer. The movie is much more interested in being tense and scary. Here’s the Catch-22 of it. I wish there was more of the satire in the movie, although I’m certain if it would’ve leaned into the satire more, it would’ve become insufferable. As is, most of the Gen-Z humor comes from a single character (Rachel Sennott’s Alice). The rest of the characters are pretty straightforward. I wish they would’ve spread the Gen-Z tropes to more of the characters. There are a couple big jokes they do give to characters late in the movie that fall flatter than they should, because until that point, those characters have been pretty normal.

 

As for the whodunit of it all. Consider this a spoiler but not really. Let me choose my words carefully. The nature of this whodunnit and the “who” in question feels pretty obvious early on and it impacts the way things play out [predictably] as a result. I was never that invested in the mystery of what was going on. I was interested in how it would play out, which is distinctly different. I wanted to know who would survive, not who did it. Given that it’s less of a comedy than advertised, that left the movie feeling empty. It’s the difference between a Knives Out and a Free Fire. Knives Out gets momentum from spending the whole movie trying to figure out the puzzle. Free Fire is about seeing how these idiots make a mess of things until they all die. Bodies isn’t that interested in solving the mystery, so I wish it would’ve played up the comedy of all the characters instead of focusing most of it on Sennott.

 

That’s a finer point that obscures my overall opinion of the movie though. It’s like how my Reaction for Ready or Not focused on how I wished it was even crazier than it was. Since then, I’ve embraced Ready or Not even more fully and love it. I liked Bodies Bodies Bodies. Most of that has to do with the cast. The two biggest names – Lee Pace and Pete Davidson – are actually the least impactful in the movie. Pace in particular is great at embodying the “old guy still hanging out with young people” type. The others in the cast made the biggest impression. Maria Bakalova surprised me a lot. This is only the third thing I’ve seen her in. The Borat sequel and The Bubble were both broader, comic roles with a lot of assurance. In Bodies, she’s very different. Nervous, overwhelmed, and timid. I’ll be honest. I thought her Oscar nomination was a Covid-impacted fluke/perfect role at the perfect time. She showed real range in this though, and I think she’s going to stick around for a while. Amanda Stenberg really has fun playing a more barbed character for a change. Myha’la Herrold too after a couple seasons in the business world trappings of Industry. Raechel Sennott and Chase Sui Wonders play arguably the most entitled Zoomers in the movie, and they do it well. The fact that the cast do feel like a fractured tight-knit group (mostly) is what keeps this movie interesting. I felt like I knew the relationship between every character. In other words, this fits perfectly into the “wind a bunch of characters up, put them in a room together, and see what happens” structure that I tend to love.

 

Bodies Bodies Bodies is better than my most pessimistic fears about Zoomer soundbites, but it’s not as darkly or sharply funny as I’d hoped either. The filmmakers are effective at building the atmosphere and directing the performers. There’s just a little confusion about the tone it wants to take or how much it wants to lean into the comedy and suspense.  

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

 

After the Credits

It was clear to me pretty early that there was no killer. Is that just me? Especially when they killed Lee Pace so early. Had it been a movie where we were really supposed to be concerned with the killer’s identity, we wouldn’t see Pace’s murder so early in the film. Sure, Peter Davidson dying was a mystery. With the amount of drugs and the specific nature of his death, there was always room for it to be an accident. Then the first and arguably best suspect, Lee Pace, gets killed next in a completely unmysterious way? The third death, Chase Sui Wonders dying from falling down the stairs when most characters are drugged up is suspicious but also not clearly a murder.

 

That leads me back to my point about the film not picking a tone. There’s the version of this that’s all about finding the killer. That version should lean more into the mysteriousness of the deaths and suspicious activity from all the characters. Or there’s the version that would’ve played up the comedy. It could’ve played its hand earlier and made it clear that they were in danger because they’re idiots, not because there actually was a killer. Kind of like the college students in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. That would’ve allowed them to play on each character’s Gen-Z or rich kid flaw. I think I would’ve preferred the latter option, but either one would’ve played better. I don’t think either option would’ve had to step on the big punchline at the end when they find out how Davidson actually died.

 

Delayed Reaction: Cube

Premise: A group of people are trapped in a series of cubed rooms, many of which have traps, and they don’t know how to escape.

This comes from an enjoyable subset of SciFi movies that I wish I had a clever name for. They can succinctly be described though as “Smart Idea; Mediocre Acting”. A lot of directors who are later known for being perfectionists or visionaries have one of these. Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Shane Carruth’s Primer. Or whoever made Circle. The idea is that there’s this high concept or really smart idea for a movie, but either because they are new, have no budget, and/or have no reason for people to believe in them, they get pretty mediocre actors for the movie. As an audience, you basically have to decide early whether the acting is too distracting or the idea is compelling enough to hold your interest.

 

Cube really challenged me in that respect. The idea is really fun. For a small budget, it looks great. The concept is immediately compelling. I was ready to be on board with it. However, the acting is so bad. I don’t know how to divvy the blame between the actors, director, and writing. I just know the final package was a lot of overacting and thin characters. If you are the kind of person who eats up even the most amateurish SyFy series, I imagine you’ll see this as a hidden gem. If you are the kind of person who could never get into even a Stargate series, like me, then you’ll struggle with this.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend