This Week in Rixflix #20: August 25-31, 2017

There's just no way around it. In order for me to post this recap within the timeframe I have set for my regular This Week in Rixflix pieces, I need to post it today. The problem is that my body and mind are nowhere in the vicinity of where they need to be to do it any justice.

Illness has taken me under again. This time it is some sort of flu or flu variant, possibly a stomach bug but I also have an ongoing headache and my throat is slowly getting rawer over the past 36 hours. As I posted on Facebook, nightmares have come with the illness, and they have been pretty severe on their own, let alone having to also feel completely shitty while dealing with monsters and murderers. As a result, this post is going to consist of this lead-in and a single review of the new American version of Death Note. I had planned capsule reviews of several other films that I viewed in the previous week: Cher and C. Aguilera in Burlesque (2010), Greer and Garson in Adventure (1945), J-Law and galaxy guardian Chris Pratt in the gorgeous but vapid Passengers (from this year), Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie as an odd sister pair in The Hard Way (1943), and Elvis himself in Easy Come, Easy Go (1967). 

It's a shame, because I had a few things to say (as I usually do) about all of these films, but the way I am feeling, it would be eons before I got the thing written. This is primarily due to my having some other topics I hope to write about this weekend, and I don't want to shift ever more projects to the back burner. (It is already a horrid habit of mine that I need to overcome.) And my reason for choosing Death Note as the single review this time is because I had already written three-quarters of it. It too was intended as a small, capsule review but turned a bit larger as I got going on it, so now my inability to edit myself down for once has turned into providence.

One note that I should add for the films that appear in the header image for This Week in Rixflix this go-around: most of the films that I watched over the past two weeks were an attempt to catch up on films from TCM's Summer Under the Stars, an event they hold annually each August. The 24 hours within a single day are used to focus on a particular star, and I love to use the event to catch up on films that I have missed in the filmographies of certain actors. This year, Summer Under the Stars overlapped with my attempt to finish the Hitchcock film course, and so I pretty much ignored the first week of SUTS, and really only came into it near the end of the second week. But I was able to knock out several titles each from Barbara Stanwyck (three films), Glenn Ford (two films), Greer Garson (six films), Ricardo Montalban (another six), and Dennis Morgan (never big with me, but I took advantage of it and saw a whopping eight films, most of them co-starring screen partner Jack Carson). When I drink, I drink deeply.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 28; 23 first-time viewings and 5 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length films: The Getaway (1972) – 8/9
Lowest rated feature films: Easy Come, Easy Go (1967) and Texas Terror (1934) – 4/9
Average films per day in August: 2.77
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.00
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 261

The Reviews:

Death Note (2017) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Did we need another one? Look, a few years ago, against my better judgment, I decided to delve into the whole Death Note thing after all the initial hype burned itself out in the manner of most pop culture. Not the manga though; I had pretty much taken myself out of the comic buying game by the time Death Note started being available in the U.S., and so I went straight to the anime. I went into Death Note with some serious qualms about being sucked up in yet another "phenomena," but then it turned out that I quite enjoyed watching the series. It took me a little while to warm to the concept, but eventually I got caught up in the cat-and-mouse between the holder of the death note, Light, and his pursuer, L. Still, even with liking the series (but not loving it), I had serious doubts about the live-action version I had also heard about it. I been through a few other anime series that had been transfered to live action, and in most cases, the results were rather tepid overall. Did I want to waste my time?

And so I watched the live-action films, Death Note and Death Note 2: The Last Name. While my main interest was to see just how faithfully they would reproduce the story away from animation, once more, I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed them. In fact, I liked the films better than the series, and even rewatched both of them pretty quickly after I finished them. So, was I a Death Note convert? Not exactly, but I could not claim to not have found enjoyment in the property. Even with that, I had even more reservations when I discovered there was a third Japanese live-action film that had been produced, which was titled L: Change the World. The film had nothing to do with the Death Note series apart from the main character of the Holmes-like detective, L, who delves into one final case at the end of his young life. Since L is the most intriguing persona in the series, I naturally had to watch that film and once again enjoyed another piece of the Death Note property, though it was not nearly the same level of quality as the first two.

So, I had success after success after success (however qualified) in watching the various pieces of Death Note; surely this could carry over into the new American version? Especially when the director is Adam Wingard, a young talent for whom I have developed a high regard over the past few years, chiefly due to You're Next and The Guest. I wrote last week about my disappointment in another Wingard project, his sequel-cum-remake (for hire) of The Blair Witch Project. I felt that his direction was fine, but he was simply overwhelmed by the necessity of both slavishly replicating the mood of the original while also creating yet another chapter in a property that really had seen its day about fifteen years ago.

Here, in Wingard's version, that disappointment is mirrored, as over-familiarity is a definite factor, but the real problem is that Death Note, unlike TBWP, is still a live property in its native land of Japan. [*See note below this review.] Wingard's direction can be as taut as ever (which it is) but the film just kept nagging me with questions over its necessity. Much of the bad press surrounding this new version has been about possible "whitewashing," in replacing formerly Japanese characters with mostly Caucasians. I don't really have a problem with that since the locale is now in the U.S. (Seattle), and so a greater diversity of races becomes more possible, but the character of Light could (and really should have, in my opinion) have easily remained Japanese. (L., always the most fascinating figure in any version of Death Note, is African-American in the Wingard version.) 

My real problem with the film, apart from its ridiculous finale (which differs greatly from other versions), is the question of why couldn't the Japanese versions just stand as the versions seen in the U.S.? The originals are both well-shot, high quality productions with some excellent acting and solid action sequences. I ask this not long after having already derided the American remake of the Argentinian Oscar-winning film, The Secret in Their Eyes. The American version was not bad overall as a film on its own; it was just completely unnecessary, as were many changes to the story to try and make the film more topical in the current American climate of terroristic fear. I felt even stronger almost 25 years ago when an American studio decided to do a remake of George Sluizer's incredible The Vanishing (Spoorloos). At least they hired the same director to screw up his own remake (coincidentally also shot in Seattle) just five years after the original. I know people who loved the American version at the time, but to a person, not one of them had seen the Dutch version, which differs greatly in style and tone from the one with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock. 

Of course, I don't hate all American remakes of foreign films. We wouldn't have Some Like It Hot, 12 Monkeys, The Magnificent Seven, and The Departed without some things being remade. (These are just a few brief examples; there are many others.) Closer to the subject at hand, speaking of U.S. remakes of J-horror properties, I loved Gore Verbinski's American update of Ringu back in 2002, a case where an already terrific Japanese horror film was arguably equaled (if not bettered) in effectiveness. So, this is most definitely not a call for American studios to stop remaking foreign films. People love to point out trends, but I feel each film project is unique unto itself. Some movies work and some movies just don't, and for me, as long as the creators of the new version have an interesting or original approach to even an old, crusty idea, wonders can often come out of that. That is part of the beauty of filmmaking, and art in general. So, I say let the sequels and remakes continue to come; I will find the ones worthy of my time eventually. And a small portion of them might turn out to be spectacular.

But the new version of Death Note? Not so much. It looks like product and it feels like product. I love Wingard, and still have hopes for his Godzilla vs. Kong film in 2020 (and contrary to popular opinion, it is no mere remake), but this film just has the sense of a job for hire. He's treading water here waiting for the big money down the line. I will give the writers some credit for attempting something different from the originals with the flashy ending, but as I mentioned before, it comes off all wrong, and every step taken along the way to get the story to that ending cheapens the overall film. It is really the second half of the film where the new Death Note truly goes awry. I don't hold this against Wingard as he had no credited hand in the screenplay, but he is still the boss in the end. The film's failure as a novel production unto its own is his failure as well. Why couldn't the series just stay in Japan? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #19 : August 18-24, 2017

OK, let's get this ship righted... I have missed a few weeks in-between my last supposedly weekly installment of this series and this post. I am not going to go into the hows and whys, apart from saying that I, for the last week of July and the beginning of this month, decided to concentrate full-time on the TCM online course on Alfred Hitchcock in order to complete everything before the course's expiration date (August 5th). That's my excuse for the first couple of weeks I missed for This Week in Rixflix; the rest is my own concern. 

But complete the TCM course I did, and not only that (as I posted on Facebook a while back), between July 6th and August 10th – a span of 36 days – I watched 42 of the 56 feature-length films that Hitchcock directed in his lifetime. Twelve of those movies (about half of them silent features) were first-time views for me, of which I will speak more on The Cinema 4 Pylon in coming weeks. (If you think this isn't going to turn into a couple editions of my All or Nothing series, you'd better rethink your position...) Most amazingly to me, in that group of 42 films, I never got around to watching some of my favorite selections of The Master, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, and my #1 Hitchcock film overall, Strangers on a Train. So now I have decided to casually play catch up with the rest of the films, so I can say that I have watched as much of his available oeuvre as I could within the same year. The Birds was the first film in that follow-up, and I plan on relaxing with NxNW this coming weekend, if not more. 

I just couldn't stop at 42, you know...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature film count: 21; 15 first-time viewings and 6 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length film: The Birds (1963) – 9/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: Toxic Shark (2017) – 4/9
Average films per day in August so far: 2.4167
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.97
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 254

And, to finish off the course, here is the list of the 42 Hitchcock films that I watched from July 6, 2017 to August 10, 2017. I have lined them up chronologically by release year (but not necessarily in order of release) so you can get a quick snapshot of the breadth of the man's career. The list covers 49 years of the man's work, extending from the silent era all the way up to Family Plot in 1976, the only Hitchcock film I saw in a theatre within the same year of its release:

1927
Downhill (1st time)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
The Ring (1st time)

1928
Champagne (1st time)
The Farmer's Wife (1st time)

1929
Blackmail
The Manxman (1st time)

1930
Murder!

1931
Mary
Number Seventeen (1st time)
The Skin Game (1st time)

1932
Rich and Strange (1st time)

1934
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Waltzes from Vienna [Strauss' Great Waltz] (1st time)

1935
The 39 Steps

1936
Sabotage
Secret Agent

1937
Young and Innocent (1st time)

1938
The Lady Vanishes

1939
Jamaica Inn

1940
Foreign Correspondent
Rebecca

1941
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Suspicion

1942
Saboteur

1943
Shadow of a Doubt

1944
Lifeboat

1945
Spellbound

1946
Notorious

1947
The Paradine Case

1948
Rope

1950
Stage Fright

1953
I Confess (1st time)

1954
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window

1955
The Trouble with Harry

1956
The Man Who Knew Too Much

1958
Vertigo

1964
Marnie

1966
Torn Curtain

1972
Frenzy

1976
Family Plot


This Week's Reviews:

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) Dir.: Edward Zwick – I would ask "Did we need another Jack Reacher film?" but then I would have to also ask "Did we need the first Jack Reacher film?" No, and no, would be my hard answers. This is not Tom Cruise hate, because as my wife will tell you, he is my boyfriend. Or at least she loves to say that because I seemingly have no qualms about going to the theatre to see the latest Mission: Impossible installment or the latest big-budget sci-fi or action flick featuring him in the lead. (There is a huge story behind all of this Cruise discussion between my wife and myself, only some of which I have made clear on Facebook; maybe in the near future.) Despite my dislike for his weird religious cult (sorry, but until their practices are more open to the public, that's what they are), I think Cruise is just fine as an action star, and even a pretty good actor in the right role. (And he is dead on hilarious in Tropic Thunder...)

So, I do see nearly everything that Cruise puts out eventually, though I don't necessarily see many of them in theatres apart from the hugest blockbusters. And then there are these Jack Reacher films, based on an extremely popular series of books that I cannot (and possibly never will) ever fathom. Of course, people I knew made a lot of jokes when the first movie came out about "Jack Reach-around," and other people told me how fantastic the books are but that Cruise was the completely wrong choice for the titular role. Part of this attitude is pretty easy to understand: Cruise is very nearly a foot shorter than the six-foot-five Reacher in the books, and at least 75-80 pounds lighter. And I totally understand that if you read the books and envision this Paul Bunyan of a man battling against the world, and then you go to the movies and see what amounts to a pipsqueak – a very muscular pipsqueak, but a pipsqueak nonetheless, I can understand your disappointment. I am not going to rip on the books only to say, "Not interested" because from the plots of the two films that I have seen, they would not be my thing at all. It doesn't matter who is in the role. Seems more like a thing for people who enjoy JAG or NCIS. I liked the first film a little bit more, which surprises me, because this sequel has Cobie Smulders in it, whom I like in everything. (Sometimes, she is the best part of that "everything," but you know what I am saying...) I just found myself mired in a pool of general annoyance at the absolutely incoherent and unbelievable plot line – especially the parts involving a girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter – which itself has found praise in its book version.

So that's the split line between me and the book-reading world right now. (OK, there are actually a great many places where I am divided against the rest of the book-reading world, but this is the one under discussion right now.) I am not going to hold forth further until the day that I, out of sheer desperation in an airport somewhere, decide to actually read a Jack Reacher novel. Perhaps I will get swept up in Lee Child's prose and find a way to buy into this world of a brooding drifter who gets caught up in conspiracy after conspiracy against him; perhaps I won't. For now, I will just say that I am not fond of the movie series, but apparently, neither are many fans of the books. On this, we can at least currently agree. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Blair Witch (2016) Dir.: Adam Wingard – Why? I am a horror movie fan of longstanding, but even I did not want to see another iteration of The Blair Witch Project come around at all. Do I still like the original film? Well, I did when it came out even though many people of my acquaintance claimed they got sick from the whirling handheld camerawork or just thought the movie was a dumb idea and poorly acted. I thought the original film was pretty spooky, was a clever way to transfuse some new blood into what at that point was a fairly stale horror environment (in my opinion, though I am sure you can always find others who professed the same at the time), and yes, was amateurishly acted and produced but with a huge amount of chutzpah. That chutzpah got its creators, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, a ton of box office and critical buzz, and even put them on the cover of Time, and that was pretty remarkable at the, ahem, time. I saw it a couple of times in the theatre in 1999, bought the DVD, and watched it twice more trying to convince people they should also "at least see it" before badmouthing it. Then I saw Joe Berlinger's cranked out sequel in 2000 on DVD instead of the theatres because of poor word of mouth, though I did watch the phony documentary promoting the second film at the time it appeared on TV. At that point, I then promptly set the Blair Witch story aside, possibly even to shut it away forever. I just no longer cared. Stand me in the corner.

It's 18 years later, and there is a whole new generation of suckers, er, young millennial horror fans out there that may not even know that The Blair Witch Project was ever even a thing. The found footage device that served as the original film's gimmick is now done practically everyday on YouTube and other sites, and there have been innumerable feature films since released in the style (the bulk of them in the horror genre), many of them quite successful. While The Blair Witch Project was nowhere near the first such film to use found footage, it was certainly one of the biggest in terms of the cultural impact it had almost immediately. I am also pretty sure that someone more knowledgable on the entire subject than I probably has connected all the dots between TBWP and the Creepypasta phenomena that we must suffer through today.

If there were a chance for a remake/sequel (because, come on, the new film really serves as both) of TBWP to be pulled off even halfway decently, I would think that director Adam Wingard would be in the list of those who could do it. A hugely prolific talent, Wingard tends to work mainly in horror, but also has a foot in the supposed "mumblecore" genre (a term that I hate). While I did just finish watching his new Netflix version of Death Note and was mildly disappointed in the result (possibly more on that film next week), WIngard has, in recent years, directed two of my favorite recent horror films – You're Next and The Guest – and I am also excited about his involvement in the eventual production of Godzilla vs. Kong (to be released in 2020). As for the movie at hand, I will say that he is the perfect pick for someone to replicate the look and feel of the original film, which is what Blair Witch tries and mostly succeeds at artistically. The film builds up some decent atmosphere, and the house they find (c'mon, you know they have to find her house eventually) is a good deal more extensive and the action there more explicitly detailed than in the original. While I never agreed with those who ripped into the amateurish acting, I will say that the cast in the new film are all most likely professionals (hey, the girl with the purple hair plays Arthur's sister Dot in the new Tick series on Amazon), but the downside to that is the original amateur feel is what I liked in the first film. The people in this film, girls included, all seem to have boners over having as many cameras as possible on them.

Now about those cameras... For me, not being a video game player of any real account, when the film starts revving up and looking more like a first person shooter being attacked, I kind of tuned out of the whole thing. I also felt, despite being told how everybody had body cameras and whatnot filming the affair that some of the angles still did not make sense to me. I am certain someone out there will protest that the angles all made sense – "You're forgetting about the crotch cam she crammed in her shorts, dude!" – but to me, that is always an annoyance in found footage films. (The only thing more annoying is when someone doesn't just drop the goddamned camera and just fucking run for it...) Me? I don't care if I saw film footage of my long lost sister (Heather Donahue, the girl from the first film) in window of the house where the evil witch supposedly lives (the premise of this film), I'm not going out in those stupid woods. I don't even believe in the supernatural at all, but if I found evidence, however sparse, that my sister is where many people are rumored to have gone missing over the years, I will hire every private detective in the book to go do the dirty work. When they don't come back, well, gather everything you have and bring it to the cops. Fuck those woods. As for the film, I am not going to tell it screw off, but I have seen it, and now I have seen two Wingard films in two weeks that have left me mostly cold. Not what i was expecting from someone that I thought had caught fire. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015) Dir.: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon – I completely stumbled upon this film by absolute accident, and then I spent a couple of wild hours early that morning reveling in sick, gory effects and an almost completely unrestrained comic sensibility. I laughed so much that I couldn't believe it, and then I had to keep stopping the video so that my brain could catch up with the flurries of rapid fire gags and insults via a great many replays of scenes. The third in a series of films that don't really exist, Dude Bro Party Massacre III operates somewhere in the vicinity of South Park as far as humor goes, and if that is not your cup of tea, please move it along, because we won't be friends. As I said, this is supposed to be Part III of a series, and the first two non-existent films are recounted at the very beginning, much in the style of the Friday the 13th series. But the film is far more than a mere slasher parody; it acts like a lost VHS tape of a film that would have disappeared altogether if some über-geek hadn't plopped a tape into his deck and captured the thing for his own collection. (It seems an impossibility that anything could disappear like that, but there are still some obscure films from the '80s that I have on tape that I have yet to see on DVD.)

I don't know which channel that makes its hay by selling advertising would have shown this film uncut back then, but we get flashes of fake advertisements intermittently throughout Dude Bro III that, even at a mere second or two are pretty entertaining. (The feeling is that the taper paused the tape at each commercial break and then started it again at the end of the break.) In one ad is Matt Oswalt, brother of Patton Oswalt, and that is more than mere coincidence, because Patton shows up in a supporting role (as a favor) in the main plot of the film (as the sheriff). We also get a brief flash, most surprisingly, of Larry King – yes, that Larry King – in another intentional cameo. The people behind the film are a comedy troupe called 5-Second Films, who are pretty well known on the interwebs for their long-running site of the same name. I have been to the site off and on over the past decade, but it had been long enough (certainly more than five seconds) that I was completely unaware they had sprung this film upon the world. I think that I may have enjoyed it even more the way that I did discover it, rifling through archive.org that morning. (Yes, I found it because someone posted it illegally; no, I did not download it for myself.) This one will definitely get added to my collection once I start buying discs off Amazon again, but if they don't put this out as a collector's item on VHS, I would be really upset. A must watch for me again (and again) in the very, very near future. It may become a perennial. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Last Girl Standing (2015) Dir.: Benjamin R. Moody – Longtime followers of this site might recall that over the past couple of years, I reviewed two different titles based around the popular slasher movie concept of the last survivor who fights the villain/monster to the death known as the "final girl". I hated one of those films, that being Final Girl (with Abigail Breslin) but loved the other one, the far more intentionally comedic and dimension-warping The Final Girls (with Taissa Farmiga, Vera's little sis). Of course, just like slasher films themselves, those two films weren't going to be the only films that would dabble with the fringe concept outside of the normal run of slasher films. At the same time as those other films were released in 2015 came Last Girl Standing (though I have only discovered its existence recently), yet another variation on the final girl trope. While I still feel The Final Girls is the most fun and accomplished of the three films, but Last Girl Standing has plenty of spunk – and loads of great gruesome gore – of its own.

Just like Dude Bro Party Massacre III, this film is technically a sequel to a movie that does not exist. The difference in tone is one of awareness. Dude Bro is completely aware of its existence as a winking and more than nudging comedy in a completely ridiculous film universe; it never allows for reality to step into it in any way, not even in its fake commercial breaks. Not so with Last Girl Standing, where its heroine, Camryn (an excellent Akasha Villalobos), is the lone survivor of a horrific attack on herself and her fellow campers by a serial killer known as The Hunter. That set-up may be a basic one for a slasher scenario, but for Camryn, the horror is all too real. This film is no tongue-in-cheek affair; Camryn has PTSD from what occurred, and it is affecting her life from every possible angle. She shuts herself down from the world and hides behind the counter and clothes at the dry cleaning establishment that has hired, where the owners have special rules where she doesn't interact with customers. Camryn is haunted by constant flashbacks of The Hunter, to the point where she starts confusing reality and what both she and we first think are hallucinations. Or is she being stalked by someone posing as The Hunter, the killer she herself dispatched by hand? Or is The Hunter really back in her life? And then stuff starts to get really weird, and bodies start piling up...

Last Girl Standing is a bare bones production, filmed in Austin, Texas with a mostly local cast and crew. (Villalobos' husband plays her love interest; that's how tight-knit the work is.) This is not to say that there isn't production value on display in the film, especially in relation to the rather extensive gore effects, all practical and mostly terrific. Don't be fooled either... the film looks and feels like an earnest drama (which it is) that takes a deeper look into a stock slasher character than we normally get to see, but it doesn't, to paraphrase Mr. Creosote, skimp on the pâté. And yet, for much of its running time, it is not a normal genre film either, though it does take a turn deep in the second half where it goes full bore towards its grim conclusion. I was more than pleasantly surprised by the film, though it certainly has some areas with which I found fault. Since I first watched the film, I wavered a bit in my feelings for it, and felt I was a bit stingy in my initial response when I added it to my film diary on Letterboxd. But after thinking about it for over a week and also watching a big chunk of the film a second time to get the mood back, I finally settled on 6/9.

The Big Sick (2017) Dir.: Michael Showalter – You know, sometimes you just need The Big Sick to clean out your system. I love the summer movie season. I love the middle months of the year where giant action blockbusters all try to outdo each other for the weekly box office take. And you will never hear me cry about there being too many superhero movies, because they are exactly the movies I wanted to see when I was a kid but were rarely made because the effects just weren't there. But even I long for the occasional break from BIF! POW! WHAM! KA-BOOM! and that is where The Big Sick came to our rescue today.

Jen and I had been planning to see if for a good while now – pretty much since its creators hit the talk show circuit – but just hadn't made it. The Big Sick is a marvelous comedy-drama about the beginnings of the real life relationship between comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, writer and producer Emily V. Gordon. They meet cute, they fall in love, they break up, and then he ends up having to sign as her husband (even though they weren't married then) to induce a coma to possibly save her life. It's quite funny and adorable, but becomes almost entirely a drama for a long chunk of the film as he not only juggles possibly losing the women he loves, but also dealing with her initially surly parents and with his own family, who want him in an arranged marriage with someone else from Pakistan. Kudos to Michael Showalter, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Judd Apatow for bringing this story to the big screen. It's a pretty satisfying, small film, and I hope it gets some recognition come awards season. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) Dir.: Mike Flanagan – A while back, my pal Aaron mentioned to me via Facebook Messenger that the Ouija sequel was, in his words, "surprisingly enjoyable". We had been discussing numerous other items of worth (to us, at least) and so I rather passed by his statement without comment. I hadn't the inclination to watch the sequel, as I had leapt on the first film, mostly out of loyalty to Olivia (Bates Motel) Cooke, and found it severely lacking apart from her participation. And so I wandered for weeks after that, secure in the knowledge that I would probably avoid the sequel for a good while, but Aaron's words kind of nagged at me. Our viewing tastes are fairly similar, and even when we don't agree on a project, we still are able to see what it is the other one found intriguing in a film. Seeing the film pop up on Cinemax one evening, I recorded Ouija: Origin of Evil and when I started watching it the next day, I found the opening of the film a lot of fun and pretty captivating. As the film rolled on, I continued to enjoy what I was seeing, and it was only in perhaps the final half hour that I finally wearied of the story they were telling me, which was that of the fate of a family that occupied a house visited by the characters in the original film. There was also the use of an effect that I am not especially fond of in films today, something I will refer to as the "Black Hole Sun effect" (after the Soundgarden video) that really takes me out of nearly any film that employs it (which, today, is a lot of horror films).

Still, even after tiring of the story and that stupid effect, I felt the film was pretty taut and sharply directed, and a damn sight better than the original. About halfway through, I decided that I needed to look up the director and found out it was Mike Flanagan, who had already delivered the truly excellent Hush a couple years ago as well as the really spooky mind-bender, Oculus. (I also liked, but not to the same degree, Absentia, from 2011.) It seems, with the recent loss of Romero and even more recent loss (this past weekend) of Tobe Hooper, that perhaps there are some openings in the ol' Masters of Horror lineup. It might be a little premature, but might I offer up Flanagan's name to the list? II feel like Wingard will eventually hit that list as well with a couple more solid films.) Flanagan has an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald Game, in the works as a major release, so maybe his time has come. We shall see. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Until next time,

This Week in Rixflix #18: July 7–13, 2017

So, I am finding that I am far more interested at this point in just watching all of Alfred Hitchcock's film than in taking the TCM online course about them. I thought that once I got through the silents and early talkies, that I would leap into online modules and first couple of tests, but I was wrong. I feel no drive toward doing it right now, and frankly, just want to dive into ever more Hitchcock films.

Part of this comes from my general dislike of schooling in any form, especially in taking time on my own to go back to doing it, and the other part is probably due to my belief that I am not going to really learn all that much more about The Master's work than I already know. (Certainly I have forgotten more than I remember, but I still feel like I have pretty good recall on the important stuff.) This is sheer arrogance and bullshit on my part. What it really comes down to is that I am a lazy bastard who believes deep inside that the really important part of all this is actually watching the films. And I have done that part already.

Inside, though, I know that I really would benefit from hearing someone else reliably explain the history behind the films and their director, so the problem now is to convince myself that cutting some time out in the next couple of weeks to really knuckle down and complete this project would be a desirous thing. After all, I have been working on convincing myself that perhaps I should go back to school to get a journalism degree. Completing such a course as this, on even a small scale, could do wonders in showing myself that I am capable of sustaining focus long enough to bring such efforts to a satisfying close. Let's see if I can...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 22; 14 first-time viewings and 8 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length films: The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Scared to Death (1947) – 4/9
Average films per day in July so far: 2.69
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 2.84
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 212

The Reviews:

When Animals Dream (2014) Dir.: Jonas Alexander Arnby – If one reads through the capsule reviews about this Danish fantasy-horror film, submitted by users of IMDb – and I highly recommend that you don't, for the most part; it can be as bad an experience as reading random anonymous comments after any story online – one would gather that When Animals Dream is not only excruciatingly dull but also NOT a werewolf movie. They seem to be especially loud on this last point, that the film, which features a young woman slowly discovering she is starting the process of turning into a creature not definably in the realm of appearing human, is not a true werewolf film. Well, yes, When Animals Dream is not full of the usual talk of silver bullets and full moons that we see in the usual sort of "B" pictures featuring lycanthropes and the stilted mythology that has grown up around how to deal with them, most of which was largely instilled in us by Hollywood. Forget all that, though... this is a movie where a human female transforms into an altogether different creature, which is recognizably lupine (or even vulpine) in basic nature, the townsfolk have an awareness of her potential for violence, and go about attempting to torment her and ostracize her from the community because of this. The results might be different from what you think is a "werewolf" movie, but since when is experimenting with form a bad idea, especially when everyone yells about seeing the same old stuff over and over again? 

Me? I'd make friends with the cute shape-changer and get her on my side, because you never know when you will need her in a scrap. Especially with the awful people who populate the small fishing town in When Animals Dream. These people are fuckers, and a bunch of glum ones at that. I will say, there is some history on their side, as the girl's mother – who appears as a mere invalid (and almost catatonic at that) from the start of the film – has previously run amok in the town. Still, throwing fish at the girl and attacking her on the job at the canning factory are pretty stupid ideas if you think she is capable of turning into something horrible and killing you. What a bunch of dopes. However, the film goes no place that you really think it is, and this too might be why so many people on IMDb are critical of the results. Geez, first they swear it is not a werewolf picture, but then they get surly when it doesn't turn out the way a werewolf picture should. What a second bunch of dopes. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Our Miss Brooks (1956) Dir.: Al Lewis – Eve Arden's comic timing and sarcastic edge were the saving grace of many a tepid comedy from the Hollywood studio factories throughout the late '30s and through the '40s. I chiefly know her from the television sitcom version of Our Miss Brooks, a character which she first made famous via the radio series, which ran from 1948 through 1957. The TV series ran concurrently for several years (1952-1956) with the radio version, and was the one to which I had access in my youth. The basic set-up of the show had high school English teacher Connie Brooks constantly trying to snare Philip Boynton, a fellow teacher, while also having to save the school from the self-serving whims of its blustery principal, Osgood Conklin. Sometimes, the show could get truly odd, which caught my eye as a teenager, as I always appreciated a show which could get away with parodying other shows and genres (on occasion) within the context of its own style. (What can I say? Maxwell Smart, along with Bullwinkle and Rocky, opened that door early...) Gale Gordon, who played Conklin, was also a favorite of mine on reruns of The Lucy Show that I saw some afternoons, so Miss Brooks gave me a double dose of his adept second banana skills. To be fair, the show  wasn't exactly at the top of my watch list, and still isn't, but I really enjoyed the show then and now.

I found out over the years since that there had been a movie version of Our Miss Brooks, released in 1956, the final year of the show's existence, but I never got the chance to see the film until recently when it aired on TCM. Using most of the television cast and having it directed and co-written by Al Lewis, who served as head writer on the TV series, seemed like it would just continue the wacky fun by jumping it over to the big screen. But this Our Miss Brooks almost feels like the life has been drained out of it. To be sure, Arden is spot on as always, and Gordon is his usual loud, quick-fuse self, but in ignoring the TV series altogether and basically doing a reboot instead (long before anyone ever really said "reboot"), the movie uprooted what was fun about the show – its fast talking, manic sensibility – and mires it squarely in a dull romantic plot and some sporadic slapstick by Gordon. If I had seen the film first as a kid and found out there was a TV connection, I would have never watched the series as a result. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

This Week in Rixflix #17: June 30 – July 6, 2017

As far as I can see, the real problem with TCM's online course this summer is timing. They have secured two days a week throughout July on their network in order to showcase just over 40 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but they started the online course that corresponds with the films well over a week ahead (in June instead) of the first night's viewing. Unfortunately, the course started out diving right into Hitch's numerous silent features, movies with which even longtime aficionados of either classic film or Alfred Hitchcock may not have much experience. I fall into both categories and I have only seen The Lodger (1927) from his silent days. Well, until this week, when I snuck in an iPad viewing of his boxing romance, The Ring, while visiting my father up in Idaho (where I am currently).

I had planned to dive right into the Hitchcock course from the start, and while I read through the materials thoroughly more than once, games come up in the course where they ask questions using images from films I have yet to see because they haven't aired yet. Yes, I can take things over and over again as much as I want to get the score I wish, but it is a matter of pride that I do things right from the beginning. The first night of TCM's airings of Hitch's silents and early sound films wouldn't happen until July 5th – when I would already be in Idaho – and so I decided that I would use my time up here to work on the module for the silent part of the course on either my iPad or iPhone. Now, it has turned out that using the Canvas app to do the online course is pretty damn tedious and more than a little annoying. Also, TCM only about half selection of the evening's eight aired films up on their Watch TCM app, so I can't even see everything I would rather see before taking the first week's exam.

As a result of all of these problems, I have decided on the following plan: 1) watch the films I can on the Watch TCM app in my remaining days in Idaho, 2) watch the other films (that I don't already own) on my DVR when I get home, 3) don't do anything with the course until I get home, where I can use my computer and not have to worry about a creaky, unreliable app, and 4) make sure everything is watched before preceding with the testing. I may have to cram most of my work into a couple of weeks, but I think it will go smoothly.

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 18; 15 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length films: Loving (2016) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – 8/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: The Sand [aka Blood Sand] (2015) – 3/9
Average films per day in June: 3.1667
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 205

The Reviews:

Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.

I needn't have worried. Right now, I am just mad that I didn't see this film on a big screen, because it would have wowed my socks right off my feet. Berg conveys such a slowly tightening and eventually crushing sense of suspense to this terrible disaster upon nature and our oceans that I am kicking myself that I didn't pay closer attention to everything related to the film on its release. Wahlberg himself is spot on as the rig tech who finds himself in the middle of an increasingly dangerous situation, as are Kurt Russell as the rig supervisor and John Malkovich as an especially slimy oil company exec who ignores necessary testing early on and wants operations to continue despite warnings. Also from the trailers, which added to my initial negative reaction, I had a sense that this would turn into just another action thriller, where Marky Mark would rip off his sleeves and save everybody on the oil rig. Again, if I had just trusted that they were going more towards telling the story as accurate as possible (by Hollywood standards) then I needn't have worried. Yes, there is action aplenty and Wahlberg does have to do some rescuing, but it is consistent with the tone of the picture and it never turns into a John McClane-style film. I look back now and realize my initial reactions were a bit flip, and hadn't taken into account that there was a very real loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon and that Berg would care more about honoring their deaths than in amping up the action quotient to sell movie tickets. That's on me for not thinking more seriously about this at the top. In the end, I really enjoyed this tough as nails film. This rating for Deepwater Horizon may go up after the next time I watch it. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.) 

The film itself has many humorous moments, but there is another darker level to this film that lends the film a quality which takes it out of the normal horror-comedy range (besides the musical element). Levy's character is not the simple, goody two-shoes character you expect from the way the film opens. She drinks like a fish when she is sad, she relies a bit too much on a fantasy life built around her romance with an Elvis-like pop idol, and endures abuse and rape from an obsessive creep in her town. Meanwhile, unspecified medical experiments are taking place in the town that is turning much of the populace (and the local wildlife) into mutated freaks. The more horrific elements of the story are pretty much tamped down until late in the film, and while they never go quite as far as I'd like, their impact is felt pretty hard when they finally appear. Having the villain grow a second mouth in his neck so he trades off lines in his big song with himself is a pretty neat idea, and the scene featuring townsfolk gathering to down "suicide drinks" en masse is heavy stuff for a musical. The film itself has a thick edge of surreality to the proceedings, so that it becomes hard to tell which of the heroine's lives is the fantasy and which is the reality. Or if either (or any) of them are at all. 

I run hot and cold with the musical score, which I feel plays it too safe and low-key much of the time. I kept waiting for one of the earlier numbers to really kick it into high gear. Even the title song, which occurs at the halfway mark of the film and is an uptempo song with a big dance break and wacky sound effects, looks too much like a rehearsal done at half-speed and never really takes off like I wish it would. (It should be the big, goofy, joyous center of this film.) I could not help the feeling that the storytellers never really commit to the notion of a full musical. There are several scenes that could have benefited from being told in song instead, and would have livened the film immensely, but St. Jules settles for more exposition via dialogue in its place. Still, there is an overall weirdness that I find quite compelling and whatever doesn't work in the film is outweighed by the things that do. And I really like a couple of the lines from the score, such as "So, marry me; there's worse things you can do/In a quarantined town of freaks, choices are few." Who hasn't thought that about their own hometown? – TC4P Rating: 5/9

American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school. 

All that has changed. If you put something stupid on YouTube, scores of absolute dopes will try to replicate or even outdo that something stupid. (As I heard recently on the news, stupidity is quite catching... and yes, it was about you know who and his goons.) If you put out a book that tells readers how to build simple bombs and grenades and any number of other things that could help you in waging a revolution against a government or protecting yourself and your family against armed insurgents, some of those readers will apparently make real, definite use out those instructions. Documentarian Charlie Siskel – the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel – has built American Anarchist around his interviews with William Powell, a professor who was only 19 years of age when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970. He spent the last 47 years of his life hiding from his legacy (he died this year in March), living in a deep state of denial over what his book brought to the fore in our society. Siskel doesn't mince words and goes after Powell (and his wife) hard, giving him opportunity after opportunity to explain his actions and outright apologize for them as well. Powell mostly tries to evade Siskel's traps, and gets very angry a couple of times over the filmmaker's persistence on this one question. In some ways, the film does get a tad one-note with this repetitive stance, but in telling us the story surrounding the infamous book and its creator, Charlie Siskel has given us a fascinating look into the power of words to do real harm; sometimes, even murder. – TC4P Rating: 7/9