What was the last movie you watched?

[Charles Castle]

Air Force (1943, directed by Howard Hawks) is absolutely propaganda. Let's make that crystal clear at the outset. Almost all war films made during the Second World War were propaganda and there was no space for anti-war sentiment in the cinema of the day. Nor was there room for criticism or pacifism in the era's politics more generally. Many such propaganda films are a drag, reducing characters into symbols without any interior life and choking on their own patriotism. This one is not like that, or not much like that, which makes it effective. It's a gripping adventure film from beginning to end, even in spite of the fact that it starts with a quote from the Gettysburg Address and ends with a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In between, though, is a pure Howard Hawks action film about his favorite types of people: Flyers. Men banded together to do a job. Professionals.

The story follows the crew of the Mary Ann, a B-17 bomber assigned to a wing in San Francisco. They've received orders for a flight to Honolulu, carrying no ammunition. It's a training exercise. The crew don't know their destination at the outset. The crew include a new tail gunner who is disgruntled with the army and plans to muster out when his tour is over in a few weeks, a radio man living up to the legacy of his legendary father, a chief mechanic whose boy is an aviator in the Philippines, a co-pilot who hopes to see his sister in Hawaii, a newlywed captain who kisses his wife goodbye on the tarmac. There is no hint that they are flying into danger, but when they arrive at Hawaii, they find Hickam Airfield and Pearl Harbor under attack by the Japanese. It's the morning of December 7, 1941. Their entire wing is redirected to alternate landing fields. The Mary Ann lands on Maui, only to come under fire from suspected fifth columnist Japanese agents. They are obliged to take to the air again and land at the ruins of Hickam Field, where they receive new orders. They must fly to the Philippines via Wake Island to help relieve American forces. The Japanese have hit Americans everywhere in the Pacific. While they wait to refit for the flight, the co-pilot discovers that his sister has been gravely injured in the attack, while her boyfriend is unscathed. The co-pilot blames him for his sister's misfortune and is none too happy to have him assigned to the Mary Ann. He's a fighter pilot, and the Philippines needs pilots. When they find out that he was one of the only pilots off the ground in the attack and that he took out three Japanese planes when the sister was injured, the crew is mollified. At Wake Island, they find more of the same, with the American personnel there grim and resigned to an impending Japanese invasion. The tail gunner and mechanic take on the marines' dog as a mascot and promise to deliver him to the marines in the Philippines. The dog becomes their own mascot, especially once they reach their destination and join the war.

Let's start with the negative. As propaganda, this film understands in its bones that racism is the way to motivate Americans to do anything. This film is very racist.* A key part of its plot involves fifth columnists in Hawaii aiding the Japanese attack. In the film, the Mary Ann is directed to an alternate landing spot on Maui where they are chased off the island by Japanese snipers. At Hickam Field proper on Oahu, the co-pilot's sister was injured not by the hail of ordinance from the Japanese planes, but by a fifth columnist on the ground. All of this is an ugly libel. There was no Japanese fifth column activity on Hawaii leading up to or during the Pearl Harbor attack or afterward, but paranoia--which this film stokes with ruthless efficiency--is what led the United States to round up Japanese Americans and put them into concentration camps. The on-screen hatred exhibited by the cast's designated hothead--played by John Garfield--is palpable and contagious. When the younger gunner is platooned to a smaller fighter and is obliged to abandon ship, he's shot as a helpless parachuter by a Zero. This prompts Garfield's Sgt. Wynocki to exclaim "Dirty--" when he blasts the offending plane out of the sky. The film leaves it for the viewer to fill in the word after "dirty." There is a definite intention in this film to render the Japanese simultaneously inhuman and less competent than the American Air Force. I understand that it's easy for me to question this 80 years later. Doubtless, the makers of this film and the American military had no such second thoughts in the face of an existential threat. It hasn't aged well, though, and may explain why this film isn't discussed much in conversations about Howard Hawks's great films from the period. Hawks was on a roll at the time, making classic after classic (the five films that precede this in his filmography are: Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, and Ball of Fire). Purely in terms of its craft, this film plays at that same level. Unfortunately, this one is tarnished and for some contemporary viewers all of this will be a deal breaker. I'm not going to try to convince anyone otherwise.

If the propaganda elements of Air Force are not a dealbreaker, then this is a great director at the summit of his abilities. It's astonishing how gripping this film is considering its first half is basically a long plane ride. This film is a good example of Hitchcock's ticking bomb hypothesis. Put a bomb under the table, show it to the audience, watch the characters talk about anything else, and voila! Suspense. The ticking bomb at the outset of the film is the date. The Mary Ann and its bomber wing depart for Honolulu on December 6, 1941, a fact that is shown to the audience by the writing in the logbook. The characters don't know what they're flying into, but the audience does. The bomb is set, and the audience is primed. The second half of the film provides its characters with two different kinds of problems. The first is finding Wake Island and hoping they can land there before running out of fuel. The second is getting the Mary Ann repaired and airworthy after its first mission in the Philippines before the Japanese overwhelm them. There are a couple of side stories that concern the individual characters running in parallel here, but they're all subsumed by the clock the film has set on its action. This is a plot-driven film, though the crucible of the plot dictates the evolution of the characters.

This isn't a film about movie stars even though John Garfield was a huge star at the time. This was an all hands on deck for the war effort kind of film. Hawks said of Garfield in Hawks on Hawks by Joseph Citro:

"He came around and said he wanted to be in it. And I said, 'I haven't got much for you. You're just gonna be one of the crew.' He said, 'That's all I want to be.' And as a matter of fact, he's about the only well-known actor in it. Well, Harry Carey--"

Most of the actors were volunteers. Some of them, like Gig Young and Arthur Kennedy, were on their way to bigger things. Hawks emphasized the nature of the film by listing the cast by their jobs in the credits, rather than by the names of their characters, but he had an eye for faces and an eye for talent. Even so, Garfield had the "it" quality of a movie star, and it's hard not to notice him. He has a fairly showy part, too. Joe Wynocki is memorable for his bitterness and his turnaround in the face of an existential threat to his country. The character is so indelible that he played a variant in Destination Tokyo later in 1943. He's referenced in the monologue Christopher Walken gives to young Butch in Pulp Fiction concerning the provenance of Butch's watch, which is a deep cut. Garfield doesn't try to steal the film, though. He's on board with the program. This is a collective effort and the progressive Garfield was down for that.

This is a film about communities formed around men doing their jobs. In Hawks's universe, each man is a professional and the team is only as good as its weakest man. He valued anyone who showed up for the job and did it with no muss and fuss. Even Wynocki does his job even though the film (and audience) initially distrust him because he wants out of doing it at the outset. His pride of work in the second half of the film, bloodthirsty though it is, is the means for his redemption. It's his idea to saw off the tail cone of the plane and put a machine gun there, and he's the reason the plane survives to fight on after its first action. This is a major theme in Hawks's work, maybe THE major theme in his work. It certainly informs the way he blocks actors and stages scenes. One of the distinctive visual textures of Hawks's work--why they're so interesting to look at even when nothing in particular is on screen--is the way he just packs the frame with human beings. One-shots of solitary actors are not as common in Hawks's films as they are in other films. When they occur in his films, it's often to indicate an outsider, as one-shots of John Garfield in Air Force often indicate. If an actor signed up to work with Hawks, he was signing on to an ensemble, even if that actor was Cary Grant or John Wayne. This has propaganda value in Air Force, because the visual image of men from all walks of life from across the country coming together to do a job aligned with the military needs of the war effort. The subplot with Lt. Rader is a key element of this, in so far as he's a solitary pursuit pilot who is subsumed into the collective of the Mary Ann's crew for the greater good. Hawks is generous with scenes for his individual characters, though. The scene where Harry Carey's Sgt. White learns the fate of his son in the Philippines only to have no time to grieve is a fine bit of acting. So is Captain Quinncannon's death scene after Wynocki pilots the crippled Mary Ann back to base. This last was written by an unbilled William Faulkner. But it's in scenes with multiple characters talking over one another that the film really shines. Hawks had refined his technique of overlapping dialogue to a fine art by this time and he uses it to move the plot along at a fierce clip.

Hawks was not happy with the concluding battle scene, which he felt went on too long. Most of that sequence was assembled by producer Hal Wallis and the film went out before Hawks had a chance to cut it down. This sequence strikes a false note because the events it depicts don't fit the timeline of the film. This battle most closely resembles the Battle of the Coral Sea, which took place in mid-1942, while the film was being shot. This is the film at its most flag-waving. The events of the film previously--the attack on Pearl Harbor, the grim fate of Wake Island, the invasion of the Philippines--all represented defeats for the American forces. Moreover, Hawks made a point of killing off every character who was seen off by their loved ones at the airfield at the start of the film. He knew that war was a meat grinder. He was the man who made The Dawn Patrol, after all. By shoehorning in a victory that hadn't taken place in the film's timeline, the film aims to uplift an audience who are under a cloud of anxiety over the relentless bad news of the early war. For what it's worth, the Allies "lost" or at the very least fought to a draw in the Battle of the Coral Sea, though it paid unexpected dividends at the Battle of Midway. I think Hawks bristled at this kind of fantasy. He was at pains to depict things he knew and events he could justify. He couldn't exactly justify the wish-fulfillment of this film's final battle, at least not inside the confines of the story he wanted to tell. But that's not why the film was made and Hawks knew it. He needed the military's blessing to get the film made at all, so he swallowed it. Other things he wouldn't swallow. He almost walked off the picture when it became clear that General Curtis Le May wanted a film about long range bombers (eventually made as Strategic Air Command). Hawks wanted to make a film about his own interests. He got his way in spite of some compromises, but he never worked with Hal Wallis again.

In spite of its narrative flaws, Air Force remains a terrific picture. Even though Hawks intended that there be no movie stars as such, the film had a secret weapon in cinematographer James Wong Howe. It's hard to overstate just how good this film looks. There's an element of noir to it given the time it was made, but there's more than that. There's a poetry to the way Howe shoots things, particularly in the early parts of the film, watching planes take off just before dawn in an absolutely gorgeous crepuscular light. The night-time airfields at Hickam and Wake Island are an exercise in outright expressionism which may have roots in a need to disguise sets, but which nevertheless conveys the dire circumstances of the aftermath of the attack in ways that more elaborate daylit sets might miss. The faces Howe has to work with are distinctive, too. John Garfield in particular had a face for film noir; both hard and soft at once with angles that could be shot with expressive shadows. Howe feels this instinctively. His camera loves Garfield. It loves Harry Carey and George Tobias, too, and to a lesser extent the more baby-faced cabin crew played by John Ridgely, Gig Young, and James Brown (not that James Brown, natch). Even in sunlit scenes, Howe pulls things toward expressionism. This all works in tandem with Hawks's blocking that makes for a film that is absolutely gorgeous on a scene by scene level.

I understand why Air Force has fallen into neglect while Hawks's other films from the same era endure as classics. I don't question it. Every generation has a right to view old films through their own set of values. As a film alone, I like it a lot. It's not entirely uncritical of war even if it's not explicitly anti-war. I think it's a key film in its director's output, and it's probably better than some of his more well-known films (I'm looking at you, Sergeant York). My uncle was a twenty year Air Force master sergeant who was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. I suspect he would have liked this film. I have no idea if he ever saw it, though. It probably would have been a kick watching it with him.

*Anti-Japanese racism was a feature not a bug in World War II propaganda. Without excusing it, in the grand scheme of things the racism in Air Force isn't nearly as virulent as what one finds in other propaganda of the era. If you go looking for, say, "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" or Disney's "Commando Duck," you'll see what I mean. The racism baked into Gregg Toland's December 7 was so bad that he was removed from the project by the Pentagon and it was retooled by John Ford, which is suggestive of a military command that at least had an awareness of the possible consequences of their actions. The war was going to end eventually and America was going to have to live in the world with Japan by and by.

[stethacantus]

Cold War 2 ( 2016 )
A sequel to Cold War, made four years later even though it takes place almost immediately on the same day of the first film. Hard to believe it took that long, considering Cold War ended with the Commissioner's wife being kidnapped in the post credit scene, setting the sequel up. Similarly, this film ends on a sort of cliffhanger suggesting there were plans to continue the story in a third film. However, as far as I can tell, the third film was about to be shot in 2019, was postponed due to political strife in Hong Kong, and apparently has not been completed yet.

The Post ( 2017 )
AS already mentioned, this film was missing from the box with my Spielberg films. I finally found where it had been moved to last Friday/

[stethacantus]

Zero Tolerance ( 2014 )
It is supposed to be a Scott Adkins film. He is prominently featured on the box. And he is barely in the film. Probably did no more than a few hours shooting for the film. The plot: Two ex-paramilitary operatives attempt to solve the death of Angel, a prostitute who was the daughter of one, and goddaughter of the other. The godfather is a cop who goes by the book. The other has a bad habit of killing anyone they question after they give him a lead. A mildly entertaining film that falls more into the  Historic Bloodshed gene.


Bridge of Spies ( 2014 )
Reviewed this before. A Spielberg film about a spy swap in the late 1950s.

[Charles Castle]

Cary Grant made three films with director Stanley Donen between 1958 and 1963. Those three films arguably define the sunset of his acting career. The last of the three, Charade (1963), is Grant's last legitimately great film. He made two more films afterward and then retired from acting in 1966. Charade is also a transitional film for American cinema generally, perched as it is between the last gasps of big studio filmmaking in the 1950s and the first rumblings of the American New Wave. Stanley Donen was the ideal director for such a film, given that his filmmaking style already resembled various New Waves before any of them even began to swell on the cinematic horizon. Donen was flexible and creative, able to slot right into whatever genre to which he was assigned (maybe not science fiction, but that may not have been his fault). Even though Donen was primarily known for making musicals in the 1950s including arguably the greatest musical ever made, Charade demonstrates a surprising--and surprisingly brutal--facility for thrillers in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock. Charade is sometimes described as the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, though that might be hyperbole.

Donen was also one of Audrey Hepburn's principal directors, having made Funny Face with her in 1957 and with Two For the Road--a New Wave film if ever there was one--ahead in 1967. The pairing of Hepburn and Cary Grant perhaps delayed Grant's retirement. Of his experience on Charade, he said, "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." Alas, that never came to pass. He was lured into making Father Goose with the promise of Hepburn as a co-star, though the part ultimately went to Leslie Caron. Maybe that's just as well. Donen intended to make a further film with Grant, too, but the actor retired and the part in Arabesque went to Gregory Peck instead. For what it's worth, that's a pretty good movie, but I don't think Grant and Sophia Loren would have gotten along well. They had a history, and Grant was probably too old by then for that kind of globetrotting adventure anyway.

Charade begins with a man being thrown from a moving train. He's been murdered. This is Charles Lampert. His widow, Regina, is on a skiing holiday with their son at the time. She tells her best friend that she's thinking of leaving Charles, but when she returns to her flat in Paris, she discovers that it has been cleared out and Charles is gone. The police are waiting to talk to her, too, given that he has been murdered. They hand her his effects, including a letter offering his apologies for what he's done to her. She doesn't know whether to be relieved or apprehensive, because the cop on the case, one Hamilton Bartholemew of the CIA, tells her that Charles has absconded with $250,000 dollars from a World War II heist his unit pulled near the end of the war. At his funeral, his army buddies come one by one to pay their respects. One by one, they menace Regina for information about the money. She hasn't got it. She has no idea where it might be. They don't believe her. Her only help is Peter Joshua, an American she met on holiday who helps her move into a hotel. But Joshua has secrets of his own. The thieves tell Regina that he is not "Peter Joshua" but the brother of one of their confederates who was killed in the heist. Then Regina discovers that that man had no brother, and he owns that he is a professional thief. Meanwhile, the thieves themselves start to get murdered, casting suspicion everywhere. And what DID Charles do with the money, anyway?

Charade gives the Cary Grant persona a good workout. The character he plays here is protean, changing from scene to scene to fit the needs of the plot while remaining essentially Cary Grant. A viewer who thinks that Grant was always playing himself will not change their minds while watching this film, but Grant, as usual, had the last word. "Have you ever seen people trying to play themselves at parties?" he once asked an interviewer some years after he retired from film. "They're terrible!" Unspoken here is the idea that Grant was NOT playing himself. He also once told an admirer who said they always wanted to be Cary Grant, "So did I." Archie Leach was always somewhere down at the foundations of his identity. What Charade does with the Grant persona is akin to the Kuleshov effect. It is charming, sinister, untrustworthy, and heroic by turns not through any particular change in Grant's performance, but by the context of the given scene in which it is placed. Grant absolutely could change the tenor of his performance for effect, but in this film he doesn't have to. Indeed, it's not even a desirable thing. The steadiness of the character here, by whatever name he goes, keeps the audience in the dark. The character's true motivations are opaque until the very end. It's a compelling hook. All Grant needs to do is hit his marks and not flub his lines. The persona does the rest.

This is not Grant's movie, though. It's Audrey Hepburn's. Fittingly, she's the character we meet first, and it's her point of view through which we perceive the events of the film. Hepburn is asked to play a wide range of emotions. Her character is not reliant on her movie-star persona. The movie asks her for terror, attraction, comedy, craftiness, motherhood, distrust, sorrow, resignation, and anger. It's a broad canvas for an actor, and Hepburn was certainly game for it. Significantly, Hepburn is an actor who did not cultivate a specific movie-star persona, per se, though in the public's mind she was probably Holly Golightly or Sabrina. She was never accused of "playing herself," because her portfolio doesn't allow that kind of pigeonholing (and, seriously, have you ever actually read her biography? It's a LOT). The character is a type, though. Regina is a variant of the wrong man accused, or the poor sap mistaken for a guilty party. She's the equivalent of Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, a character who thinks her world is secure and comprehensible until the bottom drops out and a world of chaos lies below. She doesn't understand anything for most of the film, and has to keep her wits to stay alive as she pieces things together. This was Hepburn's first go at this character type, and you can look at this film as a warm-up exercise for Wait Until Dark five years later if you like. That film is very similar to Charade, though it removes the comfort of a white knight.

Charade leans in to the more romantic aspects of the Hitchcockian thriller. Grant, for his part, thought the increasing age gap between him and his leading ladies was troublesome, while Hepburn had been paired with a ridiculous succession of MUCH older co-stars. The gap between Hepburn and Grant was "only" 25 years, which is perhaps less distasteful when Hepburn was in her mid-30s than it was a decade earlier. Grant insisted that it would be undignified for him to chase after her, so the filmmakers reversed this element of their dynamic and had her chase after him. For my tastes, it works better this way. Both of these characters are worldly and tired of the world. Their banter doesn't seem rehearsed so much as it comes from deep wells of experience. Regina is married to Charles at the beginning of the film, but she's resigned to divorcing him. She knows he doesn't love her and she doesn't love him and that's that. This is not Audrey Hepburn the ingenue, nor Cary Grant the handsome screwball comedian. This is a movie about adults, starring adults. The scenes of intimacy between them aren't coy, and their relationship isn't headed anywhere chaste.

Donen's directorial style here is geared for editing rather than indulging in elaborate shot compositions. This isn't a film that overawes you with it's beauty, no matter how photogenic it finds Paris to be. It's an attractive film as a baseline of commercial professionalism, but it's one that moves rapidly and doesn't dawdle on the scenery. Donen finds his meaning in the cut. It differs from Hitchcock in so far as this film isn't interested in emphasizing significant objects, which makes the deftness of how it leads the audience to the conclusion even more remarkable. The film tells us where Charles hid the money within the first five minutes of the film, which puts the audience in the same situation as the characters. The solution to the mystery is hidden in plain sight. When Regina eventually figures it out, the film rewards both her and the audience for their cleverness with a riot of images related to that solution thrown onto the screen in a rapid montage. The film conceals its true Villain, too, though there are plenty of villains with a lowercase "v" throughout. Of the major characters, four of them are played by actors who had already won or would go on to win Oscars. Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy are a murderer's row of supporting actors, if you'll pardon the pun. In one respect, Donen takes his cues from Hitchcock: he puts his leading lady in a series of chic outfits. Audrey Hepburn could wear the hell out of clothes and this film insists on indulging that skill. The chic of 1963 pins this film firmly in its era, if the style of the film didn't do that, too. The film debuted in theaters a month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and you can look at this film as a coda of sorts for the fashions of Camelot. Things changed quickly afterward. The form of the film is more forward looking than its fashions. This is a New Wave film in spite of dialogue that sometimes seems like it comes from a 1930s screwball comedy. A lot of the film's flourishes are completely arbitrary (the goofy face Grant makes when Regina figures out who he is being perhaps the most arbitrary) in the finest tradition of Godard and his followers (I like to think that Godard is a follower of Donen, though I doubt that's the case). Its cast, though...the cast imparts on the film a Hollywood glamour and commercial sheen that disguises its provenance. This is a film first and foremost about movie stars, and in some ways the plot and even the form of the film doesn't matter so long as light is bouncing off Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

I wonder if Ian Fleming saw Charade and again contemplated the idea of Grant as James Bond, given that the opening credits have a sinister early sixties espionage score and were designed by Maurice Binder. Maybe not, though. Even after he retired and all the way until his death in 1986, Grant was thought to be ageless, but I think he looks noticeably his age and noticeably out of shape in Charade. It makes the fight sequence with the much younger, much larger George Kennedy seem rigged for the story because Grant is the designated hero. Because, you know, he's Cary friggin' Grant.

The credit sequence deserves one other piece of scrutiny. It doesn't have a correct copyright notice, which means that the film entered the public domain the minute it was first exhibited to an audience. This also means there are a raft of shady versions of the film. I watched the Universal blu-ray, though the Criterion edition is excellent, too. Beware of other vendors, though. The film has long been a favorite of fly-by-night grifters.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I have the Criterion Blu-Ray of Charade and it looks and sounds great.

[stethacantus]

District 13 ( 2004 )
This movie was on a list of the top 10 greatest martial arts films of the past 20 years ( 2000 - 2020 ) but it isn't a martial arts film. There are some martial arts in it. But it is a parkour film. And I got the duel disc with both District 13 and District 13: Ultimatum on it. Despite being a formula action film which is a cross between Escape From New York and 48 Hours, it was extremely fun, and should be counted as one of the greatest action films of the past couple of decades. It turns out there was an American remake with Paul Walker called Brick Mansions. I'm debating if I should bother getting it. I guess that all depends on how much I like District 13: Ultimatum.

Finished the night watching Steven Spielberg's  Lincoln ( 2012 ). This is the last of the Spielberg films I pulled from the storage area. Debating if I should bring any more down, or find some of the other films that I have wanted to rewatch. Problem being, a lot of them I currently can't find.

[stethacantus]

District 13: Ultimatum ( 2009 )
When we last left off, the corrupt politicians who wanted to blow up District 13 with a bomb were exposed and arrested, and the government promised to immediately  tear down the wall surrounding the district. In the sequel, five years have passed and the district is still surrounded by a wall that keeps it's residents locked in. And there is a new batch of corrupt politicians trying to blow the district up. Once again a parkour film, only this time with not as much parkour, and a lot more martial arts. Both David Belle  and  Cyril Raffaelli  are back to reprise their roles, but sadly the lovely Dany Verissimo does not return, nor is it even mentioned what happened to her character.

Leap of Faith ( 1992 )
Had this on my LoC list and decided to watch it along with Spielberg's Tin Tin. And then this happened. Part of the plot has a farming town that is suffering from a draught. And you guessed it, the movie ends with it suddenly raining. The exact moment it began raining in the film, it also began raining outside. Not much wind, but a hell of a lot of lightning  striking every two to three seconds with constant thunder. Then came a downfall of rain that can only be described.  as a flood from the sky. Which knocked the power out. Not sure if lightning hit the lines or the rain did it, but when the lights flickered back on a half minute later, it was decided to turn all the electronics off. Ten minutes later the storm went away as fast as it came, but that was it for the night. Jus weird that we heard the rain begin to fall through the open window the exact same time it began falling in the movie.

[stethacantus]

God of War ( 2017 )
Got this just because Sammo Hung was in the cast ( in what turns out to be a minor role ) but never the less enjoyed the film. A great ancient China war epic.

Way Out West ( 1937 ) and Pardon Us ( 1931 )
Visitors to our home wanted to see these. when they found out I had them. And I thought, "Laurel & Hardy? Why not?" They talked through both of them. So what, you just wanted it playing in the background while you had a conversation? Looked up every time there was a good gag, and yep. they weren't even looking at the screen.

The Adventures of Tintin ( 2011 )
Or to be more accurate, "A" Adventure of Tintin. Despite all the effort that went into this film, it comes off as oddly thin. And with a cliffhanger for a sequel that still has not been made, but Spielberg and Jackson still claim is being written.

[stethacantus]

LAST WEEK

God of War II ( 2021 )
The first God of War was a remake of Beach of the War Gods, or at least based on the same historical events. It was a grand epic with battles involving hundreds of extras. The so called sequel is a cheap film where battles have no more than five or six actors on screen, with perhaps dozen CGI soldiers in the background. It does not have any of the characters from the first film, does not even continue the story, does not have any of the actors from the first film nor the director. It is just some movie the studio  released as a sequel.  The story, which involves magic and some palace intrigue, and a soldier who gains super powers, is actually some what entertaining. But it is a cheap action fantasy that has no business being called a sequel to a great epic.

Drawing Flies ( 1996 )
Vulgar ( 2000 )
Since I was getting Mall Rats III, I decided to get all the other Viewaskewaverse films I was missing. Drawing Flies was produced by Kevin Smith and has what may or may not be a cameo by Silent Bob. Often referred to as the lost Viewaskew film due to it being out of print for a number of years, it is a film that is about nothing. A bunch of slackers who are out of money and about to be kicked out of the apartment they share, decide to go camping in the woods. And that is pretty much the entire plot.   Vulgar has a bit more of a plot. A down and out party clown decides to become the first stripper clown, hiring himself out to bachelor parties. And he gets raped by a couple of men who hire him. There is a sort of revenge plot after that, but this is otherwise an unpleasant film.

THIS WEEK

No Retreat, No Surrender ( 1985 )
This was the first film that Jean Claude Van Damme was given an actual role in, as opposed to being an extra. It was one of the rare Seasonal Films made for the American film market. It is basically a formula American martial arts film made by a Hong Kong director and producer with an American cast. What should be boring crap is actually entertaining enough. However, it is sub par compared to the other Seasonal films. Typically a Seasonal Film goes from one fight scene to another and then to another and another and another until you get to the final boss battle. The plots are paper thin and it is all about watching the hero go from one fight to another. In this film we have a bit more of a plot of the typical Seasonal film, but faaaaaaaaar less fighting. oh, and it s a Bruceploytation film.  Filmed in Seattle, the hero visits the actual grave of Bruce Lee. After getting his ass kicked at a party, he visits the grave again and wines to Bruce Lee about not being able to fight. That night, Bruce Lee's ghost visits him and trains him to be a martial arts master, who is able to beat the film's villain, Jean Claude Van Damme.

Clerks III ( 2022 )
Perhaps they should have stopped at the second film. It was such a fitting end to the Clerks series. This one is barely funny. But it is dramatic, and the drama works well. But being the third and final film, Smit insists on killing off characters just for that drama. Did we really need to rob the two clerks of their happy ending from the second movie? It is still a good film, but Clerks II will always be the best.

[Charles Castle]

There's a deep mythological undercurrent in Talk to Me (2022, directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou). My wife immediately suggested that the film's Maguffin is a hand of glory, a magical artifact made from the left hand of a hanged man which has powerful magic abilities. You may remember the hand of glory's appearance in The Wicker Man, among other places. The severed hand in Talk to Me isn't exactly that, but bears a strong enough resemblance nonetheless, even down to the related use of a candle to invoke its power. It reminds me a little of the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacob's story of the same name, as well, which itself seems descended from the hand of glory and its other mythological relatives. In Talk to Me, the severed hand of a medium is preserved inside a ceramic shell. It enables someone holding the hand, as if shaking it, to see and talk to the dead. If the holder invites the ghost, the ghost can possess them. Like the hand in "The Monkey's Paw," the hand in this film promises answers and wishes. Sort of. In the film, it's the center of teenage shenanigans so it all ends badly, as it must. These kids could have prevented a lot of heartache if they had all watched The Ring or Witchboard or some other tale of teens dabbling in the supernatural. But then you wouldn't have a movie.

The film opens with a young man, Cole, searching a party for his brother, Duckett. Duckett has locked himself in a room and Cole must break down the door to locate his brother. As Cole drags Duckett from the house, Duckett stabs Cole with a kitchen knife before plunging the knife into his own face, killing him. The story then centers itself on Mia, whose mother's death haunts her. She doesn't know if her mother died a suicide or by accident, and her father won't tell her which. She is distant from her father. She instead finds family with her best friend, Jade, and Jade's younger brother, Riley. Jade is currently dating Mia's ex, Daniel, with Mia's blessing. All four of them wind up at a party where the hosts, Joss and Haley, have a peculiar party game. They have a ceramic hand they claim encases the severed hand of a dead medium. When someone grasps the hand and asks the spirits to "Talk to me," a ghost will appear. The holder can then invite the ghost into themselves, but only for ninety seconds. Haley and Joss assert that if you go over ninety seconds, the ghosts become unwilling to leave. Mia volunteers to try it. Mia is a particularly open conduit, and sees multiple ghosts, one of which appears to have designs on Riley. It manifests physical influence on the real-world surroundings, much to the shock of everyone, including Joss and Haley who have never seen such a thing before. Mia goes over her ninety seconds. When she goes home with Jade and Riley, she's concerned at the attention Riley drew from the ghosts, but she's also thrilled at the experience. She wants to try it again. Mia and Jade arrange another session with the hand at Jade's house while her mother is away, and this time, Riley wants a go at it. Jade is adamantly opposed, but Mia gives him permission. Riley manifests a ghost who talks to Mia as if it is her mother before another ghost takes control and Riley suddenly becomes violent, bashing his own head into the table and mantlepiece before trying to pluck out his own eye. The assembled teens are shocked, and when Riley is inevitably hospitalized, it becomes apparent that no one disconnected him from the spirit in his body. Mia becomes more and more obsessed with communicating with her mother, who tells her that she must "help" Riley. But that spirit's story conflicts with the story Mia's dad tells her. She decides to trust the spirits and embarks to find Riley's spirit on the other side. Things don't go exactly to plan.

This is a glum film that goes to some pretty dark places. The filmmakers, making their first feature, haven't salted the film with anything like a sense of humor while piling up their horrors. Their opening sequence is a doozy, giving the audience a nasty shock at the outset. It's as if the filmmakers are priming the pump. They make good on the promise of this sequence with some pretty potent scenes of shock and violence, too, made all the nastier because they are generally inflicted by and upon people who are already hurting. This is obviously a film about grief, as many upscale horror movies these days are (this is very much of a piece with studio A24's horror preferences).  Riley is open to the manipulations of malevolent spirits because her grief has made her blind to the love of those around her and the film follows her down the rabbit hole to an ending that is both of a piece with her headspace and a kind of E.C. Comics twist of the tale. There is a tension between the film's artier pretensions and its essential pulp fiction infrastructure. The Philippous have taken a lot of notes from the broader genre, combining the melancholy ghosts of The Sixth Sense with the vengeful spirits of the J-horror boom, with a salting of George Romero and even John Wayne Gacy (the attention paid to Riley by his ghost strikes me as paedophilic). Sometimes this melange of art and pulp works. As a story structure, this is fundamentally sound. It feeds off its influences (like a hungry ghost?) and plays a bit like an urban legend. It's the sort of story that should be passed around a teen-age sleep-over party in late October.

As a matter of style, however...

Talk to Me is aggressively color-graded in monotone shades of steel gray and steel blue-gray most of the time, and it's under lit. I get that they're trying to impart a mood with these choices, but it looks like a thousand other films going for the same effect. The cinematography is functional, but it's also lazy, even accounting for the fact that this movie was made for a minuscule budget. It also has a kind of unintelligible sound mix that is the equivalent of its color palette, and I found myself wishing through most of its length that I had chosen to watch the film at home rather than at a theater because at home I would have the option of subtitles. The accents of the actors are inconsistent, inviting me to wonder why Mia and her dad, Max, have American accents while the rest of the cast have Australian accents. The accents don't help the sound mix. Indeed, they work in tandem to garble parts of the film, including the accents themselves. Sophie Wilde is Australian so why she would sport an American accent is mystifying.

For the most part, the actors are good, though the film gives them limited emotional ranges to play. Sophie Wilde is the lead as Mia, and she spends most of the film playing depression, though she comes alive at the prospect of revisiting the dead. There's a metaphor there, maybe. Alexandra Jensen's Jade also gets two modes of expression, either as an infatuated teen girl obsessed with her boyfriend or as the sibling saddled with a tagalong little brother. As a matter of representation, I appreciated the presence of Zoe Terakes as Haley, whose transness and queerness isn't even remarked upon. That they are a quasi villain is a nice touch, too. I like a film that walks the walk enough to get itself banned in someplace like Kuwait because of the mere presence of a trans and queer actor. The most nuanced performance comes from Miranda Otto, which is not a surprise given that she is a much bigger talent than a film like this can expect. It's not surprising that she gets the widest range of performance as Jade and Riley's working mom. Her exchange with Mia late in the film outside Riley's hospital room requires an actor of her ability else it would feel inauthentic. Otto is more than up to it.

In spite of my reservations about the craft of the film, I like its dedication to its big idea. It has an ending in mind and damned if it doesn't pursue that end with a vengeance. I admire that. This is the kind of film that will linger because of that ending, long after all of my complaints are forgotten. Its life on streaming will surely smooth over all of those rough edges in the fullness of time should I ever choose to watch it again. Horror is still the only area of film that's holding off the onslaught of "IP-based cinema" because it's profitable without the stamp of corporate branding. Capitalism is ruining horror movies, too--don't even get me started on the most recent Scream sequel--but horror movies are uniquely able to resist the process of enshitification endemic to most corporate "content." An effective original horror movie in this economy? That's not only gold, it's a one way ticket to the cultural memory pool.

Still, I wish it were better. Its ideas deserve to be better-executed. I freely admit that it's probably good enough. It gets to where it means to go. Maybe if I let the film sit in my mind for a while, its ideas will age well. It happens sometimes, so who knows, eh?

[stethacantus]

Ichi the Killer ( 2001 )
This is another one of hose films that keeps showing up on lists of the best martial arts films of the 00s, despite it not actually being martial arts. I mean, there is a little bit of what could possibly be considered a martial arts fight. But this is mostly a cult film in the vein of Story of Riki and Tokyo Gore Police. Ichi is an insane killer who is under the hypnotic control of JiJii,  a Chinese gang leader looking to wipe out the Anjo Yakuza clan.  Ichi's first victim is boss Anjo himself, who is completely cut to pieces. JiJii's men go  to the murder scene and remove every bit of evidence  he murder took place, leaving Anjo's men to believe he had run off with the clan's money. Kikihara, Anjo's sadistic enforcer, refuses to believe his boss would run off, and believes one of the other Yakuza gangs have kidnapped him., leading him to go on a torture and murder spree to find Anjo before discovering his boss was killed by Ichi, and he and his me are next. Plenty of  mutilation scenes, both by Kikihara torturing anyone he suspects of being behind Anjo's disappearance, and Ichi killing his next victim. Interesting to watch, if you can stomach  the violence. But that is all this film is. One graphic mutilation scene after another.


West Side Story ( 2021 )
Here is he second most pointless movie ever made, behind Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho ( 1998 ). I was going to get this a couple of years ago to add to my Steven Spielberg movie collection, but it was one of those Disney+ exclusives that took so long to get a physical release that I completely forgot about it until I was ordering the Fabelmans and the Amazon algorithm asked if I wanted to buy West Side Story as well.  The 1961 version of West Side Story is a classic that still holds up to this day. It's only flaw being white actors in the leads of Puerto Rican characters. So why the hell would Spielberg want to do a remake? It is based on the same exact stage musical, so not really an opportunity to make major improvements over the first film. Aside from a few musical numbers being moved around in order, not much has changed. The Doc character, who owned the soda shop where Tony works,  has been killed off before the film even begins, and replaced with a new character called Valentina, Doc's widow and current owner of his soda shop. Valentina is played by Rita Moreno, which has her in both movie adaptions ( she played Anita in the 1961 version ). It sort of detracts from the film to have a  Puerto Rican woman the Jets like and respect when the story is basically supposed to be about them being a bunch of racists who hate Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, Tony and Maria's duet Somewhere is instead sung by Valentina to herself, which sort of renders the song pointless and far less dramatic. I should point out that Moreno didn't sing her parts in the 1961 film where the entire cast lip-synced to tracks sung by professional singers. I sort of with Spielberg had done the same for this film because the actor who played Tony in this film was off key. Another thing Spielberg added to this version was the story taking place in San Juan Hill, the upper west side slum neighborhood that was torn down in the early 60s so that Lincoln Center could be built. The film opens showing the buildings the city has torn down so far, and a few shell buildings still standing, with the rest of the neighborhood scheduled to be demolished as well. While this does add a level of futility to the Jets and Sharks fighting over territory that is about to be destroyed, it isn't historically accurate. While San Juan Hill did have a growing Puerto Rican population, it was mostly a black ghetto where whites didn't live. Which was why it was so easy for Robert Moses to have the entire neighborhood torn down. Spielberg's West Side Story is a good film and the ending of the story is still emotional. But the original can not be topped. Which one is better? I guess that depends on which one you have seen first. I will always believe the 1961  version is the best.

[stethacantus]

I am going to make this brief as I tried writing this three times, and each time Windows crashed the browser after ten minutes  and restarted it on a page that said the browser was updated, and I should take a tour of all the new shit the updated browser had.

Legend Of Gatotkaca ( 2002 )
Indonesian superhero film co-produced by Well Go and the Hi-Yah! Channel. Long and boring in the middle. dozed off three times while watching it and had to rewind back to the part I last remembered, so it ended up taking three hours to watch a two hour film. An origin story where the superhero does not show up until the final reel. The action finally picks up at the end of the film with the Villain reveled, and the hero finally turning into Gatotkaca, but both of them wear similar costumes, the fight takes place at night in the dark, and the fighting is  done up close with a lot of quick editing so you are not sure who is fighting whom.

The Fablemans ( 2022 )
Steven Spielberg's origin story, written and directed by him, but for some reason with all the names changed. It leaves a lot out, such as the first feature film he made, and independent Science Fiction film called Firelight made for $500 in 1962. The film abruptly ends with him visiting the producer of Hogan's Heroes who then takes him to meet director John Ford. It does not go as far as the year he first began working for Universal. Just abruptly ends at the John Ford encounter. So not really an origin story. Other than that disappointment, a nice family drama and coming of age film.

[stethacantus]

Unleashed ( 2005 )
I was reluctant to get this because I was not sure if I had it yet or not. Back before I relied on Amazon for DVDs and later Blu-rays, there were stores. You could walk in, examine the merchandise to make sure you were buying one in mint condition and probably not a used copy accidentally repackaged as new, and have it in your hands immediately after purchasing it. Not that every store selling physical media went away. But most of the ones that remain either have a miniscule home video section as an afterthought, or a less than satisfactory home video section that always seems to be missing anything I went in there to buy. Back when stores like J&R still existed, I would buy the latest releases every Tuesday. Among those were the latest films starring Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I know I bought Romeo Must Die and The One and a couple of other Jet Li films back then. Then came the financial crisis and recession where I gave up buying anything fun for four or five years, after which most of the stores that I frequented prior to the recession were bankrupt, and the only way to get the MST3K and other DVD releases I had missed during those five years was to buy them on Amazon. Now, I can easily check my Amazon history to see what I have bought from them. But no way to know exactly what I have in my own collection that I bought earlier than that until the day I can once again live in an apartment or house that allows shelves, and I can once again have my entire home video collection out in the open where I can see what I have and what is missing. So, I was not sure if Unleashed was among the Jet Li films I had bought. Then Amazon had this for $5 so I said I may as well find out. Turns out I never saw this film before. Actually, a really good film despite it's comic book premise of a guy raised from childhood to be a human dog.

Jurassic World Dominion ( 2022  )
Don't know why this got such negative reviews. My only critique is that it makes no sense that the handful of Dinosaurs that escaped in the previous movie have multiplied  and spread all over the planet. They could not get off that one island in the first few movies, now suddenly they can make it across the oceans to other continents?

Unless something changes, there will be no new movies coming in for a couple of weeks. One of my Amazon orders from a week ago for a bunch of Chuck Norris films was not given a delivery date until yesterday, and that delivery date is October  3rd? Even more baffling, Amazon listed for pre-order season 1 of Loki, in what looks like a legit release for the United States and not some German release that will not play on Region 1 players and will need to be sent back. I mean, it could be a bootleg, which I will know when it arrives and will be sent back immediately. But so far, looks legit, is listed as being released by Marvel Studios, and they have also announced Wandavision for Pre Order. Loki is listed as a September 26th release date, which is this Tuesday. And I pre-ordered it about a month ago, around the time the long ass heat wave began. So this weekend they e-mailed me my delivery date. November 11th. WHAT? That is two weeks and one day after the release date! And I ordered this through a family member's Amazon Prime account because only Amazon Prime members got first crack at the pre-orders. Now you see why I miss buying my videos from stores.

[stethacantus]

This week Amazon split my order and delivered one of the films I had ordered from them. Unfortunately, the movie I was planning to save for the weekend before Halloween, while the other Chuck Norris films may be turning up this week. It sort of went like this. Big flooding rainstorm. When I left the house the last email Amazon had sent me was that they would not be delivered until October 3rd. Get to work, and get an email saying the order had been split and one of the movies was being delivered that day. Actually, that was the second email I got from Amazon, the first was a "Your Order Was Delivered" email, showing a picture of an Amazon envelope just lying in front of the building on the sidewalk. When I got home the package was still there, soaked. I guess that because of the rain, the porch pirates were not out that day. And thankfully the sidewalk did not flood and wash the package down the sewer. Also, lucked out that they used the envelope with bubble wrapping on the interior as the Blu-Ray inside was still dry. Sent them a complaint email, and an hour later I was sent an email saying I would be getting the Loki season 1 this month instead of November. Have no idea if they did this to make up for their delivery person leaving a package  where pedestrians could literally step on it, or if they moved the delivery date up for everyone. But still listed as unshipped.

Silent Rage ( 1982 )
This was uupposd to be watched the weekend before Halloween, but ended up being watched on Saturday. Basically, some one thought they should do a movie where Chuck Norris fights Jason, but could not get the rights to Jasn and created  their own killer. Norris plays a sheriff who arrests a guy who just went insane and ax murdered his wife and some other unidentified man in the same house. The guy snaps the handcuffs and after tossing the police around like rag dolls, gets a barrage of bullets shot at him. He is taken to the hospital where he is not expected to live, but is brought back to life by a mad scientist who wants to test a new formula that will make the axe murderer immortal and able to rapidly heal from anything. Meanwhile, it has been 40 minutes and the audience is getting fed up, so Chuck beats up a motorcycle gang. That out of the way, back to the splatter film. The Axe Murderer wakes up and begins killing everyone. He is about to kill Chuck's girlfriend when he shows up and shoots him. Realizing bullets can no longer kill him, nor can running him over with a car or setting him on fire, Chuck has no choice but to Karate kick him, then throw him down a well. After which Chuck proclaims the problem solved and walks away, even thought the axe murderer is still alive. ( Chuck doesn't even bother to attempt to seal the well up, as they did in Phantasm and Halloween IV ( or was that Halloween V? ) Just passable as a formula slasher film, and as any Chuck Norris film, barely passable as martial arts. Entertaining only to see how both genres are mixed.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit ( 1988 )
I was planning on watching the Loki series instead of movies because Loki is basically an MCU movie released as a series. With it not coming for a while, I decided to watch The Lego Movie instead after watching the season premier of Lego Masters. And as usual, could not find it. It was supposed to be with all the Batman films, along with Lego Batman, but someone moved both of them so only Lego II: the Sequel was there. While looking everywhere, I found Who Framed Roger Rabbit and decided to see if it still held up. It doesn't. It is no longer an effects marvel. The story is pretty lame. And the ending where Bob Hopskins dances and sings is cringeworthy. Still very watchable, but enjoyed this movie a hell of a lot more when I saw it in the theaters.

[Charles Castle]

My wife and I were speculating in the course of a long drive last week about favorite authors we would like to have met. We've met a fair few of them, but she would like to have met Toni Morrison and I would like to have met Robert Bloch. I don't know what that says about us. An author I decided I would prefer not to have met is Shirley Jackson. On the evidence of her work and the general outline of her biography, I don't think I would have liked her. The dominant theme of her work is a neurotic paranoia that in her own life was apparently completely justified by the dynamics of her marriage. I watched the recent biopic starring Elisabeth Moss as Jackson and found myself nodding along even when I knew that they were fudging the details (they fudged the details a LOT). Jackson has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance lately, what with the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House and renewed interest in her last completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which serves as an ur-text for Park Chan-wook's Gothic potboiler, Stoker, and which was made into a film in 2018 by director Stacie Passon based on the book itself. Passon's film does an admirable job of meeting Jackson on her own terms, neurotic paranoia and all.

The story concerns the Blackwood sisters, Mary Katherine and Constance, who live in Blackwood Manor with their Uncle Julian, who is an invalid. Their parents passed away under mysterious circumstances and the general consensus among the townies is that Constance poisoned their parents with arsenic. Constance no longer goes into town. That job falls to Mary Katherine--Merricat, as she is known to everyone--who endures the scorn of the townies when she goes to get groceries and library books. The Blackwoods have always been the town squires. They have always lived in Blackwood manor. Only a handful of town people ever visit them, and Constance greets them politely, but they never drink their tea, or eat their food. One day, their estranged cousin Charles arrives with the intention of looting the safe in which the sisters protect their inherited wealth. Charles is dashing and sweeps Constance off her feet and plies her with promises of traveling the world. Merricat distrusts Charles, and when her distrust comes to a head, they have an argument that results in a fire that burns the mansion. The townies use this as an opportunity to vandalize and potentially loot the place. Merricat and Constance hide from Charles in the woods, and when they return to Blackwood Manor, the upper floors have been ruined and their Uncle Julian has died. But Charles isn't done with the sisters. And Merricat isn't done with him.

Film adaptations of Jackson have traditionally been a mixed bag. There are several short films and at least one feature film derived from "The Lottery," one film derived from "The Summer People," one film from The Bird's Nest, one film from the uncompleted Come Along With Me, and the various versions of The Haunting of Hill House. Some of these are good--Robert Wise's version of The Haunting is a damned masterpiece--but some of these are not. It is a surprise that it has taken this long for the movies to notice We Have Always Lived in the Castle, though in retrospect, it's also understandable. Because, what is this story? It feels like a horror story, but isn't really one. It feels like a melodrama, too, but isn't one. The catch-all of "Gothic" doesn't seem to do it justice, even though an enumeration of its themes and narrative strategies scream "Gothic." It seems a singular story from a particular author's private universe. We'll stick with Gothic. And Gothic melodrama isn't the same as Gothic horror. So how do you market this? Jackson's name, associated with Horror for decades at this point, helps. The filmmakers have tweaked the narrative some to align it more with the Gothic's offspring, the horror movie and the mystery story. It loses a little by doing this, even if it gains an audience.

In truth, it doesn't need the tweak. Merricat is an ideal goth girl heroine, whose psychosis drives her to extreme lengths. The bits of magic she places around the borders of her world align the film with a folk horror sensibility, while her secret is the kind of secret that motivates much more violent films. Jackson's touch is more delicate than that of someone like Jim Thompson or Robert Bloch, who both specialized in first-person accounts of murderous psychopaths, but Merricat in her way is both crazier and deadlier than those characters. At the outset, she lists both Richard Plantagenet and amanita phalloides among her favorite things in a paragraph that rivals the start of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House for linguistic virtuosity. The film takes its cue from the Wise version of The Haunting when it comes to translating that paragraph by having Merricat--played by Taissa Farmiga--narrate the opening in voice over. But not the whole thing. The film leaves Richard III and death cap mushrooms out of the narration and prefers to show the audience these things instead. The filmmakers are very keen on showing and not telling, even though the choice of using Merricat's narration throughout undercuts that a little. It keeps the important parts, though. It keeps her musings about poisoning the whole town, and her desire to eat a child only to have Constance tell her that she doesn't know how to cook one. The main change is a big one, though, in which the sisters become accomplices in a crime that doesn't appear in the book, perhaps as an offering to a horror audience that might demand a higher body count. In truth, it's a path that the book very much could have taken, if Jackson were a more conventional writer. It makes for a more conventional film regardless.

Given the first-person nature of the film, even more than in the book, a viewer can be forgiven for wondering if the torment Merricat endures from the townies isn't her own paranoia. The taunting from children throughout certainly makes one understand why she might want to murder them all. There's a class element to this, too, given the wealth of the Blackwoods and the envy of the townies. The feeling of constant persecution is unsettling. So is the feeling of isolation.

The "facts" of the deaths of the rest of the Blackwoods would seem to be a warning to fortune hunters, but Charles shows up anyway. As I was watching the film, I kept wanting Charles to be played by Matthew Goode, even though Sebastian Stan is a perfectly fine actor. This is the lingering impression of Stoker, I think. Fortune hunters never come to good ends in Gothic films, and this film, unlike the book, follows that trend. Charlie is dashing and oily in equal measures here and it's entirely understandable why Constance might fall for him. It's equally understandable why Merricat might loathe him, even if there weren't that vague undercurrent of incest running through the film.

This is unusually well-cast. Farmiga has apparently gone into the family business, starring in her own line of horror movies in parallel with her sister Vera, but the parts she chooses are strikingly different. She's a good fit for Merricat. I wouldn't have thought Alexandra Daddario would be a good fit for Constance Blackwood, but I am happy to be wrong about this. Crispin Glover's performance as Uncle Julian is a nice bonus. He gives it a touch of strange. Where the film falls down is in its generation--or lack thereof--of mood. This is a digital production where the crispness of its image is a disadvantage. The visual quality of the film has the airlessness of a film made for streaming. There's nothing wrong with the actual direction of the film and the actual production design is handsome, but the cinematography drains some of the life out of it. It could stand to have more shadows.

Even so, a nominally faithful adaptation is surprising enough. My dad used to say "close enough for government work" all the time, and that's probably the case here. It's not bad at all. Not transcendent, mind you, which is its own kind of disappointment, but it'll do until transcendence comes along.