13 Days of First-Time Frights: Misery

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #1: Misery


Like I said in my piece on The Spool for Stand by Me, the best Stephen King movie adaptations tend to be the ones adapting smaller-scale material. When these films try to adapt expansive Stephen King tomes like The Dark Tower or lean heavily on convoluted scares rather than actual people like the new Pet Sematary, these films stumble badly. But when Stephen King film adaptations just focus on easily-explainable scenarios and grounded intense human dynamics, you get gold. The latter case informs Misery, which has a basic premise that could easily happen in reality and turns small tasks, like getting to a door, into monumental obstacles. If you ever needed proof how the more restrained King works make for the best movies, Misery is it.

Miller's Crossing Is Another Early Coen Brothers Winner

For their third directorial effort, The Coen Brothers (though only Joel Coen is credited as a director) returned to the crime genre that has served them well so many times in their expansive careers. For this particular take on the crime movie formula, they decided to go in the direction of a period piece, setting the tale in the 1920's specifically. Despite being set in the era where the sale of alcohol was banned, the film, entitled Miller's Crossing, was actually taking more cues in its tone and style from 1940's noir features, particularly ones like The Big Sleep involving a single lead character trying to use their wits to make a whole bunch of other peoples agendas work in his favor.

Predator 2 Is A Downgrade From Its Predecessor With Brief Bursts Of Delightful Goofiness

Each of the three Predator movies has been firmly set in the universe of the original Predator feature from 1986, but they've also all tried to go in their own different direction with brand new aesthetics and none of them retain characters from prior movies. That makes Predator an odd outlier in the world of Hollywood franchises that typically either constantly reboot things or cling onto mythology like there's no tomorrow. The film that established this as the go-to pattern for Predator sequels was 1990's Predator 2, which traded in Arnold Schwarzenegger for Danny Glover and moved the action from a remote jungle to the city of Los Angeles in the then-future year of 1997. 

Outstanding Sets And Visuals Are The Real Heroes of Dick Tracy

In the wake of 1989's Batman becoming such a massive box office success, Hollywood suddenly turned to film adaptations of comic books (though technically Dick Tracy was originally a comic strip) in hopes of replicating the box office success of that Tim Burton directed feature. One of the first post-Batman comic book movies was Dick Tracy, which had actually already been greenlit by Disney a year prior to Batman being released. Starring and directed by Warren Beatty, the project carried a $47 million budget and, despite becoming only the sixth film released by Disney at the time to score over $100 million domestically, ended up performing below Disney's box office expectations.

Back To The Future: Part III Show A Million Ways To Have Fun In The West

Since watching Back To The Future: Part III for the first time and then discussing the film and the larger franchise it belongs to, I've learned something extraordinary: the low esteem I hold Back To The Future: Part II in is considered a "hot take" of sorts. While I love the first Back To The Future to pieces, the second entry in this series just never clicked for me, Marty McFly's journey into the future and various events of the first movie never filled me with all that much excitement. Back To The Future: Part III doesn't get things back to the quality level of the first movie but it does manage to create a movie that's actually fun to watch and fun was certainly something in low supply in the prior Back To The Future outing.

The Godfather Trilogy Comes To An Underwhelming End With The Godfather: Part III

And so, we come to the end of The Godfather trilogy, a saga of films adapting the literary work by Mario Puzo of the same name. Following his tenure helming the lasts two entries in this series, Francis Ford Coppola returns to the directors chair for this final chapter in the Corleone saga, though considering how starved Paramount Pictures is for content these days, I'm preparing myself for an inevitable McG directed reboot of The Godfather to get announced anyday now. For now though, The Godfather: Part III serves as the definitive end of one of the most acclaimed franchises in cinematic history, though this third chapter received initial responses that proved to be far more critical than its predecessors.

Realism And Scripted Recreations Collide In Close-Up

Utilizing the filming style of a documentary for a fictional scripted affair is a style of filmmaking that's existed for eons now and has been popularized in the modern era by the likes of The Office and Borat. A cousin of sorts to that type of movie is the Docufiction, which merges documentary with fictional elements. The first American entry in this subgenre is apparently the 1926 motion picture Moana (yes, there was another Moana before last year's Disney musical), but one of the more acclaimed examples of this style of storytelling is an Iranian film from Abbas Kiarostami released in 1990 called Close-Up,

Goodfellas Is A 145 Minute Reminder Of Why Martin Scorsese Is A Cinematic Legend

There was this odd phenomenon when The Wolf Of Wall Street came out three years ago regarding many commentators feeling that the movie was explicitly endorsing the various nasty deeds its lead character commits. Art is subjective and all that, so if that's your takeaway from the film, that's fair. Personally though, I'd say The Wolf Of Wall Street very much makes it clear that Jordan Belfort is a very bad man, one that the movie wants you to gawk at while seeing how much this real-life guy was able to get away with in his time of swindling and debauchery. Scorsese's whole point with that 2013 effort is for the viewer to come away with how delusional Belfort was as a human being; despite all the Quaallades and obvious wrongdoings he was committing, he still saw himself as untouchable, above the common world.

Edward Scissorhands Review (Classic Write-Up)

In the year 2015, Edward Scissorhands serves as some kind of bizzaro gaze into another life, another world, another time and place where the pairing of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton would produce anticipation, not dread. And while it's true that Burton and Depp would collaborate for further successful projects after this 1990 feature (as recently as 2007, their Sweeney Todd effort was an excellent movie), it seems the duo have decided to cease working together for the time being after back-to-back critical duds Alice In Wonderland and Dark Shadows (the latter film being a huge box office bomb likely resulting in the split more than anything else).

Home Alone Is Mildly Inconsistent, But Surprisingly Effective Yuletide Cinema

Welcome to 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

I see a lot of people talking about how movies were better "back in the day", which always makes my eyes roll. People have always wanted good storytelling when they go to the cinema, that's never changed. Frankly, I'd actually say the years top movies are indeed better than they used to be. The past few years top features have included The Avengers, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Dark Knight and Toy Story 3, all excellent films. Bizarrely, the biggest movie of 1990 was not Goodfellas or Awakenings, but rather Home Alone.