Thursday, October 31, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Let the Right One In


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 #13: Let the Right One In

Remember a decade back when vampires were just everywhere in the worldwide pop culture scene? This was during peak-Twilight mania, so some of it was people trying to capitalize with what cool with the kids in that point in time but a good chunk of it was stuff created totally independently of Edward and Bella, leading to an odd confluence of events that led to a lot of vampire media being released over the span of a few years. Let the Right One In, a Swedish horror film from director Tomas Alfredson based on a 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (the author also writes the screenplay here), was one example of a vampire movie released in this vampire-centric era that was made totally divorced from any influence of Twilight (it was even released a whole month prior to the first Twilight movie!)


Wednesday, October 30, 2019

The Insect Woman Is A Brutal But Essential Watch

The Insect Woman spends no time making sure its title is accurate as it opens on footage of an insect struggling to crawl up a small hill. This creature is clearly putting all of its strength into this task, yet, it's no use, it just can't make any progress. After the title flashes on-screen, we cut to our actual story concerning Tome Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari), a woman growing up in poverty and without a blood-related father to call her own. Much like the bug seen in the opening scene of the movie, Tome puts all her effort into trying to move up in life (in her case, "moving up" means bettering her social and economic status) but it just ends in despair. Over the course of the forty-five years chronicled in The Insect Woman, Tome is trapped in vicious cycles that refuse to allow her to advance. She's as trapped as that little bug was.


Douglas Laman Joins the We Love to Watch Podcast for a Discussion on Society!

One of the few SFW shots from Society
There are a lot of movie podcasts out there, sure, but few of them are as positive and fun to listen to as We Love to Watch, a series of podcasts hosted by Aaron Armstrong and Peter Moran that see the duo, usually with a guest, navigate a film tying into a certain theme for a month. Considering it's October, the podcast has been dedicated to horror cinema all month and now that theme has led them to Society! This is a film whose very existence was alerted to me by Aaron Armstrong, who start a mini-social media campaign to have me watch and review Society! Thank God he did that because Society is awesome and provided sublime fodder for a podcast discussion that I was lucky enough to be a part of!

You can listen to the Society episode of We Love to Watch below!

In Laman's Terms: The Weird History Behind All Those Post-T2 Terminator Sequels

Matt Smith in an image from a Terminator: Genisys photoshoot for Entertainment Weekly
In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

And so, Terminator: Dark Fate is almost upon us. Feels like just yesterday we were all making fun of the title of then-new Terminator movie Genisys and now, here we are, trying to revive the Terminator brand once again. Though the characters and catchphrases (not to mention the level of quality) found in the first two Terminator movies will always be iconic, attempts to keep the franchise chugging past T2: Terminator 2 have ended up going down in flames. We've had three failed attempts to restart the Terminator series and now Dark Fate is hoping the presence of James Cameron and Linda Hamilton can right the wrongs and set things on track. Before we move onto the co-lead of Tully beating the crud out of robots, how about we look back at the creative decisions that led to all those failed Terminator sequels in the first place.


13 Days of First-Time Frights: American Psycho

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 #12: American Psycho

Christian Bale flew up to the status of super-stardom with portraying the titular superhero in Batman Begins, but much like future Batman performer Robert Pattinson, Bale spent his pre-Batman days doing a variety of bold smaller-scale films working with acclaimed filmmakers. For Bale, this meant getting to act under the guidance of names like Todd Haynes, Lisa Cholodenko and Jane Campion and also included the 2000 Mary Harron directorial effort American Psycho. This grisly social satire, adapted by a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, showed off the kind of acting chops that Bale would become famous for while also demonstrating Hanlon's knack for an insightful skewering of toxic masculinity.


Tuesday, October 29, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Near Dark Review

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 #11: Near Dark

She's most well-known in the modern era for the kind of gritty dramas that led her to become the first woman ever to direct a Best Picture-winning movie (not to mention becoming the first woman to win Best Director), Kathryn Bigelow got her start as a filmmaker in the world of genre cinema. Thrillers, science-fiction fare, cop dramas, Bigelow did it all and in the process created a number of iconic movies, including Point Break. Her second ever directorial effort was Near Dark, a vampire Western horror film that also stands as one of her most stylized features even among her unabashedly over-the-top genre movie repertoire.

Monday, October 28, 2019

Prepare For Cinematic Bliss With Parasite

Please forgive the vagueness of certain parts of this review of Parasite, as you're bound to have heard by now, this is a movie that's best to go into with little in the way of expectations on what exactly you're getting into. Some movies merely use empty twists as a substitute for actual storytelling and then there are films like Parasite that are a master course in how to do twisty-turny storytelling right. Every inch of this intricately put-together production has a greater purpose and that includes the brilliantly executed revelations that upend the plot. Far be it from me to spoil such shocking moments so let's instead spend this review combing over what a miraculous creation Parasite is in as spoiler-free of terms as possible.


The Lighthouse Is Like If Phantom Thread and Fritz Lang Had A Twisted Horror Movie Baby

You know how a recurring job interview question is "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" I'm sure if you had asked Robert Pattinson that question in 2009 when he was doing the press rounds to promote The Twilight Saga: New Moon, he would have listed a hundred different answers before thinking "I'll be in a black-and-white horror film with Willem Dafoe set entirely at a lighthouse." It may not be what Pattinson would first think of as his future career prospects circa. 2009, but The Lighthouse, like much of Pattinson's post-Twilight work, is both audacious and exceptionally well-made. Put simply, this new film from The VVitch helmer Robert Eggers is like if Phantom Thread, Swiss Army Man and Fritz Lang all had a super warped child.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Judy Has A Great Lead Performance But a Middling Script

As the movie Judy begins, the titular lead character of Judy Garland (Renee Zellweger) is struggling to keep herself afloat. Money is scarce, she's struggling to maintain custody of her kids and job opportunities are few and far between. The chance for some money emerges in a series of shows in Lond, England, though it means Garland will have to spend even more time away from her kids. That's a prospect she despises, but in order to make ends meet, she agrees to the tour. Doing these shows turns out to be complicated to Garland's struggle with addiction and her time doing this gig brings out both the worst and best elements of Garland's later years in show business.


Thursday, October 24, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Nosferatu

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 #10: Nosferatu

Remember kids, plagiarism is wrong...except if you're writer Henrik Galeen and director F.W. Murnau and the estate of Bram Stoker has refused you the rights to make your own movie adaptation of Dracula. Then, plagiarism is A-OK because you get movies like Nosferatu. That's actually how this horror classic came to be, upon being told they couldn't have Dracula, Murnau pulled a Bender and decided to "make my own [Dracula]...with blackjack! And hookers!" The result was something clearly derivative of Stoker's original Dracula text, but also had enough of its own visual flourishes to ensure that Nosferatu would etch its own unique place in cinematic history.


Wednesday, October 23, 2019

The Characters in Onibaba Never Mask Their Conflict Between Each Other

At the start of Onibaba, a pair of samurai are wandering through tall grass when they're attacked by some kind of ferocious creatures. Are they being hunted down by a pack of raptors? Perhaps a deadly assassin? Turns out, it's two villagers, known only as Older Woman (Nobuko Otowa) and Younger Woman (Jitsuko Yoshimura), who are now attacking any samurai who wander into the field of tall grass they reside in so that they can sell their armor for money that they desperately need. At first, this process is done simply for survival, but an element of personal vengeance is incorporated into the proceedings once samurai Hachi (Kei Sato) returns home from an ongoing war to inform that Kicki, the Older Woman's song and the Younger Woman's husband. has perished in combat, another body lying on a battlefield somewhere.


American Factory is a Gripping Look at Workers Fighting to Reaffirm Their Humanity

In the wake of 2008 economic recession, it was the little people at the bottom of the economic totem pole that suffered the most compared to the wealthy Wall Street tycoons who actually played a part in causing this downturn in the first place. Part of this suffering came from the closure of countless manufacturing plants, leaving American workers who had previously relied on that source of income with nowhere else to go. Some hope was offered up come 2015 when Chinese manufacturing company Fuyao bought up an abandoned GM manufacturing plant in Dayton, Ohio and turned it into an American branch of Fuyao's manufacturing company. For the first time in years, manufacturing jobs were brought back to this small American town and things were looking up.

In Laman's Terms: The Unfulfilled Promise of The Righteous Gemstones

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Massive spoilers for all of The Righteous Gemstones Season One follow.


13 Days of First-Time Frights: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

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 #9: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night


You better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout, I'm telling you why. There's a vampire at the center of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night simply called The Girl (Sheila Vand) who stalks and devours cruel men in her local community. These guys have usually done something of the most wicked variety to earn their fate as a snack for this person who puts on the appearance of just being your average woman. At the same time, Arash (Arash Marandi) is having his own struggles stemming from his father's troubles with addiction. His own life is so filled with problems, maybe a bit of romance will help him forget his woes? As luck would have it, he finds himself enamored with The Girl, not realizing she's a bloodthirsty vampire. Ah, the trials and tribulations of romance.

In the five years since its initial release, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has garnered widespread acclaim that's launched both the film and its director Ana Lily Amirpour into stardom. I can't say I was as bowled over by it as its most ardent fans but that's mostly on a personal preference basis rather than some complaint on this film being inherently subpar. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is one of those slower-paced horror features that sometimes work like gangbusters for me and other times leave me at such an arm's length that they leave me a touch cold. Even if it's pacing wasn't always captivating, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night still have plenty of qualities to it that still make it a noteworthy horror film.

Most notably, the way Ana Lily Amirpour keeps undercutting visual expectations throughout A Girl Walks Home at Night is most intriguing. This stems as an extension of The Girl and how she is not what she appears to be. Walking through the streets of Iran wearing a shash and garbasaar, Amirpour is aware that characters dressed in this manner like The Girl are traditionally coded in male-created cinema narratives as being passive figures, whereas The Girl is somebody who can devour dudes in no time flat. That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how A Girl Walks Home at Night frequently takes standard pop culture assumptions and then running in the total opposite direction.

A tender scene of Arash going back to The Girl's house for the first time is an especially good example of this as the way the scene is shot, paced and scored echoes classic 1980's teen romance movies, complete with a glistening disco ball providing fragmented glittery lighting. The only difference here is that the fact that The Girl is a vampire lends a ticking clock factor to the sequence, you're just waiting for the moment where the fangs will pop out and this whole scene will go from Sixteen Candles to Nosferatu! The lead character of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is not what she seems and subversion is also on the mind of the film itself in this sequence and throughout the rest of the movie.

Sheila Vand is really good at fiddling around with viewers expectations too, you never quite know when the monstrous side of The Girl is going to come out of the blue and star chowing down on characters in a scene. This part of the performance is so well-done because Vand is so skilled at portraying The Girl as just a person, she doesn't tackle this role as a one-dimensional monsters. She's especially attune to the down-to-Earth qualities of the role when she's tasked with depicting the character in a more conflicted state in the third act, that you can easily (and intentionally) forget you're watching someone whose also a vampire until those fangs come on out again.

That engaging level of uncertainty over when The Girl's more vicious side will crop up is aided by the films sense of pacing, which really bides its time in building up to whenever vampire mayhem breaks out. Sometimes this pacing left me cold, sure, but more often than not it did effectively keep me on my toes as to what moves The Girl would make next. Generating tension on a visual level is the best part of Ana Lily Amirpour's directing in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a movie whose best qualities make it clear why this motion picture managed to catapult its creative participants fame and acclaim.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Zombieland: Double Tap Is Way Too Familiar For Its Own Good

Comedy sequels have got to be one of the most treacherous subgenres out there, the track record for these films is just not great at all. Exceptions like 22 Jump Street do exist, but more often than not, comedy sequels are just reheated leftovers of jokes that just aren't as funny the second go-around. Even getting the entire Anchorman crew back together resulted in a middling Anchorman 2 rather than a laugh riot. Zombieland: Double Tap is the newest entry into the world of comedy sequels, and as far as these types of movies go, it's actually one of the better comedy sequels out there. However, that's not exactly the highest bar to clear and when considering it as just a movie on its own terms, Zombieland: Double Tap can't help but feel more than a touch underwhelming.


13 Days of First-Time Frights: Kwaidan

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 #8: Kwaidan 

Kwaidan is named after a Japanese term that translates into English as "ghost stories", so you know some creepy and crawly things will be going down in this Masaki Kobayashi directorial effort from 1964. Kwaidan certainly lives up to the "stories" part of the term "ghost stories" as it delivers a trio of haunted tales (plus an epilogue) each connected by the recurring moral of the necessity of keeping your promises. The first of these stories is The Black Hair, which follows a swordsman (Rentaro Mikuni) leaving his faithful wife for another woman in the hopes of gaining a better place in society. Next up is The Woman of the Snow, which see's a man named Minokichi (Tatsuya Nakadai) trapped in a frozen wasteland and encountering a deadly spirit known as the Yuki-Onna (Keiko Kishi), which promises to spare his life if he promises to never tell a soul about their encounter.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Getting An Actual Injury Is More Pleasant Than Watching Wounds

Even the most cell phone adverse people on the planet would never be able to imagine the horrors the cell phone at the heart of Wounds is capable of. That phone is discovered by bartender Will (Arnie Hammer) after a skirmish at the tavern he works at. At first, he simply expects to drop it off with the police or the bar's owner so that its owner can get it back pronto. However, an unusual text sent to the phone leads Will to dig around in the device and discover a series of gruesome photos. He's also being followed around by a black car that's intent on making sure he doesn't speak to the authorities on this matter. Oh no! Will's whole life is being turned upside down by malevolent forces! Worse, he's stuck in the movie Wounds!


Sunday, October 20, 2019

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Is At Its Best When It's Weird and Original

Another live-action Disney remake, cool! We haven't gotten any of those this year. Despite being like the umpteenth slice of chocolate cake eaten at an all-you-can-eat dessert buffet, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil actually stands out as narrowly the best of these movies we've gotten in 2019. Though still just average as a movie itself, it's got more energy to it than Dumbo or The Lion King and both its production design and costume design stand out as genuinely enjoyable. It's a pity the script is a mess by, among a number of critical faults, failing to deliver on elements general family audiences would want to see if they're shelling out cold hard cash to see a Maleficent movie.


Memories of Murder Is Crime Thriller Cinema At Its Finest!

Prior to 1986, there had never been a serial killer in South Korea. That all changed once the Hwaseong Serial Murders occurred and sent investigators into a spiral to try and find out who could be behind this unprecedented crime spree. This effort is chronicled in Bong Joon-ho's 2003 movie Memories of Murder, which follows detectives Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) and Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) having to work together in order to track down a killer that proves to be as elusive any ancient diamond. The two of them are like a classic buddy cop duo, Park Doo-man is a confident local detective that always trusts his gut while Seo Tae-yoon is an out-of-town detective whose experiences in the field have left him with a more meditative sense of deduction.


Casino Is More Than Just Another Scorsese Gangster Movie

While I've already penned up some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's Casino over on TheSpool as part of the website's Martin Scorsese Month (hey, that's promotion!), there's so much to say about this motion picture that my response to it cannot be contained to just one article. Over here on Land of the Nerds, let's turn our gaze back to Casino, a movie that was widely declared at the time of its release to be merely the reheated leftover pizza to Goodfellas' fresh-out-of-the-wooden-oven pizza. True, Casino is no Goodfellas, but then, what is? Goodfellas is a massively high bar to clear, and even other Scorsese gangster movies shouldn't be held exclusively to measuring up to that one-of-a-kind masterpiece.


Thursday, October 17, 2019

Shia LaBeouf's Past Makes For Outstanding Cinema In Honey Boy

Honey Boy is inseparable from actor Shia LaBeouf. Not only did he write and play one of the lead roles in this project, but it's also based upon his life, specifically his childhood as a child actor while living with his abusive father, the figure LaBeouf plays in Honey Boy. Those expecting a glossy clean-cut biopic from LaBeouf and director Alma Har'el's approach to this deeply personal story will be left unsatisfied. Honey Boy is constantly raw in examining Shia's youth and how it impacted him as an adult and will leave viewers (appropriately) uncomfortable in numerous instances. It's not an easy watch in the slightest, but that's incredibly fitting for this story and taking such an uncompromising gaze with this story helps to make Honey Boy as outstanding as it is.


13 Days of First-Time Frights: Carrie

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 #7: Carrie

The real horror story was the High School memories we made along the way. That's a sentiment I'm sure Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) would agree with. Carrie's time in High School has been fraught with bullying and cruelty as her classmates pick on her ceaselessly. Her home life isn't much better considering that she lives with an ultra-religious Mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), whose idea of discipline is to lock Carrie into a closet when she's convinced that her daughter has been possessed by the Devil. Yes, Carrie's life is no picnic, but she does have one interesting advantage at her disposal. Carrie is gradually discovering that she carries the ability to make things move with her mind.


Wednesday, October 16, 2019

In Laman's Terms: It's OK if Somebody Doesn't Like What You Like

An image from Martin Scorsese's 2006 movie The Departed depicting Jack Nicholson's response to watching Thor: The Dark World.
In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

This is one of those rare In Laman's Terms columns that I approach with genuine hesitance only because continuing the discourse around this topic feels utterly ridiculous. There's so many real-world horrors transpiring as we speak, it can't help but feel like a distraction to talk about how it's OK for people to not like Marvel movies. Doesn't seem like such an obvious statement? But if the internet's behavior recently has been any indication, such a seemingly non-controversial stance is, in fact, tantamount to heresy. So let's jump right into examining the discussion and backlash caused by Martin Scorsese and Jennifer Aniston recently saying critical things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.


Gemini Man Delivers Double The Will Smith's But Very Little In The Way of Excitement

Notes: Films are usually shot with cameras that capture images at 24 frames per second (fps). Gemini Man has been shot in 120 frames per second and is screening in digital 3D showings presenting it in 48 frames per second. This review covers a 3D 48 fps screening.

With Gemini Man, you'll be seeing double with four, er, two Will Smith's. How did this happen? Well, it all started when Henry Brogan (Will Smith), a cool as a cucumber experienced assassin, decides to retire. Per Brogan, his job is giving him moral heebie-jeebies, he can't sleep or even look at a mirror. Time to hang up the gun and maybe engage in a research project on what exactly Collateral Beauty really is. But suddenly, armed assassins break into his house one night to try and kill Brogan and Dani Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the latter person being a lady previously tasked with tracking Brogran in his retirement. The people Brogan worked for now see this retired-spy as a loose end in need of getting cut and the person tasked with taking him out is a 23-year-old clone of Brogan named Junior.

13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

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 #6: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Us humans have been telling scary stories since the dawn of time. But given that cinema wasn’t invented until the end of the 19th-Century, we’ve been telling scary stories in filmmaking form for a considerably shorter period of time. Among many film scholars and historians, it’s widely agreed that the 1920 German motion picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the birth of horror cinema. Yes, this is where it all began, the equivalent to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Toy Story for the realm of horror cinema is none other than this Robert Wiene motion picture.

Told over six acts, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari concerns itself with the village of Holstenwall. This is where Francis (Friedrich Feher) calls home and it’s also where a local fair has managed to procure a mighty unique attraction. Hosted by the titular Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), the attraction fixates on the powers of somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) and him relaying grim prophecies to patrons. Strange attraction, right? Things get even stranger when a string of murders begin to transpire in the town. Francis begins to suspect Cesare and Caligari are behind the gruesomeness that may soon ensnare Jane (Lil Dagover), the object of Francis’ romantic affections.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari creates its scares through visual means, particular the ominous production design that makes the appearance of the village of Holstenwall as eerie as the murders transpiring within the village itself. Rare is the building or staircase here that’s brought to life with a completely straight line. Embodying every defining aspect of German Expressionism, every element of the sets has an exaggerated quality to it within The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Much like the backgrounds found in Kwaidan, Caligari uses this unique approach to visually convey that we’re watching a fable detached heavily from reality.

Watching Caligari’s visuals, it’s fascinating to see how heavily future pieces of cinema have leaned on this one’s production design sensibilities. Nightmare Before Christmas especially kept leaping into my mind right down to the textures on certain objects. Caligari didn’t just pave the way for an entire genre of storytelling, it also left an immeasurable impact on future filmmaking on a visual level. Production design isn’t the only area this production impressed visually provided you’re watching a certain copy of Dr. Caligari. The version of the film that I watched also replicated color tinting that apparently was utilized in some fashion in its original theatrical release.

This is yet another visual aspect of Dr. Caligari that manages to work divinely to instill an uneasy atmosphere. Colors also are used to enforce the aesthetics of certain environments within the Movies universe. A more restrained shade of Yellow, for instance, covers sequences set at a bureaucratic local government offer and an asylum to emphasize the everyday normalcy of these locales. More vibrant colors are utilized for scenes depicting creepier elements like Cesare to help visually differentiate them from what’s visually coded as “normal” in the world of Dr. Caligari. Modern movies like Jurassic World and Money Monster that use color grading technology to just douse their shots in a pointless light shade of blue could take a cue from the far more considerate use of various colors in Dr. Caligari.

Much of Dr. Caligari is a visual exercise, which explains why the characters are mostly broadly drawn archetypes. Sometimes that’s a flaw in a movie, but in the context of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it feels fitting for something that’s clearly evoking the feel of an old-times Ghost Story. Director Robert Weine and writers Carl Mayer & Hans Janowitz are out to pair up bold visual touches with a classical horror tale, not reinvent the wheel in terms of what kind of characters you see in these sort of scary stories. On that front, they’ve certainly succeeded with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a trailblazing feature whose impact on cinema is still being felt about a whole century after it was first released.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Jennifer's Body

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 #5: Jennifer's Body

When it comes to acclaimed horror movies getting initially negative reviews, well, to quote tom Jones, "It's not unusual." Films like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead or Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre had plenty of notable detractors upon their very first theatrical releases before getting properly reevaluated in the years afterwards. What's especially strange about Jennifer's Body is how the initial reviews didn't just critique the film, they saw it as a vehicle to attack the films writer (Diablo Cody) and to ogle the films star (Megan Fox). As has been noted in a number of excellent pieces by now, the majority of negative Jennifer's Body reviews back in 2009 were all kinds of gross and misogynistic. It's utterly repulsive to see all these reviews passing for actual film criticism, though, thankfully, a broader array of voices have made themselves heard on the internet and ensured that Jennifer's Body is getting the re-evaluation it deserves.

Monday, October 14, 2019

Brightburn Fizzles Out Before It Can Reach Its Fullest Potential

Over in Brightburn, Kansas, life is relatively peaceful enough. Kids go to school, parents go to work and Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn), son of Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman), is a seemingly normal Middle Schooler. Except, well, he's not normal. Now, really, nobody is "normal", but Brandon is especially abnormal. His parents have concealed his true origins, which tie into his superhuman strength as well as why he's so attracted to some strange machine located in the Breyer family barn. Realizing he's far more powerful than he ever imagined, Breyer begins to revel in his powers by committing a series of murders around his hometown, which won't remain peaceful for very long now that Brandon A.K.A. Brightburn has come around.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie Provides A Fantastic Epilogue To The Jesse Pinkman Saga

SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD FOLLOW

Nothing else has made me curl up my toes and instill a pit in my stomach in response to dread like Breaking Bad did. That show constantly had me on the edge of my seat watching these characters spiral into wholly new people over the course of multiple seasons. Unlike too many other grisly TV shows (looking at you Ozark), everything on Breaking Bad had a purpose, every action had a consequence, there were constant ripple effects attached to everything. That's where so much of its suspense came from, the constantly present notion that nothing in a single episode was going to waste. Breaking Bad was all about every action has an equal or opposite reaction and that led to a one-of-a-kind sense of unease that I got the privilege of experiencing once again with El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Little Monsters Is Plagued By Big Storytelling Issues

For the first ten minutes or so, Little Monsters proves to be outright excruciating, the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. This is the part of the story introducing the viewer to the protagonist of Little Monsters, an aspiring musician named Dave (Alexander England). Dave is a man-child protagonist whose foul-mouthed and selfish ways make the average Adam Sandler comedy protagonist look like a model citizen. Obviously designed to be intentionally unlikable, writer/director Abe Forsythe does too good of a job here, Dave is downright repellent. Even in the context of a dark comedy, why should I want to spend time with this guy? Who cares? One couldn't blame you for turning off the TV just a few minutes into his ribald man-child antics.


Cynthia Erivo Brings Top-Notch Work To A So-So Biopic In Harriet

As of April 2016, only one* theatrical movie has featured Harriet Tubman and that film was 2012's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Though a solid action/horror tale in its own right, even the filmmakers behind that project would be the first to admit that it's ludicrous that this high-concept exercise in historical fiction is the only cinematic representation for such an important historical figure like Harriet Tubman. For Gods sake, the man who killed John Lennon has gotten his own feature film but not a woman who was an integral part of the Underground Railroad! Such a massive oversight has been combated by the release of Harriet, a new feature film hailing from writer/director Kasi Lemmons.


Thursday, October 10, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Fly

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 #4: The Fly

Scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is working on something quite impressive. It's not something he's willing to share with just anyone, but he does end up bringing reporter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) back to his workspace to check out what he's managed to create. Turns out, Brundle has created a revolutionary teleportation device in the form of two telepods. It's still in need of tweaks so that it can properly transport human tissue but it's already transporting clothes from one place to the next without issue, surely humans can't be far behind. Veronica Quaife begins to chronicle Brundle's trial and error exercises in getting this machine to work properly and in the process the two of them being to fall in love.


Wednesday, October 9, 2019

In Laman's Terms: The History of CGI Humans Trying To Be More Human


In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

With this Friday's new action movie Gemini Man, director Ang Lee will be using cutting-edge computer-generated visual effects to create a wholly digital version of Young Will Smith. Put it another way, Lee is using CGI to "...[make] a person...from another person!" It's a groundbreaking concept that I'll be curious to see in terms of how it fares in actual execution. After all, Gemini Man is not the first movie to try and create digitally de-aged versions of our favorite movie stars, with a number of those tries going horribly awry. Before we all strap in for Aladdin Will Smith duking it out with Fresh Prince Will Smith, let's look back at the history of CGI wizardry trying to make young versions of famous movie stars.


Tuesday, October 8, 2019

The Burmese Harp Confronts What To Do When A War Is Finished

In World War II, a time of expansive violent conflict spanning multiple continents, Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) opts for a harp rather than a gun. He's the designated harp player for his troop of Japanese soldiers and he uses this instrument to send signals to his fellow comrades as well as deliver beautiful pieces of soothing music in between struggles on the battlefield. Eventually, World War II ends just as Mizushima and his fellow men are stationed in Burma. With the war over, they are transported to a prisoner of war camp looked over by British and Indian soldiers. Under orders from a British commander, Mizushima is sent to go tell a separate rogue faction of Japanese soldiers to surrender, otherwise they will be slaughtered.


13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Mist

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 #3: The Mist

We're always talking about the Before trilogy, the Toy Story trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But what about the most important trilogy of 21st-century filmmaking? What about the trilogy I call Mid-2000s Genre Fare Where An Andre Braugher Character Perishes? This trio of films, Poseidon, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Mist, are all connected in how they feature Andre Braugher playing supporting characters that prove to be antagonistic to the protagonists and eventually, even in the PG-rated Silver Surfer movie, meet gruesome ends. It's the only thread holding these three individual films released over the span of 18 months together but it's all they need to make up the greatest trilogy of all-time.


Saturday, October 5, 2019

Isn't It Romantic Isn't Quite As Creative As It Could Have Been

 
Natalie (Rebel Wilson) is a cynical soul.Granted, it's hard not to be cynical in 2019, I mean, have you seen how little people in power care about taking the most basic steps to help our planet? But she's especially cynical, particularly in regards to the tropes you'd find in romantic-comedies and also her own self-value. Her life gets thrown for a loop when she bonks her head in the subway during an attempted mugging and ends up stuck in a world adhering to the rules of a romantic-comedy. This means everything is colorful, no F-bomb's can be dropped and every guy in sight, including hunky billionaire Blake (Liam Hemsworth), is in love with her. Natalie soon deduces that the only way she can hope to get back home is through following all the romantic-comedy rules to a tee.


The Mustang Takes Its Horse To Self-Improvement Road And Rides Until It Can't No More

When we start The Mustang, Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a prisoner who has thrown himself into the shackles of isolated solitude. He doesn't talk to anyone, not even his daughter on the rare times she comes to visit him, and he's basically accepted, in his own way, the idea that the rest of his life is doomed to this miserable solitary existence. While off on a chore consisting of shoveling horse fecal matter, Roman Coleman comes across a wily mustang horse that's apparently impossible to train. Stumbling upon this horse leads Roman to discover a group at this prison consisting of prisoners, under the watchful eye of Myles (Bruce Dern), learning how to train horses as a form of personal rehabilitation.


Friday, October 4, 2019

We Live In A Society And Joker Lives In An Only Occasionally Successful Movie


So many people come and go in our lives every day, it's easy to forget that other human beings have had entire lives up to the point we meet them (maybe that's just the Walgreen's cashier in me talking).  Everybody's got a story for how they got to their current point in their lives, even wanna be stand-up comics like Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). Residing in Gotham City with his mother and working as a clown-for-hire, Arthur struggles through life due to his mental illness that includes a handicap that sends him into sudden fits of uncontrollable laughter. Bad luck follows Fleck wherever he goes as he searches for purpose in his life and a reliable father-figure to serve as a substitute for the dad he never knew.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

13 Days of First-Time Frights: Society

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 #2: Society

Have you ever felt like you just don't fit in with your friends, your neighbors, even your family? I'm sure we've all felt like that from time to time but Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) not only feels it all the time, he feels it in a more pronounced way, like that his isolation from the people around him is part of some greater conspiracy. Nobody listens to him on the matter, though, his parents barely even recognize hi mand his High School psychiatrist just dismisses it as youthful angst. But a series of strange incidents, as well as a fateful tape recording of his parents and sister engaged in some sort of creepy ritual, open Whitney's eyes to the fact that there is, in fact, something evil afoot in this society he lives in.


Wednesday, October 2, 2019

The Dark Knight Rises Shows Why Christopher Nolan's Batman Movies Are So Beloved

I wouldn't say The Dark Knight Rises needs an apology for its general pop culture perception. Such a sentiment should be saved for a movie like Jennifer's Body that was hit by misogynistic reviews and toxic backlashes against its primary creative participants. Using that word for a movie like The Dark Knight Rises that got uniformly positive reviews from critics and made over $1 billion at the worldwide box office is ridiculous. That having been said, the films general reputation among the interwebs has been immensely negative, partially because the release of the movie coincided with a new rise in nitpicky YouTube channels like CinemaSins and Honest Trailers that ensured The Dark Knight Rises would be more known for background stuntmen gone awry than anything related to its storytelling or filmmaking.


News From Home Is Another Reminder of Chantal Akerman's Brilliance as a Filmmaker

Here's a first; there apparently isn't any poster for News From Home, this cover to a DVD containing Notes From Home, among other Chantal Akerman works, will have to do.
News From Home is not a traditional motion picture. There is no overarching narrative to be found here. It simply consists of footage of various New York City locales, which are usually captured via extended single-takes, set to audio of the film's director, Chantal Akerman, reading aloud letters that her mother has written to her. Such letters concern Chantal's mother talking to her daughter about how much she and her husband miss Chantal as well as everything that's going on back in Chantal's home of Brussels, Belgium. Babies are born, marriages are formed, tragedies strike the family, all the while the footage on-screen makes it clear that New York City keeps going along. This world is one of relentless business that waits for no human being.


In Laman's Terms: An Ode To Zach Galifianakis' Joker

In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

The Joker has been around for nearly eighty years now and during that length of time, he's managed to maintain a consistent presence in pop culture as one of the most iconic comic book foes out there. Part of that achievement comes from how he's not just ubiquitous in comic books, you can't throw a rock without hitting a pop-culture incarnation of the clown prince of crime. The Joker is a regular presence in all kinds of Batman media ranging from the Arkham video games to the assorted animated TV shows and, of course, to the silver screen. Numerous Batman movies have featured The Joker, starting with 1966's Batman in which Caesar Romero reprised his role as the character from the Batman TV show.


Tuesday, October 1, 2019

All Hail The Masterful Awkwardness of The King of Comedy

The King of Comedy is another great example of a movie made in a specific era of history that still resonates as relevant today. This 1983 Martin Scorsese directorial effort hinges on the idea of a comic being obsessed with garnering fame through the aid of a late-night talk show host he's obsessed with, and admittedly, it's hard to imagine modern-day people looking for their big break being this exclusively fixated on a broadcast television late-night host as their ticket to glory. But that obsessive drive to be famous at all costs, a creepy sense of entitlement to stardom, all of that is still relevant to today. Though the pursuit of fame may manifest in different ways in 2019, The King of Comedy is about a guy whose primary motivation is disturbingly timeless.


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.