Hausu Is As Immensely Entertaining As It Is Endearingly Strange

One of the most puzzling criticisms you can offer up a movie is that it was "too strange". Not that the strangeness didn't work for you or that the strangeness was poorly executed but that the mere fact that a movie was strange was just off-putting. I saw this a lot when Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle In Time came out earlier this year and was greeted by numerous reviewers in a negative fashion for being "too weird". What's wrong with being weird or strange? I've already seen about 115 movies that have come out in 2018 and let me tell you, having the gall to embrace strangeness is a Godsend in a movie, it helps your story stand out from the pack. Maybe the strangeness won't work in execution, but I'll always tip my hat to a movie that opts to swing for the fences on weirdness rather than sit in the sidelines of normalcy.

Ready Player One Is, For Better And For Worse, A Traditional Action Blockbuster

After a whole decade of being absent from the realm of American blockbuster cinema, director Steven Spielberg returns to the genre he helped bring into existence with Ready Player One, an adaptation of a 2011 novel penned by Ernest Cline. Given just what a tremendous track record Spielberg has with blockbuster fare (I'd personally say his only two real misses in that subgenre would be Temple of Doom and The Lost World), the idea of him returning to rollicking escapism science-fiction blockbusters sounds like a winning prospect, though the excerpts I've read from the Ready Player One book (which, for full context, I've never read in full) did make the source material he was adapting seem more creepy than exciting, thus diluting my excitement for this newest Spielberg fetaure immensely.

A Wrinkle In Time Tends to Stumble But It Also Tends To Inspire Mightily

The best part about A Wrinkle In Time is that it certainly maintains the weirdness of the source material it's adapting. Those worried that Madeleine L'Engle's original novel would be translated to the silver screen with all of it's more unusual tendencies ironed out can relax, director Ava DuVernay's adaptation of this book certainly does not reduce L'Engle's work to being a Hunger Games or Harry Potter knock-off. In the process of adapting such an unorthodox piece of literature, you get a movie that has a far bolder vision than your run-of-the-mill live-action family movie and thoroughly successful elements to its name while also having its fair share of stumbles along the way.