[Game Review] Hook

 

Puzzle games are, more often than not these days, based on either programming logic or engineering logic.  There is an obvious throughline with this sort of intention, games being built by programmers through programming, which itself requires some sort of engineering knowledge (as far as "how components work with one another" goes).  Engineering and programming is, essentially, applied puzzles, so it makes sense to take inspiration from them, especially when you are already familiar. 

But this sort of thing starts to wear on you after awhile, especially when most puzzle games seem to focus more on your learning the rules than challenging what those rules can do.  Take Hook, for example.  Hook is a simple puzzle game whose real challenge comes in disorientation.  Hook, for all intents and purposes, is pick-up-sticks with a complication.  The idea is to get all of the sticks (some overlapping one another, some hook-shaped as the name implies) off the board.  The sticks don't get pulled up through the Z-axis, as you would do in a physical game of pick-up-sticks, but rather must pulled from their point to their hilt (a small line like the head of a nail indicates the bottom of a stick).  If anything gets in its way when pulling it to the hilt, you will lose a life (indicated with one to three dots on the left hand side).  Hook is, firstly, challenging the order in which you pull the sticks.  Finding this order is easy enough.  Simply look for the sticks with nothing in its path to prevent it from being pulled.  The second is where things get more complicated, and more in line with engineering. 

Hook looks like an engineering diagram, the kind you generally see for electronics.  Big gray buttons feed into thin lines that snake over one another like copper inlays on a motherboard.  Pushing a gray button follows the line to the corresponding stick, and will attempt to pull it.  Making sure these lines don't lead to sticks that cannot be pulled is your general challenge.  There is a set of rules to how these lines work.  Lines can cross but generally speaking the "current" from the button to the stick will only travel in one direction.  If, instead, the current were to split into multiple directions, the cross over the lines will have a dot on it, indicating the current will be split along all paths connected to the dot.  Parts of the path will have a circle around it, meaning you can rotate the lined portion within to change the track in which the signal will travel.  Essentially, what you are doing is switch tracks to a railroad, making sure all destinations are valid stations.  The underlying logic is easy top pick up, but the complex way the lines layer over one another and connect to the varying sticks makes this difficult to parse.  Making things more difficult is the pretty patters the lines, sticks, and buttons often make.  The puzzle itself isn't particularly hard - I managed to beat all 50 levels in something close to a half hour - but there is a distracting element meant to overwhelm you with information even as your choices are rather minimal.  The closest you could get to something like a sincere challenge is in trying to clear as many sticks in as few moves as possible, but that is completely external as the game itself never recognizes the effort.  There is nothing wrong with this sort of thing, it just isn't particularly interesting.

I've sounded overly critical of Hook, but I had fun with the game.  It is a simple game that was obviously made for phones and tablets, but translates just fine to PC.  It provides enough distraction and fun to keep you entertained briefly, but has little else really to offer.  It isn't particularly puzzling, it is more just patience testing.  Hook is fine.  It is what it is, and though I enjoyed the aesthetic, I wish that there had been something more mechanically complex about the gameplay. 

 

 

 

6.0

[Film Review] Serial Mom

 

I have a confession to make: despite years and years of obsessing about movies (some of you may not know, this being a primarily video game blog, but my first love was always movies), I had not seen a John Waters film until earlier tonight.  We are talking a decade and a half of hearing about Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Female Trouble, and, of course, Serial Mom, but never having taken the plunge myself.  The man himself I knew I was a fan of, having watched plenty of interviews with him (and that one standup special he did, This Filthy World), but his brand of exploitation film had always seemed like something I would get to eventually.  Originally, I had planned to start with Pink Flamingos, but over the years I have felt that starting with one of his more accessible films would do the man more justice.  Somehow, it would allow me to see what his emotional tenor would be without the distraction of his shock, and so Serial Mom seemed as good a place as any to start with.  

Serial Mom has, first of all, dated in a rather interesting way.  The film's themes split an interesting half, where one part feels more relevant now than it was at the time (with one caveat), while the other seems to have gone the way of the dodo.  The latter theme has to do with comments on suburbia.  Serial Mom follows a relatively simple plot: Kathleen Turner (having an immense amount of fun in the role) is a wholesome suburban mom named Beverly, a homemaker with strict rules as to how her suburban bliss should be structured and maintained.  When something goes awry - literally any little thing - her first instinct is to go straight to murder.  This reaction isn't out of nowhere, as Beverly is an obsessive when it comes to literature about serial killers.  She holds a secret collection of books and letters from serial killers in her nightstand and under her bed, and shares an interest in the gore movies her son loves so much.  Beverly isn't so simply a serial killer in hiding, however.  She seems to truly see herself as a doting wife and mother, with her suburban home being of her upmost concern.  The killing seems to be more of a side-gig than anything, an extreme solution to a fleeting problem.  

Beverly's character could be taken straight out of a family TV show from the 50s (homicidal tendencies aside), and part of that is to send up the suburban status as nucleic America.  Suburbia as painted by the film is a place of order and control, but one so often breeding laziness and obnoxious behavior.  Beverly's neighbor doesn't recycle, the ingrate, and the old lady who rents movies from the rental shop her son works at refuses to rewind her tapes when she brings them in.  Suburbia is rotten somewhere deep within, full of selfish, fattening and aging white people who seem to think the world owes them some sort of convenience.  They are often ungrateful and manipulative, and Beverly is no different.  She holds a grudge against another neighbor for stealing her parking space, spending her afternoons prank calling her ("You're a pussy! Fuck you!") and sending her hateful letters.  But with Beverly's serial killer status, she feels to be the more honest one of the bunch.  There is nothing subtle about Beverly, and part of what makes the film so funny is to see Beverly played up with so much campy fun.  But the suburban symbolism feels more than a little dated these days, partially because the suburbs no longer feel so central to the American identity, relegated instead to the pocket reality of upper-middle class families. The commentary could still work, but it would need plenty of adjustments.

What does work, however, is the themes revolving around True Crime stories.  The film erroneously says that the story is based on true events, meant to invoke the feeling of a true crime story, the same way Fargo would only a few years later.  Likewise, towards the end of the film, the murder spree happening around the suburbs is commoditized, with no one too good to make a quick buck off of the events.  Likewise, Beverly's obsession with serial killers would be downright quaint these days, being the new Soap Opera for many a housewife these days (and just about everyone else, let's not be sexist or classist here).  It's the kind of thing that would have felt perhaps too on the nose around the time Serial was everyone's podcast obsession several years ago, but imagine this: Serial Mom released two months before the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.  Oddly, despite this, Serial Mom was a box office bomb that wouldn't gain cult status until much later.

Serial Mom is a hilarious romp for the most part, being held down primarily by some pretty basic and predictable plotting and some pacing issues.  The satire feels as though it is striking in two different times, the kind of oddity you could only get when looking back on a film, but even that which does not have an immediate emotional payoff is still easily appreciated.  The film is great on its own, but you cannot undersell how great Kathleen Turner is in this film, schlocking it up for the rest of us in such an interesting and subversive way that even Roger Ebert was hoodwinked, giving the film a mixed review at release due to his feeling Turner's performance implied a serious mental issue with the woman worth pitying, not laughing at.  I think the film may have just not spelled out its more conceptual nature enough for Ebert at the time, something that is probably a little easier to swallow today when we drown in irony.  Serial Mom is the kind of film I may change my mind on as I watch more of Waters' films and grow more accustomed to his style and narrative voice, but even without that bit of background it is a riot. 

 

   

 

7.5

[Film Review] The Favourite

 

Period piece films are difficult to make in this day and age, being well worn territory for the medium.  The Favourite has been at least partially compared to Stanley Kubrick's slow and cynical Barry Lyndon, one of his few movies not generally considered a classic (but, as is common for Kubrick's less watched films, is far better than you've heard).  Barry Lyndon has never been considered the pinnacle of the genre - films like Amadeus generally get that designation, and I can't blame them - but it's easily the most committed to realism these period pieces ever get, with a style of shot composition copped many times by many other films.  The film used natural light and candle light almost entirely outside of a few key scenes, unheard of at the time and requiring a special lens and camera to pull off.  The film also created the "portrait" style of shot composition where each shot aspired to capture what looked like a Victorian painting.  A few zoom shots not withstanding (and even those used in a tasteful way), Kubrick's film wanted to hide the camera as much as possible.  Static shots and dolly shots framing the action similar to paintings of the time is virtually standardized within the genre, the way action films often use handheld camera work to elicit a sense of chaos and tension.  The Favourite, playing into the famous dark comedy of director Yorgos Lanthimos, bucks these trends and finally reintroduces creativity into the genre. 

Though he has received a lot of praise, I have never loved Yorgos Lanthimos.  Dogtooth felt like what I imagine "Lars Von Trier does comedy" would feel like (for what it is worth, he did do a comedy called The Boss of it All, and it was weird), and The Lobster ebbed back and forth from incredibly funny to annoyingly coy and strange, saved mostly for me in its ending.  I appreciate Lanthimos' odd mixture of Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Lars Von Trier, and maybe even a hint of Napoleon Dynamite here and there, but largely his works have felt a bit more dissonant than effective for me.  Lanthimos' films are, first and foremost, experiences, with their analogies being present but sometimes oddly in contrast with the emotions I feel throughout his films.  The Favourite feels like he has finally tried to reign those elements in, slightly, for something a bit more palatable for the general public, and has given me a reason to revisit his earlier films.  His comedy is still present, albeit with a more realistic context, and he has reigned in virtually none of his creative camera work and editing, which makes The Favourite stand out as something unique for the genre. 

The Favourite takes place during the reign of Queen Anne of England in the first decade of the 18th century, a reign that lasted all of seven years and was wrought with war with the French (this is pre-20th century England we are talking about, after all).  Anne's closest friend and confidant is Sarah, who is essentially running the war for the Queen while also making certain political moves for herself.  Sarah has a unique hold on the Queen, able to berate her "for her betterment", as the Queen is implied to feel, but in doing so keeps Queen Anne in a perpetual state of childishness.  The relationship between these two women feels immediately toxic, colored extremely well by magnificent performances by both Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne (who won an oscar for the role) and Rachel Weisz as Sarah.  The war is going relatively well, a particularly important battle having already been won, and the opposition party to the Queen attempts to make a bid for sending a peace treaty to the French.  Sarah, for one reason or another, wants the war to continue, and so a constant tit-for-tat political battle for the Queen's decision making quickly erupts between the two.  The conflict is exasperated when Sarah's cousin, Abigail, a Lady whose father ran the family into the ground, comes to vie for a job.  Abigail quickly makes it from maid to close friend to the Queen, spurring a bitter rivalry between the cousins for Anne's affection and trust.

The Favourite paints all of this with exceptional skill in the first half hour or so, with many other twists and conflicts to come as the film passes through its surprisingly well paced 2 hours.  Lanthimos shows exceptional skill in using surrealist editing and shot composition to make us aware of the camera work, to shatter the sterility that has been on trend since Barry Lyndon in favor of something with far more life and wit.  The battle between the cousins never debases itself to petty squabbling, rather peeling away layers of each and their intentions as the conflicts mount on the sly, keeping you on your toes for some time as to their intentions, though by the final third you've probably drawn some conclusions. The performances all around are electrifying and complex, worthy of a rewatch that I feel may heighten the score seen below.  Surprisingly, the general premise of the film is based on actually true events, albeit with heavy rearranging of facts or outright omitting them (Queen Anne's husband, for example, would have been alive during most of this film's timeline, and one core element to the plot is speculative at best, downright incorrect at worst based off of historian understanding), but these changes serve the film better than reality would.  

Lanthimos may have converted me into a fan with The Favourite, a skillfully made and acted film that is as dry and darkly funny as it is a poignant drama, a film firing on so many cylinders it is honestly shocking.  It is a film I didn't just enjoy immensely, but a film I eagerly look forward to rewatching in the future.  The film's ending, surreal and effective, will linger with me for a little while even as its point was blunt and obvious.  The film's writing, by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, is equally skilled, creating a subtle character piece out of something relatively traditional (minus one or two things, obviously if you've seen the film).  The Favourite is all skill, effective and lingering.  A stellar film with more to it than meets the eye. 

8.5

[Film Review] The War of the Worlds (1953)

Contains spoilers for The War of the Worlds (1953).

When you think of old atomic age sci-fi films, you are probably either thinking of Forbidden Planet, with its wild costumes and humanoid aliens with questionable ethics, or you are thinking of The War of the Worlds (1953).  War of the Worlds is a special kind of famous, the kind that pierces generations and finds permanent residence in the subconscious of every westerner alive, even if they don't know anything about it outside of it being about an alien invasion.  It is the quintessential alien invasion film, forwarding special effects and playing its story relatively straight.  There are no bells and whistles to War of the Worlds, just the simple premise played out in that Golden Age of Hollywood fashion.  War of the Worlds, as well, is a movie I've never really liked. 

To take it a step further, I never much cared for the original novel by H.G. Wells.  The novel has been reduced to a faded discoloration of where a memory once stood so I cannot say whether my opinion still holds, but the movie's memory remained, for the most part, before I recently rewatched it.  War of the Worlds pulls no punches, with a scientist protagonist (a suave, manly scientist, as Hollywood at the time dictated every leading man should be) and a myriad of side characters ranging from small town bumpkins to military personal who just can't seem to find enough firepower to take the darn things out.  The conflict of the film follows a relatively straightforward A and B plot structure.  The A plot follows the general human resistance to the invading threat.  An unnamed narrator comes in three times throughout the film to explain the origins of the aliens, the havoc they wrought across the globe, and the explanation as to what happens in the end of the film.  In between, we see the discovery of a fallen meteorite (that, of course, turns out to be an alien ship), the US military's initial attack, and eventually their follow up attack near the mid-point turn.  The B plot follows our protagonist and a woman named Sylvia, who is his love interest and perpetually screaming woman.  

The film has sexist depictions and near nauseating American pride undertones (the latter of which, admittedly, is little more than sheer American confidence and respect in one another from farmer to priest to military general like I've never seen in my lifetime, ignoring class and expertise).  But they come with an asterisk.  Regardless of your modern viewpoint on the matter, it wouldn't quite be fair to dismiss the movie entirely based off of that as it falls pretty well in line with what was aspirational in the American zeitgeist in the 50s, and is hardly the focus or point of the film.  If nothing else, this is fantasy for those of the time, or at least an expectant fantasy that everyone (in power and paying to see movies) could relatively agree on, and has value in communicating that as a historical record.  But, more importantly, the film should be viewed without considering those things outside of themes and plot, otherwise we would get lost in a political debate as to how we view and regulate our past, something I am not willing to do when talking about War of the Worlds, of all things.  Save that for something that deserves it.  

No, I won't give it flak for all of that, but that still leaves a lot to give it flak for.  I'll say that overall I liked the film more this time than the latter two times I saw it as a kid and as a teen, but not by very much.  The plot is incredibly traditional, but the film doesn't grind itself into nothing but action set pieces and cheap thrills.  Generally speaking, the film tries to waken wonder into what is going on, before giving us pieces of suspense as to what these aliens look like and how our heroes will ever overcome this.  At least in part, there are some good themes being played around with.  All of the military might - including an atom bomb said to be stronger than any ever dropped on this earth - doesn't seem to touch the alien civilization.  There is an early indication that perhaps there is something admirable about these (literal) beings from Mars, as pastor Matthew Collins remarks: "if they have technology greater than ours, then they must be closer to the creator!"  This assumption is discarded at about the halfway point, however, when they find that, though the aliens seem to have great minds, they are physically much weaker than us.  Their sight seems to not pick up on red light (a weird bit of detail since they see with a tri-color lens, with a part for green, blue, and red, a sly reference to Technicolor techniques and color televisions), their blood seems to be anemic, and they have frail bodies.  They aren't better than us, they are simply more technologically advanced.

There is a reason for this plot point, and for treading the technological theme.  War of the Worlds, inexplicably, has strong Christian overtones.  From the pastor at the beginning to the recurring church plot point, from the bible references to the last word of the entire film being "Amen" - War of the Worlds has one reason why we won: because we are God's creation.  Nothing we do can stop the aliens from destroying our planet, but luckily for us the bacteria that we have resistances to (and live with) are more than the aliens can handle, and after some time it finally catches up to them and offs them at a dramatic moment.  It is a relatively famous ending, but an extremely corny and unfulfilling one.  In modern eyes, they just got extremely lucky, but the film paints it as miraculous, as part of God's plan all along.  The drama of this film is essentially in small doses, set pieces revolving around actual people face to face with the aliens themselves, and the lack of options growing thinner as the military try to pivot from one idea to another.  The futility of the situation feels heavily undermined by this ending, which, pun fully intended for maximum disparagement, is incredibly preachy.  

The film is a pulpy religious film, one that makes little point but offers some nice thrills.  I don't enjoy the movie, but the special effects are more than worth noting.  The film utilized multiple props to convey the aliens and their ships, using life sized gadgets for medium shots and close ups, and miniatures for wide shots.  It is a simple trick, but it is something that had hardly been done before in a movie (King Kong (1933) uses an animatronic for a couple of close up shots, but the wide shots were all stop motion).  Likewise, the sound design created that 50s and 60s sci-fi soundscape, with the synthetic whirring of ships and the distorted chirps of lazer beams.  War of the Worlds, no matter how you slice it, is an important film.  And it is pretty enjoyable, for the most part.  While I don't want to break the fourth wall, as it were with this sort of article, I feel the need to address that the film is better than I personally like it.  From a personal perspective, I don't much care for the film.  I think it is corny, pandering, and not as fun as it thinks it is (I much prefer films like Forbidden Planet or King Kong), but if I take away my personal enjoyment of the movie, take away my distaste of the religious symbolism (although some of that has to count for a couple of demerits, surely), you get a movie worth a relatively high rating.  The rating below doesn't represent my personal opinion of the film, but does represent my assessed quality of the film if I were to filter out some of my dispositions.  Take that for what you will, and if you haven't seen it you probably should.  And then check out those much better, more entertaining films I mentioned.  This one is only fine. 

 

 

      

 8.0

[Film Review] Shin Godzilla

 

 

Godzilla has been a mainstay in one form or another since 1954, and since then has been rebooted twice before Shin Godzilla.  The timeline is not so much a mess as it is a bit of a learning curve.  The original era of Godzilla films are called the Showa era, regarding the era under Japanese emperor Hirohito (the whole "era" concept in Japan is complicated and I don't understand it all myself, but it is easiest to understand as: an era is a frame of time under an emperor - they are currently in the Reiwa era).  The Showa era has the start of Godzilla with Gojira (1954), and goes all the way to Terror of Mechagodzilla in 1974.  The Showa era is known for moving Godzilla from frightening post-war allegory into a child friendly anti-hero of sorts, from monster to beloved protector.  The films became more cartoonish as they went, until finally Toho had to reboot the franchise with Godzilla (1984), starting the Heisei era.  Godzilla (1984) acts as direct sequel to Gojira (1954), bringing back the horror elements of Godzilla to the franchise.  This series carried with it a more strict continuity and kept Godzilla as a wild force of nature, even as it pitted him against classic monsters like King Ghidorah, but the franchise was rebooted again 15 years later with Godzilla 2000.  This new era of Godzilla films became more of an anthology, where their only consistently referenced film in the cannon was Gojira (1954).  This era is considered the Millennium Series, ending in the corny (but incredibly fun) Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), in which Godzilla gets to face off (briefly) with his American reboot counterpart.  To say the least, the Godzilla franchise was becoming something of a chore to keep up with.  Toho's three timelines had only used the original film as a jumping off point, making each reboot technically a sequel.  What they needed was to completely start over, to nix the original and go again from the very start with Shin Godzilla.

Much like Gojira (1954), Shin Godzilla acts as an allegory.  Gojira was a response to Japan's being bombed at the end of World War II, a travesty that has only happened there and nowhere and no time else on the face of the planet.  A nuclear bomb strike is, not to mince words, an atrocity that doesn't just decimate where you drop it, but leaves radiation to harm future generations.  The anxieties of nuclear fallout and the devastation at the end of WWII are layered thickly within Gojira, focusing particularly on how the original Godzilla was nature being twisted into some sort of reckoning for what human beings had done.  Shin Godzilla has elements of this as well, often referencing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, but the film doesn't stop there.  One of the directors for Shin Godzilla is renowned anime director Hideaki Anno, creator of the classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion.  Anno is not a man to mince words, and went full tilt with Shin Godzilla as not only a condemnation of the Japanese government's ineptitude in handling the myriad of disasters the country faced in the early 2010s, but also in the complexity of Japanese culture that led to this being the case. 

Shin Godzilla plays unlike any Godzilla film ever made.  Godzilla himself is hardly in the film, letting the plot instead focus on a realistic depiction of how the Japanese government would handle the situation if he happened to be real.  Shin Godzilla plays out more as a cross between the scientific dryness of The Andromeda Strain with the kinetic, fast talking of The Social Network.  If you're a slow reader and don't understand Japanese, this film may be a bit rough on you.  Dialogue whips back and forth as the bureaucracy tries to handle the crisis, scrambling to get as many opinions as they can on the unprecedented creature while trying to decide the best course of action.  The bureaucratic system is slow moving and often incapable of making tough decisions, going for the least impact options more often than not to little affect on the radioactive creature.  The real villain isn't Godzilla - he is our reckoning - but rather the government itself, unable to properly make decisions to save its people.  

The complexity of Japanese culture will always be beyond a person like me, never having lived there.  There are obvious commentaries on how traditional Japanese thought leads to a hampered response, but I feel in no way qualified to comment on them.  The structure of authority seems to be a particular striking point, as often somewhat radical but less preposterous ideas are often sidelined for the more traditional, but highly unlikely solutions.  Early in the film, before Godzilla has shown himself, the odd occurrences in the sea are being investigated.  Despite an underwater volcano being easily disproven, the government acts with this understanding first, ignoring those actually looking at the data for something they can at least understand.  There is a need to uphold a sense of authority, and they ironically undermine that authority at every turn as Godzilla repeatedly proves them wrong in the face of the public.  The situation gets incredibly dire, and the US government decides to step itself in.  There seems to be an identity crisis when it comes to Japan in the global context, with anxieties latent throughout that Japan is not left to deal with their own disasters without commentary or political pressure from other nations, particularly the US.  The film deftly criticizes the US's part in global policing and control, showing them to be arrogant bullies who want to act as saviors even as they obscured the knowledge of Godzilla's existence, and want extreme action with little in the way of choice from Japan.  Shin Godzilla is more a political film than it is a monster movie, an incredible and compelling achievement for what could have easily been a simple and fun blockbuster.  The impact of these themes are in a bit of a cloud, not knowing exactly how Japan thinks of these issues, but the frustrations and anxiety therein come through loud and clear.  As a US citizen that finds this government frustrating and cruel at times, I can relate to their anger, even if I cannot relate to their position. 

Shin Godzilla's special effects are probably the most iffy aspect. The CGI for this film looks a bit shoddy, but is certainly serviceable.  The new design for Godzilla is frightening.  There is the slight feeling that post-production was either rushed or in an intense budget (this is the first Godzilla film not to use the man-in-suit technique at all, making some of this pretty well out of their wheelhouse), but it does little to inhibit the film.  Shin Godzilla was criminally undervalued here in the US, where it was criticized for its mountains of dialogue and less-than-stellar special effects.  There's something oddly hypocritical about this, as so many political thrillers - full to the brim with people fast-talking at one another - in the US get critical acclaim, but because this isn't about something within US culture it gets swept under the rug.  For my money, it is one of the best films of 2016, and maybe my personal favorite Godzilla film.  

  

 

 

8.5

[Film Review] The Clovehitch Killer

   

Serial killer films are becoming trite in this day and age.  Between the myriad documentaries or strait to streaming releases, there are more pieces of serial killer media than there ever was serial killers.  The reasons are pretty obvious even as they are ambiguous, provoking a macabre interest in those that would discard their humanity for a release that is incomprehensible to most people outside of the sexual explanation (and serial killers are often described with sex in mind).  The problem is that for all of what is difficult to understand about serial killers, there really isn't much to say.  We can step through their movements and see ambiguous markings as to what their intentions were, but it is something like trying to push two magnets of equal charge together.  There's this invisible barrier, soft feeling but preventative.  Getting a film about serial killers working requires an angle to really get right, something to put us in a new headspace to consider this from a different angle. 

The Clovehitch Killer abandons looking for reason in the titular killer's motivations.  It just is, the film says.  Instead, what we have is a film about an unsuspecting victim of the killer's insatiable need.  Clovehitch follows Tyler Burnside, a teenager in a small town in Kentucky with a rather quaint life.  His family is very religious but not overbearing, he is a boy scout and his father is the troop leader and local handyman.  He goes to school, attempts to date, and is perfectly quaint in just about every way.  Tyler isn't necessarily the text book good kid, however, as an early scene points out.  Tyler waits for his father to fall asleep, sneaks into his room to steal the car keys, and picks up a girl he has been seeing from church.  They go park somewhere and start to make out, getting heavy enough that she asks to put down the seat.  In reaching for the lever, she pulls out a picture cut out from a magazine.  The image is a lot to handle for two christian kids from Kentucky.  It shows a topless woman bound in rope with a leather mask and ballgag.  The girl is disgusted and quickly spreads rumors around about Tyler's apparent fetish, but Tyler is adamant it isn't his, as the truck belongs to his dad.

There is no twist or mystery to Clovehitch, although I read some reviews that had implied there was.  You know what is going on from the very beginning, that Tyler's father is the notorious Clovehitch killer.  There is no tricking the audience with this one.  First time director Duncan Skiles is more interested in what this knowledge does to a young person, and how they come to terms with it.  Tyler's excavation of his father's past leads him to his father's regular and rather secretive haunts around the house, and into a friendship with resident weirdo Kassi who is obsessed with the murders that happened around town.  The film could have played this as a two-kid detective story, but it doesn't.  Rather, it follows Tyler's suspicion and denial about who his father really is, and that leads to some really stellar tension. 

The trick with tension is that it is two points tugging the audience simultaneously: a point of either what the character is doing or what the audience wants them to do, and the eventual threat of them either getting caught or otherwise found out.  With Clovehitch, that becomes even more complicated.  Tyler's father is an incredibly normal, happy-go-lucky christian man.  He's kind, he has sensible hobbies, he has a humbling job as a handyman.  He's as unsuspecting as they get, but we the audience never doubt that it is him.  Instead, the threat becomes what does this man look like when he is pressed into a corner?  Tyler's continual search for more evidence his father is truly the killer is always played along a taught line of knowing that his father is, obviously, always nearby.  After all it is his house, and naturally this being a small town if he ever leaves he most likely hasn't gone far.  The possibility of Tyler getting caught is incredibly plausible, and not only that there is a tit-for-tat aspect to the dramatic play.  Tyler's father doesn't let much get past him, but even when he becomes aware of his son perhaps getting into relatively sensitive areas of the house, he plays it off as something rather quaint which somehow feels even more intense than a direct confrontation.  For a long time, you are not sure how much Tyler's father is aware of - kudos again to director Duncan Skiles - and nor are you totally sure exactly what Tyler is going to do with the information he wants so badly.  It is the kind of tension that grips you by the stomach and clenches harder as the film goes on. 

Or at least it does up to a point.  There is no "off" part of the film where suddenly I stopped feeling anxious, but there were moments that made me all that more aware that I was watching a film.  The Kassi character, in particular, was rather convenient and, though they showed restraint, had some obvious plot points ahead of her.  Likewise, there is a part of the film that, without giving too much away, had two perspectives that played one after the other that made the second go around have lesser tension, enough to argue that it could have been cut entirely.  There is a tightness missing from the script slightly, and there is a layer of realism that feels to only be half-awake, occasionally nodding off for plot convenience.  But even with these small gripes, The Clovehitch Killer is one of the most suspenseful movies I've seen this year.  It works subtly on your anxiety muscle, slowly unspooling what you know is to come until you can almost not take it anymore.  Like many of these skillful, slowburn films from first time directors, there is a lot of promise and a little work that could lead to an interesting career for Duncan Skiles.  To tell such on overdone story in a compelling way that not only retains the tension, but manages to increase it, is worth highlighting.  The Clovehitch Killer is another film in a shortlist of small budget horror movies that has started to turn my love back to horror again, and for that I am thankful.      

 

 

 

7.5

[Film Review] Poltergeist

 

Horror movies have a relatively limited demographic, as far as releases go.  They are usually aimed at people in their late teens and early twenties, with some nice runoff in the early thirties.  It is a young-adult market, and as such has to appeal to young adults.  Violence, jump scares, disturbing imagery and situations populate horror films, garnering the films an even more limited R-rating, creating this sort of black market for the younger demographic within the horror market.  The teens within the market are split, with some over the age of 17 able to watch the films in theaters, while the rest have to wait for an uncle to fall asleep, or a friend to procure a copy in order to watch a DVD or VHS left silently unattended on the shelf.  With the 00s, this changed quite a bit as films decided the black market of children watching gory horror films wasn't enough for them, and so softened up the contents of their films into PG-13 territory, but even so still kept things hedged against the R-rated fence as hard as they could.  

Poltergeist is sort of strange when you think about it, being a horror film essentially aimed at the whole family.  One scene of gore aside, Poltergeist falls into that category Steven Speilberg's harder family films generally reside.  Jaws, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and his produced Gremlins (that latter two of which inspired the creation of the PG-13 rating) each are generally family films with a darker, more frightening edge.  But they aren't horror films, not really.  Temple of Doom is a straight up action film with some darker bits thrown in for color.  Gremlins is a horror-comedy, not intentionally scary so much as the more fun "creepy", meant to provoke feelings of the macabre without forcing a pronounced reckoning with its more gnarly aspects.  Jaws comes pretty darn close, a full-on suspense thriller, if you could call it that instead of a creature feature, but prefers to let the horror take a back seat as good thrillers generally do (Se7en may be the more evenly balanced child of "horror" and "thriller", for the sake of argument).  Poltergeist wanted to be a horror film, first and foremost, but it also wanted to be a family film. 

Poltergeist was co-written and produced by Spielberg, who was contractually prevented from directing the film while he worked on E.T. with Universal Pictures.  The process of making Poltergeist is heatedly debated for a number of reasons.  Despite Spielberg being credited as the story writer, Tobe Hooper, the eventual director of the film, said the story was his and that he had pitched it to Spielberg.  Tobe Hooper at the time was most well known for his independent horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a gnarly and dark film that pushed the R-rating, notably with minimal violence.  Poltergeist feels distinctly Spielberg in style and substance, with its focus on family and childhood wonder, a far cry from Tobe Hooper.  Accounts differ as to how much Spielberg did for the film, with some saying he storyboarded most of the film (Tobe Hooper only lays claim to half the storyboards, a remarkably low number), and comments about how Spielberg was on set nearly the entire shoot.  At the end of the day, Poltergeist feels like a Spielberg film.  Make of that what you may.

But the Spielberg affect is precisely why this film works as a family horror film.  The film follows a California family who recently moved into a house that is a part of a new housing development.  The suburbs in California are popping up rapidly, and as such these developments have to act fast.  The youngest child of the family, Carol Anne, starts to talk to voices she hears in the TV static.  Odd occurrences are seen throughout the household, at first more of a marvel than anything directly scary.  It isn't until Carol Anne is taken, only able to communicate through TV static, that they turn to paranormal investigators who inform them they may be dealing with a poltergeist.  Virtually every haunted house film you've seen has been, to some degree or another, a remake of Poltergeist, most notably the Insidious films.  Poltergeist's plot isn't horribly original, but it does condense a good ghost story into its most basic traits (and relocates the action from an old mansion to a more modern, albeit mid-to-high class home) and plays them effectively.  Early scenes with the family feel real and warm, the way Spielberg does best.  The mother is doting and tired, but never trivialized.  The father is hard working and occasionally prone to manly outbursts of disbelief, but it is never dwelled on.  One of the most appreciative aspects in Poltergeist is in how it doesn't waste our time with the family's disbelief.  It is pretty early on in the ghostly occurrences that the family realizes what they are working with is something supernatural.

Also very like Spielberg, the film isn't without its comedy.  The early scenes with the paranormal investigators trying to prove their sincerity on the subject by mentioning their past observations is immediately trivialized when they see how very active the ghostly events are in the house.  The comedy more than likely undermines the horror atmosphere just a bit for the older people in the audience, but then again, the older audience isn't going to be particularly scared.  How Poltergeist is able to maintain a family oriented horror movie is by giving different demographics stuff to be entertained by.  The younger people in the audience will more than likely be scared by quite a bit of what is in the film, while the older kids will have few scares but plenty of neat special effects shots to be entertained by.  Teenagers, I could see, might opt out of the film in favor of something pushing more boundaries or being far scarier, but adults will enjoy the family drama grounding the plot in a sincere what if scenario that puts the modern person into something fantastical.  There are very few movies I can think of that try for such a broad audience while still being horror, and of that small group there are fewer that manage to nail it as well as Poltergeist does.  

Poltergeist is a strange classic, one that you hesitate to put into the horror category because of how minimally scary it is, if it is at all (the only scene that gives me tension is the scene where the boy looks under the bed, and that is because of how it is shot more than the scare itself).  It could be categorized as a family film, but it leans on the darker side of things, to the point where when I was a kid in the 90s some parents outright forbid their kids from watching it in that way the 90s was where kids were being overprotected.  Poltergeist hits a lot of points with me, and even having seen it a few dozen times I still enjoy it.  It is an excellent example of entertainment first, and of a type of movie I'd love to see attempted again.  

 

      

 

8.0

[Game Review] She Remembered Caterpillars

 

Indie developers have a particular problem when it comes to making their small puzzle game.  In this day and age, a good puzzle game hardly works on its own without some sort of small gimmick.  Usually, this works in a couple of ways.  In the rarest way, you could have a puzzle game with unique and, perhaps, niche mechanics a la Zachtronics, or you could go the aesthetically pleasing or unique route of games like Hook and Little Inferno (if you can call that a puzzle game).  Lastly, you can try to contextualize it in a meaningful or entertaining story.  This worked best and most famously with Portal, but in the indie game scene the standout example would be Thomas Was Alone.  Thomas Was Alone is technically a platformer, basic in premise and gameplay, with each of the characters just being a differently dimensioned rectangle.  Thomas Was Alone featured a surprisingly heartwarming story about loneliness, friendship, and teamwork and may be the only time I can think of that putting a somewhat tangential story on top of a basic indie game has ever actually worked for me.

She Remembered Caterpillars wants to have a compelling story, and at least tries to pick a plot that would fit its puzzle mechanics.  She Remembered Caterpillars is about grief, the loss of a parent and the reckoning afterwards, the kind of mechanical tumbling that fits a game metaphorically, looking for the bug in the system that is causing so much pain.  While that story fits the gameplay if you squint, the problem is that it rarely ever touches what you actually do in the game.  She Remembered Caterpillars has you walking little dudes of particular colors into end positions, something akin to Sokoban.  The trick is that some paths can only traveled by a specific color, and certain gates prevent a specific color from passing.  There are three colors to reckon with - blue, red, and yellow - each of which can be combined with one other color to create green, purple, and orange.  Green can walk over blue bridges as blue is within green, but yellow cannot walk over green bridges because it is missing blue.  It is simple enough, and the tight design of the puzzles makes some brain cookers, but that hardly has anything to do with the proposed plot. 

From what I can tell, the idea was that working through putting primary colors in position was a sort of metaphor for coming to terms with and understanding the death of a loved one.  The plot itself is told in snippets of dialogue or abstracted text from some sort of religious story at the beginning of every level, and throughout there are elements of something fairytale-like.  There are references to a fungus and a cycle where the elderly allow themselves to die for the young, but it does little for the plot and only references the aesthetic in that the levels are generally designed with a lot of flora.  It is a thin connection at best, and I found the drama of the story to be both on the nose and not particularly interesting.  You get what is going on rather early, and each snippet of text from there on out is really just a slow, inevitable move towards the eventual end.  

Aesthetically, the game is pretty good.  Animations are smooth and full of character, the color pallet is pleasing, and the shapes feel both rudimentary and clear.  On the most basic level, the game succeeds.  The game is fun enough and is somewhat pretty to look at.  But that leaves little to linger, little to come back to once the challenges have been overcome, and generally you feel "that was nice" and nothing more.  There is a value in that, but not much of one.  As far as distracting puzzlers go, She Remembered Caterpillars is inoffensive and pleasing, but I'd never go out of my way to play it. 

 

 

 

6.0

[Film Review] Addams Family Values

 

The Addams Family turned out to be a short film series after Raul Julia, the actor who played Gomez, died in 1994.  Addams Family Values didn't quite have the box office draw that The Addams Family did, making less than half as much, so perhaps the end of the series was in sight regardless.  But it feels almost apt that The Addams Family would end on such a tragic note.  The loss of Raul Julia certainly makes Addams Family Values somewhat bittersweet.  He brought so much life and love to the role, defining the character in a lot of ways.  The whole cast from The Addams Family returns for the sequel, and just as with the first one everyone is playing with their heart out on screen.   

Addams Family Values took my advice retroactively and decided to give the story some more attention.  The plot is corny as ever, little more than two cartoon episodes stitched together, but it works in tandem with what the Addams do best: act really fucking weird.  The plot follows the Addams hiring a nanny for their new child (but moreso to watch their other kids, Pugsly and Wednesday, to prevent them from killing the child, who they harbor resentment towards).  The nanny is Joan Cusack's Debbie, a black widow serial killer after uncle Fester's fortune.  The story basically writes itself from that point.  Addams Family Values gets a lot of mileage out of such a basic plot, mostly due to the titular family.  Debbie and Fester have plenty of funny scenes together, with her trying to woo the socially self destructive uncle and then, in the latter half, trying to kill the seemingly indestructible Addams.  Addams Family Values' plot is little more than a line to string together skits and jokes on.  Look no further than the plot involving the Addams children.  After Wednesday - quick and clever as ever - catches on to Debbie's plot to kill Fester, Debbie manages to get them sent to summer camp, and can you think of a more perfect place to have Wednesday Addams for a film?  The stuff at the summer camp is absolutely pitch-perfect, with Wednesday undermining the cheery camp counselors and tormenting the perky pre-teens in attendance, all the while falling in love with a nerdy camper whose most attractive trait is that he is so allergic to everything he could die with hardly any effort.

Addams Family Values is a heck of a lot funnier than The Addams Family.  The set up, for one, lets the film really stretch the ridiculousness of these characters in a way that plays to their strengths.  Gomez, realizing that Debbie has manipulated Fester with her overt sexuality ("I can respect that", Morticia remarks), goes to the police to get her arrested.  "She married him, took him to Hawaii, moved him into a giant mansion and has sex with him all day.  Arrest her!" Gomez screams.  When the chief of police tells him he is being ridiculous, Gomez breaks down yelling "has the whole world gone mad?" It lovingly plays off of these characters, leaning into the corniness of the whole thing and embracing the sheer joy of it all.  The film also tries to play on racism in aristocratic, wealthy white families as well through the summer camp plot.  There are numerous references to Fester marrying "the help", as one camper puts it in disgust, and other racist comments directed towards Native Americans.  A thanksgiving play is put on at camp that Wednesday, naturally, tears down completely by reinforcing the near genocidal tendencies white people showed the indigenous people of North America at the time being depicted.  It is an excellent use of the Addams impropriety to knock down stupid and ignorant walls, partially what the characters were created to do.  The Addams Family are weird, they are obsessed with the occult and murder, but they are a hell of a lot nicer and accepting than the norm, and that is what makes them so lovable.  Occultists and (implied) murderers become more likable so long as they aren't like you. 

Addams Family Values is far from a perfect film.  The plot drags here and there, and, as I said before, the film is essentially tied together with a cliche, but the jokes they are able to rapid fire at the audience make this one hell of an enjoyable film.  There is so much love and warmth in this movie that my score below really doesn't matter at all.  The film is great on its own, showing the rich possibilities these characters still have, but it also works as a touching send off for Raul Julia, a man with great passion in a role made perfectly for him.  

    

 

 

7.0

[Film Review] The Addams Family (1991)

 

There has always been something attractive to me about The Addams Family.  The concept itself was an interesting and funny idea with an incredibly campy execution: what if there was an aristocratic family that existed as counterpoint to all the norms of the 1950s and 60s?  Where other families were optimistic, the Addams would be cynical, where others were relatively Christian, the Addams would follow the occult, and, the most tellingly of all, where most families were held together by strained marriages, the Addams' patriarch and matriarch loved each other unconditionally.  Through the corny gothic aesthetic, gallows humor, and general "I'll do the opposite of what you do" shenanigans throughout The Addams Family, that gimmick only ever worked because the Addams were such a happy family.  They may wade into your discomfort, but they were happier than you, more full of life (ironically), and approving of one another's passions.  How telling it is that this was in opposition to societal norms. 

The Addams Family started its life as a cartoon strip in The New Yorker, simple one panel jokes like The Far Side playing on aristocratic norms.  The series gained enough popularity to become a relatively successful TV show (airing the same year as the slightly more successful The Munsters, a good show in its own right but not nearly as compelling conceptually), cementing the idea of The Addams Family into the American consciousness.  The Addams Family had a few more public stints before 1991, with television specials, a TV movie, spin-off shows, a cartoon show, and a number of guest appearances on the likes of Scooby-Doo, but eventually appearances from the charismatic family faded away. 

Enter 1991, and we have what must be a progenitor to the "old TV show becomes summer movie" fad that started gaining steam in the 2000s.  The Addams Family film from 1991 is a quirky film.  Cast to a near perfect "T", charm oozes from The Addams Family at every turn, with macabre jokes and joyfully impassioned performances.  My experience with The Addams Family growing up was a collage of the cartoon show, Scooby-Doo appearances, and this film (the original show from '64 never seemed to air in my household where The Munsters did for some reason, perhaps due to uncommon syndication?), but it is the depiction of the titular family from 1991 that has always felt like the go-to canonical version.  There are differences between this film and the original show (mostly through who is related to who, the film swapping out Morticia's relatives for that of Gomez), but when I think of Gomez and Morticia and Wednesday, I think of Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, and Christina Ricci.  Picking between the best performance of these three is like picking a favorite child, as each brings something lovable and different to the table.  Anjelica Huston is absolutley lovely as Morticia, the pale and clever matriarch.  Raul Julia has an insatiable amount of gusto in his portrayal of Gomez, a performance I could watch all day.  And Christina Ricci, at all of the age of 11, shows an incredible amount of darkly comedic timing and dead-panning that is lightning in a bottle for such a young actress.  Those left out - such as Christopher Llloyd as uncle Fester - do a great job as well, rounding out the cast into a flush and near-perfect match for their characters.  With a great script, this could have been a classic family film.

But, unfortunately, this is not a perfect script.  The Addams Family's plot is muddled at best, slow at worst.  Jokes weaving in and out of the film help move things along, but nothing can really help that this story is oddly weird for an Addams Family film.  Uncle Fester has been missing for 25 years after a spat with Gomez when they were kids, and his absence hangs over the father like a shadow (and not the kind he likes).  When a scam artist comes along wanting to get to the Addams' fortune, they devise a plan to fake Fester's return in order to get inside the house.  The scam artist, it turns out, has an adopted son with a compelling resemblance to Uncle Fester.  The family embraces this con-Fester into their home, even as they slowly begin to suspect that there are certain things not right about him.  It is the type of story that would have been held off for a straight-to-video sequel more than a first film in a budding franchise.  The Uncle Fester plotline allows for some fun performances between Lloyd and Julia as Julia tries to remind him of their past, but the ambiguity as to whether this is really uncle Fester feels distracting throughout, as does a plot that hardly plays into the Addams' strengths of being strange in opaque normalcy.  There are standout scenes here and there - such as the play scene, Gomez's model trains, and the late scenes at a motel - but these feel like good jokes the thin plot was more than likely framed around.  The plot, likewise, keeps the Addams in their gothic home for most of the film, not utilizing the contrast of the strange family with the world outside nearly as much as it should.  The film has a loving eye for the Addams, but the story doesn't service them nearly as well as it should.

The Addams Family is an okay film, entertaining mostly on its concept and the spectacular cast that make these character lovable oddballs, but overall the film is a bit of a disappointment.  Oddly, I have never seen Addams Family Values, the supposedly superior sequel, but I am looking forward to it.  Anything to get this cast together again, especially with a better script, because this is a concept I would love to see done right.     

 

 

 

6.0

[Film Review] American Movie

 

 American Movie has long been a classic in film buff circles, a titan in the genre of "films about filmmakers".  References to the film have woven their way into the social consciousness here and there, from Family Guy cameos to primary subject Mark Borchardt showing up on David Letterman in the 90s several times, but, naturally, those references have dried up as we enter nearly 22 years from the film's release.  The film, as of this writing, is entirely out of print.  Available for rent or digital purchase on pretty much any digital movie service, but unreleased on Blu-Ray with old DVD copies nearing $60 on used markets.  American Movie is quickly becoming a forgotten film outside of certain niche circles, and that is such a shame, because it truly is fantastic.

American Movie is a documentary following Milwaukee filmmaker Mark Borchardt, a man with more passion than a dozen people combined manage to wring out in a lifetime, but with questionable talent or good sense.  The film opens with Mark moving into preproduction on his first full length feature film titled Northwestern, a sort of slice-of-life epic about alcoholic dead beats from Milwaukee, a group that Mark has often found himself a part of.  As the opening credits roll, however, it becomes apparent that his mounting debt is going to prevent him from entering production, and he must turn to finishing his 30 min short film Coven he started 2 years ago in order to pay his debts and secure funding.  His ambition is out of control, but with that comes a life falling apart and obsessiveness over his work.  Both of these threads intertwine as the film progresses, touching on his three kids that he doesn't seem to spend a whole lot of time with, his worsening alcoholism, and his constant rewrites up to the 11th hour  ("the 12th hour", as he puts it, minutes from having to hand out copies of the script he is still in the process of rewriting).  

Mark is an odd hybrid, part Werner Herzog and part Ed Wood, willing to go to great lengths to make what amounts to campy horror films.  His productions are unbelievably lean, and with an unbelievable network of people sort of supporting him, support he has garnered through his conviction.  Mark is aggressive in selling his films to others he wants to work on them, projecting future success, a distinct vision, and a tireless work ethic that is both insane to see and absolutely necessary for him to get over the obstacles in his way.  There's a conscious dichotomy when watching the film, of both feeling inspired by his passion and a growing dread that not only is the stuff he is making not going to help him climb out of the hole he has dug himself into, but that the man is downright delusional.  It feels like the film equivalent to The Fall of Western Civilization, Part II.  There is inspiration and tragedy in equal measure, as Mark follows what he believes to be the American Dream.  

But this dichotomy is partially what makes Mark a compelling character.  You don't want him to fail, not when he is so charismatic and in such a troubled spot.  Mark's emotional state whips back and forth throughout the film, at one point even breaking aggressively through the fourth wall, asking the documentarian behind the camera if he thinks any of this is possible in a drunken stupor.  American Movie, in a lot of ways, bypasses its filmic nature because of its subject.  Mark is so compelling that you sort of forget to even look at how the documentary is being edited and made, but there is a skill to that as well.  The film seems to jump quickly from one moment to another, in a cinema verite style that matches Mark's own mental state.  Moments snap in and out quickly as Mark becomes more manic, and lingers when he is depressed.  It is hard not to feel like this film is being projected straight from inside Mark's head. 

American Movie is a must for anyone interested in or aspiring towards a career in film.  It ranks among classics of the subject like Ed Wood, Day for Night, Hearts of Darkness, and Man with the Movie Camera - it is a bonafide classic.  Mark is doing well these days, hosting his own podcast and having had some success with his own documentary in 2018.  But the lightning in a bottle that is American Movie will more than likely trump anything he does after.  It is something so nearly perfect for anyone who has dabbled in the field, essentially projecting your younger filmmaking self up on the screen in adult form. It is the fear everyone who made films as a kid had, and it is simultaneously a love letter to that fire and how beautifully it burned.    

 

 

 

9.5

[Film Review] Relic

 

Analogy films are never my favorites.  An analogy is an obviously useful tool for storytellers to add some depth to the subject they are trying to explore, but often times an analogy can lose the story entirely.  A movie I struggle with is Darren Aronofsky's mother!, which is virtually plotless outside of the analogy he is trying to express.  The problem here is that an analogy works in conjunction with a story, as an echo of meaning to the drama and characters being thrown through their narrative tunnel.  When you lose the story, the characters, and the drama, what you have left is a pretentious lecture, an artist wanting to scream at you rather than propose a mutual problem to solve or consider.  It is the very nature of pretension, where the artist claims he knows better than you and that you aren't clever enough to pick up on what he is trying to say, so he better just spell it out.  There are versions of the analogy film that work, such as Eraserhead, but the film consciously works on emotional reaction, not on lectured bullet points like mother! does with its obvious references to the bible and global catastrophe.  mother! lectures, Eraserhead feels. 

Relic, a movie that has garnered a polarized reaction from the general populace (but rave reviews from critics), suffers from a viewership who have been burned before.  Everyone has seen at least a half dozen of these empty, pretentious lectures in the guise of a movie, and everyone has learned telltale signs that they are being subjected to one: slow burn plots, a large percentage of lingering, quiet moments, metaphors that are deciphered within the first act, minimalism in all things - framing, dialogue, plot.  You know the type, and it can be an easy thing to call it early when watching a movie that starts to run down the list checking boxes.  But Relic has an intelligence to it, a confidence that says what it wants to say early to leave room for the experience that follows.  Relic isn't trying to lecture you, it is trying to convey. 

Part of me wants to call Relic subtle, but to do so I need to specify a rather large caveat.  Relic is about a mother and daughter who go out to the grandmother's house after they get a call she has been missing for an unknown frame of time, roughly estimated to be a week.  They get to the house and it becomes quickly apparent grandma may not all be there.  Post-it notes are strewn about the house as little reminders for things you'd expect someone to recall without effort, like "remember to turn off the water" stuck next to the tub.  Grandma shows up sometime in the first 30 min of the film, and no one can get out of her where exactly she has been.  From this brief description, you can probably tell relatively what this story is about, but for those of you sensitive to it, consider this your spoiler warning.

Relic wastes no time telling you it is a movie about dementia, and that is my big caveat.  The theme of the movie is not subtle, not in the least, but it isn't supposed to be.  Director Natalie Erika James knows that the best experience she can give you is not through obfuscating the point.  Dementia is the theme, but it is how dementia is depicted and felt that makes the film work.  In part, this is done through the use of conflict.  The grandmother will whisper to something (relatively) unseen.  Occasionally in the background of shots you will see what looks like an emaciated human figure, just out of focus, and you draw the conclusion this is what she is talking to.  The grandmother's fear is a presence in the house, something she feels to be stalking her, and making her home a confusing maze for her to maneuver through.  The film keeps this side of the horror at arms length for a majority of its runtime, preferring to work through the conflict of the mother and daughter who came to visit.  

The mother and daughter's fear is that gran is so unpredictable.  They are initially empathetic, splitting their empathy between them as the mother wants a pragmatic solution while the daughter wants to fill in whatever void she feels in her grandmother.  It is a clever design, where one person fears the dementia taking them over and the others fear the what dementia has turned her into.  The conflict resonates as real even as the events begin to slip into surrealist horror.  What this sort of conflict does, however, is slow the pacing of the movie, and that will definitely be to taste.  I like a good slow burn film - after all, Rosemary's Baby, one of my favorite films of all time, has very little horror throughout.  It is the mounting presence of horror that makes the film work.  There is a similar, but far thinner, paradigm here.  The trick with a slow burn is a payoff in the end, whether that be something big or something meaningful, you need that investment to return to you.  For me, by the halfway point of the film I had reserved myself to not really getting my investment back, to enjoying what the film was trying to do more than what it had done, but the film surprised me.  I won't spoil the ending, but it turned into something sincerely anxiety inducing, taking its premise into more existential waters while also showing grieving relatives of the poor gran come to violent terms with what is going on.  No more brushing this under the rug.  A mental issue in a family effects everyone, and the film does a wonderful job depicting this. 

Relic's success is in its choice subject and in how it decides to play this story.  It follows traditions set up by other films of a similar nature, but manages to be effective through skillful direction.  There are moments here and there of overstepped punctuation - a post-it note reading "Get Out" or "I am loved" that seems to abandon all subtlety - but for the most part the film is a highly skilled affair, the kind of movie that would have shriveled up into an interesting but ineffective film if it wasn't for such a strong narrative voice.  It is certainly not a movie for everyone, but for those that know how to appreciate a story told in conflict and tone, this movie isn't a vapid, mumblecore horror.  It is a traumatic and tragic depiction of mental illness, and the foreboding knowledge of genetics.  Let this be a lesson to you about polarized user review scores: sometimes, the best stuff is the most controversial.  Don't see stuff that pleases everyone, see stuff that no one can agree on.

 

 

 

7.0

[Game Review] Phasmophobia

 

There are a number of difficulties when making a detective game, but chief among them is in trying to give enough options to keep things interesting.  Give too many options, and the player can feel swamped, or can be left picking through different options one by one waiting for the game to respond with the win condition.  Give too few, and the answer becomes predictable.  The general aspiration for detective games is to allow for a player to say what they think happened in a particular investigation and have the game parse it, but for various, complex systematic reasons this just isn't possible.  Other games, like Return of the Obra Dinn, try to make the possible choices so large as to factor out the possibility of guessing while keeping the amount of variables you have to log small, but as I mentioned in my review for that game, it was still possible to guess a lot of the time.  Instead, we have to build little conditions, little measurements or a pool of answers for the player to choose from and interpret.  Keeping this interesting for even one go around is challenging, as the systems the game is built on quickly become predictable.  You can pretty much forget about any replay value.

Phasmophobia doesn't so much work around these limitations as uses them to provide a different experience.  Phasmophobia is a multiplayer ghost hunting game, where a team of up to four players will travel to one of six locations and deduce what sort of ghost is haunting there.  You need three pieces of evidence, ranging from video footage of ghost orbs to recording ghost writing in a book and pencil.  Three pieces of evidence, and you can deduce what sort of ghost you've got.  Some of this evidence can be discovered early on.  Freezing temperatures are almost always stumbled upon, as one of the most over powered ways of finding which room a ghost is haunting is looking for the room that is colder than the rest.  If that room happens to be the haunted room, you will notice if the temperatures are freezing as soon as you discover it.  A primary loop begins to form as you play, where you will start with thermometers, checking rooms until you've found the right one, and then setting a camera down and going back to your ghost hunting truck and watching the feed for ghost orbs.  Both of these things can be done pretty well as soon as the haunted room is found, making any ghost with either or both of these criteria the easiest to deal with.  After this, trying to talk to the ghost is usually a good bet, as it will generally respond relatively early on in the encounter.  The last few clues are far more difficult to acquire.  Fingerprints on doors and windows (discovered using a UV light) is strangely rare, and so easy to miss.  The EMP reader fluctuates wildly around things and places the ghost is in contact with, but it requires getting a level 5 in order to count it as evidence.  Lastly, getting a ghost to write in the ghost book requires agitating the ghost quite a bit, which means risking your life to get the evidence.  It doesn't help that the demon ghost, by far the most hostile of the ghosts in the game, requires a ghost book evidence.  Mechanically, there is a loop to follow that can often make the smaller levels a bit too easy, but the bigger levels are often front loaded with creepy stalking through hallways and into rooms looking for the temperature to drop.  It's simple overall, but rather effective.

The premise is simple for obvious reasons, which is that the game is meant to scare you and your friends and give you something fun to do while it happens.  Horror games are rarely multiplayer for a reason.  Being with others is simply a lot less scary than being alone.  Phasmophobia suffers from a similar problem, where the general eeriness of a given level is significantly shrunken when playing with friends, but there are attempts here and there to try and work around that limitation.  For one, the game heavily suggests you play with in game push-to-talk, and I recommend you do so as well.  When you talk within the game and not on a third party client like Steam Chat or Dischord, the ghosts can hear you and will become more active the more you agitate them.  Likewise, your walkie-talkies can be severed by the ghost, meaning you can only talk to others in your immediate and limited range. 

While these little mechanics certainly make the game scarier, the game hardly gets past the "creepy" stage.  There are moments of spontaneous jump scares, where you could turn around and see the ghost manifested behind you, or objects moving suddenly and doors shutting in front or behind you, but the moment you die in this game all fear will drain away.  It feels very gamey, and there isn't really much of a solution for it.  It doesn't come close to ruining the game, but it's a caveat worth mentioning.  The larger levels generally give you the most sense of tension, partially as they are creepy locations in and of themselves (an abandoned high school and an abandoned asylum) and mostly because of how deep inside them you have to get to start investigating, furthering you from the safety of outside.  

When you are in the building in question, you are at risk.  The ghost activity is measured on a 10 scale (cleverly the instrument measuring this is in the truck, meaning someone has to stay behind and relay the information if you want it while inside), with activity 10 meaning the ghost is hunting.  The lethality of ghosts depends on the type you are investigating, information you won't know until you are ready to leave the level anyway, making anticipating their hunting stage a little more scary as you don't know what you are dealing with.  Some ghosts will give you plenty of chances to get away from a hunting period, while others will be aggressive, choosing one of you and snuffing you out if you don't stop talking on the walkie-talkies and find a room to isolate yourself away from the agitated spirit.  Walking out of the building during a hunting is generally not an option, as the ghost usually locks the doors when it is looking for prey.  

Phasmophobia isn't a complicated game, but what it is is novel and fun, a game you can play for quite a while before it starts to feel like it has lost its effect, helped along by a somewhat sloppy leveling system that locks you out of the bigger levels early on to give you something to look forward to as you play (annoyingly, same goes with difficulty, a minor criticism).  The game is still in early access, and while I don't hold out much hope the game will get better than it is, there is certainly a lot of potential in the little game if they tighten it up a bit and add more locations and ghosts.  But even if that doesn't become the case, it is a fun diversion with friends, something not immediately forgettable but not quite lingering either.  It will be a "remember when . . ." type of game, and I'm down with that. 

 

 

 

7.5

[Film Review] The Vast of Night

 

One phrase I hate these days is "originality is dead".  I understand the sentiment, especially nowadays where half the films and shows that come out are either remakes, reboots, or revivals of old properties, spinning the nostalgia cynically into dollars and cents every other week.  It is a belief that comes from a very real place, provoked by big studios spending massive swaths of money on advertising for broad appeal stories that everyone has heard a thousand times before, but what the phrase means to me when I hear it is that people aren't looking for the same thing I am.  The concept of originality being the core idea of a thing, the literal plot of a film or show, is preposterous to me.  This is, it should be said, coming from the same crowd that loves everything Quentin Tarantino has ever done.  Originality is about ideas themselves, something fresh that we either haven't seen or have hardly seen before.  It is about the approach, about the details, about the emotional core or perspective of a story as much as the story itself.  

The Vast of Night proves an interesting approach can be just as original as a new plot, perhaps even more so.  The Vast of Night follows one night in a small town in New Mexico in the 50s, where a switch board operator and a local radio show host experience an odd disturbance on the air waves while most of the town is watching the local high school basketball game.  It is a slow burn type of movie, with lingering shots and a plot that moves forward by the inch.  What it is that disturbs the air waves is hardly original and hardly unexpected, it is the approach to this plot that makes the story work.  You can go in blind if you want, but this is one spoiler that doesn't hurt the film if you know it before hand (this is your last warning).  

The Vast of Night, in a more honest summary, is about a night in a small town in which aliens invade.  It is a plot done so many times before as to pass beyond the world of cliche into camp, but here is given a serious and realistic eye.  Faye, the switchboard operator, and Everett, the local radio host, are young people living in a dead end small town where everyone knows everyone.  This is skillfully shown in the early part of the movie when Faye and Everett walk around running into people, talking to them about this or that and constantly being interrupted by local gossip and questions about their family.  There is a fly-on-the-wall sense you get from these character's interactions, the way they occasionally talk over one other, references to things we don't get proper context to, and the way the camera hovers a bit low and far away to give us that "grounded" feeling, sure to get enough of the town in frame so we always know where we are.  The lighting is sparse, using street lamps and the glow from buildings to fill out the backgrounds and the foregrounds of a given shot, cutting shapes out of the dark night surrounding the town.  The feeling of place is just as important as the feeling of normalcy early on.  The entire first thirty minutes or so is essentially just Everett and Faye walking from the gymnasium in which the game is about to be played all the way to Faye's work at the switchboard around the main street, talking about gossip, what she's read in her science magazines, and testing out Faye's new tape recorder while Everett shows her how to use it (and how to act like an interviewer, which allows them to bond over Everett's confidence and Faye's shyness).  It is all very small scale stuff, building characters through interactions while simultaneously giving you the scope of the film, because we hardly get far away from everywhere they walk in this early scene.

After the early part of the film is over, you've not only gotten comfortable with the characters, but have also learned the rough layout of at least part of the town and have been gently lulled into the comfort of this small town setting.  There is certain warmth to it, which quickly gets contrasted when Faye gets to her job at the switchboard.  They hold on her for 9 whole minutes as she takes calls, hears the radio cut to a strange noise, hears that strange noise on one of her lines, investigates with other people she knows, and finally calls Everett to ask if he noticed anything at all.  It is the sort of scene I can see people getting frustrated with if they are more plot oriented than character oriented.  The plot of this scene comes relatively early when she realizes there is a strange disturbance happening on the air waves, but doesn't move to the next step until much later when she finally calls Everett who makes an announcement on the radio for anyone to call if they know what it is all about.  In that time in between, there is just Faye by herself, calling people and inquiring, just trying to process it herself.  It's a humbling sense of realism, for her to start curious and then excited, to not overdramatize the situation but slowly let it draw out in the characters own time.

Like I said, this film is a slow burn.  It is about small moments collecting into realization, of feeling what is something supernatural from an extremely natural point of view.  It's something that could easily be fucked up by a lesser director, but newcomer Andrew Patterson shows incredible skill and restraint throughout.  The camera makes some pretty insane moves - with one particular one shot that had me relatively floored, even after looking up how they did it - but is never distracting.  It is always for some storytelling purpose.  Shots linger for a long time in several places, letting characters do their work on the screen, investing you in this world as a real place rather than a fantastical adventure.  If ever there was the perfect film version of Orson Wells' War of the Worlds, this just may be it, because largely what Patterson's direction accomplishes is a feeling of believability in something that could easily be seen as outlandish.  He took no shortcuts either - there are hardly any handheld shots and they are always to serve the characters themselves moving quickly, mimicking their emotional state, not trying to ground us into a world with a real camera. 

The Vast of Night is about the experience more than it is the plot, and that takes a tremendous amount of craft in order to pull off.  It collects moments, expressions, and silence to make an atmosphere that tells the story best.  I've taken the film apart a bit here in this review, so it can feel as though the film is for analytical types like myself, but that is not the case.  It is a film made to be watched, not necessarily talked about.  People can rave up and down that they love movies or that they think movies should be about story or complexities that keep the film on their minds for days on end, but The Vast of Night wants you to simply feel what is happening.  No flash, no conspiracies.  Just a small town, two kids, and a flying saucer.         

 

 

 

8.5

[Film Review] Summer of 84

 

Much as we like to take credit for the rampant 80s nostalgia going on right now, it has technically been going on for decades.  Emo music in the 00s took after emo and jangly goth rock from the 80s (with a hint of synthwave stuff and arena rock), slasher movies saw a comeback late in the same decade, as well as gore films ramped up into the "torture porn" genre, and all the way back in the 90s we had The Wedding Singer.  The 80s was a decade that was fueled on childhood wonder and whimsy and horror.  It was a decade of missing children, of ethics groups starting to crack down on what media consumption did to young minds, of metal music becoming popular and a heck of a lot more edgy, and of this general contrast of near-sociopathic tendencies in the corporate, adult world with the somber freedom of youth.  For better or worse, it created an image for the pre-cynical America that has lingered and seeped into the very fabric of our culture. 

Summer of 84 came out in 2018, an unfortunate year given how closely it followed Stranger Things.  The comparisons between the two productions is understandable, but a bit mislead.  Both want to recontextualize the 80s style, themes, and storylines into something a bit more modern, sanding away the gloss the decade put over everything in favor of our more modern cynicism.  Stranger Things, for the most part, stays incredibly true to its source material, but takes from so many styles and creators of that decade as to create something more of an amalgamation of different concerns and thought from the time.  Summer of 84 wants to be a lot more straight forward, playing as an alternate version of Stand By Me.  It plays this in such a straight way, as a matter of fact, it comes off as wholly unoriginal until you reach its final act. 

Summer of 84 has a simple plot, following four childhood friends living in a cul-de-sac in the titular year who suspect their neighbor is the one abducting children in the area.  The plot has so many traditional beats it would take forever to list them all, from the archetypal characters (you've got the edgy punk kid, the nerdy smart kid, the fat shy kid, and the boring as hell, conspiracy theory obsessed protagonist) to the progress through conflict (parents won't understand, so kids take it upon themselves to investigate).  And while the ending has received attention for some sort of good reason, it is important not to ignore the rest of the film, because it is downright boring.  The plot follows tradition to a 'T' with no variation, even through that ending (with one slight caveat), and to vessel us through are our four child characters.  

The children are incredibly problematic, not because of what they say (most of their comments can be slid to the side as 80s fair, though some of their overt sexism seems to be overly glorified throughout) but rather because they have absolutely no chemistry.  The actors aren't bad necessarily, but they never actually feel like friends, nor do they ever feel fleshed out.  They sit in their archetypical lane and hardly veer from course.  There are snippets here and there - one kid has an abusive home life that is shown in one scene with a respectable and emotional amount of restraint, another is shown to have a worn out single mother with an implied drug dependence, also respectfully done in a restrained way - but snippets a character does not make.  For the most part, what we get is what we see in the trailer: four cliches following a cliche plot on the dotted line.  It is important to stress how traditional this all is, because many will try and make excuses for it as "being the point" in the end, but if your point is to not be interesting for a bulk of your run time then I cannot see that as a reasonable argument for quality.  This banal, eye-glazingly rote film for 2/3rds of its running time has a pay off in the end, but that pay off is hardly worth a little over an hour of film. 

Spoilers for the end of Summer of 84 below.

The film's buildup is not some red herring where the kids turn out to be wrong and something else is afoot.  They turn out to be right the whole time, their neighbor is the one abducting kids.  But it is the way this scene is handled that has garnered mild acclaim.  The tone of the film takes a sincere shift when they break into their neighbor's basement and find the little room he has constructed.  The 80s nostalgia washes away in favor of something gritty and real, where they find an emaciated boy tied to a radiator and the corpse of another decaying in a tub of chemicals.  It comes about in such a revolting and shocking way partially because of the intense contrast with the film that came before it.  It is an interesting trick the filmmakers (three of them!) pull off, but as though to prove the earlier bits of the film were no fluke, they fail to play off this shocking twist in the story.  The scene is played with a heavy dose of trauma, but for the most part the kids come out of it just fine.  Main kid is proud of what he has done, the girl love interest gives him a kiss, and all looks fine. 

The film has one more twist in store, where the neighbor hides in his attic and abducts him and his best friend (the overweight kid), dragging them to a small island in Oregon and . . . doesn't kill them.  He lets them run around and chases them, only slitting the throat of the overweight kid, a shocking but weird choice since the few minutes left in the film don't really do much with that point.  If I were them, I probably would have killed the main kid if this scene just had to take place, showing everyone else's grief and contrasting the child-hero trope in 80s films, but even then I don't think it really improves the movie.  The pay off for this last bit of trauma is simply to wipe the smile off the protagonist's face in the end, to leave you with a feeling of loss and a contrast between the romanticized style of the plot with the real life consequences.  The attempt is admirable, but it doesn't really pay off.  It feels like an aside, a confusing emotional end meant to linger, but with little else in the film to reflect on, it doesn't really make much of a difference.  

Summer of 84 is full of cliches and played out plotting and characters.  It is a competently shot and paced movie, but it lacks much content to make it worthwhile to watch.  The film tries to wring some sort of nostalgia from its premise and style, and even tries to give us one of my most hated of all tropes, the attractive neighbor girl who inexplicably and objectifyingly falls for the protagonist, despite the age difference, despite zero chemistry, despite the fact that there is no indication she and he have anything remotely in common.  She is simply interested in him for whatever thing he is self conscious about in the moment, and he is interested in her because she is hot and validates him.  It is a downright toxic cliche that literally does nothing for the plot or characters outside of making men like me swoon over the wish we had that sort of romantic involvement in our youth (or, perhaps worse, reinterpret past relationships as such, and assume things to play out similarly in the future).  The film wants your nostalgia for the cliches, the look, and the general plot to carry through the film to its one shocking moment, but it doesn't and that moment doesn't linger.  It is competently made, and with a better script I think these filmmakers could make something good, but this isn't it.   

 

 

 

4.5