Tag: Mig's Reviews

JOKER (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Todd Phillips
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beets
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 68%

PLOT: In early-‘80s Gotham City, mentally-troubled comedian Arthur Fleck, disregarded and mistreated by society, embarks on a bloody downward spiral of crime and social revolution.


Most comic book movies, by default, require at least a little pre-existing knowledge of the universe inhabited by these characters, in order for the stories to make sense.  There are precious few exceptions.  Batman Begins (2005) is one.  Superman (1978) is another.  And now we have Joker, an origin story like no other, presented to the viewer as if no previous Batman movies existed, as if the Joker was a creature as new and original as Hannibal Lecter was nearly thirty years ago.  (Or, dare I say, Travis Bickle, over FORTY years ago…)

It’s incredible, if not impossible, to believe this film was directed by a man (Todd Phillips) whose most famous movies to date have been the Hangover trilogy and Old School.  There is nothing in this gritty psycho-drama that bears any resemblance to anything Phillips has directed before.

And I haven’t even mentioned Joaquin Phoenix’s performance yet.  More on that later.

The story: Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is an everyman, your average nobody, living in Gotham City in the early ‘80s, a time of garbage strikes, graffiti-riddled subways, and a porno theater on every downtown corner.  He lives with his invalid mother and pays the bills as a clown-for-hire, doing everything from entertaining bedridden children to sandwich-boarding on the street.  His real dream is to be a stand-up comedian and appear on a late-night talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), whom he idolizes like a long-lost father.

(The similarities of this plot point to The King of Comedy [1983] have been well-documented and need not be explored here; that would require a whole separate article.)

So far, this is really heavy material, a real downer.  But then the screenplay strikes gold.  It turns out Arthur suffers from an unsettling, but very real, affliction, although it’s never quite named in the film: Pathological Laughter or Crying (PLC). Also known as the pseudobulbar effect, it is a neurological condition defined by episodes of uncontrolled laughter or crying.  People with PLC often laugh out loud or cry for no apparent reason.

In other words, Arthur simply bursts out laughing for no reason, and often, as we’ll see, at the most inopportune or inappropriate moments.

To me, this was genius.  It gives a legitimate grounding for the Joker’s iconic laugh.  What would normally be comic-bookish or hammy in previous incarnations becomes a little sad.  I felt empathy towards this guy whenever his affliction overcame him, especially in the scene on the bus when he’s amusing a little kid by pulling goofy faces, and the kid’s mom tells him to stop bothering her child, and he starts laughing despite his obvious disappointment.  The empathy for me came when I could see through the laughter, could see Arthur’s face contorting with genuine sadness and misery even as he guffawed helplessly.  It was touching.

The real turning point of the movie comes when he is accosted by three drunken yuppies on a subway, and he starts laughing uncontrollably, and the yuppies start beating him up…but they don’t know about the gun he’s carrying for protection.

But that’s enough of the plot.  I think I’ve described only the parts of it that you might have guessed anyway from the trailers.  The sensationally well-told story, not to mention the complexity of the story itself, is only one half of the movie’s greatness.

The other half, it must be said, is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance.  The trailers don’t do it justice.  A lot of the performance has to do with his tortured facial expressions when he has a laughing fit.  There are a couple of extraordinarily long shots where Arthur SHOULD be crying, but is instead laughing, and his agony is evident.  He WANTS to cry properly, but he can’t.  I don’t know how he pulled it off, but you can see both emotions on his face at the same time.  It’s a masterstroke.

Another remarkable factor at work in his performance is his subtle nods to previous Jokers in movies, and even TV.  If you watch really carefully, you’ll notice a quick reference to Mark Hamill’s celebrated voice work as the Joker in the Batman animated series and films; Cesar Romero’s eccentric dance moves from the ‘60s television series; and Heath Ledger’s hair.  (If there’s a reference to Nicholson, I must have missed it.)  I just thought it was a brilliant touch to bring in all of those influences and incorporate them into this newest incarnation, as if to acknowledge the pop-culture roots of this character, while still breaking new ground.

Joker is the comic-book movie for people who don’t like comic-book movies (even Deadpool).  It’s The Dark Knight crossed with Se7en and Taxi Driver.  It’s utterly unlike any comic-book movie I’ve ever seen, and I doubt anyone will ever be able to make another one like it without comparing it to this one.

FREAKS (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Lexy Kolker
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A sheltered young girl (Kolker) discovers a bizarre, threatening, and mysterious new world beyond her front door after she escapes her father’s protective and paranoid control.


In the tradition of one of my very favorite sci-fi films, Midnight Special (2016), Freaks is a sci-fi mystery that doesn’t pander, doesn’t spoon-feed (except when it HAS to), and doesn’t insult my intelligence.  It premiered in 2018 at the Toronto International Film Festival, was picked up by a distributor two days later, and surfed the festival circuit for over a year, winning multiple awards, before finally getting a US/Canada release in 2019.

The story opens with a young girl, Chloe (a brilliant performance from Lexy Kolker), who lives with her father in a ramshackle house with covered windows and locked doors.  She takes a peek out the window through curtains that have been duct-taped to the windowsill and sees an ice cream truck outside; in the sky above she spots birds that seem to be…frozen in place?  Hm.  THAT’S weird.

As the opening section unfolds, we learn that the father is doing everything in his power to keep his daughter safe from something dangerous in the world outside their front door.  (She has never set foot outside.)  The movie is cagey at this point about explaining exactly what that something is, and immediately I thought, “Aw, man…is this gonna be another rip-off of A Quiet Place?”  The father walks around the house performing maintenance on drapes and boards and locks, and constantly reminding her daughter how dangerous it is outside, and how he’s doing all this to keep her safe.  Shades of Stranger Things, right?

So the first couple of acts of the movie felt like rip-offs of…sorry, homages to previous contemporary sci-fi entertainments.  The girl portraying Chloe delivers a fantastic, natural performance, but that wasn’t enough for me to shake that feeling of, “Man, I’ve seen all this before.”

At random intervals, Chloe starts to see things.  People in her room, in her closet.  Sometimes these people talk to her, and she talks back.  Are they ghosts?  We’ve learned that Chloe’s mother is dead…could one of these visions be her mother?  And what’s the story with that weird ice cream truck at the beginning, with the creepy, smiling old man who seems to know more than he’s letting on?

These are all threads that make you THINK you know where the story is headed, and you may or may not be right.  You may already think you know what the rest of the movie’s about just based on my description above.  Fair enough.

As for me, I was bamboozled when the true nature of the girl, her father, and the world outside her house was revealed.  I’m not talking about a Sixth Sense kind of reveal that’s kept a secret until the last 5 minutes of the movie.  This movie makes its “reveal” with about an hour left (I’m guesstimating), so I basically felt like I got two movies in one.  Or maybe two episodes of an EXCELLENT cable miniseries.  Once the “reveal” is, well, revealed, the movie shifts into high gear and doesn’t ease off until literally the final frame.

The joy of Freaks is that reveal at the halfway point, and what they do with it afterwards, so it’s extremely hard to know what else I can say without spoiling the fun of discovering it for yourself.  I could mention the visual effects, which are relatively minimal, but EXTREMELY effective, especially during the finale.  I could mention the screenplay’s deliberate attempts to make certain plot points analogous to the current immigration debate.  (I’m gonna mangle this, but one of the lines goes something like, “If you attempt forced relocation, that will only force them underground.”)  I could mention the way certain clues are hidden in plain sight, once you get to the endgame of the movie.

But you won’t get another word from me about the story.  You deserve to discover this one yourself.  I cannot recommend this highly enough.  It’s not quite a PERFECT film, but what are you gonna do, they can’t all be Midnight Special.  I never saw one trailer, not one Facebook ad or YouTube video about Freaks.  I only saw it by pure luck tonight because the showing was at a better time than Ready or Not.

I’m telling you.  Seek this one out. It’s a winner.

TRANSSIBERIAN (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Brad Anderson
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Eduardo Noriega, Kate Mara
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An American couple takes a trans-Siberian train ride across Russia, but things take an odd turn when they meet another mysterious young couple.


One of the reasons I like writing about movies is that it gives me the opportunity to talk up great movies that I’ve discovered off the beaten track.  Movies like the stunning stop-motion film Mary and Max (2009), or Sunrise (1927), hands-down the greatest silent film I’m ever likely to see, or Wild Tales (2014), an Argentinian anthology film that plays like The Twilight Zone crossed with Quentin Tarantino.

Or Transsiberian, a virtually unknown film from 2008 that is one of the finest examples of Hitchcockian suspense in the modern era.  It was an international co-production of – get this – Germany, the UK, Spain, and Lithuania.  It was co-written and directed by Brad Anderson, a man who’s directed a LOT of episodes of various television shows, and so has a good sense of efficiency and economy in his style and pacing.  It has yet another stunning Ben Kingsley performance as a Russian narcotics detective.  And it turns the screws on the heroine of the story in such a way that you can tell exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing, when every good instinct says she should be doing the exact opposite.

After a brief prologue involving a police investigation in Vladivostok, we meet Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer), a married couple traveling home from China after a faith-based missions trip.  They decide to take a 6-day train trip across the Russian continent because Roy feels it would be nice to take an adventure…plus, he LOVES trains.  He’s one of those enthusiasts who don’t realize when they’re boring you with talk of gauges and coal-burners and cow-catchers. (Sheldon Cooper would have loved this guy.)  Jessie seems like a nice woman, but she seems to be keeping this adventure at arm’s length; you can tell she’d rather be flying coach than spending six days in a double-berth cabin.  I empathized with her right away.  They make a good couple, even though he wants kids and she doesn’t, she smokes and he’d like her to quit, he drinks and she doesn’t, et cetera.  Pretty normal.

A little while into their trip, Roy and Jessie meet the couple they’re sharing a cabin with, Abby and Carlos (Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega).  Abby seems much younger than Carlos, but Jessie lets that slide, especially because Carlos seems to take an immediate interest in Jessie, and he doesn’t seem too concerned about hiding it.  Abby seems annoyed, but says nothing.  Roy is too jazzed about being on trains and interacting with the locals to really notice.  Carlos also seems to be pretty cagey about the souvenirs he’s carrying around in his suitcase.

At one of their scheduled stops, both couples leave the train to stretch their legs.  When the train leaves for the next leg, Jessie suddenly realizes something: Roy’s not on the train.  She didn’t see him get back on.  In fact, no one can recall seeing Roy re-board the train.  The movie plays a little by making us think one thing has happened, when it may or may not have…we can’t be sure.

And then, in true Hitchcock fashion, things start to spiral into one unexpected development after another, until the movie becomes about something entirely different than what you thought it was going to be.  Without getting into too many other details, Jessie finds herself trapped in a lie that she absolutely cannot back out of, no matter how much she wants to, because doing so would cause more harm than good.  Even when she’s presented with a life or death situation, she still can’t go back on it, and the story is constructed so tightly that it’s never for a moment unclear on her motivations.  You always see the “why” to her actions.

This other level to the movie is what separates it from the pack and places it in a higher weight class.  The screenplay is a masterpiece of suspense.  There’s a scene involving her camera that had me yelling, “Oh, NO!” at the screen…and I’ve SEEN the movie before.  You won’t believe the amount of suspense that will be generated with a slightly-open camera bag, or the fact that there’s never a garbage can around when you need one, or just the absence of a train stewardess.

This movie stands apart in its genre because the characters behave EXACTLY as they should, with perfect logic, and it never feels forced.  The bad guys are never too stupid, and the good guys are never too smart.  (They get pretty lucky a couple of times, but what are you gonna do?)  I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that, by the end, some characters are happy and others are not quite so much, but I don’t think you’ll be able to guess who will last that long.

This is a treasure of a film to be sought out and…uh, treasured.

DEATH RACE (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 42%

PLOT: Ex-con Jensen Ames (Statham) is forced by the warden (Allen) of a notorious prison to compete in the post-recession world’s most popular sport: a car race in which death-row inmates can kill each other on the road to victory.


I’m in the middle of watching movies from 2008, so why am I passing up the chance to write about such gems as Hellboy II: The Golden Army, The Hurt Locker (made in ’08, RELEASED in ’09), or The Dark Knight, in favor of this drek?

Because there’s a great quote from famed movie critic Pauline Kael: “Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”

I do not always appreciate trash, I have to be honest.  The appeal of most of Adam Sandler’s early films escapes me.  I have seen only one, repeat, ONE, Fast and Furious movie.  I think Cruel Intentions should be mocked mercilessly and at every opportunity.

On the other hand, I think Wild Things is an underappreciated neo-noir classic.  (And no, it has nothing to do with the sex scenes.  …fine, it has very little to do with the sex scenes.)  I can remember plunking down good money to go see Freddy vs. Jason at the AMC Veterans.  The trailers promised a great fight scene between the two, and as those of you who saw that trashy masterpiece will remember, there were not one, but THREE fight scenes between those two horror titans.  Money well spent.

And so it is with Death Race.  The trailers promised fast cars, machine guns, and stuff getting blowed up real good.  And brother, this movie makes good on that promise.

Not only that, but with the exception of, perhaps, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this is the closest I’ve ever seen a movie get to recreating the ineffable vibe of a video game, particularly driving games like “Flatout”, the “Need for Speed” series, and even “MarioKart.”  In the world of the film, drivers (convicted criminals on death row) hurtle around a closed oval track for three laps.  The track is built in and around a prison that looks it was built on the bones of an old factory that made, well, who knows what, there’s just rusty metal and big empty warehouses and smokestacks everywhere.  Drivers have to maneuver in and around these obstacles.  Look carefully, and you can take a shortcut if you’re agile enough…just like in “Flatout.”

They’ve even found a way to utilize power-ups.  All cars are equipped with defensive and offensive measures: machine guns, napalm, smoke, oil, etcetera.  But they can only be activated by driving your car directly over special panels embedded in the track, and only when those panels are lit.  Drive over a sword, your guns are activated.  Drive over a shield, your smokescreen is activated.  Drive over a “Death’s Head”…well, you can imagine.

The action during the race is filmed with lots of quick cuts, a lot of shaky-cam, and is best played at full volume so by the time it’s over you’ll wonder if there was ever a time you couldn’t hear machine-gun fire and V8 engines.  But I gotta say, it is effective.  On that primal, reptile-brain, teenage boy level, I get juiced watching all that Detroit metal drifting around a grimy industrial track, guns blazing, explosions booming, engines roaring, and the occasional spectacular crash involving lots of fire and lots of airborne cars, flipping through the air in absolute defiance of the laws of physics.  It’s glorious.

When it comes to the script, well, what can I say?  The script exists as the nail on which to hang the adrenaline-fueled portrait of bad-ass car races.  If you think it’s possible to create a movie pitched at the level of a video game with an Oscar-winning screenplay, well, my friend, I’d love to see you try.  Expecting great dialogue from a movie like this is like going to Five Guys and getting pissed off at the chef for not including lobster thermidor on the menu.  You want fine dining?  Go to Ruth’s Chris.  You want a great big burger that’ll stick to your ribs for three days?  Five Guys is the place.  *GRATUITOUS PLUG.*

Speaking of chefs, director Paul W.S. Anderson’s filmography is a veritable cornucopia of trash, some great, some not-so-great.  Here are the, I guess, highlights: Mortal Kombat (1995), Event Horizon (1997), Soldier (1998), Resident Evil (2002), AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) – that’s one of the great-trash ones. You get the idea.  He’ll never win awards, but he knows his audience, he knows what he’s good at, and he’s made more feature-length films than Stanley Kubrick.  (I don’t know what that last bit means exactly, but it sounds good.)

I totally understand the hate for Death Race.  It’s loud, obnoxious, incredibly basic, and (something I haven’t touched on yet) completely wastes the talents of acting legend Joan Allen.  Fair enough.  But when it comes to cars and guns and women (forgot about the women, too) and explosions and more guns and more cars…I can honestly say that this great trash delivers what it promises.  Not every film has done that.

GOOD BOYS (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Gene Stupnitsky
Cast: Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, Brady Noon, Will Forte, Stephen Merchant
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 79% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Three sixth-grade boys ditch school and embark on an epic journey while carrying accidentally stolen drugs, being hunted by teenage girls, and trying to make their way home in time for a long-awaited party.


You will either love Good Boys for the humor, or you will hate it for exactly the same reason.  There can be no middle of the road.  You will either guffaw through the entire film, as I did, or you will gape in shock at the behavior and language demonstrated by tween boys.

If you’re one of those people who cannot comprehend the humor to be derived from watching curious boys who haven’t yet hit puberty staring at sex toys and wondering what the hell they’re for (“What are ‘a-nahl beads’?”), then this movie is not for you.  It’s just not.  No amount of philosophizing or rationalization will make it “okay.”  The fact that the movie made me laugh pretty much beginning to end carries no weight.  I respect your opinion.  If you want to stop reading this review, I wouldn’t blame you.  Now’s your chance.  I don’t want to waste your time.  Quit now.

Okay.

If you kept reading, you’re one of those people like me who laughed through every second of the trailers for this movie, hoping against hope that they didn’t just show us all the funny bits in the trailer.  Thank the comedy gods, they didn’t.  Good Boys is the funniest movie I’ve seen this year so far, and it may wind up being the funniest comedy of the year.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you know the plot: three 6th-graders accidentally steal some “molly” from two college girls, who offer to trade it for an expensive drone they captured while the boys were using it to spy on them.  See, the boys have been invited to a “kissing” party, but they know nothing about kissing, so they were using the drone to spy on these two college girls to see if they would kiss.  Before that, they tried using the internet, but instead of just searching for “how to kiss a girl”, they jumped right into searching for “boobies” and “porn”…which did not end well.

Read that last sentence.  If I were the father of one of those kids, I would not find that funny.  I can understand from an intellectual standpoint how a kid that young can be curious about such things, but if I found out my kid had been searching for that stuff online, as a parent, I’d be upset.  So I can see how this movie might put some people off.

But I promise you.  This movie magically takes what would be uncomfortable in real life and mines those situations for the kind of belly laughs that I haven’t had in a movie theater since The Hangover.  And it’s not salacious or prurient, because they have NO IDEA what they’re looking at, or even talking about.  (The description one of them gives for what a tampon is used for is worth the price of admission.)

As the movie progresses, the screenplay doesn’t forget to give us reasons to like these kids.  We get glimpses of one of their families in particular, as they inform him they’re getting divorced.  (“You’ll get TWO Taco Tuesdays now!  Just…one of them will be on Wednesday.”)  One of them has a real gift for singing, but doesn’t want to look too uncool, so he doesn’t sign up for an audition.  One has a crush on a girl, but is so nervous about her that he talks to his friends about how he hopes one day to make actual eye contact.  Too many comedies make the GAGS the point of the film instead of the characters.  While the gags are fast and furious in Good Boys, they MEAN more, and are funnier, because we know who these kids are, and what makes them tick.

I’m trying to think of what else to write, but it would just be a catalog of the best gags and lines in the movie.  (“I’m gonna be a social piranha!”)  I don’t believe finding this movie funny is bad or immoral.  I know there are people out there who might think so, and I empathize.  But I know what makes me laugh, and I have to be true to myself, so…there you go.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Andrew Adamson
Cast: Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis, Liam Neeson, Eddie Izzard
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 66%

PLOT: The Pevensie siblings return to Narnia, where they are enlisted to once again help ward off a tyrant and restore the rightful heir to the land’s throne, Prince Caspian (Barnes).


If The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian had been released in a world without the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter franchise, I believe (but cannot prove) it would have been hailed as one of the great works of fantasy cinema, with deeply drawn characters, political intrigues, spectacular battle scenes, and scores of wondrous creatures, some of the best put on film.  Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world, and despite scoring over $400 million at the box office, it fell far shy of its 2005 predecessor, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and was declared a failure.

I don’t mean to suggest that previous franchises are to blame for this so-called failure, but in re-watching it, it’s virtually impossible not to compare Prince Caspian to its epic predecessors, especially Lord of the Rings.  Look at the visuals of the final epic battle in front of Aslan’s How.  A massive army slowly advances on a stone-built fortress, while giant catapults hurl boulders from a safe distance.  Narnia?  Or the Battle of Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King?  At one point, a small army of sentient trees intervenes.  Narnia?  Or the Battle of Orthanc at the end of The Two Towers?  Susan Pevensie wards off numerous attackers using only a bow and arrow.  Shades of Legolas, wouldn’t you say?

Whatever.  It takes a conscious effort of will, but I believe it is possible to enjoy Prince Caspian on its own merits rather than judging it by comparison.  Once you can do that, this is a highly enjoyable adventure.  It captures the spirit of the source material, while also combining a childlike enthusiasm for all things fantastic, from centaurs to minotaurs to talking badgers, with a dark, mature storyline involving Game-of-Thrones-level castle politics.

In Prince Caspian, the Pevensie children are living their lives in 1942 London when they are once again magically transported back to Narnia, where they once ruled as beloved kings and queens.  However, time seems to move much faster in Narnia; whereas only a year has passed in the real world since they returned to London, over a thousand years have elapsed in Narnia.  During that time, the castle where they sat in power has been reduced to overgrown ruins that are barely recognizable.  Narnians (magical creatures) are forced to live in hiding.  And Aslan himself is nowhere to be found.

I found this particular story element rather powerful, but it’s hard to pinpoint why.  If I had to guess, it’s because it’s almost like a post-apocalyptic tale.  “We used to live here, when things were good.  Now something terrible has happened, and everything we’ve known is reduced to ruin.  What do we do now?  How do we rebuild?”  That kind of thing.  I guess.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with a full summary, which you can find online.  There’s a prince who’s been exiled by his greedy uncle, a talking mouse voiced by Eddie Izzard – an outspoken atheist appearing in a movie based on a work of Christian fiction, how ‘bout that? – daring rescues, single combat, an ingenious trap, and a provocative ending that suggests at least one Earthly traveler may have visited Narnia even before the Pevensies.

I think this is one of the most underrated and unfairly dismissed fantasy films in recent years.

SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: André Øvredal
Cast: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush
My Rating: 3/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 80% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In order to save their lives, a group of kids face their fears as manifested by a haunted book of stories that write themselves.


I learn from Wikipedia that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is based on a popular series of horror stories from the ‘80s, written for a young-adult audience, much like the Goosebumps books, I would imagine.  (I have to imagine, because I have never read a single Goosebumps book.)  If the stories are anything like the trilogy of so-called terror presented in the film, they must be scary indeed.  At least on paper.

The plot: a group of teenagers in 1968 – why that year, specifically?  No idea – discover a book in a local haunted house, a REAL haunted house, that is supposedly filled with stories that a crazy woman would read to local kids through the walls of her basement where she was kept prisoner by her family.  They unwisely take the book from the house and should therefore be unsurprised when the stories in the book start to play out for real.

As a film, Scary Stories delivers occasional shocks without suspense.  You know what I’m talking about, right?  The scene where something jumps at the screen and the soundtrack goes DA-DUM!!!  …and it’s just a cat.  The entire movie is like that.  There are attempts to build suspense, but they fail to do so.

Ironically for a film with “Stories” in its title, I think the problem lies with the storytelling.  The stories on their own are fairly creepy, and seem like they could provide material for a much scarier film.  A scarecrow that comes to life?  A creepy-looking woman who just keeps walking closer and closer to you no matter what you do?  An animated corpse wondering who stole its big toe?  (Okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea.)  These would indeed be great stories to tell in the dark, preferably around a campfire or at a slumber party with the lights out and the doors and windows unlocked.

But the film stumbles, and it’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what happened.  Maybe it rushes through the “in-between” material, the filler between the episodes of terror.  By rushing through those scenes, we really don’t get to know enough about the children who wind up in peril, and consequently we don’t care when they’re being stalked by monsters, etc.

Maybe it’s the fact that these stories, scary as they are on their own, are re-treads of classic horror tropes that we’ve seen over and over and OVER again.  But it can’t be that because, honestly, I have no beef with old tropes, as long as you tell the story well.  (Some might call that “putting old wine in a new bottle”, but if it’s a snazzy enough bottle, I’ll give it a pass… Avatar, anyone?)

So it has to be the storytelling.  The shocks were only periodically effective, and there are some disturbing visuals.  (My favorite involves the creepy-looking woman who keeps getting closer and close, which reminded me of a better film, It Follows.  For that matter, if you want a GREAT horror movie centered on a book, beg, borrow, or steal (not really) The Babadook.  Now THERE’S a scary story.  But I digress.)

There are some disturbing visuals, but the film just felt like it was keeping everyone at arm’s length.  Instead of getting sucked into the stories, I felt like I was watching it from inside the concession stand at a drive-in.  I was a distant observer.

You wanna know what the best part of the movie was?  The full trailer for Zombieland: Double Tap before the movie even started.  Not a great sign.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A story of family, religion, hatred, oil, and madness, focusing on a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business.


My first draft of this review got up to nearly 1300 words before I realized I was just spinning my wheels.  This is quite simply one of the most original, most daring, most engrossing films of the new millennium that I have ever seen.  And after a while, my first draft became just a list, ticking off and describing scenes that I feel make it great, rather than a precise review.

So instead of giving a full film summary, which you can find elsewhere online, I’m going to try and instead give an actual review.  I’m going to gush a little bit (no pun intended), because it’s a masterpiece, but I’m just going to have to live with that, I guess.

When I first saw this movie (with my good friend Marc Sanders, as it happens, at a free preview), I remember leaving the theater feeling inspired.  Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in There Will Be Blood has, to this day, been in the back of my mind every time I’m on stage, whether it’s a drama, comedy, or whatever.  It genuinely makes me want to be a better actor.  Oh, I’ve seen great performances before from the likes of Nicholson, Hoffman, O’Toole, and the rest, but there’s something about the laser-like intensity of Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview that had me gawping at the screen in awe as the film played out.  I can’t fully explain it.  It was, and remains, a religious experience to behold.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Daniel Plainview is a turn-of-the-century prospector who thrives in the early days of the oil boom in America, but when his ambition crosses paths with a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Eli Sunday, things get a little testy.)

So, there you go, the acting is not just top-notch, it’s revelatory.

But then there’s the movie itself, exhibiting a level of craftsmanship I haven’t seen since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.  The plot itself reads like one of those summaries of films that great directors dreamed of making, but were unable to for various reasons, like Kubrick’s unrealized biography of Napoleon.  I mean, who wants to see a 160-minute movie about oil drilling?  Why would anyone care?  Why should anyone care?

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s ingenuity relies heavily on the acting and casting choices, and of course the ingenious screenplay, but any discussion of the film also has to mention the score.  As much as any other element, the film’s musical score creates and sustains a mood of dread and suspense over such banal scenes as pipeline being laid, oil derricks being built, men surveying land, etcetera.  The atonal and urgent score suggests that what we’re seeing is the prelude to some sort of apocalyptic event or incipient bloodshed.  It keeps you on the edge of your seat, as if around the corner an earthquake or mass murder is waiting.

(Sometimes the ABSENCE of the score is just as disturbing, as in the scene in a church when Daniel Plainview is reluctantly baptized, or most of the scenes in the finale, taking place in 1927.)

But ticking off these technical details still feels lacking.  This is the second draft of this review, and I still feel as if I’m not getting across how much this movie works on the viewer.  Or, at least, how it worked on ME.  This was only the third time I’ve watched the movie since first seeing it in 2007, and I was hooked all over again, right from the opening shot, with those dissonant strings playing over a panorama of sunbaked hills and scrub brush.

The movie just FEELS perfect.  It’s anchored by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in literally every scene except two that I can recall.  But the artistry of everything else at play is just…I am at a loss for words.  It is, as another review puts it, “wholly original.”  There is just nothing else like it.  Sure, it’s definitely inspired by Kubrick, but it takes things to another level.

It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Timothy Olyphant, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A fading television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame and success in the film industry during the final years of Hollywood’s first Golden Age in 1969 Los Angeles.


Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is a little bit like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  It’s big, bombastic, and goes the long way around the barn to get to the finale, but in the end it all makes sense and is a transcendent experience.

Let’s see, where do I start?

First of all, the film’s evocation of 1969 Los Angeles is like Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way.  I’m no fashion scholar or visual historian, but every exterior shot of the city was pretty convincing to my layman’s eyes.  The movie theatres, the movie posters, the restaurants (anyone else remember “Der Weinerschnitzel”?), the cars, those HUGE sedans sharing the road with VW Bugs and M/G’s…it’s clear they did their homework.

There’s the performances by the two leads.  Tarantino once said he considered himself the luckiest director in modern history because he was able to get DiCaprio and Pitt to work on the same film.  Can’t argue with him on that score.  They carry the film in a way that few other tandems could have.  (Newman and Redford come to mind.) Mind you, DiCaprio and Putt don’t look much like each other, considering one has to be the other’s stuntman, but you get the idea.

Above all, there’s the story.  DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a former leading man from ‘50s TV westerns who is now playing colorful bad guys in ‘60s TV westerns.  Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, the stuntman who’s been taking the dangerous falls for Dalton for years.  Dalton happens to live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

All the trailers, and all the industry buzz, reveal that the Manson family and Sharon Tate play a part in the film.  That’s no spoiler.  Given what we know about those events, the movie plays like Gimme Shelter, the landmark documentary about the ill-fated concert at Altamont that was actually due to take place a few months after the events of this film.  It’s all very suspenseful, in the sense that we know what’s coming, but we’re just not sure how the movie is going to approach it.  So every scene with poor Sharon Tate in it is overshadowed by the fact that we know her ultimate fate in history.

It’s like the famous Hitchcock analogy of suspense.  Two people are eating at a restaurant when a bomb suddenly goes off under their table…that’s surprise.  Put those same two people at the restaurant, where the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, but it doesn’t go off right away as the two people eat and converse and have dessert, and we’re wondering will they leave BEFORE the bomb goes off or not…?  That’s suspense.

And that’s the genius of this movie, with Tarantino’s sprawling, winding screenplay.  We get to know Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth intimately, we get the rhythms of their relationship, of Dalton’s mood on set, of Booth’s quiet acceptance of his role as Dalton’s sole support system.  We are treated to lengthy scenes showing Dalton at work on the set of a TV western, so we can appreciate the vast differences between an actor and their characters.  There’s a brilliant backstage scene between Dalton and a child actor who is impossibly, hilariously advanced for her age, and who winds up giving Dalton some goodhearted advice.

And interspersed through it all is Sharon Tate.  Sharon Tate bopping to music at home.  Sharon Tate picking up a female hitchhiker on her way into town.  Sharon Tate almost passing, then backing up to admire with youthful excitement, her name on the marquee of a movie theatre, right next to (gasp) Dean Martin’s name!  Sharon Tate dancing, walking, smiling, drinking…living.  She’s the diner at the restaurant, and the Manson family is the bomb we know will eventually go off.  It casts a pall over the proceedings, but not in a bad way.  It’s an interesting way to bring the reality of the situation into focus from time to time.

And now I have to end this review before I inadvertently give away certain, ah, plot elements that elevate Tarantino’s film from a mere character study or period piece into the heady heights of cinematic transcendence.  I have not myself read any reviews of the film, so I can only guess that whatever negative reviews are out there probably center on the film’s finale, or perhaps on its meandering script.  All I can say, or will say, is that I am firmly on Tarantino’s side on this one.  The way the conclusion was written and filmed is the kind of thing that people will still be talking about years from now.

So just take it from me.  If you’re a movie fan, and ESPECIALLY if you’re a Tarantino fan, this is right up your alley.  It’s easily his most slowly paced movie since Jackie Brown, but that just gives you time to e-e-e-ease into the characters, like putting on a tailored suit piece by piece.  This film, like Beethoven’s Ninth, is a masterpiece.

MIDSOMMAR (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Ari Aster
Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren
My Rating: 6/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 82% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A couple travels to Sweden to visit a rural hometown’s fabled mid-summer festival, but what begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into a series of increasingly bizarre rituals at the hands of a pagan cult.


There is a lot to like in Midsommar, the second film from Ari Aster, director of last year’s masterful Hereditary.  It clocks in at 2 ½ hours, and the vast majority of that running time is devoted to creating and maintaining an atmosphere of unsettling oddness, where I was constantly asking myself, “Okay, what the hell is going on here?”  That’s a tricky task, because if you get it wrong, you wind up boring your audience.  And I was never bored during Midsommar.  So there’s that.

The plot: a young woman, Dani, suffers a terrible tragedy and turns for comfort to her boyfriend, Christian, who, truth be told, had been looking for an excuse to end things with Dani before the aforementioned tragedy struck.  But he stays with her more out of duty than real love, and they wind up going to Sweden with a bunch of friends on the recommendation of a college classmate of theirs who tells them of a marvelous nine-day solstice celebration held in his hometown, a quaint country village in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t seem to have or need electricity.

This place is…strange.  In scenes of ordinary behavior that nevertheless manage to somehow give you goosebumps, we observe the villagers performing tasks that would be at home in Amish country: folding clothes, preparing meals, gathering flowers, and the like.  Everything is brightly lit due to the perpetual sunlight at that time of year in that part of Sweden, and all that light somehow, instead of draining the scenes of suspense, actually increases it.  It’s very hard to describe accurately.  (Even the architecture contributes to this sense of unease, with a couple of buildings built with the kind of angles that would have been at home in a Tim Burton film.)

The film takes its time establishing this bright, passive weirdness.  One of the college friends asks the purpose of one of the strange buildings and is told it’s a temple…but no one is allowed there.  There are plainly crops in a field…but it’s difficult if not impossible to tell what’s being grown.  There’s a large bear in a wooden cage that the villagers seem not to notice or care about.   Some of the young village women openly admire Dani’s strapping boyfriend, much to Dani’s annoyance.

Then there’s a bizarre ceremony that starts out with a ritualized dinner, and then two of the older villagers are taken to a high cliff on the edge of the village, and…

Well, that’s when things REALLY start to get weird.  And bloody.  And even more trippy.  I think that’s where I have to stop describing events in the movie.

So.  Like I said, the film does a great job at creating this superbly unsettling atmosphere and maintaining it.  I couldn’t wait to see what was coming up next. But then the movie reached a point where it became obvious how it was going to end…

SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT, I SAY AGAIN, SPOILER ALERT.

When it became clear that this was NOT going to have a Hollywood ending, I didn’t mind at first.  I mean, Hereditary doesn’t end happily, and I thought it was brilliant.  (Well, I didn’t at first, but I do now.)  But…ugh.  In the last five minutes or so before the credits, instead of sucking in my breath at the audacity of this ending, I was instead shaking my head, saying to myself, “What the f***…?”  And not in a good way.  Midsommar ends with a whimper, not with a bang.

Which is so disappointing.  For 135 minutes, I was breathless with anticipation for the next scene.  And they lost me in the last five.  I HATE it when that happens.

I’m sure there are levels to Midsommar that make it more than just a horror movie.  No doubt there are all sorts of psychological – psychiatric? – parallels between the rituals of the village and the relationship between Dani and her boyfriend.  No doubt.  But when a movie loses me that badly at the end, all the poetic symbolism in the world won’t make me change my opinion.

Midsommar is a long ride for a short day at the beach. A crowded beach with no lifeguard and lots of seaweed.