Smile is a fun, engaging movie, but way too reliant on standard horror tropes, especially as the film winds to its conclusion.
The Times bestowed onto Smile its highest honor, the NYT Critic’s Pick. Oh, the Times. I suppose if you’ve never seen a horror/haunted spirit movie before. But I have. Watching the trailer again, it reminds me of what a great film this is throughout the beginning stages. My rating doesn’t reflect that, perhaps — because you’ve got to finish what you started. 6/10
Barbarian starts off with a great premise: two strangers booked into the same Airbnb house. Then it goes down the rabbit hole. That dark, recessed black hole — how many times have we seen that? I keep wishing for a David Lynch approach on that.
So, though not exactly original in big-picture story idea, Barbarian certainly springs out with its own twists. The biggest glitch in this movie requires a spoiler alert.
SPOILER ALERT!! SPOILER ALERT!!
The big problem I have with this movie is a common one any time there’s an otherwise human being living in bowels. And that is: the big scary beast who lives underground is a woman, I take it, who was born and raised in captivity in this underground hell. You’re not going to be very healthy living even a day or two like that, much less your whole life. So how is it that you possess some sort of super-human ability to capture and disable young, able-bodied, fit adults who venture into your lair.
I understand you have the element of surprise working for you, plus you’re on your home turf. But still, no.
Also — how are you getting your food? You never get sick living down there, so you’d have to see a doctor? This is related to my problem with zombie movies — how is that the walking dead are so much more virile than their fully-alive counterparts?
== END SPOILER SECTION ==
So that part doesn’t work so well — but I admit, I didn’t think of it until after the movie was done. That’s because Barbarian moves along at a good clip, again with its unique surprises — and there are no overt logic issues you notice as the film hies along.
Cregger [the director] isn’t as concerned with making bold political points as he is with orchestrating a snappy spectacle that goes a mile a minute. #MeToo, gentrification, the brutal underbelly of the Reagan era — all these elements fit like puzzle pieces into a broader nightmare that lets the context speak for itself. “Barbarian” is all the more creepy — and fun — because of it.
Lastly, titles are definitely, and delightfully, not MIA — so a low 8/10.
Comparison Notes: there’s a ton, but the most recent example is The Black Phone. Barbarian is vastly superior.
The Blumhouse stamp has come to mean good, direct and to-the-point scary entertainment without a lot of hokum or hocus-pocus. Sadly, The Black Phone does not meet expectations, despite engaging, spirited starting titles and compelling early development.
Quickly enough, The Black Phone reveals itself to be a boring, trite, re-tread of a film. I didn’t put a score down contemporaneously, so let’s say 4/10.
Comparison Notes: Don’t Breathe, a million other mediocre nearly identical films, and some good ones
This movie popped up on the telly last night, and I thought why not do a separate post on it. This is what I wrote in 2012:
At some point I’ll do a posting on zombie and vampire movies, but for now I recommend Jennifer’s Body (2009, 8/10). A little like an other-worldly Christian Slater in Heathers, Megan Fox plays the high school number-one popular cheerleader, who has been bitten by a bug, as it were, that gives her even greater empowerment, and renewed appetite for men that can be sated in only one way. Her best friend “Needy”, played by the compelling Amanda Seyfried, attempts to cope with her friend’s new exploits.
A terrific fairy-tale town setting of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, so named for a gushing whirlpool, instantly creates good will on behalf of the unfolding story. Highly recommended and perhaps the most pure fun of all the movies in this post.
Not exactly a Halloween movie, but close enough. Sometimes you just get lucky and a good movie gets made.
Hatching is a good movie, but first a note on its title. The title is NOT Hatching. It is, indeed, the Finnish word Pahanhautoja, which I’ve had a lot of trouble translating. Google won’t translate it, other references yield ominous phrases “Graves of evil” or simply “Graves” or “The scourge of.” Some sort of idiomatic or proper word I reckon. The Finnish poster has a stylized egg as the “O,” indicating that the English translation is close enough. In any case, as the film begins, the title is clearly displayed: “Pahanhautoja.” Not Hatching.
Why do I care? Because I did not know this was a foreign-language film until it started. I saw the trailer once a couple weeks before and was intrigued, but it didn’t stick in my memory that it was a foreign film, and definitely not Finnish. I’ve seen a few Swedish films, and a couple Norse ones, but I think this was my first Finnish film. A nice-sounding language, Finnish has a sing-song bounce like Swedish, and a maybe a little Icelandic, but also that tinge of Russian or a Cyrillic language.
It would have been nice to know I was going in to see a Finnish film. My issue: be up front with that. Don’t bury the Finnish provenance in your patronizing English marketing, IFC Midnight.
* * *
So the movie. It’s right about on par with X as far as overall entertainment value. X did not live up to its potential, whereas Pahanhautoja had a decent game plan and pretty much executed it, but still had some flaws. As shown in the trailer, a crow bumping into an otherwise solidly fixed chandelier isn’t going to cause said chandelier to come crashing down through the glass coffee table.
Pahanhautoja / Hatching gets credit for some originality on the doppelgänger theme, and as a different take on evolving human-creatures. Definitely a compelling and entertaining little picture. 7/10
I’ll hit on this in my review of Nope, which I saw last night, but Times movie critic A.O. Scott is a hack. He’s a great writer, which is par for the course with Times writers. But he seems to have great difficulty distinguishing good films from great ones, or good ones from not-good ones.
I pay for a Times subscription, so I earnestly wish that I could rely upon it for evaluation of films — but time and time(s) again, it fails me. So onward my blog marches, or slogs, as it were, ever so slowly…
* * *
I was very excited to see X, hoping to see some true innovation in the slasher genre. I suppose there was a little. It definitely hearkens back to those early slashers of the late seventies and eighties.
The movie features campy cheesy corn, just like good nachos. However, it is not completely self-aware to its own camp. X thinks more of itself than it deserves, and successfully bamboozled the critics as well. It strives to be creepy, and it was a little — maybe I’m jaded, but it just wasn’t that creepy.
And not really scary. There are a couple scary moments, but way too little. So you’re left with a campy horror movie that doesn’t know how to dive headlong into the cheesy corn, but that is also not scary. And titles are annoyingly MIA for no great reason — although at least the filmmaker thought there was, with the way to end the movie. But when given a strong genre theme, why not accentuate that right from the beginning with some strong titles?
It sounds like I hated X, but I did not — it was entertaining even with all its weakness.
* * *
Back to A.O. Scott. He called this movie “clever.” “Clever” is a powerful word, a strong word. A strong word to describe a movie, on that spectrum that leads up to “masterpiece” — which is also thrown around too often and too easily. Guessing here, as Scott lost me right at the outset with the “clever” demarcation, so I did not read the rest of his review, but I think Scott means it’s clever to combine the porn theme with the horror them. Yeah, no. There’s nothing clever about this thing. Just another hack statement by A.O. Scott.
Calling X clever is an insult to No Country for Old Men. An insult to Criminal Lovers. An insult to Django Unchained. And where on earth does it leave Mulholland Drive or that much better “X” movie, Ex Machina? I looked up the filmography of X’s maker Ti West, and it’s just a string of horror movies — conventional horror movies. Now I haven’t seen them, so maybe they’re filled with cleverness, but somehow I doubt it.
One last comparison – as far as the early porn industry, compared to the great masterpiece Boogie Nights, X is just pathetic. Did I mention I still liked it? The performances I did like, especially from the enigmatic star Mia Goth. Certainly a case of the star saving a weak plot. On the low side of 7/10
Candyman features some good bits, like the art world setting, but is mostly unoriginal, and, worse, just plain boring. It’s only about 90 minutes, but a drag anyway. Not the draggiest thing, but as a comparison, Old moved.
Which is too bad — there’s a good ‘vibe’ here and it’s a movie I wanted to like. Helping too are some cool artistic effects, for example the shadow puppets. But as the film creaked toward the end, I thought: there’s no way I would recommend this. 5/10
The Other Lamb features powerful performances and gorgeous, oft-skewed or inverted visuals; it gets lots of style points and certainly has an idea. But I was not buying large chunks of the premise — not so much the premise of a cult, one of my favorite themes, but the premise as laid out in the details.
One thing that Leave No Trace made clear: it’s not so easy or automatic to be a squatter. The details of exactly how you are so easily existing — even with law enforcement on your tail — need to be dealt with. Again, this is not a general rule, but as a filmmaker you cannot both live in a world of realistic detail and float above it — at least not without being much more more adept at the balancing act. 6/10
The Lodge presents a lesson in a lesson taken too far. It’s not with a couple flaws, and has a cliché or maybe two; nonetheless, it’s compelling and does a couple things that are new and interesting. Compelling, yes, but not quite “scary as Hell,” as the poster touts. On the low side of 7/10
movies remark 