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THE UGLY STEPSISTER (2025)

May 21, 2025 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

It’s all the rage to take traditional stories and invert them by making a sympathetic villain the protagonist, but THE UGLY STEPSISTER (2025, streaming on Shudder), a fresh take on the Cinderella story, drives it to a whole new level. Rather than skating on the premise, this Norwegian horror film aims for from-the-ground-up reinvention as it harvests brutal body horror and strong themes, making this movie a cross between Cinderella and THE SUBSTANCE.

In this movie, Elvira travels with her sister Alma to a new home in a country ruled by the dashing Prince Julian, whose book of love poems inspired Elvira into a swoon of passion and desire for a fairy-tale romance. There, she meets her new stepfather and stepsister Agnes, whom she initially admires but comes to resent for being naturally graceful and beautiful. When the stepfather dies, Elvira’s mother needs to marry Elvira off to raise money, with them sharing a goal of her marrying the handsome Prince Julian, who is hosting a ball where he will choose his bride.

Thus begins a brutal competition where Elvira will do anything to transform herself to become beautiful using painful and primitive beauty methods and gain what she believes is the perfect man and life.

Thematically, pretty much everything is covered here, from the unfairness of beauty standards and the sacrifices and pressure to conform to them to the belief that beauty is the ticket to a perfect romance and life. While it’s low-hanging fruit, it’s done extremely well by showing (in the most brutal way possible) instead of telling, trusting the audience to get it. From the start, Elvira is a deeply sympathetic character, slowly sacrificing her inner for outer beauty. The sets and costumes all look both formal and shabby, reinforcing the conflict between image and reality. While Agnes is her opponent, the real antagonist is her mother, who gets everything she wants by selling sex, whom Elvira will become if she carries on her path. And then there’s the body horror, which on a 1-10 Cronenberg scale jumps between 7 and 11, made all the more horrific because we really come to care for Elvira as a character.

Overall, I found THE UGLY STEPSISTER impressive and liked it a lot. It could have traded on a gimmick and instead reached for something far more substantial and affecting.

Filed Under: APOCALYPTIC/HORROR, MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies, Movies & TV, The Blog

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE

May 19, 2025 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Netflix’s adaptation of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is a wondrous and gorgeous work of art. This terrific adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s groundbreaking 1967 novel received plenty of accolades but not as much attention as it deserved, and I’m hoping this post will do its tiny part in rectifying that.

This novel of magical realism influenced generations of Latin American writers. I read it many years ago and remember being mesmerized by its episodic multi-generation plot, strangeness, and often melancholy tone fitting its themes of solitude, fate, and how history repeats itself. Magical realism can be challenging to do right in a screen adaptation, however, and the sprawling nature of the novel seemed to outright defy the possibility, with Márquez apparently stating he wrote it to prove a written work can be so much bigger than any cinematic production.

Nonetheless, this adaptation captures all of the beauty, melancholy, and wonder of the source work. In this story, the Buendía family travels deep into the wilderness to found a new town and a simple, naive society based on harmony, which is constantly challenged internally by love and betrayal and externally by government and eventually civil war. Spanning several family generations, these primal and cycling events are given an almost mythical flavor by the story’s magical realism, which includes ghosts, a plague of insomnia, a trail of blood announcing a death, and the stars turning into yellow flowers that rain on the town. The acting is solid, and the world is beautiful and visually lush and fun to explore. I found myself completely charmed by this show and was sorry to see it conclude.

The eight episodes comprising the first season cover the first third of the novel, with a second season already in the works that will cover the rest of the story. I’m looking forward to catching the rest of this extraordinary adaptation.

Filed Under: MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

ADOLESCENCE

March 23, 2025 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In the British Netflix miniseries ADOLESCENCE, a 13-year-old boy is arrested for murder. In four separate but linked stories, we see how the arrest impacted everyone around him and piece together what happened and why. It is a brutal, arresting watch for pure human drama, and it blew me away.

The story begins with police bursting into a home to arrest Jamie Miller on suspicion of savagely murdering his classmate Katie Leonard. Thus begins ADOLESCENCE in a breathless first episode that will have your blood boiling and shatter your nerves if you’re a parent. It looks like Jamie did it, but did he?

In the next three episodes, we see the police investigation at Jamie’s school, a psychologist questioning the boy at a detention center, and see how his family is coping and struggling for hope, answers, and peace.

Each episode is a single take, normally a technically ambitious but in these episodes a tremendous feat as we travel through a large, perfectly conceived realistic setting. Stephen Graham, who co-wrote and starred as Jamie’s dad, is no stranger to this type of filmmaking after doing BOILING POINT. That was set in a restaurant, though, and in ADOLESCENCE we follow the characters through an entire police station, high school, and town. You really feel like you’re there, and stretches of little mundane things happening take on the gravity of a dramatic pause rather than produce boredom. From timing to everything happening in the background, it’s all meticulously planned, though it doesn’t look it but instead feels completely natural.

The actors are just incredible, every single one absolutely nails it, with the great Stephen Graham leading the pack. The actor who plays Jamie, in particular, was a real standout.

The themes are as grueling as the drama. The horrible role of social media in teen’s lives, the bullying, incel subculture, never-ending hierarchy of popularity haves and have-nots, and how you think you’re doing parenting right but you never know the one thing that might have a negative influence on how your child sees the world. At the heart of this is boys and girls, young boys thinking girls have all the power, lacking positive mentor role models, and thinking you have to be aggressive to stand up for yourself. Beautifully done, none of the themes are explicit, instead offering the entire story as food for thought and discussion.

Overall, ADOLESCENCE is a powerful, heart-shredding, thought-providing, and very human drama. Highly recommended.

Filed Under: MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

AMERICAN PRIMEVAL

January 26, 2025 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Utterly violent, AMERICAN PRIMEVAL was a lot of fun to watch, though its relentless point about the savagery of the Old West becomes numbing at the end.

The series is about a group of people who find themselves at or near a lonely outpost serving traders and travelers in the Utah region, who find themselves entangled after a massacre based on the historical Mountain Meadows Massacre that occurred in 1857 during the Utah War. The result is a bloody clash of cultures between the U.S. government, the Mormon militia, and the local Shoshone tribe.

I would have loved to have had a seat in this pitch meeting. I can picture the writer pitching it as “BLOOD MERIDIAN with romance.”

The story mostly focuses on a woman traveling with her son, who must cross the mountains to find her husband. Fortunately, she falls in with a wagon train heading west to California. Unfortunately, she’s on the run from bounty hunters, and the wagon train is doomed. Enter a brooding loner who might just be able to get her across the savage wilderness. She teaches him to care about people again, while he teaches her that to survive, she will have to shed many of her civilized morals and become hard.

The scenery is of course gorgeous, the world building offering an authentic feel. The savagery feels on point for what is known about the Wild West and in particular this region during hysteria about persecution among the Mormons, which had established an armed theocracy under Brigham Young, as well as the Shoshone who are steadily getting squeezed out of their lands. The characters feel larger than life, and the dialogue and pacing are good. For those who like action, there is a body count that would make even Quentin Tarantino blush. The casting is great, the acting solid.

On the downside, it’s hard to say what the point of it all is other than, yeah, one had to be hard to survive the Wild West. The story is largely a tragedy, though it’s difficult to discern what if anything the filmmakers were trying to say other than showing a lot of people being bastards and killing each other in the Old West would be cool to watch.

Overall, I didn’t expect much and had fun with AMERICAN PRIMEVAL. It’s bloody and over the top, and if that doesn’t bother you, it’s quite a bit of fun.

Filed Under: MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

December 21, 2024 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022), a 19th century applejack salesman’s orchard is destroyed when a beaver gnaws through one of the beams supporting a giant keg, which rolls into his house and blows up. Jean wakes up in winter and finds himself in a struggle to catch food, then decides to become a fur trapper, and finally sets out to trap enough furs he can win the hand of the lovely daughter of the local supplies trader.

This movie is wacked in the best ways, sort of a live-action, multimedia TOM AND JERRY cartoon where the wildlife consists of people in animal costumes and the conflict between Jean and the animals plays as nonstop slapstick comedy. There’s a simple gaming element in Jean acquiring enough fish and pelts to trade to slowly build up his capabilities with items like weapons. The last act overplays its hand a bit, but overall, it’s great fun, with plenty of goofy laugh-out-loud moments.

I enjoyed this one a lot for its borrowing what worked about old childhood cartoons and using them to carve out its own goofy identity with a simple story that is fun and never, ever takes itself seriously.

Filed Under: MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX (2024)

December 21, 2024 by Craig DiLouie 1 Comment

In JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX, everyone’s favorite archvillain returns in a film I didn’t hate as much as some but could not appreciate.

I enjoyed the first film in 2019, though I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the right word, as I found it a good film but unpleasant and sometimes feeling a bit like work. I certainly admired its ambition, tone, and grit, how it took a comic book villain and threw him into the real world with a startling and surprising origin story. But I found it pretty cynical overall. Unlike in the excellent DARK KNIGHT, where the Joker was crazy but had a strong guiding philosophy that directly contrasted with Batman’s, in JOKER, the Joker is, well, just mentally ill, beaten down by the world so much he becomes a grandstanding narcissist who murders people he resents. The riot at the end of the movie teased that there might be more to it, as a lot of angry people in Gotham connect with his lashing out, suggesting the start of a movement celebrating chaos and the birth of a true supervillain. I thought, okay, that was the origin story, now we get the story of an archvillain.

Instead, we got, well, this.

First off, again I didn’t hate the movie, as I curbed my expectations before going into it. But after watching, I have to agree the film seemed to go out of its way to antagonize the first movie’s fans by not only subverting but curb stomping pretty much any hopeful expectation they might have had. Instead of a rampaging supervillain, we get a neutralized and neutered Joker, a tedious courtroom drama, and a musical (which I didn’t mind at first but thought should have been used as an accent instead of such a huge part of the runtime). Lady Gaga plays an intriguing Harley Quinn, and she acts as a catalyst for him to rediscover his inner Joker, only for there to be really almost no payoff for either character. Otherwise, the story pretty much stands for most of the movie, revisiting the events in the first film for most of its run and not really offering much that is new or interesting.

I caught a review on YouTube where I thought the reviewer really nailed how to fix it–tell the story from Harley’s point of view. She has a philosophy for the Joker’s chaos and uses Arthur Fleck to become the next Joker. Done this way, there would have been a real dynamic and engaging story instead of watching one where the story appears to retread its original material, leading some reviewers to wonder if the filmmakers were trolling their own work’s fans.

Anyway, if you liked the first movie, my guess is you probably won’t like the sequel. I don’t regret watching it, but I did find it a real failed opportunity.

Filed Under: MEDIA YOU MIGHT LIKE, Movies & TV, The Blog

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