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WHAT JOSIAH SAW (2021)

August 6, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In WHAT JOSIAH SAW (2021), an estranged family reunites at the family homestead, culminating a lifetime of trauma with horror. This is a surprisingly good horror film that plays with the slow burn in an almost literary telling, while nailing every unsavory Southern Gothic trope. This might be the best horror film I’ve watched so far this year.

For years, the Graham family lived on their farm–cruel patriarch Josiah (Robert Patrick, delivering a terrific capering menace), twins Mary (Kelli Garner, channeling a barely submerged crazy) and Eli (Nick Stahl, exuding pain and bad luck), and their younger, developmentally challenged brother Thomas (Scott Haze delivering a warring mix of cheerful and haunted). The mother is dead, the product of suicide. In four chapters, we see them living their separate lives of trauma, bad luck, and woe, finally coming together after an oil company makes an offer on buying the land.

But Josiah had a vision, a prophecy of how to make things right again.

This is Southern Gothic at its best (or worst, depending how you look at it). Society in decay, bad luck, grotesques, incest, firebrand religion, curses, murder, all of it kitchen-sinked and yet given a fresh (rather than tired or cheap) identity. As if to cover all the bases, every negative stereotype about the Romani are hung out like dirty laundry as well. These are people struggling with enormous trauma due to childhood abuse. This is mean, dark stuff, but not quite nihilistic, as there is hope for redemption. It’s just that there are different kinds of redemption.

It all comes together in its horrific end, assembling like a Southern Gothic horror version of PULP FICTION with just a touch of FRAILTY. This is where things weren’t quite as satisfying for me, however. The ending subverts expectations by recasting innocence and imposing justice over redemption, which is fine. The more I think about it the day after viewing, in fact, the more it works for me. I think the problem for me was in the execution. After the slow build, a lot of reveals and events come together in a way that feels rushed. This made the end somewhat unsatisfying in the moment, particularly with the final reveal that I felt should have come sooner.

Overall, I loved WHAT JOSIAH SAW. Wrapped in a psychological horror package, it’s sordid, sad, filled with dread and menace, builds its characters with care, drips with Southern Gothic tropes, and issues an Old Testament style of divine justice.

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

THE GREAT, Season 1 (2020)

August 4, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Looking at the trailer, my first impression of THE GREAT, an Amazon Prime series that reimagines the rise of Catherine the Great who deposed her husband and ruled Russia in the 1700s, was it was frivolous fluff that culturally over-modernized history to make it cute and leaned too hard into a social message I basically agree with but didn’t need hitting my head like a hammer. I was very happy to be utterly wrong. It’s damned good.

In the first season, Catherine (Elle Fanning, who grew on me just as the show ended up doing until I admired both) is a maid living in Germany and is excited about her coming betrothal to Peter, Emperor of Russia (played with a weird mix of savage comedy and just enough sympathy by Nicholas Hoult). Arriving at the Russian court, she receives one shock after another as her naive fantasies about being an empress are shattered. Peter is a childish, spoiled buffoon; out of fear, his court is filled with fawning sycophants routinely engaging in depravity out of boredom; and Russia itself is a giant slave state oppressed by the aristocracy and the orthodox church.

Over the course of the season, Catherine hopes she can inspire reforms, only to be regularly frustrated, even as Peter grains a grudging respect for her beyond her being merely a vessel for his heirs. So she begins a plot to depose her husband and take his throne for herself.

The result is fairly light, compressed, even frivolous, a strong first impression that lasts. It could have gone all the way with that and served up a titillating (horny) court drama blending history with contemporary culture for laughs while hammering a feminist message. Instead, THE GREAT’s creators put the work in to make something that is witty, funny, charming, and engaging, a story whose overall message works because the viewer discovers it for themselves. The characters are terrifically drawn and complex, even though they could as easily have been phoned in as caricatures. The show is surprisingly meaty, an exception to my usual binge watching as each episode felt complete, like I’d watched a movie. The pacing is solid, the sets beautiful, and there’s just enough real history to keep it more or less honest in a meta sense. As I watched the first season, delightful surprise turned to grudging respect for the writers and directors and finally to outright admiration. By the end, I was a fan.

Overall, THE GREAT is not particularly demanding, but it is a lot of fun, a rare entertainment that feels light while delivering something far weightier and solid.

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

TENET (2020)

August 4, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

From Christopher Nolan, who produced the exciting and mind-bending INCEPTION, TENET (2020) travels a similar path of complexity and action, but its sheer density and lack of character make it feel inaccessible, confusing, and chilly.

As for the plot, basically, it’s James Bond meets time travel. The future is engaging in a war against the past to reverse the flow of time and save themselves from a world dying from climate change, even if it means risking destroying humanity itself due to the Grandfather Paradox (you go back in time and kill your grandfather, so you never existed to do it in the first place). Enter the Protagonist, a CIA agent recruited into an organization fighting this time war.

Various objects are finding their way into the past from the future that are “inverted,” meaning they are traveling backward in time due to reverse entropy. Bullets fly into guns, explosions reassemble, etc. It’s all very cool, even if it doesn’t make much sense the more you think about it. As a scientist tells the Protagonist early on, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” For the viewer, this is very good advice. Anyway, the Protagonist must trace these inverted weapons and stop their owner from ending the world. What follows is a palindromic plot in which events flow forward and then backward and include battles in which people are fighting forward and backward in time.

TENET calls to mind THE DARK, a brilliant German TV series that examines an anomalous time loop created by the bootstrap paradox (e.g., a time traveler goes back in time and gives himself a book about how to do time travel, resulting in him learning how to do time travel in the first place). But where THE DARK has the time to stretch out and develop its ideas bit by bit as if building a working watch, and also develop its characters, TENET, despite its long runtime, doesn’t have these luxuries. Complicated exposition is dumped, sometimes with loud music or ambient noise obscuring it (I had to turn on subtitles a few times to follow the story). In some scenes, the rapid editing means missing key details if you blink. The plot rules the story, but it frequently changed with me feeling left behind. And then there’s a basic lack of character, which is probably the most notable flaw just as it is for me for most James Bond movies. The Protagonist is a blank slate in terms of his past, his personality, almost everything; he develops a quick, strong, and kinda inexplicable bond with the lead female protagonist and wants to protect her while saving the world, and that’s pretty much it.

The result is a strong James Bond kind of thriller that is stylish and with some action scenes that are absolutely thrilling to watch, particularly when people are inverted and have the advantage of knowing what has already happened so they can navigate events. The basic ideas are intriguing even if somewhat opaque to the point of being grating. This was close to being another INCEPTION, one of my favorite films. I probably would have enjoyed TENET far more if the concepts had been dumbed down a little more for movie watching, the plot had been more elegant, and the main character had been given stronger motivations, a character arc, personality, anything.

Anyway, see it for yourself. It’s certainly if not unique then highly distinctive among action films. I did enjoy it, despite what I saw as flaws. If nothing else, one has to admire its thought and ambition, along with its stylish, competent production and very clever visual scenes. I hope you’ll let me know what you thought.

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

THE BOYS, Season 3

July 13, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In Season 3 of Amazon Prime’s stellar THE BOYS, Homelander’s popularity is suffering among the mainstream but skyrocketing among men admiring his unrepentant macho act. As he becomes increasingly psychotic and dangerous, Billy the Butcher and the Boys, now government operatives, seek a weapon rumored to have killed Soldier Boy (a take on Captain America), which they believe will kill Homelander. Butcher, meanwhile, has another big card up his sleeve. The game is on, and it’s better than ever.

Based on the over-the-top graphic novels by Garth Ennis, THE BOYS accomplishes something amazing. It simultaneously lampoons comic-book superheroes, perfectly satirizes America by holding up a mirror to expose its glaring fault lines, and, at the same time, presents the most realistic depiction of what superheroes would actually be like. In Season 1, we saw the Seven, America’s greatest superheroes based on the Justice League, act like pampered celebrities. In Season 2, we saw the dangers of idealizing and worshipping them and flirting with the idea of giving them national defense powers. In Season 3, we see that superheroes don’t make you a better person, they only make you more of what you are, accentuating your flaws, and we see what happens when the weak project their desires onto a strongman who unfortunately also happens to be a psychopath.

Nothing is spared. The self-indulgent “Imagine” video celebrities put out during quarantine, corporations co-opting social justice movements, Pepsi’s horrible BLM commercial, Kyle Rittenhouse’s lame defense of murder, Trump and his heavily propagandized and fanatical following–the most hilarious bits aren’t so much the lampooning of the superheroes but of America itself, and they’re achieved simply, without any preaching, by holding up a mirror and asking you to take a look.

This season started off a little rougher than the previous two until it found its footing, reaching a little too hard for shock while delivering less of its natural comedy. Once things get rolling, though, and the fight is on, it blasts its way into its old brilliance. Soldier Boy, in particular, offers a fantastic and hilarious take on Captain America, coming back from the dead not with enduring American values but instead all its traditional prejudices. And Anthony Starr’s Homelander is even more menacing and unpredictable. Shifting alliances and a new weapon used by the Boys ups the ante and might just even the playing field. The worst of the bunch don’t always lose but are sometimes served a comeuppance in which they realize how horrible they are and have to live with it. All of the conflict that simmered outside the public eye for two seasons is coming to a head, and in the next season, we may see it boil over into a polarized America.

I’ll be there to watch it, can’t wait.

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

GONJIAM, HAUNTED ASYLUM (2018)

July 6, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Another impressive horror film from Korea, GONJIAM, HAUNTED ASYLUM (2018) is a found-footage story about the crew of a horror web series that ventures into a haunted psychiatric hospital, only to find themselves in a terrifying trap. It’s familiar fare, but the movie stakes out its own turf with some top-notch scares.

Ha-Joon runs a little horror web series and dreams of making it big by venturing into a notoriously haunted abandoned psychiatric hospital. This involves his crew of two cameramen and four young people recruited from the site to join the expedition. After setting up base camp, they explore the hospital, planting cameras and carrying others with them. To make his webcast a success, Ha-Joon is not above pushing the team and faking a few scares, but they soon find themselves encountering a very real evil.

If you’ve seen GRAVE ENCOUNTERS (2011), this is all pretty familiar, but GONJIAM makes the idea its own. The establishing scenes do a good job giving the characters individual personalities and showing them being, well, young people about to start an adventure, all pretty likeable. When they go into the hospital, the scenes feel a little crowded, but once they split up, things start to get more ominous and interesting, and when the scares arrive, they pack plenty of punch. The horror element is very well done.

On the downside, almost all the personalities and characters pretty much dissolve in crisis, the spirits are so powerful it eliminates hope, and the lore of the hospital is intriguingly hinted at but never really explored, explained, or paid off. This is a problem for me with many found footage films, where you have a great setup onto which a pretty conventional massacre is attached. A terrific exception is THE LAST EXORCISM, where the jaded reverend has his religious faith restored. In my view, the crisis part of the film is a chance to see what these people are really made of, and when it’s done well, it makes the horror so much more agonizing and engaging.

Overall, I liked it for what it was. The characters are likeable, the setting is spooky, and the horror elements are really well done.

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

STRANGER THINGS, Season 4

July 4, 2022 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Full of heart and darker than receding seasons, STRANGER THINGS’ fourth season did not fail to please, expanding the runtime on many episodes and frequently injecting incredible cinematic moments.

In this season, the kids are growing up, and a new dynamic strains the group of Hawkins friends as they are now split on opposite sides of the country. When the Upside Down returns personified in a singular antagonist, this sets up the cast to go on separate but related missions. The mission is the same as always–fight the malevolent intelligence in the Upside Down–but this time we know who that intelligence is, and the stakes are even higher as the end game is revealed, which includes the fate of the entire world.

This season has a strong tonal change. Not only must the characters act in separate groups, but it’s way darker, with a lot less comedy and fewer scenes of the heartfelt feel good variety. We have a new major character, Eddie, perfectly played by Joseph Quinn. The runtime is longer on many episodes, fully fleshing out the storylines, which are frequently punctuated by incredible cinematic set pieces, such as a cop defending several of the kids from a surprise enemy. The villain is great, a psychopathic monster with a back story and relation to El. The climax had me saying, wow, they went there! The long denouement is satisfying and sets up the final confrontation in Season 5.

This season took some criticism, but I don’t agree with pretty much any of them. Yeah, it’s formulaic, but it’s been formulaic all along, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem isn’t formula but execution, and the Duffer brothers shred the execution. They provide characters I care about, put them in an underdog role against an overwhelming antagonist with supreme stakes, and they cross most of the Ts and dot the Is. Sure, the villain takes time to have conversations with heroes instead of just killing them, but at least he has something to say rather than the usual floating, telling them their flaws so as to weaken and psychologically destroy them before attempting to physically do so. The show communicates that eighties feel without trading on it. I appreciated all the wow moments and new lore. This is good TV, period.

If I had a criticism, it would be the ongoing reliance on the eighties trope of a psychopathic bully. The bullying in these shows and movies makes me wonder how anybody survived high school without dying, and a lot of times, they seem to be there to check a box on the Eighties Bingo Card rather than add anything. Last season, Billy did add something, though in this season, the bully didn’t do much more than get in the good guys’ way and be annoying, though he had plenty of potential for more.

Overall, I loved this season of STRANGER THINGS and look forward to the big finale.

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

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