Friday Week: In a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn, and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die

JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY

1993

Directed by Adam Marcus and Sean Cunningham

Written by Dean Lorey, Jay Huguely, and Adam Marcus

Spoilers: high

American Gothic Week: The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious

CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR

aka The Crimson Cult

1968

Directed by Vernon Sewell

Written by Jerry Sohl, Mervyn Haisman, and Henry Lincoln (based on "The Dreams In the Witch House" by H.P. Lovecraft)

Spoilers: moderate

Disney's Challengers, part VIII: Dog damn

ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN

1989

Directed by Don Bluth (co-directed by Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy)

Written by David N. Weiss and zillion other people

Spoilers: moderate

Disney's Challengers: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should

WE'RE BACK! A DINOSAUR'S STORY

1993

Directed by Phil Nibbelink, Ralph Zondag, Dick Zondag, and Simon Wells

Written by John Patrick Shanley, Flint Dille, and Sherri Stoner (based on the picture book by Hudson Talbott)

Spoilers: moderate

Yeah? Well, I'm gonna go make my own Blade Runner, with blackjack, and hookers

THE CREATOR

2023

Directed by Gareth Edwards

Written by Chris Weitz and Gareth Edwards

Spoilers: moderate

Neigh

INTERNATIONAL VELVET

1978

Written and directed by Bryan Forbes

Spoilers: moderate

We'll get together then, son; you know we'll have a good time then

COME TO DADDY

2020

Directed by Ant Timpson

Written by Toby Harvard

Spoiler alert: moderate

Walt Disney, part XXV: Catnap

THE ARISTOCATS

1970

Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

Spoiler alert: moderate

Walt Disney, part XXII: A dark age indeed, one big medieval mess

THE SWORD IN THE STONE

More like Bored In the Stone, and that's still funnier than 90% of the gags in the film.

1963

Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

Written by Bill Peet (based on the novel by T.H. White)

Spoiler alert: he's the once and future king, bud

Reviews from gulag: Everybody's gotta start somewhere

Sure: I have an affinity for the bigger side of filmmaking,  but it's nice sometimes to check in on the other side of the spectrum.  Or, you know, it's supposed to be.  Oh well: as The Simpsons once observed, it's their first day.  So let's take a look at three first films from 2019: Luz, Cosmos, and Paradise Hills.

LUZ (Tilman Singer)

I know I mention "running time" a lot in these reviews, and almost always in a negative way; I mean, there's a lot to complain about when it comes to the cinema of the 2010s, but to my mind there's not a single more terrible or more pervasive problem than the slow creep of runtimes that began in the 1990s and exploded into absurdity in the 2010s, as every blockbuster started extending itself past two hours, often for no good reason, and often far past two hours, with an eye toward three.  It's why it's such a joy when a movie like Crawl appears, clocking in at 89 minutes and hence obliging itself be mostly killer, not so much filler.  It also probably partially explains why I like cartoons so much, since they usually have some measure of restraint, due to their expense as well as their presumed audience of babies.

So, with nothing else to go on, Luz's 70 minute runtime seems like a selling point; it's easy to presume a movie that barely lasts an hour couldn't even have the time to be bad.  But that's not all we have to go on (I mean, I've seen it, so I have everything about it to go on, but bear with me here): let's assume further that we know that Luz is actually the 70 minute thesis project by German film studies graduate Tilman Singer.  This is where you observe, "Aren't student films usually short subjects?"  Yes.  Indeed they are.

Walt Disney, part XVII: A boy's best friend is his mother

PETER PAN

Essentially everything that could be wrong with a mid-century Disney film rolled into a single package, to die might actually have been a bigger adventure than it is (though given that is only 75 minutes, I quite manfully gutted it out).

1953

Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske

Spoiler alert: he never grows up

Reviews from gulag: My family's slave

ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

I am not happy that Green Book won Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards.  I can't be unhappy about it, at least not honestly—I'm pretty sure I would be unhappy, but I have not seen Green Book, and have no particular desire to, outside of the possibility that watching Aragorn getting fat and eating fried chicken for two straight hours might be amusing.  Even so, I can't imagine it was anywhere close to 2018's best picture.

Nevertheless, Green Book winning does have one nice silver lining: it means Alfonso Cuarón's Netflix-distributed Roma did not.  I did watch Roma; I can hate it.  I don't hate it for the reasons Steven Spielberg apparently hates it—helping push Green Book to its Oscar win and presently trying his level best to have Netflix banned from Academy Award consideration—for the great filmmaker has never been more petty and out-of-touch in his motivations, nor, I'm sad to say, more on the wrong side of history, even if "Netflix" and "movie" in the same sentence don't conjure the most pleasant cinematic expectations, and even if there are many valid reasons to be suspicious of Netflix that don't involve giving a shit about movie theaters.

Just a worthless bum, alone on a pile of bricks

RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET

So the single worst movie of the year so far was the Disney cartoon?  Man, I had no great expectations, but I did not expect that.

2018

Directed by Rich Moore and Phil Johnston

Written by Jim Reardon, Pamela Reardon, Josie Trinidad, Rich Moore, and Phil Johnston

With John C. Reilly (Wreck-It Ralph), Sarah Silverman (Vannelope von Schweetz), Gal Gadot (Shank), Taraji P. Henson (Yesss), plus plenty of others, but let's not

Spoiler alert: moderate

Disney's Challengers, part II: A bug's life

MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN
(aka Hoppity Goes To Town aka Bugville)

Consider the mystery of why hardly anybody ever mentions the Fleischer Studios' pair of feature-length cartoons to be solved.

1942

Directed by Dave Fleischer and Shamus Culhane

With Stan Freed (Hoppity), Pauline Loth (Honey Bumble), Jack Mercer (Mr. Bumble and Swat), Margie Hines (Mrs. Ladybug and Buzz), Pinto Colvig (Mr. Creeper), Carl Meyer (Smack), and Tedd Pierce (C. Bagley Beetle)

Spoiler alert: mild

Disney's Challengers, part I: Going up against the giant

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

Gulliver's Travels was the second feature-length animated film ever, and this quickly-fading novelty is the only sensible reason it made any money at all in 1939—because the most useful thing it ever does otherwise is provide a handy 86 minute explanation of why feature animation effectively stayed a Disney monopoly for half a century afterwards.

1939

Directed by Dave Fleischer

Written by Dan Gordon, Cal Howard, Tedd Pierce, Edmond Seward and Isadore Sparber (based on Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.  In Four Parts.  By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, Then a Captain of Several Ships by Jonathan Swift)

With Sam Parker (Lemuel Gulliver), Pinto Corvig (Gabby), Jack Mercer (King Little III), Tedd Pierce (King Bombo), Jessica Dragonette and Livonia Warren (Princess Glory), and Lanny Ross and Cal Howard (Prince David)

Spoiler alert: hell, it only gets one fourth of the way through

Reviews from gulag: But Batman and Robin will never die!

And now, the rest: The Big Sick, Lady Bird, Power Rangers, The Greatest Showman, The Book of Henry, and Good Time.

It is not correct to call it "Michael Showalter's The Big Sick," and if you've seen it, you know why, inasmuch as it was barely directed in the first place, and it really does show: practically the only thing I remember at all about the look of thing (beyond "extreme bland semi-competence," anyway) is a match-cut montage of its protagonist driving an Uber, which, you know, is fine, I guess, and the whole movie looks exactly like what a TV show on the same subject might have looked like at the dawn of HD.  We don't expect much from our comedies these days, and with that bigotry of low expectations firmly in place, Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani's The Big Sick made a few waves back in the summer of 2017, when it was finally given its wide release, hot off the campaign of well-intentioned (and at least partly-deserved) hype that came out of its showings at Sundance in the January of that year.

There is, of course, plenty of bigotry to go around in The Big Sick, which tells the semi-fictionalized tale of how the sort-of interracial couple of Emily (Zoe Kazan) and would-be stand-up comedian Kumail (himself) hooked up after a bout of cute heckling and eventually got married, and also how, in between those two events, Emily keeled over and almost died after breaking up with Kumail due to his family's disapproval of either her whiteness, her heathenism, or possibly simply her non-Pakistaniness, but Nanjiani wound up dragooned into exercising a power of attorney over Emily anyway, at least for the limited purpose of inducing a medically-necessary coma when she got sick.  The big sick, as it were, and with her illness living up to that grandiose title, Emily Gordon winds up very much a tertiary character in her own romance, albeit one whose presence does continue to loom over the action even while she's doing absolutely nothing (though if you forgot, for example, what Emily's goals in life were before eating her coma sandwich, I think you could be forgiven).  Anyway: calling it a Kumail Nanjiani biopic that happens to co-star Gordon's parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) is probably a little more accurate than "a romantic dramedy about Kumail and Emily."

It isn't true that I have nothing against The Big Sick, but I do like it, because there is, after all, plenty to like about it.  The most obvious points of recommendation, beyond a doubt, are the Gordons, demonstrating for the billionth time that Hunter is an excellent actress, even if the role demands very little of her beyond "be a gruff but still-loveable small woman," and demonstrating for possibly the first time that Romano can invest a role with genuine heart; but that's unfair to Nanjiani, who carries the romantic and dramatic weights of his role reasonably well, perhaps even shockingly well, given that that apparently really is the only voice he has, and it was not well-designed for roles beyond his niche of the weird mostly-a-straight-man on Silicon Valley.  And there are a great many little bits here and there that are fun; if not a romantic comedy as such, the movie is still a comedy-comedy, and easily carves out some small place in the genre.  The best stuff, though, is funny only as a second-order effect: it's how scathing Nanjiani and Gordon's screenplay can be when presenting Kumail's stand-up comedian community, basically by simply showing it as I presume it was—absolutely terrible.  The highlight of the movie as a comedy is arguably Kumail's one-man show about the history of Pakistan, which he thinks is funny; the highlight of the movie as a drama is when he breaks down on stage and just starts monologuing through tears at his situation.  But there are about as many actual laughs in both.  This isn't Don't Think Twice, and The Big Sick doesn't have a lot of illusions about the general quality of Nanjiani's profession.

On the other hand, the whole pursuit feels slightly off, doesn't it?  Though it registers only subliminally, the fact that Nanjiani is playing himself as he was over a decade in the past (while his and Gordon's screenplay unwisely updates their story to the present) never quite stops getting in the way of a series of events that makes the most sense to have happened to a guy who was in his mid-twenties, rather than in his late thirties.  Probably by accident, then, you find yourself having to agree with Kumail's dad (Anupam Kher), that maybe this life just ain't for him.

Not that you find yourself agreeing with him, or his wife (Adeel Akhtar), very often, and this is what I actually do have against The Big Sick, which is how incredibly easy it lets off the Nanjiani clan for their egregious fucking racism.  The Big Sick really, really wants to be a feel-good movie about overcoming your upbringing (as well as the broader racism of American society at large), and it certainly has those elements (though this is another reason why Nanjiani's actual age sticks in the craw, of course: a man of nearly 40 years having to rationalize his way around his parents' bigotry is exponentially more pathetic than a man in his twenties doing so, and it's still laughably pathetic even then).  But it has no coherent critique of the family who spends a third of the movie's screentime trying to ensure a literal purity of blood, whereas Emily just flips like a switch when the movie needs her to (that is, at the last possible second, in a fairly solid romantic scene that really, really emphasizes just how much this screenplay is about Kumail), and while we can impose the real world onto The Big Sick if we want—it seems clear that whatever problems Nanjiani had in 2006, they were resolved to Gordon's satisfaction—Kumail the Character in This Movie simply isn't that convincing when he pleads that his past behavior shall not be repeated, because when he repudiates his family, he does it in the most bizarrely subordinate way possible, it sticks for about five whole minutes, and I sure as hell didn't see them change in the meantime.

Score: 6/10

Joe Dante, part XVI: She's back, she's dead, and she thinks we're still dating

BURYING THE EX

I hope Dante gets The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes made one of these days, because it would be a real shame for any great director's final feature film to be Burying the Ex.

2014 (them)/2015 (us)

Directed by Joe Dante

Written by Alan Trezza

With Anton Yelchin (Max), Alexandra Daddario (Olivia), Oliver Cooper (Travis), and Ashley Greene (Evelyn)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Joe Dante, part XIV: How about that? Turns out voter fraud was real!

HOMECOMING (Masters of Horror, season 1, episode 6)

2005

Directed by Joe Dante

Written by Sam Hamm (based on the short story "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey)

With Jon Tenney (David Murch), Thea Gill (Jane Cleaver), and Robert Picardo (Kurt Rand)

THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION (Masters of Horror, season 2, episode 7)

2006

Directed by Joe Dante

Written by Sam Hamm (based on the short story by Alice Sheldon)

Written Kerry Norton (Anne Alstein), Jason Priestley (Alan Alstein), Elliot Gould (Barney), and Brenna O'Brien (Amy Alstein)

Spoiler alert for both: moderate

The human who watches this movie can neither go to Heaven nor Hell

DEATH NOTE

Talk about your inaccurate translations...

2017

Directed by Adam Wingard

Written by Charlie Parlapanides, Vlas Parlapanides, and Jeremy Slater

With Nat Wolff (Light Turner), Willem Dafoe/Jason Liles (Ryuk), Margaret Qualley (Mia Sutton), Shea Whigham (James Turner), and Lakeith Stanfield (L)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Reviews from gulag: Late-winter cleaning

Just to get them all out of the way at last, here's a bunch of mini-reviews of the features I screened in 2016, but never got around to properly reviewing.  To wit: The Jungle Book, Nocturnal Animals, Denial, Sing Street, The Wailing, The Handmaiden, God's Not Dead 2, and The Nice Guys.  (I guess I should be a gentleman and warn you, I get somewhat spoilery for The Wailing and Nocturnal Animals.)

First up, we have Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book, presumptively the best Disney live-action remake of a classic animated film to date.  I say "presumptively" because I didn't see Pete's Dragon, but, of course, neither did you, so you're not likely to care about any misattributed superlative on its account.  Either way, more than anything else, The Jungle Book is a fantabulous technical exercise—albeit one that takes ages and ages to get used to, simply because there's just no preparing yourself for the incongruous and deeply upsetting sight of all these nearly-photorealistic CGI animals who flap their lips in a simulacrum of speaking English.  (And even after you've finally gotten your head around that, then you have to deal with those two musical numbers, imported from the animated original, neither one of which feels precisely on-target, and the latter of which does its absolute damnedest, in conjunction with the film's abysmal reimagination of King Louie as a Kongian kaiju, to ruin your fucking life.)

On the other hand, you have Idris Elba's Shere Khan, monumentally terrifying, though this has somewhat more to do with the sterling CGI performance, and Favreau's willingness to stage some genuine high-test brutality in his kid's talking animal adventure, than it does with Elba's vocal performance—although it is a rather good one.  On that same hand, however, you have Scarlett Johannson's giant-sized Kaa, who is, objectively speaking, probably just as ridiculous a creation as King Louie—but who still comes off as a bolt of creepy horror-movie perfection, right in The Jungle Book's heart.  Best talking snake ever?  Maybe.  But the best use of the focal plane in a 2016 movie, hiding Kaa's body against the limbs of the tree Mowgli's found himself in, until the electric moment she begins to move?  Oh, almost without a doubt.  (And yet Kaa's success is just as much thanks to Johannson's vocals.  In combination with Her, it leads me to believe that the woman is a significantly better voice actor than she is an actor-actor.  Plus, if they'd kept her musical number—which is relegated instead to the closing credits, even though it's by far the best of all three—it might have helped the other two feel even the slightest bit organic to the proceedings.)

Meanwhile, Bill Murray's pretty well-cast himself, as the lazy Baloo; and Ben Kingsley is likewise doing just fine with one more check-chasing late-career role, as the stolid Bagheera.  As for that kid playing Mowgli, Neel Sethi, he is frankly doing much better than he's gotten credit for: can you imagine playing make-pretend on a set like this one, let alone at his age?  He's fantastic.

And yet, if you throw in an ending that seems to be at cross-purposes not only with the original text (whether "original" means the Kipling tale or the '67 cartoon), but at cross-purposes with its own themes and story, what you're ultimately left with is not that much more than one amazing-looking mess.  (And one that probably needed an R-rating to really reach its full potential, at that.  I live and I dream, guys.)  But it is amazing-looking, and that still counts, even in 2016.  And so even all the things that you're bound to hate about it just don't matter nearly as much as they really probably should.

Score:  7/10