Bore-nado Alley

Twister was not a masterpiece.  In fact, I missed it the first time around and only saw it a few years ago.  It may seem strange now, considering the massive amount of content that’s available digitally, but when I was a kid, it was physical media. So you had to get people to agree to watch a movie and then go to a place and rent it.  My crush on Helen Hunt was never enough to win the argument as to what to rent, so I didn’t see it.

And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, my experience of Twisters.  Twister itself was a fairly ridiculous movie, but it did have a certain charm about it and it felt like a 90s disaster movie and lived up to that billing fairly well enough.  Twisters has more expectation coming with it because, whatever my opinion of the original movie is, a lot of people hold great affection for it, and decades later, there are some fairly big shoes to fill for Twisters.  Sure, they’re not Star Wars big, but I know lots of people who loved Twister.  And I am an unabashed fan of Glen Powell.  Ever since saw him grace my screen as the purposefully douchey Chad Radwell in Scream Queens, I thought he was the best thing about that show and I’ve been following his career ever since.  I even watched Anyone But You and enjoyed it.  He’s got a way of playing a character that you probably shouldn’t like, but do for some reason, and, well, I have to admire that.  His role in Top Gun: Maverick was just about the only thing I liked about that lazy rehash of the 80s classic mixed with a Death Star Trench Run against a nameless enemy.  So despite the tepid reviews (the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes continues, with this movie scoring a 75% and a whopping 91% audience score), I had relatively medium-high expectations for the film when I saw it come across my Peacock feed.

I’ll start with the good.  The majority of actors in the film do a really good job with what they’re given.  Glen Powell does not disappoint, despite the fact that everyone else was in a movie and his character was shot like he was in a Wrangler Jeans commercial.  Daisy Edgar-Jones was a true delight, never underselling her character and doing her best to bring emotional weight to the film.  Anthony Ramos, yes, John Laurens himself from the original cast of Hamilton, once again brings his immense talent to a blockbuster popcorn flick for which he is overqualified and, again, convincingly plays his character with the talent and aplomb that you’d expect from someone who broke out as an original Hamilton cast member.  I am really excited to see where his career goes.  And the same goes for Daisy Edgar-Jones, because if she can put in the shift she did in Twisters, I cannot wait to see what she can do with a really hefty, weighty role.  Now, to be fair, I believe her miniseries Normal People was well received, I’ve never seen Where the Crawdads Sing (which was not, at least critically), and I’ve only seen her in Under the Banner of Heaven, which was much more of an ensemble cast than a vehicle for her talent.

Even with the compression that happens with streaming media, the audio was fairly well mixed and the visuals came through with good fidelity.  I knew I was looking at CGI a lot, but it wasn’t so bad that it took me out of the moment, nor did I ever have trouble hearing the characters’ dialogue over the roar of the multiple tornados.  On the technical side, the movie was certainly successful.

But from a writing standpoint, it was very rough.  It doesn’t really matter how good or talented your cast is if your script feels like it was written by an 8th grader.  That’s harsh, I know, but after having watched so many good movies last month with you all, I had a hard time not contrasting it Late Night with the Devil, a movie in which not a single word, nor even a single frame of video was wasted; with Twisters, so much of it felt like filler to hit a minimum two hour runtime (the extra 2 minutes were icing on the cake, I suppose).  It starts with a flashback, which came with the painfully obvious immediate conclusion that it was about to turn into a bloodbath, because none of the characters were in a single trailer I saw for the film.  And that’s fine, it’s fine to spoon feed your audience trauma when you’ve got a film centered on a traumatized character; I’m not always against flashbacks.  But when you then rehash the opening 10 minutes of the film to explain what happened to another character, it sometimes feels like a clip show in the middle of the movie, a “previously on” segment that shouldn’t really be necessary because I just saw that scene an hour ago.  Adding insult to this, in that scene where she explains what happened, Edgar-Jones gives such an excellent performance selling her character’s emotions that it showcased what a good actress she is.  If there had been enough trust in the character and in the audience, that whole first scene could have been cut, because Edgar-Jones is a clearly a strong enough actress to convey what her character is going through, explain her reluctance to join Ramos’s team, and do it without zipping the spoon around like an airplane and telling the audience to open wide for the mashed pea purée landing.  I didn’t expect this film to blow me away, pardon the pun, but it could have been so much better and paced so much tighter with just a few tweaks.  Because the talent is there; in the rare moments that the script allows the actors to shine, they do.  This is not a low budget movie trying to punch above its weight class as a blockbuster, these are talented people playing roles very well, despite the writing.  It should have been better.

The structure of the movie, after the initial flashback scene, follows a terribly boring formula.  It goes storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, and so on and so forth.  There’s no real buildup of the story, there’s nothing it works towards, and it just feels like the time between storms is there to take up space between monster attacks, except in this case, the monster is CGI wind.  The movie has no flow, it has subplots that go nowhere, and a shoehorned romance between two characters that are so wildly not into each that it’s almost Jurassic World-level insulting.  Add to that a generic country music soundtrack in the talking scenes, all that rural noun, simple adjective, good ol’ boy bullshit, makes for a movie that’s a fairly unpleasant experience unless you’re just there for the spectacle of carnage.  Everything just happens and the climax occurs out of nowhere; the same as the tornadoes that occur in the other storm scenes.  I know these are storm-chasers and meteorologists and researchers, but they have Jack Bauer levels of bad luck when it comes to being in the path of funnel-shaped terror.  The movie flirts with the idea that climate change is causing strife for people and that there are those who are willing and happy to take advantage of that strife for their own personal gain, but it never comes close to actually having anything to say.  And somehow, that’s worse than not even trying, not even paying the half-assed lip service to what’s going on in the real world in which this movie is supposedly set.

How 91% of people enjoyed this, I’ll never know.  I worked very hard to enjoy myself while watching Twisters, and I just about did, until I sat down at my desk, starting thinking about it, and opened up this document.  It just makes me so disappointed to see what could have been a just fine summer blockbuster end up being such a huge waste of great actors because the studio and the writing just didn’t trust the audience to do some real storytelling.  It’s difficult to think of a movie that was so simultaneously overstuffed and yet so boring, but still with very good acting performances.  And maybe Twisters is worth watching just for that.  And maybe you’ll think I’m wrong and you’ll have just a lovely time with it.  Clearly, I’m in the minority here.  And baffled as to why. 

Disgrace Invaders

A few years ago, I wrote about how much it hurt to lose the ability to go to movie theaters and how it felt like it isolated me from both a social experience that I really enjoyed and a solitary one that felt like stolen time.  For me, going to the movies alone was like taking time back from everyone and everything else that demanded it from me.  It was two hours or so where I could turn my ringer off, put my phone in my pocket, and train my eyes on something other than the crushing weight of endless connectivity.  I praised trash TV like Tiger King for its ability to help us cope with the outside world that kept us on edge and, at the time, in fear of spreading a deadly disease to our friends and loved ones.  In times like that (and times like these), I still find merit in watching something with no real artistic value, something that doesn’t make you feel…anything, really.

And now I’ve found something else to replace that Tiger King feeling at a time when reality no longer makes sense to me.  If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know that I am a gamer.  I hesitate to call myself that because it’s become a loaded term these days, but I enjoy TTRPGs, board games, chess, and, especially, video games.  Video game media kind of sucks, though.  Until Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, game-based media was pretty poor.  What tends to be worse than video game-based movies are movies about gaming and gamers.  Sure, Grandma’s Boy had its moments here and there and was generally watchable, and Max Reload and the Nether Blasters had its own sort of low budget charm, but a lot of is very bad.  Leave aside films like Wreck-It Ralph and WarGames, which are quite good; that’s a different feel altogether than the kinds of films I’m talking about.  Record stores and movie rental places certainly drew the longer straw in that particular game.

So that brings me to the trash I’m talking about today: Pixels, a rightly forgotten film from 2015 with a robust 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% audience score.  Now, mind you, I’m not here to defend this movie as a misunderstood film that should actually be well regarded, like Be Kind Rewind or 2 Fast 2 Furious, because Pixels is truly, truly bad.  From the uninspired Suicide Squad-esque soundtrack (substituting 80s pop for the schizophrenic classic rock radio station that scored that film) to the by the numbers plot, pretty much everything about Pixels is bad storytelling.  And I knew this going in, after all, it is an Adam Sandler movie, which has been a hallmark for really terrible films for the past couple of decades now.  Sandler on the movie poster generally equals a bad movie.

And yet, somehow, this movie made an impression on me.  A world in which Kevin James is the President and Adam Sandler and Josh Gad are the only hopes for humanity against an alien invasion that modeled itself after an arcade tournament from 1982 that NASA sent to space for some reason manages to make more sense than the one we live in now.  And for that reason alone, it became some comforting piece of fast food that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards, but still, satisfied, in a strange and inexplicable way.  The amount of talent in this film that doesn’t show is truly stupefying.  Josh Gad, we know is a multitalented individual who can act, sing, and voice almost unbearably sweet cartoon characters; yet here, he’s a one dimensional stereotype that makes the characters in The Big Bang Theory seem deep.  Michelle Monaghan plays the obligatory romantic interest for Sandler, with the predictable lack of chemistry not keeping them from getting together for no reason at all other than the fact they’re both there, and I believe I’ve made it clear that I hold her in the highest regard.  She’s one of my favorite actresses of all time and one of the most talented, in my opinion.  But, that doesn’t really matter in a movie like this.  Peter Dinklage, at the time still riding high on the success of Game of Thrones, comes in with a fairly bog standard jerk character that really doesn’t strain his acting abilities.  Brian Cox, years before he dominated the screen in Succession, plays one of the Joint Chiefs whose main role is to insult Adam Sandler (which, well, I’d take that job too).  Sean Bean, Boromir himself, has a small part, but I guess after Fellowship, he has nothing left to prove, so why not get the paycheck?  Even Dan Akroyd, comedy royalty, has a neat little cameo.  But none of that really matters, by design.  It’s a bad movie and was always meant to be.

There is some novelty to seeing Pac-Man marauding down the streets like some giant yellow menace and I’m sure if I ever actually played Caterpillar, I would have had an opinion on how faithfully it was rendered on screen as an alien attack, but that was before even my time.  The production value of the film is quite good, certainly befitting of its $88 million budget.  But other than the fact that it looks good in HD there isn’t a whole lot to praise here. I mean, I guess I enjoyed it more than Ready Player One, which is a bar set so low an actual caterpillar could hurdle it.

However, it did something for me that I sorely needed at the time; it allowed me to turn my brain off.  And I mean all the way off.  Everything about it that was stupid, for some reason, didn’t bother me and its failure to engage my emotions in any way was a welcome reprieve from the world at large.  So now, in a way that I cannot possibly explain, I have a strange level of affection for a movie that is bad, that I know is bad, and that I couldn’t defend in just about any way.  I could say that I got three genuine laughs during its rather unnecessarily long 1 hour, 46 minute run time (the first 40 minutes or so really drag, with way too much setup), which is a better hit rate than some sitcoms.  It’s three more laughs than I got in the entire 16 episode first season of the Night Court reboot, but that’s not what matters to me when it comes to Pixels (also, don’t watch the Night Court reboot, it’s bad in a way that’s not good at all; I suffered through that so you don’t have to).

This isn’t really a review of Pixels, I couldn’t in good conscience tell you to watch it just because I found some comfort in it.  It’s more of a song of praise for finding the right kind of trash in the moment you need it.  And, dear readers, you know I try to be honest with you; I tell you when things make me cry, I tell you when they make me laugh, when they make me question my own existence, and when a guilty pleasure shouldn’t be guilty at all.  Because we are all so hard on ourselves in a world that’s really hard on us too, so if you like something that’s bad, or even if you don’t like it and it makes you feel good or even just feel nothing at all, that deserves to celebrated and you don’t deserve to feel bad about it.  So, I leave you with this final thought: remember to be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and if you can, watch Be Kind Rewind; it’s really a hidden gem.

Satanic Panic at the Disco

As Halloween season comes to a close, I want to give you one last look at the spooky stuff I’ve been watching in case you’re like me and your ideal Halloween night is spent with the lights off, hiding from trick-or-treaters, and watching something on your iPad with your headphones in.  But hey, I at least put a bowl out with some candy.  Well, I put a bowl out with a sign that says “Please take one” and everyone just assumes some kid dumped it into their sack before they got there.  It’s not very sporting, but what can you do? (I don’t actually do this; don’t do this, it’s not nice)

This probably won’t shock you, but I watch a lot of TV and movies, of all sorts of genres, and throughout the history of the medium. It’s to the point that, like rappers who can tell what their freestyle opponents are going to say before they finish their lines, I can usually tell what’s coming next.  I know the punchlines to jokes before they’re delivered, I usually have a good idea what the twists are going to be, so sometimes things just feel rote and predictable.  I value being surprised—which is different from being tricked, but that’s a topic for a different day.

The new Peacock original series Hysteria! is one of those surprising shows.  I settled in thinking it would be a fairly entertaining horror-comedy, something to akin to Totally Killer, Amazon’s retro time travel slasher comedy flick from 2023, in which Julie Bowen also stars.  But Hysteria! threw me for a loop.  I mean, it has Bruce Campbell in it, and four episodes in (halfway through the season), he seems to be the only character keeping his head on straight, which is not what you expect from a Bruce Campbell character.  I really appreciate that he’s playing against type here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The cast here is really good, with the more notable names like Campbell and Bowen giving way to the young actors and letting them showcase their performances.  But, I have to give a special shoutout to Nolan North as Bowen’s husband, the voice of Nathan Drake himself, the main character of my all time favorite video game series Uncharted and Allison Scagliotti, who played Claudia in Warehouse 13, a positively delightful sci-fi show whose time was, like many, far too short.

We start off as B horror movie as you can get.  It’s a small town called Happy Hollow in 1989 and two teens are getting hot and heavy while her mom is away and it does not take long before tragedy strikes.  Odd noises, an impending sense of doom; at first just, it was just that they were going to be caught by the girl’s pious mother, but then real fear sets in.  Two men in cloaks and masks burst through the door and drag the teens away.  Smash cut to the awkward Dylan at school, pining after the pretty, popular girl Judith, all the while ignored by everyone but his heavy metal bandmates.  Set firmly in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Dylan decides to take advantage of the tragedy to create a hook for his band, because it’s all anyone can talk about now—you see, the missing boy, captain of the football team, of course, had a pentagram painted in red on his house.  So, he crafts new personas for himself and the band and leans into it.  Word of the concert spreads, the pretty, popular girl seems interested, and Dylan unwittingly puts himself at the center of mass panic.

And this is where things get precarious.  The first episode set up a fair amount of expectation for what was to come next, but I wasn’t hooked quite yet; I’d enjoyed what I’d seen, I had a few questions that needed answers—and you know how I love a mystery—so I was willing to stick around.  After all, shows need some time to gain their footing and while patience is much thinner these days than it used to be, I usually like to give a show three episodes if I think it has a chance of being good.  The pilot is a long one that does drag a little bit towards the end, as you blow past the usual 42 minute runtime of an hour long drama and to the full hour mark, there were many scenes that felt like the end of the episode, but then it kept going.  I wasn’t convinced yet, not fully, but I really wanted to know why all the news coverage was about the missing boy and not the missing girl and why the pentagram was painted on the boy’s house when they were taken from the girl’s home.  These are some of the questions that had me eager to watch the next episode.

The tone and focus change in the second episode, sort of eviscerating the expectations of it being a horror spoof, and while it still brings a few moments of levity and comic relief, the darkness at the center of the story starts to unfold.  I was so pleasantly surprised by how the show subtly diverted into a slightly more serious tone and started to thread its way through the different interconnected stories.  But what could easily feel like a JJ Abrams-esque mystery box that is going to present a great number of questions only to ignore or hand wave them away, Hysteria!, despite the comical punctuation in its name, presents itself as a serious show.  And by serious, I mean well-made, well thought out, and frankly, interestingly put together.  Rather than relying on big, dramatic reveals, Hysteria! metes out the information little by little, leaving you often learning something new about the mystery gripping the town and leaving you in the dark enough to remain in anticipation for what’s going to come next.  After four episodes, I’m pretty well hooked on this and I can’t wait to see if they can pull it off.

While Hysteria! doesn’t appear to have the depth or scares of Stranger Things, it’s hard not to draw parallels, especially with the fourth season, which relies heavily on Satanic Panic to scapegoat heavy metal fan Eddie Munson as the cause of the mysterious deaths in Hawkins.  Much like Eddie, Dylan becomes a bit of a pariah, but also a bit of a folk hero to the kids at school who have otherwise felt ignored—and that includes a surprisingly diverse cross section of the social scale.  However, Hysteria! doesn’t feel quite like it’s trying to be big, dumb fun, nor does it feel like it’s trying to be Stranger Things either.  It’s almost unfair to compare the two despite the surface level similarities, but it is inevitable.  Halfway in, the scares haven’t really ramped up—there are creepy rituals, a lot of metal music, a lot of makeup, and a lot of impassioned speeches about the lack of god in schools and community, given by Anna Camp’s suspicious-in-more-ways-than-one Tracy (you may remember her from Pitch Perfect, but to me she’ll always be Pam Beesly’s sister), but it doesn’t feel invested in making you jump out of your seat, which may disappoint diehard horror fans, but is just fine by me.  It feels like Hysteria! is building to something, perhaps a tale about the dangers of false narratives spreading like a virus, but it’s impossible to say just yet.  Because at the moment, it’s keeping me guessing as to where it’s going to go next.

Whether what’s happening in Happy Hollow is truly supernatural and demonic or just unreasonable fear gripping a panicked populace is yet to be seen.  But I’m definitely on board to see how it all pans out.

A Disquieted Place

Continuing on with my spooky season coverage, I watched Late Night with the Devil for you, and now we’re going to talk about it.  By now you know that horror is far from my favorite genre, but it definitely has its draw when it’s done really well and Late Night is done very well.

First, the vitals.  Coming in at a scant 93 minutes, Late Night is a refreshingly compact movie that doesn’t waste much time, nor much of anything else.  In an era of bloated 2+ hour everything, plus the inevitable 4 hour Snyder Cuts, seeing a movie that’s just over an hour and a half was such a welcome change.  I really appreciate the economizing of storytelling—not that I don’t love to have a show with 8 or 10 episode and getting really stuck into it, but having a story told well in the time it takes to watch two episodes of The X-Files is just so nice.  It’s not a movie that feels short though, if that makes sense.  It’s lean, not thin.  All the fat has been trimmed and it doesn’t feel like there’s a wasted word or wasted shot in it.  Everything there has a purpose and it draws you in and keeps you there.  It’s a variation on the found footage theme; what you’re witnessing is a moment lost to time, immortalized in film, but somehow forgotten, unearthed for your eyes.  The movie starts with a quick overview, an introduction to the film you’re about to watch.  David Dastmalchian (whom you may know as Kurt from Ant-Man or Polka-Dot Man from The Suicide Squad) plays Jack Delroy, host of the show Night Owls, a perennial also-ran against Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the 1970s landscape of late night television.

The footage you’re about to see is disturbing, they warn you.  Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely some pretty creepy stuff.  As the introductory exposition explains, Jack is coming back from a personal tragedy and wants desperately to shake off the stigma of always being the runner up to Carson.  This pushes Jack to make more and more controversial decisions for his show, culminating in this Halloween special episode—an episode in which he brings on a medium to cold read the audience and a young girl called Lilly, the sole survivor of a Heaven’s Gate-like, demon worshipping cult that, under the care of parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell.  The idea here is to have Lilly tell her story and, eventually, see if she can channel the demon Abraxas, which the cult worshipped.

As you can imagine, what happens next is a source of great distress to everyone involved.  As it builds to a crescendo, the night goes terribly awry, and things get severely out of hand.  But more than anything, this movie is not about demonic possession.  This is not The Exorcist with a twist.  It’s not even about charlatans and fakers, nor is it about skeptics or close-mindedness to the unexplained or unexplainable.

It’s about success.  It’s about fame.  It’s about the sacrifices that people will make, both real and imagined, physical and emotional, that take a toll on them as they push their way to the top, or at least, in the case of Jack Delroy, very close to it.  Despite the trappings of a 1977 live broadcast, the things the movie has to say about modern content creation are both cutting and palpable, especially in a world where paths to fame and success in the media space are more varied than ever.  I’m not sure that anyone in the 1970s or 1980s or even the 1990s could have imagined a society in which you could make millions of dollars by having people watch you play video games or do makeup tutorials or do whatever it is that people do on TikTok.  This isn’t a criticism of any of those things; I’m genuinely amazed and often in awe of content creators who not only push to the top of their field in an increasingly competitive and saturated, noisy marketplace of content, but also cross over into traditional media as well.  I often wonder, when I hear someone sing with a voice so beautiful it moves me or I see someone act so well they completely disappear into their characters and all but literally become another person and they don’t get fame and recognition for those talents what sets the people who do apart.  Hard work and talent of course play a part, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of luck involved as well.  But Late Night asks some very poignant questions about what you’re willing to give up and the lengths to which you’ll go in order to bask in the warm glow of audience adulation and makes some clever observations about the toll it takes on not only those seeking fame, but on those around them as well.

All this comes through the lens of a film so convincingly authentic looking and feeling that it’s easy to get lost in the movie.  The use of highly talented actors and actresses who are not household names definitely adds to this feeling of authenticity.  David Dastmalchian is not generally seen as a headlining name, despite the fact that you’ll probably recognize him if you’ve seen even half as many movies as I have and despite the fact he showcases some incredibly acting talent in this film.  Which, honestly, shouldn’t surprise me, because I’ve seen him play so many different roles well, but always in the background.  Australian actress Ingrid Torelli absolutely nails the role of Lilly in a way that leaves you unsettled from the moment she comes on screen until the end credits roll.  She has an extremely peculiar way about her, staring into the camera and seemingly always knowing immediately which camera is on her, only breaking to speak to Jack or glower at the skeptic brought on to debunk the acts on the show.  That is, until she’s strapped to a chair and the events of the film are truly set into motion.  It’s easy to focus on the two of them as standout performances, but really no one isn’t carrying their weight in the film and they all do such a great job, I could spend the rest of my column inches just singing all their praises.

Doing a full analysis of this film seems warranted, but I don’t want to go any deeper into it because I can’t do that without spoiling the movie for you and this is something I want you to experience for yourself.  The attention to detail in every level of this movie is immensely impressive—it’s not just the acting that’s praiseworthy, every little thread in the movie can be followed to a satisfying end and the way every minor aspect of the film looks and feels like a great deal of thought and care went into it, from the moments in which tape betrays its age through dubious warps and glitches, to the placement and positioning of every single prop—Late Night with the Devil is a masterclass in minutiae, a practice in particulars, and a study in specifics.  Even the name of Jack’s late night talk show Night Owls feels like a carefully crafted reference not only to the idiomatic use of the term, but also to the owl iconography in alien and paranormal circles. It’s not just an entertaining and insightful film, it’s relevant in today’s media landscape.  When we look at the sounds that echo across cyberspace, they are often the outlandish, the ridiculous, the vitriolic, the venomous, and the insidious.  The ones banging the drums the loudest to get over the din of the billions of voices are sometimes the ones that will do and say anything to get their version of success, no matter the damage they do.  And we’re all part of the outrage cycle; this bitter, spiteful ouroboros that we participate in with our television ratings and social media accounts.  Late Night with the Devil asks hard questions about the cost of success when you’re willing to attain it with reckless abandon and the complicity of those who allow it to happen.  And they’re questions we really should think about before answering.  Late Night might not scare you in the way you think it will, but it should scare you.