Trev's Movie Dump: August - September 2016

Wowzers. Sorry. Forgot about these posts I was planning on writing a months ago. Don’t perfectly recall watching a whole lot of these films, but here’s a stab at recalling what I’ve seen.

Suicide Squad

Oh, God… Even the fog of memory doesn’t help this dumpster fire look any better now over two months from when it first came out in theaters. There was high hopes for this guy to save the other DC/WB mess that was Batman v Super: Dawn of Justice. I don’t even know where to begin on what was wrong with this film. How about we leave the mess of a story alone, and just quickly talk about the actors/characters.

Will Smith is great at being Will Smith. And, like always, he has great charism on screen. You'll likely get exactly what you expect with him.

Margot Robbie got big praise for her rendition of Harley Quinn, when, honestly… I wasn’t all that won over. She was fine, but it always seemed weird that amongst this rag-tag group of anti-heroes with obvious talents, her's seemed to be that she just swung a bat around. (They allude they she knew how to seduce her enemies at the beginning of the story , but that strength quickly goes out the door once our heroes start fighting mutant monsters throughout the bulk of the film.) Performance, though, I just don't know. I'm hearing there might be a standalone Harley Quinn movie in the future. I guess I would be open to that, but certainly not jumping up and down to see it. 

We could have easily done away with Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang and Slipknot (not that he’s in the movie for all that long). Point is, there’s a lot of people, a lot of pieces moving around in this story and it’s a little difficult to keep up with what’s going on or being able to focus long enough on one person to form some sort of emotional attachment to them.  

Then we have Jared Leto’s the Joker. I honestly don’t have much to say about this performance because the Joker was only in the movie a total of five minutes… maybe. I don’t even know what they were thinking about teasing the character like this. It’s as if they meant for it to be a larger role, than chicken-out at the last second. What I can say is that it seems like they’re moving far away from the Heath Ledger direction, and now the Joker is much more of a psychotic thug than this mysterious “agent of chaos” who’s performance earned an Oscar.

The last character we’ll talk to is Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. This was easily the best performance in the whole film. She was cold, chilling, and fun to watch. Leagues above everyone else.

There’s a lot more I could say about this film, most -- if not all -- bad, but at this point let me just leave with a statement to WB.

I couldn’t be happier that these films are being made. That I’m living in a world where I can see Deadshot at a standoff with Batman on the big screen. Please don’t stop bringing the heroes will love -- or will learn to love -- to theaters. But, for the love of Superman, simplify your stories! I feel like these films managed to incorporate every single note that was given from every single exec and studio head. Not all notes are good. Not every piece of material has to make it into a movie. Even if they has a 10-episode miniseries to tell these stories, it would still be challenging to capture everything. 

You’ve gone big and bold… twice, without much critical acclaim. Now try out making them smaller. Making them more intimate. Perhaps we’ll see some of that in the new The Batman. #BelieveInBatfleck

Kubo and the Two Strings

Visually stunning, yet the story leaves a little to be desired. Frankly, you can almost watch this movie for the imagery alone. I love stop-motion animation and want to pay it the respect it needs to ensure it stays alive in the industry. This film does manage to use the animation style to its benefit with imaginative characters and colorful settings -- like a giant skeleton that has swords imbedded into its skull to mimic hair. Really cool shit.

Unfortunately, cool shit doesn't save a film. The story felt a little flimsy, but, then again, it was more like a fairy tale, of sorts. Kind of like The Princess Bride, while a beloved and cult-favorite film, it was kind of a weak story. That's how I think of Kubo and the Two Strings. I can hope one day it will reach some level of cult status to make up being such a flop at the box office. 

The Lobster

Wow... I was not expecting what I got with this movie. I thought I was entering into this dry and witty, dark-comedy about a bleak future where if you're not in a relationship you get turned into an animal of your choosing. (Interesting, right?) The story ended up being sooo much darker than I thought. I mean, it's bleak as all fuck. I think I would have liked it more had I went into it with absolutely no expectations, but since I went into it wanting to laugh -- especially at the sight of John C. Reilly -- I was instead wincing in pain and sorrow. It's a bit of a tough movie to get through, and while certainly don't hate it... it's not one of my favorites of the year. Curious what others would have to say. 

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

The year of #LongReads is slipping away, what with all these three-hundred page nothingburgers I keep on churning through, but that's okay. Here's the much-maligned sequel to the Harry Potter series. Why don't people love this? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's because it's a stage play rather than a book - and how many people read stage plays on the reg? And also because it was written by two guys who weren't J.K. Rowling. It's basically fan fiction. Fan fiction by professional writers, sure, but fan fiction all the same.

The story begins some nineteen years after the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - so, right where that book's epilogue stops, I guess - and focuses on Harry's black sheep of a son, Albus Severus, who's so unlike Harry that he ends up in Slytherin and befriends a Malfoy. Ga-whu? I actually liked this best in its early stages, as we just check in on our wizard friends nineteen years on in middle age. How's the gang all doing? Great to see you again. Anyway, what ensues is a messy and convoluted "Voldemort returns" story that really strains disbelief, considering how thoroughly he was beaten at the end of the main series and all. (Slight spoiler - we've got time travel, folks!)

I can't say this really enhanced the series in any way, but so what? I mean, forgive me, but was Harry Potter ever even "good," or was it just an entertaining example of good young adult fiction? I mean, for fuck's sake, if you think Harry Potter was something good enough to have a "legacy" that would be "tarnished" by this modestly entertaining epilogue of sorts, go back and read the first book again.

Bottom line, this was enjoyable and entertaining, albeit slight. But my hunch is that you either already knew that, or you were never interested in this book in the first place.

Now - let's get the year of #BigReads back on track with some seasonally appropriate Stephen King. (Damn, I've gotta settle on one hashtag.)

Stan's Movie Dump: Early October 2016

Oof. In an attempt to bolster my horror movie canon, I've spent the first half of October just plowing through movies. Here are my thoughts...

Amanda Knox

Okay, the horror doesn't start right away. First up I saw a documentary about Amanda Knox which - yeah, you know what, this was a bit of a horror movie I suppose. If you're familiar with Knox's case already, this doesn't really provide a ton of new insight. But if you aren't, holy shit, watch this as soon as possible! (It's a Netflix original.) You think Steven Avery got screwed? Brother, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen what the British tabloids and Italian courts did to Amanda Knox.

The Invitation

Here's one of those unassuming little indie titles that I see from time to time on Netflix or Amazon. Good reviews, quick runtime, why not? This ended up being a not-so-great movie about a dinner party gone awry, but I don't regret the time I spent watching it. After all, "dinner party gone awry" also describes, say, Coherence, a hidden gem I found last year and absolutely loved. They can't all be winners, folks!

The Congress

I always knew I had to see this, but damn is it a weird one. It's got Robin Wright, playing herself, and struggling with the reality of being an aging actress who very well may never find work again. (House of Cards doesn't seem to exist in this world.) So she sells her image and likeness to a film studio that, using a new technology reminiscent of full motion capture, creates a perpetually 34-year-old "Robin Wright" to use in movies for ages to come. All this is interesting enough, but one third of the way through the movie, shit gets completely surreal. Twenty years later, the entire world becomes animated. By this I mean that people drink hallucinogenic potions and begin to see the world around them as some gigantic mess of Disney and Looney Tunes. The whole thing is directed by Ari Folman, whose Waltz with Bashir is one of the best and most moving animated films I've seen. And it's loosely based, at least in its third act, on The Futurological Congress, a dystopian book from '70s Poland that I read a few years back. Oh, and Jon Hamm is here, too. Or at least his voice is. Now, so many reasons to see this - but did it all come together? Not really. This was messy and almost at odds with itself for the most part, and it's very deserving of the mixed reviews it's garnered. But man, what an experience.

Rosemary's Baby

Okay, here's where the horror binge begins in earnest. Snooze! I've lamented it a dozen times in these movie dumps, but older movies so rarely hold up to my #21stCenturyPrivilege standards and Rosemary's Baby was no exception. I'm sure this was a huge deal in 1968 - a woman, pregnant with SATAN'S BABY? We're all going to hell for even allowing this to be made! - but it really wasn't very scary and it really wasn't very interesting as a story. I'm sorry!

The Others

This was good, and maybe the best ghost movie I've ever seen. (Depends on how "ghosts" are defined, I guess. I'm not talking possessive spirits here.) Not sure what surprised me more - the ending (which, dammit, I should have seen coming!) or the fact that in fifteen years no one spoiled the ending for me. I mean, this is a Sixth Sense-level twist. Anyway, I dug it. 

Let the Right One In

This Swedish vampire-ish movie had such good reviews, so I didn't even think to check out the English language remake. I should have! Apparently it's just as good - and how often does that happen? Anyway, this was delightful and fun and all kinds of scary: jump scary, creepy scary, shocking amounts of gore scary, etc. But it wasn't really a horror movie. It's more of a teen romance, or a budding friendship movie, disguised as a horror film. I won't hold that against it - lots of the best movies with horror elements aren't pure "horror" movies at all - but just know heading into this that you'll be saying "aww!" at least as often as you'll be saying "AHH!"

28 Days Later

I knew plenty about this movie going in - mostly that it completely redefined the zombie genre by making the dangerous hordes "infected" and fast and vicious rather than "reanimated" corpses who just kind of ambled along aimlessly - but nothing could have prepared me for how old and shitty and dated this thing looked. This is a 2002 movie that looked grainier and blurrier than most things this side of 1985. Granted, it was a very low-budget film, and the grainy look definitely matched the vibe, so, fine - but still! Anyway, I liked this a lot. Not quite as much as I hoped to; it gets bogged down in the same tedious "other people are the real monsters in a zombie apocalypse" themes that plague everything else in the genre. And hey, maybe - again - this was the catalyst for that trend to start popping up everywhere, but I guess I was looking for more of a "holy shit, fast zombies are everywhere, and we're all gonna die" vibe in the vein of the Dawn of the Dead remake. But this was good! It was good.

Honeymoon

I'm drawn to streamable indie horror flicks. This one's got a grand total of four actors - only two main characters - and it takes place in, of course, a secluded cabin in the woods. Two twenty-somethings gets married. They have great chemistry. They joke a lot. They fuck a lot. And then one night the woman sleepwalks naked out into the middle of the woods, and suddenly, everything is different. She's spacey. Distant. Weirdly cut and bruised. The man is confused, concerned, and eventually of course quite distraught. There aren't a lot of jump scares in this one, and frankly, the story doesn't make a ton of sense - it's an allegory, but for what!? - but the final act is plenty disturbing. I liked this! Your mileage may vary.

Dressed to Kill

Oof. Damn, what a bore. I had high hopes for this - Brian De Palma making a Hitchcock-esque thriller in the '80s about a transgender serial killer? Sure, yes, let's do this! And... nope. Nothing! Even Michael Caine couldn't make this interesting. Let's move on.

The Ring

Alright - this lived up to all the hype. Fucking. Terrifying. Apparently the sequels are butt, which is too bad, but who cares? This is the kind of movie that absolutely would have given my younger self nightmares for days. (Nights?) Glad I didn't see this in 2002 when it came out. I'd still be interested in seeing the original Japanese version. I have one friend who's seen it, as far as I know. That friend? Sheridan, of all people. And he liked it! Imagine that!

From Dusk Till Dawn

I've wanted to see this for a long time - probably fifteen years - but not enough to actually, you know, see it. Because I always knew it'd be this kind of middling Robert Rodriguez movie that played like an Evil Dead knockoff set near the Mexican border. Now, this wasn't bad - Clooney was great, and Tarantino's script elevated this a great deal - but it was still a rather generic monster shoot-em-up, ostensibly about vampires but really just full of whatever the hell monsters and demons Rodriguez and company felt like designing and throwing in there. It all felt very '80s. Very B-movie. But hey, Salma Hayek looked great, huh?

There will be more to come in October, I assure you. But this will have to do for now.

Inferno

Ten years ago I read Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code between my senior year of high school and my first year of college, and I thought they were just great. Then came the movies, first The Da Vinci Code and then Angels & Demons, which together made Dan Brown's Robert Langdon a household Tom Hanks character, but also kind of sucked. And hey, in hindsight, the books kind of sucked too, and the Internet agrees, and at this point Dan Brown has become a bit of a laughing stock among people who read, oh, at least one book a year you can't buy in an airport.

Five years ago I read The Lost Symbol, and it was just terrible. Six-hundred-some-odd pages of the same old formulaic romp through Washington, with symbol-based riddles and ancient secrets and a giant conspiracy and a boatload of pseudo-science. Hot garbage, completely unmemorable, and the best thing I could say about it was that it flew right by.

So it was with very little enthusiasm that I started into Inferno a week ago. Imagine my surprise when the book, hey, wow, wasn't that bad! I mean, it was still "Dan Brown" bad - at one point a woman was described as "an epidemiologist of epidemics" - but it was tough to put down and easy to get into and loaded with all kinds of twists and turns I didn't see coming. (Some of them cheap as hell, sure, but still!) Look, what I'm saying is that I liked this book against all my better judgment. Dan Brown is still a bad writer from any technical standpoint, but airport paperbacks are meant to be quick comfort food, and sometimes a big old McDonald's combo meal sits just right.

Apparently a film adaptation of this one is coming out in less than a week. Wow! I had no idea! I will watch it within the next few years, I am sure.

Morning Star

Late last year, I read Red Rising and its sequel Golden Son, saying in my review of the second book:

What do I want from Morning Star, the coming-in-2016 conclusion to this series? More than anything, a brake pump. Let's slow things down. Zoom in on the main character and his personal issues, zoom way out and look at this society's struggles overall - it doesn't matter. But [Golden Son was wall-to-wall] crazy high-stakes action and now it's time to land this ship instead of just flinging it into a wall as hard as possible.

So, what's the verdict?

[Timpani drum roll]

[Dramatic pause]

[A brief, high-pitched squeaker of a fart]

Five-hundred pages of tersely described space fights and planet-ruling college-aged kids betraying one another. Early on it looked as though I might get my wish for a brake pump. Our protagonist, captured and tortured for a year after the shocking events that concluded Golden Son, returns bruised and battered and broken to his very humble origins. I'm thinking, yes. Okay. Here's where we break into the third act. Here's where our guy reconnects to his roots. Here's where he "remembers what's worth fighting for." Here's where - oh, no, never mind, there he goes zipping off into space again to kidnap a billionaire or stop a moon from exploding. And just like that, Morning Star turned into Golden Son all over again.

I mean, I think I liked it better than Golden Son, at least a little. It did conclude neatly, if not amazingly. Then again, the second book was a page-turner whereas this one was a little more sluggish. I guess I stopped caring about the story somewhere in 2016. Pierce Brown had an interesting little something going with Red Rising - sort of a more sophisticated and sci-fi-flavored version of The Hunger Games with lots of references to Greek and Roman antiquity. But after an impressive-by-YA-standards job at building worlds and setting stakes, he spent the next two books flinging characters back and forth between alliances - his protagonist oblivious to all of it of course - and ended up bringing more than a few people back from the dead (or, just as bad, and more frequently, allowing them to be captured only to get away at an opportune moment). It's not "bad" or "lazy" writing, it's just YA fiction being YA fiction.

Brown's already announced another trilogy set in the same world and in it he intends to explore the society surrounding the events of this civil-ish war for the solar system throne. That's great, but I'm not biting. You had your chance, bud!

I'm done with YA fiction, guys. (Almost. Still have one more on the backlog...)

Stan's TV Dump: September 2016

Fall's here, I'm back at school, and the TV beat goes on and on and on. Let's get on down to it.

Flowers: Season 1

Another Seeso binge, this just wasn't for me at all. I get what they're going for here - super-dramatic British despair played for laughs - but it never really clicked for me. Thankfully it was just six episodes.

Hard Knocks: Season 11

Every few years I watch Hard Knocks, and more often than not I'm reminded that there's no compelling reason to watch it. That Jets season with Rex Ryan notwithstanding, it turns out football coaches tend to be just cookie cutter as hell. Plus, fuck the Rams.

One Mississippi: Season 1

Yes, yes, yes. Loved this. I'd only vaguely been familiar with Tig Notaro before watching this "comedy" on Amazon Prime, but she:

• is gay
• is from Mississippi
• lost her mother unexpectedly
• had breast cancer
• had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery
• developed severe gastrointestinal problems after her cancer and surgery

And she jumps straight into all of this and more in this six-episode series. Truly a tear-jerker of a show and yet, somehow, undeniably funny and hopeful and uplifting. What got me most of all was the version of Mississippi depicted here - not the backwoods hellhole my elitist East Coast ass assumes it is, but a friendly, progressive, tolerant place to live on the Gulf Coast, with warm weather and good food. (Was this an exaggeration? Probably. But still!) So yeah, One Mississippi was great.

An Idiot Abroad: Season 1

Here's one I've been meaning to get around to for a while. Karl Pilkington is a friend and collaborator of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and he's just fantastically dull. As a spinoff of sorts to a podcast segment in which Karl dismisses lots of world travel as pointless and not worth it, Ricky and Steve decided to send him to see the seven wonders of the modern world. See him cope with traffic in India! Watch him ride a camel in Egypt in total discomfort! Observe as he chokes down authentic Chinese food with fear in his eyes! It's total cringe comedy - so, Ricky Gervais has a field day with it as you may expect - but I can't pretend I didn't laugh at poor Carl a time or two. Look, he brings it on himself! He spent a week in Mexico and complained multiple times that he hadn't yet seen or eaten a Mexican jumping bean - go ahead and Google what a Mexican jumping bean is. There are two more seasons of An Idiot Abroad, and although I'm in no rush, I'm sure I'll get around to them eventually.

Vice Principals: Season 1

Lotta mixed feelings here. For something that was initially billed as "Danny McBride vs. Walton Goggins," this... wasn't. McBride was serviceable enough as a very McBride type of sad schlub - picture Kenny Powers without any fame or fortune - and Goggins was fantastic, but the narrative thread here wasn't my favorite. Two vice principals conspire to overthrow the new principal - a successful and headstrong black woman - in what at times feels like "angry white men: the show." I thought the nine episodes were really hit-or-miss, with one of the objectively dumbest scenes of the season (a druggy dual-hallucination outside a high school football game) sending me into absolute hysterics while a few entire episodes left me unenthused. From the get-go HBO said Vice Principals would last two and only two seasons, so perhaps this is just a story that's only been half told at this point. Time will tell!

Fleabag: Season 1

A six-episode quickie from Amazon Prime. British. Funny enough, but really nothing memorable. Sorry!

Big Brother: Season 18

This is my trashy summer comfort food. Big Brother always has a tough time sustaining itself for entire seasons. In a game comprised almost entirely of competitions, alliances, and backstabbing, you can almost always count on a few great moments a year where a villain is born or an underdog becomes a fan favorite. But you can also almost always count on a ton of dead time, when alliances really do stick together and maintain power, and entire month-long stretches can feel predictable. There's also the undeniable catch-22 of shitty people making for good television; you root for the assholes to get knocked out of the game, but once they're gone, you've lost your investment in who wins and who doesn't. Or, worse, a group of assholes runs the table, and you're left to root for the lesser of three assholes by game's end. And then, asshole or not, some people just plain don't "deserve" to win the game, you know? That's how I felt about the winner this year. She wasn't the least deserving winner, not by a long shot, but... damn was she boring this year.

Mr. Robot: Season 2

It wasn't all that long ago that I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot, and in short hindsight, man, this show really jumped to new levels in Season 2. It was way more surreal, far more "blown open," and nothing felt impossible. For that, I commend it! For the way Season 2 unfolded, particularly in later episodes (compared to Season 1 which faltered and stagnated if anything), I praise it! But that ending... eh. That felt like a classic "just wait until next season" case of blue balls. Not like Walking Dead bad, but, you know, it just left me wanting more! Two seasons in, Mr. Robot is a pretty-good-not-great show in my book. Like, it may sneak into my top five list of dramas this year, but that's in a year without Fargo or The Leftovers. Look, we'll get to that in a few months.

Jane the Virgin: Season 1

When I heard the concept of this one a few years back, I laughed. (So did everyone!) A CW show about a religious virgin who accidentally gets artificially inseminated - that's a laugher! Turns out, this loving parody of telenovelas is one of the best surprises in recent years. It's good! And addicting. And legitimately fun to watch. There are tons of female-leaning shows Marissa will turn on while I'm in the room - Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, Hart of Dixie (R.I.P.) - but Jane the Virgin is the only one that made me say, alright, yeah, I need to start from the beginning here. And now I have, and so far, so good.

Bloodline: Season 1

I ignored this one last year, but Marissa finally convinced me that we should give it a go. In a word, it's good. In a more descriptive word, it's tense. Slow. Not bad - deliberate, really - just not an action-packed type of tense like Breaking Bad was. (But then, what's as good as Breaking Bad?) This one's about four siblings in the Florida Keys. The most memorable tagline of the series, delivered by Kyle Chandler more than once (and who doesn't love Kyle Chandler?) is "we're not bad people... but we did a bad thing." Without spoiling anything, Season 1 seems to be mostly about the bad thing these not-bad people did. Season 2, I'm guessing, is about the repercussions of that bad thing. I'm sure I'll know soon!

Transparent: Season 3
Definitely a great show, but three seasons in you don't need to hear that from me. It's often moving and even more often jarring - not so much for being the most LGBT-friendly show on television, but more so in how cringe-inducing this family can be. Selfish monsters, all five of them! I actually thought this was a slight step down from the first two seasons, but that still leaves it comfortably sitting in the upper echelon of television shows in 2016.

Happy October!

Stan's Movie Dump: August/September 2016

Let's catch up with what I've caught up with.

Bee Movie

This was mentioned, for some reason, at Sween's cabin in late August. I want to say Keith brought it up. What's crazy to me is that this 2007 movie was released as close to the end of Seinfeld (1998) as it was to when I watched it. Wow. At any rate, this was a weird one. Weird is good! Especially when it means "not boring." But let's review, broadly and loosely, what happens in this 90-minute movie. It starts out with a young adult bee leaving the hive for the first time to discover a whole big world out there - fair enough. Then he befriends a human woman who is astonished to learn that bees can talk - hard left turn, but let's see where this goes. Then the bee learns that humans are using bees as slave labor to mass produce honey and steal it for themselves, so the bee sues people in court. The bee wins. All the other bees get all fat and happy off from all the honey that's been returned to them, and as a result, they stop pollinating flowers. Then all the flowers in the world die. Or maybe just the country? That would make more sense I guess. The movie ends with the bee and his human girlfriend landing a commercial airliner by defying all laws of physics and putting it down "the way a bee flies." I mean, what? What even was all of this? Interspersed throughout are a bunch of Seinfeld witticisms and bee-based puns. So yeah, it's a 90-minute kids' courtroom drama featuring a dude getting cucked by a bee.

Jupiter Ascending

"So bad it's good" is a real phenomenon, and everyone knows it. This almost gets there. Such a swollen, crowded movie, just teeming with imaginative aliens and technology, but all for no apparent reason. Rumor has it this thing started out as a 600 page script and I kind of believe it; that would have been a ten-hour movie! I don't know what the Wachowskis were thinking with this one. Channing Tatum plays a werewolf alien in rocket-powered rollerblades! It's all just batshit insanity for the sake of batshit insanity. There are a hundred things going on, as if the Wachowskis wanted to make their own Star Wars trilogy, condensed way the hell down into one two-hour film. On a scene-by-scene basis it's actually an entertaining watch. Sean Bean is here, trying his hardest. Eddie Redmayne clearly understands exactly what he's signed up for, and just chews on every horrible line his villain character needs to say, in this hammy strained whisper of some sort. Mila Kunis gives a pretty forgettable performance, but then, she also has to play the main character here, a stand-in for the audience, a regular ordinary earthling who's suddenly off on a sprawling aimless mess of an adventure. She spends the whole movie just asking other characters what's going on. I can't remember another movie that laid down so much exposition and yielded such an incomprehensible story. So yeah, Jupiter Ascending is a hilariously ill-conceived mess, but at least it's not a bore. No sir, not at all.

The Danish Girl

This, on the other hand - this was a bore. Eddie Redmayne is here too, of course, as the titular Danish Girl - or is Alicia Vikander the Danish Girl? Because this movie felt more about her cisgender character, and her dealing with her husband's transition, than it did about Redmayne's transgender character herself. It seems like the "transgender community" at large has deemed this film problematic and harmful, and while I can't fully agree with a number of those complaints - it takes place in the 1920s, of course these people aren't going to use the right pronouns or adjectives! - I also understand that I don't get to dismiss such concerns and complaints from my tower of cisgender privilege. This was a movie made, after all, by cisgender people, starring cisgender people, and mostly for cisgender people. Okay, this whole paragraph feels wildly disconnected now, so to recap, it's a slow and sluggish movie that might be harmful and problematic for cisgender views of transgender issues, and the whole thing just feels like an Oscar grab for everyone involved. Skip it! (But I didn't think it wasn't terrible.)

The Road

People raved about this one, right? The book too. And I read the book but didn't love it. Maybe you need to be a father to "get" it. Maybe I need some kids. Anyway, the movie was pretty good. Viggo Mortensen, y'all. Very Walking Dead and lots of Last of Us vibes, but without any actual zombies. What caused the apocalypse in this story anyway? Doesn't matter.

Wiener-Dog

Here's an odd one, a true black comedy with far more cringes than laughs. It's essentially four separate stories - told serially, not in parallel - whose only common link is the same titular dachshund. It's a movie full of death and reacting to death and anticipating death and it's only like 80 minutes long if you feel like checking it out on Amazon Prime. 

The Host

I'd been looking forward to this one for a while - widely considered one of the best horror films (and foreign films) of the 2000s, and directed by Bong Joon-ho, whose Snowpiercer was one of my favorite movies of the last, oh, five years or so. It's a monster movie set in South Korea where some kind of amphibious slithering giant lizard-fish with tentacles wreaks havoc on a city. The part I wasn't epxecting - and didn't really care for, to be honest - was this quirky undertone about how dysfunctional the family at the center of the movie was. Wanted to love this, but merely liked it. Eh - so it goes!

Hush

This is a horror movie about a deaf woman and a home invasion. I liked it! Netflix. As you may imagine, the deaf angle puts a new twist on what makes this particular victim vulnerable - but also what makes her resourceful and capable of fending off her assailant. There are plenty of "ugh, you dumb fucking idiot" gaps in logic made by both parties, but for a tense ninety-minute horror flick? Yeah, this was decent!

Youth

Oof, you know how long it took to find a SFW poster for this one? At any rate, this is a slow-paced movie in which old friends Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel take a spa vacation in the Swiss Alps to shoot the shit and talk about retirement, their prostates, their families, and life in general. I didn't love this one and I can't recommend it, but it felt like a decent movie I'm just not old enough to appreciate. One review I read said "this won't be appreciated for another forty years," and I kind of get where the reviewer was coming from. (That said, if Youth is being viewed by anyone at all in 20 years, let alone 40, I'll be considerably surprised.) Anyway, Michael Caine was great, as he always is. There were some surreal images and sequences I really enjoyed, too. But for something that appeared sporadically on lots of Best of 2015 lists, eh. Your mileage may vary.

The Witch
Dang, another poster with a naked woman's backside. Or is this her frontside? Tough to tell with silhouettes. The Witch is a horror movie that takes place in early puritanical New England. It's authentic as hell in its characters' language and accents - or at least it feels that way, I dunno, I wasn't around in 1630 - and in its depiction of the shitty, shitty lifestyle that was "early puritanical New England." Nothing but chores and prayers and trying not to freeze or starve - and God forbid you smile! Seriously, for a horror movie, I didn't find this one all that scary. Unsettling, sure, very. And a good movie to boot. But blood rituals and witchcraft seem less harrowing than spending a lifetime chopping wood and hunting rabbits and praying for death. Oh, and it had a great ending.

That's all for now. Look for more horror movies in October, I'm sure.