Movies | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On the Contemporary Resonance of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse” Trilogy…

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With Halloween approaching, the column is going to take a little bit of a detour into some spooky stuff, and I’m very excited.

John Carpenter remains one of my favourite horror movie directors. A large part of that is just down to simple craft. Carpenter can make a cheap movie look great. More than that, though, Carpenter’s unique brand of horror has aged very well. This is particularly true of Carpenter’s “Apocalypse” trilogy – The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In The Mouth of Madness. Carpenter imagines the end of the world not with a bang, with the slow and unsettling collapse of the invisible forces holding it together. The world unravels and unspools, and chaos breaks through

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: apocalypse, end of the world, escapist, in the frame, in the mouth of madness, John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness, the thing | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Mummy”, the Most Maligned of Movie Monsters…

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist on Friday. With Halloween approaching, the column is going to take a little bit of a detour into some spooky stuff, and I’m very excited.

I’m thrilled that I got to write this piece about the Mummy, which remains one of the most interesting of the classic movie monsters because it seems to exist at odds with the rest of the classic fiends. There are plenty of classic Dracula and Frankenstein films, the Wolfman and the Invisible Man have been handled well over the years, but the Mummy always seems like the odd creature out of every wave of classic creature feature films. So I was thrilled to do a bit of a deep dive into it to look at how – and why – that is.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: Alex Kurtzman, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, escapist, hammer horror, in the frame, monster, Movie, movie monsters, steven sommers, the mummy, universal classic monsters | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Escapist Movie Podcast – “We Finally Have An Excuse To Re-Watch Willow”

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Darren

The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard for the ninth episode. It was a light enough week for film news, so we talked about Disney’s new content warnings on some its older and more dated classics, the announcement that there was a Willow television series coming, and discussed the latest version of The Witches.

You can listen to the episode here, back episodes of the podcast here, click the link below or even listen directly.

Filed under: Movies, Podcasts! | Tagged: disney, jack packard, podcast, the escapist, the witches, willow | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Witches (2020)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Darren

The Witches offers a clumsy American update of the classic Roald Dahl novel.

To be fair, there is something potentially interesting in attempting to update The Witches, both for modern audiences and for American viewers. It’s to the credit of director Robert Zemeckis and co-writers Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro that they at least understand this. The Witches makes a number of alterations to its source material, and at least some of those reflect a genuine and compelling attempt to update the story to fit in a modern and American context.

Any witch way but loose…

At the same time, The Witches is a mess. Part of this is down to the way in which a lot of the appeal of Dahl’s story is lost in translation, as a wry and arch British story gets filtered through the hypersaturated Americana of one of the defining American directors, an even more exaggerated effect of what happened with Steven Spielberg’s work on The B.F.G. However, some of this is more fundamental, as Zemeckis struggles to balance tone and mood across the film, and finds his attentions drawn more to what his interests desire than what the plot demands.

The Witches is a misfire, but an intriguing one. There are hints of a much more compelling movie to found, sifting between its more misjudged moments.

Putting a (ro)dent in his reputation…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anne hathaway, Chris Rock, film, guillermo del toro, horror, mice, Movie, non-review review, Octavia Spencer, racism, rates, review, roald dahl, robert zemeckis, the witches | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: On the Rocks

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Darren

On the Rocks is a disarmingly charming film.

Sofia Coppola’s latest is built around the relationship between Laura and her father Felix. Laura is happily married with two young girls, but has begun to suspect that her marriage is dysfunctional. There are small clues. Her husband Dean seems less interested in physical intimacy, and has been spending more time at the office with his co-worker Fiona. As her suspicions mount, Laura reaches out to her father Felix, who has spent his life as a debonair playboy with a somewhat cynical perspective of the masculine psyche.

Daddy daughter day.

On the Rocks is an earnest dramedy, following the dynamic between Laura and Felix as they launch an investigation into her husband’s potential affair. It’s elevated by two superb central performances, a clever script, and direction that allows its characters and its actors room to work. There’s a surprising amount of honest and introspection in On the Rocks, but also a surprising earnestness. On the Rocks is a surprisingly empathic film, never judging or condemning its characters as easily as it might.

The results are engaging and heartening. In some ways, particularly given the central dynamic of an older man played by Bill Murray and a younger woman managing her own life crisis, it’s hard not to see On the Rocks as a companion piece to Coppola’s breakout film Lost in Translation. However, there’s a lot more maturity and reflection at play here, a kindness and gentleness that feels earned through the two decades between then and now.

“Enjoying a nice Mar-team-ee.”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: a24, Bill Murray, film, Movie, non-review review, on the rocks, rashida jones, review, sofia coppola | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the “Joker” Controversy, One Year Out…

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. It’s been roughly a year since the release of Joker, so it seems appropriate to take a look back at the controversy surrounding the film.

The controversy around Joker is interesting, because it was at once so loud and so meaningless. In the lead-up to the film’s release, there was a lot of hyperbole around the movie, arguing that it might empower or encourage a certain audience – angry young men – to commit acts of violence. This made the release of the film something of a wry practical joke, with Joker ultimately bending over backwards to avoid any potentially inflammatory choices. The result was a storm that raged in a tea cup, but which seemed eager to bubble over.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: controversy, escapist, in the frame, incels, joker, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Strange Logic of Netflix’s Cancellations…

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist today. With Netflix announcing a number of major cancellations recently – from GLOW to Altered Carbon – it seemed like an interesting topic to discuss and explore.

Netflix operates a bit more opaquely than more conventional television broadcasters, and so its internal logic is a little rougher around the edges. However, the logic of cancellation has become a little clearer over time, as the streamer has drawn the shutter down on more and more of its shows. Indeed, with the benefit of the growing dataset, it appears that the underlying logic of cancellation for the streaming service is not radically different from that of television – even if the underlying math is a little more unusual.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: binging, cancellation, GLOW, Movies, netflix, series, shows, streaming | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! On the Snyder Cut and the Future of Pandemic Cinema…

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Darren

So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with the Monday article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This month, it will be releasing on the Thursday.

With that in mind, here is last week’s episode, covering the long-looming release of The Snyder Cut of Justice League, and why this might represent an attractive model for studios desperately looking for new (and affordable) content in the midst of a pandemic.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist, godfather, in the frame, justice league, pandemic, rocky iv, the escapist, the snyder cut, video | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Rebecca

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Darren

The most shocking thing about Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Rebecca is how tame it feels.

The bulk of the coverage of the adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic romance focuses on the idea that Wheatley is tilting at cinematic windmills by daring to explore the same ground that Alfred Hitchcock had already so memorably mapped. Hitchcock is as close to a cinematic sacred cow as exists, and to attempt to remake one of his most beloved films would be tantamount to making another version of Gone with the Wind or restaging Casablanca. It is one of the rare lines that exists in a modern pop culture built around recycling existing intellectual property.

Maxim-um fun.

In truth, there’s nothing wrong with daring to approach the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock. After all, Park Chan-wook’s Stoker was very much an update of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. More than that, there are perhaps valid reasons for wanting to go to Manderley again. Hitchcock’s adaptation of du Maurier’s novel was constrained by the demands of the Production Code Authority, and forced to change key plot points and obscure others through subtext. While some observers might argue this renders the film more “artful”, it does justify a revisit in a less puritanical time.

However, Wheatley never manages to bring these ideas to the surface. His version of Rebecca never manages to quite articulate or express the anxieties lurking in the shadow of Hitchcock’s classic. Rebecca is a sleek and stylish production with a set of solid performances and a few flashes of visual vigour, but it lacks a strong sense of its own identity – often seeming disjointedly caught between its influences and its impulses, failing to reconcile the two into anything especially compelling.

A time for reflection.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Armie Hammer, Ben Wheatley, danvers, film, kristen scott thomas, lily james, manderley, maxim de winter, Movie, netflix, non-review review, rebecca, review | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Potential of the Pandemic Awards Season…

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist today. There’s been a lot of interesting debate recently about the Academy Awards, and what what they might look like this year, so I thought it was worth taking a closer look.

With cinemas closed around the world – and most obviously in the familiar movie markets of Los Angeles and New York – it would be impossible for this awards season to work in the same way as previous years. The Academy has made changes to its rules to compensate, but some observers argue that the Oscar simply cannot go ahead in the current climate. However, there’s a solid argument to be made for pressing ahead under these conditions – for an awards season that looks as bizarre as the year that led into it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.