montyterrible - Tumblr blog

montyterrible · 1 month

Text

“How do I love thee, Lords of the Fallen 2? Let me count the ways…”

Having somewhat recently finished my first playthrough of the 2023 Lords of the Fallen, and after immediately starting a second playthrough, I wanted to put together some thoughts on the game; however, I also wanted to avoid writing another Mortal Shell - sized epic, so I am going with an internet staple: a clearly delineated list, with five entries just because. There are issues I could talk about at great length—like the enemy variety or how the “rune” system of passive bonuses equipable on weapons feels kind of boring or limited—but I want to focus on the things that I feel led to me ultimately loving Lords of the Fallen 2 overall since that feels more fun and better suited to this intentionally limiting frame than trying to say something comprehensive.

I LOVE THE LEVEL/WORLD DESIGN…

“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight”

While I enjoyed Elden Ring and Lies of P for the most part, one area where both of those games kind of disappointed me was in their individual approaches to the recursive and generally labyrinthine level and world design people associate with the Souls-like sub-genre of ARPGs. I thought Elden Ring was too much of an open world game on the whole, with too much empty space and checklist-style design, while Lies of P was pushing in the opposite direction, with conventional linear levels so focused that they lacked a strong element of exploration. Both of those games do have some brilliant bits, but Lords of the Fallen 2023 was just a lot more satisfying to me in this regard.

It doesn’t reach the level of flexibility that the first half of the original Dark Souls has, but it often surprised me with just how consistently good it was at sending me out from a checkpoint, spinning me around five or so times, and then leading me back to that checkpoint again (to my surprise). It’s obviously more focused than Elden Ring since it has the more traditional Souls-y structure, but it’s also frequently willing to indulge in nonessential loops or significant dead-ends, in contrast with Lies of P. Furthermore, if you don’t engage with its system of optional checkpoint creation, that requires a consumable item, then some of these loops feel especially brutal, at least on a first playthrough, given the maze-like levels and the enemy numbers and aggression being quite intense.

“World design” factors in here because A) levels do loop back to one another at times in ways that I did not initially anticipate and B) the total space you explore is so dense. It’s not all incredibly interconnected via traversable paths, but as you explore and gain an appreciation for where each area is in relation to the others, you start to notice just how layered everything is. It’s possible to look up from the bottom of the world and place things at the top (or vice versa) in a really satisfying manner. In the end, you make your way all over, down, around, and under this particular mass of land that the game’s explorable world is situated upon. The effect reminded me most of Dark Souls 3, maybe especially because that is another game of this type where there isn’t an abundance of interconnectivity but where you can see the whole world from very early on and then get to spend the rest of the game traveling through it and visiting all the locations you were shown, while also looking back (often up) at the places you already traveled through.

I LOVE UMBRAL…

“. . . [I]f God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.”

In still images, Lords of the Fallen 2 can look quite impressive visually, albeit in a sometimes “default” Unreal Engine sort of (Maximum Polygons) way, but there is a certain amount of crustiness to it when you dig in and get up close and personal. I’m not some kind of graphics obsessive or someone who really cares about console power and whatnot, but the most distinctive “current gen” aspect of Lords of the Fallen 2023 is probably the element of “Umbral,” which represents both a technical showcase and an intensification of an idea that’s been developing across other, similar games.

In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you can die (at least) twice thanks to the resurrection mechanic that lets you revive on the spot where you were killed to continue fighting. In Mortal Shell, losing all of your health causes the “Foundling” to be ejected from whatever “shell” it’s inhabiting, where you could keep fighting in that extremely fragile state or could scramble to get back into your body before a single hit kills you. Lords of the Fallen 2 intensifies and expands on this concept by instantly (without a loading screen) sending you to what amounts to the realm of the dead when you’re killed initially, with true death coming only if you also die in this Umbral zone. It’s actually possible to technically die again and again without resetting an area as long as you can escape from Umbral at one of the designated exit points, which crumble upon use.

Probably the most succinct way to explain Umbral is that it’s the Otherworld from the Silent Hill franchise, but entering and exiting it is completely seamless and freeform. Being in Umbral changes the game world into something more Fucked Up. Some of the changes are just visual, but Umbral does also come with new landmasses, interactable objects, and enemies as well that sit naturally beside, around, and amidst what you could see before, effectively creating the impression of a ghostly land that’s always just out of sight all around you.

One cool concept here is the Umbral Lamp, which has various active functions (like yanking the soul out of your enemies temporarily) but which will passively let you see into Umbral if you just hold it up. Doing this reveals the hidden environment and also allows a limited interaction between the planes. I tested this very early in my first playthrough when I noticed that a wall in Umbral had this grotesque protrusion that I assumed would have collision tied to it. Walking along that wall without the lamp raised was perfectly smooth, but if I held the lamp up, I’d collide with the obstacle. Keep in mind that you can pull out the lamp whenever you want and swing it over whatever part of the environment you like. I’m not technically in the know enough to evaluate exactly how impressive this is, but it’s a neat trick that feels like it might show off the hardware.

Umbral adds so much to the exploration of the game because of how any given area is essentially doubled, though not all spaces have anything meaningful to see or find in the other realm. It’s often used as a puzzle-solving mechanic, where you have to willingly enter Umbral (risking true death) to bypass an obstacle, possibly via a path that only exists in the world of the dead. A fun horror visual you encounter a few times in the game is moving, in Umbral, along the bottom of a body of water, with plant life waving and debris and corpses floating around you like the water was still present. Even when Umbral isn’t used for anything meaningful, looking into it still reveals these extra macabre environmental details, like saintly statues that appear demonic if you shine your lamp on them. I accidentally jump-scared myself at times because I’d hold up the lamp, only to find an enemy from Umbral staring me in the face, or shrieking and taking a swipe at me as I yelped and dropped the lantern, narrowly avoiding being dragged into Umbral from the ghostly contact.

I LOVE THE “DREAD” METER (AND OTHER DISPLAY STUFF)…

“I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.”

I’m cheating a bit with this item, but, at least initially, this is an extension of what I was talking about before. When you are in Umbral, you have a limited amount of time to explore, as the number and type of enemies that continuously spawn around you from these little statues/frozen figures intensifies with time, ultimately culminating in the appearance of a very powerful reaper-like creature that starts hunting you down. I had some narrow escapes during my first playthrough of Lords of the Fallen 2, where I entered Umbral (willingly or not) and then only just managed to reach an exit point or checkpoint to escape before triggering the reaper’s appearance, or sometimes even as it was actively chasing me.

The meter that tells you how close you are to doom is a wonderful visual, though: It’s primarily this giant eye icon in the upper right part of the screen that periodically blinks (and that shuts when you’re in a safe zone). This was honestly a huge contributing factor to me getting the game after I saw it in pre-release coverage. Rather than go with some innocuous meter or minimalist bit of design, you have this very lively, large eyeball. It’s both goofy and kind of genuinely unsettling.

Other elements of the UI/HUD have a similar level of stylization, most notably the displays associated with the Umbral Lamp and ranged weapon/magic actions. Every character has the lamp, but then the other depends on whether you’re casting magic or are using a bow or various thrown objects. You toggle between these two options with the up and down directional buttons, and holding the left trigger “opens” the selected one, surrounding the larger icon with a bunch of smaller ones indicating actions and button inputs. These are all very colorful, and the arrangement (where the smaller icons sort of ring and overlap with the larger ones) just struck me as some level of idiosyncratic. Initially, the icons are even kind of mysterious or “confusing” in a way that I liked. When you hold up the lamp, for example, you see all these little options, one of which is a skull and another of which looks like a weird fetus.

Also kind of idiosyncratic is the choice to pull the camera into an over-the-shoulder position when the player holds the left trigger to either ready their aim or raise the lamp. I like this flourish because it seems kind of unnecessarily awkward. It helps with manually aiming, I guess, but the shift also makes transitioning from melee to ranged (or lamp) options a little disorienting. In combat, it obscures your view of the battlefield, for example, and while you can still evade, it feels like exposing yourself to take on this perspective. And maybe vulnerability was one consideration here, as this is the perspective from which you use your lamp, so holding it up and peering into the dark, in a sense, is meant to create this appropriate feeling of tension or horror, which is further enhanced by your slowed movement and more limited view.

Or maybe it’s just willfully different to avoid mirroring FromSoftware’s work too directly? There’s part of me that likes that option just as much (if not more) than the marginally more profound one I described above. In either case, seeing this awkward view change in the pre-release footage also charmed me.

I LOVE THAT IT IS LORDS OF THE FALLEN 2…

“I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. . . .”

While I was initially intrigued at the prospect of a sequel to the 2014 Lords of the Fallen, I kind of… fell out of interest with it when I started thinking about what the massive time jump and the title (“THE Lords of the Fallen,” at the time of announcement) suggested about the relationship between the sequel and its predecessor. I did finish that first game and did continue playing it afterward, and probably would have stuck with it even longer if I hadn’t been constantly stressing about backing up my save to a USB flash drive to avoid losing my data to frequent crashes, so this framing of the sequel felt kind of like a snub to me.

What got me back on board and did push me to get it was watching a little of someone’s stream around the release date. When they spoke to a particular character at the hub and he directly referenced the events of the first game, including outright using the name “Antanas,” that was the point I decided to buy Lords of the Fallen 2023. To someone who hasn’t played the first game, I don’t think any of this stuff is too obviously being carried over and will just feel like the usual Souls-like vagueness around names and events and such being dropped casually, sans context. There is part of me that wishes it was more prominent, but I’m fairly content with what I got: Aside from the antagonist Adyr technically “returning” from Lords of the Fallen 1, there are two other characters carried over and one who has a connection via his ancestry.

Having these little footholds of pre-existing investment is ultimately what helped me get interested in the new stuff, I feel. I started out not really connecting with the new characters in a hard-to-describe sort of way. The writing and characterization were fine, I thought, but there was just something “off,” like they were a touch too generic maybe (but maybe that feeling only comes from having played so many of these games now that I recognize the archetypes). Eventually, though, those feelings changed and I did care when characters started meeting their, predictably, tragic ends. Some of these “quests” were more underwhelming than others, but I started caring at some point I can’t exactly identify. I think I also missed the more conventionally RPG-like dialogue system of the first Lords of the Fallen, which is replaced here with the more distant-feeling Soulsian approach of just having other characters as good as monologue at you.

This sequel’s aesthetic ended up being more consistent with the first title than I originally thought. Some shift in the visuals that I find hard to pin down had me thinking, pre-release, that the game was going in a more grounded direction, where the 2014 Lords of the Fallen had this colorful, kind of goofy, comic-book-like look to it. Having now examined the enemy models in particular up close, I think the perceived shift is just a result of more subtle changes that I’m again not qualified to identify specifically; however, the “Rhogar” (read: demon) designs here definitely look like they belong in the same universe from the first game, so it was just some change in… lighting(?) that threw me at first. The one thing I was hoping for that never happened was for the old enemies or areas to somehow return as well as a surprise finale or something. That would have really delighted me.

I LOVE THAT PARRYING (AND THE GAME) IS A BIT EASY…

“I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.”

Don’t get it twisted—I died a lot in this game, sometimes in ways that felt fair and other times in ways that seemed like BS, though that’s an element of even the “official,” FromSoftware-made, Souls games. I felt tension while exploring in a way that I believe enhances that exploration, and I certainly didn’t go into any fights just assuming I’d win. The threat was there. And yet, I’d say this game is probably easier than any of the other titles I’ve mentioned above, and even that the exploration and moment-to-moment fights might feel tougher than the big bosses in a way that seems awkward or even unintentional. And yet, the game still feels like a true sequel to Lords of the Fallen 2014 in this way, as my impression of some of the post-release discussion around that game was how it was in some ways a more approachable take on this style of RPG. I think Lords of the Fallen 2 carries on that tradition.

One way it does this is through making grinding an incredibly accessible process. Since enemies spawn infinitely in Umbral, it’s easy to do a little grinding without even necessarily meaning to as you simply cut down the weaker demons because they’re either in your way or just on your way (somewhere). You don’t have to constantly visit a checkpoint and reset the level to get more sources of EXP to appear and can instead just go into Umbral and let the EXP come to you.

Bosses and enemies also have simpler move sets than in the more recent other big-name Souls-ish titles, and since enemies repeat so much throughout the game, you can get pretty comfortable with them individually. Parrying, as previously noted, also feels easier. That’s partly to do with the enemy repetition giving you so many opportunities to learn their attack patterns and timings, but they also tend to attack in simple and more easily readable ways. Most of them are humanoids, so how they hold and swing their weapons (or limbs) just makes a lot of sense even the first time you encounter them. Parrying is a matter of timing a block with the enemy’s attack, rather than performing any additional inputs, which means that you can also accidentally get parries even as you simply raise your shield or weapon to defend yourself.

I thought I’d try parrying out against the first proper boss—a heavy metal angel with her feet out—just to see how it went and found it so satisfying and reasonable to pull off that it became a staple of my first playthrough. I even went with a lighter, very small shield to maximize the risk of mistiming a parry since I felt so confident doing it (and since it’s possible to regain health in this game through certain mechanics I won’t get into here). The sounds and visuals associated with parrying just felt rewarding, as were the effects associated with breaking an enemy’s stance and delivering a “Grievous Strike,” up to and including the perhaps overly chunky wind-up and splattery noises that are meant to sell the power of the attack.

I reached a point years ago, when I still hadn’t played that many Souls-esque games, where I was no longer interested in punishing duels and was more invested in novelty and mechanics (“gimmick fights,” even). I can still buckle down and learn fights if I have to—and I certainly had to when I played Lies of P—but getting to bypass that process of dying over and over and having to come to terms with the fact that you might have an hour or more of learning ahead of you before you make meaningful progress in the game again seems just fine to me. Re-playing some Elden Ring in preparation for its upcoming expansion, I just found myself kind of tired of the Margits of the gaming world. Lords of the Fallen 2 was arguably too easy at points, even for me with this mindset, but I generally just found it fun. The exploration was the thing that really drew me in—that and sometimes feeling like I was trundling through the cover art of a heavy metal album—and the fights were more so the seasoning than the meal itself.

IN CONCLUSION…

“I love thee freely, as men might strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.”

This game was essentially a gift when I bought it, and if dollars and hours are equivalent, I nearly got my money’s worth with my first playthrough alone. However, I think Lords of the Fallen 2023 had the misfortune of being priced into the same associative tier as titles like God of War: Ragnarök or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom when it lacks a lot of that polish, scale, and detail and would probably feel more at home at 50 dollars instead. It carries on a bit of its predecessor’s jank, and however massive of an undertaking it actually was to create, it has this scrappy quality to it at times when the seams really show. It was very unfortunate for it to release a month after Lies of P as well—a similar game that was both cheaper and more polished and that also had the more audacious and novel premise.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Lords of the Fallen 2 will receive a critical/popular reappraisal in the future. That’s probably just a safe bet at this point for literally any piece of media, but I genuinely think that the stuff with Umbral and the level and world layouts are going to catch people’s attention in a wider sort of way in time, probably after a price drop or steep sale.

(Title based on and quotes above taken from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, “How Do I Love Thee?”)

#lords of the fallen #dark souls #video games #review

1 note · View note

montyterrible · 1 month

Text

What did Lords of the Fallen 2 mean by this?

More like "Soles-like," am I right, folks?

0 notes

montyterrible · 2 months

Text

“This is a (wo)man’s world”: The Excessorious Thinktation of Mr. Monty Terrible, re. Birds of Prey 2020

For a movie so focused on women, one of the most noticeable early design choices in the 2020 Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn ironically concerns a man: specifically Jared Leto’s Joker. The character is present here but in ways that deliberately omit the particulars. The animated Joker seen in the opening is more of a classically… clean-cut version of the character and not really recognizable as the Leto Joker. Ditto the image of his head Harley has as a bulls-eye on the wall of her apartment. The man himself is only seen from the back, in the couple of instances where he does “appear.”

He isn’t even seen breaking up with Harley. We’re just told about it. You can read this as meaningful if you like—Joker’s presence and his influence on Harley being this intangible, malignant thing, like a ghost, maybe, wholly separate from his physical body—though it’s also just blatantly an attempt to dodge using a version of the character that did not exactly win over audiences without outright rebooting him. The obvious brand rehabilitation happening here undermines the art a bit, such as it is: It’s more transparently a product in this way. While there may be artistic or logistical excuses, I don’t think any fully invalidate this point since it still feels like the movie is dodging even the established look of the character in a pretty telling way.

Whatever the exact ratio of intention to coincidence, the result is a message of separation, liberation—*emancipation*—for the Harley character, in-universe and as a valuable asset/property. The title might lead with “Birds of Prey,” but this is Harley’s movie: no Jokers allowed.

Not that the absent Joker is a “bad” thing. While I can find my way to liking other parts of the 2016 Suicide Squad, including Leto’s Joker, it’s inarguable that that film’s contribution to the modern DC universe of live-action films was mainly Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, as well as a certain garish sense of style that does persist here, arguably in a stronger sort of way than in even the proper Suicide Squad sequel that would come later. The impression that I come away with is that this movie’s temperament is more genuinely meatheaded in a 2016 Suicide Squad sort of way than it is crass-but-clever like the 2021 THE Suicide Squad. The fist bump the lady protagonists share at the end (over breakfast drinks and tacos) feels very much spiritually of a kind with the visual of two masculine hands gripping one another, muscles bulging from the camaraderie.

Maybe that is itself a notable feature given that this is a movie principally about women, written and directed by women, and with Robbie as a producer. It’s glittery, ridiculous, violent fun For The Ladies. It’s a movie with a breakup at its center, and we see Harley deal with that in some perhaps stereotypical ways, like giving herself a haircut and eating junk food while crying, but the whole movie kind of has a certain post-breakup anger, determination, and wildness behind it. It’s fast paced but not so much in a deft way and more like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Harley is the narrator, so her typically chaotic perspective is the excuse, in a sense, for the stylistic excess: bright colors, character introductions and sometimes vengeful motivations conveyed via on-screen text, a surreal performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” when she’s hit in the face by mob boss antagonist Roman Sionis/Black Mask at one point.

The overall vibe for the plot is “heist”-esque, with some interruptions and rewinding by narrator Harley to create excitement and a sense of fun and complication. It isn’t exactly wildly original or interesting in terms of the narrative or writing, however, and there are points where the movie seems to more or less acknowledge this: like Harley essentially admitting that Renee Montoya’s suspension (as a cop) is a trope or how Black Canary calls attention to Harley suddenly having rollerblades on for some reason in the funhouse fight sequence. Momentum is the focus here. The Fantabulous Emancipation is a lean sub-two hours, and that feels about right for this concept. The much-missed 90-minute runtime standard of old, which this movie still exceeds, was the exact right length for a disposable bit of entertainment with some highlights. You can practically feel the script (and Harley) trying to force the team together in time for the climax, but it generally does not feel like the story was mutilated to reach this runtime.

Roller derby feels like a good fit for this version of Harley aesthetically (and also jibes with the feminist theming), and it gets paid off with the skates at the funhouse brawl and afterward when chasing down Sionis’ car. Cassandra Cain has been taking things out of people’s pockets all movie long, and then she reverse-pickpockets a grenade onto Sionis to finally end him. Harley’s troubles really get started when she tries and fails to eat an egg sandwich, and then she finally gets to eat one at the end. There’s even a fun bit there where the narrator and on-screen Harleys sync up as the story concludes: “Call me a softy,” says the narration; “I dare ya,” says Harley in the car with Cass. It’s a cute, conclusive-feeling beat to end on.

The real treat here, in my opinion, are the fight scenes, especially a couple starring Harley in a police station where the music is reminiscent of a shriek of rage at times. There’s a moment where she’s hiding behind a palette of cocaine, which is then shot up by Sionis’ mercenaries, allowing Harley to inhale the dust and go a little extra berserk. The funhouse fight is visually pretty engaging thanks to the environment, which also creates opportunities for interesting fight choreography. I can’t compare this to every one of the live-action DC movies, but Fantabulous definitely has some of the crunchier action I’ve seen in these films, with a somewhat higher degree of visual credibility. This section is small, but even on rewatch, I would say that the fights are the main reason to see this movie. They’re at least noteworthy highlights.

The “emancipation” of the title definitely shows in the design and theming of the film in ways that I have to imagine made some people very angry—something something “shoved down our throats,” “childhood ruined,” woke, etc. The women aren’t sexualized in a leering way here, and the focus seems to have been on clothing them to give them a sense of style appropriate to their character versus creating something strictly “attractive” or honoring the designs from the comics. Black Canary gets somewhat more revealing attire, but in a considered way where there’s still more covered than not. Harley’s outfits take the Suicide Squad 2016 foundation and add like 200% more accessories and glitter. Cass is dressed like a kid, and Montoya looks like she’s a living, aging person and just very “normal” overall. Huntress might come closest to wearing something like a super suit consistently.

The theming is very straightforward empowerment stuff and very safe—or it would not be broadcast so aggressively like this—though that fact won’t stop the aforementioned, theoretical, angry viewers from thinking it’s some aberration and step too far. Too “political” and so forth.

It’s laid on very thick: When Harley blows up Ace Chemicals early on, Montoya immediately gets her intent (“She just publicly updated her relationship status”), while her partner (a man) is oblivious. Montoya is overlooked and overruled at work in favor of men; Black Canary is repeatedly referred to by Sionis as his “little bird.” Probably the most high-falutin’ it gets is with Harley telling Canary that “A harlequin’s role is to serve” and “You know, a harlequin’s nothing without a master.” And then Canary saves her from being some kind of kidnapped or trafficked in the back of a van after a man gets her drunk(er). Even Doc, the elderly man who owns the restaurant Harley lives above, sells her out. Some of the most squirmy violence in the film, to me, involves breaking a man’s legs with a baseball bat. It’s a movie that some might claim is misandrist, though, if anything, it feels pretty egalitarian with how hard the blows consistently land. The ladies strike one another and men and are struck by men with quite a bit of oomph.

“Friends, brothers, men of Gotham,” says Black Mask to his army, making what should be simple mercenary/goon work feel downright fraternal. Later, the final part of the final showdown happens on a pier lined with statues of the Gotham founders, most of which seem to be men. This is where Harley and Cass kill Sionis, who had risen to the top of the patriarchal heap in the modern day.

There’s maybe some self-awareness here since, earlier, Harley tells Cass to “blow something up” or “shoot someone” to get respect from boys.

While there are other men characters, two of the most prominent are Sionis and his right-hand man, Victor Zsasz, and the two of them have this very… interesting (read: gay) relationship. Like, Zsasz is incredibly visibly jealous of the attention Sionis gives Canary at one point, and Sionis has this sort of BDSM-adjacent thing going on, which would make sense with the “black” “mask,” in a way. He’s more often associated with gloves (and a fear of uncleanliness despite apparently also having a penchant for having Zsasz remove people’s faces) than with a mask in this movie, however. A fixture of his club’s stage are these two big black hands on either side, with eyes held between their middle two fingers. Which kind of suggests the gloves are the mask. Meanwhile, the mask itself is on a pedestal in a room with this sort of bondage-y art on the walls, and putting it on almost seems to be a last resort and feels like this particularly manic, strained moment for Sionis. There’s at least an association being made.

There’s part of me that appreciates how this could be an intentional assault on a certain contingent of the movie’s audience. “Aggressive” is a good word for it, as is “gay.” Neither of those things bothered me, though I did find Chris Messina’s (Zsasz) and Ewan McGregor’s (Black Mask) performances kind of grating at times. It’s funny that Leto’s Joker is persona non grata here, as both of these men are at points doing things with their mannerisms and voices that remind me a lot of that take on the Joker. You might even call some of the acting that they’re doing “bad,” in fact.

They both have their moments of genuine menace, though, that intersect with the themes and help redeem the oddball stuff—like this pretty tense and upsetting bit where Sionis thinks a woman in his club is laughing at him, so he forces her to dance on a table and her male companion to cut and then tear her dress off. Looking on, Canary sheds a tear of, we can assume, sisterhood. Zsasz similarly gets a bit creepy with Harley’s paralyzed body later in the movie and then tries to get Canary to cut open Cass to prove her loyalty and extract an all-important stolen diamond, and when he dies in this scene the women essentially take turns stabbing him in some form. It is not subtle!

Now, potentially associating male gayness (or at least some shade of queerness) with violence against women seems problematic. And while I can appreciate these versions of Sionis and Zsasz being some kind of cishet male comic fan repellant, and also just the weirdness of the take, it seems like making them more conventionally masculine and straight would have kept the theming tidier. There’s not room in here for too much nuance.

#movies #dc movies #superheroes #movie review #harley quinn

0 notes

montyterrible · 3 months

Text

Witches, Gangbangers, and Crocodiles

What are we? Some kind of Suicide Squad: Extended Edition (2016)?

In some ways, David Ayer’s much-maligned Suicide Squad movie is kind of a fascinating specimen in amber preserving the flaws of Warner Bros. and DC’s approach to emulating the success of the Marvel superhero films.

I’m not a Marvel guy—or really a DC guy at this stage in my life—but I can agree with what feels like the pretty logical, commonsense argument that Marvel’s titanic success with The Avengers team-up in 2012 was facilitated by the handful of films focused on individual characters they did first. Meanwhile, DC’s equivalent Justice League movie wasn’t preceded by an appropriate amount of scaffolding, so you end up with two of the three major pillars of the team (Batman and Wonder Woman) being introduced in the same film, along with teasers working in still other faces like Cyborg and The Flash. Suicide Squad attempts the same sort of thing in miniature, with some perhaps less well-known and beloved figures who would, admittedly, probably not deserve their own entire films but who still feel kind of under-served by their treatment here.

Erratic or downright recursive is the pacing of the opening act(?) of this movie, as it feels like it’s either on fast forward or is plucking selected scenes from other standalone films from an alternate universe, particularly in the cases of Deadshot and Harley Quinn, who receive substantial backstory attention here, at the expense of the cohesion of this movie. It’s not so much that these are bad bits and pieces of characterization and narrative in isolation so much as they just feel… out of context, and worse off for it. Like, Joker’s seduction and betrayal of Harley would certainly function better emotionally in a complete film but here feels thrown out without much weight behind it. Even the extremely colorful title card kind of shows up without much aplomb, as “Task Force X” founder Amanda Waller is simply walking into a restaurant or hotel after a couple of scenes, before we go into still more introduction and exposition that stalls whatever forward momentum there was.

This first bit is messy in a way that I don’t think even a theoretical “Ayer Cut” with an even longer runtime could fix since, again, the problem is a foundational one—These are simply other entire stories that are being smudged to try to get where we need to go as fast as possible. Once the Squad is on the ground in a post-magical cataclysm Midway City, things settle down and start to cohere better and proceed more smoothly, though there is some further embarrassment to come.

A bit of context: I first watched this movie after critical and popular consensus on it had already been reached. I knew what it was like, and believed it, but I still went into it hopeful since I saw it shortly after watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), which I, surprisingly, liked enough to watch twice in two days—the extended cut, at that. As a result, I thought maybe I would find Suicide Squad equally surprisingly good (to me). That, however, was not the case, and my assessment of it at the time was that it was simply “boring,” probably the most damning of states for a film. One moment that actually stuck with me was the one pictured above—Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag eating a chicken leg at night in a hotel room for some reason. Which I found more absurd than anything else.

On re-watch, the chicken leg is still a delightfully odd choice for a late-night snack, but I wasn’t as bored as the first time around. I wouldn’t call this movie “good” (and also don’t call Dawn of Justice that either), but it kind of works for me in certain respects.

For one thing, I found a lot of it shockingly parsable—which is to say that I didn’t think it was obscenely dark and hard to read in ways that I’ve come to associate with modern visual-effects-heavy movies of this sort. I also thought there was a degree of plausible weight and screen presence to most things, with several rare exceptions, like a particularly rough looking VFX shot we see a couple of times of the character El Diablo using his fire powers in a prison yard and (unfortunately) the major antagonist Incubus. The final battle with Incubus and Enchantress is also awkwardly low energy, weightless, and kind of choppy-feeling. It stands out in contrast to the rest of the action.

The writing is similarly a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is an absolutely atrocious bit of exposition from Flag that tries to rapid-fire explain the character Katana and her powers, and which is again emblematic of the movie trying to do too much in too little time. But then, in that same scene, where the Squad is bound for Midway, Flag calls Deadshot “a serial killer who takes credit cards,” which I think is great. Later, Captain Boomerang demands to know “[w]hy is it always a knife fight every single time [Harley] open[s] [her] mouth.” I kind of like the way this is written. It has a personality which dovetails with the distinctive visual design of certain things and is aesthetically and tonally what I might describe as “poser shopping mall… food court gangsta” or some such word salad. It’s a vibe very much of a kind with the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” that plays over the credits while various 3D objects like bullets and syringes fly around in psychedelic patterns in a weird void. It’s cool with a capital “c,” edgy with a capital “e.”

See also the look of Captain Boomerang—You can positively smell him through the screen, and he has both a gold tooth and a shocking blue metallic jacket with “Captain” written on it in large letters. Harley’s design might be the example of Suicide Squad’s aesthetic that has stood the test of time best, if only because of how Margot Robbie’s performance was (rightfully) identified as one of the unequivocally good things here and was salvaged and preserved in further films. Her many little tattoos, bleached hair with the red and blue tips, tight “Daddy’s Lil Monster” top, and overall grody stripper vibe is pure Suicide Squad 2016 Chic. She is often reduced to a strutting ass by the camera here, though, and an unfortunate part of the “personality” that I mentioned is a certain sexist streak. Speaking of Flag’s lover-turned-world-destroyer (Enchantress) at the climax of the film, Deadshot identifies her as Flag’s “old lady” and tells him to “Get up there, smack on her ass, tell her, ‘Knock this shit off.’” That is also Suicide Squad 2016 Chic. It’s absolutely unpleasant and not “good,” but it is so nakedly off-putting that it kind of loops back around for me now.

These sorts of movies have come to be associated with sanitized, boardroom-approved slop, and the Edginess of Suicide Squad, which can be offensive (sexist, racist) or just cringe, now feels like… Not a breath of fresh air, but like a really distinctive foul smell coming out of someone’s mouth. It’s not good, but you have to mark its existence for just how singular it is.

Jared Leto’s Joker performance is another iconic element of this movie, for good or bad. He’s the “poser shopping mall gangsta” vibe personified as well, with his notorious “damaged” forehead tattoo and his grillz behind/below dark red lips. However cringe, it is still a Take and is perfectly harmonious with the rest of the film. I kind of loved the Joker this time around, in fact. My meta knowledge of Leto’s real-world behavior combined with the already grimy writing and visuals and the at times too strained or wacky performance to make something off-putting in, I will argue, a positive way. Harley and Joker’s relationship is meant to be a negative thing for her, and you really feel that viscerally here thanks to all of the above. Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) might read as more Authentically deranged to some, but I think this Joker is just as repulsive (complimentary). Whether this version of the character could have credibly functioned in a Batman story outside of this specific movie, without the complementary stylistic elements, I’m not sure.

Is this Suicide Squad 2016 rehabilitation-ism, then? Maybe. There is part of me that looks at the titling of the 2021 film—“The Suicide Squad”—both as a blatant attempt to manipulate SEO to obscure the worse older title and as a snub: This is THE Suicide Squad, the definitive take! There’s part of me, absent any arguments I can credibly support, that wants to rally for the little guy. There’s plenty to justifiably hate about the 2016 movie, like the frequent and overly on-the-nose needle drops that aren’t exactly deep cuts, but there’s also something about Joker’s men breaching the prison to rescue Harley in the end right as we hear the words “just killed a man” in “Bohemian Rhapsody” that charmed me…

Or how the cylinder of Harley’s gun rotates to display the word “LOVE” as Deadshot fires it to destroy Enchantress’ doomsday device; or how the red and blue ink swirls around Harley and Joker quite evocatively in the chemical vat in the flashback to her transformation; or the surreally “off” dub job for Enchantress’ empowered voice where the words don’t seem to credibly come from her mouth.

“Personality” is definitely the word I would use now, in place of “boring,” even if I might still resist something as audacious as “good.”

#movies #movie review #bad movies #suicide squad #superhero movies #rewatch

1 note · View note

montyterrible · 3 months

Text

For the beloved partner who already has absolutely, totally everything: Joker 2016 Grillz! "Baby, let's be 'damaged' together for all eternity!"

#valentines day #suicide squad #the joker

0 notes

montyterrible · 3 months

Text

ABARA: “Has a Story,” and Other Thoughts [Preview]

In this big essay on the blog, I discuss one of my favorite manga by one of my favorite mangaka—Tsutomu Nihei’s ABARA. It seems to be a little… controversial, in the sense that I’ve pretty consistently seen people criticize its story and claim that it either doesn’t have one or that they didn’t understand it. Arguing against that criticism is my starting point for this piece, though that’s really just an excuse to talk about the work as a whole and how it functions (well, for the most part). I also talk about my general feelings regarding Nihei’s various series and address the further controversy around his evolving art style.

Here's the link. Just below, below the various warnings and notes reproduced from the beginning of the essay, is a representative paragraph…

This piece contains full spoilers for Tsutomu Nihei’s graphic novel/manga series ABARA and will also contain quick, early-series spoilers for Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan. It contains some brief NSFW discussion but also discussion and images of grotesque violence.

When incorporating quotations from ABARA, I’ve had to make certain presentational changes. The original text is effectively in all caps, but I’ve tried to present it with “normal” capitalization to make it more readable in this format, which means I’ve also occasionally made personal calls about what words to leave capitalized in a couple of the quotes, making them differ from the source material.

I decided to leave the title “ABARA” in all caps whenever I mention it since I thought it looked coolest that way.

An additional note about translation: In writing this piece, I’m going to say things like “Nihei does this” or otherwise attribute specific bits of dialogue to him in one way or another. Obviously, I’m assuming that any translated material is accurate, and I have to do that because I don’t have the capability to double-check it.

There’s a two-page spread, for example, where one of the characters is descending some stairs deep into the seemingly unoccupied reaches of the city to meet someone, and the actual action being depicted is completely unremarkable and arguably undeserving of such attention. It’s just a particularly long flight of stairs with no safety rail, curving downward along one wall and then the other of a simply titanic shaft. Hitting a landing some distance down, it then continues still further, twisting into low-detail simplicity and then ultimately nothingness. The pit of darkness is essentially reaching up, leaking upwards. Some of the lines feel drawn in ways that the art doesn’t always. Often, as in other illustrated media, the art itself ceases to register as it is, materially on the page, and just becomes whatever it’s representing. Here, the darkness of the pit is like an inverted sun, the strands “shining” up the walls—some of the shadows impeccably thin and precise, but other lines thick and still liquid-seeming, blotchy or spattery in places like the ink was dashed onto the page with passion. And it’s all in service to a rendering of an indistinct human figure descending some stairs. He’s descending into the shadow of inhuman immensity and/or deeper into conspiracy and toward revelations that will swallow him and then his whole world, in an artistic sense, but that’s interpretative and not literal. Literally, there’s no dialogue, no excitement. You could register the plot-relevant content of the image in less than a second and turn the page without dwelling on it. But this moment of artistic… dilation with the stairs is also a perfect example of how/why ABARA’s world and story can be so compelling.

#comics #manga #tsutomu nihei #ABARA #essay #review

0 notes

montyterrible · 4 months

Text

Puss in Boots, Interest in Plot

There are fairly heavy spoilers below for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and lighter spoilers for The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Watching Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) so soon after The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) really helped me further suss out my issues with the latter through contrast with the former.

The 2011 Puss in Boots was kind of a huge surprise for me in terms of quality when I finally watched it last summer. I had skipped it when it first released, along with a lot of other animated films, because I was in that period C.S. Lewis describes in the dedicatory letter addressed to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield at the beginning of his famous novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “I wrote this story for you, but . . . I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales. . . . But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Lately, I’ve felt myself sort of coming back around like Lewis describes, and I’ve been catching up on some things, like Puss in Boots.

As I suggested before, the first film surprised me with how “good” it seemed to be—specifically, or most relevantly to this piece, how much of a genuine, enjoyable adventure movie it was, in contrast to the more wry, pop-culture-indebted Shrek film franchise it spun out from. It felt quite separate from those movies, and while I was initially a bit worried about The Last Wish when I saw and felt a stronger link between it and Shrek (via some quick cameos and perhaps a marginally pop-ier soundscape and some level of silliness), it eventually settled into the sort of more dramatically satisfying mode I wanted, and I ultimately enjoyed it a lot, which was a stark contrast to my experience with The Super Mario Bros. Movie,when I just felt like the plot washed over me without much impact, without, we might say, “emotional friction.”

When The Last Wish was new, there was some… discussion online (or at least on Twitter) regarding its depiction of a “realistic panic attack”—what started as a praise and became a lightning rod for mockery. As I was reflecting on the movie after watching it, I found myself thinking about that scene, though not exactly in terms of its portrayal of a mental health issue.

In brief, The Last Wish focuses heavily on Puss having lost 8 of his 9 lives in frivolous ways over the years. Down to his last life, he’s being pursued by the physical manifestation of Death, which wants to kill him for his lackadaisical approach to living in the past. The periodic encounters with Death are presented quite dramatically and borderline horrifically, with Puss experiencing panic/fear/terror at the prospect of losing his life (for good). The “realistic panic attack” is a result of one of these encounters and is where Puss finally allows his new companion, “Perrito,” a wannabe therapy dog, to comfort him, and he also then opens up to Perrito about a falling out with his love interest from the 2011 movie, Kitty Softpaws, that occurred between that film and this one.

The reason this scene stuck with me, post-viewing, is because I realized it was such a good example of what The Super Mario Bros. Movie lacked—friction, and a willingness to let conflicts develop and breathe. So much of the conflict in that other movie felt perfunctory to me, like it was just going through the (Mario-colored) motions of having any kind of dramatic elements. The panic attack scene (and other Death encounters) also stand(s) in contrast to the trend that I hate in writing, filmic or otherwise, where moments of tension are so frequently undermined with “comedy.” Balancing humor and tension is a good and fine thing, but this tendency to not trust the audience—of children or adults—to sit in a moment and feel it for what it is bothers me.

Mario pays lip service to certain internal and external conflicts—the upcoming fight with Bowser, Mario and Donkey Kong trying to make their fathers proud—but I just never really felt those conflicts. The victory over Bowser was obviously guaranteed, and I just didn’t feel the fathers’ disappointment in any meaningful way. Like I said before: “Perfunctory” is the operative word here.

Meanwhile, The Last Wish has other good examples of letting conflicts be felt. The way it adapts Goldilocks and her bears is a great example: They start as just a Shrek-ified subversion of the original fairy tale (since they’re kind of rough -looking and -talking criminal types), but then the question of how all four of them are going to get what they want from a single wish is introduced, and we start to realize that “Goldi” has her own private idea of what the wish will be that puts her at odds with the “family.” We later find out that she wants to wish for a real (read: human) family, which explicitly puts her in conflict with the other bears’ wishes and how they feel about her, but they resolve to still help her anyway because they love her, and then the climax of their story arrives when Goldi gives up a chance to seize control of the titular “last wish” during the all-hands scuffle at the end of the movie and chooses to help save Baby Bear instead. And she and the bears then help Puss and company destroy the magical map to both prevent the evil Jack Horner from getting his own wish and because they already have what they want, we’re told. This is a storyline and conflict that is teased and revealed and that develops and transforms over the course of much of the film’s runtime, offering tension and a certain amount of uncertainty regarding its final outcome.

There are certain things in The Last Wish that are essentially predetermined: We can assume that Jack won’t get the wish (given how obviously catastrophic it would be) and that Puss probably won’t die, and savvy viewers will probably guess that Goldi will give up on her wish as well just based on how these stories usually unfold; however, there are still unknowns here: Like, at one point Perrito seemed to bond with Goldi and the bears, which made me wonder if he’d end up with them in the end as his new family, and no one getting the wish was actually kind of a surprise I hadn’t anticipated either…

What’s critical is that The Last Wish gives its internal and external conflicts room to grow, which is a little surprising given just how many characters are involved. It’s willing to let things linger and develop. Puss’s comedy beard that he grows when he’s feeling washed up is a fun little example. I thought for sure that the beard would just disappear between scenes once he started being more active again; however, it sticks around for a while, until he specifically begs Kitty to shave it off, which is both a funny moment and an opportunity for the conflict between the two to bubble to the surface and be teased ahead of the panic attack scene. Puss is also missing his signature swashbuckler’s blade for most of the film, which changes how he has to fight—first with a stick and then with a little dagger given to him by Kitty. It’s a fun, lasting wrinkle and also an obvious symbol. That sword has essentially been part of Puss since his first appearance in Shrek 2 (2004), and him losing it during the first encounter with Death, when his intense fear is introduced, but regaining it during the final bout, when he overcomes that fear, is a symbolic gesture on top of adding to the drama and comedy. He’s recovered a critical part of himself and is willing to once again fearlessly dance upon the razor-thin edge between life and death that the slender, almost delicate, blade could also be said to represent.

Having said all that, obviously one movie does not need to be written exactly like another one. It’s possible to mischaracterize what I’m saying here as “Mario needs to be Dark!” (because The Last Wish is tonally overall a bit more dramatic and serious), but that’s not it—It’s that one movie treats its conflicts more thoughtfully and credibly, while the other does not. Mario is welcome to stick with “easy,” “light” stuff like a lack of fatherly acceptance if it wants, but it could at least execute that stuff competently so that it actually feels like it matters, and that’s what The Last Wish does.

While I don’t know that I’d claim with any real certitude that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is “condescending” toward children, that is one thing that C.S. Lewis essentially says not to do in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: “That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. . . . An author . . . . is not even an uncle. He is a freeman and an equal, like the postman, the butcher, and the dog next door.” Movies like the Puss in Boots duology or Arthur Christmas (2011—another animated movie I should not have “skipped” years ago) seem to me to embody that principle well. They’re created/written at a level appropriate for children, but they don’t use that as an excuse to do nothing but fart jokes, or to skimp on their conflicts.

#movies #movie review #puss in boots #puss in boots the last wish

0 notes

montyterrible · 4 months

Text

All The Obvious “Meh” Puns Were Already Taken! And I Refuse To Degrade Luigi’s Name!

Light spoilers for an actual recent movie people might care about below…

I’m not too proud to admit that I’m something of a contrarian where popular things are concerned, and the unenthusiastically-titled The Super Mario Bros. Movie certainly made enough money to count as some kind of popular (if not actually “good”).

The visuals are definitely the best part: The color and level of detail are both really impressive, and the lighting and “textures”—of skin, fabric, mushrooms, and so on—seemed great. There was some quality of one or more of those things that made certain moments look weirdly uncanny to me. Like, the level of stylization clearly makes every frame obviously unrealistic in some noticeable way, but there were these weird moments where I was struck with this uneasy feeling that the characters were real actors wearing uncomfortably large rubber-y fake heads. Just a flash from time to time! I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

I had a similar quick flash when I watched Toy Story 4 for the first time recently, specifically during the opening scene where the toys are trying to save the remote control “RC” character from outside during a storm. There was this one shot of the toy and the rushing water and some debris where I had that same blink-and-you-miss-it sense of the uncanny. That unpleasantness aside, though, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has a cheerful, rounded, toy-like quality to it, which probably makes it a good fit to dangle in front of children, and to sell toys with.

After all the internet dunks that I thought were likely so well-deserved, I didn’t end up disliking Chris Pratt as Mario. I somehow didn’t hear at any point post-release of the film that the lack of the “proper” Mario voice is actually explained away in-universe as a cheery affectation from a silly commercial made by Mario and Luigi to promote their business. While Pratt did sound a bit like himself at times, I did also get the impression that he was doing enough of a voice to not sound exactly like I thought he would. Donkey Kong registers pretty obviously as Seth Rogen, but I personally didn’t hate that voice for him. There’s a musky and unruly quality to it that strikes me as kind of suitable. Despite playing a number of Mario games, though, I’m just not enough of a Mario Person to have strong opinions about what these characters shouldn’t sound like, probably.

I’m not big on getting “origins” for everything in movies like this, but aside from the Bros.’s white gloves being explicitly mentioned, I don’t remember much else being treated that way. There is some awkwardness with the incorporation of video game elements, however. I thought Peach’s explanation of “power ups” was pretty odd(ly literally like something from an old video game instruction manual) and that they weren’t very smoothly incorporated into a “natural”-feeling world like some other elements from the games were. The movie is also weirdly heavy on the Mario Kart stuff, and one Koopa announcing himself to be a “Blue Shell” before acting like that item was very awkward as well since the visual alone was enough to Get The Reference.

I wouldn’t say that I was “bored” watching this movie so much as the plot just kind of slid right off my brain while I stared silently at the screen for 90-ish minutes. It has the recognizable dramatic beats of a functional story, but something about it just doesn’t work for me (my handful of chuckles mostly came from the over-the-top self-destructive pessimism of a particular captured Luma character). I think the visual uncanniness contributed a bit to my disinterest, but there’s also just something fake-feeling to me about the movie because of the Mario characters, like they just don’t belong in this scenario. The licensed songs, like “Take on Me,” just further add to the feelings of weirdness, wrongness, plasticity (or something). Maybe the plot also just feels overly familiar to me too, and there’s a certain perfunctory quality to it. Maybe it’s just an excuse for fan service, or maybe that impression comes from the fact that some parts—like the journey to the land of the Kongs or Mario and Donkey Kong trapped in a giant eel’s belly at the emotional low point—are dispensed with so quickly that their inclusion feels pointless.

(Coincidentally, I saw this tweet earlier today as I was thinking about revising this little review that might describe the issue very well, as a lack of “emotional friction.”)

Making Peach more of an actor with agency rather than the “Classic” damsel certainly fits (as she’s a playable character in some games), and the depiction certainly is in sync with the girl-boss-y times we live in, though her hyper competence in every conceivable arena does sort of raise the question of why exactly Mario is needed. (It really seems like Peach could have beaten Donkey Kong in the arena fight in at least half the time.) That’s kind of a pointless observation since Mario is obviously needed as part of the requisite Team Effort to take down Bowser, when one plumber or Kong or princess couldn’t do it alone, but I do think the rush to check the Strong Independent Woman box and avoid any unfavorable association with retrograde storytelling tropes does further trivialize the already scant drama of the plot.

In comparison with the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movies, I think The Super Mario Bros. Movie pulls slightly ahead in my regard. The Sonic movies have more consistently actually registered emotionally with me, but I think Mario is better because it’s fully animated: Everything has equal, proper weight and coheres visually. I really wish the Sonics had visuals this lovely! There’s also no performance here as outrageously misplaced and grating as Jim Carrey’s Dr. Eggman, so that also makes me like Mario better. I won’t ever watch it again (unlike Sonic, probably), but it will always have those little meaningless gold stars in my nonexistent book.

#movies #movie review #mario bros

0 notes

montyterrible · 4 months

Text

Clouseau, Worrell, and the “Son of” Gambit

Several years ago, when I was re-watching the Blake Edwards Pink Panther movies during what passed for COVID-19 “lockdown” here in America, I went into the experience with the hope that I’d find something to love in the 1982 Trail of the Pink Panther, a film very much about Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau but which features very little of him owing to Sellers’ death before filming began. The resulting movie uses old footage of Sellers in the role to set up a plot where Clouseau is maybe killed and then the rest of the film focuses on a journalist attempting to put together a piece on him and his life. What I had hoped was that what I already knew from my childhood impressions of the movie would be wrong and that adult me would find some sort of misunderstood jewel. Instead, it ended up being every bit as ungainly and weird as I remembered/suspected.

While I had some lasting impressions of Trail (mostly scenes of Clouseau’s father, one of which had some background nudity in it), my feelings about Son of the Pink Panther (1993), one of several post-Sellers attempts at continuing the franchise, were even less flattering and barely concrete at all. More than anything, I just remembered not liking it the single time I watched it previously.

The moral of the story, I felt, was that the Edwards-Sellers collaboration had been a delicate mix—beautiful, very funny, and ultimately irreplaceable, in much the same way that director and screenwriter John Cherry III and actor Jim Varney sustained the Ernest P. Worrell character across a similarly expansive series of films. Seeing essentially that character in 1997’s Snowboard Academy and how the spark seemed missing there felt like further proof to me of my theory: You needed Sellers and Edwards, Cherry and Varney for these over-confident, lovable bumblers to work, and any attempt that was missing part of the pair would come up lesser.

The basic conceit of Son of the Pink Panther—that Clouseau had a son who’s Just Like Him!—was apparently even something considered for the Ernest character at one point. It’s just such a… hacky concept, though, right? It reeks of Marketability, even though I guess the comedic idea is kind of funny in its own right, even if it has basically no realistic sense to it. Like, if your father was always late to work, you will be too for some reason, or you’ll always lose your glasses on top of your head because he did it a lot…

On re-watch, I think Son of the Pink Panther is mostly fine, but it’s at its absolute best and is actually most funny when it doesn’t wallow as transparently in the memories. Roberto Benigni’s Jacques Gambrelli crashes his bike into the car of long-suffering Clouseau-hater Chief Inspector Dreyfus (still played by Herbert Lom), and right away he’s doing the old Clouseau thing of mispronouncing words. Later in the movie, once his parentage is finally revealed to him, he’ll have his name changed to Jacques Clouseau Jr., and then he starts dressing like his father and has to meet the man’s old butler (Cato, still played by Burt Kwouk) and his disguise-maker. Of course, there’s such a thing as having what amount to in-jokes with an audience of a series this long-running, but there’s this unavoidable feeling of fatigue (on my part) seeing what feels like a naked attempt to push this obviously different man in front of me and try to make me accept him as Clouseau, for all intents and purposes, by dint of all the most obvious signifiers that have been thrown on him.

There’s one scene where Gambrelli disguises himself as a doctor to infiltrate the ranks of the terrorists who have kidnapped Princess Yasmin (Debrah Farentino) and gets progressively drunker and more messed up on medical alcohol and Novocaine as he attempts to treat the head terrorist’s arm wound. It’s a scene that very much recalls Sellers’ Clouseau’s dentist attempting to pull an ailing Dreyfus’ tooth in the extremely non-canonical The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). It’s just much less uproariously hilarious this time around.

But then, when it stops trying to remix old jokes, Son of the Pink Panther can be quite funny in its own right, and I can’t even say none of the callbacks work, because there’s just something about a man getting accidentally pushed out of a window and crashing through a skylight that I can’t resist. And I just love Edwards’ filmmaking as a general rule: the indulgences, in particular. Scenes of intrigue or drama or comedy where he just sort of, in modern parlance, lets it all… cook.

There’s a whole long Clouseau-less intro focused on just the international intrigue parts of the plot, and I was almost immediately grinning and rooting for the rest of the picture to live up to my hopes. There aren’t any musical numbers here, unfortunately, but there is a sort of club scene where Gambrelli can smash into tables repeatedly and accidentally get right up in the business of a belly dancer and in which a chaotic brawl can break out.

I hate that Gambrelli ends up changing his name and his wardrobe to be more Clouseau-like because he does kind of have his own things going on, with the opera singing and Shakespeare quoting. Benigni is physically quite capable of credibly doing the Sellers slapstick too, and a more original personality with familiar goofs and gaffes is pretty acceptable to me.

As strange as it might sound, I’m glad that Dreyfus gets his own happy ending here. The initial setup and back-of-the-box synopsis give off a worrying amount of “Here we go again!” energy, but Dreyfus ends up pursuing Gambrelli’s heritage (and his attractive mother!) with something much more immediately recognizable as benevolent and even paternal. His cartoonish fate in Strikes Again, where his Clouseau obsession was pushed to its absolute limit, was to be vaporized by his own doomsday weapon. Here, he takes the much more human, even realistic, path of seeing the infuriating Gambrelli as someone to invest in and to help, perhaps for something like old time’s sake.

It’s all a much more fitting send-off for the Clouseau character as well—not just in the literal text of the thing (since he’s explicitly, definitely dead now), but also in spirit and in tone. This is, it feels like, the end of him. Yeah, the torch is obviously passed, but he is also honored in a way that feels much less ghoulishly necromantic. To use Sellers’ likeness and old scenes in Trail was a mistake, maybe even a betrayal. In some ways, Son feels like an apology, even as it simultaneously tried (and failed) to keep the series alive for money-making purposes.

It's still derivative and didn’t need to exist, but in a capitalist hell world, I suppose the Ernest franchise could have done worse than to have its own theoretical “Son of” film, as long as it turned out like this one. Which is to say, only sometimes insufferably, humorlessly indulgent and backward-looking.

#movies #movie review #rewatch #the pink panther

0 notes

montyterrible · 4 months

Text

“Is Snowboard Academy (1997) Good, Actually, Secretly, Somehow?”

At this point in Internet Content Creation, it feels like “critical re-evaluation” is essentially the default position of any given critical look at a marginally older piece of media. “Was X actually good?” is the internet’s favorite question, and I’ve certainly indulged in it myself. Sometimes, though, what was bad is still bad, and 1997’s Snowboard Academy was and remains Very Bad. The kindest thing that can be said about it is that at least the action here looks real. Held up against the weightless computer-generated fantasy of modern blockbusters, it has a certain tactile quality that can only come from putting real people on snowboards and filming them.

It’s the naked indulgence in the “cool” snowboarding (the “awesome airborne footage” promised on the back of the box) for stretches at a time, played utterly straight and tonally consistent (read: quickly monotonous), that both ages the film so immediately but also ultimately sustains it: as a snapshot in a time capsule from a simpler time, when things were still kind of genuinely rad(ical) and when effects were practical. The rest of the movie also just happens to be misogynistic, racist, stilted, irrevocably dated, and dislikable on a fundamental, conceptual level.

There’s a foundational tonal mismatch at work here. Part of Snowboard Academy is about the titular snowboard academy: Cool, snowboarding Corey Haim (as Chris Barry) wants to make his ski-slope-owning father and snooty brother accept the beauty of the board. He and his ruffian friends are given a probational opportunity to make snowboarding part of the resort, with a contest between the skiers and boarders at the end of the period to decide if the sport stays or goes. It is laughably (not really!) light on actual dramatic tension, partly as a result of the plot just not being all that dramatic and partly because it’s undercut in certain ways, a big one being the prominently-featured Ernest-style comedy of Jim Varney, who’s supposed to be part of a “slapstick subplot” but who actually takes up large chunks of the movie—back-to-back scenes in at least one case. Varney is doing his classic Ernest shtick, but it just doesn’t work with the deeply unpleasant attitude of the supposed main plot, in contrast with which Varney’s antics come off as decidedly childish. He feels like even more of an unnecessary inclusion given that there are also multiple other people doing bad comedy with ostensibly funny voices or accents in this movie, including Andreas Apergis as a similar sort of overly confident and accident-prone bungler character, yet no one thought maybe this was all too much for a 90-minute film.

Just to be clear, there were moments when I chuckled at either the Ernest or the snowboard stuff, but this is such a perfect example of how a fine-enough performance can suffer within the wrong context. There are Ernest-style gags here that would work extremely well in an actual Ernest movie, but the framing is just all wrong and saps the potential fun out of them. Snowboard Academy is essentially the worst element of 91’s Ernest Scared Stupid—the dated Cool Kids stuff—blown up to unsalvageable proportions and further poisoned from within by the more Adult elements.

There are performances in this movie that are just charisma vacuums: hideously ugly and awkward attempts at comedy, like when the resort owner (played by Joe Flaherty) accosts his cheating as-good-as-ex wife who refuses to officially divorce him until he’s made enough money for her to take a sizeable half of it (played by Brigitte Nielsen) in a hot tub with another man. The exchange here, similar to an earlier one with Varney’s Rudy James in the resort office, is a horrible blend of exposition and (attempted) comedy. This whole plot about the wife seducing the bumbling “Red Eagle” security guy (Apergis) to try to make the resort’s insurance drop them so that she can force her husband to sell is just simultaneously ridiculous and unpleasant to the point that I didn’t want to see more of it while also absolutely needing to feel more present and real for it to carry the brunt of the dramatic climax when it seizes the reins from the skiers-vs-snowboarders thread and becomes the primary focus.

The most consistently “funny” element here is how this is definitely one of those older “PG” movies from a time when what could score a “PG” rating was different than it is today: Snowboard Academy is decidedly “PG-13” vulgar, and the Ernest personality just feels incredibly out of place in the midst of it all. It’s funny that someone thought this would actually cohere.

The Snowboard Academy box is a harbinger of bad quality in its own right: Featuring the tagline “An avalanche of fun!” which is the kind of hype phrasing you’d basically guess was a lie from the get-go with how insistent it is. Opening the box, there’s a slip of paper with the DVD chapters listed out over an image of an upright snowboard on one side (cute! nostalgic, for me!), while the other side—the one that was facing up when I opened the box—is a snow-themed ad for additional comedies, which includes Ghostbusters but also has the movies “Real Genius”and “Baby Geniuses”side by side. This has nothing to do with Snowboard Academy itself, I suppose, but there’s just something so… fake-feeling about those two titles and their proximity to one another in the ad included with this other film. It’s like a 30 Rock bit, except instead of just getting quick snippets of some awful fake movie served up with actually funny editing and writing surrounding it, you have to watch the whole, terrible thing instead and just keep waiting for a moment of cohesion that isn’t ever going to arrive.

Wikipedia claims one review described this film as “Ernest Goes Skiing,” and while I understand the intended sentiment, my personal view is that this movie WISHES it was Ernest Goes Skiing. It could only ever dream of reaching the comedic heights of a nonexistent Ernest Goes Skiing movie.

I can remember my father buying Snowboard Academy years ago because Jim Varney was in it and then watching it only once. And that’s the most damning final thing I can possibly say about it, in the end.

#film #movies #bad movies #movie review #jim varney

0 notes

montyterrible · 5 months

Text

Ernest… Ernest Never Changes

Ernest in the Army (1998) is both the last of the Ernest film series and the last of the direct-to-video trilogy that includes 1995’s Slam Dunk Ernest and 1997’s Ernest Goes to Africa. Tragically, Jim Varney died only two years later, which adds an especially bittersweet vibe to this outing, a movie that features some pretty busy scenes, including multiple action set pieces, but also still in some regards looks to my eye less like a “real” movie. There’s a brightness to it, an unedited-looking frankness or flatness at times, a sort of softness in the visual department that’s maybe just aging SD media viewed through an HD display but still gives the whole thing a dreamlike quality.

If there’s such a thing as a non-canonical Ernest film, this feels like a potential candidate, what with Ernest being the savior of an entire Middle-Eastern country as an ostensible chosen one of some ill-defined prophecy. A certain looseness of the logistics of the plot—like how a hospitalized buddy (played by director John Cherry) somehow recovers fully and makes his way to both the Middle East and to Ernest’s exact location in it at the end to congratulate him on his victory—further contributes to that dreamlike feeling. Enemy vehicles are in hot pursuit and within shooting distance in one scene but are somehow far enough away in the next for Ernest and company to take a breather and set up a bit where Ernest shovels rock mines from the front of a moving vehicle to hit the pursuers. The principal antagonist dictator gets summarily dispatched by an especially hard pancake, and while there are rumblings of an even more global threat in the form of a shadowy organization led by a man stroking a white cat that wants to seize the dictator’s missile for their own ends, they’re barely present and feel like a weird (albeit evocatively-lit!) step too far into the world of fantasy.

This plot, with its espionage-esque complications, reminds me most of the previous film, Goes to Africa. The other link between these two movies is that they are the ones I felt the most trepidation about re-watching. Surprisingly, however, the racism here is much more Ernest Goes to Camp (1987) instead, which is oddly fitting given how it’s briefly referenced in the actual movie and on the box: “America’s Hero is Finally Back in Camp!” Which seems a bit like a strange break from what feels like the tradition of Ernest as a sort of eternally recursive figure: always working some blue-collar job somewhere in America, always dreaming of some bigger and better career, and always pining for a woman out of his league, with no past string of jobs and women to actually reference. No canon, again, in a sense…

What I meant about the racism, though, is that there is surprisingly not that much here that is obviously outrageously insensitive. Ernest never puts a towel on his head or cross-dresses behind a veil, for example. Islam exists primarily in the form of exclamations by certain characters but is otherwise not really depicted or overtly maligned. The fictional country is not a desaturated sandy hellscape: There are a number of shots with vivid green in them, and even the desert is more beautiful white-gold than it is as visually torturous as the action makes it out to be. Like Goes to Camp’s treatment of “Indians,” there’s an essentialist, reductive quality here that is still problematic but that comes off as shockingly ambivalent by the standards of later (read: post-9/11) years.

The Middle East here, as so often, is a land of deserts, eternal conflict, vicious and eccentric dictators, brave guerilla fighters, and an oppressed peasantry somewhere off in the background of it all. There are some digs at American imperialism and showboating principally in the form of General Rodney Lincoln (Jeff Pillars) who drops in a joke about oil prices at one point and who is both deeply incompetent and deeply obsessed with photo ops and shows of military pageantry without substance. It’s the lightest of light taps on the knuckles but still kind of surprising.

Still, Ernest (a very white guy) being a prophesied savior parallels pretty smoothly the sorts of fanciful liberator narratives America likes to weave about itself to excuse its Interventions, so obviously this isn’t a subversive masterpiece. Ernest as a cog in the US’s over-funded oppression machine just feels a lot more icky than him being a bank janitor or a camp counselor or mistaken for a vague sort of secret agent.

Ultimately, though, the armed forces, with their strict discipline and regimentation and homogeneity, are the perfect place for the chaotic force of Ernest P. Worrell to wreak his signature brand of havoc. And there are some good gags here! There’s a fun-gross one where Ernest spits a mouthful of sticky gummies candy into the face of a snarling colonel that ends with a nearby truck being pulled in by the strength of the stretched out gooey strand and flattening the guy. Ernest basically tortures a comatose Ben (Cherry) in the hospital by repeatedly jabbing an accidentally dislodged needle back into his arm (after licking it first, naturally). Ernest and a captured reporter (Hayley Tyson) crawl around beneath a deflated tent for a goofily extended period of time as the dictator’s men go in after them and subsequently get clubbed by their own guys. I chuckled a decent amount watching this one, which is not something I expected to happen, so while I’m still side-eyeing it pretty hard, it was actually much easier to enjoy than Goes to Africa—which would be a good note to end on, if this was actually the last Ernest movie I owned. The visual of a young boy in dramatic, somewhat contemplative silhouette wearing Ernest’s cap that concludes the movie certainly would have been a good last image, and kind of weirdly prescient with the feelings it evokes.

#film #movies #movie review #rewatching #jim varney #ernest p. worrell

0 notes

montyterrible · 6 months

Text

The Essential Ernest, A Portrait of Quality

The first of the Ernest films, Ernest Goes to Camp (1987) might feel, perhaps appropriately, the most like a “real movie” out of the handful of titles from the series that I’ve re-watched so far. This is in part because of its more ambitious-feeling scope: Things are getting blown up and set on fire late in the movie as Ernest and his crew of mostly children defend their summer camp from an evil mining company. It still has that vibe of a small cast in an easy-to-wrangle location, but certain bits, some more subtle than explosions, lend it a sense of extra legitimacy as a movie.

Like other films in the series, Goes to Camp uses sped-up footage to create a sense of… speed at points, but the effect this time felt much more cohesive with the look of the rest of the movie around it by virtue of how the footage seemed simultaneously sped up but also slowed down in a way that made it look less uncanny to me. Meanwhile, during a low point in the story, Victoria Racimo as the camp nurse gets to deliver an emotional address to the “delinquents” that Ernest has been assigned to camp-counsel and does so with a strong sense of veracity and power. Jim Varney sings a song earlier in said emotional low point over footage of the various main characters packing their stuff to give way to the aforementioned mining company that also feels like a real attempt to throw some weight behind the plot.

There’s some fun reincorporation of various elements: lanterns turned into rockets, biting turtles, a gross toilet. There are several fine Contraptions on display, like a food-launching cannon and a bus that’s been turned into a catapult. There’s a sort of “Chekhov’s Gun”-type scenario with an actual gun but also with a little cart (like, “Ernest’s Golf Cart”) that spends the whole movie rolling around as a kind of lightly comedic refrain between scenes and that finally comes to a stop just in time to be loaded with explosives and driven into a marauding behemoth of a construction vehicle. And there are other little moments of fine-tuned whimsy, like Ernest whistling along briefly with non-diegetic music in one scene or two of the kids tapping their feet in time to similarly non-diegetic music in another.

The extremely 80s dramatic plot heavily focuses on a strip-mining company (literally named “Krader” after its owner) that wants to take over and ruin the titular camp—Kamp Kikakee—which belongs to an old Native American man (Iron Eyes Cody) and his granddaughter (Racimo). It’s an incredible blunt instrument of environmentalist messaging, but the concept of some old dude who only cares about money trying to destroy a summer camp just feels very of its time to me and a lot of fun for it. As for the cultural and political component of that plot: Iron Eyes Cody certainly gives the movie a fun element of legitimacy, I guess, in terms of its cinematic pedigree, but—and perhaps this is unsurprising for a movie called “Ernest Goes to Camp”—I wouldn’t say that the indigenous… themes and the portrayal of said themes are necessarily Good, even if we ignore the Italian American playing one of the most explicitly “Indian” characters in the movie. In its totality, it’s a portrayal by and for white people despite it also not really making light of those elements or demonizing them. It just boils down to the old stereotypes: warriors and spiritual living and a more intimate tie to the land. I might call it “reductive,” keeping in mind that this is still a white person speaking right now…

This is still “Essential Ernest” to me with regard to its overall quality, as well how perfectly I think it captures some of the essential qualities of the Ernest character. As much as he’s supposed to be some kind of working-class caricature in some ways (he’s “whiter than white” and “a redneck,” to briefly quote 1995’s Slam Dunk Ernest), he’s also so many things that such caricatures often aren’t: He’s certain kinds of ignorant, but also consistently creative and clever; his living quarters in these movies skew campy and kitschy; his arms always seem more muscular than I expect them to be, but he’s also small and lithe and a little craven in his posture. He’s expressive and emotional and open and vulnerable—He is earnest, this Ernest—even if he doesn’t want it.

Humor often results from the dramatic irony that arises when these obvious elements of Ernest’s characterization clash with his various boasts about his charm or his physical skills, and, usually, the other characters in the movie roll their eyes and chuckle along with us, the audience. However, what makes Goes to Camp so good at highlighting this fundamental nature of Ernest is how the kids he’s been assigned eventually warm up to him, and after he’s accidentally sold the camp out from under everybody and starts talking about going down to the work site and busting some heads to make things right, his boys, who would almost certainly tell you they’re too worldly and experienced to be taken in so easily, buy into the bravado in a way that no one else does. They’re just kids, in the end, and seeing them and Ernest lose their confidence is decently affecting. Ernest Getting His Ass Beat by Krader’s right-hand man/chief goon is the precipitating event that takes us into the emotional low point sequence as the kids’ disillusionment and the camp’s seemingly impending ruin dovetail. What ultimately wins the day is not some conventionally masculine show of strength, but creativity and cleverness and goofiness—spry little Ernest, an old man, two eccentric camp kitchen staff, and a few kids winning the big fight by relying on those weaker or lesser qualities. Ernest is Ernest in all of these movies, but it’s here that his Ernest-ness feels especially prominent and pivotal to me.

#film #movies #movie review #rewatching #jim varney #ernest p. worrell

0 notes

montyterrible · 6 months

Text

Trick (Weapon) and Treat: Thoughts on Bloodborne PSX [Preview]

Uh… It’s still October somewhere, right?

Bloodborne was the first Souls-like game I ever played and remains probably my favorite of them all for largely aesthetic reasons, but it took me a while to actually play Lilith Walther’s “demake” Bloodborne PSX. In this Amygdala-sized essay on the blog, I reflect at length on that experience—on the visual art of this alternate-universe first (or early) Souls game, on its more and less overt horror elements, on how delighted I was by attacking with the “up” arrow key, and so on. A veritable gothic city block’s worth of mostly theorizing and praising. I really enjoyed it, though I do talk about my… attempted second playthrough a bit as a sort of epilogue.

Here's the link. Below, past the reproduction of the spoiler/content note that starts off the essay proper, is a representative paragraph…

This essay contains heavy spoilers for both the original Bloodborne and the fan game in the above title. Note that there will also be some grotesque imagery and descriptions/discussions of grotesque imagery at points.

If anything, seeing even the fairly insignificant changes, like enclosing some streets to make a bigger house, made me hungry for even more properly new stuff. There’s definitely part of me that hopes for a spiritual successor to Bloodborne PSX that’s wholly Walther’s, where she can make her own things and not have to balance preserving the old like she does here, though I’d also respect never revisiting this particular style of game again in favor of other things. What’s fun about even just the possibility of a smidgeon of new content snuggled in amongst the old, though, is that it dovetails nicely with the design choice to make basically every door in the game examinable. In the original Bloodborne (and in other Souls games), only doors that can be opened can usually be interacted with at all. In the exceedingly rare cases where you get something like the door in Bloodborne’s “Cathedral Ward,” that is interactable and claims to be “Closed” but is never openable by normal, non-hacking means, it creates an enduring mystery for the community because of the oddity. In Bloodborne PSX, though, any given door offers the chance of something, even though the vast majority of them still can’t be opened and just tell you that they’re locked. It’s very much like Silent Hill now, where you check every door in your path because there might be something to find this time but you mostly find nothing except for a succession of dead ends. Still, once you know this game has new content, and once you figure out you can check all the doors, you’re basically committed to turning every knob and pulling every handle in Yharnam, and it’s thrilling.

#bloodborne #bloodborne psx #essay #review

1 note · View note

montyterrible · 6 months

Text

“(Beverly) Hillbillies, that is…”

The first DVD that my family owned was a collection of assorted Beverly Hillbillies episodes. While not as primordially formative for me as the re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show we watched even before we had such a modern convenience, it’s safe to say that this was yet another piece of media that shaped my… sensibilities. There are modern mega-hit songs I hear on the radio all the time that I don’t actually know the lyrics to, but I know the opening and closing themes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Of course, often, those old DVD collections didn’t have the actual themes and had some other lyric-less tunes in their place.

I wouldn’t call the series anything approaching “high art” or “essential viewing,” and it certainly trafficked in stereotypes: The Ignorant Yokel is still with us—often the go-to voice and posture when someone wants to indicate stupidity and backwards or conservative thinking—but The Beverly Hillbillies itself was just as much a send-up of the hill folks as it was a critique of the Beverly Hills culture they were dropped into after patriarch Jed Clampett was “shootin’ at some food” and unearthed a fortune in oil. A repeated early joke in the show is how some person will treat the Clampetts like dirt and then do an over-the-top 180 after discovering they’re wealthy. It’s just as much a joke directed at the supposed well-to-do and cultured rich and how completely and utterly their nose-in-the-air posturing gives way to obsequious hand-wringing and smiling as they try to stay close to the money, in the good graces of a particularly big new fish in a small pond. Even as the show devolves into sillier and sillier escapades (like Jed’s nephew Jethro buying a tank), this core element remains true as their banker, neighbor, and sort-of friend Milburn Drysdale tries to carefully placate the Clampetts so that they keep their money in his bank, with his greed arguably enabling their continued cultural rampage through the land of (not exactly) good taste.

Looking back at the TV series as an adult (watching some new-to-me re-runs), there is a cynical, mean core buried beneath the string twangin’ “Aw shucks!” fun of making jokes about “possum innards” and the “cement pond” (swimming pool) which I always took for warmth and sweetness and fun. And, as such, the 1993 Beverly Hillbillies film isn’t actually as far off the mark as I kind of thought it was for years…

Here’s another weird Monty quirk: I actually listened to the book on tape (literal tape, cassette) of the novelization of The Beverly Hillbillies film before I saw the movie. We probably got it because my parents recognized the brand, though the actual movie and its novelization are so much meaner and more sexual than the 60s TV series, which featured plenty of talk of courting and marriage, as well as the occasional schemer looking to get their hands on the Clampetts’ money, but was never so forthright and vulgar as this. There’s a particular line from the novelization that I’m not sure is even in the movie—something from Mr. Drysdale directed at his wife and about “getting her liposuction butt in gear” (or something like that). I remember that line because of how explicit it seemed to me as a child, when I heard it riding in our car, and because of how mean it was. I’m not sure if I had seen the original show at that point, but (even if I hadn’t) after I had, the movie still struck me as mean in contrast. Aggressive, tonally.

Here's a great, representative line from the movie: Gold-digging Laura Jackson in disguise as a French tutor says to Jed, “Happiness is hard to find.” But remember that she’s FRONCHE, so take away the “H”… There’s also a sequence of scenes early in the film as the Clampetts drive to their new home where they decide that giving someone the middle finger is the “Californy” way of saying “hello,” so they do it repeatedly. The aggression’s also there in how the character of Granny is treated. Jed uncharacteristically, meanly tells her to “hush up” when they’re tying her in her rocker to the top of the car to take her to Beverly Hills, and Laura calls her an “old hag” when she and her co-conspirator, sycophantic worm Rob Schneider (I mean “Woodrow Tyler”), are dragging the eldest member of the Clampett clan off to an abusive old folks’ home after she overhears their plans. The general state of the Granny Abuse—and the fact that we barely see her or the mansion’s kitchen during the plot—feels somewhat uncannily “off” given how central that location and the character are to so many of the original TV series episodes.

The casting conjures up similar uneasy vibes overall. While I don’t think Jim Varney really looks much like Buddy Ebsen’s original Jed, the others struck me as much closer. They’re still clearly not quite right, but they’re not quite right in ways that only stick out to me because the differences feel so slight and therefore more noticeable. I thought Lily Tomlin was excellent as Drysdale’s right-hand woman Jane Hathaway, and immediately fell for Diedrich Bader’s extremely toothy performance as Jethro, during this re-watch. Cloris Leachman was also a great, if somewhat under-utilized, Granny.

I would say that replacing refined grown adult mama’s boy Sonny Drysdale with the extremely 90s-coded teenager Morgan Drysdale was some kind of aesthetic crime against the original show, but the movie is generally visually coherent with the TV series, though the big-screen cinematography certainly adds to the feeling of uncanniness with how much more expressive and less static it all looks. You see the Clampett mansion from unusual angles that feel, in their own way, as obscene as when Laura is in her skimpy attire getting her legs waxed (while Tyler watches), a gif of which is labelled as potentially explicit in Google’s image search.

Honestly, I had a good time re-watching this movie! It definitely feels more aggressive and mean (or at least more honest about those feelings), but it’s genuinely well-paced, and the jokes are well-executed. There are some physical bits—like Jethro plowing a car into the outhouse Granny is using—that are filmed in a matter-of-fact way that really tickles me. And it’s not like the movie is un-reverential where the source material is concerned. There are jokes taken directly from the TV series (including the Clampetts’ struggle to connect their doorbell ringing with people appearing outside their front door). The opening and closing themes are both used, and Buddy Ebsen makes a brief late-game cameo appearance in his role as the detective Barnaby Jones, of the 70s TV series of the same name.

The 1993 Beverly Hillbillies doesn’t so much swerve from the source material or take it to truly radical new places, but it does enliven it, with the improved camerawork and a new pep (that same aggressiveness, in a way) adding what I found to be an infectious energy this time around.

It’s ultimately of a kind in my head with a whole line-up of similar films, like the 1991 Addams Family or the 1997 George of the Jungle or 99’s Dudley Do-Right, the 2000 The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, the 2004 Fat Albert film, and even Rob Zombie’s 2022 take on The Munsters. This line from the back-of-the-box description of The Beverly Hillbillies movie novelization audiobook kind of, sort of applies to them all if you squint a little: “But times are a-changin’, and corporate raiders circle their fortune like vultures.” These are, as a loose-knit collection, films about some sort of more innocent source material coming into conflict with a more “modern” and mean and greedy world (loosely speaking). I find the repeated premise charming, and I guess it just goes to show that the original Beverly Hillbillies is kind of timeless or prescient since they were already essentially sort of doing this back in the day, just with less obvious edginess and a lower budget.

#film #movies #movie review #rewatching #the beverly hillbillies #beverly hillbillies

5 notes · View notes

montyterrible · 6 months

Text

“It’s The Great Troll Design, Ernest!”

Deep in the series’ “real movie” period, Ernest Scared Stupid (1991) is the last Ernest movie I own and was also the only choice for the last (maybe) piece of this retrospective when I realized it was going to run into October. Of all the Ernest movies I own, this one is also special since it’s the one I’ve watched the most recently. It made its way into my annual Halloween-time viewing a couple of years ago; therefore, my relationship with it is a lot more clear-headed and adult from the get-go.

To be frank, if I had seen this as a kid, I would not have made it all the way through. It would have scared the hell out of me. Scared Stupid still has plenty of slapstick, and the last thirty or so minutes of the 90-minute movie are mostly just chaotic fun as the adults of Briarville, a resurrected troll army, Ernest, and some plucky kids clash at the old mystical oak tree in a sequence that went on for what felt like a shockingly long time the first time I watched it. Yet, despite the heavy dose of silliness, the trolls are also creepy and viscerally slimy, and when exposed to their folk riddle weakness (milk), they dissolve via hand-drawn 2D energy swirls into extremely physical puddles of flesh and goop. I was a huge wuss, and this movie would have ruined my life. Now, though, I think it’s just a great largely kid-friendly horror movie. The design of “Trantor the Troll” is excellent, and part of it is the aforementioned, utterly ubiquitous slime, which is simultaneously realistic enough to approximate the humid body of a living being but also over-the-top enough to be more funny and gross than strictly upsetting.

(Related side note: Some images of Trantor seem to be blurred in Google’s image search because they might contain explicit content. That’s how effectively fleshy and slimy he is!)

The practical effects still look great, and there are some well-executed little scenes of horror, which include the classic “Lie back in the bed after checking for monsters just to find that it’s there beside you!” or another where one boy flees as the troll pursues and goads him with the voice of his kidnapped little girl friend. “I’m catching up,” says this creepy-friendly voice at one point, and, like, I’d have been inconsolable as a kid, had I seen this. These days, of course, I can instead appreciate this kind of long take of Ernest coming to the sheriff’s house and yammering inside the front door that’s impressive for how Jim Varney managed to get through all that panicked quavering and conversing without flubbing a line. Or, how there’s a fun little action sequence featuring Ernest versus Trantor inside, on top of, and then in the bed of a truck (while Ernest’s dog Rimshot takes the wheel, naturally).

Although it features the unfortunate return of Ernest in brownface as a part of one of two sequences in the movie that try to create comedy out of him rapid-fire switching personalities, I got a lot of laughs out of this one overall. There are some little quick statements that Ernest spits out, like “I didn’t have forefathers! I only had one!” or “Like my ancestor Phineas always told me…,” that just go unremarked-upon and that hit you in a kind of sneaky way that I adored, on top of some “bigger” stuff, like Eartha Kitt’s “Old Lady Hackmore” trying to extract Ernest from a barrel with a giant can opener, that’s also just fun and absurd.

Ernest Scared Stupid certainly has the vibe of a “cult hit” or a movie that gets “critically re-evaluated.” Something about the horror genre in particular seems to make it a fertile ground for works like this, and, as I’ve said, the horror parts of Scared Stupid certainly seem some shade of good. The film’s worst element is, unfortunately, the child performances probably. This isn’t entirely the fault of the actors and has to do with how they’re used. While Ernest is ageless thanks to the character being so eccentric and out of time, the kids are meant to be more hip and of their time, which would be the early 90s, and attempts to make them seem cool at points just feel more cringe. They’re funny, but “funny” in that way where you’re conscious of the fact that it’s the badness or awkwardness of the thing that you’re responding to.

The box art for the DVD also doesn’t totally inspire confidence. While the front cover image of a terrified Ernest popping out of a giant jack-o’-lantern in the middle of a graveyard, with a full and partially cloud-obstructed moon in the sky and lightning striking the ground somewhere in the distant background beyond the conventionally sinister silhouettes of leaf-less trees, reads as absolutely pitch perfect to me, the images chosen for the back don’t suggest “horror comedy” at all: just a close-up of Ernest in drag holding a milk carton, another close-up of Ernest and Rimshot, and then an image of Ernest with one of the kids. They’re setting up a troll trap, but that isn’t really clear from the limited visual information available. I can understand not wanting to make the movie seem SCARY exactly, and also probably not wanting to spoil the look of Trantor, but the images without explanation feel like they could come from any Ernest film and not this one specifically, which kind of belies the quality of what’s inside the box, suggesting Scared Stupid is more “default” Ernest than it actually is.

Of course, I say this under the assumption that someone likes the Ernest shtick. If you don’t, this is more of the same: the voices, the lip wriggling and “Ew-ew-ewww!”-ing into the camera, the inventions that run amok, the intense silliness and ignorance. While the plot is explicitly magical in ways that might make one see it as “non-canonical” (if there is such a thing as canon in the eternally recursive world of Ernest), there is an explanation for Ernest’s unfailing inability to do anything right here: It’s a curse from a troll, you see! In this case, Ernest was literally “scared” “stupid.”

#film #movies #movie review #rewatching #jim varney #ernest p. worrell

0 notes

montyterrible · 6 months

Text

One fun thing about Gareth Evans’ Apostle (2018) is how the stylized title both undersells but also perfectly encapsulates the content and themes of the movie. The “T” transformed into an upside-down cross is probably the most obvious of design choices for a horror movie that deals with religion in some capacity, to the point that it kind of makes this film seem more low-rent or trite than it actually is, but, then, the obvious lurid appeal of that upside-down cross also perfectly captures a lot of the nasty, gnarly charm here. There are bursts of (typically also gross or upsetting) excitement where Evans’ action film pedigree shines through, like a man getting well and truly Impaled by the armed guards of a cultist prophet, in an easy to enjoy sort of way. Or take the flashback where damaged former missionary protagonist Thomas reveals the story of how he lost his faith in the midst a violent conflagration in China, where he was branded on his back with a massive cross as we simultaneously watch a full-sized model of the same icon collapse in flames in front of him. Whatever could it possibly mean?!

Dan Stevens’ portrayal of Thomas is that of a man well and truly deranged, with such a cartoonishly wild and haunted look on his face at all times that it sometimes threatens to derail the sincerity of some moments. The fact that the prophet Malcolm and his inner circle are desperately seeking a malicious intruder in their midst but somehow don’t suspect the guy who’s walking around looking like he might start stabbing at any moment is pretty funny. And I think some of the chuckles that I had are genuine—like a scene of cultist children poking at a restrained woman with big sticks as a form of “play,” or how a guard’s response to a command to “sound the alarm” late in the film means ringing this pretty tiny bell. Like the stylized “T” in the title, Apostle as a whole is simultaneously goofy and cool.

What I liked most about this movie when I first watched it and that immediately got me invested on rewatch is how it opens with such force and focus—Thomas’ sister taken by the cult for ransom, his physical and mental state clearly in some sort of disarray from the very beginning, and then this great sequence where we see him intuit and evade a trap set for him by surreptitiously exchanging his own (marked) ticket to paradise with another man’s. The espionage or cat-and-mouse elements are what really make Apostle so charismatic to me. For a missionary (and drug addict), Thomas is weirdly capable, and it’s great fun to watch him fight and sleuth. I kind of wish there was more sleuthing, to be honest.

What is perhaps surprising is how readily the film shows us Malcolm’s perspective. Played by Michael Sheen, he comes across as both your typical cult leader but also as vulnerable in ways that ultimately pay off as he and his two brothers end up at odds with one another when the situation starts to deteriorate. Seeing both sides of the conflict like this might defang some of the horror or mystery of the situation, but it increases the tension. What I previously described as “espionage” is part of what makes Apostle better than its title’s design might suggest. It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of the broad strokes of cult/folk torture horror, but it’s Thomas’ somewhat empowered position within the familiar frame and the way that the leadership of the cult fractures (and, yes, also grody stuff like The Drill Scene) that make it feel kind of noteworthy to me.

The theming here is obvious in some ways: By chaining and force-feeding the goddess of the island (by treating her like a “machine,” which is a word that is actually used in this context quite late in the plot), Malcolm and company have perverted their faith. Malcolm’s dreams of a utopian, communal society without taxes or want had me kind of rolling my eyes given how common it is to put aspirations of equality into the heads and mouths of madmen in stories like this (as part of their obvious insanity!), but the dynamic that ends up developing between him and his one brother Quinn (played by Mark Lewis Jones) makes Malcolm ultimately come across much better and makes the ideas associated with him feel less… predictably trampled upon. Quinn not only describes the goddess as a machine but also makes further blasphemous and violent statements, ranting at one point about how religion can maybe serve in combat. In keeping with the upside-down “T” of it all, Quinn is characterized throughout the movie in the most brutal and blunt and obvious ways—fast with a blade or gun and slow to think, without temperance, and ultimately quick to seize complete control when he gets a chance. Malcolm, we’re essentially told by Quinn, is a true believer (and a fool because of it).

This is ultimately one of the more interesting elements of Apostle: It does feel (and act like) a pretty conventional take-down of organized religion—what with the unnatural treatment of a deity beyond what she had ever intended for her accidental worshippers, and with the increased reliance on bloody rituals and punishments and on witch-hunting outsiders—but it also doesn’t completely write off either Christianity or the faith of Malcolm, exactly. If anything, the late-game story of Apostle is about reaffirmations of faith. Thomas finds something like the headiness and satisfied delirium of religion when he burns the corrupted goddess and finally saves his sister and Malcolm’s daughter, and he even asks the latter to pray for him as he shoos them on to the escape boats while he bleeds out on a scenic vista. Meanwhile, that daughter, Andrea (Lucy Boynton), had also started praying in a pretty Christian sort of way prior to the climactic final showdown with Quinn. And if Wikipedia is to be believed and Thomas is actually experiencing “rebirth as the new guardian of the island” at the end, then Malcolm’s own faith is also somewhat affirmed when he witnesses this happening.

The land is becoming fruitful again. Yes, it did require blood, but just not in the brutal, organized way they had been going about it. If Malcolm survives to worship this new god of the island(?), then the implication is that maybe his faith is actually still ok—albeit on a smaller scale and probably sans the adherents, and the kidnapping, and the drilling big holes in people’s heads…

I watched Apostle with my religious father, and I’m pretty sure I saw a little head-nodding in there somewhere. Like, I’m not saying this is a Christian Movie, but when Thomas’ faith in his Lord allows him to twice bring his restrained arms together, in that aforementioned flashback, to pray, and effectively overpowers two men to do so, it says something. He just also happens to use that maybe-God-given strength to execute some kind of Resident Evil-style butcher-attendant of the goddess in a pretty cool and gruesome and over-the-top fashion.

#movies #horror movies #movie review #rewatching #gareth evans

0 notes