Let’s Talk About: Under the Silver Lake

It’s a sad indictment of the collective temperament of the human race that those in the public eye are often remembered best not for their triumphs and achievements, but for their blunders and missteps. Where directors and writers are concerned, oftentimes the most calamitous of these blunders and missteps have directly followed the greatest of their triumphs or achievements. Michael Cimino won Best Director in 1979 for The Deer Hunter, which he immediately followed up with 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, a disasterpiece that by all accounts ruined the industry for everybody. Kevin Smith defined slacker culture with Clerks in 1994, which he has since been following up with everything else in the View Askewniverse, which is apparently a thing that people take seriously. Robert David Mitchell was lauded in 2015 for his Indie horror flick slash cautionary tale about sexually transmitted diseases It Follows, and has now followed it up with Under the Silver Lake, a movie that admittedly might have been good had a modicum of restraint been exercised at any point in the editing process.

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Let’s Talk About: Pet Sematary

The ultimate appeal of reading a Stephen King novel is not the coherent plots or the gruesome depictions of death that make the Red Wedding look tame or the bizarre ways their author manages to draw attention to a particular character’s penis – it’s the diction. King has a very folksy, down-to-Earth writing style, like a conversational old-timer who’s greeting a newcomer to town from behind the counter of a mom and pop shop. “That blue house up on I-95, past the old Shell station? Belonged to a friend of mine. Sergeant Perry Dewall. He was the town taxidermist after the war, ‘afore the Voices of the Forest told him to butcher his family and mount ‘em around his yard like a topiary garden. We lynched him without a trial and his vengeful spirit now haunts a Speak & Spell. Here, friend, let me light that for you…” His prose has a very familiar and welcoming quality that makes you feel like you’re being regaled by an old friend over a cold beer on the porch. In essence, he’s like Jud Crandall from Pet Sematary.

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Let’s Talk About: Us

The words “Let’s talk about us” may not bode well for whoever they’re spoken to, depending on their source and the context in which they’re said. If uttered by a significant other over the dinner table, they may herald both heartbreak and a literal break from contact. If spoken by the president of Us Weekly at a shareholders’ meeting, they may indicate that profits are spiraling down the potty and everyone should start calling dibs on stationary supplies before the IRS rolls in. If said by anybody who’s seen Jordan Peele’s new film Us, they may lead to either an ardent discussion about how amazing it is or a no-holds-barred fistfight because one of the parties involved thought it was stupid.

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Let’s Talk About: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (Slightly Abridged)

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the spirit of writing significantly shorter pieces (i.e., not fourteen pages long) I would like to kick off a new phase of Snooty Film Critiques with a revision of my piece on The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot… now slightly abridged.

When the title of your movie is a whopping eleven-syllable salute to exhibitionism like ‘The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot,’ I would argue that it’s not unreasonable to expect it to feature Bigfoot prominently, or even occasionally. Curiously, this debut feature for writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski – which premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montréal last July – has surprisingly little to do with Bigfoot. Or anything at all, for that matter.

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Biographical Double-Whammy: Bohemian Rhapsody & The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

I’ll make this quick.

I saw Bohemiam Rhapsody this month and was pleasantly surprised to find that, contrary to those early scathing reviews, it was just bland and unremarkable, making it one of the best films I’ve seen all year by default. Critical reaction towards the Freddie Mercury biopic has been polarizing since its wide release, with some lauding it as a pitch-perfect representation of Mercury’s life and others decrying it as disrespectful to the point of homophobia. As with The Last Jedi, I find myself balanced in the middle of the critical teeter-totter, not hating it, not loving it, but also not remembering most of it despite having seen it last week. Then again, I can’t really recall what I had for breakfast on any given day, due to the inordinate number of head injuries I’ve had in my life.

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – Putting the ‘Stink’ in Extinction Event

Imagine, if you will (in your best Rod Sterling voice), a precocious four-year-old boy with a wooden crate brimming with toy dinosaurs – the sort with zero points of articulation because it was the 90’s and kids were still capable of using their imaginations, dammit. This boy spent his languid preschool afternoons guiding his motley herd on epic journeys through valley-like ditches, rainforest-esque gardens, wasteland-ish gravel lots, and oceanic sloughs – occasionally by way of the Millennium Falcon. The stakes were always high for this heroic herd and dangers lurked around every shadowy corner – from monstrous plush t-rexes with mint Beanie Baby tags to vicious velociraptors that had been bloodied with a red Sharpie to swarms of oversized bugs from a dollar store bucket to the mighty and terrible cat-god-of-wrath Whyskerssa (whose tender mercies hinged on proportionate blood offerings). These adventures were the sort of masterful works of fiction that village elders recount to wide-eyed youngsters over late-night campfires – noting, of course, that any resemblance their tales may bear to characters or events from The Land Before Time is purely coincidental.

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Effective Protagonists, Part III: Die Hard

After my last post on the dual power of Character wants and effective introductions in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, somebody made the astute observation that the only protagonists I’ve selected for analysis thus far have been white males.

Well anyway, today we’ll be conducting a breakdown of Detective John McClane in Die Hard.

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Mayhem: It’s Exactly What it Sounds Like

Ahh, Christmas time – a festive season of peace, love, and goodwill extended to everyone you spent the rest of the year flipping off. Families congregate under chintzy decorations and pretend to tolerate one another over extravagant feasts, Die Hard loops endlessly on an impulsively-purchased 4K TV, and everyone represses all their inner rage that’s been mounting since the last election and forces some good cheer on a holiday that’s devolved into a cynical capitalistic cash-grab.

Seems like a good a time as any to discuss Mayhem – no, silly reader, not the state of Warner Bros’s accounting department following Justice League’s opening weekend; I’m talking about the new action-horror-comedy extravaganza by world-famous director (reads off cue card) Joe Lynch. Since premiering at Cannes back in May it’s been heralded by critics as Office Space meets The Purge, and since viewing it myself I’d personally add the endorsement ‘on cocaine’ to fully capture its spirit.

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Thor: Ragnarok and the Marvel Problem

Marvel’s latest popcorn-muncher, Thor: Asgardian Rhapsody, premiered this month to critical acclaim, serving audiences a god’s portion of colourful, lighthearted, and (barring a few ‘edgy’ words) family-friendly entertainment and proceeding to earn Disney somewhere in the vicinity of ninety-two zillion dollars.

I wrote that paragraph at the end of October in complete confidence it would prove itself to be true – not because I’m some kind of absurdly intelligent Sherlock-figure who can determine the outcome of any given scenario courtesy of a supercomputer brain coupled with increasingly lazy writing – but because Disney is at the top of its A-game in regards to its Marvel properties and has yet to truly fail.

With something like seventeen bloody installments of the MCU in the can, Disney has all but mastered a formula for bona fide theatrical enjoyability combined with a guaranteed financial return that largely consists of making everything look and feel like Guardians of the Galaxy, and after a glance at their future release schedule it’s evident they’re only gaining momentum. Strap on your seat belts, kids, because we’re going to get nine Marvel movies a year until we’re all rotting in the ground.

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