Month: November 2018

The Girl In The Spider’s Web Review (Minor spoilers, and they’re only spoilers if you haven’t seen the trailer)

I never expected The Girl In The Spider’s Web to hold a candle to Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo, but I like the cast and director enough that I expected it to be at least solid. Claire Foy was also no small part of my anticipation; I haven’t seen The Crown but she’s given two of my favorite performances of the year with Unsane and First Man so I knew I was going to see it as soon as I could because of her alone.
I still cannot believe what I just witnessed.
Alvarez’s direction, at its best, is brisk and tight, but these moments are few and far between.
A notch right below its best is solid but “off”. Sometimes he clearly has some interesting framing and editing in mind but at these moments it always feels like there’s a few shots more than necessary, and whatever interesting ideas he had in mind don’t come to fruition. Other times he’s trying to incorporate two different styles, going for a sleek sort of perfectionism and a gritty handheld. I’m not opposed to these different styles being in the same movie, the same scene, or even separated by a single cut but Alvarez seems to just have no idea what he’s doing in combining these styles, and it doesn’t help that at its worst he’s clearly trying to do gritty handheld just for the sake of gritty handheld.
And don’t get me started on the crosscutting.
So that’s his direction at its high points, which I would say makes up maybe 30-40% of the movie. The rest is aimless and atrocious. Two or three shots more than necessary becomes 5 or 6 and the movie dwells on things it has absolutely no reason to. It’s aimless and atrocious.
The awful filmmaking might have been endurable if the script was any good; as incompetent as the filmmaking of The Predator was I at least appreciated the majority of the script and its attempt at economic storytelling.

But

Yeah

No.

The whole thing is devoid of personality that it is so, so desperate for. Any sense of (dare I say) “edge”, sexuality or dark humor feel tacked on because “that’s what a Lisbeth Salander movie should have, right?” Unlike Fincher’s film, in which the characters struggles and the forward motion of the different plots are beautifully in sync, there is no synergy between the character development and the plotting. There are designated “emotional moments”, designated “plot moments” (which take up the meat of the movie) and an occasional forced overlap that you can’t really blame on the actors because they aren’t given squat to work with. Fincher’s film is full of character whereas the most Spider’s Web can give us is “let’s have the characters be sad for a little bit about their traumatic past/love triangle.” The build up of Camilla Salander is also incomprehensible and dramatically inept; the film can’t decide if she’s supposed to be an unknown, mysterious figure or “the one that Lisbeth didn’t save” and it leads to her presence being all over the place. (Though she has a monologue that’s, mercifully, one of the only effective parts of the movie visually and dramatically).

Alvarez also seems to want to show off by having long stretches of no dialogue (which you’d think would be a mercy); I don’t know, maybe he wanted to show off his “visual storytelling”. Regardless, these moments are only memorable in the sense that I noticed them and spent their entirety waiting for him to do something interesting or dramatically effective with them. This theoretically could have happened if the generic, royalty-free sounding score wasn’t lazily slapped on for every second, but I guess we’ll never find out.

Anyway, the movie’s garbage, and that’s a shame. The only thing I can hope for is that its financial failure could maybe possibly theoretically inspire Sony to finally go through on the sequel to the 2011 film with the original cast and crew, the way the Jason Momoa Conan reboot got a sequel up and going for an Arnold Conan movie (which was also cancelled). But as the likelihood of that happening is non-existent, I’m gonna do my best to just forget I ever watched this thing and still look forward to Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe sequel and whatever Foy and the rest of the cast will do in the future.

 

Motivating the Motiveless: How Halloween 2018 (Possibly) Gets the Laurie/Michael Dynamic Right

A key element that’s been a part of the Halloween franchise has always been one of the key focuses of criticism; the familial relationship between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. This element was added in Halloween II for what honestly seems to be no other reason to me than to add a twist to shock people and to justify the existence of the movie beyond “now Michael kills other people.”

The fact that this twist remains a crucial element of the rest of the franchise is neither here nor there for me regarding the majority of them. I pay no mind to the twist whenever I watch the original movie and focus on Michael as the motive-less force of nature that he is, and if I ever watch films 4-8 I just accept them for what they are.

“Okay, now he’s after his niece.”

“Okay, now he’s after his great nephew.”

“Okay, now he’s after his sister again.”

But this makes the first Halloween II an unfortunate outlier in the franchise; while I can enjoy the movies that followed it with the pre-supposition that his motives are family based, Halloween II intentionally and violently changed our original understanding of Michael Myers, and all because they needed a new hook to bring audiences in. I can bite the bullet and enjoy the sequels (well, those that are enjoyable) since at their very core they’re about Michael’s family motivations but Halloween II sought to change the core of the original film and that’s what makes it difficult to watch.

To make this a bit clearer; if Michael Myers in the original Halloween was a brilliant marathon sprinter, Halloween II was like watching his legs get chopped off, and the rest of the franchise was this marathon sprinter trying to prove himself as a weight lifter with a focus on upper body strength. I’m fine with watching him do his best with weight lifting, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to enjoy watching the injury that forced him to go to a different sport.

(To get this out of the way, I actually love the Rob Zombie movies. He actually tried to explore this element that had become an essential part of the franchise beyond simply trying to make the plot cooler, and in doing so he strongly fleshed out the character that Michael had become over these years and made his films his own beast, and did so in a way that by no means endangers what makes the original Michael terrifying. Zombie’s Michael is an entirely new Michael and I like that new Michael in a way that I am still able to appreciate the 1978 Michael. No imaginary leg removal for who’s been redefined as a weight lifter from the get-go, basically)

When it was announced that the franchise was getting a rebootquel that ignored every entry that followed the original, much had been made of the fact that writers Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and David Gordon Green tossed aside the sibling twist that became so essential to the franchise. When the trailers further revealed Laurie Strode to be in full Terminator 2 Sarah Connor mode, I personally assumed that Michael would look at her as a nemesis in the same way that Laurie saw him.

This assumption of Michael’s personal investment in Laurie Strode wasn’t just assumed by me but by characters in the film; we see it in the podcasters making a documentary about the incident in 1978 and in Michael’s new doctor. The former have misguided hopes that bringing Michael and Laurie together will instigate some sort of response out of the silent murderer, and his doctor presumes that the only thing that’s kept Michael alive the last 40 years is so he can find and kill Laurie Strode.

She’s presumed to be “the one that got away.”

There also seems to be a possible meta suggestion from the film itself that Michael has now fixated on Laurie in a similar sense that Laurie has fixated on him, that the other is the Great White Whale to their own Ahab, during a comedic scene in which Michael is waiting to try and kill a teenager. This teenager just drunkenly tried (and as such miserably failed) to make a move on Laurie’s granddaughter, who rejected him. As the teenager sits in his misery, he sees Michael and mistakes him for a neighbor, only to ask Michael “if there’s a girl he wants but can never have.”

(Or something to that degree, can’t find this quote online yet)

The line is obviously funny (at least I thought it was) because Michael is being pitted against a woman he tried to kill 40 years ago.

But I don’t think he’s fixated on Laurie in the same sense that Laurie is fixated on him. She’s not “the one that got away”. She’s the one who just won’t die; the thorn in his side, the fly in his ointment.

He’s just trying to do his thing and slaughter droves of innocent people and that pesky Laurie just won’t piss off.

This, in a sense, does lead to Michael “fixating” on Laurie by the end of the movie, but there are multiple factors in play here and I would argue none of them relate to Michael having this undying need to kill his Great White Whale. The first is the twist of the secondary villain that’s found in Michael’s doctor; unlike Loomis, who wanted Michael locked up forever, Michael’s new doctor is a crazy person who was more than happy that Michael escaped so he could find out why he the killer takes pleasure in….killing. The doctor wants to “experiment” with him in an uncontrolled environment with Laurie Strode, who the doctor, again, incorrectly presumes is the reason Michael has stayed alive all these years.

Michael is either brought to Laurie or Laurie brings herself to him. And I think this means Michael looks at her the same way he looks at the mechanic whose clothes he steals or the podcasters who have his mask; as tasks to be taken care of so he can do what he wants to do.

She’s just a more important task.

Does this perspective undermine the intention behind Laurie’s characterization?

Hardly.

If Michael is a force of nature once more, this only establishes Laurie as a fellow force (Halloween: The Force Awakens?) to be reckoned with.

None of this necessarily elaborates on how the movie itself handles these elements, and there’s a good chance I’m not even right; I await for the input of fellow Halloween fans on this post (provided anyone reads it). I also think it’s a movie full of interesting ideas and it touches on them well, and it’s certainly a tense, entertaining watch, but I can’t help but feel like there’s something currently missing.

But that’s another discussion for another time. For now, I commend the movie for at least having an interesting idea on how to handle a sibling-free Laurie/Michael dynamic down down. The pieces are there, the structure and foundation solid, it’s just a question of whether the movie completely works that I don’t feel comfortable in answering yet.