Sunday, October 8, 2017

BLADE RUNNER 2049

I don't care about it.

I did, kinda, right after I saw it Friday, moved as I was by the vision of it, the colorful yet stately photography by Roger Deakins (I wasn't convinced we'd see a more beautiful movie out of Hollywood this year), the score that wasn't overbearing until the end credit crawl, and even a number of the questions it posed about the challenges of (and faced by) artificial life: when does programming turn from algorithms into emotion? What are our responsibilities to the lives we create?


But the more I think about this thing, the less it matters to me. We're shown a more greatly ravaged Los Angeles than previously (it's snowing there in 2049, and a climactic fight scene is staged just outside a levee along the Pacific Ocean), but the effect is one of reading an editorial on the things to come, not a couple of hours spent in that world. It poses intriguing notions about intimacy, sex, and love between different artificial life forms, but the voice that yells OMG SEXBOTZ turns out to be the loudest here; director Denis Villeneuve seems more enthralled by the increasingly larger nude women that dot his landscape than he is interested in interrogating their politics, or even their identities. Taking a cue, perhaps, from the nonhumans it concerns, it doesn't feel like it breathes, and it doesn't linger. The bracing emotional moments seem placed there as part of a design, like Villeneuve's filling a quota, and given nowhere new to land outside the movie's artfully dreary visual stew they can't land with anything like grace.

We're kept at arm's length from the wonders before us, and there's much to marvel at visually but ultimately little to feel. For the latest, largest work by a filmmaker who's made a name for some of the most viscerally unsettling movies of the last decade, Villeneuve's latest is strangely, disappointingly anaesthetizing. And it's made me wonder how much I ever really cared about Ridley Scott's original movie, which is not a terrific accomplishment by a thirty-five-years-later follow-up. Maybe another viewing would clear up my issues with it but it hardly seems worth the effort. Anyway.

Monday, October 2, 2017

The SHOCKtober Revision

I wanna post a mess of things for this, the Halloween season. I always begin with big intentions and then life gets in the way. I'm hoping it will not be so this time around and, emboldened by already having twice as many posts on the House this year as last (though that's a low bar to clear), I'm hoping to have twice as many posts for October as thru the whole year so far.

So a bit of a cheat, here, though I sincerely hope you'll find it useful. Long time hero-of-me Stacie Ponder is also feeling similarly prolific over on her revitalized Final Girl, and she's resurrected SHOCKtober!, in which she solicits her readers to submit their favorite horror films and then counts down from least to most popular. I submitted a list last time but didn't consult it when submitting anew. You may see the below as an evolution of my tastes, though honestly I believe there are more tried-and-true selections this time out than last. For both lists, however, I restricted myself to one film per filmmaker and no more. And both are submitted in the event you're looking for something appropriate to watch over the next month - if you get a chance to give any of the following eyes, your proprietor says go! Can you stand the excitement?


At ease, Leslie.

THE LIST (including links to my reviews, if they exist):

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Fuest, 1971)
The Beyond (Fulci, 1979)
Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963)
The Brides of Dracula (Fisher, 1960)
Byzantium (Jordan, 2012)
Cat's Eye (Teague, 1985)
Creepshow (Romero, 1992)
Crimson Peak (del Toro, 2015)
Dust Devil: The Final Cut (Stanley, 1992)
Eve's Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)


Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Ginger Snaps (Fawcett, 2000)
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (Shimizu, 2003)
Kuroneko (Shindo, 1968)
Lair of the White Worm (Russell, 1988)
The Moth Diaries (Harron, 2011)
Phenomena (Argento, 1985)
Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981)