FilmSnark

Aw crap. There's a Dead Ringers TV series now.

On the one hand, it's a series version of one of my favorite David Cronenberg movies, which featured one of my all-time favorite Jeremy Irons performances. Add that to it being a reboot, or a remake, or what-have-you, and them's some hurdles to clear.

On the other hand, it stars Rachel Weisz, who now only I love seeing but is one of my favorite actresses to play people who are just slightly off.

(See: Complete Unknown)

Sigh.

Goddamned Netflix fucking up a good thing.

I learned too late that The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, a new series that kept popping up in my attention sphere, was created by Joe Barton. Barton wrote The Ritual, which was a thrilling guilt trip, and the sensational Giri/Haji, which remains the best piece of original Netflix programming I’ve seen. He has a gift for mean, and violence, and convoluted relationships

By the time I learned about its existence and re-subscribed to watch it, Netflix had canceled it.

This is why they can’t keep their subscriber base - every time they have a piece of interesting, original content, they reach for the axe unless the series immediately spawns a craze that involves everything from t-shirts to mobile games to pachinko machines.

Half-Bad had my attention from the start, with its beginning that hint at a grungy Sapphire and Steel, getting to magic and the boots-on-the-ground trying to keep it from regular people right away. It quickly evolves into something more, however, with a somewhat on the nose set up of the UK as a witch police state, racism along the clearly delineated groups of Fairborn (proper, established, school-educated) and Blood witches (this world’s magical gypsies), and both groups’ attention on Nathan Byrne, a mixed-race kid that most everyone seems to be terrified of.

That’s about as much as you need to know in order to savor the bits that Netflix has allowed us to have.

It’s still worth watching, even if it doesn’t wrap everything up neatly, even if it relies too much on Paul Ready’s weak portrayal of Soul O’Brien in the last few episodes, and loses steam in the process.

There is a flavor there, coming off the mostly unknown actors doing their damnedest for a gig that may be their one shot. You can taste it from the credits music, from that gorgeous, colorful introduction of hovering blood petals coming down onto the scared witch investigators. There’s a flower there, waiting for the right conditions, for more of Ceelia’s crunchy delivery and Mercury’s purring, hoping to give you more of that gorgeous sex deathgasm that is the decimation, of the likely doomed emotional triangle.

I want to be able to love Alien: Isolation.

It gets so much of the environment right. That late 70s visual design. The droning blips of old tech, green CRTs and bulky IBM-like keyboards all over the place. The feeling of being alone in a cavernous installation, where even people might turn against you. The way it manages to make you worry about making too much noise even before you get to the titular critter.

All that is great, until you encounter the read-the-designer’s-mind gameplay, where you are supposed to solve puzzles or get out of situations in exactly the way they intended; how enemies communicate telepathically and they swarm the last place one of them happened to glimpse you; or how you can only create distractions in the exact way the designers meant - apparently Amanda Ripley has never heard of throwing a glass or bottle.

Ah yes, Ripley. Our character is Ellen Ripley’s daughter, looking for closure years after her mom disappeared. A clever conceit, if it wasn’t such a blatant way to start rattling off the “Alien’s greatest hits”. By the time we get to the base and start reading off messages referring to some misbehaving AI and “working Joes”, you know it’s not just going to be the one monster chasing you.

I didn’t get too far. For all I know it’s a gaming masterpiece that establishes the new Xenomorph canon, but having to repeat sections because three scavengers suddenly turned into sharp-shooters who can see perfectly in a mostly-dark room while instantaneously sharing my last-known location was too annoying. I was into the game for a scare or three, not a regular stream of ragequits.

I don’t know what possessed Andy Muschietti and to add all the inopportune jokes to It - Chapter Two.

It’s otherwise a tight adaptation of Stephen King’s book, streamlining his somewhat baroque setup by removing some extraneous elements that added little value (Bev’s husband, Bill’s wife) and some weird-ass likely cocaine-powered decisions (the turtle, teen gang-bang). Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise is unsettling in a way that Tim Curry’s never achieved. It even manages to capture that flavor of King’s that others have a hard time getting right: the feeling of friends getting back together, finding their rhythm, finding each other again. An optimism that there are people who will be there for you no matter, despite whatever else gets slathered on top. That things back then were relevant, important, meaningful enough to matter even now.

But those fucking joke-y interruptions murder tension whenever things are starting to pick up. It’s already hard enough to remain scared when the CGI monsters look like Gollum’s acromegalic, alcoholic grandma, without an absurd ha-ha music joke as purportedly terrified characters are confronting their fears.

I’ve gone back to it a couple of times, the theme drawing me back. I stick around for those scenes where Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman do let things play out, like with the multitude of faces that fight to get into Bev’s bathroom stall, or the presence that chases Ben at school.

Spiderlight is easy to recommend, inasmuch as it is trivial to describe to its intended audience.

It’s a high fantasy party-deciphering-prophecy-to-rid-the-land-of-the-dark-lord kinda novel, with a wry sense of humor, which feels as if you are listening to the inner thoughts of four self-important RPG nerds who take the campaign way too seriously, while the game master tries to nudge them out of their comfort zone and make them look past the tropes, to mostly humorous but sometimes morally wrenching results.

If that piqued your interest, I’ll throw in a freebie: at one point there’s even a theological discussion that would fit impeccably as a Secret of Monkey Island sword duel.

Does that help seal the deal? Because if it even half-sounds like your kind of morsel, it’s delicious.

It’s not groundbreaking, the way Glen Cook’s Black Company series was, with his focus on seeing fantasy from the point of view of a bunch of foot soldiers, while managing to retain the epic scope.

Titane, the second movie by French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, is…

Titane is…

Titane is demented, unpleasant, sensual, and absolutely the wrong movie to write about when getting back on the movie-writing horse.

You met Alexia immediately, as a child, when her raw petty unpleasantness causes a car accident which she survives, but results in her needing a titanium plate in her skull. The moment Agathe Rousselle’s adult Alexia walks into a car lot, some indeterminate decades later, wearing her scar like a proud brand, and we see the group of people simping after the gaggle of car dancers and asking for their autograph, you can smell Crash coming at you at well over the speed limit.

It’s a suspicion that gets almost immediate confirmation, in a scene of froth and drool coming out in a frenzied stream as so much ejaculate, as the movie becomes violent and unpleasant - right before making a turn into straight nuttery that makes you think “alright, it’s Crash meets Christine”.

That, right there, would have been a bizarre enough experience. I’d have watched it and be here singing odes to its inventiveness. It’s not enough for Ducournau, though, who has in mind a nastier story of bizarro behavior, violence, manipulation, and several shades of mental illness, with a nice glaze of unreality on top. Alexia is a wildfire, consuming and uncaring, unbalanced and out of control. It can’t last, and Ducournau is well aware of it, unexpectedly changing lanes into something that - in comparison to the first half hour - feels positively domestic, while at the same time managing to engender even more dread.

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, other than with the single line I wrote on my notebook.

Fucking masterpiece.

Closest I can get is that it’s as if Michel Gondry and Stephen Chow had made a pastiche of John Carpenter, Shane Carruth, and Wong Kar Wai, after watching too much Doom Patrol. All while mixing kung fu and humor to show that existentialism and nihilism are two ends of a horseshoe.

It is the most original, joyful, creative, willfully absurd, life-infused movie I have seen since … um … I don’t even know. I’ll get back to you on that one, if I manage to think of anything that comes even a few timelines close.

It has been 26 years since Big Night came out and, for whatever reasons, I didn’t watch it until tonight.

It feels true, and entrepreneurial, and bittersweet in the way that trying to find your own way usually does.