Movies, Film, and Chili

  Teen Wolf: The Movie is about werewolves fighting against a firefly demon enemy. About halfway through the movie, it dawned on me that perhaps this was based on a CW show and when I looked it up I found out it was MTV. The movie is very much written for an audience who has seen the show as many characters and their powers are not introduced.  Directed by Russell Mulcahy , who also directed the TV show, 1986's Highlander, and more recently the two episodes of Netflix's TV series 13 Reasons Why. I'm not sure what the budget of the film was, but surely they could have spent more on the CGI as it's of the quality of Charmed or Buffy. This is 2023 though, audiences expect better. There are also some camera positions that are questionable and fog also just lingers in specific areas which I suppose is more of a production design issue. The sets are sometimes unbelievable and sometimes the backgrounds are obviously computer generated. The music also swells sometimes then dies

  Infinity Pool  is a hedonistic acid trip with allegories to the current media-political landscape. Written and Directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of the King of Venereal Horror, David Cronenberg . Most people know David from the 1986 film The Fly. Brandon on the other hand is still best known as living in his father's long shadow. Brandon has a lot to say in the film and sometimes I can't tell if the directorial choices are intentionally backward to sell a message or just because he's a relatively new director. I think on the positive side, that his father gave him the tools to speak.  The film stars Alexander Skarsgard who you might recognize as The Northman, True Blood, or The Legend of Tarzan . I always thought it was interesting that Skarsgard played The Northman and in True Blood, he was also named Northman. Here he plays James Foster, an aspiring writer who would go to many lengths to gain fame and a fanbase. Mia Goth  has been in a lot lately and I loved Pearl  l

  Skinamarink is an experimental horror film with two children haunted by an entity. The film was written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball. He certainly made some odd choices for his experiment. More than ninety percent of the shots were at around a forty-five-degree angle up or down. So you're constantly looking at feet and legs or corners and tops of doors. You never see the entity that is causing all the issues that are going on and that's more of a writing element than it was a directorial choice. In terms of writing, there is a ton of symbolism. The film plays with the idea that what if the childhood trauma of your parent's divorce was physically manifested. For instance, the doors and windows disappear with an audio clue and a visual blip. The father and mother can't stand to face their children. That phrase could mean that parents have a hard time justifying their selfishness to their children, but also the movie physically has the parents with their backs to the

Plane is Die Hard in the pacific islands. A pilot must save the hostages against all odds. Plane is written by Charles Cumming and J. P. Davis. While Charles isn't known for writing films, he is an accomplished spy novelist. Davis on the other hand has more films under his belt, having written 2022's The Contractor . The movie follows the typical Die Hard formula, and even has an annoying hostage if you remember Harry Ellis. The film is directed by  Jean-François Richet , which might not ring any bells but he directed the not-John Carpenter's film Assault on Precinct 13 the remake from 2005 with Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne. While his direction isn't going to win any awards, I didn't notice any glaring flaws in direction.  Gerard Butler  feels like he has been relocated to straight to DVD and Digital movies and in some sense, this film felt a bit above that grade. If he keeps making movies that don't appeal to a larger audience or convince the distributor

  M3GAN  is a horror movie with the mashup idea of what if the killer doll idea was an artificial intelligence. With a story by and Produced by James Wan, M3GAN has a marketing team that struck gold. Just look at the box office for a horror movie in the Hollywood dumping ground of January. James Wan is a modern-day Wes Craven and shouldn't need an introduction but I'll mention a few of his works, Saw, The Conjuring, and  Insidious. A part of me thinks the reason why Blumhouse (Production company), and Universal (Distributer) dumped this movie in January was because of the relatively unknown director of Gerard Johnstone . I can only imagine that confidence in him has skyrocketed since this success, as there wasn't too much wrong with the direction. I imagine that the doll itself is partly CG in the face especially. I'm looking forward to The Corridor Crew doing a deep dive to find out the mystery of how they accomplished the look of M3GAN played by newcomer and accompli