Notorious
How soothing it can be to watch a masterful thriller that has no explosions or stunts, just human beings reacting to each other with dubious or dangerous agendas.
Why is that considered boring these days?
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Much of the film’s action is internal. NOTORIOUS is a love story masquerading as a spy movie. The suspense concerns whether or not Devlin will wake up to his love for Alicia before the poison kills her.
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It took me longer than it should have to realise the core story of Mission Impossible 2 is the same as Notorious.
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I think the surname of the female lead character is taken from the names of the writers of Notorious? Haven’t seen either in years and am now tempted to watch… MIssion: Impossible 2. I’ve had a hard day.
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Internal is not exciting anymore?
For many people, I do not think it is. They are looking for adventure of an external/physical nature, e.g. TOP GUN: MAVERICK.
Could ALL ABOUT EVE get 14 Oscar nominations and win Best Picture in today’s culture?
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Maybe it would win. But mass audiences would not have seen it.
How sad and - sorry - stupid.
Does this mean a story is not important anymore, or at best takes the backseat to superficial stimuli like CGI effects and explosions?
I do get why teenagers prefer that stuff. Heck, I went through that phase, too, and preferred my sci-fi/fantasy movies to the talky films with weighty themes adults loved.
But now it seems that adults have been infantilized so much that they only love to watch the kiddie films.
I generalize, of course, and realize that only last week I wrote a rave review for TOP GUN MAVERICK. And yes, I am on a Bond site, enjoying these films as if I were still a teenager.
But folks, I’m really trying…
I think that story-heavy films are seen as more elitist nowadays. Every narrative movie needs a story, but intricate stories are the exception rather than the rule. And despite the acclaim an intricate story like GLASS ONION will generate, the next complex story that bombs will immediately call such work into question.
Or they never grew out of their teenage stage. I commend this article to you:
I find its argument persuasive
But you engage all of the above on more than just a thrill/sensation level.
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By Timothy, that was piffle.
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Well, it has Dougray Scott as the villain and Thandiwe Newton, for me that alone makes it worth watching.
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Finally watched The Gray Man (2022) - kept me entertained for sure, but not much new - the tram chase scene was spectactular and there was an early scene that looked like DAD morphing into Moonraker!
I also watched a Danish thriller called Loving Adults on Netflix.
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Knives Out
It was the last time I went to a movie theatre before the pandemic began. I had tried to get a ticket the week before but all showings that day were sold out.
On this Friday, my wife and I finally got tickets, and we watched the movie with a full house of people who were just as delighted as we were.
The following years I had the blu ray sitting on my shelf but due to the burden of everything that happened in the past two and a half years, including severe and painful changes in my family, watching this movie became something I put off again and again. It reminded me too much of that day I first saw it, when life was so much simpler.
Now I finally tried again. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, even more than the first time. The labyrinthine construction of the plot is so clever, the cast is perfect, the directing is devilishly funny. It really is a feel good movie for me, and when it was over I wanted to see it again.
Looking forward to Glass Onion so much!
Charade
Donen, Grant, Hepburn - another classic comic mystery thriller, timeless and perfect in every way. Pure charme. Works on me every time.
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Watched Halloween Ends. Will need a second viewing in order to do a proper review, but this was an odd one, and I’m not sure it’s odd in a good way. For a film that is supposed to be (as if) a sendoff to the Halloween franchise, it’s a massive swing and a miss in that regard. Even mores as a goodbye to Jamie Lee Curtis and Laurie Strode, it’s feels on that front as though they didn’t even make it into the ballpark to even take their swing and a miss.
As a film, though, there are some ideas to really like here, which I’ll get into after a second viewing. The one solidified opinion I have on it thus far as that this film and Halloween Kills should have swapped places. Ends is not how one, ahem, ends a franchise as enduring as the Halloween films have been.
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I’ve begun writing this review several times only to delete what I’d written and start over several times now. Putting one’s ideas into writing about a film this strange, this odd, this offputting is surprisingly difficult. To cut to the chase and give the Reader’s Digest version of what had previously been an absurdly long review, the main takeaway that one needs to take from HALLOWEEN ENDS is that this is not a HALLOWEEN film at all.
HALLOWEEN ENDS is a romantic drama about two extremely damaged human beings who are struggling with their places in the world. The film introduces new character Corey Cunningham, who is blamed by the entire town for the tragic accidental death of a child he was babysitting, an event that we see in what is a pretty clever cold open for the film. He is introduced to Allyson (Andy Matichak) by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) when Laurie brings him to the hospital where Allyson works so he can be treated for a wound he sustains while being bullied by some high school kids outside of a local convenience store.
What commences for the next hour or so is a film that is entirely dedicated to their romance. And they move super fast, going from first meeting to ready to leave Haddonfield together all in the span of a couple of days. It’s jarring, to say the least.
If you’re asking yourself at this point, what does this new character and his romance with Allyson have to do with HALLOWEEN and the advertised showdown between Laurie Srode and a character we have yet to mention in this review, you’re not the only one. And the answer to that question is: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Summary
Michael Myers is barely in the “final” movie of his own franchise. You’d be forgiven for thinking that after Myers become potentially a supernatural being at the end of HALLOWEEN KILLS, he might be in line for a truly epic sendoff in the final film. And you’d be wrong in thinking that. Michael has gone from unkillable boogeyman at the end of KILLS to an old man somehow clinging to life down in the sewers of Haddonfield. Yes, you read that right, Mikey’s been living in the sewer system for the past four years. And they do everything they can to make him look like a shell of his former self. First, he goes soft when he spares Corey’s life during their first encounter, and he even allows Corey to beat him up in a later scene when Corey comes back to the sewer to take the iconic Myers mask for himself so that he can wear it while dispatching the bullies he’s encountered along the way. After Corey gets his fill as the copycat Michael Myers, the two of them team up to essentially kick off the endgame of the franchise. He goes to Laurie’s house to kill her so that she won’t be in his and Allyson’s way anymore. Instead, he’s ambushed by Laurie and then he bows out of the film. This is essentially where the film ends, but since Michael Myers has tagged along with Corey for some reason, he and Laurie now find themselves in the same home and, after neither of them really being in any way aware of the other at any time during this film, they basically decide that since they’re now under the same roof for the first time in four years, they might as well go ahead and fight it out.
Yes, you read that correctly, the reason that the big showdown occurs at all is because Michael Myers essentially got tired of waiting in the car while Corey was in the Strode house trying to kill Laurie. It’s an uninspired final battle between the two horror icons that does, at the very least, end on a truly decisive note.
The truly troubling thing about this movie is that it was sold as being somehting completely different from what it is. It’s sold as a film featuring the final battle between two horror icons. That’s not what this movie is AT ALL. Without the last thirty minutes, they wouldn’t have even been allowed to call it a horror film. It’s a movie that has a lot of good ideas (the main plot is isn’t bad, but it’s not acceptable for a film that is supposed to end this franchise), but hardly any of them are executed in any way that would register even as being minimally competent. The studio sold fans of the franchise one film. Then gave them a completely different film from the one they sold them. As it were, HALLOWEEN ENDS is a gut punch. After two really good films in HALLOWEEN 2018 and HALLOWEEN KILLS, the idea of sending Laurie Strode and Michael Myers out on a high note was right there in the filmmakers’ collective grasp. The execution of the ideas presented in ENDS, however, not only keeps this from being a satisfying conclusion to David Gordon Green’s trilogy, it also does significant work in destroying the legacies of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers as icons in the horror genre. Just an odd, odd way to end a franchise. Truly just… odd.
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I’m going to post a completely opposite take on Halloween Ends, although I must admit it’s very late as I write this, so you’re not going to get a more thoughtful review like Dalton wrote.
In short, it worked for me. If the movie had centered on Laurie and Michael, it would have just been like the 3 movies (going back to '78) that came before it. I don’t know how you could have done anything new with that storyline, and I think the filmmakers knew that. The movie would have been doomed to be just more of the same.
What “Ends” did instead is something clever. It uses its run time to present a story that seemed to have nothing to do with Halloween, yet after you think about it, it actually had everything to do with Halloween.
Summary
To me, the Corey storyline was a Michael Myers origin story, told in a sneaky way. Think about it - both stories opened much the same. Babysitting on Halloween night. Parents come home to discover a horrific event took place. Kid puts on a mask and starts killing. By seeing how Corey took the path he took, we got a glimpse as to how Michael became what he became.
We learned about Michael through watching Corey. We got to spend time with a human Michael without actually spending time with a human Michael. It felt like we were watching a flashback to events we didn’t get to see in the '78 film.
Now that’s not to say they did a good job of all that. There was all kinds of sloppy writing, as Dalton pointed out.
I’m not saying it was anything great, but for what it was it worked for me.
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It seems that expectations once again impeded the reception.
Especially since many fans thought this concluding chapter of this version of that story should and could only end in one way.
I love that the filmmakers really went against those expectations. In my mind, they would have failed if they had just gone through the motions as previous incarnations of this series did, presenting Laurie once again trying to kill Michael through the runtime of this whole movie.
It was important and actually quite logical to open the storyline of Corey.
On the whole, while I did prefer this trilogy’s ideas over the other sequels (watching only H2, H3 and H20, having no interest in the others after reading about them), I still think the best way to enjoy this story is sticking with Carpenter´s original. An open end with no closure.
Everything else is, despite being intelligently conceived in this trilogy, just milking the original idea.
In a previous version of the review (it went through a couple of drafts), I think I did a better job of pointing out that I thought that some of, perhaps even a lot of, the ideas they presented were good ones. I just don’t think that they were necessarily ones that were appropriate for the “final” film in the franchise.
The biggest problem I have with the film is how they treat Myers. To reduce one of horror’s best villains to a weak old man living in a sewer feels like the filmmakers just flipping the bird to the audience, especially when this is ostensibly the final time that we will see the character. After the way they had him begin to “transcend” into something potentially supernatural in KILLS, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. For a guy who has done nothing but kill when he’s been free to roam about, it makes zero sense that he just stops for four years, especially to just spend his time hanging out in a sewer.
I think maybe a better way to go with the story would have been to lean into what the trailers actually promise the viewer. I would disagree with the idea that the poor reception to the film is a matter of having poorly adjusted expectations for what we were getting. Through the marketing, the fans were explicitly promised one type of movie, but given something completely different. I’m fine with a little bit of deceptive marketing, but you can’t promise one film and then deliver something entirely different with the finished product. They did the equivalent of a company running commercials for a luxury sports car and actually delivering a motorcycle. Two perfectly fine products that do similar things, but what was delivered wasn’t in any way, shape, or form what was actually promised.
The trailer promises us the final showdown between the two leads, but it also hints at the idea of a copycat Myers. I think a lot of fans noticed this when, in the trailer, the “Michael Myers” who opens the door on a gun-wielding Laurie has all of his fingers intact after having them blown off with a shotgun in KILLS. Without the benefit now of having spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly to pull it off, a film that leans into the idea of Corey copycatting Michael Myers, putting the town further on edge, would have been a better way to still take the idea they were going for while still delivering a more fitting close to the franchise. It also gives the ending of the film a more natural way to occur, with Laurie somehow discovering that Myers is actually Corey around the 2/3 mark in the film, but then the real Myers makes his final appearance for one last chance to terrorize Haddonfield by dispatching Corey in a somewhat public way and then continuing on with this killing spree. As the ending stands, it’s tacked on to an entirely different film. They only throw down at the end because Michael is tired of waiting for Corey in the car, goes into the house, and is like “well, I’m here, might as well”.
So, in the end, the idea presented isn’t necessarily a bad one. Some tweaks to it, along with much better execution of the central idea, could have led to a classic HALLOWEEN film. But if you’re going to subvert what is expected from this type of film this much, you have to execute it well, and HALLOWEEN ENDS executes almost all of its ideas very poorly. For example, the romance between Allyson and Corey, which is a very central part of the film, is almost amateurish in is execution. Matichak and Rohan Campbell have almost no chemistry together, and I’d go so far as to argue that Campbell’s performance is weak enough to go a long way towards making a lot of the problems with the execution of the film’s ideas even worse. To make a long story short, if you’re going to go this far out into left field with what you’re doing, you’ve got to execute it well, and they fall way short of hitting that mark here, leading to most of these novel ideas falling flat.
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Agreed. It would have worked a lot better to switch Kills and Ends. The townspeople beating Corey in the street thinking it was Michael would have been perfect.
The marketing angle I disagree with you on, Dalton. You are absolutely correct that I felt whiplash watching a story that was far different than what had been sold to me, but can that ultimately be held against the movie or is the problem solely with the marketing?
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Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). A recent rewatch, the definition of chicken nuggets. Which means average that fills up the bare minimum of what you want. Action was done ok.
Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit is a mostly boring film with occasional bits of action (Kenneth Branagh cannot do action films). It’s biggest sin is probably that its just plain forgettable (and grossly underutilizes Kiera Knightley).
Wasn’t planning on seeing it (I’ve missed the last several Marvel and DC movies), but having just learned that Pierce Brosnan is in Black Adam, I guess I have to see it now.
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