I'd attach a sketch to the top of the post as usual, but Google/Blogger is doing its usual bang-up job of dismantling existing services to concentrate on new failures. It's a great strategy, no need for you to look up if Google has ever turned a profit on anything other than strip-mining data for advertisers. Anyway
October 8th - SPEAK NO EVIL is a clever metaphor about British manners that value civility in one's tone more than the act of actually being civil, and in which a family is drawn into potentially fatal situations just because they don't want to cause a fuss when red flags appear during their stay with the young couple they met on holiday. It's a metaphor that works well for times in which anti-genocide protestors are shouted down at events where they should be given a microphone, and I got on well with the film as a whole, but mainly I was tickled to see some great footage of a locale I had to draw for several episodes of ACES WEEKLY's Velicity Jones back in the day, and that footage would have been bloody handy at the time, let me tell you, as I had to pore over footage of grainy Youtube holiday videos of Croatian hilltop villages just for background art that the letterer would obscure with balloons. God, I hate comics.
Also, please buy the comic, as insulin is not getting cheaper.
October 9th - SAW, SAW II, SAW III, SAW IV, SAW V, SAW VI - well, I wasn't really doing anything today, anyway. The plots of the Saw films can be summed up thusly: "arrg, ahh, no, no stop, please", except for the one where it's "ahh stop, no please" but it's happening six months earlier. The films pull this nonlinear narrative gag quite a few times, and to be honest, I think it only really worked once, and that was in... eurm... well this is embarrassing, I don't actually seem to be able to tell any of the films apart, but it was one of the later films, where the FBI show up and you think the film couldn't possibly be setting up yet another "they have been dead all this time" sting, but it does. These are less films and more a kind of serialised gory melodrama, as the studio was churning them out once a year, clearly more interested in creating a franchise than making art, and as a consequence the films have little to say about the individual creators involved, and I think only James Wan, who co-wrote and directed the first movie, can claim to have made something that was definitely his own, as he went on to make other memorable trashfests such as one of the Fasts and Furiouses, M3gan, and the gloriously daft Malignant. The other dudes are probably auteurs in their own fields and I'm doing them a terrible disservice by dismissing them like this, but I'm struggling to think of anything of worth or import to say about this series so far, and there's another four of the things to get through because you don't just stop watching a movie series when you're six movies deep - the sunk cost fallacy, like ADHD, is real. I guess I have to say something nice, though, and to be honest, I did like that the movies pretend really hard to be deep rather than just deeply stupid, and Saw 6's ending where the protagonist just sort of lumbers into his own undoing and dies in a hilariously graphic depiction of one of the oldest death traps in all of fiction was admittedly really funny. There are a couple of spins on old death traps from fiction in the latter films, and I guess if one were being charitable, I could say this was a commentary on the lack of imagination displayed by the killer who has taken over from the antagonist of the first few films, hinting at his being uninvested in the work he's doing, but it's equally as likely that by this point, the makers were just getting low on ideas.
One good thing about the franchise, though: in being so laser-focussed on creating a franchise from low-cost theatrical movies, it has probably kept the mid-budget movie alive in an era where the cinematic blockbuster and the arthouse indy have little occupying the ground between them.
October 10th - SAW 3D, JIGSAW, SPIRAL, SAW X - welp, I liked Jigsaw, but to be entirely clear, this was only when I had got momentarily confused by yet another nonlinear narrative switcheroo about what killings had been perpetrated by whom, and when, so that it seemed that a character had appropriated the legacy of a killer to bring a corrupt police officer to justice via an elaborate Xanatos Gambit and thus appropriated his vile legacy to do some genuine good, which was a nice happy ending for a grisly and nihilistic series - but sadly, I had simply got befuddled momentarily and it actually was just another person taking over from the original killer to enforce their own arbitrary sense of justice. The next film in the series, Spiral, looks to be correcting course and taking aim at systemic corruption, but sadly it doesn't last - or at least, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very long - and it becomes about graphic deaths once again perpetuated by a vigilate. To be fair to it, I suppose only a moron or a genius messes with the formula nine movies into the franchise. Looking at you, Jason Goes To Hell. And Last Jedi.
Saw 3D and Saw X are continuations of the main series, being the optimistically/fraudulently-titled "Final Chapter" and requel, respectively, and both make little sense from one moment to the next, the Final Chapter ending as other entries in the series have in what I think the makers probably at the time tried to pretend was a callback, but which just looks like yet another sequel bait setup to me. Saw X is a prequel/sequel/reboot which really just does more of the same, though this time the characters, despite being younger than they were in any of the other movies, clearly look 20 years older. The story is dumb and it ends on more sequel bait, but I liked the bit where the guy has to perform brain surgery
on himself and then dissolve his own brain in acid, and the bit where a character uses their dead friend's intestines as an impromptu lasso - whomst among us, am I right?
Well, that's all ten movies, anyway. I heard, as it were, a voice of thunder crying "come and see", and I saw. I saw a load of old bollocks.
October 11th - A HAUNTING IN VENICE is the latest of the enjoyably daffy adaptations of Agatha Christie's Poirot by Belfast lad Kenneth Branagh, and it doesn't do anyone any good to take these films too seriously as anything other than acting showcases for all involved, for good (Brannagh, Reilly) or otherwise (hard to believe that his performance alone wasn't the only thing that poorly-dated the casting of Russell Brand). Dang, Michelle Yeoh's in this, I keep forgetting she's a proper actress, as I can recall when she was constantly pegged as a beauty pagent winner who got cast in some Hong Kong chop-sockies as sex appeal and everyone in the action movie press was slagging her off because her Stalking Crane technique wasn't convincing as she initiated with a left inward stride or something and seemed to be concentrating more on "learning lines" and "convincingly delivering them while remaining in character" instead of perfecting the art of kicking Jackie Chan in the neck, and she clearly wasn't going to last in this game.
You might think that last bit where I joked about Michelle Yeoh being lambasted for acting instead of learning to fight better was some sort of off-the-cuff riff, but trust me, if you can get your hands on some copies of IMPACT: THE ACTION MOVIE MAGAZINE from the early 1990s, you will find that I am not paraphrasing anywhere near as much as you think I am. I seem to recall the divine Maggie Cheung getting it in the neck in a similar fashion around the same period and oh yeah I think I was talking about A Haunting In Venice at some point so getting back to that, I have never seen any of the other Poirot stories adapted - I will assume that Murder By Death is not canonical - except for the Kenneth Brannagh films, and while I'm sure they were all great and it was totally my loss, I liked this just fine, it was fun, it had some of Brannagh's usual directorial flourishes, just to remind you that the camera can also be a performer, and while it's maybe not actually scary, that's okay when a movie is at least entertaining.
October 12th - THE BLACK PHONE is a horror where I got the twist ending spoiled for me ahead of time, though I decided to watch the film to at least see how it was performed, and... there is no twist ending, I was thinking of something else, so the ending of this did actually take me by surprise purely because it didn't have the bleak twist I thought it did, and I really liked it. The kid actors are great, but then I suppose they'd have to be, as they're pivotal to the narrative rather than just set dressing in another character's story, and there's ambivalence about what the antagonist wants with all those children so it doesn't get too ick like these films usually do. Occasionally intense, but never anxiety-inducing, this was a pleasant surprise.
October 13th - TALK TO ME is another Australian horror, and for a country that seems to export blonde actresses, I'm surprised there wasn't one fronting this. Being the tale of a cursed hand that dipshit kids use to play occult party games, things go wrong, yadda yadda - all rote stuff, albeit performed and shot well. The story has no great surprises, but it's well-told.
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