Reaction Shots

Lower Standards, More Fun Is there any director quite as diverse in genre output as Ridley Scott? Any, anyway, that are recognized as mainstream? I can think of some, sure, but they are rare but I don’t think any are as consistent as Scott in his output, both in terms of regularity (it sometimes seems he just poops movies out) and even if the quality is variable, it’s of a usually decent order. At the very, very least, I can’t think of a Ridley Scott movie that has actively bored me.  To be sure, I’ve found some tedious to the brink of boring, but I don’t recall ever being thoroughly bored. Even “Gladiator” which left me pissed off that I’d wasted hours on a pointless story at the very least had a scenery chewing performance from Russell Crowe (despite how idiotic the story was) and god, was it gorgeous to look at. If there’s an issue with Ridley Scott’s movies, it’s never in the visual craft. He evokes worlds and atmospheres like a painter. No, the issues are often found in c...

Chloé Zhao “Eternals” adaptation is a case study in what the MCU does to individualistic directors. This is not going to be a slam on either Marvel or Zhao, but it’s time to really evaluate the dynamics between the corporate vision and the individual auteur’s.   I’ll dip into this more as we go on, but I need to start off by saying that I completely disagree with Alex Dowd at the A.V. Club and his claim that Zhao’s work is just another boilerplate Marvel movie. Far from it; there is a tremendous amount of love in this film, there are actually moments when characters and the actors portraying them are actually given space to breathe, and I disagree strongly that it’s just as formulaically “quippy” as other films in the MCU. However, it’s just these strengths that point to the weaknesses in the film and while I personally don’t find them completely debilitating, those weaknesses are distracting and keep a film that could have been one of the best MCU offerings from being just reall...

Yes, that’s the Preston Sturges! This year, I revisited Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Trilogy , Boris Karloff’s “The Mummy”, and a grossly overlooked gem, the latter of which needs to be seen. “Dementia” has been on my mind. Not the real dementia, though I’m familiar with it, nor Coppola’s “Dementia 13”. No, I’ve been turning over a film also known as “Daughter of Horror.” Also known as… If a case could be made that David Lynch was actually born a couple of decades earlier and made an unreleasable movie in the fifties, this is it, and I’d be prone to believe that.  Recently, the film popped up on my radar since it’s undergone a remastering and if I recall correctly, will stream in its renewed form next year. My understanding is that it was remastered a couple of years back by BFI, and while it was an upgrade, inadvertent cuts were made (to the credits, I think, but also to the soundtrack). This is a shame because the only version I’ve been able to find is in its incarnation as “Daugh...