My Own Little World

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian household in a suburb-like small city. Currently, I am pursuing a degree at a moderate Christian university for the purpose of pursuing a career in full-time church work and have worked in churches for this summer and the previous two. In the past couple years since going to school, I have experienced several crises of juxtaposition in my faith, pitting beliefs I have had since I was a child against a more “liberal” or “secular” understanding and being surprised when realizing that the two were not contrary but could be complementary. The juxtaposition at the crux of this wrestling has been that between faith and doubt, how the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty (or, more damningly, self-sufficiency). I say this to show why a film like First Reformed resonated with every fiber of my being. It is a treatise on the difference between facades of authenticity and the real thing, and it uses the supposed tension between...

Upgrade really, really, really tries to be smart. It knows that it has the confines of a familiar story arc of a man seeking revenge for the killing of his wife. It knows it has a small budget which means it cannot do anything too ambitious. It knows that it needs to have an aesthetic like films much more intelligent and meaningful than itself. Upgrade knows something else, too: it has a get-out-of-jail-free card inside the mind of its protagonist. And that makes it one of the laziest films I have seen this year. STEM, the computer implanted in the protagonist Grey’s spinal cord, can do whatever it wants to with Grey’s body if he gives it permission to do so. We see this happen near the beginning of the second act in a fight scene that caught me by surprise with its tone and fun cinematography, both of which were altered dramatically from the moments before it. As scenes like this began to make a pattern, however, my mind began to see how the script was using STEM as...

What a ride. What a dark, depressing, riveting ride. I had very few expectations going into You Were Never Really Here . The story, characters, and aim – all were mysteries to me. After seeing it, I have never been happier that that has been the case. This film is shocking, brutal, and just an overall rough emotional experience. It also tells a story of sex trafficking that is too real to be ignored, and my guess is that is the main point this movie tries to get across. You Were Never Really Here mirrors themes of and comments on some recent events in the news like the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, focusing on how the rich and powerful can do anything they want to just about anybody – (horrifyingly) including 13-year-old girls. I was almost brought to tears several times in this hour and twenty-five-minute film because I realized how unfortunately realistic this story might be. The film has a great voice behind it in Lynne Ramsay’s direction. She often takes a slower han...

If A Quiet Place has taught me anything, it is the importance of good sound design. This is a highly effective horror film for a lot of reasons, but the way it uses sound to its advantage creates such a tense atmosphere that I won’t be forgetting soon. It is almost entirely silent with few portions of spoken dialogue. The production team tried to make very little noise so that every on-camera sound could be amplified in post-production, and it paid off. Because the suddenly loud noises are so loud and because we know that the creatures in the film are only attracted by these kinds of sudden noises, every time those sounds occur the tension instantly goes up. It is a perfect setup for a lot of good jump scares, but it also lends itself to the character development. One of the children of the family focused on is deaf, and when the film is from her perspective all the on-set sound goes away, giving us some very suspenseful and even emotional moments. In fact, A Quiet Place ...

I have a love-hate relationship with mother! On some level, I do love this film. It has some of the most evocative and unforgettable images I have seen in the past several years of film. It also has the guts to do things I would never have imagined with its story and in particular its perspective. Director and writer Darren Aronofsky has created one of the most intriguing yet still puzzling films ever made, and almost all of this comes from its use of allegory. Actually, let’s talk about that. Aronofsky’s use of metaphorical and allegorical imagery and narrative is bold, to be sure (and not something that I will be discussing in detail so I can avoid spoilers); however, there are times where it almost lost me – in fact there’s a lot of those times – because of this film’s slow pace. In retrospect after having talked with other people about this film, the sequences of monotony that slow the film down do have a lot of meaning, but that doesn’t mean I appreciate them any more...

Spy films typically have very quick paces, moving from one set piece to another to progress the plot and eventually move towards a large twist or showdown. That’s not a problem with the genre, but it can allow characters to go undeveloped and their plot twists either too predictable or too spontaneous. When that happens, no matter how good the films can be otherwise, they feel shallow and too palatable. Shallow and palatable are not words I could use to describe Red Sparrow . This is the antithesis of a typical spy thriller, with its slow pace that focuses on the more deliberate parts of a spy’s work while also confronting Dominika’s (Jennifer Lawrence) harsh training and what it meant for her humanity. I really appreciated this actually; even though the film is long and does feel like it, it focuses a lot more time on elements of the story that might be short montages in a Bond or Bourne film. The biggest beneficiary of this slow, deliberate pace is the character developme...

I have to admit that I am not as familiar with Ridley Scott’s filmography as much as I should. I have seen only a handful of his movies, but there has always been an element of risk involved with them. Blade Runner and Alien changed science fiction films forever, while some of his more recent works have seen the revitalization of dead genres like what Gladiator did for Rome-era epics. In his most recent film, the now 80-year-old Scott took a risk of a different kind. All the Money in the World originally starred Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty, but after his sexual assault allegations Scott opted to reshoot all of Spacey’s scenes with only a month left until release with his supposed original first choice for the role, Christopher Plummer. They re-edited as they reshot, getting all of Plummer’s scenes filmed in a little over a week. Why am I telling you all of this? It’s for one reason, and only one: there’s little to no evidence of the film’s hectic reshoots in the final ...

There are very few things that are as much of a sure thing in film as a thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Movies like Psycho , Vertigo , Rear Window , and To Catch a Thief remain some of the most tautly crafted films I have seen, and 99% of this is due to the man himself. Hitch has this unusual ability to take an otherwise ordinary moment and make it more suspenseful than anything else you've ever seen. Nowhere is this more evident than The Birds . Coming off one of his many masterpieces in Psycho, Hitchcock had pretty much free reign when it came to making thrillers and horror films. For some reason, he decided that birds out of all things were the best villain for this. Unsurprisingly, he makes it work incredibly well. Simply a bird landing on a playground outside of a schoolhouse goes from a normal occurrence to something terrifying and suspenseful because of how this man helms this film. The Birds is a good old-school thriller, showcasing some of the genre’s b...

There's something to be said for the art of the twist ending. A really good plot twist towards the end of a film, no matter the genre, can make repeat viewings incredibly insightful and very rewarding which in my mind makes a film more valuable. I personally love plot twists in the course of watching a film for the first time and how they often make me look for the trail of breadcrumbs filmmakers leave throughout their work. One of the films most renowned for its twist in modern times is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense . When this came out in 1999, everybody ate it up (at least from what the box office numbers show). It catapulted Shyamalan to the front page of filmmaking, and for good reason. This is a really well-constructed supernaturally-driven drama with some horror elements. Here's the secret to this film, though, and why the twist works so well: The Sixth Sense  has a really keen understanding of what it is as a film. It realizes that its content does ...

In closing the door on 2016, I realize that there are a lot of films that I have seen that unfortunately I was unable to review for one reason or another. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want you guys to know what I think of most of these films, so just like the last couple of years I will be doing a few posts over the next month or so wrapping up all of the films I got a chance to see from this past year. This time, I've got one of this year's most prominent sci-fi releases and a non-Transformers Michael Bay film... Arrival  - Buy it.  Arrival is one of the most thought-provoking sci-fi films I've ever seen. The direction from Denis Villeneuve is ridiculously visually rich and very artistic with its long takes and steady shots. Amy Adams turns in the best performance of her career, and the way the film reveals her character's true nature in the third act is stellar. The design of the aliens and their language is beautiful, and I love the film...

I love science fiction films. The Star Wars franchise has a near and dear place to my heart, as well as more recent films like Interstellar , The Martian , and Gravity . I love how people are getting really interested in these films again and also that the special effects used on such films are getting really, really, really good. I couldn't even tell that Gravity  was using CGI, even though I knew it was. So, naturally, I was looking forward to Passengers . Chris Pratt is a really solid actor who has charisma like crazy, and Jennifer Lawrence is Jennifer Lawrence. Morten Tyldum also seemed like a good director from the one thing I've seen from him, 2014's Imitation Game . It was a pretty decent biopic with some minor issues, but the visual front was very well-executed, something that I knew this film would need. And to be fair, the visuals in Passengers  are great, and they're probably the best part of the film. The effects are magnificent and blend well with the...

I'm not just open to original films: I crave them.  An original film makes my viewing experience incredibly difficult because I can have trouble separating the originality from the quality of film-making present. So, when I sat down to watch The Gift , I was treated (for the first act of the film, at least) to a semi-routine stalker thriller. Honestly, it was well-directed, well-acted, and decently written. It just didn't pull me to the edge of my seat all that often. The premise of The Gift  is at least unique in a way: upon moving to a new area, a man, Simon, and his wife Robyn are approached by Gordo, one of his high school classmates, who mysteriously leaves gifts on their doorstep and shows up uninvited at their house repeatedly. The device of the gifts on the doorstep is interesting and well-executed, as we see how intrusive Gordo can be early on. However, the film remains trapped in itself for most of the first act, developing not unlike other psychological thrill...