Three Films Make A Post: Mystery runs in the family

Enola Holmes (2020): I’m really far from the core audience for this one, so take this with a grain of salt, but I do believe that a teen audience could be better served than with this Platonic Ideal of boring competence as directed by Harry Bradbeer. It’s a film as bland as they come, full of bland attempts at being charming, bland emotions, bland characters who’d be happy if they’d be allowed to add half a dimension to the two they have, a bland plot told tediously. Even the feminism is bland with a vaguely unpleasant vibe of – fortunately - blanded down Libertarianism, curiously enough, as is the pointless Fourth Wall breaking, which these days seems to be the lazy scriptwriter’s way out to simply tell the audience stuff their script should put into action.

Poor Millie Bobby Brown seems to be the only one alive in front of the camera in this tragically Watson-less Holmesian universe; Henry Cavill is Holmes interpreted as a clothes rack.

Follow Me aka No Escape (2020): Keeping with the blandness theme, Will Wernick’s film about a Vlogger (again) trying to survive a Russian (yep, it’s the mysterious and evil East again) escape room experience that may just be a little too real, is exactly what you expect following this description. If you don’t see the so-called final plot twist coming from miles away, you’re probably a happier person than I. The rest of the movie consists of bland characters stumbling through one of those boring and bland warehouse sets, solving death traps and puzzles untouched by creativity and excitement, going through exactly the plot motions you’d expect in exactly the obvious way.

It’s suspense filmmaking that’s gotten so formulaic, you better call it unexciting filmmaking.

Red Spirit Lake (1993): Pretty much the absolute opposite to the blandness of the other two films in this entry is this camcorder shot wonder by Cinema of Transgression associated filmmaker Charles Pinion. It’s sleazy and bloody to an amount Herschell Gordon Lewis would have loved, but Lewis’s commercial instincts are replaced by the kind of (very special) arthouse sensibility that likes to pretend to be amateurish to be as subversive as possible, using a lexicon of horror movie tropes as aggressively as it can, editing, shooting and acting roughly on purpose, only to go from some homemade gore effect to moments straight out of abstract experimental cinema, being weird as hell throughout.

After two films so desperate to be for everyone they become too bland to be for anyone, this sort of thing feels even more alive.

Things I Liked About Zack Snyder's Man of Steel (2013)

• The film does a not unsuccessful job at working on the great problem with Superman as a hero, namely that actual heroism needs the hero to do heroic things despite of his flaws and fears and failings; being a hero is hard. Usually, Superman is just too perfect for that, and you need to invent a magical element to get him to even break a sweat. Snyder's way here is a bit more organic and human, while still keeping the demigod-like status of the character as much as possible without going the Miracleman route.
  
• On the other hand, the film doesn't make the mistake of turning the character all grim and gritty. Despite a higher body count (not caused by our hero), this guy is not a killer at heart, nor is there anything cynical about him, which even a declared Superman-sceptic like me sees as important for getting the character right.
  
• It's also pretty important to the way the film sees Superman's heroism that it spends time with non-superpowered people doing their parts in saving the world, or "just" saving each other. In fact, the film's most heroic deed in a human understanding of the word falls to Laurence Fishburne's Perry White, doing something that hasn't anything at all to do with saving the world but a lot with all the good parts of being human.
  
• Despite giving her still way too little to do, Snyder does deliver one of the better Lois Lanes. Why, you can even believe she's a competent reporter and a human being beyond being a professional love interest. It does help that Amy Adams is pretty awesome.
  
• When it comes to the carnage, Snyder is often very good at giving the impression of the sheer physical impact of the Kryptonians on Earth, taking his cues on how to show the destruction of the film's final half hour from giant monster movies more than other superhero films, it seems to me.
  
• While the film's plotting is a bit hit and miss (Pa Kent and the dog come to mind with the misses, for example), it does hang well together philosophically with a connection between characters and theme that feels organic instead of forced or random. Of course, this lacks the sheer ambition, confusion and ambiguity of Christopher Nolan's final Batman film but these things would probably not be Superman-like anyhow.
  

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