In short: Bird Box (2018)

To nobody’s surprise, it’s the end of the world again. This time around, some apparently rather terrifying things are racing around the world driving most people who see them to suicide. We will later learn that they also drive a small number of people into hunting down the people who somehow have avoided looking at them. Because being down on the mentally ill is always okay (he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm), the film also suggests it is people with mental illnesses thusly susceptible.

We learn all this via flashbacks while following a woman named Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and two little kids apparently named Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) on a blindfolded voyage down a river towards what may or may not be our usual post-apocalyptic sanctuary. So when we don’t have dramatic boating adventures, we witness how the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors (including Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Jacki Weaver) get slowly whittled down to the trio we are flashbacking from.

Turns out, Netflix can make this sort of “serious” Hollywood genre fare as well as the major studios, ending up with a film so riskless and obvious, yet technically very competent, it would have been the lone Oscar nominated movie a couple of years ago, before the Academy realized you might as well nominate good and interesting films beside those trying to be “worthy”. One of the best things among many wonderful things about Black Panther is that it’s not a film designed for Academy nods.

Don’t let my somewhat disgusted tone steer you wrong: director Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic horror film is in all regards perfectly decent or better, and absolutely worth a watch. She’s certainly a very competent filmmaker, and I’d love to see something by her with a more ambitious script. What we get instead is Eric Heisserer using the perfectly wonderful and weird basic idea of the apocalypse from Josh Malerman’s novel for a post-apocalypse by numbers film, with characters only more lively than stock because the cast is really rather good (even Bullock does great work, especially for a woman who can’t move half of her face anymore), and so full of aggressive attempts to make its audience feel feelings I found myself less moved the more the film went out of its way to touch me.

That last aspect of the film is not at all improved by the its treatment of Bullock’s character arc. Not terribly great parenting has apparently caused her to be so emotionally distanced she can’t even (gasp!) look forward to having a child; fortunately, the apocalypse comes along and teaches her the value of motherhood and not giving your children names like “Boy” and “Girl”. The ending’s pretty ridiculous too, with a pat little happy end that fits not at all into what we’ve seen before. Does she name the children when she arrives in Happyland? You betcha! The Babadook, this certainly isn’t.


But honestly, Bird Box is a perfectly watchable, extremely well made film, with a couple of fine suspense sequences, it’s just annoying me righteously with all its gesturing towards a supposed depth it doesn’t actually have.

Three Films Make A Post: A horrifying descent into the twisted killing spree of a psychopath.

Witchouse 3: Demon Fire (2001): Ironically, J.R. Bookwalter’s likeable little horror movie - produced for Charles Band’s Full Moon when the money was obviously starting to run really low (though at least there aren’t any puppets around) - looks cheaper than most of the director’s self-financed films. It’s not terribly exciting business about the dangers of doing magic rituals while drunk (until the underdeveloped PLOT TWIST CHANGES EVERYTHING, of course), but Bookwalter makes the best out of no money and presents some minor chills, mostly spending his time on Debbie Rochon, Tanya Dempsey and Tina Krause (as well as Brinke Stevens as the evil witch Lilith) having fun, flipping out (particularly Rochon has two and a half highly entertaining scenes of losing her shit), and saying things like “You look like you fell down a flight of abusive boyfriends” while mostly keeping their clothes on. It’s entertaining enough for what it is, and tries hard not to bore its audience.

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997): Where the first Speed was a dumb but inventive and fun action movie, this sequel is more than just a bit of a slog. Despite the promise of the title, the film is at least thirty minutes too long, full of boring subplots blandly presented, non-characters nobody gives a crap about and a general air of a script not so much written as spat out by some sort of script robot. Returning director Jan de Bont seems to have lost all his mojo for presenting exciting action. Never a man for prodding actors along, he can’t even get an entertaining performance out of Willem Dafoe (or any of the other actors, for that matter), so that the whole thing doesn’t just have the air of a bad sequel but of a film nobody involved actually wanted to have much to do with apart from cashing their pay checks.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008): On paper Nicholas Stoller’s comedy (written by lead Jason Segel) should be a mess of a movie, seeing as it mixes genuinely sweet romantic comedy, awkwardness humour (a comedy style that still leaves me puzzled), “raunchy” comedy, Hollywood self-irony, and full frontal nudity by Segel. In practice, all these things for once feel as if they belong together here. That’s thanks to a script by Segel that is generally much cleverer than it needs to be, and often more insightful into the way actual human beings work than it pretends to be. A cast (Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Russell Brand in the main) that can switch comedy and acting styles at a moment’s notice does help there, too.
Plus, there’s a puppet comedy Dracula musical involved.

In short: Speed (1994)

Hilariously growly voiced cop Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels) are instrumental in thwarting evil-crazy bomber Howard Payne’s (Dennis Hopper) plan of blackmailing the city of Los Angeles into paying him three million dollars lest he blow up an elevator full of people. After said thwarting, Payne is presumed dead, but of course, he’s still alive, and has a new, even more idiotic, plan: he has installed a very special bomb in a bus that’ll activate when the bus’s speed falls below the limit of 50 miles per hour.

Cars will be destroyed, stuff will explode and Jack will find sweet, sweet love (until the sequel, that is) with bus passenger turned inadvertent driver Annie (Sandra Bullock when she still mostly looked like a human being, decades before a frightening, unmoveable botox face won her an Academy Award). Well, and Harry will die, of course.

Occasional director Jan de Bont’s (also known as the man we still curse on each first full moon after Christmas for his abominable remake of The Haunting around here) magnum opus is rather good fun as the big, stupid, silly action movie it is. Sure, Payne’s plan is idiotic, the laws of physics don’t apply to anything happening in it, Dennis Hopper overacts in a disappointingly joyless manner, and Keanu Reeves is our hero, but there’s also quite a bit to like here.

The script might take place on planet action movie, but you can’t say it doesn’t know how to escalate things excellently, or that the resulting film doesn’t take its title seriously, going from one increasingly absurd stunt to the next with aplomb while actually keeping up the tension throughout. I’d even go so far as to say that the film does have at least some clever ideas, if not intelligent ones: locating it in Los Angeles with its bizarre assortment of Freeways (that still look like science fictional spaces to certain European eyes like mine) is pretty much perfect, and having Payne apparently spy on the characters via cable news live chase coverage is even mildly subversive. The dialogue’s often (one suspects thanks to an uncredited Joss Whedon doing a thorough re-write) funny in a knowingly cheesy way, and in general, the film’s rather good at providing the necessary card board characterisation in a very efficient manner. And how many action movies have you seen where the hero cop’s doomed partner makes it quite this far into the film?

While de Bont’s direction has all the grace and elegance of a sledgehammer, he is very good at the car chases and explosions aspect that makes up ninety nine percent of what’s on screen here, and even though I personally prefer my action directors to have a bit more of an eye for the poetry of violence and carnage, de Bont’s doing just fine here, perhaps for the only time in his side-career as a director.

In short: Gravity (2013)

(I wrote this little rant before the film’s expected Academy Awards wins, which only goes to show that obvious things are obvious).

I’m not as enamoured with Alfonso Cuarón’s SF film as mainstream critics seem to be, but let’s start with the good first.

On the level of technical craft, Gravity will be difficult to beat, with brilliant photography, realistic feeling yet subtly spectacular production design, and a for the most part highly effective soundtrack (including sound design) that all bring together effortlessness with a tight focus on their roles in telling the film’s particular story well. Consequently, Gravity contains its fair share of rousing suspense moments and has a visual rhythm that seems hard to beat in its perfection.

Unfortunately, this perfection is marred by some painfully sentimental moments in the script, the sort of pap Hollywood films use when they’re too cowardly to show actual human emotions and instead prefer to go for the self-important representation of sentimentality as humanity, or even humanism. In some scenes – particular the embarrassing bit of dialogue where Sandra Bullock’s character tells dead, absent George Clooney to say hello to her dead daughter in the afterlife, or the film’s plain stupid final shot – this drags the film down considerably. It might as well jump up and shout “gimme an Oscar” at these points, for all the emotional effect this stuff has on me. Of course, actual raw human emotion would just not be pretty enough; somebody in the audience might feel uncomfortable instead of uplifted by intense fakeness pretending to be a deep understanding of the human condition.

I’m also not very happy with the film’s decision to cast stars instead of actors, though Sandra Bullock does an alright job for a woman who can’t change her facial expression anymore thanks to the entertainment industry’s obsession with turning perfectly attractive middle-aged people into plastic doll monstrosities.

Given these problems, I found myself quite frustrating watching Gravity, with the way its technical prowess collides with its emotional dishonesty, and its intellectual emptiness, the way heroic gestures stand in for the much messier human truth, and actual heroism. But then, you can hardly expect anything else watching a movie so clearly aimed at hitting the safe spot that gets one an Academy Award or ten. If you want to see this sort of thing done less hypocritical by a new-ish Science Fiction movie, I’d recommend Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report instead.

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