Three Films Make A Post: Stephen King took you to the edge with The Shining and Pet Sematary. This time......he pushes you over

Matchstick Men (2003): A film about con men seems to be a really weird proposition for Ridley Scott, for this particular genre thrives on the proper sense of timing and pacing, both not elements of storytelling many of Scott’s film suggest much understanding of. Consequently, the – terribly obvious if you’ve seen a couple of films from the genre – con part of the movie sputters and stops awkwardly, not exactly helped along by how bland the whole con is. Of course, this is the sort of film that thinks itself rather above the concerns of a proper genre film because IT HAS SOMETHING TO SAY! Alas, what it actually does say is neither terribly interesting nor insightful, so this bit does fall pretty flat too.

I’m also not terribly happy with the film trying to get most of its humour out of making fun of the mentally ill, as excited as Nicolas Cage seems to be to play this sort of thing. Doesn’t help much here that the jokes often just aren’t terribly funny.

El bar (2017): Which is also something that troubled me about Álex de la Iglesia’s comedic thriller about a group of people stranded in a bar with a deadly virus, all Man being the greatest monster of them all tropes imaginable locked with them inside, and a really stupid government conspiracy outside. The mix between comedy and thriller never quite worked out for me not just because the jokes aren’t funny (there’s only so many times you can laugh about a hipster beard), but because the characters are comedy characters – too broadly drawn to make the thriller and psychological side of the film convincing, a decent cast notwithstanding.
As an old pro, de la Iglesia does know how to stage this sort of thing competently and somewhat excitingly, but to my eyes, this is the plot of a forty minute short film stretched out to feature length by adding random clichés about how horrible people under pressure are.


Sisters of the Plague (2015): Jorge Torres-Torres’s New Orleans set mumblecore arthouse horror film (seriously) about ghosts, possession, and relationship troubles certainly isn’t generic, on the other hand. Given the mumblecore aspirations, its slowness (though unlike with Matchstick Men this seems at least the consequence of an actual directorial decision) and the film’s general air of conscious spurning of many filmic conventions, this one’s going to be hard going for many a viewer. I got something out of it – Josephine Decker, Isolde Chae-Lawrence and Thomas Francis Murphy certainly play their behinds off, and while I found the heavily metaphorical use of the supernatural and quite a few of its moments of purposeful sloppiness (it’s the mumblecore influence, I’m sure) not much to my taste, there’s a sense of place and an air of the Weird about parts of the film that I found at least fascinating, sometimes even riveting.

In short: The Martian (2015)

Well, at least it’s better than Gravity. But seriously, I basically have the same troubles with this film I had with Andy Weir’s book, namely that it’s such a typical example of that kind of absurdly optimistic SF that’s convinced every problem can be solved in a technical manner if one only applies enough elbow grease. And while I certainly prefer that to The Cold Equations style bullshit, this approach does ignore the fact that sometimes, you’re fucked even if you do not do anything wrong, that there’s situations you can’t escape from. One might even argue this sort of tale suggests if someone doesn’t survive a catastrophe, it’s their own fault because they weren’t plucky American enough. And people wonder why I’m sceptical about optimism as a concept. Though, when I compare this to the brilliant but also less elbow-greasy Interstellar, it’s not the optimism as such but The Martian’s inability to sell it, perhaps because of trouble number two.

For trouble number two is the incredible blandness of Matt Damon’s main character, a man whose emotional reaction to being possibly doomed to die on Mars is to shrug, quip, and go on to the business of applying elbow grease and science to grow some potatoes. As book and film portray him (though you could argue the book’s even worse), Damon’s Watney has no character traits, no psychology, and really nothing and nobody about Earth he seems to miss in a way that actually hurts, which makes it rather difficult to care about his survival – if the set-up and tone of the whole affair didn’t make it clear from minute one that he’s going to survive in any case, so there’s no reason to get excited about him from that perspective either.

If you can ignore that, The Martian’s not a bad huge SF disaster movie, with a cast ridiculously overqualified for the little the script gives them to work with, shiny special effects. Pretty much what you’d expect from a flick made by Ridley Scott in his by now nearly two decades old incarnation as a director who does little but add a glossy professional sheen to every project he’s involved in, his days of giving his films actual personality long gone. As Scott, his The Martian is big time Hollywood professionalism, for better or worse.

Three Films Make A Post: IN BLOODY PANIC COLOR

Prometheus (2012): I was going into this completely willing not to believe any critical word I've read about Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, for when have mainstream film critics ever gotten genre films? Unfortunately, this one really is as dumb and ill-thought out as they say, with some basic plot ideas that could have made for an interesting piece of visionary SF/horror, like Arthur C. Clarke meets Lovecraft, if any of the lavish detail that went into the production design had found its way into the script. Instead, there are character who aren't even clichés (wasting a great cast) acting like idiots, characters who also are not even vaguely believable as people, ideas that are never explored, a plot that's driven by everyone being an idiot, random crap that just came into the writers' heads and a painful willingness to be as tedious and uninteresting about everything as possible, and dialogue that could be improved by having the actors make farting noises instead. I'd go into more details, but then I have already wasted two hours of my life on this.

Chernobyl Diaries (2012): As far as horror movies about stupid, self-centered American tourists visiting Eastern Europe and dying of stupidity and because All Eastern Europeans Are Evil™ go, this one's kind of watchable. It just suffers from a way too slow build-up, with long long minutes of getting to know the main characters - turns out there's no reason to give a crap about them -, useless exposition (or do Americans really not know about Chernobyl?), and being co-written by Oren Peli, who, as I by now know, could not write a sympathetic or interesting character or an ending that's not absurdly dumb to save his life. But some of the pissed-off mutant stalk (get out of here, Stalker!) and attack scenes are realized quite well by director Bradley Parker and the locations are mildly creepy, so there is some entertainment to be had here.

I also have to give the film credit for going for a very bleak ending, even though it stretches the limits of my belief even more than the radiation mutants do.

Storage 24 (2012): A handful of people find themselves locked in with a very rude alien in a 24 hour storage facility. Unfortunately, before any monster movie fun can be had, lead actor and co-writer Noel Clarke aka Mickey from Doctor Who will have much space for a love triangle with two equally annoying partners, and many dispiriting soap operatics will occur. That part of the movie would be easier to stomach if the film bothered to make its characters interesting or even just give them actual character traits beyond "Noel Clarke is straight, and whines a lot, but he also wrote the script, so he will be our hero". As it stands, the film already had burned through all of my goodwill once the theoretically fun bits started, and just annoyed me with its alien monster by numbers, its drama by numbers and its plot by numbers, all told without any verve.

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