Review: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI 
(FANTASY/ACTION-ADVENTURE) 
★★
Directed by Rian Johnson
Screenplay by Rian Johnson
Starring: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Laura Dern, Benicio del Toro, Kelly Marie Tran,  Billie Lourd, Gwendoline Christie, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong'o
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence.
152 minutes

Verdict: With a minimalist plot needlessly stretched into the longest runtime in the series, with a confusingly cartoony and flippant approach, Rian Johnson's entry in the Star Wars saga is among the weakest, despite some strong ideas and visuals.

This review contains details that may be considered minor spoilers.
 
You could say THE FORCE AWAKENS played things safe, but it should be acknowledged how bold and brash that movie was in its efforts to return the Star Wars franchise into something "safe."  In its execution, THE FORCE AWAKENS is a very fun movie, buoyant in tone, filled with inventive but familiar action, evocative imagery and carried by great new characters like Rey, Finn and BB-8; but in story and substance, THE FORCE AWAKENS is hollow, essentially reprising the original 1977 STAR WARS to an absurd degree (listening to Michael Kaminski's exhaustively researched book, The Secret History of Star Wars, recently, it's remarkable how similar even the THE FORCE AWAKENS's superficial differences from the 1977 are to that script's earlier drafts), and going frustratingly out of its way to return the story to the original trilogy's status quo.  Yes, the Rebel Alliance claimed victory over the Galactic Empire at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI, but by the beginning of THE FORCE AWAKENS, Leia is already commanding a "Resistance" against an improbably well-funded paramilitary organization carrying on the legacy of the Empire, now called "The First Order" (even as they represent the establishment governing body, the New Republic, the Resistance is meant to be a Rebellion-style scrappy band of fighters).  By the halfway mark of the movie, the entire game board has been reset with the complete and utter destruction of the New Republic, and I guess the First Order is supposed to be the new version of the Empire even though they don't really have any established political power, and the Resistance is basically just the Rebel Alliance all over again.  At this point, they're just two paramilitary organizations fighting each other across space for some vague notion of power versus democracy or something.  It's fun in spots, but also lacks meaning.

With THE LAST JEDI, Rian Johnson, the writer/director of LOOPER, THE BROTHERS BLOOM and BRICK, takes a stab at the franchise with considerably more creative freedom than Abrams was afforded by the difficult position of rebooting the franchise ten years after George Lucas's much-maligned prequel trilogy.  For better or worse, Johnson exercises much of that freedom in thumbing his nose at what's come before, frequently subverting expectations more for the sake of being subversive than in service of a worthwhile thematic construct, then earnestly positioning itself as a new direction for the series, but not necessarily a more interesting direction.  Like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE LAST JEDI follows a much more stripped down and looser plot than its immediate predecessor, but THE LAST JEDI does not strive to be the EMPIRE-inspired "dark sequel" of the sequel trilogy.  In fact, it's cartoony.  Not just light in tone, and not humormous in the style that THE FORCE AWAKENS introduced to the series; no, it's goofy.  In addition to sight gags that go beyond the organic cleverness of BB-8 flashing a thumbs-up lighter and into Robot Chicken territory, many of the characters are self-aware archetypes and act in ways that appear to consciously make light of themselves and the narrative.  It doesn't exactly feel like the Star Wars I know and love, while the speechifying about moving forward and not dwelling on what came before tells me I should be okay with that, but if it doesn't feel like Star Wars, what's the point of all this?

The story picks up almost immediately where THE FORCE AWAKENS left off, with Rey (Daisy Ridley) on the Jedi steps at Ahch-To seeking training from the legendary Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who turns out to not be quite what she'd expected after his years in self-imposed exile, following the turn to the Dark Side of his nephew and apprentice, Ben Solo, now known as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).  Meanwhile, the base of the Resistance has been exposed following their successful campaign against Starkiller Base, so Luke's sister, General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher, to whom the movie is dedicated) is forced to evacuate with the help of the skilled but hot-headed Resistance pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac).  During the evacuation, the Resistance sustains heavy losses and is trapped by the evil First Order's forces, led by the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis, beneath CGI performance-capture), Snoke's apprentice Kylo Ren, and the sniveling General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson).  In order to shake the First Order off the Resistance's trail, defected First Order stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) teams up with a maintenance worker named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran, channeling an obnoxiously anime-style character) to find a codebreaker who can help them.

Especially in the context of Star Wars, its worth noting that THE LAST JEDI is 152 minutes long, a whole half hour longer than the original 1977 film, and the longest in the series so far, 10 minutes longer than the next runner up, EPISODE II- ATTACK OF THE CLONES.  Granted, there are longer movies than 152 minutes, and some of them are great movies, but considering that the original STAR WARS is setting up this original fictional galaxy entirely, introducing at least seven iconic characters (Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Obi-Wan, C-3PO and R2-D2; I'm willing to hear arguments for Tarkin), a religion, politics, and more, while finding ample time for great, stunning action sequences and character development, all in a nice, tight two hours, the fact that a movie that does as little as THE LAST JEDI insists on being a full 25% longer is just obnoxious.  To be fair, EPISODE III- REVENGE OF THE SITH is 140 minutes, and while I'd say that's also too long, it has a lot more to deal with and makes much better use of that time.  This kind of runtime on THE LAST JEDI is lazy and undisciplined, but reportedly, Johnson's rough cut was three hours long, which is head-scratching given how thin and ultimately inconsequential the plot actually is.

THE LAST JEDI is not without its strong ideas.  It attempts to introduce some fresh moral gray areas into the conflict between Kylo Ren, Rey, the Resistance and the First Order, and  like it or not (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't), there's no denying that the movie expands the view of the Star Wars galaxy into new areas of exploration.  There's lots of little things that fans are likely to love, regardless of substance, such as a moment involving alien creatures with conspicuous udders, but these are the superficial things like Aunt Beru's blue milk.  Everyone who's noticed Beru pouring a cup of blue milky liquid in the original film gets a kick out of references to blue milk, but that's not why people love Star Wars.  Many of the visuals are striking, and there's certainly some gorgeous action sequences, most notably the well-advertised battle between a collection of rusty, low-flying Resistance craft with plows that stir up red dirt against a line of updated AT-AT walkers on a salty white planet surface.  There are a few good moments of starfighter action, in addition to a lot more time spent with Poe Dameron than was in the previous film, but that extra time reveals him not to be so much the cocky and brash but talented pilot as much as he's a borderline psychopath who leaves a trail of destruction in his wake on both sides.  The action is spread fairly thin though over the extended runtime, and most disappointing of all is the distinct shortage of lightsaber action.  There's a good action sequence with a lot of lightsaber carnage, but fans of a good lightsaber duel will be sorely disappointed.

THE FORCE AWAKENS is definitely rocky in spots; rushed and occasionally lazy in its narrative, essentially remaking the original STAR WARS, but it succeeded in introducing a trio of great new characters in Rey, Finn and BB-8, all of whom are reduced to much smaller and less interesting roles this time around.  It's unlikely that J.J. Abrams had much in the way of honest answers for all the questions he left hanging at the end of his movie and was more interested in posing the questions in the first place, and whether its answering them or not, Rian Johnson's film doesn't put a lot of thought into them either.  With the exception of a few well-designed sequences, like the aforementioned AT-AT battle, the visuals are also significant step down from Abrams's admittedly imitative style, and it lacks that movie's sense of joy, hollow or not.
As easy as it is to speak negatively about the film, I didn't hate THE LAST JEDI.  I didn't like it much either.  I hope I'll come to enjoy it more when I get around to rewatching it (although, that extra long runtime doesn't help in that regard), but upon seeing it for the first time, my main thought was, "I'm not sure if it's the worst movie of the series, but I'm not sure it's not."  Previously, I might have put that on ATTACK OF THE CLONES, but for as clunky and poorly executed as that movie is many technical aspects, its concepts are more interesting, its action is more spectacular and fun, and its emotions, overwrought as they may be in practice, are still more engaging.  THE LAST JEDI has better dialogue and acting, but that can only amplify a movie of this kind, not make it.  It lacks a real point.
Thematically, the movie suggests the leaving behind of the old for the ushering in of the new, but it's a cold comfort when the 'new' is a Star Wars movie that doesn't feel like Star Wars.

                                                                                                                                                                    Images via Lucasfilm

Christmas Movies That People Love Even Though They Christmas Suck

An easy way to turn a turd into a multi-generational favorite is to make it a Christmas turd.  The holidays turn some of us into big gooey, sentimental and nostalgic messes, and even when it's crap, anything that reminds us of those happy days of yore benefits from our yuletide emotional vulnerability.  It's a time of year where people will actually buy "traditions," in one of the weirdest phenomenons of capitalism, like that creepy-ass, pedo-smiling "elf" that parents now put on their shelves to drag out the holiday gift-getting, and now they do it year after year because the marketing campaign told them to.  Let's face it, the holidays turn a lot of us into morons, and commerce, including Hollywood, knows it.  It doesn't matter if a movie is "solid-gold shit," as they say; if someone grew up with it, especially as part of their childhood holiday viewing cycle (and God knows, Millennials being so unscrupulously nostalgic and the ABC Family programming churned out in the later part of that generation's adolescence), it's going to become a tradition, maybe even a "classic" of sorts.  That doesn't mean they're not garbage.  These movies are garbage.  It's okay.  You can still like them, but they are garbage.

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS 
(FANTASY/COMEDY, 2000) 
Directed by Ron Howard
Screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter Seaman
Based on the book by Dr. Seuss
Starring: Jim Carrey, Taylor Momsen, Jeffrey Tambor, Christine Baranski, Bill Irwin, Molly Shannon, Clint Howard, Josh Ryan Evans, Mindy Sterling, Rachel Winfree, Rance Howard, Jeremy Howard, T.J. Thyne, Mary Stein
Rated PG for some crude humor.
104 minutes
The year 2000 was not a great one for movies.  Perhaps it's because everyone in 1999 was so sure the world would end that they thought that movies in the coming millennium wouldn't matter, so they didn't put as much effort in.  Good but not great GLADIATOR won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the highest-grossing movie internationally was MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II, the sweaty perineum of the Mission: Impossible franchise, while stateside, the biggest movie of the year was a fuzzy green turd soup called HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS.  First, it was classic 1957 storybook from the imagination of Dr. Seuss, then it was a charming, inventive 1966 Chuck Jones animated TV special, and finally, it was new millennium that brought with it this odorous shart.  Jim Carrey, the sometimes good but often obnoxious comedian who soared on wings of obnoxious hyperactivity to 1990s stardom, headlines beneath a furry green fat suit, a silicone mask and yellow contacts as the titular Grinch; a furry, green curmudgeon who lives on a stylish garbage dump mountain overhanging "Whoville", where all the Christmas-loving Whos (basically people except they're ugly as hell with nasty chipmunk teeth and disgusting snouts) live.  THE GRINCH may have been released in November 2000, but it is pure '90s, oozing with that garish Joel Schumacher's Batman/laser tag aesthetic that permeated over-stylized big budget movies of the last few years in the 20th century.  The movie opens with, of all horrible things, a group of teenagers like you might expect to pop up in a cliched horror movie (except that have that nasty-ass Who makeup on their faces), daring each other to get a peek at the infamous Grinch.  There's a whole bunch of weird world-expanding plot threads added to pump the simple story up to a feature-length running time, and it's all informed by a very dated '90s pop culture worldview that's just weird.  There's a love triangle between the Grinch, the Mayor of Whoville (Jeffrey Tambor) and the uncomfortably sexualized Martha May Whovier (Christine Baranski).  A love triangle.  Involving the Grinch.  This is the kind of crap that you're supposed to read about as deleted concepts described on IMDb's trivia page where you can wonder if it's accurate or not, but they put in the movie here.  Oh, and there's a definite acknowledgement of sexuality in the Who experience, so now you have to picture those nasty little Whos with their nasty little noses and innocent-but-in-a-kinky-way personalities doing dirty things in bed.  There's a gag about how Whos are born, that is, they float down from the sky in little gondolas to their parents' doorsteps, and when one would-be father examines the baby that just landed outside the door, he remarks to his wife, "He looks just like your boss."  That means the Whos have affairs.  It's left up to the imagination just how the babies wind up in those gondolas, but it's clear that there's good old fashioned whoopie-making involved.  Soon after, the Who women that the baby Grinch winds up with are having a "key party," which, as anyone who's seen Ang Lee's THE ICE STORM knows, is where swingers drop their car keys into a bowl for drawing later to decide which random person they're going home with to do sex with.  Those dirty, dirty Whos.  Also, the Grinch makes a face-dive right into Christine Baranski's Christmas cleavage.  We've established that it's filthy and looks like a '90s horror movie, which isn't inherently bad, but this soggy toilet sock goes hard for the commercialized sentimentality, too.  Taylor Momsen, who plays Cindy Lou Who (no more than two in the original text, but here, she's about ten and old enough to reminisce about better Christmases), has to look cute, so she has none of the grotesque makeup of the other Whos, but she still looks like a moron, and her false "I just wanted Christmas to be perfect" sincerity is nauseating.  The featured song of the film, "Where Are You Christmas", sung by Taylor Momsen in the actual film and by Faith Hill in the end credits, is a pox on the genitals of the holiday season, a crock of shit pretending to yearn for a purer, less commercialized Christmas while actually standing for the opposite.  Christmas is on December 25, got it?  It's not lost, you insufferable carnival barkers.  As to the Grinch himself, this is where the movie truly shits the bed on an epic scale.  The story of a bitter soul who's become jaded to the materialistic celebration of Christmas, but he's just misunderstood and when he learns what Christmas is really about, his heart grows and he's changed for the better; except this Grinch isn't misunderstood.  He's genuinely a dick.  He's not so much an asshole that he can't quite reconcile leaving Cindy Lou Who to be die in a gruesome post office accident (although he does debate with himself considerably over the issue), but even when he was a kid, before the cruelty of bullies supposedly led him to choose a career in professional dicktitude, the Grinch is a dick.  As an infant, he giggles maliciously at knocking another one of the baby gondolas off-course, he bites the head off of a Santa plate, and as a child, he gleefully destroys other peoples' things in a montage where he makes a Christmas present for young Martha May Whovier in hopes of getting Christmas laid.  So he's already a nasty little shit.  After his supposed change, he's still obnoxious, and in the very final moments of the film, when he's joined the Whos for Christmas dinner and is carving the roast beast, the last lines are of the Grinch asking who wants the gizzard, then claiming it for himself like a dick.  Like, what do you want us to feel, movie?  Ugh, there are few things worse for a movie to be than this kind of cloying, sentimental bullshit without even having a heart to back it up.  Shaggy, green, poo-smelling garbage.  Garbage, I say!

THE POLAR EXPRESS 
(FANTASY/ANIMATED-MUSICAL, 2004) 
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr.
Starring: Tom Hanks, Leslie Zemeckis, Eddie Deezen, Tinashe, Peter Scolari, Michael Jeter, Chris Coppola, Charles Fleischer, Steven Tyler, Daryl Sabara (voice), Nona Gaye (voice), Jimmy Bennett (voice), Andre Sogliuzzo
Rated G
100 minutes
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the early era motion-capture animated characters of THE POLAR EXPRESS looks like handsomely-lit dead human bodies being puppeteered like goddamn marionettes.  But hey, if that's what Christmas magic is to you, who am I to argue.  Eh, I don't care.  Other early motion-capture animated movies have had their technological shortcomings but made it work though, and THE POLAR EXPRESS fails most importantly in its clumsy and desperate efforts to tug the heartstrings with nostalgia and feel-good innocence but instead winds up shoving a thick handful of treacly sentimentality up it own ass and trying desperately to keep that interesting for 100 minutes, occasionally tickling the prostate and coming up with extended boring set-pieces for the train to run into, but nobody cares and this movie should go dunk its head three times and pull back up twice.  Outside of the human characters, who look dead and malevolent (like the inferi in the Harry Potter series; dead bodies that have been enchanted by a Dark Wizard's spell, except these inferi have gone rogue and are celebrating Christmas), the production design is sumptuous and the digital medium is ideal for recreating Chris Van Allsburg's clean and luminescent aesthetic.  Robert Zemeckis, writer and director of the film, has a massive hard-on for this kind of technology, and POLAR EXPRESS is beautiful dick painting, swooping with an impossible camera through the wintery landscapes rendered in the computer, lingering for extended, decidedly non-subtle shots on a golden train ticket fluttering improbably through the wind.  That's one way Zemeckis stretches 32-page storybook that's mostly paintings out into a feature run time.  Another way he does this is with boring, drawn-out set-pieces like the train (which is simply on a trip to the North Pole, nothing more) like a big herd of caribou standing in the way, and a particularly absurd stretch in which the train slides off of the tracks and onto a frozen lake, then gets back on the tracks again.  They also find time for a train ghost (Tom Hanks, along with five other roles) who has an absurdly forced laugh and harasses people who don't believe in bullshit with terrifying Victorian-style marionettes.  Ugh, this should have been a short film, like half an hour at most.  But even then, we have this lavishly produced fable for children about how logical thought is obnoxious and it's important to be a sap, which is probably why some people still believe that global warming is a Chinese hoax.  THE POLAR EXPRESS begins with a young boy (physical performance by Tom Hanks, vocal performance by Daryl Sabara) trying to grow the hell up and come to terms with the fact that there's no omnipotent, elderly old man from the Arctic who breaks into his house at night and leaves presents.  I mean, heck, if the kid was struggling with a similarly stupid belief like whether vaccines make you retarded or if legitimate rape causes pregnancy, we'd be rooting for him to him to stop being such an idiot and start acting like we live in the real world here, but if it's about Santa?  Oh God, no, don't stop believing in Santa!  Oh my hell, what a horrible, awful thing to not believe in Santa Fraud!  Guess what, guys?  News flash: SANTA ISN'T REAL!  Dumbasses.

HOME ALONE 
(COMEDY/FAMILY, 1990) 
Directed by Chris Columbus
Screenplay by John Hughes
Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Roberts Blossom, Catherine O'Hara, Angela Goathels, Devin Ratray, Gerry Bamman, Hillary Wolf, John Candy, Larry Hankin, Michael C. Maronna, Kristin Minter, Ken Hudson Campbell, Kieran Culkin
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (slapstick action violence, language, some rude humor and thematic elements).
103 minutes
Kevin McCallister is a huge, gaping, sweaty, taco poo-smelling asshole.  You know what would be really funny?  A movie where Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern give Macaulay Culkin an atomic wedgie and threw him in the garbage before rooting through his rich family's house, clogging the sinks and having a merry Christmas while those McCallister dildos learn a little something-something about what really matters.  Seriously, think about it; the biggest movie of 1990 was the story about an obnoxious kid from a rich family who gets ditched while his family goes to France over Christmas, and while his hot mom harasses everyone she comes into contact with in order to get home to the brat, the kid spends the holiday designing torture traps for poor people.  What a shitty world.  Yay for rich white people, violence, and asshole families reconciling with each other because it's a big, fat asshole Christmas.  Yeah, yeah, kids rule and adults drool, whatever.  The most annoying thing though is how, like THE GRINCH, it's a bunch of mean-spirited, awful people being awful, but then they try to shoehorn in a stupidly sentimental subplot between Kevin and Old Man Marley (Roberts Blossom), an old man who tells Kevin he's not a murderer even though he clearly is.  Where'd you get that cut on your hand, Marley?  Where'd you get that cut?  Why do you need such a big bucket of salt?  You're telling me you only need that much salt to salt the sidewalks?  No mummy bodies in there at all, huh?  What a load of bull.  Catherine O'Hara though, what a peach.

THE SANTA CLAUSE 
(FAMILY-COMEDY/FANTASY, 1994) 
Directed by John Pasquin
Screenplay by Leo Benvenuti and Steven Rudnick
Starring: Tim Allen, Judge Reinhold, Wendy Crewson, Eric Lloyd, David Krumholtz, Larry Brandenburg, Mary Gross, Paige Tamada, Peter Boyle, Judith Scott, Jayne Eastwood, Melissa King, Kenny Vadas
Rated PG for a few crude moments.
97 minutes
On an awkward Christmas Eve shared between a divorced dad and his obnoxious son becomes even more awkward when the dad inadvertently kills (yes, kills) Santa Claus (yes, the Santa Claus) in their own front yard, setting in motion a course of events that will destroy his life as he knows it and damn him to an eternity of servitude and fatness.  What is this off-kilter but chilling Christmas horror fable I'm talking about?  Why, it's only Walt Disney Pictures' blood-curdling holiday classic, THE SANTA CLAUSE!  By mistakenly killing a mythological figure he doesn't even believe in, successful advertising executive Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) is forced into become Santa Claus himself, cursed to surrender his identity and travel the entirety of the world annually to deliver gifts to all the greedy, grubby, gentile children.  He'll no longer recognize his body as it rapidly ages (like that guy at the end of INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE) and as he develops excess fat at an impossible rate.  Even his personality is no longer his own as he begins to crave sweet things like never before, he becomes consistently jolly and good natured, free will be damned... just like poor Scott Calvin.  Trapped in a body that is no longer his, imprisoned in a mind that he can no longer control, he is a slave to the world, surrounded by child-people at the North Pole who claim to be hundreds of years old and may or may not have sex lives even though, by all appearances, they are children (Judy, played by 9-year-old actress Paige Tamada, assumes Scott is hitting on her and tells him that she's "seeing someone in wrapping," although there's also a Denny's waitress named Judy, leading to a misunderstanding involving Scott's relationship to whichever Judy which includes sexual undertones).  The least terrible of these North Pole immortals is Bernard (David Krumholtz), who has the regrettable duty of informing whatever new sad-sack gets dragged into this hellish Faustian bargain that all their hopes and dreams are dead and they now have to be Santa Claus, but even Bernard goes an pulls a dick move like giving Scott's bratty entitled kid Charlie a magic snowglobe that forcibly beckons Santa Scott every time Charlie shakes it.  Imagine that you can't even rely on that sweet ten minutes a day where you can reasonably excuse yourself from dealing with your godawful children to lock yourself in the bathroom and take a dump, because your co-worker gave your shitty kid a magic frickin' snowglobe.  Throw in a third-act sequence of pre-9/11 police station terrorism where a bunch of smug-ass kids dressed like they just came from sanitation workers summer camp and calling themselves "elves with attitude" (oh, for the love of...) break Santa Scott out of jail, tie-up and torture a cop before gagging him with a donut, and we have the makings of yet another holiday family classic.  This is why western civilization is declining.

Review: COCO/OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE

COCO 
(FANTASY/FAMILY-ANIMATION) 
★★★
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Co-directed by Adrian Molina
Screenplay by Adrian Molina & Matthew Aldrich
Story by Lee Unkrich & Jason Katz & Matthew Aldrich & Adrian Molina
Featuring the Voices of: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Herbert Siguenza, Gabriel Iglesias, Lombardo Boyar, Ana Ofelia Murguia, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Selene Luna, Edward James Olmos, Sofia Espinosa 
Rated PG for thematic elements.
109 minutes
Verdict: As visually lush and emotionally ambitious as can be expected from most of Pixar's better fare, COCO sometimes relies a little heavily on familiar Pixar mechanics but is nonetheless one of their stronger recent offerings. 
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN COCO IF YOU LIKED:
TOY STORY 3  (2010)
MONSTER'S INC.  (2001)
FINDING DORY  (2016)
THE BOOK OF LIFE  (2014)
UP  (2009)

Next to 2015's INSIDE OUT, COCO is Pixar Animation's best movie since TOY STORY 3, but still a bit less polished in its storytelling than the studio typically delivered in its prime.  It leans heavily into Pixar's bag of proven tricks, e.g. emotionally loaded storytelling, familiar antagonist types, exposition via old-timey TV and newsreels; and while it's somewhat predictable and well worn by now, the formula hasn't lost all its potency.

Directed and developed by Lee Unkrich, director of TOY STORY 3, COCO follows the adventures of Miguel Rivera (voiced by newcomer Anthony Gonzalez), a 12-year-old boy in Mexico who dreams of being a musician just like his late idol Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt).  Unfortunately, Miguel's great-great-grandfather was a musician who walked out on his family, leaving Miguel's great-great-grandmother to raise his great-grandmother as a single mother and shoemaker, and his family has stringently banned music ever since, Captain von Trapp-style.  In his quest to become a great musician, a mishap occurs on Dia de los Muertos which sends Miguel to the Land of the Dead prematurely, where Miguel encounters several of his ancestors, including his great-great-grandmother, who offers to send him back to the Land of the Living but on the condition that he never play music.  Naturally, Miguel can't live with that, so he decides to stay in the Land of the Living, at least until he can find someone who will send him back without no-music conditions, such as de la Cruz.  To find de la Cruz, Miguel enlists the help of Hector (voiced by Gael Garcia Bernal), a trickster who wants Miguel to put up his picture in the Land of the Living so he'll be remembered, and he's running out of time, since once no one left in the Land of the Living remembers a denizen of the Land of the Dead, they fade away into nothingness.

It's fairly heavy stuff, death and remembrance, but Pixar's approach is as lively and accessible as expected, with plenty of humor and somewhat clunky attempts to jerk tears.  The animation is gorgeous and richly detailed as ever, and the voice cast is all solid.  On its own, it's a pretty good movie, although within the Pixar canon, it's hard to miss the repetition of major elements for MONSTERS INC., UP and RATAOUILLE, among others.  In terms of animated movies centered around Dia de los Muertos though, it's an improvement on THE BOOK OF LIFE.

OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE 
(ANIMATED-SHORT/MUSICAL) 
★1/2
Directed by Kevin Deters & Stevie Wermers
Screenplay by Jac Schaeffer
Based on characters created by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
Featuring the Voices of: Josh Gad, Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff
Rated G
22 minutes
Originally planned as a Christmas TV special for ABC (with a few commercial breaks it would perfectly fit a half-hour block alongside something like A Charlie Brown Christmas), OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE was lumped in with COCO and heavily advertised with its own trailer and posters, no doubt in hopes of better selling the original movie with the tremendous clout of the Frozen brand name.  Unfortunately, it sucks.  Following the original FROZEN's comic sidekick sentient snowman Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad) as he goes in search of holiday traditions for the princesses Anna (v. Kristen Bell) and Elsa (v. Idina Menzel) because traditions for traditions' sake is apparently the end all and be all of holiday happiness.  It feels like it was written by Disney's storybook department, the people who write those illustrated corporation brand approved stories featuring Disney characters which they sell at Wal-Mart.  There are four original songs, plus two reprises, crammed into 22 minutes by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson (replacing Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez who wrote the original film's songs), all of which are basically serviceable but not particularly memorable.  The whole thing has an air of being strictly for FROZEN's youngest devotees and bears little of what made the original such a phenomenon in the first place.  OLAF'S FROZEN ADVENTURE is an ideal time for parents who were in a rush earlier to leave the kids in their seats go back to the concession stand for popcorn and drinks.

                                                                                                                                                                          Images via Disney

Review: JUSTICE LEAGUE

JUSTICE LEAGUE 
★★
(ACTION/FANTASY) 
Directed by Zack Znyder
Screenplay by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon
Story by Zack Snyder and Chris Terrio
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Robin Wright, Joe Morton, Amber Heard, Billy Crudup
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action.
121 minutes
Verdict: Whelp, it's not as bad as it probably would have been, but the first live-action theatrical appearance of DC's Justice League will likely go down in movie history as a weird accident occurring in slow motion.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN JUSTICE LEAGUE IF YOU LIKED:
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE  (2016)
MAN OF STEEL  (2013)
WONDER WOMAN  (2017)
MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS  (2012)

JUSTICE LEAGUE is significantly better than BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, but it's still not particularly good, and what's more, the people who did like BVS: DOJ probably appreciated it for reasons that JUSTICE LEAGUE has now eschewed.  It's a rushed course-correction, something that seems a bit closer to what a DC cinematic universe could have more successfully attempted from the beginning, but at this point feels unearned and shoddy.  It's more an obligation than anything else.  It's a $300 million wet fart.  BVS was lambasted by critics, and while it certainly had its defenders, and it did technically make money at the box office, it performed well beneath what it should have brought in as the teaming up of a trio of our culture's most iconic and popular superheroes onscreen together for the first time.  The wheels were already in motion though, with filming beginning for JUSTICE LEAGUE only a couple of weeks after the release of BVS, with Warner Brothers scrambling to re-position the series on the fly.  Zack Snyder, who directed the not-great MAN OF STEEL and the horrid BVS, was directing JUSTICE LEAGUE for over a year before leaving to deal to a personal family tragedy, leaving Joss Whedon, the man who united Marvel's all-stars behind the camera in MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, to step up and direct JUSTICE LEAGUE through to completion, which included reportedly extensive re-writes and re-shoots.  In the end, Whedon is given a screenwriting credit, while Snyder maintains sole directorial credit, and the movie is just all kinds of weird.  Individual directors have made odd, uneven misfires before, but the behind-the-scenes drama does lend some explanation.  It was also mandated by the studio to have a two-hour run time, which I realize is probably to the chagrin of fanboys who want as much movie as possible for their dollars, but I've made no secret that I'm in favor of shorter movies.  Ideally, a two-hour run time would be the decision of the filmmaker, but really, most of these bloated two-hour-plus blockbuster run times come down to excessive exposition, overly convoluted plots and overextended action sequences, and the constraint of a limited run time I think genuinely helps most movies, including this one.  BVS was pretty bad all over, but enduring bad for two hours is easily preferable to enduring bad for two and a half, so while I acknowledge the artistic infringement of a run time mandate of two hours coming from Warner Brothers executives, I'm not complaining.

After beginning with a brief flashback scene introducing a more classically good-natured, decidedly revised Superman (Henry Cavill) from his super-douche portrayals in Snyder's MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN V SUPERMAN, the movie opens immediately following the events of BVS, with Superman dead and buried in a montage of society declining set to Sigrid's cover of "Everybody Knows", sort of bringing to mind a superior Snyder opening montage from WATCHMEN.  Then, the CGI aberration called Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) arrives from outer space, or something like that, to collect the "Mother Boxes," vaguely defined ancient sources of raw power which, when combined, are even more powerful, so Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Ben Affleck), and Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), set to uniting a team of super friends to protect the planet.  In DC's rush to get to the team-up before the set-up, there are still a few characters that need introducing, having only previously appeared in weirdly lazy BVS cameos. There's Victor Stone, aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher, previously best known for stage work), a former college athlete whose father saved him from a nearly fatal car accident with the use of a Mother Box which regrettably also turned most of his body and part of his mind into advanced alien machinery.  There's Barry Allen, aka The Flash (Ezra Miller), a super-fast, socially awkward youth who's awestruck by the other heroes, and lastly, there's Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), the super strong, aquatically-powered prince of the undersea city of Atlantis.  They're still short one Superman, though.
The most obvious target of criticism, so obvious it really isn't fair, is Steppenwolf, a character that doesn't necessitate a CGI creation, but which has been rendered as such anyway and looks about 15 years late to the party.  His motivation is the cheapest stock motivation for any action movie villain; power, pure and simple; and there's really nothing else.  Hinds, a perfectly good character actor with the right material, gets one of the easiest paychecks outside of voicework doing a motion-capture performance with hardly any performance seeming to coming through the pixels.  Steppenwolf is an utterly lifeless creation.  He's not even accidentally interesting.

Within a perfectly ample two hours however, whether what the movie is doing tonally or thematically is particularly successful or not, it makes good use of its time with little waste.  While BVS took an extra half hour to do little worthwhile, JUSTICE LEAGUE sufficiently introduces three new heroes, a piece of crap villain, a lazy McGuffin, and while a lot of that is rote and could have been put to better use, it never feels rushed or languid.  As opposed to the oppressively moody, self-serious gloom and doom of BVS, the tone is a lot lighter and optimistic this time around, with a lot dull and desperate attempts at humor from The Flash, who's basically a less inspired version of Quicksilver from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, although there are a couple of decent laughs scattered elsewhere.  Honestly, the funniest thing about the movie by far is the behind-the-scenes story of how Paramount Pictures wouldn't allow Henry Cavill to shave his luxurious MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 mustache for reshoots as Superman, so thousands of additional dollars had to be spent by Warner Brothers digitally removing the mustache with visual effects.  They must have been so busy with Cavill's upper lip that they didn't have time to give Steppenwolf any expressions.
In the end, the movie feels sort of pointless, but also harmless.  It's trying to make up for the godawfulness of BATMAN V SUPERMAN and SUICIDE SQUAD, but in rushing into the franchise building so early, before they knew what they'd done, the DC Extended Universe crippled itself.  There's a potentially much worse movie in JUSTICE LEAGUE, which is a weird reverse of the more common kind of movie that has good ideas but bad execution.  It's not that JUSTICE LEAGUE has good execution, but the execution is a lot better than the ideas.  The result is a movie that feels neutered, maybe for the better, but neutered nonetheless  It's the kind of movie that I think I wouldn't mind seeing more of, except, you know, good.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers

Review: THOR: RAGNAROK

THOR: RAGNAROK 
(ACTION-ADVENTURE/FANTASY) 
★★★
Directed by Taika Watiti
Screenplay by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
Based on characters created by Stan Lee & Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, Taikia Watiti, Rachel House, Clancy Brown, Tadanobu Asano
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive material.
130 minutes
Verdict: Without shaking up the Marvel Cinematic Universe in any particularly exciting way, RAGNAROK is the best of three Thor-led movies thanks in large part to its light, breezy tone and colorful personality.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN THOR: RAGNAROK IF YOU LIKED: 
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2  (2017)
THOR: THE DARK WORLD  (2013)
THOR  (2011)
TIME BANDITS  (1981)
TRON  (1982)

The Thor installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far have been particularly weak points in the franchise; the Kenneth Branagh-directed THOR (2011) was seen as a big leap in bringing a far more fantastical superhero into the MCU than had been featured before, and it got the job done in a mostly staid way, while the Alan Taylor-directed THOR: THE DARK WORLD (2013) remains one of the weakest installments in the MCU yet, with a stock villain, oversized destruction and structurally mangled.  Even Tom Hiddleston as Loki, a fan favorite in the MCU as a whole, I don't think got to a very strong point as a villain until MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS.  But introducing New Zealand-born filmmaker/comedian Taika Watiti as director of THOR: RAGNAROK was an interesting move, similar to Marvel picking James Gunn for GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.  Best known for his work on the cult-comedy TV series Flight of the Conchords, and two independent comedies, the 2014 vampire mockumentary WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (co-directed with Jemaine Clement) and the 2016 comedy-drama HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE, Watiti's work is energetic, with an often very weird but witty sense of humor and a fair bit of heart as well, and as the MCU struggles to keep from falling into bland formulas, it needs directors who bring a stronger flavor.  Watiti succeeds partially in that respect, making what's easily the best Thor-led Marvel movie yet, but while often feeling very much like other Marvel movies in a way that the exhilarating candy-colored trailer set to The Immigrant Song seemed to suggest.  At the same time, it also feels very, very much like a certain strain of 1980s sci-fi/fantasy movies, e.g. TRON, TIME BANDITS and THE BLACK CAULDRON.  Terry Gilliam could never make a Marvel movie, but it turns out that a Taika Watiti Marvel movie is a pretty good approximation of what that might be.

RAGNAROK places Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Norse God of Thunder and member of the Avengers superhero team, in an unfortunate predicament when he learns that he is not in fact the first born of Odin (Anthony Hopkins); instead, that title belongs to Hela (Cate Blanchett), the warmongering Goddess of Death, who Odin has been able to keep at bay until now, and she's coming to claim the throne of Asgard.  She makes short work of Thor, destroying his hammer, and Thor and his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) only manage a narrow escape.  Crash-landing on Sakaar, a refuse planet, Thor is captured by the planet's eccentric ruler, the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), and forced to fight in a gladiatorial arena, where he is reunited with a fellow Avenger, the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), who went missing during the climactic action of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON.  The burden falls on Thor to escape the Grandmaster's grip along with the Hulk and make it back to Asgard before Hela kills all who resist her rule.

Presumably, as the subject of the Avengers' villain Thanos's romantic intentions in the upcoming AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, Hela will return in future installments of the MCU, although, in essence as a character, she doesn't bring all that much more to THOR: RAGNAROK than the typical MCU villain.  On the other hand, Blanchett brings a fair bit to the character herself; beautiful in her ethereal way with a Goth makeover and hamming it up as a distinctly comic book villain (on multiple occasions, she slicks her long black hair up into hard and shiny antlers) but with a reasonable amount of restraint that keeps things safely out of Rita Repulsa territory.  Goldblum is just doing his Goldblum thing like he hasn't done for years as the simultaneously zany and deadpan Grandmaster, and Watiti himself earns a few laughs as one of Thor's fellow gladiators, the rock-skinned Korg, whose CGI-rendered features are unfortunately poorly defined.  Among the new characters, however, I'm a particularly big fan of Tessa Thompson (star of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE and co-star of CREED) as the exceptionally hard-drinking Scrapper 142, a self-exiled Asgardian and bounty hunter with a Jack Sparrow-like drunken efficiency.

While the joke-laugh ratio isn't as successful as Watiti's WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS or HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE, RAGNAROK is often very funny, which, like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, is unexpected for a movie that seems to be emulating THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK in a lot of ways (ironically, Marvel's "Phase 2" of movies IRON MAN 3 through ANT-MAN specifically did reference THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK according to producer Kevin Feige, by way of each film, except for ANT-MAN (originally intended as part of Phase 3), depicting a scene in which a character loses a hand, but RAGNAROK and VOL. 2 are part of "Phase 3").  With a thoroughly breezy, fun tone, it's kind of too bad that the movie wound up half an hour longer than the run time had been reported as of this past summer, because it does start to feel a little long by that last half hour.  130 minutes isn't actually unreasonable for most tentpole studio movies, but I really think brevity is an increasingly underappreciated virtue of entertainment.
It's never as weird or avant-garde as it promises to be, but RAGNAROK is always entertaining and frequently amusing, making proper use of the appropriately-themed The Immigrant Song and never afraid to be a lot of silly.  Oh, and the Hulk fights a gigantic wolf, which is awesome.

                                                                                                                                                                        Images via Marvel

13 Halloween Movies Better Than Hocus Pocus or It

PARANORMAN 
(HORROR-COMEDY/ANIMATION, 2012) 
Directed by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
Screenplay by Chris Butler
Featuring the Voices of: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Tucker Albrizzi, Anna Kendrick, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Leslie Mann, Jeff Garlin, Elaine Stritch, Bernard Hill, Jodelle Farland, Tempestt Bledsoe, John Goodman
Rated PG for scary action and images, thematic elements, some rude humor and language.
92 minutes
PARANORMAN is not a perfect movie, but what works about it works so well that it more than makes up for its flaws in the end.  From Laika, the studio behind CORALINE and BOXTROLLS, PARANORMAN is more fun and funny than CORALINE, but with a lot more edge and even chills than anything in BOXTROLLS.  PARANORMAN is the kind of movie that horrifies parents, but makes kids feel stronger for making it through, assuming it doesn't keep them up in terror all night.  It's genuinely a kids' horror-comedy, more appropriately comparable to Amblin productions than most movies that get that comparison; a little scary, a little naughty, imaginative and hearty.  Produced in stop-motion animation with a slightly warped, hand-crafted sort of look, PARANORMAN is a "one crazy night" story about Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), an 11-year-old boy ostracized at school and at home for his ability to see and speak to ghosts, even though nobody believes him.  As his Massachusetts town commemorates their proud history of witch-hanging and a famous "witch's curse", it falls upon Norman to save the town when it turns out that the witch's curse is very much real, and as the only one around who can speaks to the dead, only he can stave off the curse.  In a way, probably unintentionally, PARANORMAN is an answer to the thematically similar and more popular but inferior Halloween cult classic HOCUS POCUS, in which a group of modern kids spend a night trying to stop the curse of cartoonishly evil New England witches returned from the grave.  PARANORMAN is like that, but with a lot more a heart and badly needed empathy.

ED WOOD 
(COMEDY-DRAMA, 1994) 
Directed by Tim Burton
Screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
Based on the book Nightmare of Ecstacy by Rudolph Grey
Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, Mike Starr, Max Casella, Lisa Marie, George 'The Animal' Steele, Juliet Landau, G.D. Spradlin, Vincent D'Onofrio
Rated R for some strong language.
127 minutes
ED WOOD is one of my favorite movies, period, although it does have a seasonal appropriateness around this time of year as the story of a hapless filmmaker best known for his schlocky, ultra-low-budget horror flicks and his friendship with the elderly Bela Lugosi, best known as the man who played Dracula in Universal's classic 1931 monster movie.  It's Tim Burton stripped down, at least stylistically, trading in his kitschy, gaudiness for a mature and more sincere tribute to artists, even the non-conventionally good ones.  Edward D. Wood Jr. had become known as one of the worst filmmakers of all time, receiving posthumous recognition as the director of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, when a film critic in the 1980s derided it as the "worst movie ever made."  The screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karazewski (the pair responsible for PROBLEM CHILD and its sequel) cleverly finds young Wood (Johnny Depp in his second collaboration with Burton) as a struggling young aspiring director who idolizes Orson Welles (the director of CITIZEN KANE, often cited as the "greatest movie ever made" by critics polls).  He also secretly enjoys wearing women's clothes and has an angora fetish, so when a poverty row production about a sex-change operation begins, he puts himself up for the job.  On a chance encounter with the washed-up, drug-addicted veteran horror star Bela Lugosi, Wood strikes up a friendship and a working relationship, putting Lugosi in his movies and gradually accumulating a troupe of outcasts and oddballs, and while his films are scoffed at by financers and critics, Wood tries not to let the negativity break his indomitably optimistic spirit.  Yes, Wood's movies suck, but they're his visions, and he cares enough to do whatever it takes to make them realized, and that counts for a lot.  ED WOOD is a hopelessly fell-good movie about a non-success story that only becomes successful from a very particular perspective, with lots of humor, emotion and romance, and I freaking love it.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET 
(HORROR/MUSICAL-DRAMA, 2007) 
Directed by Tim Burton
Screenplay by John Logan
Based on the stage musical by Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim, and the play by Christopher Bond
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Edward Sanders, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener, Laura Michelle Kelly, Sacha Baron Cohen
Rated R for graphic bloody violence.
116 minutes

For a while there, everyone was talking about SWEENEY TODD as an Oscar-worthy new Tim Burton classic.  It got enthusiastic reviews with placement on multiple critics' top ten films of the year lists and was a box office hit, but in just a few years, Burton was back to being a stale artistic visionary past his prime defined by garishly over-stylized generic blockbuster fare like ALICE IN WONDERLAND and DARK SHADOWS, and no one seemed willing to admit how great SWEENEY TODD was, lest it conflict with the narrative that he hadn't made a good movie since however far back.  Except SWEENEY TODD really is that good.  It's improbably good and one of Burton's best movies.  Personally, it's only second to ED WOOD as my favorite of his movies.  With a marvelously atmospheric penny dreadful style, SWEENEY TODD is a lurid crime story set in a filth-ridden Victorian London that destroys goodness, where a one-time young husband, father and barber returns as a hardened shell of a man to cut the throat of the depraved judge who sent him to a prison colony.  Cutting that one throat isn't as simple as all that though, so in the meantime, all throats that make their way to Sweeney's shop for a shave are subject to arterial opening and dropped down to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop below to be made into meat pies and served to the appreciating public.  It's not all grimness and gore though, and there's a love story on the side between Sweeney's daughter and a young sailor (played by Jayne Wisener and Jamie Campbell Bower, who look like a couple of weird Burton sketches brought to organic life), but the grimness and gore is so much fun.

SE7EN 

(MYSTERY-THRILLER/HORROR, 1995) 

Directed by David Fincher

Screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker

Starring: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Spacey, R. Lee Ermey, John C. McGinley, Richard Schiff, Richard Roundtree, Mark Boone Junior, Peter Crombie, Leland Orser, Michael Massee, Reg E. Cathey, Hawthorne James

Rated R for grisly afterviews of horrific and bizarre killings, and for strong language.

127 minutes

It's not like David Fincher is known for his feel-good films anyway (he sort of tried with THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, which is one of the most bizarre mismatches of director and material ever), but SE7EN is probably his most bleak movie to date.  In many ways, I suppose it's depressing, but it's also so engaging, taut and cool that it's hard to feel sad about it.  Stunned maybe, even disturbed, but for as utterly dark as it is, SE7EN should have a more depressing effect than it does.  After the debacle of ALIEN 3 (which wasn't even that bad, but people certainly thought so at the time and Fincher hated making it while the studio took it over), Fincher reset his feature filmmaking career with this script that had made the rounds in Hollywood for a while and had earned a reputation as "the head-in-the-box" movie.  Set in a unnamed, constantly rainy and crime-ridden city, SE7EN takes place over the course of a week as Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a veteran lawman on his last seven days before retirement, and Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), an ambitious and charismatic but hot-tempered transfer, are put together on a murder case that gradually reveals itself to be part of a larger plan; a sermon on the seven deadly sins using the killer's victims as examples.  A morbidly obese man forced to eat spaghetti at gunpoint until his stomach breaks (gluttony), a model with a mutilated face given the choice between calling for help or downing a bottle of pills (vanity), and so on.  It's a fairly simple movie, very stylish, and maybe even a bit hokey, but engrossing, disgusting, and full of a bitter, angry energy that improbably add up to a grimly appealing, exhilarating result.  The ending is a twist ending for the ages.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS 

(CRIME-THRILLER/HORROR, 1991) 

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Screenplay by Ted Tally

Based on the novel by Thomas Harris

Starring: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald, Brooke Smith, Diane Baker, Kasi Lemmons, Paul Lazar, Dan Butler, Charles Napier, Danny Darst, Frankie Faison, Tracey Walter

Rated R for unspecified reasons (strong disturbing violent content including grisly images, language, some sexual content and nudity).

118 minutes
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS has been propped up as "the horror movie that won Best Picture" at the Academy Awards, and it kind of is, but I think I'd sooner put it under "thriller" than "horror" if I were sorting a video store.  Then again, the distinctions between thriller and horror are famously unclear, and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS does have a death pit, cannibalism, human skin-suits, an insane asylum and so on, so I guess it's close enough.  I think in a more clear-cut case of horror genre filmmaking, however, that the narrative would focus more on the victims or the killers in this kind of story, and instead, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS focuses on the forensic crime investigation side of things.  In any case, it's a great movie, and it's sometimes considered a horror movie, so it's on the list.  Directed by Jonathan Demme, who got his start as one of low-budget schlockmeister Roger Corman's protégés, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS elevates its otherwise highly unsavory material into brilliant, weirdly sophisticated cinema.  A strong woman in a male-dominated law enforcement environment, Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee who is chosen to pick the impenetrable, genius mind of imprisoned serial killer/cannibal/psychopath Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), in the hopes that her feminine attractiveness will loosen him up to divulge the details on the latest serial killer at large, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), a man who's been kidnapping female victims and skinning their bodies.  Lecter is much too clever for that though, and for that matter, so is Starling, so they begin a series of mind games; Starling's personal stories in exchange for Lecter's expertise, each one ever struggling to gain an upper hand.  It may seem ironic that the movie opened on Valentine's Day, 1991 (making its sweep of the major categories at the Oscars more than a year later all the more remarkable, considering the Academy's notoriously short memory that usually awards only films released late in the year, closer to the voting process), but the intellectual romance between Starling and Lecter is, maybe not a love story, but certainly a unique and memorable bond in the history of celluloid relationships.

DRAG ME TO HELL 
(HORROR, 2009) 
Directed by Sam Raimi
Screenplay by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, Adriana Barraza, Chelcie Ross, Reggie Lee, Molly Cheek, Bojana Novakovic, Kevin Foster, Flor de Maria Chahua
Rated PG-13 for sequences of horror violence, terror, disturbing images and language.
99 minutes
Sam Raimi's return to horror is often underrated, but it's on par with EVIL DEAD II for laughs and chills, maybe more chilling, really.  Weird leading lady-character actress hybrid Alison Lohman stars as Christine Brown, a young woman in a bit of an identity crisis who makes a bad decision and pays an arguably disproportionate price.  As a bank loan officer trying to get a promotion, Christine is typically a nice person, but to prove herself as able to make "hard decisions," she turns down and inadvertently humiliates an old gypsy woman asking for an extension on her mortgage.  The gypsy woman, in turn, curses her with the "Lamia", a demon who torments its victims for three days before dragging them down to Hell.  Working within a PG-13 rating (although there is an unrated version that's slightly bloodier), Raimi subjects Lohman to all manner of suitably gross material to the face, e.g. vomit, insects, embalming fluid (from a corpse's mouth) and so on, and another character becomes the target of her projectile nosebleed, and it never feels like inhibited PG-13 horror.  There's an often dismissed theory that the movie is, at least in part, an allegory for eating disorders, which I'm not sure totally pays off, but I think there's enough of a through-line for that to make sense.  In any case, it's a wildly fun sort of horror movie, both funny and twisted, with a lot of genuinely creepy concepts and imagery, blurring the lines between horror and hilarity, making for an ideal sort of scary movie night.

EVIL DEAD II 
(HORROR-COMEDY, 1987) 
Directed by Sam Raimi
Screenplay by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley DePaiva, Denise Bixler, Richard Domeier, Ted Raimi, John Peakes, Lou Hancock
Rated R for unspecified reasons (strong bloody horror violence and gore throughout).
84 minutes
The definitive "splatstick" horror comedy, EVIL DEAD II would be near the top of just about every "best sequels" list except that it's only sort of a sequel.  You don't have to see the original THE EVIL DEAD to understand EVIL DEAD II, in fact, seeing the original first would probably just make the sequel more confusing.  EVIL DEAD II is partly a remake, playing a simplified version of the original's plot in first quarter of the film or so, then expanding beyond that, but also all with a very different tone and style.  Directed and co-written by Sam Raimi (who would later find more mainstream success with the Tobey Maguire-starring trilogy of Spider-Man movies), EVIL DEAD II is a manic horror-comedy in which Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell, an actor who's just the wrong side of handsome; handsome in a way that's tough to take seriously), a none-too-bright fella brings his girlfriend to an abandoned cabin in the woods for a romantic getaway, but they inadvertently unleash demonic forces and she gets possessed, Ash has to carve her up with a chainsaw.  Ash's hand gets possessed too, so again, out comes the chainsaw.  Tormented by demonic "Deadites" that are not only evil, but also obnoxious and very rude, including his severed, possessed hand, Ash endures geysers of blood, china dishes to the face and more before more guests arrive to try to send the demons back to their resting place or else become victims themselves.  It's gory, it's goofy; a scrappy little bloodbath with a nutty sense of humor and rough edges.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD 
(HORROR-COMEDY, 2004) 
Directed by Edgar Wright
Screenplay by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Jessica Stevenson, Peter Serafinowicz
Rated R for zombie violence/gore and language.
99 minutes
SHAUN OF THE DEAD may be the last truly great zombie movie, at least for a long while, since the internet meme culture has overdone zombies (especially the ironic depiction of zombies) to the point of annoyance, right alongside liking bacon and Batman being awesome.  Nobody cares internet, so shut up.  Marketed as a "romantic comedy with zombies", or a "zom-rom-com", years before ZOMBIELAND, WARM BODIES or any of the other in the string of less inspired zombie movies with a comic twist that came along in its wake (to be clear, I do like ZOMBIELAND, and WARM BODIES was okay, I guess), SHAUN OF THE DEAD remarkably succeeds independently as a romantic comedy with a goofy, wry sense of British humor, and as a zombie movie with real emotional stakes and gory horror.  While for some movies those elements would clash when combined, or one would overwhelm the other, director/co-writer Edgar Wright has a particular talent for balancing and shifting tones.  Co-writer Simon Pegg stars as the titular Shaun, a hapless man-child who's trying to win back his girlfriend, deal with his even more immature long-time best friend/flatmate, come to terms with his emotionally-distant stepdad, and save his mom, all in the middle of a big, fat zombie apocalypse.

THIS IS THE END 
(HORROR-COMEDY, 2013)  
Directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
Screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Emma Watson, Michael Cera, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, David Krumholtz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Aziz Ansari, Brian Huskey
Rated R for crude and sexual content throughout, brief graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence.
107 minutes
You couldn't be blamed for glancing at THIS IS THE END and thinking of it simply as one of your standard hard-R comedies, the sort often populated by stars like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, but it's as much a parody of religiously-tinged horror movies as anything else, and it's a great Halloween movie.  THIS IS THE END is great any time of the year, but it has a seasonal appropriateness at this time of year.  A laundry list of Hollywood talent star as themselves (or a version of themselves, if you like) in the directorial debut of the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg duo, in a story that places Rogen and many of his celebrity friends at a party at James Franco's house in the middle of the Biblical Apocalypse.  Many of them are casualties of the first wave as a massive pit into Hell opens up in the street in front of Franco's fortress-like house, while a few righteous are raptured up into Heaven in beams of light, leaving the remainder to debate what's going on, ration their supplies, and not drive each other crazy, while Hellhounds and cannibals roam the fiery Hollywood Hills outside.  Worse, Danny McBride came to the party uninvited the night before, and now he's picking fights, eating all the food, drinking all the water and masturbating on everything.  THIS IS THE END is one of the funniest comedies of the 21st century so far, and with exorcisms, demons, no small amount of blood and gore, not to mention an appearance by Emma Watson chopping off the tip of a giant penis sculpture with an ax, October is a perfect excuse to put it on.

THE 'BURBS 
(COMEDY-THRILLER, 1989) 
Directed by Joe Dante
Screenplay by Dana Olsen
Starring: Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Rick Ducommun, Carrie Fisher, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schaal, Henry Gibson, Brother Theodore, Courtney Gains, Gale Gordon, Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Cory Danziger
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; some comic morbid thematic material and brief language).
101 minutes
THE 'BURBS doesn't have the same cultural resonance as other early Joe Dante movies like GREMLINS, INNERSPACE, or even GREMLINS 2, but it may just be the best of them.  Critics were mixed on it when it opened in theaters in 1989.  That baffles me.  It's so thoroughly funny, stylish and subversive, essentially a live-action cartoon, which isn't unlike most of Dante's films, but it's perfectly matched with its cast.  Set in a suburban cul-de-sac, Tom Hanks stars as Ray, an overstressed everyman planning on spending a week on staycation, relaxing and avoiding trouble at home, but trouble finds him in the form of the ultra-odd new neighbors, the Klopeks.  Their house smells funny, their lawn is a disaster, they never socialize, and they drive their garbage out to the curb in the middle of the night and bang the hell out of it with a stick.  Ray would like to leave well enough alone, as would his wife, played by none other than Princess Leia herself, Carrie Fisher, but egged on by his troublemaking neighbor Art (Rick Ducommun) and his militaristic combat veteran neighbor Rumsfield (Bruce Dern), Ray begins to suspect that the Klopeks are murderers practicing Satanism.  It's kind of an Amblin/GOONIES/MONSTER HOUSE-style kids solving a mystery adventure, except the kids in this case are actually three grown men with too much time on their hands.  It's full of weird humor that I love and has a great spooky-kooky atmosphere, playing up expectations, then subverting them unrepentantly.

HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY 
(FANTASY/ACTION-ADVENTURE, 2008) 
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro
Story by Guillermo del Toro & Mike Mignola
Starring: Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Selma Blair, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, Jeffrey Tambor, John Alexander, James Dodd, Brian Steele, John Hurt, Roy Dotrice
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, and some language.
120 minutes
Despite starring a red-skinned, horned demon in the title role and a blue fish-man on the side, HELLBOY II strikes me as not much more of a Halloween movie than THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but it does star a red-skinned, horned demon in the title role with a blue fish-man on the side, so it's probably close enough for some people.  The first HELLBOY leans a little more toward the horror while HELLBOY II leans into fantasy, but HELLBOY II is so much better.  They're both good; watch both; it's just that HELLBOY II is particularly great and at any time of the year.  Ron Perlman might an unlikely candidate to headline a superhero movie, but he defines the role in a way that makes it nearly impossible for anyone (like David Harbour is about to attempt in an upcoming reboot) to follow-up in any comparably favorable way.  Since the original HELLBOY was a box office disappointment that recouped its budget on DVD but never reached a very mainstream audience, HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY works largely as a standalone film for a fresh audience, with its hulking red main character, summoned by Nazis during WWII and intercepted by Allied troops, working for the top-secret Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) as a supernatural detective/monster-killer.  An underground civilization of fantastical creatures from time gone by, it explains, is waning, so a radical militant elf prince prepares to wage war on humanity and claim a dominant role in the world, and to do so, he plans to awaken an indestructible, merciless mechanical army.  The movie does have its share of scary, creepy moments, such as a swarm of "tooth fairies" that devour human flesh like little flying piranhas, or the Angel of Death (one of multiple elaborately designed fantasy creatures played by Doug Jones) in a sequence that sets up another sequel that would disappointingly never materialize, but mostly, it's a funny, fun, romantic, very sweet fantasy-action movie full of monsters.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL 
(HORROR, 1959) 
Directed by William Castle
Screenplay by Robb White
Starring: Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long, Alan Marshal, Carolyn Craig, Elisha Cook Jr., Julie Mitchum, Leona Anderson, Howard Hoffman
Not Rated (PG-13-level;)
75 minutes
When HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL first showed in theaters in 1959, select theaters screened the film with "Emergo", so that in the scenes of the film when a certain skeleton in the movie appeared, a plastic skeleton would drop down from the ceiling of the actual theater and swoop above the audience via a system of pulleys.  That's how you know HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is an amazing Halloween movie.  It's that kind of movie  The great Vincent Price stars in one of his most memorably fiendish roles as millionaire Frederick Loren, who invites a quintet of strangers to stay the night in a haunted house with the promise of $10,000 to any who stay the whole night, but the whole thing is actually a ruse for Mr. Loren to kill his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), unless she offs him first.  There's no actor who can better embody the Halloween spirit, as it were, than Vincent Price, creepy yet kooky, morbid with a sense of irony, and like all of his better movies, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is thoroughly morbid in a comic book sense, severed heads, pools of acid, dancing skeletons and gruesome, but corny effects.

HOUSE OF WAX 
(HORROR, 1953) 
Directed by Andre DeToth
Screenplay by Crane Wilbur
Story by Charles Belden
Starring: Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones, Paul Picerni, Roy Roberts, Angela Clarke, Paul Cavanagh, Dabbs Greer, Charles Bronson, Reggie Rymal
Not Rated (PG-13-level; morbid thematic content and brief sensuality).
88 minutes
Arguably Vincent Price's most iconic role, HOUSE OF WAX is another delightfully campy/creepy pulp horror movie that's insanely watchable.  Set in Victorian Era New York City, Price stars as Professor Jarrod, a talented but sensitive wax figure sculptor whose artistic ambitions clash with his business partner's desire for more gruesome exhibits to draw in the crowds, so the business partner burns him alive in the wax museum to claim the insurance money.  Jerrod survives though, horribly scarred and unable to use his hands, but this time, he has plans to rebuild his house of wax with exhibits that will attract public interest, by committing grisly murders by night, stealing the bodies and dipping them in wax to recreate his own crimes as exhibits in his museum.  Released during the first trend of 3D movies (with the red and blue glasses), the movie has a couple of memorably moments of blatantly gimmicky 3D gags, most famously a promoter beckoning people into the wax museum with a paddle ball aimed directly at the screen.  It also marks the screen debut of Charles Bronson, who plays Jarrod's mute assistant, Igor.


Honorable Mention

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES 
(HORROR/FANTASY, 1983) 
★★★
Directed by Jack Clayton
Screenplay by Ray Bradbury
Based on the novel by Ray Bradbury
Starring: Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd, Royal Dano, Vidal Peterson, Shawn Carson, Pam Grier, Mary Grace Canfield, Richard Davalos, Jake Dengel, Jack Dodson, Bruce M. Fischer, Ellen Geer, Brendan Clinger, James Stacy
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; some frightening moments and violent images, and thematic elements).
95 minutes
Darkest desires.  Greed.  Vanity.  Lust.  Terrible prices paid.  It doesn't exactly sound like Disney fare, but in the confused post-Walt and Roy days of the studio in the 1970s and early 80s, prior to the creation of the Touchstone Pictures label that allowed them to release movies with mature content with affecting the Disney brand, they were experimenting with some weirder, darker movies.  However, even while some at Disney were trying to go dark, there were others of the old guard who were constantly trying to avoid going that dark, and the result with SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES is a heavily flawed movie with moments of greatness.  Based on a Ray Bradbury novel and adapted to the screen by Bradbury himself (albeit with some heavy uncredited rewrites), it's the story of a small town in the American Midwest in the early half of the 20th century where a mysterious carnival, "Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival", rolls into town in the middle of the night and offers the town's wistful resident's their deepest desires, but each at a terrible cost.  Surprisingly, rather than going with a mere jobber, Disney hired the well-regarded British director Jack Clayton, who had several gritty dramas under his belt and one critically revered horror classic, THE INNOCENTS, but when he did his thing, the studio was uncomfortable with his deliberate, artistic approach and some of the more intense aspects of the movie (it was only Disney's second live-action horror movie, and the first, THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, had been heavily reedited and reshot under studio direction), and they sidelined him while reshooting and reediting the film.  Still, the final product with the Disney label at the top has a child's bloody head severed via guillotine, a man's hand squeezed so hard that his knuckles split open, and at least one implied orgy (rated prior to the creation of the PG-13 rating, it was rated PG).  The Norman Rockwell-style of picturesque middle America that contrasts with the demonic forces of the carnival is clunky, the performances of the two boys at the center of the film, Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) are dodgy, and some of the mythology behind the movie's events is left undefined, but there are a number of factors and scenes that make it very worth watching.  Jonathan Pryce, probably best known to younger audiences as Governor Weatherby Swan from the Pirates of the Caribbean series, is awesome as Mr. Dark, the ominous master of the carnival with a delicate, quivering tension and just a hint of sexual perversion, contrasting with Jason Robards as the town's frail but noble librarian, Charles Halloway, and two main scenes together are incredible.  When Dark comes to the library, searching for the two boys, Jim and Will, he and Halloway have a lengthy exchange that's just wonderful, with Dark offering to make Halloway young again if he'll turn over the boys, angrily lowering his bid and tearing pages as Halloway stands his ground.
MR. HALLOWAY: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
MR. DARK: Then rang the bells both loud and deep, God is not dead nor doth he sleep.
MR. HALLOWAY: The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on Earth, good will to men.
MR. DARK: It's a thousand years to Christmas, Mr. Halloway.