Jurassic World Rebirth

 The Jurassic World movies are built around a seriously toxic, mind-numbingly idiotic plot point: That dinosaurs are just not cool enough, and that people will get bored of them quickly. The original Jurassic Park was built around the awe that these creatures inspire; They're the entire appeal of the franchise, for fuck's sake.

 This whole concept seems to come from one Colin Trevorrow, who's finally left the Jurassic World building to go fail upward somewhere else. He leaves behind three of the stupidest mainstream films of the last decade.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is helmed by the infinitely more capable Gareth Edwards, working from a script from David Koepp -  a man who's produced his share of shit, but also some cool stuff. Their tack, which is to hew closer to Jurassic Park than to any of the sequels, is solid.

 Unfortunately, they've chosen to carry forward the stupid, stupid baggage from the Jurassic World films. So as the film starts, we're informed that dinosaurs are dying all over the place, and people just don't give  a shit.
 Well, most people. Obviously evil biotech companies are after dinosaurs' magic blood, which they know they can use to eliminate heart disease. And since there are no more parks, they need to go get this magic dinosaur blood (it needs to be from the biggest dinosaurs, because they have the biggest hearts, you see!) from closed off areas near the equator where dinosaurs still roam free.

 You know what, after re-reading the paragraph above, I'm not sure Koepp is that much of an improvement over Trevorrow. Sadly, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

 An obviously evil suit (Rupert Friend) working for one of those obviously evil big pharma companies hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to go get the magic dinosaur blood with him and a group of other PMC types. On the way they rescue a family who decided to go sailing in dinosaur-infested waters, so when things inevitably go wrong and everyone gets stranded in yet another dinosaur island, the film splits its time between the PMCs going after their quarries and the family trying to make it to safety.

 And... it's mostly fine. It's dumb - really dumb - and noticeably making an effort at being very kid-friendly (complete with a cute baby dinosaur following the family around and basically acting like a puppy). It's also overstuffed, making its relatively lean (for the current status quo) runtime feel much longer than it actually is.
 But action is mostly good. There's extremely little sense of risk - this is the kind of movie that blatantly only kills evil characters or the ones it doesn't spend any time developing. It also cheats all the time by making pursuing monsters either disappear or suddenly fall back in the interstices between one shot and another; The worst offender in that respect is a scene where the family out-paddles a chasing dinosaur (a scene that's directly taken from Crichton's book for the original Jurassic Park).

 OK, I'm not really selling it, am I? It's got good momentum, the effects are pretty good (although nothing groundbreaking), and there's good variety. There's also good dinosaur variety: We get Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurs, Titanosaurs, and a few others. The mutated dinosaurs fare less better, but at least the sausage-headed big bad is a botched mutation, so it looks like something out of H.R. Giger's sketchbooks than an actual dinosaur.

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

 The main issue here is that the movie is in too many ways really fucking basic. An early scene where Zora (Johansson's character bonds with another one played by Mahershala Ali is representative - they trade sad, sad news and make sad sad faces at each other, while all the time Alexandre Desplat's extremely intrusive, manipulative score indicates to us that we should be sad too. The filmmaking relies far too much on glib lines, reaction shots and hearty laughs (tm) whenever someone does something that's supposed to be funny - the rhythms almost make things feel like they're edited like a trailer a lot of the time. This might be a side-product of being aimed at children, and I fucking abhor it.

 David Koepp's script is another major problem. The plotting is... fine, but all the characters are fairly nondescript, the humour is terrible, and every interaction is clumsily handled or botched. Oh, and he insists on writing young people, that's always funny to watch. In this one he's created a lazy zoomer who offers weed to a pre-tween! Isn't that hilarious? The less said of his attempts at a 'stick it to the man' messaging, the better, but at least he includes an American family of latinxs as the coprotagonists - that's actually appreciated in the current political environment.

 Going by his work, at this point I'm convinced that the indelible characters from the first Jurassic Park are all Crichton and Spielberg.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is a blatant bid to recapture the magic of that fist movie - there are a ridiculous number of references, callbacks, and scenes that mirror events from it. It's a pale imitation, though, and it's weighed down by too many iffy elements. A respectable attempt, and much, much better than the last few tries, but it still misses the mark.

The Man From Earth

 I've mellowed out a lot in my opinions about movies over the past couple of decades; Even if it doesn't sound like it, these days I'm way more likely to shrug off a film's problems and look for the fun or something interesting, if the film allows for it.

 The Man From Earth is an interesting one, though, because it managed to consistently annoy me while having its heart firmly in the right place and doing things I appreciate. For starters, it's pointedly a "thinking person's sci fi" movie - no action, no spectacle, basically just one long conversation between some erudite, supposedly companionable people.

 The premise is that as a university professor (David Lee Smith) is getting ready to skip town, a group of colleagues (Tony Todd, John Billingsley, Ellen Crawford, Annika Peterson, and William Katt - the Last American Hero himself, playing a history professor with a leather jacket and a soul patch!) come to give him an impromptu going away party. As the evening unspools, the protagonist lets slip that he's functionally immortal, and has been walking the earth since before the last Ice Age; The rest of the day is spent with the bemused guests alternating between asking good-natured questions and trying to figure out if it's an elaborate prank. Later, a psychologist (Richard Riehle) is called in to join in the fun.

What's not to love?

 Well, the script, for one - credited to one Jerome Bixby, a "legendary Sci Fi author" (of short stories, none of which I've read) who's probably more famous for scripting the great It! The Terror From Beyond Space, plus a handful of Star Trek episodes and It's a Good Life from The Twilight Zone.
 Bixby made his name in the fifties and sixties, and it really, really shows; The film's central conversation does cover some good points - mainly about how hard it is for an individual to form an accurate image of a larger picture, and it's moderately enjoyable, but mostly it feels stilted, a little outdated and... annoyingly quaint, is maybe the best way I can describe it.

 The weight these people assign to the protagonist's word is outsized. They are shocked! They are amazed! They react to his declarations as an affront to good sense and property, while obviously being deeply affected! I'm exaggerating, of course, but not that much. Characterization, which is indispensable in what's essentially a chamber piece, is extremely scattershot, and everyone serves as fairly transparent mouth pieces for whatever idea the author is pursuing. An author, I should add, firmly rooted in the golden age of sci fi- an era notorious for giving very little importance to people's inner lives*.

 Given all that, it's hard to fault the actors for failing to breathe lives into their roles. Smith is actually pretty good as the protagonist, whom he plays with a quiet, self-effacing charm. The great, late Tony Todd steals the show as a characteristically (for Todd) soulful professor. Everyone else... oof. Katt is kind of enjoyable as a douchebaggy professor who drags a student date (Alexis Thorpe) to the party** - only kind of enjoyable, though, mostly he's just there as an unreasonable foil and little else. The rest of the cast consists of TV actors, and they fail to provide any of the naturalism or charisma that the film sorely needs. Oh, and poor Peterson's sole function is to be in love with the protagonist and completely, utterly support him no matter what. I have no idea if she's any good because she's completely wasted -both as an actress and as a character. At least she looks really nice.

 So all that's left is the ideas the film discusses... and aside from some meditations on subjectivity, they're pretty basic and on-the-nose; Dorm-room philosophy. There's a silly, kind of fun theological bombshell dropped at one point (directly stolen from a book by Michael Moorcock), but it only throws dirt on Christianity - Buddhism, as usual, gets off scott-free.

 The form of the debate is pretty poor, as well. The professors make for poor inquisitors: it seems to me that proving the guy is telling the truth would be as easy as "write this paragraph that I'm going to dictate in every language you know", but they insist in throwing slowballs and being in (sometimes reluctant, but usually vocal) awe of him instead.

 Director Richard Schenkman actually has a pretty fun, trashy resumé (he's directed entries in both the Angel and I Spit in Your Grave series!) but this is, by form and necessity, an extremely subdued film. There's some attempt to give the film some variation - a couple of walks outside the cabin, lots of shuffling around, some movers taking stuff away, giving the film's one set some variety - but this is a very low budget production... as will become immediately clear by the extremely TV Movie title credits.

 I think, given how much I like the idea of the film, and its built-in cosiness, I might have still given it a pass even with all the ways it falls short. But in a desperate attempt to end the film with an exclamation sign, there's an event so idiotic, so contrived, that it completely ruined any goodwill that had been accrued up to that point, and made all of the failings that much more glaring.

 The film ends with a trailer for a sequel that looks so awful it made me morbidly curious; But a friend confirms that yes, it is exactly as awful as it looks, and completely devoid of any interest. Thanks Matt, your sacrifice was not in vain.

 *: All of which makes me think this clearly needed to have been written by a new wave author; Imagine what Roger Zelazny (who wrote his share about immortals) or Rob Silverberg could have done with it.

**: No one even raises an eyebrow.

Tales From the Lodge

 Five friends and a plus one get together in a remote lakeside cabin to spread the ashes of a friend who died there a year prior. They tell each other spooky stories to while away the hours, but soon they discover they might be in a spooky story of their own.

 Yes, it's another anthology film, but the structure is fairly different from most other portmanteau films, with the framing story (written and directed by Abigail Blackmore) being given much more importance than the tales told within. The other cool detail is that each of the tales is directed by whichever character is telling the tale. They're also narrated by them, so you get interruptions and a running commentary by the rest of the gang.

 As far as the main story goes, it's fairly routine and marred by an extremely ridiculous final twist that rings both completely implausible and is slightly wrong-headed. The poor plotting is more than made up, though, by an extremely appealing, colourful cast of very charismatic character actors (all TV veterans) sharing a very believable, lived-in chemistry. It's easy to believe these forty-somethings have known each other since uni, and it's a pleasure to watch them bounce against each other, even if they can be somewhat vicious - especially against poor Miki.

 Lady's man Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) arrives to the lodge with a new conquest, Miki (Kelly Wenham), in tow. Once everyone's assembled in the living room, as a spur of the moment thing he tells a really funny (and surprisingly creepy) tale about a confrontation with a slasher. Later, after spreading their friend's ashes in the lake (in a scene that audaciously swipes a joke from The Big Lebowski), the sharp-tongued Martha (Laura Fraser) honours the occasion with the best story in the movie, a hilarious yarn about a bad marriage, demonic possession, and lots and lots of sex.

I guess if you're going to steal, you steal from the best.

 After one too many jabs from Martha and an indiscretion from Paul, Miki angrily leaves the cabin. Russell (Johnny Vegas), the group's clown, tries to lighten the mood with a silly zombie aside, a cheeky and very short slip of a tale that uses up most of the film's makeup FX budget, as well as some cheesy motion comics-style art.

 Not a minute after the tale is done, Miki comes back from the woods in near hysterics after being attacked by a maniac while trying to make her way back home. The group discover their cars have been pushed into the lake in the meanwhile and that the phone landline has been cut (there's no cell phone reception, of course.)

 While trying to come up with a plan to fend off any attacks from the mysterious slasher, Joe (Mackenzie Crook), who has a terminal condition and is waiting for a heart transplant, tells Paul of an anxiety dream he's been having, making the last segment of the movie a surreal vignette. Then we're back to the final stretch of the main movie, where whole situation with the killer comes to a head.

 The cast is rounded out by Sophie Thompson in the main group (who is hilarious as the motherly Emma but doesn't get a story to tell) and a few others within the segments. I'd like to give a shout out to Tom Stourton as Zeke, the horniest, most intense ghost walk guide you could imagine.

 It's the acting and the script that really elevate the film; The dialog is bloody excellent, the tales themselves reflect the character of whoever is telling them, and it's full of low-key but hilarious jokes and running gags. You'll want subtitles on for this one if you're not a native speaker, as the British accents are thick and the naturalistic dialog is sometimes hard to follow. I also probably should warn that there's a twist at one point that can be construed as transphobic - I don't think it's knowingly hateful, but it did make me raise my eyebrows. Other than that, this is a very, very likeable horror comedy.

M3gan 2.0

 M3gan was a lean, very 90's throwback PG-13 techno thriller. Director Gerard Johnstone and scriptwriter Akela Cooper set out to sequelize it almost immediately, and their new story (Johnstone has sole scriptwriter credit) leant bigger, louder, dumber at every turn. The result is a two-hour monstrosity that leans closer to one of the latter Mission: Impossible franchise installment than to M3gan, an action-comedy that unfortunately indulges in all the worst trends of modern blockbuster scriptwriting.

 The plot rather cleverly threads two separate loose ends from the first movie - an unnecessary industrial espionage subplot, and the implication that M3gan (still embodied by Amie Donald and a boatload of special FX) had uploaded itself to the cloud. The industrial espionage has resulted in Amelia (Ivana Sakhno), a M3gan clone out in the wild, doing black ops for the US government. She goes rogue almost immediately in the prologue (handily setting up the film's action aspirations), then starts making her way back to the US, murdering everyone involved with M3gan's creation on the way.

 Cue the re-introduction of M3gan's creator Gemma (Alison Williams) and her niece/surrogate daughter Cady (Violet McGraw), who enjoy a somewhat closer relationship, still fraught due to Gemma's tendency to put work over her personal life.

 After a seriously ridiculous act of government overreach that sets the tone of just how stupid things will get later on, M3gan reaches out to Gemma and they form a sort of alliance to defend Cady against the new android that's hunting them all. Later on, they discover that of course the whole world hangs on the balance.

 The script for this thing is seriously overcomplicated, contrived, and dumb as all hell. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that it's the sort of plot that sucks the air out of everything else, making characters into puppets and driving them to make all sorts of stupid choices to line up all the pieces. And to comply with the modern blockbuster feel it also includes several mandated, very fake-feeling emotional beats to try and give it an approximation of a soul.

 Luckily it doesn't take itself very seriously. The comedy is not all that great, but the script retains a sharp ear for M3gan's ironic detachment (and Jenna Davis still hits it out of the park with her delivery). The original film's campiness also makes a comeback, predictably amped up - expect an expanded dance sequence, fabulous new outfits, and another song. On the plus side, there are a surprising amount of Steven Segal references in the finale, up to and including a very familiar-looking arm-break.

 Oh, and Jemaine Clement pops up as an amoral tech bro, and his performance is a joy to behold. I love it when you can see an actor clearly having a blast.

 There are quite a few action scenes, most of them with decent-to-great choreography. Unfortunately the action filmmaking is not nearly up to the task of capturing it properly, with piss-poor editing and blocking - there are several points where some of the moves seem to be edited out of sequence, or are at least poorly set up enough to be a bit disconcerting. There are some cool superpowered manoeuvres in the mix as well, although nothing that compares with excellent first fight in Upgrade. To top it all off, a fairly strict enforcement of the PG-13 rating (which, for example, forces a beheading to be played out off-screen*) robs the action of much of its potential impact.

 It's a huge shame; Early on a reconstructed M3gan trains against a kung-fu training dummy, setting up some expectations that the film will take its cues from Hong Kong movies. I wish Johnston had paid more attention to how they're shot.

 As a whole, M3gan 2.0 is just OK. I admire the shift in genre and the ambition behind it, but the overwritten, soul-less, messy story plus the way the action is shot killed it for me. That it's overtly campy and tongue-in-cheek raises it a notch above your Mission Impossibles, Jurassic Worlds or Fasters and Furiosers, but at two hours it becomes really hard to swallow.

*: It also leads to a very funny curtailed "fuck" after they use up their one allotment.

V/H/S/2

 Within just nine months after V/H/S was released, the fine folks over at Bloody Disgusting rounded up another bunch of new and returning miscreants to make another sleazy, gory collection of found-footage horror shorts. V/H/S/2 runs about thirty minutes shorter than the first movie, and that tightening really pays off. And while it's still sleazy as hell (we get a pair of boobs and a dong within the first few minutes), but it's noticeably tamer than the first film; I'd only choose "degenerate" as the sixth or seventh adjective to apply to this one.

 The wrap-around this time is about an entertainingly amoral private dick (Lawrence Michael Levine) who, along with his partner (Kelsy Abbott) is hired to find a missing college student. They track him down to a house that looks suspiciously like the one in the first film (and we even see a little footage from some recurring assholes) - there are a load of tapes everywhere, but no corpse this time around.

 I'd forgotten these films implied a shared universe, though it always seemed a bit half-arsed. This segment is written and directed by a returning Simon Barrett, but it's pretty forgettable aside from a goofy-looking bit of gore later on.

 Barrett returns for the first story (Phase I Clinical Trials) as a scriptwriter, paired as usual with director Adam Wingard. It follows one Herman (played by Wingard), the recipient of an experimental electronic eye that connects directly to his brain and records everything he sees (justifying the PoV approach).

 The problem is that the eye is a little more keen than is useful, as a cute woman (Hannah Hughes) who's run into similar usability problems explains later on. It's an excellently creepy little ghost story; Between this and V/H/S/94's Empty Wake, Simon Barrett is responsible for probably the most traditionally scary segments on these anthologies.

 Next are Eduardo Sánchez (mis-spelled as Edúardo in the credits) and Gregg Hale, both alums of the found footage film that kicked it all (Sánchez co-directed, and Hale produced) in a zombie segment that has a pretty fun first-person twist on the zombie genre. It's quick, vicious, technically accomplished, and the premise carries it a fairly long way.

 And then comes what's easily the best segment of the movie, and possibly in the whole series: Garth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's Safe Heaven. An Indonesian documentary (Fachri Albar, Hannah Al Rashid, Oka Antara and Andrew Suleiman) crew go visit the remote compound of a mysterious and controversial cult leader (Epy Kusnandar)... on the same day that their promised rapture comes.
 The tension is built beautifully as the increasingly discomfitted documentarians keep discovering just how fucked up things are, only for things to get more and more fucked up. There's a ton of gore, a lot of weirdness, and the action is shot with the sort of tense energy that both Tjahjanto and Evans can do so well. I've met some people who hate that it ends with a really goofy joke, but not me. I love this one.

 Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near the same amount of appreciation for the last story, Jason Eisener's Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where a bunch of obnoxious teens and pre-teens face off against each other in an escalating series of pranks before a bunch of feral aliens come to try and abduct them. It's remarkably energetic, but it doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the characters are hateful except for one very good boy who is cruelly put down. If that's intended as a provocation... well, good job: I fucking hate it with a passion.

 Aside from that bum note, V/H/S/2 is a blast: a high-energy collection of fairly distinct, gory tales - it's a shame that it chooses to go out on its weakest link, souring the experience somewhat. But on the whole it's easily one of my favourite modern horror anthology films.
 It was followed one year later by V/H/S Viral; I don't remember it being very good, but it was so poorly received it sidelined the series for seven years - which seems like an exaggeration. I'll revisit that one soon.

Ugetsu

 It's always surprised me how little so many classic samurai movies romanticize their roaming warriors. I probably shouldn't be, given that most of them were made while world war two was in living memory. Ugetsu was made less than a decade after the war ended, and its depiction of the samurai is possibly the most unremittingly vicious.

 The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, takes inspiration from an 18th century book of ghost stories (some them influenced by the same traditional stories which would go on to influence Kwaidan a decade later). But it's almost forty minutes before anything even remotely supernatural happens.

 Not that you'd notice, because director Kenji Mizoguchi makes the war-torn 16th century Japanese countryside into an uncanny, limbo-like expanse, and the roaming bands of wild-eyed samurai into chaotic, ravenous demons.
 In the eye of the storm lies a small village, where Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) and Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa), two potters, see an opportunity to profit by selling their wares to noblemen while supply is at an understandable low. Their greed gets the better of them, and after an initial venture they decide to head to a nearby city with their families. The trip, even the preparations for it, are harrowing, since their village is soon invaded by rampaging soldiers. 

 The journey is tense and masterfully presented, with a jaw-dropping centerpiece: a gorgeously shot lake-crossing that's unnervingly otherworldly.

 At the gates of the city, a concerned Genjurô sends his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and his infant son back to the village; he soon lets himself be seduced by a local noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, who might be the first instance of a pottery groupie I've ever seen); Tôbei, meanwhile misplaces his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) while assholishly pursuing his dream of getting some armour and becoming a samurai himself.

 So this is the part where the men let their greed ruin their lives, as foretold early on by a a village sage. Tôbei lucks out in battle, and his dishonourable means gain him great favour from a warlord - only to find that his fortunes came at the metaphysical expense of his wife's. As for Genjurô, he finds that his would-be paramour lives in a derelict mansion with her handmaiden and is clearly, let's say, vitally-challenged. That doesn't stop him from... kind of tacitly accepting a marriage proposal.

 There are a couple of elements in his story shared with a couple of Kwaidan's tales, possibly due to the common sources of inspiration; That impression becomes more pronounced once Genjurô finally makes his way back home for one final supernatural twist. Tôbei's story is simpler, and his fate harder to relate with since he's such a buffoonish idiot. Poor Ohama.

 I actually preferred the journey to the destination and the harrowing war survival story to the ghostly escapades, which is rare for me. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had seen this before Kwaidan (which came out more than a decade later), but I'd like to think it's more of a testament to how well those early war scenes are handled. It's a lovely, unique movie that despite some missteps (the final monologue is pretty enough, but works against the film's spell) has aged exceptionally well. And the lake scene really is an all-timer.

Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

 Rose (Nicola Harrison) brings her children to rural Maine from the UK escaping their father (Tom Fisher). They get a new house in the boondocks, and carefully start building a new life for themselves as the Marrowbone family.

 But Rose is very sick, and soon dies, making her eldest son Jack (George MacKay) promise to keep her death a secret until his 21st birthday so the family won't be split apart. And shortly after her death a man (presumably dad) comes back. With a hunting rifle.

 Cut to the credits, and then six months later, with the Marrowbones carrying on as their mother requested - Jack goes to town every now and then, maintaining the fiction that her mom is still alive (albeit sick) and courting a local girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) while his siblings (Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and a very young Matthew Stagg) remain cooped up in the house.

 The kids live in terror of some sort of ghost haunting the house, there's a pesky lawyer (Kyle Soller, who's also a romantic rival) insisting on house visits, and some missing money - but the film is mostly structured around the mystery of just what went on in those missing six months.

 It's a handsomely mounted gothic tale clearly modelled after The Others, written and directed by The Orphanage scribe Sergio G. Sánchez under the auspices of executive producer J.A. Bayona; That's a pretty good lineage! I wish I could be more positive about it.

 For one, the tone - which goes a little too thick on a sort of deeply nostalgic 'gee whiz' innocence - put me off immediately; The film opens with someone browsing a home-made diary with plush covers labeled 'Our Story', and a narration that's prone to make all sorts of melodramatic pronouncements.
 The characters are all just barely defined; Jack is the responsible one, Allie (the local friend) is infinitely understanding and forgiving, and loves Jack very much, and the younger siblings also can be described with a couple of adjectives each. Sollner's lawyer villain is a bit more fun, though the script often contrives to make him more of a menace, to provide a momentum that the film sorely lacks.

 The film gets by for a while thanks to some beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez and a drip feed of revelations regarding the situation at La Casa Marrowbone. But these revelations get more convoluted and more melodramatic as the story heads towards its conclusion; There's one admirably brutal secret at the heart of the film, but the way its consequences spread outwards to explain all the weirdness can get bracingly stupid. The script twists itself into knots trying to explain away every detail, and while there's some interest in seeing how the pieces fall into place, the whole ends up being a disappointing mess.