Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.

Three Films Make A Post: Her clothes torn away, screaming in terror!

Ant-Man (2015): Peyton Reed’s film is the clever little caper comedy superhero movie with bouts of perfectly appropriate sentimentality the Marvel film universe was looking for, and I, for one, am quite happy with and about it, and am now waiting with bated breathe on DC and Warner making the appropriate move. Ha, who am I kidding?

Anyway, I found this one a rather joyful experience that on one hand keeps with the Marvel idea of heroism, and on the other hand knows how to vary the formula, while making a lot of jokes I actually found funny.

Chopping Mall aka Killbots (1986): Keeping in mind the awful, boring tit-fests most of director Jim Wynorski’s movies are, this one’s a little oasis of quality. Things being relative and all, that doesn’t actually mean this slasher/survivalist killer robot epic is all that great, it just means its generally watchable, doesn’t break down under a cornucopia of unfunny jokes, and does entertain in its cheap and stupid way without anyone having to work to get through watching it. That’s faint praise indeed, but being perfectly watchable and generally entertaining, if not spectacularly exciting, makes this one of Wynorski’s best.

The Diabolical (2015): At first, Alistair Legrand’s film pretends to be another piece of Insidious-style mainstream horror, but it quickly turns into something more interesting, and not just through its much more controlled approach to jump scares. No, this is a film whose last act plot reveals actually make sense in the context of what came before and are in fact actual parts of the film’s narrative, and that does try to mix up various things we’ve seen before in ways we don’t necessarily have. Having said that – and also giving a friendly nod to some more than decent acting performances by people like Ali Larter and Arjun Gupta – I never truly warmed the film.

I think that has a lot to do with the overload approach it takes to its plot and characters, where nobody can’t just have a single problem, and no probably supernatural manifestation ever comes alone, which might give the film variety but also robs it of the focus it would need to actually make me care about its characters or its plot. Still, at least its interesting and trying to be more than just dross.