Alien Covenant 2017 2ND REVIW

This film may not have the entertainment and thrill of Alien 2 & 3, but it its so much more satisfying as a sequel (prequel really). The theme of a Luciferian intelligence lurking in technology ties back to the original Alien and also the original Blade Runner. I would argue AC and Prometheus are essentially bridging the worlds of both Ridley Scott franchises in structure, style and continuity. And why not, when the other Alien films (and especially Alien vs Predator films) really play a loose fanboy level of shared history, thats past, presents and future.

Now is the film about real world unsubstantiated conspiratorial possibilities? We don't know and thats where the fear as an audience becomes overwhelming in a pronounced EXISTENTIALLY human way. Juggling the metaphysics of the white man-created mythology is heavy, confusing, sometimes taxing but Ridley Scott is putting on a master teaching class about our shared human experience. He's educating you on the past. Why? Not to welcome you into an elitist club of intellectuals who worship ego and reject utopian progress, but to speak against abuses of any form of collective human power on Earth or in any kind of Heaven, God or man-made.

And yet there's a grim sadness. A depressed bleakness that highlight's a fragile Romantic soul that bleeds its heart for the suffering of others, rather than let them burn in the ravaging stages of any Late Capitalism.

Dullness & pain is felt in the muted aesthetics of Ridley's interpretation of not only the abstract themes of Survivalism, Cave Art, Primitivism, Tribalism, Sexism, Racism, War, Murder, Genocide, Apocalypse, Hell, Extinction, Limbo, Eternity, Nothingness, Nihilism, Horror, Fantasy, Mythology, Romanticism, Occult, Speculative, Science, Fiction, Media, Art, Capitalism, Socialism, Satanism, Christianity, Deitism, Dualism, Dialectic, Neutrality, Monism, Pluralism, Mathematics, Economics, Materialism, Idealism, Marxism, Postmodernism itself and etc.

Its a leisurely film, the kind old directors often make. But it still has enough emotional intensity, mental clarity and visual splendor to satisfy any audience I think. Its very tame in some respects. Subtle rather than outspoken or garish. I haven't always agreed with Scott's outlook on life and society, but I think he has grown as a thinker and artist and watching his descent & ascent commercially and politically has helped an entire generation mature through the shared film-going experience. And for that I am personally grateful to his work.

I think the film, most essentially, sets up a clever and radically original direction for the series. Whether that is retained as this Fox buyout plays on. I don't think Disney can survive this type of inflation so fast. The bubble has to burst. And when it does, the assets of Fox will go to someone who has more buying power than a cost-cutting Disney. I would love if Scott Free could buy Alien or Blade Runner just so Scott's vision can be preserved not in a capitalist sense of corporatizing with monopolists who cheat the market. But actually belong to the workers, unlike the exploited victims in Scott's films.

Walt Disney left an uber-moral, somewhat Stalinist version of rightwing Devil-worshipping brand of communist Christianity built on fleecing Believers for their money a(donations) and silencing their economic opposition as the true Devils. The Devil is a lie in the sense that to believe the character is to believe in the character. What I mean is that Christianity teaches to hate an entire group (Jews) while Satanism teaches to love a non-existent collective animal urge to murder and rape out of some primordial slime DNA's quest for fungal infection in order to reproduce. This scientific revelation has combined with a previous form of Atheism that now sees all religion as a shared fictionalized subjectivity but unconsciously leaving an objective record of human shared self-awareness. We have a hivemind built of psychic energy that seems to exceed time and space. Thats a very rewarding reality but brutal at times when too much order leads to spontaneous anarchy.

Scott's films vs the predominant American moralism in Hollywood. Scott is English so he gets it as much as any European director can probably get it. He follows Kubrick, Franco, Welles and Ridley's brother Tony. Admittedly Ridley Scott's work often feels too willing to comply with corporate interest and obscuring oblique censorship, but he retains a fiery voice that is Pro-Independence always. He's really the last mainstream director to still work freelance as a prolific commercial level. That may turn many off from the sincerity of what he's selling. But I think he's doing as much as he is allowed so he can help the widest audience while hopefully not fleecing too many idiots who don't get the knowledge.

So is Ridley Scott saying anything valuable in his message lately? Has he ever changed his message to sell out? Remember that he entered the film world as a director of big budget commercials and TV. So if anything he's probably started from the right and swung left as he's aged and seen exploitation and the ravages of modernism first hand. And he's still making the most elegant, technological, daunting and challenging films in the business and only getting sharper. Scott is one of filmmaking's masters and has he become one of its biggest "anti-heroic heroes"? Is he simply an Anti-Hero? Is he too a Villain to the complexion of the changing, conglomerized Hollywood product? I think so.

With Alien Covenant, Scott shows us that we create our own demons. To not believe in God is to believe in Self alone. As this robot sets out to prove he is God and greater than his own Creation, he never learns that he is merely a cheap imitation of his Creator's own faulted Will. Many of Scott's films focus on the blinded quest of Aryan supremacy, the fall of Western civilization in a perverse self-love that pits Self against The Other. Man no longer can love brother or sister, love or relation, counterpart or Self. The story of David the android is similar to Roy Batty or Pinocchio or Frankenstein's Monster or Lucifer, the original Anti-Hero. He wants to know what love is because his father gave him none. The search for "Love" as an abstract intellectual goal and not a natural, chemical, sensual experience is why David feels he must create a demonized, hybridized, most primitive and most deadly expression of his own lonely "superiority" complex. What starts in a factory traverses through space travel, global genocide and finally lab-created colonization of the universe. Scott paints a striking metaphor - a moving mirror painted in pulp fiction signs - to reflect the misguided and totally self-satisfied destructive impulses of White Man's fall from grace of God. His failure to become God.

Good Time / Wonder Woman 2017

Wonder Woman was a disappointment. A bit more generic, sentimental, corny and naive than expected, but it was a fair popcorn film for 2017's low standards. The problem was that on-paper and in reviews, WW mixes the genres of  superhero, feminist, war, spy, coming-of-age, mythology... but it doesn't elevate any of these genres. The combination itself is progressive and interesting, but the script is bland, cliche, missing big moments and the directing is just serviceable.

Patty Jenkins as the first woman to direct a popular superhero film got rave reviews but outside of the cute romantic dialogue scenes, she's just another studio director-for-hire basically babysitting an already assembled factory. Zack Snyder's action choreographers, storyboard artists and CG animators make the film what it is: a comic book come to life for 14 year old girls. But I didn't find the feminism to be anything memorable. Wonder Woman is strong yet naive... and thats all. She goes from wide eyed idealistic woman-child to slightly bruised idealistic woman (losing her virginity and seeing people die equals adulthood).

The film was surprisingly conservative. Very few women play a role, its steeped in the boring man-culture of WWI, the script doesn't make any radical observations on anything, WW is the secret weapon of a team of conservative men and ultimately she is a non-character until she finds a strong male hero. And the idea of a happy multiracial team of men and women in this past era is absurd. Not more absurd than a golden lasso of truth, but the film needed emotional realism & historical honesty.

This is the most successful DC film since The Dark Knight because it has the optimistic, screwball nostalgia of the original Superman/Batman films, but it needs more grit, anger and futurism for me to respect it as much as Batman V Superman or even Suicide Squad. It was more watchable than Justice League, so there's that.

Good Time on the other hand was a brisk, exhilerating watch, one of the best new films of 2017. Its as pure an indie effort as we will get, written, directed and produced by brothers who capture their own experience of extreme American poverty in the 21st century.

It starts somewhat unoriginally with a Buffalo 66/Dog Day Afternoon setup of NY ethnic rejects (one mentally challenged) getting involved serious crime and absurd melodrama. But it differs in that its spirals into a different chaotic journey closer to Italian NeoRealism than a dark satire. The film is an almost character study of a man with pure intentions who is forced to sink to lower and lower means to do "what is right" by him. Robert Pattison, like Kristen Stewart, is trying to wash off the Twilight series or a bad romance by taking riskier acting roles. He's fine here, but he's just the centerpiece for much more amazing performances and characters.

Its not the most powerful film but its message is essential and executed beautifully. Few films are attacking our economic and moral structures and very few do it with as much style and street authenticity. Having lived in squalor and met plenty of these people, the film resonated with me. These people are the biggest victims in life and Hollywood for all of its phony liberal posturing does nothing to highlight their struggle. And that struggle is so much more compelling than superheroes or spaceships or ghostly psychopaths because its the reality the other disposable entertainment is escaping from.

The Dark Tower / Happy Death Day 2017

I like doing year end lists simply because I'm forced to compare films I wouldn't watch otherwise and find gems.

The Dark Tower got scolding reviews from popular critics and middle class white audiences who were so much more enamored with the reboot of Stephen King's IT. Now I haven't seen that film, but its reviews from its own fanbase are cold. What I found in Dark Tower was a very modest, watchable, unusual and kinda bad ass adventure film. It was sold as a dumb shoot em up superhero-style film and while it is gritty, hyperkinetic and cartoony, its a family film. Its like The Matrix for kids. This film is bound to earn a cult following and, while it could've benefited from another script draft and a much tighter final scene, this is good popcorn entertainment.

I'm such a fan of this film for its very "woke" philosophical message. In a year full of mainstream Nazis, Illuminati puppetry in vogue and general corporate evil triumphing over democracy, here's a film about a misfit kid fighting apocalyptic White Satan with the help of his surrogate father, a black vigilante Jesus. Bold move from Sony, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman. I fucking hate franchises but I'll take a Dark Tower 2 if it sticks to its message of deprogramming tomorrow's leaders.

Happy Death Day was another cute teen-oriented movie. This one found major success as its another cheaply produced, decently executed and mega-promoted film from producer Jason Blum. In 2017 he gave us Get Out, Split, Amityville Awakening and probably some other shit. The guy is laughing to the bank on these "horror" films that really are spoofs and exploitations of the horror genre. Thats not even a real complaint but it is disheartening that he's averse to producing really powerful, visceral horror cinema. But his films have an indie/outsider spirit, good talent and they get young people interested in the theater experience.

This film is a reworking of Groundhog's Day (it doesn't deny it) and of course its inferior, dumber and cornier. The filmmakers kinda insult the intelligence of young fans and adults who must sit through this, but the redeeming thing about HDD is this it boasts the most complex female character of the year AND she's the protagonist. We see her have a full arc from obnoxious, self-obsessed bitch to empathetic, responsible young woman without any pandering or making her a perfect queen genius or a weak, fragile baby doll. Most of the characters are stereotypes and the plot is fairly predictable and there are no big laughs, but it will satisfy its core audience: young girls. And they have enough woman-hating/man-hating garbage filling their minds that a small bit of smart feminism goes a long way.

Split 2017

I wrote a favorable review this year of M. Night Shymalan's unpopular The Happening. I think its the most creative, topical and pleasing of the work I've seen. Split is a throwback to his earlier films - very Hollywood checklist, very moody and self-serious. It has moments of awkward humor and deep social commentary but its all stifled by the industrial, commercial nature of the story. What starts as a very creepy, reflective portrait of the sick Jungian archetypes of modern American structuralism drizzles into a lazy deconstruction with cop-out answers about trauma that were only clever in the 1950s when Hitchcock made them originally. The presentation isn't interesting enough and it all feels cheapened as it climaxes with an "Avengers" cliffhanger ending. Yes, this was all an origin/prequel/commercial for Unbreakable 2. That explains the boring execution and lack of inspired ideas as Shymalan is out to please "demographics" with superpowers, a "sexy psycho" Heath Ledger antagonist, child/sexual abuse subplots and impossibly brilliant teenage victims who are too often visually sexualized (not a good look when the film is about sexual victimhood).

Maybe its all a brave pervy confessional of its director with the psychoanalytic nature of the plot and this obvious hypocrisy of fetishizing adolescent white girls, a running theme in Shymalan's work. He blames his mom like every director ever - like Aronofsky's mother! this year- and delivers a bland Saw rip-off off that easy critic-bait. I found the film disturbing for the right and wrong reasons. This was like the 10th film this year to make softcore porn out of child-looking actresses and it seems like a male generational confirmation and/or a sexist self-pitying protest. Its gross, to me. Why not just show hot women and get over this disgusting Lolita fetish? Why keep drilling these nasty dark impulses into commercial films? That doesn't make it art. Elite Hollywood pedo lifestyle propaganda dressed as softcore S&M popcorn entertainment for teens. And this weirdness goes all the way back to 80s horror slashers and beyond.

Anyway, the film was too long, too slow and didn't pay off much of anything but shows another, more unlikable but vulnerable side of M. Night Shymalan who must be having a bad midlife crisis and dip in his bank account.

John Wick 2 / Raw

I skipped 2014's John Wick, but this year's sequel left a big impression. Now it feels like sequel because it has a semi-stock plot and Keanu Reeves is comfortable but maybe not as engaged as he can be. But the film overall is a thrilling, intelligent, non-cliche ode to Cold War espionage and modern gangster films. All with the Eastern religious principles and universal themes Reeves includes in most of his major work. The script again is clever and the directing is quite dazzling at times, making incredible use of the action and beautiful locations, but Reeves has become one of the true auteurist actors whose strong voice is unmistakable and very helpful. You can tell how hard he works on the quality action choreography, ironing out the script and keeping other actors on their toes.

In many ways, it feels like a showcase of ingredients sorely missing from other action franchises, a highlight reel of high action movie IQ styled into a film. But it doesn't feel like boring aesthetic exercise or pretentious masturbatory machismo. Its old school and very faithful to its inspirations (Bond, Punisher, Death Wish, Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra, Commando), but totally open to the ideas of Kubrick, Refn and more risky filmmakers. The film exemplifies its class with a great nod to The Shining, basing the look of a character on another, but NOT the personality. Thats how nostalgic influences should be incorporated. Creatively, distinctly and respectfully.

But films are ideological and I dig the message. Here is a person haunted by who he was. Unlike the Bourne films, he knows who he is now and has to fight to continue being that good person. But he also accepts the killing machine he still is and uses it as a weapon. This is kung fu Jesus, which Keanu has trailblazed and owned as a character archetype. Somewhere between Zen master and vigilante superhero, while weighed to a realistic world thats logical and pessimistic. And the whole ride ends with a fantastic cliffhanger that matches its unique worldview. I'm now a big fan of this movie's world.

Raw was not so fun. Its a bland "horror lite" story about the savagery of sisters and how awkward college age is. Indie horror has become saturated in films like this (Ginger Snaps, Excision, Tale of Two Sisters, Takashi Miike's chapter of Three Extremes). Its supposed to be a disturbing critique of Millennial morality (or amorality) but it comes off like a stuffy conservative exploitation of young people. Boring rave music, young girl's asses in the camera, candy colored blood all over the screen and a bizarre treatment of vegetarianism that is supposed to be mocking and supportive but just comes across boneheaded. The script is paper thin and minus its 2017 characterizations of young women and gays, its like any shitty slasher cash-in out of Europe from the 1980s except devoid of the softcore sexuality or moments of macabre or grue. I was surprised how tame this experience was after hearing it made audiences sick. Pussies.

Films like this are so typical of digital age indie filmmaking: focused so much on brief moments of visual splendor or "shocking" a soccer mom audience who will never watch this (except maybe the director's) that it can't be bothered on logical characters or creative shots or sustaining interest at all. On its most successful level its a dark satire about young women finding wild abandon after adolescent repression, but it never comes off dark enough or funny enough. The recently ended TV show Girls did it so much better, nailed a dozen of the same scenes and ideas too. And that show is quite passe now. I don't think its crazy to find influence in that show but this is a weak tribute.

Logan 2017

I don't get off on trashing movies often. I wish they were all good. But I love that I can trash this piece of shit.

I enjoyed the 1st third of this film. It was automatically the best shot and acted Marvel film. Generic and derivative, but I kinda dig the idea of Wolverine doing Skyfall. There are so many macho, dumb, faux-gritty, angry-white-man-in-the-future movies in the wake of Mad Max Fury Road, what damage could one more do? But then the charm of Logan wore off.

The script is such cliche-filled, overly-sentimental, racist nothingness. We've seen this movie played out 30,000 ways. I can imagine the pitch:  

"Its a modern noir/Western/jiu jitsu road movie about fatherhood and sacrifice and old school American values in a degrading post-Obama world. But the next generation will be like Wolverine! Girls can be tough too, if they act like men. And there will blood, tears and lots of sweat. Some blacks will sacrifice themselves for their superiors. And the bad guys will be real Nazi militant types to show WE aren't Nazis!" 

Between all of the corny tearjerker lines and white trash humor there are some amusing bits of senseless gore and practical action setpieces. This movie (minus the Emo Cowboy meathead shit) is almost indistinguishable from Deadpool. Replace the romantic subplot with the daughter subplot and boom! Fox specializes in these conservative fratboy lovefests that stroke white male egomania.

Look, I am not anti-white or anti-male. I fucking love film, the most white male centered artform there is. But fuck! The genre is dead creatively because its saturated in ridiculous, moronic, repetitive, juvenile white manbaby power fantasies and deathdreams. Thats why I didn't even bother to review the equally boring and stale Dunkirk.

Everything remotely watchable about this film can be found in The Toxic Avenger. Troma did the whole "gory, working class superhero" thing long ago and made it way more fun and way less pretentious. So sorry if I'm not impressed with your regressive propaganda. John Wayne is dead. Its 2017. Grow the fuck up.

Get Out 2017

I saved this film for the last weeks of 2017 as a Christmas gift to myself. I was quite delighted by what I watched.

Get Out is a dark satire casting the experience of being black in a white society with classic horror film tropes. Its already been compared to the Stepford Wives and described as a cynical spoof of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. Fair. But I'm more reminded of the Wes Craven film "The People Under The Stairs". The film lays out the mental exploitation, dehumanization and utilitarian mental slavery of blacks in Western culture with a kind of domestic thriller that only lampshades the violence of slavery and being ghettoized. All while remaining a flippant, hip date movie for blacks and whites to empathize over. Its kinda "Gone Girl" for Obama-loving Millennials.

Its actually a thin plot given a very smart, dynamic and bold treatment. Its not too cynical or disturbing, always remaining light and fun as the films listed above. Writer/director Jordan Peele is a real film student who combined some topical references to say something necessary in a fresh way. Would I call it a masterpiece? I don't know. Its themes were heavy, heartbreaking and finally cathartic to me, a person who has lived painful experiences like this. But the masterstroke is that it paints an optimistic crowd-pleasing climax that doesn't go for melodrama or grand spectacle or epic tragedy. This story rightly sticks to a happy ending thats earned and not beyond realism.

On objective technical merits, its a wonderfully directed film with expert acting, beautifully integrated plotting and non-traditional cinematography and a memorably original soundtrack. And thankfully there is no cliffhanger for a sequel. Imagine a film that completes itself!

This is a strong contender for Best of 2017 and already has the popular vote with critics. Its miles ahead of just about everything else I saw and its the most satisfactory and positive of the best films. You'll just have to see how I rank it on the year-end list :)

Death Race 2050 / Baby Driver / Dagon

This year the studio that bought Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 decided to lease it back to him (or at least, let him produce an independent film for them to distribute). In effect, is the biggest and best technically independent film of 2017. Corman still knows how to round up amazing talent and resources for a low budget product that its more than just product. Corman is such a genius because he's always stuck to the interests of the youth & working class who consume his films and includes an inspiring, transgressive message of independence and rebellion. Death Race 2050 is loaded with biting, smart satire and a late tonal shift that lifts it from dumb action romp to valid dramatic exercise.

DR2050 is somewhere between Idiocracy ripoff, Hunger Games spoof and Mad Max Fury Road tribute. Its still exploitation filmmaking, but its the Hollywood machine being exploited and not the viewers. Its also the most creative and socially conscious comedy I could find all year. Very highly recommended.

I couldn't get past the first 40 minutes of Baby Driver. It reeks of that desperate commercial pandering and pedestrian philosophy that I had to sit through from 90s TV and Hollywood. The protagonist is meant to endear himself by constantly lip-syncing to black music, twitching and pouting silently. Its supposed to be this heavy dick suck to Gen Z hipsterism like "Wow, they are so much more cultured and cool than us Gen Xer's". I'm Gen Y, so this phony, creepy, exploitative lovefest isn't impressive in the least. Its driven home by the casting of Kevin Spacey as Baby Driver's cheerleader and obvious audience surrogate.

Worst of all is that this film is an open ripoff of Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive. Those first 40 minutes are a big budget, whitewashed, suburbanite version of that film's magical concoction: A sexy getaway driver with a personality disorder, a hip jacket and gloves is in dept to gangsters. The film is built on its (dated in BD's case) hipster soundtrack and awkward "bad boy" romance. And its all done with annoying, zippy, one-liner dialogue and musical dancing. Its sooooo concentrated to appeal to teenage girls, soccer mom's and Rex Reed-type critics, which isn't a crime but its decidedly unintelligent, easy, fetishistic and insulting.

Whereas Drive was a deconstruction and total left turn from The Driver, Baby Driver is the sugarcoated, mass-produced version of the deconstruction that is likely unaware of the original.

Brian Yuzna & Stuart Gordon are the producer-director team behind Re-Animator and they wrote the classic Disney film "Honey We Shrunk The Kids" (not allowed to make it!) who have had an honorable career in the independent horror genre. Dagon is one of their weaker fare but its still very competent and risky for its time & place. Its a Spanish production that makes use of an awesome decaying Gothic locale and some fantastic actors, but the script is pretty ABC besides the creepy Lovecraft mythos. Its extremely violent & spooky but not suspenseful and the characters are flat. You have to be forgiving with a film this small and I think a ton of talent keeps it from the majority of it ever falling flat. I especially enjoyed Macarena Gomez as the main antagonist. She's a pint-sized, adorable but very threatening female villain.

I fall out of love with big budget Hollywood commercial filmmaking more and more. I don't even really enjoy low budget exploitation much anymore, but its always remarkable when some real artists get work in these fields. I'm inclined to support the smaller films because they mean more to the artists and have more creative freedom. DR2050 is a good example of a film that overloaded on universal themes, artistry and fun to make you forget how small its scope is. BD relies on tired big budget tricks and knicks recent low budget ideas to fool the masses, but is essentially a non-story. Dagon isn't a classic but its way more brutal, clever and well-made than films twice its size and half its age.

Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets 2017

What a refresher! Luc Besson directs a film that feels like his own personal answer to the Disney-fication of Star Wars. His classic Fifth Element was a tribute to the original trilogy and the SW prequels were inspired by Besson and it seems Besson repays Lucas with what feel like a 2017 Lucas film. Its a simple kiddie plot, but its helped by not straining for dramatics or false complexity. We get a cute romantic buddy action film set in an alien future with a great message of ecology and equality. Can't knock the only film this year with a graphic non-imperialist message.

The film is gorgeously designed, shot and directed like a Technicolor cartoon. Its a wonder that this film was independently financed as it resembles the best Hollywood had to offer. Obviously the scope isn't quite as grand and it doesn't have the cast of millions or wall-to-wall explosions, thus focusing on undervalued artistic tools like costume, staging, lighting, etc. The cast are not as established but they appear inspired and in the groove. Surreal cameos from Rihanna, Ethan Hawke and Herbie Hancock are badges of honor that this film was done out of love and not out of profit.

American media were embarrassing in their dismissal and celebration of Valerian's domestic failure. Thats where we're at. Folks are such brainwashed corporate consumerists that they root against potentially entertaining experiences so their team wins. Bizarre. And yes, Valerian is better than The Last Jedi.

Justice League / The Last Jedi 2017

I'm ranking all the major releases of 2017 so I bit the bullet tonight and tackled the two big franchise films of the season (illegally bootlegged, of course).

Justice League was quite a disappointment. WB is becoming infamous for studio meddling and its so painfully obvious here. What should've been the climax of Zack Snyder's brutal, operatic Man of Steel/Batman V Superman films is an uneven unofficial Avengers film. WB got rid of David S Goyer, the man who wrote those films and Nolan's Batman trilogy (and the undervalued Blade trilogy) and replaced him with some newbie and Joss Whedon. Whedon handled extensive reshoots as Snyder faced a horrible personal tragedy and its shows. Only 1/3rd of the film feels like Snyder's work (mainly the epic action scenes that save the picture) while there's just too much boring, unfunny character play. What made BVS so special was the conflict between characters. Here, there's no chemistry at all as they are played as playful co-workers. That style fits the colorful, family friendly Marvel world but not DC.

Its not a bad movie but its very generic. Superman Returns/Dark Knight Rises territory. I thought the casting was great, if wasted. The dialogue was the worst element but at least the script had a brisk pace. The plot was low on drama or any real message besides what has to be the most over-used, commodified empty sentiment of the 2010's: "Hope".

Perfect segue to The Last Jedi. Star Wars 8 is like the lighter, dumber twin of this year's Alien 8. Its an epic achievement of CGI, moody digital photography and franchise callbacks. But Alien Covenant struck me as so important because it sets up so much nauseating formula just to radically reject it while Jedi can't find any confidence outside of its knowledge of source material. But the problem with this new Disney trilogy is that each film is beholden to ONE old film at a time. Jedi is a remake of Empire in tone, visuals, settings, character arcs with a "surprising" reversal of the ending of Return of the Jedi (only because Force Awaken took Empire's ending).

But Episode 8 is much better than Ep 7. Its even more poppy, emo, silly, sleek and that becomes a distraction. If this wasn't set in George Lucas' old film it would just be another post-Harry Potter fantasy flick for teens. The drama is on that same level. Take a swig every time someone yells "Nooo!!!" or cries or stares into the void to a silent soundtrack. Its such generic melodrama and emotional exploitation, but it works for 4/5 audience members, right? I dunno. The film is facing major backlash and my takeaway is that audiences are quickly growing tired of Xerox-style sequels. They want futuristic science fiction, intelligent characterization and... newness. Ep 8 has too many dollars behind it to be a bad movie. Its watchable if very boring and overexerting. But I much rather watch Attack of the Clones for its awkward innovation and sincere sense of magic & chaos than a rich, warm but hollow redo of a better film.

The major failure is that Disney's films treat The Force as simply a Hippie superpower and not the political/religious allegory Lucas intended it to be. Thats what inspired a generation of fans to embrace it beyond the movies. It was based on something more than toys, one-liners and muppets.

The Last Jedi, like Justice League, leaves us after 2 hours of explosions with that bland non-message of "Hope". Things are awful and "the darkness" is winning (you know how much I hate this binary colorism Hollywood loves to sell) but keep faith that someone else will save you or things will just work out on their own. I like the pessimistic, pro-active moral of Alien Covenant much better: Stop hoping, evil won't lay down, FIGHT BACK.

This is what happens when our culture becomes too steeped in man-child culture. We have to put to bed all of the lofty idealism and fluffy entertainment and make films that are about the real world and how to survive. The evil villains in JL and SW have no motivation beyond "I'm bad. I'm angry." Why aren't the heroes angry? Why don't the villains see themselves as heroic? Again, Alien Covenant nailed this. Some damn realism goes a long way. Anakin Skywalker was manipulated by a fascist system for 3 movies before he turned evil. Ben Solo's reason is unknown. Actually, Luke explains that Ben was brainwashed similar to Anakin, so why would Luke not see this happening? How is the hero of Star Wars so stupid to let the tragedy of his father repeat EXACTLY? And, overthinking this, Yoda saw Anakin turning and prepared for it but Luke didn't prepare for Ben? And why did this chick even need training when she was more powerful than Luke within a few days? And did the writers forget about this? http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rule_of_Two This is all fanboy continuity but if you aren't going to pay attention to the details, why even make the film?

Answer: money

Mother! / Alien Covenant / The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Mother! is Darren Aronofsky's companion to Black Swan. Its like when Scorsese made Casino to cash in on Goodfellas: the director improves on some stylistic qualities, but it really was stronger the first time. To Aronofsky's credit, the theme is a bit more illusive and mature, but it really didn't need to be. At the end of the day, he's just showing off which films he likes by mish-mashing references and deconstructing genre tropes, making left turns on horror cliches and playing to the most literate viewers. But this "not remake" of Rosemary's Baby is a bit too blunt. Its trying to visualize the intersectionality between patriarchy & Western morality through the metaphor of childbirth. Again, Polanski did it so poetically and originally that this film can only up the modernity and mainstream surrealism. Aronofksy does what DePalma did to Hitchcock for years by underlining other artists nuances by beating you over the head with them. Am I crazy or does he reference The Giving Tree many times? Its another absurdist Freudian horror film for feminists, but not as entertaining, creepy or surprising as you would hope. There is one really effective scene (the one that caused a festival audience to vomit), but the film is still stale and overly long. Jennifer Lawrence isn't an actress I've ever cared for, but she's starting to show a bit less woodenness, although she's essentially just a sympathetic photography model as per usual. Javier Bardem is his usual warm but creepy self, but Michelle Pfeiffer steals the film and you wish she was the centerpiece of the whole thing.

I gave Alien Covenant a 2nd watch and I'm delighted I did. This is the best sequel of 2017. It works perfectly as a prequel to Alien and delivers enough of the canned formula to satisfy the masses, but diverts to create its own original plot, injecting some much needed newness in the saga (which Prometheus delivered too sloppily). Ridley Scott puts on a masterclass in scifi directing from what is a very thought provoking script about the morality of a superior intelligence that sees humans simply as fodder for a more pure and honest lifeform. Yeah, yeah, its essentially the plot of the first Alien, but the series has never returned to that essential theme with any success. Here, it is the entire premise. Its as if Ridley Scott is remaking Alien the way he originally envisioned it, divorcing it from the feminist gore, weapons & monster genres and deeper into the dark psyche of egomania, fascism, eugenics, Nazism, occult and other pressing fears rarely mentioned in the non-metaphysical commercial scifi we are used to. The villain here is an executioner judging humanity without bias, showing us our own monstrosity in the face of the monsters we have literally made into iconic anti-heroes. And in a way, Scott returns to the basic principles, obsessions and meanings in the old spaceman films of the 50s & 60s that inspired he, Lucas, Tobe Hooper, Lynch, Carpenter and a generation of dark genre directors. Ridley combines those new American influences to his European sensibility (and the experience he's collected working more consistently and with bigger productions). This film wasn't too popular because it wasn't Prometheus 2 or the same, tired Alien formula, but this easily rivals this generation's Star Wars films or Avatar. Its that well directed, written and produced. I'm very sad that this might be the last time Scott touches the saga he started as Disney just bought the franchise through Fox. They will almost definitely return it to a commercial teen action fanboy territory and we won't get a conclusion to what is a fantastic cliffhanger. But maybe Scott can talk his way into making it by throwing in more of those pesky xenomorphs.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is worth a watch. Its not the memorable, charming, grisly, risky affair that director Yorgos Lanthimos had with his preceding film "The Lobster", but its snarky enough, clever enough and chilling enough to satisfy. Its a great satire on class struggle, a comedy to the working class but a real nightmare for the upper crust "hoi polloi". Here is another film where the villain has a somewhat valiant mission of cruelty and the protagonists are just symbolic meat. The absurdity and shocks are tempered and there's a pronounced fetishism of surfaces and appearances. I kinda felt that the plot and characters were window dressing to arrive at the moody production design, grim performances and bleak moral worldview. It didn't stray too far from The Lobster, which is disappointing because it was that film's originality that won me over, not how highbrow it proved itself to be. But check it out for the lovely directing, clever if predictable script and a very succinct cast, practically carried by the exquisite Nicole Kidman.

Annabelle Creation 2017

I watched almost all of the first Annabelle and found it to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, given that its from this decade, well financed and yet remained a racist, rightwing propaganda piece exploiting 20 decent horror films unknown to a mass audience. But the people who hated the original said this was a "superior sequel". It was superior in its rightwing extremism, lack of substance, exploitation of old movies and general evil.

Refresher: Annabelle 1 followed a Conservative couple in the early 1960s starting their family but haunted by the evil spirit of a hippie girl who died. Their black female "friend"/servant gives her life to protect the family and atone for her own race's savage religion. The end.

The "self-sacrificing coon" is a favorite trope for Conservatives

Now the people who love this sequel are the mindless social liberals who are really conservative but vote democrat and like Beyonce. So when they say its better they mean the cinematography and money is greater. And it sure is. The D.P. has the talent for a better film but he brings the flavor of good films like The Reflecting Skin and Days of Heaven to this nightmare. I kinda hate him for that. Anabelle 2 or The Conjuring 4 is 2 boring hours of gorgeous production design and high tech effects sold as a film. The plot, acting and directing is non-existent. Its needlessly slow & uneventful to trick its already bought and paid for critics to claim it has "dread" or a "European sensibility".

The most defining and distressing thing about this film and many other faux-hipster cinema coming out of Hollywood is an open fetishization and obsession with female children. Dressing them up in fetish-y costumes, making them objects and not characters and just staging them in sadistic, meaningless power fantasies. Stranger Things, Logan, Fury Road, It Follows, Amityville Awakening, Wonder Woman all have these physically frail childlike or child actresses playing naive almost primitive Barbies with no spectrum of emotion, a kind of oblivious and damning virginity and a canned feminine submissive "strength". They are cast and directed to be these pretty dolls for ogling and nothing more.

This is the Hollywood exec's ideal female image

 Annabelle Creation takes it further by literally making the film a feature length warning to young girls to follow Christian patriarchy or you will be possessed and your murder justified. Also gotta love the Nazism of deeming the handicapped protagonist as bitter, vengeful and ultimately better off dead. This is woman-hating, liberal-hating religious propaganda on a mass scale and its no shock. The moronic rightwing public fear Hollywood is run by evil liberal Jews yet what real Leftist films have been released by a major studio lately? Any true leftist is anti-capitalist, so the major schlock makers are obviously Far Right capitalist statists totally relieved by this dark Trump age or bullshit-filled Anarchist Capitalists who rather feed their bank accounts than fight the power.

On a somewhat cheerier note, I marvel that this film broke records and its essentially the same formula as the films Charles Band has produced with Full Moon. All of the Blumhouse crap and James Wan garbage: criminally cheap, unoriginal productions based around dolls & off-screen supernatural hijinks with a Conservative, retro aesthetic. But Full Moon was always quirkier, more experimental and modest in their conservativism. They tended to make fun of their own party and own up and disown the Nazism and McCarthyism. Now Hollywood's rightwing indulge in it thanks to dog whistles from Mel Gibson and our president. What a bleak future for the big studio movies. TV, comics and literature are guaranteed to gain the monopoly on progressive storytelling.

The mantra of this new Conservative cinema is appropriating mainstream genres, preaching a more inclusive facade but working to dismantle feminism, multiculturalism, atheism, anything too "arty". They are trying to give us Liberal filmmaking minus all the nasty Liberalism.

Amityville: The Awakening 2017

I checked this out because I was raised on low budget horror films. Amityville: The Awakening is like a culmination of where the genre is for better and worse. The film was shot in 2014, faced 2016 reshoots because of "negative" test screenings and was a sizable success in foreign theaters. In America it was just dumped out on streaming with no fanfare. Its a shame because this film is a great example of low budget TECHNOLOGY today. I'm talking practical gear like the excellent camera, lighting and editing we now have.

But its also so streamlined that basically every film produced on this economic level is the very same in aesthetics. Worse the budget & technical aspects determine the creative. This film is automatically stunted by the minimal script, shooting days, casting, FX, etc. And this is bare bones. The film is a Frankenstein of stale cliches dressed up in some modestly modern direction. The score is dead, the pace is too tranquil for a horror film and its an identical experience of the big budget exploitation that inspires it. Awakening has no respect for its shared history with the rest of cinema. Its a cold commercial enterprise with no morals or values to share. It sets up a lot of gritty, dark, nihilist tropes and then feeds you kind of warmed over, totally utilitarian philosophy about nothing. Its a great showing of materialism, escapism and maybe its a bit more progressive than horror films from 40 years ago look today, but its not as experimental or energized or focused on entertaining or engaging you in some beauty of its art.

Despite all of that I think Bella Thorne & Jennifer Jason Leigh do a lot to inject some life and honor in this bad movie. Its a waste of Thorne to be honest because she has too much range for such bad scripts but she makes it an opportunity to show her acting chops, which are still green but. being a child actor, she's definitely learned a lot from other actors. She gets a lot to sponge from Leigh who has always been a tragically powerful and very capable B-movie actress. I think Leigh is stronger than this film which hurts her performance a bit. There's no range to the character so her forceful acting seems campy & hammy, which she's done well avoiding in her career.

Do we blame the producer & director or the production company? I think we blame the banks that invest in these films. They demand films fit something old & popular over potentially being important & entertaining. "Awakening" is so beholden to the past and playing safe, just making a cheap buck and exploiting its workers. Also the film has a disgusting number of gratuitously sexual shots of an underage lead actress. No surprise that this has ties to the Weinsteins. And again its the same dreck they've put out for 20 years. So maybe the fault lies with the current studio heads running the film business into the ground.

T2 Trainspotting (2017) / Willard (1971) / The Passenger (1975)

Danny Boyle scored a real winner with T2, the best sequel/spinoff film I've seen this year. It respects the original so much because its a totally natural progression as a story & personal meta-narrative. T2 succeeds because its not someone new giving their version of the old vision. Its the original vision just 20 years more mature and established. So many corporate reboots fail because they decide on a fresh update and re-treading. Boyle makes a great theme out of the past and uses his first entry as a stylistic gimmick, but he (and the material itself) clearly state that they are not suckered by a cheap nostalgia tour. The film is helped tremendously thats its working off a sequel novel, but only loosely.

T2 won't get its props because its one of the rare higher profiled films this year that wasn't for kids, teens or families. This was the only mature 2017 film I've seen that wasn't partly trying to pass itself off as exploitation or a "popcorn film with a message". But the film isn't overly bleak. Its fun, gorgeous, experimental, sincere, thoughtful and a bit abrasive. Its a self-aware mid life crisis for the characters within and outside of it, including our society. Its not interested in returning to the70s, 80s & 90s but analyzing the changes, positive and negative, and celebrating LIFE 20 years later. Its so grateful for its audience and the opportunity to step back into its rare lot in cinema history.

I won't say its better than the original but maybe equal. I didn't want a Trainspotting sequel but this is the film I didn't know I needed. It totally recontextualizes and romanticizes and in some ways eclipses the original. Maybe this is easier to find in European cinema than in American when I think about the charming and welcomed Ab Fab film from a few years back. They are more accustomed to picking up stories again and respecting the virtues of storytelling in commercial filmmaking.

Willard took me by surprise too. I remember the stylish but hollow remake from the 2000s and that both films follow a 1967 novel. I expected a brainless Psycho ripoff with rats eating people. This is much more sophisticated, at least the script is. Its a very introspective study of society's victims and the realistic circumstances that leave them reduced to animal behavior to survive. Willard creates a complex, intelligent metaphor out of its title character. He's a true anti-hero or tragic hero. And the actor Bruce Davison does a lot of good work in the role.

Now the production is not so ambitious but quite memorable. Produced as studios faced a recession, Willard is shot closer to a B&W 1960s thriller TV series like Twilight Zone or Hitchcock Presents. Its very bare bones and muted, but this serves the tone of the film. There isn't much on suspense or action, so we the directing is focused on fleshed out performances and a sense of nerve that creeps up.

But the film is more than a serviceable adaptation of a good story. It surpasses the original text from my understanding in that Willard becomes a catalyst for the zeitgeist of angry youth. It worked well for the political climate then & now. Millennials will relate to the economic and generational abuse this character suffers. He rises into an avenging arm of rebellion, a Marxist. And he suffers a fate that is more poetic and radically leftist than his modest Poe-esque fate in the original tale. He becomes a mirror for the failures of the Love generation and a casualty of class warfare, selling out his own ideals by following the cycle of abuse he set out to destroy. Its heady, very appropriate and shocking for a low budget horror film that could've wasted effort on FX and decor (like the remake and surely the upcoming re-remake).

Jack Nicholson might be the greatest film actor of all-time by body of work. He's made a long list of excellent films because he's worked with some of the best directors of his era: Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roger Corman, Polanski, Tim Burton, Scorsese and fit all of their esteemed aesthetics. The Passenger unites Jack with influential director Michelangelo Antonioni for a political/existentialist/postmodern/travelogue about identity and freedom. Antonioni loves to create surrogate characters of himself who take on harsh journeys into themselves to either triumph or crumble from their own reflection.

This is the 3rd Antonioni film I've watched and the 3rd in that timeline. Following Il Grido and Blow Up, The Passenger is an even wider and more abstract pilgrimage into the cinematic form. The director is fine playing off established tropes and motifs because he bends them in new ways, like he's revising a world view by performing the same story in vastly different ways. One big distinction is the change in female perspectives in these stories. In this one, Maria Schneider plays a radical youth who acts as a spirit guide or perhaps a siren who leads him to one of two fates. Antonioni might've been a Hitchcock fan because the film builds to an incredibly intense climax loaded with meanings.

"The Passenger" is a sure masterpiece like Blow Up before it, "Willard" is a very tuned in piece of mainstream-meets-counterculture that has aged terrifically & "T2" is a spiritual poem that lives up to the spiritual poem that inspired it. 3 great movies to enjoy forever.

Jeepers Creepers 3

I caught this despite the serious controversy around it. I knew the director served time for sex with a minor, but I didn't know that when I became a fan of the 1st film. It disturbs me but I trust the director is sorry for what he did and is probably just another artist trying to survive. I will feel terrible if Victor De Silva turns out to be some awful predator still, but I want to see new art so I watched his piece. Its a frigging free watch on cable, I'm not paying the guy. But it is odd that SyFy's politics allowed this. Progressive or just weird?

Anyway, its a decent sleepy watch. Not scary. Not overly entertaining. Not above the quality of a lot of "prestige" TV shows. It reminded me of bad straight-to-video horror sequels in the 1990s. Its the same kinda aesthetic & economic resources. The big difference is low budget technology has evolved and old cinematic tricks haven't aged. De Silva deserves credit for making a film that is well-crafted.

Thats about all I can say about it. I reviewed this film because I want to prove I'm fair. If I loved it I'd say it & if I hated it I would say it. This was super mediocre. The first film was a genuinely creepy minimalist horror film from the bleakness of the 9/11 era. The 2nd film was a campy, pervy softcore teen porno spoofing the sado porn of straight teen horror softcore pornos. Neither is great, but its unique and darkly human.

Pt 3 was hollow, stilted, gratuitous, depressive, uninformative and a little uniform. Its better than much of 2010s' ' horror, but its so dependent on Netflix, Hollywood, old horror classics, some obscure foreign influences & ESPECIALLY The Walking Dead.

This film wasn't as creative or worthwhile (or cinematic) as Cult of Chucky. Stick with that film. JC3 is just kinda gross & creepy and not in the good & honest way. We can pull the plug on this kinda Hollywood surviving.

Cult of Chucky 2017

The Child's Play franchise will go down as the best of the 80s slasher franchises that dominated pop culture once. Chucky has outlived & outclassed the likes of Freddy, Jason, Pinhead & the others. Only Leatherface stands next to Chucky as both had new films this year, but Child's Play has retained most of its first predecessor's charm, intelligence & horror credibility by keeping the voice of its creator. No, the Child's Play producers have gone a step further and given the auteurist credit solely to the writer by letting him direct. And Don Mancini has evolved into a formidable & singular talent. He's already one of the supreme directors of low budget horror IMO.

"Cult" follows the very strong "Curse of Chucky" from 2013 (the same year as TC3D hmm). That film was a pseudo-reboot that returned the film to its Urban Gothic roots as a serious mind-bending supernatural stalker film with a psychotic twist. That film was also built on Mancini's economical crafting of a vintage Hammer Studio-like atmosphere & VERY sharp social awareness and genre postmodernism & it was a much more successful experiment than the misunderstood and less popular Seed of Chucky.

Cult is not as successful as Curse, but there is so much to recommend. The plot is cleverly weaved, witty in its plot twists, surprisingly lyrical for a Chucky film and very hard to classify. Like Antonioni's Blow Up, the films of David Lynch & many European styled films, the main gimmick is perception. This is the most essential but underutilized theme in telling a story on film. Mancini has done his homework and even stretches it a bit. He makes some interesting comments about the nature of truth, reality, sanity, society & morality. The film works like an old school art film, not like a killer doll movie. In fact, there might not be enough Chucky for slasher fans. I think its an okay trade-off.

It fun to let the other characters in the Chucky myth basically drive the entire plot. Chucky becomes a Hitchcockian "McGuffin". He ties these vastly different perspectives together and represents different psychological traumas for them & that works best after 6 movies. These characters being the leads in different chapters all meeting for the first time. Very cool.

I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. It was more neat, bleak and open-ended than the previous endings. Even that is a twist on typical slasher sequel expectations. It leaves us in a new territory thats more abstract and gritty than anything in the other Chucky stories. I'm totally sold on Mancini's direction for the next film as its shaping up to be a very personal epic saga of his own demons & angels. 

Leatherface 2017

I caught this last month and let it gel in my psyche a bit. The film was shot in 2015 and the anticipation was unbearable for me. I love the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as much as I love any film and I have issues with all of its sequels/side-quels/requels/reboots/remakes/pre-boots. Can you believe this is TCM 8? Sigh.

So its an atmospheric, sadistic, kitschy, pretentious type of horror movie. Thats actually not that unusual these days. I actually wished they kept the uber-modern "popcorn" Saw vibe of TC3D, but no go. Stylistically this is the film that the franchise needed a few movies back. Its got way more teeth & class than the influential but numb 2003 remake. And its actually a psychological thriller unlike half the damn movies. Most important, Leatherface has the most original Chainsaw plot since the original. All of the other films are light remakes with varying degrees of original execution. LF fails on that front. It could've worked commercially or artistically if it had a more unusual approach instead of the "let's be 1970s! lets be as faithful as possible!" thing.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are a pair of remodernist fanboy directors from France. They make Alexandre Aja style gore films (a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox...), each a take off of some great horror director. They made a really crappy Tobe Hooper-inspired film called Among the Living, so they got this job. If you've seen their Argento-inspired film "Inside" or the... Argento-inspired "Livid", you know these guys are great stylists who have no concept of realism, logic or storytelling. But they can light the Hell out of a scene and squirt blood everywhere. Oddly, even with a semi-Hollywood budget, this is not the bloodbath or visual feast I expected. Bummer.

Redeeming it is the script by some Millennial screenwriting teacher. Its more of a deconstruction of modern teen horror, backwoods slashers and "Badlands" style hostage films. Yeah, its basically a poor man's Devil's Rejects, which wasn't a good film itself. At least this film isn't so gimmicky. Or its gimmicks are more interesting. This is a very nasty film. Lots of gross setpieces and inexplicably evil or stupid cartoon characters everywhere. Maybe its just the lifeless interpretation of the directors tho. Apparently the film was supposed to end with an elaborate massacre inspired by Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. So it was supposed to be campy. The whole thing would've worked if it didn't try to make a serious film out of such a tired and illogical premise. Again, this is hardly based on TCM. You get the impression it was an original script that had Leatherface & fam shoehorned in. That actually worked with a couple Hellraiser sequels and could've worked here if the writer were more original and the directors camped it up.

Fanboy note, the origin given is hilariously lame but also effective in the sincerity of its "14 year old at Hot Topic" angst. This is going to become a bonehead classic to the next generation of horror fans and thats serviceable. Tobe Hooper died the week that this thing debuted which is meaningful in some way. Maybe this is the last Massacre. Eh, I'm cool with that.

*In retrospect, I'm quite fond of this modest low budget film. Mainly for its style and production, but also the hammy acting, the muddled occult references and a genuine obtuseness that shines compared to something like "Amityville: The Awakening". Leatherface is a mixed bag with some great parts and hopefully its enough to re-energize the franchise and get these directors some real work.

Blade Runner 2049 - 2017

Here we go.

Who knows how this film will age with me, but I wasn't a big fan when I saw it earlier in the month. I felt a bit insulted and exploited honestly.

I'm not going to talk about the massive fanboy hype or push to give the DP an Oscar nod before the premiere. I'm going to try and avoid the fact that its a copy structurally, thematically and technically of the 1982 classic. Fuck that. Thats the problem.

The first film has to be covered briefly. Here is a landmark achievement in screen storytelling that went against the Lucas/Spielberg grain (love those guys btw) to present a cold, existential, cynical picture of our future post-corporate apocalypse and technical enslavement. Or is it technical apocalypse and corporate enslavement? Anyway, underneath its bleak noir deconstructionism was a radical existential question about "what is a soul?" Are souls only human? Can a machine have one? Where's the spirituality in a world where man is a machine and machine is a man?

It answers this (at least in Ridley Scott's original cut) with the theory that souls are attained/created by anyone who earns one. There are men without and machines/animals/objects with. In Blade Runner, Deckard finds out that he is a replicant, not "a real boy" in Pinocchio fashion. His entire life has been a lie orchestrated by his creators to hide the fact he isn't real. But he accepts it; that his dreams are pre-programmed and that his free will is an illusion. His guardian angel sets him free and assures him that he has attained his eternal reward. This deterministic view upsets people. "Don't tell us humans are the same as robots!" It upset Warner Bros execs and Harrison Ford, so they re-edited the film so Deckard is not an unconscious machine but a really boring, flat human with no spiritual journey... who just falls in love with a machine woman by random whim. They essentially eliminated the poetry, tragedy and transcendent spiritual victory in a metaphor about enlightenment. It was reduced to a "future cop vs cyborg" movie. Yawn!

Flash forward to the Reboot Era. "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a super success and 80s nostalgia is inescapable. So good ol' WB dusts off Blade Runner and create a franchise from this 80s commercial failure/critical touchstone. But Ridley Scott is only brought back as "executive producer", which means a humored consultant used for marketing. The directing job goes to Denis Villeneuve, director of many world cinema-influenced Hollywood thrillers and darling of new film criticism. I think they brought back one of the original screenwriters too. But this is the same WB that mangled Suicide Squad and ripped the nuts off Batman V Superman.

Watching BR2049 I couldn't resist the very spacious, digitally colored and expensively art-directed cinematography. The film is top notch eye candy. I have to say it fails to live up to the original Blade Runner in its lighting techniques, but almost no one would notice or care so I'll drop the point because visuals are not paramount to this film's impression on me.

Whereas Scott's film was so radically different from its class, Villeneuve's film is so radically the same: the same as the first Blade Runner and the same as every new "prestige" attempt at blockbuster cinema. Besides the effectively moody lighting, the sleek production design and frankly expected & redundant moments of replicants philosophizing "how human am I?", this is like Logan, Kong Island, Leatherface and the other 2017 genre films that are mimicking 70s/80s tropes and aesthetics. Sadly, none bring the originality, experimentation or storytelling craftsmanship of their influences.

We are in this moment where style equals substance to the wannabe cinephile because A. thats the easiest thing to identify about great older films on Criterion, and B. Bret Easton Ellis has incorrectly defined Hitchcock's theory of "Pure Cinema" to a generation of internet critics. What Hitchcock meant was film built around montage: the combination of shots to create a non-visual idea. Somehow Ellis has repeatedly defined Pure Cinema as the "visual over everything" and "aesthetics divorced from ideology". I understand how he could make this mistake. Hitchcock was more interested in visual narrative than audio or text. But he never meant visual storytelling as a singular expression. Thats just an easy cop-out calling card to identify Hitchcock. Hitch himself was sorry that he was known purely for his aesthetics by early critics. And to divorce aesthetics from ideology is to analyze half of the artwork & be a shallow critic. The aesthetics serve ideology. Cinema is intrinsically ideological, which is why its been used for propaganda since the beginning. This is why Bret hasn't become a success in filmmaking and his opinions on film are not taken too seriously. But he has a legion of fans, many pretentious, many alt-right, many ignorant on cinema. I think a lot of these people showed up to see 2049.

Now if we go by Ellis' standards, Blade Runner 2049 is a near-masterpiece. Lingering "dead time" shots of gorgeous but hollow visuals, creepily pampered actor faces in technicolor lights, every movement measured for a maximum textual impact. Its one of the widest visual palettes I've ever seen on a big screen. But there's nothing else under the hood. Its like a very gorgeous date who has nothing original to say but he/she took a philosophy class once. The original '82 masterpiece is like a date with a heroin chic model fluent in 12 languages who wants to argue about Foucault. Basically its a comparison between Sean Young and the 12-year-old-looking-20something who plays the hologram girlfriend. Style is nothing without substance.

2049 is a beginner's course on Blade Runner. It tries to boil down, paint by numbers & commercialize the original and like a pop star's mp3 cover of a David Bowie anthem on vinyl... it loses a lot in translation. It tries so hard to be taken seriously. It wants you to feel so much apathy, disillusion & wanderlust. "Damn, its hard being a Millennial!!!" But it doesn't illustrate any of this well. Essentially we should relate to this story as a sequel because there's another generation who gets it. Thats all. Just like Disney's Star Wars, the respect for the original text somehow grants a reward- except, nah. 2049 doesn't re-interpet the original worth a damn. It doesn't return to Philip K Dick's original novel for anything. Its a cash grab looking for hipster cool points only. And this is most of Ryan Gosling and Denis Villeneuve's history.

Best & worst of all, it retroactively canonizes Warner's shit version of the story where Deckard is just a man. Or does it? Deckard is neither, so 2049 is trying to be a sequel to both films, which is a cool touch, but also the only logical choice for a sequel to a film with 3 official versions. But either way you look at it, Deckard's return is very flat and wasted. The decades long ambiguity of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant is expanded to... "is he the father of the first half-replicant or first full replicant child?" Neither is that interesting.

The only way you can arrive at 2049 surpassing Blade Runner is if you are talking about the awful Theatrical Version. This is the most pretentious, boring, frustrating action film I've ever seen. And thats not a knock. I love Godard, "The Brown Bunny" and the lesser films of Bergman, Kubrick & Tarkovsky. But 2049 is still a crappy story underneath. No amount of shoegazing actors or post-ironic sexism will change that. And its sad because Blade Runner avoided all of that. It was a genuinely spiritual, psychological, romantic, feminist, speculative and socially relevant work of commercial art. This is just a lifeless replicant that needs to be retired.

*Always wanted to write a cheesy critic closing line like that :)