Celebrating 30 years worth of fanaticism and community in the cult of Ashley ‘Ash’ Williams.

Thanks to our Star Trekian utopia of VOD insta-satisfaction (“Number One, slap The Greasy Strangler on the view screen!”), it’s becoming difficult to remember the ruthless savagery of that bygone VHS hunt. I spent far too many days roaming my hometown and neighboring cities chasing down lesser-known Kurosawas, the Critters sequels, and the seemingly always elusive pre-Mad Max apocalyptic mindfuck, A Boy and His Dog. Too often I had to settle for less, and rewatch Police Academy 4 instead of the highbrow hilarity of Zapped! cuz some other Scott Baio devotee had the local Power Video on stakeout. If your tastes in cinema aligned with the Blockbuster new release guarantee then you were golden, but us degenerates with a predilection for Roger Corman, and movies made before our births were doomed to the endless quest. Which, of course, doomed our family and friends to our equally infinite rants for VHS nostalgia. After all, having dedicated entire days of our lives chasing down Cannibal Holocaust, we have to justify our obsession. It was worth it.

As I got older, the anger and frustration of the hunt gave way to pride and community. I was not alone in my fanaticism. That Scott Baio devotee hidden in the bushes was not my enemy, he was my lifelong compatriot. Two hands reaching for the same Evil Dead II tape on the shelf would not result in gladiatorial combat, but a black hole debate of KNB EFX vs. Tom Savini. The Evil Dead trilogy was (and still is) a binding agent for my friendship. I can talk all day long on all manner of film, but a tangential reference to Ashley Williams or Ram-O-Cam ingenuity will gain you immediate entrance into my inner circle of dork.

Very few had the privilege of witnessing The Evil Dead or Evil Dead II on the big screen. Sam Raimi’s original film is the very definition of a cult classic (crack open your Merriam Websters, it’s true), and while the sequel was a modest success for its budget, the groovy sect of Bruce Campbell was eventually built on the backs of rental sales. Fandom is a finicky creature; for it to grow, the individual in the community needs to feel like they belong to a limited group. The cult must appear small enough to feel special, but large enough to fend off isolation. It’s a sweet spot cocktail impossible to replicate no matter how many Machetes or Wolf Cops that drown the market. Basically, you need a film that’s successful enough to spawn a line of Rotten Cotton tee shirts to lure in fresh fish, and no more.

20 years ago, let alone 30 years ago, a VHS copy of The Evil Dead was as nearly impossible to acquire as Zapped! I didn’t have a chance to see that incredibly earnest first film until years after my obsession with Evil Dead II’s splatstick had developed into a full-blown mania. In light of the sequel, The Evil Dead is a challenging, possibly confusing watch. The micro budgeted spook story of Ashley “Ash” Williams’ encounter with an ancient demonic possession is an inventive monster mash that will forever continue to inspire filmmakers from around the world. If Sam Raimi and his friends could venture into the woods of Tennessee and pull off a terror tale like The Evil Dead than you can too.

Having suffered through the studio system for his sophomore slump Crimewave, Raimi returned to the horror genre in an effort to maintain his precarious career. Thanks to Stephen King’s glowing review of The Evil Dead (“…The most ferociously original horror film of the year…”), the director of Maximum Overdrive was able to convince his producer, Dino De Laurentis to back a second dip into the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. The original film had decent returns in Italy, and the infamous producer broke off 3.6 million dollars for Raimi and crew to resurrect the cabin set inside the gymnasium of a junior high school in North Carolina. Still working on scraps, original plans for a time traveling adventure to the Middle Ages would have to wait for the follow-up flick, Army of Darkness.

Failing to acquire the rights to the original film, Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel tossed continuity to the wind, and elected to recap/rework The Evil Dead into the first fifteen minutes of Evil Dead II. Ditching the college friends, the sequel kept Bruce Campbell’s Ash and his girlfriend Linda (now played by actress Denise Bixler), but rushed the deadite takeover of the ill-fated cabin in the woods so that they could speed their way into the Three Stooges hysterics that obviously drove their passion. Appearing less interested in plunging pencils into ankles or branches into vaginas, the entertainment of Evil Dead II is found in visual puns, pratfalls, and Bruce Campbell’s vaudevillian theatrics. It took the sequel for Sam Raimi to reveal himself as an auteur, and as such, Evil Dead II marks itself as a momentous coming out party for one of genre cinema’s most playful maestros.

Keeping that in mind, for Sam Raimi’s cartoonish vision to succeed, he needed his own Wile E. Coyote to torment. Bruce Campbell is the man with the cheezeball charm, and the elastic face. As perfectly acceptable as he is to terrorize in The Evil Dead, in Part II, Campbell explodes with hilarious yet often unsettling energy. One of the few humans on this planet who can actually sell comic booky, expository conversations with himself, Campbell’s Ash has no difficulty connecting with his audience through sheer persuasion. Certainly taking more glee than the deadites, Raimi delights in torturing Campbell through a series of rag doll stunts, and the man who would be king commits with sadomasochistic abandon.

Ash is a lovable dolt of a hero that we gladly cheer on, but through the process of rabid rewatches, we likewise appreciate the amount of bodily harm that has cursed his very existence. After decapitating Linda, fleeing the dark bowers of the forest, and experiencing a supernatural eradication of the daylight, Campbell grumbles a command inward, “I gotta get a grip on myself here.” But that’s the last thing we want. The true pleasures of the Evil Dead series come from Ash’s Energizer Bunny spirit. Kandarian demons joyously tear into his flesh and mind, but the S-Mart slacker keeps going and going and going.

These tortures ripped from the pages of The Book of the Dead do take their toll on our hero, and Evil Dead II does have room in its runtime for horror and sorrow even if it’s preoccupied with physical comedy. Ash does not shake off this punishment in the same way that other 80s icons may have; despite his best efforts, he is no John Rambo. Chainsawing off your hand after it goes bad, and bobbing with your animated furniture will put more than a slight crack in your sanity. The resulting howls that burst forth from Ash’s resulting mental collapse are riotous, but also deeply upsetting.

Who’s laughing now? Really, none of us should be. Linda’s beef jerky, stop-motion pirouetting results in a severed head locked in the vise of ye old workshed. Ash gives his lady’s dome a pointed index, “You’re going down!” but for all his gesticulating, he is destroyed by a psychological assault of romantic pleading. The manner in which Linda’s latexed fiend reverts to her old self is utterly heartbreaking. If not surrounded by guffawing deer trophies and snickering desk lamps you’d probably drown in sympathy. It’s an ugly scene.

Evil Dead II is a go-for-broke declaration of talent. Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel refuse to settle for a simple zombies in the woods story which could have easily placated its audience. Their kitchen sink is piled with undead girlfriends, psychotic appendages, wisecracking doppelgangers, well-meaning archeologists, revenge-fueled hillbillies, a gigantic rotten applehead demon, and buckets of red, green, yellow, and black blood (gotta keep that rating R with all the colors of the rainbow). If Raimi was going down he was not going away without unleashing a beastly bonkers mixture of genre upon the cinematic landscape.

Thankfully, fandom responded with a new religious order: The Cult of The Evil Dead. We’ve got tee shirts, action figures, video games, companion books, and a television spin-off looking to lure in newbies. You cannot drop a hilarious, gory cocktail like Evil Dead II on an unsuspecting market and fade away into obscurity. Sam Raimi is that rare breed; he’s a creator who was able to return to the property that made his name, absolutely reimagine it, and found encouragement to take his supposedly outdated Three Stooges heart into whatever tale sparked his fancy. Whether you wanted it or not, that heart beats forcefully in the bodies of his pulp hero Darkman, his western The Quick and the Dead, his spectacular Spider-Man, and Oz The Great and Powerful. And! You can find all of those singular exploits with the click of a button, as there is no need to declare war with your neighbors over a VHS tape.

Getting a Grip on ‘Evil Dead II’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not satisfied with the theatrical conclusion? Here’s an alternative.

This is going to be a brief post, and a first for me, as the video I’m about to share with you I haven’t actually seen, but it was recommended to me by my editor, so I have every faith it’s worth your while.

The reason I haven’t seen it is because this video deals with the hypothetical of how Rogue One should have ended. I haven’t seen Rogue One yet — I live in the Tundra, long story — but I am eagerly awaiting the home release and have somehow managed to hear nothing of the film’s actual end, despite my job and everyone I ever talk to, so I certainly don’t want to spoil it now with a hypothetical.

But you don’t have that problem, or likely you wouldn’t have clicked here, and really, I think the concept serves as introduction enough: From the How It Should Have Ended YouTube channel, take a look at how Rogue One should have ended.

How ‘Rogue One’ Should Have Ended was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

An animated fable.

The best stories are elliptical, their ends are new beginnings. This is certainly true of today’s Short selection, End of the Road, an animated film from Bri Meyer in which a motorist traveling through the desert picks up another at the side of the road at the scene of a very bad car accident. The traveler doesn’t seem hurt, but as he won’t speak, it’s tough to tell. Until it isn’t.

Meyer facilitated every single aspect of this film himself, from the writing to the animation to the editing, and as such it’s a very aesthetically cohesive short with every element informing the others. It’s a simple story with a heady conclusion and in its brevity there’s a chilling elegance that make End of the Road far more resonant than its runtime might suggest.

‘End of the Road’ is Just the Beginning was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The director dishes on industry bias, ‘Taxi Driver’ and turning a perceived setback into opportunity.

The buzz surrounding Prevenge, the pregnancy revenge horror film written, directed and starring Alice Lowe, is well-deserved. Prevenge follows Ruth (Lowe), a grieving woman who embarks on a killing spree and believes that her unborn child is guiding her in this quest for revenge after the loss of her partner. Chock-full of biting British humor, this mother-to-be’s rampage is both relatable as well as a refreshing new twist on the sub-genre that has often been plagued by rape plot lines. But most of all, it’s wickedly funny, which comes as no surprise considering Lowe’s remarkable career in comedy across the pond.

Although Prevenge is her directorial debut, Lowe has worked alongside some of the biggest names in British comedy for the better part of fifteen years, including Rob Brydon’s Annually Retentive, Horrible Histories, and Gareth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Lowe was part of Steve Coogan’s 2009 ‘Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters’ tour and she has appeared in a number of British comedies including The IT Crowd, Little Britain, and The Mighty Boosh. Lowe also starred in and co-wrote the 2012 Ben Wheatley film Sightseer and she has collaborated with Edgar Wright on numerous occasions, including appearances in Hot Fuzz and The World’s End.

But despite her impressive resume, Lowe was still was met with doubt about her directorial debut. “I’ve been making a lot of films for a lot of years, not as a director per se but I’m a writer, I’ve produced, I’ve been on set for more than fifteen years. I kind of feel like I’m over qualified to do this yet still you have this thing of like ‘Oh, are you gonna be able to do this as an actress? Are you gonna be able to direct?’ And I’m like but hang on you’re giving this opportunity to a twenty-six year old guy who’s never stepped foot onto a set and that’s not perceived as a risk but yet I am perceived as a risk, even with all the experience that I have? And I find that really crazy and weird.”

It feels hard to imagine Prevenge in anyone else’s hands, in part because it was birthed out of Lowe’s real-life pregnancy. “It was really a strange sort of situation where I wanted to make a film but I was pregnant and I was going to take time off because I thought thats what you do when you’re pregnant.” This initially led Lowe to turn down the chance to direct, something she had been wanting to do for a long time. But then Lowe realized she could turn what the industry often perceives as a setback into an opportunity. “I think its interesting that I wanted to make a film and the way I made a film was twisting something that would’ve generally been perceived as something that’s hobbling you in your career. I had to twist that to an advantage…and I was aware that there is a certain sense of like well you don’t think that I can direct a film but how about if I do it pregnant? You wont be able to say I can’t do it now.”

And so, Lowe returned with a new pitch — one that revolved specifically around her situation. “I just thought ‘Well, what if I made a story for myself as a pregnant character?’ And I sort of came up with the story there and then and I pitched it to this company and said ‘It’s a pregnancy revenge movie and we’ll call it Prevenge but thats probably a terrible title, we’ll call it something else.’ And they loved the idea. I had no intention of making my directorial debut while pregnant, that wasn’t part of the plan, that was just something that happened and I’m really glad that I did it now.”

With Prevenge, Lowe is putting her own feminist stamp on a genre that has seen a resurgence lately with the success of films John Wick. But unlike many of these films, where the audience is immediately shown the reason for the main character’s motivation, Prevenge slowly gives you insight into Ruth’s behavior over the course of the film. Right from the start, you’re forced to empathize with her based solely on her loneliness and vulnerability. For Lowe, this was intentional.

“I actually wanted to challenge the audience a bit to go well, what if you don’t know why she’s doing it, can you still empathize with her? Even if you don’t like her, can you still watch her? Because I always think we have this underestimation of female characters where we think if they’re not likable then people won’t like the film or they won’t watch it and I always felt like why would you care about that? No one cares if Travis Bickle is likable, you just watch the film and you understand what Taxi Driver is about and what it means. People even romanticize his character because they’re like ‘oh, it’s a symbol of loneliness.’ It doesn’t mean we have to go out and shoot pimps, we can still identify with him. So I just wanted this character to have this kind of maverick loner quality that wasn’t over-explained, that we didn’t have to know exactly why we should feel sorry for her in order to give her permission to be behaving like this. I just wanted to people to enjoy or be interested in what she was doing.”

In addition to Taxi Driver, Lowe was influenced by a wide array of horror classics when making Prevenge, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining and Don’t Look Now but also films “about liminal periods, like Carrie, a girl becoming a woman, [and] things like Dead Man’s Shoes or Red Road, which are British revenge movies that are very mysterious and fascinating.” While the film’s soundtrack is a nod to Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter.

As for life beyond Prevenge, Lowe told me she is already hard at work on her next film. “It’s still a bit under wraps because I’m still writing but it’s gonna be even more out there I think, even stranger if that’s possible. Still dark but kind of more of a conceptual piece which is quite exciting as well. And funny! Still funny.” If Prevenge is any indication, we’re in for something truly special.

Prevenge premieres exclusively on Shudder beginning March 24.

Director Alice Lowe On Reshaping the Revenge Genre was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tim Curry has stolen my heart and he’s taking it into Communist space.

Full-Motion Video games were a mid- to late-1990s fad that were either semi-playable movies (where you shot at bad guys running on screen) or incorporated live-action cutscenes into otherwise animated games. Think Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but on your grandma’s PC. They’re usually all as silly as you’d imagine, either aimed at a younger audience delighted to watch some over-the-top fantasy or an older audience wowed by the possibilities of technology. It seems like the perfect home for character actors and infomercial escapees to camp it up with little career risk and some quick cash, right?

The weird thing is how many A-list actors — or at least people you’d never expect — appeared in these games. What’s even weirder is how crazy most of their roles were. Nobody’s a heartfelt dramatic lead, they’re all chewing the digital scenery and revelling in this new media frontier. It’s a delightful embarrassment, like going through old yearbooks, and I hope you’ll join me on this trip down Random Access Memory lane.

1. Tim Curry — Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3

This is the motherload, so I’ll spoil you by dropping it on you first. The Command & Conquer games are notoriously batty — the Red Alert offshoots even moreso, taking place in an alternate war torn past. Curry’s edition (as he co-stars alongside Jonathan Pryce and George Takei), features the Soviets, led by Premier Anatoly Cherdenko (Curry), facing defeat versus the Allied nations. So of course they go back in time to kill Albert Einstein. Curry’s performance is, at its dullest, a Gwen Stefani song in terms of banana-ness. His best lines are in the clip below, which features Curry’s hilarious Russian accent, the director’s choice to keep a take that has him audibly and visibly laughing at the lines, and the multisyllabic elongation of the word “space.” Enjoy.

2. Christopher Walken — Ripper

Back in 1996, the hot thing to get into was video game acting. Apparently. Why else would Christopher Walken agree to be in a schlocky point-and-click detective game? He plays Detective Vince Magnotta, a hardboiled cop that simply doesn’t know what to do with his arms. This was before some movies were entirely green screen, but this acting was as stilted and strange as that similarly unnatural environment. Walken’s best delivery in the game, is when fed up with those around him: “Theeze gaiz! Are un-fucking-believable!”

3. Christopher Lloyd — Toonstruck

Speaking of things being, well, unbelievable, another 1996 game with live-action acting starred Christopher Lloyd as an animator that gets Cool World’ed into his own cartoon. Sucked into the animation, he squares off against a malevolent count (played by patron saint of hamminess Tim Curry) whom he must find and defeat in order to go back home where things have depth and non-primary colors. Another adventure game, Lloyd’s wild-eyed acting actually keeps pace with the wacky creatures around him, making this oddball game one of the better uses of the “real life person in a cartoon world” premise.

4. Clive Owen — Privateer 2: The Darkening

That’s right, a pre-fame Clive Owen starred in an amnesiac sci-fi space combat simulator alongside John Hurt, Christopher Walken, and Brian Blessed. Hearing the classically trained Shakespearean actor deliver the line “He was….reading my email?” as a musical sting signals nefarious activity is a joy to behold and a wonderful time capsule for how movies and video games have slowly collided over the years.

5. Brian Keith — Under a Killing Moon

Brian Keith, who played everything from The Wind and the Lion’s President Theodore Roosevelt to the excellently cranky (and excellently named) judge on Hardcastle and McCormick, appeared in a detective game as the main character’s cranky mentor. Gameplay technology hadn’t quite caught up with the storytelling ability of PC video games at this point, so it make sense these games would focus on questioning characters with pre-recorded phrases accessed by options like “investigate facts” or “investigate vibes.” Keith’s performance is one of the most understated on this list, but he also gets stabbed to death in an office by someone named The Chameleon, so let’s not pretend that’s normal.

6. Rob Lowe — Fox Hunt

Fox Hunt was a painfully unfunny razz of spy movies that stunt cast the loneliest Bond (George Lazenby) as its attempt at establishing a bona fide. But the best part is Rob Lowe, cast as a high-strung infomercial mogul with an army of clones. That you have to shoot. While freefalling from 20,000 feet. This is real and I’m disappointed its existence isn’t brought up regularly in interviews.

7. Joe Piscopo — Multimedia Celebrity Poker

The first thing Joe Piscopo does in a seemingly docile poker game is wave his hands magically at the camera while making a Three Stooges nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. Costar Jonathan Frakes bottles his shame inside his tasteful turtleneck as he and Morgan Fairchild just try to maintain some dignity as they sit in front of a pixelated window dealing cards. I’m not sure Piscopo ever did any acting as sophisticated as developing a poker tell, but he tells a variety of long-winded jokes at the same level of insufferability while bugging his eyes as widely as the Windows 3 engine could render.

8. Mark Hamill — Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger

I could go into the lore of Wing Commander and its tenuous connection to the game Clive Owen appeared in earlier in this list, but I think I’ll just leave this clip of Mark Hamill calmly discussing wartime tactics with a crazy Sesame Street lion-man right here:

9. Mark Wahlberg and Seth Green — Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch

I just couldn’t decide who to pull out of this one, so I gave this music video creation game dual headliners. Marky’s undeniable charisma and complete shirtlessness couldn’t make up for the game’s limited song selection or lack of primary music video clips (it’s mostly stock footage), but Digital Pictures, the company behind the series, produced Kris Kross and INXS versions of the same concept. That is, until they all tanked and the company went out of business. “But wait,” you may very soundly and astutely ask, “why is Seth Green here?” He’s the teen leading the story before you make any music videos at all. In fact, he berates his sister’s objectification of Marky Mark’s shredded bod with the rebuke that he is “a serious musician.” The ’90s were a strange time.

10. Darren Aronofsky — Soldier Boyz

That leads us to the strangest (and cheating-est) entry on this list. Darren Aronofsky isn’t an actor, no. He merely directed the video segments of this game. Which, since it’s an FMV game, is almost everything. I’m sure he was told what to do and, seeing as it was a year before Pi debuted at Sundance, he really didn’t have many bargaining chips to make aesthetic choices. Regardless, the sheer insanity of his involvement with a game revolving around some pre-xXx bad boy recruitment by the military for a top secret mission (that later allows the player to go to a woefully offensive Asian brothel) demands that I keep it on this list.

10 Crazy Full-Motion Video Game Performances By Well-Respected Actors was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I really, really hope so.

It isn’t official yet so take this news with a grain of salt, but according to Variety, Michael Shannon (Man of Steel, Midnight Special) is Fox’s top choice to play the character Cable in Deadpool 2. Previously Pierce Brosnan had been rumored to be in the mix, but according to the report, Shannon is the studio’s “top choice.”

For those who don’t know, Cable is Nathan Summers, the future child of Scott Summers, a.k.a. Cyclops, and Jean Grey, a.k.a. Marvel Girl? Phoenix? She’s got a lot of secret identities. In the comics, he comes from the future to lead the New Mutants/X-Force, and he’s an all-around badass: cybernetic arm, cybernetic eye, a penchant for cigars, big shiny guns, and a hatred of guff, in that he doesn’t take any. Attitude-wise, he’s like a cross between Wolverine and Sgt. Slaughter: a stern but fair taskmaster and the toughest guy in any room. He’s also the mentor/partner-in-crime/possible or occasional lover of Domino, who’s also in DP2 and will be played by Zazie Beetz (Atlanta).

As you can tell from that description, Shannon would be perfect in the role, and I for one would love to see him slinging dry barbs with RyRen.

But like I said, this isn’t official though you can expect it to be soon. Deadpool 2 is in production now for a March 2018 release.

In other news and points of interest…

…Adam Wingard released the first trailer for his Death Note adaptation for Netflix…

…the first trailer for the new Mystery Science Theater 3000, also on Netflix, also dropped…

…Paramount released a four-and-a-half minute clips from the opening of Ghost in the Shell…

…and this guy won the internet with his Nerf-gun remake of a pivotal John Wick scene.

Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including a discussion about when to abandon a TV show, a look at Evil Dead II 30 years after the fact, a video hypothesizing how Rogue One should have ended, and an interview with Alice Lowe.

And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.

Will Michael Shannon Join ‘Deadpool 2’ as Cable? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When you have all the money, you can be this risky.

Don’t worry, Disney has no plans to make a “sequel” to Beauty and the Beast. But that isn’t to say they’re not going to produce a follow-up to the enormously successful musical fairy tale. Walt Disney Pictures president of production Sean Bailey told Deadline this week that they are considering spinoff and prequel possibilities. Maybe that means we see Gaston’s origin story or a movie about the married characters played by Stanley Tucci and Audra McDonald. How about a gay romance for Le Fou?

The truth is, though, spinoffs and prequels are still each a form of sequel. There’s a matter of semantics that says otherwise with regards to why Bailey stresses those specific types of franchise expansion while dismissing the other, but they all continue the story, whether it’s forwards, backwards, or to the side. It makes sense, given the failure of Alice Through the Looking Glass, that Disney might be opposed to the term “sequel” as it implies the forward continuation. Yet who’s to say any other follow-up is safer?

Fortunately, Disney is making so much money lately overall, including the profits they’re already seeing with Beauty and the Beast, that they can afford to explore territory that has already proved treacherous for them. They’ve had no success with follow-ups to live-action remakes of animated features so far. Not with 102 Dalmatians in 2000 nor the Alice sequel last year, which very well could have just been a Mad Hatter spinoff and played roughly the same way (nor have other studios, as evidenced with The Huntsman: Winter’s War). Meanwhile, there has been interest from the studio in making direct, forward-continuation sequels to Maleficent and The Jungle Book.

Not every moneymaker needs to be broadened outward. Fans flocked to Beauty and the Beast for a straight rehash of the beloved 1991 animated version, to see famous actors cosplay as cartoon characters and sing karaoke. And they got a little bit of bonus material in padded back stories and extra music numbers, but they mostly were satisfied in getting exactly what they wanted. They don’t necessarily want another movie that primarily does something else, any more than they wanted the animated Beauty and the Beast sequels, which were direct-to-video releases for a reason.

Disney doesn’t always know what’s best, for fans or general audiences or their own bank account. This quote from Beauty and the Beast director Bill Condon in a recent The Hollywood Reporter interview makes that clear:

Before I arrived, they were rethinking Beauty and the Beast more radically, more like Snow White and the Huntsman. There was a lot of conversation about the War of the Austrian Succession that didn’t interest me. But then after Frozen opened, the studio saw that there was this big international audience for an old-school-musical approach. But initially they said, “We’re interested in a musical to a degree, but only half full of songs.” My interest was taking that film and doing it in this new medium — live action — as a full-on musical movie. So I backed out for a minute, and they came back and said, “No, no, no, we get it, let’s pursue it that way.”

Condon had the right idea and, beneficial to the studio’s shareholders, he was listened to. Now the same formula would seem the way to go with the other live-action remakes Disney has in development, and yet for Mulan the plan is to do away with songs. While that could result in a more interesting movie, it isn’t the most lucrative way to go. Originally, Disney was going to focus on a Genie-centric prequel as their live-action Aladdin, but the change of idea to go with a straight remake, songs intact, will be more popular.

At least for the time being Disney hasn’t made any indication they’re thinking of also branching out for crossovers. On the one hand, they already have the TV series Once Upon a Time, which mashes up their properties. On the other hand, realistically the only movie Beauty and the Beast could maybe link up with given their time periods is The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, specifically the Legend of Sleepy Hollow segment. Meanwhile, there is a script going around Hollywood that’s basically a Disney Princesses crossover, even though it will likely be made by another studio.

The concentration right now, and even this is not ideal for audiences seeking new, original ideas, should be the live-action remake track, of which there are about 14 titles announced so far and many others to add to the pile for many years’ worth of releases. Of course, once the slate is exhausted it could be too late to make follow-ups for whatever landed the best, since ideally you’d want the same actors. The time for No One Prequels Like Gaston is probably now if ever, with never being the preferred option.

Disney Goes Down the Rabbit Hole With Possible ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Follow-Ups was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The former film’s opening remade with the latter’s imagery.

This video might be a year old, but it’s a new favorite for me, combining two of my favorite films of all-time: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona from 1966 and Frankenstein.

It seems that while he was conjuring the idea for his 27th film, Bergman was hospitalized. It was there, in the grips of a fever dream, that he conceived the opening of Persona, complete with lifeless bodies under white sheets and other such horror iconography, religious references, and even the metaphorical transfer of life via a flickering projector. Sound familiar?

The fine folks at Filmscalpel thought so too, so they whipped up this nifty video that recreates the opening of Persona utilizing only clips from various Frankenstein movies, and I have to say, it is eerily congruent with Bergman’s opening, as evidenced by the placing of said opening side-by-side with the recreated one.

While the video only deals with the visual qualities of Persona’s first scenes, it got me to thinking about narrative commonalities shared by the projects, as well, including the search for identity, disastrous co-dependence, and the urge to make a life (in Persona metaphorically) out of nothing. Was Bergman seeking to make his own version of Frankenstein with Persona? Likely not, but having spent time with this video, it seems impossible Mary Shelley’s monstrous novel was far from his mind.

The Ghastly Similarities between Bergman’s ‘Persona’ and ‘Frankenstein’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Life’ Finds a Way to Deliver a Fun Thrill Ride Despite the Generic Setup

A compelling cast, an intelligent enemy, and slick thrills make for an entertaining slice of sci-fi/horror.

As much as films like Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures want us to believe otherwise, space-set horror films have shown us again and again that astronauts really aren’t all that bright. How else to explain the endless display of scientists and space explorers who encounter a previously unknown alien life-form and against all common sense decide it’s probably something they should touch?

That’s the immediate hurdle the new film Life needs to overcome even before the the first frame appears, and while the moment in question is a definite stumbling block the movie still succeeds in becoming a highly entertaining and often suspenseful ride into darkness.

A six-person crew aboard the International Space Station have just brought an interplanetary sample aboard, and they’re thrilled to discover it contains an alien being. It’s microscopic and inert, but with a little cajoling the creature stirs back to life and begins growing. The crew celebrates, people of earth rejoice (via satellite feeds) at the discovery, and then all hell breaks loose along with the alien itself.

The small, blob-like creature displays a frightening intelligence making it a formidable foe, and after a few chaotic moments the crew find themselves thrust into an emergency situation. The alien grows with each ingestion of, well, life, and soon comes to resemble a fleshy, translucent mix between the aquatic angels of James Cameron’s The Abyss and the re-animated colon and kidneys from Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. It works though, I swear. As the already small crew sees their numbers dwindle it becomes clear that they’re fighting for more than just their own lives — they’re fighting for earth itself.

Daniel Espinosa’s latest is a return to the energy and narrative vitality he displayed with 2012’s Safe House (and neglected with 2015’s Child 44) ensuring that Life is an exciting thriller without a dull beat to be found. The film’s only bumps come via a script (by Zombieland’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) that gets the big things right while dropping the ball on multiple smaller issues.

The film’s immediate strength comes in the form of characters who feel like fleshed out individuals. They’re real in their interactions and personalities, and none of them are of the obnoxious “jerk” cliche destined to cause trouble down the road. Instead they’re good people caught in a nightmare, and the characters are emboldened even further through engaging and charismatic performances.

Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Ryan Reynolds are the big names here, and all do great work, but their lesser known co-stars are every bit as compelling. Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Hiroyuki Sanada round out the crew, and all six deliver characters we hope to see survive.

Bakare plays the scientist mentioned in the opening above, but while we still get an otherwise brilliant man sticking his finger someplace he shouldn’t the script and Bakare’s performance soften the blow. The character is hobbled by disease, and not only does this new life form offer the possibility of medical advances but it also becomes something of a surrogate “child” for the man without a family of his own. “It’s curiosity outweighs its fear,” says one of the crew, and they could just as easily be speaking of themselves. Sure it still leads to disaster, but the motivation goes a long way in our acceptance.

Other script bumps fare less well. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that this is an older effort from Reese and Wernick, one pulled from a dusty drawer and sold after their recent successes. It’s lacking their humor for one thing and instead feels like a simple stab at a genre picture, but it’s also riddled with small annoyances in the form of poor choices by characters who should know better and plot beats that reek of convenience.

“How will we know which thruster the alien’s in?! Argh! Oh hey, maybe we can use these thruster sensors?”

I’m paraphrasing, but it’s pretty silly.

The other big issue is a Jason Blum-sized reliance on loud sound cues to let viewers know they should be scared. Rather than trust the terror of the situation and our concern for the characters in peril, Espinosa insists on punctuating “jump scares” with sonic stings. They’re really the only part of the film that feel cheap.

Life doesn’t really do anything new here — well, aside from the rarity of pairing two A-list actors in a genre piece — but minor stupidities aside it succeeds in delivering a thrilling, suspenseful piece of entertainment.

Review — ‘Life’ Finds a Way to Deliver Slick Thrills Despite the Generic Setup was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If we’re going to use it as an insult, let’s define our terms.

The film industry seems to have no shortage of words that either serve as synonyms or subsets of “adaptation,” most of which are brought to you by the letter “R”: reboot, reimagining, rendition, redo, revival, retelling, recreation, reanimation (and looking to the other 25 letters in the alphabet, version, homage, makeover, update). One, however, is not treated quite like the others, and that word is “remake.” When filmmakers bring it up by choice, it usually seems to be to explain why their films should not be thought of by that term, thank you very much.

Perhaps you know exactly what I’m talking about. Or perhaps you think I’m reading far too much into things. After going through over 500 pages of research on remakes and adaptations, I myself thought the latter just as possible as the former.

So I decided to collect some data.

I looked at 50 reviews of Bill Condon’s new live-action Beauty and the Beast, which I then categorized as being largely positive, largely negative, or solidly mixed, focusing on how they characterized the relationship between the new film and the 1991 animated version (for example, if they loved Dan Stevens and Emma Watson, but made disparaging comments about Disney’s new live-action obsession, I marked it as mixed). I just picked the first 50 reviews over 100 words in length that I found from a combination of Rotten Tomatoes-acknowledged critics and a Google News search. This left me with 25 positive, 16 negative, and 9 mixed reviews. No, I’m not winning any awards for experimental design any time soon, but I did put in a fair bit of effort (yes, 50 is an arbitrary number).

Of the positive reviews, 7 (28%) referred to the 2017 film as a remake at some point or another. Six of nine mixed reviews (66.7%) used the term “remake.” Every single one of the 16 negative reviews, meanwhile, referred to the film as a “remake.” [For the record: the IMDb blurb of Beauty and the Beast (2017) refers to it as an “adaptation.”]

Of course, that is not to say that every single negative review lurking out there on the internet of the new Beauty and the Beast includes the word “remake,” but I think the data provides strong enough evidence to call it: on some level, the word “remake” rubs a good deal of people the wrong way.

So, there we have it: “remake” is a dismissive term.

But — and here’s the real $1,000,000 question — what is a remake? Considering we have that veritable treasure trove of “re-” terms currently used more-or-less synonymously, can we come up with a solid working definition of “remake” that incorporates this dismissive subtext?

Now, defining and categorizing and sub-categorizing adaptations and remakes and updates and expansions and compressions and transpositions and homages and superimpositions and revisions (oh my!) escalates a lot quicker than one might think. I braved my way through a “eurhythmatic analysis” (no connection to the pop duo, sadly) of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and the only thing it made me certain of is that I will never be able to mindlessly enjoy those films again. I saw homage defined as a subtype of remake in one essay and a subtype of adaptation in another book, which would be a lot less ironic if I hadn’t then realized they were written by the same person. So either he had a change of heart or considers remake a sort of sub-umbrella of adaptation. It’s hard to say, because according to the index of the latter work (and a thorough re-reading of the context in which homage is defined), the term “remake” wasn’t worth featuring in a 300-page volume on film adaptation. All of this is to say that my research on this subject left me feeling like Palmer Smith (David Rasche) and J. K. Simmons’ nameless C.I.A. authority figure at the end of Burn After Reading. But I digress.

I do, incredibly, have a point in telling you all this, and the point is this: my usual method, in which I boil down some film theory and pour it over some recent releases and season with semi-obscure references to taste, failed me this time. That is to say: it’s (mostly) my own attempts at logic and reasoning from here on out, folks.

Exciting.

Okay. So let’s start with adaptation, and crudely define it as the basing of one work on other, pre-existing work(s). The line between inspiration and adaptation is at best hazy, at worst non-existent.

My go-to cinematic illustration of this is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later — or, as I like to think of it, my favorite adaptation of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Screenwriter Alex Garland has been relatively frank about his debt to Wyndham. When asked about his choice to introduce the protagonist, Jim (Cillian Murphy), waking up from a coma, Garland responded: “It was really to facilitate a lift from Day of the Triffids — where a guy goes into hospital and the world is normal, then comes out and everything is turned on its head.” But really, it goes much deeper than that. From the way Jim ends up in that fateful coma (a work-related incident), to the way he and love interest Selena (Naomie Harris) end up with a young female tagalong, to the military status of the non-mob-creature antagonists introduced relatively late in the narrative (Christopher Eccleston’s Major Henry West), there are echoes of Day of the Triffids running through 28 Days Later from beginning to end. Boyle’s film is basically the (fantastic) answer to, “what would happen if you modernized Day of the Triffids and conflated venomous tripedal man-eating plants and a blinding green meteor shower into a zombie rage virus pandemic?”

With that in mind, and since I am a “prepare for the worst” sort of person, let us then consider all films as existing on a sliding scale of adaptation, in which remakes are so far to one extreme of the scale that they actually fall right off. In other words, I am asking you to imagine remakes as both being adaptations and not being adaptations.

This is actually a lot less crazy than it sounds. I’m basically asking you to think of remakes and adaptations as night and day. We pose day and night as opposites due to the presence or absence of sunlight, but night is also a subset of the 24-hour periods we call days — a subset that is also in opposition.

How remake is a subset of adaptation is quite obvious: it is, by necessity based on some other work. How remakes are in opposition to adaptations is decidedly less so, yet one need look no further than the words themselves to see the conflict: adaptation has a decidedly forward connotation to it — adaption, evolution, process, change. Remake, meanwhile, is by definition going backwards — returning.

So there we have it: a conflict between remake and adaptation. But that still leaves us with a very important question: what the hell is a remake?

In the essay “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” Thomas Leitch defines movie remakes as “new versions of old movies.” This might seem incredibly obvious, but there’s an important implication here: if you are taking a story from one medium to another, it cannot rightly be called a remake. The inherent challenges of translating a story from one medium with specific advantages and disadvantages to a different medium with different specific advantages and disadvantages are also a considerable source of value (this concept is literally known as medium specificity). [Cross-language adaptations face a similar hurdle that prevents even the most faithful of such adaptations, like Let Me In and Let The Right One In, from being remakes.]

For example, the anime auteur Satoshi Kon explained his heavy use of live-action references in his animated films thusly: “I’ve always been inspired by live action. But it isn’t for the love of cinema. In fact, it’s more because I don’t want to take references from other animation. If you make animation from another animation, I don’t see the interest in reproducing the very same thing. I think that when you change the form, new ideas are born. For example, when you adapt a play for the cinema, the interest comes from the change of form. Allowing you to bring in fresh ideas.”

But wait, you might be thinking, isn’t that the whole point of this slew of new live-action Disney films? Like what Kon said, but in reverse? The answer to that question would be a big fat “no,” because while they might not be the driving forces behind these films, advancements in computer graphics opened the gates — advancements which have the ability to selectively erase the animated-to-live-action medium specificity hurdle. Disney’s not approaching the concept of, for example, talking household objects or a bratty prince cursed to resemble a bipedal water buffalo from a different angle — they’re all still fundamentally animated, just with greater verisimilitude. If they could have done these films with the technology available 20 years ago, they would have — just look at the live-action 101 Dalmatians.

Before moving on, there is an important subgroup that must be identified and weeded out before we move forward: the pseudo-remake. Considering the number of films adapted from other media, one must be careful dealing with “remakes” of adapted films. Is the primary point of reference for the new film the old film, or the old film’s source? In other words, is it a remake or a re-adaptation?

For example, no one in their right minds would call Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy a remake of Ralph Bashki’s 1978 animated film. Really, the only arguable case for the latter influencing the former is perhaps as a cautionary tale.

As the name would suggest, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looked much more to Dahl’s novel than to Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (of which Burton is not a fan).

The Coens themselves refer to their True Grit as a re-adaptation as opposed to a remake of Henry Hathaway’s 1969 version, Ralph Lamar Turner notes in “‘Why Do You Think I am Paying You if Not to Have My Way?’ Genre Complications in the Free-Market Critiques of Fictional and Filmed Versions of True Grit,” there are certain elements of their film — the severity of Cogburn’s drink problem, for example, that can be traced back to the earlier film much more than the novel.

You’ve Got Mail openly pulls from both Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and the play Parfumerie from which the 1940 film is adapted.

The disaster that was last year’s Ben-Hur attempted to present itself as a “re-adaptation,” but then had their version of the chariot sequence — i.e., the most iconic scene of the iconic 1959 film — front and center in their promotional materials. Take that as you will.

As with most things, there are a lot of grey areas. even when inspired by the original film’s source material, re-adaptations—especially when the earlier adaptation is a well-known work in its own right — often show at least some relation to earlier adaptations, either by homage or, in some cases, carefully avoiding paths already trodden by earlier adaptations.

Ultimately, though, if you’re going to call something a “remake” you need to be able to argue that that film’s content is pulled primarily from a single earlier film.

Much like Leitch, Björn Bohnenkamp and colleagues, in a Journal of Cultural Economics article, state that movie remakes “tell a story again that has been told before, in the same modality in which it has been told before.” But this is hardly sufficient. By either of these definitions, remakes include a large number of hugely diverse films with a variety of relationships to their predecessors. Leaving the definition here does not explain why “remake” is the preferred term of unimpressed critics everywhere.

The key is change — that concept of progress, of evolution, that I referred to earlier. While changing the medium guarantees this sort of change, it’s hardly the only way to get there. Going back to Disney, Maleficent is hardly to Sleeping Beauty what the live-action Beauty and the Beast is to the 1991 one. This perspective switch on a familiar story isn’t seen in movies a quarter so much as it is in literature, where novels ranging from Wicked to Grendel have revisited popular narratives from new perspectives, and though these works cross no media boundaries, people seem to have no desire to refer to them as remakes. So why would we refer to their cinematic equivalents as such? I say we shouldn’t.

The general rule of thumb I’ve come up with for differentiating remakes from all other movies based on other movies, after far too much research and time, is that if you can pitch the overall relationship between the old film and the new film in specific terms (i.e. “like the original, only better” won’t fly) without it sounding pathetic, it’s not a remake:

Maleficent is Sleeping Beauty from Maleficent’s perspective.

Treasure Planet is Treasure Island set in the future, in space.

Ghostbusters (2016) is a gender-flipped update of Ghostbusters (1984).

For films that fail this test, there’s one last hope: there is something deeply satisfying in a film that realizes its full potential — something almost as satisfying as a film which fails to reach its full potential is disheartening. Giving a second chance to missed opportunities has considerable potential as a motive for recreating an existing film, only Hollywood is not known for its history of seeking future success in the wreckage of past failures. It’s known for doing the exact opposite.

Which finally brings us to the real deal — the true remake. The reason for these films’ existence is purely economic. They seek to repeat a success verbatim, only perhaps writ larger. That is not to say that films that are not remakes cannot be made for purely economic reasons, but at least there’s hope. Remakes, to put it bluntly, have no soul or substance. That does not mean that they cannot be entertaining or enjoyable, that they cannot be well-crafted. They can be all of these things — or none.

Are remakes inherently repulsive? They certainly have some ugly qualities, especially if you peel back the curtain a little, but I generally put them somewhere on the scale between mindless fun and necessary evil (movie business is a business, after all).

Regardless, the new Beauty and the Beast is unequivocally a remake. Of all of the live-action “spins” on old animated films from the Disney canon that have been released since Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, it is the only one that leaves little room for argument on this matter. Maleficent completely shifted the perspective of Sleeping Beauty, in a way that also had significant thematic implications. The Jungle Book and Cinderella featured no such seismic shifts, but pulled from sources beyond their Disney animated versions. For the former, this included a significantly different ending, for the latter, some smaller but still quite important differences, like changing the timeline of Ella and the Prince’s relationship so that it’s a little bit more like an actual relationship and less hi/bye/I-think-you-left-your-shoe-also-marry-me.

The new Beauty and the Beast has an “exclusively gay moment” that has simultaneously snowballed into both a controversy and, quite frankly, a joke, and interracial kisses between minor characters who spend most of the film as household objects. It fills in a few plot holes and expands a few back stories. It changes nothing of any substance, but it dangles out little sparkly baubles of “inclusivity” and “feminism” to distract you from this fact. It’s a remake that wants desperately to trick you into thinking it’s something beyond what it is, which is actually the only part that I personally find irritating. Because it’s one thing to be a piece of cotton candy — that singular foodstuff that entirely lacks both physical and nutritional substance — it’s another thing to act as if said confection wouldn’t melt like the Wicked Witch of the West in a gentle rain.

But then again, it is working. After all, I’m sitting here writing about the film, aren’t I?

We Need To Talk About The Word “Remake” was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How the director’s use of god’s-eye view heightens tension.

We’ve talked before in these virtual pages about the bird’s-eye or god’s-eye view in cinema, that shot that takes place above a scene, independent of any participating perspective, and as such serves as a visual, omnipotent narrator revealing to us in the audience things the characters on screen could never see.

Tarantino employs this shot often, as do other directors like David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson, but perhaps no contemporary director is a bigger proponent of the god’s-eye view than Brian DePalma, who utilizes the shot in his various thrillers to heighten both the tension and the conflicting moralities his films often depict. DePalma’s is a cinema of subjectivity, it deals with what the world sees versus reality: Carrie as a mousy nerd worthy of ridicule versus Carrie as a victim of abuse worthy of sympathy; Eliot Ness as a stalwart of justice versus Eliot Ness as an uncertain neophyte. DePalma deals with shifting or hidden identities, ulterior motives, and other such intentionally-deceitful narrative facets, and one way he winks to us in the audience is through the god’s-eye view, which knows all but reveals only what the director chooses to let it.

Furthermore, DePalma’s use of this shot is intended to position those of us watching his work as voyeurs, people peeking in on slices of life we perhaps shouldn’t see, it makes us complicit in the secrets he’s revealing and thus instills a spectrum of emotions from guilt to guilty pleasure.

In the following supercut from La Cinematheque francaise, most-all the god’s-eye view shots from DePalma’s filmography have been assembled to reveal the various impacts the shot has on his particular brand of storytelling.

The Eye in the Sky: DePalma from Above was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Forget Disney’s recent reiteration of the classic fairy tale and instead look back at where the tale’s magic began on film, with Jean Cocteau.

The self-titled Belle and her captor-turned-prince Beast have returned to cinema screens around the world. In Disney’s latest live-action reiteration of one of their much-loved animated fairytales, Bill Condon’s live-action Beauty and the Beast has reintroduced contemporary audiences to the pair. With their return has come explorations of Disney’s representations of gayness, the question of modern viewing habits, and record-breaking box office success (the film has broken the March record for best opening with a $175m domestic gross).

This multiplicity of films on the same tale has been seen before, with the reintroduction of Snow White in 2012 arriving in the form of three very different films. 2012 brought the strong and defiant rebel ‘Snow’ in Snow White and the Huntsman, while Mirror Mirror restyled the classic tale. Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves proves the most thoughtful, with the director turning the tale into a more personal, humanised story.

However, Beauty and the Beast’s reintroduction into popular culture inevitably carries with it the films that precede it. Christophe Gans’ 2014 Léa Seydoux starring version is the next most well-known live-action adaptation, while Disney’s 1991 animation is unsurprisingly on the minds of both audiences and critics. Yet, most crucial of all is Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle et la Bête. Using innovative lighting and cinematography, personified candelabras, and Jean Marais as both villain and hero, Cocteau’s film can be seen to have inspired — unintentionally or not — the films that follow it.

Walt Disney himself had trepidation over whether to adapt the tale following the beauty and magical realism of Cocteau’s. Ultimately he did, but not without “borrowing,” to put it lightly, many of Cocteau’s signature ideas (with one example being the personified inanimate objects). It’s clear in Condon’s interview with Vulture’s Kevin Lincoln that the live-action director of the 2017 reiteration faced the same hesitancy, with Condon stating that he was intimidated “to a degree because it’s such a beautiful movie.” Condon continues by describing the timelessness of the fairytale, noting that it’s “one of those stories that, in so many different art forms and media, it does continue to stay relevant and get reinvented.”

Yet Condon seems to forget the influence of Cocteau’s story — that itself differs slightly from the original tale by 18th century French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s popularized rewritten work — on Disney’s animation that Condon would eventually turn into live-action. The only recent nods to Cocteau’s influence are the subtle “tips of the hat” in the live-action film and Tim Walker’s Le Sang d’un Poète-inspired photoshoot and video with Emma Watson for Vanity Fair. What’s more, Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête proves that the tale lives on in reinvention, but with over eleven reiterations (including Condon’s) since the 1946 French-language version, it has to be asked why Cocteau’s is the one audiences return to. (Short answer: because it’s the best.)

To understand Cocteau’s influence on the films succeeding his La Belle et la Bête, it is important to know the origins of the story he adapted. Often believed to have been inspired by the painting of the “man of the woods” Petrus Gonsalvus, who suffered from a condition that made him grow more hair than normal, resulting in him looking like a half-man, half-wolf, Villeneuve’s tale proves the most complex of the two most prominent verisons from 18th century French society. Villeneuve’s long tale contains most of what audiences see in Cocteau’s adaptation. There’s the dream-like atmosphere as Villeneuve’s Belle dreams of a Prince in the Beast’s castle, the use of magic as poetry with transportation through a ring and a mirror, and the sense of the heightened realist domestic world with Belle’s two vulgar sisters and three brothers. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s abridged version turns Villeneuve’s tale into an archetypal story with less complex and easier to understand characters.

It’s clear that the tale of Belle and the Beast’s longevity exists in its ability to be reinvented. And with Cocteau’s film, the story transcends the written word and the liminalities of reality to become, according to Roger Ebert, the “most magical of all films, […] giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal.” It’s a film, or perhaps more a poem, that isn’t intended for children nor adults, but instead for the poetic mind. Before La Belle et la Bête plays, Cocteau appears in his position of the artist, with us — the audience — as his friends. With a focus on his hands (a motif he has explored through many mediums, such as his first film Le Sang d’un Poète and his portrait photographs with Philippe Halsman) Cocteau describes how children will believe what we (storytellers) tell them. Writing on a chalkboard, he continues describing the simplicity of belief, asking audiences for a “little of this childlike simplicity.” The film begins not after the child’s version of “open sesame,” the significant il était une fois… (once upon a time), but after Cocteau’s signature with the star under his name.

Cocteau’s presence makes it clear that, despite his loyalty to de Beaumont Villeneuve’s original tale, this is his version of the story; and it’s a version that focuses on the clarity of symbolism and imagery. Cocteau understood that “only clean, unadorned photography could properly convey the sense of mystery he was after, making the on–screen world that much more immediate and believable.” Working with cinematographer Henri Alekan and with assistance from René Clément due to Cocteau’s ill health (that is exhaustedly catalogued in his on-set journal Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film), the director transformed the everyday into the fantastical and the fantastical into a world of familiarity.

Often, the Beast’s world, that is obscured by the natural scenery of forestry and bushes, makes more sense than the world outside of it. There’s the scene when Belle’s father, played by Marcel André, travels into the forest. With high-angled voyeuristic shots and Georges Auric’s score becoming louder the further Belle’s father journeys in, Cocteau uses the forest as a border between the world of Belle and the world of the Beast. Belle’s home and the Beast’s castle are separated, yet, through the mystery and magic of the enigmatic forest, borders and boundaries are crossed. To return to the simplicity Cocteau asks of his audience before the film begins, the filmmaker leaves the answers to questions in the forest; all that matters is the remaining poetry of the film.

In his collected essays in The Art of Cinema, Cocteau coins his essays on cinema under the cine-poetry term, calling them Poésie de cinéma. As Robin Buss notes in his introduction to the collection, Cocteau “asserts that the underlying mechanism of cinema is like that of dreams.” Cocteau is neither a filmmaker nor a playwright nor a writer, but a poet; and to him, poets operated not just in the form of poetry, but in the form of dreams. Importantly to him, however, cinematic poetry is not “deliberately ‘poetic’” (which steered into the world of elitist art cinema, according to Cocteau), but derivative from the real and the unreal; from what audiences believe and what they see.

What Cocteau allows his audience to see in La Belle et la Bête can either be seen as a manipulation of his viewer or his ability to use the technicalities of filmmaking as a form of magic. For example, Cocteau has described how he persuaded Alekan “to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince, in as saccharine a style as possible. The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teenage girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation.” A conflict between the artistic and the technical emerges here, as the ugliness of the Prince reminds the viewer of the lure and attractiveness of the Beast.

Yet, for the Beast’s actor Jean Marais (who also played what would be Disney’s version of Gaston, Avenant, and the Beast-turned-prince), the costume of the Beast was so uncomfortable that Marais developed painful sores while his skin was damaged by the glue used to keep the fur on his body. For Jean Marais — a person who looks more like a Greek sculpture than a mere human — turning into the Beast brought pain and ugliness for the actor, while for Josette Day’s Belle, and for the audience, the pain only came once the Beast had vanished, left only with the uncomfortably real-looking Marais. In fact, there’s the now well-known story that Marlene Dietrich, upon seeing the shimmering prince, called “where is my beautiful Beast?” The technical is turned into poetry here, with Marais’ real-life pain mirroring both the Beast’s internal struggle as well as the pain audiences feel upon seeing the prince.

With Marais playing three different representations of ugliness, Cocteau translates the magical realism of his world into his characters. Avenant, Belle’s brother, acts as a living embodiment of the ugliness of the interior self juxtaposing with the exterior. The Beast works as an opposite formula to Avenant’s character, while Marais’ final prince serves to remind the audience that Cocteau complicates the idea of the typical hero and villain. What’s more, Marais was Cocteau’s muse and lover, with some using this to read into the idea of a man hiding a secret, freed only by the power of love.

The return of Cocteau’s preoccupation with mirrors as vehicles to other worlds (that would be explored again in 1950s Orphée) is reminiscent of his belief that films are mirrors for both the artist who has made them and the viewer watching. Through this, La Belle et la Bête becomes not just a carefully crafted film of poetry, but also an experience. Each frame and image Cocteau and his cast and crew create layer upon each other, bringing the pieces of broken glass together in order to form a mirror through which the audience can traverse into.

Like the shadow that greets Belle’s father at the Beast’s castle, or the personified candelabras and fireplaces that haunt the film, La Belle et la Bête is a film that combines the human and the non-human, the real and the magic, and poetry and film. Ultimately, Cocteau’s film is incomparable to the films that follow it. Instead, it’s a story, a film, a poem, that exists in its own right; something that is recreated again and again, as seen through its influence on Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, or Philip Glass’ opera interpretation of the film.

Belle explores the many mysteries of the Beast’s castle upon first entry. She finds high-ceilinged rooms, luxuriously decorated to compensate for the sense of emptiness present, as if the objects can reflect the emotion of the Beast. She also finds the magic mirror, her ill father being her reflection. However, the most impressive part of the sequence is not what Belle discovers, but instead what happens to her upon her discovery. As she travels from room to room, instead of walking she instead appears to be floating. This hovering sequence culminates when Belle is in the Beast’s hallway. Her feet are off the ground yet she still moves, with the floating curtains both recalling the idea of a spectre and foreshadowing the cloth-as-theatre imagery Cocteau uses later in the film upon Belle’s arrival back home. As she moves, it’s ambiguous as to what it is that is moving her — her free will, or what lies in the castle. What is clear, however, is that this is what it feels like to watch La Belle et la Bête, or any Cocteau film.

It’s not evident whether it’s you, the viewer, who’s in control or Cocteau, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the sense of magic and poetry that lures you in.

The Beauty of Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

Seriously, you have to see ‘Hi, Stranger.’

I’m at a loss for words. This doesn’t happen often, fortunately, but as of this moment I am stymied trying to come up with a way to explain Hi, Stranger that makes any kind of sense. It’s Claymation and three minutes long. It was written and directed by Kirsten Lepore. It concerns a humanoid figure with a nice butt speaking directly to camera, to you, as though it (he?) was an old friend, or maybe even a lover. I saw it on Digg.

That’s honestly all I think I should say, except to offer my strongest, most sincere recommendation. There’s a delightful absurdity to Hi, Stranger, at times an uncomfortable absurdity even, but every single second is oddly captivating, like your hands are when you’re on really, really good psychedelics.

Sometimes you just need a little weirdness in your life. Make Hi, Stranger that weirdness today.

I Don’t Know WTF This Is, But I Love and Fear It was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A supercut of every eye image in Kubrick’s masterpiece.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film about understanding, both what it means to have that capacity and how that capacity can catapult a species further, both positively and negatively. It is a film about looking at the universe surrounding us with new eyes, eyes that don’t just look but that see, eyes that look through the surface of things into the core where understanding is waiting to be attained.

Narratively, this is a tough concept to get across, which is why plot-wise 2001 can feel lose, lightly-structured or even nonsensical in spots. But visually, Kubrick and his cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott are enforcing this concept all throughout the film with the repetition of ocular images, that is, images that resemble or recreate eyes.

Obviously there’s the glowing red pupil of Hal 9000, but everything from corridors to spacecraft to solar flares hints at the idea of eyes, seeing, and understanding. To prove the point I’ve gathered into one supercut all the ocular imagery from 2001. Some are more obvious than others, but all lend themselves to helping us understand this film about understanding.

For more OPS videos, visit here.

For more videos written and edited by me, visit here.

A Film About Understanding: ‘2001’ and Ocular Imagery was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How McDonagh uses violence as a window into the brokenness of his characters.

Prepare your virgin ears. A new Red Band trailer has just dropped for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, the long awaited new film from Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). The darkly comic, foulmouthed filmmaker hasn’t made a movie since 2012’s Seven Psychopaths (citing a desire to travel, as well as a production of one of his plays on Broadway), but it’s clear that his return to the big screen will be everything we’ve been waiting for. Three Billboards stars Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes, a hard-charging, crotch-kicking Missouri woman who, when police fail to turn up a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, pastes three billboards with messages indicting the beloved local chief (Woody Harrelson) for his inaction. McDonagh regular Sam Rockwell co-stars as Officer Dixon, the chief’s deputy, leading an impressive ensemble cast that includes Lucas Hedges, Peter Dinklage, John Hawks, and Abbie Cornish.

The new film represents a change of pace for McDonagh, whose previous two features have both been (somewhat ambivalently) about men with guns. In Bruges, his stellar debut, starred Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two Irish hitmen hiding out in the Belgian city after a job gone wrong. Seven Psychopaths, in a meta turn, featured Farrell as a Hollywood screenwriter named Marty, who laments the role of violence in his own films. Seven Psychopaths builds to a bloody climax, but after making it McDonagh resolved to change his relationship to violence onscreen. “With the next one [Three Billboards] there’s violent aspects beneath the surface of it, but there’s no onscreen violence and no guns at all,” he told the BFI in 2012, “And it’s a very strong female lead character, so it’s the opposite of [Psychopaths] in a way. And it’s a bit more serious.”

Leave it to McDonagh to see no violence in a film that (in the trailer alone) features a man on fire from a molotov cocktail, a woman being choked, another being punched, and a dentist falling victim to his own drill. But McDonagh has always drawn a distinction in his films between slapstick violence (such as Farrell karate-chopping a dwarf in In Bruges) and real violence, which he treats as “painful, truthful, and ugly, and not gratuitous.” This distinction is at the heart of Three Billboards: the real violence at the film’s center, the murder of Angela Hayes, underpins the humor of the film with profound grief.

McDonagh has always used violence not as a mere plot device but as a way into the brokenness of his characters, mining what he calls “the childish, stupid, sentimental nature of violent men.” Though he finds black humor in the callousness and contradictory morality of murderers, he distinguishes himself from filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino (to whom he’s often compared) in his resolve not to take any death lightly. “If you’re shooting 100 bullets like they do in most movies, they’ve all got to go somewhere,” he told Birth.Movies.Death. in 2012, “…and what happens if they hit an innocent?” Three Billboards takes place in the aftermath of just such a killing, fittingly featuring McDonagh’s first female lead contending with the childish, stupid men with guns around her.

Of course, McDonagh does not condemn these men either; the “villains” in his films are often sympathetic and always as broken as the heroes. Murder is always murder, but good and evil in McDonagh’s films are harder to pin down. Just as In Bruges features a conflict among murderers in the wake of a tragedy, so Three Billboards pits the drama in similar circumstances among innocents. No one comes away entirely clean, and all are resoundingly human. If the trailer and McDonagh’s comments are any indication, this will likely be the filmmaker’s tenderest to date (“fuckheads” and “bitches” aside).

No release date has yet been set, but the film is expected to come out later this year. To hold yourselves over during the wait, provided you’ve already seen In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths (do it if you haven’t), check out McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter. Like Three Billboards, Six Shooter finds black comedy in the aftermath of grief. The film stars Brendan Gleeson as Donnelly (a quiet foil to McDormand’s Mildred), a widower who encounters an irreverent young man on a train ride home. And yes, as the title suggests, it features men with guns. But already in his first cinematic effort, once can see the seeds of McDonagh’s ambivalence toward violence and sensitivity to its aftermath.

You could also just watch the Three Billboards trailer a dozen more times.

Martin McDonagh’s New Film Has a Trailer, More Broken Humanity was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Silly nostalgists, ‘Power Rangers’ is for kids.

There is a fine line between what is simply not for me and something that is actually objectively awful. For the most part, Power Rangers falls on the former side. I turned 40 this week, so the idea of being too old for anything is admittedly a frustrating personal issue right now. When Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was all the rage, I was a teenager working at a Toys “R” Us dealing with parents trying desperately to find all the action figures before Christmas. It was the latest craze. The Cabbage Patch Kids of the ’90s.

Now the kids who wanted Power Rangers toys when their popularity was big news are adults and filled with nostalgia. That is why Power Rangers has been made and presumably why it’s not a movie for kids. There’s also a strong fanbase who seem not to just be looking back to their childhood playthings but have been into the series all along. At the screening I attended for the movie, grown ups wore apparel and costumes based on a show for gradeschoolers. They were audibly satisfied with what they saw.

But if Power Rangers is primarily for those diehards and others who grew up with the source material, then it should be more like the show, just as cheesy and cheap-looking, right? But it also ought to be like the show in that it should be rated PG, so another generation of kids can grow up with the characters. My four-year-old son, who only knows of Power Rangers through merchandising, including the action figures that are still made, was upset that he couldn’t see the movie. It’s hard to explain why.

To him anyway. To anyone else, it’s easy to see why Power Rangers is PG-13. Nostalgia is a a big part of what fuels Hollywood these days. But many modern adaptations of ’80s and ’90s properties wind up doing well beyond the initial fanbase nostalgia. Transformers, another one-time toy craze was decades later turned into a billion-dollar movie franchise (which gets a nod in Power Rangers). Beauty and the Beast, a 26-year-old animated film remade in live-action form, just broke all sorts of box office records.

Power Rangers does nothing for anyone who isn’t cheering for the cameos of Amy Jo Johnson and Jason David Frank and the one utterance of “Ay-yi-yi!” by Alpha 5. It’s a poor attempt to turn something that pops with color and corniness into something darker and taken seriously. For 100 minutes (it takes that long for the costumes to go on) it wants to be a misfit teen drama recalling everything from Rebel Without a Cause and The Breakfast Club to The Goonies and Stand By Me, with sexual themes and deaths, only to climax with a nonsensical and dumb-looking giant robot vs. giant monster battle.

Power Rangers is like a syndicated TV series version of Chronicle, void of all that film’s strengths, meets the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie. At least in Power Ranger’s misguided desire to combine kitsch with something genuinely, non-ironically cool, the accomplished actor playing the villain appears to be glad to be there. Still, while Elizabeth Banks has campy fun with her role as Rita Repulsa, her performance doesn’t fit tonally with the first two thirds of the film, which otherwise only finds comic relief in autism.

Banks is also one of only two notable adult characters in the movie, which may be why I found myself rooting for her. One of the problems with Power Rangers as a movie for grown fans is there is no proper grown-up perspective that connects the material to its audience. The protagonists are teens, yet it’s hard to believe any real teens who’d identify with them will want to see or will like the movie. The show wasn’t for teens either, but it didn’t treat its teens like teens so much as a cartoon fantasy version of teens for little kids.

Remaking Kids Movies For Adults

I’m fine with Power Rangers not being for me, but I find it weird that it’s for people closer in age to me than to the demo it should be for. I accept that I like Riverdale, a TV series based on comics that I read as a child fantasizing about being a teen, strictly for nostalgic reasons while knowing it otherwise wouldn’t be for me. And it, too, does skew older than I was during my days as a fan. But at least it works for that modern young audience more than for old fans like myself, who tune in to see what we cherished as it exists today.

Nostalgia shouldn’t be the primary driving force of a movie like Power Rangers, nor should it inform it. Nostalgia is something that will draw old fans to something they once beloved anyway. That’s how nostalgia works. Hollywood needs to stop trying so hard to appeal to grown ups’ memories, especially if they think to do so means shifting tonally more mature while not also shifting more intelligently. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a charmingly stupid show, but Power Rangers is a terribly stupid movie.

‘Power Rangers’ is the Pinnacle of the Problem With Hollywood Right Now was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brie Larson signs on to tell story of free love and nineteenth-century presidential politics.

Last year, I talked about how it was Amazon’s big year of becoming a serious production house by buying a lot of serious movies. But there was something missing in that award-gathering arsenal: namely women. Contrary to their namesake, Amazon had spent much of their multi-level spying money on putting beefcake after beefcake onto the big screen. But times look to be a changing, as Amazon has announced signing on Brie Larson to both produce and star in a movie about Victoria Woodhull with a script penned by Ben Kopit, mostly known for having written some Brett Ratner movie that’s still in production. Woodhull, however, is known to most as the first woman to run for president, her 1872 candidacy for the office predating the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution by over thirty years.

Larson, like Woodhull, has always identified as an activist; earlier this year, she told Vanity Fair that “filmmaking is my form of activism,” explaining that hearing reactions to her first starring role in Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 had shown her that movies can make acute differences in the lives of their viewers. And since scoring a Best Actress award for her turn as a mother living in the captivity of a rapist in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room (2015), Larson has become a public face for the possibility of Hollywood to advocate on behalf the political lines she feels passionately about. In 2015, she told Variety that she wanted to drive movies that are “stepping outside of clichés and showing women and other races and other sexualities.” The next year, she was signed on to play Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a role that Vogue called the franchise’s “biggest female superhero, and a feminist icon.”

Even more recently, she refused to join in with the ritualized revelry associated with Awards Season, silently protesting Casey Affleck’s awards sweep. Accusations of sexual harassment and assault have dodged Affleck’s career and, for many, Larson voiced their disapproval of the golden-tinted validations.

Victoria Woodhull is a compelling figure outside of the tagline of her presidential run and one whose complexity has constantly evaded representation in the popular culture. Unlike Susan B. Anthony, whose religious convictions and celibacy have allowed her to become a pacified figure of purity nowadays cited regularly by abortion activists, Woodhull was married twice and identified often as a “free lover,” famously proclaiming that:

I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere… it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.

Outside of her involvement in the women’s suffrage moment, Woodhull was party to a number of other interesting women-firsts: along with her sister, she was the first to found and run a Wall Street brokerage firm and, later, the first to found a newspaper. Their company, Woodhull, Claflin, & Company, attracted a rising class of society wives and widows, madams and their better-earning prostitutes, all making a killing in new license of urban life still tethered to countryside morality. Their newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, was the first to publish an English translation of the Communist Manifesto in the United States. The New York Times also notes that both sisters also “broke other sexual taboos by wearing men’s apparel — business jacket, vest, and tie — with shorter, ankle-length skirts.”

The challenge of any historical feature that utilizes a popular historical narrative is do something interesting or surprising with a story oft-tread in the schoolroom. Ava DuVernay, for instance, chose to highlight a particular set of historical events with Martin Luther King in her justly celebrated Selma. As did Steven Spielberg when contemplating the similarly tread territory of Lincoln (2012). Steve McQueen, on the other hand, took a relatively lesser-known piece of abolition literature in order to make a movie that was celebrated as a brutal picture of American chattel slavery.

The women’s rights movement has longed for such a picture to reach similar mass audiences. One of the biggest critiques lodged at Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (2015), one of the latest high-profile movies to use the women’s suffrage movement as narrative material, was of its formulaic jaunt through historical totems. Liz Braun, of the Toronto Sun, called it “hollow at the cent[er].” The A.V. Club accused it of acute “dullness.” Woodhull’s story, however, offers less in the way of happy endings to decorate the post-credits scene. Her run for the presidency brought her in the negative spotlight of middle America and the anti-Vice crusades popular at the time. One of the many economic depressions of the late 1800s destroyed her business. She came to renounce both her beliefs and her country, spending much of her remaining life in England.

One of the few attempts to bring Woodhall to the popular imagination, a campy Broadway musical called Onward Victoria that starred Jill Eikenberry, closed after a single performance. But Woodhall’s image has remained in the back of the imagination: Onward Victoria was revived as recently as last year. “The problem with shows about Victoria Woodhull,” theater director Julianne Boyd once said, “has been that Victoria did so many wonderful things that it’s been hard to know which ones to deal with.” Decisions that we eagerly await Brie Larson making.

Captain Marvel to Run for President on Amazon’s Dime was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finally, a religion we can all get behind.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a good man just trying to introduce order to a chaotic world is wrongfully, violently, and publicly executed just for being who he is, only to return from the dead a few days later stronger, smarter, more capable than ever before, and practically immortal; he then uses this newfound power to “save” humanity from itself by separating the righteous from the wicked.

Likely you stopped me a line or two in because of course this sounds familiar, it’s perhaps the most told story in the history of the world: the Christ story. Only, I wasn’t describing the most-definitely-not-white Christian savior, I was describing Detroit Police Sergeant Alex Murphy, better known to you as RoboCop.

If you think about it — and lots of people have for a while now — their stories are pretty parallel, minus the explicit and gratuitous violence of RoboCop; the Bible gets all that out of the way in the Old Testament, or what we’d call a prequel.

But seriously, both men are a part of an organization bound to serve and protect, both are betrayed — Murphy in a sense by OCP’s mishandling of the department and their flagrant disregard for human life, preferring mechanized officers, and Jesus by Judas, of course — and as a result both men are killed in disturbing fashion accompanied by unimaginable suffering. After some tinkering by heretofore unknown powers that seemingly exceed the scope of man, both are resurrected from the dead and empowered in a superhuman fashion. Using this newfound omnipotence, both “men” confront the masses and confirm them to their way of thinking, albeit by drastically different means.

At least two key moments in the film would seem to support this allegory, starting with the execution of Murphy. The first shot takes off his right hand, which is spread open palm out, just as Christ’s was when nailed to the cross. Think of this scene as like the worst stigmata ever. And of course, Jesus is said to sit at the right hand of God. Then there’s the scene near the end of the film when Murphy, now RoboCop, strides across a pool of shallow water, looking as though he’s walking atop its surface like a certain Messiah was known to do.

Furthermore, RoboCop operates based on “Prime Directives,” or commandments that dictate his behavior, and he fulfills them without question, almost as though he has unwavering faith in them.

Then there’s this:

I don’t know about you, but that sure as shit sounds to me like something Jesus would have on a bumper sticker.

And of course there’s the film’s director, Verhoeven, who not only wrote a book about Jesus, he also confirmed this theory in an interview with MTV News back in 2010:

“The point of Robocop, of course, is it is a Christ story. It is about a guy that gets crucified after 50 minutes, then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes and then is like the super-cop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end.”

In the same interview Verhoeven also refers to RoboCop (the machine, not the film) as “American Jesus.” Good enough for me.

Verdict: this one’s true as hell, which is where we’re all going after all this. If you believe in that sort of thing.

For more Fan Theory Friday columns, click here.

Many, many sources contributed to this article.

Fan Theory Friday: Is RoboCop American Jesus??? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No Bad Deed Goes Unpunished at the ‘House on Willow Street’

O. Henry’s ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’ gets a devilish upgrade.

It’s not easy being a kidnapper. Months of planning, a tenuous trust in your cohorts, and a lack of empathy are just the basic requirements, and any slip along the way can lead to missed payouts or jail time. And it only gets worse when the person you abduct isn’t quite the innocent victim you expected.

Four crooks (including You’re Next’s Sharni Vinson) plan to kidnap a young woman with the expectation that her wealthy parents will pay handsomely for her return, but after snatching Katherine (Carlyn Burchell) from her big, spooky home they immediately feel as if something is off. She doesn’t look well leading one of the crew to wonder if maybe they’ve actually rescued the girl from a bad situation.

If only they were that lucky.

Katherine warns her captors that they’ve messed up royally and should just let her go, but the pull of a ransom is too strong. When calls to the parents go unanswered two of the crew head back to the house and discover several corpses, clearly murdered and dead for days, and even as they rush back to the warehouse they realize it’s probably too damn late.

Director/co-writer Alastair Orr‘s (Indigenous) latest gives the classic O. Henry short story (“The Ransom of Red Chief”) a feature length twist with House on Willow Street by swapping out the obnoxious little kid for a woman with demonic tendencies. Of course this also means the story’s hapless and outwitted kidnappers are also destined for a far worse fate this time around.

The foursome find themselves assaulted by grim visions that at first seem built solely on graphic shock value but are soon revealed to hold more personal connections to the haunted. Guilt and grief become fodder for a malicious demon to play with resulting in gory demises at the end of sharp objects and a very determined and foul mouth tentacle. Yeah, you read that right.

There are some wonderfully creepy and grotesque visuals to be found here both in the form of practically achieved effects and CG-enhanced monstrosities, and while some work better than others they all add to the hellish landscape our woefully unprepared kidnappers find themselves in. The film’s only two locations are the dimly lit house and the even less-well lit warehouse where they’ve bound their captive, and while both could have used a bit more lighting the horrific glimpses offer disturbing breaks from the darkness.

The first of the film’s big issues though comes in its feature length. There’s ultimately very little here as once the initial revelation is made we’re left with a series of somewhat repetitive incidents where mostly indiscernible characters are left on their own, besieged by nightmare visions, and eventually succumb to the dark side. Moments work quite well, but the space between them is often familiar.

Second, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the jump scare audio stingers are absolute shit in their volume and ubiquitous presence. Every single scare is killed with a loud sound cue meant to make viewers jump, and while it works for some people it’s a cheap and insecure way to build fear. It’s a shame as there are visuals and sequences that are more than creepy enough on their own without this obnoxious aural intrusion.

House on Willow Street offers some minor scares alongside its intriguing setup and visuals, and while far more could have been done with it the end result may be just effective enough for a late-night watch.

House on Willow Street releases today on VOD and in limited theatrical release.

Review — No Bad Deed Goes Unpunished at the ‘House on Willow Street’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cage re-teams with Simon West. Do they create more magic?

“I’m not the squirrel playing with his nuts here.”

This week I decided I wanted to check out a newer-ish Cage movie that I hadn’t yet seen. After sifting through the few Cage movies I’ve missed over the last fives years I finally landed on Stolen.

Stolen is a 2012 film that pairs Cage back up with director Simon West. You may recall that back in 1997 Cage starred in West’s directional debut, a masterpiece of a film called Con Air. These two getting back together is something I’m entirely on board with. Why it took me five years to finally get to Stolen I’ll never understand.

Cage stars as Will Montgomery, a notorious thief specializing in bank robberies. While he and his crew are in the middle of a heist that will net them $10 million, Will and his partner Vincent (Josh Lucas) get into a disagreement. The argument is about whether or not they should kill a janitor. Vincent wants to but Will does what he can to stop him and eventually Vincent gets shot in the leg.

Vincent gets in the van with the rest of their crew but during the chaos Will drops the money. As Will goes back to get the money his crew leaves him behind for the police to pick up. Will won’t go down without a fight, however, and quickly steals a police car. The chase is on.

Will certainly puts up a fight but eventually he’s captured and tossed into jail. Flash forward to eight years later and Will is released from prison. The first thing he wants to do is visit his now teenage daughter, Alison (Sami Gayle). Before visiting her he picks her up a stuffed teddy bear in what I assume is a slight nod to Con Air.

Will tries hard and means well but Alison isn’t interested. And can you blame her? Poor girl has abandonment issues!

Despite her concerns, Alison hears Will out for a bit but eventually storms off and leaves in a cab. Little do they know at the time but that cab happens to be driven by Vincent. At this point Vincent is missing a leg, missing some fingers and has faked his death. He blames Will for ruining his life and has waited eight years to get his revenge. He plans on doing so by kidnapping Alison.

Stolen didn’t do great at the box office. According to Box Office Mojo the film opened domestically in 144 theaters and only lasted two weeks stateside, pulling in just over $300k. That’s not very good. In fact it’s very, very bad. But these box offices numbers do not reflect the quality of the film.

Stolen is a really fun movie. It’s not Con Air good, but then again Con Air is one of the greatest action movies ever. Cage and West could team up a hundred more times and would very likely never make another movie as good as Con Air. But that’s a testament to Con Air more than anything else. Stolen is a completely different type of action movie but still very enjoyable.

The whole time I was watching Stolen I couldn’t help but think it would have been incredibly successful in another era. If this same exact movie is released in 1998 with Cage in the lead role it’s a box office hit. Cage was huge then and this is exactly the type of movie people loved him for. And the performance from Josh Lucas is a throwback to that time period as well. His portrayal of Vincent is way over-the-top and totally harkens back to the villains from 90's action movies.

Going back even further Stolen has this almost 70's vibe to it. There’s a pulpy-thriller thing going on. It feels like the type of thing Michael Caine or Elliot Gould would have starred in. And I 100% mean that as a compliment.

Cage and Lucas balance one another perfectly. Lucas definitely goes bigger in this film while Cage plays it a bit more reserved. He still has the moments where he kicks it up a notch, but by and large he’s more on the subtle side this time out. Oh and he runs a lot which is just interesting.

Up to this point West’s career has sort of been all over the place but there’s no denying that he knows how to direct action. The opening chase sequence is fantastic. When it comes to staging and shooting action scenes he clearly knows what he’s doing.

“I’m not an ace driver by any stretch of the imagination,” Cage explains on the Blu-ray special features, indicating he may have done some of his own stunt driving, “but I’ve done it long enough now that I’m a good driver and I have an intuition for it.”

Beyond the car chase stuff there is a bunch other cool practical stunt work. I don’t think there’s a second of CGI in this movie. Not that the movie is overflowing with practical effects and stunts, but there are some really great moments. And while the actors did all have stunt doubles, it appears they all went as far with their own stunts as they could.

“When we talk about stunts,” Cage continued, “I say this with caution because I never want to tempt fate, but you know I work well with fire. I’m not afraid of fire. So I’m able to get in there and work with it because I have respect for it but I’m not afraid of it.”

Nicolas Cage respects fire. Remember that the next time you try and disrespect fire.

The fire scene is actually really rad. It comes in the big finale and you can definitely see the respect Cage has for the fire. The scene unfolds at the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans theme park, which is an awesome location for an action movie’s final showdown. If you’re not familiar with this abandoned theme park I suggest doing a quick Google image search.

The most shocking thing to me about Stolen is the fact that it took Cage and West 15 years to get back together on a project. They clearly work well together and they appear to enjoy working with each other. In the behind-the-scenes footage Cage praised West saying, “I would say yes to Simon on almost anything because I feel that he’s one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with. He’s a gentleman and an artist.”

If you like West that much then do more movies with him, Cage! It’s now been five years since Stolen was released. Hopefully we don’t have to wait another 10 years for this director/actor duo to pair up again. I can’t wait that long!

Stolen has moments that range from silly to flat out ridiculous. There’s a scene involving gold being melted and stolen that I’m not quite sure I buy at all. And there are some moments of dialogue that feel like they’re trying really hard to be witty and clever. In the grand scheme of things these are very minor flaws. Stolen checks all the boxes I’m looking for in a thrilling heist film. And most importantly of all, its further proof that Cage still has it.

“Any time you get to work with an actor of Nic Cage’s caliber you jump at that opportunity. And the reality is there’s only a few actors on Earth who I put up on Nic’s category. I mean he’s one of the true greats.” — Josh Lucas on Nicolas Cage

The Tao of Nicolas Cage: ‘Stolen’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.