KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. Been busy with TV, particularly a binge watch of season 5 of Lego Masters Australia which I found all-consuming most of the week, and a Mike Flanagan series the week before. But this isn't KWIT, it's KWIF.
This Week:
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, d. Jane Schoenbrun - Crave/HBO)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024, d. Brian Taylor - rental)
Hard Target 2 (2016, d. Roel Reiné - Netflix)
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But with the knowledge, I picked up on the subliminal very early. In the opening moments as young 11-year-old Owen is watching TV, a commercial for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer-esque program (by way of Canadian-produce kid's horror) "The Pink Opaque" provokes a reaction out of of their otherwise slack-jawed viewing. Later he's with his mother at a high school where she is voting to re-elect "the saxophone man", so that alerts us to it being around the start of Bill Clinton's second term. But in the booth, Owen's mom lets them press the voting buttons, and even though they knows who they're supposed to be pressing the button for, their finger starts trailing off for other options. "Don't ask, don't tell" is hard to ignore when his name comes up in an LGBTQ-framed context.
Milling about afterwards, Owen meets Maddy, a grade niner reading the season 1 episode guide to "The Pink Opaque". Owen is curious. Maddy, at first dismissive, senses something in Owen and engages. Owen can't watch the TV show she loves and she can sense that it will come to mean as much to Owen as it does to them. Owen fakes a sleepover at a friends in order to get to Maddy's to watch the show. It's a revelatory moment for Owen and a bonding moment for both. Two years pass and Owen is in high school and though they don't socialize together really, but Maddy leaves Owen messages and tapes of the show, and they start hanging out together to watch the show, season 5. Late in the school year Maddy says they're skipping town, escaping it's small-minded trappings as well as an abusive stepfather. They encourage Owen to come with them, but Owen gets scared and tells on themself to get grounded so they can't be with Maddy when they leave.
Then Owen's mom dies, leaving them with their abusive, neglectful father. Shortly after that Maddy disappears, their TV set on fire in the back yard. Eventually everyone thinks Maddy is dead. And then "The Pink Opaque" is cancelled. (The question I ask, was the burning of the TV in response to Owen's betrayal or was it in response to the cancellation, or are both, effectively, one-and-the-same...how real "The Pink Opaque" is is part of what makes this film so layered and fascinating)
This is the first half of the film, roughly, and generally. It's very much vibes...the music and the score, the neon haze and/or crackle of TV static as illumination sources. It's almost as if Owen and Maddy were floating between two worlds. Maddy says that, sometimes, "The Pink Opaque" feels more real than real life.
The film is beautiful and atmospheric. It's patient and full of surrealism. It blurs lines between what we (and Owen) are seeing and what Owen is feeling (and therefore what we should be feeling). It's a difficult thing to really catch onto unless you understand Owen, the quiet, apologetic, mumbly kid trapped in their own head, narrating their own life from the inside. If you get the meaning it's like being sliced open and having your guts spilled out. Jaden Smith, who plays Owen, captures this hesitancy so effectively, as if Owen is this awkward bag of flesh and bone that seems to keep moving in spite of itself.
The second half of the film jumps another 8 years ahead in time and we observe Owen's life...without Maddy, without their mother, as if there's nothing left in the world for them, but they keep going through the motions anyway. Owen is now in their early 20s, and their asthma is affecting them so direly that it's like they can barely breathe. But it's not asthma. Their skin is literally choking the life out of the not-Owen person within. Strange events keep happening to Owen, strange apparitions of TV static or pink haze that seem so alluring and yet Owen is so utterly wary.
And then Maddy, but not Maddy, returns. They return for Owen, but not Owen. They return for Isabel, the main character of "The Pink Opaque", but Owen is confused and doesn't understand. Not-Maddy tries to explain, to relate their life since they left this shitty town and its constricting mindset. Layers of analogies that should punch through only seem to make Owen dizzy, unable to accept anything they are saying.
More time passes, Owen ages faster than the rest of the world around them. They are trapped in a cage of their own making. Revisiting "The Pink Opaque" exposes to Owen an entirely different show than what they remember, something far more juvenile (much more the cheap Canadian Are You Afraid of the Dark, less of the Buffy), and containing none of the importance and meaning that it did to them for so long. They are lost in the world they've built around themselves, still apologizing for their existence.
I can tell you the broad beats of this whole movie and it won't even elicit a tiny fraction of the actual emotional wallop the film does. I was devastated throughout watching this film, tears streaming from my eyes uncontrollably. For an hour or two afterwards I just couldn't compose myself and I would still find myself sobbing in response to the intention of the film.
If you don't get it, it's not easy to explain. From a very high level, it's a film about being trapped. The Trans and non-binary messaging is the foremost intention, but the resonance, the emotion of feeling trapped, just in general, should feel at least somewhat familiar to most people. And finding escape, in television, in friendship, in shared experiences is so liberating to a point, but it's not everything if you're just not able to live life as you want to live it.
I refer to both Owen and Maddy as "they". When I call Owen "they/them" it's because there is who Owen really is and who they are pretending to be. Maddy's more subliminal story is about them understanding that they're not the lesbian everyone (including themself) though they were in high-school, but non-binary.
This definitely falls under the "horror, not horror" moniker, as there are no scares and not even really scary moments, but as a whole it is horrifying just the idea of being trapped in one's own skin, to have to wear not just an image, but an identity that is inauthentic, and to be aware of it, whether suppressing it or confronting it on a day-to-day basis. The film could have went really far into outright horror with metaphors of body dysphoria but Owen has so buried their authentic self that it's only in the films final moments that Owen is directly addressing that side of it.
After that the very end is so painful to watch if you are connecting with what you're looking at, a human in such excruciating emotional turmoil, a cage not entirely of their own making, but one they do actually have the key to escape from. It would be sad if I didn't have such empathy for Owen...instead it's heartbreaking.
The film has definitely connected with some (like me) and puzzled others, but it didn't break out into a cultural phenomenon, nor even a cult one...yet. There's a lot of David Lynch in this, but where Lynch often doesn't seem to know where his ideas manifest from, leading to stories and scenes that are inexplicable, here Schoenbrun seems to know every intention they have in every moment, and every scene. There is not a single piece of absurdism or surrealism that doesn't have a specific purpose. I felt a kinship between this and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Schoenbrun themself has also said Donnie Darko was a big inspiration. The inspirations are many beyond that. And it transcends them all.
Maybe my favourite film of the year? I regret not seeing it in theatre.
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But Mignola wasn't content to let Hellboy remain his sole vision, and the world of Hellboy grew, the stable of writers and artist participating in telling the legacy of the character expanded, and soon I was overwhelmed. I wouldn't say it was a deluge, but it was much more than I was prepared to take in. I don't know if any of it was watered-down, but I felt my connection to the character slipping.
The first Guillermo Del Toro movie re-sparked an interest, but my re-approach of the comics only showed me how far behind I had fallen and it felt daunting to catch up. The second Del Toro movie dove into fantasy in a way I couldn't connect with and I pretty much left Hellboy behind after that. That was 16 years ago.
I tried to watch the 2019 Neill Marshall-directed, David Harbor-led Hellboy feature and I just could not get into it. It's in a very small group of film that I've started watching and never finished (like, count-on-one-hand small). I liked Harbor as replacement for Ron Perlman, but that's about it. This new, very low-budget (about 20 million) Hellboy is at the very least much more watchable than that.
Here Hellboy and fellow Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Agent Bobby Jo Song are trying to take a demon spider back to home base, but get derailed. They're stranded in the Appalachian Mountains, coal mining territory which, they learn is besieged with witches. A World War II veteran, returning home after a long absense, seems to have much familiarity with what's happening and why. He tells the story of the Crooked Man, one of the first settlers to reach American shores, who played both sides in the Civil War, who was hanged for his treason and greed, but was given the task of collecting souls for the devil, with payment of one penny per.
Witches seem to be in vogue right now (see also Agatha All Along, Star Wars: The Acolyte for just two prominent examples) almost with a sympathetic eye towards them. Here, however, they're nasty creatures with nasty ways of dealing with things nastily, treating witches as humans-turned-creatures, less as humans transcending humanity.
Hellboy here is played by Jack Kesy, an actor I'm not all that familiar with (though I did watch some of the first season of The Strain which he was the lead in). He's seemingly emulating Ron Perlman's depiction of the character, and I'm not sure if that's for "consistency" (from the producers/director) or lack of his own definitive take. It's a good performance, even if he's not quite got the same presence as Perlman or even Harbor.
Of the other key performers in the film Adeline Rudolph as Bobby Jo I thought was the strongest actor in the film (and maybe got a little swooney over). She's a novice to the field, primarily an in-house researcher, and so Hellboy is quite protective of her (he's also a little swooney over her, but subtly). I also liked Jefferson White as Tom Fennell, the not-a-witch-man returning home and finding his old world in a bad state and feeling very much responsible. Even the old, blind reverend, played by Joseph Marcell, is low-key incredible. It's a good cast overall.
The film is, at 20 million, cheap for these kinds of things, and it feels it. In his review Toasty [we agree, almost] cites "fan flick that had been given a budget", and for sure it feels that way especially in its opening prologue where it uses a lot of unrefined cgi-effects to, well, ill-effect. I would say extract the prologue altogether and it would be a better film, but it does circle back into the story and is sort of necessary. I really wish they figured out a practical effect for that spider instead of a cheap digital render.
Most of that "fan film" feeling falls at the feet of director Brian Taylor, a filmmaker who has been in the Hollywood system since 2006's Crank, a movie I very much did not like. He made a lot of films with Crank co-director Mark Neveldine, including Crank 2: High Voltage, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Gamer, all of which I very much did not like. I have seen some of Taylor's solo work, like some of the TV series Happy! (which I also did not like) and Mom and Dad (which I found ok).
The feeling of a Taylor-Neveldine film was one that is frenetic, high energy, but not in a controlled way. It's ADD on acid, just out of control and I found them very unpleasant to watch. Taylor on his own is more toned down but he still doesn't seem to know how to resist constant cutting between obtuse angles and weird stylizations with little consistency or always carrying purpose. Here, with probably one of his lowest budgets, but highest demands on that low budget, his lack of stillness winds up looking quite cheap quite often. That said, he also captures some fairly stunning shots, and there are some very visually striking frames in this film. Buuuut, for every one moment framed so acutely, there are two that are not, and they can be distracting.
As Toasty opined, it "presents as a horror movie but without embracing it". And that's true. But in true Hellboy sense, at least that of what I remember of Mignola's 90's works, it was always a bit more "supernatural adventure" than "horror". This lives in a John Carpenter's Vampires vein, and in that vein it works for me. It's not a spectacular production, but I think for what Hellboy has been in film in the past, we've hit the right budget and style to be an ongoing franchise of 20 million dollar direct-to-streaming productions, especially if it's going to have Mignola and long-time collaborator Christopher Golden on scripting duties. It's not rekindled a fervour in me to start cramming more Hellboy comics in my diet, but I really would watch more of these it they can sustain this upper-echelon-of-90's-DTV sensibility.
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I'm writing these in reverse order of what I watched them in. I watched I Saw the TV Glow immediately after watching Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and within literal seconds of Shoenbrun's film starting I said to myself, "this is what a real movie looks like". Not to diss Taylor any further, but there's an assuredness to Shoenbrun's craft that Taylor just never had. Oh, Taylor's work has often seemed cocky, but it rarely backs that cockiness up with ...well, being objectively "good". But compared to Roel Reiné, Taylor looks like Scorsese... at least he's getting 1 out of 3 shots that are really something appealing to look at (and most of the rest at least have some level of competency even if they are erratic and sometimes ugly), watching Hard Target 2 was even like watching a fan film. At least fan films the people involved care about what they are trying to do. I think Reiné, whose credits include The Scorpion King 3, Death Race 2 & 3, SEAL Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded, and seemingly a dozen other cheap-and-quick in-name-only sequels and/or paycheck vehicles for action movie has-beens and never wases.
It was on a sick day. I laid in bed, not wanting to move. The only reason I finished this film is because I let myself be held captive by it. It's definitely not a so-bad-it's-good, it's just bad. Bad-bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Stupid, and bad. And cheap. Lazy. Dumb. Nonsensical at times.
There's a whole world of direct-to-video/streaming/on-demand filmmaking that's been in operation since the 80s. Before that it was sci-fi and horror B-movies, or cheap foreign knockoffs, or Spaghetti westerns as opposed to the regal American ones. There's always been a place in cinema for this type of garbage. But ever since the digital age made the "film" part of filmmaking unnecessary and the accessibility of editing and other digital tools a thing of the past, these types of movies have gotten so cheap, and churned out so lazily that I fail to see how anyone gets any joy out of watching them, nevermind making them. They're soulless product that are soon to be even further deprived of soul by being entirely AI scripted. We probably won't even know the difference.
Scott Adkins is, in this sphere of modern direct-to-whatever a well known and respected commodity. He's a fairly handsome guy, not too shabby an actor sometims, and he's fucking fit at hell and loves doing stunts. In this film, the stunts seem like an afterthought so they're as cheap and lazy as everything else in the film.
As far as the man-hunting-man element goes, this is a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a ....well, you get it. Nothing, absolutely nothing original is happening here that has not been done in another story of this type, and any attempt to add "flavour" to this by way of some form of romance or intrigue or political message is handled, well, stupidly as to make the effort irrelevant.
We know Adkins is going to escape his very stupidly set up predicament. We know hes going to give his ill-gotten riches to his newfound local lady friend, and we know his comidically burdensome guilt that he carries is going to be absolved by an external force rather than any internal resolution. Its climax is one of the worst boat chases I've ever seen ending in one of the stupidest standoffs I've ever seen.
I couldn't watch 2019's Hellboy for more than 30 minutes but I watched all of this garbage? I must have been sick....
The wonderful critic Emily St. James' mandatory post-watch reading:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.vulture.com/article/the-hidden-hope-in-i-saw-the-tv-glows-ending-explained.html