Reel Entropy

The Open Bar Review – Wes Craven

Posted on October 31, 2016 by reelentropy

In this week’s Open Bar Review, for Halloween we put together a career retrospective on Wes Craven, who died in August of last year. Rhiannon returns triumphantly to tell us all about it.

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Inferno is one third of a great movie, then it gets boring

Posted on October 28, 2016 by reelentropy

Images like this of Tom Hanks in Hell, seeing people punished in the manners Dante described while mysterious women in plague doctor masks walk through the chaos, lend an intensity to Inferno. Unfortunately, they cut off completely about a third of the way through the film. Images courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Oh, that’s right, Sony owns the rights to this series. That explains it.

In Inferno, the third film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novels, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns to bring more obscure Catholic conspiracy theories into the mainstream. This go around starts with Langdon waking up in a hospital in Florence, Italy after suffering major head trauma and unable to remember the past two days. Soon after he comes to, a policewoman arrives at the hospital to kill him, and his doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), takes him to her apartment for safekeeping. Langdon discovers he’s already embroiled in a desperate chase to find a virus engineered by the late billionaire psychopath Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster), which will release at midnight and wipe out half the human population. For laughably stupid reasons, Zobrist set the virus on a timer and left behind a series of clues to the its location themed around Dante’s Inferno.

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Posted in Entropy | Tagged #memento, #ron howard, #tom hanks, Angels & Demons, Ben Foster, Catholic conspiracy trivia, Catholicism, CERN, Dan Brown, Dante, Dante's Inferno, Felicity Jones, Holocene Extinction, Inception music, Inferno, Irrfan Khan, Large Hadron Collider, Mary Sue, Power fantasy, Robert Langdon is kind of dumb, The Da Vinci Code, The World Health Organization does not have a police force, World Health Organization | Leave a comment

Ouija defies the Natural Order

Posted on October 26, 2016 by reelentropy

Another striking thing about Ouija: Origin of Evil is its almost complete lack of a score. Nondiagetic sound is what most jump scare movies use to telegraph their scares, but this movie maintains the same eerie silence from start to finish. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

Ever since The Conjuring blew the lid off the horror genre by opening to $41 million in July 2013, studios have been devoting most of their scary movie resources into Blockbuster season. October, traditionally horror’s time to shine, has become something of a middle ground between early Oscar season and a dump months for processed horror sequels that weren’t good enough for a prime spot. With the options clearly being bottom of the barrel and so much out-of-theater competition for spooky entertainment, scary movies have seen a sharp decline in quality and audience satisfaction in recent years.

This is the climate Ouija: Origin of Evil is born into. The original movie released in October 2014 was hated by critics and audiences alike, but it turned its $5 million budget into quite a bit of money. Dollar signs speak much louder than critic scores, so another sequel nobody wanted to a movie nobody liked was in order.

But Ouija: Origin of Evil has one key difference from the standard October faire: it’s actually really, really good.

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Posted in Documented entropy, Entropy | Tagged #blumhouse productions, #jack reacher, Absentia, annabelle 2, Annalise Basso, Blockbuster season, Boo! A Madea Halloween, Brett Ratner, David F. Sandberg, Elizabeth Reaser, Gerald's Game, John M. Chu, Lights Out, Lulu Wilson, Mike Flanagan, Occulus, Ouija, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Stephen King, The Conjuring | Leave a comment

Applying Chaos Theory: Mope Mope Power Rangers!

Posted on October 18, 2016 by reelentropy

I have as soft a spot as any ’90s kid for Power Rangers and I’ve been walking on air since I heard they were getting a Darker and Grittier reboot, but this first trailer is, well, tragic.