‘The Conjuring’ and that long-fabled franchise fatigue

Posted on June 6, 2021 by reelentropy
I’m the cop in the back just wondering how far they’re going to push this weird charades act. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

3/10 The Satanic panic never really ended. The surge of news about “Satanism” that started as a religious offshoot of the rebellious ‘60s and consumed the suburbs of Reagan’s America with fears of pedophiles and kidnapped children being used for human sacrifice buried itself deep in the American psyche and has been catnip for related media ever since. The fact that it was the Catholics you had to watch out for all along remains painfully ironic, both because of how obviously it is preists’ real crimes that are projected onto “Satanists” and because of how Satanic panic media is constantly sending up Catholic mysticism.

Two of the biggest perpetrators and profiteers of this panic were known frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, who traveled across New England in the ‘70s and ‘80s summoning media frenzies to everything they could get within shouting distance of that went bump in the night and then hawking books and lectures about demonology – Ed, apparently with a straight face, claimed to be a “self-taught demonologist.” Despite all of their most famous hoaxes being disclaimed by witnesses and collaborators alike, they and their higher-profile incidents have remained prominent in American culture, waxing and waning with the general fear of Satan. Recently, that’s come in the form of The Conjuring film series, a collection of terrible, boring haunted house movies based extremely loosely on the Warrens’ “case files,” which I strongly doubt are things that they kept.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entropy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Cruella’ scorches screen in Sex Pistols reimagining

Posted on June 6, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

8/10 Cruella is a bold, fast, fun, intricately detailed and remarkably complex film about power, destiny, art and cruelty. In the past decade’s long and mostly painful parade of uncurious, unnecessary remakes of Disney classics, it immediately becomes the best and by a significant margin.  

London, 1970s- A little gay kid named Estella Miller (Emma Stone, who also produces executively) grows up orphaned on the streets of London as a petty thief who really wants to be a fashion designer. In her childhood, Miller was forced to hide her extreme gayness, stuffing her split black-and-white hair under a rust wig and suppressing her sadistic, borderline psychotic tendencies, which she externalizes as a separate personality called Cruella.

Miller lands a dream job with London fashion mogul Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), but soon realizes it was the baroness who killed her mother by siccing her attack dalmatians on her. Miller dusts off her suppressed gayness, using her natural hair as a disguise and adopting Cruella as an alter ego to wage what can only be described as guerilla fashion warfare on the baroness, sabotaging her new lines, ambushing and upstaging her at every event and sucking all the air out of the fashion media, bent on taking away the baroness’ identity – her professional stature, her confidence, her dogs and her possessions – before taking her life.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entropy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Quiet Place’ sequel summons audiences back to the theater

Posted on June 4, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

8/10 A Quiet Place Part II isn’t the first blockbuster to release after the COVID-19 crisis really got underway, but it’s the first to perform more or less to expectation. It’s a uniquely cinematic experience and would be an intriguing editing experiment in any year.

Upstate New York, 474 days post-invasion- Earth is occupied by “dark angels,” blind predators with incredible strength and speed, a completely bulletproof exoskeleton and a sense of hearing so powerful and keen that they are summoned by the slightest noise, and they have wiped out most of the human race. After their farm is destroyed in the first film, what remains of the Abbott family, Evelyn and children Regan and Marcus (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe), with her new day-old son in tow, break to stay with Emmett (Cillian Murphy), a family friend from before the invasion and one of the community of survivors from their town. From there, the group splits. Marcus, who is caught in a bear trap and unable to walk, stays at the camp alone with the baby; Evelyn makes the dangerous journey into town for medical supplies; and Regan, who has discovered a way to use feedback from her hearing aid to make the creatures vulnerable, tracks a radio broadcast to what appears to be Chebeague Island in Maine, where she hopes to broadcast the feedback so the monsters can be destroyed en mass.

Also, A Quiet Place Part II begins with a long flashback sequence of the first day of the invasion, introducing Emmett and following the deceased Lee Abbott (John Krasinski, who also writes, directs and produces) through the chaos.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entropy | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Those Who Wish Me Dead’ is here to announce Taylor Sheridan has arrived

Posted on May 25, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

6/10 The subtlest but most telling mark of a well-directed film is that that air of relaxation you get in the hands of a story that’s confident in its own telling. Those Who Wish Me Dead is writer/director/producer Taylor Sheridan’s sixth feature script and second time in the director’s chair. He’s been a rising star for a long time, able to make movies that are distinctively his even when he only writes them and already with his own prestige television series in Yellowstone.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida- Father-son duo of hitmen Jack and Patrick Blackwell (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) assassinate an attorney general. Four and a half hours north in Jacksonville, forensic accountant Owen Casserly (Jake Weber), who discovered the secret that got the attorney general killed, takes his son and bolts, knowing they’ll come for him next.

Park County, Montana- Smokejumper Hannah Faber (Angelina Jolie) has been assigned to watchtower duty after losing a comrade and a few campers in a fire she was in charge of fighting. In the wilderness, she encounters a boy, Connor Casserly (Finn Little), whose father has been killed by two assassins who pursued them all the way from Florida. Faber is tasked with keeping Casserly safe from both the Blackwells and the fire they’ve set to cover their tracks until Casserly can get his father’s secrets to the press.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entropy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Erstwhile ‘Gone Girl’ heiress ‘Woman in the Window’ never stood a chance

Posted on May 25, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Netflix.

3/10 The Woman in the Window releases on Netflix May 14, 2021, almost a year to the day after its planned May 15, 2020 release date. The COVID-19 crisis both ruined its theatrical release and ruined the movie itself, which concerns a woman who cannot leave her house, but it may have been ruined well in advance.

104 W. 121st St. in Harlem, autumn- Anna Fox (Amy Adams), a psychologist who is so agoraphobic she faints from fright whenever she leaves her house, languishes, watching old movies and drinking too much wine. Obsessed with the outside world she cannot access, she becomes concerned with the Russell family that moves in across the street, befriending the wife, Jane (Julianne Moore), who saves her house from an egging on Halloween night. Soon after, Fox sees Jane Russell murdered through her window, but when she calls the police, she’s shocked to learn that Jane Russell (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an entirely different woman, is perfectly fine. She becomes suspicious of the husband, Alistair (Gary Oldman).

The path from cerebral, woman-centered mystery-thriller Oscarbate with an all-star cast in the distinct vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train was necessarily a long one. COVID-19 was the second disaster to force The Woman in the Window to reschedule. After acquiring Fox, which had secured the rights to the film two years before the book it was based on even hit shelves, Disney pulled it from its Oct. 4, 2019 release due to poor test screenings. After re-editing and another delay because of the pandemic, Disney is distancing itself from the title more than it has from others it inherited from Fox, hawking it to Netflix instead of releasing it on either of its streaming services.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entropy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment