Roused to Mediocrity

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planet earth ii [trailer park.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-16 • In movies, scott, trailer park • 1 min read

Sooo excited. Time to rewatch the first one!

Bonus trailer:

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night two: ‘cronos’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-15 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, scott, vampires • 1 min read

“I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I think it’s better if we stay together.”

The second night of HMF and I’m revisiting a favorite from nights of Halloween past.

Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature has all of the themes he comes back to again and again. Del Toro himself said:

“To me, Cronos contains the essence of what I want to do … a sincere declaration of how I view the world.”

Both literally and figuratively, this is vintage del Toro.

His best work uses and subverts genre trappings and fantastical horror to showcase the beauty and monstrosity of humanity. The horror of the monsters in the del Toro canon always pale in comparison to what humans are willing to do to one another in a quest for power, money, or youth.

Del Toro said of Cronos, “I do what I’ve done in Devil’s Backbone, what I’ve done in Pan’s Labyrinth, etc. Which is, I take the central monster figure and I make it the saddest figure in the tale.”

This is a story of the inherent tragedy of vampire lore. One of the central themes in many vampire stories is the loss of humanity in the pursuit of immortality. The inability to accept the reality of death results in a half life. Vampires are immortal, they reject death, but only by becoming death. They live forever, but only in darkness, only by consuming life itself. #fucktwilight

These stories are often about the destructive potential of the human quest for immortality. Thus, Guillermo del Toro is the perfect storyteller for the genre, and it in turn is a perfect playground for his first feature.

Cronos is arrestingly grotesque and beautiful, often at the same time. A monster story about what it means to be human. A horror film about love, family, redemption, mortality, and sacrifice. Or to put it more simply, Cronos is Guillermo del Toro at his best.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? Most definitely. As is easily seen above, Cronos is included amongst my very favorite Halloween Movie Fest films from the seven years I’ve done it.

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night one: ‘near dark’. [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-15 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott, vampires • 1 min read

“Boy, you people sure stay up late.”

“We keep odd hours.”

And we’re off! Night one kicks off with Kathryn Bigelow’s cult classic about a guy who tries to convince a young lady to engage in some casual sex, and as these things often go, she turns out to be a vampire. Our young cowboy finds himself thrown in with a gang of asshole vampires who terrorize bar-flys, truck drivers, and hitchhikers along remote portions of Texas and Oklahoma highway.

The film is pretty to look at, and it’s easy to see the DNA of a directing style that would eventually win Bigelow a ton of awards for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

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Critics liked Near Dark, and as I already mentioned, it became a cult classic. In some ways, I can see why. The idea itself was an interesting take on both vampire movies and neo-westerns, and at times it delighted in its own violent mayhem. It also featured a synth soundtrack by Tangerine Dream that had some great moments.

However, overall, this one was just too nonsensical in all the wrong ways for me. The writing and story just didn’t hold together at all. It was erratic and silly, but to me it didn’t seem to be so intentionally. Everyone has the sorts of holes and weaknesses that prohibit enjoyment, and Near Dark had too many for me.

If anyone wants to have a specific conversation about what didn’t work for me in Near Dark, I’m game. I just didn’t want to go on and on bitching about it in this post. That’s just not what I want RtM to be. I’m also totally down if someone who loves this movie wants to enlighten me concerning its virtues. I would genuinely enjoy learning to see it through a fan’s eyes.

Will I Ever Watch It Again? No. There’s definitely something I’m missing. It’s got a big following of folks who love it and rewatch it, so I’ll leave them to it.

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primer for vampire movie fest [halloween movie fest, 2016.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-14 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott, vampires • 2 min read

Here we go. Halloween Movie Fest 2016.

First, a primer in part one of this year’s HMF.

As promised, the first half is all vampires. A movie fest within a movie fest. Like the cream in one of those Halloween themed orange and black Oreos, but where the cream filling is actually a monster who will grant you a grotesque immortality if it likes you, or merely exsanguinate you if it doesn’t.

The mini movie festival within a festival is rooted in last year’s HMF. When I was doing some reading on The Wicker Man after I watched it, I learned that it was a big deal for Christopher Lee to be the understated villain in this (mostly) subdued horror film. Until then he was mostly famous for his role in the Hammer Films Dracula series as the titular vampire.

I’ve never seen any Hammer Films, but they were clearly notable in the history of horror, so I read up on them a bit. The Hammer Films rabbit hole led me to a few other vampire films I’d never heard of, one thing led to another, and I realized that at the very least I was going to need to make half of HMF16 vampire movies.

This is fun for me, because it gives me a style of ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ I haven’t done in quite a while. I love Halloween Movie Fest, but it’s much more varied and diverse than other versions of ‘AD,AM’ I’ve done.

It’s different doing ‘AD,AM’ with a more specific genre, like Westerns or Noir films. It changes the way I watch because I’m focused in on the nuances and boundaries of that genre, whether those boundaries they are heeded or ignored. I start to inhabit the language, style, and palette of that genre. It becomes the story ecosystem I live in for a bit. This pointlessly fun activity gives me this big frame of reference for each film, which is obviously always there, but is easier to see and discern in the context of the geeky rhythm of this sort of endeavor.

The closest I’ve come to this within HMF is zombie films, because the genre is so young and the rules are so clear. Every departure from the tropes is really obvious, every stylistic choice stands out, meaning you need fewer films to really sense what a particular storyteller is trying to do.

Anyway, this year I get to fully add that element back into HMF by watching ten vampire films in ten days.

Next up, night one: Near Dark.

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black mirror, season 3 [trailer park.]

By Scott • On 2016-10-11 • In nerd candy, scott, television, trailer park • 1 min read

All year, as more info came out about the third season of Black Mirror, I’ve been worried.

My question: is it possible to maintain the previous quality after doubling the length of a season with the move to Netflix?

Even if it turns out that every episode isn’t a winner, the trailer for the new season has gone a long way in calming my fears.

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halloween movie fest 2016!!

By Scott • On 2016-10-05 • In another day. another movie., hmf16, movies, scott • 1 min read

Sing it with me!

/ It’s the most wonderful tiiiime of the year. When the zombies are lurching and vampires and slurping so we live in feeeeaaar. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. / It’s the hap-happiest season of all. With the slashers all stalking and spirits all walking down your bedroom haaaaallll! /

Absolutely terrible adaptations of Christmas songs aside, October is back and the Halloween season is upon us. For my money, it’s right on time. I mean, it’s always right on time, but this year it’s even righter on time. Yup, it’s so perfectly timed I’m not even using well constructed phraseology anymore.

It’s been such a crazy year for me since Halloween Movie Fest 2015. We live in Brooklyn now, a very recent development, and I miss Seattle terribly. I’m surrounded by strange new things, thousands of miles from my friends and the home I grew to love over the course of nearly a decade.

What better way to feel something familiar than to slip into the tradition of Halloween Movie Fest? I hope it will be the movie-watching equivalent of putting on a perfectly aged sweatshirt on a chilly, rainy afternoon.

This year, there will be an ‘Another Day, Another Movie’ (ad,am) festival within HMF16. Some Inception-level shit. The first 10 of the 20 nights of HMF16 will be a vampire themed version of ad,am. More on that in the post for the first portion of the (mostly) one man movie festival. For now, the important thing is that bloodsuckers will make up half of this year’s list.