Gifts That Keep Giving – Why Hollywood is Spending Big on Christmas Movies

Like any other year, you’d expect at least one movie hitting the big screen that takes advantage of the holiday season and centers it’s story around theme of Christmastime.  This year is no exception.  We were greeted with a major one this year in the form of the action film, Red One (2024), which brings a bit of Michael Bay-esque mayhem to the Santa Claus mythos.  The movie also brings in two of the biggest action movie stars in Hollywood today, Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, to give it even more cinematic gravitas.  Unfortunately, even with it’s well-timed holiday season release date, the film failed to deliver the presents at the box office, becoming a rare misfire for the the two stars on the marquee.  But that’s not the thing that got the notice of Hollywood insiders.  What really sparked a conversation around this movie was it’s astronomical price tag.  The movie, which is based around an original concept centered on the mythos of Santa and holiday traditions, cost over $250 million to make.  That is an astonishingly high production budget for what is essentially nothing more than a Christmas movie.  Now, the movie was financed by Amazon Studios, which is part of one of the world’s wealthiest corporations, so it’s soft box office results will not exactly sink the fortunes of the studio, but even still, many are questioning why a Christmas film needed a quarter of a billion dollar budget.  It’s been speculated that the budget ballooned because of cost overruns due to the lack of professionalism on the part of it’s main star (Dwayne Johnson) who caused multiple delays, but it still doesn’t account for why the project needed to keep going despite all of the production issues.  The answer lies in the fact that Holiday movies have grown into a much larger business over the last couple years.

In the last few decades, we’ve seen a rise in what can be considered Holiday blockbusters.  Christmas films certainly aren’t anything new, as they have existed in Hollywood as far back as the early days with classics like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).  But it was with the success of Home Alone (1990) that Hollywood took notice that a Christmas themed movie could not only perform well at the box office, but also be dominant too.  Further Christmas themed movies would continue to emerge afterwards that were not only successful but could also lead at the box office.  There was The Santa Clause (1994), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), all of which delivered surprisingly strong box office results.  In some of the cases, these movies succeeded not just because they capitalized on the holiday season, but because they connected with audiences in a way that transcended their holiday theming.  Home Alone especially stands out more for it’s comedic pratfalls than it does for it’s holiday aesthetics, because that’s what drove people to the theaters over and over again.  This is usually what separates the good holiday films from the bad, as not every holiday movie is a success at the box office.  Red One is proving that right now, as it does not have the legs to carry it through the holidays and will likely be out of theaters even before Christmas Day itself.  But, there is still a lot of signs that Hollywood is not weary of banking heavily in Christmas themed movies anytime soon even as movies like Red One continue to eat it at the box office.  What we are finding out is that Holiday movies are a far more resilient genre all on their own that have longer shelf lives than most other types of movies.

The reason why studios are willing to invest so much in new holiday themed films is because of something called the long tail effect.  This long tail effect is when a movie premieres in theaters or somewhere else and remains in the public view long after, You see it with movies that remain profitable many years later, helped by a healthy presence in subsequent television airings and re-releases.  Some movies get rediscovered this way too, such as It’s a Wonderful Life which had initially bombed at the box office and then later became a perennial classic.  While the long tail effect can happen to movies in any genre, it seems to more frequently happen with holiday films.  This has been an interesting phenomenon in recent years and it is beginning to be reflected in the way that more and more holiday films are being produced.  Hollywood certainly is more comfortable investing in something that they know is going to have long term value beyond it’s initial release.  One thing that has certainly changed in recent years is the frequency.  While it was common to see a new holiday classic emerge every couple of years, we now are seeing at least one new movie a year specifically be spotlighted with a Christmas theme at it’s center.  This year it’s Red One, a couple years ago it was the R-rated action comedy Violent Night (2022).  And I’m sure that the next couple of years will give us plenty more.  But what is interesting is that these movies are not just being made to solely rely on their theatrical box office.  Now, many more holiday movies are getting made with the intention of sticking around for many years.

What I think has contributed to this trend is the creation of programming blocks on cable television and on streaming.  These are special selections of movies centered on Christmas that are meant to cater to their audience’s desire to see holiday themed entertainment in the lead up to the special day.  The cable channel Freeform dedicates the entire month of December to playing nothing but Holiday themed movies and specials.  And on Christmas Day itself, the cable network TBS devotes it’s channel to a marathon run of one specific movie, 1983’s A Christmas Story, which has become an annual tradition all on it’s own.  On streaming services, there are specific specialty pages created just to help viewers find holiday themed movies and show episodes.  And what these specially selected programming blocks do is to keep the same holiday themed movies and specials in the public eye year after year.  These have definitely helped in making the long tail effect work especially well for holiday movies.  But, the programming blocks can’t just survive on the same small sampling of holiday classics we all know about.  They need new entries to help keep things fresh over time, though the best of them still remain an essential piece.  Sure, you’ll easily see evergreen titles like Home Alone or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in the mix, but every year there are newer movies that get added, whether created as an original by the station or the streamer in question, or became an essential addition due to it’s box office performance.  It’s too early to know if Red One will see that kind of future, though the fact that it was made by Amazon tells you that it’s almost a certainty that Prime Video will be spotlighting it on their front page for many Christmases to come.

While these programming blocks definitely take advantage of the holiday season as a whole, it’s hard to know what kind of movies will become perennial favorites.  The problem is that Hollywood is producing a glut of holiday movies every year, and most of them don’t stick the way that they hoped they would.  Hallmark has created literally hundreds of holiday themed movies, but I don’t think many people can name one right off the top of their heads.  Still, Hallmark’s holiday block of films are among the most watched on television every single year, so their business model is still working well for them, even if their Christmas movies all blend together into an indistinguishable holiday blob of entertainment.  The same thing is also happening with broadcasters that cater to the same crowd as Hallmark, such as the Lifetime network or Netflix.  These easy to digest, non-offensive holiday themed movies are good at capturing that holiday spirit, but they don’t stand out like the perennial classics do, and those are the ones that continue to drive the highest viewership during the holiday season.  People just have the desire to re-watch the best Christmas movies there are to get into the holiday spirit, but it’s a hard canon to add onto.  When the same movies continue to generate viewership year after year, why try to replace any of them?  Just like any other genre, it’s hard to know exactly what movies are going to click with audiences and holiday movies ae no different.  For some of the “perennial” Christmas films, they were likely created without ever knowing that they would take on another life as an essential holiday film.  And yet, Hollywood tries a lot harder than they should trying to manufacture the next big holiday classic.

This is probably the reason why holiday films are becoming bigger budget undertakings in recent years.  The bar has been set high by the movies that we recognize as a perennial holiday classic.  A movie like Red One attempts to hit those holiday tropes in a big way, and sadly comes across as too much of a manufactured product rather than a movie made with a lot of heart.  The movie banks on us knowing all of the mythos surrounding Santa Claus and the Christmas season, mainly through the secularized sense, and tries to use all that as the unique element added into a standard action movie plot.  It’s a mix that doesn’t work as intended because we can see the intention behind the film, which is a cyncial ploy to re-sell a regurgitated, standard action movie plot with a new gimmick, and hope it hits that holiday sweet spot.  This is certainly the response it’s getting in theaters, but separated from it’s box office disappointment is it possible that the movie will have a long shelf life as a title spotlighted on Amazon’s own streaming platform?  It’s too early to know, but that long tail effect has kept even bad holiday movies like Jingle All the Way (1996) and Eight Crazy Nights (2002) in the public eye for much longer than they should have been.  The huge budget that Red One received certainly gives it a grander feel, and that’s likely what the filmmakers were intending with their movie.  Because the bar is high for standing out in the genre, you’ve got to present your movie as something pretty special.  Maybe Red One accomplishes this on a visual level, but it remains pretty hollow as a story.  Still, it’s an indicator that holiday movies are getting more ambitious as they try to crack open that door into becoming a perennial favorite for the season.

The only thing is, a lot of the holiday classics became just that out of more humble means.  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) was just a second sequel in a comedy franchise, taking the next logical step past the summer based vacation of the first movie, and managing to surpass it with it’s spot on holiday observations mined for comedy.  It certainly didn’t need a massive budget to do that.  A Christmas Story and Home Alone were also likewise modest projects that only grew in esteem over the years due to their perfectly executed storylines that tie into Christmas.  It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even about Christmas for most of it’s run time, and only incorporates the holiday into it’s inspirational final act.  In all, it’s difficult to actually manufacture a perennial holiday classic, and even with a bigger budget and big conceptual gimmick, your movie is still going to face an uphill battle to be accepted as an essential part of the holiday season.  But, this season also gives more movies a chance than any other genre towards achieving that classic status, because there is a audience that is primed every year to expect something new over the holidays.  Being a Christmas movie definitely brings it’s own built in public attention because there are people out there who seek out holiday themed entertainment.  While that journey to the podium of all time classics is a very narrow one, the platform to launch that journey from is quite broad.  That’s why we see such a large annual investment from Hollywood towards making so many holiday themed movies.  And in the case of movies like Red One, they are getting to be bigger and more ambitious in the hopes of standing out.  But as we’ve also seen, the holiday audience is discerning  and more prone towards accepting past favorites over flashy newcomers.

The holiday season is becoming a much bigger deal when it comes to the movies that take advantage of it.  The reason why Hollywood considers it essential to invest so much money into creating new holiday films is because they hope that one or more will give them that long term success that holiday films typically bring.  With the case of Red One, the question arises about what is too much to spend on a holiday movie?  Red One is certainly going to be a prime example of how not to spend money on a Christmas movie, and will almost certainly leave Amazon in the red.  But, is Amazon looking at the short term box office or the long term viewership on Prime Video as as their barometer for the success of the film.  It may play differently as a permanent fixture on their streaming platform that they can re-promote every holiday season.  But, it’s just one example out of many.  None of the classics are ever likely to diminish over time, because they continue to hit that sweet spot for the holidays that we all appreciate.  The question is, what else may land in that special category of perennial favorites?  For the amount of money that is increasingly becoming a part of Hollywood’s plans for the holiday season, something of quality is likely to emerge.  The long term prospects for success the a perennial holiday film provides is what helps to drive new investment into the genre each year, and eventually something will land and become a new classic.  It may not be this year, but Hollywood will keep trying.  In any case, there is an excitingly open market during the holiday season that we all participate in as we search for new favorites while also indulging in what makes Christmas so fun.  And the classics will remain there as well to help give us that entertainment fix during the holidays.  I for one always have to catch Christmas Vacation once every year(in addition to Charlie Brown’s Christmas).  I’m sure that all of you have your go to essentials as well.  With the frequency that Hollywood is attempting to give us something new each year, let’s hope that another holiday classic is waiting to be opened under that Christmas tree very soon.

Moana 2 – Review

Disney Animation has gone through a bit of a reversal of fortune over the last 5 years.  After experiencing a resurgence in the 2010’s thanks to the like of mega hits such as Frozen (2013), Big Hero 6 (2014) and Zootopia (2016), Disney was back in top form in the animation world and were looking for big things in the decade that followed.  They finished the decade strong in 2019 with Frozen II (2019) which grossed well over a billion and a half dollars at the global box office.  But, things were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic the following year.  Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) which was slated for a Thanksgiving 2020 release was pushed back into the following spring, and given a hybrid streaming and theatrical release due to the theaters not being fully re-opened at that point.  It was more than what Disney’s sister studio, Pixar, received as their movies just went straight to streaming with no wide theatrical plans.  Raya did about as well as it could given the circumstances, but it was miniscule box office compared to what Frozen II pulled in.  Later that year, Encanto (2021) fared better, but was still short of the $100 million threshold that Disney had before surpassed quite regularly.  Not only that, but Encanto became a bigger hit on streaming than it did in theaters.  The following two years weren’t any kinder to Disney’s box office woes.  Their next film Strange World (2022) was DOA upon it’s release, and Disney’s ambitious 100th anniversary celebration film Wish (2023) was a failure with both audiences and critics.  For a studio that was once the envy of all of Hollywood, they were now in a bit of a crisis mode.  And animation fans were beginning to worry, because Disney had long been the gold standard for quality animation and their success would help uplift the industry as a whole.  The lack of success for the animation studio could ultimately lead the corporate side of the company to invest less on newer projects and instead shift their priorities into more streaming and less theatrical

A lot of the problems for the studio stem from the fact that their slate of films during this pandemic period were all original projects that had no prior built in audience familiarity, and solely had to be sold on the Disney name alone.  If things were running as smoothly as they were in the 2010’s, then these original titles could have had better luck at the box office.  But with everything thrown into rebuild mode post-pandemic, the Disney brand alone wasn’t going to salvage these movies.  In the end, only Encanto emerged as a modest enough hit for Disney.  The failure of Strange World and Wish combined has especially put Disney in a bind.  Pixar itself experienced the same downward trend, though their misfortunes were also self made by Disney’s misguided plan to shove them straight to streaming for 2 whole years.  But thankfully Pixar was able to reverse their misfortunes this summer with their first, much needed hit of the decade with Inside Out 2 (2024).  Now the highest grossing animated film of all time, Inside Out 2 reveals a strategy moving forward that may save Disney Animation too, though it’s one that’s unfortunate for the sake of progress in the medium.  While Pixar has also put out a string of original films, their salvation was found in the release of a sequel to one of the their biggest past hits.  For Disney, they may need to rely upon safe bet sequels to help salvage their reputation for a while, at least until they can prove to the corporate side that Animation is a medium of filmmaking that is still worth investing in.  But what movie sequel would work in this case?  Well, for Disney, the best barometer for knowing what sequel to make came from how their past films have been performing since release on their new streaming platform Disney+.  And one film in particular that has consistently outperformed the rest, and has become one of the most viewed movies not just on Disney+ but on all streaming platforms in general, is the 2016 hit film Moana.  Hoping to bank on Moana’s high profile with fans in order to generate some much needed box office momentum for the studio, Disney has quickly rolled out Moana 2 for this Thanksgiving weekend.  The only question is does it live up to it’s predecessor, or is it already lost at sea?

Moana 2 takes place a few years after the events of the original.  Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) has been sailing from island to island searching for signs of other tribes that populate the numerous islands of the vast ocean.  While her search has proved to be fruitless for the most part, she does find a pottery fragment on one deserted isle, proving that there are other tribes still within reach.  She returns back to her home island of Motunui, where her mother and father Tui and Sina (Temura Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger) both still reside, plus her baby sister Simea (Khalessi Lambert-Tsuda).  While sharing her findings, she is sent a message from her ancestors about a sunken island named Motufetu that once connected all the ocean currents together and was destroyed by a vengeful storm god named Nalo, thereby keeping all the people of the ocean separated.  Moana now seeks to find Motufetu, and assembles a crew to sail with her, heading towards an island that no mortal can find.  On her boat, she has brought Loto (Rose Matafeo), a crafty shipbuilder; Kele (David Fane), a disgruntled old farmer; and Moni (Hualalai Chung), a resourceful historian, as well as her animal companions Pua the pig and Hei Hei the rooster.  While neither she nor her crew have any idea where this mythical island may be, she does have a good idea of someone who might; her old friend, the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson).  Unfortunately, Maui himself has been imprisoned by one of Nalo’s enforcers, the demigoddess Matangi (Awhimai Fraser).  Can Moana rescue her powerful ally and get him to use his mighty fishhook to lift Motufetu out of the sea in defiance of Nalo’s curse and help reunite all the islanders that have been walled off from one another?

Moana 2 has a lot of pressure riding on it, given the state of Disney Animation at the moment, as well as the high expectations of an audience that treats the original as a beloved classic.  Sequels can always be a gamble, even when they are safe bets when it comes to audience familiarity.  One thing that should be noted about this movie is that it didn’t start out as a film at all, but rather began it’s production planned as a mini-series for the Disney+ platform.  It was only at the 11th hour that Disney decided to re-work the program into a single film.  It makes sense, because given the enormous popularity of the first movie both in theaters and on streaming, that having a theatrical roll-out would be more beneficial in the end for the project.  This is definitely a huge reversal of Disney’s pandemic era plans, which put streaming above all else.  You have to wonder if Disney left a ton of money on the table by going all in on streaming rather than building their brand up again through theaters.  The downside though is that bringing something from streaming to theatrical has it’s drawbacks too, as the quality of the product might take a hit.  Going from a story meant for multiple parts and trying to force it into a theater friendly run time under 2 hours is a difficult task, especially late in the game, and I would be lying if I said that some of those issues are visible in the finished film that we do get.  But, does it make the overall movie bad?  Not at all.  While it is far from perfect, and also less successful than it’s beloved predecessor, it still manages to function as a solid entertaining adventure.  If the movie has a fatal flaw, it’s that the truncated story feels like just that; something that was planned to be much larger in it’s original plan, but was reduced to just the bare minimum in it’s switch to theatrical.

The film definitely misses some of the key ingredients of the first movie.  For one thing, it doesn’t have the deft guidance of legendary filmmakers at the helm anymore.  The original Moana was directed by Disney Legends John Musker and Ron Clements in what would be their final film for Disney Animation before their respective retirements, culminating over 30 years of work at Disney that included classics like The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and The Princess and the Frog (2009).  Moana 2 has an entirely new team of directors behind it.  Given the difficult transition that this movie faced, I do think the new directors Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller and David Derrick Jr. did a commendable job of trying to make the film live up to original.  While they don’t have the same level of experience as Ron and John, they still keep the overall vibe of Moana’s next chapter feel tonally consistent.  While the episodic nature of the film belies it’s original format, and at times feels underdeveloped, there are still plenty of exciting big moments that have that right epic heft to them.  An encounter with a giant clam in the middle of the ocean is an especially impressive moment that certainly feels right at home on the big screen.  One of the things that definitely helps this movie is that it maintains the same screenwriter Jared Bush, who just recently was announced as the new Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation after the departure of Jennifer Lee.  Bush never looses the thread of the story, even as he had to cut down so much of the original plot in order to re-work this into a film.  The movie puts it’s focus on Moana and her journey, which is what the film needs the most, although character development is unfortunately minimal, as she doesn’t grow much as a character here compared with the original.  It’s essentially just a further adventures kind of story and nothing too groundbreaking apart from that.  Still, the movie doesn’t reflect poorly on what had been built before.  It’s just more of the same.  That may be enough for some, but it will probably also disappoint many other audiences too who are expecting something that blows them away like the first movie did.

One of the other unfortunate aspects of the film where it falls short of the original is in the music.  The original was blessed to have the talents of Lin Manuel-Miranda working as the songwriter, just fresh off of his record-setting run of the Broadway musical Hamilton.  His songs for the original Moana have likewise become huge hits for Disney, earning their place on the charts as well as becoming standards in many people’s go to play lists.  The new songs written for Moana 2 are not what I would consider awful, but they are far from memorable like the Lin Manuel-Miranda songs.  The new songs were written by newcomers Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear and are at best serviceable to the story, but they definitely won’t be anyone’s new favorites in the years ahead.  But, even if the songs are subpar, the performers are still giving it their all when performing them.  Auli’i Cravalho particularly remains as powerful a singer as she was in first film.  The sequel thankfully sees her return to the role, along with all the other voice actors from the original.  One of the things that definitely helps Moana 2 in the overall picture is just how good Moana and Maui’s relationship remains enjoyable to watch.  Auli’i and Dwayne Johnson may not have recorded their lines together, but their characters’ chemistry is still just as strong as ever, and both are great to listen to throughout the whole movie.  Johnson even gets some surprisingly heavy moments to work with in this film, and he does a remarkable job there too along with all of his humorous moments.  The downside of the re-working of the film is that all of the new characters feel like their development got heavily truncated.  The characters themselves are not particularly bad, but their purpose in the story just feel superfluous with all their scenes left on the cutting room floor.  The worst example of a character that got especially truncated is the character Matangi.  It feels like she was being set up to be much more of a villain in this story than she ends up being.  She even gets what sounds like a villain song.  But, not long after we first meet her, she just as quickly disappears, and we don’t even see her at all in the climatic third act.  The Moana/ Maui dynamic still thankfully carries the weight of the film, but it does feel like a lot was lost in transition with all of the other characters, and that’s unfortunate given that a few of them could’ve developed into something really interesting.

One thing that definitely doesn’t feel underwhelming about the movie is the animation.  Even when it was under development as a streaming series, Moana 2 was always going to be worked on by the same team at Disney Animation that works on all their theatrical films.  The character animation is especially on point, as Moana, Maui and all the other islanders all remain wonderfully expressive.  I also love what they do with the animals too, especially  Hei Hei, whose realistic chicken like movements still remain hilarious in the context of the movie scenes that he’s used in.  But the movie also ups the ante a bit from the first film with regard to it’s sense of scale.  The aforementioned encounter with the giant clam is an especially harrowing moment, as is the climatic confrontation with Nalo at the very end.  The stakes definitely feel higher as a result, and the animation team makes it all look very impressive.  The only downside is that Moana 2 loses the more cinematic widescreen presentation that the first film had in favor of a more streaming friendly 2.00:1 aspect ratio.  The film still feels big, but the widescreen format might have also helped to reinforce that feeling on a big screen a bit more.  At the same time, there are some great animation touches throughout.  While the songs themselves are forgettable, the staging of them is still spectacular.  Matangi’s song in particular has some great trippy visuals thrown in, with a lot of the colors going wild in that sequence.  Maui’s song is also visually dazzling, although that one isn’t as uniquely visual given that it echoes a lot of the same style as his song “Your Welcome” from the first Moana.  It’s not exactly a huge step ahead in animation from anything else Disney has made recently, but the last time Disney went experimental, we got Wish, so it’s not exactly a bad thing right now for Disney to keep doing the things they are good at while they rebuild their brand.  And in terms of the animation here, the execution is key and Moana 2 is undoubtedly beautiful, if familiar, achievement for the Disney Animation team.

I get the feeling that people will be mixed with their feelings on this film.  Sure, the movie delivers on everything we’d expect for another adventure with Moana and Maui, but it doesn’t deliver on anything more than that.  It is the very definition of a safe sequel; it does the bare minimum without contributing much more.  It’s chopped up storyline may also frustrate people expecting to find a more engaging plot as well.  For many critics, this will be regarded as a disappointment.  For me though, I am filtering this mostly through my experience with Disney movies as a whole.  Is it a downgrade from the first Moana?  Objectively yes, but not by a lot.  For me, I did still have a good time watching it, mainly because I like the characters and the performances that the actors put into them, especially Auli’i Cravalho as the titular heroine.  As long as they got that right, along with some stunning animation, I would still put this as a movie I would recommend.  I certainly thought it was lightyears ahead of the soulless Wish that we got last year.  And as far as sequels to Disney movies go, this is also a big improvement over the disappointing Frozen II.  It does enough stuff right to make it serviceable companion piece to the first film, even if it falls short as a successor.  The movie definitely leaves room open for another sequel, and my hopes is that by developing it from the beginning as a theatrical film that they’ll avoid the pitfalls that befell the project in it’s late transition from series to movie.  Regardless of what I think or what other critics think, this movie is almost certainly critic-proof and is going to make a ton of money over the holidays.  And that in the end is what Disney was hoping for; banking on the familiarity of the Moana brand to help boost this new film in theaters.  The downside is that Disney may become too comfortable with sequels driving their creative output instead of original films.  But, if Moana 2 can help reverse the fortunes of the studio, then maybe they might be able to balance new titles along with more sequels in the future.  That the hope anyway.  For now, it’s a worthwhile trip across the seas watching the further adventures of Moana on the big screen, and it’ll be exciting to see how much further she will go.

Rating: 7.5/10

Gladiator II – Review

When the first Gladiator (2000) was released in theaters at the turn of the millennium, it was part of a much different cinematic landscape.  The decade prior was one of the last eras that a type of movie known as the “prestige blockbuster” would dominate the landscape.  The “prestige blockbuster” was a film like a historical epic or an intimate drama that could perform at the box office the same way that a blockbuster action film would.  These were the kinds of movies that would win a bunch of awards while at the same time making profits in the hundreds of millions for their studios.  These were also sometimes big ambitious movies too, but with a much more serious tone than the average blockbuster.  The 90’s weren’t the first period of Hollywood’s history where these kinds of movies would dominate.  You can look back all the way to Gone With the Wind (1937) to see an example of a historical epic being a blockbuster success, and the trend would carry over into the 50’s and 60’s, with widescreen spectacles like Spartacus (1960) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) became monster hits in addition to winning lots of awards and acclaim.  The 1990’s in particular feels like one of the last big eras where these kinds of movies would prosper, starting off with Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves in 1990, and continuing with films like Forrest Gump (1994) and Braveheart (1995) soon after, and eventually peaking with Titanic in 1997.  The decade that would follow would see a major shift away from the “prestige blockbuster” as big historical epics would fail to ignite like they did in the 90’s and other genres like fantasy and comic book films would begin to take over.  It was a dramatic shift that probably took Hollywood a bit by surprise and it would take several more box office bombs to seal the “prestige blockbusters” fate.  Sure, there are standouts that still work, like last year’s Oppenheimer (2023), but the “prestige blockbuster” really feels like an anomaly now rather than a common occurrence.  And the movie that really did feel like the last of it’s kind for a while was Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

When it first premiered, Gladiator was not exactly seen as anything special.  But after it’s modest opening in May 2000, Gladiator just kept sticking around, and by the end of that summer it was one of the highest grossing films of the season.  This was surprising given how old-fashioned it was.  It was definitely a throwback to the old sword and sandals epics of the past that had defined the last time the “prestige blockbuster” had ruled Hollywood.  Though it felt classic in it’s storytelling, it did feature some cutting edge visuals in it’s presentation.  The recreation of the Roman Coliseum in particular was a groundbreaking work of visual effects for it’s time, and the movie won it’s effects team an Oscar for the effort.  There was also the usual visual flair that Ridley Scott had been known for with movies like Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) that helped it to stand out from other sword and sandal epics of the past.  But what I think helped to captivate audiences even more than that was the magnetic performance by Russell Crowe in the role of Maximus; the general who became a slave, who then became a gladiator who challenged an empire, as the tag line stated.  Maximus is one of cinema’s greatest heroes, and Crowe’s performance is widely praised even to this day.  The movie went on to win 5 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe, though sadly Ridley Scott went home empty handed.  In the years since, Scott has tried many times to replicate the magic that he succeeded to capture with Gladiator, but to little avail, with movies like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Robin Hood (2010) and The Last Duel (2021) all falling short at the box office.  Still, he remains an active filmmaker well into his 80’s without showing any signs of slowing down.  Even after making Gladiator, he contemplated a return to the same story one day, trying to come up with different ideas about how to continue the story into another chapter.  It wouldn’t be easy, given that (spoilers) Maximus is dead at the end of the film.  He went through numerous drafts of a sequel, including a supernatural one written by musician Nick Cave.  But, 24 years later, Scott has finally landed on a story that he feels does justice to the original and now we have Gladiator II releasing into theaters.  The only quest remains is if it is a worthy successor, or are we not entertained.

Taking place 16 years after the events of the original Gladiator, we begin in the midst of a battle between a free city on the Northern African coast and the might of the Roman naval fleet.  Led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the Romans take the city in quick order and imprison the soldiers on the other side.  Now slaves at the mercy of Rome, the remaining “barbarian” soldiers are taken to the gladiatorial arenas on the outskirts of the city where they are going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder looking for more stock to showcase at the fights in the mighty Coliseum.  One soldier named Hanno (Paul Mescal) proves to be an especially skilled fighter, and he peaks the interest of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former gladiator himself who now makes a fortune as supplier of goods for the Roman armies.  Macrinus sees the fury in Hanno’s eyes, with a will towards vengeance, and he hopes to use him as a weapon in his own ambitions for the control of the Roman Empire.  Meanwhile, General Acacius is secretly plotting his own challenge towards stopping the corruption that has infected Rome, with the twin Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) representing all the worst qualities of leadership in the crumbling empire.  Acacius is aided by a handful of senators who were loyal to the great Marcus Aurelius, as well as loyal to his surviving daughter Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), Acacius’ wife.  However, plans are turned on their head when Lucilla witnesses the gladiatorial fight set up to honor Acacius’ recent victory.  She sees Hanno fighting in the arena and immediately recognizes him as her son Lucius Verus Aurelius, the true heir to the throne of Caesar.  After the fall of Emperor Commodus and the death of Maximus in the Coliseum, Lucilla knew that her young son wouldn’t be safe in the power vacuum that followed, so she ensured that he would be taken far away from Rome so that he could survive.  But now he has return all these years later, with hatred for Rome in his heart.  And with many schemes all playing out in and around the heart of the Empire, what ultimate fate will Lucius bring to the the future of Rome.  Will he hasten it’s destruction or will he assume his birthright and end the corruption that has infected the Empire?

When the decision is made to do a legacy sequel to a beloved film many, many years after the fact, there are a lot of risks involved.  The primary risk is that the movie has to escape the shadow of the film that came before it.  People already have expectations about what they want based on what they love about the original film, and the sequel then has to both meet those expectations and then surpass them in order to justify it’s existence.  There are several examples of legacy sequels that hit their mark, like Creed (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), but there are also a lot of examples of sequels that completely dropped the ball like Blues Brothers 2000 (2000) and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016).  So, with 24 years in between the first and second films, how does Gladiator II stack up as a legacy sequel?  While it is far from being one of the worst legacy sequels ever made it is also sadly not very good.  The biggest problem with the movie is that it fails to escape the shadow of it’s far superior predecessor.  Ridley Scott’s original film had this operatic verve to it, with everything from the performances to the staging to the music all creating a spectacle that felt grand.  A lot of that is missing in Gladiator II.  While there are some things that Ridley Scott demonstrates that he can still do very well, namely directing the action set pieces, there are also many signs that he has lost a little bit of that golden touch as he’s gotten older.  Of course, it is still impressive that at the age of 86 that he’s still capable of pulling off a movie of this kind of scale.  At a time when many of his colleagues have either slowed down or have long retired, he’s still putting out a movie at the rate of one a year, which has only cemented his legendary status.  But, with Gladiator II and last year’s Napoleon (2023), Ridley is also showing signs that while he still has command over the visual style of his film he doesn’t quite have the command over the story anymore.

Where I think the problem lies is with the script to this movie.  It’s kind of remarkable that the original Gladiator, with it’s collection of three screenwriters (David Franzoni, William Nicholson, and John Logan) had a more coherent and memorable script than the one for the sequel written by a single screenwriter.  The original film had a singular focus to it’s story, and that was showing the incredible journey of Maximus as he goes from general, to slave, to a gladiator that challenged the Emperor.  Nearly a quarter century later, we still quote lines from Gladiator, and some of them are pretty profound.  One line in particular that I love is “What we do in life echoes in Eternity,” which this sequel also recognizes as a powerful statement as it gets quoted a lot.  The script for Gladiator II, written by David Scarpa (who also scripted Napoleon) doesn’t have anything profound to say, and it spends far too many scenes calling back to the superior writing of the original.  For the most part, the movie just ends up being a repeat of the first film; with Lucius following the same trajectory as Maximus.  And this leads to yet another big flaw with the film, which is the character of Lucius.  He is a pale imitation of the character of Maximus.  The film never allows him the time to develop as a character, other than just showing how he is driven by vengeance over the death of his loved one in battle.  Paul Mescal is certainly not a bad choice to play the role.  He’s a capable actor and he certainly has the impressive physique to play a gladiator.  But the script just gives him this hollow, ill-defined character to work with.  When Russell Crowe played Maximus, he created a iconic hero; a man you would want leading you into battle, and the movie clearly defined what motivated him, with his sense of justice and seeking to live up to the ideals of Rome that Marcus Aurelius instilled in him.  For Gladiator II, it seemed like Ridley Scott and David Scarpa were at a loss for how to continue on with the story since Maximus dies at the end of the original, and they just looked at the character of Lucius and decided he’ll do and tried to shoehorn his story into a Maximus 2.0.

While Lucius remains a sadly hollow focal point of this movie, there are still other elements of this film that actually help to lift it up from being a complete failure.  First and foremost, the presence of Denzel Washington helps to save this film.  Denzel is working on a whole different level than the entire rest of the cast, and he helps to breathe much needed life into the movie.  I love the fact that he doesn’t even bother doing an accent and just plays the role like it’s an extension of himself.  All the other actors are speaking with the usual dignified British accents that you hear in these kinds of period dramas, and Denzel sounds like he just walked off the set of American Gangster (2007).  It shouldn’t work, but it does and Denzel’s scenes are by far the best part of the movie.  You can tell he’s having the best time on screen as he gets to peacock around in flowing Roman robes.  He also gets all the best one-liners in the script, which he delivers with an incredible amount of swagger.  Sadly nothing else in the movie rises up to what Denzel is bringing into the film.  While it is nice to see Pedro Pascal present in a Roman epic like this, which he does seem to fit in well as that Roman soldier gear looks good on him, he sadly is underutilized in the story and his character General Acacius is kind of pointless in the grand scheme of things.  I kind of wonder if the movie would’ve been better if it centered on his character rather than on Lucius.  The performances of Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as the twin emperors also feel like pale imitations when stacked up against Joaquin Phoenix’s memorably camp portrayal of Commodus in the original Gladiator.  And while it is nice to see Connie Nielsen return to the role she played 24 years ago in the first movie, she also does feel underutilized in the film.  Basically, in terms of the cast, the only ground where this movie surpasses the original is with the inclusion of Denzel Washington in the film, as he’s the only element of the movie that feels like something new.

In terms of Ridley Scott’s direction, he seems to be most at home with the battles in the Coliseum.  These moments are definitely the ones that feel most alive in the movie.  One thing that I was happy to see was Ridley Scott getting to finally realize an idea that he had to scrap in the first movie, which is a fight between the gladiators and a warrior riding a rhinoceros.  Probably due to the limitations of computer animation at the time, Ridley was not able to get a realistic looking rhino to work on screen in the original, but with the advancements over the last couple decades, he now is able to make this rhino fight look the way he wanted and it did work in this sequel.  There’s also a naval battle that takes place in a flooded Coliseum that while is completely at odd with the true history of the real arena nevertheless makes for an exciting moment in the film.  One thing for sure is that Ridley Scott is very good at making his movies look great on screen and Gladiator II is no different in that department.  The money put into the set designs and visual effects are all well spent and Scott can still deliver the goods in this regard.  But the sum of everything else just doesn’t gel together.  I’ll give the film this, it definitely doesn’t feel it’s 2 hour and 28 minute length, and it moves at a brisk pace.  But, the editing of the movie also doesn’t have the same flow as the original film does, which went a long way towards giving it that operatic feel.  Here, the editing is very basic and just becomes a means towards moving us from plot point to plot point.  Also a major downgrade from the first film; the music.  Hans Zimmer wrote the score for the first Gladiator, and it still stands as one of his greatest works, with tracks like “Now We Are Free” being some of the greatest pieces of music ever written for film.  Zimmer sadly didn’t return for this film, and instead Ridley Scott turned to Harry Gregson-Williams instead, who’s been writing the music for most or Scott’s more recent films.  He’s a decent composer, but his sound is a lot more basic than the experimental work that Hans Zimmer does with his scores, and that difference is palpable in this film.  The music just doesn’t have that grandiosity to it, and it even has the audacity to call back to Zimmer’s much better tracks in moments that don’t earn it.  It’s another element of the movie where you definitely notice the fall off from the first film, and it sadly also makes the experience that much more disappointing.

In the immediate years after it’s original release, Gladiator inspired this brief revival of the sword and sandals epic, with many of the big studios hoping to cash in on the same success that Gladiator achieved.  Unfortunately, it was short lived.  Warner Brothers struck out twice with both Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) back to back, and 20th Century Fox also failed with Ridley Scott’s own Kingdom of Heaven (2005).  Gladiator II feels like another one of those failed imitators that tried to be the next Gladiator but couldn’t muster it.  It seems like Ridley Scott himself has been trying to chase Gladiator many times over the years and always come up short, even with a movie that is directly tied with it.  While it is admirable that Ridley has managed to get this long in the making sequel across the finish line, it also will be looked at as an unfortunate footnote to one of his masterpieces rather than a classic that will stand strong on it’s own.  The only thing that stands out as better in this sequel is the performance of Denzel Washington, which gives this movie much needed life.  Otherwise, everything from the story to the characters just feels like a step down from the original film.  I don’t think it should reflect poorly on Ridley Scott.  He is a legend multiple times over and the fact that he’s still tireless in his old age is kind of inspiring.  But we can’t expect him to keep delivering Gladiator quality films anymore.  If anything, he’s been much better in recent years making movies that are different from his usual historical epic formula.  I really liked his historical drama The Last Duel (2021) which took an unconventional approach to the way it told it’s story through multiple points of view.  I think Scott can still deliver if he has an interesting script to work with.  Gladiator II just feels less like it’s own movie and more like an obligation.  Scott wanted to see if he could still make another Gladiator and he wanted to deliver on the promise that he made for a sequel to the original.  But honestly, he should have left Gladiator alone.  It was a perfectly constructed story that reached a definitive conclusion.  There was nothing more to say about the story of Maximus, and this sequel proves it with it’s own story just feeling like a hollow retread.  It’s not a complete, embarrassing failure as there are good things in it (namely everything Denzel bring to the film) but on the whole it will never be remembered as fondly as the original classic.  To sum it up, no I was not entertained.

Rating: 6/10

Who’s Super Now? – 20 Years of The Incredibles and How Pixar Created the Blueprint for the Rise of Marvel and DC

The early 2000’s were an interesting transitional time for comic book movies.  After the crushing failure of 1997’s Batman and Robin, the genre as a whole went into a bit of a recession as it tried to re-establish what it needed to be.  The Batman franchise had evolved from moody and grim to campy and colorful, and it was not what audiences were looking for.  Heading into the new millennium, a different approach was looked at.  Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) got the ball rolling by grounding the super hero mythos in something that was more familiar to the world that we live in.  A couple years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) took the genre in a direction that made it’s adventure fun but not overly camp.  In many ways, the genre was heading in a direction that honestly was much closer to the comic books that these movies were based on.  Fidelity to the comic books was the guiding force now rather than the traditional standards of genre that had been present before.  And each comic book movie was able to have it’s own identity rather than follow formula, though there were still common tropes that still stuck around.  By the end of the 2000’s, the comic book genre had gone from being on life support to being the dominant force in Hollywood, and it would only continue to grow into the following decade and beyond.  But while the mighty forces of Marvel and DC were battling for supremacy in Hollywood, it could be argued that both have an entirely different source to thank for setting the tone right for the genre.  The movie that had the most profound influence on the super hero genre over the last 20 years (with impacts on everything from character development to the sense of humor present) didn’t come from Marvel nor DC, but rather from an animation studio called Pixar, which itself saw it’s own meteoric rise during this same period.

Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) came at a pivotal time for both animation and super heroes.  For Pixar, it was a big leap forward for them in terms of animation.  Up to that point, they had steered away from depicting human characters, often leaving them to the background as they were far more difficult to model in a believable way.  You look at the early character models of characters like Andy and Sid in Toy Story (1995) and you can see why Pixar chose to center their early movies on stylized toy characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear.  Animals or non-humanoid creatures also gave the studio more creative freedom with the primitive tools they had to work with, which was evidenced in the movies A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003).  However, they faced increased competition from Dreamworks Animation, which struck a huge hit with Shrek (2001), which featured more human characters in prominent roles.  For studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, the dilemma was to find the perfect medium in animating humans that would avoid the uncanny valley pitfall that can often occur.  The solution that Pixar ultimately landed on was to treat their human characters less like perfect recreations, and instead look for ways to make them stylized in a way that would make them easier to animate.  And what better example to look for exaggerated forms of human physique than in comic books.  There are plenty of examples of comic book artists doing away with traditional character models and bringing their own unique stylistic twists to the looks of popular characters; in many cases creating body shapes that could only make sense as part of comic book art.  This is likely what inspired the artists at Pixar and drew them into the idea of making a super hero movie that felt very heavily inspired by the freeing graphic inventiveness of comic books.  Instead of characters with perfectly rendered anatomy, Pixar’s Incredibles would have humans with extreme features that not only made them stand out, but would also be perfectly accentuated to their personalities as well.

The interesting thing about how The Incredibles came to be at Pixar is that it marked the first time that the studio went outside of their own inner circle to green-light a new project.  Now, writer and director Brad Bird was no stranger to the Pixar team before he came to work for them.  Bird was part of the same class at Cal Arts that also included Pixar Animation co-founder John Lassater, and both men started out as junior animators at Disney in the early 80’s, so they were already familiar to each other.  Bird, however, left Disney fairly early on to pursue independent work.  He would work on projects such as Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series, as well as directing a couple episodes of The Simpsons, including creating key supporting characters such as Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob that still remain a part of the show to this day.  It was, however, when he made his feature film debut in 1999 with The Iron Giant that Brad Bird began to make a big splash in the animation industry.  Though The Iron Giant is celebrated as a masterpiece today, it did not have a great opening in theaters and ended up prematurely closed the studio that made it, which ended up making Brad Bird a free agent again.  Regardless of box office, the love for Iron Giant was strong across the animation industry so there were a lot of studios that were willing to meet with Bird during this time, and that’s when John Lassater decided to call up his old colleague.  It would prove to be fortuitous because Brad Bird had been developing this idea for a film centered around a family of super heroes that fit perfectly with the desire of Pixar to experiment more with stylized human characters.  Up to this point, the Pixar legacy team had consisted of the people who worked on the original shorts as well as Toy Story.  Lassater had directed the firs three features, while Pete Doctor and Andrew Stanton helmed Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo respectively.  The Incredibles would be the first new film by someone who had not come up through the ranks of Pixar, but as evidenced by the results, Brad Bird fit in very much with the Pixar community.

There are a lot of layers to what makes The Incredibles a perfect super hero movie.  For one thing, the film is not about the characters doing super hero things, but rather it shows us how they try to build a life outside of their super powered identity.  In the world of The Incredibles, super heroic acts have been made illegal due to a string of incidents where people have become collateral damage in the fights between super heroes and super villains and in turn have led to law suits.  As a result, super heroes have live anonymously underground, forced to suppress their abilities.  The Parrs, a family of “supers,” try to blend in with this new normal and this is the focus of the story.  The movie has fun with how the Parrs use their powers in this domestic setting, but it’s ultimately about how they function as a family unit rather than what they must do to save the world, which does come into play in the final act.  The movie brilliantly allows each character to have their own power type too.  Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, has super strength; his wife Helen is super stretchy and goes by the alter ego Elastigirl.  And their children are unique as well; shy Violet can make herself invisible and creates a force field around her, while hyperactive Dash has super speed.  And the baby Jack-Jack, well, that would be spoiling too much.  The Parr family also has a close relationship with Lucius Best, whose freezing powers have earned him the name Frozone.  You can see the parallels with these characters with pre-existing characters from comic books, like Ice Man, Invisible Girl, or The Flash, but putting them together as a family was a unique way of framing their story and examining how being super would function in an average family narrative.  Super hero families aren’t a novel idea; Marvel has tried for years to make a Fantastic Four movie work, with attempt number three coming next summer.  But with The Incredibles, it’s a focal point for the story that works and helps to endear each of these super beings in a way that makes them relatable to the everyday average family.

But what was the thing that set The Incredibles apart as a super hero movie.  What Brad Bird did, in addition to directing an action packed film, was craft a script that in many ways deconstructed the very idea of being a super hero.  The brilliance of the story is that the super heroes are forced to suppress their powers in order to function as a citizen of society, and if a super hero can’t use their powers, what are they left with.  Bob Parr’s crisis in the film is that he has all this power, and yet he has to work a boring day job like everyone else.  What this motivates him to do is to break the rules just a little bit while still trying to balance his home life, with a wife who is more determined to keep him and the family in check.  We see that Bob is a hero to his core and wants to use his powers for good, but is foolhardy to the point where his desires don’t take into account the repercussions of what his actions may do.  By looking into this side of Bob’s character, we see how Brad Bird is examining the duality of being both a god among men and a flawed human being at the same time.  It’s a more introspective examination of the tropes of super herodom that in many ways has found itself worked into the whole genre at large.  When Marvel began their MCU, it was noticeable from the get go that they were taking a much more introspective look at the characters themselves.  The humor of the MCU is definitely more meta than super hero films of the past, and you can’t help but recall how a lot of their deconstruction of super hero tropes fell reminiscent of the ones from The Incredibles.  There’s a through line to be sure of the jokes in Incredibles about villains monologuing leading to 20 years later where Wolverine punches out a villain and says “Not everyone gets a speech,” as seen in Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).

But The Incredibles is far more than just examining the home life of super heroes.  The point wasn’t to just show what Superman does when he is only Clark Kent.  Brad Bird’s film is ultimately about embracing the special part of what makes us who we are; something that is a common theme in his films.  Some have criticized the movie for promoting an Ayn Randian objectivist point of view; where exceptional people should be held up as better than the rest of society.  The Randian elements seem most pronounced in the movie with Bob Parr’s frustrations over being held back by the anti-super laws, but I don’t see the movie as a validation of Randian beliefs either.  If anything, Brad Bird’s point in the film is not objectivism, but rather the way society scapegoats it’s problems on those who are different.  Ultimately, the Parr family realizes that just sitting on the sidelines doesn’t make society better either, and that the need to conform is not just restrictive to them, but it’s also preventing them from having a healthy family life as well.  When they get to be super powered in the open, they grow closer together as a family.  Exceptionalism, according to Brad Bird, is not in being better than everyone else, but in being the best version of oneself.  That’s something that he showed more definitively in his next film, Ratatouille (2007), where the motto “Anyone Can Cook,” reveals itself to be the idea that a great artist can be anyone, even the least expected.  And he also celebrates the idea that people who chose less power can often be the best representation of oneself; such as The Iron Giant choosing not to be a weapon and instead becoming “Superman.”  This is another idea that has helped shape the characterizations of super heroes over the last 20 years.  It’s the motivation that makes Wonder Woman walk into No Man’s Land and act as a human shield, or Spider-Man choosing to let everyone in the world forget who he is, or Thor letting his home world be destroyed in order to save it’s people.  Like the Incredibles family, modern day super heroes don’t just choose to be super to be better; in many ways they have no choice but to do what’s best for those they care about.

It’s the complexity of character that The Incredibles brought that certainly helped create ripples throughout the super hero genre, though there certainly were many cases before of complex characterizations.  One other thing that the movie had a strong influence on was the way it showcased the power sets of it’s characters.  The movie seems to have the most fun with Helen’s Elastigirl power set, as her stretching ability gave the animators a lot to work with.  One of the biggest highlights of the movie though is the sequence dubbed the “One Hundred Mile Dash.”  It’s a chase scene involving Dash as he tries to escape guardsmen trying to hunt him down.  Even to this day I don’t think super speed powers have been as showcased as well on screen as it is here, and we’ve had two Quicksilvers and one Flash in the movies by now.  There are many other great elements of the movie that the movie set a high bar for that I don’t think any other super hero film has been able to match.  One is the presence of the character Edna Mode (voiced by Brad Bird himself).  We see all these amazing super suits in Marvel and DC movies, but are never given an explanation about who makes them, with a few exceptions.  A character like Edna is a great addition here, and it makes sense that a person who designs suits for super heroes would be a type A personality herself.  She is easily one of the highlights of the movie and a character type you wish would be more present in the genre.  One other brilliant part of the movie is the villain, Syndrome; easily one of the greatest in all of Pixar’s canon.  Syndrome’s role is a great deconstruction of toxic fandom, where one’s fascination with super powers often leads to eventual loathing of not having control over it, and a desire to flip the power dynamic in their favor.  Syndrome wishes to create a society where everyone has access to super hero ability (which he will profit off of by selling it to them), so that in his eyes, “when everyone is super, than no one will be.”  He’s a character that has become frighteningly all too real in the last 20 years, as tech bro billionaires have used their wealth to bully their way into politics and culture.  Given Pixar’s close proximity to Silicon Valley, it’s almost like Brad Bird and his team knew what was coming and tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen and are now in a world increasingly run by Syndromes.

Unlike The Iron Giant, Incredibles was an immediate success upon it’s initial release.  The movie grossed a respectable $260 million domestic and Brad Bird won his first Academy Award for Animated Feature that year.  What’s more, it was a major milestone for Pixar Animation, as it helped them improve their style of animation and showed that they could tell a human story without having to be rigid in their animation of the human figures.  You know you’ve got great stylized human characters when each one’s silhouette alone conveys personality.  It also was a great leap forward in staging, pushing the medium of computer animation further into a cinematic mode, with the movie very much reaching epic heights in it’s sense of scale.  But at it’s heart, Brad Bird drove home the idea that this was a family film as well.  The heroes aren’t just defined by their deeds, but in how they act as a family unit as well.  And it contrasts so brilliantly with a villain who only sees the powers as the only thing that makes a hero who they are, completely missing the whole point of what heroism is.  While The Incredibles is working with tropes that were already there present in the genre, it did help us to look at them in a fresh new way, and that in many ways guided the shifting winds that would define the genre through the whole rise of the MCU and the DCEU.  One noteworthy contribution to the genre that definitely has a direct connection to The Incredibles is the contributions of it’s music composer Michael Giacchino.  After writing music for television and video games for years, Giacchino was able to make his studio feature film debut as composer for The Incredibles, with a mid-century jazz score reminiscent of the James Bond films. Cut to a decade later, and Giacchino is credited with writing the fanfare for Marvel Studios.  You now hear his music before every Marvel movie, which is quite a legacy to leave behind, and it all started with writing the score for The Incredibles.  Marvel even gave the longtime comic book fan a chance to make his debut behind the camera as director of the special Werewolf by Night (2022) for Disney+.  Even 20 years later and The Incredibles still remains a high water mark not just for animation, but for super hero films in general.  Even it’s sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018) performed like a MCU film at the box office, grossing over a billion worldwide.  Culturally, it is undeniably Brad Bird’s most influential film, and that’s saying a lot for a man with multiple masterpieces on his resume.  It’s an action packed ride, but also one where the heart is in the right place, showing how heroism in the end is not about personal glory, but instead about discovering the best way to use what you have for good.  It’s old school in that way, and there’s no school like the old school.

Too Big to Stream – How Netflix’s Fight With Movie Theaters May Be Hurting Their Brand

There is no doubt the biggest disruptor in cinema over the last few years has been the company known as Netflix.  The Silicon Valley startup that had the novel idea of renting out movies through the mail from an online platform has since grown into a megalithic player in Hollywood itself, literally re-shaping the way that business is conducted within the movie industry.  It has also been one of the causes for a lot of destruction of the old standards of production and distribution.  The first casualty of Netflix’s rise was the video rental industry.  Blockbuster Video, which had itself leveled the competition to leave themselves in a position where they were the only video rental option in most markets, fell very quickly in response to Netflix’s easier to use service.  By the time Netflix was moving away from it’s mail service model to a streaming model, making on demand entertainment even more convenient, Blockbuster went from being a national brand to a ghost of it’s former self, now only open in a single location in Bend, Oregon.  The shift to streaming has also led to a significant decline in physical media in general, with most big box stores no longer featuring a movie aisle as most physical copies are now sold exclusively online.  Studios that once made a mint on selling their legacy titles on physical media have instead decided to play in the same field as Netflix, and launch their own streaming platforms instead.  There really is no other company that has changed the culture in the movie industry as much as Netflix has, and after leveling past juggernaut industries like that of home entertainment and video rental, they seemed poised to put another prominent column of Hollywood out to pasture as well; the movie theater industry.  However, this next step has taken some unexpected twists and turns that in some ways has put pressure on Netflix to rethink it’s whole business model.  Is it better for them to seek to destroy the theatrical model of distribution, or is there a better option for them in actually working with movie theaters?

One thing that has surprisingly emerged in the last couple of years in the wake of the streaming wars is that movies that released in theaters first actually perform better on streaming than the movies that were put out as streaming exclusives.  This has been the case with the studio run services like Disney+, Max, and Paramount+.  One noteworthy example is Disney’s Moana (2016), a film released in theaters 8 years ago, years before there was a Disney+, and even after all this time it is still ranked high on the all-time watched list for every streaming platform.  More recent films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and Barbie (2023) have also given their streaming platforms a boost after their initial theatrical runs, which by the way both netted over a billion dollars each.  Which is to show that releasing the movies first in theaters does not decrease their viewership numbers once they are released on streaming after.  If anything, it shows that movies have resiliency.  Of course, I’m citing examples of movies that were universally beloved by audiences, and their repeat watching value certainly translated into viewership on streaming.  But, it’s also a sign that a theatrical roll out doesn’t hurt either.  In fact it is more beneficial in the long run for a movie to premiere on the big screen first because of the patterns of viewership that help to spotlight any certain film.  When a movie is in theaters, the choice is limited to the availability of screens, so the customer is making a very active choice in what movie they are going to see.  Whether the experience is good or bad, the movie goer still had a clear idea of what experience they were paying for.  Movies on streaming on the other hand don’t benefit from that factor of audience interest.  They are algorithmically spotlighted on a platform that customers usually spend scrolling through hundreds of titles in order to find something to watch.  At a cost between $10-20 a month, streaming gives it’s customers and abundance of options, but very few quick choices.  And naturally, the movies that people saw on a movie screen will be the ones that they actively seek first, while straight to streaming will tend to be buried.

This has become a contentious thing between Netflix and the movie industry now.  For years, Netflix has been spending billions on expanding their library of movies and TV shows, which was something they had to do out of necessity after studios like Disney and Universal began to remove their films and shows from the platform in order to consolidate for their own platforms.  And as part of this expansion of their in-house production, they also were trying to build their brand as a prestige name in the industry.  They did this by getting big name talent like Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, David Fincher, and Alfonso Cuaron to bring their next projects to their studio.  Netflix developed this reputation for being generous to filmmakers with movie ideas that probably were not going to work in the Hollywood business model as it was.  This attracted a lot of talent to Netflix and away from the other studios, who were starting to fret about the pull that Netflix was having in the industry.  And for a good while, it was working.  Netflix went from being an online streaming platform featuring films from all studios to a major studio within itself.  They were buying up real estate across Hollywood, including the legendary Sunset Bronson studio lot that was once home to both Warner Brothers during it’s early years.  They were beginning to frequently appear at awards ceremonies  including the Oscars and even racked up a fair amount of gold along the way.  But, the streaming market has definitely changed with all the other studios now running their own platforms.  And while Netflix still dominates as the streaming champion, their status as the ideal place for filmmakers to go has somewhat diminished.  Before, Netflix could persuade filmmakers to come to their offices with the appeal of getting their dream projects made, sparing no expense.  But now, the legacy studios of Hollywood are beginning to lure the filmmakers back with a different appeal that seems to be more ideal to them nowadays; that they can get their movie seen on the big screen.

One has to thing that filmmakers are making a calculated risk between these two options now.  One, they go to Netflix and get their strange, unconventional movie made without restrictions but also see it play exclusively on streaming and potentially be buried in the algorithm.  Or, they go to the studios and potentially face numerous obstacles from executive meddling, but eventually they’ll see their work play in front of an audience on the big screen.  But, there are those filmmakers who very much desire to have their movies screened for a wide audience and that’s becoming a more and more desirable option to some.  Box office is a very tangible measure of a film’s success, so it’s a great way to gauge if your movie managed to succeed or not.  On streaming, your movie becomes one of numerous titles listed simply as thumbnails on a smaller screen.  Most streaming platforms don’t even publicly state their internal numbers, so the measure of success is somewhat a mystery.  And there are just a lot of filmmakers out there who are still succeeding without even thinking twice about choosing to go theatrical first.  Christopher Nolan for example clashed with his previous home studio (Warner Brothers) after they were about to push his film Tenet (2020) to streaming during the pandemic against his wishes of waiting for theaters to re-open.  He jumped ship, went to Universal who gave him an assurance of a theatrical first release, and he made Oppenheimer (2023) to resounding box office and awards season success.  Tom Cruise likewise convinced his studio Paramount to sit on Top Gun: Maverick (2022) until the theatrical market recovered, and it payed off extremely well.  So, what filmmakers are seeing is that there is an added benefit to getting the movie seen in theaters to lots of people, because it gives their film an added spotlight that can be tangibly felt.  That’s why a lot more filmmakers are starting to demand a bit more on their distribution front, and ensuring that their film is not just made, but also viewed.

One of the biggest challenges recently to Netflix’s streaming first policy is a recent push by filmmaker Greta Gerwig to get her next film project set up at Netflix released on more screens nationwide.  After her success with Barbie, Greta inked a massive deal with Netflix to launch a brand new take of the Narnia books from C.S. Lewis into a major film franchise.  Clearly, Netflix sees this as a major potential win for them, but Greta Gerwig believes (rightly I’d say) that such a franchise can’t just thrive on streaming alone.  Narnia is a major title to produce, akin to The Lord of the Rings in scale and scope, which is what prompted Disney and Fox’s short lived run with the book series.  They are movies that demand a big screen treatment, and that’s why she’s putting pressure on Netflix to consider a wider release.  It’s not something new for Netflix to go wide with one of their films.  As part of their contract with director Rian Johnson, Netflix did agree to release the first of his two Knives Out sequels, Glass Onion (2022), in a wide theatrical release before it was put on streaming.  However, they limited the amount of time it played in theaters, and the film was gone after only two weeks.  This clearly limited the amount of box office it was going to take, and by all accounts, Glass Onion did pretty well in it’s short run.  Who knows how much money Netflix left on the table by pulling it after such a brief run.  Perhaps the Netflix accountants think that box office is miniscule compared to the $15 a month they currently get from their hundreds of millions of subscribers, but any box office is is helpful to the bottom  line, especially when it can off set production and marketing costs.  For Greta Gerwig, she actually has a powerful ally in her camp; the IMAX Corporation, who are interested in getting Ms. Gerwig’s Narnia films on their screens.  IMAX has a lot of pull in the industry, and have proven to be a big driver of box office for films because of the premium ticket price.  Greta clearly wants to get her movie seen properly on a bigger screen than just having it streamed on a platform; but at the same time, she is working with Netflix’s money, who ultimately have the final say.

Netflix has been defiant, but the other streamers have reconsidering their plans to put a bunch of their movies exclusively on streaming.  Paramount made a last minute choice to take their musical re-make of Mean Girls (2024) and put it into theaters in advance of it’s premiere on Paramount+.  The choice proved fruitful as the movie grossed over $90 million at the box office, making it a hit for the struggling studio that they otherwise wouldn’t have had if it went straight to streaming.  There is also an example of movie studios that were planning on making multi-part mini-series for streaming all of a sudden restructuring them into feature films for theaters.  Disney’s upcoming Moana 2 (2024) was one of those streaming series projects that got re-worked and now it’s being projected to be a box office winner for Disney Animation, which is really in need of one. But perhaps the biggest example of a shift back to the theatrical model that payed off big for a studio was Warner Brothers decision to take Tim Burton’s long anticipated sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) and put it into theaters after initially greenlighting it as a streaming exclusive.  To date, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has grossed nearly $300 million domestic and over half a billion worldwide.  Had they gone the streaming route, Warner Brothers would have missed out on a net profit of over $100 million on this film, which they definitely need after the box office flops of Furiosa (2024) and Joker: Folie a Deux.  But there are other examples of some studios doing the reverse.  After a string of box office disappointments like Napoleon (2023) and Argylle (2024), Apple Studios has opted to pull back from theatrical and release more of their films straight to streaming, like they did to the recent film Wolfs (2024) starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.  That film was planned for theaters, with trailers already running in most markets, and in the eleventh hour the movie was shifted to streaming instead.  While there’s this case to prove a bit of the point to Netflix’s argument, the trend of movies going from streaming to theatrical is growing bigger.

In many ways, it comes down to what type of movie gets either the theatrical or streaming treatment.  The movies that seem to get the lowest bit of interest are the ones that studios feel safer putting out in streaming, meanwhile the safer bets and higher profile projects get the theatrical market.  But with Netflix, they seem content on going all in on streaming; at least up to now.  They only used limited theatrical releases to put their movie out for awards contention, since they still have to play by the Academy’s rules in this regard.  But still, that limits the visibility of their in theaters to just a handful of theaters, namely in Los Angeles and New York, where Academy voters mostly live.  Movies play differently on living room entertainment systems compared to the movie theater experience.  If Netflix wants their prestige movies to gain any traction in awards season, make it so that they have the highest profile in the grandest presentation possible.  When Netflix was starting to disrupt the industry in the 2010’s by investing in Oscar caliber campaigns, they certainly had the kinds of movies to back that claim up.  In some cases, their movies were garnering the most nominations in any year, led by movies like Roma (2018), The Irishman (2019) and The Power of the Dog (2021).  This last Oscars, they had only one nominated film, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023), and it went home empty handed.  Couple this with the fact that straight to streaming films have garnered the reputation of being the new direct-to-video moniker of poor quality, and you can see that Netflix’s brand has somewhat diminished.  All of the Oscar worthy stuff they put out is now being drowned out by the deluge of bad films that get dumped onto their platform, whether made by them or licensed by another studio.   It may now be worth it for Netflix to clean up it’s reputation by putting their name out their more in a theatrical arena, showing that they can be competitive with the legacy studios in Hollywood.

Netflix should not be adversarial with the theatrical market.  It’s a resilient mode of distribution that Netflix has been unable to conquer in the same way it has so many other industries.  Even still, movie theaters are not fully recovered yet from the blow dealt to them by the pandemic.  The problem isn’t so much that people prefer to watch movies at home than go out to a theater.  We’ve discovered in the last couple years that there is indeed a reliable base of customers that will definitely make time to watch movies in theaters.  The issue today is that the movie industry is just not making enough movies in order to fill the demand of the theatrical market, and this is where Netflix could be a lot of help.  Not every movie they make is necessarily worthy of the big screen treatment, but there are a few that absolutely would benefit from a wide release in theaters.  Most people forget that Eddie Murphy made a new Beverly Hills Cop sequel this year exclusive for Netflix, because it never got a theatrical release.  Seeing how much a legacy sequel made so many years later ended up lighting up the box office this fall with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, perhaps Murphy and Netflix realized they missed out on a gold opportunity this year to bank on the nostalgia driving their movie.  Will Netflix make the change?  It’s hard to say.  In many ways, the streaming market is changing once again to something that favors a symbiotic relationship with the theatrical model and not one in opposition to it.  There are added pressures now for Netflix to reconsider their position, including more demands from filmmakers and more competition from other streamers that are benefiting from the theatrical to streaming mode of release.  Given that Netflix has more to gain than lose by just doing more in the theatrical market, it should be an easy choice.  There seems to be signs that some at Netflix value the theatrical experience; they did help save the legendary Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood after all.  Netflix needs to shake off the reputation they have as just a content mill, and actually show that they mean business as a new major Hollywood studio by showcasing what they can do on the biggest scale possible by getting their movies out on the silver screen.  They’ll still remain a top dog in streaming for years to come if people get interested in all their movies again, and not just the ones that the algorithm pushes to the top.    For many, nothing beats the theater experience, so for Netflix’s sake if you can’t beat it, join it.

Collecting Criterion – Election (1999)

We are mere days away  from that time again, when we must do our duty as citizens and vote for who will lead our country for the next few years.  It’s a day that we are either eagerly awaiting, or more likely dreading.  But, nevertheless it is an essential function of a healthy democracy, where every voice matters.  Much of the political discourse in our nation, for better and worse, is influenced greatly by our culture and Hollywood has contributed it’s fair share of political movies over the years.  A few of those films have become special enough to be recognized by the Criterion Collection, and they span a wide variety of issues.  There are political thrillers from the likes of director Costa-Gavras, namely Z (1969, Spine #491) and Missing (1982, #449).  There’s also Watergate era paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View (1974, #1064).  Political documentaries also are represented in the collection, like Harlan County U.S.A (1976, #334) and Hearts and Minds (1974, #156).  But perhaps the most politically charged film that are found in the Criterion Collection are the political satires.  Some of the most hard hitting ones include Robert Altman’s 11-part mini-series Tanner ’88 (1988, #258), where it skewers the American political machine by running a fake candidate in a real election.  There is also the chillingly prophetic film A Face in the Crowd (1957, #970) from Elia Kazan, where a loud mouth entertainer is propped up to run for office and over the course of time becomes a dangerous demagogue; a savage critique of the toxic relationship between media and politics that feels eerily too close to reality today.  But perhaps the one of the most interesting political satires that has made it into the Criterion Collection is a little film about a high school student body election that over the course of the film reveals itself to be a microcosm of the American way of politics in it’s entirety.  That movie would be Alexander Payne’s breakthrough second feature simply titled Election (1999, #904)

Alexander Payne beforehand was no stranger to tackling politics in his movies before Election.  His first feature, Citizen Ruth (1996), satirized the debate around abortion in America during the 1990’s.  A movie like Election seemed like a logical next step.  But it is interesting that ever since, Payne has largely avoided overt political stories in the rest of his body of work.  Through the following two decades he was more concerned with human stories such as About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), Nebraska (2013) and most recently with The Holdovers (2023).  Really, the only movie in that time where he returned to making a political satire, it was the movie Downsizing (2017) which many people agree is his least successful film.  Election does fit well within his larger body of work mainly because it is a film about characters more than it is about any political agenda.  For his film, Alexander Payne and his frequent writing partner Jim Taylor created characters that reveal themselves to be familiar archetypes of the kind that you see pop up in any contentious political campaign.  By keeping the scope of his setting small, Payne helps to draw more attention to the stakes of this small scale election and how it pertains to the characters in his story.  While the stakes are small, the way these characters deal with their own scheming and manipulation in order to seek victory in this election reveals an interesting concept that has a far more reaching conclusion than you would think from the start.  All of the pettiness and backstabbing we see in politics today really isn’t that far removed from the way we behaved when we were in high school.  Politics has grown increasingly juvenile over the years, with elections becoming more of a clash of personalities than a clash of ideas.  The fact that social media and the ability to meme is a function of campaigns today is just another sign of how spot on Alexander Payne’s satirical look at campaigning was.  It should have been a wake-up call, but instead it was sadly ahead of it’s time.

Set in Alexander Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska (as most of his films are), the movie follows the student body election of Carver High.  Currently, the overly ambitious and over-achieving Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is running un-opposed for student body president, but even despite of that, she is aggressively campaigning in a way that even Beltway insiders would find over the top.  Her election seems like a foregone conclusion, until History and Civics teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) decides to shake the campaign up.  McAllister has grown to dislike Ms. Flick after she got herself involved in a sexual relationship with the geometry teacher who was also Jim’s best friend.  Though he agreed that his friend Dave should have been fired for the inappropriate relationship he had with a student, Jim is also upset that Tracy did not face any consequences herself.  As a way of trying to make her pay for her misdeed, he convinces dim-witted star football player Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run for class president as well.  While completely lacking in any of the same knowledge needed to run student government like Tracy has, Paul nevertheless gains support from the student body by virtue of his simple charisma.  Tracy is outraged that the clearly unqualified Paul is just coasting through his campaign while she is working hard and getting nothing in return.  To make things even more complicated, Paul’s lesbian sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) decides to enter the race herself as a spoiler third party candidate, running on a position of ending student government in general.  When the day of the election comes, McAllister finds that Tracy has won by only a single vote.  Not wanting to see her succeed, he hides the last couple votes she would need for victory, and hands the election to Paul.  However, McAllister’s dirty deed is discovered and he loses his job for the election interference.  Tracy gets the student body president position she always wanted, but it comes at the cost of alienating her from half of the student body.  Despite the victories gained, the movie shows us that the fight itself is not without cost.

It’s hard not to watch the movie today and not see the parallels with American politics today.  Even when it first was released, many people were shocked by how much the film predicted what would happen in the presidential election a year later.  Before the 2016 and 2020 elections became the messy situations that we have recently endured, the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was at the time the most controversial in American history.  Just like the race seen in Election, it was a contest between an ill-informed but folksy son of privilege versus an intelligent but socially awkward career politician and the race did literally come down to just a couple of votes out of millions cast.  When Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor wrote their screenplay, they probably thought that their premise would be far too ridiculous to ever come true, but as we’ve sadly learned about American politics, reality has become stranger than fiction.  Where the movie Election really nails the satire is in showing how politics is a very petty game of one-upsmanship.  Tracy Flick may have the stamina and knowledge to do student government right, but we also see that it’s a desperate cry out for attention for her.  In a way, the movie does present it as a positive point about her character, since she is shown to not have a lot of wealth and influence behind her so she is entirely self-reliant.  But she is also shrill and dismissive of others, believing that she alone is capable of doing the job of student president.  Meanwhile, Jim McAllister is a petty person for putting his own resentment of Tracy before the needs of the student government.  In many way, an audience reading of the film can say a lot about us as a nation when it comes to deciding who’s in the right and the wrong.  Some may see McAllister as the hero for stopping someone as power hungry as Tracy Flick from getting what she wants.  Others may view him as the villain for deliberately disenfranchising voters for his own petty ends.  In the end, the thing that I think Alexander Payne is trying to say is that everyone in this film is a terrible person in their own way, and that that’s just politics has become over time; picking the least awful person for the job.

But what definitely wasn’t awful was the craft that was put into this movie.  Alexander Payne’s become a master at capturing what you would call mid-American ambiance in his movies.  Hailing from Nebraska, he has a fondness for fly-over country simplicity and Election definitely feels at home in that vision as well.  Even while the perspective on the American political process is examined with a lot of cynicism in the movie, the perspective on the people and the place where they live is not.  Payne’s very humanistic outlook for the characters in his movies very much helps this movie from becoming too sour of a portrayal of political machinations.  It also helps that he cast the right people to play the parts in the film too.  Reese Witherspoon is just note perfect as the efficient to a fault Tracy Flick.  Before Election, Reese had been one of the go to actresses at the time to play deeply troubled teenage girls, with breakout roles in Pleasantville (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999).  Playing the buttoned-up and over-achieving Tracy was a bit of a departure for her, but not something that she wasn’t capable of pulling off.  It also gave her a place to shine her credentials in comedy, something that she would carry with her to box office success in 2001’s Legally Blonde soon after.  Opposite her is a wonderfully sleazy performance from Matthew Broderick as Jim McAllister.  He does a great job of playing this character as pathetically petty while at the same time giving him a sense of relatability that helps to prevent him from being two one-dimensionally evil.  Also, Chris Klein makes for a perfect dim-witted jock in the role of Paul Metzler.  He himself wasn’t too far removed from appearing in the sex comedy American Pie (1999), so he probably knew exactly the kind of charming empty vessel that the movie needed to get the political metaphor across.  Indeed, in lesser capable hands, a political satire like this would have gotten muddled with too much overt symbolism, and with Payne keeping it grounded in his simple Nebraskan style, he was able to create a more provocative film as a whole.

For this film’s release within the Criterion label, the film underwent a new 4K digital transfer, approved by Alexander Payne himself.  Sadly, the film has only been put out by Criterion solely on Blu-ray and DVD, with no word yet of a 4K release in the future.  So while the movie is playing on these lower resolution presentations, it should be said that the movie does indeed still look good.  For a movie reaching it’s 25th Anniversary it still holds up pretty well.  Cinematographer James Glennon’s work shines through in the new transfer, with the naturalistic colors really getting a great treatment in the restoration.  The digital transfer was sourced from the original negatives, so it’s understandable that it would look pretty immaculate.  One can only imagine what a 4K disc version of this movie would look like.  The movie also features a new DTS 5.1 surround mix based on the original film’s sound mix.  Election is not a particularly dynamic sound experience, as like most Payne films it’s a fairly quiet movie from beginning to end.  There are some bright spots that do give you a full aural experience, like the scene where Tracy has a meltdown and starts ripping up campaign posters in the high school hallway.  The film’s soundtrack, which features quite a few country songs, also benefits from Criterion’s very clean and strong sound mix for this release.  I do wish that Criterion gives this movie a proper 4K UHD release in the future, but it’s also not a movie that’s meant to be a showcase for picture and sound.  It’s treated respectfully in it’s presentation on Blu-ray and should look and sound great on most home entertainment set-ups.

Criterion of course delivers a bountiful collection of extra features for this release.  Some are old, taken from Paramount Pictures’ previous DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film, as well as new ones from Criterion themselves.  The most prominent feature is an Audio Commentary track from Alexander Payne himself, recorded in 1999 for the original DVD release of the film.  The commentary is informative, with Payne going into detail about why he made the movie, it’s not so subtle political message, and a variety of other topics.  Of the new bonus features, the most substantial is a brand new interview with Reese Witherspoon herself.  It’s interesting to see her looking back on the film with the perspective of several years being removed from it.  She talks about how the film changed the course of her career, what she thinks about the character of Tracy and how the film has aged with regards to it’s reflecting of real world politics since it’s release.  Another interesting inclusion in the bonus features is the inclusion of Alexander Payne’s student thesis film from his studying at UCLA’s film school, titled The Passion of Martin (1990).  It’s a fascinating inclusion on this disc, giving us a look at the origins of Alexander Payne as a filmmaker, seeing him working out what kind of films he wanted to make.  Also on the Criterion disc is a 2016 documentary called Trulnside: Election, which features on-set footage of the making of the movie and interviews with the cast and crew.  There’s also a very fun inclusion of the local Omaha news reports that chronicled the film’s production, which I guess was a big deal for the citizens of Omaha at the time as many films typically are not made there.  Lastly there is an original theatrical film trailer, which is a standard feature on most Criterion Collection releases.  Overall, Criterion compliments the film with some very nice bonus features about the film’s making, as well as some interesting bonuses that give some perspective on the film’s impact over time.

With a lot of political satires, there is a danger of being too on the nose about your message, or too mean-spirited about the people you are trying to mock.  Alexander Payne manages to reach the right tone with Election.  His mockery is more geared toward the process of American politics and less so of the people.  Sure, characters like Tracy Flick and Jim McCallister are flawed and fueled by jealousy and insecurity, which is a terrible mix in the realm of politics, but Payne allows us to understand that all of his characters are human beings as well; each one broken in their own way and trying to survive in the best way they can while trying to shield the world from their inadequacies.  The characters in Election feel all too real, and that’s what helps to get the point of the film across.  Our political reality has just become increasingly more absurd over time, with social media fanning the flames even more.  And even though Election came at a time long before social media, and really only just a couple years into the era of the Internet revolution, it’s metaphor still resonates.  Just this year alone, we are worrying about bad actors interfering with the counting of votes in order to get their preferred candidate into office, and throwing democracy out the window as a result.  The moment in the movie of Jim McAllister tossing those few votes into the trash can doesn’t seem all that different from reality anymore.  While Payne’s film remains hopeful about the people trying to strive for what’s best in the end, sadly it’s the reality of petty grievances getting in the way that makes Election feel all too prophetic in the end.  The one thing he left out is how bad the demagoguery would get in the world of politics we live in now.  The saddest part of the film is how politics ends up destroying people in the end.  A character like Tracy Flick feels very familiar to us.  She has to perform even harder to achieve her goals by virtue of being a woman, because men are given more privilege in the world of politics.  So many men of privilege like Paul Metzger seem to have the keys to power given over to them without much struggle, as they can make all the mistakes they want and still succeed, while even a simple flaw can destroy a woman seeking the same goal.  Hopefully we’ll move past that obstacle soon in the world of politics (fingers crossed for this week’s election), but as movies like Election have shown us, politics is a game where there is no clean victory.  Another solid entry from Criterion that in addition to a lot of other great films about politics only gets more relevant with time.

Criterion Cellection – Election (1999)

 

Top Ten Terrifying Performances in Horror Movies

The horror movie genre isn’t exactly known for being the place to find great acting.  Given the lower costs that most horror films are made under, it usually relates to a lower quality of performance seen on screen.  Bad performances in horror movies usually are attributed to the level of quality of the actor themselves, who perhaps are acting in front of the camera for the first time.  Or there might be a good quality actor in a role that is very much ill suited for them and they are just there to collect a paycheck.  Either way, horror movie sadly do not get the same good fortune that other genres get when it comes to showcasing the talents of the actors.  But, there are cases when great performances can coincide with some truly terrifying movies.  Even in some of the cases where a horror movie is clearly done on the cheap there can be an example of a performer giving it their all and treating schlock like it’s Shakespeare.  There are in fact some performances that have transcended the genre and have been heralded as among the greatest of all time.  In a couple cases, there are even Oscar winning performances that came from horror movies.  For a genre that is as old as cinema itself, it’s understandable that many actors have looked to the dark side to find a role that really allows them to flex their acting muscles in ways that other genres don’t allow them to.  For this list, I am going to share my choices for what I think are the top ten most terrifying performances to have ever come from horror movies.  To be on this list, the performance can’t just be a great but not scary one that happened to be in a horror movie.  The performances on this list are ones that genuinely send chills down the spine of audiences while at the same time showcasing just how good the actor is in playing the part.  And in some of the cases on this list, the roles have been so unforgettably terrifying, that they still stick with us many years later.  So, with all that laid out, let’s take a look at my picks for the Top Ten Terrifying Performances in Horror Movies.

10.

ANNIE GRAHAM from HEREDITARY (2018)

Played by Toni Collette

Not every performance in a horror movie starts out as terrifying.  Some evolve over the course of the movie and by the finale turn into the things of nightmares for audiences.  One of the most vivid portrayals of a slow burn descent into the terrifying can be found in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, where actress Toni Collette delivers one of her most stellar performances in a career that’s full of great ones.  The character of Annie Graham is on the surface a grieving mother, who not only lost her own mom with whom she had a complicated relationship, but also her daughter in a horrific accident, all in the span of a couple of days.  But, as the movie moves further into the plot, we begin to see Annie unravel in an unsettling way, lashing out at the family she has left and going to extreme measures to reconnect herself with the loved ones she lost.  The movie heads into some very dark territory with her character, revealing that she is a pawn in a satanic cult’s ulterior plans, which have been placed upon her family for some time.  And Toni Collette magnificently navigates the unraveling of her character, while still maintaining a grounded sense of who this woman is.  In the final act of the film, we see the character of Annie fully possessed, and that’s where the character really becomes a nightmarish demon on screen.  But even beforehand, Toni is terrifying in her role as she believably makes us see this character come apart mentally.  Toni Collette’s performance has been seen by many as one of the all time best performances to never get an Oscar nomination, and people attribute this to the Academy’s bias against genre films, particularly horror.  As my other picks on this list will show there are examples where there were horror performances too good for the Academy to ignore, but they did drop the ball by ignoring Toni here.  The only thing that keeps it from being higher on this list is that the terrifying parts of her performance don’t come out until almost the very end, but what we do get is good enough to get her recognized here.

9.

BABY JANE HUDSON from WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)

Played by Bette Davis

There was a weird movement in horror during the 1960’s that people have dubbed “Hag-sploitation.”  It was a trend where horror filmmakers would create movies that centered around “scary old women” to give their stories a more gothic quality to them.  In many cases, these “Hag horror” movies would give roles to aging actresses who were not getting any other work due to the way Hollywood devalued it’s female performers once they reached a certain age, and these roles were often seen as exploitational and indicative of the end of the road for these once beloved starlets.  But this certainly wasn’t the case for Bette Davis.  Even into her senior years, Bette was still at the peak of her talent, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? showcases just how much she still had that spark of talent and was able to completely own even a sinister “hag’ role like that of Baby Jane Hudson.  The film, interesting enough, is about an emotionally stunted former child actor who is clinging to past glory while taking out her aggression on her invalid sister played by Joan Crawford.  What starts out as passive aggressive insults eventually devolves into psychological torture and then eventually acts of murder.  And all the while, Baby Jane continues to slip deeper into insanity, which Bette Davis brilliantly displays in her performance.  By the end of the movie, she has even devolved entirely into a childlike state of mind, and this is where she is at her creepiest, especially in the way that her concept of reality becomes more fractured, and it puts her sister in greater danger as she is witnessing that downfall firsthand.  Davis’ performance certainly helps to raise Baby Jane above the otherwise bleakness of “Hag-sploitation.”  You can tell this wasn’t just a desperate ploy for work; she was really invested in playing this character and it shows.  It’s a masterful performance that even 60 years later still gives off creepy vibes and it was a benchmark role in horror filmmaking which led to a lot of imitations but none were ever able to deliver as powerfully as Bette did here.

RED from US (2019)

Played by Lupita Nyong’o

Sometimes the most terrifying kind of character is the one that looks exactly like us.  That’s the angle that Jordan Peele went with for his sophomore film as a director.  After tackling racial tension in his first film, Get Out (2017), he decided to look at class divisions in his follow-up, with a movie where affluent people on vacation are terrorized by their own doppelgangers, who seem to have come from underground laboratories and are tethered to our world while living in their hidden world under our feet; that is until they begin to rise up.  And their leader is a terrifying character named Red; the only one of the doppelgangers capable of speaking, which she does in a restricted, damaged voice.  Lupita Nyong’o plays the dual parts of Red and her “real world” counter part Adelaide, but it’s the former role where she really displays her acting talents.  Red, with her doll face like expression and husky voice is a nightmarish presence in the movie and Lupita does not hold back in making her a memorable character.  The fact that she’s the only one of the doppelgangers that displays any intelligence, as all of the others are feral by nature, makes her especially creepy.  Lupita brings this almost alien quality to the character, like she is investigating her victims while at the same time seeking malicious ends.  There is a twist revealed about the character, which does add another creepy layer to the character’s story, as well as to her relationship to Adelaide.  Lupita and Jordan Peele could have taken a more conventional route with their take on a home invasion horror scenario, but with the character of Red and the other doppelgangers, they create this twisted examination of a society where the divide between the haves and the have nots could not be more clearly defined.  And when we see our own selves presented back to us through the unnerving, almost frozen expression on Red’s doll like face, it clearly sends the message of the danger that lies beneath the surface of our class divides.

7.

LONGLEGS from LONGLEGS (2024)

Played by Nicholas Cage

This recent horror flick is already developing a reputation for being one of the creepiest in the last couple years, and part of that is due to an unexpectedly chilling performance from Nicholas Cage as the titular serial killer.  The film itself is a bit like Fincher’s Se7en (1995), only with more supernatural elements mixed into it’s murder mystery.  It’s a slow burn horror flick that takes place in an era where “Satanic Panic” was taking hold in pop culture, and the movie takes that theme to the extreme.  What is clever about the movie is that the mystery is not about who is committing the murders, but how and why, and when we get our answers it’s not what you’d expect.  Nicholas Cage is an actor known for going big with any role, and sometimes that can be a curse just as much as a blessing for some films.  Here, his unpredictability as an actor actually works for the character.  This Satan worshiping doll maker named Longlegs is deeply unsettling  from the very first moment he appears on screen, and Cage’s willingness to take the character over the top adds just that extra bit of terrifying to the role.  He speaks with this creepy Michael Jackson-like squeal of a voice and his face is pale and almost plastic like the dolls he creates.  And Nicholas Cage’s penchant for unhinged outbursts really drive home the creep factor of the character, where every moment he spends on screen just gives you this spine-chilling feeling.  It’s clear that Cage was really relishing this role, and the freedom it allowed him to just create something original.  It’s one thing to create a cold, foreboding persona for a serial killer; it’s another to have him smiling and blowing kisses while singing “Happy Birthday” like Cage does as Longlegs.  I have a feeling that this is going to be a character and a performance that people are going to be talking about for a while.  For me, it is certainly the most the creepiest character I’ve seen in a long while in a movie, and proof that Nicholas Cage can be a great actor when his over the top instincts fit the right kind of role.

6.

NORMAN BATES from PSYCHO (1960)

Played by Anthony Perkins

While Cage’s Longlegs performance is fully displayed without any nuance to show us a different side of the character, Anthony Perkins on the other hand presents a very different approach to portraying a murderer.  Norman Bates is one of the great misdirects ever achieved with a character in a horror film.  When we first meet him, Norman seems like a mild-mannered road side motel manager who is devoted to caring for his mother.  Perkins perfectly portrays this everyman aspect of Norman when we first meet him.  He is harmless and soft-spoken and the character of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) feels safe in his company.  But as we listen to Norman speak a bit more during the fateful night that he and Marion meet, the mask slips ever so slightly, especially when they discuss topics like Norman’s mother and the “women” who come in between him and his devotion to “mother.”  Alfred Hitchcock masterfully hides Norman Bates true nature throughout the film.  Even when Marion is murdered in her hotel room, we quickly suspect that it’s Mrs. Bates and not Norman who did the deed, and we remain sympathetic to the mild-mannered man.  But, as we move further into the plot, we learn that Norman is not what he seems, and by the end we find out that “mother” has been long gone and that Norman is the true killer.  It’s the strength of Anthony Perkin’s performance that helps to keep the rouse up throughout the film, and it makes the ultimate reveal all the more satisfying as a result.  Hitchcock’s Psycho, which itself was based on the notorious Ed Gein murders, changed the horror genre forever, and showed us that monsters are not just the creatures that spook us in the night.  It showed that even the un-assuming boy next door could turn out to be a monster as well.  And that hiding in plain sight portrayal of evil is what makes Norman Bates so terrifying.  To drive that point home, Perkins delivers one of cinema’s greatest evil smiles in his final scene, with his mother’s decomposed skull briefly superimposed over his before the shot cuts away, showing us how the face of evil can sneakily appear so harmless at first.

5.

REGAN from THE EXORCIST (1973)

Played by Linda Blair; Voiced by Mercedes McCambridge

To be fair, the character of Regan herself is not the monster that terrifies in this film, but rather it’s the demon that has come to possess her.  Even still, it’s a remarkable performance from Linda Blair to throw herself into the mayhem of her character’s possession like she does in William Friedkin’s ground-breaking horror flick.  The deterioration of Regan throughout the film is terrifying to watch, and it’s incredibly shocking when we see this once sweet little girl causing self-mutilation and speaking profanities.  As the demon takes hold even more, even her childish voice disappears and is replaced with the raspy, other-worldly voice of the demon.  Veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge contributed her own husky voice to the role of the demon and it’s a remarkable vocal performance, making the demon sound unlike anything of this world.  Mercedes probably relished saying the shocking lines that the demon utters in the film, like “Your mother s**** c**** in Hell,” because not only were they barrier pushing for their time, but there was the added shocking factor that those words were coming out of a child; albeit a possessed one.  A lot of credit is due to Linda Blair perfectly lip-synching to the demonic voice as well.  For a movie like The Exorcist to work, the audience needed to buy into the belief that the demonic possession they were watching felt real.  The results from Linda and Mercedes performances not only made it feel real, they made Regan’s possession feel like evil literally captured on the screen before us.  It had to be daunting for an actress Linda’s age, and there are stories of Freidkin’s set being a bit hazardous at times, but she displayed a command of the role that you wouldn’t expect a young actor to have, especially when their job is to scare the daylights out of the audience.  And what her performance ended up giving us is one of cinema’s most terrifying performances ever.

4.

JACK TORRENCE from THE SHINING (1980)

Played by Jack Nicholson

Much like Toni Collette’s descent into madness in Hereditary, we see the same change in character from Jack Torrence in The Shining, only the fall is much, much bigger in this acclaimed adaptation of the Stephen King novel.  Jack Nicholson is another actor who likes to go big in his roles, and Stanley Kubrick very much let him go big here.  What’s great about Nicholson’s performance is that the build to insanity isn’t so much gradual as it is taking things one step further after starting in an already heightened place.  Jack Torrence is first introduced as even-keeled in the beginning, but the wheels begin coming off not too far from that, especially as isolation begins to take it’s toll on the character’s psyche.  Nicholson’s performance is quintessentially him, with himself ratcheting his own persona beyond it’s limits.  By the time he reaches his full murderous state, Nicholson’s performance becomes truly a nightmarish presence.  We get our first taste of the worst of his character during the “All work and No play” scene when he confronts his wife Wendy (played brilliantly by the late great Shelly Duvall), and it’s effectively creepy how he is able to scare us while also doing so with a smile.  And the of course there’s the climatic chase through the Overlook Hotel where the ax-wielding Jack pokes his face through the door and screams out “here’s Johnny.”  It makes it all the scarier that he’s playing around with his victims while hunting them down in a murderous rage.  By the end of the film, there is zero subtlety left in Nicholson’s performance, but that really is what makes him so effectively terrifying in that final stretch; just the unhinged nature of his character at that point.  That’s the scariest kind of evil, when the person you loved no longer feels anything but blinding rage, and seems to enjoy using their power to terrorize you.  The story leads us to believe that the Overlook turned Jack towards evil, but the movie and Jack Nicholson’s performance also indicates to us that Jack Torrence didn’t need that much of a push to go off the deep end, and they show that to us in quite a spectacular way.

3.

ANNIE WILKES from MISERY (1990)

Played by Kathy Bates

Staying with Stephen King for one more film, we find an example of a horror film performance so good that the Academy was wise not to ignore it.  Kathy Bates star making turn as Annie Wilkes in Misery did earn her a much deserved Oscar for Best Actress, and it’s a role that managed to display incredible acting chops on the part of Bates as well as be terrifying and not watered down at all in order to fit the Academy’s standards.  The character of Annie Wilkes seems to be an externalized expression of fear on the part of Stephen King, as she is the epitome of toxic fandom in the extreme.  What is interesting about Bates performance is that she appears warm and matronly at first, but only a couple scenes later we see her turn into a rage monster that snaps over the most minor of infractions.  There is clearly something going on with the psyche of Annie Wilkes, but Kathy Bates is wise to not soften her character too much.  Annie is a monster to be sure, and the strength of Bates performance is in showing the full range of dangerous extremes that Annie can go to at any time.  Perhaps the best example of Kathy Bates’ brilliance in her performance is the most famous scene in the movie when Annie has the writer Paul Sheldon (a great James Caan) tied to the bed, where she plans to hobble him by purposely breaking his feet with a sledgehammer.  The best part of that scene is just how soothing and calm Annie is, right before she does the shockingly violent act.  It makes her all the terrifying as a result; how disassociated she is from the horror she is inflicting.  Kathy Bates certainly goes over the top too with the character through some rage filled explosions, but it’s those quieter moments of madness that really give us the chilling effect.  Creating a character like her must have been cathartic for Stephen King as he probably encountered one too many fans who displayed a little bit of obsessiveness themselves; though not to the extreme that we see with Annie Wilkes.  I think it’s that familiarity with the character (her obsessiveness and rigid conformity) that makes her one of cinema’s most terrifying characters; evil personified with sugar-coated sweetness.

2.

COUNT ORLOCK from NOSFERATU (1922)

Played by Max Schreck

It’s amazing that one of the earliest horror movies still manages to hold up over a century later, and the same goes for the terrifying performance at it’s center.  Director F.W. Murnau was unable to secure the rights to the novel Dracula from the Bram Stoker estate, so he crafted a vampire story of his own that was still fairly close to the original.  Nosferatu became the first ever vampire movie, and much of the rules of horror cinema stems directly from this ground breaking film.  The vampire at it’s center, Count Orlock, is vividly brought to life by the unforgettable Max Schreck.  The lanky build and statuesque height of the actor creates this image of an otherworldly creature, and it’s a nightmarish image that still sticks with audiences today.  It’s especially terrifying when we see him standing at the end of a dark corridor in the middle of the night, and even more terrifying when he later stands in the frame of a doorway about to enter the room to feed on his prey.  Murnau effectively creates this sense of terror without having Schreck do much action at all.  It’s all about how Count Orlock’s mere presence creates this foreboding atmosphere in every scene that he’s in.  Murnau also makes brilliant use of shadows to invoke the vampire’s presence even when he’s not physically on screen.  The performance that Schreck gave was so convincing that speculation rose that he was an actual vampire, which became the basis for a behind the scenes biopic called Shadow of the Vampire (2000), where he was played by Willem Dafoe.  We have since seen Dracula brought to the screen many times, including brilliantly the first time by Bela Lugosi, but even in all his many versions, I don’t think there has been a Dracula that has terrified audiences the same way as Count Orlock.  For a 100 year old movie to still have the ability to terrify it’s audience is a real testament to the effectiveness of Schreck’s performance, and we owe every portrayal of vampires in cinema to the high bar that he set with his spine-chilling on screen portrayal.

1.

HANNIBAL LECTER from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Played by Anthony Hopkins

For all the critics who look down on acting found in horror movies, it should be noted that what many regard as one of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid did in fact come from a horror movie.  Anthony Hopkin’s became a cinema icon with his portrayal of the hyper intellectual cannibal behind bars in this Oscar winning Jonathan Demme film.  It’s interesting to note that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, for as terrifying as he is, is not the main antagonist of the movie, nor is he an obstacle for the hero Clarice Starling (an equally brilliant Jodie Foster) as he spends the movie as her ally in her search for the “Buffalo Bill” serial killer.  But make no mistake, Hannibal is still a monster and the movie does such an effective job making every moment in his presence the stuff of nightmares.  The brilliance of Jonathan Demme’s direction is that he puts the camera right in the faces of his actors.  Anthony Hopkins delivers his chilling performance while looking right down the barrel of the camera, making his presence feel all the more invasive.  It’s also unsettling that we rarely see him blinking as well.  With Hannibal Lecter, it’s not about what he does that terrifies, but the way he casts a pallor of foreboding over a scene with his methodical way of talking and the stillness of his movements.  He’s like a demon that you feel waiting for you in the darkness, only he’s here fully lit and we are unable to escape his piercing gaze.  The movie still shows us how dangerous he can be with the prison break scene, where he goes on a bloody spree of violence after spending the whole rest of the movie behind bars.  Hopkins’ Oscar win for the role was a no-brainer, and he would continue to bring the character back to the screen in subsequent sequels and prequels.  But it’s here in The Silence of the Lambs  that we see him at his most terrifying.  No other performance on screen makes you feel like the villain is piercing right into your soul and haunting you without doing much at all.  It’s that psychological terror that makes Anthony Hopkin’s performance as Hannibal Lecter the most terrifying ever put on screen.  It raised the bar in portraying terror on screen, and showed that even horror could raise the bar high for all cinematic acting in general.

So, there you have my choices for the most terrifying performances ever in movies.  Some are more obvious than others, but what I find interesting is how well older horror films have held up over the years in showcasing great performances that still can terrify audiences today.  Anthony Perkin’s portrayal as Norman Bates is still a brilliant bait and switch that can still shock audiences, as well as Bette Davis giving us one of the most vivid portrayals of madness on screen as Baby Jane Hudson.  And then of course there’s Max Schreck whose chilling portrayal of a vampire is still the gold standard for the sub-genre 100 years after the fact.  Also the fact that both Anthony Hopkins and Kathy Bates have won Academy Awards for their unapologetic horror movie performances shows that the genre is just as capable of presenting quality acting as any other genre out there.  Recent examples like Toni Collette in Hereditary and Lupita Nyong’o show that great actors can still deliver their best work in scary movies, and I feel like Nicholas Cage’s recent work in Longlegs will also stand the test of time and be regarded as one of the best in the genre.  What is great about all the performances on this list is that they displayed great acting while also accomplishing the goal of being scary.  It shows that you don’t have to water down a terrifying performance in order to get critical praise.  Are there bad performances in horror movies?  Sure, but no more so than any other genre.  The low budget stigma surrounding horror movies seems to have also extended to the perceptions of the performances given in them as well, but that seems to have changed in the last few years as more and more A-listers are looking to spread their wings in the horror genre.  While it can sometimes be risky, horror movies tend to do better when they allow their actors to abandon their guardrails and just let loose, and that seems to be what is appealing to actors more and more these days.  There is a freeing aspect to what the horror genre can do for actors who just want to do something wild and weird every now and then.  And as this list has shown, some of those unhinged performances turn into some of our favorite performances.  That’s the blessing of horror in Hollywood; it gives it’s talent the chance to be weird, wacky and unbound in a genre where all that is valued.  And as we’ve seen, the best actors alive have been the ones who have scared us the most.

Seeing Dead People – The Sixth Sense 25 Years Later and the Shift in Scary Movies in the New Millennium

The horror movie genre looks a lot different today than it did a quarter century ago.  While some things haven’t changed, like Hollywood chasing success in the genre with an endless number of sequels, the style of horror movies is much different, and that is due to a shift to a more auteur driven flow within the genre.  One thing that has made horror movies so appealing to the movie studios in Hollywood is that they are a low risk, high reward product for them to invest in.  Horror movies tend to be cheap to make and are able to perform well at the box office, meaning that it’s a genre with a track record of profitability.  Unfortunately, during the 80’s and 90’s, the cheapness of horror movies became much more of a defining feature of the genre.  The movies of that era could never be considered high art, and were for the most part just manufactured to put butts into seats, typically from less discerning teenage and college age audiences that just wanted cheap thrills.  But even those demographics were growing tiresome of the same old tricks that the Hollywood was giving us in the horror genre.  Particularly towards the end of the 90’s, horror had just been reduced to schlock, with emphasis on cheap jump scares and gross out gore as a means of entertaining their audiences.  There were bright spots to be sure, like Wes Craven’s iconic Scream (1996), but even that got drowned out by a dozen Scream clones that followed in it’s wake.  Horror was in desperate need of a re-evaluation, which for a lot of people was a desire to take the control of the genre out of Hollywood executive offices and back into the hands of filmmakers who had a real hunger for changing the rules of the genre.  Horror films has been a great breeding ground in the past for visionary directors, such as George A. Romero, John Carpenter, and Brian DePalma.  Even Steven Spielberg technically sprung out of thriller filmmaking with movies like Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975).  But what kind of filmmaker would arise in the turn of the millennium to cause a dramatic shift in the horror movie genre.

I think very few people saw the rise of one M. Night Shyamalan coming.  Born in India before his family moved to the States when he was still a baby, Shymalan grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, developing a desire for filmmaking at an early age.  Him and his childhood friends would get together and make short films, so by the time he started attending the Tisch School of the Arts’ elite film program, he already had a good knowledge of visual storytelling.  From these early exercises in filmmaking, he demonstrated a fondness for dark thrillers and tense horror.  He looked to influences like Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling in shaping the the way he told stories with a darker edge.  But upon graduating from film school, he didn’t immediately jump into the horror genre right away.  His first feature film was a semi-autobiographical drama called Praying with Anger (1992), and his follow-up after that was a feel good coming of age story called Wide Awake (1998).  At the same time, he was also drafted to write a screenplay for the live action adaptation of Stuart Little (1999).  None of these early film would have led you to know where he was about to go next as a filmmaker.  While he probably appreciated the work he was getting, it’s also apparent that he really wanted to make the kind of movie that he would want to watch, and that’s what drove him to create his first horror movie.  He sent his spec script for his take on a “ghost” story to multiple studios, and found a surprising interested party in David Vogel, the then head of production at Disney.  Vogel belived in Shymalan’s script so much that he agreed to the $3 million dollars for the rights, and the stipulation for Shymalan to direct, without the corporate approval of the Disney higher ups.  It was gamble, but as we all would see, it was a gamble that payed out in a major way.

The Sixth Sense went into production in the Fall of 1998, shooting entirely in M. Night’s home base of Philadelphia.  Unfortunately, David Vogel’s stunt in getting the rights cost him his position at Disney, as he was dismissed shortly after.  Disney would allow the production to move forward, but the budget would be heavily trimmed down.  In many ways, this would’ve destroyed the visions of most filmmakers wanting to shape their movie the way they wanted, but M. Night was able to make lemonade out of those lemons.  No stranger to working with non-existent budgets in his home movie days, Shymalan found ways to create an effective horror movie with the constraints that were thrust upon him.  He relied on old school techniques from the early days of horror, like the use of atmosphere and tricks with lighting to evoke a sense of terror in his scenes.  The film has no post-production visual effects added, and only a few instances where his ghost actors appear in make-up.  As we would see, that is all that was needed in the end.  One of the most effective tricks shown in the movie is another old school slight of hand where actress Toni Colette exits her kitchen and goes into the other room with the camera following her and once she re-enters the kitchen, all of the cabinet doors are open.  Of course, those in the know with regards to filmmaking obviously can put together that once the kitchen is out of view of the camera, a bunch of production assistants swarm in and open all of those cabinet doors before the room is in the camera’s view again.  It’s simple, but effective if you do it right and Shymalan makes it work in his movie.  With The Sixth Sense, Shymalan is not creating just another schlocky horror film; nor was he making something that hadn’t been done before in horror filmmaking either.  He was simply using the art of cinema to tell a horror story really effectively and make old tricks feel new again.  In a time when horror was loud and ugly, Shymalan made something that managed to thrill effectively through it’s minimalism.

It certainly helped that he had a cast who effectively contributed to this more muted style of horror filmmaking.  At the time, the movie actually benefitted from the collapse of another movie.  Bruce Willis was contracted by Disney to complete 3 films, the first of which was the blockbuster Armageddon (1998).  Unfortunately, the second film on that contract, Broadway Brawler, imploded after Willis demanded the firing of the director.  That film never got back on track and the studio needed to find another project quick to allow Willis to fulfill the obligations of his contract.  This is where the arrival of The Sixth Sense proved to be fortuitous, because it was movie that was a departure from the usual films that Bruce Willis had been a part of which were typically action oriented, and would allow him to show more range as an actor.  The part of Dr. Malcolm Crowe gave Willis a chance to be subtle, and even charming at times; a welcome departure from the gruffness of his past roles.  But, while it was beneficial for M. Night Shymalan to have a big name movie star in his film, it mattered a lot more to get the casting right for the crucial character of Cole Sear; the little boy who can “see dead people.”  The crux of the movie is dependent on the ability for the audience to believe that this young boy can see the dead, and that’s a difficult thing for a young actor to nail on screen.  Luckily for Shymalan, he found his Cole in a young up-and-coming star named Haley Joel Osment.  Osment, who had previously played the small part of Forrest Gump’s son opposite Tom Hanks a couple years back, showed acting talent beyond his years in the harrowing performance that he gives as Cole Sear.  It also mattered a great deal that his chemistry on screen with Bruce Willis was believable.  The interactions between Willis and Osment are definitely among the highlights of the movie, with Willis showing a vulnerability on screen that we typically had not see him show.  The film also features an incredible performance from Toni Collette as Cole’s mom Lynn.  Her performance is a heartbreaking one in which she tries everything she can to help her son who is “different.”  And there is a remarkable cameo role from former boy band singer Donnie Wahlberg (brother of Mark) as a disgruntled former patient of Malcolm Crowe, a role that Wahlberg apparently lost nearly 50 pounds for in order to give himself a gaunt look.  It was a blessing of all the right actors coming together for the roles that would indeed propel them to greater things later on.

Of course, the biggest key to the success of M. Night Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense was The Twist Ending.  This was probably the thing that made David Vogel jump so many hurdles in order to secure the rights.  Fair warning, I am about to spoil the twist ending of the film in this paragraph, so if you haven’t seen the movie by now skip ahead.  In the closing moments of the film, it is revealed that Dr. Malcolm Crowe has been dead for the majority of the movie and that he has been appearing as a ghost the whole time.  The only reason audiences didn’t originally pick up on that is because we see him interacting with Cole Sear, a boy who can see and interact with ghosts.  It’s only in retrospect that we realize that Cole is the only character that we’ve seen Malcolm speak directly too.  In the reveal that comes in the end, where Malcolm realizes he is a ghost, that all the puzzle pieces that Shymalan had been laying out start to make sense.  The effectiveness of the twist lies in the fact Shymalan doesn’t just pull it out of thin air; all of the clues were in plain sight, but with the way the story was being told, as it focuses on Cole’s journey, those clues are not at the forefront of our minds until the twist makes us see the story again in a completely different light.  It’s something that Shymalan learned from one of his inspirations, the master of twist endings Rod Serling, who utilized them brilliantly in many episodes of The Twilight Zone.  What was also crucial was that, like many of Serling’s most memorable twist endings, there had to be catharsis with it; that the audience would feel rewarded if it picked up on all the clues, but also not feel dejected if they hadn’t.  It took careful planning for Shymalan to not give away the fact that one of his main characters was dead the whole time, but he had to make sure that the clues would be recognizable by the end.  For this, he borrowed another trick from another one of his inspirations; Hitchcock.  Alfred Hitchcock famously used color coding as a way of signaling the presence of danger, something that he most famously used in Vertigo (1958).  In The Sixth Sense, Shymalan uses the color red to signify when a ghost was present in the scene.  Sometimes this was shown overtly, like when Cole is visited by a ghost girl, played by a young Mischa Barton.  She appears after Cole hides in his bedroom play tent, which of course is a bright color of red.  This helps tie the color to the appearance of ghosts, but when we learn the truth about Malcolm at the end, we sudden notice all those subtle hints of red that were present throughout the movie whenever he meets with Cole.  All of these ingredients helped to give the movie the effective twist ending that it needed and boy did it pay off in a big way.

Part of why The Sixth Sense made the impact that it did was also due to the fact that it came out in the middle of a turning point for the horror genre.  Earlier that same summer in 1999, The Blair Witch Project (1999) premiered and completely turned Hollywood on it’s head.  This found footage horror movie made on a shoe-string budget with a simple digital camera and no-name actors remarkably opened at number one at the box office and grossed an astounding $140 million.  While the gimmick itself was probably what lured a lot of people to the movie theaters to check out this oddity for themselves, it also revealed a craving from audiences for something different in the increasingly stale horror genre.  The Blair Witch Project filled that void perfectly with it’s unconventional way of telling it’s story.  But surprisingly, The Sixth Sense would also benefit from this change in audiences’ taste as well.  While The Sixth Sense was more mainstream than the experimental Blair Witch, it also stood out as being very different from the other horror films of that era.  It wasn’t a slasher thriller; it wasn’t a jump scare fest; and it wasn’t a blood soaked gore fest.  It was an atmospheric ghost story with some mystery elements thrown in.  And for audiences, that was enough.  In many ways, M. Night Shymalan was harkening back to the auteur driven horror movies of the 1970’s, many of which were slower burns than the in your face aggressiveness of the 80’s and 90’s.  Movies like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) or Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) take their time in building their scares to a crescendo, and Shymalan makes his film even more low key than those.  It’s not about how many times you can scare an audience, but by how well you can scare them.  Shymalan brought atmosphere back into the forefront of horror filmmaking, and the effect it had was very evident on the horror movies that have come in it’s wake.

One of the strongest legacies that The Sixth Sense has left behind is the way that it brought horror back into the hands of the filmmakers.  The genre has been much more driven by style and the unique visions of it’s filmmakers.  In the wake of The Sixth Sense,  Hollywood was interested in finding out who would be the next M. Night Shymalan; a question that even Shymalan has struggled to define for himself.  There certainly has been a resurgence in the number of film directors that have emerged as uniquely tied to the genre of horror films.  James Wan is one of those filmmakers that managed to emerge from the horror genre with a clearly defined trademark to his name.  He helped to shepherd the Saw and Conjuring franchises into some of the most lucrative horror series in recent years, and he continues to develop new horror concepts that appeal to modern audiences.  The interesting thing is, his horror movie are wildly varied, from the gory Saw films to the subtler scares of The Conjuring.  Likewise, other horror filmmakers like Ari Aster are re-defining the things that we find scary on the big screen, like how he terrified us with a Scandinavian paganism in Midsommar (2019).  And there are other recent horror filmmakers like Mike Flanagan, Leigh Whannell and Parker Finn who are generating effective scares through the mainstream machine of Hollywood with old standards like Stephen King, Universal Monsters, and just even the simple act of a sinister smile.  Horror has gone through a complete transformation in the last quarter century thanks to what The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project left behind.  It’s honestly now the genre where we see the most creativity allowed for filmmakers, because it’s one of the few avenues where experimentation is rewarded.  In many ways, this is a golden era for the genre, and it’s something that Shymalan thankfully pushed Hollywood into accepting.

When it first released in the waning Summer days of August 1999, The Sixth Sense opened to a respectable but not extraordinary $26 million.  But remarkably, it continued to gross the same amount weekend after weekend, $20 million for 6 weeks straight; a feat only Titanic (1997) had a achieved before.  This was a true phenomenon that Hollywood couldn’t quite figure out at first.  What we witnessed with Sixth Sense’s unprecedented run was one of the first truly viral movies, where word of mouth played a major role in driving up it’s box office.  While people raved about the craft of the film, it was that perfectly executed twist ending that really brought audiences back again and again.  Shymalan created an experience with The Sixth Sense, and not just a product like so many horror movies of the last decade were.  In the end, The Sixth Sense grossed an astonishing $293 million at the box office, making it the highest grossing horror film ever at that time, a title it would hold for 18 years before 2017’s IT surpassed it’s record.  The film would also go on to earn 6 Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and for Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette in their supporting roles.  Bruce Willis would also walk away from with $100 million through his back end profits deal when he accepted the role for initially less than his average salary.  Since then, Shymalan has struggled in the shadow of his greatest achievement.  He’s had success here and there, including with Signs (2002) and Split (2016), but he’s been a filmmaker who’s unfortunately been boxed in by his own style of filmmaking, which hasn’t gotten better over time.  Thankfully, Haley Joel Osment has been able to survive the usual pitfalls that can ruin child actors and he’s aged into adulthood fairly well as a beloved character actor, including returns to the horror genre with movies like the recent Blink Twice (2024), co-starring Channing Tatum.  Toni Collette likewise has excelled in her returns to horror, including her acclaimed performance in Hereditary (2018).  While M. Night Shymalan may have become a victim of his own success and struggled as a filmmaker in the years after, there’s still no denying that he crafted a masterful film with The Sixth Sense.  In all of it’s subtleties, it re-freshened a genre that was in desperate need of a transformation, and the great thing is that he managed to make it happen with tricks of the trade that used to be staples of the horror genre that had sadly been forgotten over time.  With hints of Hitchcock and the Twilight Zone present in his movie, he managed to show us what a horror movie used to be and could once again become again, and this helped to usher in a new era of experimentation in horror filmmaking that we are still seeing today.  We have The Sixth Sense to thank for the slow burn intensity of artsy horror like we see in films such as Skinamarink (2022) and Longlegs (2024); movies that don’t force scares on you but still fill you with a sense of terror while you watch it.  It’s unbelievable that a little movie about a child who “sees dead people” would be the kind of movie to change Hollywood horror for many years after.

Off the Page – Coraline

Neil Gaiman has emerged as one of the most unique voices in modern literature over the last couple of decades.  The British author has particularly had a hand in creating a renewed interest in fantasy literature, especially when it comes to darker themed fantasy.  Gaiman himself cites the likes of J.R.R. Tolkein and Lewis Carroll as inspirations in his writing, and it’s interesting how he has carved out his own voice the literary world.  Not only has he made a name for himself with the written word, but he has also become a celebrated writer in the field of comic books as well.  The common theme that seems to appear in most of his writing is the idea of mythical and celestial beings existing in a modern world setting.  It’s a theme that pops up in most of his works.  His first novel, Good Omens, involved a familial relationship between a literal angel and a demon.  American Gods told a story about the gods of the old world making their way through life in the New World of modern day America.  Even his run of Sandman comics for DC involved the clashing of heaven and hell on earth.  But even with all of the literal biblical sized elements that he throws into his stories, his writing is also focused on the humanity that often comes into conflict with these world shaping elements.  Perhaps the best illustration of his ability to ground the fantastical in a contemporary, ordinary world is found in what was his first foray into children’s literature.  Of course, when we say children’s literature from the pen of Neil Gaiman, it’s still in the genre of horror fantasy.  His version of a story appropriate for young readers is within the same context of the works of the Brothers Grimm being appropriate for young readers.  He softens his edges, but still creates for his readers a spooky and at times also disturbing atmosphere.  And that’s the story we find in his 2002 novella, Coraline.

Coraline tells the story of a young girl who finds that her new home is not what it seems.  The titular heroine is at odds with her parents after their move, and wishes for an escape.  She finds that escape when she finds a door in the back of the house to another house identical to her own, only livelier and more welcoming.  There she finds a woman identical to her mother, only with buttons sewn onto her face instead of eyes.  This “Other Mother” is generous and attentive in a way that her own Mother has not been, and Coraline grows more fond of this “Other World.”  As he seems more inclined to stay in Other World, she soon realizes there is a catch; to live there, she must sew buttons into her own eyes just like the other residents there.  She of course refuses, and begins to see the Other Mother for who she truly is, a deceptive creature called the Beldam, who begins to grow  more grotesque after the pleasing facade has fallen.  Coraline manages to return to the real world, but her family is nowhere to be found.  It is here that Coraline realizes the cost of taking her parents love for granted, and favoring her own comfort and happiness over the needs of the family as a whole.  From this point, she determines to find her real family, and in the process, she learns of the horrible history that her new home has had with the Beldam lurking behind the hidden door.  Overall, it is a spooky sort of haunted house story that Neil Gaiman manages to craft that certainly is provocative without ever being gory.  You can definitely see the Lewis Carroll influence, as the Other World is a twisted take on the concept of Wonderland, where it takes on a sinister character after making too much sense instead of nonsense.  When the novella was first published, it was instantly successful, earning Gaiman among other things a Hugo Award.  A couple years later, Gaiman would oversee a graphic novel adaptation, which was published in 2008.  The graphic novel gave readers the first visual representation of Gaiman’s imaginative world, and as it turned out, it would be just an appetizer as Coraline was about to make the jump to the big screen.

“How can you walk away from something and then come towards it?”

Enter Laika Animation studios.  Laika had just emerged after a rebranding of the old Will Vinton Studios, which had been the stop motion workshop that had been animating shorts and commercials since the 1970’s, famous for the California Raisins among other things.  Due to growing health issues, Will Vinton was looking to pass his Portland, Oregon studio off to new management that he hoped would continue the stop motion tradition after he was gone.  A former animator who work at his studio was Travis Knight, who just so happened to be the son of Nike founder Phil Knight, and he managed to convince him father to invest in Vinton’s ailing studio.  Vinton retired in 2005 and shortly after Travis Knight took over management of the studio, re-branding it Laika Animation.  Knight wasted no time in turbo-charging the output of his new studio, quickly looking for a project to develop into a feature film that he hoped would put the studio on the map.  Given that stop motion already has this other-worldly feel to it, so a story like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline was a match made in heaven for Laika.  The story had all the elements that was ideal for the studio, a spooky story that could still appeal to all audiences and allow for them to flex their arms creatively, especially with the construction of the “Other World.”  And to also show that Laika was serious about getting the tone of the book right, they sought out some veteran help by hiring Henry Selick to direct the feature.  Selick, of course, famously directed the classic stop motion feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) for Disney and producer Tim Burton.  The success of that film led to a follow-up adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1996), but the souring of the working relationship between Selick and Burton eventually led to the former leaving their partnership in pursuit of a different creative path.  This was fortuitous for Laika, as they wanted their house style to evoke the weird and imaginative sights that both Nightmare and Giant Peach both shared.  Bringing Selick on board would prove to be exactly what their Coraline project needed, as it gave the film the fully realized vision that it needed.

“You probably think this world is a dream come true.  But you’re wrong.”

So, what did Laika manage to do to give Coraline the cinematic treatment.  Gaiman’s story already lent itself very well to the visual form as the graphic novel demonstrated.  On the whole, Laika didn’t make a whole lot of changes to the story itself; it plays out pretty much as it did on the page, with some notable but not too drastic alterations.  Perhaps the most noticeable difference is that Laika decided to give their setting a bit more character.  Neil’s novel is set in no particular place, with only the house itself being the primary setting for the story.  It’s presumed that Neil sets his story in his home country of England, as the house he describes is reminiscent of the old manor houses that dot the English countryside.  Laika on the other hand gave Coraline a decidedly American setting, and in fact the studio chose it’s own back yard as the place to set this story.  The movie takes place in the town of Ashland, Oregon, which is a real town nestled just north of the California state border.  It’s a small cultural community known for it’s yearly Shakespearean Festival.  If you’re wondering why the movie has citizens from the town reciting quotes from the Bard, that’s the reason why.  It’s an interesting choice to set the story there, because while Ashland can be an inviting place, it’s also a bit cut off, being surrounded by mountains and farms.  The often gloomy Oregon weather also plays well with the atmosphere of the story.  But what is interesting is that Laika also makes the “real world” in their movie stylized as well.  Both the realms of reality and fantasy have the same off-kilter look; the big difference is the way that the different realms are colored.  Coraline’s reality is muted and washed out, while “Other World,” is bright and colorful.  This is an effective way to differentiate the two, with the more sinister side appearing initially to be the more appealing of the two.  The effect is still the same with regards to the story, which works to Laika’s advantage.  They are able to make even the real world visually interesting, without sacrificing the impact of seeing the “Other World,” and in the end it gives the movie as a whole a vibrancy of style.

The characters for the most part are pretty similar to their literary counterparts.  One change that is made to the characterization is that the movie does not carry over Gaiman’s use of the first person narration from Coraline herself.  Coraline is still the main character here, but we are experiencing the story with her, rather than having her recount it for us.  Apart from that, she is the same character described in the book; spunky and free spirited, but still flawed due to her abrasiveness, especially when she shows it to her parents.  The story is a coming of age tale and through it we see Coraline grow into a more responsible character, not letting personal interests and desires get in the way of doing what’s right.  The animators definitely made her distinct, with the matching of her yellow rain coat and blue dyed hair creating an instantly iconic profile.  She’s also given great personality by a then teenage Dakota Fanning in her vocal performance.  Her work in the film is also complimented by a surprisingly complex vocal performance by Teri Hatcher as both Coraline’s mom and as “Other Mother” aka the Beldam.  Hatcher remarkably plays her role with incredible range, showcasing so many different variations on the same character; being warm and inviting at one point and then terrifyingly shrill by the end.  The Beldam is also a character where the animators got to be more creative in their designs.  Neil Gaiman described the creature as looking just like Coraline’s mother, except taller, thinner and paler, and obviously with those unsightly button eyes.  In the film, the Beldam goes through multiple transformations, at times being similar to what Gaiman described, but done one step further.  By the end, the Beldam is almost insect like, with metal needles as spider legs.  It makes for a truly terrifying villain for the story, and one that very much could only be fully realized in this style of animation.  All of the other characters are much like their counterparts in the book, with the animators using their creativity to give them all exaggerated bodies.  Coraline’s neighbors in particular are fun caricatured designs, like her downstairs neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible having extreme “curves”, and her upstairs neighbor Mr. Bobinsky having blue skin.  The one character that seems to be the most direct pull is The Cat, who in the movie speaks with the distinct voice of Keith David.  He’s a character that definitely feels like he jumped right off the page, and he’s very much present in much of the promotions of the movie, including appearing as part of the logo.

“Even if you win, she’ll never let you go.”

There is one character that was original to the movie that made a significant change to the story.  The film added another neighbor named Wybie to the plot; a boy around Coraline’s age that doesn’t live in the same house like the rest of Coraline’s neighbors but nevertheless still hangs around the property.  He starts off as a bit of a nuisance to Coraline, being a bit of a weirdo that talks too much.  But, when Coraline begins to investigate deeper into the mystery of the house she lives in, she learns that Wybie’s family has a dark past related to it.  Wybie tells her that his grandmother lost a sister when they used to live in the same house.  The sister disappeared one day and was never seen again.  It’s only after Coraline challenges the “Other Mother’s” authority that she comes face to face with the truth.  The house is haunted by the spirits of children, all of whom were captured and eaten by the Beldam, who lured them into the “Other World” the same way that Coraline was.  This revelation is found in the original book, but the fact that one of the ghost children is related to Coraline’s new friend in the real world gives the revelation a much more personal angle.  It hits home a lot more that Coraline knows what fate she’s about to face after becoming aware of Wybie’s great aunt’s own grisly fate.  It helps to elevate the threat of the Beldam in the story and it gives Coraline a bit more purpose in the story.  Not only is she going to face off against the Beldam for her own survival, but she also is doing it to seek justice for those who were not able to escape.  It definitely gives Coraline a bit more urgency in her story, showing that she is thinking through her ordeal as she presses forward.  The inclusion of Wybie in the story also gives Coraline a character that she can relate with on a personable level.  As she finds out, Wybie is the only one who believes her after she has passed into a different world, with all the adults dismissing her childish “fantasies” as just that.  It’s interesting that in the “Other World,” the Beldam has also created an “Other Wybie” whose mouth has been sewn shut.  Perhaps the fact that “Other Mother” went to the extra effort to keep “Other Wybie” silent is what convinces Coraline to take the words of the real one more seriously, and that’s an interesting new wrinkle added into the plot of the film.

What the movie and book both effectively realize is the theme of confronting fears head on as a positive sign of maturity.  For Coraline, she appears on the surface to be a fearless pre-teen girl whose adventurous spirit leads her to explore the unknown.  But all of that fearlessness to what’s in front of her also puts a wedge between her and her parents.  Her fear is internalized; she is afraid to open up to her parents and tell them she loves them, because that’s a sign of immaturity in her eyes.  There’s a degree to that in every rebellious youth, but the movie and the book Coraline confronts this theme in a very vivid way.  Her fear manifests clearly when the Beldam has taken her parents away.  She realizes her greatest fear is being alone, and that because of her actions, she has ended up isolating herself, making her own fear come true.  It’s a mature theme to explore in a coming of age story like this, and it’s interesting to see how Coraline comes to the realization that having everything come to her on her terms is actually what has made her world come apart.  Once the Beldam shows her true form, and the “Other World” begins to slowly crumble apart, we see all the old things that made the “Other World” so inviting before suddenly become the things of nightmares.  In her quest to save her parents, all of the different encounters with the “Other” residents of the house become twisted and nightmarish moments in the final act of the film.  And the worst is saved for last when she has to face the Beldam face to ugly face, all the more disturbing when the creature is still faintly like her mother.  Another interesting element that was added for the film was the idea of the Beldam luring her victims with dolls that look just like them found in the real world.  What it tells us is that the Beldam seems to sense the insecurity that a child like Coraline possesses and uses the dolls as a plant to coax out the curiosity of each child once they arrive at the house.  Neil Gaiman’s story certainly deals with all these themes, and thanks to Henry Selick’s creative vision, those themes manifest is some truly eerie and at times terrifying moments on screen.

“She wants something to love, I think.  Something that isn’t her.  Or, maybe she’d just love something to eat.”

Coraline premiered in February of 2009, but regardless of its wintertime release, it has since become a favorite for Halloween time playlists.  The film was critically well received and it had a pretty healthy box office take for a stop motion animated film.  More importantly, it put Laika Animation on the map.  In the 15 years since Coraline’s premiere, they have released four more features (2012’s ParaNorman, 2014’s The Boxtrolls, 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings, and 2019’s Missing Link) with a fifth one currently slated for 2025 called Wildwood.  While they have struggled to repeat the same success as Coraline, each film is still highly regarded and the studio has helped to keep the prestige of stop motion animation going.  Like many other successful runs, it matters how well a studio is able to perform on it’s first go, and Laika certainly found the right story to tell with Neil Gaiman’s short modern fairy tale.  The movie itself has helped to elevate the novel itself, which when it was first published was regarded as one of Gaiman’s lesser works.  It was still loved, but it didn’t shine as brightly as Gaiman’s run of Sandman comics, or his novels Good Omens and American Gods.  What is noteworthy though is that the movie Coraline was the first actual cinematic adaptation of one of his literary works.  Since then, many of his novels have been been given adaptations, mostly for television.  Both American Gods and Good Omens were faithfully adapted into shows for Starz and Amazon Prime respectively, while Netflix managed to take his vast collection of Sandman comics and turn it into a successful mini-series.  And after 15 years, Coraline still holds up and is probably even more popular now than it was when it first premiered.  One thing that really has helped it to stand out is the fact that it’s an animated feature that’s not afraid to be a little dark.  Animation used to have a lot more darker moments than they do now, and those were the kinds of movies that have withstood the test of time.  Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to make a family friendly film have that extra little bit of peril in it, even if it becomes borderline horrific, because those end up being the scenes that we remember most from childhood on.  Coraline has the perfect mix of all that; whimsy, humor, creepy atmosphere and even a good scare here and there.

“They say even the proudest spirit can be broken…with love.”

Joker: Folie a Deux – Review

Five years ago, Warner Brothers and DC struck gold with a bold and ambitious movie centered around one of pop culture’s most infamous villains.  The movie Joker (2019) stood out from all the other comic book movies that were released towards the end of the 2010’s.  It was grounded, gritty and unforgiving in it’s tone.  The filmmaker behind it, Todd Philips was diverting far from his usual comfort zone in comedy and was taking a page from early Scorsese with this origin story centered around Gotham City’s “clown prince of crime.”  The Joker has always been a highly coveted role in the past for actors, because it’s a character that is all about extremes, especially when it comes to both humor and horror, and that’s a mix that many actors love to throw themselves into.  From Jack Nicholson to Heath Ledger, many great performances have helped to turn the Joker into a cinematic icon, but in the case of the Todd Phillips’ movie, the Joker was not just going to be a foil for the Batman this time; he was going to be the main character.  To make the movie work, they needed an actor who could not only pull off the grandiosity of the Joker persona but also someone who could find the human being underneath and make that aspect just as fascinating.  Joaquin Phoenix proved to be the ideal choice for the role, as he slipped into the clown shoes of this iconic villain and crafted an unforgettable performance that was both chilling and unhinged but also felt authentic.  The resulting film was a smash hit at the box office, becoming the first R-Rated film ever to gross over a billion dollars worldwide, a feat only matched this year by Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).  The film also received numerous accolades, including a Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival, and 11 Oscar nominations including Best Picture.  Joaquin ended up walking away with a Best Actor win for his performance, making him the second Oscar winner for a portrayal of the Joker, after Heath Ledger’s posthumous win in 2009 for The Dark Knight (2008).  In many senses, the timing of Joker’s release could not have been better to capture the zeitgeist of the comic book movie boom.

But, the success of Joker was not without controversy.  Many people were worried that the movie painted too sympathetic a portrait of the Joker character, and in a way they believed that the film was an endorsement for anti-social, anarchic behavior that often attributes itself to the Joker persona.  Only 7 years prior, the infamous mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado was attributed to a gunman who wore make-up similar to the Joker, which is a memory that still sticks with movie-goers to this day.  Because Joker is such an evocative idea of a villain, his persona has been unfortunately usurped by dangerous radicals in the online community, including incel movements and even white supremacist groups.  For many, the idea of this origin film giving a more nuanced look at the beginnings of this famous villain was like playing with fire in an already volatile cultural moment, with so many people getting radicalized into these extremist groups, particularly angst-y young men.  Now, Todd Philips and Joaquin Phoenix have always asserted that their movie is not an endorsement of the Joker’s actions, but rather that the movie is an examination of the way that societal problems and lack of care for mental illness leads to the creation of someone as bad as the Joker.  Like with heroes, villains are not born but made as a response to problems in society and the trauma it leaves behind.  Most audiences agreed and could see the nuance of the filmmaker’s intent, but there were many others, especially those in the radicalized community, that only saw the movie as a glorification of their anti-social behavior and they adopted the movie as a vindication for their extremism.  In the wake of this movie, particularly with the unrest of the pandemic and the 2020 election that saw rioters attack the Capitol, as well as the targeting of marginalized groups under the guise of “fighting the woke,” it’s easy to see why so many people were fearful of the message that the movie was sending, even if it was misinterpreted.  Still, Joker remains a controversial yet potent film that still sparks conversations today.  And perhaps in response, Todd Phillips and company are looking to provide an answer to the volatile impact of the first movie with a sequel called Joker: Folie a Deux.  The question is, does it offer up anything new or meaningful to the discussion?

Joker: Folie a Deux takes place not long after the events of the first film.  Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is being held at the Arkham Asylum where he is awaiting trial for murder.  His daily routine involves receiving medication to pacify his violent tendencies and he is allowed to roam around the courtyard under the watchful supervision of a group of rough and mean prison guards, led by officer Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson).  Not long before his trial starts, Sullivan decides to allow Arthur to attend an Asylum musical therapy group.  It is there that he meets another inmate at the asylum named, Harley Quinzel (Lady Gaga).  Harley it turns out has been infatuated by Arthur after seeing his crimes play out in the public eye, including the murder of talk show host Murray Franklin on live television.  Arthur takes a liking to her and they begin a courtship in the prison, leading to some mayhem along the way.  Meanwhile, Arthur’s lawyer Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) is trying to soften his persona in preparation for the trial, getting him on board with the idea of pleading insanity in order to get a lighter sentence.  His defense will be that he suffers from schizophrenia and that the Joker is a separate personality created out of the years of abuse he faced at home.  His defense is of course being disputed by the city that is seeking the death penalty in response to his murders.  On the other side of the courtroom, Arthur’s attorney is having to face off against the ambitious and skilled new Assistant DA, Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey).  But, Ms. Stewart is noticing that Arthur has been under the influence of his extremely volatile new girlfriend, and that it’s bringing out all of the bad aspects of his character into full view.  She worries that the unstable relationship that Arthur is having with Harley is going to jeopardize his chances of avoiding the death penalty because the jurors are only going to see Arthur and Joker as being one in the same.  Will Harley and Joker’s whirlwind romance ultimately lead to Arthur’s end, or is she awakening something far worse in him than was ever there before.

Perhaps the boldest choice that Todd Phillips could’ve ever made in response to the reception of the original film was to decide to follow it up with a musical.  But, that’s exactly what he did.  Folie a deux is a French term for shared psychosis, and the use of it in this title is to explain that both the Joker and Harley are both feeding the psychotic states of each other, and that is manifested in the movie through song.  Music is the language that speaks to both of them, and so we see the descent of madness they both fall into being presented in the movie as lavish musical numbers.  Keep in mind, this isn’t a movie that has a song here and there; this is a full-on musical, with songs intended to underscore the story and everything.  This idea intrigued me, because it was such a departure from the original film which was a ground, gritty drama.  I was excited to see how well this change in genre would work within the same world.  Also, I wanted to see the anti-woke crowd have a meltdown, seeing their beloved Joker franchise take a decidedly more artsy direction that runs contradictory to their worldview, and would hopefully cause them to abandon their claim on the original so that it wouldn’t be co-opted by such a bad faith group of anti-fans.  Well, I can definitely say that the meltdown among those people is happening, and they are throwing a massive fit over the direction that Joker: Folie a Deux has taken the franchise.  Unfortunately, Todd Philips didn’t give much else to this movie to make those of us on the opposite side care either.  I don’t know if Joker: Folie a Deux was too much of an over-correction for the harder edges of Joker’s message, but the movie that we got just has nothing that appeals to either the “woke” or the “anti-woke” crowd.  The musical element is ambitious, but it rings hollow and doesn’t have the desired effect of creating a sense of awe with the audience.  In many ways, this is one example where I can say that the movie is made worse by the musical numbers and not better.  And most annoyingly, it seems like Todd Philips doesn’t really have a point to make in the end.  The first Joker, for all of it’s controversy, still had a clear sense of what it wanted to say.  Here, the movie just throws a lot of different big concepts all at us at once, and none of it lands.

What’s frustrating about Joker: Folie a Deux is that it ultimately feels toothless.  It becomes clearer the further you get into the movie that Todd Phillips had nowhere to go after the first Joker.  Whatever statement he was trying to make, he already made it clear before.  So, the choice he made with this sequel was to flip genres and go full surrealist with the musical twist.  The strange thing is that the movie is still in that gritty tone of the first movie, so the switch to musical numbers feel jarring and without meaning.  And it should be noted that this is a jukebox musical, meaning that all the songs are not original to this movie.  The film utilizes old standards of classic  Hollywood, such as “That’s Entertainment,” “If They Could See Me Know,” and “Put on a Happy Face” to name a few.  And you’ll notice that a lot of the song choices are very on the nose beating you over the head with their themes.  The movie has a very La La Land (2016) feel to it, where it bounces back and forth between the fantastical and the down to earth, but it doesn’t have any of the cohesive narrative that that revisionist musical had.  Perhaps the audience that’s going to feel the most frustrated with this movie’s lack of bite and cohesion are the comic book fans.  In Joker, they got a fascinating deep dive into one of the most iconic comic book characters of all time.  With this, the comic book connection is really treated like an afterthought.  There’s not a single mention of Bruce Wayne or any of the Wayne family in this movie, which is odd to see a Joker film that doesn’t have any connection at all to Batman.  At least the last film gave a hint at that future.  This movie almost feels disconnected completely from the comic book, like it could be about any other murder trial.  It’s only occasionally you’re reminded that there’s a character named Harvey Dent in this movie, because nothing distinguishes him as a character at all, and there’s not a single hint of his future as the villain Two-Face.  The movie doesn’t have anything to say as a musical, as a comic book movie, or as a social commentary.  It’s just feels like a 2 1/2 hour epilogue to the first movie with a few songs added in.  It offers nothing more than that.

And the sad thing is there is that the movie is still well crafted from a technical standpoint.  The period recreation carried over from the first movie, which depicts a Gotham City in the same vein as late 70’s/ early 80’s New York City, still looks incredible.  Lawrence Sher, who was also the cinematographer for the first Joker, returns to do the photography for this movie.  The film was shot digitally, but the team did a great job making it look like it was made with the same kind of film stock they would’ve used on the films in the 70’s.  And when the movie does go into the dreamlike musical sequences, Sher does make them feel bold and colorful.  And while the musical numbers are hit and miss (mostly miss), the one piece of the movie that still shines bright musically is the original score by Hildur Guonadottir.  Hildur was the recipient of the first Joker’s other Oscar win for Original Score and her haunting music is a perfect fit for gritty world that this film depicts.  The eeriness of her mix of low bass strings and horns fits very well with the fractured state of Joker’s personality in this film, and the score just does such a great job of setting the melancholy mood of the film.  You almost resent the fact that the movie interrupts itself to start playing a musical number as it takes away from the beautiful music in-between.  There’s definitely skill on display, and Todd Phillips definitely shows off his knowledge of classic films as the movie references not just old school Scorsese, but also has nods to the musicals of New Hollywood as well like New York, New York (1977), All That Jazz (1979) and Hair (1979).  Even older musicals like Singin’ in the Rain (1952),The Band Wagon (1953) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) get shout outs.  There is clearly love of movie musicals in this movie, but the love also seems to be misplaced.  The fact is, even with all the skill put into the musical numbers and the drama side of the story, the film never really commits to one or the other.  It’s hard to tell if there is sincerity in the musical numbers, as it feels like Phillips isn’t so much trying to create a new kind of musical as he seems to be using it more for parody.  Unfortunately, the movie never feels clever enough to get the ironic use of musical numbers to carry much of an impact.

For the musical numbers to also work, it also matters to have the right cast in place.  The musical is primarily sung through by only two performers in this movie; Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga.  Phoenix is no stranger to singing on film, as he received an Oscar nomination for playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (2005), a film where he didn’t do any lip-synching in playing the country music legend.  For this film, he’s called upon to do some pretty big numbers which require a powerful singing voice, and strangely he still performs in character as Arthur Fleck, who he portrays as having a weak, damaged voice.  In a way, the strain in his voice makes sense, as it shows the struggle that Arthur Fleck has in controlling his emotions, showing the psychological damage he’s still dealing with.  And when we see him fully embrace his Joker side, his voice gets much bigger and commanding.  Joaquin plays both of these sides well and there’s a lot of crazy turns that he takes with the character in this movie.  Even as his character lacks the rich development that was found in the original film, he’s nevertheless giving it his all as an actor throughout the movie.  Of course, on the singing side, the movie benefits greatly by having Lady Gaga in the cast.  Here she’s taking over a role that in past films has been memorably played by Margot Robbie.  I find it refreshing that her version of Harley Quinn is nothing like Robbie’s bubbly little anarchist.  Her performance as Harley is definitely well suited for grittier version of the Joker mythos.  The only problem is that Harley Quinn is not as important to the overall plot as she should be.  We see her be a bad influence on Arthur Fleck in prison, but we don’t learn more about Harley outside of what Arthur sees with her.  Again, like the absence of Batman, we are denied the inclusion of seeing Joker and Harley committing crime together like they do in the comic books.  Harley is just there to be a motivator for the evolution of Joker’s story, and that sadly is another disappointing underuse of the potential of the character.  But, at least she sings the hell out of her songs in the film; far and away the best singer in the cast.  There isn’t much else to say about the cast other than there’s some decent work from a good collection of character actors, such as Cathrine Keener and Brendan Gleeson.  I also want to spotlight little person actor Leigh Gill, whose witness stand scene is a highlight in the film and he manages to steal the scene with a heartbreaking performance.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not the worst movie of the year, nor is it the worst comic book movie of the year; both easily go to the travesty that was Madame Web (2024).  But I will say that this is probably the most frustrating movie of the year, because of the waste of good talent that I saw on screen.  I was thinking back a lot to my experience watching Megalopolis the previous week.  Objectively, Megalopolis is a much sloppier, mismanaged movie than Folie a Deux, but it was also much more entertaining to watch.  Both movies are wild swings, but one of the movies misses and still manages to be memorable while the other misses and just makes you feel nothing.  There was little hope for Megalopolis, and yet I admire it’s audaciousness and the fact that it was just such a bizarre experience.  Joker: Folie a Deux wishes it could be bizarre.  Like I said before, there just seems to be this lack of committment to the bit from Todd Phillips.  He’s making a musical, but the musical numbers feel restrained to the point where they don’t soar, with Phillips still trying to tie it back into the grittiness of the original film.  And the fact that the movie never gives us anything more than a rundown of Joker’s criminal trial to center the story around also makes the movie feel small.  It’s barely a comic book movie adaptation, with a baffling absence of any hint of Batman. Lady Gaga is giving it her all in the belting out of her songs in the film, but her Harley Quinn has nothing else to offer and like everything else in the movie, she’s just there because she’s a piece of the Joker puzzle that ultimately never fully gets solved.  The must insulting part comes in the end, when Todd Phillips even appears to undermine the Joker origin that he set up in his original, beloved movie.  You leave the theater wondering what was the point in the end, and sadly there is none.  I get the feeling that Phillips was upset by just how many people misread the first film and he wanted to deconstruct the mythos that he himself had created as a means of getting the point across that he intended.  He wants us to see the way that fame and celebrity can corrupt, and that we as a society are embracing more and more people not for their good qualities but rather for their extreme personalities, and that can often lead to horrible consequences as villainous people can be elevated to heroes for the angry masses.  Unfortunately, too many people viewed the first film as a celebration of the extremes in society, and Folie a Deux feels too much like a not well thought out rebuttal to that misunderstood message of the first movie.  I imagine this is all we are going to get out of this brief else-world storyline from DC comics.  It’s not a good sign when you’re big musical comic book movie barely gets a reaction from even the most forgiving fans of the genre.  My screening was dead quiet by the end, and there were even walkouts before the credits rolled.  Joker will still live on in comics and on the big and little screen for years to come, but I doubt we’ll hear anymore singing from him for a while.

Rating: 5/10

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