Free Guy

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There’s nothing quite as satisfying as watching a movie that you expected to be, y’know, probably fine, and it turns out to be really good instead. But then again, I think it is also time to acknowledge that Ryan Reynolds, at this stage in his career, is one of those guys who doesn’t make bad movies. Plus, and I’m ranging a bit far afield of my point now, but his acting style is one I have hardly ever seen before. There are the people who vanish into their roles, and the people that are too famous to vanish but still you are impressed by their ability to be two people at once, and the people who are obviously just playing themselves. And then there’s this guy, unique in my memory, who plays himself, but in a funny game of what if. “What if I got to pretend to be Pikachu?” “What if I got to pretend to be Deadpool?” “What if I got to pretend to be an irrepressibly cheerful NPC in a sandbox video game?”

Free Guy is pretty much the movie you expect it to be, at first glance. Guy works at the Bank, which gets robbed several times a day by the People Who Wear the Glasses. Then, after an inciting incident with a girl humming a song, he starts taking control of his own destiny. I like video games, and I like Reynolds, so the premise was enough to get me to watch. But the thing is, the story is written much more thoughtfully than the previews implied, and the result is a timely, occasionally hilarious, and sweet-hearted look at what our games and indeed what our world could someday look like.

Gojira no gyakushû

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I couldn’t help it. I just had to know how Godzilla recovered from being reduced to his component molecules by the oxygen destroyer. So I went digging around and found the second Toho movie, Godzilla Raids Again.

This movie focuses on Japan’s fishing industry, albeit with nearly no fishing. Apparently they have spotters who fly around looking for fish to send the fishing boats to, and lady radio operators to convey messages back and forth between the pilots and the fleet. Which is all fine and good, until one of the spotters, er, notices Godzilla. This gives the writers a chance to correct the paleontologist from last movie. Now, Godzilla is from somewhere between 130 to 70 million years ago, “as everyone knows”. But no fear! there’s also a similarly proportioned ankylosaurus from the same time period also awakened by more atomic testing, who they started calling Anguirus for reasons that were not at all clear to me. And this is where the paleontologist got a bunk script again, because, okay, that guy is also nearly 200 feet tall (I suppose I know why they weren’t going to walk that part back), and he has spikes all over his back instead of only along the sides, and he’s a vicious carnivore.

People knew better in the 1950s, right? I mean, they must have. And yet.

Anyway, from there the movie proceeds about as you’d expect. Here come monsters to attack Osaka, but the Japanese have learned how to lure Godzilla away now. Which worked out great, up until a subplot with a prison transfer escape attempt ends up blowing up the waterfront fishing cannery, and suddenly Anguirus and Godzilla are locked in mortal combat, and also lots of familiar pilots are flying around in danger, with familiar radio operators swooning over them.

I want to watch the next movie and find out how Godzilla comes back next time, but it’s not available anywhere. …which reminds me, I never did tell you how he came back this time! …he didn’t. This is just a different Godzilla. How many of them are there?? But just remember anytime you are watching one of those old sequel movies, it’s not even the actual Godzilla.

I feel so betrayed.

The Quarry

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Did you ever want to take the movie Friday the 13th, put it in a blender with a choose your own adventure novel, and put the resulting mash into a not-quite walking sim video game? I mean, I hope you wanted to. Who even are you, if you didn’t?!

The Quarry documents the events of the night after the last night of summer camp at Hackett’s Quarry in upstate New York, in the summer of 2021[1]. All of the kids have returned home, and the counselors are cleaning and packing up to vacate the premises themselves (other than the two counselors who never showed up for the summer, after vanishing ominously in the prologue). Of course, nothing ever goes quite as planned when you’re high school on the cusp of college-aged summer camp counselors in a horror movie, does it?

The gameplay is a mixture of walking sim while looking for clues and things and the choose your own adventure interludes I mentioned, either interrupted occasionally by fairly forgiving quicktime events[2], timed CYOA decisions, wildly infrequent gunplay, and occasional exercises in hiding and trying to decide when to stop holding your breath. Oh, and also interrupted by chapter breaks when a creepy fortune teller attempts to influence your path. If this all sounds like mostly minimalist play in which the actual story is the real star, well, there’s a mode where you can have it just show you the movie with randomly determined outcomes, if that gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

All that said, I’m leaving out the piece of the game (aside from the actual story) that I found the most compelling. You can’t just go back and fix the decisions you regret. No take backs! I’m not sure why I’ve never envisioned such a possibility in interactive fiction before, but I haven’t, and it seems nobody else had either, since this is the first time I’m finding such a thing. It’s especially well suited to a horror movie, where people that you wanted to survive die tragically all the time, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I need to let some time pass, but I very much want to play this again, and that is not something you will catch me saying very often, anymore. Strongly recommended, unless you hate horror movies on the face of it or will feel really bad when the characters die and it’s your fault. But honestly it’s not very scary, even though it is occasionally shocking and definitely violent as all get out.

[1] Or 2022, I forget. Like it matters. This is not a game world that experienced COVID, y’all.
[2] Example: I think I managed to catch multiple of them even though I had set the controller down for a moment

Gojira

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So this is super weird.

I know I’ve seen the Raymond Burr Godzilla (which is perversely difficult to find on streaming (not that I particularly wanted to), as compared to how easy it was to find on any given Saturday afternoon in my youth), and I would swear I’ve seen Gojira as well, or even if not, it’s the same movie minus inserted Raymond Burr footage, right?

But, because it has been a while, I figured to myself that I would watch the film in advance of the horror movie podcast episode about it, and it turns out that either they diverge wildly, or I just have not seen this movie after all. I remember the people running along trails to hilltops to see Godzilla approaching, and Burr giving close-up commentary on the moment, and I remember him (Godzilla, not Burr) smashing through buildings and elevated trains and such in Tokyo, but I had minimal to no memory of the family drama / romantic subplot between the paleontologist, his daughter, her scientist fiance, and her fisherman lover, and I had completely no memory of how the movie ended.

For example, and this is a spoiler for a seventy year-old movie, so with that said, did you know Godzilla dies at the end?? There are like ten or a dozen or more other Toho movies in this series, the vast majority of which he is alive in, and I have no idea how! It never crossed my mind that he could die, that was the one thing I was certain of!

Like, I used to be sure that (before he became a guardian instead), Gojira was a metaphor not only for the dangers of nuclear testing, but also for the learned hopelessness of the Japanese people a mere nine years past Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nation of people in all the world’s history who were the most thoroughly crushed by opposing forces. But if they can just turn around and kill the supposedly undefeatable nuclear behemoth, that particular metaphor flies right out the window.

It’s like learning that Rosebud was his wife’s middle name, or that Rick and Elsa had never been to Paris. Everything I know is wrong, and what can I even do with this information now?

Barbie (2023)

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Far, far later than intended, I finally saw Barbie. It’s always really annoying to see a cultural touchstone movie months after everyone else, because it means it was impossible for me to form my opinion in a vacuum as I prefer. Obviously it touched some nerves and was important, but it bugs me that now my review has to at least in part be about that, instead of solely about what I thought of the movie independently.

Oh well.

So it’s like this. A bunch of people named Barbie, a smaller but still significant number of people named Ken, a few people named Skipper, and one or two other folks all live in Barbieland, where Barbie is capable of doing anything and certainly does. But when generic Margot Robbie Barbie[1] starts to have weird feelings about death, she learns that the only way to keep her perfect life is to travel to The Real World[2] and meet up with the girl who owns her-as-a-doll to get that girl back into a good headspace. But when Ken[3] decides to tag along, the movie veers in wildly unpredictable directions, and soon the fates of both Barbieland and the real world are at stake.

Alright, I guess everything past here (and the footnotes I will leave above the break) are spoilers. Because you simply cannot talk about this movie without spoiling it. There would be no point.

[1] ie not an astronaut not a president not a McDonald’s employee, just Barbie
[2] There’s a map and everything. I remember people making a stink about the way the brief blip of a kid’s map of the earth was drawn because it betrayed some kind of woke agenda, and I just… I suppose I was going to have to deal with months of baggage about this movie in my review if I had watched it on opening day, wasn’t I?
[3] who the movie helpfully tells us in the first five minutes lives only for the brief moments when Barbie’s gaze falls upon him

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Hunted (2020)

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Don’t hold me to this, but I think Hunted is a French movie. This is apropos of almost nothing, except that I will later use it to explain my problems with the movie, which are for the most part a little unfair.

So there’s this girl out for a night on the town, and she’s getting her flirt on, and before you know it she’s consentingly in the back seat of a dude’s car, when it suddenly turns out that he and his friend who climb into the front and starts driving, they do not have the noblest of intentions. And then she improbably escapes (not for the last time), and the hunt is on!

Anyway, French I said. One thing that I do not know is if the movie is dubbed. I think it maybe is not, but a lot of people in it, especially the primary antagonist, have incredibly annoying voices. Are their voices annoying because they do not match the person talking? I mean, that could be a sign of dubbing, but it could also just be a sign of someone with an unlikely voice. And since I already kind of hate my own voice, it feels crappy to rag on someone else’s, and yet… it was a distraction.

But the main problem is that it put me in mind of two other movies, both of which are substantially better. First, because of the woman’s ubiquitous red jacket, I thought constantly of Little Red Riding Hood, which in this context means I was thinking of Freeway[1]. And second, for pretty obvious reasons, I Spit on Your Grave[2]. And it is possible to make a mashup of two other movies stand up on its own, but this one, for whatever reason, just didn’t work for me.

Not to say Hunted did not have its charms. Here I am especially thinking of the survivalist bow-hunter mother and son, and the incredible uses of that one arrow. The pair of scenes to which I am alluding were very nearly enough to turn me around on the whole flick, so if you’re still curious, it might be worth your time after all.

[1] Unreviewed here because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, with Joe Bob’s full commentary supplanting my own, but I kind of loved it is the short version. Maybe the only dark, grimey for the sake of grime movie I’ve ever felt that way about. Starring Reese Witherspoon before she was anybody and Kiefer Sutherland before he became somebody the second time around.
[2] Which, as you know, I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, back before his comeback was fully established.

Blacula

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How, you ask, have I never seen Blacula? The truth is, I really don’t know! I’d swear I got further than the Bs in the horror section of the College Station Hastings during my mid ’90s tenure. (I suppose they might have just not had it, though? Weird.) Anyhow, now I had to watch it, since the horror movie podcast did. And for the most part, hooray?

I mean, I’m not saying it’s good. But it for sure has its charms. In 1780, Prince Mamuwalde and his wife Luva are visiting Europe in protest of the slave trade, and they come to the castle of a certain Transylvanian count, who is not sympathetic to their goals by virtue of being a massive racist. And also a vampire.

Approximately 200 years later: Mamuwalde wakes up in exactly the kind of overstereotyped Los Angeles you’d expect out of an exploitation movie, and goes on a vampiric spree while also trying to win over the doppelganger of his long-dead wife. And… I mean, that’s pretty much it. The plot is just so very thin[1]. But the acting! I mean, to be clear, it’s not good either, but it’s comfortable. There’s scenery chewing by an African vampire prince, there’s a club fuckboy named Skillet, there’s a completely insane undead cab driver, there’s Icepick from the old Magnum PI series as a coroner with a gratuitous hook hand. You can’t make this shit up, except that it was the ’70s, and anyone who knew a dentist could not only make this shit up, but get it financed, filmed, and released! It was a glorious age, and we will never see its like again.

[1] unless you’ve never seen one of those “you are my reincarnated spouse, therefore you must disregard all red flags and love me” stories before, I suppose

Why Hide?

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So, first things first. Both based on the movie I watched and based on a simple visual comparison between the two, Christmas Presence is a much better title than Why Hide? is, and I’m glad they changed the name at some point.

Once upon a time (ie the opening credits scene), twin girls were playing in the woods, and something happened to one of them? Both of them? Twins, so it was difficult to tell. Then, a bunch of adults show up at a house in the middle of nowhere to celebrate Christmas, and they… they are not likable. They bicker, but it isn’t fun, and to the extent that any of them might have been better than others, it was overridden by how caricatured they all were.

Later, because of ghosts or missing twins or ominous groundskeepers or maybe Anansi, they start dying. That middle part kind of worked, mostly because of the rising tension. But then the end of the movie did not make a lick of sense, and nope, I just did not like this one, even with the better title.

Alas.

It Takes Two

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Over the past month or so, Mary and I have been playing It Takes Two, from the same people who made A Way Out. This time, we actually played on the same couch together, which was fairly successful. What’s weird is, aside from the structural premise that the games are meant to be played together and do not support physical distance, from a screen real estate perspective, these two games could not be farther apart.

It Takes Two is a family drama about parents of a young daughter who have begun to resent each other and are on the verge of divorce. Only the daughter overhears this decision, and using a weird couples’ counseling book accidentally puts them under a curse where they are body-swapped into instantly regenerating clay and twiggy fabric bodies of insectile proportions, and the personified book leads them through fantastical versions of their home and their past, trying to teach them how to reconnect and start working as a team again.

Will it work? Depends among other things on how good you are at combat platformers.

But honestly, it was a sweet, heartfelt game about a plan that would almost certainly fail in real life, and I have to recommend it to anyone who likes to play a game with other people. It’s too bad it isn’t easier to curse people on the verge of divorce into having no choice but to trust each other and work together and have the kinds of experiences that form lifelong bonds, and find out whether that would work or not.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

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Another few weeks, another new Mission Impossible movie. And boy are these things getting more and more serialized!

Fallout concerns itself with all the[1], ahem, consequences of cutting the head off the Syndicate serpent in the prior film. You see, all the employees left adrift were themselves well-trained spies, so they just kept on keeping on, and now Ethan Hunt and his team have to secure a few loose nuclear weapons.

Blah blah action-cakes and chases and things, but here’s what I found most interesting about this movie after you cut past the (at this point) recycled world-in-danger plots and revenge plots and double crosses and explosions and all: Tom Cruise isn’t smirking his way through each threat anymore. I’m not sure if it’s that he’s older, or that Ethan is older[2], or that the writers want me to buy that there’s more on the line than there used to be, despite prior plots centering on a highly transmissible and extremely deadly synthetic virus and on global thermonuclear war, and Ethan not having all the answers with a snap of his fingers is the way they thought of.

Whatever it is, I liked seeing them have to work for it this time.

[1] oh hey, I just got the double entendre
[2] Yes yes, Tom = Ethan, but I really do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the two possibilities. Tom being older is about him also having a more realistic world view and admitting that all of these things shouldn’t come so easily as they do, even in a fantasy action world. Ethan being older is about his growing awareness of his own mortality in a body that is beginning to run out of steam a little faster than it used to, as well as his growing awareness that nobody can maintain a win streak forever.