“With a special guest star, the Wicked Witch of the West.”
Hey, did you know that it was my birthday last week while I was on vacation? And that my birthday is also part of the reason I was taking a break? Well, you know now! Happy birthday to me! It’s a week later and I have nothing left to celebrate. The leaves have already fallen off the trees and my pumpkins have smushed. It is almost Halloween, somehow, and I don’t even have a costume. Every year I feel my enthusiasm for celebration waning, and I do not appreciate this downward trend. I want Halloween to be something. I do not know where the time has gone, and all things slide ever closer to flat entropy.
Of course, I did stuff anyway to celebrate my birthday outside of this blog. Like I do every year, I went to pumpkin patches with close family and friends to revel in the beauty of the autumn harvest. And that does always get my autumn spirits going, seeing all the pumpkins and apples and trees ablaze with changing colors. I even smashed up apples to make apple cider this year, something I’ve never done before. ANd the best part is that I got paid to do it! I was doing it for my job! That’s pretty cool, I think. And yet, I feel flatter this year than in years previous. I don’t know why. Perhaps a combination of a stressful work season, a change in medication, it feeling like we are on the cusp of total ecological collapse, or a combination of the above. I don’t know. Time marches onward, and I feel like I’ve already missed the fall.
But at least some of that time has been spent watching vaguely Halloween-related movies! Here’s four (?) reviews of movies I watched over my semi-birthday vacation and one (?) review of a musical I watched for my birthday specifically. I guess there is something to celebrate on this blog after all!
Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)
I will not hold punches here. Hocus Pocus 2 was far and away the worst movie I watched during my vacation. Like, none of the other movies even come close to being this bad, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is pretty mid-tier. Listen, I’m not really attached to the original movie in any way, and I haven’t seen it since my middle school’s Halloween assembly where we watched the movie when I was like thirteen, so I don’t know how this really compares to the original. But taken on its own, it’s bad. Not for a lack of trying or anything; the sets are fun, the costumes are good, none of the CGI is egregiously bad, the actors and actresses all perform well. It’s just not written very well.
For a family movie about witches who are resurrected from the dead to steal the souls of children, it’s an incredibly bland film, with tons of questionable decisions. If you want an example of what I mean, there are two (two!!!) scenes in this movie where the three main witches randomly break into song and dance, for no apparent fucking reason. I don’t know if this happened in the original, but even if it did, it should not happen in this one. I didn’t just inwardly groan, I outwardly groaned. The first time it happened, my jaw actually dropped because I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just so bizarre, so out of place, so tacky, and it totally ruined the moderate pacing the movie had built up. And the second time it happened? Ground the whole thing to a fucking halt. It’s bad.
The movie has its moments. The two co-stars have decent chemistry on screen, and I did like some of the b-plot with the zombie and the magician. But this isn’t the sequel that anyone was clamoring for, and even though the ending is set up to have another sequel, I’m hoping everyone now realizes that asking for even this one was already a mistake.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
I have never seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre from the seventies (fucking hell, it’s that old?), even though it is high up on my list. I have heard many wonderful things about it. Conversely, I had heard next to nothing about this one, except that it was a better sequel than the other seven or so existing sequels. Which is perhaps not saying much about the other sequels, because this movie is firmly set in upper mediocre territory.
I watched it with most of Cheyenne’s siblings, minus the youngest because this is way too gory for anyone at any age, and I’ll admit that Cheyenne’s teen sister and I both enjoyed it pretty heartily. Its gore is often so over-the-top that it’s hard not to laugh, but also at times bounces around to being genuinely gruesome stuff (which is, you know, what a movie like this probably should be). Cheyenne could barely stomach any of it, but she’s a bit of a wuss when it comes to realistic horror. Though calling this movie “realistic” would be a bit of stretch; around the half-way mark, the movie gets so ham-fisted with its messaging and dialogue that you can almost feel the script coming apart at the seems. Which is a real shame, because right up until the part where Leatherface is about to get on the bus, the movie really has something going for it.
The cinematography at the beginning is really clever, making Leatherface feel imposing without really showing him at all. It sets up some interesting moral quandries and social commentary (which it then totally drops and/or attempts to shove down the viewer’s throat harder than a chainsaw to the face), and it toys with violence that could me both reserved and grotesque, if that’s possible. Then, you know, it sort of flies off the rails and falls into the traps of needless plot holes, stupid character decisions, a total lack of subtlety (shocking, I know), and an ending that’s dumber than Jason Voorhees in space. But, what the hell can I say? It’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don’t think high art is really the style here.
Hush (2016)
I did only see the second half of this movie, but I think I kind of got the idea from reading the Wikipedia plot summary. I’m typically not much for psychological thrillers (or whatever you’d call this), and even less so home invasion movies, but Cheyenne loves Hush and I happened to be in the room while she and her sister were watching it, so I might as well comment on it. And it’s pretty good, for a movie from a genre I don’t care much for.
Not knowing what the field of home invasion movies generally looks like, I can’t say if it’s truly groundbreaking or not, but I have to commend the way that the movie uses sound, the main character’s internal dialogue and imaginings, and the lived reality of the main character being deaf playing into the script. See, the crux of this movie is that the main character is, in fact, deaf and mute, and she’s being held de facto hostage in her special high-security cabin in the woods by some sort of sociopath. I don’t know if it makes much social commentary on anything, since dialogue is (understandably) sparse and largely only serves to move the action forward, but I’ll be damned it isn’t effective at doing exactly what it sets out to do. It is bare-bones in a good way; nothing seems to exist without a purpose in the action. And for a home invasion movie, cutting out all the fluff to get to the tension is probably what you want.
For the most part, the movie is tense in the same way that the night-vision basement scene in Silence of the Lambs is tense. You, as a viewer, tend to have a lot more information about the intruder than the main character lady does, so you’re constantly trying to figure out how and when she’s going to respond what you, for the most part, already know is coming. And it keeps that tension pretty constant the entire time. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I recommend it? Yeah, if you like that kind of thing. Will I watch it again? Not unless Cheyenne asks me to. It’s just not my type.
NOPE (2022)
What is up my alley, though, is NOPE. I mean, it’s a Jordan Peele movie, so it’s weird, dense with meaning, and full of tons and tons of little details and nods to other greats both in and out of the genre. And I really liked it. Although, unlike other Jordan Peele movies, I found it surprisingly “normal.” With a few exceptions, it feels like what you’d expect a movie about ranchers who discover aliens to be about. There is no bizarre twist or moment that really pulls the rug out from under the viewer, like in Get Out or Us. There are, of course, things that set it apart from your bog-standard alien mystery story, and the fact that it’s run by Jordan Peele means that there’s never a missed beat, but I think what surprised me the most was how predictable the plot ultimately felt.
Don’t get me wrong; that’s actually not a criticism of the movie. The themes tie everything together well enough that the predictability of the plot goes a long way to hold up the strength of the visuals and characters without burdening it with unnecessary twists and turns. And the visuals are anything but predictable. I mean, right from the start, it hits you in the gut with weird stuff. And it keeps up that pressure until the very end. Which is good, because without that pressure, there’s actually not a ton that happens in the movie. There are lots of things that happen to characters, but the actual plot of the movie could be summed up pretty snappily. And that’s ok. It is, kind of like Hush, a plot-sparse movie, which is fitting for its California valley setting. But unlike Hush, it is rich in visuals and layers of meaning. Plus, it’s got the Akira bike slide, perhaps for the first time in real life, which was about the last thing I expected to see. So that’s pretty cool!
While NOPE may be the easiest Jordan Peele movie to explain what’s happening, it’s not any less complex of a movie for it. And that rodeo scene, man! That gives me chills.
Wicked: The Musical (Broadway in Chicago, 2022)
Storytime: I first saw Wicked live in 2013 (I think?). I was a freshman in high school, and I went on a field trip with my school’s Thespians club to see it at Chicago’s Oriental theater, now called the James M. Nederlander. I was in the second-to-last row in the center-right of the balcony, and I had never seen a “real” musical before. I had no idea what to expect. Sure, I’d been to see musicals, but it was either kids’ stuff at Drury Lane out in the Chicago suburbs (not knocking on them; they do a great job) or a traveling theater troupe’s production of the “Greatest Hits of Jesus Christ Superstar” performed in my church’s Catholic school gymnasium. I had never been to anything resembling a Broadway-style show. I had no idea what to expect. And I was absolutely blown away.
In my memory, it was one of the coolest things I saw in high school. The music was tremendous, the sets were dense and colorful, and the costumes and choreography were of the highest caliber. It was a telling of the story of The Wizard of Oz as I’d never even imagined it before, and a compelling character piece about what it means to do good in the world, told by someone who’s been relegated to being “evil.” After seeing the show on my birthday this year, almost a full decade since I last saw it, I realized that none of that has changed. Instead, it is me whose changed.
Wicked is still amazing. I still love it, and I still love the music. I recommend everyone see it, if they can afford one of the exorbitantly priced tickets before they are sold out. And the Nederlander theater is such a lavishly-decorated place that it matches the gaudy excess of the Emerald City perfectly. I can’t think of a better place to host it. And the movement in “Defying Gravity” has got to be one of the greatest scenes on or off Broadway. It’s unearthly.
But seeing it the second time, after having now seen several other Broadway-style shows (including Hamilton, Carmen, and a full version of JC Superstar, among others), it did not blow me away like it once did. Maybe because I knew what to expect. Maybe because I’m jaded and cynical and going through a depressive phase (“phase”). Maybe it’s because the entire character of Nessa Rose left a really foul taste in my mouth (she strips away the rights of the Munchkins because she’s… in a wheelchair? Hmmm.). Whatever it is, I still thoroughly enjoyed the show. I remember it feeling incredibly long as a kid, but it flew by when I watched it this time, and I was lucky enough (thanks to my Mom as a birthday gift) to have a seat in like the sixth row back in the Orchestra section. I could see the sweat coming off of Elphaba’s browline. I am thrilled that I got to see it again, and share it with Cheyenne, to boot. And yet… and yet I can’t help feeling like something is missing.
Maybe it’s not the show, though. Maybe it’s me.
