Tag: Edgar Allen Poe

2023 In Film: Day One (The Awful)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Spoilers, but 2023 was actually a pretty good year for film. There was a lot of excellent stuff, much more great than awful, but tradition states we must start with the worst, and these are pretty damn bad.

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Ups: It is good to see spectacle cinema again.

Fun idea.

Pretty good CGI.

Downs: Dull.

No sense of peril, obstacles are approached, defeated, and then forgotten in a few minutes.

Zero reason for it to be set 65 million years in the past rather than in the future.

Terrible title.

Best Moment: When Koa finds out the truth about Mills.

Worst Moment: The parasite nearly killed one of them. Completely inconsequential.

Best Performer: Ariana Greenblatt

Opening: Adam Driver’s character convinces his wife to let him go on a two-year trip to raise money for his daughters’ healthcare. She dies whilst he’s away. All of that information is delivered to the audience FAR too quickly. It would have been better if they opened with the crew members of the ship just sitting around joking, that way when they died we would actually feel something.

Closing: An asteroid hits Earth, killing most life. The audience feels NOTHING.

Best Line: “65 million years ago a visitor crash-landed on Earth”

Original Review here

Assassin Club

Ups: Good idea.

Made it very easy for me to pick “Worst Film of the Year”

Downs: Wastes so much potential.

Stupid character decisions.

Edited in a way that makes parts of it incomprehensible to watch.

Dull.

Best Moment: The subway fight.

Worst Moment: When a mysterious character is unmasked. Because it happens one scene after the concept of them was introduced, so felt like a waste of a mystery.

Best Performer: Henry Golding I guess.

Opening: He tries to kill someone, and helpfully explains his process to the audience, but is shot-blocked.

Closing: I genuinely don’t remember. I think he shot a woman. I stopped caring by this point.

Best Line: However they described the person in the worst moment section, only because it actually created intrigue.

Original Review here

The Pale Blue Eye

Ups: Some lush visuals

Downs: This could have been a chance to showcase some American talent, going with an almost entirely British cast is a strange choice.

Best Moment: The shot of the house burning down, elegant in its simplicity.

Worst Moment: The reveal, when you find out the whole film is balancing on an incredibly convenient coincidence in timing.

Best Performer: Toby Jones

Opening: With an Edgar Allen Poe quote, obviously. The last media I partook in that started like that was Eternal Darkness back in *coughs to obscure date*

Closing: The killer has been revealed. But the film then carries on for another few scenes where we get flashbacks about things we didn’t need to see.

Best Line: “I didn’t want them to confess, I wanted them to die”

Original Review here

Thanksgiving

Ups: Gory

Deliciously satirical

Creative kills

Downs: I hated every single character.

The villain makes too much sense.

Predictable.

Too bleak, stopped caring.

Best Moment: When the killer kidnaps them in the middle of a parade.

Worst Moment: The reveal, because it’s too obvious.

Best Performer: Patrick Dempsey

Opening: The store massacre. Bloody, chaotic, and quite fun. But also renders every main character too unsympathetic to give a shit about.

Closing: The killer’s body wasn’t found. Sequel!

Best Line: “Don’t slide into the killer’s DMs”

Original Review here

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Detective Augustus Landor investigates a series of grisly murders with the help of a young Edgar Allan Poe

I suppose it had to happen. I’ve had a run of really good films so far, with every single one worth watching again. So I suppose it’s inevitable that eventually I’d get a film I didn’t like in 2023. It’s a shame, but this is probably the longest I’ve been into a year before that happened. Also, the first Netflix film I watched this year which just goes to show something, I’m not sure what, though.

So why doesn’t this work? It should, it has a really stacked cast. Look at the names involved: Christian Bale, Toby Jones, Timothy Spall. What connects those names? All British. The film location? 1830’s New York. Which (and I’ve checked a map), is not Britain. I get sometimes actors play different nationalities, and it’s usually not a big deal. But for this many members of the cast to not be American feels a bit weird. This could have been a great showcase for young American talent. The biggest non-British performer is Gillian Anderson, and she’s almost British as she’s spent large portions of her life here. Just to check, America still has actors, right? Or are they just depending on comedians now?

At times it’s beautiful. The location lends itself well to stylistic shots of landscapes, and it suits a story like this. The director, Scott Cooper, also directed Antlers, which you may remember I was not a fan of. And if you don’t remember, here’s the link anyway, warning, I do go off on a weird tangent for……well pretty much all of it.

The other issue? It’s hard to get through. Not because of content or strangeness, but because at times it is painfully dull. Ultimately, it comes down a poor script. It doesn’t know what kind of film it wants to be. Does it want to be a gothic horror? A murder mystery? The most annoying thing about the script is how much it fumbles what should be the highlight. The reveal of the murderer towards the end. One, the things that needed to happen are a little hard to believe. There are so many coincidences and weird character decisions. The scene showing the reveal isn’t even exciting. It tells you who the murderer is, then explains the motives, then shows you the murders in flashbacks. We didn’t need a scene of them killing people or approaching them, we know it happened, and we gain nothing from a barely lit shot of someone punching someone and shouting “who else was there?” at someone.

It’s a shame as I really wanted to enjoy this, I was hoping the Poe thing would give the film a sense of intelligence and darkness, as it is, you could replace Poe with anybody and it wouldn’t change the plot much at all.