In the sequel to Alien (1979), our story brings us back to Ripley some fifty-seven years after she entered stasis. It turns out colonists have settled the Zeta Reticuli planet where she initially encountered the alien. She returns with a group of Colonial Marines when the colonists disappear. She plans to exterminate the aliens they find, but of course the corporation does not, and hijinks ensue.

I’m still trying to parse my negative reaction to the movie. I can recognize many good points in it: Sigourney Weaver is great, the action scenes with Ripley vs the Queen are very enjoyable, and the aesthetic surrounding the aliens is still delicious. Yet I found myself largely bored and annoyed while I was actually watching it.

I knew to expect an action movie rather than horror this time around. I do vastly prefer horror. But one of my favorite infinite-rewatch movies is Die Hard (1988), so I had good reason to suspect I wouldn’t mind the shift in genre. Aliens lacks the engaging dialogue and methodically escalated stakes of Die Hard. You really can’t understate how much the dynamic between McClain and Gruber pulls the movie along. As cool as the Xenomorph queen looks, she lacks the gravitas of Alan Rickman. Carter Burke, the resident Weyland-Yutani wiener who serves as primary antagonist for much of the movie, is not all that interesting either.

So Die Hard wasn’t a good comparison (and Aliens couldn’t have been in conversation with it, as Die Hard came two years later).

It seems likelier that Aliens was some kind of improvement over older action movies. It earned quite a bit of cultural cachet in its time, including memes that have persisted to this day (“nuke it from orbit”), so something here hit hard. I just don’t know what. I’m just not all that familiar with its subgenre. I’m guessing that having a woman-led action movie by the guy who wrote Rambo II and Terminator was exciting.

And boy, is Ripley a woman in Aliens. She was androgynous in the first movie. Themes of reproduction weren’t especially played up then. By the time Aliens comes around, they’ve left Ripley’s cat somewhere safe (thankfully) and replaced her with a small child, whose nurturing falls exclusively on Ripley’s shoulders. Ripley is also put against an alien mother as her ultimate foe. The woman-as-childbearer aspect has been pulled into focus. I vaguely recall the few later-franchise movies I saw, and it seems the reproductive stuff only gets increasing importance.

Believe it or not, this came out only twelve years after women could have credit cards under their names in America, so I can appreciate how second wave feminism might have enjoyed it.

The Marines were generally obnoxious, though. The action scenes with the Marines in them were muddy and incoherent — possibly as a way to emphasize the emotional chaos of the situation — and their machismo leading into the battles got tiring. I suspect some of what I “missed” may be an expectation the Marines would be more useful, better-regarded, and survive even a little bit. Without that expectation, there was very little pleasure in watching them fall apart.

I really suspect I need to revisit this movie as part of a bigger self-education on 80s action movies. It will probably come across better that way. In the meantime, I am comfortable rating it three stars because Sigourney Weaver did her job excellently, “Chekhov’s Mech Suit” was fun (as my child termed it), and I really do always love the alien aesthetic.

I last rewatched Shakespeare in Love almost exactly a year ago, so I wasn’t exactly overdue another review. But that was before I started doing movie reviews on Egregious. My last review is shorter, as tends to be preferred on Letterboxd.

A very clever movie, which unfortunately *knows* it is a very clever movie. In the days before Gwyneth Paltrow’s x-ray vagina eggs or whatever, she was just an adorable, horny, cross-dressing lil scamp trying to climb up on Ralph Fiennes’s hairier brother while popping off repurposed Shakespeare lines. There’s enough cross-dressing that they couldn’t make it wholly heterosexual, but they made a sincere effort. I can’t hate a movie that had *this* much fun being made, though I also cannot love it, despite the incredibly meta self-awareness of writing tragi-comedy like Shakespeare was a screenwriter in the 1990s.

“Great score and costumes.” -me and also The Oscars

(posted 3/23/23 on Letterboxd)

This was accompanied by a three-star rating. I don’t disagree with my original review so much, but I feel like I was generous in giving it three stars based on how I felt. My takeaway was negative in general. I found it way too “cute” last time. It was jarring to me, since I grew up loving the movie. For a ten-year-old literature nerd in 1998, Shakespeare in Love is fabulous. As an adult, I couldn’t get the same experience.

I was compelled to revisit it because Martin Clunes, star of the best show ever, plays a significant character. Coming at this from an I Love Martin Clunes angle had me looking closer at all the performances.

What a cast! Obviously we have Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes as the central relationship. The rest of the cast list is absurdly stacked: Our Savior Martin Clunes, Geoffrey Rush unrecognizable as the dude from Quills, Imelda Staunton, a deliciously villainous Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and of course Dame Judi Dench as the Queen. Also, bafflingly but charmingly, J.Lo’s husband.

There are surely other noteworthy actors in the movie; it seems to be mostly cast with English actors and I’m not as familiar with non-Hollywood actors in general, hence my failure to recognize Martin Clunes as The Greatest until now.

On the performance level, I don’t see anything to criticize. Even Ben Affleck, who sticks out to say the least, is entirely appropriate for his character. I should have actually closed out my last review by saying “Great score, costumes, and cast.” The Oscars agreed with me on that too. Paltrow and Dench both took home statuettes.

Rory pointed out to me that the Oscars attention was not merit-based, but politics based, as major awards demand. Weinstein himself mounted an aggressive campaign. Yikes.

But Shakespeare in Love was primed to appeal to Hollywood anyway: Its anachronistic take on Shakespeare is extremely indulgent to the industry’s favorite things.

In much the way there’s always a dog in plays to appease the Queen, this movie panders hard. Shakespeare himself is the best example. His character is sent to therapy right at the beginning of the movie, which is the most 1990s-tortured-screenwriter act they could have done. You’re immediately, firmly placed in an anachronistic state of mind, which would have made all the characterizations more meaningful to Oscar voters at the time. Producers are selfish, screwing around, and must be wrangled. Writers are flighty and insecure. Actors are deeply, reverently committed to their art, and also totally unreliable ego-monsters.

For all my annoyance at the cutesy way-too-clever screenplay, that’s a lot of the reason it’s successful. It might rub my fur the wrong way now, but it’s excellent at what it seeks to accomplish. Part of that is awards-bait. Part of that is the fart-sniffing of Hollywood. But the most significant part, to me, is how it seeks to prove that all the mechanisms and tropes of Shakespeare’s era are rather timeless, because it tells you cynically what parts of a story will please audiences, and then…it executes those parts of the story to please audiences. Successfully!

Still, I don’t love it as I used to. The Queen connecting with Viola because they’re both struggling to survive in a man’s world falls as totally flat as Barbie’s shallow feminism 101, designed only to recognize the struggles of wealthy white women. Using Romeo and Juliet as an example of “true love” is silly and simply untrue. The play isn’t even about true love. It’s about a couple kids who impulsively fall into an intense relationship, and how their family’s grudges kill them. More of a warning than a love story or comedy. Plus, Shakespeare in Love tries very hard to avoid being gay, like all the No Homo Media of the 90s and 00s, which always sends me sinking down a dark hole remembering the homophobic abuse endured at the time.

I still think it’s better than I felt last year. Its sustained impact is mostly harmless, though the abusive shadow of Weinstein looms large over this and many films. Shakespeare in Love is just trying to have fun and entertain you. The costumes are really beautiful. The score is outstanding. The actors are all so good, and Martin Clunes is great (don’t @ me).

Also, I appreciate how a quick rewatch reminded me how much my mood at any given moment really impacts how generous I feel about a movie. Thanks, smug little Hollywood movie.

(image credit: Miramax)

I was fully prepared to five-star Irish Wish before I watched it. This checks all my boxes in concept: It’s sort of a holiday-themed Netflix romcom starring Lindsay Lohan. I love Falling for Christmas (2021). I don’t currently have St. Paddy’s Day movies on rotation, but I was willing to start a pile.

Irish Wish features Lohan’s character wishing she were marrying her long-time crush while she’s in Ireland for his wedding. Thanks to magic, she swaps places with the bride (a friend of hers). Of course, this is a whole monkey’s paw affair, where it turns out what she wants isn’t what she needs. The changed circumstances highlight to Lohan that she’s not meant to be with the crush. It also helps her realize she’s in love with the guy who played Jack Crusher on Picard.

The milieu establishes that love is a soul mates affair, and I like soul mates in a fantasy setting. Crush and Friend manage to fall in love again despite the situation-swap. And when Lohan manages to undo her wish, she still ends up with Jack Crusher. They were always meant to be. Aww.

Lohan is perfect in this. Even better than Falling for Christmas! (Which came from the same creative team, too.)

This is as good as any Netflix romcom, with all the usual asterisks added and then dismissed. You don’t eat Kraft dinner and complain it didn’t taste like filet mignon.

There have also been a lot of monarchist nonsense in Netflix romcoms, and those tend to be my less-favorite. Fantasies of wealth (and the accompanying security) are a staple of the romcom genre in general. I don’t begrudge anyone their fantasies of security, but I appreciate when a romance makes it easier to swallow by taking us far, far away from real-life politics. Give me Aldovia instead of England, please. (Letterboxd)

Irish Wish did not distance itself from real imperial politics.

The wealthy crush’s family lives in Killruddery House (Wikipedia), an English-occupier house in Elizabethan style. The only filming location necessary to Ireland is the Cliffs of Moher, a famous tourist destination, which feels like a very shallow scoop off the top of Irish-themed things. And Lohan’s tricky little wish isn’t manipulated from one of the many potential local Irish spirits, but Saint Brigid. (Wikipedia)

The mere inclusion of Brigid explicitly in her saint form is one markedly post-Christian reformation. In an attempt to be fair, I’ll note that an overwhelming percentage of modern Irish people identify as Catholic. 94.1% of Irish identified as Catholics in a 1961 census; even in the 2022 census, 69% continue to identify as Catholic. I tripped across these numbers reading a nuanced essay about Brigid as a historical saint, pre-Christian goddess(es), and as a title on Stone, Soil, and Soul. (It’s a substantial and worthy read.)

Paganism isn’t just history in Ireland; as with most indigenous cultures, contemporary peoples continue to observe their traditions. (Psyche) The colonial presence of the British still hasn’t been accepted either. A united Republic of Ireland continues to be a hot topic, and the party in favor for election this year would pursue it. (NPR)

Hence Irish Wish calls itself Irish, but it’s a specific Ireland: a colonized, Catholic Ireland, where Lindsay Lohan’s crush is a selfish manipulative Irish-accented occupier whose family wealth comes from conquering and her Happily Ever After comes with the much-cooler English hero. Why is the romantic couple American and English in a movie with “Irish” in the title? Kind of a letdown, y’all.

It’s a reminder of the deeply conservative nature at the heart of Hallmark-style romcoms.

In this case, my Kraft dinner came tainted with a memory of my Irish grandma swearing about the English, and there was no way I could possibly enjoy it as much as Falling for Christmas.

So I guess this one isn’t starting off my St. Paddy’s Day-themed watch list. Considering St. Patrick was all about converting the Irish to Christianity (Time), I wasn’t married to it anyway, but I really like all the silly green decorations of the holiday, and I like having an excuse to slap Irish flags and cartoon leprechauns on everything. I’m not gonna say I’ll never revisit (Lindsay Lohan is so charming! she’s doing great y’all! I love to see it!) but I’m not keen on this approach at all. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for my grandma’s dream of an English-free Ireland though.

(image credit: Netflix)

The Cell (2000) starring J.Lo is a science fiction horror movie about entering a serial killer’s mind to locate a victim who hasn’t yet died in his basement. It’s very sexual, very gory. It looks like the music video for Closer by Nine Inch Nails and somehow feels a bit like Silent Hill, though its closest genetic relative is surely Silence of the Lambs (1991).

I can’t explain why this is one of my favorite cozy movies BUT IT IS. There is something truly SO COZY and reassuring about the flimsy serial killer genre. Where they are monsters, not people. Where there is some mystery to unpack and not merely senseless violence. Where law enforcement CARE and are hellbent on solving problems.

As usual, mental illness is thrown under the bus for our serial killer here. He’s got a kind of fictitious viral schizophrenia called “Whelan’s Infraction,” which is magically brought about by trauma involving water. In this case, our killer was “activated” by a violent baptism.

Law enforcement catches him early in the movie, but Whelan’s Infraction has rendered him sorta-semi-braindead and he has a living victim with ~40 hours left.

Luckily my wife J.Lo has been working as an unusual kind of therapist: she goes into the mind of a sick billionaire’s son using a fictitious machine. This “neurological connectic transfer system” can “map the mind and send the signal to another party.”

This is in an era (have we even left that era?) where people are obsessed with this idea that there are broken little children inside serial abusers, giving them mystique and charm. Its story depends on the extremely common mistaken assumption that a childhood history of abuse explains adult abusers. “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft is an interesting rebuttal to that myth (though I recommend reading it with caution, as it’s very triggering).

I don’t mind the pseudoscience, including the bad psychology. Everything about The Cell feels unreal, inside and outside the shared dreamscapes, in a manner that is extremely cohesive. After all, The Cell is firmly in the fantasy universe where cops Actually Do Stuff and serial killers are brilliant; why bother with real science?

As I get older, the more I see The Cell as a fetish fantasy. It’s always obviously had major elements of fetishism. As I’ve grown, I’ve seen how many people really have explicitly serial killer, horror, and murder-related fantasies as part of their sex life, and i’m like, ohhhhhh. That’s what I’m watching. Perhaps my associations of the security in a well-controlled BDSM environment are also why I find it so cozy!

The performances are really good too.

Vince Vaughn is the lead detective in the movie. Yes, THAT Vince Vaughn. His role is not meant to be remotely comic, but I still laugh at everything he says. They realize the killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) has an albino dog. And Vince Vaughn says all grittily, “He’d love a dog like that.” SURE VINCE. His performance doesn’t detract from the film; I would have no notes if I weren’t familiar with him from other media.

The ability for J.Lo to commit to a movie where she was surely not seeing things we’re seeing, in sequential order, cannot be overstated. Director Tarsem Singh does a LOT of practical effects, but even so, there’s a lot here demanding an actor’s very best imagination. She’s extremely believable. (Fun fact: according to IMDB, Sandra Bullock was originally meant to play this role. I can imagine it, but I also think it would have been a weird fit for her career.)

The physicality of Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance is so amazing. He manages to feel both like a vulnerable boy at times, and like a looming monster at others. He is beautiful and ugly.

Last time I watched The Cell, I was coming off a Hannibal/Lambs binge, and I enjoyed it but the story felt more lacking. Coming at it from watching more horror movies, it felt pitch-perfect. This is a great example of a movie that makes more emotional sense than rational sense, much like The Fountain (2006).

~

On a note about the format I watched: The Cell doesn’t seem popular enough to have a remaster, so my version has those dots up in the corner indicating reel changes. There’s a lot of other visual grit too! The Cell is very consciously cut so that there are dramatic tonal/visual shifts whenever reels change! Many movies used to be edited with TV commercial breaks in mind as well, and it’s striking how anachronistic it feels a quarter of a century later.

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

(This review was adapted from my live watch thread on Bluesky.)

Argylle is a movie about a red-haired genre fiction author with a cat and a big ol’ booty getting entangled with the spies she writes about. Think Romancing the Stone meets Kingsman: The Secret Service, which is the easiest and most accurate comparison because both Kingsman and Argylle are Matthew Vaughn movies.

I can’t tell you that Argylle is a good movie because I don’t think it is, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was convinced from the trailer that Argylle was made for me. And it was. I loved Kingsman 1&2, and I too am a dump trucked sometimes-redheaded author of genre fiction who loves cats.

But Argylle was “for me” in ways I didn’t expect, too. By the time the over-wrought ending comes around with peak terribad CGI and an “okay, is it over now?” aroma, Matthew Vaughn is dangling genderfuckery and gay subtext over my head like a cat toy. I get it Matthew Vaughn! We’re both disaster bisexuals who want to be topped by Bryce Dallas Howard! gawd.

This is another outing for Samuel L. Jackson, who appears to be spending his recent career years doing Only Movies Where He Can Fuck Off and Enjoy Himself. He has a spectacularly shallow role in the plot, along with other Vaughn-bff Sofia Boutella, playing her minor part in the disaster bisexuality of it all. And there are cameos from Ariana DeBose playing a lesbian in CGI locations.

Catherine O’Hara plays Moira from Schitt’s Creek, Bryan Cranston plays a real ~daddy~, and nobody here was working all that hard but they’re kinda too amazing to suck anyway.

I’m convinced there is a clause in Sam Rockwell’s contract that allows him to *always* do his fancy footwork dancing. He radiates Husband Who Doesn’t Wear the Pants vibes, so I like him a lot, except for the part where his character doesn’t like cats. That’s not negotiable.

But mostly I’m here for Bryce Dallas Howard, my wife, boobular and asstastic, serving up size-12 action movie doe eyes. The thirst is so, so strong. She looks good in every look. I want her to destroy me.

I guess Henry Cavill is there too.

You’ll guess the twist in the first twenty minutes if you don’t already know it, and the plot really labors over spy twist after spy twist, and somehow I enjoy the whole thing. Every twist *feels* pointless and shallow, but they’re also clearly tropes that gives Matthew Vaughn a raging stiff Vaughner, and it works on me too.

You know how I talk about some movies being intended to push buttons exclusively? Like when directors just make something because the idea is so hot to them, they don’t care if it actually works on any other level? Well, Argylle (and I suppose Kingsman) is this for Matthew Vaughn, and it’s fully this for me. It kickpunches every last spy fetish button I have and slips in some genderfuck to make sure I’m left drooling for fanfic. (There’s barely any fanfic! Guess I’m gonna be writing a spy romance.)

I highly recommend this movie to people like me, who don’t mind that the whole thing looks like one of those old CD-ROM games where people were filmed in front of green screens and plastered over 90s pixel art, who are very gay, who like spy movies. So I guess basically I recommend this for people who liked Tenet too.

(image credit: Apple and Universal Pictures)

“Lisa Frankenstein” is a revenge fantasy for depressed girls who read Jane Eyre at graveyards in the 1980s.

Diablo Cody says the name is a “coincidence” because she was naming the character after Lisa from Weird Science, and she didn’t mean to invoke “Lisa Frank,” a brand which might be litigious if the writer said otherwise. The movie definitely has a lot more to do with Weird Science than Lisa Frank. It’s about a magically resurrected person who exists to fulfill the teenager’s romantic and sexual fantasies. Thank you, magical lightning!

I was sold on the concept from the get-go. The lively teaser trailer had me pumped, and the movie certainly fulfills the expectations of the trailer. But there’s not a lot more than that. If you search up the version of the trailer that is ~4 minutes long, that is almost exactly the movie, except Lisa Frankenstein has been extended to ~90 minutes.

I’m not saying this as a complaint. The trailer should tell you whether or not you’ll like the movie. This is all button-pushes without much substance: amazing goth aesthetic, melodramatic performances from talented actors, and an Edward Scissorhands aesthetic homage.

If you want early Tim Burton done with feminine sensibilities, then Zelda Williams has you covered.

If you want Jughead Jones doing a mostly dialogue-free Demon Barber of Fleet Street, you’re in the right place.

If you’d like a whole lot of new screenshots for your angsty colorful Tumblr mood board, then there may have never been a better movie for you.

My question for moviegoers broadly is, do you love the idea of a tanning bed resurrecting Frankenstein’s Boyfriend so much that you’ll get something out of the movie version more than the trailer?

I did, but it’s less because the movie bounced on my buttons and more because debut director Zelda Williams did an amazing job. I was so obsessed with everything visual that I literally could not resist drawing while I worked on it. What a strong style. I look forward to more from this director, and I hope she drags her cinematographer along.

The story, eh. Diablo Cody’s writing often feels hollow to me. Concept is made king because Cody doesn’t create fully realized characters that feel human. There is something terribly flat and mean-girl about the way that Cody draws characters in every movie I’ve seen outside Juno, and sometimes I really wonder how Juno managed to be so human given the givens.

The story *mostly* works if you see it as being written by someone with a grudge toward certain archetypes which may or may not actually exist. It’s all emotional catharsis without needing to grow up. Our heroine can remain forever in a stunted state of teenage love.

Fabulous performances cover a lot of shaky ground. Kathryn Newton is divine as a very old high schooler (she looks and feels 27, even slouching her way between lockers, but this is normal for the Hollywood High School Cinematic Universe). Liza Soberano is precious. Carla Gugino puts a lot of work into realizing her villainous stepmother. Jughead Jones joneses Jugheadily.

Show up for the concept, stay for the aesthetic, and just kinda step over the writing. Lisa Frankenstein is fabulous fun.