This is a great example of The Metropolis Effect. I just coined that–do you like it? It’s meant to describe the experience I had watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the first time, long after it was initially released. I had seen so many movies (TV shows/books/games/music videos) cribbing heavily off Metropolis that the originating movie almost felt modern–even derivative. Coming across it late, I’m already so familiar with the ripples from the rock hitting the pond, seeing the splash that came first is *weird*.

Such is is with The Blair Witch Project. I was eleven years old when this came out, and this wasn’t my kind of movie. It seemed way too scary. Hence I’ve spent twenty-five years experiencing the ripples from Blair Witch without knowing the reference.

Again, I find myself shocked at how modern The Blair Witch Project feels! The retro look is *so* cool right now, I’d absolutely believe everything was some kind of grainy VHS filter. Found footage dominates internet horror. My kids are into horror on YouTube, and I’m telling you, I think I’ve seen about two hundred brilliant twists on everything Blair Witch did so neatly.

The permeability of the membrane between reality and folk myth was punctured by The Blair Witch Project and culture has been streaming through that hole ever since. Or maybe we should go all the way back to Orson Welles narrating The War of the Worlds over the radio and scaring a nation into thinking aliens were invading–which is *really* impressive genetic lineage for a shaky movie that mostly has three cast members we don’t often see very well.

I remember how everyone Back In The Day (spits out dentures) was so confused by this, because it felt real. This wasn’t what movies looked like! But now, *everything* looks like The Blair Witch. There are just as many brilliant filmmakers running around with their friends, doing creepy shit with their cell phone videos that looks so similar.

I just want to keep referencing later projects that seem to borrow from Blair Witch’s magic. For instance, I kept thinking about how this was slower-paced and naturalistic very much like the original Paranormal Activity, too…but Blair Witch was way less boring. Hearing their missing friend calling from the woods had me making Annihilation bear jokes. The Rolling Giant did well capturing a similar ambiance with camera work barely glimpsing the pursuer. Cloverfield tried to scale up the stakes of found footage to kaiju-size. On and on and on.

I don’t know how to comment on this besides thinking it was just brilliant and prescient. I get why it hit so hard. The ending lands flawlessly. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m genuinely glad I waited to see it because I don’t think I could have appreciated it when I was younger. I bet this was a blast to see in the theaters with a crowd, though.

(image credit: Summit Pictures)

Dredd is an early-10s science fiction action movie where a post-nuclear war America has consolidated into a few metropolises, and most people live in giant towers, like whole cities in a skyscraper. Quality of life is real, real bad. A brutal policing force of Judges intervene with crime. They have the authority to judge and kill perpetrators on sight. Massive public car chases and shootouts are common. In this particular movie, Judge Dredd takes a trainee to answer a call, and things escalate.

This is based upon source material also adapted in an 80s movie with Sylvester Stallone, so if it sounds familiar, it should. 2000 AD is a comics classic.

Surely I could come up with involved, over-thinky commentary about how this satire of America’s punitive police-forward culture is just as much participating in the mythology of copaganda as it is criticizing it. Aside from the very fact they differentiate between good cops and bad cops, fundamentally misunderstanding ACAB, any movie that makes bad stuff look cool allows people to take the wrong message. See: terrible IRL cops idolizing The Punisher.

Dredd leaves much room for genuine idolization of this brutal police state. The creators’ intentions are coming from the right place; the observations are keenly made. It’s really more symptomatic of the policing culture’s greater issues that you can’t make a brutal, awful cop that cops won’t wanna mimic. I don’t want this kind of policing satire anymore, no matter how well it’s done. You know?

All that said, Dredd 3D is superlative on every other axis I care about. Imagine someone made a perfect adaptation of the *spirit* of 1990s Boomer Shooters (Doom, Hexen, Quake, et al) wearing the clothes of 2000 AD. That sort of dry action hero paired against absurd numbers of enemies, with a multi-functional gun that can shoot whatever you need (providing you conserved ammunition for the boss battle), and the floor-by-floor level design of Dredd feels like a much better adaptation of Duke Nukem 3D than we will ever see.

Alex Garland is behind the screenplay for Dredd 3D. Considering Garland’s fascinating relationship with feminine gender in Men and the highly metaphoric Annihilation, it makes sense to see him here: Ma-Ma and Anderson are two female characters written and played pitch-perfectly. Is it weird to say the movie Dredd simply doesn’t hate women? There is frank acknowledgment of female objectification in the story, but even visions of sexual violence against women are kept vague, and Ma-Ma declines to commit excessive violence against Anderson. It’s a show of ultimate respect that Ma-Ma simply wants Anderson dead. Not tortured, raped, or skinned–just a whole lotta bullets in the chest and the head. Now that’s feminism I can get behind.

Whenever I think of movies with fabulous editing, Dredd 3D is at the top. The score is kind of a minimal electronic drum-and-bass thing for the most part, but it’s unrelenting, and the dominance of the rhythm draws you from one cut to another with the breathless excitement of a music video. The pacing is outstanding.

Dredd’s also a shockingly beautiful movie, with shots that are like anti-aesthetic fine art. This is a movie celebrating the bright spatter of blood, the shock of angry scars on pallid flesh, and grunge dragged down stucco walls. SFX took great pride in showing every frame of bullets blasting through bodies. It will always hold the title of Best Movie Shown in 3D in Cinemas Ever, for me, because the sparkling slo-mo scenes are the single greatest usage of stereoscoping filming I’ve seen, and it’s almost as beautiful on my flat television.

None of it would be as sweet if Dredd didn’t have the most flawless action movie punchline known to mankind. With a crazy escalating level of violence endangering a city block’s worth of people (and then some), things feel huge. The stakes are big. Ma-Ma turns out to be a major source of criminality for all of Mega City One, and a lot of people die, and cops turn even more corrupt, and a drug lab gets destroyed. Yet the punchline is that this is just another day. Shrug. When he finally delivers “justice” upon the big bad, Dredd’s ready to go home to take a shower and sleep for the next one.

Fabulous.

(image credit: Lionsgate)

This is one of the very few movies that didn’t involve dragons, vampires, aliens, or alien vampires that I ever bothered watching as a kid.

Yet again I find myself in the surreal position of growing beyond the young heroines to which I once related. I used to see myself as Wednesday in The Addams Family; I became Morticia sometime in my twenties when my adorable children sprouted sarcasm. Now in my thirties, with an artistic principled teenager and a perspicacious blonde spitfire, I find myself relating to older moms yet, like Susan Sarandon as Mrs. March. You can tell she used to be like her daughters. She’s still got that youthful, hopeful edge that keeps her fighting for her daughters’ rights to be individuals, free of systemic abuse and expectations that don’t suit them, and the fact she can’t get through a conversation without bringing up feminism is way too relatable.

How beautiful to grow up with the families in my movies. How lovely it is to connect to womanity throughout the decades. This is a book from 1868 filtered through 1990 sensibilities, now viewed from the mid-2020s, and I find myself reflecting on the progress (or lack thereof) from thirty years ago as much as a hundred sixty years ago. Such a straight line can be drawn from, say, the March daughters’ coming of age to my mom’s coming of age, and my own, and those of my children.

A hundred sixty years doesn’t feel so long ago, and that’s comforting. A hundred sixty years from now maybe isn’t that far away either. I wonder if there will be women butting up against the expectations of the Heterosexual Treadmill like Jo March, who’d much rather write gothic stories than get married and have babies*. I can say with certainty that there will be girls developing friendships with boys they think *like* them, only to discover the boys actually *want* them, just like 1868, just like my own young life at the turn of the 21st century.

Marriage is a complicated prospect meaning a great many potentials that had higher stakes for women. They still do. The implicit burden of being the one with less economic power has changed somewhat, but perhaps the difficulty of men to genuinely recognize that burden hasn’t changed at all. While Jo in the story was storming around denying a need for marriage, Louisa May Alcott held similar sentiments. She didn’t initially choose to marry off the girls. The need was passed down from a publisher who wanted happily ever afters for a hungry audience.

Giving Jo an ending with Mr. Bear feels weird, just like the developments with Laurie don’t feel *good* exactly. I don’t think I’m projecting my unease on the story. It feels a lot like Alcott expected even the best man to struggle to respect her passions, like Mr. Bear. And Teddy’s attraction to the March family more than Amy has a whiff of the role women are expected to play for men as wife, mommy, therapist, and his entire social life.

But the bittersweet authenticity of these disappointments, compromises, and sacrifices is maybe what makes Little Women so good, too. If you told your childhood self how your adulthood turned out, don’t you think you’d feel a little bittersweet in the comparison? A lot of people don’t end up living out wild childhood dreams – perhaps most people don’t – but life may be beautiful if you hold love and family close anyway.

On a sentimental level, Christian Bale is such a charming Teddy because he’s also the voice for Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle. If you love Howl and Sophie in the American version, it’s kinda not hard to root for him a *little* bit? Even when he’s being a weird womanizing punk? I expected him to explode into miserable goo when he started tantruming over Jo.

The score for this particular version of Little Women is enough to absolutely break my heart even when I’m not facedown in bed over Beth for the thousandth time in my innocent life. Seeing the absolutely *amazing* cast so young, when we’ve now become accustomed to their grown faces, has a way of making a gal reflect on exactly how much her own face has grown. The years pass in the movie and the characters age but the actresses don’t (with the exception of a casting-swap for Amy mid-movie). This is the sentimental dream of childhood’s years coming to an end. It aches in such a lovely way.(image credit: Columbia Pictures)

Though Eternals is very much the same brand as Marvel’s other offerings, it feels quiet and intimate. The visual style is soft: with flattering, moody lighting, the surgically enhanced lead actors look truly like timeless aliens rather than video game characters (as Marvel’s creations sometimes do by the end of post-production). We linger in close conversations held between ancient beings. The narrative slips away from modernity to historical periods with a drifting camera. The Eternals themselves are comfortable in every time period, and so are we, lovingly experiencing humanity beside them.

Shakespeare loved to write about direct opposites, and Chloé Zhao has made full use of this technique to hammer home the humanity intrinsic to gods on Earth. A grand-scale comic book story about planet-sized aliens is made relatable by treating the Eternals as normal-ish people who want to help the world, who are then changed in dramatic ways when their mission is revealed to be less-than-helpful.

Unfortunately, the grand-scale story also comes with a grand-scale cast. Each character was designed with interesting power sets played marvelously by actors who brought interesting things to the role, and I would have liked to see more from all of them. But how much time can you spend with all your favorites when you have about a dozen favorites and 2.5 hours to visit with them?

I most often rankled against Eternals when it reminded me that it’s part of one of the biggest entertainment franchises, like ham-handed text on screen explaining lore that is then repeated by the characters. Laboring over explanations of why they didn’t intervene with other MCU events irritated me. This movie desperately wanted to be its own, but it is still part of the brand, packaged in plastic and dispensed with a Happy Meal. Zhao did a wonderful job making a wonderful movie within those constraints.

Whether Eternals works in the greater scope of the MCU ultimately depends on how future creators will handle them. The piecemeal storytelling means we may see these characters brought in elsewhere, with all but their simplest defining characteristics stripped so that they can be functional cogs in an oversize, spectacular machine (like, say, Peter Quill in Endgame). This is where I find my dissatisfaction in the MCU, and it will seem especially criminal to reappropriate the Eternals in such a fashion when the complexity and charm of the characters in Zhao’s vision are what make them worth watching.

(Image credit: Disney. This review was originally posted on Letterboxd on Jan 14 2022.)