Seth Harris

Movie Review – Cocoon

Cocoon (1985)
Written by Tom Benedek
Directed by Ron Howard

Steven Spielberg’s E.T. has a profound influence on the 1980s and created a subgenre where family, fantasy, and science fiction merged. These were humanist movies, without threatening antagonists or, in some instances, no real villain at all. The common factor in all the pictures was characters experiencing contact with some fantastical entities, typically alien, evoking a sense of child-like wonder in them and leading to the resolution of interpersonal issues. Of the E.T.-inspired movies, Cocoon is one of the better pictures because it keeps the story character-centered and allows the science fiction elements to enhance that narrative.

Media Moment (05/01/20)

NBCUniversal’s CEO Jeff Shell recently made comments about the success of Trolls: World Tour’s digital release due to coronavirus theater closures. The movie has apparently done well enough that the company is now looking at releasing more films to homes first during the quarantines but also continuing the strategy when theaters open back up. AMC and Regal didn’t take this news well and have said all movies released by NBCUniversal will not be carried in their theaters if this goes through. Shell has backtracked it a little with some confusing semantics, but I think home streaming options are going to become a must as this pandemic drags on into the summer and likely the fall.

Comic Book Review – Venom: War of the Realms

Venom: War of the Realms (2019)
Reprints Venom #13-16, Venom: Cult of Carnage
Written by Cullen Bunn, Frank Tieri, & Donny Cates
Art by Iban Coello & Danilo Beyruth

Marvel is no stranger to the sprawling event comic. Currently, they usually have one big event with some smaller ones sprinkled in more concentrated ways over a year. War of the Realms was the culmination of Jason Aaron’s run on Thor and saw the hordes of Norse mythological monsters unleashed on Midgard, aka Earth. This doesn’t seem like too natural of a fit for Venom, but with Donny Cates’s expansion of the antihero to include ties to a Lovecraftian god in the form of Knull, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch now.

Movie Review – Better Off Dead

Better Off Dead (1985)
Written & Directed by Savage Steve Holland

I turned four years old in the summer of 1985, so my memory of the year is foggy at best. What I know about this mid-point in the decade came from retrospectively consuming media when I was older. Back to the Future is probably the most prominent touchpoint for movies. I watched that picture over and over and over. I had a Matchbox car that resembled the Delorean enough that it became a stand-in for the iconic vehicle during my imaginative play. This was also the year that saw the release of The Goonies, The Breakfast Club, Clue, Rocky IV, Weird Science, and so many more films. Only one of those movies will come up in my individual reviews the next few weeks, though others will likely find a spot on my favorites list when we wrap up. To begin things, we’re going to look at a film you may have caught on its numerous showings on Comedy Central in the early 2000s, the teen comedy Better Off Dead.

April 2020 Digest

Features
My Favorite Screwball Comedies
Twin Peaks: The 30th Anniversary
My Favorite Movie Musicals
March/April Book Update
How I Read a Poem: The Second Coming|W.B. Yeats Part 1, Part 2
My Favorite Movies of 1990

Movie Review – The Lodge

The Lodge (2019)
Written & Directed by Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala

There are lots of familiar elements at play in The Lodge. You have a stepmother figure whose purpose in the story is ambiguous, possibly malevolent. There’s a snowed-in cabin where the power goes out, cutting the lines of communication. Sleep is disturbed by noises in the night and troubling dreams of the landscape. There are even two kids who might be up to no good. All the pieces are there, but the execution just ultimately stumbles, and nothing ever comes together. The Lodge has so much promise but fails to deliver on that promise.

My Favorite Movies of 1990

Goodfellas (directed by Martin Scorsese)
No film came out in 1990 that comes anywhere close to Scorsese’s mobster masterpiece. The scope of the movie is epic, covering every post-War decade in America up to the point the picture was released. Scorsese has a lot to say about the American Dream and the disgusting, reprehensible acts that must be committed for people to lock-in their own. There’s also pulsing energy to this film that would go on to inform the rest of the decade, the director sets us off on this roller coaster. Characters are manic and insane, always in macho posturing with each other, never willing to budge an inch lest they are perceived as weak within their community. Goodfellas is the anti-Irishman, while that film is muted and contemplative, Goodfellas is the story of a man in his prime, drunk on power and money, not yet to that point of self-reflection while reality comes slamming down on top of him.

Movie Review – The Grifters

The Grifters (1990)
Written by Donald E. Westlake
Directed by Stephen Frears

The Grifters by Jim Thompson was published in 1963, and while the film adaptation takes place in contemporary 1990s Los Angeles, director Stephen Frears chooses to treat some aspects as anachronistic. The story features a character archetype that seems to fascinate moviegoers indefinitely, the conman or, in this case, the conman and the conwomen in his life. We love to see how duplicitous tricksters trick each other, often leading to tragic outcomes, where even the “winner” feels broken and lost because they’ve played their grift on someone important in their lives.

Movie Review – To Sleep With Anger

To Sleep With Anger (1990)
Written & Directed by Charles Burnett

To Sleep With Anger is a mixture of things. It’s a meditation on modern urban family dynamics. It is a retelling of the Biblical stories all mashed together. The film is an extension of fears about nostalgia, especially in black communities who have lots of moments in history that they reasonably should fear. It’s ultimately hard to classify this picture into a single genre, which is a benefit and a flaw at times.

Book Update: March-April 2020

Fiction

Instructions For a Funeral: Stories by David Means

I really disliked this collection for one main reason, Means’s prose is meandering so much that you completely disconnect from the character he’s giving a voice to. There are some alright pieces with a good core idea, but then the execution is soporific, leading me to realize I’d “read” three pages and not remembered a stitch of what I’d seen on the page. I’m a reader who loves literary fiction and even postmodern writing that plays with structures and voice. But this is just plain boring, with characters who never become compelling and lacking the urgency good short fiction possesses.