Malignant (2021): Surprise, I don’t like the newest James Wan movie, like nearly every other film he made. Unlike with somebody like Rob Zombie, I’m always disappointed when a Wan movie yet again doesn’t click for me, for Wan is so clearly a ridiculously talented director.
Alas, he’s also one apparently not the least bit interested in applying his powers to material worth a damn. This non-Conjuringverse movie clearly wants to be a Dario Argento giallo circa Opera, seeing how many elements the film cribs and how much it quotes from that era and style. But where the good (and often the mediocre) giallos manage to use their style as substance, the film at hand is just a series of barely coherent, very pretty, and completely pointless scenes that barely manage to make a movie at all. In a particularly catastrophic development for what he film is going for, there really doesn’t even seem to be one unified style to it, there’s no plot or theme to speak of anyway (though there is, of course, an expectedly stupid late movie “revelation”), so all we’re left with is a film whose scenes only connect via their colour scheme.
My Son (2021): In an act that tragicomically completely misunderstands the strengths and weaknesses of improv, this remake by Christian Carion of his own film sees poor James McAvoy stumble through a complicated plot without being provided with a script or dialogue, whereas every other actor is. The result of course consists of many a scene of McAvoy – who also doesn’t seem to have been provided with prompts to tell him what any given scene is supposed to be about – floundering or going off in directions the rest of the film doesn’t want to follow, because everybody else isn’t there to improvise with him, but to unsubtly push him into the directions the script says he must go. Which is the absolute opposite of what improvisation is supposed to be about.
Much of this is shot very prettily, but this prettiness works not at all with the lack of direction this filmmaking approach can’t help but produce. The pacing is dreadful, obviously, and while McAvoy is certainly doing his best, the whole affair is custom built to make him fail.
Crescendo (1970): Because this is apparently not a day to talk about films I enjoyed, how about what I take to be the by far worst thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer? The script has openings for all the little clever bits, the subversive push and the great use of well-worn tropes as the other movies in the cycle did, but in practice, everything about it feels the wrong kind of tacky, terribly conservative in its conception of psychosexual hang-ups, and simply just not that interesting.
How much of that is Alan Gibson’s rather bland and ineffective direction, how much Sangster having an off month is anybody’s guess.
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