Three Films Make A Post: A Scotch Mist...A Girl Never Kissed...A Yank Who Missed...and Landed HIGH AND DRY

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020): After the actually watchable first Babysitter, this is a step back into his old crappiness for director McG(odawful). The film’s more a compilation of badly realized and badly staged pop culture references, with a script that interrupts any scene that should be perfectly entertaining when just left alone for some smug “joke” that’s generally about as funny as getting murdered. The final act is total catastrophe, the film pretending it has emotional character arcs (it would need actual characterisation for that) and going for an ending that’s supposed to connect this one better with the first film but mostly feels random and shoe-horned in to get the most out of a shooting day with Samara Weaving.
And please don’t get me started on the thing’s tendency to point out that it has just made a joke, suggesting the filmmakers believe their audience consists of actual cave dwelling monkeys. It’s genuinely dreadful.

The Wind (2018): A completely different kind of film is this piece directed by Emma Tammi. Told slowly and out of chronological order, it isn’t the easiest film to get into or understand initially, but a fantastic performance by Caitlin Gerard, wonderfully creepy and beautiful shots of wide, empty plains and fields do ease one nicely into the uncanny atmosphere. It’s a tale of the supernatural and of madness that keeps things just ambiguous enough to work, exploring the uneasiness of the settler in a very strange land with particular emphasis on the strains this kind of life puts on women.

It’s also an insightful psychological portrait of a murderer, using the strange and the supernatural, mental illness and delusions as ways to understand things difficult to.

The ‘Maggie’ aka High and Dry (1954): This British comedy by Alexander Mackendrick has obvious parallels to the brilliant I Know Where I’m Going, but without that film’s undertow of the mythical, and does not quite reaches its heights. That’s not a shame, really, for not being Shakespeare doesn’t after all necessarily mean you’re a bad playwright. At the very least, the film is funny, using certain clichés about Scots and Scots working class people in contrast to an American businessman with American business work ethics without getting preachy or embarrassing about it.


But then, when the film isn’t setting up its jokes, it does spend so much time and love on its characters that they stop being short hands for ideas or butts of jokes and become people, the film genuinely trying to understand where everyone is coming for, what got them there, and what they might learn from each other. That’s so not 2020, but really rather refreshing.

Three Films Make A Post: Saving the World is Alien to Them

Rim of the World (2019): I’m generally on board with Netflix’s approach of producing or just buying up a lot of stuff to throw at its audience in the hopes of some of it sticking. Alas, other things are pretty sticky, too, which brings us directly to this abomination directed (ha!) by McG(odawful) and written by the guy who certainly wasn’t responsible for the good bits in Thor or the very many good ones in X-Men: First Class. This movie-like object tries to milk the Spielberg/Abrams/Stranger Things axis, but only proves how good and clever the things it rips off are by getting nothing whatsoever right, neither the characters who manage to be one-dimensional clichés the script clearly isn’t even clever enough to understand, nor the horrible attempts at “humour” that fall so flat, a pancake is voluptuous in comparison, nor the alien design that looks like something out of a really shitty SyFy Original, nor the plotting that can’t get a straightforward journey to save the world right. Also horrible are McG’s generic and bland direction, the generic and bland score, as are the special effects. The whole thing plays like something made by people who think they have the whole being Spielberg/JJ Abrams thing down pat but are indeed to those guys as Bizarro is to Superman.

Arcadia (2017): Fortunately completely unrelated to Rim is this attempt by director and writer Paul Wright to portray the repeated construction and reconstruction of the philosophical and sometimes physical relationship between the British and the idea of the land they live on (more than the reality). Wright does this collage-style, repurposing footage taken from everything from exploitation movies, to documentaries, to public safety films, building an impressionistic view of Wright’s interpretation of the Question of England.

Given this technique, what Wright wants to say about his theme isn’t always quite clear, and sometimes, things do seem to come down to one of that “closeness to nature = good / keeping the green shit away = bad” business I tend to be rather sceptical about.


Topsy-Turvy (1999): For reasons only known to my subconscious, I have for years turned Ken Loach and this film’s director Mike Leigh into a horrifying fictional poverty porn creating monster, where as a matter of fact, Leigh really isn’t into that sort of thing at all, as this period comedy about Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of “The Mikado” proves rather handily. At first, a certain meandering quality and the film’s considerable length do threaten a bit of a hard time, but the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes that the film’s often episodic seeming structure does indeed lead to a rather interesting place where the film not only becomes a portray of the British operetta masters, and their fraught relationship, but also of their working methods, musical theatre, the sexual and social politics of their time, and the creation of art as a collaborative process; also, a film that suggests that “The Mikado” is really pretty great. All the while, the film (and its great cast) portray the very diverse cast of characters with depth as well as broadness, managing to mix human and social insight with quite a bit of the funny stuff.

Three Films Make A Post: These aren't everyday people and this is no ordinary movie.

The Babysitter (2017): Kid (Judah Lewis) learns his beloved/lusted after babysitter (Samara Weaving) and her friends are satanists of the type really into human sacrifice and playing truth or dare to warm up; also, milking the blood of the innocent. A night of somewhat bloody mayhem ensues.

Given his usual predilections, this shallow horror comedy directed for Netflix by the name-disabled McG is downright un-annoying, keeping the pseudo-hip ad-man style the guy’s been using for a decade now somewhat in check enough to actually tell a straightforward tale in an effective, well-paced manner. The film generally manages to ignore all the best opportunities talking – or making decent jokes – about all kinds of interesting stuff connected to the meaning of being a grown-up, burgeoning sexuality and so on and so forth and trades it in for pretty young people, a lot of blood, and an okay rollercoaster-style time. It’s a perfectly okay way to spend (less than) ninety minutes with pretty, moving, mildly bloody pictures without much behind them.

Kwaidan aka Kaidan (1964): On the absolute opposite of the horror movie spectrum stands Masaki Kobayashi’s venerable classic of a horror anthology based on Lafcadio Hearn’s versions of Japanese ghost tales. It’s slow-moving, artfully stylized, mixing moments deeply informed by Japanese theatrical forms with techniques right out of the German expressionist handbook as well as others as state of the art of filmmaking in 1964 as you’d expect of a Japanese film. It’s a movie that manages to be at once deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture and aim for the universal as it is expressed through ghost stories, filtered through a the work of a man who wasn’t Japanese by birth. Given its three hour running time and its calm and theatrical air, one might fear this is the kind of “classic” mostly feeling worthy and dead like certain museum pieces do, but in truth, the film’s still challenging and moving, at times creepy, at other times bizarre, and absolutely daring in the way Kobayashi expects his audience to follow him in seemingly peculiar directions. Of course, following him is extremely rewarding.

It Comes at Night (2017): Supposedly the straightforward horror follow-up to Shults’s incredible Krisha, this is actually a film that seems to very consciously – just look at the title and what doesn’t happen in the film! - evade explanations and exposition that would help an audience make sense of its in theory simple viral post-apocalypse tale. What exactly is the nature of the illness striking the world? Is it a metaphor for inner tensions and fractures of the film’s characters more than an actual disease? Are the nightmares of the film’s viewpoint character (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) only an expression of his anxiety and fear, an early symptom of the infection, or a hint at the supernatural? This and more the film’s not going to explain. What you get instead is a movie about a breaking and broken family unit during an ambiguous apocalypse, filmed with a mounting sense of dread and acted brilliantly by Harrison, Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough and Christopher Abbott, moving slowly but surely.


I’m not completely sure the film needs to be quite this ambiguous about so many things, but as a mood piece and a portrait of human self-destruction, the film’s very successful to my eyes.

3 Days to Kill (2014)

Retired by the CIA – with cheap watch and pension and little else -because of his terminal cancer, killer Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) goes to Paris to attempt to reconnect with his wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and his teenage daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) before he dies; a purple bicycle will be involved.

As luck will have it, oversexed CIA gal Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) decides that Ethan might have seen the mysterious evil international arms dealer only known as The Wolf (Richard Sammel) in his final mission, and now wants Ethan to find and eliminate said The Wolf (his main henchman is a guy called The Albino who doesn’t actually seem to be an Albino, by the way, and rather looks more as if he were called The Hairless Guy). Ethan’s prize would be an experimental drug that just might cure his cancer if it doesn’t kill him. Consequently, Ethan is back killing and torturing people again, while at the same time trying to juggle fatherly responsibilities and an attempt to get back in his wife’s good graces.

As frequent readers know, I have a conflicted relationship with the films made by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. As much as I like their project of making European-based mid-budget genre movies with as many international actors in a career low as they can hire, as little do I enjoy many of Besson’s scripting tendencies, particularly the often needless stupidity, and the unhappy feeling Besson is proud of the general dumbness of what he writes.

It doesn’t help that some of EuropaCorp’s directors are guys like Olivier Megaton, who never saw an action sequence he wanted to film in a comprehensible way, and never encountered an annoying editing tic he didn’t want to repeat again and again. As luck will have it, somebody involved in EuropaCorp seems to have realized that there are quite a few Hollywood directors in a career low too, so they can actually hire someone who knows how to direct a movie instead of Megaton. In a curious turn of events, that special someone in this friendlier variation on Taken is McG, not a director I usually connect with things like “competence” or movies I actually want to see.

McG does good work here, though, connecting the script’s curious mixture of broad comedy (there are torture jokes), kitschy family drama, the slightly more down to Earth version of EuropaCorp action that leaves Besson’s oldest enemy – gravity – untouched, and Besson’s infatuation with bizarre and puzzling ideas (not that I blame him for that), in a way that results in a highly entertaining film, if one with a script that only tenuously, and for the most part without seeming to try very hard, connects its disparate part. The script even needs to use pure chance to throw together the film’s grand finale.

Fortunately, when taken separately, the film’s single parts are done with professionalism and often charm, and while they only make a successful whole if you’re willing to suspend quite a few more things than mere disbelief, 3 Days to Kill works hard to convince a viewer to like it enough to suspend whatever the film asks her to. I, at least, found myself disarmed early on (perhaps only by the shock of actually getting to see what happens in the action sequences instead of guessing at it), laughing about my share of the film’s jokes, raising my eyebrow happily at the film’s more outré or just unexplained ideas, raising my other eyebrow less happily about stuff like the squatters from Mali who have moved into Ethan’s apartment and teach him a valuable lesson by virtue of their “authenticity”, and not feeling too offended by the family drama stuff. The last is made a bit easier by the happy fact that Ethan’s teenage daughter is actually played by a teenager, isn’t annoying, doesn’t get kidnapped, and is even allowed to have sex without getting punished for it (spoiler), which makes the whole “bringing the family back together” thing less unpleasantly reactionary as it could be, particularly since Ethan’s fathering style – while still pretty violent – doesn’t seem as outright insane as is par for the course in these films.

It also helps the film that the cast is pretty fun to watch too. Costner (of whom I’ve never been much of a fan) seems to have slightly puzzled fun with the film’s weirder aspects and is generally really funny when he’s supposed to, teary when he’s supposed to, and off-handedly violent when it’s time for that, while Steinfeld and Nielsen have the family drama down pat, and Heard works her modern low budget movie queen magic with just the right degree of self-irony and some interesting costuming decisions.

So, as the man (right, me) said more than once about other films already goes here too: what’s not to like?

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