whedabrakyovaer

There is camp, and there is schlock... and then there is Bloody Bridget. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into after I read the blurb on the Nevermore website, but nothing could have prepared me for this... I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but in the best possible way. Out of all the movies I've seen at the Nevermore Film Festival (thus far), this film is definitely my favorite. From beginning to end I was laughing my ass off; hell, I haven't laughed this hard and this long for any movie in recent memory (except maybe Deadpool 2. My compliments to absolutely everyone involved in this project, well done!

Saw "Five Nights at Freddies" last night. I have played the first game, but none of the sequels. So as someone with limited familiarity with the brand, I found the film pretty accessible. It also did the impossible by making a specific jump-scare into a running gag that legitimately made me laugh. The acting was (mostly) solid, the lore was interesting if not a bit cheesy, and the animatronics all looked great (tho I personally wanted them to look more creepy). Oh, and I hear it only had a $20M budget, so kudos for stretching that budget as well as they did! I give this film *6/10* - soft recommendation.

This is one of those films I'd be very curious to hear what other people thought of it. It is not a traditional movie, and plays out like an anthology held together by the primary narrative. Because of its construction, the film doesn't really have a three act structure, nor do the anthology stories, but it feels like they were meant to all add up to something meaningful... wether or not it succeeds in this is where I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of others.

For me, I was disappointed, especially after how strong of a start it had. I felt that the framing devise... inside the framing device... where the most recent story was happening, didn't work very well. It is one of those situations where the total of all these stories somehow adds up to being less than the sum of its parts.

There is a good story here, it is just not in this movie.

Jaws is a classic 1975 adventure/thriller film featuring a movie monster that would feel right at home in one of the modern Jurassic World movies. It was the first "blockbuster," making $100 million in 60 days (at the time prices were about $2 per-ticket), and fundamentally changed the way Hollywood approached filmmaking. It is also a film that has had some unintended but long-lasting consequences for sharks in the real world due to the misinformation presented in the story (much like how most people still think the tyrannosaurus couldn't see movement thanks to the "Jurassic Park" film franchise despite this theory having being debunked by the early 1990s, except a lot of sharks are killed). The film even has a term, the "Jaws Effect" (coined by Dr Christoper Neff at the University of Sydney), used to describe the negative impact the movie has had on the general public's opinion on and behavior towards sharks named after it, such as the shark-hunting tournaments and indiscriminate government policies for shark-culling along beaches (even including endangered species).

While an unintentional part of the film's legacy, the "Jaws Effect" has led people to believe that sharks intentionally and even vindictively seek out and attack humans, that these encounters are almost always fatal, and that the only way to keep people safe is eradication. Sadly, this has resulted in a rapid global decline in shark populations, across all species, leaving sharks as one of the most threatened groups of animals on the planet. To put that into numbers: humans now kill about 100 million sharks every year, cows kill about 22 humans every year, and sharks kill about 5 humans every year. A truly bewildering testament to the power pop-culture fueled misinformation can have in our society, and should serve as a warning against depicting real-world animals as monsters in film.

So, back to "Jaws."

The plot hinges on a long-discredited theory about individual "rogue sharks" in which a shark can develop a taste for human flesh and so begins to intentionally hunt humans instead of their natural prey. In the film, this "rogue shark" adopts the coastal waters of the fictional town of Amity as its hunting grounds and proceeds to do what monsters with a craving for human flesh do. There is some back and forth between our outsider main characters, the new-ish police chief from New York and a consulting marine biologist, and a weaselly local mayor about closing the beaches during the 4th of July. Safety vs profits, they leave the beach open, a boy dies and so the adventure to kill this monster in earnest begins. This is where another bit of misinformation is implied, a bit of misinformation that is still being fought against to this day: killing sharks quickly and efficiently is going to save our children's lives.

So what was the point of this monster? The film opens with a woman being punished via shark-attack for skinny dipping, mirroring the puritanical themes of many slasher-films from the 70s on through the 90s, where having sex or being nude on screen is punishable by death. Does this mean the "shark" a Chucky, Jason or Freddy Krueger (would that make Ellen Brody the final girl)? Or maybe the "shark" is a force of nature that is responding to the way human activity, under the guiding hand of capitalism, has disrupted the ocean ecosystem and the "shark" is the punishment for all that summertime tourism. Or maybe the "shark" has more in common with the monsters from old creature-feature movies like King Kong or Gill-Man (from "The Creature from the Black Lagoon") where the good white folk needed to protect their property, way of life, and their women from the monster, "the other." The implied return to the status quo after the "shark's" death, to me, feels most like the last option... and thanks to the scene where the various business owners are demanding for the beaches to stay open, capitalism could be the damsel in distress.

Speaking of the locals, what's up with the antagonistic islanders? It is made clear that unless you're born on the island, you'll always be an outsider, and so they demonstrate a general disrespect towards police chief Brody for being born in New York. This antagonism is also extended towards the marine biologist that Brody calls in to help with the "shark" problem. We see what happens when the mayor "does what's best for the community" and keeps the beaches open despite warnings from Brody and Hooper, but this theme is dropped once they board the Orca with a shark-hunter named Quint who's taken to killing sharks as a way of dealing with his PTSD. It feels like there should be a theme here about ignoring the warning from experts in order to continue making short-term profits... or maybe a message about how the encroachment of human activity into wild spaces is forcing conflict where there was none before... but no, the message seems to be that any force that threatens the American way of life should be immediately destroyed without a second thought or introspection. As an aside: given that we don't see any examples of the regular townsfolk siding with Brody and Hooper, and only the woman who lost her child during the July 4th attack was shown to be upset, I can't help but wonder if she wouldn't have complained at all about the beaches being left open if it had been someone else's child who took the bite.

Alright, so we've got a monster who's after our women, our children, and our American capitalist way of life. Clearly it must be destroyed, but who's gonna do it? The outsiders of course. Police chief Brody is driven by his sense of duty despite being despised by the community, marine biologist Hooper is driven by his fascination with sharks and wants to study this anomalous "animal," and Quint the shark-hunter with PTSD who has a Captain Ahab complex and wants to kill this great-white "shark" to make himself feel more powerful and in control. It should be noted that Quint outwardly suggests he's doing this for money, lots of it, but this reads more as a guise to mask his true motivations to me.

Once on Quint's boat, the Orca, the theme switches from islanders vs outsiders to a measurement of manliness.

Quint is a moonshine-making badass army of one, and the only one capable of getting stuff done and getting it done right. He's also the captain of this vessel, and as such he's the manliest man of the three and a person to be revered. Quint even sabotages the radio at one point because asking for help is a sign of weakness. Sheriff Brody is afraid of water due to almost drowning once, and unlike Quint's PTSD which made him a shark-murdering badass, Brody's PTSD makes him weak and therefore a lesser man. Then we have marine biologist Hooper, an educated "rich-kid" with "soft hands," who's the target of much derision from Quint since his methods are most out of line with his. Earlier in the film Hooper, with his soft-hands, also dropped the tooth, a crucial piece of evidence that might have convinced the islanders to close the beach. Later when the three are comparing scars, Hooper earns a modicum of respect from Quint for not being afraid to put his own skin in the game.

As a side note, the whimsical adventure music that kept playing between moments of tension felt very out of place to me. These three strangers who don't much care for each other are out to kill this animal and the music is suggesting it is a jovial experience. Have you ever been trapped on a boat with people you'd rather not be around? Trust me, it's not a good time.

After sabotaging the radio, Quint becomes more and more like Captain Ahab as they fail to kill the "shark." Eventually he challenges Hooper to do something using his own methods, and so Hooper enters into the shark cage he knows will not stand up to this "shark's" jaws with a plan to lethally inject it with strychnine, using a hypodermic spear. However, he winds up dropping the spear, with his soft-hands, proving his methods were inferior after all. After this he proceeds to hide on the seabed (like an unmanly coward?), while Quint gets eaten alive by his white-whale.

This metaphor may be more apt than you'd initially think too, sine the white-whale from Moby Dick was based on a real sperm whale (Mocha Dick) that, presumably after having his family killed and butchered by whalers, which were hunting these creatures to extinction at the time, proceeded to target and destroy whaling vessels. Another source of inspiration for the book was the story of the whaleship Essex, which was attacked and sunk about 2,000 miles off the coast of South America in 1820. Sperm whales are highly intelligent social creatures, similar to humans in that way, and travel in pods of 15-20 creatures. I know if I were as big as a whale and watched whalers butcher my family, I'd be destroying ships too.

So it's rather fitting that this indiscriminate shark-killer meets his end hunting the biggest one of all... which supports the idea that the "shark" is a force of nature responding to human activity... though the rest of the film, sadly, does not support this metaphor.

Anyway, Sheriff Brody is on the sinking Orca when Quint dies and is the next target for the "shark." Using quick thinking he lodges one of Hooper's O2 tanks (nicely set up earlier) into the "shark's" jaws and shoots the tank, blowing the beast apart. It is at this point that Brody becomes a "real man," and despite the deeply traumatic experience he just went through, he's cured of his fear of water by the sheer power of his masculinity (he even comments to Hooper while they're swimming back to land how he used to be afraid of water). He's definitely not going to develop PTSD like Quint did, making him even manlier than the shark-hunter was.

Maybe he'll have earned the respect of the islanders. We'll never know because the film ends before they get back to land. But as it stands, "Jaws" ends without a thematic throughline.

After watching "The Suicide Squad," I had no desire to watch a spinoff show about the Peacemaker. But I'll be damned if this wasn't a fantastic show. This is how you redeem a character; loved it from beginning to end.

Thor: Love and Thunder is a bewildering film in which the final product is worth less than the sum of its parts. The two primary storylines don't mesh well, lots of big-moments happen off screen, and the jokes come at a cost to the characters rather than enhancing them. Truly, this is a puzzling follow-up to Thor: Ragnarok (one of my favorite movies in general) and Avengers: Endgame. I daresay it is a bad film.

Aggressively "feel-good" at the cost of everything else, Brian and Charles could be described as Disney's Pinocchio meets The Room, shot as a documentary in the Welsh countryside; but not in a good way. Or maybe just "Cliché the Movie."

To call painfully introverted protagonist Brian an "inventor" is incredibly dishonest. His inventions range from gluing pinecones to a bag (poorly), to cobbling together a bike, cuckoo clock, fan and wings... and then actually expect the device to fly. In short, this man is an idiot and everyone we see him interact with in the village (except the generic village bully) seems to like him and cut him slack for his child-like shenanigans and his suggested inability to pay for things on a regular basis.

Brian somehow (magically) creates a sentient 7-foot tall robot that goes from acting like a human child to an incredible docile "rebellious" human teenager, to young adult by the end. So to be clear, this is not a film about a lonely man who makes a robotic friend who has a unique non-human experience and perspective, it's about a lonely man who has a documentary crew following him around while he makes a child and keeps said child prisoner in his home until the child gets kidnapped, tortured and only wants to return to his former prison because it wasn't so bad by comparison... not what I'd call a feel-good movie.

The film almost gets interesting when Charles occasionally begins to gently rebel against Brian's terrible parenting, but this goes nowhere and is quickly shrugged away with more bad parenting... In fact, the film actually suggests (after the aforementioned kidnapping and torture by the generic village bully) that Brian was right all along... before doing a noncommittal 180 at the very end and Brian somehow (magically) presents Charles with a "ticket around the world" where the first stop is Honolulu, and nobody that Charles knows will be going with him... that's definitely going to end well.

I would say you might be able to enjoy this film if you just turn your brain off. But at an hour and a half the film drags and you'll likely wind up taking a nap instead.

It's painfully clear that Sam Raimi only watched parts of WandaVision (the parts he was told would be relevant), and straight up ignores all of Wanda's character development from that movie. Now she's making all the same mistakes again, but even more extreme, thanks to being corrupted by an evil book... I know Sam Raimi isn't good at believable female characters, but this is just sad. Kudos to Elizabeth Olsen for an amazing performance nontheless.