Category: movies

#REVIEW: Superman (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews3 Comments

I’m just gonna say it: James Gunn’s Superman is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Please take that with whatever amount of salt you like; my opinions are subject to change and enthusiasm can take me on a ride from time to time, so it’s possible that in six months I’ll have cooled down a bit for whatever reason. The only movies, though, that are even close to this one are the original Christopher Reeve Superman, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Avengers movie. And if I’m being honest, Superman ’78 hasn’t aged as well as I might have wanted it to, and I think this version is much better as a movie although I’m not quite willing to put David Corenswet above Christopher Reeve just yet. It doesn’t have the emotional baggage those movies have; I’d been waiting for Iron Man and Avengers for decades when they finally came out, and I grew up watching Superman ’78 over and over and over again.

It’s difficult to overstate how shocked I am to be saying this. In retrospect, I should have put more stock in the tagline they chose for this movie: Look up. It’s fucking brilliant on a whole bunch of levels, but the most important thing about it is that it speaks directly to this movie’s sense of aspiration, the idea that Superman is, first and foremost, a hero, someone who wants nothing more than to do good and to leave the world better than he found it. Superman has not been an aspirational figure for some time, and I’m not even willing to admit he was in the last three movies that had a dude with an S on his chest in them. Hell, two of Reeve’s movies weren’t great, and one of those two was genuinely hot garbage. I’ve really only genuinely liked two movies with this character in them before last Saturday. I am immensely, irrationally protective of Superman, and this movie simply gets him right. Finally. Finally.

I have been waiting for a very long time to watch another Superman movie that understands the character. Going in, I figured that at best I wouldn’t be trying to get the sun to explode on the way out of the theater, and I might have just decided to lay down in traffic if it had been genuinely bad. 2025 has been a terrible enough year without Superman getting fucked over again.

But let’s get into some details. Buckle in; I’ve got a lot to say about this movie, although I don’t think this is going to reach the epic length of some of my Star Wars reviews. Then again, there have been a couple of those that I didn’t think were going to end up being very long that ended up over 10K words, so …

(This won’t be completely spoiler-free, by the way, but I’ll try not to mention anything that wasn’t made obvious by the trailers.)

Let’s start with the casting. There’s not a single weak spot in the main cast. Not one. David Corenswet is amazing, although I’d have liked to see more of his Clark– even during one of his “Clark scenes,” the interview with Lois in her apartment, he’s actually playing Superman wearing Clark’s clothes. We never get anything approaching the epic Reeve transformation scene I linked the other day, but the characters are differentiated enough that it works. Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are both phenomenal, and Hoult’s Lex in particular manages to make scene-chewing monologuing scary. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen is the most useful Jimmy Olsen I’ve ever seen on screen. I liked the Justice Gang enough that I want a movie just for the three of them– Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific are both outstanding, and I’m gonna have to be careful that I’m not overusing my superlatives, but they take a character I’ve never liked and a character I know nothing about and make me want to see movies about them. Isabela Merced doesn’t have as much to do as Hawkgirl, but I enjoyed her nonetheless. Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell as Jon and Martha Kent are flawless. And María Gabriela de Faría brings a twitchy vulnerability to her Engineer, another character that I don’t know much about and want to see more of.

My wife commented that this did sort of feel like a sequel to a movie that they hadn’t made, which I can see, and there are a handful of characters who feel like they’re there just to be there– you need Perry White, of course, and I liked Wendell Pierce’s casting even though I’m not a hundred percent certain they ever actually said Perry’s name. Mikaela Hoover and Beck Bennett as Cat Grant and Steve Lombard are just sorta there. Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho is scary and sad and creepy, which … again, I don’t know a ton about Metamorpho, but from what I do, that’s about right. The worst thing I can say about the casting– and, hell, one of the worst things I can say about the movie— is that I don’t quite get Eve Teschmacher as a character, but that’s not Sara Sampaio’s fault.

This is one of the best-shot action films I’ve seen in a long time, and even scenes in relative darkness are clear. You can actually tell what’s going on during the fights, and it’s amazing that a movie that features a kaiju the size of a skyscraper never manages to disappear into smearing CGI all over everything. Every punch that gets thrown has weight. I’ve seen a few people say that Mr. Terrific’s solo fight about halfway through the film is the best scene in the entire movie, and … I don’t quite agree (the best scene in the movie is between Clark and his dad, at the farm) but it’s up there with Yondu and his arrow as far as Gunn’s action scenes go.

The score uses John Williams’ iconic original music to its benefit without feeling enslaved to it, and while I can’t hum any of the other themes without seeing the movie again, it definitely puts its own spin on things. They could have copy-and-pasted half of Williams’ score and been just fine, so the idea that they added to it and changed it and it worked is an impressive achievement.

Let’s talk about the Star Wars movies for a minute, though. I’ve completely turned on two of three of the new trilogy movies, and while I loved The Last Jedi I will probably never watch it again. The Force Awakens was made retroactively worse by Rise of Skywalker in a way that I’m not going to explain right now. But part of what annoyed me about the discourse around Rise is the people who were insisting that it was a repudiation of The Last Jedi. This was mostly people who didn’t like Last Jedi saying this, and those folks are, in general, not to be trusted– but it went from simple shit like he smashed his helmet in the second movie, and has a new helmet in the third! to slightly more serious if still wrong critiques like insisting that Kylo Ren telling Rey that her parents were nobodies who left her to die in a ditch was absolutely 100% meant to be canonical truth and not Ren deliberately making shit up to fuck with her, which was obviously the case to anyone with a smidge of media literacy. I didn’t like the idea that she was a Palpatine, but it wasn’t a repudiation of anything at all.

James Gunn’s Superman, on the other hand, is a direct thumb in the eye of the Angry Murder Alien movies, and I couldn’t be any happier about it.

Over and over again during this movie, you see Superman stop fighting in order to save people. The kaiju wrecks a floor of a skyscraper and he stops to make sure everyone is OK before rejoining the fight. He protects people, throwing his body in between civilians and danger over and over again. He literally saves a squirrel at one point. And while the climactic fight in Metropolis at the end of the movie probably did as much property damage as the climax to Angry Murder Alien 1, the movie takes it time to make sure everyone understands that they are evacuating Metropolis while the fight is going on. Is it completely logical and reasonable to believe they knocked over a couple dozen huge skyscrapers and no one got killed? Eh, probably not. But you don’t care, because by this point in the movie it’s been made clear over and over again that Superman is there to save people, that people believe that Superman’s job is to protect them, and you’re willing to believe that if Superman says Metropolis has been evacuated, then it’s damn well been evacuated.

I never understood why any of the Murderverse characters wanted to be heroes. Calling their little group the Justice League made no damn sense– can you name any time in any of the main DC movies that anyone other than Wonder Woman cared about justice? That’s a real question! And you can’t do it! Lex Luthor would still be an evil, murderous bastard if Superman had never shown up. Nothing in Angry Murder Alien 1 or Angry Murder Alien Vs. Bat-Themed Ninja Killer would have happened if Superman had never come to earth!

Corenswet’s Superman wants, before anything else, to do good and to save people. His desire to keep people from getting hurt sets the entire story of the film in motion. When he’s fighting the two physical villains of the film, Ultraman and the Engineer, he tries to talk them out of fighting.

Superman’s greatest power as a character isn’t his heat vision, or his strength, or his ability to fly. It’s that he refuses to accept that there’s ever nothing he can do. That if put in an impossible situation where the only way out is to kill or to let someone die, he does the impossible thing anyway. They effectively put him in that exact situation in this film, where there’s a dimensional anomaly eating Metropolis at the exact same time as a nation on the other side of the world is being invaded by a technologically superior force and the citizens are literally crying out his name to come and save them. The movie wants you to think that he’s going to have to choose, that he’ll either have to let people die in Metropolis or let people die in Jarhanpur.

No. He’s fucking Superman. That’s not how it works. He’s going to save everybody. That’s what makes him Superman. And he does.

(There is also a brilliant, if maybe a little overly snarky, scene where Lex Luthor reveals that he has a literal army of genetically enhanced monkeys manipulating the internet into hating Superman. It’s … maybe a little too on the nose. But I loved it anyway.)

Little spoiler coming. It’s not going to be anything that surprises you if you’ve thought much about the movie and it’s absolutely not going to ruin anything, but still.

This actually ties into the only thing I can think of that I really didn’t like about this movie. The film has three bad guys: Luthor, Ultraman, who is a black-suited Strong Silent Guy for 90% of the movie, and the Engineer, whose bloodstream Lex has filled with nanites so that she can create weapons out of her body and interface with computers. You’re meant to believe (although this is a comic book movie) that Ultraman doesn’t survive the movie, and while the Engineer’s fate isn’t quite as clear, she gets knocked unconscious in a really dangerous place late in the movie and you never see her again after that. She could very well still be alive; her status is more ambiguous than Ultraman’s.

I’m not going to get into why, but I would really have liked to see Superman work harder to save both of these characters. He’s kind of got his hands full with other shit when Ultraman goes down, but he tries to talk both of them off of the ledge and away from Luthor during their final battle, and you get the feeling that the Engineer, at least, is listening. Again, she’s kind of fascinating– she’s twitchy and broken and walks with a limp when she isn’t doing metahuman shit and, while I might change my mind after a second viewing, you get the feeling that her enhancement wasn’t entirely her decision. I can do without more Ultraman, and Superman doesn’t directly kill him, but I feel like he should have shown more concern for him, for reasons I’m not going to talk about– this is a guy who lectures Guy Gardner when the kaiju dies, for crying out loud– but I want to see María Gabriela de Faría again. I’ll be paying the closest attention to the last parts of this fight when I inevitably see this movie again.

Okay, that’s it for the spoilers.

You should see this movie. You should see this movie if you love superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you’re tired of superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you don’t usually see movies at all. This movie deserves to be extraordinarily successful. 2025 has been a miserable fucking year for anyone with a trace of a human soul, and it’s probably going to get much, much worse before it gets better. This movie foregrounds hope, and truth, and justice, and a better tomorrow, better than anything I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie that I really feel like America needs right now. And it’s really hard to imagine how I could have loved it any more than I did.

Look up.

On Clark Kent

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies2 Comments

We just got back from Superman, the first movie I’ve seen in theaters in a good long while and the first superhero movie I’ve seen in theaters in longer than that. If I write a review of this movie right now it’s going to come off as completely unhinged, because I don’t remember the last time I loved a movie as much as I loved this one. Y’all know what I’m like about this stuff. I need to give it a day or two to cool off before I try to write a review. That’s assuming I don’t see it again tomorrow, which isn’t off the table, and which might reset the clock.

It’s fucking fantastic. Go see it. But let’s set that aside, and talk about TikTok for a minute.

This is KJ and Trinity Blair. They’re TikTokers. They’re also identical twins. KJ has about a quarter million followers and Trinity has 1.6 million. Before I say another word, I wanna be real clear that I have no intention of saying anything negative about either of them and since both of them are way more famous than I will ever be it’s not like they have a reason to give a shit what I think anyway.

Trinity Blair’s main account is here and KJ’s is here. Trinity also runs a podcast, I think, but I don’t really know anything about it. Go ahead and look at any of their videos. I guarantee you will see a comment where someone asks if they know about each other, and anything where both of them show up you will have someone who will ask if they are twins. I only know they exist because they ran a little … joke, if you’re being generous, publicity stunt if you’re slightly less generous, or “scam” if you’re not generous, where they pretended to not know each other existed a while and actually brought their parents into it where each of them confronted a parent about her “secret” twin sister.

Now, through this whole thing, there were people posting comments and linking to videos of the two of them together, because it’s not like they purged their accounts before they did it. But one way or another they probably realized that they’d be able to convince a whole lot of people that they hadn’t previously known about each other, since every single time one of them posts they get a dozen comments about it anyway.

You know what you don’t ever see in their comments? “Hey, are you two secretly the same person?”

And maybe you see where I’m going with this, and what the connection to Superman is.

I have long been willing to die on the hill that everyone in the world not knowing that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person is not remotely the high bar to suspension of disbelief that people think it is. Clark Kent and Superman have been seen together. They live in a world with shapeshifters, for God’s sake, and there are photographs of the two with each other. Clark Kent, while an influential journalist, is just a journalist, and a print journalist at that, and unless you think most of the world can pick Josh Marshall or Jamelle Bouie out of a lineup he isn’t close to being famous enough that most people know his face. And you know what people would do if they thought the two of them looked alike?

They’d say “Man, you and Superman really look alike,” not “Man, you and Superman are clearly the same guy!” Trinity and KJ Blair are literally identical and people regularly question whether they’re twins. That’s the reaction– people looking at twins and questioning what they’re seeing. Every set of identicals on the planet has the experience of someone seeing them with their twin and asking if they’re identical twins, and I suspect most same-gender fraternals have been asked the same thing.

Superman shows his face. There’s no reason for any random person to ever have the idea that he had a secret identity in the first place. And I’m sorry, it’s a hell of a leap to just randomly decide that he is this other dude who’s busy with a journalism job even if he does get to interview Superman a lot. You would absolutely have people using the interviews as proof they’re not the same person.

There was a great comic where Lex Luthor programmed a computer to figure out who Superman was, and the computer told him the truth– that Superman was Clark Kent. And Lex completely ignored it, as the idea that anyone with that much power might masquerade as a normal person was so completely unimaginable to him.

Corenswet’s Clark doesn’t get as much screen time as I might have hoped, so you don’t get a ton of data about what his Clark acts like– although the scenes with his parents are absolutely stellar. There’s no moment like this, though:

So yeah. This character gets superpowers from Earth’s yellow sun, can shoot fire out of his eyes, and regularly lifts skyscrapers when he isn’t busy flying over them. The idea that the whole world doesn’t just automatically know that he’s some other random human out of eight billion who sort of looks like him is far from the most unbelievable thing about this story.

Okay, look, Marvel …

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, moviesLeave a comment

You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.

I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.

Please don’t fuck this up.

Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.

They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?

I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.

Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.

(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)

#REVIEW: SINNERS (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

I don’t remember the last time I wrote a movie review. It’s been a while, I can tell you that.(*) The thing about me reviewing movies– and if you’ve been around, you’ve seen me say this before– is that I have to guard against my own enthusiasm a lot of the time. There are plenty of times when I’ve written a movie review quickly after watching the movie and in retrospect it’s been more positive than maybe it would have been if I’d waited a few days.

Last night, after watching Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, I commented to my wife (and posted on BlueSky, I believe) that I’d have been more positive about it had I never seen From Dusk Till Dawn. And since FDtD is easily the movie’s most obvious point of comparison, let’s go straight at this: the two movies are similar enough that you could tell me Sinners was deliberately meant as a remake and I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That might feel like a slam; it’s not, as From Dusk Till Dawn is a great movie. But that’s where I was; I enjoyed Sinners quite a bit but I felt like in large part I’d seen it before.

I’m sitting here right now, fifteen or so hours later and having slept on it, wishing I’d bought the thing instead of renting it, because I want to watch it again.

Sinners is that rarest of things: a movie that’s growing on me. I think I’m just going to assume that everything Ryan Coogler makes for the rest of his life is going to be gold; Michael B. Jordan is amazing playing two of the three leads in twins Smoke and Stack,(**) and the entire supporting cast ranges from solid to outstanding– I haven’t seen Delroy Lindo in anything recently, and I could watch that man read the phone book. I’m not familiar with Wunmi Mosaku, but her Annie is tremendous, and Hailee Steinfeld disappears into her role thoroughly enough that it took a good 2/3 of the movie before I realized who she was.

(A quick word about that: apparently there are people mad about Steinfeld being cast as this character, who says at one point that her “daddy’s daddy was half Black,” which makes her an eighth Black. The fact that Americans have a word for someone who is 1/8 Black is part and parcel of how fucked up this country is, and light-skinned Black people moving away and quietly passing into the white community has been a real thing for going on two centuries in this country. Steinfeld herself is literally an eighth Black. She is the exact race of the character she portrays. Pick up a book, Goddammit.)

Anyway, I always forget to talk about the plot so let’s do that: it’s 1930-something, somewhere in Mississippi, and Jordan’s Smoke and Stack have returned to their hometown after leaving years ago, loaded with cash and guns and planning on opening a juke joint. The first half of the movie is getting ready to open, pulling everyone else into their orbit, including the actual main character, Miles Caton’s Sammie, himself an extraordinarily talented blues musician. Sammie is Smoke and Stack’s younger cousin. They open up the joint to a successful first night, and then everything goes directly to Hell in more or less exactly the same way it did in From Dusk Till Dawn, and if you haven’t seen FDtD and don’t know the twist (although they haven’t done much to hide it) I’m not going to go any further than that.

Other stuff: everyone’s praised the music, for good reason, although Buddy Guy’s 88-year-old voice coming out of Sammie’s mouth is a little odd. Guy actually shows up in person in a stinger at the end of the movie, so don’t turn it off when the credits roll, although you probably won’t be in enough of a hurry to turn it off that you’ll miss it. The movie is almost a musical but not quite. There are numbers, but they make more sense in context than, say, Alexander Hamilton randomly bursting into song.

(Okay, yeah, it’s a musical, but it’s not the type of musical that people who don’t like musicals should avoid. Just fuckin’ trust me, please, plus blues musicals are amazing, as it turns out.)

So, yeah. Two thumbs up. Check it out. But it’s only five bucks more to buy it from Amazon Prime than to rent it, so buy it; you’ll want to watch it again.

(*) It was over a year ago, and ludicrously enough, it was Abigail, which I also compared to From Dusk Till Dawn.

(**) I would not have called myself an MBJ hater, but I’ve never quite gotten the hype about the guy? I mean, he’s good, but he’s got the reputation of the second coming of Denzel Washington or something, and I haven’t seen that from him yet. Okay, y’all. I get it now. Plus, not for nothin, he’s insanely sexy in this movie. Do what you want with that information.

This, goddammit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, moviesLeave a comment

This. This. This is Right and Correct and if I go see this movie and it disappoints me I am done with DC movies for the rest of my life. I talked some shit about the costume when we got our first look at it and I’m still not a hundred percent on board with some of the decisions they made there, but it looks like Gunn has gotten the core of the character right after decades of on-screen misrepresentation, and if that’s actually Superman on the screen they can put him in a French maid’s outfit for all I care.

I had like four different posts planned for tonight and seeing the trailer knocked all of them clean out of my head.

You’ve got me back in theaters for a superhero movie, DC. Don’t fuck this up.

In which I am unbelievably petty (WARNING: Superman opinions)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, movies6 Comments

Let me begin with some Statements which are Generally Known to be True:

  • That I am insanely, irrationally protective of Superman, and do not believe the character has been done right in live action since the Reeve era, with the possible exception of Tyler Hoechlin in Superman & Lois, which I really enjoyed for about five episodes and then mysteriously stopped watching;
  • That I am fully aware that a set picture is not the best way to evaluate a superhero costume;
  • That I have been loud and wrong about iconic superhero costumes before;
  • That I absolutely hate it when nerds do exactly what I am about to do, although I will attempt to mix in some positives;
  • That I am probably not going to see this movie, not because I am boycotting it but because I don’t see movies any longer, and I feel like maybe that’s could give me an out about having an opinion, an out that I am currently not taking; and
  • That David Corenswet’s performance is going to be infinitely more important than his costume, as will other minor details like the fucking script, and I know literally nothing about how he’s going to move and act as the character. I do know I’m not terribly interested in Ultraman or Mr. Terrific, one of whom was also in the leaks but one of whom is still technically a rumor.

That said!

Wait. No. Let’s do this first:

Two things are Correct about this costume.

  • The colors, for the first time in years, are correct, and this says good things about the direction the film is going to take;
  • Putting the S-shield on the back of the cape in yellow is also Correct.

I hate every single other fucking thing about the fucking costume.

  1. The collar. They’ve clearly drawn inspiration from the New 52 costume, which I hated, and part of the reason I hated it was the fucking collar. Every other and I mean every other live action iteration of Superman’s suit has done the cape/shoulders/neck area better, including Tyler Hoechlin’s, which dropped the cape into prominent gold grommets and still looked better. I hate the collared look. It is, in fact, the thing about the costume that I hate the most.
  2. The S-Shield. This is a version of the Kingdom Come shield, which was fine in Kingdom Come, which was set in the future and involved a Superman who had gone through intense personal loss, and is not fine here. Just use the fucking regular S-shield, Goddammit. This is not a place where we fucking need to innovate. Also it could stand to be a little bigger– if it was right, at least– but that’s not that big of a deal.
  3. The texture. This may not survive the transition into the actual film, but I hate all the little lines and shapes everywhere. The cape looks like it’s made from microfiber, which also sucks.
  4. The belt. Yes, the costume needs the belt, and I’m happy it has a belt, but that belt looks like Batman’s belt. It looks chunky and rubbery for no clear reason.
  5. It’s fucking baggy. Superman wears his costume under his clothes and it needs to be tighter. This also may not survive the transition onto the actual silver screen. In fact, I really doubt it’ll be noticeable on the screen. I hate it anyway.
  6. The wrists. Also borrowing from New 52, and perhaps more obvious in other pictures than in these, they’re pointy, and they look fucking stupid. You also can’t conceal pointy wrist cuffs under a dress shirt.
  7. The briefs. Shut up, Goddammit, the word “petty” is right in the title. Yes, I’m happy they’re there, and I’d rather have them than not have them, but those are fucking boyshorts, not Superman briefs. It’s wrong and it’s wrong for no reason.
  8. The boots. Actually, the boots are fine. I have no beef with the boots.

Do not get me started on Clark’s hair:

(Actually, the hair is whatever; I think Clark would have a more conservative haircut than that ramen-looking GenZ mop bullshit but it definitely makes him look less like Superman, so I’ll deal.)

Okay. I’ve got that out of my system now, I hope. I have seen a couple of images today that I can’t find now where someone took the Corenswet suit and basically Photoshopped in the edits that I suggested above, and it looks perfect, and I’ll update if I find one again. And I will get over it, especially now that I’ve written this. It’s not the most important thing about the fucking movie. All the same: blech.

#REVIEW: Abigail (2024)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews1 Comment

ABIGAIL is one of those movies that technically has a big twist, but if you’re aware of the movie at all, all of the marketing, including the trailers, has spoiled the shit out of that big twist already, and it happens early enough in the film that the twist is kind of also the premise, which makes it hard to talk about. So this sentence will serve as the spoiler-free review: Abigail is kind of a failure as a horror movie– I am bad at horror movies, and I have been since I became a father, and I was never scared. It is, however, a pretty damn effective, predictable but wildly entertaining horror-adjacent action/slasher film, and all in all I’m going to recommend it, so long as you go in with the proper expectations. Expect something closer to From Dusk Till Dawn than to The Exorcist or Paranormal Activity and you’ll be fine.

So, yeah. Spoilers from here out, although once you know the premise, you already know the broad strokes of the movie.

Alisha Weir, am I right? I haven’t seen a child actor this effective since Season 1 of Stranger Things Millie Bobby Brown, and I really don’t think Millie has ever had a role that allowed her to cut loose the way Weir gets to in this movie. Millie has never gotten a line as iconic as “I’m sorry for what’s going to happen to you.” But let’s back up and talk about the actual movie: Abigail starts off as a heist movie, as a group of criminals kidnap a little girl from a massive mansion and then, rather inexplicably, spirit her off to a similarly massive but much older and creepier mansion out in the middle of nowhere, where Giancarlo Esposito tells them to wait with the girl for 24 hours, during which time he’ll extract a $50 million ransom from her father, which they can all split and then be off on their separate ways.

Only, oops, the little girl is a vampire, and, well, it doesn’t go great for them. This plan has some flaws even before you get to the vampire, and my wife called another minor twist early on– all of the kidnappers have screwed over this little girl’s vampire crime lord father at some point or another, and she’s managed to bring them all here so she can hunt and kill them. Two of them die before it’s immediately clear what’s going on, and the reactions of the rest to being hunted by an actual vampire are kind of hilarious. Eventually the main female character survives, blah blah blah, you know how this is going to go.

This movie rides on the strength of its atmosphere and its characters, and the house is effectively creepy, Amelia’s penchant for tossing ballet moves into her fighting style and her hunting (watching her tiptoe across a stairway bannister on her way to try and kill somebody is impressively fucked up; her movement and physicality throughout the movie is excellently done) and the gore level is turned up to 15; the number of bodies and/or body parts that literally explode in this movie is … significant.

And, again, the characters are fun, if broadly drawn; the ex-undercover cop turned criminal, the dim-bulb Quebecois muscle guy, the e-girl hacker, and the Main Character With a Dark Past, along with an ex-marine and a druggie wheelman, plus Giancarlo fucking Esposito, who has never in his life not elevated anything he was in. The biggest problem with the movie is that everyone in it looks like someone more famous than them; the Quebecker looks like Elon Musk, the hacker looks like Winona Ryder circa Beetlejuice, the ex-cop is Not Ryan Gosling, and the druggie is basically playing the exact same character he played in Euphoria, which I guess isn’t quite the same thing but it’s still kinda weird. They all bounce off of each other nicely and most of them get at least a couple of cool moments here and there to chew some scenery of their own. I mean, this moment here. I love it:

The house itself is straight out of Resident Evil, and I mean it as a compliment when I say this movie would make a great video game, although it kind of already did, except with a little ballerina girl instead of nine-and-a-half-foot-tall Lady Dimitrescu. The scenery is great, the pool scene is horrifying, the ‘plosions are gross, the characters are fun, and at least some of the acting is absolutely phenomenal. Again, it’s not scary, so don’t go in wanting that, but I’m really glad we actually sat down and watched this last night. I don’t watch many movies any more so I like to be able to recommend them when I do. Two thumbs up.

On nepotism and Willow Smith’s EMPATHOGEN

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Music, ParentingLeave a comment

Fun fact: under certain circumstances, I’m not at all convinced that nepotism is a bad thing. Take sports, for example. My understanding is that there’s been some debate about whether Lebron James’ son Bronny ought to be entering the NBA draft or not. But here’s the thing: maybe (I have no idea, and don’t intend to check) Bronny can use his dad’s no doubt impressive influence to get drafted higher than he might be otherwise. But if he can’t perform at the NBA level, he’s not going to perform at an NBA level. There’s nothing Lebron can do if his kid goes out there and averages two points and six turnovers a game. He’s not gonna get playing time, and if he does, there are a billion people out there who are going to be losing money when he’s on the court and eventually it’s going to catch up with him. I remember when Bob Knight insisted on recruiting his son Patrick. Patrick dragged down the team. It was a terrible fucking idea and IU’s basketball program paid for it.

It seems like the place where nepotism is the biggest problem is in politics and business, along with those parts of the entertainment business where, y’know, knowing things can be useful. There are too many examples here for it to be really necessary to list any, but nonetheless, the previous occupant’s wastrel children and Meghan McCain come to mind immediately. You don’t even know about Meghan McCain because her dad was good at something. You know about Meghan McCain because her grandfather was good at something. Similarly, Eric Trump would be living in a trailer park if his grandfather hadn’t been rich. Go find a picture of Rudy Giuliani’s kid sometime. He barely even looks human.

Which brings me to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s children. They have tried, tried oh so hard, to make Jaden Smith a thing. Jaden Smith’s not a thing. He’s not gonna be a thing. Because in order to actually be a thing in the entertainment industry he’d have to be talented, and if he is talented I have yet to see any evidence of it. Which is why he doesn’t show up in things that don’t have his parents’ money and influence behind them.

Now let’s talk about Willow.

Okay, you would never have heard Whip my Hair if it wasn’t for Willow’s parents. Fine. But do you happen to remember how that story ended? The kid shaved her head in the middle of the tour so that she didn’t have to perform the song any longer. She’s got all kinds of interviews talking about it, but I’ve always enjoyed hearing Will discussing it here.

Willow just released empathogen, a … jazz album? I have her two previous albums; I haven’t listened to anything earlier, although I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and dive into her work before I discovered her on lately I feel EVERYTHING. Her last two albums have been punk rock, and they have kicked ass. This is completely different, and from what I’ve seen her first three albums don’t sound like any of these last three either. I’m not convinced empathogen is a jazz album, although it’s definitely jazz inflected, but most of the instrumentation is guitar, bass and drums; if there are any horns or other strings on there I didn’t notice them on my first listen, which I will admit was in the car and not exactly careful. The vocals are definitely jazzy. I’m not even sure I liked the damn album, but I’m absolutely fascinated by it. (Thinking about it, empathogen is as much of a jazz album as Cowboy Carter is a country album. The influence is clearly there, but you can’t pin either album down to a single genre.)

There’s been some talk in the last few days about whether Willow is a “nepo baby,” in other words, whether she owes her career to her parents’ influence or not. I would like to suggest that given how wildly, insanely eclectic Willow’s musical output over the last nine years had been, I’m really fucking glad that her parents are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and not Steve and Carol Smith … because the kid wouldn’t have a career if she didn’t have a leg up. The music industry doesn’t work with people who refuse to fit into boxes like this. Can you imagine what would have happened if some random fuckin’ kid told Jay-Z that she was done with her fun little hair song and wasn’t touring any longer? We’d never have heard from her again. And, I mean, we can argue about whether Will Smith as a parent should have said “Okay, baby, I got you” or, uh, something else(*), but the fact is if her parents weren’t famous I wouldn’t have these albums, and if nepotism gets me lately I feel EVERYTHING and empathogen once in a while, I’ll maybe put up with some fourth-generation news nitwit if I have to.

Suri Cruise and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt are both either already or about to turn eighteen, by the way, so I look forward to the two of them owning the world in, oh, five years or so.

(*) “Baby, Mr. Jay-Z is going to cut Daddy’s balls off and bury both of us underneath Madison Square Garden. You’re gonna grow that hair back today if I have to sell your soul to Satan to make it happen.”