beer_good_foamy

During lockdown, while many other artists are doing mini-concerts from their homes, I thought I’d do you all a favour and not.

— James Blunt (@JamesBlunt) March 25, 2020

My 2020 in media. The good thing was, we all had a lot of time to watch and read. The bad thing was, it was hard to do anything but just rewatch and reread old favourites. But still, here goes.

10 new movies I really liked this year:
First Cow
Bacurau
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Possessor
Wolfwalkers
Babyteeth
Relic
Ema
Deerskin

5 TV series that did really good things this year:
She-Ra And The Princesses of Power: A final season that has Chekov's guns firing every 30 seconds. This and The Good Place shows what you can do when you write towards an ending.

The Queen's Gambit: It's not about chess, it's about obsession. And also chess. I've yet to see Anya Taylor-Joy not impress in anything. The ending has some issues, but up until then, wow.

Tales From the Loop: Brilliant adaptation of Simon Stålenhag's books of retro small-town sci-fi to an American setting; takes the look and then expands it into a slowly unfolding, character-driven story.

What We Do In The Shadows: Season 2 was a huge improvement on a season 1 that was already really good. I mean, the open stage episode alone...

The Good Place: TGP ended in January 2020?!? It feels like five years ago! It was a good ending, whichever decade it happened.


5 TV series that occasionally did worthwhile things this year:
Warrior Nun 
The Haunting of Bly Manor
Rick and Morty
Lovecraft Country
Wynonna Earp

10 songs I loved this year:
Zombie Girl - Adrienne Lenker
Under the Spell of Joy - Death Valley Girls
Pulling the Pin - Run the Jewels feat. Mavis Staples & Josh Homme
For You - Laura Marling
The Prettiest Song in the World - Man Man
Told You Once In August - Dion (who, at 81 freaking years old, is sounding way too good)
A Hero's Death - Fontaines DC
r(E)volution - Sa-Roc
Murder Most Foul - Bob Dylan
I Know the End - Phoebe Bridgers

Five new-ish books I loved this year:
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
Taking Izmail, Mikhail Shishkin
Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli
The City We Became, NK Jemisin
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Five old-ish books I loved this year
The Emperor of Portugalia, Selma Lagerlöf
The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin
The Exploits of Moominpappa, Tove Jansson
Babel-17, Samuel R Delany
Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison

So a few quick thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker.

I've been purposely lowering my expectations about this ever since I realised JJ Abrams would be calling the shots again. As someone who's starting to think that maybe The Last Jedi is the best film of the whole series (which doesn't mean it's perfect) but still has a lot of nostalgia around the original trilogy I really don't want to let go of, I figure this will probably be the last new thing I watch in the Star Wars verse, and I just wanted it to not be TOO embarrassing.

( Spoilers )

OK, so movie review time. I watched Ari Aster's (alleged) horror movie Midsommar yesterday, in which a bunch of American college students have a really bad time at a Swedish midsummer celebration, and as an actual Swede, I have to say...

( Cut for cultural appropriation and vague spoilers )

I now really want a Swedish film maker (say, Ali Abbasi who made the excellent Border) to make Thanksgiving: A horror movie in which European college students visit a friend's family in Wisconsin, are forced to observe a violent ritual in which so-called "football players" are torn limb from limb while fighting over a dead pig, and slowly realise that they will be the stuffing in a giant bird.

...well, not just yet, but I just got a chance to see Halloween (2018), and I have thoughts on it and on how monster franchises and its Final Girls age. No specific spoilers, but then it's a slasher so there's only so much plot to spoil...



( Thoughts under cut cut cut blood artery spray murder Hitchcock Psycho )

So, the scorecard:
Halloween (1978): 5/5
Halloween II (1981): 3/5
Halloween III: Season of the Witch AKA The One Without Michael Myers (1982): 3/5
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988): 2/5
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989): 1/5
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers AKA The One With Baby Paul Rudd (1995): 1/5
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998): 3/5
Halloween Resurrection AKA The One Where Busta Rhymes Roundhouse Kicks Michael Myers In The Face (2002): 1/5
Halloween (2007): 3/5
Halloween II (2009): 2/5
Halloween (2018): 4/5

So, what to watch on the night itself? It had to be a rewatch, I've done way too few of those this month, but what - classic, recent, well-known, obscure? I ended up going with a new-ish movie that feels like a classic, that has a nice little fan base but maybe hasn't got the mainstream splash it deserves.

Ti West's The House of the Devil was made in 2009, but you'd never know it. The look (shot on gloriously grainy 16mm while everyone else was going digital), the plot, the soundtrack, the pacing, even the opening credits feel like something filmed just before VCRs became a thing and everyone started churning out the same slasher movies over and over again. Yet it doesn't feel stale; West knows when to lean against the clichés, when to make us wait for them until our knuckles turn white, and when to run a kitchen knife through them.

Anyway, so Samantha is a student desperate for cash to move out of her crappy dorm, so she takes a babysitting job out in the country... in an old spooky house... owned by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov... Which turns out to actually be a grandmother-sitting job... but she really needs the money and it's just one night. How bad can it be?

It's not the most action-packed movie in history, as West shows us he means business early on and then lets us wait a good long while, turning up the heat ever so slowly until he lets it all hang out in the finale. This is one spooky movie, and it does it all so effortlessly. I love it.



Anyway, I hope people haven't been too bored by this series of posts, and happy halloween to you all!

Mark of the Vampire is one of those classics I've always dismissed unseen as another Dracula knockoff, but after listening to recent episodes of the brilliant podcast You Must Remember This (which is currently doing a history of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) I figured I should give it a shot.

And it is, in fact, less of a Dracula knockoff than a sort of semi-postmodern deconstruction of Dracula (or would be if it weren't from 1935). You know the story; cranky old professor tries to convince sceptics that the superstitious villagers are right, that the mysterious deaths and entrallments happening are because of the tuxedo-clad nobleman played by Bela Lugosi ... except the film makers have thought a bit more about it, and not only worked more at the special effects, but also have a twist coming that's actually kind of clever, or at least ambitious, horror meta. It's not as good a movie as Dracula is, and certainly nowhere near as scary, but a worthwhile comment on it.

All the best horror movies are metaphorical on some level. The best monsters represent something.

The winds of the Djinni blow wherever fear rules.

Under the Shadow flips that upside down by essentially remaking Dark Water in the middle of Tehran during the Iraq-Iran war. Shideh has to give up her medical studies because, well, so when her husband is drafted to serve at the front, she's left at home in her flat with her daughter and whatever neighbours haven't yet escaped the city ... and as bombs and rockets rain down, morality police patrol the streets threatening any woman who doesn't behave modestly, she starts to believe the Djinni are after her child. After all, she's in a world where hellfire can literally fall on her head at any time, where seeing pale children who walk around in a daze without speaking is perfectly normal, where she's forced to hide herself to even go outside in the name of Values ... so when every horror trope becomes normal, does it matter if the monsters are real?

I love that we're in a world where we can debate if the greatest Iranian horror movie of recent years is this or the equally brilliant A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. I prefer the latter for style, but Under the Shadow packs a good punch.

And the Stephen King movies keep on coming. 1922 is another new Netflix movie, this one based on a recent novella of the same name which I remember quite liking, about a farmer who convinces his son the only way to keep their farm is to kill the mother of the family, and is then driven mad with the guilt (unless he's not and something else is going on). The movie, though, as much as it tries, isn't up to much. In a way, it makes me miss the olden days of Stephen King adaptations; say what you like about the likes of Children of the Corn or Creepshow, at least they didn't put on airs. 1922 tries to tell a spook story rather than a horror story, with a slow icy mood like a budget version of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford mixed with horror elements (that soundtrack), but for all that Thomas Jane in the lead role tries (and boy, does he ever try) he can't breathe life into it. Would have made a decent one-hour episode of an anthology, but at 1.45 it just drags.

Both Sweden and Denmark have their embarrassing 1950s horror movies - Terror In The Midnight Sun and Reptilicus, respectively - so I figured I'd watch the Finnish equivalent.

Except The White Reindeer is actually kind of good? Set in 19th century (I think?) Lapland among the Sami reindeerherders, where a young woman sacrifices a reindeer to the Old Gods to keep her husband... except then she starts turning into a white reindeer that lures men to their death instead. Yes, it's a werereindeer movie!

So it's a bit hokey, but it's got great imagery, shot and plotted almost like a silent movie (well, Finns don't talk much) and the lead actress pulls off a great performance as the movie builds to a really effective climax. Also, I'll always have time for movies that scratch at an ostensibly Christian world to reveal a barely forgotten pagan myth underneath (see also: The Wicker Man, Pumpkinhead, Virgin Spring, Shadow of the Raven, etc).