Movie Challenge Update #2

If the Scream franchise were any more self aware, it would start talking shit to us through the screen. I'd avoided the franchise for many years because I felt it was impossible for MTV to be responsible for something that wasn't ruining our reputation abroad, but after digging into half of the franchise or so over the last few weeks while my girlfriend had to watch them for a podcast, I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining and coherent some of these are. I'm not saying that any of them serve as, like, a respectful homage to their Edvard Munch-ish roots, but I am saying that its Ouroboros qualities keep delivering a specific type of food that I would liken to eating fresh Taco Bell on a nice plate.

I don't think it ruins anything to say that the dress featured on the cover of this film is atypical, and this was the first time I've seen something made recently in the horror genre that felt truly original since "The Love Witch" or "Midsommar". If it's true that there are only two types of great stories, then this movie blends both of them as a strange dress does come to town and a woman does go on a journey.

No one seems to be able to figure out if this movie is brilliant or horrendous, but for me it was boring and a bit scarring. It's gorgeously shot, poorly or hardly written in many places, and I didn't enjoy watching a single frame of it. It's also viciously gory and morally vacant, which isn't normally a strike against a film for me from an artistic perspective but here it feels like Nicolas Winding Refn, who also directed "Bronson" and "Drive", is trying to punish us for ever liking his work in the first place. And if that's the case, then the beating the audience takes is particularly brutal. If I cared any less about a film that looked this good I'd think I had wandered into "The Batman".

This has to be the most Irish movie ever made. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and director Martin McDonagh does a wonderful job toying with the audience throughout with his own farm-y take on Chekhov's Gun. It felt like a meditation on the psyche of Ireland and the central characteristics that have driven much of the regional tension over the last couple of hundred years at least, but I'm not qualified to comment in any concrete way because 23 and Me says I'm less than 10% Irish.

At this point, it's difficult to meet anyone online or off who isn't spending a portion of their time investigating something, so my barrier to entry for goofy detectivism continues to lower. With that in mind, I think this movie does a great job of capturing the campy elements that made Agatha Christie novels so endearing growing up, and a fairly poor job of making the story itself particularly compelling. I'm not saying there were gems sewn into the seams of the 1937 original novel's dress, but I am saying that this film has precious little to its name other than the lineage of its author, cast, and directors. Also, a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters for a million years could not conjure up a less Egyptian take on the Nile or the surrounding region, which I suppose is the point.