Category: Films

Review of “Overlord”

If you are a stickler for historical accuracy, Overlord is probably not for you.  The most glaring error I saw was Whites and African-Americans serving in the same paratrooper unit.  During the Second Word War, combat units were segregated.  Black personnel had their own units, although some African-Americans did serve in white units in a support capacity such as cooks or transportation drivers, etc.  Combat units did not become integrated until 1948, three years after the war ended.  The paratrooper unit in the movie should have been either solidly white or solidly black (there was one black paratrooper unit, the 555th Regiment, though it did not seen action overseas). There were probably lots of smaller errors, though none were blatantly obvious to me, and I am probably more well-versed in the units and tactics of the Second World War than most people, because I have a longstanding interest in military history, particularly that of World War II.

The story is about the survivors of a squad of paratroopers on D-Day, who are supposed to parachute behind German lines and blow up a communications tower.  However, they find the tower, which is concealed in a church, is on top of a covert facility in which the Nazis are using the local French populace as guinea pigs in experiments to develop a soldier that will live for a thousand years.  The serum to transform the soldiers is not yet ready and, although it can raise the dead (turning them into hideous monsters), it has not yet been tested on the living.  Of course, you know that some of the living will be injected with the serum.

As far as the story goes (outside the noted anachronism), I thought it was well-written with regards to explaining how certain aspects of the plot tie together.  For example, in one scene American soldiers are hiding in an attic while German soldiers are on the floor below.  One of the Americans knocks something over and the Germans start up the steps to investigate.  A young French boy who is with them, and who is the brother of the woman the Germans are questioning, downstairs happens to be in the attic with the Americans.  As the Germans come up the stairs, he appears at the top with a baseball glove and ball, which he drops down the stairs.  The Germans think the noise was caused by the boy, laugh, turn around, and head  back downstairs.  The reason the boy has the baseball glove and ball is explained in an earlier scene, when it is noted that he has a longstanding interest in baseball, which is not normally a sport that interests the French.

The film is fast-paced and the suspense and action are constant.  This film straddles the genre boundary between horror and action and does it very well.  For a horror movie or action movie, the characters are well-developed.  I actually felt some empathy for the main ones in their various plights.  When someone dies, there is actually a reason.  This is not the norm for most horror or action films where the characters are there just to build the horror by increasing the body count.  The ending is not disappointing and it ties up one plot point nicely.

This movie is well worth getting at Red Box, which is where I got my copy, and would be worth the price of full admission at a theater.  It might even be worth adding to your DVD collection.

I recommend this film to horror fans, though action-adventure fans may find it too gory.

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Review of the Film Versions of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go

Phil Slattery, 2015

Last week while in Albuquerque, I attended the Tuesday night meeting of Southwest Writers.  It was a pleasant evening with Jim Tritten giving an enjoyable and quite professional  presentation on why writers should write short stories (he had a long list of reasons, which I won’t even try to list here, but they were on the money).  I met a few people and I was engaged in a conversation on favorite authors with one person, when she said something, which I unfortunately cannot recall at the moment, that made be think about just who the most recent Nobel Laureates in Literature are.  Many years ago I had wanted to start reading the works of Nobel Laureates in order to learn about the state of the art of writing, and I never followed through, though I did collect a few additional works for my library.  Some of my favorite authors did win the Nobel Prize, but they most fall into the realm of classic literature, in the sense that they are all dead:  Hemingway, Mann, etc.  Therefore I looked up the latest Nobel Laureates on Britannica.com, and decided to start with the most current laureates, reading their best known works and progressing backwards in time.

Of course, the first laureate I encountered was Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the award in 2017.  I found an interview with him on You Tube, which was quite interesting and I read the Wikipedia article on him just as starting points.  I wanted to learn more about his works as quickly as I could, but as I read rather slowly or at an average rate at best and have none of his works in my library, I decided I wanted to get just a taste of his subject matter and his basic ideas.  In his interview, Ishiguro mentioned that he was happy with the two movies that came out on his works:  The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.  Therefore I went out an rented them.  Granted, these told me nothing about this style or voice, but it did give me an idea, however vague, of his subjects and themes.

I am not a big fan of slow, low-key, thoughtful movies, which these were (I prefer action movies, thrillers, horror, etc; I love Quentin Tarantino films such as Kill Bill or Inglourious Basterds or old school movies such The Longest Day, Donovan’s Reef, Spartacus, Dr. Zhivago, or Lawrence of Arabia). Looking at these two from a literary perspective, I did find both intriguing, because I saw in them a lot of ideas as subtext that posed interesting questions about life.

For example, in The Remains of the Day the butler, Stevens, seems to hide from life in his job, never forming close attachments, though the Housekeeper is definitely interested in a relationship with him.  She sees something in him that attracts her, but Stevens always keeps to his almost robot-like performance of duties. When the Housekeeper does find Stevens reading something, and playfully insists on seeing it, though Stevens is very reluctant to reveal what it is, she discovers that it is a simple, sentimental romance.   So, Stevens does seem to have an interest in romance, but he never lets that show.  He is very reluctant to go outside the comfort zone of his job.  Even when his father, the under-butler, dies suddenly, Stevens puts off mourning and tending to his father’s corpse, preferring to tend to the important meeting that his employer is hosting at the moment.  To me, The Remains of the Day poses as subtext the question of how many people are like Stevens, avoiding the fears and unpleasantness of life, such as fear of confronting death or fear of failure in romance, by focusing on their careers.  Doubtlessly, there are a lot of themes that can be read from this work, but those are the first two that pop into mind.

In Never Let Me Go, a work of science fiction, in an alternate reality in which a cure has been found for all previously incurable diseases, three friends grow up in a series of boarding schools to find out that they are being grown only to provide donor organs (I am not clear about why donor organs are needed if all diseases have been cured, unless they are damaged by injury or something other than a disease).  They do not know who their parents are and eventually theorize that they might have been drug addicts or criminals or other undesirables who gave up their children for adoption.  All of these children are expected to die (which is called “to complete”) by their third donation, which is usually before the age of thirty.   During the course of the movie, as they grow up into young adults, the young man (Tommy) at first loves Kathy, but then they split up and he reveals his love for Ruth.   But the continue on with the lives society has designated for them, and [SPOILER ALERT] and Ruth and Tommy are gradually sold for parts, their young adult lives consisting of constantly recovering from surgery.  Kathy lives a little longer, because she becomes a “carer”, who helps others through their surgeries and therefore her life is extended a few years to provide this service. At the end, the movie (I do not know if Ishiguro does in the book) points out that none of us have enough time in life anyway.

Maybe I missed it somewhere in the movie, but the question that kept popping up in my mind was why don’t these kids just run off to another country.  If all they have for them in life is to be chopped up and sold as spare parts like a stolen automobile, why not run off to a south seas island, where one can’t be found?  I saw nothing to stop them other than a lack of money to buy a ticket, but if I were in that situation, I would find some way, legal or not, to get a plane ticket, especially if I could save not only my life, but that of the woman I love as well.  To me, this whole scenario poses the question of why would anyone play out an unpleasant role/life that society has designated for them, when one can simply run off like Yossarian at the end of Catch-22?  Maybe I missed something in the movie.  Maybe the movie didn’t cover a detail in the book.  I don’t know.

At any rate, I will continue to investigate the works of Kazuo Ishiguro.  Though not exciting, per se, they do pose interesting philosophical questions.  What little I have actually read in a sample of The Remains of the Day shows me that Ishiguro seems to have a simple, clean writing style and voice that I like. I would like to see how Ishiguro actually treats these themes in writing.  I like writing that is simple in appearance, but that has great depth. I would like to see how he pulls that off in prose.

Now, I just need to find the time to read both these works, but I have already started listening to the audio book of Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Laureate for 1946.   We’ll see what happens.

Review: Ouija – Origin of Evil, never play alone

I’m not at all surprised that a sequel to the abysmal Ouija happened (that movie, somehow, made a ridiculous amount of money), but I am surprised that it attracted the talent of Mike Flanagan…

Source: Review: Ouija – Origin of Evil, never play alone

Review of “The Disappointment’s Room”

the-disappointments-roomI am not very enthralled with “The Disappointment’s Room” .  I started to nod off to sleep once and I found myself checking my e-mail when a major denouement occurred.  Nonetheless, it’s an okay film to which I give a C+ (slightly above average).

It’s  a typical, low-key haunted house plot.  A family consisting of a mother, father, and small son moves from the big city (Brooklyn) to an old mansion in the country (in this case North Carolina) outside  a very small town of quaint characters where everyone knows each other.  The mother finds out that their house is haunted by the spirits of a nineteenth-century family, ruled by a stern father, who kept their deformed daughter locked in a room upstairs.  However, the mother’s perception is in question, as she is recovering from her own bout of mental illness and depression, somehow rooted in the death of the couple’s daughter (I won’t give away any more).

The ad I saw billed this as “drama/thriller”, and I would say that is a decent summary, except I would add this is about 60% drama and 40% thriller.  This movie would have been better if the director (D.J. Caruso:  Disturbia, Eagle Eye, Taking Lives) had focused more on the thriller aspect.  The psychological aspect of the mother’s problems isn’t sufficiently explored to be terribly interesting…nor is the story behind the ghosts.

The suspense (though not intense) is fairly continuous as the story progresses, but no real shocking revelations in terms of twists or the unexpected take place.  Still, the story is put together better than some and I didn’t notice any obvious loose ends.  Luck did play a major part in resolving the plot, which I always take as lazy writing.   The whole film seems to be made out of stock characters and bits of stock plots lazily interwoven to make a few bucks without really advancing the genre or taking the effort to create anything new or to explore the deeper aspects of the characters.

I recommend seeing this movie at a matinee, if you have nothing better to do and if you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket.

Hold onto your seat at “Don’t Breathe”!

Dont breathe Sept 2016Pay full ticket price to see this at the first opportunity.   This is one hell of a suspenseful movie.  I’m old enough that I fall asleep in action movies and shoot’em-ups if they flag the least in holding my attention.  I sat on the edge of my seat like a teenager through this entire flick, flinching, dodging, squirming, and ducking with the action every step of the way.

The plot is incredibly simple.  Three teenage friends work as a team to  break into rich people’s homes for different reasons, a girl to earn enough money to run away from home, her jerk boyfriend who trips on the vandalism, and the intellectual who has a crush on the girl and will follow her anywhere.  The jerk finds out about a blind veteran of Iraq, who won a lot of money in a lawsuit involving the death of his daughter.  They film the vet’s house in a deserted section of Detroit until they find out that he rarely leaves.  They decide to go against their usual practice of waiting until the owners leave and instead break in during the wee hours with the intent of chloroforming him while he sleeps.  Of course, things do not go as planned and the friends find themselves trapped with a tough, twisted killer who has a dark, sinister secret to protect.

With Iced Tea, Farmington, New Mexico, March 20, 2015
With Iced Tea, Farmington, New Mexico, March 20, 2015

Now, at this point, you can probably guess who is the first to die and then the second, but don’t be too sure about the ending as there are innumerable twists and turns throughout and they are particularly rapid-fire at the end.  I found the action very inventive and well done with completely unsuspected twists.  One moment that had me twisting and muttering “Ewwww” was the most wicked and innovative use of a turkey baster that I have ever seen or even heard of.

I found the acting first-rate and the use of close-ups very effective for bringing the viewer directly into the fast-moving, blood-splattered heat of the action.  I didn’t catch any slip-ups and I thought all the action was logical and exceptionally well planned out down to the tiniest detail.  The set-ups to maintain or generate constant suspense were right on the money.

See this movie at your first opportunity.   This is one of the most terrifying thriller/horror movies I have seen in a very long time.

Morbid Meals – Killer BLT – Tribute to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

EXAMINATION In the cult classic black comedy, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, one of the random acts of violence perpetrated by these deadly nightshades was that a man was attacked by a BLT sandwich…

Source: Morbid Meals – Killer BLT – Tribute to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Announcement: Phil Slattery Teams with Darksomnia Productions to Produce Documentary of a Haunting

Francene Kilgore (l) and I on the set with Alrenzo Black (r) and 2tk (center) of Darksomnia Productions, August 6, 2016
Francene Kilgore (l) and I on the set with Alrenzo Black (r) and 2tk (center) of Darksomnia Productions, August 6, 2016

My fiancée (Francene Kilgore) and I are teaming with Darksomnia Productions of Farmington, NM to produce a documentary/dramatization of a haunting that occurred in south Texas from about 2006-2010.  Filming is taking place.  Parts of the documentary will be dramatized by actors while my fiancee and I appear discussing the events.  The video should be completed within 1-2 months.   More details to come.

 

Darksomnia Productions
Darksomnia Productions

Alrenzo Black (l) and 2tk (r) of CEO's and co-founders of Darksomnia Productions.

Alrenzo Black (l) and 2tk (r) of CEO’s and co-founders of Darksomnia Productions.