Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week, my housemates and I have been reveling in the delayed bounty of the 2021 holiday release schedule, gorging ourselves on Pokemon Arceus and Dying Light 2. After twenty years of waiting, Game Freak have at last delivered the Pokemon game I’ve been craving since childhood: a largely open-world adventure, where you can just ramble around and catch pokemon to your heart’s content. The instinct to fill a pokedex is one of my most powerful lizard-brain itches, and so I’ve been happily catching critters by the dozens, all while awaiting the imminent and world-shifting release of Elden Ring.

Don’t worry though, we also found time for plenty of movies. Let’s rumble through the week’s finest selections, as we explore one more Week in Review!

Our first selection this week was a quasi-classic of modern horror, Wes Craven’s original Scream. Scream is… fine? It’s not scary, but it’s not really trying to be; it’s more a tongue-in-cheek riff on slashers than a dedicated slasher in its own right, and slashers are probably the least scary horror subgenre anyway. There’s not much to be said for its formal beauty or performances, either (though I’m always happy to see Matthew Lillard, whose personal charm as a character actor almost makes up for his painful dialogue). 

Scream might actually be a victim of its own success; I’m guessing its metacommentary on horror conventions felt fresher in 1996, but at this point, “the character who knows all about horror movies” is a regular member of slasher lineups. And Scream doesn’t even know that much about horror movies! Its references go no further than the top slasher tentpoles, with “The Howling” standing as the only callout I hadn’t already seen. From an era where meta horror has provided us films like Cabin in the Woods and Behind the Mask, Scream mostly just feels quaint at this point, lacking the traditional horror payoffs to elevate its simplistic moral commentary.

Of course, I can’t have Wes Craven showing me up, and so our house immediately followed that with The Howling itself. Now that is a film with some truly weird ideas! First off, The Howling is a Joe Dante production (Gremlins, Small Soldiers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action), so you can be sure the action will hinge on Joe’s favorite conflict: Man Versus Weird Prosthetic Creatures. Centered on a news broadcaster who’s been traumatized by her near brush with a serial killer, the film sees her and her husband traveling to a remote coastal commune. There, they attempt to relax and rekindle the spark of their relationship, only to discover that everyone’s a goddamn werewolf.

The Howling is a messy confluence of several core ideas, fusing a central metaphor for how lycanthropy reflects “the beast inside us” with a cynical thread regarding the dehumanization of news media. These are both interesting ideas, but the film has trouble figuring out what to do with them; the “bestial nature” thread basically dries up after the first half, and the last act is pure action/horror payoff, as the remaining heroes do battle with an entire commune of werewolves. What I’m ultimately left with is not a cohesive statement, but a pointed collection of compelling fragments: the genuinely terrifying opening act, the cathartically indulgent finale, and the occasional moments where the film’s moral philosophy seems tethered to a coherent point. Not an entirely successful film, but more than interesting enough to justify the viewing.

We then checked out an esteemed classic, the legendary noir title Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard centers on a young, unsuccessful writer in Hollywood, who’s behind on his payments and desperate to sell anything. When he unexpectedly stops in at a decaying Hollywood manor, he discovers it houses Norma Desmond, one of the great actresses of the silent film era, still hopelessly certain that her comeback is just around the corner. Our protagonist Joe has little but contempt for Desmond, but when she offers to hire him as an editor for her rambling comeback script, he can’t refuse. Over time, Joe’s own sense of self begins to crumble, as he finds himself a painted fixture of Desmond’s crumbling palace.

First off, apparently not all noir films are also crime dramas! Shows what I know, that one of the genre’s most acclaimed features bucks a trend I figured was essential to its genetic makeup. Instead, Sunset Boulevard is a frequently agonizing psychological drama, as everyone around Desmond does their best to flatter her fantastical inner world, where she’s forever “the biggest star in the world.” Genuine silent film legend Gloria Swanson is incredible as Desmond, in a role that demands both total vulnerability and terrifying authority. And her private world is illustrated through wondrous mise-en-scène, as each new composition makes a tangled jungle of her baubles and finery.

Along with Swanson’s performance and the film’s general beauty, Sunset Boulevard is further elevated through its savage commentary on how the cinematic sausage is made. The dialogue is as witty and whip-fast as any screwball comedy, but it’s all focused on the maddening process of editing a script, securing a production studio, and generally clinging to the underbelly of the great Hollywood behemoth. As you might guess, all this cinematic shop talk was an absolute treat for me, and the dialogue is so damn compelling that it actually sells Joe’s third-act romance in just three brief scenes. Accomplished in its every formal aspect, Sunset Boulevard articulates both the fanciful dream and sullied reality of Hollywood, culminating in one of the most cynical, tragic, and iconic scenes in film history.

Our next feature was a new release, as we checked out Dennis Villeneuve’s adaptation of (the first half of) Dune. Only learning this was a “part one” in theaters must have felt like some kind of betrayal, but having watched the film, I actually can’t imagine any other way for this story to be adopted. Even in prose, Dune is ponderous and stately in its movements; Villeneuve is a director who works in elegant contrast and massive scale, and the first half of Dune fits his methods like a glove.

Interstellar drama is so common it has become mundane; there is no inherent thrill in watching a spacecraft take off or land, because we’ve seen it happen a thousand times before. That is not to say that such a sight is not inherently miraculous, but rather, that any artist wishing to celebrate the inherent majesty and awe of science fiction must use every tool in their aesthetic belt to rescue the miraculous from mundanity. For Villeneuve, the trick he has successfully employed in both Arrival and Dune is “make the ships really goddamn big.” They’re traveling through the frictionless vacuum of space, and often carrying entire armies worth of soldiers, so why wouldn’t they dwarf our understanding of airplane scale?

Through the combination of Villeneuve’s staggeringly massive designs and keen eye for framing, he manages to restore the inherent, rightful awe of watching a ship descend from the stars, or unleash a hailstorm of fire upon an unsuspecting city. Dune has always felt more prophetic than personal, and Villeneuve seizes on that quality, making both his ships and characters move with the weight of gods. So, too, is the inherent weightlessness of CG conflict mitigated through Villeneuve’s artistry – the man knows how to corral shapes into a coherent, emotionally resonant composition, meaning there’s never any sense of visual busyness or disorientation, simply one jaw-dropping layout after another.

The performances are also quite good on the whole. Dune feels like a bit of a vindication for both Timothée Chalamet and Jason Momoa – the two have been putting in a lot of good work over the past few years, and this film demonstrates both of them at their best. Chalamet is quite gifted at evoking a sense of otherworldly distance, the sort of “cold aura of command” that he also employed in The King. Paul is more of a messianic instrument than a human being, and Chalamet evokes that seemingly without effort, while still adding just a touch of boyish naivety. Meanwhile, Momoa is pretty much the sole spot of warmth in an otherwise elegiac narrative, his charm single-handedly balancing the film’s general austerity of emotion. Villeneuve is a talented director with a clear style, and Dune is the perfect material for that style – the result is a thoroughly satisfying adaptation of a singularly unfriendly book.

Finally, we also checked out that misbegotten Disney collaboration of The Rock and Emily Blunt, Jungle Cruise. First off, if you’re trying to get me invested in your halfhearted CG Amazon adventure, absolutely do not open by referencing the infinitely superior Aguirre. Aguirre is a work of love and madness, and you chucklefucks chose every plot beat of Jungle Cruise by focus-tested committee; if you’re going to insult me with your incompetence, at the very least don’t remind me of the movie I should be watching instead.

Anyway, misguided Herzog references aside, Jungle Cruise basically embodies all of the pitfalls of CG that I praised Dune for avoiding. The film is clearly evoking the style of past action-adventures like Indiana Jones or The Mummy, but its total reliance on CG sets means there’s never a sense of tactile weight or physical depth in any of its compositions. Additionally, the need to largely avoid their (non-existent) backgrounds means the cameras hang far too close to the characters, preventing us from really understanding what exactly is going on from moment to moment. Successful action scenes require coherent internal narratives: “I need to get to that door before it closes -> this rock might be able to flip its close switch -> gotta get to the rock -> gotta make the throw,” or something like that. By holding the camera right up in its actor’s faces and never constructing any sort of environmental conflicts, Jungle Cruise reduces all of its action scenes to meaningless sound and fury, just a bunch of yelling and flashing lights.

The one, shining spot of redemption in this film is Jesse Plemons’ performance as a villainous German seeking eternal youth. Emily Blunt phones in a character with no personality, and The Rock plays the same guy he always plays, but Plemons is delightfully weird in his every movement and delivery. In spite of possessing a face like a baked ham, Plemons is an excellent character actor with a wide dramatic range, and I look forward to seeing him pop up in all sorts of odd roles over the next thirty years.