Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’ve got a touch of sound and fury for you all, as the week’s screenings included a film I hated with every single fiber of my being. Yes, we did indeed watch Favreau’s detestable Lion King remake, so you all get to enjoy a dash of that naked fury that I only direct at things that make the world worse. Fortunately, the rest of this week’s screenings were much more fortuitous, ranging from a distinctive artifact of anime’s digital transition to a just plain excellent slasher film. Let’s start with the bad and push on through the good then, as we run down the latest Week in Review!
Buoyed on by my housemates’ insistence, we followed up last week’s viewing of The Lion King with its 2019 CG reimagining. Well, “reimagining” is probably the wrong word, as I failed to parse one jot of imagination in any aspect of this cursed film. I was already expecting how bad it would look: in Jon Favreau’s meat hook hands, every beautiful color, every stunning composition, and every fragment of character acting is drained from the original. In his senseless pursuit of alleged photorealism, he ensures every shot of this film feels unfocused and boring, aspiring to no more than keeping his expressionless CG animals more or less in mid-frame. Once dynamic, color-rich song sequences are entirely drained of their appeal; you can barely even see what’s happening throughout the murky Be Prepared, while I Just Can’t Wait To Be King abandons any sort of visual storytelling beyond “here are some animals on screen.”
But Favreau’s always been a hack, and “let’s pursue photorealism instead of artistry” has always been an inherently worthless exercise. What did surprise me about this film was how badly it fell short of the original even when you disregard the visuals. The writing is clumsier and less focused, seemingly more interested in demonstrating “hey, we’ve got celebrity voice actors!” than actually telling a story. And the song mixing is atrocious, with instruments entirely submerged and voices way too high in the mix, in a way that further highlights how badly the vocal melodies compare to their original counterparts. Pretty much the only vocal performance that compares favorably to the original is Donald Glover’s, but even he can’t overcome the production flaws. This version of The Lion King is “the original but dramatically worse” in every way you could imagine, taking a film that awed millions and regurgitating it as a cynical exercise in exploiting misplaced audience priorities. Favreau, you’ve done it again.
We then completed our run-through of what my housemate classified as “the essential Rockys” (Rocky 1 through 4) with a viewing of Rocky III, wherein Stallone faces off with the charmingly titled Clubber Lang (Mr. T). While writing about Rocky II, I reflected on how Stallone’s films tend to slot into either character study or hoo-rah machismo models; Rocky III marks the transition point between those models, as our protagonist shifts from a man haunted by his demons to a superhero fighting a supervillain.
Rocky’s first, failed match versus Lang feels like the conclusion to Rocky’s initial story: he goes the distance with the champ, eventually wins the championship, loses faith in the validity of his accomplishments, and is chastened by a tragic reminder of what is truly valuable in life. The scene of Stallone bawling next to his dying coach is one of the best in his career; in that moment, all of his anxieties about “real wins” are proven insubstantial, as he eagerly lies about his performance to sooth his coach’s concerns. At his best, Stallone can evoke a tragedy much like De Niro in Scorcese’s hands, a pockmarked emblem of masculine power in a world where such strength can only bring ruin.
Then Carl Weathers pops up, we have a perky training montage, and Stallone beats the crap out of Mr. T in their rematch. So yes, ultimately a somewhat disjointed film, but I honestly quite enjoyed both of its halves. There’s things to love about both Stallone the macho man and Stallone the masculine critique, and Rocky III offers a winning portion of each.
Next up was Housebound, a New Zealand horror-comedy about a young woman named Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly), who is sentenced to eight months of house arrest at her old family’s home after the latest in a string of minor crimes. Once there, she is reunited with her chatterbox mother, who seems to believe there is some kind of presence haunting their house. Over time, Kylie begins to witness some inexplicable events of her own, leading to a paranormal investigation of the house’s darkest secrets.
Housebound is definitely more comedy than horror, but it succeeds ably in both spheres, offering plenty of demented comic payoffs and an immensely likable cast of characters. It doesn’t start off that way; Kylie’s character is so intensely self-absorbed that it takes some time to get invested in her story, and her mother capably performs the role of someone who is simultaneously “nice” yet impossible to live with. But once house arrest officer-slash-paranormal investigator Amos gets involved, the film spirals into a gripping and consistently funny ghost hunt, with plenty of satisfying twists, and some delightfully gooey practical effects. Housebound’s final act offers a perfect fusion of cat-and-mouse tension and comic release, featuring one gag so good that I gotta clench my teeth to avoid spoiling it. Light, charming, and smartly constructed, Housebound is a rewarding watch for fans of comedy or horror, and likely a fine “gateway horror” film for those who’re working up the courage to approach the genre.
I then screened an anime film that’s been on my list for a while, Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s Blood: The Last Vampire. The film’s only forty-five minutes long, and is essentially just a series of action scenes, following vampire slayer Saya from a subway confrontation to Yokota Air Base, as she hunts down a series of bloodthirsty beasties.
The film’s plot isn’t particularly interesting, but basically everything else about this production is. The setting, for one; “an American air base in Japan during the 1960s” is a specific and novel environment, and facilitates the film’s confident mixture of English and Japanese speech. Blood also feels reflective of multiple inflection points in anime production history. As a short theatrical feature conceived as a franchise foundation, it stretches back towards Production I.G.’s early history of prestige, creator-driven films and OVAs, while as a film conceived largely to demonstrate digital animation’s potential, it obviously presages the industry’s wholescale adoption of digital methods. And most importantly, it actually works: Katsuya Terada’s distinctive character designs meld well with the digital components, and the film’s generally dark aesthetic does an excellent job of masking the seams of its various parts. An interesting snapshot of a very different time in anime production history.
Last up for the week was a slasher semi-classic, The House on Sorority Row. In spite of its uninspired title, Sorority Row turned out to be a distinctive and altogether superior slasher, elevated by its uniquely engaging narrative structure, uncommonly witty script, and strong performances across the main cast. The film follows a group of sorority sisters who attempt to play a prank on their dorm mother, only to accidentally kill her instead. With the sorority hosting a party in hours, the group elect to hide the body in their disused pool, precipitating an anxious hour of attempting to hide their crime while slowly getting picked off by a mysterious killer.
Rather than the usual gang of anonymous victims you often find in these features, Sorority Row’s cast is distinctive and dynamic, featuring clear subdivisions of cliques between the overall social group, and lots of large personalities between them. The relative culpability of these characters pushes them in strange, panicked directions even before the killings start, while the contrast of violence and revelry gives the film’s middle act a frantic, almost delirious energy. The film even touches effectively on the tragedy of this dorm mother’s legacy, tapping into that ever-fertile vein of experience coveting youth. Funnily enough, the weakest element of this slasher film is actually the slashing – the kills aren’t particularly distinctive or scary, but when the scaffolding surrounding them is this impressive, that’s an easily forgiveable failing.
