Five Nights at Freddy’s
We are definitely starting November off on the right foot. I had completely written off Five Nights at Freddy’s as a trainwreck, yet I still felt a gamer’s duty to see it. I can’t exactly say Five Nights at Freddy’s is my type of game though, as I don’t feel like a narrative is woven into the gameplay. Sure there are tons of lore in the FNAF, but the story is usually your just some guy trying to survive the night. Basically, it’s like working as a tester in a Jack-in-the-box factory. So off the bat, Five Nights at Freddy’s has the challenge of twisting the game’s lore, not story, into a working script; hence my reservations.
So is the film any good? It’s surprisingly, okay. It’s not something I would rush to see, but it certainly could have been worse in the year of The Exorcist: Believer and Insidious Chapter Five. Don’t get me wrong, the film’s second act is more laughable than scary and not as creepy as the filmmakers thought. However, there are well-made tense scenes with the animatronics hunting their victim that had my blood pumping. Overall, not great but I wasn’t bored. Put that on your poster Blumhouse.
Divinity
Imagine a modern-day science fiction film like Interstellar mixed with a black-and-white 1950s sci-fi film aesthetic with just a dash of lust dropped in and you will have Divinity. A scientist, on the brink of perfecting his miracle drug that gives you immortality at the cost of infertility, has his home invaded by two mysterious strangers. The movie then begins to ask questions like what is the purpose of sex in a world full of infertility? When is the cost of immortality too much? Has science gone too far? As I walked out of the theater, I found myself chewing on many of these questions; some days my stream of consciousness will wander back into these lines of thoughts. The hour and a half I spent with the film felt well worth my time, but I see both critics and audiences alike prefer director Eddie Alcazar’s previous work. It has piqued my interest and I wonder if my opinion of the film would change if I view his previous films. For now, I will say viewer discretion is advised.
Killers of the Flower Moon
If we are going to have more three-hour movies, we should bring back intermissions. Scorsese, Nolan, and the rest can’t expect me to sit there the entire time and not have to use the bathroom. I had to download an app called Runpee that tells you the best scenes to sprint off to the bathroom. Some filmmakers might scoff at this, but this is the world you created.
What? You want to know about Killers of the Flower Moon? For almost three and a half hours long, it’s both well-acted and well-paced. It’s a powerful tale about a family that systematically destroyed the Osage Nation in an attempt to inherit their oil money; we certainly need more stories like this that paint the bloody truth of America’s history with Native American tribes. I have certainly sat through worse movies that felt longer than this one. It undeniably helps when DiCaprio, De Niro, and Gladstone are all equally commanding their presence on screen.
Unfortunately, this film doesn’t quite stick the landing for me. For me, a tragedy should make me want to drop to my knees and cry out in agony. I felt this in Oppenheimer as the titular scientist realizes the horrors he has kicked off, but I didn’t get that with Killers of the Flower Moon. The film wants DiCaprio’s character to be torn between his love for his wife (Gladstone) and his duty to his uncle (De Niro), but it never really felt that way. The movie shows you all the ways he served his uncle but never showed him sacrificing for his wife. So naturally when things didn’t work out, it didn’t feel tragic but natural. As always, I present this nitpick not to say the film isn’t worth watching, but in the hopes, we, as screenwriters, can learn.
It’s a Wonderful Knife
I left the theater with a frustrated sigh coming out of my nose like an irritated bull. The red cape I bullishly charged through was a horror movie called It’s a Wonderful Knife; a movie that promised to be It’s a Wonderful Life mixed with a slasher movie. Early on our protagonist is able to kill the potential slasher, but at the cost of her best friend and brother. One year later, still angry with her inability to save her loved ones, she wishes that she was never born. She immediately finds herself in a world where the killer lives and has continued his mad spree. I was hoping this would initiate some Christmas cat-and-mouse as our heroine knows the identity of the killer. Sadly, this movie is too interested in copying It’s a Wonderful Life beat for beat with uninteresting horror characters. Unsurprisingly, our heroine learns the same lesson George Bailey learned seventy-seven years ago: she had friends and family all along who loved her as I painfully screamed for some semblance of a horror movie. There are one or two interesting kills, but you’re better off looking them up on YouTube. Skip.
Priscilla
I can’t escape the feeling this movie was born when Priscilla Presley exited the theater after just watching the Elvis biopic. With so much to cover in Elvis, it was only natural the 2022 biopic was going to merely scratch the surface of Priscilla’s life. Thankfully, A24 and director Sofia Spaney are here to fill in the cracks. Despite experiencing only a fraction of the fame and fortune that was inevitably Elvis’s downfall, Priscilla was not immune to the tragedy. The constant fame and attention Elvis had took its toll on their relationship. Priscilla was forced to remain hidden so women would continue buying anything Elvis touched. The two of them would argue over paparazzi articles saying Elvis was hooking up with his movie co-stars; you certainly think of Suspicious Minds with a new context. Overall, the film reminds me of the drama that would occur when streamers or internet celebrities get exposed for having secret significant others. Priscilla shows us that Elvis and Priscilla were tragic guinea pigs in the great experiment of whether fame and relationships mix. I will admit, much like Killers of the Flower Moon, I didn’t have a need to drop to my knees and cry out in vain. However, I do hope, somewhere out there, there’s a world where Elvis didn’t get famous and got to spend his days loving Priscilla Presley.
American Fiction
I see what you did, Cord Jefferson. A little frustrated that people only want a certain type of story from you? Possibly a story of a downtrodden young black man on the cold windy streets of Chicago? Maybe you wrote something recently that was metaphorical trash only to have people fall head over heels for it. Honestly, as someone who would like to be in the same line of work, I get it. I often lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, worrying that I might have to write a hypothetical story for a mobile game looking to farm microtransactions. So I get the struggles of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison as his publisher pressures him to write something more “black”. With bills piling up, Monk writes a book about his fictional life in the ghetto under a pen name. The meta-narrative had my curiosity, but it was Monk’s family drama that had my attention. Wrestling with his family getting older and the struggles that come with it, the characters within Monk’s family are the unsung heroes of the film. Proving once again, that characters are king. American Fiction is an easy recommendation for me.
Thanksgiving
In a world where online shopping is not a thing, a masked killer going by John Craver is rounding up people associated with a Black Friday massacre and using them as guinea pigs in his Jigsaw audition tapes. Much like It’s a Wonderful Knife, Thanksgiving is fully committed to its holiday theme with its brutal kills including cooking someone alive and bashing someone’s skull with a meat tenderizer. However, unlike It’s a Wonderful Knife it never dwells on its stock slasher characters. The movie does enough to give you a handful of likable characters and plenty that you wouldn’t mind seeing get the axe. A very succulent slasher for your post-Thanksgiving movie binge. One thing I want to call out is the opening Black Friday massacre. As someone who saw footage of the madness of Black Friday sales, witnessing that same insanity unfold into so much death and destruction made my blood run cold. John Craver was simply a symptom of the true disease: capitalistic greed.