I ran a games website back when it was a cool thing to do.
Nowadays I spend my time raising two humans, cohosting a podcast with @jimplachy, and trying to make the world a better place.
In my estimation, I am doing a mediocre job of all three.
All we truly have in this world each other; so take care of one another.
Night #16 - The Timekeepers of Eternity
https://letterboxd.com/thejesusfish/film/the-timekeepers-of-eternity/
Listen, the source material here is miserable. The Langoliers is a bad short story, and an awful made for TV movie. Setting out to “improve it” is not a difficult task, even if all you do is re-edit it. When Timekeepers of Eternity opened with, what I can only call, the “Take on Me” filter, I thought “ahh, that’s cute - a nice play on the destruction of yesterday motif - what a clever way to open this movie.” When the filter persisted through the roughly 60 minutes of “remake” I ended the film thinking “did they make it worse.”
Night #15 - The Chair
I like youtube horror shorts. It’s cool what folks can get up to when they don’t have the pressure of a full on “production” on top of them. The chair is a cool idea. Physical Objects of Bad Mojo is a good genre. The writing here was good, the acting was not, and the ending was meh. But a cool idea.
Night #14 - MaXXXine
There are two movies here. One that happens before the compactor scene, and one that happens after. The first movie is great, confident, and unhinged Ti West. The logical follow up to X and Pearl. Messy and fun. 3 stars The second movie is just messy and boring. The overarching slasher narrative is uninteresting, and the “reveal” is meaningless. The epilogue is good though. 2 stars.
Night #13 - Heretic
People talk about Christian movies and roll their eyes. Shit like Soul Surfer or War Room - movies with stories and dialogue written so a 12 year old can understand them. They have no depth, they beg no questions, they pose no threat to the status quo. And it’s because the church feels such an uneasy grasp on its congregation - is so unsure of their devotion - that anything that triggers critical thinking is seen as a demonic. Anything that poses a threat to their control is heresy. Heretic is a movie about control. And it’s a movie about
Forgot to post yesterday.
Night #12 - Night’s End
I..uh...huh. So this is a very earnest movie. Geno Walker is great as the movie's protagonist, and does what he can with what he is given. Which isn't much. This is a covid movie. No actors share the same space, everyone communicates over zoom, and the monster is always 6 feet away from our hero. In typical monster fashion, it does not wear a mask. The crescendo of this movie is.....exceptionally dumb. On a scale of which where it strips any redeeming aspects of the movie. Michael Shannon is in this movie...and he knows. But he tries too.
Night #11 - Ash
I hope that whoever scored this movie was paid handsomely. Not because the score is particularly remarkable (it’s fine), but because it is constant. I would be surprised if there were more than 5 minutes of the movie’s 100 minute runtime that didn’t have some sort of music playing in the background. The folks making this movie had no confidence in it. Every bit of it feels amateurish. You can see the direction given to the actors in each scene - nothing feels natural. The story is fine. Did you like Life? How about The Thing? How would you feel
Night #10 - The Astronaut
https://letterboxd.com/thejesusfish/film/the-astronaut-2025/
Man, what is it with 3rd act reveals that both set up and reveal the twist in the span of 20 minutes? And what is it with quality actors taking these gigs that are well below their ability? Kate Mara and Lawrence Fishburne are good in this. They do everything they can to lift a bad script into mediocrity, and they mostly succeed. The ending dumb, however. There is nothing to overcome that.
Night #9 - Tuesday
Tuesday’s concept is..incredible. What if death could be reasoned with? What if death had feelings? What if death were vulnerable? What would happen if you cared for death? My rating here has more to do with where I wished the story had gone, rather than whether or not it’s a good story. It is a good story. And this is a VERY A24-ass movie. I wanted it to do other things with its premise, but what it did do wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t what I wanted.
Night #8 - Everyone is Going to Die
https://letterboxd.com/thejesusfish/film/everyone-is-going-to-die/
So nothing in this movie really succeeds. Meh acting, dumb story, preposterous reveals, and no closure. I think the worst part is that it is just a tired concept. A remix of this has been done a thousand times, and this one doesn’t add anything interesting to the beat. However, it’s competent and doesn’t insult you, so half marks for that, I guess.