Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With The Owl House nearly completed, my house has been casting about for some reliable replacement binging, and ultimately settled on another attempt at Jujutsu Kaisen. This has sadly been as disappointing as the first; Jujutsu Kaisen is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from Naruto, Bleach, and Hunter x Hunter, with no understanding of what made any of those ideas work in the first place. The characters are one-note, the world has no substance, and the fights are preposterous Calvinball nonsense, with combatants inventing new aspects of their abilities constantly, meaning there is never anything resembling tension or a coherent contrast of powers. Gojo is likely the worst offender – his power is basically “I can do anything so long as I use the word ‘infinite’ while describing it,” and I’m thus frankly relieved that he’s found himself stuck in a box for our current arc. Anyway, we’ve fortunately had better luck with our recent film selections, so let’s break that shit down in the Week in Review!
First up this week was Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s recent horror production starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers “Smoke” and “Stack” Moore, who return to their home of Clarksdale, Mississippi after first fighting in World War I, and then spending seven years in the Chicago mafia. Arriving atop a stack of ill-gotten gains, they swiftly buy a disused mill to transform into a juke joint, enlisting their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to play guitar for their opening night. However, their slice of freedom soon comes to the attention of a runaway vampire, who is determined to make their community his own.
After years of toiling in the franchise mines, Sinners finds the eminently talented Coogler taking a big original swing, and god damn does he hit it out of the park. Sinners is a big film, embracing the grandeur of the Mississippi skyline and the bedlam of a crowd in thrall to the music, and somehow finding some largely untapped space in terms of the vampire metaphor. Or perhaps it’s the opposite; rather than framing the vampire as a call to temptation, or the destructive persistence of the old guard, or some tortured race-related metaphor, the film’s use of vampires feels secondary to its actual themes, merely a tool through which Sinners can reflect on inheritance, integration, faith, morality, and the search for a better life.
Crucially, the vampire who starts this whole business is actually an Irish immigrant, the feared outsider du jour of the film’s 1932 setting. Both alleged “sides” of the conflict are seeking some form of freedom and community, and both express that longing through music, a language the film defines as connecting us not just as individuals, but even across time itself, in a grand lineage of the soul’s true voice. This makes the film less a riddle to solve than a collective expression of engagement with an impossible quest, an ensemble reflection on finding peace with the iniquity of America. Vampirism is like religion, a source of forced homogeneity that can hopefully paper over the vacancies in our hearts – but music is something true, something that speaks to a bond greater than ourselves.
I found the film’s themes enthralling and conclusion wittily life-affirming, but it’s also just a fun, expertly constructed piece of genre work with an utterly dynamite soundtrack. Like Spielberg, Coogler employs horror as a seasoning to elevate a work that encompasses many genres; unlike Spielberg, Coogler has the audacity to essentially make his own From Dusk ‘till Dawn, wholeheartedly embracing genre excess on his way to the bloody punchline. An immediate essential horror feature.
We then checked out Havoc, a recent crime drama by The Raid director Gareth Evans. Tom Hardy stars as a homicide detective haunted by an unforgivable secret, who ends up drawn into a gang war when the son of a mayoral candidate (Forest Whitaker) is implicated in the killing of a local Triad leader. Copious gunfire unsurprisingly ensues, as Hardy brute forces his way through gangbangers, bystanders, and even his own police department on the way to the ugly truth.
Evans definitely has a fondness for these city-wide crime epics, as his own tinkering with The Raid’s formula in its sequel clearly indicates. Unfortunately, while The Raid 2 still boasted Iko Uwais and Yahan “Mad Dog” Ruhian to perform the high poetry of violence, Havoc’s contests are more in the line of “Tom Hardy versus Timothy Olyphant,” neither of whom are understandably interested in breaking their noses for a direct-to-Netflix feature. Though Evans appears to be seeking his own French Connection, only Hardy is really operating at that level, and even he is frequently undercut by Evans’ mediocre script. Nonetheless, the two standout action sequences both demonstrate Evans has still got the juice when it comes to fight choreography – give him a better writer and a lead who can kick high, and I’m still down for another feature.
Next up was The Prowler, an ‘81 slasher centered on an ill-fated prom celebration. Twenty-five years after the gruesome killing of two attendees of a post-WWII graduation dance, our leads are preparing for their own year-end celebration, trying on outfits and taking dips in the pool and generally isolating themselves for somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, it turns out someone else is also celebrating that haunted anniversary, and leaving a trail of bodies behind them in the process.
The Prowler is simply a sturdy, accomplished slasher in all regards, so traditional and reliable that I’m frankly shocked I didn’t hunt it down before now. The cast are all reasonable performers, and the leads in particular generally make intelligent choices, which always offers a more satisfying contest than when they’re basically self-annihilating Tucker & Dale-style. The cinematography is also a cut above what you’d expect from the genre, with plenty of smartly lit compositions and an emphasis on menacing, labyrinthian corridors. And most impressively of all, effects maestro Tom Savini is on call and apparently exorcising some truly wicked demons, as his kills here outdo basically any of his feats from the Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Romero zombie franchises. A superior slice of slasher comfort food.
I then checked out The Garden of Words, Makoto Shinkai’s forty minute tale of (you guessed it) longing and anticipation. The film centers on Takao, a fifteen-year-old boy who feels restless and out of place in high school, and who on rainy mornings steals away to a city garden in order to plan designs for shoes. There he runs into Yukari, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who seems equally out of place in her life; the two form an uneasy bond, as each waits for the rain to subside in their own life stories.
In retrospect, The Garden of Words seems much like the swan song of Shinkai’s early era, centered on films that idealize a vanishing childhood as they look towards an uncertain adulthood. Takao is your classic starry-eyed youth, but Yukari seems to occupy Shinkai’s own position; adulthood has offered her no greater certainty, and thus she can only marvel at Takao’s ambitions in quiet jealousy. This “holism of Shinkai” extends to the production’s visual design; the film is his last before Your Name would pull in a much broader animation pool, and thus it is his final film to offer his original balance of understated, often stiff character animation and ostentatiously rich color design, a visual dichotomy that seems to echo his dramatic philosophy, presenting characters unable to fully engage with their luscious surroundings.
The story’s destination is obvious and underwhelming, and the film ultimately peters out rather than rising towards one of Shinkai’s signature anthemic climaxes, but that actually seems appropriate for the final heir to the era begun by Voices from a Distant Star, and which achieved its aesthetic peak in 5 Centimeters per Second. Many directors get accused of constantly telling the same story, but it’s rare to see one so overtly say goodbye to their favorite tale.
