Happy Thursday! The days are getting longer, this weekend is the Superb Owl and maybe spring is on the way. So let's see what fun stuff I've found recently.
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Guillermo del Toro has such an odd, interesting career. He's done comic book movies (Blade II and the Hellboy movies), a kaiju film (the very fun Pacific Rim), gothic horror (Crimson Peak),,,but I do love his odd couple of movies set during the Spanish Civil War. The Devil's Backbone is a brilliant piece of work set at a boys boarding school during that war with a possible ghost, a deadly pool and a bomb that can go off at any time.
And then there is Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro works so, so well with fantastic elements and this movie about a daughter and mother who have taken a sort of shelter with a Spanish general (wonderfully played in all his cruelty by Sergi López). It's a both lovely and horrifying film about war and family. It's a little girl who is trying to survive a war with a mother who is doing her best to survive and then...and then there are these creatures she finds. And who may be her salvation.
Pan's Labyrinth is available for rent and purchase at the usual streaming places.
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Ah, the first time I noticed the great Oscar Isaac. Drive is ostensibly not about him, but is about Ryan Gosling's very quiet and reserved character who drives for the local mobs (especially for a weirdly scary Albert Brooks). But Isaac keeps looming over it, as a just-out-of-jail partner to Carey Mulligan who absolutely sees that Gosling is interesting in Mulligan and is so confident about his relationship that he barely feels the need to say anything. Isaac since this has done a lot of good genre work, like Force Awakens and Annihilation and Ex Machina) but I do enjoy when he does some gritty crime work like this. (I can absolutely recommend, for instance, the excellent HBO mini series Show Me A Hero, about the public housing fight in Yonkers NJ in the '70s).
Drive is available on Tubi with ads and rent/purchase at the usual places.
Show Me A Hero is on HBO Max and Cinemax Go for subscribers and one Apple TV and Amazon for purchase. (And really, if you can check it out. It may have Catherine Keener's best performance.)
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Schlock time! The Exorcist is a great movie about a mother terrified how her daughter is ill and she and their doctors cannot figure out why (there is a scene in this with a spinal tap that is maybe the scariest medical scene I've seen in a movie). The possession parts of the movie are almost besides the point for how terrifying the movie is about a mother who is so, so scared for her daughter.
Then there is The Exorcist II, which is simply kind of dull and weird as they use a goofy device on Linda Blair's head to...bring forth dreams? Summon Satan again? Maybe try and make the movie interesting? In any aspect, it doesn't work.
And now, 17 years after the original, we get to The Exorcist III. Which I might keep for October and my annual horror watches, because by all accounts this movie is entertainingly bonkers.Directed by William Peter Beatty, author of the original novel of The Exorcist, and I'm always intrigued when an author of a novel takes a more direct hand on a movie sequel, It doesn't happen that much but when it does it can be...weird.
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My pick of the week is 2020's Crip Cramp: An American Revolution. Running on Netflix, this is an excellent documentary about Camp Jened, a New Jersey camp for teens with disabilities that ran from the '50s through the '70s and was a fulcrum for a lot of people who became important in the civil rights movement that resulted in theAmericans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It's a fascinating documentary that is both infuriating in what these people had to go through while also uplifting and at times quite funny. After all, they were teens and they went through the usual teen dramas with how there were camp dramas and romances and tiffs.
But god, this is worth seeing for the ADA stuff. It's 32 years old now and parts of it feel so established that we forget how new it actually is.
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