Knee-jerk review: "Longlegs"

1. The unsettled creepiness of the trailer for this movie did the trick.
2. Nicolas Cage is over the top as usual.  They hid his face - heavy with strange prosthetics - from all the promotional material, which certainly upped the curiosity factor, but what we imagined turned out to be far scarier than what he really looks like.
3. Definite echoes of Silence of the Lambs, of course (newbie female FBI agent brought in on a disturbing serial killer case) but if you're going to steal, steal from the best.
4. The tone of the whole thing just feels... off-kilter.  Eerie.  A low hum of dread. 
5. That doesn't mean the filmmakers are above employing a few traditional jump scares accompanied by a screeching music cue.
6. Lot of long takes and wide angles that makes one anticipate something's about to happen.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it's a fake out.
7. In other words, it's the kind of movie where a character sits alone at night researching scary things (our heroine apparently can't work on this case during the daytime) and the camera's pointed at them in a way that you can see an open window or door behind them.  So you're crawling out of your skin expecting something awful to appear in that window or door.
8. We've never seen Blair Underwood this gritty and terse.  Isn't he usually playing some variation of the suave charmer?
9. Things get stranger and stranger as the story unfolds.  The final reveal about what's exactly been happening with these serial murders is completely nuts.  But that's usually the case with these kinds of things (see also: most of Stephen King's novels).  The set-up is so weird and scary that there's no way to plausibly explain it all away.
10. We discussed the ending with the 15-year-old Fry on the drive home, trying to puzzle out some of the character choices at the end.  We thought we understood the rules of what was happening.  But then maybe not?  We finally decided this sort of movie is about mood more than plot.
11. For us, there's nothing scarier than someone knocking on your front door in the middle of the night.
12. The odd "longlegs" name we think is explained in a quick line of dialogue during the first encounter with the Longlegs character, but we didn't make it out.  He says something about how he didn't bring his long legs.  What the heck.  (UPDATE: apparently, the gag is that he's towering over the little girl he's talking to - using long legs - so he squats down to better communicate.)
13. The film geek in us 100% loved the gimmick of using a square aspect ratio to signal the flashbacks.
14. Obligatory scene of characters exploring a dark, scary place with flashlights.
15. A couple of allusions to T. Rex's "Bang a Gong."  No idea why.
16. If nothing else, it was a memorable experience.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "Twisters"

1. Traditional summer popcorn movie.  Whether or not you take that as a recommendation is up to you.
2. Glen Powell is a movie star.  Full stop.  Effortless charm, charisma, and cool.
3. A big sequence midway through depends on the audience believing that a small town in Oklahoma - surely as weather-aware as they come - can be caught totally off guard by the sudden arrival of a tornado.  Textbook definition of "suspension of disbelief."  Tornados don't appear out of nowhere like a boogeyman in the woods.  Forecasters usually know 2 or 3 days in advance that trouble is brewing.
4. We were unfamiliar with director Lee Isaac Chung, but this movie is as polished and slick as they come.
5. Never hide from a tornado under a highway overpass.
6. "If you feel it, chase it!"  If you think about it, that makes no sense.  Better is a line delivered later: "If you're afraid of it, ride it."
7. Is this ragtag community of nomadic screwball tornado chasers really a thing?
8. The most interesting element of the movie - unscrupulous land barons swooping in to take advantage of raw emotions to buy destroyed property at a discount - is so glossed over if you blink you might miss it.
9. Every amateur scientist surely has a giant laboratory in a rural barn, right?
10. Is it me or does Daisy Edgar-Jones look like should could be Anne Hathaway's little sister?
11. We remember seeing the original Twister back in the summer 1996 and liking it a lot, but aside from the crazy ending where (overrated) Helen Hunt and (always underrated) Bill Paxton are inexplicably able to ride out a tornado by hanging on to a standpipe, we don't recall many details.  And, of course, also the flying cow.  Oh, and also the terrifying prologue where Helen's dad gets sucked out of the storm cellar.
12. As a kid, we visited a relative's farm in rural Texas many times that had a storm cellar.  Like something out of The Wizard of Oz, just this set of metal doors set into ground right in the middle of the yard with a little ventilation pipe sticking up.
13. Are there really meteorologists who can just look at the clouds and figure it all out?
14. Some online chatter about whether or Twisters should have featured a character from Twister to make it an official, traditional sequel.  Not necessary.  It's not like these movies are offering some complex narrative tapestry.  (The metal Dorothy gizmos from Twister are featured.)
15. In sum, if you're looking for a movie with lots of tornados causing lots of damage, this is that movie.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: Netflix's "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"

1. Historically, the film snob cinepile is us has avoided commenting on streaming movies.  The local multiplex is where "real" movies belong.  But we're making an exception here.  We get why Netflix would want this sequel, but we can't help but wonder what the box office might have been if it had gone into theaters this July 4 weekend.
2. We were probably too young (12) to see the original Beverly Hills Cop, which was a pretty hard R, despite the humor: bloody violence (the cold-blooded execution of Axel's buddy that kicks the whole movie off was particularly shocking to a young Cheese Fry), extreme profanity, and as a final kicker, a lengthy scene in a strip club.
3. In many ways, the filmmakers have created an 80s action comedy in 2024.  It's all stunts and fights and jokes and cool moments with the barest thread of a plot to string everything together.  They have our respect.
4. Eddie Murphy, of course, has effortless charm and presence.  What has he been doing with himself all these many years?  A quick look at IMDB tells us he's mostly been toiling in streaming titles aside from his work as Donkey in the Shrek movies.  His last theatrical movie may have been Tower Heist all the way back in 2011, which was a pretty good caper movie if you haven't seen it.
5. Aside from Bob Seger's "Shakedown" and Brigitte Neilsen, we have zero recollection of what happened in 1987's Beverly Hills Cop 2.
6. We really didn't fully understand all of the convoluted plot nonsense here with drug smuggling and cargo trucks and nefarious activity at dark, seedy shipping docks.  It's not an 80s cop movie without nefarious activity at dark, seedy shipping docks.  But the mechanics of the plot aren't really what's important in a movie like this.  Everyone wants the Macguffin SD card that will prove the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good.  How and why wasn't completely clear.  But we went with it.
7. Kevin Bacon is in 100% mustache-twirling villain mode.  It suits him.  This is no spoiler.  As soon as he shows up, you'll know he's the Big Bad.  This isn't a movie of subtlety.
8. It's not a Beverly Hills Cop movie unless Axel has to bullshit his way into some exclusive location.  Good stuff.
9. While we appreciate bringing back Billy Rosewood and John Taggart, the actors playing them show their age (Judge Reinhold is 67, John Ashton is 76) in a way that unexpectedly made us face our own mortality.
10. This movie didn't really require a dramatic throughline, but the business with Axel trying to reconcile with his very estranged daughter definitely helped add substance.  Bonus points for really making it seem like their split was Axel's fault.
11. We suppose it was inevitable to bring back Bronson Pinchot's Serge character.  We honestly could have done without.
12. We remember ever less about 1994's Beverly Hills Cop III aside from the fact that it for some reason ended in an amusement park.  Not sure we even saw it in a theater. 
13. It's almost distracting how many different ways the movie arranges and rearranges and orchestrates the famous "Axel F" theme. 
14. Gold star for a pretty solid - and brutal - Beverly Hills street shootout, but we have deduct points for staging the climax in a fancy mansion that is a totally ripoff of the original movie's ending.
15. Way, way more fun than we were expecting.

Tweet

Knee-jerk review: "A Quiet Place: Day One"

1. It's not exactly what the trailer sold. The question is whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
2. Rather than an apocalyptic sci-fi horror movie with chases and jump scares, which is what we were expecting (people-eating aliens attack Manhattan!), it's more of a moody character piece about two lost souls finding each other in a time of tragedy (a dying woman finds a reason to live!).  It's not bad for what it ends up being... but it's not the traditional horror movie audiences might be expecting.
3. Even so, there are effective sequences of what might happen if all of Manhattan had to be cut off from the rest of the world.  And the aliens do attack our human heroes more than once, so that box does get checked.
4. We've never encountered a cat that obedient or that interested in helping/paying attention to humans.
5. Djimon Hounsou is always fascinating , no matter what he does.  Apparently, he's reprising his voiceover role from the second movie.
6. We're just not sure if these monsters can sustain a franchise.  Characters try hard to be quiet, then a character makes a noise, then monsters attack.  Is that enough? 
7. The first movie, of course, was top-notch on every level.  A modern classic.
8. There's still something chilling about a New York City scene involving an explosion that covers everyone in white ash.
9. Whatever weirdness was happening in that construction site with the aliens and the eggs and whatnot, it's surely laying the groundwork for A Quiet Place: Week One.

10. Wikipedia tells us that Patsy's Pizza is a real place.  
11. Is the presence of a clickwheel iPod suggesting an early 2000s setting?  We're too lazy to work out the timeline of the original movie to estimate when the original attack was supposed to have happened.  Cool detail, though.

Tweet