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seanmichaelragan
Reviews
Late Night with the Devil (2023)
"Network" meets "Ghostwatch"
Fun to play "spot the influences" with this one. Starting off, the big one is Sid Lumet/Paddy Chayefsky's "Network;" if you haven't already seen that one, do yourself a favor and see it ASAP! Especially if you can manage to watch it right before you watch this. The Carmichael Haig character is clearly inspired by James Randi, and Christou is arguably Uri Geller. Lilly is Linda Blair in The Exorcist by way of the Branch Davidians. "The Grove," of course, is a real phenomenon--it's called "Bohemian Grove" and the still black-and-white photos featured in the flick are real. Scramble all that up with a healthy dose of "GhostWatch," and you've got a really great cocktail. Don't mean to suggest that this is not sufficiently original or anything like that. It's just super fun if you're a culture vulture to spot this stuff!
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
Does not live up to its premise
The source material here is so rich, but unfortunately it gets fumbled by hackneyed writing and bad taste. The crew of the Demeter behaves with astonishing stupidity, over and over again, for no conceivable reason other than that if they do not behave stupidly, they will escape and the movie will be over. It's all too formulaic, all too Hollywood, all too franchise. That said, it's still worth seeing because they at least manage to set up the survival drama artfully, even if its execution is frustratingly bad. Might benefit from a fan edit to to bring it closer to the movie it could and should have been.
Insidious (2010)
At first I was irritated...
...when "the Ghostbusters and the Poltergeist lady" showed up, because it seemed like such a screaming left turn in terms of tone. And I still think the abrupt comic relief was maybe just a little too much to ask of the audience's suspension of disbelief. But after seeing the whole movie I feel more inclined to applaud the bravery of these choices than to decry them for being unconventional. If filmmakers are going to make heavy demands on an audience's credulity, I vastly prefer that they err on the David Lynch of side of the line than the Michael Bay side.
The Ascent (2017)
An astounding achievement
I don't know if the rumors that this movie had a $20,000 budget are correct or not, but I did just today see an indiegogo campaign page that had raised something like $2,500, suggesting that in fact it was made on a shoestring budget. I know that the digital video revolution and streaming home entertainment have changed everything in terms of accessibility for indie film makers, but this movie really drove that point home for me in a way that no other ever has. I have watched many, many movies that literally cost a thousand times as much and enjoyed them a thousand times less. I wish Roger Ebert had lived to see it.
Also, I wanted to politely take issue with mitchellchristopherlong's quibble about the music playing while the detectives investigate the "Olivia" crime scene. I would argue that the music here serves an important dramatic function, specifically to make us see this scene (which we have seen so many times before in so many different crime shows and movies, inevitably via detectives who are jaded and cynical) with fresh eyes, as the authentic human tragedy that it really is. What the score here says is, "This is a different kind of movie. These are real cops who really see the victim. It's an awful thing to see and it hurts them every time, and they care." In fact, the dialogue literally tells us as much before they go in. "It's not like in the movies," Cardenas says to the reporter. So they're making an effort here to establish a more realistic emotional tone, which is one of the reasons why the left turn into supernatural horror that comes later is so effective.