The Lost Boys. Joel Schumacher. 1987. ⚃

Does anybody remember reading an article in… like… The NME? In the late 80s? I remember the article was called something like “American Gothic”, and it was about these new, exciting movies coming from the US. It was movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, and this one. I think? It’s a long time ago.

And when I read it I thought “yes! that’s such a thing!” Because I’d been watching these movies (on VHS) and I thought, too, that there was a connecting tissue, somehow, between these movies… something fresh, something punk, something exciting was happening in genre film in the US at the time.

I’ve tried to google the article, but that’s impossible, of course — nothing that happened before 1997 exists. Does anybody have a copy of that article? Because I bought the movies in question on blu-ray the other week, because I can’t really remember them at all now. Are they any good? And I wondered whether they mentioned any other films in that article…

Anyway!

Let’s start with The Lost Boys, because Schumacher died the other day.

[half an hour passes]

I had totally blanked on how much this was a mid-80s horror movie. It’s got that… look… where you can immediately tell. It’s not that far removed from, say, big-budget movies like Gremlins, really…

But I did remember correctly: It’s fresh and cheeky. And punk. Well, there’s a lot of punks in the background of the shots, at least.

It’s no immediately clear what’s even going on, even if the comic book geeks are talking about vampires…

I mean, even why the lost boys even want Michael is pretty obscure.

[half an hour passes]

As usual, I love Dianne Wiest… but it’s like she’s in a different movie from the other actors, and I’m not quite sure what they are going for. I can imagine Schumacher standing just off-camera shouting “BROADER! BIGGER! FUNNIER!” to the actors, because they’re totally not aiming for anything resembling naturalistic.

On the other hand, that does reflect the plot — her character is the one in the dark, while the others are living it up.

[the end]

Well, that wasn’t the movie I was expecting at all: It really is Gremlins, but with vampires instead.

But I like it. It’s fun.

The Fate of the Furious. F. Gary Gray. 2017. ⚂

Oh, this is directed by the guy that did Men in Black: International? That wasn’t… very good? I mean, it wasn’t a disaster or anything, but…

[ten minutes pass]

Wow, that’s how you do an action movie opening. Driving around, explosions, evil bad guys…

[ten minutes pass]

Well, in the previous episodes I mean movies, there’s often at least been a hand-wavey thing about the heroes not killing an excessive amount of innocent bystanders… like in the… hm… one of them… where they explained that it was OK to kill all those cops because they were corrupt. But here they’re just blowing up an entire city? And using a wrecking ball on the cops? I mean, that’s a fun gag, but are these people complete psychopaths now?

[half an hour passes]

There’s so much… plot… in here. The previous ones were fun heist movies, and that really worked. This one has so much going on, and very little of it is entertaining. People standing around, talking about things that aren’t very interesting. Dom’s a father now, and the kid has been kidnapped and OH GOD MAKE IT STOP

[ten minutes pass]

HELEN FUCKING MIRREN!!!1!

What budget did this have, anyway?

Oh, right…

Nice gross. It also explains why these movies are happening mostly outside of the US, I guess…

Anyway, it’s also disappointing how much they rely on CGI here. Much of the fun of the previous movies had been the excitement of the driving… but when it’s just a swarm of badly-animated CGI cars, it’s just… meh…

Practical stunts are always more fun to watch than CGI.

[the end]

The fun scenes in here are so much fun that they almost overshadow the hours and hours and hours of sheer tedium. But only almost.

The scenes with Mirren and Statham are totally cool, and most of the other characters get to have a scene or two where they do their bits, and that’s all good. But the movie, as a whole, just doesn’t work. I mean, even cutting out half an hour of boring exposition wouldn’t really have helped that much, I think? It’s just a plot that doesn’t quite work.

And man, all that CGI fire… I guess they thought they had CGI fire perfected in 2017, but it’s mostly “oh, there’s more CGI fire” now. Everything’s on fire, because they could just drop some CGI in, and that just cheapens it…

But the twist (you know the one) had me laughing out loud, because I just didn’t expect it.

Furious7. James Wan. 2015. ⚄

Oh, this isn’t by Lin? Oh right, he had to sit this one out while doing Star Wars Beyond…

It continues on from the sixth movie very closely, so I wonder whether he was involved anyway.

[an hour passes]

OH MY GOD. This may be the best action movie ever! It’s so much fun, and it’s so funny! The action scenes are just unbelievable! Like they should be! It’s like “oh yeah… those Bond movies were much too realistic…”

But it’s not just that the action is so incredible, but it’s all so… good-natured. It goes from one “whoo!” scene to a “yay!” scene to an “ooooh!” scene. I love it.

Best movie in the franchise, I think. Well, at least so far; still an hour to fuck things up.

[the end]

Watching this was so enjoyable. It’s one action scene after another, and they’re all so audacious that it makes me laugh out loud at the silliness of it all. There’s so much heart here, and it’s so charming… And of course, there’s cars hitting helicopters.

CARS HITTING HELICOPTERS.

I think this may be the best action movie ever.

But it’s not perfect. There’s, like, five minutes of boring exposition that could have been dropped. But it’s pretty darn near perfection. I mean, for its genre.