seenathyland

[seenathyland]

Friday the 13th (1980) & Jason X (2002)

Seen: 13 June 2025

Summary: Friday the 13th: An unknown assailant kills off Camp Crystal Lake Counsellors one by one before the doomed camp's reopening. Jason X: After being frozen in cryo-stasis for 400 years, Jason revives on a space ship to terrorize the crew who claimed his body as plunder from a destroyed earth.

A double feature for Friday the 13th! I don't have much deep analysis of these movies, but the juxtaposition is stark, and I do have some thoughts.

My main thought about Friday the 13th on its own is that, for a genre notorious for sexually objectifying women, the person eroticized most by the camera of Friday the 13th is arguably Kevin Bacon. Not complaining.

(Surely this is something we can all agree on)

Apart from that, it's often the case, when a movie has transformative effects on a genre, that movie appears overhyped to later generations. I'm here to assure you that Friday the 13th is still enjoyable. It does the job as a horror movie, with a good mix of humour, tension-building, and abrupt violence. I don't often jump in my seat at horror movies, but I'm not too proud to admit that there was one moment in this movie that still 100% got me.

The unseen killer stalking the teens, the calm, private moments interrupted by violence, the isolated and seemingly peaceful scenery that turns sinister... it all works, then as now. The final act had some issues with fight choreography, logic, and tone, but it still coheres, and complaining about it feels like picking nits. Despite its apparent simplicity and frivolity, there's some depth to it, and some pathos, and an understanding of how to build tension. You can't ask for much more.

---

Moving from that to Jason X was a hell of a transition. Jason X opens in an underground Crystal Lake research facility, with Jason chained in the middle of a dark, featureless room. Within minutes, he's killed his guard and David Cronenberg and is on a spree in the facility that ends with him being lured into a cryo chamber and frozen while stabbing his captor through the metal of the cryo chamber.

The woman who froze him is awoken some 400 years later on a ship heading away from earth, having been scavenged from the wreckage of the planet and is dismayed that they also brought Jason along for the ride.

After watching the original, the viewer is immediately struck by the absurd encrustation of lore that grew in the 20 years that separate the movies. There are shady government agencies (plural) vying for control over Jason. There's a research facility just to study him. He has defined powers and attack patterns. We're far from the original.

In space, you get even further, vibes-wise. The protagonist is genre-savvy, the setting is industrial and medical, there are few calm, private moments to interrupt with abrupt violence, and Jason rarely sneaks up on the viewer, instead, he appears where he's expected to, on cue. I'd say they replaced tension with gore, but there wasn't even much gore.

Then again, it doesn't really invite a lot of scrutiny. It's happy just being fun, and if you're not looking for anything deeper, it was fun, in a cartoonish sort of way. It has some quippy dialogue that is delivered well, and the violence, if not shocking, is at least inventive (not Terrifier levels of inventiveness, but something).

If you treat it as a comedy, it does a lot better than as straight horror, but if you're not willing to turn your brain off and are looking for something that will actually scare you... well, I can see why many people I know see this as being a low point for the franchise.

[seenathyland]

Dogma (1999)

Seen: 10 June 2025

Summary: An abortion clinic worker sets off on a quest to stop two banished angels from reentering heaven and thus destroying the universe.

I don't want to say this movie hasn't aged well – it always was what it is – but it lives a much happier life in memory, where time can sand down the stiff performances, ungainly dialogue, inconsistent characterization, sublimated misogyny, and lazy mythology.

Which isn't to say the movie is all bad. For all its warts, it has moments of comedic brilliance. Carlin's casting as the cardinal is inspired and lends some oomph to the satire on the Church. Jason Lee's performance as Azrael is solid. Matt Damon punishing the board of directors of a golden calf themed restaurant chain for idolatry is hilarious and one of the most memorable things in the movie.

On its own terms, the movie is lampooning the way organized religions twist "good ideas" into smothering doctrines, so it's fine that the all the christian mythology doesn't really make sense or cohere – that stuff's not the point, it's just set dressing for the message that Jesus' teachings get perverted. On the other hand, the movie doesn't give us a good idea of what the non-oppressive Christian idea looks like. Instead, we get some vague ecumenicism, no real idea of what the movie thinks authentic faith is, and a gesture against ossifying ideas into beliefs.

It almost works if you squint, if only because the whole thing is done so sincerely. Despite the sarcasm and the dick and fart jokes, Dogma's sincere in its criticisms of what it sees as self-serving, hypocritical, harmful, and cynical. And its sincerity is made a bit easier to swallow by the fact the cinematography is simple. Miracles or big action moments happen with few exceptions off camera or over the course of a cut. Not leaning on the fantastical elements lets the dialogue gesture somewhat more effectively at the movie's core ideas.

But much of the humour comes from the fact that Kevin Smith still finds awe in the biological fact that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. The sexual politics of the movie, from jokes about picking up loose women at an abortion clinic, to the clinic worker's loss of self-worth when she finds out her ovaries ovarain't, to her impregnation by divine fiat at the end of the movie... well, it's all a bit unsettling. Kevin Smith's views on women seem to be much like his views on god (at least in 1999): they are silent, inscrutable, incapable of wrongdoing, owed worship, and preferably show up to clean up the mess once the boys have had their fun.

If you can overlook that, then the movie has some fun moments and a unique idea. But it's a lot to overlook, and I don't know if I can ignore the golgothan in the room.

[seenathyland]

Cabaret (1972)

Seen on: June 1, 2025. One-sentence summary: A struggling showgirl and her gay boyfriend live it up in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi Party.

Cards on the table, I love this movie, and I think it's incredibly effective at what it does. Are there musicals with better songs? Certainly. Are there movies that treat queer themes better? Yeah, sure. Are there historical dramas that can teach you more about pre-Nazi Germany? You bet.

But Cabaret has one big thing in its favour: Every single song in the Kit Kat Club is at once an attempt at denial and escapism, and an ironic critique of what goes on in the rest of the movie. Sally lives her life in denial of the changing world around her, both in her personal life and in the political climate, and the songs sung in the Kit Kat Club feed into that denial. But the audience is also implicated by the catchy tunes that put a happy spin on events. The dramatic irony that comes out of it is humourous to a point but also incredibly cutting.

"Wilkommen"? Put your feet up, be at ease, enjoy the show... except the whole movie is about the rise in xenophobic violence (against the Fremde, étranger, stranger). "Mein Herr" implies Sally won't change her roving ways (a tiger is a tiger not a lamb), where the liaison with Brian and Max will prove that wrong (it also foreshadows another person with a high "body count" who will cross Europe inch by inch, mile by mile, and man by man...only in the war sense, not the sex sense). "Maybe This Time" is Sally expressing hope for her doomed physical relationship with her gay boyfriend. "Money" is about money being the only thing that matters, but that's not the case for the (Jewish) Landauer heiress or Max, the aristocrat who flees to Argentina. "Two Ladies" is about a functioning ménage a trois, which is what Max, Brian, and Sally don't have. And "Cabaret" is Sally fully in denial, giving herself over to hedonism even as things further devolve in Germany and at the Kit Kat Club.

Even the German song that plays in the background ("Heiraten") is ironic — it's about how marriage is the solution to all life's problems... when Brian only proposes because Sally's pregnant, and even that doesn't stop her from getting an abortion (rightly, because that relationship would not have worked for either of them).

If the movie has a thesis, it's that the Nazis rose to power because people in Germany didn't sufficiently push back against the creeping rise in prejudice until it was too late. The songs at the Kit Kat and in the beer garden (especially "If You Could See Her" and "Tomorrow Belongs to Me") shock the audience out of complacency so we pay attention to what else is being politely ignored throughout the film. By the time Max flees to Argentina, Brian has had enough and gets into a fight with some Nazis, but it's not sufficient -- no one else is treating them as a serious threat.

It's impressive how well these songs act as ironic critiques given how frivolous they seem when taken out of context. My first contact with the title song was a Me First and the Gimme Gimmes cover when I was a kid, and I thought it was the dumbest song I'd ever heard. The tune was catchy, but the lyrics were insubstantial hedonism. Placed in context, that lack of substance is the point. The audience is the monster for seeking it out.

The movie is effective at dragging the viewer into the gap between what's sung and what's seen, and that ironic distance, which gets more in your face as the movie progresses, should inspire a certain amount of reflection. Not just about the historical subject matter, either. I find this movie especially powerful in the current political climate. Which is troubling, to say the least.

[seenathyland]

Hi,

I'm ███████████, and I use this blog to record my thoughts about movies that I've seen at my local, independent, single-screen movie theatre, the Hyland Cinema*, in London, Ontario.

Yes, I know Letterboxd exists, and no, I'm not interested.

*The Hyland is not affiliated with this blog, nor to they endorse it.

[seenathyland]

Friendship

Seen: May 23, 2025.

One-sentence summary: When Craig, a friendless corporate drone, is urged by his wife to hang out with their new neighbour, he's swept up in a whirlwind bromance that soon turns sour.

Friendship is essentially a 100-minute I Think You Should Leave sketch, cycling through anxiety, discomfort relentlessly. If this sounds like a good time to you, as it does to me, that should be all you need to know.

For those who still need convincing, let's get into it.

Craig (Tim Robinson) is a suburban dad who works for Universal Digital Innovation making apps and products "more habit-forming." He is living life by the rules. He's got a home, a wife (Kate Mara), a kid, and a void.

When Craig receives a package meant for his neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), he hand delivers it at his wife's urging, making sure Austin knows he "didn't open it because I know that's illegal." Austin, showing comfort and social grace, wins Craig over with his chill demeanour and cool phrases. "Stay curious," he says as Craig is on his way down the driveway. Craig will repeat this phrase and others, mimicking the object of his admiration in a way that is immediately cringe-inducing.

Austin invites Craig to see his band play, takes him foraging for mushrooms, and leads him through a maze of aqueducts to break in to city hall and smoke of the roof. Those are the highs, and they're tinged with anticipatory resignation on the audience's part, as we know it won't last. When will Craig fuck it up? What strange thing will he say or do that will irreparably damage this budding bromance?

Craig's obsessive infatuation with his new friend gets him into trouble when he goes for a group hang and can't follow the social norms of this group of dudes. He's enthralled and wants to be in on it, but he can't join in in their acapella singing, he can't open up because he has few interests and no deep interiority, and he doesn't realize it's a no-no to sucker punch his opponent in the garage boxing match the group was having. He's always walking eagerly to a doorway only to slam full-force into an unseen glass door keeping him from his destination.

Craig's mix of admiration for, envy of, and cathexis on Austin walks a comedic-horror line and is always on the verge of tipping into Single White Female territory. In fact, you can easily imagine Friendship as a Single White Female remake as seen from Jennifer Jason Leigh's character's perspective, especially once Austin has cut Craig out of his life.

(SWF trailer for the uninitiated)

Craig's relationship with his wife is cordial and superficial. We meet her in the opening scene, in group therapy, having been in cancer remission for a year. We learn that she's relieved to be in remission but terrified of it coming back, and we learn that she hasn't had an orgasm in a year. Craig, uncomfortable but upbeat, shares with the group that his year has been going awesome, and he's orgasming just fine. The dysfunction of the domestic space, signalled early by her lack of sexual satisfaction and their lack of communication, will spiral out over the course of the film, reflected in every other relationship Craig has.

It's heavily implied that Craig's wife is cuckolding him with her friend and ex, a fire fighter. She may even have pushed Craig to befriend Austin to give her more time for her affair. This makes the plot something of a failed attempt at an Elective Affinities (Goethe's book, structured around the chemical science of the time, involves a stable couple experiencing extreme, insuperable, tragic attraction for two lodgers they've taken in; this is modelled on a double displacement reaction).

Craig's wife, having had a clarifying near-death experience with her cancer, has all but decided to run off with her firefighter ex, but her husband is still attached, still bonded (to use the Elective Affinities chemical frame) to her. So, to break that bond and free her for her firefighter, she pawns him off on someone else. (Alternative reading: with their relationship nonfucntional and no emotional or erotic energy passing between Craig and his wife, Craig has to put that energy somewhere and it lands on Austin.)

But this displacement isn't a clean reaction. Austin rejects Craig, and he feels the need to lash out at both of them, first trying to replace the absent Austin with his wife and child (which could never work — if he could have that relationship with his wife or kid, he wouldn't have needed Austin). He takes his kid mushroom hunting (kid's not into it, Craig's violently ill). He takes his wife to explore the aqueducts, and in a shocking SPOILER moment, loses her. He loses her as in that's the end of the relationship, and he loses her in the sense of having to get the police involved in a rescue mission. This is the moment his wife decides on a clean break, Craig's incomplete transference of his emotional dependency be damned. If Goethe's Elective Affinities is a deterministic argument that a stable marriage needs to guard itself against the threat of passion to avoid tragedy, Friendship is a cautionary tale about investing too much in relationships that seem stable but lack reciprocal passion ("You all accepted me way too fast, you can't do that!").

Ultimately, Craig is motivated by the need to fit in despite his whole personality being only vaguely shaped like the hole he's supposed to fit in to. He relies on rules to know what to do, and in a new situation, when the rules are unclear, he's going to act weird. The friction he experiences in every social situation, where everyone else seems to know the rules, makes him lash out. Like many I Think You Should Leave characters before him, he exists at the point of conflict between explicit and implicit norms (e.g. "Jizz, like cum shot? You can say that because you said we can say whatever the hell we want." "Sure." "Or horse cock?" "Yeah, I guess. There are no rules about swearing." Reader, there were indeed rules about swearing).

Craig, despite being the agent of so much chaos, just wants people to be predictable, just wants everyone to follow the rules. As someone with a hard time knowing if I'm in on the joke, I deeply empathize with the tragedy of someone doing what they think they're supposed to do, following all the rules, and still being treated like an outcast – by his wife, by his coworkers, and by himself as he constantly finds himself failing to measure up.

Then he wrecks his wife's car trying to destroy Austin's most valued possession out of petty spite and rage, and the good will goes away.

Throughout the movie, I found myself gritting my teeth between the moments of relieving laughter. The person next to me, by the halfway mark, couldn't stop jimmying his leg as a tension release. More people covered their eyes watching this than at the last few horror movies I've been to. A woman in the row ahead of me found herself muttering "oh no" over and over. The movie, much like I Think You Should Leave, is incredibly effective at creating tension, cringe, anxiety, and discomfort, and at relieving those same feelings just a moment later than you'd wished they had.

Unlike I Think You Should Leave, you follow Craig around long enough that you build empathy for him, even if he's clearly in the wrong. His one-note, fish-out-of-water characterization is enriched and given depth by the repetition.

[seenathyland]

The Shrouds

Seen: May 3, 2025

One-sentence summary: When the graves are vandalized at his high-tech cemetery, GraveTech founder and restaurateur Karsh sets off on a journey to find the culprits — and to figure out the nature of the strange growth on his deceased wife's skeleton.

I love Vincent Cassel as an actor. I admire Guy Pearce. I would set myself on fire for David Cronenberg. So perhaps my expectations were too high walking into the theatre for this one.

The film follows Karsh, the CEO of GraveTech, a company that makes shrouds that provide live, 3D images of a deceased person's body via an app that pairs with a screen on the physical grave site. Karsh is grieving for his wife, dead now four years, and is trying, however begrudgingly, to get back into dating. The movie begins with Karsh on a blind date at the restaurant he co-owns, which happens to be on the site of the GraveTech cemetery. Karsh demonstrates the GraveTech app to his date, showing her his dead wife's corpse, to his date's polite disgust. He then goes to decompress by talking about it with his dead wife's identical twin sister (Diane Kruger).

Karsh has recurring dreams of his deceased wife. In them, he is in their bed, and she is either returning or heading off to see her cancer doctor. Each time, there's less of her. A mastectomy, a hip replacement, an amputation to remove her ulna, affected by the cancer. (The visual effects in these scenes leave something to be desired. Something about the smoothness of it all, the cleanliness, renders them as much unconvincing as uncanny.) Karsh resents this situation not because his wife is in pain, dying, but because he feels the doctors are taking her from him piece by piece. It's a possessive, fleshy idea of love, base, carnal, and jealous.

The themes so far are obvious: the stickiness of grief, how obsessive coping mechanisms can feel like they're helping but only dig you deeper into your problems, voyeurism and technology, the destructiveness of jealous love. This, an obsessive grief, deeply felt, and rooted in the body is the core of the film, and where it's at its strongest. I can't relate to that reaction to loss, but I suspect that those who do will find this aspect of the film deeply satisfying.

Added to this is a paranoid mystery narrative, as the GraveTech cemetery is vandalized, and it's an open question as to who did the deed. Was it the Chinese (eyeroll — always with the Chinese), or perhaps corporate espionage, or an environmental group out of Iceland? The only person who can help is Maury (Guy Pearce), a tech/security guru. He's also the ex-husband of Karsh's dead wife's sister, both of whom seem to be clinically paranoid.

Their paranoia, about doctors' plots and state actors and covert surveillance, suffuses this suspense/thriller plot line, though ultimately, there isn't much suspense, as reveals just sort of happen without any narrative action. Cronenberg doesn't seem very interested in the suspense elements of the movie, and it all resolves with plots seemingly turning out to be true — reveals that would feel unearned if they elicited any feeling at all.

It's this half-assed suspense plot ��� more than the overwrought dialogue, more than the unrelatably objectifying and jealous Karsh, more than the melodrama — that made this movie feel longer than its two-hour runtime.

[seenathyland]

Secret Mall Apartment

Seen: May 11, 2025

Summary: When the man paved over some city blocks to build a mall, 8 artists decided to reclaim part of the mall for themselves. They created an apartment inside the bowels of the mall, in a forgotten corner used for storage during construction, and for 4 years lived there for days at a time. This documentary tells you all about it 17 years later.

The title tells you a lot about this documentary. It tells the story of 8 friends who, for 4 years, kept an apartment in an unused space in the bowels of a mall in Providence, Rhode Island. Over the 4 years, the friends documented their daily lives in the mall, their close calls with Security, and the construction and decoration they did to make the place feel like home.

It was an incredibly fun, utterly charming, sometimes surprising movie, but I think my main takeaway is how bad artists are at talking about art. The documentary is not going to give you a clear, authoritative statement about whether the apartment is art, or what that art piece might mean. You get a bunch of statements about it, sometimes conflicting, sometimes not (some of the conflicting ones from the same person). A lot of what you get is topics rather than statements (one guy interviewed lists, "it talks about capitalism, it talks about gentrification, it talks about..." without ever saying what it might have to say on these topics). I like ideas, and I can think of a number of different things this could mean, but I want to know more about what the artists were trying to say (if anything). Regardless, it compels me.

On its face, it's a quirky caper documentary – and there is that element to it – but it's also a heartfelt nostalgia piece for '90s/'00s Providence, a vindication of public art, a critique of gentrification, and a character study of a very particular kind of art dude (unspoken throughout is the gender dynamic of this domestic space, though one can make some unkind inferences). You see the group smuggling building materials into the mall, moving furniture up an impossibly steep stairwell, and brazenly going in and out of emergency exits like they owned the place. You also see marital disputes, their big plans for the space, the other art projects they thought up using the apartment as a staging area, and their bright-eyed youthful optimism for their art, their world, and their friendship.

We primarily follow the ringleader, Michael Townsend, a Providence artist and teacher who works with sick children making tape murals (think temporary graffiti) when he's not pursuing his other projects (a secret sculpture installation in an inaccessible area underneath the train tracks, a mural in OKC, a memorial project for 9/11 victims that involved doing tape outlines representing each person killed in the attacks; big projects, often public, often illicit). Michael is a charming, well-spoken, idiosyncratic reformed crust punk, who has the kind of charisma, motivation, and self-possession that would suit a cult leader well. He seems to draw people in, get them excited about his ideas and projects, and draw them along with him in their shared enthusiasm.

It's lovely, seeing the footage they created in the '90s, a huge low-res square of digital video that immediately kicked me in the chest and transported me back 20 years. The camaraderie in those videos makes it all the more apparent that the group has drifted apart, as friend groups are wont to do over 17 years. But one wonders if there's more to it than just drift – the film doesn't do the expected, almost pro forma big reunion. Maybe that's not surprising, given that Michael and one of the other artists have since divorced, but I was still holding out hope for it. Instead, you get them doing separate walkthroughs of a recreation of the apartment, and a special surprise at the end. But I would have liked to see the whole group back together, if only to have them compare their mature understandings of the secret mall apartment with each other's.

That I really wanted this reunion is just an indication of how charming Michael and the other artists are in their talking head interviews with the documentary team. For the most part, these people seem to have grown up and moved into careers in the arts, and they're looking back at the secret apartment wistfully, nostalgically, maybe a bit astonished at their own youthful gall. You do get the impression that Michael might not have moved on too far from where he was in the secret apartment days. He seems content, but is still doing much the same kind of thing for a living (a joke is made of him sending his girlfriend a picture of his bank account at $0.41 -- nothing wrong with that on its own, but you get the impression of arrested development).

This documentary opens up a world, one where the developers behind malls can tear through your city to erect their behemoth (and not even put any entrances facing your side of town), but it also opens up a counterworld to that, where communities resist by making the developed spaces their own.

The message of the secret mall apartment, I think, is that no matter what capital does, no matter who runs roughshod over your community, no matter what they take from you, we will make a space where we can live.

[seenathyland]

The Return

Seen: May 8, 2025

One-sentence summary: Odysseus returns to Ithaca after 20 years, ragged and scarred emotionally and physically, unsure of what kind of welcome awaits him.

What gets me is that this movie will fly under the radar basically unseen unless, somehow, it gets paired up as the Deep Impact to Nolan's Odyssey's Armageddon (or the Antz to its A Bug's Life). But it probably came out too early to ride that wave, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Return has two astonishing performances from Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. Fienne's Odysseus comes back to Ithaca a broken man, half-starved, scarred, "tanned" more in the sense of leather than of suntan, unrecognizable, and alone. There's no conniving trickery left in Fiennes' Odysseus. The man of many turns has seen that all the gifts Athena has given him are poison, leading to death and ruin for all who oppose him, nor does he gain from them, beyond living to make fools of more foes.

He's tired. The last 20 years of his life, 10 in the Trojan War, 10 on his way back, have wrung the life out of him and left him a complicated knot of wiry muscle and trauma, honed for one purpose: to kill, not to live or to rule.

He feels worthless. The songs people sing of his victory in Troy are glorifying and compounding his shame. His trickery made possible the sacking of Troy, the despoiling of its women, the murder of its men, the wreck of its wealth. Troy could not be held; it could only be sacked, Odysseus tells some slaves around the fire, who have mistaken him for a beggar and taken him in temporarily.

Fiennes is amazing in this role. He plays it with sufficient subtlety and depth, this old, traumatized warrior coming back home unsure if there's a life here for him now that he's done fighting (if he can ever be done fighting). This is a foil in every way to the unthinkingly violent youthful suitors on the one hand, and the rich, effete older suitors on the other. These suitors are a blight on the island, a sign of a kingdom without its king, where no proper order has been implemented, in part because Queen Penelope won't compromise her fidelity to her husband.

Penelope, too, is played with subtlety and grace, by Juliette Binoche. Not just a loyal and faithful wife, she's played with a seething rage just underneath the surface. A rage at the world that stole her husband, at the men who would marry her for her wealth and kingdom, at the husband who would abandon her and her son, and at her son who hasn't lived up to his father's name.

Penelope weaves a shroud by day, promising that when it is finished, she'll choose a new husband. Of course, by night, she undoes her work, postponing the choice (though she's weaving on what looks like an almost modern treadle floor loom instead of a standing warp weighted loom, which would be like if Odysseus crashed his Sea-Doo to wind up beached on Ithaca. But if that's my only complaint, it speaks well of the rest of the movie). She connives and politics as much as she can, giving this Penelope more agency than many other tellings of this story.

It's a quiet, introspective film punctuated with a few abrupt shifts to violence that end just as quickly. Violence isn't glorified. Odysseus tries to avoid it as much as he can, and the young suitors commit it unthinkingly, but neither sees it as a path to honor, and the film doesn't linger on it or sensationalize it.

The most interesting character choices are those of Penelope and Odysseus and how they conceive of his return. It's not immediately clear, when Odysseus comes to Penelope in the guise of a beggar, if she recognizes him and simply hasn't decided if she wants him back, or if she has failed to recognize him at all. They meet in the dark, and he won't come too close to the fire. Odysseus is also unsure if there's a place for him in Ithaca, now that he's been gone for 20 years and broken by his own deeds. Over the course of the film, they feel each other out, and the relationship, once he's recognized, is raw. Just as violence isn't glorified as the golden road to honor, love isn't glorified as a panacea.