Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #6: “Avenue of the Giants”

A short-haired Elsie Fisher and a slightly hunched, shabbily dressed Stephen Lang converse in the woods.

With no official site and no trailer online, this is the only image available for this film on any entertainment hub that’s covered its film-festival tour.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

We’ve now gone beyond “at least five” into festival overtime. Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond our control at our fifth feature presentation, we wound up with a free pass for one more film. I’d already driven 150 miles this week around central Indiana for cinema’s sake — in the midst of a normal 40-hour work week, mind you — and was burned out on driving, but Heartland also had dozens of new films available for virtual rental at home (our first film was among those). After digging through the entire list, I found a drama in Anne’s historical-aficionado wheelhouse of World War II in general and the European theater in particular.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #5: “A Disturbance in the Force”

Cartoonish poster for the documentary at hand, with various "Star Wars Holiday Special" stars drawn in a pyramid.

NEVER FORGET.

Longtime MCC readers may not be surprised to find this very special miniseries found a path toward Star Wars. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Unfortunately this also led to the worst theatrical experience we’ve had in years. For the record, this was not the filmmakers’ fault, but this entry was unwritable without being candid about that part.

Speaking of unfortunate viewing experiences…

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #4: “Monster”

A flabbergasted Japanese mother sits across from two unhelpful teachers. Her subtitles: "There was no misunderstanding!"

“Parent v. School System” is sadly a conflict that transcends international boundaries.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

Thanks to Heartland I’ve finally seen my very first film by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. Years ago Shoplifters was in my Hulu queue for about ten minutes before it disappeared, because Hulu isn’t the best service for movies. My son saw that one as well as Nobody Knows and After Life, so he had an advantage over me as we watched Kore-eda’s latest drama, Monster. I have no basis for comparison, but my son thinks Monster might be his favorite Kore-eda film yet.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #3: “Fancy Dance”

Lily Gladstone's lesbian aunt character Jax, curtly talking to an offscreen relative/policeman. The room is poorly lit, lots of beige.

If you can only see one Lily Gladstone film this year, you now have two choices if someone hurries up and distributes this one.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

Erica Tremblay’s name rang a bell when I saw it on Heartland’s website: she’s served as Executive Story Editor for AMC’s Dark Winds (based on Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee novels) and Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs, and wrote one of the latter’s funniest episodes, “Decolonativization”. One of those shows is great so far; the other is among Best TV Ever and deserves its own MCC entry sometime. Hopefully they lead the way for more Native/indigenous stories to be told across screens great and small. She’s now directed her first feature film, Fancy Dance, which she also produced and co-wrote (with Miciana Alise) and which opened at Sundance earlier this year. Heartland’s artistic director who introduced our showing mentioned Tremblay has had several shorts previously at this festival. I’m kicking myself for having missed out, more so after watching her heartfelt, heartbreaking results here.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #2: “The Promised Land”

Period-piece farmer Mads Mikkelsen standing over a burning field at night.

What if Little House on the Prairie but Charles Ingalls is a retired badass?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

During his downtime between playing villains in four out of every five Hollywood films, Mads Mikkelsen enjoys the occasional smaller production back home in Denmark. Last time we saw him at this level was for the Oscar-winning Another Round, in which he played a gregarious family man who turns frivolously alcoholic with his buddies For Science, only to have things spiral out of control. He starts in a completely opposite corner yet descends into chaos once more in his latest film, a historical farming drama called The Promised Land that one could argue is a Western with smaller hats.

(Minor housekeeping trivia: The Promised Land is no relation to Promised Land, the 2012 Gus Van Sant film that starred Matt Damon and John Krasinski, which I totally forgot existed. It’s blander than the original Danish title, Bastarden. I get why the renaming, but they could’ve kept brainstorming.)

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #1: “Jailhouse to Milhouse”

Pamela Hayden smiling while holding on to a large cardboard standee of Milhouse, who looks confused as usual.

“My mom thinks I’m cool!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. Last year’s big names included future Oscar nominees The Whale and The Banshees of Inisherin; past years featured films that I later ended up catching during their scheduled theatrical runs, such as Room and Lion.

For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. We attended our first Heartland showing in 2011 (a tale I’ve yet to share here on MCC), attended Heartland’s sneak preview nights in 2015 and in 2016, and attended merely one of last year’s showings…which turned out to be a film that’d already been on Hulu for months. We’ve always been afraid of overcommitting during our usually busy Octobers, but we knew we could do better than that.

This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana. Anne volunteered to accompany me to two of them; my son is on board for one; still another will be a solo outing to a theater 35 miles from home that I’d never heard of, let alone knew existed. Lord willing and if my family will let me, I’m hoping to write about each experience as quickly as I can throughout the week, hopefully in shorter entries than my usual overlong amateur film essays with anti-casual word counts. We’ll see how that goes.

Our first HIFF entrant was screened at home, apropos of its subject and how we’ve known of her talents for decades. But we never knew her story till now.

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I for One Welcome Our New “Barbie” Overlords

Margot Robbie as a happy Barbie in a  cute pink hat, driving away from Barbie-Land while singing along to Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" on the soundtrack.

It’s Stereotypical Barbie With New Hat! On sale now!

One of the cool benefits of having your “man card” revoked (a hoary internet phrase that hasn’t amused in years) is you’re under no macho mandate to throw a grizzly-postured tantrum whenever someone in the world dares tell a gynocentric story in which males just might have a lesson to learn about not making manhood their religion and sole personality trait. Mine was plucked away decades ago without a fight and without regrets, which might explain my uncanny superpower to make any dudes-only group disband merely by joining them. I’ll concede masculinity has some uses, such as in my household roles of Chief Spider Hunter and Crabgrass Appeasement Negotiator, but what few signs of ostensible manliness I ever bother to exhibit aren’t really a source of chest-thumping pride, nor are they a weak spot with fontanelle sensitivity whenever they’re justly and sharply skewered.

From over here in the wallflower seats in the corner, the Barbie movie was 98% brilliant. I’d enjoyed director/co-writer Greta Gerwig’s last two films, Little Women and Lady Bird, as well as the insightful Frances Ha, which she starred in and co-wrote with her partner/director Noah Baumbach, who in turn co-wrote Barbie. I hoped they’d be up to the challenge of crafting a big-budget battle-of-the-sexes satire that also had to double as a feature-length ad for a major corporation’s massive merch-line, after Jon M. Chu failed to achieve this dream of mine with Hasbro’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

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“Oppenheimer”: In the Shadow of Manhattan

Cillian Murphy with hair slicked back, sitting with a lit cigarette and staring wide-eyed into the distance as an offscreen General Matt Damon asks important questions that annoy him.

J. Robert Oppenheimer lit up more cigarettes than nuclear bombs. Believe it or not!

It’s 1986. DC Comics has begun publishing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in monthly installments. It is one of several contemporaneous works that change the medium, for better or worse. Its most powerful character is Jonathan Osterman, a nuclear physicist turned by a freak laboratory accident into the nigh-omniscient, nigh-omnipotent Dr. Manhattan fourteen years after the end of World War II. Although the word “quantum” is never used in-story, his origin and intimidating powers are directly tied to the Atomic Age and the emergence of quantum mechanics. The American government employs him as an ultimate weapon, wins the Vietnam War, and changes the world and its timeline, for better or worse. As extrapolated by Moore as a sort of offshoot from quantum superposition, Dr. Manhattan perceives everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen to him all at once, rather than in chronological order, within/outside of each and every second that ticks by for us mortals (up to a pivotal event in the concluding chapters):

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

It’s 2023. Oppenheimer is the new film from Christopher Nolan, the celebrated writer/director whose works often play with time-shifting and experiment with our perceptions in their storytelling construction, for better or worse. Tenuous connections stretch between the leapfrogging reminiscence of the fictional Dr. Manhattan and Nolan’s narrative of the real-life Mr. Manhattan Project himself, theoretical physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Much as Dr. Manhattan’s life is portrayed as a series of flashbacks that are out-of-order to us mortals yet interlock conceptually by the end, Nolan likewise eschews the standard Hollywood biopic formula (this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then The End), with a slightly modified form of the other standard Hollywood biopic formula (ordinate flashbacks within an end-of-timeline story frame) to chronicle the lives of the masters of the atom from interwoven character arcs. Certain images recur from one era to the next for foreshadowing and epiphanies and so forth. Ultimately the audience needs to experience the whole tapestry before they can truly see each component for what it is.

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“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”: IMF MVP + BFFs v. AWOL AI

Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson sharing a warm, quiet moment on a Rome rooftop with some basilica in the background.

Do you know how hard it is to find a decent pic of Ethan Hunt holding still?

You’ve seen the headlines. You’ve watched Tom Cruise all but jumping on his couch about it for years. You’ve seen the extended trailer that already spoiled the Scariest Motorcycle Jump by an A-List Actor Ever. At long last, Ethan Hunt is back! The series that tops itself every time is back with a sequel that took an entire pandemic to make!

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“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”: One Last Whip-Crack for Us Gen-X Whippersnappers

Angry Indiana Jones standing indoors and brandishing his whip.

Funny how Disney’s official movie site gallery has more pics of Imaginary Plastic Surgery Indy than of Keepin’-It-Real AARP Indy.

Like most of Generation X, I grew up with Indiana Jones as a surrogate uncle. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at the drive-in when I was 9, possibly the perfect venue for a thrill-ride throwback to the Saturday-matinee serial era that outraced every action flick ever made up to 1981 and for decades after. I’d just turned 12 when I was awed by the breakneck speed-runs of Temple of Doom at an indoor theater (the perfect age to fall for it), though my grandma walked out at the heartectomy scene and waited in the lobby for the rest of the runtime. I was 19 when our family skipped Last Crusade in theaters, but I bought it years later when one of McDonald’s bizarre ’90s merch experiments had them selling the entire trilogy on VHS alongside their Extra Value Meals. I finally got to watch Our Hero reunite with his dad as I reunited with Fun Uncle Indy.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After “The Flash” End Credits

Michael Keaton as Batman in the Bat-Cave, with his costume on except no mask.

…a.k.a. Batman III, as far as Warner Bros. and nostalgia addicts are concerned.

Weaksauce disclaimers up front. Your Mileage May Vary.

Sometimes we spend money on things you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s for stuff we don’t endorse, like that time we paid to see the largest inherently racist monument in America, or when we watched House of Cards during the pandemic. Sure, we’re happier when our expenditures are a wholehearted vote for the parties responsible for the thing we’re about to experience or consume, but sometimes we pay the price because we want to see the flawed thing for ourselves and formulate our own impressions, for better or worse or worst. Any personal reservations and/or revulsion are then taken into consideration when expressing our opinions and/or regrets in the final analysis. Interpret it however you will, but we define it however we will.

In a sense, we compromised: my son and I went to see the latest superhero film starring an actor accused of felonies, misdemeanors, and misdeeds ranging on a scale from obnoxious to irresponsibly gross. Anne stayed home, enjoyed a free afternoon, and gave me permission to share all the spoilers later at dinner, from the funniest to the stupidest.

The TL; DR version: The Flash was better than I expected, which is more than I can say for some of this year’s other sequels. That’s neither a justification nor an unconditional thumbs-up for it. Onward we press with the usual wordiness.

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My Ten Favorite Spider-People in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”

Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen sitting upside-down on the underside of a ledge, looking out on New York City.

Two Spider-friends chatting about their tangled webs.

It isn’t writer’s block exactly, but jovially verbose movie entries that amount to “WOWIE WOW WOW WOW 11/10 no complaints!!!!1!!” take far longer to coalesce in my head than irritated MST3K-ish nitpickery of a more disappointing flick. Hence why Transformers: Rise of the Beasts got an entry before Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse did, even though I saw the latter first on opening weekend. Obviously I can’t simply not write about it, but it took days to turn “WOWIE WOW WOW WOW 11/10 no complaints!!!!1!!” into any kind of fun writing exercise. Hence: pointless listicle time! I haven’t churned out one of those in months.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” End Credits

A cardboard standee at the theater with the good-guy Transformers lined up, animals on one side and cars on the other.

Action figures sold separately. May be a mental choking hazard for viewers over 12.

The shiny, tinny, explodo-driven popcorn-drek series that chewed up and spat out the dignity of Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Glynn Turman from The Wire, and Stanley Tucci’s Merlin is back! And it’s more toyetic than ever! Gone are the lumbering, turgid, 100,000-piece jigsaw monstrosities that didn’t resemble the cartoons of our youth, by which I mean Michael Bay’s poorly “written”, billions-earning quintilogy and its intricately hollow CG animated stars. The robot designs are simpler, the thin characters are thinner, the exotic location shoots are fewer, the camera’s male gaze is less lecherous, and the filmmakers remembered how Hasbro’s former key demographic — i.e., The Children — used to think these things were cool. That faint marketing memory lives on through director Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II, the least ambitious and pretty-okayest of that great trilogy) and five (!) credited writers, who, along two multinational companies’ worth of corporate overlords, have decided our alien car-robot heroes should make some new alien animal-robot friends!

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” End Credits

Rocket mid-speech, surrounded by his friends' legs.

Guardians Origins: Rocket. This time, it’s fursonal.

Just as the Fast and the Furious saga proudly demonstrates found-family pop-culture franchises aren’t just for whitebread folks, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy series has demonstrated they aren’t just for humans, either. Whether you’re a little-league space hero, the daughter of a genocidal madman, a 1950s kaiju, a funny-animal gunslinger, or some other kind of ill-formed misfit who’d never be invited to apply for Avengers membership (okay, maybe the Great Lakes Avengers), these losers gave us hope that we too might find the right motley crew out there who needs us on their team so we can all become all-stars with our own action figures.

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The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 10 of 10: An Epilogue of Film, Fowl, and Facades

Several dishes on a wood table in a hardwood restaurant. Meal details are described later in the entry.

Welcome to The Eagle! That’s the name of the restaurant, not the main dish.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do…

Thanks very much to those of you who’ve followed along with my eight previous, glacially posted galleries that comprised our October journey around Indiana’s original state capital Corydon. Whereas the first chapter was a prologue about a donut shop we tried along the way, so too is our epilogue connected to the main storyline only by our timing and our desire to add still more festivities to Anne’s autumn birthday weekend. As a capper, we spent Saturday on Massachusetts Avenue, downtown Indianapolis’ premier upscale restaurant hub. On one end of Mass Ave we planned for lunch; on the other, a film for a special occasion. All told, the meal was better than the movie.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” End Credits

The four main cast members in an arena, gazing upon the surrounding audience and awaiting potential doom.

The film begs a variation on Gene Siskel’s old rule of thumb: is this film more entertaining than, say, watching the same four actors at a table playing a D&D session?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, served for years as our neighborhood’s Dungeon Master and owned all the Advanced D&D hardcover manuals published through 1986, by which time all my friends had moved far away, found other pursuits, or quit me specifically. Our group breakup was slow in coming, and the final session ended acrimoniously through no small fault of my own. Eventually my subscriptions to Dragon and Dungeon Adventures magazines expired, and I stopped keep track of updates and new products in the world of TSR’s classic tabletop RPG, unless you count the handful of time my wife and I attended Gen Con and were surrounded by the company’s products. One silver lining: my departure left me with no reason to see the misbegotten 2000 film that took its name in vain.

My attention wandered so far away from the game that years passed before I was aware TSR had been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, the Magic: the Gathering masterminds. Still more years passed before I learned they in turn had been gobbled up by Hasbro, thus moving D&D under the same corporate umbrella as G.I. Joe, the Transformers, and, arguably the source of their company’s best film to date, Clue. I likewise had virtually no emotional investment when trailers began popping up for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Once it was released and word-of-mouth picked up momentum, then I gave it a chance. I entered the theater, I mentally rolled a d20 saving throw vs. Awfulness, and the imaginary die blessedly came up a 19.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “John Wick: Chapter 4” End Credits

Keanu Reeves' John Wick sits outdoors at a shiny table with two rows of glass cards in front of him, and two identical rows in front of the unseen opponent seated across from him. Off to one side, Ian McShane in sunglasses looks sternly at the game. Blurry doves fly by in the background.

Our Hero prepares for an expensive game of Concentration.

Previously on John Wick: the third chapter (the one with the vestigial subtitle) ended with Our Hero Keanu Reeves mostly dead yet slightly alive (again/still/more than ever), the Continental’s sacred hotel-for-rich-assassins charter revoked, and the audience left wondering how director Chad Stahelski and his Grand Stunt Army of the Republic could possibly top all that, which of course they’d have to because they ended on a cliffhanger as if to triple-dog-dare themselves into doing it all again. Hence John Wick: Chapter 4.

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“Creed III”: Fighting It Out vs. Working It Out

A giant CREED III theater standee with Jordan and Majors' characters sitting in their corners, glowering, ready to fight.

Killmonger v. Kang. Two villains walk in, one champion walks out.

Previously on Creed: Michael B. Jordan from The Wire IS boxing champion Adonis “Donnie” Creed, the lost son of Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed, himself a champ as well as a frequent opponent to, and later best friend of, immortal contenduh Rocky Balboa. In the first Creed, Adonis emerged from his childhood turbulence to seek purpose in the same sport that defined his dad’s life, directed by the great Ryan Coogler (who then moved on to Wakanda). In Creed II Our Hero took on Viktor Drago, son of Ivan Drago, the wrecking machine that murdered Apollo, as overseen by director Steven Caple, Jr. (whose follow-up will be the next Transformers flick). Old man Stallone hung around to show the kid the ropes and assure folks all this was canonical in the Rocky Cinematic Universe.

Next up is Creed III, the RCU’s ninth entry. Rocky is out of the picture and Jordan has taken over the director’s chair, but he’s far from alone in prepping for his next title bout.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Scream VI” End Credits

Most of the cast of "Scream 6" looking straight at us viewers.

I will not drop spoiler hints in the caption, I will not drop spoiler hints in the caption, I will not drop spoiler hints in the caption…

Previously on Scream: I’d given up on Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s meta-horror series after the trilogy-capping Scream 3 sunk into chaotic, anti-postmodern soap-operatics back in 2000 sans creator Williamson. In recent times the horror genre in general hasn’t been a frequent go-to for me, but in 2022 curiosity about the fourth and fifth ones got to me when they showed up in my streaming subscriptions and outshone by a wide margin. Thoughts regarding the fifth one:

The meta-META-prologue neatly and hilariously resets the stage and tone, the stabby-stabby is not always kind toward those we assumed were untouchable, and once again the killers’ motives are perceptively Too Real. My chief nitpick is one character’s sad attempt to make the term “requel” happen. STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. A “requel” is a just a sequel that had to wait a decade or more for another generation to pick up the baton and sprint with it. Now that Craven is no longer with us, successor directors Matt Bellinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are more than poised to hold that baton high and poke some eyes out with it.

The same directing duo returns with Scream VI, another round of dancing with one or more devils in the pale moonlight, who may or may not have favorite scary movies. The scenery is all-new and the knives are sharper than ever, but the meta-commentary that makes or breaks every episode’s whodunit solution could’ve used a few more strokes against the whetstone.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During AND After the “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” End Credits

Zachary Levi as Shazam, sitting at a park table and looking scared and confused while Helen Mirren (offscreen) says menacing things.

“Wait, what do you mean THEY FIRED HENRY CAVILL?”

Previously on Shazam!: TV’s Chuck, a.k.a. Zachary Levi, was DC Comics’ choice to play The World’s Mightiest Mortal, as Fawcett Comics once billed him before DC Comics swallowed them and the Big Red Cheese whole back in the ’50s. My thoughts in sum:

It’s the role Zachary Levi was born to play! The best DC Comics film of 2019 does a better job than current comics of recreating that classic CC Beck/Otto Binder magic, the heroic misadventure and the endearing innocence. Sivana’s partners-in-evil are disproportionately horrific as if there were a minimum mandatory Zack Snyder threshold to be met, and Billy Batson’s newly-adult, frequently actionable shenanigans are spared a lot of deserved consequences, but the film’s found-family core and ultimately encouraging vibe have such a puppy-dog charm that it’s hard to stay mad at it.

Levi’s magically adult Billy Batson, his teenage counterpart Asher Angel, his seven foster-family members, and five identically super-powered counterparts are back in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which is all of the above twofold: the rules-free magic, the wacky misadventure, the thick-skulled innocence, the disproportionate horror, the frequently actionable shenanigans, and the complete lack of consequences on every level. This time the meek attempts at encouragement and puppy-dog eyes tested my patience too far.

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