Dream Contained

I've discovered another Stephen King movie is vastly underrated. 2003's Dreamcatcher may not be the best Stephen King movie ever made but I think it deserves better than its 28% Rotten Tomatoes score.

I really like the cast, for one thing. Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, and Damian Lewis play a group of old friends who also all have psychic abilities owing to an encounter in their childhood. In this, the story resembles numerous other Stephen King stories, such as It and Stand by Me. The twist here turns out to be an invasion of toothy alien eels that burst out of peoples' colons.

But not before giving them lots of gas, something Jason Lee's character laughs at as merrily as his breakout character, Brody, in Mallrats. If you're amused by fart jokes, you'll probably find this movie a lot of laughs. I tend to see farts as a mundane human function so I get bored of them quickly. That doesn't matter, though, because I don't think they're played wholly for laughs here. The reflex to see them as comedic helps put the viewer off-balance as they start to work more as a sign of these victims losing control to their bodies. It becomes a malevolent sign of the parasite asserting physical dominance.

I really like the interplay between the characters' abilities and the alien menace they fight. It almost feels like an X-Men movie except, since it's Stephen King, anyone can die at any time. Any resemblance the characters have to superheroes only adds to the horror when their fingers are getting chewed off or their guts exploded.

The dialogue isn't always great. William Goldman and director Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay is absorbing enough when plot stuff is happening but their attempts to make the four friends sound like regular guys fall flat. Lee tells a joke about a Meg Ryan movie that seems like maybe they were trying to tap into the sort of nerdiness Lee exhibited in Mallrats. But it comes off more like an insider reference from a screenwriter who's worked in the industry for a long time and has no clue how regular people process his work. The movie also never really justifies its title.

But I liked the alien design and Kasdan capably threads all the scenes together. Thomas Jane and Jason Lee are two actors very good at playing one, specific kind of guy, and they're not quite playing to their specialties here. Still, it was nice to see them, especially knowing how underutilised both have been throughout their careers. Morgan Freeman and the recently deceased Tom Sizemore also have nice supporting roles.

Twitter Sonnet #1697

A foolish phantom crossed the edge of dreams.
His paper boat absorbed the ink of night.
A darling face was nothing like it seems.
And so the Eyes of Green put out the light.
The pirate building sailed to take a yam.
A ruddy whale was miffed at spinning ships.
The gummy candy crossed the mental dam.
The ducal fleet is little glowing blips.
With shrinking foam, potato heads depart.
Decisive glass divides the tile space.
What fog condemns the shower crushed a heart.
For running deer we hid the monster face.
A Janus language clogged the mirror spark.
A pixel storm has turned the glasses dark.

To Film a Predator

For all its problems, 2018's The Predator actually has some ideas to chew on, ideas that are surprisingly against the grain. Badly put together action sequences nerfed by poor cgi aren't improved by a completely forgettable performance from Boyd Holbrook. But the supporting cast, particularly Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, and Trevante Rhodes, really shines in this story about people and aliens who like to kill.

Like seemingly everyone else in the world, the trailers for this movie didn't impress me, but then I saw the Comic Con panel and I was charmed by the cast's chemistry. Director Shane Black seems like he took care to see that the ensemble actually built a relationship and it comes through in the movie. To the point where even actors I didn't especially like, like Holbrook and Olivia Munn, were a valuable part of the group because of their unlikeable qualities.

It's ironic the film has been in the news because an actor cast in a minor role, Steve Wilder, whose Wikipedia entry is inexplicably marked for deletion, was revealed to have been convicted of trying to "lure a 14-year-old girl into a sexual relationship". Olivia Munn, who shared the now deleted scene with Wilder, has expressed her horror in interviews while Shane Black initially defended his casting of Wilder before finally apologising for it. Munn has stated in interviews that she doesn't know why Black hasn't apologised to her personally which I find rather surprising. She speaks as though she were assaulted but I have to wonder how many of us have bought a coffee from or talked casually to someone who's done time for a felony? It begs the question, in this woke world, how are convicted offenders supposed to be treated? Should they be denied careers or can they be permitted the chance to become productive members of society?

And that's in large part what the movie's about. When McKenna (Holbrook) makes first contact with the Predator, he's framed and shuffled away by the government in a cover up effort and he ends up on a bus with the miscreants who become the film's heroes. They include at least one man, Nebraska (Trevante Rhodes), who's a murderer; he recalls fondly the time he bumped off his C.O. just because he felt like it.

There's an obvious parallel set up between these humans who kill for their own satisfaction and this alien who's on Earth to hunt humans for fun. There's also a thread about biological improvements being mistaken for disorders: McKenna's son is autistic which, in usual movie logic, makes him able to understand and manipulate alien technology and there's a line from Munn, who plays a biologist, about how some speculate autism represents a next stage in evolution. That's what the movie's glossy version certainly seems like but I'm not sure it's really constructive. Maybe if it sways some anti-vaxxers we can say some good came out of it. But saying autistic kids should be able to solve complex equations in an alien typography puts a lot of pressure on kids.

What the movie needed more of is Thomas Jane. His character's Tourette's is played for laughs but in a credible way, the way it would be among a bunch of lower class guys busting each other's balls. Jane infuses the performance with a natural, anxious, and oddly contented sadness. The relationship between his and Keegan-Michael Key's character as two fucked-up survivors who support each other is pretty sweet.

A lot of the story is really predictable and the Super CGI Predator lacks all the live action weight of the original. But it's a pleasure watching this cast play off one another.

Predator of Comic Con

The first panel I saw in Hall H yesterday was for Shane Black's upcoming Predator movie, which distinguishes itself with the word "the" at the beginning. I had zero interest in the movie before yesterday but after the panel I kind of want to see it. Looks like the panel as a promotional tactic paid off this time. Primarily it's because of the cast--something the trailers never gave me a sense of in quite the way I got yesterday from one of the clips and from the chemistry of the actors just bantering on the panel. I'm barely acquainted with the work of most of these performers. I've always been kind of lukewarm on Olivia Munn, I loved Thomas Jane on The Expanse, and Keegan Michael Key I tend to enjoy about 15% of the time. He has a tendency to make a funny joke and then carry the premise very quickly past the breaking point. But all together, this group had a real chemistry with an honesty about it that made their individual faults likeable. Black talked about the fact that he had the actors rehearse a lot before filming, implying this was an unusual practice, but maybe it shouldn't be if it's responsible for the real sense of camaraderie I saw. Black said he was inspired by the ensemble chemistry in the original Predator.

The only awkward moment was when Olivia Munn called it a "micro-aggression" that women in movies generally didn't know how to use guns. So she said she insisted her character, a biologist, should at least have a basic idea of what to do when picking one up. The word "micro-aggression" always reminds me of Micro Machines. But otherwise everyone seemed to have a good time busting each others' chops. Sterling K. Brown and Keegan Michael Kay joked about trying to get Blaxploitation references into the film and Thomas Jane came off kind like Ringo Starr in A Hard Day's Night, the oddly glum member just slightly on a different wavelength from everyone else. Brown insisted Jane show the crowd his feet which Jane did, revealing he was barefoot. Apparently this is a lifestyle choice of Jane's. "It sounds like a joke but it's not," Brown explained to the laughing audience. Jane said with absolutely flawless glum sincerity, "I like to touch things with my feet." He apparently once belonged to a Barefoot Society but got kicked out. Munn said she didn't want him to be in this society which I guess doesn't count as a micro-aggression.

The moderator, Grae Drake from Rotten Tomatoes, wasn't bad though not the best I've seen. She took a selfie with the cast at the end and joked, "Someone's grabbing my ass!" but then seemed to remember the political pall currently cast over the industry and awkwardly added, "It's great!" Everyone in the audience received a Predator gift bag which included a card with concept art and, bizarrely, hand sanitizer. The whole panel's on YouTube here: