#2,349: Get Out
Before I Fall - ★☆☆☆☆
This year's [sci-fi premise + high school] entry.
It's said that in Harold Ramis' vision of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character spends perhaps hundreds or thousands of years working his way to enlightenment by reliving that same day. So here's our pitch: let's take a group of teens that are meant to be pretty unlikeable at the outset, you know, so we can show what a journey they've taken? And we'll give just one of them the chance to set things right by letting her relive her day, oh, how about half a dozen times? I'm sure that'll do it.
It's goofy beyond belief, but just beginning to count the ways in print feels a little bit mean.
Sleight - ★★★☆☆
Mostly neat. A little bit fast and loose with its own rules. I'm always interested in 'magic' movies to see where they do practical tricks vs. visual effects.
(Okay, again, I want to avoid the list of nerdy nitpicks, but for real, just about everyone casually touches him on the arm at just the right spot and nobody notices anything? Even he doesn't flinch at it? Seems like a weird choice.)
The Belko Experiment - ★★½☆☆
Another B-Movie. B for Blumhouse. Everything they make is like, passable, but you wish they'd gone just a little bit further. Their whole company lives and dies by the 80/20 rule. (Which is going great for them, of course, but I'm always a little let down.)
As to the movie itself, it seems like a waste to enter this little niche of a subgenre if you don't have anything new to contribute or say or do or add. I didn't realize that James Gunn wrote it until I looked it up on Letterboxd, but that makes sense to me.
Get Out - ★★★½☆
This movie doesn't make me think that Jordan Peele "reinvented" horror or whatever, but It does make me think that he grew up watching movies made in that time when horror and sci-fi movies were about something. Get Out, like an early Romero Dead movie, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is a movie about something, and we do need more of those. It's a pretty straightforward horror flick– could've been made 30 years ago, except for if it couldn't've been made 30 years ago.