Odd Thomas Film Review: In Odd we Trust

For those looking for a more supernatural base that is more witty and creative rather than eerie and spooky, Odd Thomas is a well done fun ride.  The twist is easy to spot, but it won’t matter because the heart of the film centers on the Protagonist, Odd, (yes, that is his name, and yes he’ll make a point to tell you) and his girlfriend Stormy. 

Odd is, much like his name suggests a nontraditional hero.  Unlike the super souped up crime fighters of the superhero universe, his strength is more intuitive and less muscle mass, and his supernatural ability to see dead people provides him a sense of vigilante action that will allow him the chance to save the little California town he lives in.  

The film immediately springs into action and is not conservative about taking its time with slow dialogue.  It usually takes ten minutes of screen time to set up universe of a film, but with some quick step the filmmakers of Odd Thomas were able to clue the audience in with just three minutes before the first inciting incident.  It is a heartfelt and emotional film that has the ability to captivate the senses. 

Based on a mystery thriller novel by Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas is a fun Halloween film that follows a young man as he plays “detective to dead people,” the way he puts it.  The supernatural clairvoyant is everything I wish the kid from the sixth sense grew up to be. Anton Yelchin is strong and powerful and poignant in his performance.  There is no much to say about the film other than it is another Netflix pick for some Halloween fun.  

Contracted Film Review: My Netflix Pick

At first glance Contracted seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.  It is not.  The ostensible twist does not come until the end, but to start the film, it opens to a medical examiner raping a dead corpse.  Already the visceral senses are made uncomfortable, and you question if this is just another gratuitous and unnecessary shot for shock value.  I say this because the film makes no attempt to disclose any first person account as to who this man is beyond that opening scene. 
He remains faceless even when he meets the female protagonist, Samantha, who is left inebriated at a friend’s party.   It isn’t a stretch of the imagination when the unknown male rapes Samantha, and in a fait accompli, sets in motion the next three harrowing days of this woman’s life.   We are lead to believe that whatever this woman contracted it was this blurred figure that passed it along, making her patient zero.

Scary Halloween films usually consists of creepy monsters, evil, sadistic, often supernatural psychopaths on a murder spree, and a lot of melodramatic acting.  What makes Contracted scary is the opposite.  While it is possible to outrun a murderer, even a supernatural one, one cannot outrun the failings of the body.  The virus, still unknown to Samantha, takes on a physical toll.  There is copious blood loss, teeth following out, nails coming off, and the occasional slew of maggots dripping out of the vagina.  The fear is heightened by the unidentifiable decent into a maddening disease that which has no name.  It is not a demon that can be exercised.  It is not a masked madman that can be killed.  It has no face, but the one that belongs to Samantha.
With no scientific explanation to hold the weight it is up to the film’s lead actress to give a convincing performance of a fractious mind deteriorating in physical form.  Navigating through an already complicated life, Samantha, played assuredly by Najarra Townsend, starts to lose everything she loves. 

What I disliked, though I cannot hold against the film, is that Samantha’s sexual orientation was vilified by her ex lover, Nikki.  The film does not make it clear if she is a lesbian or a bisexual, but what is clear is that sexual relations with men makes a woman contaminated and repulsive, as a scene between Samantha and Nikki fighting implies.  It is an unfair assessment, but one I find that occurs within the LGBTQA community.  Take the words of out bisexual Megan Fox – when stating her bisexuality she said she would not date a bisexual woman because “that means they also sleep with men, and men are so dirty that I’d never want to sleep with a girl who had slept with a man.”

With this quote in mind, perhaps what became an unintended theme of the film centers on the female body; the virus inflicted on Samantha becomes a personification of the loss of agency and personhood.  And succumbing to the virus is a more deeply frightening personification of living under a toxic form of patriarchy.  Samantha’s sexuality is used against her as punishment not just in being raped by a man, discriminated by her female lover, but that she is, by default, a virus too.  In any case, Contracted is a fascinating, but narrow perspective of a subgenre of a genre.  I recommend this as my Netflix pick for horror films to watch on Halloween.    

The Boxtrolls: Better Parents than Actual Humans

The Boxtrolls: Eggs, Winnie and Fish

The Boxtrolls is a stop motion animation film for children with surprising adult themes.

Parenting is not an easy venture, but in the film the contrast between two different worlds is a fascinating axiomatic observation.  Juxtaposed on screen are the merger of an aristocratic society and the gutterpups of the underground – the boxtrolls.  In a tangible, contiguous glimpse, the film brings two worlds together to shows us the variation in environmental development of childhood.

Winnie, the town council’s daughter, and Eggs, the boxtroll child are raised in extreme difference.  Winnie has everything money can buy; she is well fed and living in a palatial home.  All things are given to her in ways the less fortunate can only dream of.  Yet, she is missing the most valued and cherished thing a child needs: Parental guidance and love.  

Love is what the boxtrolls encase Eggs in.  Despite living in the catacombs of the underground they have made a home with a mélange of items that fills the usually damp place with familial warmth.  They provide Eggs with the attention he requires and allow him the agency to discover the ability of creation in artistic ways from materials the above ground society calls garbage.  In many ways Eggs is raised as an equal to the boxtrolls.  They love him enough to nurture him as a living being, in doing so he sees the world in a soft, good natured way.  He sees beyond the so-called monstrosity the town labels the boxtrolls in a caveat of annual entertainment. 

For Winnie, the opulence she is privileged with leaves her in unloved isolation.  She acts out in obstreperous rebellion to garner the attention of her absentminded father, and unlike Eggs, is treated as an inferior being that is not only incessantly talked down to, but neglected as well.  Her father is too busy being an ostentatious, cheese loving blueblood to notice her pleading behavior. 
With no parental guidance, Winnie learns to adopt the ferociously prejudiced thinking of the town.  When she meets Eggs she spews, in non sequitur haste, what the town believes to be true of the boxtrolls, but as the notion is proved false, the shift in the story reveals to Winnie what the audience already knows.  The real monsters that prey on the fear of others are adult humans. 

There are different ways to interpret the film, but one thing is quite clear.  The boxtrolls are lovable creatures with a childlike sensibility; each one unique in style and personality.  Children of all ages will love this film as well as any adult.  Stop motion animation is always a wonderful treat to enjoy given the painstaking time each movement costs, and so with that I say, while the film does not pass the bechdel test, it is still worth a watch or two.  

The Maze Runner: Where are you running to?

Disclaimer: This review is based on the film, and not influenced by the Maze Runner series. 

My first question, upon viewing the Maze Runner, is why a group of scientists would create a maze, where seemingly healthy males, in a very Lord of the Flies existence, could be studied for a cure to a virus that appears to have no cure, especially if an antidote already exists for whatever infliction is caught in the maze.
Further, if the idea was to inject the boys with the virus, and see which develops immunity, it does not explain the need for a maze – in many ways it sounds counterproductive.  But perhaps these are questions best answered in the books. 

In a more existential manner, the maze – as a metaphor – represents the birth of social hierarchy in a patriarchal form.  With a clean slate, a group of just boys are selected and introduced to a “survivor-esque” situation, which they dub the glade.  They build forts, a farm, and create rules to follow.  Within this glade, and amid the confusion of their plight, the boys build a society that becomes their safety net.
Which is why, Living for years in an all male society, the boys are dumbfounded that a lone female – Teresa – is the last person brought up to the glade.  Did the scientist run out of male bodied persons or was Teresa part of their show?  Regardless, how did they think the virus would affect a male body versus a female body given that the whole planet is suffering from this unknown infliction? Was there a similar experiment with just females?  If not, there should have been.

In another matter, the boys’ reaction to Teresa was to treat her as an anomaly – a sense of curiosity.  This leads me to question if the lack of poise with the opposite sex was due to their isolation within the glade or have the boys never interacted with females prior to Teresa’s appearance.  Perhaps we’ll never know, but what is known is that despite her presence her character does very little to improve the situation.  She, like many female characters in film, becomes an empty plot device. 

It is an accurate depiction of how I believe patriarchy came to exist as we know it today.  It is ironic that it takes an unimaginative dystopian future to give us a glimpse to humanity’s past, but alas here we are.  In creating societies, building foundations to countries, male identified people created their own form of a glade without the consideration and utilization of female identified people.

Gally (Will Poulter) is the perfect personification of rigid patriarchy set in his ways, afraid of change.  However, Teresa is not the change that challenges Gally as one would assume.  She is hardly a threat to the status quo of the glade.  It is the film’s male protagonist, Thomas that threatens Gally’s whole existence.  Thomas’ presence revives a desire to change the course of the boys’ lives by breaking the established rules.  This is unsurprisingly very similar to how society functions today.  Males challenge males while women watch in the background.  

It has always bothered me that during apocalyptic/dystopian films, having one or even two women in the film feels like it is filling a quota rather than allowing women agency in something as life altering as the end of the world.  The Maze Runner is another film that fails the Bechdel test; there may be, theoretically, two women in the film, but neither ever speak to each other or are even on screen together.  I understand that the book was not written as such, but inconsistency like this does build over time, polarizing the roles of female identified people in all media forms, and as a female moviegoer it is difficult to relate to the films with stories I enjoy. 

As a cinematic venture, The Maze Runner was a moderately fair dystopian film.  It is a series of books, so the ending left on an almost anticlimactic place, but certainly if you love the actors and one main actress in the film then you’d surely enjoy what the film has to offer.  

Dracula Untold: Film Review

Luke Evans as Vlad the Impaler

The brilliance of Dracula Untold is not, as one would assume, in the newly elucidated version, its plot, but in the impacted performance of the film’s lead. 
Against the backdrop of flat dialogue and superficial supporting performances, Luke Evans transforms the infamous Vlad the Impaler from a sadistic, blood thirsty warrior into a sympathetic anti-hero choosing an unconventional way to save his family. 

There seemed, also, to be a great haste in the film’s development of plot, rushing through its storytelling of Vlad’s younger days in order to set up a deflated conflict between two characters whose chemistry had not been established in any aesthetic way.  A missed opportunity to showcase a compassionate affection tied into a youthful bond, especially given the two actors, Luke Evans and Dominic Cooper both have starred together in another film, Tamara Drewe.  Their familiarity with each other could have given the film a familial feel that was missing. 

I was also disappointed in the limited characterization of Mirena (Sarah Gadon), which I believed could have been so much more than a cliché plot device for the anti-hero’s return to vampiric revenge that would plague him for centuries.  It is simply tiring that female characters continue to be nothing more than sacrificial lambs to propel the male protagonist into his climatic battle of the last act, but this is, unfortunately, how films in Hollywood are made. 

Dracula Untold is average in plot, but makes up for it in action sequences.  One scene, in particular, stood out the most.  With a thousand men to one, Vlad, with his newfound powers, takes flight toward the desolation of his enemies, which can be seen through the reflection of a sword impaled inside a falling solider. 

In the words of papa Lannister (because he is forever papa Lannister) and resident master vampire (Charles Dance), “Let the games begin.”  Though, for us, the audience, we never see the games begin for alas the film ends too quickly, hinting at a possible sequel that most likely will not happen.  All the more disappointing since the 21^st century retelling of Dracula with Luke Evans would make more money than any archaic origin story of the impaler.