Impressive as always. Here's my end of month dump.
Picnic at Hanging Rock from the Top 100 ClubLife
Do you like Alien? If so, you might also like Life. It's practically the same movie except most of the choices are a shade worse. Instead of the lived-in blue collar workers and ship of Alien we get a glossy space-ship inhabited with uber-smart scientists. Instead of the slow-burn horror of the first 45 minutes or so of Alien, we get a pretty boring setup that leads to the film's one great scene, an extended version of the chest-burster scene. There's no cat either!
What there is, though, is a pretty cool alien design. It has a kind of supreme plasticity and various incarnations and it moves really interestingly. The CGI isn't perfect, unfortunately, but damn is it fun to see at work. If only its victims were as interesting. There's not a whole ton going on with the human characters, and that means that any scene not featuring the alien becomes just a waiting game, and not a fun one. When the alien shows up, there's a pretty good body horror thing to be had, although the pleasures run out of juice before the film does. The end is fine, but not the rollercoaster it wants to be. A swing and a near miss.
C+
Stranger Things S2
If season 1 was an Alien riff, this one is Aliens. Bigger, more fun, and with a little more heart. Stranger Things had a better setup, though, because the first season already was part-action, already cared more about developing the relationships between many of the characters, and already built much of the foundation that this season took full advantage of. Almost all the additions to the cast are wonderful. Max both brings something new to the kids and fits in very well. Paul Reiser is here too! He cleverly straddles the line between good and bad guy, especially early on, and feels both referential to his Aliens role and like his own thing. But the MVP of the newbies is Bob, played by Sean Astin. I'll admit I wasn't super excited to see him show up. I've never really liked him, I think he plays a notch or two too big in pretty much everything he does. But damn if he isn't superb as Bob. His character is a version of the doofy stepfather we've seen a million times in things like this. He's supremely uncool, totally out of the loop, but also very into Wynona Rider, and surprisingly effective in his lane. He is emblematic of why the show as a whole works so well. There's always a twist to a character, something that turns them from cliche into a real human being. It's fantastic.
I wish some plot things weren't done the way they were, mostly to do with Eleven, but other than that, this is an improvement almost all around. I'm impressed, and even more excited to see S3.
A
Raw
I read your reviews and decided this weekend to keep this for my final movie of the month. Maybe this just hit a sore spot for me, but damn, I spent the majority of my time uncomfortably writhing in my seat. I've got food hangups, so this cannibal film really hit all my squirmy buttons. Whether it was going in or out of our heroine's mouth, every body part consumed added to my icky feelings. It's just profoundly unsettling. It's also pretty great.
Like most great horror films, there's more going on than meets (meats?) the eye. There are larger ideas at play here. At one point one character says to another that when a dog bites a human the dog must be put down because it might have developed a taste for our fleshy goodness. From there on the movie demonstrates the concept, but with a person instead of a dog. But it's also a rape metaphor. Justine, a lifelong vegetarian, is forced to eat raw animal meat as part of her hazing at a new veterinary college. From that trauma (and it is very clearly depicted as a trauma), she displays versions of certain reactions to getting raped that are both strange and somewhat understandable, especially within the context of the original trauma. Her further meat consumption is sometimes fueled by lust and sometimes by anger. It's maybe the first film that has made me feel even a fraction of how horrible it must be to be raped. A great deal of that power comes from the fearless plunge into viscera and amazing sound design. Because rape is a profound invasion of the body, the cannibalism metaphor works as a very close parallel.
The problem with metaphor movies, though, is that they need to really nail the landing. At this point, I'm still undecided about the end of this film. In some ways I think it runs off the tracks a bit and gets caught up in the metaphor a bit too much. In other ways I think the ending does a pretty great job of pointing at the larger implications of the way rape often gets normalized, especially on college campuses. It's the best version I've seen of rape culture on film. I think there's something both satisfying and unsatisfying about the end of this movie, and that's going to keep me thinking and reading about it for a while to come. It's a modern classic even if you just want to watch it as a cannibal movie. Anything that gets me so unnerved must be some kind of great.
A-
I'm gonna try to come back later to respond to things I missed.