REGRESSION(directed by Alejandro Amenábar) Is Too Stylish for Its Own Good

Alejandro Amenabar is a master manipulator of mood that, in his finer moments, takes us to the heart of the matter. In this, he is comparable to M. Night Shyamalan. But what worked in the enclosed unreality of THE OTHERS doesn't work here: Small Town American milieu. The characters are unconvincing, as if solemnly reverse-engineered from Hollywood cliches into realism. Instead of realism derived from reality, we get the mere designer realism fabricated by way of coarsening dime-a-dozen cliches about rural America and religious culture. It's like affluent people buying 'grungy' or 'worn' clothes from the fashion industry. REGRESSION suffers the same fate as PRISONERS directed by the French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve. Their vision of American Gothic is based on movies, TV, and urban legends. It's like no amount of ham-fisted realism in THE DEER HUNTER can shrug off Cimino's ludicrous Tolstoy-Visconti treatment of material that called for intimate detail than epic scale.
If THE OTHERS worked in mode of morbid chic, REGRESSION aims at social commentary that seems as off-base as over-waxed with style.

That said, REGRESSION is a timely movie in the age of Jackie Coakley & Haven Monahan, Emma Sulkowicz the Mattress Girl, the KKK sightings at Oberlin college, the sheer lunacy of Camps 'Rape Culture' hysteria, Black Lives Matter outrage, Putin as New Hitler, and ridiculous fear of Sharia Law taking over America. And let's not forget Americans think 25% of the population is homosexual or transsexual.
The boy in THE SIXTH SENSE says 'ghosts see what they want to see'. Well, it can happen to real individuals too. Indeed, to entire communities and even nations. Though the hysteria in REGRESSION is checked before it gets totally out of hand, we do live in a society where the media, academia, and government are in the business, even mission, to bury reality with the Narrative. And these Narratives are so pervasive and relentless that entire colleges are under the impression that white males(instead of black males) pose the main sexual threats and that most blacks are being killed by 'racist' white police officers. Among Conservatives who fear being labeled 'racist', 'antisemitic', or 'homophobic', there is the easy scapegoating of Muslims as the source of all ills.

REGRESSION is less of a film than THE EXORCIST but smarter on the theme of evil. In Blatty and Friedkin's movie, evil is obvious. He, she, or it pukes all over and looks wicked and gross. In REGRESSION, evil permeates through hearts and minds without notice. Even people who think they are pursuing justice or doing penance are caught up in the evil web that, instead of having a single source, emanates from vanity and egotism of everyone. Evil arises from distrust but also from trust. From lack of faith but also from faith that turns everything into a black and white morality play. In other words, there is no identifiable Evil. Rather, evil is the sum of all the broken lives aspiring for dreams that turn into nightmare.

It's too bad that Amenabar got excessively caught up in style(impressive as it is, especially in the hypnosis scenes that almost bear comparison with Kubrick and Kobayashi), because REGRESSION is a most relevant movie in a world where the power of Narrative has so many people hallucinating faux-realities of goblins and spooks as imagined and sensationalized by the globalist media.

Rating: 2/5.

THE END OF THE TOUR(directed by James Ponsoldt) offers a glimpse into world of journalism, literary culture, and celebrity

An engaging film built on contradictions. A 'serious' writer works for Rolling Stone magazine specializing Pop Music. He is assigned to interview a 'reclusive' writer of a 1000 pg novel with hulking physique and dorky personality. David Foster Wallace is a one-man cat-and-mouse game. A passive-aggressive internal drama queen(beauty-in-the-beast) who both seeks out and hides from celebrity. His mind is too immersive for shallow pop culture, his tastes too callow for artistic depth.

Done without sentimentalism and sensationalism. It is also about clever Jew and messed-up Aryan and might make an interesting double-feature to A DANGEROUS METHOD. Solid film.

Rating: 3/5

KRAMPUS(directed by dorky Michael Dougherty) Mixes Horror with Holiday

Seems inspired by the fairy-horror school of Tim-Burton-Terry-Gilliam.
Mostly fast-forwarded through this lousy movie. Given the degeneration of Christmas into Black-Friday-Walmart-Riots, maybe Krampus the monster better represents the spirit of our age than classic Santy does. But what might have been a cute 20 minute short film slogs on for feature length, and there simply isn't enough material or talent to hold our interest.

Rating: 1/5.

PRINCESS BRIDE(directed by Rob Reiner) Is Goofy Fun

This is reportedly Ted Cruz's favorite movie, of which he can quote every line. It isn't difficult to understand why. If ever a movie was made for dufuses, this is it. It's fun and entertaining just the same, and it has at least two or three very inspired scenes: The first duel, the battle of wits, and the rescue at the end when the romantic hero summons a weird combination of intuition, skill, and stamina to rise above paralytic stupor to unravel the evil prince's plot and save the damsel in distress. Not a pretty movie except for the romantic leads. One wonders which character Cruz identifies with most. The dashing hero? Or the cunning and conniving villains? Or one of many freaks? Probably all of them.

Rating: 3/5

BRIDGE OF SPIES(by Steven Spielberg) is combination of John Le Carre and Norman Rockwell

What is it about the Spielberg touch? Even when you know he's making schmaltz, it is often irresistible as it is here. This movie is a bridge between genre cliches and grim realities. It ventures just outside the comfort zone to brush against the chill but then steps back in to avoid the cold truth of the Cold War. It's that ingenious balance of glow and gloom that makes Spielberg's 'serious films' appealing to middlebrow sensibilities. There's something that passes for ambiguity, but it's ambiguity 101, an introductory course accessible to all with a modicum of effort.
Spielberg's mastery is such that everything he does now looks effortless. You won't learn much about real history, but BRIDGE is still more intelligent than most movies out there. And certainly more entertaining. Coens had something to do with it.

Rating: 4/5

JURASSIC WORLD sucks like the new STAR WARS movie.

This movie sucks for the same reason as the new STAR WARS(FORCE AWAKENS) movie.
The wonder is gone. Magic is an afterthought. The first JURASSIC movie was full of surprises as vision and technology. Already the second installment had little to add and turned into parody. Third one wasn't even directed by Spielberg. It was T-Rex on the loose once more with big jaws to snatch up more dough.

So, what does the latest installment have to offer? Only more advanced computer graphics. So, we have a gaggle of dinos stampeding and flying all over the place. The whole thing looks like a video-game with characters who only register as pairs of legs. The tasteless 'Trevor Lynch' of Counter-Currents defends JURASSIC WORLD because it has lots of white heroes(while denouncing the new STAR WARS for diversity-mongering), but both movies are cynical exercises in purse-snatching.

Rating: 1/5

A SPECIAL DAY(with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni) Is a Special Film. Directed by Ettore Scola.

The kind of intelligent humanist film we rarely see anymore. Mastroinni plays a fruitkin leftist preparing to be exiled by Fascist authorities on the day Hitler arrives in Italy. The entire film takes place in a tenement complex and uses some of the devices made famous by Hitchcock in REAR WINDOW. It makes us think about history as heroic vision(as promulgated by propaganda and myth) and as private lives with weaknesses and vulnerabilities that makes people what they really are.

Rating: 4/5