Sean Lemme

I started blogging as a way to lazily pass my high school senior project and somehow I've kept doing it for more than half my life

Shocktober Day 21: Train to Busan

Train to Busan (2016)

Train to Busan begins with a disturbing image that I wish the movie explored more. A farmer drives his truck into a quarantine zone and becomes distracted trying to reach his vibrating phone in the passenger seat. While his eyes are off the road, he runs over a deer. The farmer gets out, inspects his vehicle for damage, then resumes his journey. But the camera lingers in place and the dead animal suddenly lurches back to life. This begs so many questions, like what animals are infected? Do they only want to eat their own kind or will they attack anything they see? Unfortunately, Train to Busan is not the zombanimals movie I’ve been waiting for. It is, however, one of the most fun zombie movies I’ve seen in a while.

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Shocktober Day 19: Green Room

Green Room (2015)

Green Room represents exactly the things that have created my general resistance(?) to horror movies and why I’ve still seen so many of them. Green Room is a thrilling movie and on paper I like lots of movies that are exciting… but most of those are action movies. Here, the intensity is in service of creating dire situations that you have to hope you’ll never face in real life. You could go as far as to describe them as miserable. And yet, the movie is smartly made with fully-realized characters, beautiful imagery, and all the other film criticism cliches. It adds up to an all-too-familiar picture: a movie I respect a helluva lot more than I like.

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Shocktober Day 16: Bone Tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

The month-long celebration of Patrick Wilson continues with S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, a brutal, modern send-up to John Ford’s The Searchers. While John’s made it no secret he’s a big fan of Zahler as both a writer and director (though I don’t think he’s ever gotten the chance to write about him on the blog), I have to admit I approached this film with a bit of trepidation. For one, it has a reputation for having one incredibly gruesome scene and I wasn’t sure I’d want to see something like that. Moreover, Zahler’s devil-may-care reputation made me wary investing my time in a potentially unsavory character. Is he someone who’s rejected Hollywood and embraced the taboo to aid in his storytelling or does he actually have a warped view of the world? Bone Tomahawk makes me believe the former.

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Shocktober Day 6: Attack the Block

Attack the Block (2011)

The best genre movies (as in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy) often blend a healthy dose of reality in with all the unbelievable. Dawn of the Dead is about surviving a zombie apocalypse, but it’s also about cultural rot that consumerism tries to conceal. E.T. is a movie about a kid befriending an alien, but it’s also about dealing with a divorce. Princess Mononoke is about an exiled prince trying to cure a terrible curse, but it’s also about how humans exploit and abuse the environment (like pretty much every Miyazaki film). Whether it’s through subtext or loudly proclaimed over and over, these movies show that a different setting can illuminate ideas that might be ignored or taken for granted. Attack the Block is one of those movies.

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Shocktober Day 2: Shutter Island

Shutter Island (2010)

Our decade of terror nearly missed out on having a Martin Scorsese movie, as Shutter Island was originally slotted to be released in October 2009 before being pushed back to February 2010. The reason given at the time? The recession was hitting too hard and Paramount needed something to help buoy their slate in the early part of the new year. So they pushed the movie with the bankable star and acclaimed director based on a book from a famous author. This announcement came about a month after Universal similarly moved their Wolfman movie from November 2009 to February 2010. Both these developments were covered on a humble blog in the form of tastefully titled reviews. I bring up these things not because they are interesting, but because I found it horrifying how long ago a decade can feel in our breaking-news-every-15-minutes world.

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The Bald and the Boisterous

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

I’ve had a bit of trouble settling on a verdict for Hobbs & Shaw, the first(?) Fast & Furious spin-off film. On one hand, it is a very silly, over-the-top buddy cop action movie. On the other, it seems like the product of a bunch of bad decisions that just had to be followed through on because: money. It’s a movie where Dwayne Johnson pulls a helicopter out of the air, like Captain America. It’s also 135 minutes long and feels like it. Is this too much of a good thing?

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Criterion Month Day 31: Come and See

Come and See (1987)

Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko), a 14-year-old who recently joined the Soviet partisans, and Roubej (Vladas Bagdonas) have just caught a break. Roubej had led their supply run directly into a minefield which claimed the lives of their two comrades, but these two made it through and found a collaborator who has a cow. They threaten the man and make him roll around in manure, then steal the animal. This cow will save the lives of partisans and villagers if they can get it back. But before they are even out of sight, a German machinegun blasts them. Roubej is instantly killed, but the poor bovine lives long enough to try to understand what just happened as it suffers through its last labored breaths. It’s just the latest in a never-ending deluge of devastating blows thrown at Flyora, made all the more depressing because the filmmakers really did shoot a cow and film its death. Come and See is just that kind of grueling.

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