Day: June 9, 2018

I don’t know how to precisely describe those moviegoers whose negative reactions to Ari Aster‘s Hereditary resulted in that now-infamous D-plus CinemaScore rating, but I do think that “dumb as rocks” is a fair term to use.

Despite this Hereditary will most likely earn $12 to $13 million for the weekend. Box Office Mojo‘s Brad Brevet wrote that perhaps the D-plus rating could be taken with a grain of salt as “CinemaScore always seems to behave a bit strangely when it comes to horror films.” He added that A24’s The Witch received a C-minus CinemaScore and yet enjoyed a solid box-office run.

Repeating once again: There are brilliant X-factor horror flicks — John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook, Andy Muschietti‘s Mama and now Hereditary — and then there’s the pig trough of run-of-the-mill horror flicks. Do you want to hang back with the brutes or open yourself up to the New Insanity? Insensitive, all-but-clueless people tend to favor insensitive, all-but-clueless movies…sorry.

HE’s 30 Greatest American Films: (1) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, (2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (3 & 4) The Godfather & The Godfather, Part II (5) The Graduate, (6) Election, (7) Zodiac, (8) Rushmore, (9) Pulp Fiction, (10) Some Like It Hot, (11) North By Northwest, (12) Notorious, (13) On The Waterfront, (14) Groundhog Day, (15) Goodfellas, (16) Out Of The Past, (17) Paths of Glory, (18) Psycho, (19) Raging Bull, (20) 2001: A Space Odyssey, (21) Manhattan, (22) Apocalypse Now, (23) Strangers on a Train, (24) East of Eden, (25) Bringing Up Baby, (26) The African Queen, (27) All About Eve, (28) The Wizard of Oz, (29) Zero Dark Thirty, (30) Only Angels Have Wings.

Nobody is ever accidentally late to anything. If you’re not on time it means you didn’t want to be. You took your time because you felt like it. Period.

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Eunice Gayson, the very first Bond girl in this history of the 56-year-old franchise, has passed at age 90. Gayson played Sylvia Trench, a hormonally inflamed brunette in her mid 30s, in three romantic scenes with original 007 Sean Connery — two in Dr. No (’62) and one in From Russia With Love (’63). Wikipage surprise: “Gayson’s voice in Dr. No and From Russia with Love was overdubbed by voice actress Nikki van der Zyl, as were the voices of nearly all the actresses appearing in the first two Bond films.”

But it’s important to see this one…right? Starting in 35 minutes, and I haven’t left yet. I hate watching movies with young kids…hate it. And the sound system where I’ll be seeing it is notoriously bad. And you have to pay through the nose to park there.

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Early in John Boorman‘s Deliverance, four suburban adventurers (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox) enjoy a thrilling if hair-raising canoe ride down the Cahulawassee. In the aftermath Reynolds tells Beatty, “You did good, chubby.” Today that line would be frowned upon as it normalizes fat-shaming. I’m not saying that dropping this line would be an artistic tragedy, but it probably would be dropped if Deliverance were to be remade today. Tell me I’m wrong.

Joe Sixpack is too stupid to vote against President Trump for the usual reasons (i.e., the fact that he’s a lying traitor and a brute authoritarian who’s working hard to dismantle our democracy) but he probably would vote against him if the economy goes south. I wish it were otherwise. I wish Maher was wrong.

Video: @BillMaher: “One way you get rid of @realDonaldTrump is a crashing economy, so please bring on the recession. Sorry if that hurts people, but it’s either root for a recession or lose your democracy.” #RealTime#TTTpic.twitter.com/wSd6jNYueC

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 9, 2018

Ari Aster‘s Hereditary is one of the most unsettling 21st Century horror flicks I’ve ever seen. It ends on a crazy-as-fuck note, but it turns your blood into crimson ice. In my book it stands alongside John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Robert Eggers‘ The Witch, Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook and Andy Muschietti‘s Mama, not to mention Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby and Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents. And almost all the critics feel the same — 94% and 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

And yet — hold onto your hats and drop a Percocet — mainstream horror fans have given it a failing grade according to the curve. Right now Hereditary has a D-plus rating on Cinemascore.

A few days ago Daily Beast critic Nick Schager complained that Hereditary isn’t wild or crazy or gorey enough. In response to this, I wrote that “something tells me that mainstream (i.e., grunt-level) horror fans will be saying the same thing when it opens, following in the path of The Verge’s Tasha Robinson.”

Posted on 5.22.18: “Not to paint with too wide a brush, but horror-genre fans tend to be on the coarse and geekish side in terms of their preferences. They’re basically about a general opposition to subtlety or understatement of any kind. Which is not to imply that Hereditary errs on the side of understatement. It certainly doesn’t during the second half. But the first half is almost a kind of masterclass in how to deliver on-target chills and jolts through fleeting suggestion rather than the usual sledgehammer approach.”

What happened? How in the name of Christ can a film as scary as Hereditary end up with a D-plus?

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