Jun 19, 2020, 8:19 PM
@Auspice Which one? The first movie or King of the Monsters? I'm middling on the first movie but I loved KotM.
Good or New Movies Review
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@Roz said in Good or New Movies Review:
My inner child is in a state of whaaaaaaaaaaaa but the rest of me is in a state of horror over how the transformations will look and remembering the trash heap that was the TV show and-
I think the more exciting (to me) news in that is the graphic novel adaptation and that 'retro box tin' that I absolutely 100% need.
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So I've been thinking a lot about the new Candyman film for the last few days and I'm gonna brain dump a bit
The premise of the property is that Candyman is an urban legend where, if you say his name five times while you look in the mirror, he appears and kills you. In-fiction it's an urban legend in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago, which hadn't been demolished and gentrified when the first film came out.
The story is that he'd been a black painter who'd been commissioned to make a portrait of a landowner's wife, and the two of them had an affair. And when they were found out, he was gruesomely murdered.
And the conceit of the film is that he exists as the story. He is, in-universe, a boogeyman kids talk about to give themselves the creeps. You have a story of a lynching, and a direct parallel between that and modern-day black people in the inner city who've been left abandoned.
But our protagonist, our viewpoint character, is a white grad student.
So this is one of the things you see a lot in horror, where the monster is an intrusion into the everyday. Back to Dracula, where instead of having the courtesy to stay in the decaying castle in the Continent like a proper Gothic fiction menace, he follows Harker home to (then-)contemporary London and starts victimizing and corrupting our pure Anglo-Saxon women.
You see it a lot in horror, when you're looking for it. Our protagonist is from the modern, rational world, and being attacked by something out of the superstitious worldview. Frequently there's an exposition scene where our protagonist needs to get help from someone who understands the rules they have to live with now, who's foreign, or crazy, or ethnic, or maybe just countercultural or female.
So Candyman (which is, to be clear, one of my favorite movies ever made) is a story about black people who have been abused, but as the Other. Our viewpoint is the white middle-class academic woman menaced by a black bogeyman.
(Even in the sequels--which I'll otherwise not speak of--the protagonists are the direct descendants of Candyman's mixed-race child, they appear and present entirely as white women.)
Which is why I'm really looking forward to seeing an interpretation of the property where our writer, director, and protagonist are black. See the take on the story from the people who live it, not just the outsider who gets dragged into it. -
See, I took something different away from the original Candyman. First, I just took it as a horror movie. I try not to read too much into my cinema. That said, I think there were obvious parallels between the movie and the real world. Cabrini Green was a rundown ghetto where people had largely no hope. Candyman, to me, represented that oppressive atmosphere of hopelessness and decay. The everyday people in the film were used to it and him for the most part and had a much milder reaction to the thought of him being real and killing people than the main character. The main character, a middle class white woman, is thrust into a world that she existed on the fringes of but was never immersed in. Now she's immersed and experiencing the horror that these people experienced every day.
I didn't see it as a white woman menaced by a black man. I saw it as an economically privileged person(even if I wouldn't have used that terminology back then) experiencing the plight of the underprivileged people she'd been living next to her entire life and never really gave much of a thought about.
It was one of the few movies that made me think about socioeconomic inequality. Like District 9 it taught me something and was one of the best horror movies I'd ever seen. At least that's how I remember thinking about it. To be honest it's been a long time since I've seen the movie. With the new one coming up, however, I may have to change that.
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It can be more than one thing!
Slightly more seriously, yes, you're absolutely right; the horror is, in a large part, that Helen is forced to actually live what she's been ignoring, or treating as an object of academic study. One that, even when she was aware of it, was always something over there. (There's the one scene where she's walking out of the police station after she's identified the "real" Candyman, where she's making comments about the fact that the police didn't give a shit until he attacked a white person from the right part of town. It's her black best friend who's trying to brush it off and move on with their lives. "Yes, white girl, I know, take the win.") You have a recurring thing where we're contrasting Helen's First World Problems (worrying that her husband's flirting with students, getting into pissing matches over dinner with a tenured professor) with day to day life in the projects that she visits to get material for her dissertation.
I'm not saying that Candyman handled things badly. It is, as I've said, one of my favorite movies ever made. It had something to say, and it said it really well; Tony Todd included "truth to power" in the tweet he sent out to give the new movie his blessing, when he thought he'd been recast. (A class act, even more so when I know that they absolutely wanted him back in the title role.)
I'm just thinking about the fact that what it was saying, it said from the position of a white writer/director, through the lens of a white middle-class academic who approached the story as an outsider. I'm really interested to see the story continued from the perspective of a black creative team, with a black protagonist; where this is their history that the story is about.
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I see what you're saying. I'm excited to see it in September. Only three movies that got reshuffled really bummed me out. Ghostbusters, Godzilla vs King Kong, and Candyman. I'm glad Candyman just got pushed a few months back and not a whole year.
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Def. I mean, I also hope it's a good horror movie. Which it should be; they have a solid team working on it.
Have you seen the trailer/short film Nia DeCosta tweeted out? https://twitter.com/NiaDaCosta/status/1273293842113089536
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I had not till now. It was very well done. Now I must rewatch the original this weekend. LOL
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Aw crap. Just read that Godzilla vs Kong has been moved to May 21st, 2021. Sucks but at least it'll be a nice birthday movie for me to hit.
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@ZombieGenesis said in Good or New Movies Review:
Aw crap. Just read that Godzilla vs Kong has been moved to May 21st, 2021. Sucks but at least it'll be a nice birthday movie for me to hit.
Maybe it'll make up for the LAST Godzilla-birthday-movie I had.....
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@Auspice Which one? The first movie or King of the Monsters? I'm middling on the first movie but I loved KotM.
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@ZombieGenesis said in Good or New Movies Review:
@Auspice Which one? The first movie or King of the Monsters? I'm middling on the first movie but I loved KotM.
The one that came out in 2014. I haven't seen KotM yet. I forgot that was also a May movie.
The first one (I keep forgetting it's a 'reboot' of things...) was OKAY, but it wasn't great. I mean yeah it had Bryan Cranston who I love. It has the ever-memeable 'Let them fight' but as a MOVIE it felt so disjointed and while I felt it was intended to be an ensemble piece, it just didn't quite pull it off.
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Watched The King of Staten Island last night.
It's not my favorite Judd Apatow movie, but it was still good and worth the $20 I paid on VOD to watch it.
Some bits hit really close, because I know people who were exactly like the main character. And they're still like that, even in their 30s.
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@Roz said in Good or New Movies Review:
My issue is there is... a LOT of potential that can be unpacked for this, but it's certainly not a single movie kind of premise. Lots of filler in the books can be ignore, but even then. A TON of material to cover
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Seriously - someone make me a screencastify or something of how to do the damn spoiler tag and I'll put my wall of text back.
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@silverfox said in Good or New Movies Review:
Seriously - someone make me a screencastify or something of how to do the damn spoiler tag and I'll put my wall of text back.
You just have to keep the lines inside the spoiler tag 'connected' with no blank lines. I use a dot.
This is a spoiler. . More spoiler.***=Spoiler Example***
click to show -
Alright, try 5.
****** So. Animorphs. Lemme just sit here a bit and unpack a bunch of stuff.******
click to showAlright, now that THAT is out of my system.
******
click to show******
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@insomniac7809 said in Good or New Movies Review:
So Candyman (which is, to be clear, one of my favorite movies ever made) is a story about black people who have been abused, but as the Other. Our viewpoint is the white middle-class academic woman menaced by a black bogeyman.
So, while I agree with literally everything you've written here, I watched Candyman for the first time last month, and I want to point out that I had to pause and rewatch the scene early on in the film where the protagonist (I don't do names. No memory) gets information from the black janitorial staff in the university. Because that scene absolutely nails the profound awkwardness of that kind of interaction, where the white woman is nice and blissfully unaware of how cautious the black staff are around her. I know it's a weird detail to be fixated on, but it was quite seriously my favorite scene of the film.
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@Rinel
Okay, I feel like I must have come across much more harshly to the 1992 Candyman than I meant to. It is, as I've said, a personal favorite in the horror genre, which is itself a favorite film genre. I know exactly what scene you're talking about, and yeah, it's a really well-developed, thoughtful commentary on the material it's covering. I'm not dropping the P-word (I know that some people have; I wouldn't but it's not really my place to say; obviously Peele and Monkey's Paw had enough attachment to the property to secure it), I'm just saying that I really think a take on the material from the other side is a really cool opportunity.Like, I don't try to read every piece of media as a direct allegory or a code; the joke about how it can be more than one thing wasn't really a joke. But just looking at the trailer for the new one...
The opening clip is a mixed-race, mostly-white group of teenage girls calling on the Candyman, with the one black girl involved showing up afterwards to witness what happens when they dredge up that old pain. The location is a gentrified Cabrini Green, with the whitewashed exterior of the church hiding a broken-down interior full of the sort of Candyman graffiti we saw in his shrine in the first film. We have a few people from the older generation, including Anne-Marie (Vanessa Williams) from the first film, who remember what happened thirty years back. Our protagonist is an artist whose history traces back to the first film, who finds himself obsessed with the Candyman story and uses it to create an exhibit featuring imagery of lynching victims (I really don't subscribe to 'interpret art as 1:1 symbolism code' but come on) and we have a scene where he looks in the mirror and sees Candyman reflected back at him...
And okay maybe you're the one over-analyzing 152 seconds of trailer footage did you ever think of that but seriously I am stoked to see this one.