Category: Directed by David Gordon Green

Halloween Ends (2022, David Gordon Green)

While I had some expectations about Halloween Ends’s plot going in, based on the previous entry, the franchise, and behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt, nothing prepared me for a soft remake of Nightmare on Elm Street II.

Halloween Ends is not about Jamie Lee Curtis getting out the butcher knife granddaughter Andi Matichak gave her in the last movie to kill Michael Myers (once again James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) with Will Patton helping like they’re an adorable old couple hunting serial killers. It’s about local boy Rohan Campbell who accidentally killed a little kid he was babysitting a year after the last movie’s events. On Halloween, obviously. So, Ends’s opening kill is a child’s graphic, accidental death.

It’s incredibly manipulative but also really compelling.

The action then moves ahead three more years. Curtis has given up the prepper life (which seems entirely unlikely given Ends would then take place in 2022, post-Covid—but just like with its immortal septuagenarian spree killers, it doesn’t take place in the real world). She and granddaughter Matichak live together in a charming house where Curtis works on her true crime memoir. Matichak’s a nurse, so she didn’t slow down with college after her entire life was destroyed. Despite being Matichak’s best performance in the series, she and Curtis still don’t have a rewarding cinematic relationship. They’re just too slasher movie broken for it to work, and the movie doesn’t even try.

Curtis happens across Campbell in the present—some high school seniors in the marching band are bullying him—and introduces him to Matichak, who’s apparently been dating a bunch of dudes since Courtney murdered her boyfriend last movie. Her most recent beau is a shitty cop—shitty even for cops—Jesse C. Boyd. Luckily for Matichak, thanks to the bullying, Campbell’s about to snap and has no qualms about picking fights with a cop. Not when he’s a bad boy who zooms around town real fast on the motorcycle he’s fixed up.

Ends fearlessly rides a motorcycle over its shark tank, no qualms about all the eighties horror movie tropes it implements (in addition to Nightmare II, Boyd also does a Christine-esque transformation). It’s shameless, which works for it. Especially since Matichak finds her newest Bonnie in Campbell, and they have eighties teen movie montages riding around on his bike, trying to escape their respective traumas.

The movie pays a lot of lip service to trauma and recovering from it. Curtis has a bunch of narration about it, including narrating clips from the other Halloween movies. It’s a little weird to have a forty-year-old franchise, but they’re only using the clips from the first one, H40, and Kills. They should’ve CGI’ed something else together for it. There’s not a lot of flash in Ends, all things considered. It’s a muted finale.

Albeit one with some bizarre plot decisions. Like having everyone in town hate Curtis for the 2018 massacre—she spent her life bullying a man with brain damage, what did she think would happen—or Patton basically being a cameo. If it weren’t this Halloween series with its deceptive opening titles vise a vie cast importance, he’d be unbilled.

Best music of the H40 trilogy from Cody Carpenter, John Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. Solid photography from Michael Simmonds and especially editing from Timothy Alverson. Green’s direction is fine. He’s not mimicking the original movie anymore, not with Campbell as the new protagonist, which helps.

It’s not good or successful, but it’s also not terrible, and it’s definitely the most engaging of the H40 series.

Halloween Kills (2021, David Gordon Green)

Halloween Kills is a fascinating sequel. It’s a terrible movie—though probably better than the previous one just because there’s so much less Jamie Lee Curtis, so you’re not watching her embarrass herself the entire time (though she’s got some really embarrassing moments). But given it’s the ninth Halloween sequel and the second remake of Halloween II… a lot is going on in what the filmmakers do and don’t do. And if you’ve suffered through the other twelve movies or whatever… as a viewer, you too can see the creative choices in context.

So fascinating.

And terrible.

It’s so bad. At least the first forty-five minutes are a gory, cruel, humor-drained riff on a fan service sequel. Then, after establishing Will Patton didn’t die last time and then flashing back to the original Halloween and doing a non-Halloween II sequel in flashback—how they missed a Curtis in the hospital joke is beyond me, but I’m not sure I’d feel good if I felt simpatico with Kills’s makers—the movie brings back supporting cast from the first movie. Not Halloween H40 first movie—we’ve established everyone’s back already—but Halloween 1978 first movie. Nurse Nancy Stephens is back, plus little kid grown up Kyle Richards. Anthony Michael Hall appears as the other little kid grown up, as does Robert Longstreet, but Longstreet’s so indistinct it seems like a retcon. Because Halloween movies need retcons in 2021.

Charles Cyphers is also back, but later in the movie and entirely coincidentally—fatefully? Also returning are Michael Smallwood and Carmela McNeal as the disposable Black couple. They were in the last movie but apparently not memorably enough. And Dylan Arnold as Andi Matichak’s boyfriend (and Longstreet’s son). This Halloween is the one where we get the Elm Street parents going after Freddy, basically. Though not emphasizing the teenagers in danger because… well, why do teenagers when you can do stunt cameos and then little kids. Though the little kids in danger stuff turns out to be a Season of the Witch: Halloween 3 reference, which is kind of the only thing actually cool in the movie. Like, they do a solid job working it in.

Oh, and there’s also some good gore animatronics. Kills’s Michael Myers is cruel and gross, basically doing anatomy experiments, and there are occasionally good gore animatronics. The rest of the time, it’s just gross for gross’s sake, but they do an actual fine job at least twice.

Some of John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies’s score is good. Mainly in the first forty-five when it’s the not-funny spoof of itself. During those moments, it seems like making a good Halloween escaped director Gordon Green and his co-writers, Scott Teems and Danny McBride, with them knowingly avoiding past tropes only for it to fail.

It’ll turn out Gordon Green, Teems, and McBride have some big ideas to work out in the second half of the movie, so no, it was just them killing time before their “unjust, lawless mob” plotline, which isn’t the movie but also is the movie. It’s this movie; it’s just this movie is actually only set up for the next movie. Not doing a “Michael Myers Will Return in HALLOWEEN ENDS” is actually the filmmakers’ worst move, and they don’t make a single good one. They just don’t let the film acknowledge itself because they’re pretending it’s serious. And we get to see how Gordon Green does serious with Halloween, and it stinks. It’s embarrassing and silly, and you can tell they tried real hard.

Anyway.

Lots of bad and middling performances. Judy Greer looks really underwhelmed her sequel option got picked up. Curtis and Patton, who bond in their own Halloween II pseudo-remake, are bad. Hall’s not good, but it’s also a lousy part. The supporting cast ranges. Occasionally there will be some effective slasher sequences, possibly thanks to Timothy Alverson.

It’s hard to tell if anything’s good about Kills, production-wise, because Gordon Green makes an absurd choice every thirty seconds, and it distracts, but Alverson’s editing seems good, actually. Whereas Michael Simmonds’s photography is just not incompetent. Also not sure about Richard A. Wright’s production design. Is it terrible, or is it bad at making South Carolina look like Illinois, or is it referencing the Rob Zombie redneck Halloween remakes? Or is it all three?

Again, it’s a fascinating sequel.

Shitty movie, though. Just an utterly shitty movie.

Halloween (2018, David Gordon Green)

Halloween never met a MacGuffin it didn’t embrace. Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and director Gordon’s script strings together MacGuffins to make the plot. And if it’s not a MacGuffin, it’s something they’re not going to do anything with. With a handful of exceptions, Halloween is usually at least reasonably acted. Sure, everyone lives in a 2018 where smartphones aren’t omnipresent but the screenwriters probably couldn’t figure out how to update the set pieces they lift from previous Halloween sequels for new technology.

Real quick, just because I probably don’t want to dwell on it–Halloween (2018) recreates some of the previous sequels’ thriller or slasher set pieces. It amps up the violence considerably–the film’s nowhere near as violent after it starts homaging the original Halloween as when it’s trudging through its first act mire. These set piece recreations tend to be extraordinarily violent, like Green is trying to set his Halloween–a sequel only to first film–apart from all the sequels. It’s bloodier. It’s meaner. It’s maybe louder. When Green isn’t luxuriating in the physical graphic violence, he uses the sound for off-screen graphic violence. It’s left up to the imagination.

Only not the result, because he always shows the result.

It seems weird, because for a while Halloween seems to at least be pretending it’s serious. But when Jamie Lee Curtis calls Donald Pleasence-stand in Haluk Bilginer “The New Loomis” (Pleasence’s character from previous films, including the original), it’s like Halloween feels comfortable dropping the pretense.

Back to the MacGuffin-filled opening–wait, there’s a third MacGuffin there too–anyway, Halloween opens with Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees as these obnoxious British podcaster producers doing a “Serial” on Michael Myers and the first Halloween. They go see Michael (presumably Nick Castle when he’s got the mask off, but never shown clearly–maybe Green and editor Timothy Alverson’s greatest–and most effective–feat). They bring him into the movie. They go see Jamie Lee Curtis. They mention Judy Greer.

Greer is Curtis’s daughter, who lives in town (the same town from the other Halloween movies because even though both Curtis and Greer suffer from severe mental anxiety and depression, they never want to leave the town). She’s got bland “dad” husband Toby Huss and smart and capable daughter Andi Matichak. Matichak and Curtis ostensibly have a character development arc, but much of it either happens off-screen or when diegetic sound is brought over it for effect. The screenwriters avoid the heck out of character for Curtis. With Castle–i.e. what’s happened to the slasher since the slasher movie ended forty years ago–it’s easy. He’s been tied to a stone, silent for forty years. No development whatsoever. Easy.

Curtis, Greer, and Matichak? Not so easy. Greer’s second-billed but barely relevant. She just gets to think her mom is crazy and tell her to get help. Over and over again. Huss should be there to support Greer and he gets more material than her. And, until she’s following in grandma’s final girl footsteps, Matichak gets less than her friends. There’s best girlfriend Virginia Gardner (who’s actually really good), Gardner’s boyfriend Miles Robbins, then Matichak’s boyfriend Dylan Arnold and his bro Drew Scheid.

Matichak gets less to do, outside being hunted by a quinquagenarian masked spree killer, than any of them. The other characters don’t get more development, but at least Gardner and Robbins get stuff to do. Gardner especially. She’s babysitting adorably foul-mouthed near tween Jibrail Nantambu. Another big change in Halloween as it goes on–somewhere in the second act it decides it’s going to do some comedy. The first act doesn’t have any except Hall being a dip and Huss being such a dad.

The frustrating thing about Halloween–not while watching it but while considering it–is how many weird, senseless plotting choices the screenwriters make, apparently for no reason. The film has spared down visuals. Green avoids establishing shots. Possibly because he’s shooting Charleston, South Carolina for mid-sized town Illinois. But probably not. When they’re most important, he’s avoiding them because he’s doing his whole Halloween (2018) is meaner and bloodier and realer.

That tone doesn’t fit with podcasters Hall and Rees. Either they’re jokes, in which case Halloween (2018) is a joke, or they’re serious. But the film kind of wants to take Rees seriously and not Hall. Only Hall’s the noisier one.

With the exception of Curtis, Halloween’s female characters tend to be silent sidekicks to their far less capable male partners. Patton and Curtis know each other–from the first Halloween night–but… it’s not like they get character development. Halloween (2018) doesn’t do character development, because it’s going to deliver an amazing finish. Jamie Lee Curtis vs. Michael Myers, forty years later.

It’s the point of the movie. Curtis has spent forty years arming and training herself to take out Michael Myers. And now she’s going to get to do it.

And the big finale… isn’t boring. It’s dumb. If it weren’t so visually flat, it might be worth some spoof value. Because Halloween (2018) plays like an unaware spoof of itself. Like the screenwriters had something else in mind and Green just sucked the laughs out of it. But Green’s one of the screenwriters.

Halloween (2018) takes itself way too seriously while seeming to know it shouldn’t be taken seriously at all.

Curtis is fine. She and Matichak have potential. She and Patton have potential. The movie explores neither. Matichak’s all right. She’s got very little. Patton’s fine but seems like he should be good. Greer–the movie avoids giving Greer character more than it does Curtis–Greer is hostilely wasted. Like she’s stunt-casted.

The teens–other than Gardner–are all thin, both part and performance; it doesn’t matter.

Gardner’s good. Nantambu’s funny. Not good, but funny.

Technically, nothing leaps out. Green’s direction is fine. It’s never terrible. The script’s weird, but not bad as far as dialogue. Usually. Except the podcasters. And the Donald Pleasence stand-in. Alverson’s editing is good. Simmonds’s photography is flat, visually and in terms of quality. The score–from John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter (yes relation), and Daniel A. Davies–sounds like a Halloween score. Nothing special.

Richard A. Wright’s production design is lacking.

Halloween (2018) is a curiosity. Even though it had the ingredients for something else. Something more. The film’s stunningly unambitious. It’s also passive aggressively hostile to those unfamiliar with the previous movies. While the podcasters fill in a bit, it’s more what’s been happening since the last movie, not what happened in the last movie.

And Curtis gets nothing. Nothing with any of it. Because the script can’t figure out how to make her a protagonist. It can’t figure out a lot of things.

The movie can’t figure out a lot of things. It’s really flimsy and kind of cynical–it’s like a one hundred minute exploration of why you shouldn’t try to make a “serious” movie sequel. To Halloween specifically, but also in general. Again, if it were a spoof–even a dark comedy one–there might be something here.

It’s not. And instead Halloween H40 just a lot of actors wasting their time and some remixed John Carpenter music.

The Sitter (2011, David Gordon Green)

It’s somewhat shocking, given Jonah Hill’s presence and David Gordon Green directing, The Sitter is such a mess.

Would a remake of Adventures in Babysitting with a listless college dropout in the lead instead of Elisabeth Shue be funny? Maybe. Probably even. Sadly, Sitter doesn’t give Babysitting any source credit (although some of the scenes are lifted) and the lead isn’t a listless college dropout. Oh, Hill’s “character” is supposed to be a listless college dropout, but he’s really just playing the fat kid from Superbad.

The film runs just over eighty minutes and there’s barely enough story for it. Green’s disinterest in the project is obvious–one has to wonder if it was a contractual obligation for he and Hill. By the third act, Green isn’t even pretending. Hill manages to solve all of his babysitting charges’ problems in the run time, each in exceptionally contrived scenes.

There are some funny moments and the film has good performances, but eighty minutes of outtakes with Sam Rockwell and J.B. Smoove goofing off as drug dealers would probably be a better (and more narratively cohesive) project.

The script is the conspicuous offender, but the fault lies more with Green and producer Michael De Luca. The Sitter is a concept without a narrative; everyone just pretends it isn’t a disaster. The end credits even go so far as to act like the characters are memorable with postscripts. It’s awful.

Sadly, the film’s occasional (unintentional?) interesting aspects go uncultivated.

The Sitter‘s a waste.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by David Gordon Green; written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka; director of photography, Tim Orr; edited by Craig Alpert; music by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo; production designer, Richard A. Wright; produced by Michael De Luca; released by 20th Century Fox.

Starring Jonah Hill (Noah Griffith), Landry Bender (Blithe), Kevin Hernandez (Rodrigo), Max Records (Slater), Sam Rockwell (Karl), J.B. Smoove (Julio), Ari Graynor (Marisa Lewis), Kylie Bunbury (Roxanne), Erin Daniels (Mrs. Pedulla), D.W. Moffett (Dr. Pedulla), Jessica Hecht (Sandy Griffith), Bruce Altman (Jim Griffith), Method Man (Jacolby) and Sean Patrick Doyle (Garv).

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Pineapple Express (2008, David Gordon Green)

Maybe American cinema is okay after all, maybe it is evolving. Or maybe Pineapple Express is just an exception. It certainly seems like Seth Rogen’s finding the right mix for popularity and quality, but Express outdoes anything I thought it’d be.

After a shaky prologue sequence–which overuses Bill Hader for some kind of a Superbad reference and underuses James Remar, who only gets a couple lines–Express moves into safe territory. It’s Rogen being a funny pothead while he goes about doing funny things as a process server. It’s all very funny and very safe. Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg manage to incorporate the most astounding plot elements and make them work–Rogen’s got an eighteen year-old high school girlfriend and there’s a great scene with him getting jealous over one of her classmates. It shouldn’t work, but it does and beautifully.

Then James Franco enters the story. Pineapple Express is, while still very funny in its quick scenes at this point, able to take a break for Franco and Rogen to sit around for a long scene. The scene’s funny, but it’s also character establishing. Express does narrative work while it’s treading water. The film mixes genres better than any American film I’m familiar with.

The film then evolves into the stoners on the lam comedy the trailers advertise. This period only lasts a little while (it’s hard to tell how long the periods last in Express, which runs close to two hours) and includes a hilarious fight scene.

But when the film becomes a buddy action movie–Pineapple Express owes more to Lethal Weapon than anything else–it gets fantastic. It plays with the genre it’s aping while never leaving it. It’s Lethal Weapon with Danny Glover and Mel Gibson hugging. But it still maintains that original genre–the stoner comedy–even during the intricate action scenes.

Director Green does a great job with those action scenes–seeing Gary Cole do John Woo is a great sight gag–but it’s kind of strange how little I thought about the direction throughout. Green does a fine job, but Pineapple Express is all about the script. Down to the relationship between Cole and Rosie Perez (who better have a comeback after her performance in this film), it’s absolutely perfect. I know Green did something–he got Franco his t-shirt design, for instance–but it seems like the script dictated the direction. There was only one way to do these scenes and the film does them in that way.

At the center–eventually–of Pineapple Express is the relationship between Rogen and Franco. The script gives the male friendship the language of a teenage romance, which works–both comedically and not. The film pushes the past the humor and stays with the approach. It isn’t for the one laugh, it’s for the entire film, which makes it rather affecting.

Danny McBride is really funny in the film’s flashiest role, but in terms of acting, Craig Robinson kind of runs away with the film. Every line reading he gives is fantastic and there’s a joy in waiting for him to appear and deliver another. Nora Dunn and Ed Begley Jr. are also hilarious in small roles, again thanks to the script.

There’s a certain level a film like Pineapple Express can attain–and it does–so there’s a question to exactly how good of a film Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg can write. If they keep at this level, or even a little under, it’d be fine–there aren’t many new American films as good as this one–but I’m wondering if they’re capable of doing even better. I can’t wait to see what they do next….

I’ll probably still be laughing at jokes from Express until then.

3.5/4★★★½

CREDITS

Directed by David Gordon Green; written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on a story by Judd Apatow, Rogen and Goldberg; director of photography, Tim Orr; edited by Craig Alpert; music by Graeme Revell; production designer, Chris Spellman; produced by Apatow and Shauna Robertson; released by Columbia Pictures.

Starring Seth Rogen (Dale Denton), James Franco (Saul Silver), Danny McBride (Red), Kevin Corrigan (Budlofsky), Craig Robinson (Matheson), Gary Cole (Ted Jones), Rosie Perez (Carol), Ed Begley Jr. (Robert), Nora Dunn (Shannon), Amber Heard (Angie Anderson), Joe Lo Truglio (Mr. Edwards), Arthur Napiontek (Clark), Cleo King (Police Liaison Officer), Bill Hader (Private Miller) and James Remar (General Bratt).

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