Elvis Launched a Book Club with his Hocus Pocus Bros.

After a scorching summer, the weather has finally cooled here on the East Coast and the leaves are changing color. The spooky season is upon us with Salem and the local fair bustling. Yesterday I saw traffic outside my house at a standstill which is the only time of the year it ever happens. So naturally, with the season’s transformation in the air, and the release of so many good horror movies, the correct reaction was for me to watch romantic comedies…. right?

Okay, I lied a bit. I did watch a horror movie, Hocus Pocus 2, but it’s been a strange year. Now that we’re in the middle of horror season I’m not quite feeling the spooky magic. As many film critics have stated, this has been a killer year for horror movies so in a way I’ve been in the mood for months. Though now that we’re in ‘drop every horror movie’ panic season I’ve shifted to other interests. Will I get around to my horror marathon? Maybe. But for now, I’m going with the flow.

It’s hard to replicate the magic of the first Hocus Pocus.

Inevitably, Disney is going to remake every viable property that they own, and now with its acquisition of 20th Century Fox they own nearly everything; so remakes, reboots, and redos are here to stay in our foreseeable future. That’s why I’m not going to be too hard on Hocus Pocus 2 even though it hardly lives up to its legacy.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything good about it. Hocus Pocus 2 starts off very strong with a flashback to the Sanderson sisters as little girls. It introduces us to a few new characters like Reverend Traske (Tony Hale) and The Witch Mother (Hannah Waddingham). Traske acts as the instigator for isolating the Sanderson sisters while The Witch Mother introduces them to magic, but the real stars in this flashback are the young actors playing the Sanderson sisters (Taylor Henderson, Nina Kitchen, Juju Brener). Especially Taylor Henderson as young Winifred. She nails Bette Midler’s mannerisms and all three girls have a presence that keeps you glued to the screen. I actually hope we get a TV show or a prequel movie with them.

The rest of the movie is a fairly standard Disney legacy remake. The most loved characters are back to confront the new generation. Multiple callbacks are made. The new characters prove their worth and the original characters take a step back by the end. A strong decision they made was not to make the new generation related to the original. None of the new girls is the daughter of the original main characters, and thus they don’t need any of that extra baggage. That tweak helped make this familiar formula feel a tad fresh. A few of the callbacks are fun, like this time around the witches are riding a broom, a Swiffer wet jet, and two Roombas. Billy is back as the lovable zombie, but he, unfortunately, doesn’t have much to do. Then there’s the ending. It felt too much like the movie wanted sympathy for the Sanderson sisters and it reminded me of Disney’s trend where they turn villains into the good guys or morally questionable people. All in all, it’s an okay primer to the spooky season.

While it’s not a horror film The Plague Dogs certainly has horrific imagery. Celebrating my 3,000th logged film on the deliciously addictive social media site Letterboxd, I decided to watch one of the most emotionally draining animated films I could find. This is not a film for the faint of heart or dog lovers. The story revolves around an animal testing site where two dogs that were experimented on escape and survive in the wild.

The opening shot is of a dog swimming for his life in a test pool. Scientists record how long he can tread water before he loses strength and sinks to the bottom. It was a smart move to make this film animated because the situations the dogs are put into would have made production morally questionable. Animation also helps audiences distinguish the fantasy element of this tragic tale, emphasizing the fact that real animals weren’t harmed, but they do get treated like this in the real world.

Not wanted by the town folk, never daring to go back to the scientists, the two escaped dogs try to be wild and are taught by a fox how to kill sheep. The animation is sickenly gorgeous. It has a style that you don’t see today and it’s not afraid to show you the gruesome remains of dead sheep or people. It lingers on the tragedy and has one of the most shocking deaths in all of cinema. It’s a tough watch but worth it.

To cheer myself up I dived into romantic comedies.

Failure to Launch was an iconic romcom that I had never seen. Now I have. Of how often I heard about the movie growing up I expected it to be better. The premise is actually interesting and a fun take-back-your-agency type of setup, however, the movie decides to forget that side of the story and focus on the standard rom-com instead. It was fun to see Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper be young little nuggets. What actually made the film energetic was by no surprise Zooey Deschanel. She’s a treasure and her manic subplot always cheered me up.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Book Club!

Advertised as little old ladies reading the spicy tales of Fifty Shades of Grey, this movie brings a lot more heart and depth about relationships than one would suspect. It’s not every day an actress over fifty gets a well-written part. Hollywood seems to have a limit when it comes to their women with agency and once that limit has been reached they’ve been regulated to ‘insert mom’ here or ‘insert grandma’ there. After a clunky exposition dump to start the movie off, the rest of the run time is dedicated to exploring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen’s characters in meaningful ways that you don’t normally explore in a movie.

What I found refreshing about Book Club is the antithesis of the modern romance, which strives to be a voyeur through the clumsy meet-cutes, where these characters understand there’s a weight to their dating actions and they have to figure out if they are doing this for themselves, or for family. It’s quite sweet to see the ever steamy Andy Garcia woo Diane Keaton off her feet. It’s heartbreaking to watch Mary Steenburgen come to grips with her marriage and its emotional payoff. Finding depth in these stories is such a treat in an otherwise empty arena on Hollywood’s romantic stage

In a similar vein, the latest raunchy rom-com Bros. comes out unabashedly strong. I’m not a fan of Judd Apatow’s style of comedy. It always feels unnecessarily raunchy for R-rating’s sake. Thankfully, Bros. can be seen as a really great drama too! What I appreciated the most about this movie is the diverse amount of gay men on screen. Hollywood loves the femme twink, but here we see men of all ages, of all body sizes, and shows a spectrum that even includes ‘straight passing’ gay men all through the eyes of the protagonist who falls in love with somebody he never would have thought to have fallen for.

There’s too much to unpack with Bros. for this newsletter, but through Billy’s journey, you get to see the many sides of gay men responding to each other. One of my favorite scenes is with Billy trying his chance with a gym rat, doing so by deepening his voice, and the gym guy freaking out once Billy reverts to his normal high-pitched voice after sex. Billy embarrassingly leaves the guy’s apartment, but not before asking if the gym guy wouldn’t have gotten with him with his normal voice (he would have) and then bonding over a movie poster. I really love this scene because it shows that even in a marginalized community where the outward appearance is solidarity (which ties in with Billy’s job at the LGBTQ+ museum) the inward appearance is still faced with stigmatized judgment when in fact they’re all very similar than one would assume.

Finally, I ended the week with my Grandmother experiencing Elvis. With Luhrmann’s controversial 2022 blockbuster I wasn’t sure where my Elvis loving Grandmother would stand. Thankfully, she really enjoyed it. Elvis is as much an experience a second time around. The editing is wondering and I love how it mimics Elvis’ career. It’s both exhilarating and draining. Just like writing for a living!

Speaking of writing…

If you’ve made it this far thank you! I have a lot of exciting ideas I want to try and realize with this recent attempt at a Substack. One aspect I’ve been struggling over was what my focus would be. There’s a lot of film criticism out there and I didn’t feel I had a unique enough voice to tackle the weekly grind of staying up to date on everything. Whether it was news or movies.

Instead, I want my Substack to be focused on writing. One of my monthly segments will be Scene to Seen. This is where I’ll be able to talk about adaptations. So many people complain about deviations from the source material in movies that adapted their favorite property, but there is far more nuance in the art of adaptation than the black and white brush off of “It wasn’t accurate to the book,” or those click bait articles with titles such as “Everything different in _____ from the book.” With Scene to Seen, I want to dive into the decisions screenwriters make when adapting and explore the ramifications for good or bad.

I have a few other ideas for other segments on this Substack, but I’ll need to test and iron out all those details later. I’m very excited to see where this journey will go and I hope you’ll join me. Click that Subscribe button to receive an email every time I post!

My first Scene to Seen will cover Bullet Train. I hope to have that out by the end of the month. Until next time~