iuly1983 Reviews

The Strain (2014–2017)

excellent horror show

[10/10 · 7 July 2015]

On paper, The Strain was going to be fantastic. Guillermo del Toro and co-writer Chuck Hogan overseeing an adaptation of their horror novels for television along with Carlton Cuse? About a nasty vampire outbreak in New York City? Starring David Bradley and Corey Stoll? Sign me up. The Strain looked like a slam dunk. But that was on paper. And that's why they play the games. With del Toro himself directing the pilot, the horror elements of The Strain were established from the start as the strongest part of the show. Borrowing a lot of the creature design from Blade II (also directed by del Toro), the vampires here weren't elegant – they were brutal, blunt instruments with gnarly "stingers" shooting out at their victims. Whenever it was time for a vampire attack the show came to life, and the creators' enthusiasm for the genre was plain to see. The flip side of that, unfortunately, was that aside from those moments it was a show very much in need of that shot in the arm. The dialogue was distractingly poor and the story meant to get us on Eph's side – his fractured family – was forced and unnecessary.

Fight Club (1999)

what a movie

[9/10 · 7 July 2015]

listering, hallucinatory, often brilliant, the film by David Fincher is a combination punch of social satire and sociopathology. Fight Club may be iconic and technically proficient, but it's more distant than perhaps any film to attain "modern classic" status. The trajectory of Fight Club is baffling. In its first hour or so, this picture appears to be a gloriously spiteful and well-acted satire of our bogus contemporary "crisis of masculinity": self- pitying guys hugging in groups and claiming victim status - modern consumer society having allegedly rendered the poor dears' hunter- gathering instincts obsolete. But, by the end, it has unravelled catastrophically into a strident, shallow, pretentious bore with a "twist" ending that doesn't work. And it is a film which smugly flirts, oh-so-very- controversially, with some of the intellectual and cultural paraphernalia of fascism - but does not have anything like the nerve, still less the cerebral equipment, to back this pose up.

Edward Norton gives a compulsively twitchy, nerdy, hollow-eyed performance as Fight Club's Narrator: a 30-year-old single guy with a white collar job in the automotive industry and a secret addiction; he loves attending support groups posing as a sufferer. Hilariously, this is the only thing that gives him an emotional high.