The View From The Mountain

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

While I’m not a big fan of medical shows, I decided to give Pulse , the new medical drama on Netflix, a try for one basic reason: its lead actress, Willa Fitzgerald. She was memorable and charming as officer Roscoe Conklin in the first season of Reacher on Amazon Prime. She made a great sidekick for the lead character, vagabond adventurer Jack Reacher. Thanks to Reacher being a drifter, the series changes its supporting cast every season, leaving Willa free to get cast in Pulse as Danielle “Danny” Simms, a third year resident working the ER at Maguire Hospital in Miami. Pulse starts out very good, with a major hurricane bearing down on the Miami area, and eventually rolling right over the hospital itself. The hospital, newly built, was designed to withstand massive storms like this, but that doesn’t mean everything is just hunky dory. Despite being protected from the hurricane, there are still major problems for the ER staff to deal with. And the episodes with the hurrica...

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

Actress Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician/actor Lenny Kravitz, is best known for her roles in films like Mad Max Fury Road , Rough Night , and as a very memorable Catwoman in The Batman (she was superb in that film). She made her directorial debut (as well as co-written the script and co-produced) with Blink Twice (Amazon/MGM), a psychological thriller about a cocktail waitress named Frida (Naomi Ackie) who’s busy working an exclusive event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) when the guy who’s running it, billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites them to party with him on his private island for a few days. Of course, the women take him up on his offer, looking forward to treating themselves to a wonderful vacation on a tropical island. However, Frida quickly notices some strange things happening, like one of the maids, who keeps laughingly referring to her as “red rabbit.” Jess also realizes that she’s suffering from memory lapses. But most of this is pa...

Once upon a time, back in the 1960s, they released a cool figure model kit of Superman smashing through a wall. I kept seeing this on the shelves at various stores as a kid, but never bought it because I was too intimidated back then to build it. Well, long story short, I bought this re-release of the kit that came out back in 1999. I also bought an aftermarket resin head of George Reeves, who had played Superman on the 1950s TV show. The resin head is in the same scale (1/8th) as the model. It was a fun kit to build,and one that I pretty cool to own. I really like how it has Superman in a dynamic pose that shows off his super strength. And having the George Reeves head on this figure is the icing on the cake for me. I was a fan of the George Reeves Superman series as a kid. Here's a shot of the model with the George Reeves head, comp...

There have been many horror movies over the years that have been hailed as “a new horror classic,” but so few of them actually live up to that title. It Follows is that rare film that is truly a classic. Released to theaters ten years ago this year, It Follows very quickly proved that it wasn’t just another tired rehash of the tropes found in the slasher genre, and wound up becoming a horror film that’s truly scary and unnerving. After a tense opening scene showing a teenage girl (Bailey Spry) running in a panic from an unseen threat--only to be found dead the following morning, the movie then focuses on Jay (Maika Monroe), a nineteen year old college student who’s trying to find some fun in her mundane life. But after a sexual encounter with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary), things get very weird. Hugh knocks out Jay with chloroform, then ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned building. And it gets even stranger ...

Director Robert Eggers remaking Nosferatu is a perfect fit. Eggers, whose films are all period pieces that are expertly researched down to how people speak in a specific time period, manages to entice the viewer into his stories by making them believe they are really in the era they are watching onscreen. The mundane complaint that Hollywood is running out of ideas is constantly being proved wrong by Eggers, who is telling his stories from across the breadth of time. And his take on Nosferatu is no exception. The original 1922 silent film Nosferatu was born out of the desire of telling the Dracula story from Bram Stoker’s seminal novel, but without paying for the rights. So certain names and locations were changed, and presto: we wound up with a classic silent film that still holds up exceedingly well, thanks to its extremely creepy vampire that became an enduring menace in his own right. Egger’s Nosferatu is a ...

I got this moon buggy toy from the movie Diamonds Are Forever back when I was a little spud around when the movie first came out. But I recall being annoyed upon seeing, instead of an astronaut, it had a guy in a suit driving it. Not realizing this was supposed to be 007 (I had never even heard of James Bond at that point in my young life), I removed the silly guy in the suit and always pretended that the moon buggy was driven by a proper astronaut. The arms are folded in front of it because they can no longer hold a pose. But the radar dish still spins when you roll it along.

The Amazon streaming service had a surprise for me the other night: Brainstorm , the 1983 science fiction film that wound up becoming actress Natalie Wood’s last movie, due to her untimely death. I saw this when it was first released in theaters, not really paying much heed to the behind the scenes saga. At that time, I was so hungry for new science fiction--ANY science fiction--that I happily ran to the theater whenever a promising SF feature came out. Watching Brainstorm , with its themes of life and death, wound up made me very sad back then--so much so that I never re-watched the film again (until recently). I wasn't prepared for how much it reminded too much of the then-recent death of my mother, who was a huge fan of Natalie Wood. Now, re-watching the film for the first time some 42 years later, I enjoyed it as being a strange piece of nostalgia from my late teens. While Brainstorm is flawed, the concept of scientists working on a m...

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...