The View From The Mountain

Hocus Pocus 2 is a bit of a disappointment. While it’s great seeing Bette Midler, Sara Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy back as the Sanderson Sisters, the witch trio from 1600s Salem who have returned a second time to terrify modern day kids, I just wish the sequel was at least half as good as the original 1993 film. The first HP did a superb job of also firmly establishing its three young leads, played by Omri Katz, Thora Birch, and Vinessa Shaw, that you were still rooting for the kids--despite the wildly charismatic and funny performances by the veteran actresses playing the Sanderson Sisters. In sharp contrast, the sequel barely spends any time fleshing out its three young leads (played by Whitney Peak, Belissa Escobedo, and Lilia Buckingham); they each lack a specific character "moment" that everyone had in the original film. The sequel seems more preoccupied with blatant product placement instead of creating full-blooded characters. And the...

I dreaded watching the Doctor Strange sequel, so much so that I avoided it for a while now. I didn’t want to see it for the simple reason that Scott Derrickson, who did such a marvelous job with the first Doctor Strange film, opted out of helming the sequel. Derrickson, who directed such frightfully good films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose , Sinister , and The Black Phone , gave us a wonderfully weird and dark Doctor Strange film that was tinged with such strong elements of horror that it was a little unnerving in certain moments. In other words, the first Doctor Strange was pretty fucking great, and remains one of my all-time favorite Marvel Movies. But since I was a Doctor Strange fan from way back when I was a kid, I finally gave in and watched Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness on Disney Plus, and guess what? It really wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I kinda, sorta liked it. Well, OK, I really liked it. Yes, I really enjoyed Doctor Strange 2, I admit it...

It’s been forty two years since the death of legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, but his influence lives on the a new generation of filmmakers. The recently released Watcher, ably directed by Chloe Okuno, is another thriller with a Hitchcockian flair. Julia (Maika Monroe) moves to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who’s been transferred to the Romanian office by his company. Francis speaks Romanian fluently, having been raised by a Romanian mother, but Julia--who’s still trying to learn the language--is lost at sea. Okuno makes a point of not translating any of the Romanian that’s spoken in the film, making us feel Julia’s isolation and frustration at being left out of conversations and life in general. But life gets even harder for Julia when she starts seeing a shadowy figure watching her from one of the windows in the apartment building across the street. Soon, she starts seeing a strange man who appears to be following her where...

The Orville has long been an entertaining science fiction show that got even better with its third (and possibly final) season. With shooting on the third season getting held up by the pandemic, Seth MacFarlane--who created the series, as well as stars as its Captain, Ed Mercer--seemingly took the added time to rework the scripts. And that was a very good thing. When The Orville first debuted, it was seen as a comedy that offered a funny, satirical view of Star Trek, the classic series from which The Orville was inspired by. The humor was very broad and bombastic, sometimes going a little over the top. But even in the first two seasons, the slapstick humor began to slowly be replaced by earnest storytelling as MacFarlane and his writers fleshed out their characters and the universe they lived in. And by doing this, The Orville only got better. While there’s still humor in the third season, and it’s much welcome (because the humor here is still genuinely fu...

It makes sense that The Batman would have its opening scene take place on Halloween night. Gotham City, Batman’s stomping grounds, is practically a Halloween-fest all year round, with most of its denizens wearing masks. The Riddler (Paul Dano) is clad in a mask when he sneaks into the home of the Gotham City mayor and murders him--later promising more deaths and revelations of dark and dirty secrets online. This Riddler is a far different beast than Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, who I grew up with on the ’66 Batman TV series. But as much as I will always worship Gorshin’s performance (and he remains my all-time favorite Riddler), I thought Paul Dano’s more creepy take of a deeply disturbed Riddler worked very well in The Batman. Tech savvy, including knowing just how to work the rubes into following him online, this new Riddler is far more dangerous--and even scarier--than ever before. And his weird quirk of dropping clues is given a legitimate reason: he wants...

I avoided seeing Ghostbusters Afterlife because the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters wasn’t very good. Neither was the 1989 sequel to Ghostbusters--and, admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters, either. I didn’t hate the original movie, but I was never caught up in the wave of adoration for it that swept through the country back then. I guess you can say I’m not a Ghosthead, one of the rabid fans of the franchise, and the subject of a very well-made documentary that you should see, especially if you really enjoy the movies. But I eventually saw Ghostbusters Afterlife because--well, why not? I assumed beforehand that I would dislike it, but that it wouldn’t matter, because I’d only watch it once, and just forget about it, just like I did with the other Ghostbusters films. But something interesting happened: I would up enjoying Ghostbusters Afterlife a great deal. The new Ghostbusters film tries to be the true sequel to the original film, despi...

While I’ve always considered myself more of a DC Comics type of guy (with Batman being my all-time favorite), I’ve also been a huge fan of Marvel’s Spider-Man since I first saw him in the cartoon show as a little spud (“Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can….”). And so I’ve also enjoyed the Spider-Man movies produced by Sony: the Tobey MacQuire Spider-Man films, the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films, and the absolutely fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is my favorite Spider-Man film, bar none. But I was never a big fan of the Tom Holland Spider-Man films. I have no problem with Holland himself; he’s a genuinely talented actor who gives it all with what he’s given to work with, but that’s not much. Spider-Man: Homecoming had Peter Parker act like he’s the ward of Tony (Iron Man) Stark, and even after Stark kicks the bucket (and good riddance) in the Avengers films, Peter is still living in his shadow in Far From Home. ...