Review

Mass

Chill Review, TV Shows

Midnight Mass is pretty good but quite slow, even for me. And I am definitely one who enjoys plodding, methodical movies and TV shows. Also, I don’t care about religious themes very much and the show is perfused with those.

It’s still worth watching, though. And I do like that Mike Flanagan (the director) tends to use the same cast, so you get to experience their range and talent across various shows he makes. Overall, the work feels like a stage play on screen. I enjoyed this but will not be to many people’s taste admittedly.

Recommended, with caveats.

Cinematic Omens

Chill Movies, Review

The First Omen was not that good. Kind of meandering and predictable. However, the cinematography was nice.

(That’s a shot of Margaret and her roommate getting ready to hit the town. Our girl Maggie1 is trepidatious about going out in a dress she feels is too revealing, while her roommate applies some peer pressure for her to woman up.)

In addition to just having a great name, Nell Tiger Free is very good in the film, as are Bill Nighy and Ralph Ineson. But you spend most of your time with Nell so she is the reason to watch if you like good acting. Otherwise, skip.

  1. No one actually calls her this in the film.

Escapade

Chill Books, Review

I quickly read L.D. Smithson’s The Escape Room. It’s not worth the minimal time. It’s as light as a feather and has no content to match its convictions. It never commits to anything. It’s ostensibly about a group of eight people forced to compete to the death in reality TV show while giving us a look at the relationship of an older, kind of overbearing sister to her younger, more easygoing sibling. However, the work never explores any of this satisfactorily and it neither examines the problems with the pigeonholing of the younger sister as “scatty” nor the horror of being essentially forced into almost-gladiatorial combat with seven other people.

It’s not clever, it’s not interesting and it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it horror? Is it family drama? Is it just plain drama? It’s never observant enough of human behavior or extreme enough to warrant any reaction. Both the book and all the characters in it are so milquetoast that you want to call the novel and all the people in it “Obama.” The book feels like it was written by a committee who had seen Fincher’s Se7en with all the good parts edited out combined with a binge of Golden Girls and Sex in the City.

The prose — well, let’s not talk about that.

I rarely encounter a bad book that I read all the way through, but this one I did. I wanted to see what happened when the two sisters finally had their big confrontation that the book should’ve been building to. And you know what happened? Not a damn thing. I guess I fooled myself because even that encounter was an anticlimactic waste of time.

Do not recommend.