It's A Scary February With Danny

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I hope you all are reading this post's title to the tune of "Jolly Holliday" from Mary Poppins. Anyway it's Friday, which means there are a bunch of new movies out! And if there are a bunch of new movies out, then I am talking about them over at Celebrity Beehive. Click on yonder to see slash read. And then come back so we can...

Boo! It's a surprisingly scary weekend at the multiplexes this weekend. Let us talk about it. The big one is Lil' Danny Radcliffe's remake of the 1989 TV flick The Woman in Black of course, which has been getting generally decent notices from all I've gathered.  I will probably go see it, if I can drag myself out of the house this weekend. But a couple of smaller spooky pictures are also in the game, albeit on 99% fewer screens. 

The first one is our beloved Ti West's new film The Innkeepers. I wrote a review here. It has its moments, but it maybe meanders a little bit too much, and it's a little bit more in love with Sara Paxton than I got to be. Killer ending, though.

The other scary movie out this weekend is the bizarro Brit-flick Kill List, which I wrote a non-review of here. I'd love to say more about Kill List but I maintain that it's a great movie to know as close to nothing as possible about going into, so y'all go watch it and you get back to me.

Both The Innkeepers and Kill List are supposedly available to watch at home instantly if you have access to that kind of thing, so you don't even have to leave the house! You can sit on your couch and feel the cold dead fingers of horror climbing up your spine there, hooray! And speaking of cold dead fingers...
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... Madonna's movie W.E. is out in limited release today, and I guess I'm allowed to talk about it now, having seen it a few weeks back. Before that let me remind you that the contest to win the soundtrack ends today, so head over there to leave a comment or email me if you haven't yet. 

As for the movie... urgh. It just doesn't work on the most fundamental of storytelling levels. The word that I couldn't get off my lips afterwards was "inexplicable." I do have to give it credit for having one of the flat-out most nonsensical scenes I've ever seen, with sudden period-inappropriate punk rock and enormous wobbling flappers and Charlie Chaplin.

But everything having to do with the modern-day half of the story is completely pointless, and I think Madonna realized after she cast her that she just could't stand Abbie Cornish, because she shoots her as if she's an oafish linebacker. There is a moment when Abbie is climbing into bed with a man and I literally had no idea which of them was the man. And I hate saying this because I really like Abbie Cornish, she was astoundingly good in Bright Star, and I keep feeling as if the world has conspired against her, but this movie is only fuel for that fire. Madonna gives us no purpose for these scenes besides a beastly creepiness, and Abbie's character, if read by the film's logic, is an unhinged weirdo. And the film just goes on and on and on with no end in sight. 

That said, it's a bit of a conundrum when there's something really wonderfully good inside a movie so pompously terrible, but Andrea Riseborough crafts a wonderful character out of Wallis Simpson. It's not entirely true that the movie "lights up" whenever she's on-screen because the movie is so stultifyingly blind as to what it's about it never much lights up at all, but you do wander off with your brain and imagine a movie where Riseborough is allowed to be as magical as she so obviously wants to and could be. But it just leaves her sitting there, blowing smoke rings around. It doesn't help that she's so much more colorful and interesting than the Edward that James D'Arcy gives us - in fact it topples their supposed "great romance" right over, because the only explanation that's explicable for this amazing woman to go with this dullard is because he's the king, which is exactly what the movie's arguing against.

And the film only half-deserves its Oscar nomination for its costumes - Riseborough's clothes are swoon-worthy, but then you must deduct points for poor Abbie, outfitted as the oafish linebacker, tromping around thickly in inexplicable (there's that word again) bores. Sigh. Poor Abbie Cornish.
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