Nine Thoughts on 2018 in Movies

1

I watched a few James Bond films recently: Roger Moore vehicles For Your Eyes Only (1981), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Octopussy (1983) plus Pierce Brosnan starrers Goldeneye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). I am sorry to confirm that Octopussy is still the most abysmally terrible of these. Sure, Bond films don't always strictly "make sense" -- see, for example, everything about Silva's confinement to and escape from MI6 in the generally excellent Skyfall (2012) -- but I have watched Octopussy many times and I am still baffled by the plot. I truly don't understand who is doing what to whom or what any of the villains are trying to achieve in this movie. The film has a few great set pieces -- the auto rickshaw chase through the streets of Udaipur and the climactic fight on the airplane exterior stand out -- yet as a whole, Octopussy is a confused, boring mess. I urge you to avoid it.

It pains me to say that after Octopussy, The Spy Who Loved Me, a perennial favorite, fared the least well for me on these recent viewings. It's the sexism. One particularly odious scene in which Bond is offered an unspeaking, scantily clad woman as a companion for the night just spoiled the movie for me. I seem to be reaching the point where these old cinematic friends grate against my strong feelings about misogyny.

Combining his sexism with his imperialism, Bond quips: 
"When one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures."

Thankfully, For Your Eyes Only was much more bearable on the gender front -- Melina Havelock may be the most empowered, least sexually objectified woman co-star in the Bond corpus. Furthermore, Topol is superb as Columbo and Eyes' climactic rock-climbing sequence is a series high point. The Spy Who Loved Me still has the best villain (Stromberg), the best villain's henchman (Jaws) and the best theme song (Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better"), and I will need to re-watch The Man With The Golden Gun to be completely certain of this, but For Your Eyes Only might well be the best Roger Moore James Bond film.

Goldeneye was also excellent -- definitely the best Brosnan Bond film by far, featuring the franchise's second-best theme song. Tomorrow Never Dies is pretty good, Michelle Yeoh is terrific and Jonathan Pryce has a good time chewing scenery. Yet it has the very worst theme song of any Bond movie, no offense to Sheryl Crow.

2

The Favourite or BlackkKlansman or Sorry to Bother You is my favorite movie of 2018. Probably BlackkKlansman. I don't know. BK is a surprisingly upbeat and enjoyable film made by a very talented and focused director at the height of his powers. It may even be Spike Lee's best film, or is surely ranked among his best. Its ending, when it shifts into documentary footage, is one of the most potent and saddening and moving and gut-wrenching moments I had in cinema this year.

I love the audacity and genre-bending qualities of both The Favourite and Sorry to Bother You. Sorry To Bother You is scrappy, rough around the edges, more satirical and weird than pathos-driven, yet it packs a cumulative wallop with its zany absurdism and its willingness to address key social issues like labor strikes in a head-on way -- a rarity in Hollywood cinema. It is a satirical comedy with a touch of the surreal and science-fictional. Though it won't ultimately appeal to everybody, it is definitely a must-see.

The Favourite is a comedy of manners without the manners -- a dark comedy with touches of pathos, depth, and unexpected beauty. Visually audacious in its use of fisheye lenses, natural lighting, and long takes, The Favourite is riveting due to its tight script and its nuanced handing of interpersonal rivalries, lust, and love. All three leads are terrific but Olivia Colman as Queen Anne and Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah are particularly revelatory. 

3

As far as big "popcorn" movies go, the only ones I clearly remember enjoying in 2018 are Black Panther and The Meg. I especially appreciated the women characters in Black Panther and also its villain Killmonger. He convinced me. And the rhino battle near the end ruled. I guess Black Panther is the best Marvel movie, though to me that is not necessarily the highest compliment, but whatever. This stuff is also true:

Killmonger is disenfranchisement turned into a person, someone for whom killing is a better fate than life and death is a better fate than bondage. He recalls slaves specifically, who would rather throw themselves from the ships than face a lifetime in chains.

The film’s idea of solving its dilemmas is always contained, to avoid conflict with other kinds of civics, to black-on-black violence . . .

Black Panther identifies and neutralizes its target audience by marketing empowerment but ultimately discarding it as the foolhardy goal of a Marvel villain. 

But whatever. I think I want to check out Into the Spider-Verse soon -- I have a feeling that might be the kind of superhero movie I will enjoy. I am also greatly looking forward to Captain Marvel. End of superhero movie talk.

Big-budget prehistoric giant shark movie The Meg actually surprised me  -- as predictable and rote as it is, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Jason Statham and Li Bingbing make excellent co-leads. I need to re-watch that one soon I think.

4

I also really enjoyed Eighth Grade and Will You Be My Neighbor? this past year but those ones haven't stuck with me as much.

5

One of the highest points of my moviegoing year was attending the Eastman Museum / Dryden Theater's Fourth Nitrate Picture Show last May. The Nitrate Picture Show is a three-day film festival screening only nitrate film prints, by definition pre-1950s films since the industry switched to less flammable "safety film" after that. I am incredibly fortunate to live in a city -- Rochester, NY -- that can show such prints, as apparently there are only four or five theaters capable of screening nitrate films in North America, and the others are in California.

The entire program was wonderful, including a collection of shorts that kicked things off on Friday afternoon and Saturday night's headliner The Red Shoes (1948). Yet the real highlights of the festival for me were three films I hadn't seen before: the Robert Siodmak film noir Cry of the City (1948), George Cukor's delightful rom-com Holiday (1938) -- shown in a rare sepia-toned print -- and surprise "blind date with nitrate" festival finale Man of Aran (1934). The basking shark fishing footage in the latter film was the apotheosis of my Picture Show experience and a great way to cap off this very special event.

Just a few weeks ago I went to the Dryden's encore New Year's Eve screening of The Red Shoes -- a fun way to ring in the new year and a reminder of how much I am looking forward to attending the Nitrate Picture Show again this year. 

6  

Hereditary was 2018's best horror movie. (I enjoyed A Quiet Place while watching it but it didn't really stick with me afterwards and I was bothered by its big plot holes -- where does the farm's electric power come from? -- and its melodramatic valorization of John Krasinski's patriarchal father character.) Hereditary is suspenseful, emotionally harrowing, and visually striking. Its plot presents an interesting twist on the demonic possession plot, with some gendered elements I am still trying to work out. All the performances are excellent, though Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff are especially compelling. With its possession / parenthood themes and paranoia-inducing cinematography, Hereditary's closest cinematic cousin is Rosemary's Baby. A must-see for horror fans.

One of my favorite recurring images from Ari Aster's excellent Hereditary.

7

I teach film studies and my students are often kind enough to loan me DVDs and Blu-rays of movies I haven't yet seen. Two of the best movies I've seen in awhile came to me as loaners from students last fall: Escape From Tomorrow (2013) and Mandy (2018).

Escape From Tomorrow is a movie I knew about largely due to its audacious premise and unique, controversial production history. Shot surreptitiously and illegally and in the Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks, Escape tells the tale of Jim (Roy Abramsohn), a husband and father who seems bored with his family's trip to the Magic Kingdom. Shown entirely from Jim's somewhat disengaged and prurient perspective, Escape From Tomorrow, in one of its finest sequences, depicts the It's a Small World ride as a nightmarish, acid-trippy hellscape. Unable to use the song "It's a Small World" for licensing reasons, the film's soundtrack music actually makes the well-known ride both more familiar and more uncannily horrifying.  Brilliant.

Escape continues its deconstruction of the Disney experience with science-fictional behind-the-scenes machinations, an undercurrent of commentary about Disney princesses as sex objects, and its weird -- yet successful -- twist ending. Featuring great black and white cinematography and a haunting musical score, Escape From Tomorrow is much more than a guerilla filmmaking stunt -- it is a truly compelling satire. That said, it is surely aimed at Disney critics like myself or at least Disney fans with a sense of humor about their fandom and a tolerance for irony and dark comedy.

Mandy is one of the most visually striking movies of last year. It fuses a male-oriented revenge thriller / action movie with horror-movie trappings and art-film visual techniques. Laden with slow motion, wordless sequences, and red filters, Mandy is similar in general premise to Sam Raimi's wacky Army of Darkness (1992) but serious-minded and deliberately paced, more interested in mesmerizing visuals than speedy action. Mandy features one of Nicolas Cage's best performances in years -- he gets Cage-ishly unhinged by the end but earns it via a relatively restrained and measured performance in act one. Linus Roache also deserves kudos for being extraordinarily creepy and despicable as death cult leader Jeremiah Sand.

Nicolas Cage in Panos Cosmatos' artsy revenge thriller Mandy (2018).

Both of these films are strongly male-centered. Escape From Tomorrow, while clearly lampooning protagonist Jim's pretensions, also presents its women characters mainly as sexual objects (e.g., the two young women Jim keeps encountering in the park) or as two-dimensional, shrewish villains (e.g., his wife Emily [Elena Schuber]). Mandy does a little better, giving Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) some degree of agency in the first half, but ultimately she is a woman in a refrigerator, her death fueling Red's drive for revenge. In both cases, I guess the films' black humor and artsy visuals redeem them for me despite their palpable sexism.

8

Some comments on two 2018 films I saw in the past week:

First, the documentary RBG. This is a wonderful, well-constructed, inspiring feminist film that I highly recommend. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a feminist trailblazer, having spent her long career doggedly fighting against gender inequality in the U.S. legal system. She is a true American hero, driven, hardworking, and unswervingly ethical. She is also, despite her serious exterior, great fun, as the later parts of the documentary, tracing her recent rise as a pop-cultural icon, make clear. This is a great movie about a great person.

Second, Mary Queen of Scots, which I just saw two nights ago at the Little Theater. This was a movie I really wanted to like, yet despite my somewhat middling expectations, I was disappointed. The two stars, Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, do everything they can with the material, and Ronan in particular manages some lovely moments, especially when interacting with Ismael Cruz Cordova's David Rizzio, the second most compelling character in the movie after Ronan's Queen Mary. Yet the film commits three major fuckups:

• It wants to be a movie about sisterhood and the oppression of women, yet it lacks the focus to deliver on its own heavily belabored thesis. I know we are supposed to care about how much Queens Mary and Elizabeth suffer at the hands of scheming patriarchal men, but the way the film sketches this oppression is too two-dimensional and facile to have any emotional resonance. This is especially the case in the film's egregiously stupid portrayal of Elizabeth (Robbie), who despite early promise is reduced to a maudlin, petulant, woe-is-me figure in the film's second act. Her final confrontation with Mary, a contrivance not based on historical incident yet featured in many fictional tellings of this tale, also feels contrived -- and when Elizabeth confesses that she is jealous of Mary's beauty and love life and motherhood, I almost barfed. The movie ultimately sells out both its female leads by making them obsessed with motherhood at the expense of all else. 
• The movie utterly squanders Margot Robbie and David Tennant. As she demonstrated in I, Tonya, Robbie is capable of fully committing to difficult, complex characters, but Mary Queen of Scots does not give her enough screen time to develop Elizabeth properly, and, as just mentioned, it has no idea what to do with her in the second half of the movie except to make her weirdly jealous of Mary yet uninterested in doing anything about it. Regarding Tennant, in Jessica Jones Season 1 he played Kilgrave, one of the greatest pop-cultural villains of the last several years, yet Mary Queen of Scots mostly makes his John Knox stand behind a pulpit and deliver dull, clunky sermons about how all women are duplicitous whores. Just watch Tennant's compelling performance in Jessica Jones Season 1 and see also Jonathan Goad's performance as Knox in The CW's Reign (2013-2017) for examples of how this could have been handled.  
• Bothwell is way too boring and de-romanticized, acting as a raping, scheming conspirator against Mary rather than her lover and co-plotter against Darnley. This choice robs Mary of her agency. She is a victim of patriarchal trickery rather than a lover caught up in genuine passion for Bothwell and a desire to be rid of her drunken, weak-willed first husband.  

Ultimately, the film is just too rote and boring, like the shitty Imitation Game. It takes very interesting people and situations and flattens them out via clunky storytelling and lack of focus on its purported theme. It cannot decide if it wants to tell a compelling tale about sisterhood or to check all the expected boxes in terms of what is known (or suspected, or speculated) about the historical Mary Stuart. Guy Pearce and the rest of the supporting cast do good jobs but it's not enough to save it. I cannot recommend Mary Queen of Scots except to hard-core period drama enthusiasts, Saoirse Ronan fans, or Mary Stuart completists.

9

Lastly, a short list of films I want to see in the near future: If Beale Street Could Talk, First Reformed, You Were Never Really Here, Leave No Trace, Escape at Dannemora.

Shark Lake (2015) vs. Sharktopus (2010)

Eric Roberts, one of the best things about Sharktopus. 

This post is an (only very slightly) enhanced take on ideas I first hashed out here. I mainly posted this revised version to set the stage for an upcoming Shark Attack Movie Roundup! and because I had a few more things to say about Shark Lake (2015) and Sharktopus (2010).

Sara Malakul Lane as Deputy Hernandez, the protagonist of Shark Lake. I'd show you a shot of the shark but it might deter you from wanting to see the film.

Shark Lake is a low-budget B-movie which features top-billed Dolph Lundgren in about four short scenes. The rest of the movie is carried by Sara Malakul Lane as sheriff's deputy Meredith Hernandez. She is compelling and some of the film's attack sequences -- especially an early one involving an old man -- are pretty amusing. But the special effects are pure shit, and therefore, despite its promising title, the shark is the least goddamned interesting thing in this shark movie. I don't inherently mind fakey or cheap special effects, but in a film-world that purports to be dealing with "real" sharks, bad effects can really ruin it. (As we'll see, I am much more tolerant of shoddy, obvious CGI when it is used to convey the weird and fantastical as in Sharktopus.)

The best stuff in Shark Lake includes the pub scene when Hernandez tells her adoptive daughter Carly that one of her nine-year old schoolmates is sexist, and the witty banter that subsequently ensues between Hernandez and oceanography nerd Peter (Michael Aaron Milligan). It's also fun to watch Lundgren growl his way through a few incomprehensible scenes late in the movie. But it is a weakness to make a shark attack movie in which the shark attack scenes are by far the worst part.

Overall, Shark Lake is one of those "so bad it's good" entries. While the acting is pretty good, the film's badness mostly stems from its bargain-basement special effects and some very odd plot turns near the end. Nonetheless I would call Shark Lake a very enjoyable low-budget shark attack film. Bear in mind that I am both a low-budget shark movie junkie and an ardent fan of The Room.

You guessed it: Sharktopus. Yes, they're on dry land.

Malakul Lane, who does such a noble job propping up Shark Lake, goes underused in the otherwise delightful Sharktopus. Eric Roberts basically steals the movie from its ostensible leads, and the sharktopus creature's visual appearance and attack scenes are much more satisfying than similar ones in the generally less overblown Shark Lake. Indeed, Sharktopus as a whole is great fun, in part because it is great fun to watch a huge shark / octopus hybrid crawl up onto dry land, roar, and kill people.

Sadly, in Sharktopus, Malakul Lane is relegated to being an especially drab embodiment of the "babe scientist" stereotype I discuss in my review of Doctor Strange. She spends a lot of time sitting in the back of a motorboat, silently typing at a laptop computer. This is disappointing given that she is given much more to do -- and therefore more character depth -- as the protagonist of Shark Lake.

One of the least thrilling aspects of the generally action-packed Sharktopus.

Shark Lake vs. Sharktopus: despite plot confusion and rock-bottom shitty monster effects, Shark Lake has much better dramatic sequences than does Sharktopus. The strengths of Sharktopus are its awesome attack sequences, especially since the creature can climb up on land and remain there for several minutes at a time. And again, Eric Roberts.

Both films are exploitative and crass, but Sharktopus is more so. Take, for example, an early dark-comic scene in which Roger Corman himself cameos as an elderly beachcomber who watches a woman get brutally killed by the sharktopus. He looks on impassively, watches her die, shrugs, steals the now-dead woman's prized coin off the beach, and walks away. Despite some gratuitous ass shots in a couple beach party scenes, there is no comparable scene of death being treated so lightly in Shark Lake.

Horror Film Class Required Movie List

A still from Frankenstein's beautifully shot opening sequence. 

I usually don't blog about academic or teaching-related subjects but I've been blogging about my love of the horror film for some time now. elucidating its roots in German Expressionism, exploring its defining classics, profiling its greatest monster movies, extolling its immortal masterpieces, calling attention to its best recent iterations, effusing about its Gothic incarnations, and even having fun reviewing some of its mid-range entries. So it seems timely and interesting to jot down the list of films I plan to screen in the horror film class I'm teaching this coming spring, with some brief commentary about my inclusions (and exclusions).* Here goes:

The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian). While there is a large body of silent horror cinema I would have liked to include, in the end I narrowed it down to this one towering, influential classic. Would I have liked to show at least one German Expressionist film like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), or The Golem (1920)? Yes, for sure.

I even seriously considered showing Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), which, despite its oddball, art-film tendencies, is one of the most unnerving and uncanny horror films I can think of. (It is also one of two films -- the other one is The Student of Prague [1913] -- which would most help me teach the concepts in Sigmund Freud's famous essay "The Uncanny," an early required reading selection.)**

Yet in the end I went with Phantom, for two reasons: (1) It is familiar and easy to follow on the story level, anticipating as it does so many of the monster movies that get made in its wake, and (2) Lon Chaney, its amazing star. With all due respect to German stars Max Schreck and Conrad Veidt, Chaney gets my nod for the most important and talented horror film actor of the silent cinema. He more or less sets the standard for what a truly terrifying yet sympathetic monster should be, paving the way for stars like Boris Karloff . . .

Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) and Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning). Of these two, I think Frankenstein is the better movie -- it's pretty much the best of the early Universal horror films -- but I could not imagine a syllabus without both. Hell, without Nosferatu in the mix, the Tod Browning / Bela Lugosi Dracula is one of only two bona fide vampire movies I've got!

Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) is a low-budget masterpiece produced by the legendary Val Lewton and directed by noir / horror master Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Night of the Demon). I love the psychosexual dynamics of this film -- it makes the connection between sexuality, ethnicity, and horror quite clear. An exotic (and exoticized / fetishized / animalized) foreign woman (Simone Simon) believes that if she is ever sexually intimate with a man, she will turn into a cat and kill her would-be lover. Nevertheless she falls in love with and marries an over-confident, too-rational American man (Kent Smith) who doubts the reality of her ominous beliefs. Insane erotic-horrific antics ensue.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold) is my 1950s creature feature selection. As with Cat People, I chose Creature mainly for its unnerving psychosexual and gender(-ed) dynamics. Although I am personally more partial to 1950s entries Gojira and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there is something tonally and visually special about Creature from the Black Lagoon. The underwater photography sequences in particular are haunting, spooky, and magical -- they get to the heart of the creepy sexuality that drives the whole film. Interspecies lust and sexual terror set in a primeval jungle = thematically rich horror film fun.

Dracula (a.k.a. Horror of Dracula, 1958, dir. Terence Fisher). Great Britain's Hammer Film Productions is such an interesting studio, a scrappy little operation that accomplished much on the strength of tight scripts, economically cheap yet aesthetically bold set design, consistent direction, and the prodigious star talents of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Hammer Films reimagined many key Gothic and horror film staples -- Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, the Mummy -- for the late 1950s and 1960s and beyond.

Specifically, Hammer's version of Dracula lends the vampire tale a lurid, feverish edge via full color cinematography and simmering sexuality. It is, simply put, a really fun Gothic horror film. Plus it can be used to discuss remakes and adaptations: after F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and the 1931 Browning/Lugosi Dracula, the Hammer version is probably the next most influential (and best) filmic iteration of Bram Stoker's novel.

I couldn't eliminate either Peeping Tom (1960, dir. Michael Powell) or Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) from the course's required viewing list, so I am making my students watch both of these landmark thrillers over the course of one week (two class meetings).

Obviously, Psycho is the more well-known, canonical choice, a truly great film that every cinema lover should see -- more than once. Although there are certain Hitchcock films (Strangers on a Train, The Birds) I like equally to Psycho and some (Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo) I like even better, Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece clearly holds a well-deserved place at the forefront of his impressive oeuvre. Psycho is also traditionally viewed as an important precursor to the rise of the slasher film in the 1970s.

But Peeping Tom is fucking amazing and I could not imagine leaving it off of this course's film list. So it stays too.

This Psycho - Peeping Tom split decision exemplifies what I call "the Godfather conundrum." A few years back when I was designing a course on 1970s Hollywood cinema, I really wanted to show the students Francis Ford Coppola's overlooked masterwork The Conversation (1974). I also knew that they needed to see The Godfather, because the idea of a 1970s Hollywood cinema class without The Godfather is absurd. And while maybe a third to a half of the students came into the class having seen The Godfather before, the remainder hadn't, so I felt I had to ensure that everybody saw the historically more significant film that time around. And due to The Godfather's extraordinary length, I didn't feel right asking the students to watch both Coppola pictures in one week. But for this horror class I'm doubling down on Psycho and the less-seen yet holistically better Peeping Tom.

Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero). This is not only one of my all-time favorite horror movies, it is without a doubt the single most important and influential horror movie of the 1960s. More than any other film, Romero and company's Night of the Living Dead is responsible for raising the acceptable level of onscreen gore, bringing on the nihilism, and showing a whole generation of North American horror auteurs what could be done on a low budget.

As low-budget maestro John Carpenter says of Night of the Living Dead in a 2002 interview, "Everybody who made a low-budget film has been influenced by that movie, every person. Each and every one of us. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t."†

Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento). Really, my whole syllabus is too English-language-o-centric, and omitting influential works by German Expressionists like F.W. Murnau, New Japanese Horror auteurs like Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and even recent "New French Extremity" mind-benders like High Tension and Martyrs really disappoints me. But in the end I chose to favor the North American horror film tradition, so as to foreground interpretive issues (like gender and sexuality) over a more historical account noting lines of directorial influence, etc.

Yet at no point could I ever imagine a horror film class that omitted Dario Argento, the Italian director whose work, along with Mario Bava's, exerted enormous influence on the post-1960s horror movie.†† The only difficult decision was "which film?" In the end I went with Suspiria because, while something like Deep Red speaks more directly to the development of the English-language slasher, Suspiria is more creepy and interesting and supernatural and Gothic. Its stands out from the pack. And its provocatively ambiguous use of point-of-view camera is unsurpassed in global horror cinema.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper). I've already written about how the original Texas Chain Saw is my favorite movie, ever. So let me confine my comments here to the film's role in my class: as a representative of the "slasher" subgenre.

Many critics and film historians contend that Psycho set the basic template for the slasher film, though the work of the Italian giallo directors is probably even more directly germane to the development of this popular subgenre. I like Texas Chain Saw because, along with Black Christmas (dir. Bob Clark), it essentially launched the North American slasher film proper in 1974. So I am focusing on the origins here, rather than the commercial heyday, which comes later, at the very end of the 1970s and the first several years of the '80s.

Yes, screening Chain Saw means I'm not showing other classic slashers like Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes (1977, dir. Wes Craven), Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter), Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Prom Night (1980, dir. Paul Lynch), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981, dir. Steve Miner), or A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven). So many great movies, so little time . . .

The Fly's Seth Brundle sez: "Help me, I'm masticating!"

Videodrome's Max Renn sez: "Long live the new flesh, muthafucka!"

Videodrome (1983, dir. David Cronenberg) is included because Cronenberg is the most inventive and original North American horror director and his work all but defines what it means to do "body horror." I have on-again off-again considered screening his remake of The Fly (1986) instead, but there is going to be a Cronenberg film and it will be hard to pry me away from Videodrome.

I have been occasionally conflicted about this choice. Videodrome is one of my personal favorite films, period. In the context of my class, I really love its depiction of how violence and eroticism get easily combined and tangled up with each other. Plus the whole premise of the in-movie "Videodrome" show (or signal, ee hee hee) is brilliant -- sexuality as (technologically induced) virus, a theme Cronenberg has been mulling over since his early short films in 1969.

Yet I have a feeling that my students might enjoy The Fly more. Videodrome is like a fervent, macabre manifesto whereas The Fly is more polished and plot-driven.‡ In The Fly, the passion is there but it is sublimated into the love affair between Seth (Jeff Goldblum) and Veronica (Geena Davis). Videodrome assaults its viewer with fourth-wall-breaking scenes of grotesque yet metaphorical sexviolence -- and shows us its depraved dystopia though the eyes of Max Renn (James Woods), a misogynistic, perverted, profiteering scumbag.

Alternatively, The Fly presents us with the slow, horrifying bodily disintegration of a basically decent if overreaching man. The horror consists of seeing him lose his humanity and become a vile insect-monster. The Fly's production values are much higher, and the plot way less twisty and ambiguous, than Videodrome's. While Videodrome may actually be the more cerebral (that is, thematically opaque) of the two, it nevertheless possesses a dark, nihilistic psychosexual streak that makes it more horrifying, if a bit puzzling and confusing as well. (I think I just talked myself back into sticking with Videodrome.)

Ringu (1998, dir. Hideo Nakata) and The Blair Witch Project (1999, dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) show that 1999 was a big year for horror. That year, Ringu started a global craze for New Japanese Horror films and consequently, despite the high quality of The Ring (2002) itself, spawned a ton of dull-assed English-language remakes of said films. Meanwhile, Blair Witch made a squillion dollars as a result of its canny, viral internet marketing craze and launched the found-footage subgenre that thrives to the present day.

Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett) is just a great teen horror movie, comedically and postmodernistically self-aware (like Scream etc.) but more interesting in part because of its focus on female sexuality. Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) would be another strong contender with which to explore this theme, but Ginger Snaps is more contemporary and clever and hip. A solid, intelligent, entertainingly gory horror movie.

The excellent The Babadook (2014, dir. Jennifer Kent) is a personal favorite of mine and should pair well with the previous week's Ginger Snaps, dealing as they both do with issues of coming of age and family melodrama. I like that both films tell female-centered stories. The Babadook is my course's only female-directed film.

Horror often vilifies mothers and maternity by making them monstrous: most mothers who appear in horror movies (like Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Voorhees) are evil to the core. The Babadook reverses that trend, giving us a heroic, brave, determined mother who nevertheless must come to terms with her (family's) dark side. The Babadook fuses horror with melodrama to achieve something really special and interesting and cathartic. A must-see.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012, dir. Drew Goddard). This is not a personal favorite though I've enjoyed it both times I've seen it. It's my example of a postmodern hybrid horror-comedy thing -- that is, a "horror film" in quotes. Also, in large part due to the vigorous cult of Joss Whedon fandom, there has been much recent critical ink spilled on the film, some of which I will use to my advantage in teaching the film to students. It's a fun movie with which to conclude the semester.

Films I most regret leaving out:

• Gojira (1954, dir. Ishiro Honda). Though I wrestled mightily between this and King Kong for my representative of a "classic" monster movie, I was leaning pretty heavily toward Gojira when a colleague helped me see that Creature from the Black Lagoon would be the best "creature feature" I could show. Creature speaks to U.S. imperialism and sexual repression from the inside, whereas Gojira grapples with nuclear-age guilt and trauma from the point of view of its real-world victims (the Japanese). Creature also pairs better with Val Lewton's Cat People in representing Golden Age monster movies. Sorry Gojira!

• Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott), a truly great monster movie that, like Gojira, I had to cut for space reasons. Alien is well-executed on every level and stands as one of the best horror / science fiction movies ever made. Furthermore, this is a film I want to expose more students to because I want to weaken or debunk the myth that James Cameron's Aliens is superior to -- or even quite as good as -- its influential predecessor. Alien is much written about in film criticism so I have good analytical essays on it. But I ran out of room, so no Alien.

• The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers). I love this movie, perhaps too passionately and somewhat irrationally. And while screening it could open up interesting discussions about horror film fandom and historical verisimilitude, its main plotline is too similar to Ginger Snaps to warrant its inclusion. (Cue sad trombone.)

• The Thing from Another World (1951, dir. Christian Nyby) and The Thing (1982, dir. John Carpenter). Fuck yeah! Need I even explain why showing these back-to-back in the same week would be cool? Let me add that I am a big John Carpenter fan and it is disappointing not to have Halloween or especially The Thing on this syllabus. 

• Eyes Without a Face (1959, dir. Georges Franju). After Gojira, this is the exclusion that pains me the most personally. As an instructor, I would say that my omission of any German Expressionist films or more J-Horror films or even Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street is more egregious, but as a fan, the absence of Franju's chilling masterpiece really hurts. I just love this movie a lot and it images stick with me and haunt me like few films' do. 

• The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick). Regular readers know that I am a major Kubrick fiend, and while in the early 2000s I considered The Shining to be one of the master director's lesser works, I am currently of the opinion that the Stephen King adaptation stands as one of Kubrick's best, most enduring efforts. It is also the absolutely perfect film for teaching about the cinematic Gothic (described here). But alas, I will instead ask Cat People, Suspiria, and both Draculas to perform that function in a course too crowded to incorporate The Shining or other great Gothic outings like The Innocents or Crimson Peak.   

• Something -- anything -- by director Wes Craven. Sadly, his early shockers Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes got bumped by Texas Chain Saw for slasher week, Scream was superseded by The Cabin in the Woods for postmodern "horror" week, Freddy Kreuger just got fucked over, and even The People Under the Stairs, which works well (alongside the brilliant Candyman) for teaching about horror movies that explicitly depict racial conflict, got nixed for space reasons. I am so sorry Mr. Craven! 

Candyman sez: "What about me, you white devil?"

Count Orlok sez: "What about me, you dummkopf??"

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* This is a list (and a course syllabus) I have labored over mightily. It has been difficult for me to winnow down the film choices to fit a roughly fourteen-week semester. Ultimately, there are seventeen required-viewing films included -- I couldn't even trim this thing down to my usual one film per week.
** So deep runs my love for Vampyr and so convinced am I that it makes the perfect companion-piece to Freud's "The Uncanny" that in all the early versions of my horror film class outline, Vampyr figured as the first film. But then last spring I had dinner with film studies colleague Dr. Sid Rosenzweig, who asked me if I was starting off my class with Phantom of the Opera. Once he said it aloud, it seemed startlingly obvious to me that Phantom was indeed the best film with which to launch the course. Thanks Sid!
† From "Interview with John Carpenter and Austin Stoker" videorecorded at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, 25 Jan. 2002. Available as a special feature on the Assault on Precinct 13 "New Special Edition" DVD (Image Entertainment, 2003).
†† Jason Zinoman discusses Bava's and Argento's work and importance in his enthusiastic and informative book Shock Value (Penguin, 2011) pp. 35, 38, 123.
‡ Videodrome is among my top four or five Cronenberg films alongside Shivers, The Brood, Dead Ringers, and Crash.

Double Review: The Blob (1958) and The Wolf Man (1941)

Young "Steven" McQueen plays protagonist Steve in The Blob. 

I am a self-proclaimed horror movie fan. As a devotee of the genre, I love its towering canonical classics (the 1930s Universal horror films, Gojira, Night of the Living Dead, John Carpenter's The Thing), its overlooked but easy to defend hidden gems (Martin, The Descent, Candyman), and even its schlocky fringe entries (Haxan, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Mountain of the Cannibal God) on the border between horror and comedy.

Of course I don't love every horror film I watch (e.g., most of the recent remakes of 1970s classics), and there are horror films I deliberately avoid (e.g., Human Centipede).

But I really enjoyed The Blob. I was aware of it, of course, but never got around to seeing it until a couple weekends ago -- as part of the Criterion Collection, it streams on Hulu Plus. It is a fun, well-constructed monster movie combined with a teen exploitation melodrama. It is infused with 1950s Cold War paranoia (the titular Blob is red after all) and sublimated teen sexuality. The movie maintains a fast clip and uses its studio-set mise-en-scene evocatively.

Check out the spooky meat locker!

A very young "Steven" McQueen plays protagonist Steve, a morally upstanding "good kid" who nevertheless pals around with his small town's group of resident juvenile delinquents. While out on a date with his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corseaut), Steve sees a strange object drop out of the night sky and rushes to investigate. The object is a small meteorite containing the titular blob -- before Steve arrives, a local farmer finds the meteorite and gets attacked by the slimy, gelatinous entity.

Despite its predictable plot and some hamfisted B-movie acting, The Blob's built-in schlockiness saves it, as do its cool, visceral blob effects. The two go hand-in hand. For example, I laughed more than I got scared during the scene when Steve sees the doctor being attacked by the blob through the window. But that's okay: The Blob is a film that needn't be scary to be pleasurable. In some ways, the film does credit to fans of the monster movie genre by faithfully honoring its conventions and keeping the pace brisk.

God help me, the first time I saw this well-made scene I laughed at poor Dr. Hallen's violent death. 

McQueen is a treat to watch, as is Earl Rowe as Lieutenant Dave, the one cop on the local police force who takes Steve seriously and believes his claims about the monster before anyone else (besides Jane) does.

The Blob may not be a first-ranker as far as monster movies go -- it is no King Kong or Gojira or Them! nor does it have the frightening, paranoid power of Don Siegel's brilliant Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But it is great fun for its unintentionally campy performances and its cleverly executed (if cheap-looking) effects. The Blob is scrappy, low-budget, schlock-horror cinema at its finest.

Sadly, Universal's The Wolf Man does not hold up quite so well, in part because it is tonally darker, taking itself more seriously than The Blob does. The Wolf Man is hard to laugh at yet isn't as scary or compelling as its studio cousins Dracula, Frankenstein (both 1931), or The Mummy (1932). In the end, despite my general love and admiration for the 1930s Universal horror film cycle, I enjoyed Universal's The Wolf Man quite a bit less than I do those other Universal films or The Blob.

Lon Chaney Jr. is The Wolf Man's star and its weakest link. Unfortunately for him and Universal Studios, leaving the "Jr." off of his screen credit does not grant him the substantial talent and acting chops of his late father.  

The Wolf Man's major problems boil down to its combination of

(1) Predictable, boilerplate plot elements you can see coming from miles away,

and, even more devastating,

(2) The lackluster lead performance of Lon Chaney, Jr. as Larry / The Wolf Man.

It is easiest to talk about these two elements together.

In the opening shot of The Wolf Man, an encyclopedia entry on lycanthropy mentions Talbot Castle as a site of ongoing werewolf occurrences, then seconds later Larry shows up at -- you guessed it -- Talbot Castle. Badly written expository dialogue between Larry and his father (Claude Rains) follows.

It's not that I expect innovative plotting in horror genre fare like this -- it's just that if the plot and dialogue are going to be so canned, then the film needs either really good actors (like, say, Rains, who plays Larry's father Sir John Talbot) or terribly bad or stiff ones so you can laugh at them.* Chaney Jr. is just good enough to be mediocre but not bad enough to be hilarious. He's not colossally bad, especially when playing the Wolf Man, i. e., Larry in werewolf form. But as Larry, he comes off as the kind of one-dimensional, good-ol' American gladhander we usually see Chaney's Wolf Man costar Ralph Bellamy play in films like His Girl Friday or Rock Hudson play knowingly and parodically in Pillow Talk. One has the feeling that Chaney Jr. is not in on the joke here. Rather, his limited acting chops make his Larry unintentionally buffoonish.

To take a contrasting example, Bela Lugosi surely lacks range as an actor -- his portentious mugging as The Wolf Man's gypsy fortune-teller Bela is essentially the same schtick he used to play Count Dracula in 1931 -- but at least he works quite well in the (small) role he is given.

The same cannot be said of Chaney, Jr., who is simply not up to the task of carrying a genre film like this on his hulking shoulders. I should be able to feel more pathos for Larry as the terrible, supernatural disease of lycanthropy afflicts him -- instead, I root for the boring townspeople who want him dead. He comes off especially flat next to nuanced performers like Rains and Maria Ouspenskaya, who plays the gypsy woman Maleva and who steals every scene she's in.

Remember how I mentioned Universal's Frankenstein and The Mummy earlier? The main point of connection between those two films is star Boris Karloff, a world-class film actor who brings that special something -- screen presence, gravitas, charisma -- to every role he plays. Sure, one could argue that Frankenstein, at least, has a slightly better script than most of the Universal films that followed it, and that it benefits from the "freshness factor," being only the second film of the Universal horror cycle after Dracula. Furthermore, both Frankenstein and The Mummy also benefit from the abilities and inventiveness of their respective directors, James Whale and Karl Freund.

Yet the point I'm making here is that good stars make a big difference, especially in genre movies, where other elements are often (by design) formulaic. Even in the present day, there is a reason Tom Cruise action movies tend to perform well, and why big-budget blockbusters that eschew stars often face grim prospects. While I enjoy many of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and early '40s, the cycle's best entries are the ones with really charismatic and talented star actors: Karloff in Frankenstein and The Mummy, Karloff and Charles Laughton in The Old, Dark House (1932), and Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933).

So consider skipping The Wolf Man in favor of any of these other, better Universal horror films. Or watch it as an historical curiosity, as an example of what happens when a studio tries in vain to substitute one Chaney for another.

The great Boris Karloff as Imhotep in Karl Freund's The Mummy. 

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* Rains also plays the title role in Universal's excellent The Invisible Man (1933), the nurturing psychiatrist who brings Bette Davis out of her shell in Now, Voyager (1942), and of course the evil yet ultimately pathetic villain in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).

Periodizing the Blockbuster Era

The above diagram schematizes some of the factors influencing the transition from the Hollywood Renaissance period (1967-1980) to the early decades of the Blockbuster Era (1975-present).

In the middle part of the chart (with the "synergy" arrow), I draw a boundary at about 1981, walling off the Hollywood Renaissance from the Blockbuster Era. Going solely by the content, tone, and look of the films, it's easy to impose that gap, with Raging Bull (1980) the last barbaric yawp of the European-influenced Hollywood Renaissance period and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) the herald of the big-budget Blockbuster Era.*

You can even see the difference between these cultural and industrial moments -- Renaissance and Blockbuster -- in the two (successful) Spielberg films that straddle the turn of the decade. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), for all its third-act spectacle, is a film of the Hollywood Renaissance, or as close as Spielberg ever gets to directing one barring The Sugarland Express (1974). Close Encounters is an auteurist passion project for Spielberg, based on one of the few screenplays (outside of Sugarland and Poltergeist) he ever wrote himself. It features French New Wave icon Francois Truffaut performing in the movie, his presence a direct nod to Renaissance-era auteurism. More surprisingly for Spielberg, Close Encounters ends ambivalently: an emotionally unbalanced man abandons his earthbound family to fly away with aliens.

And then there's Raiders of the Lost Ark, a tightly episodic, sequel-spawning, consciously "calculated" action blockbuster.

However, at the infrastructural level, and as the short line at the bottom of my chart indicates, the transition between Renaissance and Blockbuster starts well before 1980. Disney is already lucratively synergizing their various product lines (live-action films, animated films, TV shows, theme parks, toys, etc.) by the 1950s, and TransAmerica buys United Artists in 1967. Disney and UA are the corporate harbingers of the post-1970s era of multinational corporate takeovers, corporate mergers, and the dominance of the synergistic business model built around "tentpole" summer blockbusters.

Film historian and political economist Thomas Schatz claims that 1974-5 represents the "peak and, as it turned out, the waning" of the Hollywood Renaissance period, its last hurrah consisting of films like Nashville, Night Moves, Chinatown, and The Conversation.** Indeed, film historians Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell tell us that the multinational corporate takeover of the major studios was more or less complete by 1982, at which point "all the Majors except 20th Century Fox had become wings of diversified conglomerates" like Gulf + Western, MCA, and Coca-Cola.†

Popeye Doyle sez: "We better enjoy this Hollywood Renaissance thing while we can, Cloudy -- it ain't gonna last."

Yes, certain artsy, downbeat, auterist films continue to be made into the late 1970s and early 1980s: The Deer Hunter, Coming Home (both 1978), Apocalypse Now, Being There (both 1979), Raging Bull, Reds (1981), and even First Blood (1982).

But despite all these promising late entries, there's no denying the implications of 1975's Jaws, "a social, industrial, and cultural phenomenon of the first order, a cinematic idea and cultural commodity whose time had come" (Schatz p. 26). Jaws is extremely well-made entertainment by super-genius director Steven Spielberg -- it's a totally badass movie, even according to Mark Kermode. Furthermore, it establishes the broad template for all subsequent blockbusters via its postmodern genre-mixology:

Jaws was essentially an action film and a thriller, though it effectively melded various genres and story types. It tapped into the monster movie tradition with a revenge-of-nature subtext (like King Kong, The Birds, et. al.), and in the film's latter stages the shark begins to take on supernatural, even Satanic, qualities a la Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. And, given the fact that the initial victims are women and children, Jaws also had ties to the high-gore "slasher" film, which had been given considerable impetus a year earlier by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Schatz p. 25)

Genre-wise, then, the post-1975 blockbuster is nearly always an action-adventure film, even when hybridized with or superficially "skinned" to resemble another genre. Usually set "in the romantic past or in an inhospitable place in the present," the action-adventure typically features "a propensity for spectacular physical action, a narrative structure involving fights, chases and explosions, and in addition to the deployment of state-of-the-art special effects, an emphasis in performance on athletic feats and stunts." As Steve Neale, quoting Michael Nerlich, writes:

the ideology of adventure in its modern sense -- its association with the active seeking out of such events -- was developed in conjunction firstly with the medieval cult of the courtly knight, secondly with merchant adventuring (and state-sponsored piracy) in the early modern period, and thirdly with the spread of empire during the course of the nineteenth century. Hence its links with colonialism, imperialism and racism, as well as with traditional ideals of masculinity, run very deep.††

By defaulting to action-adventure pastiche, rather than artfully revising or reworking specific genres like many Renaissance films do, and by "recalibrating the profit potential of the Hollywood hit" to new, astronomical levels, Jaws and Star Wars toll the death knell of the auteurist Renaissance. Schatz writes that "the promise of Jaws was confirmed by Star Wars" -- its "emphasis on plot over character" solidifies the still-dominant action-blockbuster template (Schatz 24, 31, 29).

In 1981, Lucas and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark confirms the successful formula and sets the tone for the biggest hits of the coming decade:

Top Grossing Movies of the 1980s (adjusted for inflation) according to Box Office Mojo

1. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
3. Return of the Jedi (1983)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
5. Ghostbusters (1984)
6. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
7. Batman (1989)
8. Back to the Future (1985)
9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
10. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

My favorite sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981's highest grosser and the film that sets the template for the summer blockbuster. 

Quoting Richard Schickel, Schatz notes that blockbusters from this point forward all belong to one of two "metacategories," either the comedy (e.g., Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters) or the action film (e.g., all the other films on the above list). Schatz describes Star Wars in particular as the key proto-"high concept" summer blockbuster. For him, Star Wars exemplifies the tension between story and spectacle that characterizes the summer popcorn movie writ large:

One the one hand, the seemingly infinite capacity for multimedia reiteration of a movie hit redefines textual boundaries, creates a dynamic commercial intertext that is more process than product, and involves the audience(s) in the creative process -- not only as multimarket consumers but also as mediators in the play of narrative signification. On the other hand, the actual movie "itself," if indeed it can be isolated and understood as such (which is questionable at best), often has been reduced and stylized to a point where, for some observers, it scarcely even qualifies as a narrative. (39)

I agree with this account and have myself written about the recent blockbuster's trend toward spectacle over narrative.

What I want to do with the rest of this post is to try to break down the Blockbuster Era (so far) into smaller constituent periods, mainly derived from the chronological sketch given by Mark Harris in his must-read 2014 piece "The Birdcage":

The revolution of George Lucas’s game-changer — in purely financial terms — was that it confirmed what the James Bond series had suggested a decade earlier: There was no ceiling on how much money the right kind of series with the right kind of potentially escalating fan obsession could take in. Over the 25 years that followed Star Wars, franchises went from being a part of the business to a big part of the business. Big, but not defining: Even as late as 1999, for instance, only four of the year’s 35 top grossers were sequels. 

That’s not where we are anymore. In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period. Twelve of the year’s 14 highest grossers are, or will spawn, sequels. A successful franchise is no longer used to finance the rest of a studio’s lineup; a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it.

To continue where Harris leaves off, I turn to Pamela McClintock's recent piece "Hollywood's Obsession with the 'Requel'" for its succinct definition of the latest transmogrification of the blockbuster: the requel. A requel is "a movie that's both a reboot and a sequel, blending old with new in an effort to extend the life of a franchise and, in the best cases, reinvent it for a 'universe' of follow-up movies."

The most successful requel so far.

Whereas the "hard" reboot usually retells an origin story, as with Star Trek (2009) or The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), the requel, according to McClintock, is different from either the reboot or the pure remake "in that it nods to and exploits goodwill toward the past while launching a new generation of actors and stories." It is, in essence, a thinly veiled remake in which the same basic stuff, with slight new variations, happens all over again to a new generation of characters. I like to describe it as "strangely similar things happening to slightly different people."

It's appropriate that Jurassic World should lead the (successful) charge into the Requel period, since it is so transparently a remake of Jurassic Park (Lee Sabo calls it "fan-fiction story-telling"), which in 1993 was already hyper-aware of its status as a global commodity.

The most important shot in Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park's gift shop. 

To sum up: origin-story-retelling reboots include Batman Begins (2005), Star Trek (2009), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).

Recent "pure remakes" include King Kong (2005), Cinderella, and Pan (both 2015).

Our requels category is so far inhabited by Terminator Genisys, Jurassic World, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (all 2015), and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016).

I propose the following Periodization of the Blockbuster Era so far:

1975-85: Marking the inception of the Blockbuster Era proper with Jaws and Star Wars, these are the "Ten years that shook the industry" (J. Hoberman), the inception of the mega-blockbuster era. Schatz notes the increase in sequels and remakes from 1974 onward, writing that "From 1964 to 1968, sequels and reissues combined accounted for just under 5 percent of all Hollywood releases. From 1974 to 1978, they comprised 17.5 percent" ("New Hollywood" p. 27).

1986-99: The period of international conglomeration, worldwide release, and global synergy. The period during which Schatz's "calculated Blockbuster" -- calculated to be a major hit, produce sequels and spinoffs, and synergize with a larger product line and brand -- becomes the driving force behind the Hollywood film industry. As Thompson and Bordwell write,

The first wave of film studio acquisitions, from the 1960s through the early 1980s, had been initiated largely by conglomerates who wanted to diversify their holdings, to add a movie company to a menu of bowling alleys, parking lots, soft-drink bottling, or funeral parlors. The wave that began in the mid-1980s was more narrowly targeted, aimed at synergy -- the coordination of several compatible business lines to maximize income. (p. 664)

This period includes the Michael Eisner regime at Disney -- he's CEO 1984-2005. Eisner focuses on synergy and developing branded content, placing "special emphasis on activities and services that went beyond moviegoing or TV viewing" (T&B p. 696).

1989 is a key year, the starting point for the "dark" and "adult" interpretation of Batman on film. As Eileen Meehan documents, a dark interpretation of Batman was test-marketed beforehand by the release of Frank Miller's comic The Dark Knight Returns into mainstream bookstores.‡

Neale notes that in the 1990s Hollywood "conglomeration and synergy tended to accelerate on a national and international scale, as some of the mini-majors disappeared and as others were absorbed by the majors, and as the costs of making blockbusters and routine features alike continued to rise" (p. 230).

This period sees the wholesale onset of computer generated imagery (CGI) with pioneering effects-driven blockbuster films The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and of course Jurassic Park (1993).

Jurassic Park (1993) is perhaps the key film of this period -- a landmark in computer-generated effects, synergistic product lines, and global release strategies (Thompson and Bordwell p. 697).

Michael Keaton in 1989's Batman, another key film of the 1986-99 period.  

2000-14: I am tempted to call this the "Pointlessly Serious Superhero Movie" period. Fox's X-Men franchise launches eponymously in 2000, setting the general tone for the period. Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, which starts with Iron Man in 2008, goes a bit lighter in tone than X-Men, whereas Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12) and Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), Man of Steel (2013), and Batman v Superman all go darker and more pretentious.

Speaking of Nolan and Snyder, Kevin Tsujihara becomes Time Warner's chairman/CEO in 2013 and announces a slate of ten Warner Bros. movies based on DC Comics characters to be released between 2016 and 2020. Of Tsujihara, Harris writes:

He has never produced a movie; in fact, he is the first studio head to rise in the ranks purely through brand extension and ancillary divisions, and brand extension is what he’s all about. Besides the DC announcement, his big accomplishments have been to nail down those three additional [J.K.] Rowling movies to add to the studio’s portfolio of eight, and to turn one Lego movie into four.

Tsujihara's counterpart at Universal is Jeff Shell, who becomes CEO in 2013 and about whom Variety's Peter Bart and Claudia Eller write that "Shell’s background and management style is strictly corporate and solidly Comcast." Significantly, Shell rises through the corporate ranks on the television side. Writing in 2014, Mark Harris suggests that by making seven- and ten-year plans for interlocking franchises a la Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, contemporary movie franchises replicate formulas that have been honed to perfection on and by television:

TV looms large over this new movie lineup. How could it not? TV is everything. TV is how people see movies; TV is where people want to watch movies, on demand and on their own terms; TV is what Twitter wants to talk about. Most of all, TV knows how to keep people coming back, which is its job, every day and every week, and is a quality that, above all others, the people who finance movies would dearly love to poach.

2015: The Requel period begins. In addition to the McClintock piece referenced above, see also Adam Sternbergh's recent essay on the studio as auteur and the "Marvel movie" as prototypical blockbuster. Analyzing directorial duo Joe and Anthony Russo's successful run of MCU films, Sternbergh writes:

As TV becomes more cinematic in its execution (multiple locations, expensive FX), and films become more TV-like in their storytelling (single chapters in an ongoing story), the decision to employ TV directors on Marvel films starts to make sense. Which is why directors like the Russos — talented, proficient, flexible, and instinctually collaborative — are perfectly suited to flourish.

If the release of Jaws marks the beginning of the Blockbuster Era, then it's been forty-one years since then. We are over forty headlong years into this Era, it is barreling along, we are just beginning the Requel period, and there's no end in sight. We don't even really know what we're in for yet. As Harris concludes,

What we are witnessing is not stability but transition — the evolutionary moment of overlap in Hollywood when the old way and the new way transiently coexist. Ten years from now, the old way will be gone. The new way will simply be the way.

The way of the endless requel and its mutant spawn.

Hi, I'm Mark Harris. I'm so goddamned smart about movies and a fine writer, too. Carter is quite impressed with me.

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* You'll notice that I call the Hollywood Renaissance a period and the Blockbuster Era an era. That's because the former is a short transitional period bridging the stretch between the decline of the Studio Era (and it is surely in decline by the 1950s) and the rise of the Blockbuster Era. The Hollywood Renaissance years constitute the tail end of a longer period that begins circa 1948 when the Paramount Decree critically alters the makeup of the Golden Age Studio System. Thomas Schatz describes the 1947-60 period in the later chapters of his The Genius of the System (Pantheon Books, 1988).
** Schatz, "The New Hollywood," in Movie Blockbusters, Ed. Julian Stringer (Routledge 2003),  p. 27.
† Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (Third Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2009) p. 664.
†† Neale, Genre and Hollywood (Routledge, 2005) pp. 49, 46, 51.
‡ Meehan, "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!" in The Many Lives of the Batman (Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, Routledge 1991) p. 53.