Misery | Motion State Review

This review contains minor spoilers for 2018’s The Predator. Also, minor graphic language. Okay, major graphic language.

Shane Black’s new Predator movie, which opened last night and was advertised as an “explosive reinvention” of the series, purportedly debuts on the crest of a new wave of R-rated Hollywood blockbusters. Deadpool and Logan did pretty well in ’16 and ’17, see, and Kingsman and Mad Max: Fury Road succeeded in ’14 and ’15, so we must be in a New Age of Hard-R Blockbusters, right? The Predator will do for 2018 what those other movies did for the previous half-decade, injecting some hardcore badassery into a film landscape increasingly populated by PG-13 flicks about pretty people in capes and tights. This is the same Shane Black who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies and directed the mouthy noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so The Predator must have the brash and unforgiving potency of a genuine R-rated monster movie. Right?

Pah! The ’80s laughs at your puny efforts. Steve Rose at the Guardian lays it out:

Predator represents a bygone era of ripe, risky, reckless action movies, often dripping with blood, testosterone and cheese but also wildly entertaining…[Predator‘s popularity] reflected a movie scene where Hollywood didn’t have to play it safe and pitch every movie at the broadest possible demographic in order to recoup costs.

We’ll get to the 2018 version of Predator in a minute; whatever sadness this nostalgia may engender for a bygone era of balls-out filmmaking is going to have to take an emotional backseat, because 1990’s Predator 2 is here to peel the skin from your bones.

Continue reading Predator 2 (1990) →

According to my mom Misery was the first movie I ever watched start to finish, late one night in one of my first few weeks when I just didn’t want to sleep. Apparently all I wanted to do was watch an utterly insane Kathy Bates hold James Caan against his will in her snowy, isolated Colorado home. A lifetime of watching movies later, I returned to that first movie that started it all for me as a viewer (full disclosure: I can’t seem to find my notes on it from a couple decades back).

My first thought upon re-watching my first film: it’s no wonder I couldn’t sleep! I probably couldn’t sleep for weeks. Kathy Bates is so terrifyingly good as the psychotic Annie Wilkes — writer Paul Sheldon’s (James Caan) “biggest fan” — that bipolar does not even being to describe her. One second, she is exactly as self-advertised: Sheldon’s biggest fan, in pure admiration. However, one slip up by Sheldon, such as killing off the main character in his “Misery” series of novels, and she becomes a different person all together — violent, inconsolable, and capable of anything. Regardless of which mood Wilkes happens to be in, though, it is always clear that she will not let her favorite writer go, ever. They are meant to be together, or at least that’s what she thinks.

Continue reading Misery (1990) →