Some dark thoughts on BRIGHT

I hated it.
I hated it so much I bailed out at the two-thirds mark and I NEVER do that.
Really, I loathed it. And I shouldn't have. I should have embraced it with the fervor of a lover long denied. Because I love urban fantasy. The first time I encountered it, in a mix of two of my favorite genres--mystery and fantasy--I felt like it had been invented JUST FOR ME. The first urban fantasy I can remember seeing on television was Cast a Deadly Spell that featured a noir-ish storyline with Fred Ward as a private detective who gets involved with mystic books and cults and a woman he saves from a dark fate.  I loved it.
And then there were television shows like Poltergeist Legacy and the Dresden Files, and Warehouse

Paul Blackwood as Harry Dresden

13 and Grimm. There was Supernatural. Oddly, I never got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, possibly because I didn't like the few episodes I saw. But Buffy was the gold standard for UF television for a long time.

And now there's Bright. Here's what I liked:  Margaret Cho's in-your-face performance as a tough police sergeant. It was interesting casting and she was fine. I also liked Joel Edgerton as a gentle orc still trying to figure out how to deal with being "the first" of his kind. Although weirdly, it felt like he was channeling Dave Bautista's gentle giant character from Guardians of the Galaxy.

Here's what I hated about Bright:  Everything else. It looked cheap. It looked like it had been filmed in sepia tone. The sound was muddy. But really, what I hated most was the cynical take on the world. And it's encapsulated in a scene that happens very early on in the movie when Will Smith's wife screams at him to kill the fairy who's been getting into their bird feeder. He doesn't want to kill the fairy, but she insists, so in front of a group of neighborhood gangbangers, who are vastly amused, he beats the fairy to death with a broom. It's not subtle. (And neither is the subtext.  A cop beating a fairy to death? And just in case nobody GOT THE SUBTEXT, Will Smith has a line about "fairy lives don't matter today.)

I almost stopped watching right then and when I later mentioned it to friends on FB, a lot of people were in agreement. (One guy said he thought it was funny but I could not disagree  more.) Will Smith is a wonderful actor. Here he seems to be phoning it in. His character is incredibly unlikable.

The movie was pretty polarizing. I checked out the Rotten Tomatoes reviews (My favorite had the line, "Orcs are the new black") and can see how polarizing it's been.  And while as a UF fan I should be thrilled that there's now a sequel in the works, all I can think of are the many terrific UF series that would be great as television series or occasional movies. Max Landis, Bright's writer, may love the genre, but he relied on every tired trope and cliche in the business and delivered a heavy-handed social commentary along with it. I was sooooooo disappointed.

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix...a review

The title of this book makes it sound like a bouncy YA  with a dash of horror--maybe something along the lines of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. That is not this book. Instead, Grady Hendrix has whipped up a complex study of teenage friendship that' is brutally honest about class iand exceptionally sharp in dissecting the pecking order of a private high school in the deep South where the worst thing you can do to a dad is make him look like a Republican.

Abby, the book's narrator, is a kid whose life takes a downward spiral after her father, an air traffic controller, loses his job when President Reagan goes over his union for calling a strike. She's buoyed up by her freindshp with Gretchen, a rich girl who lives in the "nice" part of Charleston in a house that always smells of air conditioning and carpet shampoo. They are closer than sisters and then something terrible happens to Gretchen that changes everything.

As Gretchen goes into freefall she gives Abby plenty of reasons to simply walk away from their friendship but Abby will not do it. And because she will not, she pays a horrific price. The way Hendrix lays this out is very well thought out, and he final chapters of the story are genuinel tense, genuinely horrific, and terribly, terribly real. This is a book about love and loyalty and boundaries. And it will make you ask--how far would you go to save someone you love?

Feminist Horror Films--Where are they?

I'm not the first woman to ask this question and I won't be the last. Bitch Media, a site that accompanies the magazine Bitch (a feminist response to pop culture) has an interesting post on faux feminism and the lack of feminist horror films. (They don't count rape-and-revenge films and neither do I.)
Are so few horror movies feminist because if you take out "women as victim" you don't have much of a movie?  Is Cat People a feminist movie?
Heartless Doll posted a list of 10 top horror movie heroines back in 2008. I doubt they'd have many to add in the four years since they compiled their list. (Is The Others feminist?) Among those they listed were Carrie from Carrie; Wendy from The Shining, Ripley in Alien (which I don't really call a horror movie) and Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby. I don't quite get that last one. It's not like Rosemary prevails, but at least she is more than the usual drippy heroine who screams a lot.
The NBC television show Grimm is about to do an episode based on the myth of La Lorona (the weeping woman who steels children she finds by running water) and I'm looking forward to that because the stories of La Lorona are so sad and gender-specific. There must have been a horror movie centered on this myth/folk tale before but I've never seen it.
We need more horror movies with female villains and even more with empowered females hunting monsters. Buffy the Vampire Slayer can't really be the only one, can it?