Blurbing For The Weekend 2/21/25

There’s a Community episode where Britta’s ex-boyfriend, a carnie named Blade, comes to town, inspiring Troy and Abed to spend the night watching Blade. We never see the movie, just hear a lot of fighting, gunfire and Wilhelm screams, to the hushed awe of Troy and Abed, and mild confusion of everyone else. Realizing I couldn’t remember if and when I’d watched Blade myself, I finally did so. Troy and Abed were right. It’s awesome.

The titular Blade is a “daywalker,” his mom bit by a vampire right before his birth. As science would logically dictate, he has all the powers of a vampire, and none of the lethal allergies to silver, garlic or daylight (the movie charmingly waves away the power of crucifixes as religious propaganda). He does crave human blood, but settles for a serum provided by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), a biker guru who found him as a long-orphaned, and newly thirsty, teenager. Since then, Blade (I don’t recall the movie explaining when young Eric Brooks took this name or why) has become an expert at kicking ass and killing vampires with silver stakes. Though rightly unpopular with the pure-born vampire illuminati that secretly run our world, Deacon Frost, an atypically ambitious “turned” vampire, has secret plans for Blade. Big secret plans.

Unlike the heroes I’ve been blurbing about in MCU movie posts, Blade - as played by Wesley Snipes - has no clear personality or emotional arc. Though his fighting style is an unfuckwithably badass mix of martial arts and machine gun fire, his demeanor hops wildly between Schwarzeneggerian bon mots, John Wayne swagger, Shaft heroism, Dolemite sass, and the occasional tender tear. To be fair, Blade seemingly spent his entire adulthood only talking to vampires he’s about to kill, and a drolly curt, vest-happy Kris Kristofferson. He's too busy being awesome to be anything else.

Also unlike the MCU movies, Blade was made in the late ‘90s and is rated R, so it’s full of kung fu fights and a considerable amount of gore. The climax is some truly Clive Barker shit, with Blade enjoying an erotic chowdown on a ladyfriend and some surprisingly oedipal insanity. For once, writer David S. Goyer’s fondness for ancient caverns full of non-denominational religious arcana improves rather than pads a movie; even with early CGI, Blade might have the most genuinely ominous ritual-to-bring-about-a-Big-Bad sequence in superhero movie history. Though once the big bad arrives, we get back to kick-punch-stab-kick. Which is fine.

Stephen Dorff, playing Frost, has way more fun here than I remember him having in anything else at the time. Donal Logue had a lot of fun elsewhere in the ‘90s, and is a hoot as Frost’s hopped-up, hapless sidekick Quinn (“I’m gonna be a naughty vampire god!”). It says something when Udo Kier is the third most intriguing vampire in a movie. Maybe even fourth! While I’ll roll my eyes if some Blockbuster Video nostalgic says Blade is objectively better than an MCU movie, I’ll admit the bar it sets for cool chaos might play a part in Marvel endlessly delaying the reboot. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

Anybody who says Blade II is a major improvement on the first must be one of those cornballs who can’t get enough of Guillermo Del Toro. Look, he’s fine. I'll love him forever for Pappy McPoyle, and I haven’t seen Cronos or The Devil's Backbone, which look intriguing. But his movies are so earnest and basic, like the work of a post-Miramax Spielberg. I always want to ask his acolytes if they actually watch other movies. As such, Del Toro’s work on Blade II is fine. It's slightly more euro-trash than the first, with more slow motion, more close-ups of weird guys mugging, and fewer foley artists punching beef. The vampire baddies are also way less fun, with more make-up and fewer jokes. But it’s still a movie where Wesley Snipes looks supercool and obliterates countless stunt people, who then politely turn into CGI ash. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

And now, some POPCORN CLASSICS!

Talladega Nights: The Legend Of Ricky Bobby. It’s been a while since Will Ferrell or Adam McKay made me laugh, and, retroactively, I don’t know how I ever laughed at Sacha Baron Cohen. But I still have love for this McKay-directed collection of easy redneck jokes and the then-fresh chemistry of Ferrell and John C Reilly working together. It helps that the characters are kind of relatable. I was a homer-drool-gif when I saw the family dinner scene in theaters, and Reilly explaining he wants to hear the TV while playing the stereo “because I like to party” makes perfect sense. Crêpes are great, and if a woman ever talked to me like Amy Adams does to Ferrell in that bar, it would indeed be happening. On this watch, I particularly appreciated Gary Cole as Ricky Bobby’s restless, self-destructive dad who only appears during the rare moments he wouldn’t make his son’s life worse. And while Michael Clarke Duncan doesn’t have much to do, the biggest moment of comedic inspiration in the movie is his “don’t you put that evil on me!” 

Faults. Leland Orser, a true “that guy” actor (who randomly first caught my eye in the Peter Berg un-comedy Very Bad Things), plays a disgraced cult deprogrammer who keeps finding a new low point in life (he starts the movie spitefully eating ketchup). Unable to give up entirely, he agrees to help an elderly couple rescue their daughter (an eerily resolute Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and hopefully rescue himself. What separates Faults from countless low-budget twist-thrillers with decent actors is director Riley Stearns’ confidence with oddball detail. Making a cruel loanshark an effeminate, drawling portrait photographer would look like 8th-rate Coen crap in most cases, but Stearns is so unthirsty, so matter-of-fact about it, that it's just who happens to be forcing the hysterically calm Orser to endure this nightmare. Also, Sterns wisely cast Jon Gries, another all-time “that guy,” in the role.

House Of The Devil. This proto-“A24 horror” cult classic got one of my biggest raves for Tiny Mix Tapes when it came out, despite an underwhelming climax. With Ti West so failing to overcome its flaws in the years since, I’ve long been afraid to go back and see how it holds up. While the moments of retro flair have been normalized, it’s still a solid slice of suspense, with Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov given juicy material worthy of their weirdness, and Greta Gerwig’s pizza-centric roommate only made more glorious by time. I truly must have checked out on the final quarter at that critic’s screening, because it went a lot longer than I remembered, and isn’t really bad. The violence is simply nowhere as inspired as the extended anticipation beforehand. But with the possible exception of Pearl (which I haven’t given a second viewing yet), Devil is still West’s least underwhelming work. 

Phantom Thread. Possibly my favorite romantic comedy of the last decade. SPOILERS! Daniel Day-Lewis plays a genius dressmaker enjoying the anal retentive life of his dreams, with Vicky Krieps as the waitress turned model who knows what he really wants is to take an uncontrollable, incapacitating shit. When I first saw the movie, I cried out “dude is going to be on the toilet for hours!” as Reynolds Woodcock gave his massive brunch order to young Alma. Imagine my delight when that turned out to be foreshadowing! Day-Lewis’ tightly wound stricture, unintentionally hilarious in most dramas (I lost it during Lincoln when I imagined Ben Stiller imitating him), is put to knowing, effective use here, set against both Krieps’ unapologetic tempestuousness and Lesley Manville as his resigned but resourceful manager/sister. Thread is easily my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie, largely because the formal requirements of the story force him to focus his usually shaggy gifts. There's no homage for homage's sake, artless SNL cameos or ponderous long shots here, just absurdly beautiful, poised filmmaking to establish what Woodcock achieves in his work, letting the humans provide the cracks in the facade. The eventual discovery of shared kink is both poignant and ridiculous, in the all-too-rare manner of the best John Huston.  

The bags of popcorn are explained here. Anthonyisright at gmail dot com is the e-mail address where you can tell me why Guillermo Del Toro is not the post-Miramax Spielberg, or whine that there's nothing wrong with being the post-Miramax Spielberg, or bring up something unrelated to Miramax or Spielberg. It's totally up to you.