Change Your Image
lhasa-jack
Reviews
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Immensely better than expected
In truth, better than any of the Harry Potter movies. The magic makes the things the most powerful wizards use at Hogwarts look like pulling a rabbit from a top hat. Better in every single dimension. I am a big fan of the Harry Potter books and movies. I bought books 4-7 at midnight the day the released. Saw the first screenings of most of the movies. So, quite a fan. Fantastic Beasts absolutely blew me away. No joke. Some of the same themes and motivations are central here as the previous series. Child abuse. Madness. How authority reacts to things beyond its control. Character development and growth are again the real plot movers. Often twists in truly unexpected ways, surprisingly.
The Twilight Zone: Try, Try (2020)
This episode is incredible. I go a long way into the history of horror and SciFi here to convey why this episode is PERFECT TZ.
And it was perfect.
I was immediately teetering on the edge of a skyscraper. Excitement. Curiosity. Fascination. Then the turn. Where Delight and Delirium coexist for a fraction of a second before delirium gets dark. Anxiety. Terror. Hope. Doom. Astonishment.
Richard Matheson wrote most of the original series episodes that hit that mark so perfectly. He also wrote 'I Am Legend,' 'What Dreams May Come,' 'A Stir of Echoes,' 'The Shrinking Man,' 'Hell House.'
His 1952 novella, 'I Am Legend,' still defines horror as a genre. The first 'pandemic' story. 15 years after its publication, it inspired'Night of the Living Dead.' Over the next 6 decades it was licensed as 3 feature films, each cast with top tier talent as the protagonist, Neville. Vincent Price(1964),Charlton Heston(1971), and Will Smith(2007). Stephen King often mentions it when talking about the horror stories he grew up with.
The novella received below average reviews from critics on its release. But, it became more influential than any of those critics ever were. Years later, it found an audience that realized it was special because Matheson possessed the ability to portray loneliness, depression, isolation, fear, anger, these raw, guttural, feelings in a way that left the reader clenching the book because the protagonist was so incredibly relatable. He was real inside each reader. Few are capable of creating it. Even fewer actually get it done, and in the hands of millions.
I've gone way off in tangent here, the point being that writing like this is rare. Getting it across via cinema nearly impossible. It's what made the original Twilight Zone so gripping. Each reboot has hit close to that high water mark of conveying human emotion in a way that is uniquely bizarre, chilling, fascinating, with at least one of two episodes.
This episode will be what defines the 2019-2020 Twilight Zone in television history, even if it's the only of the 20 episodes to hit that incredibly high mark that Matheson set.
Bravo.