TOP TEN 2015

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This Christmas, a holiday season inundated with an insurmountable flood of Star Wars merchandise, I heard my nephew describe one of his toys as a "Lego Movie Lego Set." In other words, this is a toy set based on a film adaptation of that same brand of toy set. Setting aside the meta-awareness that The Lego Movie brought to the conversation, that playset throws into stark reality the perpetual cycle of film and merchandise, forever feeding off of each other.

Before my second viewing of The Force Awakens, a ticket purchase that I felt some vague guilt about, there was a big screen commercial that by all appearances advertised neither a film nor a product, but rather urged its audience to talk to more people about Star Wars and watch more Youtube videos about Star Wars. We've gone beyond advertising products, and are now advertising cultural monopolies--the utter domination of discourse.

Culture is eating itself. 2015 exists at the nexus of rampant reboot/remake/requel culture. Movies that make significant money are almost never original properties anymore. That being the case, production companies have delved deep into their reservoirs to try to dredge up old properties that still carry with them a modicum of brand recognition. Thus we get the crushing inevitability of a nostalgia-pillaging Jurassic Park sequel. A wretched Fantastic Four cobbled together out of sheer corporate obligation. A new Terminator movie that nobody liked, the third Terminator movie in a row that was meant to kick off a subsequently aborted trilogy. A trilogy of failed trilogies. And on the horizon, a Die Hard remake, a Labyrinth remake, a Memento remake, and cinematic universes for Marvel, DC, Ghostbusters, Avatar, Transformers, Hasbro, the Universal Monsters, and The Fast and the Furious, among others.

The cart is firmly before the horse.

IT FOLLOWS: STDos and STDon'ts

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Jake Weary, Daniel Zovatto
Runtime: 100 mins.
2015

The first and only thing I knew about It Follows before walking into the theater was that it is an allegory for STDs. That's already interesting, but what breaks the movie out of "interesting" and into "fascinating" is that it's so much more than that. Just when you think the film is sinking into its subtext, it's abandoned for pure horror movie thrills. Not to worry though, it always returns to its themes in more complex and circumspect ways than you could reasonably expect from a slashy horror film starring beautiful, sexually active young people. It Follows doesn't fall into the oldest of horror cliches: sex is bad, if you have sex you get killed. Instead it makes that trope the premise, thereby setting it on a pedestal for us to examine its subtleties.

It Follows is a horror movie with a lot on its mind that never forgets to be a horror movie.