tartley.com (Posts about movie)

Iron Lung

Jonathan Hartley — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:55:23 GMT

Game by David Szymanski, published 2022

Movie written, directed, and starring Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach, released 2026

New work meeting background just dropped!

Invited to view the movie at Pop's with Phil and Sarah, I crammed the game it was based on from start to finish the night before, with Zander watching disdainfully over my shoulder every step of the way. I gave SCP-354, which inspired the game, a wide berth.

Both are tense and engaging, but clearly only for a particular kind of viewer. The game itself has a very narrow focus, as befits a single-person indie production. This means you'll only really enjoy it if you're dorky enough to fixate on the mechanic of cross referencing your submarine's map co-ordinates sufficiently hard to orient your way around a whole system of underwater trenches. Every step of the way you negotiate your way past unseen but deadly canyon walls by dead reckoning alone, a tense enough exercise even without the proximity alarms. On top of that, strange noises and... other interuptions... when they drop, are technically relatively tame and limited, but in context, entwined in the co-ordinate grind, they are experienced as shocking and panic inducing.

Similarly, I enjoyed the movie, but I see reviews are all over the map. Clearly some don't have patience for its limited scope - 99% of the runtime takes place with one character in a single room. But I found it taut and thrilling. Some patches of unclear dialog softened the high-concepts thrown around, but for me it was always an experience of style and vibes anyway.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Jonathan Hartley — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 15:01:22 GMT

Directed and written by John Hughes, 1986. IMDB

So, way back in my teen years, we had a VHS tape of this, which friends and I played and played and played, probably racking up more rewatches than any other movie in my life. So it was a pleasure to break it out for our 11 year-old, some some 37 years later (!), to see whether it still holds up, and find that it really does.

By chance this was the week after we'd just watched The Blues Brothers, so we got to compare and contrast two movies set in Chicago - a privileged white story, and a poverty stricken, largely colored one, which even share scenes filmed in the very same restaurant.

Back then, I had no idea who Ben Stein was, so it was amusing to see him now and suddenly join the dots. Apparently his infamous "voodoo economics" speech had no script and was ad-libbed.

Reviewing Rooney's comical attempts to break into the Buellers' house made me realize for the first time that this was Hughes' dry-run at what would become Home Alone.

I had always been frustrated that I'd never been able to lay my hands on the "You're not dying" song that Cameron plays while sick in his bedroom (i.e. here's the few seconds of it on Youtube, exactly as it appears in the movie.)

Now we have the Internet, I can see that this failure wasn't exactly my fault - there is no such song. The few bars we hear were whipped up by Ira Newborn specially for the film, based on an old Louis Armstrong song, Let My People Go. Fortunately for us, one man was obsessed about it enough to actually recreate a full length song based on the snippets from the movie. Here is Daniel Simone's Let My Cameron Go, full of a lush Pink Floyd sound, and ripe with the sort of ecstatic anticipation that even Roger Waters would be proud of.

Duly added to my rotation for next time I'm sick.

Update: Dany Boyd's CinemaStix posted a lovely YouTube about how Ferris isn't the main character of this movie.

Resolution and The Endless

Jonathan Hartley — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 19:12:24 GMT

Resolution (2012)

The Endless (2017)

I only had a hazy awareness of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the writer and directors, before watching these movies. But having discovered them, I now realize that they are doing just about my favorite thing in film: Quirky, intense, psychological drama wound around some high concept science fiction.

Going in, I hadn't realized the two films are related. But then they contain the same scene, viewed from two different angles (pictured above), and it starts to become clearer. As it happens, I watched them out of order - my enthusiasm for The Endless caused me to look up their earlier Resolution. But with hindsight, I think this is actually the best order to view them. If Resolution has a weakness, it's that the science fictional elements seem a bit arbitrary. Why should this supernatural entity focus its narrative-obsessed attentions on these two men, here in this cabin, out in the middle of nowhere? But in The Endless, this particular brand of supernatural outlandishness is revealed to be just part of a wider pattern, affecting many people in this geographical area. Although this is the bigger, weirder story, it is more fully fleshed out and becomes more believable, creating a setting which recontextualizes and improves the earlier film.

Rating: 10/10 if you like mindbending SF horror, 0/10 if you prefer something a bit more polished and comfortable.

Cloverfield (2008)

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:15:58 GMT

Against my better judgement I couldn't help but snag a torrent of this. Sure enough, as the opening credits kicked in, my housemates assured us it was rubbish.

But then what happened is that I proceeded to love it. Clearly it polarises. The whole thing is shot in a shaky handicam held by one of the characters - imagine Blair Witch meets 9/11, only it isn't terrorists, it's a giant, evil whatthefuckisthat stalking the streets of NYC. It reminds me of Primer, in which the script is so realistic and lacking in over-ripe gravitas that, unusually, the actors don't even look like they are acting! What a concept. Well this is similar - albeit a lot dumber - but the strength is not in the script, which isn't especially strong, but is in the novel method of presentation.

There's clearly a limited number of movies that could be made like this, but for me, it was a welcome respite from the staged set-pieces of Hollywood's more conventional output. The sense of panic and confusion was beautifully heightened by the total lack of exposition - viewers only get to see what this small group of characters get to see, and even that is in blurry and imperfect fragmetary snatches. The monster, when it is even visible, is only glimpsed from afar. It was the closest a movie has ever come to creating the kind of tense, terrifying immersion that really great computer games can create.

I was amused to note that a bridge they take shelter under at the end looks exactly like the bridge they took shelter under at the end of The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) - do all the bridges in Central Park look the same, or does this one have some special meaning? Anyhow, the final scene is saddening and telegraphed quite plainly from the opening shot (Camera retrieved at incident site US 447. Area formerly known as "Central Park") and it makes me weep with relief that a movie could so willing try and break the mold.

Rating:

0/10 if you're not into monster flicks, or if handycam footage makes you vomit.

10/10 If you fancy being scared silly by a giant alien monster.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:17:24 GMT

The Earth obligingly stood still for us twice this week, on back-to-back nights. In each, a lone alien man arrives in a spaceship with his giant robot buddy Gort, to tell humans that they must mend their destructive ways or be destroyed.

The 1951 version was very Fifties - intrusively hopeless special effects, and seems to my eyes to be riddled with outlandish social etiquette and hopelessly naive politics. I suppose in the years following World War II any platform for preaching pacifism seemed worth a shot. If only more people considered it worth preaching today. I completely missed the Christian allegory that permeates the movie until it was pointed out to me: The alien comes from the heavens, and lives amongst common people, taking the name 'Carpenter' to blend in. He preaches peace to humankind, or else warns we will suffer a fiery apocalypse. He is our intermediary to 'Gort' (in fact the servant of Gort, in the original script) who later resurrects him from the dead, so that he may deliver his final message before being taken back up into the skies. Cute if you're into that, I guess.

Equally predictably, the 2008 version was very Naughties. Intrusively overblown production values string together a mediochre script. The pacifism and Christian message of the original has been replaced with a more timely environmental message - the writers perhaps intuiting that modern Americans are not so receptive to anti-war talk. Otherwise the scope and potential of the ideas at play are completely wasted - lost amidst the creative wasteland of a budget that could no doubt have fed countries. Once provoked, Gort unleashes self-replicating insectile microbots, which swarm and consume Philly, spreading fast. At the last moment, Keanu / Klaatu sees some humans hugging and crying, and has a big change of heart - the Earth deserves to be spared, after all. What a crock.

So there you have it. Watch this space for more reviews from me - wasting nights of my life, so that you don't have to. Final ratings:

10/10 if you are a stump-sucking mealy-mouthed pig-dog with googly eyes.

0/10 if you have any vestigial glimmers of taste or discernment.

Fargo

Jonathan Hartley — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:09:56 GMT

Directed: The Coen Brothers, 1996.

Some brilliant performances, some lovely moments. Emminently watchable. Interesting point, I don't know about Fargo itself, or The Dakotas, but the fine residents of Minnesota will insist that they neither sound or act like the depicted characters, which is of course absolutely charming. (love you guys! :-)

Wall-E

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:39:38 GMT

Director: Andrew Stanton

I resisted for quite a while, expecting cloying superficiality. I was wrong. Or at least I like this kind of cloying superficiality. Clearly made with love by a truly dedicated army of master artisans. Featuring sound effects from the same guru sound guy who worked on the original Star Wars, along with an animation team who watched every single Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movie over their lunchtimes, to inspire them in the ways of visual story telling. With a hardcore Larry Niven reference and a serious environmental message in the background to boot. Huge fun. I watched it twice.

Rating: 8/10 - Thoroughly engaging, emotive and humorous.

Scarface

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:11:01 GMT

Director: Brian de Palma (1983)

Oh, I don't know, my expectations were too high or something. I expected an intense study of greed, corruption and criminal will. Maybe I'm desensitized. All I found was that it frequently descends into simply camp 1970s gunfight scenes. Amusing to note the influences it has had on other media, particularly the mansion in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I couldn't find much else to commend it.

The Simpsons Movie / Goodbye Forever

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:48:12 GMT

There is, of course, no point whatsoever in me posting a belated review of the Simpsons Movie, which I and everyone else gleefully watched many months ago now. To the now long abandoned discussions of its merit I have absolutely nothing of value to contribute.

However, that shall not dissuade me from posting this one anyway, since such posts as these are not, as you might assume, for the benefit of my readership, few and benighted as they might be, but instead form an attempt to chart my media consumption habits for my own retrospective perusal.

It was with some dismay, therefore, that I noted that this inverted system of priorities is mirrored in the Herculean task of my reading of other people's posts. Simply put, I seem to be reading other people's blogs in order to make them feel good, upping their stats, making complimentary comments, showing an interest, etc, etc, rather than for my own benefit. Once this cold fact had impinged upon my conciousness, I had only one course of action left open: Cold Turkey. That's right. No more Google Reader.

Abandoning the hampster wheel should free up a considerable amount of my time for other activities, and I am keen to quantify that process, so I will be keeping detailed logs of my time usage for a few days prior and post the switchover, to ascertain exactly how many hours I previously spent looking at labelled pictures of cats, which I will henceforth presumably be free to spend looking at actual labels on cats (or possibly labels on actual pictures of cats, let's not get overly ambitious.)

In a final layer of delicious irony, I shall of course be blogging comprehensively about the entire experience, however your collective reactions to that will remain forever unknown to me. Henceforth you should consider me to be a purely one-way conduit of information. Goodbye forever.

Lions for Lambs

Jonathan Hartley — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:15:18 GMT

It got a right drubbing critically, and was a box-office failure, but I found it powerful and compelling. It may not be crafted with the greatest finesse, but nevertheless it raises interesting and powerful questions, of the competence of our leaders in war, of the culpability of the media in towing the line, and of the personal responsibility that falls to each of us.

Most Americans seem unaware that their profligate spending on 'defence', coupled with regular invasions of other countries, cause them to be regarded by much of the rest of the world as the single biggest threat to world peace.

In such an environment, this movie asks us to have the bravery to let our point of view be known, and to take action when our beliefs contradict our Goverments' decision to go to war. For anyone with questions about the justification for the recent wars that America has started (and my own country England has supported) this movie raises many issues, and spoke powerfully to my conscience.

Rating 8/10.