Top 100 Favourite Films: #20-11

#20: Ouija: Origin Of Evil – Even The Other Side has rules

This is one of those films that instantly sounds like a bad idea. The 2013 film Ouija was such a horror non-event that it’s surprising that anyone even cared enough to remember it, let alone try and expand on it. Add to that the influence of producers like the annoyingly prolific Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions and the reliably dismal Michael Bay, whose studio Platinum Dunes have made the words “horror” and “prequel” synonymous with “run” and “hide”. Enter director/co-writer Mike Flanagan, fresh off of an already unprecedented success with Oculus, who did something that no-one would have expected from a production with this starting point: He put the effort in to make it work.

David Stratton: A Cinematic Life (2017) - Movie Review

Even in the world of Internet criticism and the democratisation of opinions about media, there is still one name and one name only who is the most important film critic in Australian history: David Stratton. The Oceanic answer to Roger Ebert, gaining mainstream attention through the Australian version of At The Movies with fellow critic Margaret Pomeranz, he basically embodies everything I both love and hate about the typical newspaper film critic. He has a very evident love for the medium and helped build up the Sydney Film Festival, but he also employs a lot of the faux-profundities and literary snootiness that I have railed on many times before. Still, regardless of all that, I find myself almost required to show respect where it’s due because of his importance to the industry. Have to admit, I wasn’t exactly anxious to check this film out, given how this is the sort of critic I usually try to avoid out in the wild, but considering how this year has been for Aussie cinema already, I reckon it’s worth being given its time in the sun on this blog.