Society has collapsed. Biological warfare has changed the majority of humans into werewolves. Those who have not been infected live in locked-down shelters. You live in Shelter 5, with your second wife Lorraine. You used to live in Shelter 4 with your first wife, Wendy. Wendy kicked you out after she found out that you were cheating on her with Lorraine. Things have been tense ever since.
Now, Lorraine’s pregnant. The midwife has told you that the delivery is not going as planned. A C-section has to be performed to save the lives of both Lorraine and the baby. (With humanity nearly wiped out, the survival of your baby could give hope to those few who remain.) You have to get a doctor but that means making you way across the desert wasteland and the ruined city to Shelter 4. Not only do you have to save the life of your second wife but you’re going to have to convince your first wife to help you do it. You only have a few hours to make it and all of the shelter’s hoverbikers are damaged beyond use. Best of luck!
Second Wind is an interactive fiction game for adults. The stakes are real. The puzzles require thought. Your mistakes have consequences. Puzzles are usually my great downfall when it comes interactive fiction. Timed challenges are my second greatest downfall. As you can probably guess, I had to play Second Wind a few times before I got anything close to a good ending and, even then, it was only as good as any ending can be when the world’s gone to Hell in a bucket without anyone even enjoying the ride. But the challenge made the eventual success even more rewarding. When playing a game like Second Wind, the best advice would be to remember that using google is not the same as cheating and that Occam’s Razor is your friend. It also helps to take notes because a lot of the game’s puzzles depend on remembering numbers and then inputting them into the keypads necessary to enter the shelters.
I dug Second Wind. It’s better-written than most and the descriptions are so vivid that you’ll feel like you’re in that apocalyptic desert, trying to make your way back home. And if you really do get lost, there is a walk-through that explains the puzzles without leaving you feeling too ashamed for not being able to figure them out for yourself.
I had a lot of screenshots to choose from this year to use to open this post. There was Tab Hunter shooting a magic arrow from a flying carpet, someone in a dog suit trying to lick Elvis Presley, Betty Compson doing Cinemax shadow theatre in 1929, chandeliers made of women, and much, much more. I decided to go with the geeky choice. That’s Warren Beatty in Kaleidoscope (1966) demonstrating a supply chain attack.
He breaks into a factory that makes playing cards for the different casinos/clubs in the area. He marks the originals that will be used to print the cards. Then he sits back and waits for the marked cards to be printed and delivered securely, end-to-end, to the casinos/clubs. He can win as much as he wants because all the cards are pre-marked. Is he winning too much? No worries, cause even if the casino opens up a fresh deck, they’re marked too. Of course he eventually runs into a problem when the film realizes it doesn’t have a story beyond this neat idea.
As you might have guessed from my mention of Tab Hunter, Elvis Presley, Betty Compson, and a staple of pre-code films, I watched a lot of TCM last year. I don’t know what happened. I haven’t watched the channel this much in close to 15 years. But It was well worth it. It help me rediscover why I got into film back in the mid-2000s.
Unfortunately, unlike previous years, I only got through 761 films. On the other hand, this year I don’t have to stretch things to have 25 best films. The sheer tonnage of garbage I watched in 2020 made that a tough list to compile.
I do have to preface these lists with a little bit of information. Since I was watching TCM, it meant that I did several of their Stars Of The Month (John Garfield, Doris Day, and Elvis Presley). I watched a lot of films during the month where they only play Oscar nominated films. Finally, I also sat through almost every official IOC commissioned Olympic film. I try to have a variety of different films when I make these lists. It was just more difficult this time because of the large clumps of similar films.
The rules are the same as in previous years:
There is no particular order to the films in these lists. They either made it, or they didn’t.
These lists do not necessarily have films that came out in 2021. These are films that I saw for the first time in 2021. Unlike previous years, there is actually one from 2021. I wanted to include at least one this time.
The gems list has films that don’t make the best list, but I want to put a spotlight on them.
Disagree with any of my choices? Good! I want people to form their own opinions and think for themselves. But if you care to share those opinions, then be nice about it.
I link to reviews of these movies if I can find any that have been written by one of our contributors here on Through the Shattered Lens.
One final thing of note is that The IX Olympiad In Amsterdam (1928) is the Italian cut. It’s not the slightly less awful version–The Olympic Games, Amsterdam 1928 (1928)–that was done in Germany by UFA to try and get Dutch theaters to stop boycotting the film. Perhaps they were boycotting the film because it is the worst Olympic movie ever made.
Earlier today, the Toronto Film Critics Association named Drive My Car as the best film of 2021!
Here are all the winners from the hometown of Degrassi:
Best Film Winner: DRIVE MY CAR Runners Up: LICORICE PIZZA & THE POWER OF THE DOG
Best Director Winner: Jane Campion – THE POWER OF THE DOG Runners Up: Ryusuke Hamaguchi – DRIVE MY CAR & Denis Villeneuve – DUNE
Best Screenplay Winner: DRIVE MY CAR Runners Up: LICORICE PIZZA & THE POWER OF THE DOG
Best Actress Winner: Olivia Colman – THE LOST DAUGHTER Runners Up: Penelope Cruz – PARALLEL MOTHERS & Kristen Stewart – SPENCER
Best Actor Winner: Denzel Washington – THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH Runners Up: Benedict Cumerbatch – THE POWER OF THE DOG & Andrew Garfield – TICK, TICK…BOOM!
Best First Feature Winner: THE LOST DAUGHTER Runners Up: PASSING, PIG & SHIVA BABY
Best Documentary Winner: SUMMER OF SOUL Runners Up: FLEE & THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
Best Foreign Language Film Winner: DRIVE MY CAR Runners Up: PETITE MAMAN & THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
Best Animated Feature Winner: FLEE Runners Up: ENCANTO & THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES
Best Supporting Actress Winner: Jessie Buckley – THE LOST DAUGHTER Runners Up: Kirsten Dunst – THE POWER OF THE DOG & Ruth Negga – PASSING
Best Supporting Actor Winner: Bradley Cooper – LICORICE PIZZA Runners Up: Ciarán Hinds – BELFAST & Kodi Smit-McPhee – THE POWER OF THE DOG
The Power of the Dog picked up another award for Best Picture today when the Kansas City Film Critics Circle (KCFCC) announced their picks for the best of 2021!
Here are all the winners from Kansas City!
Best Picture Winner: The Power Of The Dog
Runner-Up: West Side Story
Best Director Winner: Jane Campion – The Power Of The Dog Runner-Up: Steven Spielberg – West Side Story
Best Actor Winner: Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power Of The Dog Runner-Up: Andrew Garfield – Tick, Tick…Boom!
Best Actress Winner: Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter Runner-Up: Kristen Stewart – Spencer
Best Supporting Actor Winner: Ciarán Hinds – Belfast Runner-Up: Kodi Smit-McPhee – The Power Of The Dog
Best Supporting Actress Winner: Ann Dowd – Mass Runner-Up: Ariana DeBose – West Side Story
Best Original Screenplay Winner: Licorice Pizza Runner-Up: The French Dispatch
Best Adapted Screenplay Winner: West Side Story Runner-Up: Drive My Car
Best Cinematography Winner: The Tragedy Of Macbeth Runner-Up: Dune
Best Animated Film Winner: The Mitchells vs. The Machines Runner-Up: Flee
Best Foreign Language Film Winner: Drive My Car Runners-Up: The Worst Person In The World
Best Documentary Winner: Summer Of Soul Runner-Up: Procession
Vince Koehler Award For Best SciFi/Horror/Fantasy Winner: The Green Knight Runner-Up: Dune
Tom Poe Award For Best LBGTQ Film Winner: Flee Runner-Up: The Power Of The Dog
Rick Penning (Sean Faris) is the captain of his high school rugby team and the team’s highest scorer. He’s also the son of the team’s coach (Neal McDonough). Coach Penning is obsessed with winning at all costs and refuses to tell his son that he’s proud of him. Coach Penning believes that emotion equals weakness and that only losers brag about doing their best. After a loss to the Highland High school rugby team, which is coached by Larry Gelwix (Gary Cole), Rick and his teammates blow of steam by drinking, driving, and crashing a car.
Rick is sentenced to juvie but his case officer (Sean Astin) can see that Rick needs rugby in his life so he arranges for Rick to play with the Highland Team. At first, Rick resents the new team and doesn’t want to follow Coach Gelwix’s advice on or off the field. Coach Gelwix makes the team do community projects while they’re not training and Rick says that’s not his thing. Rick just wants to score points and he doesn’t care about teamwork. But the team and the coach eventually win Rick over and, once Rick gets over being selfish and starts playing for the team instead of just himself, Highland High starts winning games and Rick becomes the team’s newest captain. But, when Rick gets paroled from juvie, he’s sent back home to his father, who expects Rick to reveal all of Highland’s secret plays and weaknesses. When Rick refuses to betray Coach Gelwix, his former teammates frame him and get him sent back to juvie. Rick ends up playing for Highland again, just in time for the state championship and a chance to lead Highland against his father’s team.
Forever Strong had a good message but, from the first minute, I know what was going to happen and how it was going to all end. The story was pretty predictable and the movie seemed to assume that everyone watching would already know everything that they needed to know about rugby. At my high school, athletics pretty much meant football. I don’t think we even had a rugby team. (If we did, we never cheered at their games, which I feel bad about.) Whenever everyone in the movie was arguing about the right way to play rugby and which position on the team was the most important, I was lost. I did like Gary Cole as Coach Gelwix. He was the type of coach that every parent should hope coaches their child’s team.
Since today is the birthday of John Carpenter, can you guess what the theme of the latest edition of Lisa Mare’s Favorite Grindhouse Trailers is going to be?
Enjoy!
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Let’s get things started with the wonderfully grainy trailer for 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13! Though the film may have been intended as an homage to Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, everything about the trailer screams grindhouse.
2. Halloween (1978)
Assault on Precinct 13 may not have set the box office on fire but it did help build Carpenter’s critical reputation. One fan of the film was the actress Angela Pleasence, who suggested to her father, Donald, that he accept Carpenter’s offer to play the role of Dr. Loomis in Carpenter’s next film. And that film, of course, was Halloween!
3. Escape From New York (1981)
Donald Pleasence returned to play the President in Escape from New York and, of course, Kurt Russell appeared in his first Carpenter feature film. (Russell had previously played Elvis in a Carpenter-directed television film.) Though the film may not have been an immediate hit in the United States, it was embraced in Europe and it led to an entire series of Italian films about people trying to escape New York.
4. The Thing (1982)
Carpenter and Russell reunited for The Thing, another film that underappreciated when first released but which has since become a classic.
5. They Live (1988)
They Live is one of Carpenter’s best films and certainly his most subversive. What may have seemed paranoid in 1988 feels prophetic today.
6. In The Mouth of Madness (1995)
Finally, in 1995, Carpenter proved himself to be one of the few directors to be able to capture the feel of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories on film. In The Mouth of Madness, like other Carpenter films, has been rewatched and reappraised over the years and is now widely recognized as a classic.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 74th birthday to one of this site’s patron saints, the great John Carpenter!
In honor of the man and his legacy, here are….
6 Shots From 6 John Carpenter Films
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, dir by John Carpenter. DP: Douglas Knapp)
Halloween (1978, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Dean Cudney)
The Fog (1980, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Dean Cudney)
The Thing (1982, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Dean Cudney)
They Live (1988, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Gary B. Kibbe)
Escape From L.A. (1996, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Gary B. Kibbe)
Through the Shattered Lens 