Happy Columbus / Indigenous Peoples' Day! I was waiting for a friend to come visit but it looks like he's not going to make it today. So, I watched a movie to try and get caught up. I knew the moment i started watching it where it came from (it's a netflix movie written by stephen king) because king has a distinctive style and references in his writing that I have grown accustomed to recognizing over the years. Plus, it said so at the end of the movie, so it was kind of hard to miss.
Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022) is about a young boy who meets an old man. The old man is having trouble reading and has hired the boy to read old books to him. The relationship lasts until the boy enters high school, and somethign bad happens, but the relationship doesnt end there. Like most of King's stories, I'd be giving things away if I said more, so I'm just going to end it ehre and let you watch this one on your own.
Donald Sutherland gives an excellent performance as Mr. Harrigan. I admit I have not seen Mr. Sutherland act for a while and expected his acting talent to have suffered some of the effects of aging, but if it has, I was unable to find any. His performance as the titular Mr. Harrigan was excellent and appropriately creepy in all the right spots. I imagine they could have done something with special effects to approximate Mr. Harrigan's vengeance, but not showing him at all was just as good. A simple view of the end result in which Mr. Harrigan "dispatched his enemies with haste" was supremely effective in and of itself. The rest of the cast did an appropriately good job and I won't mention any of them here because I've never seen them in anything else that I can recall.
I only have one problem with this movie and I get that it violates the suspension of disbelief rule, which was otherwise in full effect for me, but this one is a contrsdiction that the movie makes for itself, and that always triggers me. Mr. Harrigan hires this boy to do his reading for him, saying his eyes are failing and he needs the boy to read the old novels in his bookshelf for him. This relationship continues for at least a good 5 years, as stated in the story, until the boy is in high school. At which point, the boy (craig) buys Mr. Harrigan a cell phone (where the title comes from). But, if his eyes were too bad to be able to read, how was he able to discern the text and information on his phone, which he seems to readily take to? I imagine there is the possibility that Mr. Harrigan just wanted some company, and if that's what the movie was trying to point out most obviously by making sure the viewer knew that Mr. Harrigan could see perfectly well, then that makes more sense and is not actually a contradiction to its own established plot. I'm thinking that's probably the case, because otherwise this was a pretty decent psychological / spirtual horror movie, and I don't want to think the movie made an accidental mistake.
Okay, in other news, I am still one movie behind so maybe I can catch up today. Not much else going on in the news, you know, aside from the usual wars, corruption and madness that plagues mankind on a daily basis. I'm still quite sore today and slept poorly so if you notice mistakes in my spelling, cut me some slack, jack. That's something they used to say in the 70's. Hopefully I shall return later this evening with another review, and be all caught up. All new movies so far this month, or at least, ones i have not seen before. Well, technically I did see Day Shift once before, but that was only a couple months ago when it came out, and it was good enough to watch again. Hopefully I can keep this streak of new movies going, instead of having to review something I've seen before, but whata re the odds? I don't think I've ever had an OHMRAT where I could even find 31 horror movies I had not seen before. I mean, let's face it, I watch horror movies a LOT. :-) Til later then, hope you are enjoying the holiday, if at all possible. Sunny out. maybe I'll grab some fresh air, too.
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