I liked it. It sets up a good tone and pacing. The story should get more interesting as it goes along.
Back to Children With Angels..Yes, genre mixing can serve a lot of purpose, but I don't think doing it in a superficial way really does work. I love the filmmakers who bleed them together but wrap them in a narrative that is their own.
To illustrate my point, my favorite Jazz musician Dave Douglas started in the early 90s by doing jazz suites that celebrated different periods and different musicians. Everyone said he was talented and capable of mixing everything, but they all said he sounded too "jazzy".
When Douglas developed he began to develop sounds and tendencies that became all his own. He didn't stop meshing different time periods or artists, but he blended them into his music in a way that the references weren't the first things you heard. It was Douglas' own sounds that you heard.
I think Paul Thomas Anderson has achieved this type of narrative power in his films. I've liked all of his work to some degree because he has aligned his films with a talented vision all his own. His references aren't a bad thing, but they will be if he doesn't step up his ambition to allow the material to be as ambitious as the filmmaking. There Will Be Blood could do that.
When I think of simple genre mixing, I think of combining styles and identities but doing so in a way that just satisfies the hallmark of one of those genres. I also think of filmmakers who use style mixing to just tell stories that exist in a irreverent state without any meaning. The Coen Brothers usually fufil that.
See, genre mixing isn't even new. It's been around forever in all national cinemas and even before breakthrough films like Citizen Kane. Every filmmaker and technician has borrowed different aspects of another genre or style to fit their own work.
The Hollywood system of the 30s through 50s showed that studios can exist to tell one kind of film and do so for ridiculous conventions without any innovation or strive to have deeper meaning. Filmmakers sometimes played around with these stories, but never to serious challenge under the Hollywood studio. It's just for some reason these films because influential because each genre has a style to it and over zealous critics in France attached themselves to something that wasn't very interesting.
Art cinema has had tendencies in every country and age, but it is not equivalent to Hollywood genres. That's ridiculous and simplistic.
