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The Box (2009)
A fascinating premise ruined by a fatuous filmmaker
I was what seemed to be the target demographic for DONNIE DARKO when it premiered in 2001: an angsty, outcast teenager into horror movies, psychedelics, and New Wave music. It even took place in my home state of Virginia! Writer-director Richard Kelly's first movie was instantly iconic for me and my small circle of friends: quotably hilarious, surreally mysterious, and somehow oddly relatable. A couple years later, I befriended an older dude who had gone to high school and was baffled by how much this guy hated the movie. To him, Kelly had been the most pretentious of jerkoffs: the kind of person who ran for class president and incorrectly used five-dollar thesaurus words in his election speech. When the "director's cut" of Donnie Darko, which absolutely nobody had asked for, was released shortly thereafter, I found myself understanding the man behind the camera. Kelly had taken a beloved cult classic, one that was funny, touching, and evocative, and turned it into an ugly and obnoxious mess. Who had asked for pseudoscientific CGI diagrams, faux-philosophical narration, a different soundtrack, and what felt like an hour of padding? Who other than Richard Kelly, of course?
Every film Kelly has made since the original theatrical release of Donnie Darko has confirmed my friend's image of who he was in high school, and THE BOX is no different. There is real talent in the production design and staging of THE BOX, and at its heart, I believe, is an extraordinarily interesting premise that I can't recall having been done anywhere else. Yet Kelly's obsession with sci-fi minutiae, his preoccupation with some of the more cliché chapters of the Philosophy 101 textbook, and his apparent belief that the only person who should be amused by art is, well, himself completely destroys the movie. (The horrible "Southern" accents of Cameron Diaz and James Marsden are also a notable accomplice in this destruction, and I won't blame Kelly for that.)
On the face of it, The Box is an extraterrestrial sci-fi morality tale that would have slotted in well with the mid-twentieth century works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke: aliens come to earth, and their superior qualities call into question the presumed dominance of humanity as the most intelligent species, the species supposedly made in God's image. Compared to the superior knowledge, self-control, and empathy of the alien race, humans are mere brutal animals, perhaps more deserving of extermination than an invitation to join the galactic civilization. In this movie, that premise boils down to the titular box, a garden variety Twilight Zone moral choice that tests whether the participant will choose to enrich herself (and her loved ones) at the expense of the sudden and certain demise of some hapless stranger. Should our ethic of care be all-encompassing, or are we only obligated to extend empathy to those we have direct contact with? A mephistopholean Frank Langella is the keeper of the box and the bestower of its questionable boons, and the movie seems to unfold as a straightforward "be careful what you wish for" tale.
What makes Kelly's adaptation potentially brilliant, however, is that I don't really think the movie is about what it seems to be "on the face of it." The aliens' test for empathy is so inhumanly rigid that it allows no room for forgiveness, nuance, or mistake. Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz), who impulsively and after much deliberation presses the button that will bring her a suitcase of money while bringing death to some stranger, instantly regrets her decision and tries to reverse it at a time when she could in fact still save the life of the stranger. Throughout the film, we see her and her husband (James Marsden) exhibit extensive displays of selflessness, be that Mrs. Lewis's sympathy for the scarred face of Langella's character, Mr. Lewis's desire to build a prosthetic foot for his disabled wife that will make her impairment less painful to bear, and numerous other scenes that convey their basic, realistic decency. Ironically, Mrs. Lewis's death at the end of the film is brought about by an enormous display of empathy: she takes full responsibility for having pressed the button and pleads with her husband to take her life so that she might lessen the suffering of their son. In the conclusion of the film, the extraterrestrials' maneuverings seem not to have eliminated an unempathetic monster from intergalactic society but rather the opposite; perhaps the goal of the aliens, in fact, is to eradicate empathy?
A filmmaker who was interested in exploring this theme would focus his time on exploring the fallout of Mrs. Lewis's decision. The emphasis would be on conversations, dramatic moments, tortured regrets, arguments, the seeking of mercy. When Mrs. Lewis pleads to be killed so that her son might have a fulfilling life, the scene would be powerfully moving, not laughable. Richard Kelly, however, jettisons all this human potential and instead focuses on the kind of mumbo jumbo that he stuffed into his bloated director's cut of Donnie Darko: a silly B-plot involving a library full of pod people with nosebleeds, some kind of absurd quantum physics waterbed contraption, excessive preoccupation with the sci-fi logistics of how the aliens came to occupy the body of Frank Langella, and various other tedious nonsense. What Kelly desperately needs is an editor or producer who will deny him from executing his most selfish and inane artistic impulses. The Box is a masterpiece of a story directed by someone who has no interest in telling that story.
I watched The Box because I recently tasked myself with (re)viewing in reverse chronological order all 22 movies to have received the lowest possible score of F from Cinemascore polling of opening night audiences for wide release films. People would expect this list of movies to include a lot of obvious low-budget dreck, but it actually contains a surprising number of films with prestigious pedigrees, including several that were directed by Academy Award winners and nominees. Thus far, The Box has been one of the more peculiar entries on the list. The reason it got an F is pretty obvious to me: audiences by and large seem to despise an unhappy ending, and the unhappy ending of The Box certainly isn't aided any by the (unnecessary) randomness of the plot contrivances that abruptly force it into the story, the histrionic melodrama of Cameron Diaz's fake Southern crying, or the baffling feeling that the movie ends with some half a dozen plotlines left unexplained and unresolved. The movie's garish cinematography, exhausting runtime, and unnatural performances likewise don't help. Nevertheless, this is the only F film I've seen so far where I both agree with the abysmal score and yet also recognize that it could've been much, much more. Perhaps a filmmaker with a deeper interest in humanity will see the potential and one day remake the material into the interesting philosophical dilemma that it could've been.
A Real Pain (2024)
Tries to be spirited, but is mostly just stilted
Jesse Eisenberg's second effort as writer-director sets out to be something unconventional. There's something of Richard Linklater's BEFORE trilogy in the DNA of A REAL PAIN, with some recognizable inheritance from Michael Winterbottom's TRIP series also apparent. The perambulatory pacing, the languorous cinematography that asks you to look beneath the surface of touristy sights, the dialogue that meanders through an unpretentious and unstructured unpacking of the meaning of life, the total absence of any "bad guys," the near total absence of any outright conflict, the barest hint of any goal guiding the plot aside from the completion of a simple itinerary... A Real Pain shares all these realistic features with those earlier, more spirited, life-affirming films. Yet somehow... it doesn't quite work.
I'm not sure what was at fault with why I never really got into this movie. I think a large part of it has to do with all the supporting characters (i.e. Everyone besides the cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin). Will Sharpe's non-Jewish tour guide, the Rwandan convert, the old couple, the sexy divorcee... the characters are all very basic, very conventional, very boring. The actors who play them are fine, but there's not much they're given to do, and so they seem unnatural and lifeless, more like set decorations than people. Eisenberg knows how to direct a camera, I think; he knows how to put the proper cinematic elements in place. But perhaps he doesn't know how to direct actors, or maybe he just doesn't know how to write characters. There's never anything to suggest that these people exist beyond the moments we see them in, which perhaps could've been fixed with some more spontaneous improvisation from the actors.
Eisenberg and especially Culkin are better in this regard, but there's still something rather stilted and "written" about a lot of what they say and do. Eisenberg's "workaholic salesman with OCD" is largely one-dimensional, and the few times where his character expands beyond that facade seem more like forced acting than any kind of genuine glimpse into something deeper. Culkin is wonderful--a glimpse perhaps of his Succession character if Roman Roy actually cared about people--but I think that's just a credit to Culkin's talent; he somehow manages to transcend what he's been given to work with.
This is a decent indie film with a few good laughs, a couple of interesting ideas, a memorable tour of Poland, and a solid performance from Culkin. From the trailer and the reviews, I was expecting something much funnier and emotionally impactful, but I'd still recommend the movie to anyone interested in it.
Silent House (2011)
86 minutes too long
I recently tasked myself with (re)viewing in reverse chronological order the 22 films that have received an F Cinemascore. For about 40 years, Cinemascore has polled opening night audiences of wide release films, and their lowest score has been reserved for a rare lot of pictures. You'd expect the list to include a lot of low-budget, asinine, obvious flops, yet many of the movies were directed by filmmakers who were elsewhere nominated for Oscars, and a few of the movies are even-in my opinion, at least-genuine masterpieces. SILENT HOUSE was the sixth movie I watched, and it was the first that I would consider truly abysmal.
I saw Gustavo Hernández's original 2010 Uruguayan film, LA CASA MUDA, shortly after it came out, when it was still had a reputation among IMDb users and some critics for being an effectively disturbing thriller. I was nevertheless thoroughly disappointed, giving it a 1-star rating on IMDb. Many years have passed, and I've forgotten the specific reasons of why I hated the original, but in hindsight I suspect that the English-language adaptation would make even it look like a good movie. I think I remember the original having at least one or two good jump scares.
The English-language Silent House is an absolute mess. Camera trickery makes it appear to be a film that was shot in a single take in real time, and the circumstances of the plot result in a movie that is largely free of dialogue, with long stretches where only the main character (Elizabeth Olsen) is on screen. Olsen is a talented actor, but she can't rescue a movie that is incoherent and tedious for much of its running time. She stumbles around the house looking horrified for reasons that never fully make sense; apparently, she's trapped and/or afraid that she's being stalked by an intruder, but despite the over-the-top horror constantly distorting her face, the camerawork never makes this feeling quite palpable; there's always an extreme disjunct between our own understanding of the film's environment (which leads to confusing thoughts like, "Why doesn't she just turn around?" or "Can she really not get through that door?" or "Isn't there another door?") and what the character perceives to be the same environment.
Spoiler alert (if something so predictable can possibly be spoiled): this disjunction is intentional because what we're seeing isn't really a woman being stalked through an abandoned summer house but instead a woman on the brink of insanity being stalked by her own nightmarish memories through the labyrinth of her trauma. That's the intended effect, at least. The filmmakers are dedicated to this one simple conceit that they are completely unable to execute, and their insistence on prolonging this conceit for as long as possible results in a main character who is so stupid and helpless that the movie's cliched depiction of trauma crosses deep into the realm of outright offensiveness. For a psychological thriller about similar themes that is much more effectively horrifying, you should instead see REPULSION (1965) with Catherine Deneuve.
There's really nothing redeemable about this film, which is only 86 minutes but feels 86 minutes too long. The actors aside from Olsen are laughably bad, and the dialogue sounds like it was written by an early model of ChatGPT. It's so tedious, baffling, and off-putting that it doesn't even have the distinction of being "so bad it's good." Avoid at all costs!
Heretic (2024)
Message Board: The Movie
Have you ever been reading a flame war on an atheist subreddit and thought, "Wow, this would make a thrilling movie!" Or maybe you saw a meme somebody posted on Facebook about how Christmas is just a sanitized version of the Roman Saturnalia, and in reading through all the comments, you thought, "Wow, somebody should copy this verbatim into a screenplay because this is all very intelligent and interesting and it's exactly how real people talk!" If so, HERETIC is the movie for you!
Sitting through this film is the equivalent of being stuck in a car for two hours with someone who can't stop talking about all the unrelated listicles, Google News headlines, and TikTok informational videos he half remembers skimming from his most recent session of doomscrolling on the toilet. Did you know Monopoly was actually invented by some woman who didn't get any of the credit or money? Did you know Radiohead was sued for plagiarizing the melody of Creep? Did you know that, like, there were all these other gods, like 13 gods or something, who have the same birthday as Jesus? Yeah, I saw it online. It was this really interesting article.
Heretic is perhaps the most obnoxious of movies: one that thinks it's really intelligent but is actually just a bunch of sloppily thrown together, superficial Wikipedia citations. And please don't assume that my critique of the film is just me failing to realize that I'm really only critiquing Hugh Grant's character; while he's certainly the most obnoxious troll of the bunch, the two women who battle wits with him are equally guilty of logical fallacy after fallacy. The movie ends with one of the women using what could be her last breath to state how the "results were conclusive" in some random social science experiment about prayer. This movie might have worked well as a satirical sketch about how you should never "feed the trolls" in the YouTube comments, but as anything more--a gripping thriller, a meaningful examination of faith, a compelling character study--it is a total failure.
Heretic is one of the talkiest movies of the year, but little of it coheres into anything of substance. What's the point of tossing off the trivial fact that Monopoly was a ripoff of an earlier game? What's the point of saying that Creep's melody may have been pilfered from an earlier song (and was then in turn copied by a later song) if you're not interested in exploring anything about those songs, their lyrics, their respective contexts, or how they deal with the art of adaptation? Facts are constantly being stripped of their substance and nuance in this film and then ushered forth to prove arguments so broad that almost any random facts could take their place without significantly changing the evidentiary weight of the argument. This screenplay reeks of the same lazy research practices of many college students: if a writing assignment needs to include four outside sources, they type a keyword into Google Scholar, download the first four results, grab a direct quote with some interesting fact from the first paragraph or two of each of those sources, don't bother reading anything else, and then plug the quotations into the most convenient parts of their essay. Bam! They've got a "research paper." Four sources, read em and weep, now gimme an A!
If that were all somehow *the point*--that Hugh Grant's villain is a parody of bad writers--then that could maybe be kinda interesting. But I highly doubt that's the intended point. The filmmakers present Mr. Reed as a cunning grandmaster who's always thinking five steps ahead and is capable of pulling off elaborately evil plans. I think the movie is convinced he's quite brilliant, like Milton's Satan, and that the film itself will bless its viewers with some great wisdom to ponder.
And if that's the case, which I think it is, then I'm not sure who the audience for this was supposed to be. Anybody who has spent anytime at all thinking about religion and faith has surely already encountered many of the ideas, facts, and arguments presented in this film. I can't imagine anyone being truly challenged, inspired, persuaded, or shocked by any of the points raised in this film, whether they're a religious person or an atheist. Even the title is rather misleading, since instead of anything unorthodox being introduced in this film's themes, it's really just a bunch of garden variety atheist talking points that get blathered non-stop.
Having done all this complaining, I will confess one thing: the three main actors, and especially Grant, are all phenomenal. Their performances make the movie watchable even as the plot becomes increasingly convoluted and unconvincing.
If the filmmakers had been able to execute some more thrilling, disturbing, or suspenseful moments, then I'd be content to call it a good movie with bad dialogue. But ultimately the movie isn't as satisfying as it could have been, even on a stylistic level. Some viewers might get better mileage with the scares, but I advise that you approach with caution.
Snack Shack (2024)
A teenage period dramedy without teenagers, period detail, drama, or comedy
This movie is a total misfire. My initial reaction was to wonder how a low-budget, low-adrenaline film like this even got greenlit for a 2024 theatrical release, but then I recalled all the similar films I've seen that were much better: movies like MID90S, DIDI, and even the "adults cast as tweens" television show PEN15, which precisely conveyed turn-of-the-century adolescence with close attention to period detail and a dose of nostalgia tempered with realistic levels of cringe. It's not true that "there's no audience for a movie like SNACK SHACK," as I initially thought; rather, this movie is just so uninteresting that any audience that wanders into it is likely to be left bored senseless.
First, the story: Snack Shack's frenetic opening scenes suggest that it is about something and has something to say. The rapid-fire banter of A. J. (Conor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle), which seems pulled from a Discord thread of college-aged finance bros trying to launch a new cryptocurrency, is incredibly exhausting and annoying. The movie immediately presents its two stars as some of the most obnoxious main characters in recent cinematic history. Nevertheless, there's something intriguing about this premise. Their scheming, snarky dialogue is so over-the-top that it has to be satirical. Why does it seem like these fourteen-year-olds have just snorted a mountain of coke? Why are they talking like they're in an episode of Succession written by Aaron Sorkin on meth? Will this satire form the structure of the film? Since the movie is set in 1991, are we meant to be watching the birth of the mindset that will later bring about the 2009 recession? Does the movie's presentation of competitive, physically violent, reckless capitalists in their adolescence 30 years ago speak to the cutthroat nature of the middle-aged men who currently control the levers of society?
No, not at all. In fact, this plotline almost immediately disappears. While the movie certainly becomes more watchable once its two main characters shut up, its also becomes much less interesting. The Snack Shack of the title is introduced as a speculative business venture that may not pay off, but then it almost immediately pays off and becomes just a backdrop to more tired plotlines. For a movie that's ostensibly about capitalistic scheming (whether it's meant to critique that scheming or even romanticize it, which seems more the case here), it has very little interest in actually exploring those plotlines. The characters risk a few questionably ethical plays (selling prurient profanity to five-year-olds for a profit, bribing a delivery driver for stolen goods), but these moves are incidental, nearly inconsequential, and generate very little narrative conflict or suspense. Instead, the movie quickly devolves into the most cliché of coming-of-age conflicts: they form a love triangle with a neighbor girl, Brooke (Mika Abdalla), that is terribly uninteresting, unsexy, unromantic, and unrealistic. Their competition over the girl could have mirrored their amoral business ventures, but instead the two themes never intersect at all. To make matters worse, the movie doesn't even bother to make that boring theme the source of its climax. Rather, they decide to randomly (yet somehow predictably) kill off an older character whose presence in the story and relationship to the characters never fully makes sense. This character is played by a Nick Robinson that the filmmakers have somehow managed to strip of all charisma, and his sudden off-camera death and how that brings A. J. closer to Moose, Brooke, and his disapproving father (David Costabile) is meant to wrap up a film that was, I guess, about how the briefness of life means that you should love the ones your with? I dunno. It all seems very hodgepodge and pointless (and way too tediously overlong) by the end.
Stylistically, the film has nothing to offer. Similar movies at least have fun with their period settings, but this movie seems indifferent to that fact. Other than the clothes worn by the main characters, there's very little to suggest that this movie is set in 1991 and no clear reason *why* it needs to be set in 1991. A visit to a grocery store with shelves that are full of 2023 products with 2023 labels made me recoil.
The casting is equally offensive. Gabriel LaBelle has the body of an adult actor who's on steroids, meets daily with a personal trainer, subsists on a diet of whey supplements, and is desperate to be cast in the MCU; the way he speaks and acts likewise bears no resemblance to a 14-year-old in his last summer before starting high school. Conor Sherry, who appears to be doing a Butt-Head impersonation throughout most of the movie, is slightly better in this regard, but the film still doesn't seem like it has anything truthful to say about being a teenager. Of course, it's common practice to cast young adults as high schoolers, and I've seen late-twentysomething actresses like Brigette Lundy-Paine and Sosie Bacon give very convincing portrayals of teenage ambivalence and anxiety. But writer-director Adam Rehmeier either doesn't know what real teenagers look and act like, doesn't remember, or simply doesn't care. My guess is that any actual 14-year-old who stumbles upon this film would neither recognize themselves in this story nor see anything worthwhile to aspire to.
Snack Shack is lazy, halfhearted filmmaking at best. It romanticizes binge drinking, going so far as to make silent drinking in the face of grief pass as some kind of powerful, meaningful moment of male bonding. For a movie that appears to be all about male bonding, all of its relationships are cold and clinical. It has very little humor or excitement, nothing in the way of narrative cohesion, mopey scenes that are totally unearned, and at least thirty minutes of tedious padding. Don't bother with this one.
The Devil Inside (2012)
Realistic found footage horror with effectively grotesque scares
Recently, I tasked myself with viewing and reviewing--in reverse chronological order--all the 22 wide release films that were given a worst possible "F" score by opening night audiences according to Cinemascore exit polling. The first entries were not nearly as thoroughly horrible as I expected them to be and included masterpieces like Darren Aronofsky's mother! As well as the surprisingly chilling and effective 2019 relaunch of THE GRUDGE. I was expecting this to be the first truly awful film of the bunch--its abysmal Metacritic reviews and the reputation of its notoriously abrupt ending long preceding it. Yet I am once again baffled. As far as found footage demonic horror films go, I'm not quite sure how you could do much better, and I'm not quite sure why the opening night audiences for this January release (well known as the "dump month" for horrible movies) were expecting anything better than this competently made, chilling, and engaging film.
The found footage film is a cheap and gimmicky format. Its very realism often depends upon the movie possessing qualities that would otherwise be disparaged: consumer-grade filming equipment; amateurish cinematography; and gaps in the editing, coverage, and narrative that we would otherwise expect to see in a more traditional movie. With a traditional film, the movie isn't itself a diegetic artifact of the story and its fictional world; we can get a more comprehensive and omniscient view of what's going on without ever having to wonder about how and why it was recorded. Many found footage films often violate this realism principle because the alternative is something that might feel impersonal, incomplete, or confusing. For example, LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023) is presented as never-before-seen footage from a catastrophic taping of a live 1970s television talk show. It is mostly very convincing at sticking to this requirement, yet in between takes it also shows us close-ups of the crew having private conversations off set. Who was filming this? Why would the crew have allowed themselves to be filmed in this intrusive way? Even just logistically speaking, why would the production team have been burning money by using up costly filmstock to capture footage that would have normally had no use or value? These scenes should not exist as documentary evidence, yet without them it would be much more difficult for the viewer to grasp all that was going on in the plot.
THE DEVIL INSIDE stays very faithful to its found footage format, and despite having a very low budget, it does this in a very convincing way. We see camcorder footage of very realistic seeming police officers investigating a detailed crime scene that looks and feels like a real 1989-era home where something horrible has happened. We see 1990s era news broadcasts that seem completely authentic. We get the footage of an amateur documentary film crew, and what they record and what they have access to and what they manage to get on tape always seems like it could be the real accomplishments and documentations of an amateur documentary film crew. The editing doesn't cheat, the locations all seem real, and the acting is for the most part convincing.
The scenes of demonic possession are especially disturbing, and the filmmakers should have been applauded for their use of practical (and digital?) effects, effective editing, and impressive physical performances. In general, I'm not very scared by exorcism movies, but the grotesque contortions depicted in this movie are unsettling and terrifying. Those few scenes alone should have satisfied any moviegoer, but the movie that fleshes out this scenes is equally engaging and well-made.
Yes, the ending is bleak and very abrupt--but what else would it be? Realistically, given the plot and the format, how could it have been anything else? Audiences seem to be expecting a screenplay that would solve the mysteries at the core of the plot, but the very purpose of the plot is to demonstrate that these mysteries are inexplicable. Isn't that scarier than some contrived explanation about who the demon is, where he came from, why he's doing what he's doing, and how he can be stopped? Based on the other F Cinemascore movies I've seen, I think perhaps audiences were also disappointed by the "unhappy ending"--but this is a horror movie! Get over it?
The movie is not perfect, of course. The performance by the main actress, Fernanda Andrade, seems a bit scripted at times in contrast to many of the other more naturalistic actors around her. The plot also has many headscratchers involving legal procedures that have no resemblance to reality, but these can be somewhat overlooked by considering that a supernatural conspiracy is afoot.
Overall, I found this movie to be hauntingly grotesque, consistently engaging, well paced, and a strong example of what a realistic found footage horror movie looks like. Why audiences despise it and feel so condescending toward it is something I really don't get. If you like horror films, then ignore this movie's reputation and give it a shot--it's not nearly as bad as the popular consensus has contrived to make it seem.
The Grudge (2019)
Why all the hate? This is solid horror with much to admire
This was the 21st film in over 40 years of Cinemascore polling to receive the rare and dreaded "F" score from disgusted opening night audiences. I am (re)viewing all the films in reverse chronological order and reviewing them here so that I can maybe understand what causes an opening night audience to thoroughly reject a wide release film. In this case, that rejection seems totally unwarranted; for anyone who enjoys a good horror film, THE GRUDGE should be a rewarding experience.
The acting is uniformly excellent, in service of characters who are believable, grounded, and worthy of attention and sympathy. That's a remarkable accomplishment for any film, and even more so for the thirteenth installment of a horror franchise. Andrea Riseborough, a classically trained English actress, is phenomenal as the grieving Pennsylvania police detective who gets wrapped up in trying to solve a compelling mystery. She is understated, fully committed, and absolutely convincing, selling every moment of this supernatural fantasy as though she is a real human being experiencing it. Likewise can be said for every other actor: Betty Gilpin, who in a few brief scenes gives us a powerfully moving portrayal of a pregnant woman torn apart by a pessimistic medical prognosis; John Cho as her husband, whose facial expressions in a single brief phone call convey the total love and hope and complications of a committed relationship; Jacki Weaver as an eccentric woman guided by principles as she performs an extremely difficult job; William Sadler as a detective driven insane by his realization that ghosts may in fact be real; Frankie Faison as a loving and desperate husband who has watched his wife of fifty years deteriorate through physiological, mental, and supernatural anguish; Demián Bichir as a pragmatic, stoic man missing his recently deceased mother; and even Lin Shaye in her formulaic role as "crazy old lady in a horror movie": all are incredible, all are fully convincing, all elicit pangs of empathy. Not one of them seems like mere fodder to raise the body count. Not one of them serves no purpose. Nicolas Pesce has written and directed a deeply humanistic film about life, faith, and grieving that just so happens to be a hard-R horror film.
As for the horror elements, these are likewise excellent. The visual effects--decayed bodies, mutilations and violent endings, spiteful ghosts--are all carefully crafted and horrifying. The sound mix is immersive and unsettling, with buzzing flies and unnerving silence. The cinematography by Zack Galler is mesmerizing: gorgeous color and lighting that doesn't seem like it should be very scary coupled with lingering tracking shots that make every frame rife for sudden terror. There are perhaps too many predictable jump scares, but there's an even greater number of chilling images in which phantom figures lurk in the background. I was not genuinely scared by this film, but to be sure, I have been watching horror films for over thirty years and am rarely scared by anything. The Grudge nevertheless gets under the skin much more effectively than 90% of similar films.
So why did audiences hate this movie so much as to give it an F Cinemascore? I'm not sure, but it seems to be a combination of two things.
First, I assume that the opening night audience included many people who are longtime fans of the franchise, and to them, the structure of the film--which replays some of the storylines and scenes of at least three of the previous films--may have seemed like a redundant rehash. The only other film in the series that I've seen is the first American one, which I saw in theaters almost twenty years ago and which I remember almost nothing about except that I thought it was pretty awful. None of the other films in the series, including the original Japanese one (which was made by the same director as the 2004 American one), have a reputation for being any better. I have a hard time believing that any of the other movies in the series is better than Pesce's 2019 one. But perhaps these filmgoers were too deep in fifteen years of lore and fandom to recognize that Pesce had actually made something of genuine substance with the material.
Second--and I don't enjoy saying this--I think many of the opening night filmgoers who weren't familiar with the series were maybe too stupid, drunk, and/or high to understand the movie's unconventional structure, which spans several timeframes in nonlinear order. Several of the reviews I've read here mention that the story "makes no sense," that it's a bunch of "random" scenes thrown together, that the characters have no connection to each other, etc. Frankly, that kind of judgment strikes me as idiotic. The timeline and how all the stories fit together never confused me for a second. More importantly, WHY all the stories fit together made perfect sense to me. The film was resonant with a consistent theme that was fully coherent and meaningful. In order to not understand how a story about an abortion decision, a story about an assisted suicide, a story about a grieving single mother, and a story about ghosts fit together into the same story, you have to be exceptionally incapable of paying attention. Maybe they should stop serving beer in movie theaters.
I would highly recommend this film, and my only reservation in doing so is the fear of judgment I would receive from people who know about its undeservedly terrible reputation and would sooner assume that I have terrible taste than that audiences just couldn't appreciate the horror gem they had been given. I look forward to watching Pesce's two prior feature films, and I hope that the unfair assessment of this movie doesn't derail his future prospects of turning out effective and chilling horror.
The Turning (2020)
Has no idea what it's doing with the source material
The Turning was the 22nd film in over forty years of Cinemascore polling to receive a dreaded F score from repulsed opening night audiences. Here, the reason for the repulsion seems to clearly be its poorly executed rugpull of a "twist" ending. Despite being based on exquisite source material, this adaptation has no clear vision of what it's trying to say, a fact which becomes blatantly apparent by the end even to anyone who doesn't realize it's based on something else.
Henry James's 1898 horror masterpiece THE TURN OF THE SCREW, on which this is rather faithfully based, is perhaps the most artfully ambiguous story ever told. It's presented as a thirdhand friend-of-a-friend ghost story shared as an entertaining anecdote at a cocktail party: some young lady of middling background took a job as a governess raising two wealthy orphans in a fabulously grotesque Gothic mansion and may or may not have done battle with ghosts in her failed attempt to protect the ill-fated children. If you want to read it as a straightforward ghost story and sympathize with the governess as a detective of the supernatural, then by all means you can--the narration certainly gives weight to that reading.
But the far more interesting, convincing, and, indeed, terrifying interpretation is that it's all in her head. Mind you, it's not that she's fully othered as being insane; her irrationality is something fairly familiar, something we're all susceptible to: she's too willing to act on assumptions, and she gets carried away by where those assumptions take her.
Having no real experience with orphan children, she *assumes* that they are the flawless, beatific, uncorrupted angels of William Blake and Romantic poetry. When their actions provide her with tangible evidence that *real* children are actually sometimes spiteful, cruel, dissembling, and obnoxious, she tries to contort reality to fit her presumptions rather than let go of her delusions. Thus, the boy child must no longer actually be a boy but instead a small, premature man with all the meanness and ugliness that comes of being a man. It's easy for her to imagine how he was corrupted by a male influence of low caste, how he lost his innocence and thus is no longer truly a child. What's harder for her is to imagine how an even younger *girl* child was also thereby corrupted, so in order to continue clinging to her worldview, she has to resort to increasingly convoluted and paranoid rationales involving demonic possession. It's too unbelievable for her to admit that a little girl can be a petty little prankster and liar and a little boy from boarding school can know a thing or two about sex and fighting. That's not how the world works! No, it's easier for her to imagine that children are pure until degenerate demons get their grips on them.
The governess makes all sorts of other assumptions about class, education, religion, gender, sex, and romance--even assuming that the children's aloof (and probably gay, like Henry James himself) playboy uncle, who wants nothing to do with the children or with her and who only briefly meets her in order to hand over all responsibility, must be auditioning her to become his wife and thus the adoptive mother of the children. Because in her mind any person--particularly a blood relative--would love the opportunity to devote themselves to raising two poor little orphans out of tragedy, it never crosses her mind that there are people in the world who have no interest in raising kids. What would be an obvious reality check to some people only requires a little extra rationalization in her stubborn imagination.
Her overactive imagination leads to tragedy all around, if only because her version of reality is allowed to have more authority than the beliefs of the illiterate housekeeper and the young children who are in her charge. And that's what's so terrifying about the source material. Henry James was a prolific, critically acclaimed, and bestselling author in a period when the height of literary fashion in the English speaking world was calling itself "realism." Not just a storyteller, James was also an early literary critic who helped to define this genre. Realism, on its face, might suggest that it is founded in some fundamental, objective reality: that the descriptions are concrete statements of fact and that what transpires is something possible within the readers' shared reality. Realism is not "romance" or "gothic" or any heightened or otherworldly depiction of a fantasy world; it is, quote unquote, "our world." But in The Turn of the Screw, James made it clear that even "realism" is speculative: two people may be standing in a room gazing out from two adjacent windows onto the same landscape, but what one person sees isn't quite the same as what the other would report--literally, as in the angle of perspective and thus the blind spots are ever so slightly different, but also psychologically: one person's animalistic nature "red in tooth and claw" might be another person's uplifting ecological idyll. I might see an unruly child, but you might see a case of demonic possession.
THE INNOCENTS, Jack Clayton's definitive 1961 adaptation starring Deborah Kerr in one of the greatest performances of all
time, gets all of this. For that reason, it is one of the very best horror movies. The unsettling cinematography gives us the full possibility of real hauntings, but Kerr's intense performance tilts us toward recognizing that *she* is the most malevolent influence on screen and that the ghosts are probably just phantoms in her head. The film is filtered entirely through her subjective perspective, but the equally impressive performances of the children and the housekeeper as they scramble to react to her weirdness make it clear that the only monster they're scared of is the violent one that may be lurking inside of her.
The Turning, written by Carey and Chad Hayes and directed by Floria Sigismondi, chooses to iron out all nuance and ambiguity into blatant, concrete nonsense. Here, Kate the governess (Mackenzie Davis) is certifiably INSANE with some genetic (and generic) psychosis that has been passed on from a disoriented artist mother who spends her days sketching creepy charcoal nightmares at the bottom of an empty indoor pool in a psychiatric hospital. What illness has the mother passed onto her? What are the symptoms? What's the typical onset? Is there a treatment? Nobody seems to know or care--she's the kind of crazy that only exists in a poorly researched horror movie.
Beyond this disability-phobic backstory, we get almost nothing that we can hold onto about Kate's character or motivations. Unlike the source material, we don't really know what it means for her to be taking care of children for the first time. We don't know what her feelings about wealth and privilege are. We don't have the slightest inkling of her hangups about sex or her notions of romance. Her convictions, her biases, her desires, her fears: we get no grasp on any of that. Her character swerves from playfulness to fear to anger to firmness to resentment, and it's all completely random. Not the kind of randomness that makes us think she has unstable mood swings, either; no, it's the kind of randomness that only comes from a thoughtlessly written screenplay. She becomes increasingly erratic and insane only because the screenplay demands it.
But on top of that, the movie lies to its audience. Its supernatural elements are so pervasive, are introduced in such an illogical order, and are insisted upon so strongly that I initially thought that the movie's take on the source material would be to go 100% ghosts with no actual insanity at all--a kind of Rosemary's Baby, if you will. Consider: we see ghosts on screen even when Kate is not in the room. The ghosts aren't just filtered through her subjectivity, as in The Innocents. The ghosts are presented to our perspective alone, objectively, like in a regular horror movie. And what we see of the ghosts from beginning to end all conforms with one consistent backstory that matches historical events that transpired in the house. Kate's hallucinations seem to have foreknowledge of information that Kate has not yet learned, suggesting that they are prophetic and real rather than fabrications of her mind. Given the movie's conclusion, it's cheap and it's cheating.
That said, the movie is not a total failure. Brooklynn Prince, the young star of THE FLORIDA PROJECT, is wonderful here, a natural talent and a charismatic presence. Davis's chemistry with her also makes for some of the most engaging scenes of the movie, even if they do seem to belie the movie's sense of who Kate is. And the supernatural imagery is indeed pretty creepy, if only it were real and not some deceptive and stigmatizing presentation of vague mental illness.
The best thing I can say about the film is that the ending has a little more restraint than I initially expected. When the movie suddenly rewinds twenty minutes, I expected us to then see *every* scene again, only this time the "real" version, which would've been utterly predictable: Kate pushing the housekeeper down the stairs instead of the ghost, etc., etc. Thankfully, the filmmakers trusted that the audience wouldn't be so stupid as to not be able to fill in the blanks themselves. But if the filmmakers were to have really accomplished the ending they hoped for, then we wouldn't have needed that rewind at all.
Don't bother with this. Its F Cinemascore is understandable. See THE INNOCENTS instead.
National Anthem (2023)
Too much going on, yet not enough
Charlie Plummer is one of the best American actors who's still largely "undiscovered." In LEAN ON PETE (2017), his quietly searing portrayal of a sensitive boy trying to lead a life of kindness in a cruel and grinding world helped to elevate that film to one of the twenty-first century's best. It's a movie that's not wholly different from NATIONAL ANTHEM, although gay director Andrew Haigh (WEEKEND, ALL OF US STRANGERS) took an asexual approach that left most of the queerness of Plummer's character as merely a subtextual potentiality. The potential parallels between the two films--combined with the fact that Plummer never disappoints in pictures as varied as SPONTANEOUS, KING JACK, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, and more--left me excited to see this movie. Unfortunately, while National Anthem is not a bad movie, it never really achieves the spark of greatness. It left me largely bored and disappointed.
Director Luke Gilford, in his feature film debut, strives for a few different emotional tones but doesn't really nail any of them. There are sex scenes, but they're shot with the strange lighting and angles of some 1980s music video, and so they're not really sexy. There are romantic scenes, but despite strong performances from Plummer as Dylan and his love interest played by Eve Lindley, there's not much chemistry--their romance is more of a coincidental shrug than anything that conveys passion. There are scenes of romantic conflict driven by Rene Rosado, the third part of the love triangle, but the development of Rosado's character is cliche and nearly nonexistent. There aren't any clear stakes to the question of "will they or won't they," so the conflict is dramatically inert and its resolution unsatisfying. The film is ostensibly a showcase of queer joy in the hidden world of gay rodeos in the American West, but it never feels very joyful, inspiring, or uplifting because there is extremely little humor or spontaneity; instead of taking in this world through Dylan's perspective, we see it in the form of docudrama photojournalism--colorful characters smiling for the camera--which gives us a nice glimpse of an unfamiliar world but never really lets us feel like we're taking part in it. There are scenes of coming-of-age family drama that perhaps come closest to achieving their goal because of how well Plummer plays off the actors portraying his mother and little brother, but even that drama is pretty tired and unremarkable. There are memorable moments, but they don't cohere into any strong thread. On top of all that, there's a psychedelic drug scene that is inconsequential; scenes of work that don't seem like they're depicting real jobs; a tragic action climax that is random, forced, and predictable; and, of course, the titular performance of the national anthem, which fails to add any real thesis to the movie's narrative sloppiness.
I've written many negative things, yet the movie itself was ultimately fine if unremarkable, and I'm willing to round up with my star rating because its heart is ultimately in the right place. I'm sure many people, perhaps especially young queer people growing up in rural America, will see a lot to relate to and enjoy in this movie, and I'm grateful for that. Personally, however, I was just kinda bored.
Longlegs (2024)
Aesthetically great, narratively awful
When the theater was emptying out, I overheard a kid of maybe fourteen bragging to his friend that he had "predicted everything from the beginning." The third-act exposition dump in this movie is so convoluted, contrived, and ridiculous, however, that if this kid was telling the truth, I'd suggest he seek psychiatric treatment for his psychosis immediately. This movie starts out very strong and has a lot to admire, but its ultimate overreliance on artificial and nonsensical plot elements left me feeling disappointed.
My highest praise goes to the cinematography of Andres Arochi, who somehow doesn't have a single other credit with any IMDb votes. I'm curious to see more of his work. He makes the camera an active presence in the film, filling every frame with eye-gripping dread. The movie's sets feel both utterly normal and deeply unsettling thanks to how Arochi lenses them, and that sense of visual suspense is the sole source of the stars I'm willing to rate this film.
The acting is also quite strong, although the characters are a little too static to bring out the best of the actors. Blair Underwood is fantastic as a jovial detective and family man, Alicia Witt is compelling as the mysteriously monotone mother of the main character, and Shafin Karim and Daniel Bacon both shine in their single scenes as a psychiatric warden and a coroner. Maika Monroe, who is generally fantastic and mesmerizing even in not-very-good movies like HOT SUMMER NIGHTS, is equally up to the task here, but unfortunately her character never has any scenes that really allow Monroe to show her depth or range, so the performance ends up seeming pretty one-note from beginning to end. Nicholas Cage is Nicholas Cage, perhaps a little distracting in this role, and his titular "Longlegs" psychopath is ultimately not as interesting or scary as the opening scene suggests he will be. A scene with Kiernan Shipka, star of writer-director Oz Perkins's prior Satanic horror mystery THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (a superior albeit still not very good movie), is distractingly bad here; I think Perkins directed her to be inhuman with her speech and intonations, but it just comes across as bad acting rather than creepiness or menace.
Those are the best things I can say about this movie. Overall, the plot is one of diminishing returns--an extensively detailed yet somehow very flimsy supernatural contrivance where the clues and the mystery and the motivations aren't really interesting because they're not rooted in anything other than the gibberish words on the pages of Perkins's screenplay. The third act is awful, with redundant flashbacks, a backstory narration dump, dialogue, and a present-day sequence all showing (but mostly telling) us the same thing over and over again. The motivations are vague rather than ambiguous, the twists random rather than revealing, and the whole thing just too silly and stupid for me to bear.
I don't begrudge anyone who's able to enjoy this movie. Perhaps a little substance abuse would make it easier to go with the flow and simply enjoy the aesthetics. For me, however, the movie was an overlong and underdeveloped disappointment.
MaXXXine (2024)
Weakest film in the trilogy, with nothing new to say
This movie is enjoyable enough to watch until the climax arrives, when it becomes apparent that it doesn't add up to much. I hesitate to say that the movie "has nothing to say" because it does have plenty of things it wants to comment on--perhaps too many different little things. It's just that none of these things are really all that fresh, witty, insightful, or provocative. A lot of what is said in the movie has already been said elsewhere and better--including in the previous films of Ti West!
Some topics that this film fleetingly references, and the movies that did it better: the competitiveness of show business (cf. ALL ABOUT EVE, SHOWGIRLS), pop culture's glorification of serial killers via television news (NATURAL BORN KILLERS), a docudrama and metaportrayal of making a horror movie in which the process behind creating the artistic vision seems to bleed into the real lives of the filmmakers in chilling ways (BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, BODY DOUBLE), the gritty ladder climb from pornography to horror to respectable cinema (KNIFE+HEART), moral panic around pornography (X), moral panic around horror movies (CENSOR), moral panic around 1980s "satanic cults killing babies" in every town in America (West's own HOUSE OF THE DEVIL), somebody so desperate for Hollywood fame that they'll do anything to achieve it (PEARL), the creepy and slippery border between acting and living as an actor (MAY DECEMBER), organized Christian leaders who turn out to be murderous hypocrites willing to go to any evil length in the name of "fighting for good" (THE FIRST OMEN, SUSPIRIA)....
I could keep going on. My point is that this movie says a lot of things, but it doesn't say any of them particularly well, so much so that while watching the movie I was constantly being reminded of better films. Sadly, in no respect would I ever say that this movie "said it best." There isn't a single scene that raises the bar or changes the stakes concerning how any particular subject could be presented, neither on a substantive level or even in a more superficial stylistic way. Although the movie is consistently fine (uniformly well acted, with convincing production design and some engaging cinematography and editing), it's never all that engaging or memorable. Except for one scene involving the process behind making a special effects mask, there's not much worth mentioning. The characters aren't very interesting or deep (except maybe Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine's agent). The slashings and death scenes are few and unremarkable. The horror scenes are not at all scary or suspenseful, and the action scenes are not at all nail-biting. The climax is predictable, the twist is full of plot holes, and its ultimate message is so preposterous and exaggerated that it struck me as a complete misfire.
X was fun. PEARL was fantastic. This is just a hollow sequel. West threw enough quality ingredients into the blender so that some people might get some enjoyment out of it, but I was largely just disappointed.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
I honestly don't understand how anyone can like this
I have seen all of Yorgos Lanthimos's feature films, starting with DOGTOOTH when it was first available in the US, a movie I eagerly anticipated and that I remember vividly and fondly fifteen years later. I have liked or loved all of his movies; my least favorite would be ALPS, but even that I found thought-provoking and amusing, definitely more good than bad. Yet now I am confronted with KINDS OF KINDNESS, which is so atrociously awful, so lacking in merit than I can only imagine that Lanthimos is being deliberately hostile to his audience, purposely trying to squander the good will he has built up among the mainstream in recent years.
There is almost nothing positive I can say about this film. It earned a few laughs from me from shock value alone, and it technically held my attention captive as I stared at it, trying to find something of value, but that's literally it. In the end, my time felt violently wasted. Several people walked out of the theater I was in. I honestly can't fathom why it has received above average plaudits from critics, IMDb users, and film festivals.
By my measure, this is not satire or allegory or even surrealism. All of those genres, in order to be effective, need at least some intersection with reality. For example, SHOWGIRLS is delicious satire of show business, misogyny, and double standards. The acting is absurdly exaggerated, the plot far exceeds melodrama, and the screenplay has the characters saying things that no rational human being would say. YET: it's always clear that these people are versions of the irreconcilable beliefs we hold about sex, art, and work. The main character's boyfriend, for instance, can loudly sex shame her for being a stripper with aspirations of becoming a showgirl--showgirl dancing isn't "art," plus "everybody's got AIDS!"--but the "fine art" dancing that he would rather her be performing is indistinguishable from her giving him a lap dance on stage. What the difference? Only that in the "high art" version, he's the one directing her. Throughout, SHOWGIRLS--as well as any other effective satire--provides a key for deciphering what its real-world target is. The presentation may be exaggerated, absurd, etc., but it's clear that this presentation is just "taking literal" what we tend to believe more metaphorically.
Likewise with surrealism. There's less of a one-to-one allegorical correlation between a surrealist film and reality than there is with satire, but there still has to be some kind of intersection with the world we recognize; otherwise, what's the point? Consider the films of Luis Buñuel--for instance, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. Much of it makes no sense. The plot depends upon a physical impossibility: without any scientific explanation, people find themselves unable to leave a party while the outside world is literally unable to access the party venue where they are trapped. We will never be trapped in this situation ourselves; indeed, as a sci-fi premise, the improbability of what unfolds isn't even worth exploring as a thought experiment. And yet it works very well because the moments, the emotions, the characters themselves are all recognizable. We know what it's like to FEEL trapped at a party, and Buñuel shows us a new way of looking at those feelings. Many of us know what it's like to be too timid to be the first person to depart from a party that has passed its peak, but what understanding of that feeling do we gain if we choose to explore them through the unlikely lens of a sci-fi disaster thriller? A lot, in fact! The movie is mesmerizing and hilarious.
My point is that these examples and so many others give their audiences something to hold onto: "this is what people do in situations such as this" or "this is what the world would look like if we really took seriously what it is you claim to believe." KINDS OF KINDNESS gives us NONE of that. The acting is atrociously bad, and it seems like the editor just stitched together the first take of every line reading. The plot meanders from one absurdity to the next with complete disregard for how the pieces might fit together. It contains so many disparate pieces that the center absolutely cannot hold. Any individual moment might have potential for meaning--what if your boss controlled every aspect of your personal life? What if dogs were people and people were dogs?--but it's all surface, no depth, no juxtaposition even. People might be animals, sure, but what does that have to do with paranoia or jealousy or cannibalism or grief or the myriad other ideas that are all supposed to be part of the same story? Throughout this film, I kept hoping that the focus would rack, that something would click into place, that suddenly all (or at least some) of the points that Lanthimos was driving at would make sense to me. But trust me, that moment never comes. You could rearrange many of the scenes in this movie, remove some, replace them with completely different scenes, and the movie as a whole would hardly change. The experience of watching this is one of hostility and malice, like Lanthimos is punishing you for wanting to see a movie about kindness.
If it were funnier, more engaging, better acted, more stylishly shot, more amusingly written, more *anything* really, then maybe that alone would suffice. But instead this movie is cheap cheap cheap: cringey acting, serviceable production design, and a screenplay that feels like a first draft written in a single sitting by someone who had no idea what they wanted to write about when they first sat down. If this were a directorial debut starring unknown actors giving equivalent performances, then this movie wouldn't even have a 15 on Metacritic.... because it wouldn't have even been greenlit or released in the first place. I honestly want to understand how anybody got any satisfaction out of viewing this, and to anyone who hasn't seen it, I can only suggest that you save three hours of your life for anything else.
A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
The apocalypse is just the backdrop
You wouldn't expect it from the title or the marketing material, but this is really a character-driven drama about death and dying--and a vehicle for Lupita Nyong'o to show off her exquisite acting--and only a sci-fi horror thriller as an afterthought. I suppose the plot couldn't quite exist without the premise of the world being suddenly torn apart, but the specifics of the lore from A QUIET PLACE are more incidental than anything. That's a good thing; the last thing we needed was some exposition explaining where the aliens came from, and this movie doesn't bother with any of that.
Nyong'o is incredible, displaying a broad range of the human emotional experience with her expressive face and very few words. Her eyes sell the terror of the film's premise far more than any visual or sound effects. From beginning to end, she makes the film's world seem real, and there would be no point in the movie existing if not for her. Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou are also fantastic in much smaller roles, and while Joseph Quinn is perfectly fine as the co-lead, something about either his performance or his character's underdeveloped backstory or both make him the weakest link in the movie. It's hard to fathom why exactly he behaves the way he does, and nothing in the movie makes clear just how much he's motivated by fear, passivity, romantic attraction, pity, and/or something else. A better actor--perhaps even Alex Wolff--could have conveyed something more convincing.
I'm avoiding spoilers in this review. In short, if you're looking for a third thriller about alien invaders who hunt with their ears, then this should satisfy you by providing just enough of what you need in terms of sound-based action horror. If you're like me, however, and don't expect that you need "more of the same" or "another retread prequel overexplaining what's already obvious," then know that this movie offers a lot more than that: a moving humanist story amazingly performed by Lupita Nyong'o.
The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)
Entertaining, but nothing new
This sunbaked suspense film, which plays out like a bottle episode of some Yuma County PD procedural, is pastiche but not postmodern. It proudly wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve--name dropping Terrence Malick's melancholy murderers from BADLANDS as being more worthy of emulation than the more popular and presentable BONNIE AND CLYDE, for instance--but it never really reveals anything new about any of these genres or films, neither explicitly nor more subtly. It's not NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, despite an appearance from Gene Jones, who will probably always be remembered as the dimwitted convenience store "friendo" forced by Anton Chigurh to gamble for his own life on a coin toss; in fact, it's not FARGO or any other Coen Brothers film either, despite the echoes given off by the brainy and brawny duo of sociopathic bank robbers played by Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan. The movie's sensibilities don't even qualify as neonoir or spaghetti western; rather, it's much more old-fashioned than that. It's more TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE than Sergio Leone, more DETOUR than A SIMPLE PLAN, more John Wayne than TWIN PEAKS. Although set in 1973, this movie's screenplay seems like it was pulled straight from 1953.
And there's nothing wrong with that! It's a good film, a crisp and entertaining 90 minutes. It's well acted and well directed throughout, with no false steps. It kept my attention at all times, with several surprises, and I felt more or less satisfied when it was all over. Nevertheless, it seems mostly forgettable when all is said and done. What does this movie have to offer that we haven't already seen before? What does it have to say to us? Nothing much. If it had unparalleled style and panache, then that wouldn't matter, but it doesn't really have that either. Instead, we get some predictable substance packaged in some above average style, worthy enough to pass the time but unlikely to ever be ranked on anyone's list of the year's best.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
A painfully recognizable and deeply unsettling depiction of dissociation
This is a powerful film that manages to capture dissociation in look, sound, face, and voice. Call it what you will-the melancholy of remembering a place (or a tv show, or a feeling) that you can never revisit; the alienation of growing apart from your childhood friends and having no clear pathway to filling that void; the easy comfort of slipping into the high-stakes catharsis of television narratives; the unfairness of familial dysfunction and estrangement; the dissonance of working a job that bears no similarity to what you feel to be your own inner richness; or the utter dysphoria of lacking the words or the actions or both to somehow make the body you're living in comport with the life you feel it deserves-I SAW THE TV GLOW somehow conveys all of this and more with unsettling, aching realism without really ever saying any of it in explicit words and images.
There's so much to applaud here for making that so. The original soundtrack, with its songs that sound familiar although you've certainly never heard them before and their lyrics that seem to be hitting precisely at what's going on even though you can't quite follow them all, is of course a huge standout, and it's one of the greatest soundtracks to come out in a long time. The cinematography by Eric Yue is also exceptional. In color and light and focus, Yue has somehow perfectly rendered the feeling of being a child on the cusp of puberty and adulthood, up past his bedtime on a summer night-the kind of adolescent summer night that can easily go on right past dawn since there are no jobs or alarm clocks or bills or responsibilities to demand that you go to bed at a decent hour. The cinematography is sultry, carnivalesque, and ripe for adventure, but it also hints of danger and otherworldliness.
And of course there are the performances of Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy, Justice Smith as Owen, and the exceptional Ian Foreman as young Owen. Lundy-Paine and Smith play characters half their age (as well as those same characters when they closer to their age), and it's perhaps some of the most effective "twenty-five-year-old playing a teenager" casting I've ever seen. Lundy-Paine transforms from a chill, overly hip, 14-year-old goth girl to a just-barely-hanging on, failing-to-fit-in, 16-year-old lesbian loner to a twentysomething drifter with severe mental health challenges in an especially captivating and fully convincing way. Her performance is a far cry from the cheerful, well-adjusted younger sister she played in ATYPICAL. Smith, who is always rather monotone, also gives his best performance here, his "expressionless" voice and face barely concealing the turbulent seismic activity raging in his soul. A line towards the end of the film, when he remarks how much he loves his family, is still haunting me.
And of course Jane Schoenbrun's writing and direction are what make it all work. I gave up on trying to finish their tedious prior film, the highly acclaimed but frustratingly uneventful microbudget horror WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR. My dislike of that film prevented me from watching this one sooner. But all the silent pain, the alienation, and the surrealism of that previous film is done with maximal efficacy here, and it's anything but boring. Rather, it's riveting, and the frequent clips of "The Pink Opaque," a fictional fusion of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "The X-Files" and any number of horror/sci-fi shows that captivated teens in the late nineties, manage to simultaneously be a hilarious, pitch-perfect parody as well as absolute nightmare fuel.
This is an excellent and evocative film, highly recommended for anyone who likes Millennial period pictures, psychological horror, and/or queer coming-of-age dramas.
Good Boy (2022)
Suspenseful and Unsettling
This is a lean, taut suspense film--only 80 minutes long, and more than half of that is truly suspenseful and unnerving. There are only four actors in the movie, and they all do an excellent job of seeming like real people with real motivations, blind spots, and flaws. For the most part, writer/director Viljar Bøe does an excellent job of showing us things that don't quite make sense and convincing us that it's not necessarily irrational or unreasonable. He creates a feeling akin to being seduced into a toxic relationship, where in hindsight you realize how abundant all the red flags were but in the moment you're willing to rationalize and excuse every individual one. If this is allegorical horror, then its allegory is for the poor "NTA" victims on the Reddit thread "Am I The A**H***?", who post detailed narratives of having been gaslit by psychopaths yet seem totally clueless about the blame not being their own.
That said, once the mystery is revealed about midway through the movie, the movie does lose a great deal of its suspense as characters quickly devolve into horror movie stereotypes. While the second half is disappointing, it's not so bad that it brings the whole film down--plus, the final moments are fresh and surprising enough that they'll guarantee the film's haunting images will stick with you for a few days. On top of that, Bøe's writing wisely leaves a lot of backstory unsaid, leaving audiences with plenty of queasy questions that they won't want to think about the answers to. A lesser film would feel the need to tidy things up more.
I'd recommend this for anyone who's into disturbing thrillers. The strong acting, masterful editing, and original premise are enough to earn a solid recommendation, even if the final act doesn't fully live up to the movie's promised potential. I eagerly anticipate Bøe's next film.
In a Violent Nature (2024)
A failed experiment
Horror is my favorite genre. I saw TERRIFIER 2 twice in theaters. When I first saw the trailer for this film with its evocative title, I had high hopes for it... but also suspected that it could be pretty boring. The trailer itself is pretty boring. A slasher film that stays in the perspective of a lumbering monster has never been done before, so perhaps it could make audiences feel dread in a whole new way. I praise the idea of the experiment, but I also think it failed to set proper controls. Either way, the end result is incredibly boring.
What the trailer suggests is real-time mayhem. It even hints at the possibility of a single take. The movie isn't really either of those things, and this is the most significant reason why the experiment fails. From the very beginning, there are artificial cuts; we don't just follow the killer as he walks up upon his first victim--rather, there's some editing that advances the pace along. What would be a 90-second walk down a driveway instead becomes a 75-second walk because of a couple of quick time elapsing cuts. Why bother? A 90-second take could be tedious, but it would also be immersive. A 75-second edit can only be tedious since your eyes and imagination are literally jarred out of being placed in the scene. The whole film is like this: writer/director Chris Nash wants us to feel immersed in the killer's movements but isn't daring enough with his editing to do full immersion. There's a reason why films like JEANNE DIELMAN (201 min.) and AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (234 min.) with their long, static, unedited shots feel "shorter" than this movie (94 min.): they commit to fully placing us in the unblinking perspectives of their characters. Our gaze fixates, our pupils expand, and our attention holds and absorbs with long takes, whereas edits inevitably lead to "saccades"--our eyes jolt to the change and our attention span reloads to take in the new sight. (Don't believe me? Search for "Motion Pictures and Saccade Patterns," an excellent video about audience eye movements during THERE WILL BE BLOOD.) In short, the very editing that was presumably done to make the scenes briefer and less tedious probably only served to make them more uninteresting, not less.
On top of that, most of the killings aren't even done in a single take. Some of them are, and those are the most effective scenes of horror in the film, but many of the slashings are hindered by jump cuts, deliberately obscured blocking, and off-camera action that only call attention to the film's limited special effects budget. A real-time, unflinching depiction of a murder is a terribly unsettling thing--see IRREVERSIBLE, DANCER IN THE DARK, and DEKALOG: FIVE for some particularly disturbing examples. A movie that just edits together different angles of a murder is simply standard slasher fare and not especially capable of terrifying. That's how most of this movie is, which is another reason why it's a failed experiment.
If Nash had made this movie without all the unnecessary editing, it would have been a more successful experiment but it could've possibly been just as boring of a failure. Most of the acting is quite bad (in part because of the bad writing, which could have been avoided through some more naturalistic improvisation), the backstory is confusing and cliche, and there's nothing on display here that stands out as any indication of excellence--but at least we'd have a more accurate depiction of what appears to be promised by the trailer. I can't recommend this film to anyone--not even horror aficionados--who are likely to feel that their time has been wasted. At one point in the middle of the film, my husband went to the bathroom. When he returned, I filled him in on what he'd missed with a whisper: "He did some walking." We laughed in our shared misery. Perhaps it's possible to make an effective horror movie in this style, but IN A VIOLENT NATURE is certainly not it.
Abigail (2024)
Why is this movie pretending to be something else?
Fifty minutes pass--fifty!--before the filmmakers reveal that Abigail is a vampire. They must think this puts them in the same ranks as PSYCHO--how shocking that the main character is stabbed to death in the shower at the end of the first act!--but Psycho came out in 1960. To release a movie like this in 2024 is to be so stupid as to not realize that the trailer, poster, and all other marketing materials--not to mention any likely word of mouth--will make it perfectly clear to everyone watching this film that the little girl is a vampire. The director even says in the IMDb trivia section that he wants "ballerina vampire" to become a popular Halloween costume. Who on earth do they think will be watching this movie and needing 50 minutes of "mystery" before this big "spoiler"?
That would maybe be okay if those 50 minutes were filled with something worthwhile, but they most certainly are not. The reason the trailer didn't instead try to sell us on just a "kidnapping gone wrong" crime heist mystery is because that mystery is so painfully cliche and hollow. We get three separate moments in which one character goes through the room explaining every single person's backstory. Admittedly, the first round is supposed to be completely wrong and that wrongness is meant to be a joke insofar as it's so stereotypical--but every other round is just as stereotypical, fake sounding, and hollow. And why is that? Maybe because, according to the movie's IMDB trivia page, the screenwriters didn't even write these backstories and had no idea who the characters even were as they were making the movie! Know your audience: we're here to see a little girl biting people in between pirouettes, not to get spoonfed some faux-serious messaging about opioid addiction.
Some of the vampire action in the second half of this very overlong film is pretty fun, but it's much too little too late. Angus Cloud is the only actor who manages to consistently seem like a real person (he's also the first to die, of course), and Alisha Weir as Abigail is also quite good when they're not forcing her to monologue, but for the most part the acting (especially Dan Stevens) is godawful, compounded by the most unnatural sounding writing.
This isn't Psycho, nor is it RESERVOIR DOGS or an Agatha Christie mystery. Know your role, Project X: this is a movie about a ballerina girl vampire. Don't try to be something you're not.
Wyrm (2019)
Two different movies that don't quite add up
WYRM bifurcates into two movies, both of which are very good but neither of which is great. The first is a comedic satire about sexual education for children. The second is an indie dramedy about grief and growing up. I haven't seen the short film on which this is based, but my guess is that it was mostly just one of those and that once writer-director Christopher Winterbauer secured funding to expand it to a feature-length, he whisked in through the back door what probably should have been a new, separate project rather than expanding what was already there. Which is fine, it works-but the second half of the movie does seem very different from what was promised at the start.
The first half is a lightly dystopian satire that's both sci fi and 1990s period film. The titular outcast Wyrm (Theo Taplitz) lives in a world where sexual development is front and center in the education of adolescents and is mediated through ostentatious technology that monitors their sexual behavior. The target of this satire is what queer theorist Lee Edelman would call "reproductive futurity": the idea that American society places a huge premium on procreative hetero-sexuality because "children are the future." In Wyrm's world, bureaucrats are driven to make sure that all children start engaging in healthy, age-appropriate sexual exploration at just the right time so that "no child is left alone": monogamous, moderate sexuality is the key to happiness and health. This world isn't anti-gay in the way one might expect, but it does sideline queer individuals such as the quasi-asexual Wyrm, who is currently struggling with bigger problems than trying to impress a new girlfriend or boyfriend. His developmental "delay," which is made extremely visible by the blinking, padlocked collar around his neck broadcasting his virginity, is only reinforced by his school's wrongheaded emphasis on incentivizing sexuality through shame; by the time the film starts, the fact that he is still a virgin is likely to be a major factor in making him stay a virgin. This aspect of the film is funny and weird and makes for some very memorable, surreal imagery. Halfway through the movie, however, Wyrm achieves the milestone that gets his collar to pop off. At that point, the whole dystopian premise essentially disappears.
The indie dramedy is present throughout the movie, but once Wyrm's collar pops off, it becomes the sole focus. In fact, almost everything in the second half of the film could just be a 1990s period drama with no sci-fi elements whatsoever. Wyrm is grieving the death of his older brother, which has estranged his parents in different directions and has made Wyrm's twin sister (Lulu Wilson) bitter and jaded. Wyrm records interviews with people who knew his very popular, accomplished brother, and in the end he presents his findings on the many complicated forms of grief and memory. This aspect of the film is perfectly fine! Sosie Bacon is excellent as the dead brother's surviving girlfriend, Rosemarie Dewitt is very convincing has Wyrm's lost mother, and Wilson gives a memorable turn as a sister whose grief has manifested as anger. It's all very realistic and touching, but it has almost nothing to do with the other half of the film, and when that premise is completely jettisoned midway through the running time, it leads to a jarring feeling that somehow outweighs the fact that each individual half was quite solid on its own merits. Taplitz, who had the quieter of the two leading roles in 2016's LITTLE MEN, sells every moment of the film and somehow manages to hold it all together, but the movie is nevertheless disjointed.
What I've critiqued is minor, and I would certainly recommend the film to anyone who's curious. But I hope that the next film Winterbauer writes has a more solid structure holding it all together.
Arcadian (2024)
Cool creature design, but that's it
From what I've seen of positive reviews of this movie, there's really only one thing that people enjoy: the creature design of the monsters. They are quite gruesome and memorable--part cockroach, part shoebill stork directly descended from dinosaurs, part hellspawn lyncanthrope, part xenomorph, part uncanny valley katsina doll, part (according to the filmmakers) Disney's Goofy. They behave extremely unpredictably, move in infesting packs, and are not quite like anything I've seen before in a horror film. The movie makes no attempt to explain where they came from, what they are, what they want, or anything else about their natural history, and that's a good choice--the mystery is what keeps them scary. They don't even have any catchy trademark name that all the people in this world refer to them by, which is nice! Benjamin Brewer is foremost a visual effects artist, and this is apparent in the fact that his creature design is the only aspect of this film that is at all good.
Unfortunately, a cool monster design can't sustain even this 90 minute chore. The acting is fine, but the writing and directing give the actors little opportunity to make their characters and world feel lived in. I never got a real sense that these were three family members who depended upon each other and had limited interaction with any other human beings; they seemed more like strangers who were teaming up for the first time--or, rather, actors who had just arrived on set. There are no instances I can remember where the characters did (or said) anything that seemed to confirm the reality of their dreary existence. A knife-stabbing "Are we not men?" ritual during one dinner scene is the closest example I can think of, but that peculiarity is undercut by a dozen more examples of half-baked dystopian cosplay. For instance, why is Thomas's haircut so godawful? If you've been cutting your own hair for your entire life--or even if this happens to be the first time that the teenager insisted on cutting his own hair rather than letting his father do it--the end result isn't going to scream "civilization has just ended." Civilization ended fifteen years ago. They would've adapted to having no more Hair Cutteries.
The plot is extremely thin and riddled with implausible character choices as well as numerous extraordinary coincidences. Too often, things happen only because the screenplay needs them to happen. The characters are paper thin, and there's really nothing that this movie even attempts to explore thematically; like lots of other postapocalyptic films, this one doesn't have anything to say about humanity, civilization, or its downfall. All it really has to offer, truly, is a creepy creature design.
That would be fine maybe if the movie were exquisitely edited--if the encounters with the monsters were shot in such a way that they were actually terrifying, nerve-racking, or gripping. They're not. In fact, the blocking of many scenes (for instance, in the cave) doesn't make any logical sense at all; if you can't even figure out the layout that the characters are confined in and what's physically possible within that space, then how can you be concerned about them being trapped or not trapped? Sometimes the camera just cuts and a character has bypassed an obstacle without any explanation. This is a movie where characters overcome obstacles simply through the aid of the screenwriter beginning the next scene. Likewise, the only thing positive I can say about the editing is that the movie ended before it had completely overstayed its welcome.
Feel free to hit that fast forward button and "skim" this movie if you're still curious; as long as you see the ten minutes of monster scenes, then you're not missing anything.
Problemista (2023)
A tired retread of Torres's older, better material
Julio Torres has been presenting his comedy to the public for about eight years now, and I've been a fan of his work for almost all of that period. I was happy to see PROBLEMISTA in theaters even though I knew it would lack the spectacle and the crowd that usually drives me to the theater these days. About half an hour in, my inner voice was reasoning to myself, "Well, it's good you're here in the theater because if you were watching this at home, you'd have probably turned it off by now"-as though feeling obligated to finish something unpleasant all the way through to its bitter end is somehow a good thing. I watched the whole movie and I do not feel the wiser for it. Torres has recycled his earlier bits into something less alive, and his debut film makes me fear that he should stick to shortform comedy.
For someone only vaguely familiar with Torres's work, some of these bits will probably feel fresh, but I couldn't help feeling that most of the scenes were uninspired imitations of bits he did years ago. In some of his earliest standup, he talked about the desperation of turning to Craigslist to find income. He tells the same story here, but in a rushed manner that lacks the "stranger than fiction" relatability of his original material. On SNL, his "Wells for Boys" sketch found immense charm in a very specific portrayal of a daydreaming, sensitive boy; Problemista is bookended with what seems like a more autobiographical spin on this, but with a story and images that failed to connect. Torres's Instagram turns toys and small objects into full-fledged personalities that are loveably annoying, and his object-oriented HBO special MY FAVORITE SHAPES likewise is able to spin an entire surreal universe out of narrating stories about inanimate props. His character in Problemista is likewise supposed to possess this gift, but what we see in the film comes across as idiotic rather than wondrous; his running gag about Cabbage Patch kids with smartphones simply isn't very funny, and his idea for a Slinky that requires constant supervision likewise comes across as inane rather than innovative. The dead painter Bobby who is central to the film's plot is also meant (I think) to inspire audiences to see the world with the infinite imagination of a child, yet the egg portraits that comprise his life's work are likewise a dud, never coming across as anything more than a pretentious lack of talent.
Finally, there is the character of Tilda Swinton, who (I presume) is the Problemista of the title. Torres's SNL sketches about Melania Trump were a tour de force; a sketch in which she builds a loving friendship with a Pakistani Amazon call center employee played by Kumail Nanjiani is easily one of the best things ever aired by SNL. Cecily Strong's Melania was entitled, demanding, and dangerously powerful but also desperate, yearning, and akin to Dark Romantic poets like William Blake and Lord Byron in her gloomy and barbed lust for life. His Melania was a Gorgon, a lonely victim of her own monstrous power, as dangerous as she was in need of saving. She was a completely ridiculous object of satire but also an object of empathy, somehow oddly relatable, and-most importantly-endlessly fascinating. With Swinton's Elizabeth in this film, I think Torres attempts to capture the same loud dissonance but fails miserably. Swinton is one of my favorite actors, but every line she has in this film is delivered in the same obnoxious bray; she provides occasional glimmers of depth in her facial expressions, but the writing simply doesn't support it. I suspect Torres was too intimidated by her to give her any direction or demand a second take. The result is that her character is thoroughly repulsive, flimsily drawn, and unwatchably annoying. Her "squeaky wheel gets the grease" behavior serves as an inspiration for Torres's change in the climax of the film, but it's almost appalling that the screenplay thereby seems to be condoning her aggressiveness, ineptitude, and entitlement. Perhaps the point is that Torres's character, who has real problems and is facing true injustices, has learned to leverage the power of acting like a privileged one percenter, in a sense using evil for good... but I don't know. The story is too sloppy to communicate any clear message, and I can't imagine we're supposed to celebrate that the world has gained one more impolite loudmouth.
Overall, Torres's debut film suggests to me that he should stick to shorter formats. Not only has he recycled numerous bits that worked far better when he first conceived them years ago, but the film as a whole fails to gel into anything that feels complete or properly structured. There are certainly some good bits here. In Greta Lee's single scene, she gives a more powerful (and hilarious) performance than in the entirety of her starring role in last year's acclaimed PAST LIVES. James Scully, Larry Owens, and Megan Stalter also earn some solid laughs. But, in the words of my husband, this is simultaneously the most "half-baked yet overcooked" film you're likely to see in a while, where you'll walk away knowing more about why Torres hates FileMaker Pro than you will about the background story of the main antagonist, and where multiple customer service calls are presented in their entirety whereas the exhibition that the film climactically builds to doesn't get any screentime at all.
I will continue to enjoy Julio Torres's comedy, and I hope he is given a chance to direct a second film that presents us something new and fresh from his lovely imagination. I cannot at all recommend this strange, slapdash, and insufferable film, however.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
It isn't the movie people are praising
What if I told you that the Nazi who ran Auschwitz was an awful person-that he didn't care about the people who were being killed in the concentration camps, that he turned a blind eye to the violence around him, and that, on top of all that, he wasn't even someone who was especially fascinating in his evil but was instead just kinda flabby and boring and, well, banal? Would that blow your mind? Would you be shocked to learn that? Would I be telling you anything you didn't already know? If I put him on film for two hours petting his dog and visiting his doctor for a medical checkup and sharing inside jokes with his equally heartless wife, would I have made a masterpiece? Is it necessary for you to spend two hours coldly examining the banality of evil?
That is the movie that Glazer has made. The movie that the trailer sells, however, and that the sound crew tried to create and that lots of viewers seem to believe they have just seen is something completely different, something far more interesting. I have heard many people talking about this movie as being about the "complicity of violence." Reviews claim that it has a message for ALL OF US about what it means to ignore the oppression in our backyards. These reviews suggest that this is a story about what it means to have to live your life in the midst of someone else's oppression. Will you cover your ears? Convince yourself it's not what you think it is? Convince yourself that there's nothing you can do? Focus on your own problems? Be brave and try to resist somehow?
If that were indeed what THE ZONE OF INTEREST was, then yes, that would be quite a compelling and meaningful movie! What I saw, however, was something much more simplistic and much less vital. This is due to Glazer's choice of perspective: for the most part, we see the film through the eyes of the camp commander and his wife-the two most powerful for hundreds of miles. They are evil and awful. Glazer knows they are evil, you know they are evil, anyone who knows the first thing about history knows they are evil, and they are also willful, active, voluntary agents in perpetrating the Holocaust. We are not meant to empathize with them (which would be a bizarre and much more problematic artistic choice); instead, we are meant to stare at them in tedious, disgusted horror. The only potential surprise-although it probably wouldn't be a surprise for anyone watching this movie-is that they are boring and "just like us." Except we know that they're NOT like us. They're not like us at all because they're very powerful Nazis, and we would and could never be in their position. The film asks nothing of us; it's all too easy to keep your distance from them from beginning to end. Your opinion will not change, for they do not change. From the opening minutes you will hate them, and when the credits roll you will realize that you still hate them for exactly the same reasons. At no point will you put yourself in their shoes. At no point will you ask yourself, "Well, if that were me, would I be able to trust myself that I wouldn't do the same thing?" At no point will you get so wrapped up in their story that you find yourself actually caught up in their petty bourgeois melodrama, only to be snapped back to the reality that people are being murdered just off screen and you have been guilty of focusing on the wrong thing. The film never asks that of you, and so it's hard to see how it has anything to do with calling attention to our own complicity with violence.
The film briefly glimpses through the point-of-view of other characters, and these are some of the only interesting moments in the film. I can only imagine what this movie could have been if it had instead focused mostly on, for example, the viewpoint of the commander's teenage son: someone old enough to know what's happening and to possibly do something about it, someone capable of questioning the privilege of his position, yet someone who also just wants to make out with his Aryan girlfriend. Such a perspective would be rife for exploring what it actually means to be complicit in such a system. Likewise, if the film had been more firmly rooted in the perspective of one of the "local girls" who work as housekeepers for the family, that could have given a better portrait of what it means to be trapped in an unjust system. What do you do if you know that your employer is a murderer yet you still need a job to support your family? By focusing the camera on these side characters, Glazer could have actually given us some interesting questions to ponder. Instead, the majority of the film is wasted on hammering home the obvious points that Nazis are evil and evil is banal.
For anyone interested in seeing a film that is actually about what ZONE OF INTEREST is supposedly about, I highly recommend all 9.5 hours of the riveting 1985 documentary SHOAH by Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann captures a wide variety of witnesses with his camera: powerful camp commanders and their families, bureaucrats whose contributions to the Holocaust consisted in selling train tickets, local people who came to terms with the fact that their farms were now neighboring killing factories, people who resisted, people who hid, people who survived. SHOAH's all-encompassing scope hammers in the horrifying fact that the Holocaust was a fact of OUR existence, that it happened in our same boring world with people just like us on all sides. THE ZONE OF INTEREST's one-note sound design gimmick, on the other hand, is all it really has going for it; otherwise, it has nothing more to add to our understanding of Nazi violence than the most recent Indiana Jones movie.
Elemental (2023)
No chemistry
I found myself unable to suspend disbelief for a single moment during the entirety of watching this overlong movie, and of the thousands of movies I've seen in my life, I can't recall ever having such similar discomfort. This movie made my brain hurt, and there wasn't a single positive attribute (except maybe the soundtrack) to alleviate that pain. Since its inception, Pixar has been committed to building worlds out of fantastical premises: what if toys were sentient, what if cars were people, what if our emotions were personalities who inhabited a surreal geography within our minds. They've made movies that weren't very great, but never, in my opinion, was that due to a failure at worldbuilding. For instance, I wasn't the biggest fan of INSIDE OUT, but it wasn't because I couldn't get on board with its depiction of our brains' interiors; rather, it was because I thought the real-world plot was too simplistic, melodramatic, and unbelievable, unable to properly sustain the fantasy world within. For ELEMENTAL, I can't help but imagine its origins in some burnt out writer sitting in a stifling office, in need of sleep, perhaps intoxicated, thinking, "Well, what if a fire woman and a water man, like, had sex? I don't think that's been done before." And then that premise, which could have only been sustained in a two-minute, extremely experimental and surreal short film, was workshopped in a series of uninspired Zoom brainstorming meetings where instead of trying to figure out how this bizarre idea could be developed into a character-based plot, the other writers only felt safe pitching the most obvious jokes: what if the water man, like, cries all the time? And if she's made of fire, then, like, maybe she eats really hot food! And that, moreover, instead of then trying to develop these obvious jokes into actual silliness that could be the main (and only) attraction of the film, they instead put extremely little effort into the humor and instead somehow got the idea that they were making a serious film about failing infrastructure and the emotional obligations of second-generation immigrants. The end result is an uncomfortable and lifeless mess.
I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around this universe. There are "earth" people who look like trees and dirt and flowers, but the buildings also have hardwood floors and the fire people eat "coal nuts" made by compressing pieces of firewood in their own piping hot hands. They explain at one point that a "water person" is "not just water," so clearly there's a distinction between "elemental people" and inanimate objects that are made of those elements, but I still couldn't get over the fact that if I were a tree person, I would probably be horrified by the fact that fire people eat things that look like my babies. This kind of confusion inevitably haunts every frame of the film. I could not wrap my mind around the characters' basic stupidity surrounding things such as evaporation and condensation, and I was deeply unsettled by the abject boundarylessness of their bodily forms--that in "Elemental City," air people are constantly being walked through, earth people are constantly having their leaves burned off, and water people are frequently being sucked into puddles and floods but still manage to hold onto their clothing... which, why and how are they wearing clothing and what is it made of? The people are chaotic and boundaryless, yet they live in a city that has building inspectors and bureaucracy. The population should all be used to certain facts about their coexistence, yet every character seems constantly surprised by the strange sights happening all around them. The whole plot is built on a modern conception of ethnic segregation, yet the premise segments the population groups based on premodern taxonomies that couldn't possibly be segregated. Isn't a cloud just the gaseous state of liquid water? If fire and water have a baby, then will it be a cloud? If the cloud baby gains too much weight, then does she look more like her water mother? The movie constantly asks you to consider these things while also forcing you to not think too hard about these things because of how obvious it is that the filmmakers haven't thought very hard about these things because if they had thought about these things then they would realize that the film could not exist. It's dizzying and unlike any movie experience I've had before.
All that aside, the romantic plot is entirely devoid of chemistry and heart. The acting is abysmal, and the two leads, who are supposedly young adults, speak and behave like eight-year-olds. The film very obviously wants to be an allegory for realistic American people, yet there's no humanity whatsoever in how these characters are written. If you strip away the disorienting fantastical premise, which is pretty easy to do, then you have a very poorly written and acted Hallmark romcom. If the animation were at least appealing, then there would at least be that, but instead this is probably the least visually pleasing movie Pixar has ever made. I watched the movie two days ago yet cannot recall a single image that I was impressed by. Only the score and soundtrack are halfway inspired.
Writing this, I feel like I might be coming across as a jerk who just doesn't like animated fantasy family films. So in contrast, I point you to ROBOT DREAMS, a movie that is up against ELEMENTAL at the Oscars this year and is not altogether different. It's a feature length film without dialogue about a New York City inhabited by humanoid animals of all species as well as their sentient robot friends. There are ducks who are people wearing hot pants and driving motorcycles and there are pigeons who are just pigeons, and this does not feel weird. There are robots who have minds despite being made of inanimate machine parts and there are also inanimate machines, and this does not feel weird. There's even a snowman that comes to life and somehow has a robust preexisting social life despite having just been born, yet none of this is weird or unbelievable or unsettling to me; the movie is so exquisitely and convincingly made, that it's easy to buy into every mesmerizing frame. The movie is sexless and (largely) genderless and very much kid friendly, yet the love felt between the two main characters is one of the most heartfelt and human portrayals of a romantic friendship that I've ever seen depicted on film. ELEMENTAL is a colossal failure, and that has nothing to do with my inability to enjoy the genre.
Sick (2022)
Inaccurate and Uninteresting
In general, I consider anachronisms and other goofs a source of trivial amusement, not negative criticism. SICK's entire raison d'etre, however, is to be "a slasher movie about the height of the covid pandemic," so it seems a bit more essential that it actually get those details right. Without its commentary on covid paranoia, this movie would just be a very hollow, cliche, and unrealistic slasher film. Yet this "period film" does such a bad job of historical accuracy despite being made in such close proximity to the era it's trying to reflect. Years from now, people will watch this movie and assume that it somewhat accurately reflects the atmosphere of spring 2020. Obviously, they will know this satirical thriller is not a "historical document," but that won't stop scholars of the future from falsely assuming that its depiction of grocery store shopping, etc., is realistic. It is not.
In 2020, our routines so rapidly shifted from unprecedented to urgently necessary to obsolete that it's easy to forget exactly what we were doing during any particular snapshot in time. This film blurs those changes together in a sloppy way resulting in plot holes. In the first week of April, people were still cobbling together what they could to make masks. I, who very much took covid seriously from the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, would have still been wearing a combination of an old disposable painting mask and a bandana. The medical facemasks ubiquitously seen in the film took longer to enter widespread use, nor do I think they were ever so consistently and appropriately worn even in the most rigidly controlled environments, where you would still expect to see at least one person wearing a mask loosely hanging below the nose. This inaccuracy immediately made the first sequence difficult to believe for me, which was additionally complicated by the fact that when the character's TV turns onto a live newscast, it says 5:03pm despite it being full on nighttime from the start of the film, an impossibility anywhere in the United States in the first week of April. Later in the film, we see covid rapid tests that didn't even exist until months later, being used in a manner that isn't realistic to produce results that make no sense given the timeline of exposure being discussed. (These last details could be explained as character errors, but still.)
All of these mistakes could be forgiven if the film otherwise provided a trenchant examination of our pandemic-era mindset. Unfortunately, it does not. The final act yields some darkly humorous conflict that I won't spoil here, but otherwise this movie does not resemble anything at all the experience and horror of the disruptions and death tolls of 2020. In fact, this movie seems like it was made by someone decades in the future making a best guess about what covid was like. There's no actual insight to be found.
On top of that, the film is overall just hard to swallow. The performances are all questionable, and the screenplay is absurd. There's one random scene about an urban legend in which one character randomly cites the Folklore Index off the top of her head--a scene which I suppose was meant to provide some realism and character depth since it adds nothing to the themes of the film, yet which fails to do even that because of how unrealistically it's all delivered. Characters who should be dead miraculously aren't. Characters who should be afraid and trying to survive instead do completely unlikely things. This whole movie is a mess.
I was disappointed by director John Hyams's previous horror film, ALONE (2020), but thought that he at least had potential. In that film, after all, the behaviors of the killer and the would-be victim are refreshingly realistic and unpredictable despite some other glaring plot holes and deficiencies. Unfortunately, this film makes me lose all interest in seeing what Hyams has to offer in the future.
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
There will never be a great Moby Dick movie, but luckily there is Avatar: The Way of Water
There have been many attempts to film Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Some, like the 1998 tv miniseries with Patrick Stewart, have made a more earnest effort to stay faithful to the source material, but they all are ultimately disappointing because the task itself is a fool's errand. Moby-Dick was a novel written in 1851 American English; a movie--and try to look beyond the obviousness of what I'm saying--can never be a novel written in 1851 American English. A movie made in 2022 can only ever be a movie made in 2022, and so Avatar: The Way of Water--stay with me--may be the closest will we ever get to a spiritual adaptation of Moby-Dick to film that can speak to us in the same way that Melville hoped to speak to his contemporaries.
By saying this, I don't mean that this sequel to Avatar is an attempt to adapt Moby-Dick to the big screen, although clearly the mid-film scenes of hunting "tulkuns" in order to harvest the extremely valuable liquid inside of them were directly inspired by scenes from that book. What I mean more than that is that The Way of Water has the same feeling, the same composition, and overall some of the same messages as Melville's novel. In crafting Moby-Dick, Melville was able to pull together all the influences that his audience would have been very familiar with: Biblical scripture and Great Awakening oratory, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, protoevolutionary scientific literature, bloody adventure tales mythologizing the lucrative whaling industry, anthropological ethnologies, and so on. The chapters are written differently to reflect these different discourses, and often his keen observation treats them with satirical distance, albeit a biting satire that one can easily mistake for sincerity. Cameron would be a fool to incorporate the same influences into his twenty-first century film, so instead he draws from the sources that we are more familiar with: the nature documentary, the ecological disaster film, the militaristic action blockbuster, the coming-of-age, star-crossed romance, and the outsiders/outcasts-banning-together sci-fi parable. In many cases, Cameron has already made masterpieces in these genres, so he's also evoking his own oeuvre. He knows the language of cinema just like Melville knew the language of literature, and he can distill each form to the essences that make them endure. The averted glance of a teenager in love, the horror of a destroyed environment, the thrill of a battle between high-tech machines and oppressed freedom fighters--Cameron has been filming all that for years, and he does so extremely well.
Cameron's reckless disregard for conventional storytelling structure also parallels Melville's. Moby-Dick will end a chapter with two gossiping sailors ending their secret conversation because they see the villain approaching with "something bloody on his mind," only to begin the next chapter with thirty pages of taxonomic classification of whale species. Cameron's 192-minute movie likewise will juxtapose an intimate family scene against an abrupt battle sequence; will show us that the villains are inching closer toward having the upper hand only to then linger on children admiring the seascape for fifteen minutes. This was very jarring and off-putting to me at first, but once I learned to embrace the experience as being something beyond my complete comprehension and control, I surrendered to a feeling akin to believing the stories in the Book of Genesis. This was mythic storytelling that was going to place me in vivid moments of an imaginary realm. Unlike the original Avatar, there are no exposition dumps nor any carefully choreographed structure signposting how one scene leads to the next. Instead, when you learn that there is a human fishing crew operating in the oceans of Pandora, you are simply supposed to expect that this world is much larger and more complicated than you initially assumed. The original Avatar seemed small and artificial to me, but this version of Pandora comes across as a vast, immersive, fully realized world with many different people in it.
Melville faced technological progress with wonder yet also fear, questioned the power of authority to dangerously oversimplify while nevertheless succumbing to the awe that authority and prowess evokes, and celebrated the differences among individuals, species, and cultures while also embracing their potential to bond together over their similar interests. Melville showed masculinity in all its dangerous, fragile, and inspiring forms. Avatar: The Way of Water does many of the same things in a way that speaks to modern filmgoers.
Cameron has made a film that greatly surpasses the original. Just like Melville took the nineteenth-century American novel to its most experimental and essential form, Cameron has given us a film that showcases twenty-first-century filmmaking in its highest and most consummate capacity. This is more of an experience than a mere movie, and it should be experienced under the best possible conditions, i.e. 3D IMAX, by anyone interested in seeing a sci-fi master using cutting edge technology to transcend reality and take us deep into his imaginative dreams.