Review of Doctor Sleep (major spoilers)

While I was waiting to be let into the theater for this movie, the woman sitting next to me opened a newspaper and there was a full-page review of Doctor Sleep, a negative one, and I thought, Oh great. I was already walking in with bad expectations—the trailer for this movie doesn’t do it any favors. It felt a bit like, LOVE THE LITTLE MERMAID? GUESS WHAT WE MADE THE LITTLE MERMAID 2!! Included were some reshots of iconic parts of The Shining, which only pointed out the impossible task set up by making a sequel to The Shining: how do you follow up on a Kubrick film that is one of the most classic horror movies out there? A movie beloved by pretty much everyone (excepting Stephen King himself). Add to that that the villain appeared to be a hot, female version of Slash from Guns N Roses—I didn’t really think the movie would be any good, but found that over time, the movie kept winning me over.

When Doctor Sleep the novel came out, I had the same reaction—did we really need a sequel to The Shining? But several people insisted, no, it’s good, it’s actually very much about alcoholism. (I never read the book—my reading of horror trickled to almost nothing since the 2000s—the alcoholism thing was a hard sell for me). But what I admired about this movie is not just that it’s well plotted, that the shotguns that are hung over the mantel do in fact satisfyingly go off, but also that it did interrogate some interesting thematic content that a lot of horror movies are lacking.

Well let me first say this, I’m not sure Doctor Sleep is actually a horror movie. It’s not scary—maybe the last act is a little, and there’ s a scene of a kid getting killed that’s a bit intense, but the overall feel of the movie was something more like dark fantasy. During my initial negative feelings of the movie, you see this cold opening that is similar to It. A little girl off on her own encounters Rose the Hat, who seems to want to be friends/ eat her. The thing is, Pennywise is scary, even when he’s being friendly—Rose the Hat just isn’t. What is up, I thought, with a villain with an occasional Irish accent and a black hat and a band of random carnies. Rose isn’t really the villain of the movie though.

We grow to learn that Danny Torrance, after surviving the events at the Overlook Hotel, has not surprisingly been traumatized by those events. Drinking blunts both the trauma and tamps down his shining. He moves to a new town where he befriends a man literally named Bill who gets him a job, a room for rent, and an introduction to AA. (If you’re not familiar, AA was founded by a man named Bill W and AA attendees sometimes refer to themselves as “Friends of Bill W.”) Dan forms a cute pen pan relationship with another person with the shining—this turns out to be Abra, a kid living a thousand miles away (played very effectively by Kyliegh Curran—in particular during the eye-changing scene).

Rose and her band of merry assholes are basically psychic vampires who have been hunting kids to “eat”—this is never really as scary as Pennywise, but ultimately I was fine with this. Where I started to really like this movie is when it took turns I wasn’t necessarily expecting. And if you’ve consumed a lot of Stephen King, you can definitely feel the Stephen King in it. When things really start going to shit—Rose detects Abra’s existence and is out to get her, prompting Dan and Abra to finally meet—I was surprised to see Dan and Abra decide to tell Abra’s father everything (casting aside the often tiresome trope of “we can’t tell anyone for reasons/or they’ll think we’re crazy!”) Dan also tells Billy the whole deal—Billy who is basically the most solid, bestest friend you could ever ask for—and the two embark on a mission together. I loved these scenes of them together and was super sad to (SPOILER) see Billy get killed. But it never felt like Dick Hallorann’s death in Kubrick’s Shining (who basically shows up to get killed so that Danny and his mom can have a giant snowmobile to get out of Dodge.) It felt really appropriate—when things get really bad, Dan doesn’t have a sponsor who is always going to be there. Really, really bad things are going to happen, and he’s going to have to get through it on his own.

Particularly after recently rewatching the new version of It and its second chapter, it was satisfying to see a psychic battle between Abra and Rose visually depicted in a way that made sense. Not only did it make sense, but it was both visually interesting and tense. (One of the significant failures of It Chapter Two was its inability to depict the whole Ritual of Chud in any way that made sense— it just didn’t translate well from the novel, and ultimately felt a little ridiculous). Not so here—Abra and Rose have a confrontation that I think in lesser hands would not have worked.

A really satisfying element of this movie was Abra herself. Most often, horror movies have children for the sole purpose of being innocent victims of potential violence—the stakes are raised just based on our fear of bad things happening to small humans. I found myself very satisfied with a character like Abra: she’s incredibly psychically strong and knows it, maybe even revels in it. She’s not hapless—she’s agentic and an active partner in moving the plot forward. I got the impression that she was actually stronger than Rose, but this was never done in a way that didn’t make you lose a sense of stakes.

This movie, unlike what the trailer may imply, is not a rehashing of Kubrick’s Shining, relying on the same old elements for cheap scares. There are hints of music and occasional shots, but the director (Mike Flanagan, who directed an episode of The Haunting of Hill House—which I loved—in addition to Hush, another solid horror movie) was pointedly not making The Shining 2—which was the only way to make this movie successfully, I think. Despite the fact that the trailer is filled with familiar images (the blood getting off the elevator, the creepy twins), that’s not at all what this movie is. It’s a movie in its own right.

But yes, there is a part where you go back to the Overlook Hotel—and this is not done cheaply—the storytelling earns it. (This is the only point in the movie where they go all in on musical callbacks to The Shining—and because the movie earned it, I found myself smiling. It also earns the long, overhead shots of the windy drive up to the hotel—this time in winter rather than the summer opening of the first movie.) Dan is fucked up because of everything he’s seen, and he has spent years trying to avoid that trauma by drinking. For supernatural reasons, it makes sense for the final confrontation of Dan + Abra vs Rose to take place at The Overlook: Dan knows it to be a place where hungry entities await their next meal. The hotel itself is very powerful—perhaps more powerful than all of them. But going back to the hotel provides the most satisfying moments of the movie because Dan is finally going back to confront the trauma he never did previously. After turning various valves in the boiler room (a nod to the novel—a key element left out of Kubrick’s version), he wanders the rotting hotel, finally coming to an oddly immaculate ballroom in a recreation of the above scene. Dan really wants a drink. Floyd the bartending ghost is only happy to provide one. We don’t see Floyd at first, but Dan immediately addresses him as if he is Jack Torrance. Finally, decades after his father’s death, he confronts his father not just about his own trauma, but about Jack’s trauma. And much like how Dan’s “Floyd” is Jack, who is Jack’s “Floyd”?

The novel The Shining is far more about alcoholism than the original movie version (let’s just set aside the TV remake, starring the guy from Wings, which, while more faithful, starred the guy from Wings.) Stephen King is often writing about his own addiction issues, and was often writing while actively being addicted, and Doctor Sleep might be the closest thing to being directly about his own monsters. (Rose literally survives as a semi-immortal being by consuming something that you have to kill others to get—when she consumes it, her wounds are healed, and she can live a bit longer). I think if others don’t like this movie, it might be because they wanted more horror elements, or The Shining 2, or maybe they object to the down-home sensibilities of King’s storytelling—but for those of us who like him, this style of storytelling is something familiar while also sometimes being surprising and satisfying.

Review of It: Chapter 2

Sounds like most people are on the same page: sadly, this movie doesn’t live up to its predecessor. It’s just not as smart or as scary as Chapter 1 but to be fair I also think making Chapter 2 was going to be a tall order any way it was done. It made me wonder: is It really possible in movie form? The book is just so long and weird, and it’s hard to have both time periods fully fleshed out. In the book, the best parts are the parts in the 50s when the characters are kids. And the mythology only really works because of kid logic—it’s harder to sell that when they’re adults. That in and of itself would have been a hard hump to get over, but ultimately this movie stumbled both over that hump and others.

This second part clearly lacked some of the magic of the first movie, which was some perfect configuration of well-cast kids and genuinely creepy and/or scary scenes. I loved how the first movie depicted the start of their relationships and spent the time on character development so that you really believed how close and important they were to each other. My only criticisms of it where the strange omission of the very overt racism against Mike, the omission of Patrick Hocksetter (and that deeply disturbing fridge scene), and how they set up the final confrontation to be about saving Bev, rather than running straight into the fire to kill It.

If this second part was going to—unlike the miniseries—get into the weird mythology in the book, it didn’t quite work to leave that out of the first part. Stephen King himself says that sometimes he makes things worse in his books by explaining why scary things exist in the way that they do. Do I really need to know that Pennywise is basically an alien that hitchhiked to Earth on a meteor? It’s almost more scary if you don’t know at all. The mythology in the book is just plain ridiculous—silver bullets and the ritual of CHUD and the turtle—but it works during the 1950s part because they’re kids. The book spends quite a bit of time on the silver bullet issue: finding the silver, making the bullets, testing to see who was best with the slingshot. The slingshot itself was so emblematic of the book: kids fighting a powerful entity with a slingshot—a literal David and Goliath. If the entire crux of the fight revolves around belief being the thing that gives them power, it doesn’t actually matter which mythology they happen to come across the the encyclopedia or whatever—as long as they believe it.

The movie handled this pretty clumsily in the second part. It takes a while for the Loser gang to reassemble in Derry—I guess I was okay with that. But rather than bringing in CHUD, and glamour, and silver bullets in the first movie, they kept it all for right when the adults get back to Maine. And it takes the form of Mike drugging Bill with psychedelics so the latter and re-experience the research that Mike did with unnamed Native Americans to figure out how to defeat It… The whole Native American mysticism might have worked better if they were actual people rather than a convenient trope. In my memory, the book handled it better—as kids, they build a sweat lodge and go into it and have visions—it works because it’s something that the kids would have seen on TV or read about in school and totally believed. Even as I was watching it I was pulled out of the story for a moment to think about how clumsy this was. It was infodump and also took away some of Bill’s agency.

It’s impossible to depict visually how CHUD was in the books—a battle of wills—so instead the ritual takes the form of each Loser having to go off by themselves to find an “artifact.” This is where the movie starts to drag. Each person has a flashback and as much as I love the child actors from Chapter 1, this started to feel laborious. Mainly because each person got their own scary scenes when they were off by themselves and I didn’t find the scary scenes that scary. The special effects weren’t that great, and seemed to lack some of the slow creepiness that wasn’t necessarily high tech but was good from the first movie. There are some great scare scenes in the first movie: when Stan first sees Pennywise at the stanpipe, the fridge scene, the movie projector scene, the scene right after Bev brains her father. And they weren’t dumb jump scares—they were good—like the not-from-the-book scene where one of the boys (Stan, I think) is forced to go into his dad’s office but he’s scared of a painting that’s in there. (the painting comes to life, naturally—but a painting is just the sort of weird thing a kid would be scared of). The scares in this movie felt too much like the effects you’d see in a low budget horror movie on Netflix: not that realistic and not that original. (With the exception of the fortune cookies—I’ll give them that.)

Despite being somewhat bloated, some significant angles were cut from the book, mainly Bill’s wife Audra also being in Derry (and bewitched by the deadlights) and the full context of Bev’s marriage. The adults in the film definitely felt like older versions of the kids, but they also didn’t feel as fleshed out. It’s hard to translate the internal narrative from the novel to film without voiceover. The novel has the space to really stretch out and fully characterize the entire ensemble cast. The end result is that the adult versions of the kids lacked a sort of fullness in the film. Bev and Richie felt like they had a bit more to them, but you could entirely forget that Bill was supposed to be their leader.

They did a couple things really well: the movie was really well cast (despite the fact that I would love loved to have seen Jerry O’Connell as Ben and Amy Adams as Bev). But the cast was underutilized. There’s one brief, really creepy scene of Bill Skarsgard without his clown makeup on. (Although as creepy as I found it, the introduction of the idea of It in human form but pre-Pennywise just raised questions that didn’t really have answers). I respected that the movie, unlike the miniseries of my youth, didn’t edit out the hate crime that occurs in the novel. (My recollection is that the novel opens with that scene). I saw a Slate criticism of this scene, but like pretty much every Slate article, it exists for the point of critiquing something from a political standpoint that lacks any sort of depth. The point of that scene (It was published in 1986, btw) was about how Derry is rotten to its core. Derry looks like an ideal New England town. But It isn’t the only thing deeply wrong about the town. This is a town where people observed Mike (as a child) running for his life from racists who are going to do god-knows-what to him when they caught him and did nothing. A town where a bunch of boys are carving an H into Bill’s stomach and a car drives by, pointedly sees this . . . and keeps driving. The same place where adults are weirdly blase about the fact that so many kids are missing, or don’t seem to notice that something is traumatizing their kids. So there’s a hate crime—which was written to mirror an actual gay bashing that really happened—and what’s terrible about it is that no one is going to help the two men who are being attacked. And one of the attackers is a teenager, maybe even younger.

But two failures I can’t really forgive: Bill Skarsgard was totally underutilized. I don’t know what it is about him, but he is just one of those actors that I absolutely can’t take my eyes off of, even when he’s in stuff that’s kind of bad (cough cough Hemlock Grove). The first part of It was at its absolute scariest not when he was biting off people’s body parts or turning into various monsters, but when he was being creepy and unnerving. Case in point: his very first scene where he meets Georgie— he’s sort of wall-eyed and out of it and drooling a little and being otherworldly.

The other thing? How It is actually defeated. Metaphysical stuff aside, even twenty-something years later, I still have a clear image of the adult versions of the characters at the end of the books, stomping on It’s eggs and ripping It’s heart out. The final fight in the movie, though, it ends up boiling down to the characters surrounding It and shouting, You’re nothing! This just . . . doesn’t work. We know the characters don’t actually think It is nothing because four seconds ago they were screaming hysterically and spoiler Eddie was just fatally stabbed spoiler. Contrast to in the book, the kids are young enough to actually believe in silver bullets, a verbal talisman, and that an inhaler can have magical properties. The Ritual of CHUD stuff is hard—and taking it away sort of negates Bill being their leader— but I think they could have made do with Eddie dealing the lethal blow with the piece of iron-wrought gate being used as a spear. Back to my point about this being a movie or not—I almost think the only way they could have done all the CHUD and turtle stuff was if this had been a TV show, where they would have gotten the time to flesh out the mythology (because if it comes in bits it seems more reasonable, as opposed to one bad acid trip at Mike’s house.)

TLDR: Don’t think you need to see this in the theater, in particular because it will take your entire afternoon, but worth renting.

Review of Midsommar (spoilers abound)

On a scale of 1 to What in Sam Hill, with 10 being Mother! and 1 being Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog, Midsommar probably ranks at about a 9. I wish I could say I recommend it, but I can’t.

My expectations were super high because it came from the same Writer/ Director as Hereditary, possibly the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, but also one I have enormous respect for for its writing, acting, and thematic content—I didn’t even care that the plot actually isn’t that interesting.

The first thing I heard about this movie was that it occurs almost entirely in daylight (this isn’t exactly true—only the Sweden parts are) which was certainly intriguing. The movie has the same slow pace as Hereditary and The Witch—it takes its time to unfurl, focusing a lot of attention on atmosphere. In the first twenty minutes, I definitely felt like I was heading toward something like Hereditary—I felt like something equally horrifying was around the corner and was cringing in preparation for it. The film opens with Dani (Florence Pugh) dealing with her douchcanoe boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor, who eerily looks like a young Chris Pratt). I liked that the movie was willing to spend the time to show their relationship dynamic: he’s already checked out of the relationship but is the sort that stays in it because he’s too cowardly to break up. Dani is in exactly the sort of relationship you are in during your twenties: trying to cajole emotional support about of someone with low emotional intelligence who is fundamentally selfish but unwilling to admit it. She tries to get comfort about a disturbing email she received from her sister who has a history of bipolar. Just as Douchcanoe is talking to his friends about how he has to break up with her, he gets a phone call from Dani.

I thought this was handled well— filmed in a way that was disturbing, tense, and well choreographed—Dani’s sister has killed both their parents and herself with carbon monoxide from their car. Although this is not the most violent way to die, its filmed in a way that is visually disturbing. You get the sense that you are seeing it from Dani’s imagined perspective. This makes the phone call to Christian appropriately disturbing: Dani is just screaming. Cut to him trying to comfort her as she is just primally screaming—this reminded me of the epic mourning wails of Toni Collette in Hereditary (for which she should have won an award). So … awkward.. not the best time to break up after all.

Rather than displaying any sense of emotional honesty, Christian lets Dani tag along on his bro-trip to Sweden, led by his so-nice-he-must-be-creepy Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Pelle is the only one who is actually nice to her, which immediately makes you think he is three steps away from putting them in an industrial-sized Vitamix. They are accompanied by Christian’s anthropologist grad school friend/ rival Josh (William Jackson Harper) (who, other than the floral arrangements, provides the movie’s only color), and Mark (William Poulter), the comic relief.

At this point, the movie moves away from a lot of the super atmospherey stuff that made Hereditary and The Witch so great and turns into the standard cult movie I’ve seen dozens of iterations of. You get to the isolated cult location. Everyone’s super nice. Something mildly disturbing happens, but because it’s a horror movie nobody Nopes the fuck out of there. Then people start to disappear one by one, and then it all comes to a head. I was kind of hoping for more than this, and ultimately the film doesn’t deliver more than this. It definitely makes its time to move through the trope though. We get to see a lot about how the commune that Pelle grew up in functions—more than we need to, because I’m not sure if it matters how they function, or that their holy book is written by a deliberately inbred prophet (who ultimately has some Chainsaw Massacre tendencies). The nope moment occurs when the outsiders are viewing a cultural ceremony which results in a man and a woman jump off a cliff to their deaths. Some of the outsiders are horrified, although more interestingly Christian and Josh really aren’t—they see the anthropology grad student equivalent of dollars signs in their eyes.

The movie probably is fundamentally about the relationship between Christian and Dani. He doesn’t really see her. He doesn’t, as Pelle manipulatively but rightly points out, make her feel held. This was a super interesting thematic aspect that I wish was tied more to Dani’s trauma. We know her sister’s action has basically orphaned her, but I felt like the movie was on the verge of saying something interesting about romantic relationships that ultimately it didn’t say. Christian is selfish. He doesn’t think, wow, we just witnessed two violent suicides while my girlfriend is still suffering from PTSD after her entire family was killed— maybe we should get out of here and eat comforting Toblerone at the airport ASAP. There always has to be some compelling reason why people in horror movies stay in bad places: haunted houses, creepy asylums, communes where people smile a little too widely. The reason in this case is that Christian and Josh have decided they want to do anthropological research at the commune. (One thing that felt spot-on about Christian was that he was lagging in trying to figure out what his thesis would be—ultimately his idea is derivative of Josh’s).

A lot of the foreshadowing is so direct that it isn’t even really foreshadowing: we see historical renderings of a woman feeding a man pubic hair and menstrual blood (Josh is then fed such a . . . meat pie. . . by a witchy ginger who wants his sperms); we see a bear being set on fire (Josh eventually goes out tauntaun style in a bear). This made things less tense. We know that people are going to get up in the middle of the night and do unwise things and get caught. I was more interested in Dani’s nightmares, which connected to the horror of her family’s death. Lately I’ve been thinking about how all horror, fundamentally at its core, is about the fear of death. We’re terrified of monsters, but we’re never going to encounter them—the only real terror is the very probable terror of having the deal with the death of loved ones (and ourselves, eventually).

As expected, both Christian and Dani are made to succumb to the cult. Dani feels some terror and confusion and gets drugged out of her mind, but in an interesting scene (that brought to mind the remake of Suspira) she connects with them emotionally as they mirror back her screams in a moment of emotional distress. She dances in an endurance contest, losing sense of reality and her identity. Ultimately, and as you suspect, she is named queen of the festivities and is given a choice to pick the last of the human sacrifices. Shall she pick Jorgen-or-whatever-blond-anonymous-dude, or Christian, whom she has just discovered having sex with the ginger witch? (to be fair the sex was bizarre and not exactly consensual—on the other hand, Christian is a douchecanoe, and you get the sense that her decision to select him isn’t entirely about that particular act, but her disappointment with him in general).

So . . there’s the movie. For all its flaws and ridiculousness, I liked Suspira for the thematic content about women, about power, and maybe even about dance. Midsommar felt like it started to kind of be about something (Dani’s orphaning) while also being about something else (her relationship with Christian), but then veered into something else (a LOT of showing things about the cult which ultimately don’t matter) without dipping its toes back into the first two things enough. What, then, is the movie saying — that douchcanoes are disappointing—? they are, but is the cult just a vehicle for demonstrating this? Texas Chain is not a movie about the relationships between the kids who eventually run into Leatherface—it’s a story about a family. Hereditary is a story about mourning; The Witch is a story about the control and repression of women. I think Midsommar is missing the final stitch or two that would have tied the whole thing together.

Review of Blackkklansman

I hate to say it, but here is a thing which started with a great premise, but then failed in its execution. It had everything working in its favor: a great hook and timeliness. A black cop who pretends to be white over the phone in order to infiltrate the KKK. Even the pre-setup: he's the first black cop in this particular precinct, and they warn him that he is going to to have to "be the Jackie Robinson."

It's based on a true story, so I can't fault the story for going where it does which is to say to pretty expected places once you know the premise. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) enlists Flip (Adam Driver) to play the part in person, Flip is conflicted, Stallworth starts a relationship with Black Power activist Patrice (Laura Harrier) only she doesn't know he's a cop (and yes, she would mind.) 

This movie was startlingly long. When I was sitting there I was thinking, crap I wanted to get to bed at a reasonable hour. I left the theater and looked at my phone, expecting it to be 11 (the show started 7) and was surprised to see that it was only 9 pm. How on earth does a movie feel two hours longer than what it actually was?? Even while watching it I kept being pulled out of the story by thinking "this scene is much longer than it should be" and I found myself wondering about how established artists can get away stretching their arms and taking up space and making work that is too long but emerging artists have to trim their work to be beyond super-lean. 

So if it felt too long, I have to wonder if there was enough story to fill out two hours. Surely there should have been, but yet it didn't feel like it. The movie could have gone more into depth on both Stallworth's and Flip's characters. What's Stallworth's background, what did he study in college (there's a point to mentioning that he avoided Vietnam because he was in college), what is his family like, and what made him want to be a cop? For about ten seconds, the movie touches on the fact that Flip, while Jewish, grew up without really "being Jewish," and maybe an interesting conversation about identity could have been had here. We are given bonked-over-the-head examples about why Patrice might have been driven toward the Black Power movement, but this movie painfully, painfully lacks in subtlety. What, for example, distinguishes Patrice from any prototype of a young student involved in the movement? (Nothing). Maybe the heavy-handedness of the movie was intended to make it more easy to digest for people who don't know much about that time period. But I would have rather seen scenes putting everything in context than scenes that felt like 40% of them could have been cut without sacrificing anything. 

The unsubtleness of this movie is a mismatch with the sort of audience that goes to see a movie like this. The parallels to modern day America are really obvious--enough so that the obvious nods to the present day could have been written a bit more obliquely or even not at all and we still would have seen them. But if you didn't feel like everything was spelled out in enormous billboard-sized capital letters, there's the ending.. After the movie ends there's a few minutes of documentary footage ramming home the parallels today. As if it needed to be stated. This included the graphic footage of the people being murdered/injured in Charlottesville by a white nationalist plowing a car into them. We've seen that footage--everyone sitting in that theater had. It isn't news to us, and felt weirdly misplaced and jarring, like being hit over the head with a bat while hanging up anti-bat-hitting posters. 

A spoiler-ridden review of Hereditary

Hereditary falls squarely in the center of what I think is an exciting development in horror movies: horror that leans more towards the literary. Reviews of this movie had a lot of "Not since The Exorcist..." language which made me skeptical, along with my friend's text along the lines of "Have you heard the hype about this movie? People are saying it's traumatic." Well that was enough to sell me. 

Hereditary very much reminded me of The Witch and It Comes at Night with some echoes of The Exorcist. I suppose I would consider The Exorcist literary horror, but it does lean more towards overt horror (ie, looking at horrifying and explicitly unpleasant things for long scenes.) The way this movie was filmed--as if the camera is lurking--and the excellent score reminded me of all three: unnerving drones, unpleasant prickly noises, indistinct sounds you can't quite pick out. With the exception of The Exorcist I generally don't find literary horror scary, but I do enjoy it. 

What I found most horrifying in this movie wasn't the supernatural elements, which I doubted the existence of for maybe four-fifths of the movie. There's some indication in a very Rosemary's Baby way that the recently deceased mother of Annie (Toni Collette) was a witch. The narrative does feel like it's headed for supernatural elements, particularly in the way it focuses on Annie's profoundly creepy daughter Charlie. She's unnerving (amazingly well acted by Milly Shapiro), but I thought she was headed for either demonic possession or a diagnosis of psychopathy (there's a scene where she finds a dead pigeon and cuts its head off to keep). But it was easy for me to push the supernatural to the side for most of the movie because an unexpected turn. 

This is the scene I keep thinking about even days later. The teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolf) lies to his mother that a party he wants to go to is more of a school BBQ and she makes him take his sister. He takes her, and leaves her alone for a minute so he can smoke pot with the girl he likes. Charlie eats some cake with nuts in it and starts going into anaphylactic shock. Peter puts her in the family car and hurries her to the hospital, and of course you can see the accident coming. But I was 1000 percent not expecting the way it would go down and how it would be depicted. The accident is horrifying, and it both is and isn't Peter's fault. You could see a teenager getting into this situation from being mildly irresponsible, but not outrageously so. We don't see exactly what happens and it isn't clear that Peter has. There's an incredible scene of Peter just staring straight at the camera for at least a full minute, stunned, and the sense of horror and dread and there's no going back from this is palpable. Alex Wolf, the by way, who I've only ever seen in Jumanji nailed this scene. He heads home, in a daze, lies down in his bed, and there's an extremely painful scene of his blank face as he can hear his mother's off-camera screams as she discover's Charlie's body. Toni Collette's screaming here was more disturbing than any piece of violence or weirdness that occurs in this movie. 

For almost all of this movie but the end, you could interpret it as being about the impossible task of the family dealing with this death. How does a mother then relate to her son? How can he possibly cope with being responsible for the accident? When supernatural things seem like they're happening--Peter and Annie seeing apparitions, Peter's self-injurious behavior--this can all be explained away by hallucinations they are experiencing from intense grief and guilt. There's also the issue of mental illness: Annie's family tree is rife with it, and she rather casually mentions at a grief counseling meeting that her mother had Dissociative Identity Disorder. Personally I don't believe in DID, and wasn't sure how I'd feel if the movie turned out to be about it. Abrupt changes in Annie's behavior--ostensibly from possession--could be explained by DID if you wanted to take a non-supernatural interpretation of this movie. It was this aspect of the movie--grief as the supernatural--that I found most intriguing. It could have ended ambiguously, and I thought the movie was headed this way, but then it goes full Black Phillip.  

Black Phillip, if you haven't seen The Witch, is the family goat who at the end of the movie, starts speaking in the voice of Satan. The talking goat is the point of no return, and the same thing happens in the last fifth of Hereditary. 

We then get firmly grounded in the idea that the witchcraft angle is real. This leads to an ending that was very similar to The Witch with a dash of Rosemary's Baby thrown in. The one thing that left me a little puzzled is why--possessed or not--Annie bizarrely kills herself. Whatever entity that has taken her over (and it isn't clear who exactly) already has possession of the body, so why it needed to end her life was unclear (unless, I suppose, it was a human sacrifice). Overall, grounding it in witchcraft didn't take away the emotional complexity--much like how The Witch was still about all these strictures that were/are put on women. It still raised interesting questions-- was Annie's sleepwalking actually sleepwalking, some supernatural thing, or some form of mental illness? Was what Peter did something he could ever come back from? (I desperately wanted him to just leave the house and not come back.) How can the husband (Gabriel Byrne) draw the line between indulging his wife and allowing her outbursts while also being wary that she might be in the middle of a psychotic break? How can he balance dealing with his own grief while the tension between his wife and his son is becoming worse and worse? 

There is one thing about this movie that I did not like and found unfairly gratuitous: WHY WHY WHY the dog. Come on man. Any horror movie or thriller where there is a family dog, it is basically there for four-legged cannon fodder. Towards the end of the movie the dog isn't particularly present and I probably would have forgotten about it . . . Except then there is a one second scene that just shows the dog's body cast aside in the garden, it's murder, apparently, occurring off screen. By someone. For some reason. THIS WAS A SENSELESS DOG DEATH. WHY. It did nothing for the plot, and the dog did not get to fully develop his character arc as a result. 

Review of Picnic at Hanging Rock

1. What in god's name was this show?

2. I could not stop watching it. 

There aren't too many things I'm willing to watch that are willfully confusing--or artsy for the sake of artsy. But this definitely falls into this category. 

Worth watching for Natalie Dormer's wardrobe alone. 

Picnic tells the story of a sketchy woman, Ms. Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) who flees from a mysterious background to start a finishing school for troubled girls in an absurdly beautiful estate. Like when you have fantasies of living in some Harry Potter boarding school, this is the estate you're thinking of. Three girls disappear during a picnic and the rest of the series attempts to cover what swirls around this scandal. Were they murdered, did they disappear, or did something mystical happen? 

Honestly, the plot is interesting enough to keep things moving, but the plot wasn't really why I kept watching. The series has interesting themes about the ways in which women are bound, sexuality, and class. But ultimately I watched this for the visuals and an arresting score. The visuals are dreamlike at times, and the scenery varies from this sumptuous estate where the school is, to these scenes from the landscape at Hanging Rock itself. The score is sometimes intense and deliberately unnerving (reminiscent of The Witch). 

I think the lower reviews of this show (currently 6.3 stars on IMDB) are due to the fact that the show didn't really ever intend to be about a neatly tied of mystery when people wanted it to be. The original Picnic at Hanging Rock was a popular Australian novel which the author occasionally implied was actually a true story. The novel's last chapter wasn't published with the original book, leaving it with an inconclusive ending. An . . . interesting decision. (In case you want the spoiler: the ending which was pulled from the book, then published later, also has a somewhat inconclusive ending. The girls disappear into some sort of void and time travel or another dimension may be implied.) 

Review of A Quiet Place

This was a solid horror movie, very much not about the thing at the center of it--whatever beasts they may be--but much more about how humans would attempt to survive such a thing. It isn't a It Comes At Night sort of movie (literary horror movie where nothing much happens) but there is more heart to it than a standard horror movie where the characters are more or less cannon fodder for whatever hunts them. It's both well-filmed and acted. This was like the movie Signs was trying to be with some of the better elements of Don't Breathe (except without that extremely fucked up turkey baster part). 

The background isn't so much important: creatures have arrived that are blind but apparently very good at hearing. You make a sound and that is enough to bring them (quickly) to hunt you--and there's no fighting them. One of the most interesting parts of this movie is the inclusion of a deaf character--the daughter. I'm very curious to hear what deaf people think of this movie. The family already knows how to sign because of her and there are some interesting shots that contrast how the other characters perceive the world vs her. (In some ways, she has an advantage: if she can't see it, it doesn't frighten her into making sounds, so she's safe as long as she's quiet.) One of the horror tropes I love is the "hiding from the beastie but you're terrified and have to keep from breathing too loud or screaming." There's a lot of that here, obviously. 

While this is a great movie to see in a theater, it is NOT a great movie to see in a theater if people are talking, whispering, or crinkling wrappers. Like at all. It is largely a quiet movie--there's very little dialogue and long stretches without any loud sounds. (But when there are loud sounds, they are definitely loud.) I actually wish I could have seen this in a theater but with noise-cancelling headphones. (On the one hand, I don't want to be That Guy who shhhhs people, but on the other hand, STFU.) 

Sidenote, whenever I watch something dystopian I can't help "but couldn't they have...?" In this case, placed a speaker in a quarry or large hole, surround it with explosives, turn the music on remotely, press play. Beasties run there, then get killed. Explosion sound draws other beasties who are killed by the secondary ring of explosives. 

Anyhow, I definitely would recommend this movie--I'm frequently disappointed in horror movies because they're the same dumb thing over and over (Insidious, any knockoffs of Japanese horror movies--although I will say I have a soft spot for Paranormal Activity, even though it isn't actually good). I do think something new was brought to the table. 

Recommended watching: 

Don't Breathe

Hush

Review of Ready Player One

It took me a while to articulate exactly why I thought this movie was dumb. (spoilers)

Arriving to the general conclusion wasn't hard: I felt myself thinking this several times during the movie itself, sort of cringing in vicarious embarrassment for everyone sitting in the theater. Some particular things that piqued this: The cartoonish villain. The shoe-horned in romance with a John Green-style "cool girl." (The "hideous secret" of her true appearance outside of VR is, eek, that she has a birthmark.) The fact that a massive corporation funding professional full-time game players can't seem to get any players who are better than cannon fodder, or can solve mysteries that a teenage boy can despite all their resources and the fact that some working there might actually have been alive during the 80s--critical for understanding the mysteries. That Wade's aunt gets murdered along with dozens or perhaps hundreds of other people and it's sort of his fault and he has zero reaction to it, moving quickly to the next scene where all he can think about is this chick he likes. 

Yeah I guess it is fun to see a bunch of references to pop culture . . . but nothing particularly clever was done with them. I'm a huge fan of The Shining and yup, it was fun to go into the Overlook Hotel. But like, why? Living in the references felt like bad fan fiction like "We're here for the sake of being here" rather than "we're here because we have something interesting to say about The Shining." Here's some glitter--I'm going to throw it directly into your eyes. 

This is exactly why the movie felt really off to me: it was a middle grade story, starring teen actors, with tons of references to things from my childhood (and I'm almost forty). It didn't have the complexity or emotional depth of young adult/ teen fiction, or even more complex middle grade, so you were left with this weird sense of being at middle grade simplicity but with older actors. But then there are all these references that older people would get--The Shining, Child's Play, that would totally be lost on people who were 8 to 12. Actually, maybe even 15. Naturally, the good guys win in the end. And they share their wealth . . . across the five of them, and everyone else continues to live in abject poverty in stacked trailers in a world that pretty much feels like Idiocracy? Sure, we'll turn off the virtual reality two days a week, but not address anything about how life is so terrible that people want to live in fantasy worlds instead. I don't really expect something intended for middle schoolers to deal with complex issues like class or how corporations hurt culture and government in and endless quest for profit, but I do expect that to be addressed in works for slightly older people. 

Is this depth asking too much in movies that are just supposed to be fun? I don't think so actually. In the past month I just watched Toy Story 3 for the first time, in addition to the Lego Batman movie (for the 4th time). It's really hard to do what these movies did really well: tell stories with heart that are funny and enjoyable for both kids and adults. Nothing in either of those movies made me roll my eyes, despite the former being pretty sentimental. Why exactly is Toy Story good? Well, its unabashedly earnest. It really tries to imagine what it would feel like to be these toys. And seeing their secret world is fun and clever. Any adult watching that movie knows that the toy paradise day care center they end up in is of course going to turn into a hellscape--it was funny anticipating how this would pan out. Lego Batman is a perfect example of how you can reference things, but do it in a meta way that ends up being cute rather than thin. The Joker acknowledging that his longtime antagonistic relationship with Batman is in fact a relationship. The whole "it works at multiple levels" thing. 

Highlight of the movie: Philip Zhao. Lowlights: For the love of god, why would you have the Delorean from Back to the Future and never drive it to 88 miles per hour, throw off sparks, and activate the 1.21 gigawatts of energy needed to travel through time??? (And yes, I know that the answer to this is addressed in the book, but it isn't in the movie). 

Review of Unsane

TLDR Review: Don't bother--not even sure if't it's worth a 3 dollar cable rental. 

Unsane is a study in how certain people can make mediocre work, have it funded and mass distributed, and have it peacefully go away when it turns out to be unremarkable, not even leaving a blemish on their career. 

The movie's main point of interest is that it was filmed on an iPhone. Um . . . so? the basic heart of storytelling--character and plot--will always be more important than how it's filmed. If Steven Soderburgh's main interest was playing with the iPhone idea, he could have easily plucked a better screenplay of the pile of hopeful manuscripts. This movie is pretty disappointing if you saw Soderburgh's Side Effects and were expecting something of that caliber. 

Unsane focuses on a young woman, Sawyer, who is settling into a new job in a new city. She's fled a stalker and still remains jumpy, frightened that she'll run into him just around every corner. She goes to a psychiatric facility for therapy, only to unknowingly sign forms to voluntarily commit herself. 

What follows it basically a higher-end Lifetime movie. Sawyer is trapped in a hellish hospital written as fairly unsympathetic to anyone who might be in such a hospital for any reason. The patients are played as standard koo-koo extras (violent, laughing and talking to themselves--why do portrayals of institutions never include self-aware people who check themselves in because they're suicidal and want help?) Everyone is consistently unreasonable, from the nurses to the orderlies who seem to think it is appropriate to put men and women in the same collective bedrooms and lock the doors. Everyone, that is, except for the handsome black dude patient, Mark, who turns out to secretly be a reporter. 

Mark provides the plot with a good excuse for a hospital to lock up "sane" people: it wants insurance money and spits out patients once their coverage ends. (This could have been the more interesting focal point--the horrors of the American insurance industry. We trust Mark's story until--twist--we find out with Obamacare half destroyed, there is no insurance coverage for mental health anymore, and Mark is just a crazy patient who thinks he's a reporter pretending to be a crazy patient. )

I digress. Instead, the movie plods down more familiar paths. Is Sawyer crazy, or is her stalker now an employee at the hospital? I never hemmed and hawed about whether she was crazy--I always assumed the stalker was in fact there. There have been a lot of stalker movies but I'm not sure I've seen any that really dig into the most fundamental issues that are the most psychologically interesting. That is, man's entitlement to women and how frequently this leads to violence. (I could be wrong, but I could have sworn I read a review of the movie in The New Yorker right when it came out and it erroneously referred to David, her stalker, as her ex-boyfriend, which he most certainly is not and it is blatantly clear in the movie that they never dated and she had no interest in him whatsoever at any point. I wonder if someone corrected them.) He is a near-stranger Sawyer meets when she is volunteering at a hospice and he takes a liking to her. We don't see a lot of the stalking, but it's clear: she doesn't like him that way and he doesn't know her, but insists that he loves her. This last part often appears in stalker narratives whether real or imagined. The love interest constructed to some extent, which is how she can be the perfect love. The construction is easier to deal with than the reality of a flawed, imperfect woman. 

How quickly things go from I love you I love you to I'll kill you. Sounds a bit like borderline personality disorder to me--funny because people tend to think of that more as a "female" personality disorder. I think women, when humiliated, turn their hatred inwards more often than not. Men don't sometimes. Sometimes the rejected man turns from "I hate myself" to "I hate myself and you're all going to go down with me." (insert reference to any one of the hundreds upon hundreds of shootings that have taken place in the past two decades.) 

The struggle continues on fairly obviously in the movie. Could Sawyer's elderly mother turn out the be the knight in shining armor? No--god forbid and elderly person be portrayed as anything but a victim. 

Sawyer manages to get a weapon and stab David when he traps her in a padded room and then there is an extended chase scene. Why is it that in these scenarios the would-be victims stab once, leave the knife behind, and then scramble away in an uncoordinated run reminiscent of a drunk, newborn giraffe? They never think "this person is actively trying to kill me, maybe I better stab them repeatedly in the brain just to make sure they won't get up with a knife sticking out of them and still run pretty quickly after me, because I am, after all, a newborn giraffe." (The only one who ever handled this right was Jamie Lee Curtis, the original final girl:

Recommended reading:

Loner, by Teddy Wayne

Enduring Love, by Ewan McEwan, or the very capable film adaptation staring Daniel Craig

Review: The Disaster Artist

Every now and then you're at a movie and you can just feel the joy of the audience in the air. This was one of these movies. This movie currently has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes--beaten out only be Coco, which apparently makes people openly weep in their seats (I've been meaning to get to that one this week.) 

This was a movie that was clearly made by fans, for fans. The Disaster Artist is fiction, based on a nonfiction book, about the making of a movie called The Room. The Room, if you haven't seen it, is quite possibly the worst movie every made. It was written, directed, produced, and stars this guy Tommy Wiseau, who then featured a huge picture of his face on the movie poster. The Room is badly written with a hackneyed plot that doesn't really make sense, badly acted, awkward, bizarre, unintentionally funny--but strangely, has a high production value. It presumably was intended to be serious, but then turned into a cult classic. DC is one of several cities that has midnight showings where people interact with the screen ala Rocky Horror. You drink, you throw spoons, it's good fun because it's so ridiculous, especially after a few cocktails. 

The Disaster Artist tells the story of how the film was made, starting with how Greg Sestero, a hopeful actor, meets Tommy in acting class. Tommy has long black hair, a clearly eastern European accent that his claims is from New Orleans, and massive amounts of money with mysterious origins. Greg gloms on to Tommy's relentless pursuit of an acting career despite not having any talent, and the two agree to make a movie. 

Ultimately, the film is about the friendship between a relatively normal guy trying to make it in the acting world (Greg), and a bizarre, emotionally needy, possibly borderline possessive friend (Tommy). There is real emotional content in the movie--about friendships, about how hard it is to make it as an artist, about what happens when your friends pass you by--but really, it also explains how this incredibly weird movie got made and it's just so funny. It's probably funny even if you haven't seen The Room, but my theater in particular (this was a limited release screening in DC) was filled with people who clearly had seen it and could quote from it. 

The film has tons of throwbacks (stay for the clips at the end!) and a surprising number of celebrity cameos. James Franco is amazing and needs to win all kinds of awards. He embodies this person in total--the weird unplaceable accent, mannerisms, even physically (I can't tell if Franco was squinting one eye for the entire movie, or if maybe they injected him with something, but in either case, damn.). After a rough weekend, this movie was just pure joy.