Lover From the Black Lagoon

Movies: The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is clearly inspired by 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon. del Toro, a director known for making films that walk the line between the real and the fantastic, also appears to borrow from the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet's films--in particular The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen--are both whimsical and a little scary and bizarre. They're like the original Grimm's fairytales, filled with evil men and strange creatures, violence and playfulness.

Despite pulling from the work of other directors, classic horror and science-fiction, and millennia of fables and fairytales, The Shape of Water is anything but derivative. del Toro has done something remarkable with this film: he's taken half a dozen different genres--suspense, romance, drama, fantasy, history, and horror (with a sprinkling of comedy)--and stitched them together in such a way where no one genre dominates another. And at the heart of this tale is a desire common to all humans (and, apparently, non-humans as well): the longing for connection and the desire to be seen and accepted as we are.

del Toro also accomplishes a difficult feat: he makes us believe that a woman might actually want to fuck an amphibious half-man, half-creature. And fuck they do. Hoo boy.

Taking place in 1960, The Shape of Water follows Elisa Esposito (in a career-best performance by Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman who works the graveyard shift at a government research facility in Baltimore. Elisa's only friends are her closeted gay neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and fellow cleaning lady Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa seems to lead a quiet, orderly, and lonely life.

Then one day, the research facility becomes home to an "asset"--a sea creature that was captured and brought to Baltimore by Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, malevolent and somewhat sexy as he always is). Strickland and his superior, General Hoyt, see this creature as a potential weapon in the Cold War and want to vivisect it to see how it works. Scientist Bob Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlberg) sees the creature as "beautiful" and wants to treat it with gentleness and certainly not kill it. Meanwhile, Elisa sneaks into the lab where the creature is kept chained up and feeds it hardboiled eggs and teaches it sign language. She discovers that the creature can communicate and feel emotions. When she overhears the plans to vivisect her new friend, she decides to bust the creature out of the facility and set it free.

There's also a Russian double-agent subplot as well as a subplot involving Giles in his attempts to express his desire for other men. del Toro manages to make these plot lines vital to the story and its themes of what it means to be an outsider and to be misunderstood. In fact, every character in The Shape of Water is misunderstood in some way, and forced into submission by other people, by society, or by circumstances. Of course, Elisa is misunderstood in a literal sense by being mute. Giles is a gay man in the 1960s, Zelda is a black woman, and the creature is, well, not human. But even Richard Strickland--the "bad guy" of the film--is misunderstood and bullied by his superiors. He reacts by acting aggressively towards those weaker than himself, but his pain is understandable even if his actions are deplorable. Like most great films, The Shape of Water has no one-dimensional characters and no simple answers.

Director of Photography Dan Lauston films The Shape of Water with a wonderful palette of shades of green, from the bright green candy that Strickland compulsively consumes to the grayish-blue green of the water where the creature lives. Green is a symbol of renewal and nature. Likewise, eggs show up in the movie a lot: Elisa hard boils them everyday before she heads to work, and her first connection with the creature is when she offers it an egg to eat. Like the color green, eggs are also symbols of rebirth and fertility, and The Shape of Water--especially the ending--is the story of Elisa's rebirth in the face of finding a connection and love where she leasts expects it.

If you think that a movie about a human woman falling in love with a non-human creature is silly or stupid, of course I only have to point to King Kong, or Beauty and the Beast, or every vampire and werewolf story ever told. Stories like these are about being loved for who we are, no matter our outside packaging. Stories about monsters are also about being hated or feared by society and a demand for conformity.

The Shape of Water takes place during a precarious time in United States history. The early 1960s was a time of manners and hierarchies, but it was also right before the world blew wide open with JFK's assassination, the Civil Rights Act, and Woodstock. The Shape of Water reveals that during this time in the United States, beautiful strangeness--or maybe a more accurate term would be "queerness"--existed right there under everyone's nose. That queerness, like the creature in the movie, lurked below the surface, just waiting for its moment to emerge from the depths and demand to be seen in all its glory.

Grade: B+

A Portrait of Grief 14 Feet High

Movies: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It's difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Like his 2008 film In Bruges, it's a mix of intense drama and pitch-black comedy sprinkled with a light dusting of absurdity. The concoction, not unlike when I first had a salted caramel flavored beer, is both strange and addictive: I'm not sure what I feel about this, but I....I kinda like it!

Three Billboards is the story of a mother's grief. Frances McDormand, who is excellent in every movie she's been in, including this one, plays Mildred Hayes, a middle-aged woman whose daughter was raped, killed, and burned into unrecognizable ash just outside the town limits of Ebbing. After 7 months, it seems like the local police force is too busy sitting on their thumbs to make any arrests. So Mildred rents out three dilapidated billboards along the road where her daughter was murdered to send a message to the police and specifically the chief. The messages read:

RAPED WHILE DYING

AND STILL NO ARRESTS?

HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? 


(To give you a sense of the kind of humor this movie trades in, when Mildred and her 17 year old son, Robbie [played by the wonderful Lucas Hedges], drive down this road, Robbie remarks "Oh, great, the 'Raped while dying' route")

Chief Willoughby is played--also wonderfully (every single actor in this film brings their A-game)--by Woody Harrelson. Willoughby is a good man and beloved by the people of Ebbing, so Mildred gets tons of shit by putting up these billboards. Even the town priest pays her a visit to implore her to take them down. But Mildred rightly points out that she's gotten more phone calls, house calls, and attention in the days following the erection of the billboards than in the 7 months following her daughter's brutal murder.

Willoughby treats Mildred with respect compared to other members of the community, including her ex-husband Charlie (played--you guessed it--wonderfully by John Hawkes) and the hotheaded, slow-witted police officer Dixon, played MORE THAN WONDERFULLY by Sam Rockwell in one of the best performances of his career--which has been filled with amazing performances.

Officer Dixon is probably the most complicated character in the film. He's angry and abusive, but he longs for approval. He's the epitome of a blatantly racist small-town cop. He's everything wrong with police today distilled into one character: not that smart, thinks he's all that, lazy as hell--except when beating the shit out of innocent people. He's irredeemable. Or so you think....Three Billboards is full of surprises, both good and bad.

I won't get into the details of the plot since that would spoil the movie, but I'll distill my overall impressions into a couple sentences and you can decide if this is a movie you want to see:

1) As I said, the acting in Three Billboards is, to a performance, excellent, A+, perfecto. You will not be disappointed by a single performance in this film. Somehow, McDonagh gathered Hollywood's best and brightest and wrung out every drop of acting they had to give.

2) If you like movies where justice is served and peace and order restored in a way we rarely see in real life, then this is not the movie for you. The plot arc is really more of a rollercoaster and there's no neat little bow tying things up and the end.

3) There is, however, redemption. Three Billboards might be the most "Christian" movie that's not explicitly about religion I've seen this year. In particular, the character arcs that Mildred and Dixon travel throughout the film are like something out of the Bible (or a Greek tragedy, as my mother, who saw the movie with me, said). Three Billboards is about a lot of things, but it's surprisingly not about justice. It's about something deeper than justice--it's about forgiveness, redemption, hope, and love. And if all that sounds cheesy, I can assure you that the path this film takes towards these fuzzy feelings is the opposite of cheesy. It's goddamn brutal. It's a trial by fire, literally. To steal the title of a Rebecca Solnit book, it's about "Hope in the dark".

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will enrage you. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. You might hate it or you might love it. But I can promise you one thing: It won't bore you.

Grade: A-

Oh Hai Movie

Movies: The Disaster Artist

"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

The above is a quote from the wonderful Tim Burton film Ed Wood in which famed terrible director Ed Wood (Johnny Depp, before he was the caricature he is today) meets with Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio). Wood is about to give up his directing dreams when Welles tells him to believe in himself. The joke is, of course, that Wood is essentially the polar opposite of Welles in terms of talent. But the quote has always stuck with me as a pure-hearted bon mot in a cynical world. Even if you're a no-talent hack, you still have a right to your dreams.

In order to appreciate James Franco's film The Disaster Artist, you first need to know what The Room is. Here is the Wikipedia entry for it and here are some options for where to watch The Room, or at least clips of it.

But to give you the elevator pitch, The Room is a 2003 film written, directed, produced, and starring a man name Tommy Wiseau. The Room has achieved cult status for how absolutely awful it is on every count: the actors are wooden, the script is terrible, and the plot is thin. But the cult behind the room would be nothing without the mystery of Wiseau--a man with a seemingly bottomless bank account, a bizarre accent, and dreams that stretch far beyond his talent.

Unlike Ed Wood, who was an all-American man (who, incidentally, enjoyed wearing women's clothing) with optimism and goofy charm, Wiseau is pretty much an asshole by all accounts. He bullied nearly everyone on the set of The Room, refusing to buy water for the cast and crew even at the peak of summer and calling the moles on his lead actress's body "disgusting". These revelations came to light in a memoir co-written by Greg Sestero, Wiseau's friend and second lead actor in The Room. That memoir is titled The Disaster Artist and it is the basis for this film, directed and starring James Franco. A rather strange actor/director/writer/producer in his own right, Franco is pretty much the perfect auteur to take on this project.

Franco plays Wiseau to near perfection, nailing the vaguely Eastern European accent and strange mannerisms impeccably. Franco's younger brother, Dave, plays Greg Sestero, which is arguably a more difficult role since it's far more subtle than mimicking Wiseau.

The Disaster Artist opens in 1998 San Francisco where Wiseau and Sestero meet in an acting class. Where Sestero is conventionally good-looking but timid onstage, Wiseau looks, acts, and dresses bizarrely but is absolutely fearless in the class. Well, that or crazy. But we all know that there is a thin line between madness and genius.

Sestero and Wiseau become friends and eventually Wiseau convinces Sestero to move with him to Los Angeles and make a real effort to pursue acting. Sestero agrees and they move to an apartment Wiseau already owns. The fact that this man owns apartments in both San Francisco and LA is mind-boggling to Sestero--how does he have all this money? To make matters more mysterious, Wiseau claims to be from Louisiana although he clearly has an Eastern European accent. And he refuses to tell Sestero how old he is. When pushed, he claims to be Sestero's age: early 20s. The man is OBVIOUSLY at least two decades older, but won't cop to it. What's up with this guy?

After multiple rejections, Wiseau decides to make his own movie and give himself the starring role and Sestero the second lead. The movie, titled The Room, is about Johnny, an "all-American hero" in Wiseau's words, who is betrayed by his girlfriend who sleeps with his best friend, Mark (played by Sestero). Through sheer force of will and with a little help from the apparently millions of dollars Wiseau inexplicably has in his bank account, he gets the film made and released.

Franco cast dozens of actors and comedians for The Disaster Artist. No role is too small. Ari Graynor plays Juliette Danielle, who plays "Lisa" in The Room, the unfortunate young woman who had to endure a sex scene with Tommy Wiseau. Seth Rogen plays Sandy Schklair, the script supervisor. Additionally, for you Room-heads:

Josh Hutcherson plays Philip Haldiman, aka "Denny"
Nathan Fielder plays Kyle Vogt, aka "Peter"
Jackie Weaver plays Carolyn Minnott, aka "Claudette" (the one who "definitely has breast cancer")
Zac Efron plays Dan Janjigian, aka "Chris-R"

Oh, and all three hosts of the podcast How Did This Get Made?--Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are in the movie.

Oh, and why not throw Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Hannibal Buress, Allison Brie, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally, Charlene Yi, and fuckin' Bob Odenkirk in there as well? Seriously, all of Hollywood got a paycheck from this movie. Hell, I visited LA for a couple days this year, so I expect my royalties check to come in the mail any day now.

Seeing huge stars in tiny roles playing terrible actors working with a terrible script is part of the fun of The Disaster Artist. The film is less of a compelling and accurate tribute to Wiseau (they definitely downplayed his weirdness and on-set abuse, most likely to have his permission to the rights to his story) and more of a meta-comedy about fame and movie-making. Some folks have suggested that The Disaster Artist is "Oscar worthy" and I personally do not agree. It's a funny, good movie that speaks almost exclusively to fans of The Room (I can't imagine what people who have not seen The Room and walk into this movie blind will make of it) but it's not a masterpiece. In my opinion.

Even though it falls back on buddy-comedy tropes (Sestero and Wiseau have a massive falling out, but make up in the end), The Disaster Artist is great fun and pretty darn hilarious. I definitely recommend it to fans of The Room. For people who haven't seen The Room, I actually *do not* recommend seeing The Disaster Artist...yet.

First: Watch The Room "dry" just to familiarize yourself with the movie and how uniquely awful it is.

Then: See The Room during a midnight screening that includes audience participation. This is The Room in its truest and ideal habitat.

Bonus:  Read The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell to understand the full story and insider's perspective behind the making of The Room

And then you're allowed to watch The Disaster Artist. If you see The Disaster Artist without fully appreciating the story behind it, you might find yourself saying

Grade: B+

No-Tell Motel

Movies: The Florida Project, Voyeur

Two movies that revolve around cheap motels, one very good and one....problematic, to say the least.

The Florida Project

Directed by Sean Baker, whose 2015 film Tangerine made waves on the indie circuit, The Florida Project is a small movie with a big and complicated heart. The film focuses on 6-year-old Moonee, a sassy scamp of a girl who lives in a motel with her mother, Halley, and spends her days causing mischief with her friends Jancey and Scooty. While the film is ostensibly about the innocence of childhood, Baker almost immediately pulls back the curtain to reveal how fucked up and precarious Moonee's world actually is. Her mom is little more than a child herself--probably in her early 20s, no job, incredibly bad attitude toward those who only try to help her. In short, she's a terrible mother. While not abusive, per se, Halley's choices impact Moonee's life in ways neither Moonee nor Halley fully comprehend. If The Florida Project isn't excellent marketing for birth control and the morning-after pill, I don't know what is.

The motel where they live is owned by Bobby, who is played with deep wells of compassion by Willem Dafoe, the biggest star of the movie. Technically, Halley and the other women (all with small children) who live there are not legally allowed to take up permanent residence, but Bobby makes exceptions for them all despite the fact that Halley yells at him and causes him all sorts of trouble. Bobby acts as a de facto father figure to Moonee, Scooty, and Jancey who spend their days running around unsupervised (the film takes place over the summer, so they're not in school). I don't even have kids, yet I was cringing to see these little ones running along busy streets and exploring abandoned houses filled with debris.

But Baker didn't make this movie to shit on Halley and the other residents living hand-to-mouth. He shows a side of poverty most people (especially people who go see artsy movies like The Florida Project) never get to see. Social conservatives will shit themselves from scene one, in which children have a bit of fun spitting on parked cars and calling the adult woman who chastises them a "bitch". Is there something that's the opposite of a wet dream? Because this movie is whatever that is to conservatives who are anti-welfare, anti-sex work, and anti-single mothers. It hits on nearly every stereotype of the poor that conservatives believe: that they're entitled, lazy, and immoral. BUT, by showing this hard knock life through the eyes of children, Baker humanizes both the children and the adults and shows how difficult it is to break the cycle of poverty. He also shows how even a "bad mother" can have her moments of deep love and caring: when Halley takes Moonee and Jancey to see fireworks for Jancey's birthday and presents her with a Little Debbie's cupcake with a candle stuck into it to serve as a birthday cake. Ill-equipped moms have hearts too.

The Florida Project's saving grace is its humor and its honesty. The movie is actually hilarious, mostly due to Moonee and her friends' antics. And when I say it's an honest, I mean that Baker doesn't pull any punches: he does not romanticize poverty nor does he portray poverty as a living hell. He doesn't put the poor on a pedestal. There are no noble Bob Cratchits in this movie.

At the end of the day, The Florida Project is just a slice of life...a kind of life that many, many people live filled with struggles, hustling, and trying to take your pleasure where you can find it. Baker honors that and asks us not to close our eyes and shut our ears to the stories of people who live a harder life than we live.

Grade: A-

***

Voyeur

Released on Netflix, Voyeur is a documentary about a man, one Gerald Foos, who bought a Colorado motel with the sole purpose of spying on people who stayed there. He created little vents in the ceiling of each of the rooms so that he could spy, unseen and unheard by the residents as they watched TV, argued, and had sex. Foos did this for years without ever being caught until he sold the motel.

This documentary shows Foos' relationship with iconic journalist Gay Talese, who wrote a story about Foos titled "The Voyeur's Motel" for The New Yorker in 2016 and recently released a book about the story of the man who peeped on people for years.

Supposedly, the twist is that Foos claims to have witnessed a murder in the motel--a murder that he inadvertently played a role in. He spied a drug dealer hide his stash in a vent in one of the rooms and then he--Foos--went in and took the drugs. Later, he watched through the vent in the ceiling as the dealer discovered the drugs were missing, blamed his girlfriend, and then strangled her. Foos didn't stop him or call the police. By all accounts, we should be able to add "accessory to murder" on top of Foos' peeping Tom charges...

Only Foos has never been charged or faced any consequences for his actions. To me, this is the real twist of the story and the one that makes me wonder if the filmmakers were ethically wrong to make this film and Netflix ethically wrong to release it.

While Voyeur certainly doesn't celebrate Foos, it doesn't really do enough to make it clear that what he did was SUPER WRONG. I mean, the guy built a literal "observation platform" to watch people fucking in his own goddamned motel! He supposedly claims he saw a murder (the documentary suggests that Foos made this story up) and didn't do anything to help. He betrayed the implicit trust in the patrons of his motel.

Yet Voyeur is honestly more interested in Gay Talese than anything else. While the film is about Foos, it spends a lot of time explaining who Talese is and his relationship with Foos that dates back to the 80s, when Foos wrote a letter to Talese explaining to him that he had bought a motel for the express purpose of voyeurism and that he kept a log of everything he observed. Then, Talese came out to visit Foos at the motel and Foos took Talese up the observation platform and they spied on a couple having sex. Yes, not only did Talese know Foos was actively committing something that, if not illegal, was highly unethical, he participated!!

You guys, I'm no saint. If I lived in a high-rise apartment building in a big city you better believe I'd have a pair of binoculars by the window. Voyeurism is fascinating and I think all of us have curiosity about what people do and say behind closed doors. But buying a motel and remodeling it so that you can spy on your customers every night for decades is wrong. The people being spied on did not consent to it--and that's exactly what Foos liked about it--that they couldn't see him, but he could see them. And Voyeur is not a clever enough, ethical enough, or ambitious enough film to both tell Foos' story and make it crystal clear that the man is a fucking criminal.

If I sound a little hesitant to fully condemn it, I guess I am because I don't know all the details about the legality of peeping (I think the fact that the statue of limitations was up allowed Foos to not be charged for crimes he committed years before). But Voyeur left a bad taste in my mouth and I really think it should not have been filmed or released--it's giving a man who took advantage of others a chance to speak for himself when all those people whose privacy he invaded don't have the opportunity to tell *their* story or get justice. I can't recommend the movie at all, and therefore I'm not going to give it a grade.

Grade: n/a 

Lady Be Good

Movies: Lady Bird

Directed by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird takes inspiration from the best coming-of-age films, such as Rushmore, Election, Donnie Darko, and Ghost World and improves on them by defying cliches, being truthful to the female teenage experience, and--a rarity in the teen movie Canon--having a truly good heart.

Lady Bird is not only one of the best films of 2017, I'd call it one of the top coming-of-age films ever.

The story follows Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, played by Saoirse Ronan--who dazzled me in last year's excellent Brooklyn with her talent. Lady Bird is a unique teenager in a way we see in real life but rarely in film--she is a mess of contradictions. Her SAT scores are high, but her grades suck because she's smart but not really into school. She wants to go to college in New York City even though she's never been there. She loves the color pink and wants her "first time" to be special and memorable, but she also brutally sasses the speaker her Catholic high school brings in to talk about the evils of abortion. Lady Bird loves her family deeply and also takes them for granted, putting her own needs above the realities of her parents' financial struggles.

In short, she's a teenager. A beautiful, gloriously full of herself teenager.

The strength of the movie Lady Bird lies in its honesty. Not even "brutal honesty", which I find to usually be just as much of a lie as naiveté, but a simple, realistic look at the warring emotions and big dreams of 18-year-olds everywhere.

The film takes place in 2002 in Sacramento. A very specific time and place. The year resonated with me personally since I myself was 16-17 in 2002. Lady Bird and her best friend Julie swoon over the song "Crash Into Me" by Dave Matthews Band--a song that, in fact, was MY favorite song in 2002 and remains one of my favorites despite everyone loving to shit on DMB.

It's a really sensual, good song. It's about sex, ya know, with references to bondage ("Tied up and twisted/the way I like to be/for you, for me") and voyeurism ("Hike up your skirt a little more") that, uh, "spoke" to my hormone-addled 16-year-old brain.

ANYHOO. The point is, the movie really captures 2002 with a bullseye accuracy you don't often see in movies. The film it reminded me the most of was Wes Anderson's glorious Rushmore, only Lady Bird is firmly grounded in reality instead of Anderson's beautiful fantasy world of perfect symmetry and rich, velvety color.

Lady Bird's mother is played by Laurie Metcalfe, an amazing actress who does just a pitch-perfect job here as an extremely loving mom who can be both quite liberal (when Lady Bird asks "Mom...when is a normal time...to have sex?" She replies, "In college is good...and use protection like we talked about") and incredibly critical and overbearing. In one of the final scenes in the film, Metcalfe gives one of the best, most honest scenes of a mom's bittersweet sadness at realizing her baby is growing up that I have ever seen on film.

In addition to Metcalfe, the entire supporting cast, from Lois Smith playing Sister Sarah Joan, a nun at the school with a wonderful earnestness and sense of humor, to Lucas Hedges playing Danny, Lady Bird's kinda-sorta boyfriend, is great. The only teeny tiny flaw was the football coach-turned theatre director who came off as a one-joke gimmick (he treats directing Shakespeare like he's prepping a playbook for the big game! Hilarious! And totally unrealistic).

I feel like I could go through the movie scene by scene and tell you how great it is, but that would rob you of the chance to see for yourself. In fact, I've already said too much! Go see Lady Bird. It's one of the funniest, good-hearted but not sentimental portrayals of teen girlhood I've seen. And it's a bright spot in a year where we desperately need good feelings.

Grade: A+

Deer In The Headlights

Movies: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the worst movie I've seen in the theatre in 2017. It has some interesting ideas, some ok acting, and some chilling moments, but in general it is painful to watch and--an even bigger sin--boring.

Ironically, Greek director Lanthimos' The Lobster was my favorite movie of 2016. I describe Lanthimos as Wes Anderson's evil twin: his movies have the awkward, drily humorous dialogue and stylized cinematography of a Wes Anderson movie but with more violence and darkness. The Lobster, as well as Lanthimos' first film, Dogtooth, take place in strange and interesting alternative realities. The Killing of a Sacred Deer takes all of it too far, plunging into absurdity and nihilism.

Killing follows the Murphy family: Colin Farrell is Steven Murphy, a cardiac surgeon with a history of alcoholism. Nicole Kidman is his wife, Anna, an ophthalmologist. Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic play Kim and Bob Murphy, Steven's kids. But Steven has another "son" of a sort: Martin, played by Barry Keoghan (who was excellent in a supporting role in Dunkirk earlier this year and is pretty much the only interesting actor in Killing).

Martin is an awkward young man whose father is dead. It's revealed that Martin's father died on the operating table while Steven was performing heart surgery on him. At first, the viewer might think that Steven is trying to make amends and do right by the young man by acting as a father figure--having lunch with Martin and giving him nice gifts. But soon enough, we realize that darker forces are at play.

Stop reading if you don't want to see spoilers!

Spoilers below!!

One morning, Bob (Steven's young son) wakes up and can't move his legs. There is nothing physically wrong with him, and yet he is paralyzed from the waist down. Steven thinks his son is faking. But then he meets with Martin who tells him bluntly and completely without passion or anger, that Steven must choose a family member to kill to make him and Martin "even". If he doesn't, all of his family members will, one by one, suffer paralysis, then refusal to eat, and finally bleeding from the eyes followed quickly by death.

There is no scientific or logical explanation for how Martin is meting out this justice. The film's title implies a sort of Native American spirituality--a return to balance after a wrongful death (and we learn that in the case of Martin's father, it was wrongful--Steven drank alcohol before performing the surgery, possibly affecting the outcome). Is Martin a god? A witch? It is never explained, much like how the procedure to transform humans into other animals is never explained in The Lobster.

And that's fine. I have no trouble suspending disbelief. What I didn't like about the film was how relentlessly awkward and weird it was--and I love weird movies! But it was almost like Lanthimos was trolling the audience. I felt like I did when I saw Swiss Army Man--like, "is this a joke?" Creativity and strangeness can be valuable assets to a movie, but only when used intelligently to build a world or to make an important point. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is beyond pointless. I would say that it was "emotional torture porn" except that the only "emotion" I felt was, "why is this movie two fucking hours long? What a goddamn waste of time. When am I going to be able to get dinner?"

My primary emotion while watching this movie was eye-rolling contempt. Honestly, if the movie had been 30 minutes shorter and had more natural dialogue and realistic acting, it could have been a good. That's the most annoying thing--that Lanthimos took an interesting idea and blew it. Instead, we get two solid hours of Colin Farrell playing a man who displays no realistic emotions at the possibility of his wife and kids dying and then fucks around wasting time until the absurd climax that I *think* is supposed to be darkly funny, but was just groan-inducing.

The only good thing I can say about The Killing of a Sacred Deer is that it had potential. Squandered potential, but potential nonetheless. Because Lanthimos has directed some truly excellent films, I will likely keep my eyes open for his next movie, which I hope is better than this one, which was a waste of time and money for both the filmmakers and the audience.

Grade: C-

Maximum Spoop

Movies and TV: Gerald's Game, A Dark Song, Lore, Mindhunter, Raw

Hello boils and ghouls, lady-ghosts and gentle-wolfmen. In honor of Halloween, I bring you: A Bunch of Movies and TV I Have Watched Recently. All of them either spoopy or suspenseful. And in addition to giving them all a grade, I will also rank their level of spoopiness from one (1) skull (not spoopy at all) to four (4) skulls (maximum spoop). Please enjoy!

Gerald's Game

After the disappointing remake of IT, I am happy to report that Gerald's Game, another adaptation of a Stephen King novel, is legit scary on multiple levels. King's novel was about a middle-aged married couple, Jessie and Gerald, who, in an attempt to spice up their love life, retreat to a secluded vacation home for a weekend of sex and overpriced wagyu beef steaks. 

After popping a little blue pill, Gerald (played with white-collar menace by Bruce Greenwood) handcuffs Jessie (a superb Carla Gugino) to the bed with real, police-issue handcuffs (no trick locks here). But when his attempt at kink gets overly aggressive, the two begin arguing and Gerald has a heart attack, collapsing on the floor. That's where the real fun begins.

King is a master at the horror of confinement. Think about it: Cujo is about a mom and son trapped in a car by a rabid dog; Misery is about a writer kept under lock and key by his biggest (and most insane) fan; The Shining is about a man going stir crazy in a secluded and snowed-in hotel. Well, Gerald's Game takes it to a whole new level where survival means being able to reach a glass of water on a nearby shelf in order to stay alive another day.

But beyond the "handcuffed to a bed and no one can hear you scream" aspect of the film, the story has another level: Jessie's repressed memories of being molested by her father at a pivotal moment in her preteen years--an incident that set the stage for her deferment and submission to aggressive men in adulthood (e.g. Gerald). The film handles Jessie's flashbacks to the incident in a minimally exploitative (yet still devastating) way. 

And there is yet another level of horror to the film. As night falls and Jessie's exhaustion and thirst get the best of her, she imagines a man in the shadows of her room...or is it just her imagination? You'll have to watch it to find out! 

Gerald's Game, while perhaps not destined to be a horror classic, is both a good movie and legitimately terrifying. I highly recommend it for horror and suspense fans.

Grade: B+

Spoop-o-meter: 3.5 out of 4 skulls

***

A Dark Song

Anyone who's fooled around with a ouija board at a slumber party knows that you shouldn't fuck around with the occult. Even if you're a stone-cold atheist, attempts to contact the dead or tap into world's beyond this one feel....wrong. Like you're poking around someone else's bedroom at a party. You KNOW you shouldn't be doing it, as curious as you might be.

A Dark Song is a slow-burn horror movie about a woman, Sophia, who hires a man, Joseph, to help her participate in an elaborate dark magic ritual to contact her dead son. When I say the ritual is elaborate, I mean that Sophia and Joseph spend months secluded in a house, fasting intermittently and developing a sort of Stockholm Syndrome type relationship with one another. 

And then people...or things...start showing up inside the house...

The plot of A Dark Song isn't all that complicated and the horror lies in the tension that ramps up to an explosive and genuinely terrifying climax. If you're a fan of occult horror or haunted house movies, you will likely not be disappointed. Be prepared to be thoroughly spooked.

Grade: B+

Spoop-o-meter: 3.5 out of 4 skulls

***

Lore

Based on the popular podcast, this 6 episode series on Amazon Prime is more fascinating (and, at times, gut-wrenchingly sad) than spoopy. The episodes, narrated by Aaron Mahnke (who is not a good narrator. His voice is halting and irritating. Think: William Shatner + uptalking), focus on folklore from around the world and its ties to the modern world. For example, in what I think is the best episode, "Black Stockings", Manhke ties the 2009 murder of a woman, Caroline Coffey, by her husband, Blazej Kot, to the Irish lore of changelings: fairies that kidnap humans and leave an imposter behind that looks exactly like the human, but behaves strangely. Kot's defense team argued that he suffered from Capgras Delusion--a medical condition where a person is convinced that one or more of their loved ones have been replaced by imposters. 

In another episode, "Echoes", Manke traces our fear of insane or mentally unstable people to the rise of the frontal lobotomy in the mid-Twentieth Century and how it was used to control and sedate people who exhibited behavior and emotions that went against the norm (yes, he gives a shout out to the sad case of Rosemary Kennedy).

Lore is, in this way, less about the horror of the supernatural and more about the horror of what humans are capable of doing to other humans and how we justify our atrocious behavior. Lore is a good show for folks who want a little spoopiness this Halloween season without full-blown jump scares or gory torture porn. 

Grade: B

Spoop-o-meter: 2 out of 4 skulls

***

Mindhunter

A Netflix original series, Mindhunter follows two (fictional) criminal profilers, Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) as they interview (non-fictional) serial killers in the 1970s in an attempt to understand the psychology of men who commit horrendous crimes in order to possibly prevent future murders.

I loved this show, which is directed by David Fincher and strongly resembles his film Zodiac, which is one of my favorite movies. I binge-watched the 10 episode series in 3 days. Your mileage might vary though. There have been complaints that the show is too white and too male, although, I'd argue that since the show is about serial killers, who are overwhelmingly white and male and who overwhelmingly kill white women, this is less an artistic choice and more a reflection of reality.  

That said, the show goes places some viewers won't want to go. Although there is minimal visual violence, save a few gory photos, there is a lot of discussion--often in the killer's own words--about depraved acts, such as, I don't know, cutting off a victim's head and fucking the body. The show is rife with discussions that are both misogynistic and about misogyny. And the worst part, to me, is how obvious it all is. Guy wants to fuck a 12 year old girl. He does, she gets upset, so he bashes her head in. Another guy has a controlling and abusive mother who delights in humiliating him. So he "humiliates" other women by killing them and fucking their lifeless corpses. I watch this show and I'm like, 'well yeah, of course stuff like that happens'. It's not really a shock--and that's what's so shocking. While ostensibly about the psychology of sociopaths, Mindhunter's subtext is about gender and sexual politics. #notallmen are rapist and serial murders...but #yesallwomen have felt like prey at times in their lives.

Mindhunter, perhaps more than any other movie or show on this list, is not for the faint of heart. And not because of jump scares or violent images, but because of the show's direct stare into the Evil That Men Do and the clinical observation and categorization of that evil. Fans of true crime will eat this shit up, as I did. Others, stay away.

Grade: A-

Spoop-o-meter: 3 out of 4 skulls

***

Raw

Here's a movie for fans of gross-out horror and also feminist horror. This French language film directed by Julia Ducournau is about Justine (Garance Marillier, all gangly limbs and wide eyes), a freshman student at a veterinary college who is forced to eat raw meat as part of a hazing ritual (oh, those vet students and their hazing!) despite the fact that she's a vegetarian. Soon after, she's eating shawarma on the sly with her gay guy friend, Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) and eating raw chunks of salmon out of the fridge as a midnight snack.

But shawarma and salmon don't cut it for long. Justine is hungry for flesh--both in a sexual way and in a literal way. 

Like many coming-of-age horror films, sex and death and tied closely together in Raw. And as with many horror films with a young, female protagonist (think: Ginger Snaps, It Follows) these cravings push against the self-control young women are expected to exert with matters related to their bodies. Young women aren't supposed to eat too much or be too sexy. Justine, after tasting animal flesh, quickly bursts through those taboos--she gets drunk and kisses random girls and boys at a party; she seduces Adrien and can't stop biting him during sex; she gets in physical fights with her older sister who is also a student at the school. 

Raw is not for those with weak stomachs. Though certainly not the grossest horror film I've seen, it's got some pretty stomach-churning scenes (thanks to a great props department). It's not "scary" in the sense of jump scares, but it is, well, raw. For fans of female-driven horror, Raw is definitely worth the watch.

Grade:B+

Spoop-o-meter: 3 out of 4 skulls

Boob Tube 2: Electric Boobaloo

TV: Catastrophe, Master of None, Westworld, Big Little Lies


We're in the Golden Age of Television, people. Even I'm being pulled more toward TV than movies these days, and that's saying a lot.

***

Catastrophe

In a year of "meh" movies (with the exception of February's Get Out), the number one pop culture item I've felt the most connection to and have recommended to anyone who will listen is Catastrophe.

Created by and starring comedians Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, the (very short and binge-able) series starts when American businessman Rob meets Irish teacher Sharon in a bar in London. Although Rob doesn't drink due to his history of alcoholism (more on this later), he buys Sharon a drink and the two almost immediately return to his hotel to fuck. They proceed to spend the entire week Rob is in London banging each other like crazed weasels.

I'll start by saying that Catastrophe is INCREDIBLY REFRESHING in how it portrays middle-aged people and sex. This is an anti-slut shaming show in which people have sex because it's, I don't know, FUN and because they're grown-ass people.

But, even though they're 40ish, the crux of the show lies in a surprising twist: Sharon gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. After she tells Rob, he moves to England to try to actually make it work with her and have a role in his child's life.

I really don't know what it is about Catastrophe that makes it so damn good, but it's easily one of the best comedies...maybe one of the best shows, period, I've ever seen. It's hilarious, it's realistic, it's heartwarming in a non-sentimental way. It WILL make you cry, especially the end of the third season.

Delaney and Horgan are very charismatic leads--they are people you would definitely want to know in real life. Bucking the trend of proudly "unlikeable" characters in shows like Girls and It's Always Sunny, Catastrophe tries a different angle: characters who have flaws and are *at times* unlikeable, but are generally pretty cool people. You know, like how real life is?

Some of the topics covered in the three short seasons of the show (each season is 6 episodes long, and each ep is 25 minutes, meaning the entire run of the series is shorter than the Lord of the Rings trilogy) include: "geriatric" pregnancy, adultery, dealing with an aging parent, and alcoholism. Rob's story line where his drinking problem flares up after years of sobriety is based in part by Delaney's real life struggle with the disease, which lead him to nearly kill himself in a car accident in his 20s. It's a very potent storyline since it shows how helpless one can be--even a successful, strong, intelligent adult--when faced with an addiction.

And yet, these heavy storylines come with a large dose of humor and forgiveness. Catastrophe is one of the few shows I've seen that realistically deals with life issues without crushing or destroying the characters that face them.

I really can't recommend it enough. If you watch one show this year (and again, the time commitment is minimal), watch Catastrophe.

Grade: A+

PS: Did I mention that Carrie Fisher is in it? She plays Rob's mom. It's one of her final projects before she passed.

***

Master of None, season 2

After a nearly perfect first season, Aziz Ansari returns with a much more personal and uneven season 2 of his show about an Indian guy named Dev trying to make it in Hollywood and also deal with dating, parents, etc.

When I say that this season is "uneven", I mean that with the success of the first season, Ansari took artistic and personal liberties with this season--with results that will thrill some and annoy others (one friend of mine said she hated the first episode and couldn't watch any further).

Indeed, I found myself incredibly impressed with some aspects of the season and "meh" about others. The episode "Thanksgiving", co-written by Lena Waithe, who went on the win an Emmy for it and became the first black female to win an Emmy in the comedy writing category*, is possibly one of the best episodes of television I've seen this year. But the later episodes with Dev pining over an engaged female friend seem to verge on artistic masturbation, as if Ansari is trying to take a personal (and self-flagellating) story and layer artistry over it to make it seem more important than it actually is.

But despite the ups and downs, the second season of Master of None still has Ansari's signature goofy wit and keen eye for the everyday absurdities that Millennials in particular have to deal with--for example, being close to our parents (good!) while still feeling a bit under their thumb (bad!), as Ansari highlights in the funniest episode of the bunch, "Religion". Also: the hamster wheel of online dating that becomes so repetitive it's no longer fun.

I've never much cared for Ansari's stand-up comedy, but he seems to have found the right outlet for his unique voice with Master of None. If you liked season 1, you will probably also enjoy season 2.

Grade: A-

* Fucking get it, girl!

 


 












***

Westworld

After finding out that I have 4 months of free HBO on account of being "a loyal Verizon customer", I went straightaway to the first season of Westworld and I was not disappointed.

"Westworld" is a playground for rich people who want to do immoral things with no consequences. It is a park inspired by the American West: saloons, brothels, cowboys n' Indians, shoot-outs, and rugged adventure. There are a variety of "hosts" in the park--robots designed to look and act perfectly human--for the visitors ("guests") to interact with and, if we're being honest here, to fuck, rape, and kill without facing the consequences of hurting a "real" human.

But, as we all know, the singularity is imminent and some of the hosts begin acting up--likely because they were programmed to experience "reveries", that is, memories. This is NOT a good thing in a place like Westworld, where hosts' memories would be filled with the most horrific shit you can imagine.

We see two sides of the park: inside the park, we have Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood, insanely good in this plum role), a cattle rancher's daughter who feels compelled by a voice in her head telling her to "remember"; Teddy (James Mardsen), a cowboy with one motivation: protect Dolores; Maeve (Thandie Newton), a brothel Madam whose intelligence level allows her to begin "waking up" outside the park when she's in for repairs; and many others. Outside the park, we have a battle of wills between Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen), and park founder Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) over how much sentience the hosts should be allowed to possess and how to deal with hosts that go rogue and have the potential for violence.

Westworld is, of course, about what it means to be human. From the host side, the question lies in consciousness and will--the ability to develop and follow your own voice. From the guest side, the question lies in human capability for violence/apathy vs. kindness/caring. Over and over, guests tell other guests, "this park will show you who you truly are"--i.e. are you a person who, given a chance, could kill in cold blood? Rape a screaming woman? Kill a bad guy?

I once briefly dated this guy who was very much an insecure asshole (he's married now, to a very lucky girl 😎) who told me that all humans are motivated by one (or more) of these three things: money, sex, and power (he then asked me which one of those was most compelling to me and I answered "sex" without thinking twice, and he answered "power". We were not together much longer). The guests at the park already have the money...so what they seek inside the park: pleasures of the flesh, or the intoxication of total power over another being, tells us about their character. And it might tell YOU something about your character, based on which host or guest you find yourself rooting for and identifying with. I'm Team Bernard, for the record.

Grade: A-

PS: Westworld also stars that guy who Laura Linney did NOT fuck in Love Actually, like a damn fool.

 

 Laura Linney...your character in Love Actually, sucks, actually.










***

Big Little Lies

It starts as trash and blossoms into something more. Big Little Lies is an HBO miniseries based on the novel by Liane Moriarty and produced by one Reese Witherspoon who also stars as a very, very Reese Witherspoon-esque character.

The series stars out with a very trashy, pulpy flavor: someone is killed during a fundraising gala for a public school where the children of Monterey, CA's wealthiest attend. We don't know who got killed or who did it and the series backs up a few months to the first day of school, with high-strung, super-nosy Madeline Mackenzie (Witherspoon) dropping her first grader off at school and making the acquaintance of young, definitely NOT wealthy single mom Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley).

The series also introduces us to Madeline's best friend, Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman), a once high-powered lawyer and now a stay-at-home mother of twins and wife of the much younger Perry (Alexander Skarsgaard).

Secrets and drama abound. Did you guys know that being obscenely rich doesn't automatically make you happy in life?!

While I fully expected Big Little Lies to be a high-gloss soap opera (and, in many ways, it is), many of the problems the characters have are actually "real" problems, not just gossip and petty power plays (although there are those as well). The series tackles domestic violence, rape, bullying, divorce, and many more difficulties that people both rich and less rich face. The series also has a strong, grounded anchor in Shailene Woodley who is easily the most relateable character and serves as a counter-point to the other women who live in insanely gorgeous mansions while Woodley lives in a one bedroom apartment with her son.

Big Little Lies is, above all things, stupendously entertaining. I couldn't wait to get home from work and watch the next episode. And at 6 episodes total, it was all over much too quickly. The only thing I didn't like was the conclusion which I found a little too predictable and convenient. The show is certainly not perfect, but it does give you the best of both worlds in terms of juiciness and weight.

Grade: B+

Mother F*cker

Movies: mother!

Welp. This certainly was a movie.

Darren Aronofsky's film mother! lives up to the hype of being unlike any movie I've seen before. It is balls-to-the-wall bat-shit insane, especially in its third act. I feel really bad for the poor kids sitting next to me who probably thought they were buying tickets to a scary movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Well, J. Law is definitely (literally) front and center during the entire movie, and, yes, parts of it are very horrifying. But this movie is so beyond any given genre or narrative that I don't know what people who didn't obsessively research the film (like me) before seeing it thought. They probably hated it.

If you want to go into mother! knowing nothing, please do so--but be warned that this movie is NOT for the faint of heart. There are a couple scenes that made me wonder how the hell the film ended up with an R rating instead of unrated or NC-17.

I'm going to go into total and complete spoilers below, so if you want to see the movie knowing nothing, stop reading now.

***

Jennifer Lawrence is a woman married to a much older man (Javier Bardem). The characters have no names. Bardem is a successful poet struggling with writer's block and Lawrence is a homemaker restoring their grand house, which is located in the middle of nowhere, without even a road or driveway leading up to it. The house was once nearly destroyed in a fire, and Lawrence takes great pleasure in restoring it.

One night there is a knock at the door: it is a man (Ed Harris, great as always) who claims he thought the house was a bed and breakfast. Bardem welcomes him in and asks him to spend the night, much to the consternation of Lawrence, who is unsettled by the stranger's presence.

But things get really strange the next day when the man's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, excellent as a boozy cougar type) shows up at the door with luggage and everything. What the hell is going on? Did these two know about the house? And why are they so comfortable making themselves at home? The guests are verging on rude: Harris repeatedly smokes indoors, despite Lawrence's request he take it outside; Pfeiffer point blank asks Lawrence why she hasn't had children yet ("Is it him, or...?" she rudely inquires about the couple's fertility). Lawrence is incredibly annoyed...while Bardem seems 100% comfortable with the strange guests.

THEN their two sons show up. Played by real life brothers Brian and Domhnall Gleeson, the two young men *immediately* begin fighting until one of them kills the other.

Ok pause for a second. Did I mention that Ed Harris' character has a bruised/broken rib. And that he and Pfeiffer break into Bardem's study and touch/break an object they're specifically told not to touch? And they have two sons...one that kills the other in anger...

Are we getting the picture yet? Well, if you spent your Sundays the way I did growing up, you may have figured it out by now.

Anyway, after the son kills the other son, Bardem allows the man and wife to bring their friends over to help them grieve. Then a party breaks out. All of this to the absolute horror of Lawrence, who literally mopped up a dead guy's blood earlier.

She screams and begs these people to leave her home. They don't, and, in fact, one of them calls her an "arrogant cunt", and two others sit on her kitchen sink, which promptly breaks away from the wall and starts a flood of water.

A flood? hmmm...

Finally, they leave. Bardem and Lawrence fight, then fuck, and then magically she wakes up pregnant. And the couple have peace and quiet for about 9 months.

But THEN Bardem writes his next great poem. Word spreads quickly and on a special night where Lawrence cooks her husband a beautiful dinner for just the two of them, a bunch of Bardem's fans show up at the door.

And THIS is when shit gets wild. Over the next 30 minutes of the film, more and more people stream into the home as Lawrence begs them to leave and begins to experience contractions. The fans are literally worshipful of Bardem--begging him to touch them and creating icons with his picture. They begin taking parts of the home ("to prove we were here" one explains) and literally destroying the house. Total chaos reigns. The cops show up. They pepper spray people. Rioters show up. Terrorists show up and start killing people. The house looks like a war zone. And Lawrence goes into labor and finally gives birth in Bardem's study.

If you've been tracking the metaphor, you've realized at this point that mother! is a retelling of the creation story of Genesis, with Bardem as God and Lawrence as Mother Nature. She's not happy about her husband letting Mankind overrun her beautiful paradise. But it's only about to get worse. She's just given birth to God's Son.

What happens to God's Son in the Bible?

As Lawrence holds their newborn son in her arms, her husband tells her that the crowd outside wants to see him. She refuses. But when she falls asleep, she awakens to realize that he has taken the baby and is showing him off to the cheering masses. But then someone takes the baby and begins passing him around the crowd. Lawrence is apoplectic.

And then you hear a snap.

And then...take and eat, this is my body given to you.

YUP. A BABY GETS EATEN IN THIS MOVIE.

Which makes complete sense given the plot.

Lawrence, who has been screaming the whole movie, screams in agony to see her son's body being consumed by the crowd. When she tries to stop them, they beat the living fuck out of her, calling her a whore. Because that's what Mother Nature is to Mankind: a whore to beat, rape, and kill. Given to us by a loving God.

Meanwhile, her husband begs her: "we can't let his death mean nothing. We have to forgive them!"

Lawrence ain't having none of that. She crawls to the basement with a lighter. She spills oil from the furnace to the ground. She lights up. And the house explodes.

But Bardem isn't done using her yet. He is unharmed, while she is badly burned. The last thing he does is remove her heart from her dying body and molds it into a crystal (identical to one Adam and Eve...whoops, I mean Harris and Pfeiffer...break in his study, earlier). This crystal heals the home, helping it rise from the ashes...and then we see a new young woman--a different actress--wake up in their bed and call for Bardem. The cycle has begun again.

***

Ok, so that's the plot. I was really of two minds about this film: on the one hand, it's insanely pretentious and really on the nose. We get it, Aronofsky: you believe that people are shit who have destroyed the earth. You're right! We ARE shit. Human beings are shit. We rape, kill, plunder.

Aronofsky apparently also believes that God Himself is the Ultimate Shit because He created us and allowed us to murder and eat his son and beat up his wife--all for a little glory. I dunno, maybe Aronofsky is onto something. Based on some of the ways I've seen "Christians" behave toward their fellow man, it wouldn't surprise me to find out they're actually worshipping a big Asshole in the sky. There are a few Christians I know who are really good people, but there are a lot who would murder, rape, and torture their fellow man in a heartbeat if they believed their God told them to do it. Heck, some of them are already doing just that!

So, Aronofsky has a bone to pick with humans and with God, and pick it he does, in a pretentious and silly way in mother!

BUT. On the other hand. The sheer fucking audacity of this movie. The speed at which things escalate. It truly feels like you, the audience, are trapped inside a nightmare. Things don't make sense, time skips forward, the walls bleed.

This isn't unusual for an Aronofsky film. From Pi to Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan, his films include various dreamlike elements that verge on insanity. mother! just dials it up to eleven.

And, although the film really punches you in the face with its message, I have to admit I kind of loved the idea of taking the Bible and turning it into psychological horror from the perspective of Mother Nature. It's the ultimate taboo: it's one thing to say you don't believe in God and it's quite another to suggest that God is actually self-obsessed, sadistic, and dismissive of those who give Him everything. But, there's Biblical precedent for that point of view: just read the Old Testament to see God murdering every motherfucker in sight! He creates the world and Man, and then He's like "fuck this shit, these human are terrible!" and wipes us all out. Meanwhile, Mother Earth is trying to grow fruit and flowers and little fuzzy bunnies and Mankind is like...shitting all over it! If I was Her, I'd blow the world to hell too!

So, I really have to hand it to Aronofsky. He has directed a movie that whether you love it or hate it, you are GOING to feel *something* about it and you are going to talk about it. I've seen some news items that are calling mother! "the worst film of 2017", which is hilariously and provably wrong. The Emoji Movie is obviously the worst movie of 2017 because a film like that doesn't fucking try. mother! on the other hand, tries. It tries really, really hard to say something and be something and make you feel something. And I don't care what anyone says, that's the definition of art.

mother! may be pretentious trash. It may be a "feast of filth". It may be a wild scream into the void. But it most certainly is one thing: a work of art.

Grade: A-

Summer Movie Wrap-Up

Movies: IT, Logan Lucky, Dunkirk, Rough Night

Hello readers!

Once again, time has slipped me by and I am in catch up mode for my reviews. While most of these movies are worthy of an individual blog post, I think it'll be easier for me to just rip the band-aid off in one go. That way, I can make space in my reviewing schedule for the most wonderful time of the year: Oscar Season, which is rapidly approaching.

Here we go:

IT

I have not read the Stephen King novel IT, nor have I seen the 1990 mini-series with Tim Curry playing the iconic Pennywise the Dancing Clown. So I went into IT pretty blindly. I knew the basic plot, but I had nothing to compare it to.

I was surprised to find that IT wasn't scary to me at all.

What's interesting about the film--and I'm sure what King intended all along--is that the humans in the small town of Derry, Maine, where events take place, are scarier than the evil lurking in the sewers. We have a roving gang of bullies that see no limits to the violence and humiliations they commit upon their victims. We have distant, neglectful parents; or, conversely, parents that try to keep their children trapped under their wing instead of encouraging independence. There's a backstory of brutal, race-based violence. And most disturbing of all, a plot line of father-daughter sexual abuse.

The reason Derry is so fucked up can (possibly?) be blamed on what some consider a town curse. Over the decades, bad things have happened in Derry. Children go missing at a rate much higher than the national average. Something below the town feeds on fear, violence and pain.

When Billy's (Jaeden Lieberher) kid brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) goes missing, he bands together with his friends--they call themselves the Loser's Club--to find out what happened to Georgie. Each kid has a terrifying vision that plays on their individual fears, be they germs, blood, or--yes--clowns.

The Losers' journey takes them into the sewers of Derry and to the heart of fear, which they can only overcome by sticking together...and by looking Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard, excellent) in the face and telling him they're not afraid.

I have to conclude that while IT was solid, I wasn't super impressed with it. Something seemed "off" about it, and not in a good, creepy way. It was less scary and more campy than I thought it would be, and I wasn't prepared for that. But as a horror aficionado, it could be that I'm too jaded to plug into the dread that IT is supposed to make you feel. So, depending on how scared of clowns you are, or how sensitive to children in peril you are, your mileage may vary,

Grade: B-

***

Logan Lucky

Here's another film I wanted to like more than I did (you'll find this to be the case for almost all the movies I saw this summer).

A mere four years after Steven Soderbergh "retired", he has returned with a wacky, Southern-fried heist movie. Channing Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, a down-on-his-luck blue collar man who gets fired from his construction job due to an injured leg and whose trashy ex-wife (Katie Holmes in a thankless role) has custody of their crazy-adorable daughter.

Jimmy's brother, Clyde (Adam Driver, awesome as always, but with a...questionable...accent) lost his forearm in Iraq and now tends bar at a shitty dive off the freeway. The Logan family is said to have a curse, although their sister, Mellie (Riley Keough, in a colorless female role...thanks, Soderbergh, and fuck you too!) seems to have escaped it...so far.

 Jimmy gets a plan in his head to right the wrongs visited upon him and his family by robbing the Charlotte Motor Speedway, which has a series of pneumatic tubes to move money around. To do this, the Logan brothers have to bust a gifted safecracker, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, hilarious and playing against type), out of prison so he can help them. Thus begins a hilarious and complex heist, which includes getting Clyde *into* prison so he can get Joe out of it, plus asking Joe's redneck brothers for assistance in breaking into the Speedway and moving trashbags of cash out.

There's also a subplot involving Jimmy's daughter in a child beauty pageant. Call this movie Ocean's Eleven by way of O Brother Where Art Thou and Little Miss Sunshine.

This is a movie where the journey, not the destination, is the point. The film ends on a somewhat unexpected note that may leave you wondering what the point was. But it's not about how the film ends, or what the "moral" of the story was. It's about the fun you have in getting there. Or something.

Logan Lucky made me realize that while I recognize Steven Soderbergh's gifts as a director, he's really not a director I connect with. Other than Magic Mike (the first one), which is one of my favorite movies, I always feel a bit underwhelmed Soderbergh's films. Granted, I have yet to see Out of Sight and Traffic--which are considered to be among his best work. But the films I have seen have left me feeling like "is that all there is?" At least with Logan Lucky, there's plenty of laughs and entertainment on route to that ennui.

Grade: B-

***

Dunkirk

Surprise, surprise: another movie I felt "meh" about despite its pedigree! Sorry guys, I guess this blog entry is a bit of downer. Or maybe not...maybe it's a good counterpoint to the rapturous reviews Dunkirk and the above two films have received.

Directed by Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk is undoubtedly a very tense film. It's also a surprisingly short film, which I think serves it well since it's not really plot or character driven.

Dunkirk tells the story of the attempt to rescue thousands of Allied soldiers from the shores of Dunkirk, France after the Germans have them surrounded and begin bombing them from above. The film is broken into three chapters: "The Mole", which focuses on the attempts to evacuate soldiers from the beach; "The Sea", about a local man in Weymouth (right across the sea from Dunkirk) who takes his personal boat to try to rescue soldiers; and "The Air", about a couple fighter pilots trying to fight the Germans who are dropping bombs on the exposed soldiers on the beach.

One problem I personally had with Dunkirk is that I know so little about war. The types of guns, aircraft, boats, etc--it's really just not my bag. So a lot of what was going on didn't really click--especially during "The Air" portions of the film.

My favorite portions of the film were "The Sea" sequences, which were much more character driven. Additionally, the scenes on the beach were continuously tense, which was good because it helped me *feel* something in a movie that otherwise would have bored me to tears.

Dunkirk is star-studded and everyone involved gives undeniably top-notch performances. So I'm not sure why I didn't connect with the film. I feel like I have to give it two grades--an objective one that honors the artistry and talent that went into this film, and a subjective one about my personal feelings.

Objective grade: B
Subjective grade: B-

***

Rough Night

Ironically, the movie with the shittiest reviews is going to get the best rating because I fucking loved this movie. Now, let me give you some context: I watched Rough Night on an international flight during which I was completely exhausted and tipsy on free wine. So, that might have colored my opinion. But fuck all of that, this movie is hilarious.

Rough Night is a comedy about a bachelorette party go awry. We have our bride-to-be: uptight Jess, played with sleek Type-A-ness by Scarlet Johansson. We have her best friend Alice, a teacher by day, horny party slut by night (played with gusto by Jillian Bell). There's Frankie (Illana Glazer), a riot girl activist and Blair (Zoe Kravitz), who was Frankie's lover in college and now is a corporate mom going through a divorce. Finally, there's Pippa (Kate McKinnon), a flighty, wacky Australian that Jess met during her study abroad semester. All five ladies meet up at a fancy beach home to spend a weekend in Miami in celebration of Jess's upcoming nuptials to Peter (Paul Downs).

I'm not going to pull any punches: this film is, in many ways, deeply conventional. It does the whole "Sex and the City" thing by giving each character one overarching personality trait as a shortcut to telling them apart. It also has a lot of "female friend movie" tropes, like the best friend who is being pushed out by a newer, shinier model.

 But despite these conventions, Rough Night is funny and dirty enough for a rollicking good time. Some high points include when the ladies meet their neighbors, a pair of overly-friendly swingers (played with perfect naughtiness and sleaziness by Demi Moore and Ty Burrell) and a subplot involving groom-to-be Paul's bachelor party antics.

Rough Night isn't going to win any awards, but given how poorly it was reviewed when it came out in theatres earlier this summer, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Maybe exhaustion, three cups of airplane wine, and low expectations make for the greatest viewing experience of all.

Grade: B+