Yellowjackets
If you haven't heard of Showtime's news series, Yellowjackets, you must be living under a rock. This series has caused a feverish obsession in almost everyone who has watched it.
The show has two timelines: 1996 and present day. In 1996, a plane carrying a girl's soccer team who are traveling to a national tournament crashes in the Canadian wilderness. Many of the girls, as well as the assistant coach and the two sons of the head coach, survive. But their trials and tribulations are only beginning and there are horrors untold lurking in those woods...
...in the modern day timeline, four of the women who survived the harrowing 18 months of being lost in the wilderness try to live their lives. Those women are Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), an unsatisfied housewife and mom; Taissa (Tawny Cypress), a Black and openly gay woman running for senate; Natalie (Juliette Lewis), an addict and alcoholic fresh out of rehab and back to drinking and drugging; and Mistry (Christia Ricci), a nurse who works in an elder care facility and is probably a sociopath.
When the adult women receive postcards that have a symbol on them that is tied to their year and a half in the woods, they get scared. They did things to survive in the woods that they don't want people to know about. Is their past coming back to haunt them?
The series has been picked up for five seasons and, sure enough, by the end of season one we have some answers, but many, many more questions. Yellowjackets is just as good and just as disturbing as you've heard and it is definitely worth paying for or bumming a Showtime login from a friend to watch.
Grade: A
***
Nightmare Alley
Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley is a noir film about a man, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who takes a job as a carny at a traveling circus. The year is 1939, so many people are down on their luck and no one really cares about Stan's past. He makes friends with a fortune teller, Zeena (Toni Collette), and her alcoholic husband, Pete (David Strathairn), who teaches Stan the tricks of the "mind-reading" trade. He also falls in love with young beauty, Molly (Rooney Mara). He eventually convinces Molly to leave with him and start their own mind-reading act together.
They do, and are enormously successful. One night, they encounter a very skeptical woman, psychologist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who attempts to expose their act in the middle of it. Stan is able to save the situation, but he is very intrigued with Lilith and vice versa. Stan and Lilith meet and come up with a plan to swindle customers: being a psychologist to very wealthy clients, she knows the private details of their lives. Clients who wish to contact dead relatives come to Stan, who claims he can communicate with the dead. Using Lilith's knowledge, they can make big money preying on grieving rich people.
I bet you can guess where this is going to end up, given that the film is a hard boiled noir. Stan gets his comeuppance. The ending is actually REALLY great, even if you can see it coming a mile away. It's nasty and poetic. Cooper is excellent at playing a very attractive con man whose biggest sin is greed, and the entire cast, stacked wall-to-wall with talent (I haven't even mentioned that Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, and Mary Steenburgen are in it), truly embodies the noir genre down to their very bones.
This is a really fun movie and well worth the watch.
Grade: B+
***
Rose Plays Julie
This is an emotional drama from Ireland about a young woman, Rose (Ann Skelly), finding out about her birth origins. Adopted at birth, Rose contacts her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady). After a little light stalking on Rose's part, Ellen agrees to talk to her about her origins. It turns out that Ellen was raped and became pregnant as a result. She couldn't go through with an abortion, so she had Rose (named Julie at birth) and put her up for adoption.
Rose then becomes obsessed with finding her bio father, who turns out to be a very successful archeologist. Rose tracks down Peter (Aidan Gillen) and is disturbed to find out that he is "living life as though nothing happened". Simply by talking to Peter, she is able to get close to him because Peter is still very much a predator. But Rose, now donning a wig and going by "Julie", has some lethal plans for Peter.
One random thing: this whole movie I was like "who is the guy who plays Peter?? He looks SO familiar!" Turns out it's the same actor who played Littlefinger on Game of Thrones. He's perfect for the role of the attractive and covertly violent predator.
Rose Plays Julie is more heavy on the emotions than on the violence, though there is indeed violence. It's not an I Spit on Your Grave or Last House on the Left type rape-revenge movie. It's much more subtle and thoughtful and, at it's heart, is about a woman reconnecting with her mother. Only recommended for people who are ok with themes of rape and violence.
Grade: B
***
The Vigil
The Vigil is an interesting and unique horror film about a man, Yakov (Dave Davis), who lives in Brooklyn and has recently left the Orthodox Jewish community. He is in a very vulnerable position, both in terms of culture (he is learning how to live outside the very conservative and cloistered community he grew up in) and in terms of finances.
In order to make rent on time, he takes a gig as a shomer, which is a person who keeps vigil over a dead body before it is buried. A prominent man, Ruben Litvak, who was a Holocaust survivor, has died and his wife who is in the early stages of dementia, cannot keep vigil. So Yakov agrees to do it for a few hundred bucks.
Well, it turns out that some kind of demonic or ghostly entity attached itself to Ruben in life and is now haunting his home. This leads to some excellent scares throughout the movie as Yakov keeps seeing shadows and other creepy things throughout the house. It turns out that this entity is a Mazzik--a malevolent spirit that attaches itself to people who are vulnerable. It attached itself to Ruben when he was forced to kill a girl while in a concentration camp...and now that its host is dead, it's looking for another vulnerable person to haunt.
The Vigil mines Jewish culture and folklore for inspiration. I can't tell you if it's done in a way that honors Jewish people and culture rather than exploits them since I myself am not Jewish (and I don't think the director is Jewish either, but I'm not sure). But I can say that it's a very solid horror film. The imagery is very frightening without being gory or gross, and I liked how Yakov's unique situation (being in limbo between two cultures) added a lot of dimension to his character and his motivations.
Grade: B
***
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
This is a strange little comedy directed by Josh Greenbaum and written by (and starring) Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. It's about two Nebraskan women (the titular Barb [Mumulo] and Star [Wiig]) who, despite being middle-aged, have never left their tiny, midwestern town. So after hearing about a friend's trip to Vista Del Mar, Florida, they decide to book a trip themselves.
Now, that plot alone could carry the movie. But there is a very strange b-plot where a woman, Sharon Fisherman (also played by Wiig), develops a strain of venomous mosquitos that will kill anyone they bite. She plans to unleash the deadly insects onto the citizens of Vista Del Mar during an annual seafood festival. Why? Revenge, of course.
So, Sharon's henchman/boyfriend, Edgar (Jamie Dornan, a joy in this absurdist comedic role), is scoping out Vista Del Mar ahead of the mosquito doomsday, and ends up partying with (and sleeping with) both Barb and Star. Edgar's budding relationship with Star makes him reconsider being the evil henchman to a woman he loves who clearly doesn't love him back.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is no Bridesmaids, but it is pretty funny. Dornan, who usually plays psychopaths (The Fall) or kinky assholes (Fifty Shades of Grey) goes all in playing against type as a bad guy with a secret heart of gold. He even has his own musical number!
Barb and Star won't blow your socks off, but it's worth a watch.
Grade: B
***
Archive 81
Archive 81 had a lot of promise, but didn't quite pan out the way I hoped. Starring the magnetic Mamoudou Athie as Dan Turner, a film archivist who is hired to restore a collection of video tapes burned in a fire, Archive 81 has been compared to The Ring, Rosemary's Baby, and other horror films that delve into the occult and/or ghostly media.
The tapes that Dan restores were filmed by a young woman named Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi) in 1994. Melody is doing an oral history project on the Visser building. It turns out that this building eventually burned down, which is why the tapes have the fire damage. Dan is intimately familiar with such tragedies as his house burned down when he was a kid, killing his parents and sister. Dan is disturbed to see that his own father, a psychiatrist, pops up in the videos. And he wonders why the fuck he was chosen to restore these tapes.
Archive 81 is good, if convoluted. There are seances, cults, demons coming through TVs, paranoia, drugs, and more. I do think the series would have benefited from a tighter focus and a clearer story. It's hard to tell what the point was by the end of the 8 episodes (which definitely leave room open for another season). I wasn't really left with a message that I could digest. So I'll just say that Archive 81 is good, but not great.
Grade: B
***
Kingdom
Created by controversial (yet genius, in my opinion) filmmaker Lars von Trier, Kingdom is a Danish television series about a haunted hospital. It's usually talked about as if it's a horror series, but it's actually closer to a comedy/soap opera with a few light scares.
I only watched the first season, which is 4 episodes, but man, enough wacky shit happens in just over 4 hours that I felt pretty satisfied by the end of it. The show follows various doctors and patients of Kingdom Hospital. An elderly woman keeps checking herself into the hospital (always with questionable symptoms) so she can help other patients commune with the dead. A doctor is pregnant with a fetus that grows at about 10x the normal rate, making her look 30 weeks pregnant in only 11 weeks. An insanely arrogant visiting neurosurgeon from Sweden makes life hell for everyone, but is still inducted into an "Old Boys" type society of doctors despite being a shitty surgeon and a shittier human being. A resident steals a corpse's head. You know, #JustHauntedHospitalThings
And at the end of each episode, von Trier himself comes out in a tuxedo during the closing credits to muse over what we just watched and the nature of life and death. I absolutely lost it the first time this happened and it was never not hilarious. Lars von Trier is basically if an internet troll was also a very talented--if deeply troubled--filmmaker. Y'all don't have to love him, because I love him enough for all of us. Even when he's on his bullshit, which is all the time.
Grade: B+
***
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