Mother fucker

Suspiria (2018): It’s risky business remaking a sacred text, especially now as we are all acutely aware of the current deficiency of original content. To repurpose Daria Argento’s Suspiria is even more treacherous as it’s oft regarded the wicked mother of the great giallo tradition (I’m more of a Deep Red guy personally) regardless of what one might ultimately think of it. To interpret this vocation as an opportunity to deepen (Red Army Faction and Theresienstadtand transit camp), extend (50 minutes), stultify the color palette, and sooth the unsettling Goblin soundscape is bold to put it kindly. These are the things that seemingly made Suspiria what it was; the attributes that sparked Luca Guadagnino to chase his critical darling, Call Me By Your Name with a retelling of his lifelong object of horror affection. The divided reaction was foreseeable, and the squawking rarely wafted from cries of apostacy which sparked many telling and reactionary “I think the original is a mess” responses. Regardless, when a director decides to inherit the namesake, they must carry its weight like a specter. Luca’s movie shares much of Argentos threadbare plot though it spends much of its time with formerly ancillary characters. Suzy (Susie here) Bannon once again joins the Tanz Dance Academy (now Markos Dance Company) to dance amongst a coven of necromancers hoping to conjure/nurture an elder witch via female sacrifice. The aforementioned holocaust allusion is heaped on the back of Jozef Klemperer, a psychiatrist whose missing student belonged to said dance company. Her ramblings are prescribed as delusions which later sparks a cheap but opportune line of dialogue about believing women. Klemperer, whom it should be noted is one of three roles played by Tilda Swinton here looking like Grandpa Sawyer, spends most of his time investigating things that we have been explicitly shown, making the suspense kind of pointless. He is haunted by the loss of his wife which he is revealed to be complicit. She was a Jew who sought to flee the Third Reich but was convinced to stay by her husband until it was too late. Their tragic romance is cheaply exploited for an affixed emotional relevance, a register that Guadagnino juggles throughout. I don’t mean to sound sensitive, but this shoehorned addendum pissed me off. It ranks among the worst of sanctimonious virtue baiting I’ve seen in a filmscape full of moral opportunism. The real joy here is in the suffering, which at the very least is effectively unremitting when it wants to be. Suzy’s story involves a pilgrimage from a grim Mennonite existence to Berlin, illustrated via a child’s scribbling of hair on a map; a nice little bit of foretelling. We are privy to brief glimpses of her mother’s final moments, her crow rattle a looped sound bite during some of the most cliched nightmare imagery imaginable. Said matriarch brought to mind the zealots of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch; another modern horror hype vestige celebrated in some circles as a bold feminist text though accepting this would be accepting death and suffering well beyond the realm of what most of us consider actual merit. The plight from rural to urban is much like the journey from piety to paganism though rooting this freedom in witchcraft, especially the witchcraft rooted in hierarchy and allegiance punishable by death, is not much different from the legalist shackles of what most of us consider the Mennonite or Puritan faith. ----- I am aware that this is the point as one of the characters represents a new order which will usher in more a more merciful reign, which kinda takes the piss out of everything IMO ------ Susie moves up the ranks rather quickly, especially in the eyes of Madame Blanc (the only good Swinton performance here) who is one of the only witches who seems apprehensive about the impending Markos reign. Just as Germany was divided in 1977, so the coven can’t seem to agree on where they are going, though not a single witch is above murder or torture, especially to those who defy their power or go snooping around. One of the snoopers is Sara (Mia Goth), a character I wish the movie was built around, though this would mean doing away with the film’s final twist which would be just fine by me. Sara’s narrative takes over right before the final act (yes this movie is one of those with title card chapters) and ends cruelly and abruptly with nothing to show for it. The finale, which is inexplicably dominated by CG blood and a shitty slow-motion effect, attempts to shoehorn a little Argento in for good measure. It’s wackadoo to be sure, though after Panos Cosmatos’ sustained pandemonium in Mandy it feels like a cred-baiting afterthought. This felt especially true as Guadagnino couldn’t help himself but to return to real life atrocity and Thom York’s signature voice as penance. I guess the thing that has me perplexed is how the Argento movie had any impact on this guy? I understand that remakes come with the freedom of personal expression, but when these freedoms only wrought a new Radiohead record and some tethered social atrocities, I don’t think it’s worthy of the name Suspiria. I guess I’m just part of the old guard yelling “Markos!” awaiting my head to explode.  

october

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018): I’m not so sure that we’ve purged ourselves of the found-footage phenom, a subgenre that clings especially tight to the horror genre and has yielded enough fruit at the box office to stay steadily lucrative since the Paranormal franchise spun $15,000 into $193,000,000. Before it Ruggero Deodato turned a $1,900,000 profit in 1980 and 19 years later The Blair Witch Project wrangled $247,000,000 much to the delight of Artisan/Lion’s Gate. I’m not sure why it took seven years for producers and studios to start flooding the market but since 2006 the already thin formula didn’t take long to be in desperate need of a rebirth. Like it or not, Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended may have ushered a prospectively fleeting but fresh rendition of an old and tired tune. I’ll admit that I wasn’t fan my first go around. I saw it with four other people, not on the big screen and with plenty of chatter. On the small screen it’s hard to read some of the messenger text and easy to feel lost. The POV is limited to Blair’s laptop, bouncing around from one tab to the next in a frantic attempt to stop an apparition from murdering her and her friends on the anniversary of the ghost’s suicide (an act shown via Linkdin style at the movie’s opening). At some point we begin to realize that Blair would rather watch her friend’s die than face her own culpability, or worse, to accept the judgment of others within the realm that we all spend most of our waking lives in. It’s also quickly revealed that all five of Blair’s friends are backstabbing opportunists at best. Their will to survive only exasperates this tendency in very predictable ways. It has a nice nasty E.C. vibe to it. The nightmare here is Blair’s fear of past iniquities being made public, much like the embarrassing video that sparked the suicide. Gabriadze makes good use of our communal fear of not being able to close a tab, take down a post, or essentially delete the worst aspects of our being. It’s quite the indictment, though these cyber-jerks aren’t far from the fish in a barrel types you would see during the 80s slasher craze, thus it’s painless to accept their demise. These are some heartless kids, the kind whose rottenness thrives on anonymity. The second installment takes a different approach. First, the threats here are very real. Second, the kids are fairly good people thus witnessing them succumb to shit luck is ostensibly harder to watch. Director Stephen Susco adopts and respects Gabriadze’s technique and lands a better finale. Here the Skype heads wind up in the seemingly omniscient grasp of human traffickers, anonymous via the titular dark web where fellow creeps bid big bucks (or bit coins) on various reprehensible acts, mercifully (?) left to the imagination. I’ll say this, it left me feeling very icky and slightly unsafe by end, though the twist lightened the blow. It was too contrived to completely buy, whereas the River itself recalled all too real horrors lurking in the most loathsome depths of human nature. I also wasn’t invested in the love story and the subsequent calamity born from it. I would argue that the first film did a far better job juggling the tabs and sidebars. While that film introduced the dissemination of vile and cowardly anonymity, this film exists in a world where we witnessed a Twitter troll become president. The cup of shit spilleth over.    

Halloween (2018): I was just listening to two men discuss this modern iteration of Laurie Strode as a contradiction or as an ill-defined character. Their reasoning was bullshit, a yearning for absolution. In a nutshell, they were confused as to how a woman in Strode’s position could be both wounded and empowered as though people who survive such things can’t be both. They also spoke of Carpenter’s original, specifically Myers, as a manifestation of Strode’s fear of her own sexuality, aka trying to “elevate” a perfectly efficient horror film for their own conscience’s sake. That’s what I get for listening to a podcast, and I should consider myself lucky considering the fate that befalls two loathsome podcasters in David Gordon Green’s sequel, which is the first that John Carpenter himself has consented and is thus given the hallowed distinction of being cleared by the creator himself to ignore all nine “sequels” and Rob Zombie’s two remakes and continue the saga of Mike and Laurie. It is often conjectured that psychoanalysis does the masked maniac no favors. Leaving Michael’s homicidal impulse as blurred as possible makes for a scarier ride, so they say. Zombie ignored this advice, and some very good and astute critic’s have argued that his second whack at Carpenter’s boogeyman is a damn near masterpiece as a result. I’m not quite with that, though the death of Annie Bracket (along with its aftermath, namely the wonderful Brad Dourif’s reaction) and the nightmare intro are scenes I would gladly re-watch if there was some way to circumvent the dialogue and a lot of the stuff in between. Green’s film flirts with explanations but lands on nothing regarding Michael; he’s evil and addicted to killing people. Check out the scene where he walks from house to house with no drive other than to send random Haddonfield residents to Charon’s boat. The 78 Halloween shows the 1951 The Thing From Another World on a screen, and the director once commented memorably on the amount of times we see someone open a door. At once routine and seemingly futile, that decision leads to one of the best scares in horror movie history. I have vivid memories of seeing it as a child and jumping out of my seat. Patience can pay off, especially in the right hands. Halloween (78) was made before the days of cell phones and dwindling attention spans, thus remaining relatively prevalent despite taking its sweet time getting to the slashing. Green avoids such aspirations and it’s probably for the best. One of my favorite bits of dialogue (some written by Danny McBride) comes in a scene where Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson is walking down those familiar Haddonfield streets with a pair of friends, talking about the events that put their town on the map. The pothead boy makes a flippant but relevant observation about the deaths or lack thereof. In today’s headlines, 4 dead teenagers wouldn’t make a splash and thus its fair if not callous to wonder why anyone gives a shit. Within 30 minutes Green’s Michael has that matched, and very little is left for the imagination. I don’t say this disparagingly. Before this exchange, Allyson dispells the rumor of Laurie’s ancestral union to Michael, a nod to the 1981 sequel which I happen enjoy. I remember seeing that at my uncle’s house in Connecticut. I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. By removing all familial affiliations we are able to wonder once again why Michael is so hellbent on killing the Strodes and that’s as it should be. Green’s Halloween isn’t as bestowed with mobility and physicality, it doesn’t use enclosed space anywhere near as successfully as it’s hallowed ancestor. But as a product of its time and creator, it’s a nice alternative to haunted nuns and purges.

Hereditary (2018):  The name says it all. I guess there are fewer fates as bad as being in the wrong womb at the wrong time. Ari Aster’s debut follows a condemned familial heirloom much like the Loomis’; one in which nearly every off-the-cuff detail can be/often is a presage. And I’m very thankful to report that these details don’t wind up a superimposed thesis in disguise. All the invading horror is what you fear it to be and all signs point to an inevitable but still surprising culmination that goes contentedly off the rails and all for the better. I don’t typically find sadism or cruelty a badge of honor, but there is something endearing in Aster’s readiness to follow through on such bleak intimations. Annie (Toni Collette, give her awards) embodies such a real representation of parenthood at its murkiest and most frantic, which isn’t to say that she’s a bad mother. She’s not, but her mother -- a deceased character never to be resurrected but still somehow very much present---- sure as hell was. The film opens with the bad grandmother’s death and the relatively tempered reaction to it. Little does anyone in this family know that this death will set such terrible things into motion. As Annie’s life begins to mirror her vocation (creator of diorama mini-sets) sinister forces begin to manipulate her trajectory and the trajectory of her children and husband. At one point she unknowingly unleashes the very thing she seeks to ward off. It’s because she doesn’t have all the information and dipping one’s toes into witchery can be especially treacherous to a greenhorn. She’s at the mercy of a group of people who reject it by nature; not dissimilar to visiting a fraudulent mechanic with no clue of how a vehicle works. It seems Aster knows the mechanizations well enough, but any humdrum film school neophyte can build a nice slow malevolent dread to a lackluster fizzle, it’s in the landing that Hereditary ultimately ensures its place at the table. Finally A24 has a horror film to be proud of.

Tully and The Rider

Tully (2018): Five years ago I was working as a Day Habilitation Specialist, which is ACHIEVE’s way of labeling me the person in charge of a “core room” of upwards of ten adult individuals with developmental disabilities. I had one staff to help me out (spent most of the day on social media) sometimes two (also addicted to the phone) when the agency could spare someone. I was aware of my son’s encroaching birth, which of course left me with a lot of looming questions that made me even more nervous to tackle parenthood. My coworkers sure as shit didn’t help matters, telling me nightmare stories about their experiences with newborns where they essentially gave up on sleep, sanity, and a social life. One of my friends/coworkers told me that my life was “officially over,” reminding me that my time playing music was about to end and chased this hammy avowal with an elated cackle. I’m happy to report that these cookie-cutter pussies were wrong. I think it’s common to overwhelm the tenderfoot parent with portentous dread; perhaps to prepare them for the worst of the worst, or to fish for compliments about his or her resilience, or maybe both. Either way, their warnings helped give me a literal panic attack on the floor of Wilson Hospital the second night of Dean’s life outside the womb. Parenting is often viewed in popular culture as a seventeen-year setback with the requisite “but it’s worth every minute” soppiness tacked on for bolstering décor. Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are tackling this struggle again, this time with middle class adults as opposed to Cody’s teenage jerk avatar. Charlize Theron and Ron Livingston play Marlo and Drew married and miserable with two kids and one on the way. Early on we see Marlo brushing her “quirky” son’s arms, legs, and back. This is called the Wilbarger Protocol, a sensory therapy for kids and adults with tactile defensiveness, which is mostly linked with individuals on the spectrum. It’s a lovely scene that stuck out like a sore thumb, to me, in contrast to Cody and Reitman’s drab view of Marlo’s despondent daily routine and all of the assholes who pop in and out of it. It should be noted that, to my already fading recollection, the film chooses to end with a very similar moment. Sandwiched in between we get scene after scene of Marlo slowly losing it a la Mabel Longhetti, but with nicer music to lighten the blow. She’s being swallowed up by hypercritical adults (brother, sister-in-law, principal, stranger at café, etc.), unruly kids, and a husband who quite frankly doesn’t do enough, if anything, to lighten the load. With the arrival of a newborn girl, her third child, it only gets worse. A montage helps illuminate the struggle, which is especially real for those unlucky enough to be married to a Drew. At her wits end, she SPOILER! conjures up the titular night-nanny and becomes the best mom in the world until nearly killing herself after a drunken night hopping around gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods inhabited by her younger self. That same boundless/happier woman would seemingly be Tully, at least in Marlo’s fragmented and idealized fantasy concoction of years that can’t be replicated and are thus gone except in memory alone. I would imagine that anyone could get bummed thinking about the sadness of passing time and the vanishing glory days that none of us will shut up about. Plot twists in and of themselves are only successful if they enrich and inform what came before and I’m convinced that this one is cheap and pointless, leaving what came before emptier. Maybe the collapse with nothing in it was the point, I don’t know. Parenthood is often comedically rough as is life itself, and thus I’ll take a hundred Blockers to one Tully.

The Rider (2018): Similar to Tully, Chloe Zhao’s glimpse into modern day Teton Sioux rodeo culture (I’m not sure which of the seven sub-tribes our rider belongs to) features a “quirky” individual but treats her with far more dignity and respect. Her name is Lilly and she is developmentally disabled. She is loved by her brother and father, both saddled with their own glut of emotional/existential/psychological hurdles. At times Lilly emerges as the sole voice of reason amidst mulish masculine recklessness and monotonous destitution. Tully’s version of everything and everyone lacks dimension and complexity, which I’m guessing is by design. Zhao’s film is deeper by construct; using real events from Brady Jandreau’s actual life to form a loose narrative about whether life beyond vocation is worth living. She finds a poignant parallel in the human sanctioned death of an injured horse. If we find it just and humane to kill an animal that loses its ability to walk and roam free out of mercy, why not let Brady kill himself doing the one thing that gives his life meaning? Combine this with the Jandreau/Blackburn’s struggle to keep a roof over their head and you can see why this young kid might take his friends’ chest-puffing bait to toughen up and die preserving his legacy. The fact that he finds his will to live in not one, but two disabled individuals --- the other is Lane Scott ------ is nothing short of beautiful.

late

Shape of Water:  A pietistic bore readymade for those searching only to reinforce their worldviews, with cursory caricatures rather than living/breathing characters. Shannon’s zealous goon is laughably empty, the type of strawman scoundrel that real life goons are sure to hate without seeing any attribute  of themselves reflected back. Don’t even get me started on his wife and kids. The creature is similarly shapeless and nondescript, just another messiah to suffer our sins. Spare me the shabby platitudes. The road to Oscar glory is paved with good intentions.

A Quiet Place: It’s hard to not hold this whole Krasinskian notion that horror needs elevation against this movie. He cites Get Out, Don’t Breathe, The Witch, and The Babadook as modern examples of the genre being classed up (or at least that’s how I’m interpreting). To be fair, it seems he’s saying that these movies plugged this unlikely naïf into the genre, the gateway drugs to the depths where the good stuff hangs around. A Quiet Place opens with a family inaudibly rummaging for food and supplies in an abandoned rural market, the scene ends with an accidental death, one that leaves each character with a generous amount of fear and guilt and limited resources to air them out. Despite all of this, the parents decide to conceive a child, without a failsafe plan for either giving birth or anything thereafter. I normally wouldn’t give a shit about this type of oversight but it was written into the plot and therefore I think it’s fair to question both the logic (at least) of such a decision. If you’ve witnessed your young child being eaten by a monster why risk the same fate for the other two kids? Krasinski poses the question; if you can’t protect kids, why have them in the first place? If only the movie could hang its hat on this. It can’t. Being an “elevated” horror film has its pratfalls and sometimes packing half-cooked ideas and metaphors into what should/could be an otherwise streamlined thriller plot about survival and parenthood is a curse in disguise. There are suddenly new itches to scratch and not enough hands. Krasinksi doesn’t fuss over the details that led to this invasion. He spares us exposition, coddling us instead with a goofy whiteboard that leads to an inadvertently funny finale where a character’s disability conveniently unlocks the method of vanquishing of these CGI beasts. This segues to my main problem with A Quiet Place, the monsters aren’t scary. To my recollection, I have yet to be truly scared of any creatures composed by a computer. Frankly, I’m curious as to how anyone could be. What good are you if you can’t scare us?

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri: Cognitive dissonance in which the enemy of our most reprehensible enemy will become our friend and we will ride out into the sunset. Thus, cops who beat all forms of marginalized caricatures to near death will find absolution in their shared hatred for men who rape and burn young girls alive. Like Shape of Water, McDonough prefers his characters to be manifestations of his feelings towards things like the Catholic church, rape, snowflake liberals, alt-right hypocrites, etc. I’m not necessarily opposed to McDonough’s exasperation with virtue signaling slacktivists and chastising moralist cowards, but his schtick is tired, trite, and oh so proud of itself. This was among the worst things I had seen last year.

1988 all over again

The movie that first comes to my mind when looking back at 1988 is Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, a story seemingly springing from the director’s own life in Liverpool where he was born in 1945, the youngest of ten kids where he would face a blend of love, abuse, loss of faith, and the always lingering question of identity. The past doesn’t ever leave, it dawdles like a ghost and Davies knows better than just about anyone how to conjure it up, and I suppose that for this reason above all else that it deserves a spot atop. The entire endeavor feels like memories coming to life, disjointed recollections vividly rebuilt with a true care and regard for detail and feeling. There is something in the way he stages and revives these memories, the use of music, sung by the cast, especially makes for beautiful scene after beautiful scene, though it wouldn’t be Davies if not for a cruel patriarchal ogre at the center of the action. I should note that I viewed in on youtube with a full screen and headphones a few years back, thus a proper viewing would be ideal.

Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ considers Jesus as a diety unsure of his purpose and completely oblivious to the pitfalls of morality, specifically how good intentions don’t always lead to benevolent outcomes. Behold Lazarus, disoriented and terrified to be led back from death to life. Schrader and Scorsese view morality similarly to Bunuel, where good deeds are stalked by something diabolical lurking in the shadows. Jesus is seen finally as a man teetering between two extremes, tortured by his vocation and therefore the surrogate we deserve, even if he is ultimately triumphant in death. Similarly, I teeter in my reactions to this movie, which is monumental but always elusive for me.

What else and why? First, Claude Chabrol’s portrait of Vichy France, specifically the life and Tribunal sanctioned death of Marie-Louise Giraud. First viewing was a bust, 1am on TCM about two weeks after my son was born. Maybe I was too tired or maybe I didn’t want to confront the polar opposite of infant life. The second viewing felt like watching an entirely different movie, touchy subjects aside, I feel Chabrol takes a very detached high road and thus lets the irony of Giraud’s fate sink in a little more.  John Carpenter’s They Live imagines a world in which aliens use a giant ray to alter our perception of all things, especially the growing chasm between the affluent and the homeless and starving. This leaves only Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David to go mutineer and kick their fucking asses back to Mars (or wherever these ugly bastards come from).

Kzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing examine two of the ten big ones from mount Sinai. Thou shalt not kill. Sounds like a solid commandment. Who is the thou? First, it’s Jacek, a young man tortured by the death of his sister in which he believes himself to be exceedingly complicit. He kills a taxi driver creep, brutally (the scene itself is as ugly as they come), and then the state returns the favor in a scene of equal brutality. Once again, the notion of justice is touched upon with a somewhat objective view. On one hand, we are privy to a hideous act of violence that results in someone’s death, albeit a guy who may or may not be a dangerous person himself. But to then be saddled with the reality that this one action can result in a hanging, especially given the complications surrounding the circumstance, I imagine that most of us will at least think about the ramifications. Or maybe not. In A Short Film About Love, peeping Tomek spends his nights staring at Magda, unbeknownst to her. From this, Kieślowski somehow manages to make a case for love, at first unrequited but later reciprocated, and more importantly contemplated. This love is the polemical kind that most will find very hard to empathize with. I did.

I’ll let Miyazaki do the talking: “My Neighbor Totoro aims to be a happy and heartwarming film, a film that lets the audience go home with pleasant, glad feelings. Lovers will feel each other to be more precious, parents will fondly recall their childhoods, and children will start exploring the thickets behind shrines and climbing trees to try to find a Totoro. This is the kind of film I want to make.” Mission accomplished. The beauty here is in the master’s devotion to everyday routines both natural and communal, Miyazaki’s refusal to let things get swept away by fairy tale grandeur. I distinctly remembering this and Bela Tarr’s The Wreckmeister Harmonies being the first two films that Dean actually held his interest, which is not my way of being a snob, I just seized the opportunity to catch up on some blindspots while this little ball of fun looked around at things enquiringly and mystified.

For a very different look at quotidian existence, specifically trying not to starve to death during the declining days of WWII where American bombers napalmed the Japanese countryside (Kobe in this movie) killing many and leaving more homeless and hungry, check out friendly Ghibli rival Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Here we bear witness to 13 year old Seita and his 5 year old sister Setsuko’s slow crawl towards starvation and death after their mother is vaporized. It’s sad! Another very sad animated film = The Land Before Time. I’ll never forget the heartache of Little Foot left alone to find the Great Valley after the death of his mother. To this day that sorrow sticks with me, I get the Pavlovian weeps whenever I hear James Horner’s The Whispering Wind. I’ll never forget the following year when my mother was rushed to the hospital with a brain aneurysm and a very slim chance of survival. She lived, but there was a solid three week span in which it was probable that she wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t wrap my little brain around it. While my mother was recovering, my first grade teacher played this movie in class and I ran out of the room crying. I re-watched it this year the day after I realized Lou was probably going to die and cried again. There is something about this movie that seems fit for tragedy.

Robert Zemeckis had the guts and wherewithal to bring Disney (Mickey, Dumbo, Donald, Pinnochio), WB (Daffy, Bugs, Yosemite Sam, Porky), and Fleisher’s Betty Boop together for a dark and nasty noir classic. Toons are exploited and segregated, Toontown is a ghetto where toons are left to die in Judge Doom’s dip when they step even slightly out of line. Not only is it our titular hero’s sacred looney duty to stop him from demolishing his beloved shantytown and turning it into a freeway a la  Robert Towne, but also to prove his innocence. For many years I had only seen a cut version of my father taped it off television and left out virtually every scene with Jessica Rabbit. What the fuck?  

Don’t forget John v Hans in the fortified Nakatomi Plaza, where Bruce’s emotional climax comes at the sight and recognition of none other than Carl Winslow rather than his wife, which is kinda the heart and soul of the movie. How about Raymond v Rex, which delivers one of the most psychologically terrifying and depressing finales in movie history not only because Raymond gets to spend his final hour and change trapped in a coffin but because he knows that his beloved fiancée went out the same horrible way, a fate beyond what he probably could ever comprehend. And it’s futile to try and articulate the euphoria I experience whilst watching Frank Dreblin do just about anything. Leslie Nielson is my hero.

Top Ten 0f 1988 in alphabetical order:

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies)

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata)

My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)

The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad (David Zucker)

A Short Film About Love/A Short Film About Killing (Kzysztof Kieślowski)

Story of Women (Claude Chabrol)

They Live! (John Carpenter)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis)

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodovar)

Honorable Mentions in roughly preferential order: The Last Temptation of Christ, Ariel, Die Hard, As Tears Go By, The Vanishing, The Land Before Time, The Thin Blue Line, Monkey Shines, Cop, Alice, Dead Ringers, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, Bird.

Not for me: The Blob, A Cry in the Dark, Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Lair of the White Worm, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Willow, The Bear.  

Like or Respect (*s indicating that I haven’t seen it since I was young): Above the Law, Big Top Pee Wee, Bloodsport, Bull Durham, Coming to America, Critters 2: The Main Course, Beetlejuice, Hairspray, Child’s Play, Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, The Dead Pool,  Ernest Saves Christmas, The Fox and the Hound, A Fish Called Wanda, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, License to Drive, Mac and Me, Maniac Cop, Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Oliver and Company, Pound Puppies and the Legend of the of Big Paw, Pumpkinhead.

Didn’t pay due attention to: The Horse Thief 

Didn’t see: Paperhouse, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Akira, Big, Chocolat, Cinema Paradiso, Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Eighth Happiness, Far North, Heathers, Lady in White, Married to the Mob, Miracle Mile, Salaam Bombay, Police Story 2, Zombi 3, High Hopes. 

Phantom Thread

What a gift to be on your back, helpless and in need of care. Of course, it means you are in pain and immobile. These are the “dangers of falling in love” but also the dangers of letting your ego run amok. Mr. Woodcock knows not what he does or, more importantly, how he does it. One of the first impressions we get is of a man who acts like a three-year-old, and I say this not to libel the guy but to speak to my own experience of walking on eggshells during the hallowed breakfast routine. His lady friend offers him a pastry and he turns it down, quite patronizingly, complaining about its texture similar to how my daughter Flora complains about the soggy cereal that she lets sit. It’s one of many mercurial mood swings that seem to spring from interruptions. Whether he’s aware of it or not, Reynolds is being rude and perhaps his lofty place in the 1950s postwar London couture scene has him convinced that this disposition is a merited roost from which to stare down at the world. That he despises distraction isn’t wrong in and of itself and if I’m being honest, much of his vocational predilections hit a little to close to home. There is something truly monstrous about the way artists/authors/musicians/directors innately neglect the people who have the most personal investment in their well-being. It’s not exclusive to gender, but being pumped with testosterone doesn’t help. Just the other day I was watching Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery when Tara sat next to me and started to ask me questions about what I was watching. I nearly went Woodcock on the poor lady.

Reynolds meets Alma, a war survivor and immigrant whose history is only implied only through facial cues. Facial cues are the heart and soul of this movie, which doesn’t lack for lavish gestures both of the directorial and thespian varieties (this is a PTA movie). Much has been made of the fact that this is supposedly Daniel Day Lewis’ final movie (and what a magnificent and measured way to leave us) but to fail to appreciate the work done by Leslie Manville and Vicky Krieps would be silly. Anyway, the Alma/Reynolds affair begins with games and power structures as you would expect in that particular day and age. One takes it on the chin while the other floats through life oblivious to etiquette, not of the bourgeois variety, but the way a man of his stature addresses and treats those of a very different caste. He’s not the dictatorial prick you see typically see in films like these, but his superciliousness is almost worse. Alma puts up with it for a while, but after a very existent and hilarious fight she takes matters into her own hands. I won’t spoil it, but it involves a fungal bit of tough love/reawakening.

If the movie were content to settle on this rebirth it’d be great but it’s the backsliding and ultimate acceptance on the part of Reynolds that really got to me. Truth is, you fight and make up. Usually during this squabbling, you see something truly awful in yourself that needs fixing. Then you begin to let those foibles crawl back into your monthly, weekly, and daily customs. We could all be so lucky as to have an Alma in our lives to “feed” us when we need to be fed. We all need to get sick from time to time. To see this power dynamic shift is a thing of beauty. It’s the death of pride and the birth of understanding.

*also, it’s as carefully composed as you would expect. Those lilac socks, the lavender bowtie, and the mauve car really were a feast for my eyeballs.

*my personal favorite scene was towards the end where the doctor was checking Reynolds and he darts a batshit look at Alma.

*  I get the Rebecca comparisons, though comparing Cyril to Mrs. Danvers is lazy and disrespectful to perhaps the only character who tries to add some stability to a house built on pandemonium.

* Sure, Johnny Greenwood deserves props for the score but let’s give some love to whoever chose to add Quebec’s own Oscar “the Maharaja” Peterson’s My Foolish Heart or My Ship, Daydream by the Duke, and Dolly Suite Op 56:1 Berceuse by Gabril Faure, Katia Labeque, and Marielle Labeque to the mix.  

1990

A lot of objectors to Goodfellas, and other Scorsese movies, seem to fixate on whether the actions onscreen are held liable enough to corroborate and reinforce their held values. I find its viciousness a genuine strength. The nastier I feel the better. What was once a brisk and funny piece of unceasing directorial flair, an ostensibly commemorative movie about the lure of hoodlum routine, turns irretrievably dark once poor little Spider gets popped for an infraction as silly and trivial as wounding tiny dick Tommy’s inflated ego. Tommy, a once endearing psychopath, is now an object of scorn and a man whose comeuppance we craved. It’s not simply that Scorsese has the decency to show these goon’s obligatory downfall, it’s that these men start to become the sniveling rats that they once hated so much. They lived long enough to witness themselves/each other change into wretched losers and traitors. Scorsese would bear witness to a lot of similar riffraff growing up on Elizabeth between East Houston and Prince. My own father had a similar experience with wise-guy sodality, and the confusion felt upon realizing his father’s friends were criminals. His godfather was a racketeer and killer, my grandfather’s friend from the homeland. He remembers having pillow fights with him, wrestling, and playing baseball in his aunt Mary’s backyard. His was privy to only one side of a very complicated and wicked man, a side advantageous at that time and place. His chameleonic nature was part of his survival. My father only learned of this man’s transgressions later in life and I’ve always sensed that he had a conflicted respect despite actions that were very easy to castigate. It’s the deception that makes Goodfellas such a singular entry in an already rich subgenre. I don’t mind heaping praise on this movie, one of my favorites without question.  

Goodfellas was the only movie in this strong year that I didn’t have a hard time ranking. It’s a vapid chore; false (I will change my mind about the order as soon as I look at it again) and needlessly taxing. How can you compare Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan to Ron Underwood’s Tremors? I can’t. They are both great for very different reasons. Ron Underwood’s Tremors was my son’s favorite movie at the age of three. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he watched it upwards of forty times in the span of a year. That’s probably a low estimate. I saw it once when I was in fourth grade, at my friend Brett Rathbone’s house. I also looked at Penthouse and drank beer there. My son saw it because the television was accidentally left on AMC during and after his nap. We came downstairs and witnessed a toddler completely horrified and enthralled. When we tried to turn the channel he started screaming. It reminded me of my former self, watching AMC’s Monster-Vision at my grandmother’s house. I’ll never forget the horrifying radiation victim’s from Eugene Lourie’s The Giant Behemoth (1959) or Peter Cushing hiding out in a cave and witnessing the existence of the eponymous Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957). It was also thanks to an unsupervised AMC station being left on that I saw Michael Carreras’ The Lost Continent (1968), where a tramp steamer full of degenerates accidentally discovers the hellish landmass full of prehistoric beasts and evil Spanish conquistadors. My point being that it was Dean’s destiny to stumble upon a monster fixation that will both scare and infatuate for many years to come. Tremors isn’t merely a bygone creature-feature, it’s a solid comedy and one of two great Fred Ward performances in 1990.  

On that note, I will add that I was very glad to have had an opportunity to watch Miami Blues, Trust, and An Angel at my Table for the first time. All three of these sparked an interest in directors that either had been off my radar or that I had seemed to underappreciate.

1.      Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)

2.      Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)

3.      A Bullet in the Head (John Woo)

4.      Tremors (Ron Underwood)

5.      Miami Blues (George Armitage)

6.      Close-Up (Abbas Kiorostami)

7.      Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante)

8.      Trust (Hal Hartley)

9.      White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)

10.  Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar Wai)

Honorable Mentions: Miller’s Crossing (Coens), Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven), Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis), Wild at Heart (David Lynch), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Steve Barron), Cry-Baby (John Waters), Nightbreed (Clive Barker), King of New York (Abel Ferrara), Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh), An Angel at my Table (Jane Campion), Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismaki), A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer), To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett).

You can’t argue with that bunch.

On the fence/enjoyed/respected: Godfather III, Dick Tracy, La Femme Nikita (Luc Besson), Darkman (Sam Raimi), The Exorcist 3, Frankenhooker.

No way: Leather:, Texas Chainsaw 3,

Kid picks: Kindegarten Cop, Dick Tracy, Home Alone, The Witches, Predator 2, Problem Child, Arachnophobia, Child’s Play 2, House Party, The Rescuers Down Under, Marked for Death, Another 48 Hours, Ducktales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, Narrow Margin, Ernest Goes to Jail, Delta Force 2, Graveyard Shift, Maniac Cop 2, Ghost Dad,

Haven’t seen: Joe Versus the Volcano, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Hardware, Dreams, Mo’ Better Blues, The Grifters, The Guardian, The Field, Vincent and Theo, Boiling Point, Dr. M, Nouvelle Vague, Archangel.

Lanthimos, Morrison, and Malick

The majority of Dawson City: Frozen Time has the sonic ambiance of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven mated with Takk on loop. For the most part, it works wonders exalting the steady flow of information accompanied by pictures and footage dug up or found, seemingly by the grace of God. Sometimes it felt smothering (to me), like studio time ran out for the musicians, thus requiring Bill Morrison and Alex Somers to recycle the same string arrangement just to quash some white noise. This is the only complaint I have, which is to say that I think this is one of the good ones. It tells the story of the titular Yukon city whose population and notoriety fluctuated based on the lust and need for its local resources. It’s tragic and I’m not sure exactly how or why. Dawson was the final destination of hundreds of silent film prints, most sunken at the bottom of the Yukon River, the rest dug up and at least partially restored. It’s not as simple as this, though. A lot of Morrison’s film is about the restoration but so much of it is about loss, be it to nitrate’s flammable properties or just time doing its thing. See it.

I’m depressed that critics are so quick to dismiss and demand directors be sent to pasture. Fuck that, and fuck you. You will never toil over anything half as much as these men and women, as you sit comfy with such misguided brio. Again, fuck you. Terrence Malick has cut his teeth long enough and hard enough to do whatever the fuck he wants and it just so happens that he’s making movies unique enough to be considered an affront to dwindling attention spans all over our cinematic wasteland. This is not to say that I necessarily carry his water. In fact, I found Song to Song a tough sit, not because of its pace nor its length but rather its dialogue, which I found mostly unfortunate, but that’s me and I don’t measure up. I’m not saying you can’t hate it, I’m saying that you can’t dismiss it outright. I’m also saying that by suggesting that he’s spent, you’re suggesting that artists have an expiration date based on your own subjective views on quality, which are probably bullshit.

I’m not so sure that I’ll ever give Yorgos Lanthimos another shot. He insists that he is incapable of doing anything “straight-forward” which sounds a lot like a man admitting that he’s sheepishly trussed to a gimmick. He’s perfectly content to be the scalawag, the pebble in the shoe to bougie patron pushovers who fall prey to his cheap baiting. The problem isn’t that he’s without talent, nor that he’s eagerly playing the cat toying with the prudish mouse, it’s that he has absolutely nothing to say about anything. It’s a lose/lose scenario for those who react to the scenes boobytrapped to elicit disgust. Disliking his work or having any sort of moral reaction to his puckish onscreen incitements only makes him stronger. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer he toys loosely with the mythology of his homeland, specifically that of Princess Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, who is offered up to the sacrificial slab to appease an angry goddess. The goddess here is a 16 year old boy named Martin, whose father dies under Collin Farrell’s surgical knife. The guilt therein is never truly established, though it is implied that he may have had “two drinks” before the procedure. The crime certainly doesn’t fit the punishment, but Lanthimos is not concerned with justice as much as he’s smitten with cruelty. Thus, the only atonement will be the sacrifice of a family member. As Farrell’s kids fall mysteriously ill, Martin’s empty threats become a very real and urgent certainty. You can probably guess where it goes from there. You probably predicted that the dialogue is delivered in Lanthimos’ signature dry tone. You probably guessed that there would be several scenes of taboo sexual behavior. You might not guess that this story somehow manages to be stretched maliciously to a two hour running time. All of it, though occasionally elevated by its poised aesthetic bluster, feels like a lazy means to a mean end. The punchline, which is played simultaneously for laughs and devastation, might have worked if Lanthimos wasn’t dangling the lives of caricatures and metaphorical cyphers (as opposed to humans) in front of us. I don’t mind being punished or teased, but his apparent aversion to straight-forwardness, aka his supercilious perch high above the genre he’s aping, will continue to render him worthless to my square tastes.