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.    

2015

Jeff and I were talking recently about the many problems of canonization, specifically that nagging thought that sticks to the back of my brain when watching something/anything with the expectation that it could possibly occupy a spot on some forthcoming trivial list. That prospect is just another wall built up between me and the movie itself, locking me inside my own head at intermittent moments throughout. I’m thinking when I should be seeing, hearing, and feeling. It’s like watching a movie with a noisy/opinionated audience, except that audience is me. It’s hard enough for some to pay attention to a movie with phones constantly beckoning or with free time itself being a dwindling resource. But here we are, too deep to turn back.

All of that being said, I think Hard to be a God could be/needs to be much higher on my list but I saw it under extremely distracting circumstances. I was tending to the numerous demands of a newborn girl, which made for some eagerness on my part. I broke it up into four viewings, which is a flat injustice to something so inimitable and otherworldly. Like Mad Max, it simply could not be duplicated. It comes from a very specific filthy place, where ideas are constantly materialized and not a moment is wasted on useless exposition or anodyne filler. I doubt we will see the likes of either anytime soon. Hard to be a God is not a movie I’m eager to reenter, less because of the spit, shit, and misery than the running time, but I clearly owe it another more lucid go. I had a similar experience with In Jackson Heights and About Elly, all movies that our local Art Mission Theater wouldn’t dream of showing.

I paid money to see seven of the ten, all assiduously viewed on a big screen with the exception of Heaven Knows What. I saw that one in my basement with my euphoric mother in law. That goes for all of my honorable mentions with the exception of five titles. My #1 has stayed put since I saw it, oddly enough with my friend Hunter with whom I share very little commonality when it comes to cineaste predilections. For instance, he declared The Revenant his favorite of the year for reasons that I frankly understood but couldn’t abide. We both agreed on Timbuktu. Sissako’s juggling of tenor threatened to come apart and it nearly does in its final moments, only to seamlessly bookend this tale of maladroit terrorists and the families they destroy. I’m not sure I’ve been as wrecked by any single scene in the last few years as the one where Kidane chooses to bow in the direction of his wife and daughter, a brave and pure gesture and a spit directly into the mouth of intimidation and death itself. I also cried during Inside Out, Creed, and The Good Dinosaur. I saw Blackhat extremely stoned with Mike O’D.

I sat next to a couple during The Hateful Eight and around the halfway point she whispered “get me the fuck out of here” which tbh I completely understand. I hope Tarantino injects some of his undervalued benevolence in his next movie. Part of what I love about the guy is his joy for filmmaking and all of the people, places, influences, etc. that make it so special and important to him. He’s a far less interesting provocateur, at least these days. Roth made two films that one could argue were deliberately/gleefully abhorrent. I don’t know. I enjoyed the hell out of both and I think part of that stems from his diminished reputation. It’s a good thing. He’s making movies like he has nothing to gain or lose. The Good Dinosaur is underrated, mostly because critics were too hung up on its assembled Frankenstein plot structure. I thought it landed everything it needed to and I’d take it 100% of the time over something like The Revenant, which is similar in structure, kinda. I have little or nothing to say about Bridge of Spies, except that I think it’s the best thing he’s done since 2005. I don’t want to dwell too much on the negative, but I left a lot of the critically adored films with a meh. I’m not sure why, maybe I’ll try and tackle that in a post this week. Probably not.

2015 B*$:

1.       Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)

2.       Heaven Knows What (Sadfies)

3.       Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

4.       About Elly (Asghar Farhadi)

5.       Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg)

6.       Creed (Ryan Coogler)

7.       In Jackson Heights (Frederick Weisman)

8.       Inside Out (Pete Docter)

9.       Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)

10.   Blackhat (Michael Mann)

Honorable beloved mentions: The Hateful Eight, Carol, Sicario, The Good Dinosaur, Mistress America, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Magic Mike XXL, Bone Tomahawk, Girlhood, The Mend, Buzzard, The Green Inferno, Knock Knock, Run All Night.

Not for me, my fault: Anomolisa, Spotlight, Ex Machina, The Assassin, Room, Tangerine, It Follows, Phoenix, Clouds of Sils Maria, While We’re Young, Jauja, Eden, Queen of Earth, Results, Jurassic World, Unfriended, Black Mass, The Visit (minus that scene under porch), Krampus, The Revenant.

Didn’t see: Brooklyn, Son of Saul, 45 Years, Arabian Nights, Embrace the Serpent, Irrational Man, Spy, Ricki and the Flash.

I liked these to varying degrees but their presence of an honorable mentions list feels as though it cheapens the aforementioned movie’s worth: Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Amy, The Walk, Crimson Peak, The Man From UNCLE, The Lobster, Horse Money, Amour Fou, Vacation, Goosebumps.

2016 and desperation

Brawl in Cell Block 99 descends deeper and deeper into a circumstantial and corporeal hellscape as our main goon creeps closer and closer to his objective, which will leave him in no better off physically. The carnage follows in step as acts of violence become increasingly catastrophic. It belongs to a very short list of movies that have stuck with me from 2017 (All These Sleepless Nights, Logan Lucky, A Quiet Passion, and mother! too). I also haven’t been able to shake the final scene/closing credits of Good Time, a similar stroll through an infernal cityscape where desperation plays such a large role in behavior. The acts of violence here are far less graphic but much more appalling because the acts are done unto the innocent. These poor few are in the wrong place, or line of work, at the wrong time. It also features the best portrayal of a person with developmental disabilities I’ve ever seen. Here are my favorite movies from last year.

Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang Soo)

Everybody Wants Some (Richard Linklater)

Silence (Martin Scorsese)

Love and Friendship (Whitt Stillman)

Allied (Robert Zemeckis)

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)

The Wailing (Hong-jin Na)

O.J. Simpson: Made in America (Ezra Edelman)

The Other Side (Roberto Minervini)

Sunset Song (Terence Davies)

I also have varying degrees of love and respect in my heart for:

No Home Movie, The Love Witch, Things to Come, Manchester By the Sea, The Witch, Hail Caesar, Knight of Cups, Hush, The Shallows, Sully, Certain Women, Gimme Danger, Cemetery of Splendor, and Train to Busan.

I liked The BFG, Arrival, The Handmaiden, Midnight Special, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Those haven’t stuck with me however. Against any conceivable taste or better judgment, I enjoyed Don’t Breathe and that last Purge movie.

I failed to see The Mermaid, Demon, Aquarius, The Illinois Parables, and Happy Hour.

power and abuse

PR rules everything around me. This is a sad but true reality, at least in the music world, and part of me wonders how long this has been going on. There is a current local "DIY" soap opera unveiling on thee ole FB that's far more entertaining than anything I've seen lately. Part of the very public brawl involves a certain canny band's ability to play the PR game and bend the public's will to their favor at the potential cost of another band’s reputation. They know just how to get their name in all of the right places, how to tease their albums' release song by song, how to book and ride another bigger band's dick and leech their fans along the way, and how to flash their easily inherited political beliefs in the public eye so that they always come out on top when someone calls them out on their bullshit. The shit-storm they have summoned has kicked up some intense one-sided dialogue, an echo chamber for a very angry group of men who shoot ignorantly from the hip. Sadly, the conversation has led to very serious and unsavory issues that the aforementioned PR maestros are now shrinking away from in light of said allegations' likely fabrication. One band's inability or unwillingness to play along, it seems, has put a very large target on their back and allegations are hard to shake. None of this has anything to do with the movies so I'll try and segue.

Basically, being involved in such a zealous and stern "DIY" community has me wondering about the so-called validity of it all, at least on a universal level. I love the idea of artists staying strong and true in the midst of this rigged system of pay-to-be-played arm twisting. Of course all open displays of idealistic integrity make one susceptible to a harsher standard. But is this idea limited to music? Do we make exceptions for bands that are actually good? Are we supposed to hold film to the same standard? I'm no absolutist so I say do whatever the fuck you feel, all while having a surplus of hatred towards the notion that syndicates are so crooked, lame, and lazy that they only accept things set before them by an overpaid/mouth-breathing/barnacle publicist who could truly give a tinker's damn about the art form they peddle. Seriously, fuck these chumps and Trojan horse they rode in on. This is the same media Ouroboros that gave a certain very powerful man his current position as his brain rots along with what little ability his dumb ass had to reason with.

With all of this being said, I have to admire some who know how to play the game well. Take the new version of Stephen King's IT as an example. It was destined to succeed via its namesake alone, but its marketing campaign all but guaranteed its current reign. All the heavies involved knew just how to bring this story to a modern audience and it had a lot to do with riding the hysteria of Stranger Things and its nostalgia fetish. The movie itself chronicles a group of young tormented dorks as they face a relentless fusillade of outside maltreatment. The world, according to King, is predatory by nature and small kids take the brunt by default. The prey here face an extreme and embellished form of harassment from their bigger peers, Munchausen by proxy from a sweaty, blotchy, and all around grotesque matriarch, neglect from grieving parents, being surrounded by death, molestation, etc. To quote Lillian Gish from Night of the Hunter, “this world is so hard on little things.”

To top off the misfortunes, we have Pennywise (a very uneven and often infuriating performance), a clown that eats kids, especially the ill-fated ones with a sufficient stockpile of fear and loneliness. It’s a worn-out kernel of wisdom that fear is a form of power, one that the horror genre has tossed around to varying degrees of success. Pennywise might as well be Freddy with all the puns and wisecracks in ample supply. In all honesty, It isn’t especially scary though Andy Muschietti has a way of making an audience distrust even the safest environments by making every scene a means to a jump-scare. It gets old. Also, I’m not particularly scared of clowns so the mere sight of Pennywise didn’t conjure up some wicked childhood trauma.  

I personally found the heart of IT to be the crushing weight of loss as seen and felt by Bill in the aftermath of the death of his little brother, Georgie. Everything else, with certain flourishes of the Beverly/father situation being the exception, felt like a thematic caricature, the most overblown renditions of childhood trauma imaginable. I guess I don’t mind it when characters lack dimension but it’s hard to have skin in the game when the enveloping world is so overblown and Muschietti and crew don’t have enough faith in camp to stay afloat. And look at the treatment of the bully, himself a victim of some irrefutably severe abuse. For a much better examination of abuse, also from King, check out Gerald’s Game, a similarly assured populist product that eventually commits and morphs into a movie about mistreatment itself.

Steven Spielberg may have been the king of PR, with so many of his greatest successes being sold as potential failures. Bruce’s mechanical blip set what could have/would have been just another B-movie with bad effects into the realm of Hitchcock and Hawks. Close Encounters supposedly was one of those “all-in/betting the farm” blockbusters for Columbia. The same goes for the black and white Schindler’s List and the CGI Jurassic Park, both released successfully in 1993. He clearly curates his legacy, and why the fuck not? Like most anyone else, I’ve crawled through the apostate chapter of my Spielberg transfiguration. I grew up a fan, unknowingly because I didn’t know what a director was. I remember working at Barnes and Noble with a now prominent/respected (justifiably) member of the NYC film critic circle. He would continuously sing the praises of tried and true cinephile golden calves whilst using our main man Steven as the mainstream antithesis. I didn’t have the poise to resist so I fell in. Now here we are, both returning to the altar to worship the king of populist art. And make no mistake, it’s art. The new doc is nothing new and certainly a hagiography of the most shameless order, but basking in this master’s freakishly pristine compositions is worth the worn-out familiarity.

Still….. fuck PR and the horse it rode in on.

Mother!

I can rarely recall dreams but when I do it's usually because something terrible has lingered on to the point in which I am sure I can still feel the fear, sadness, or regret as though it happened in reality. My nightmares always seem to lure me in, just as I'm beginning to call their bluff and wake up, something very close and familiar happens just in time to drag me deeper until I get so fully immersed that even the most bizarre and impossible things become real and it's much harder to shut it down and wake up. That's the first thing that struck me about Mother!, a film that can/will surely tempt the majority of its viewers to tether its happenings and characters to themes, allegories, riddles, and metaphors. I suppose that'll have to mostly wait until a second viewing, something that I very much look forward to. For me, it was a nightmare.

I'll admit forthright that their were certainly forces outside of the film itself that made me extra aware of its soundscape; among the most impressive I have heard in a very long time. Comparisons to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby are rampant (as well as the rest of the apartment trilogy), but today I thought about that oft told anecdote about Polanski's instructions to William A. Fraker to deliberately point the camera just far enough to the side of a certain door frame as to obscure our vision into the room beyond, causing audiences to lean to the right in hopes to see what trouble Ruth Gordon was stirring up. Here I heard voices, just faint enough that I would catch cryptic premonitions (or so I thought) of the wicked things about to blow our way. You want to hear what these guests are saying because you are sharing a consciousness with the titular heroine. Her trepidation to host these increasingly awful barnacles is often tempered by her husband's pride and need to be validated by an audience. Soon her house, that has been so carefully and lovingly restored, is taken over and pillaged by a swarm of zealous locusts. The only way to stop a swarm of locusts is to burn them and everything they inhabit.

The locusts are drawn by the Bluebeard poet, pretentious and selfish, always tending to his legacy and never to his wife. He is drawn back into the peril and madness if only to absorb more of the choruses of praise and adoration that fuel his waning creativity. He sacrifices her and more to the altar of vanity. The guest's offenses escalate, little things begin to rot the house's foundation and mother's withering mind until the entire structure (which seems to grow several floors taller as the madness escalates) erupts into a full blown battle zone, like a nightly stroll through our current mess. The pandemonium is brilliantly orchestrated, the violence often abrupt, ridiculous, and always unsettling. I've been drawn to an unguarded an unhinged approach to art, the kind that leaves oneself bare and vulnerable to all sorts of shame to be raked over the coals. One of Mother's many virtues is its willingness to be mocked and hated in its desperate desire to burst out of its "poet's" pen.

Darren Aronofsky's technique here is risky, but for the first time in his career I found him free to move beyond the strictures of a dominant central theme vortex or a need to tidy up and tie things together. This is an abnormally talented director at his peak, throwing his innards at the page and screen, seemingly not giving a shit if any of it sticks. I can't think of another mainstream release in recent years that has toyed so cruelly with its unsuspecting audience. Paramount deserves credit for not burying it. It's an angry little film that touches upon God's betrayal of earth's beloved matriarch, our collective blind fanatical love and obsession with him, our very poor stewardship, the perils of love, the perils of writer's block, the perils of parenthood, etc. I haven't even begun to unlock it. This is not to say that I found it all successful, but I'll take this brand of brash virtuosity over just about everything else I've seen this year. It seems obligatory to confess that I don't belong to the Aronofsky cult, at least I didn't before.

a cure for hubris

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, in which 338,226 trapped soldiers were successfully evacuated from death or captivity, put forth the tag “survival is victory.” The late-great Tobe Hooper questioned this assertion, wondering what dodging death might leave behind. One could hardly be comforted by Marilyn Burns’ crazed laughter at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or take comfort in Elizabeth Berridge’s long walk home at the end of The Funhouse. I think it’s also safe to argue that the Sawyers/Strakers are survivors as well, albeit perhaps not the quintessential models that we as a society would like to put forth as representations of our species’ bold harmonious resilience. The also late-great George Romero pondered the moral concessions of being left alive to simply evade and endure, often pondering the danger of other humans, reanimated or not, and what their natural propensity for prolongation might breed. The horror genre as well as movies themselves have been blessed with their perverse heirlooms, though far too often squandered by lazy homage or mere lip service. Their absence has been felt for far too long.

It Comes at Night ponders survival and human nature in the wake of a viral outbreak, that has ostensibly vanquished most of humanity. Our introduction to this world is callous and upsetting; a father takes his diseased father-in-law to the woods, puts a pillow over his face, shoots him, dumps him in a hole, pours gasoline over the body, and burns it. From there we are introduced to this family’s vigilant way of life, a regiment supervised by the aforementioned father; an apparent fusion of the writer/director’s stepdad and his deceased father. The father’s caution is reasonable, though many a cinematic family portrait would judge his panicky impulse to guard his flock as that same loving whim often gets in the way of his ability to nurture. I would imagine that all parents (of both humans and animals) can relate to this conundrum. The ignorantly blissful don’t seem to inherit this hopeless world.

When the remnants of the plagued world come barging in, the family must choose whether or not to harbor or kill. The man doing the late-night barging claims to have a starving wife and child a few miles away. They choose to accommodate, under the strength in numbers pretext though it’s fair to suspect that empathy – thanks largely to the presence of a helpless child – played a large part in this decision. Their empathy pays off for much of the rest of the film, as this fortified shelter becomes something like a home. During this section, we are privy to actual happiness and harmony while knowing damn well that Trey Edward Shults has something nasty up his sleeve. The survival here consists of more than just ducking and dodging contagions, there is also the business of providing food and water for sustenance, as well as chopping wood for warmth. The shelter itself requires upkeep, the kind that seek to keep potentially infected humans and animals out. For unspecified reasons, the dangers are believed to be worse at night.  

Eventually the shit hits the fan, bonds begin to fade giving way to the type of miserable self-preservation that we all sensed as soon as we saw the A24 logo. The finale is ridiculous, shoving its once practical characters into an unnerved hysteria, resulting in dismal mayhem. Shults betrays his own meticulously conjured character dispositions in leu of an apparatus unleashed to reaffirm very typical and boring toe-dipping horror hipster clichés. Maybe I’m out of step, but most of these artsy genre hype machines inherit the tired genetic traits and lack that sense of go-for-broke madness that Hooper and Romero put forth so beautifully. There is a lack of vulnerability about it all, something carefully measured and full of posturing. The ending is horrible and truly tragic, and yet somehow ineffective.

Similarly, Gore Verbinski’s latest spent $40 mil and 146 very long minutes trying to convince me that CGI eels ought to haunt my dreams. The story was written by Verbinski and condensed into a screenplay by Justin Haythe and entails a young malefactor sent to retrieve his CEO boss from a dubious spa treatment/sanitarium in the Swiss Alps where he, thanks to pesky meddling, quickly becomes a patient. The mere thought of being admitted and imprisoned whilst sane is scary enough, add the forced treatments which here include drilling into teeth without anesthesia (been there and done that) and other archaic healing techniques only add to the paranoia of walls closing in for good. Eventually, this young brash dupe is driven insane only to soon realize the truth behind the local lore of an insane incestuous baron who performed and killed local peasants. I forgot to mention that said baron was burnt alive in the reactionary fire set by the angry villagers 200 years prior to the events happening onscreen.

Personally, I enjoyed this part of the story because it kicks the otherwise stillborn plot into and unhinged and senseless motion. It’s clear that Verbinski is having fun dressing up and playing gothic in castle corridors, sadly this only constitutes about 15 minutes of his film. His influences are on clear display (Polanski, Scorsese, Kubrick, De Toth, Bava, Del Toro, Corman) so much so that his film ultimately gets buried beneath them. It has no purpose or identity and is thus ineffective at nearly every turn. Say what you will about his remake of The Ring, but not even its multiple twists and turns could slow it down. Here he’s simply a guy with too many tools at his disposal, a studio errand boy/talented artisan with 3.7 billion worth of box office cred to fund his every quirk. He and M. Night should hang out.