pride, death, fame, and self-preservation

Zama (2018): Don Diego de Zama is a functionary of the Spanish empire in colonialized Paraguay, and he extremely desperate for a transfer back to his motherland because he feels above it. He may also miss his wife and kids, it’s possible. He’s a monster, sure, but he’s got feelings too. He was a magistrate not born in Spain, thus bound to the new world that he hates so much. The local governor uses his request for a transfer as a tool to bend his well, it is clear to us that he is just yanking his chain. The governor is a different breed of monster, I’m not sure he has feelings beyond those that tend to his needs. Zama’s happiness or lack thereof is a result of his pride and status, caught somewhere in between, a social purgatory that finds him with power but no respect. Of course, all this colonial pride deserves a villain if only to make it all worth something. He gets one. A native prisoner speaks of a fish fighting to remain in water that seeks to reject it. The finale basically literalizes the flopping fish losing air. Martel invites us to be voyeurs of his follies and it’s hard not to laugh, until the cold hard realities of death creep up and spoil the party.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018): “Uncertainty—that is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next can we vouchsafe certainty. I believe certainty regarding that which we can see and touch, it is seldom justified, if ever. Down the ages from our remote past, what certainties survive? And yet we hurry to fashion new ones, wanting their comfort.” I stopped taking comfort in false certainty, at least I tried. It’s not that I find it all so dismal and cruel that I’ll wind up like the characters in this, the Coen’s six-part western anthology of death, but you never know. Banking on certainties, those which aren’t tangible can get you in a lot of trouble. But where is the hope in that? I don’t know, and for once I take comfort in not knowing. If there is one bit of comfort that we can all take from death, it’s that none of us will make it out of this life alive. Buster Scruggs tells five tales of varying tones, complexities, cruelties, and ironies with death a consistent presence and certainty. The first story introduces the titular San Saba songbird who is quick to remind us that he is indeed no misanthrope right before sending at least seven men to the reapers. It’s a fully committed cartoon; replete with song numbers and animated angel wings. I think it’s glorious but as some have noted, it certainly plays as a greatest-hits of every bad inclination lobbed against the brothers as navel gazing assholes. Maybe they are, but I don’t care. It’s customary to remind all that anthologies vary in quality and this is no exception but while the highs are extremely high, the lows are merely not as tall. My personal favorite seems to be the consensus.

A Star is Born (2018): A story so nice they told it twice… twice. It’s built around the tragedy of love, addiction, and showbiz and all the evil compromises therein. One character’s ascension is predicated upon another’s ruin; in Bradley Cooper’s hands it’s rock martyrdom (the Pearl Jam kind) at the altar of pop superficiality. The songs weren’t my cup of tea, especially the rock ones, but I liked it. I’ve read a lot of bellyaching about Cooper’s self-infatuation here and how his overemphasis on his doomed drug/booze hound is just a conceited distraction from the titular star whom the film ought to celebrate and luxuriate. But the movie is about the tragedy of his addiction and thus needs to be a tragedy and what good is a tragedy if you don’t give a fuck about the person biting the dust? And this notion that Gaga is somehow upstaged here is ridiculous. The love story is the main attraction and while pop culture junkies with a binary view of love will speculate as to whether or not the stars fell into it IRL (tabloid fodder that rules the land) I would like to float the notion that even when one is pretending to “love” another, he/she/they might be susceptible to manifest feelings that can be redefined within the slender strictures of what we have deemed to be love itself. This hybrid is the main draw here and the movie benefits greatly from its complexity. I don’t know how this happened but somehow I’m on team Cooper.

US (2019): Jordan Peele loves the word tethered and so do I. It’s an evocative word that conjures weaving fabric or taking a thread and embedding it within a larger whole. In horror I imagine the 80s goop gore, a body horror travesty where a head grows out of a slimy torso, reeling in pain and torment, ready to spoil my lunch and dreams. Here we get tunnel dwelling clones who inexplicably mimic the motions of those above, the titular US? Peele, after winning over most critics as well as taking home a best original screenplay Oscar for his debut, nobly stuck with the genre that so many insist he elevated. I think it’s important to note that he gained his notoriety writing sketch comedy, not necessarily because he specialized in comedy but that he specialized in short form, which might explain why this screenplay fails to explain why or how the “tethered” are indeed tethered to their doppelganger. I’m not the kind of viewer who needs explanations, I prefer to be left with more to ponder but here we have just enough exposition dangled in front of us to wonder why certain details were left out of the final product. Specifically, how and why do these angry puppets mimic our every motion? I think the word tethered and all the connotations that this word induces drove the narrative here, and Peele could benefit from abridging his ideas. It’s not an uncommon notion in modern horror to tether a film to a superimposed allegory as we live in such politically boisterous times that declaring and identifying oneself 24/7 is a constant pressure and perceived civic duty. When the themes drive the narrative, all must fall in line with the message within and art winds up the victim. This, to me, is the what irks me about this notion of horror as a genre in desperate need of redemption. It’s a boring notion that boxes movies within their higher purpose. US thankfully isn’t sunk by this. Though built on a short form premise, it’s stretched out with much more grace and aptitude than its predecessor. My heart constantly went out to Winston Duke’s dad, stuck acting out the role of protector with little to no real-life experience to survive let alone keep your family alive. The Hands Across America gag continues Peele’s evisceration of shallow neo-liberal self-congratulatory lip service. Get Out succeeded in its succinctness, a great concept that maybe lacked the aesthetic goods. Here he remedies what I would say was a lackluster style but at the service of a convoluted story that probably would have benefited from a golden pair of scissors. I’m not saying that horror ought to lack ideas but that those ideas need not be the impetus and chauffeur to guide us through. And yet, somehow this movie still works which is a testament to Peele’s hype which is certainly now justified and we who love horror will be lucky to have him stick around and trust the genre that he’s now supposedly king of.

2017

Top ten lists are stupid, but they happen and someone ought write about the need to catalogue, rank, and canonize the things and what good it ultimately does for the artform itself. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s pointless. With a year faded into the ether, it’s easier to silence the hype. Some of these were revisited recently, some caught up with. The rest were just hazy recollections, but somehow they stuck around this long and for that I give them big kisses.

Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch): Sometimes they come back. They have been coming back like baby bunnies lately. Most of the time they are just spit out and wrinkled; hitting all the same beats and rhythms that earned them a place in some foggy version of our hallowed nostalgia heap. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, in my mind, was a ten-tape box set ever present at various punk houses across America, usually on a shelf right about my head as I tried to sleep on a hardwood floor in my neon lightning bolt sleeping bag. My family wasn’t much of a T.V. show family and I very much doubt that if they were that I would have been permitted to see it in the early nineties. Eventually I caught up with the show, thankfully well before the hip Netflix hype faze, therefore I had a proceeding investment in old friends like Bob, Laura, Coop, Lucy, James, Hawk, the Log Lady, Agent Phillip Jefferies (once David Bowie and now a giant steaming tea kettle), etc. While its nice to catch up with the ole gang, it’s maybe nicer to spend so much time with Dougie Jones as he acclimates to the bizarre rituals of middle-class suburban Vegas existence. Sometimes I think we don’t realize how often we are laughing with Lynch and his characters rather than at them. It’s rare to see something this funny and moving shift instantly to bleak and inquisitive about these mortal coils that we will all shuffle off someday. It swears allegiance to no set register, happily shifting gears without a warning shot, keeping us always on our toes. It doesn’t simply rest on the lazy laurels of fanboy service maintenance. Episode eight is perfectly content to be a great film unto itself. It has become customary for these unending returns to wreak of our shared communal acceptance of mediocrity if it’s rolled up in a husk of wistful nods to something being born and conceived before burrowing deep into our minds and hearts. This feels like a fetus, looking up at its mom asking “what year is it?”

Goodtime (Sadfies): Connie spends most this movie racing against the clock to release his developmentally disabled brother Nick from the notorious clutches of Rikers detainment system. Sounds heartwarming, but it couldn’t be further from. Connie as played by Robert Pattison, in a performance worthy of its hype, is a wily and callous opportunist, willing to destroy anyone standing in his path. As is often the case, one man’s journey to betterment seals another’s pain and sorrow and the Sadfie’s don’t offer clemency as a moral respite nor a form of consolation or contrition. Everything from the camera’s physicality to the words that characters choose sound fresh and mapped out with regards to who these people might really be on the streets. At its core Good Time is a futile race to a nonexistent freedom; the upshot of desperation. We all know that Connie won’t get away and we know that he shouldn’t, and somehow, we are wrought to root against our better moral and logical judgment. As for the unlucky people he uses to get what he wants; it’s sickening, and it should be. The scenes specifically dealing with Nick are especially precise. We have seen plenty of bombastic Hollywood elucidations of individuals with developmental disabilities but this one rings truer to me. The final scene was among the best that I’ve seen in any film in years.

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman): It’s been said before, but somehow Wiseman makes the seemingly mundane vital and captivating. Without uttering a single word and by simply beholding and forming mounds of material, he makes the case for the importance of information and harmony. It’s not just about the fortification of this crucial union between public and private, it’s about development and how we spread knowledge like a plague to quell the swelling insanity.

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson): Sometimes love requires a push, a nudge, or kick to correct our self-serving trajectory. I know I need to get knocked off my perch from time to time. It’s rare to be truly surprised where a story ends up. I’ve seen enough variations on the jerk dude falling back down to earth, but poisonous mushrooms weren’t the emancipators I had anticipated. Given how meticulous this director tends to be, I must tip my hat to the timing here. I was just about to write the entire thing off (impatience and distrust on my part) when the “twist” arrives. The fact that he was able to pull the exact same trick twice with even more efficiency the second time around is pretty impressive.

Downsizing (Alexander Payne): Payne’s oeuvre spends a lot of time with men entering and maneuvering sudden crossroads. He hasn’t ever attempted something so big and bold as Downsizing, though the overall stencil remains the same. This time we follow Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) from overpopulated and unsustainable world that we all know from a very accustomed vantage point to the same world but smaller (5 inches according to Wikipedia). A large part of the initial suspense lies in Paul and his wife (Kristen Wig) investigating and thus wrestling with the titular irreversible process. Once it’s done and Paul is left alone, he’s left wondering what we all tend to wonder; what’s it all about and how we can make it seem/feel meaningful? From there we meet the best cast of eccentric (to normies like Paul) companions in recent memory. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier play a pair of tiny hedonists who supply their community with the good stuff, while Hong Chau steals the show as a Vietnamese dissident forced to downsize as political punishment, an action that nearly cost her life and claimed the lives of everyone with her. Paul’s overwhelming sense of insignificance is exploited for good and eventually he sees the light in a finale that isn’t afraid of the foreseeable charges of mawkishness. The concept itself calls for a steady visual hand, the specifics are carefully and engagingly mapped out, and Payne doesn’t shrink away from his overall message here despite facing a cynical throng constantly diagnosing intention.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Craig Zahler): Zahler’s worlds are hellscapes that erupt into attentive and unadorned scenes of tough violence. He’s an impenitent genre guy and I hope that he can enjoy his success without being tantalized and diluted by the inevitable amplified budget. If I’m being completely honest, sometimes these movies drag on too long and talk too much, but that’s a small price to pay for this guy’s pristine renunciation of our communal good nature. In Zahler’s stories, his protagonists beat men into mush, men who are bound to a systematic moral decay driven by greed and lust. Humanity is the devil.

mother! (Darren Aronofsky): It’s lame but I guess it might be useful to note that I haven’t wholeheartedly liked a single movie by Aronofsky. While his talent isn’t lost on me, his bold style has always felt at odds with his normie narrative duties. I know its something well beyond my comprehension, begging rich people to fund your movie, but his movies always seem compromised by the time he gets to where he’s going, either that or they just plain didn’t do it for me. This time around he finally went for it, and its imperfections are far more interesting than any tidying up he’s done in the past. For starters, he lures the viewer in by flashing little chards of lucid plot right before hurdling us further and further into complete disorder. For a better look at how I felt around the time of seeing this you can read this: https://musabran.blogspot.com/2017/09/mother.html

I’m out of steam. Look:

1.       Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)

2.       Good Time (Josh and Benny Sadfie)

3.       Downsizing (Alexander Payne)

4.       Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

5.       Ex Libris (Frederick Wiseman)

6.       Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler)

7.       mother! (Darren Aronofsky)

8.       All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak)

9.       Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh)

10.   Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina)

Honorable: The Florida Project, Faces/Places, A Quiet Passion, Get Out, The Lost City of Z,  Girls Trip, The Merowytz Stories, Dawson City: Frozen Time.

Purgatory: Spiderman: Homecoming, Lady Bird, Personal Shopper, Okja, A Ghost Story, Wind River, Leatherface, Blade Runner, Monster Truck, Song to Song, Stronger, Thor: Ragnorak, The Last Jedi,

No: Wonder Woman, The Big Sick, The Work, Split, A Cure for Wellness, Logan, Beauty and the Beast, Kong: Skull Island, Raw, Baby Driver, The Belko Experiment, Power Rangers, Life, Alien: Covenant, It Comes At Night, Rough Night, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled, The Bad Batch, Dunkirk, Atomic Blond, 3 Billboards, It, I Tonya, Jeepers Creepers 3, Happy Death Day, The Foreigner, The Snowman, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Call Me by Your Name, The Shape of Water, Jumanji 2, The Post, Hostiles.

 I didn’t/I couldn’t: BPM, Mudbound, Loveless, The Other Side of Hope, The Square (I saw half of it), Columbus, The Human Surge, On the Beach Alone at Night, Staying Vertical, Wonderstruck, Kedi, The Death of Louis XIV.        

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.