Film of the Week: Milk and Serial

 

It's hard to remember the last time I watched something as agonizingly mean-spirited and skin-crawling as Milk and Serial, the hour-long, $800 found footage horror movie from director Curry Barker, who also plays the titular "Milk". Playing out over the course of a few days and amidst the rapidly crumbling relationship of two prank Youtubers, Milk and Seven (Cooper Tomlinson), the film excellently uses it's format, often implicating it's audience in the film's horrific occurrences and using dramatic irony to hang tension over our heads like a guillotine about to drop. It's a film that looks you deep in the eye and shows you a portrait of a deeply unwell person lashing out at others for increasingly petty reasons, sticking with you long after it's done. 

It's hard to talk about Milk and Serial without giving away a lot of what the film is trying to keep hidden, so for the interest of writing a review, I'll ask that those who haven't seen it stop about here and experience it for themselves. (Long story short: it's good! I recommend it.) The film, initially depicting a loud house party prank that seemingly catches the attention of a frightening, clearly mentally ill stranger (Jonathan Cripple), starts as something cliched, a group of hapless friends meddling with someone they shouldn't, all the while recording for no clear reason beyond Milk's insistence that they do so. It feels trite, predictable, and it isn't until Seven is forced to kill the stranger in self-defense after he drags the two to the desert that it takes a turn. Milk, claiming that the kidnapping was a prank but that Seven's killing was an accident, suddenly turns to the camera, saying it's time to explain how "the real prank" worked. The turn is jarring, working in the film's favor as we see Milk, revealed to be a psychotic serial killer who has claimed at least six victims, retraces his steps, showing us the secret steps that occurred in the background of the film's first third. 

Barker is very good as Milk, his boyish grin dripping with cruelty and self-referential smugness, a perpetual "I know something you don't" as he gaslights and terrorizes a guilt-ridden Seven. There's a casualness to his cruelty, from the way he makes casual conversation with a helpless victim to the ease with which he spins unnecessary lies just to wear down his hapless partner. Unlike American Psycho or Dexter, which gives their serial killers something of a charm, Milk is just nasty for nastiness sake. His explanation, a boiled over resentment of the more creative Seven, feels petty, more of an excuse for his behavior, while there's a clumsiness to his plans that both sews tension and robs of catharsis. His manipulation of Seven is simply abuse, his hastily-slapped together lies to lure in both the stranger (revealed to be a struggling actor looking for a gig) and his son clumsy and holding up just long enough for him to get away, and the moments where his mask slips showcase the bitter manchild underneath it all. 

Even the film's usage of found footage feels very justified, effectively operating as a video diary of every step of Milk's plan to wear down Seven and convince him to kill himself, an effort that will supposedly make him the greatest serial killer of all time. While the film does stray from this, cutting to their other roommates in an effort to move the rest of the story along, it makes the rest feel intimate. We're effectively Milk's accomplice, stuck with him and helpless to do anything for Seven as the situation devolves. The film's ending even plays to this idea, as the movie is over the moment Milk and Seven's situation hits it's end. We're finally free, but any real resolution is simply out of our grasp. 

The ending similarly plays to the film's nasty spirit, as Seven overhears Milk talking into the camera of his true agenda and finally snaps, killing his abuser and then himself. There's no dramatic reveal, no bold last word or secret extra step, just a quiet, "Oh," and then both men are dead. Roll credits. It robs us of both resolution and satisfaction, as Milk dies largely vindicated but is completely unable to celebrate the fame he desperately wanted. We don't even know if he becomes the celebrity he so badly wanted to be. It simply...ends. It's a bold ending, but one that suits the story being told here. We, like Seven and his hapless friends, saw what Milk wanted to be seen. Anything else just weighs down the content. 

Film of the Week: Duel

 

Steven Spielberg is one of those filmmakers that, despite being a multi-Academy Award winner whose helmed some of the most successful and critically acclaimed films of all time, I feel can be genuinely underappreciated for the sheer talent and inspiration behind the camera. For all the criticisms that he's a sentimental director, in love with Americana and old-school style, Spielberg is also a deeply creative, often brilliant director, so good at it that he often makes it look easy, as James Mangold found out the hard way in making Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a film I generally liked but was a far cry from the original trilogy. This was very evident to me in the making of Duel, his directorial debut from when he was a mere 25 years old. A low-budget tv movie, shot at breakneck speeds and cut together a mere matter of days before it's premiere, Duel is a fascinating peek into the early days of one of cinema's greats, tense and surprisingly character-driven in it's depiction of road rage gone bad.

Shot on a low budget of $450,000, Duel is considerably minimalist, shot almost entirely on the highways and deserts of California. There's only one physical location, a diner that David Mann (Dennis Weaver) crashes outside of and spends a fair amount of time contemplating the next move in his battle of wits with a seemingly psychotic, unseen truck driver. This adds to the film's constant sense of paranoia and isolation, as Mann, a stressed businessman on a last-minute trip out of Los Angeles, is completely alone, unsure of who to trust and where he can even go to avoid the wrath of the driver. Weaver, chosen by Spielberg due to his role in Touch of Evil, is excellent as Mann, an embattled everyman whose frustration and resentment boils over as he feels the walls close in around him, while Spielberg's decision to leave the driver as a faceless entity pays off very well. We as an audience are left to decipher the exact motives of the driver, who goes from chasing down Mann at 90 MPH one moment to helping a bus full of kids the next. Is it casual cruelty that drives the pursuit? Misplaced vengeance at a driver who cut him off? It's up to us. 

The true antagonist, in a way, is the driver's truck, a worn-down Peterbilt 281 tanker hauling some form of hazardous material. The Peterbilt, a rusted, roadworn tanker with a set of license plates across it's front like a Predator's belt of skulls, serves as a looming threat, it's mere appearance (even when parked) signaling very clear danger, and it's final, dinosaur-like roar as it's destroyed makes the "vehicle as monster" message very clear. Making this a battle against a faceless threat lets us sit with Mann, his internal monologues and frantic, anxious expressions telling much of the story without saying much at all. 

And of course, Spielberg's direction goes a long way. The truck is presented as death on wheels, hurtling across the road while looming large in every shot it's in, and in a particularly tense set-piece, it appears almost out of thin air from off-frame to try and run over Mann as he attempts to call for help in the only phone booth for miles. Duel often feels claustrophobic, the miles of open road lonely and hostile rather than particularly freeing, and even when Mann is around other people, it's little comfort as he attempts to surmise the identity of his unknown attacker, the camera at one point closing in on his face as he scans the room, looking for any clues that could help him. The tension becomes suffocating at points, and the final shot, a lonely Mann sitting on a hillside as the sun sets, gives little comfort as we realize just how exhausting this fight for survival, forced on him just because he was in the wrong place at the right time, has been. 

Duel is a fascinating piece of cinema history and just a damn good movie overall. Spielberg would go on to do bigger and better things, but it's easy to see why this is one he often revisits. Without it, one of cinema's great auteurs might not have ever been able to explode on the scene. It's like watching the expert planting of seeds: in time, something beautiful will grow from it. 

Film of the Week: In A Violent Nature

In A Violent Nature is a film often incredibly content to sit in it's silence, leaving you with little but your thoughts as we watch Johnny (Ry Barrett) trudge from kill to kill, watching from afar as the tried and true cliche of hapless attractive young people go about their business. Shot in the Algoma district of Ontario, it's often gorgeous to look at as Johnny trudges through the locales, but it's a lot like it's killer in that it has frustratingly little to say. The film flirts with a meta narrative without neccessarily committing to it, leaving a fairly entertaining slasher that doesn't quite live up to its premise while still leaving gore hounds like myself fairly satisfied.

It's not to say there isn't fun to be had here. Johnny's continued abuse of a corpse as a means of opening doors and windows is genuinely hilarious, while the film's most interesting concept is the quiet reveal that it's a sequel to a previous rampage of Johnny's, as a grizzled park ranger (Reece Presley) explains to two of our survivors. The film often works best when it's committed to the idea of showing us the things that horror movies decide not to show. Johnny's treks, a deliberate subversion of the idea of a slasher simply teleporting to the next place, through the wilderness are strangely peaceful, as director Chris Nash and cinematographer Pierce Derks are content to just let us soak in the gorgeous views while playing with lighting just well enough to make the film's nighttime scenes pop out. 

And, of course, if you come to this looking for a slasher film, you'll have a fun time. The film's various kills are suitably gory and fairly entertaining in their execution, while Nash wisely commits to a more mundane tone as a contrast. There's nothing in the way of music as Johnny tears his way through the cast, nor are there cheap jumpscares as we see it from the killer's perspective. They're simply brutal and to the point, then on to the next trek. None of it feels personal or particularly passionate, just Johnny eliminating an annoyance on his journey for his late mother's necklace. A particular favorite is Johnny's violent killing of the aforementioned ranger, a slow affair as Johnny cripples the man, drags his body to a wood shed, then slowly but surely dismembers him with a log splitter. Of all the film's kills, it's the one most fitting of its premise, and the often jarring contrast between the general serenity of much of the film and the comical absurdity of its deaths is a lot of fun to behold.

As a slasher, it's entertaining, but for a film that loudly prides itself on playing with perspective, it doesn't do too much with it. The shift in perspective, theoretically, should subvert our expectations and sympathies, but we learn frustratingly little about Johnny over the course of his adventure. A single flashback that establishes the importance of his mother's necklace is our only real hint to his motivation, while a scene of him playing quietly with a toy car is suitably interesting, but the "why" of him is left up to us with little in the way of clues to put together. The film suggests some sort of explanation near the end in the form of a long-winded story told by a good samaritan (Lauren Taylor) about how the isolating effect of nature can make anyone feral, but it's hardly a full rationalization of the various killing sprees. Without a properly subversive answer, Johnny is little different from the slashers he serves as a parody of, and his brutal, dreamlike murders lack a proper impact without a "why.".

In A Violent Nature is an interesting experiment—a slasher from its killer's perspective—that doesn't quite hit the heights that its premise could. There is, undeniably, a real talent on display here, as Nash frames events beautifully and comes very close to selling the idea in its wonderfully brutal kills, but it's something that maybe needed a little more to go from "good" to "great". A sequel has been announced that I will happily be seated for, so perhaps the second (or third, if we stick to continuity) time will be a charm.

Film of the Week: The Raid: Redemption

There's a lot of beauty to be found in simplicity. As fun as it is to watch a filmmaker approach a complicated concept or idea and pull it off, it can be equally entertaining to watch a filmmaker approach a simple premise and absolutely knock it out of the park, using the simplicity to really hone the craft into something special. The Raid: Redemption, Gareth Evans's 2012 genre-redefining action film, is a perfect example of this philosophy. It's premise, a botched raid leads to a group of cops trapped in an apartment complex full of murderous criminals, is on the paper fairly simple, it's characters often boiled down to basic traits and motivations, and, save for a compelling emotional hook, it's story hums along with a quiet, unsurprising efficiency. But, we're not here for the story beats, we're here for the bone-breaking, beautifully choreographed action and impressive feats of tension of which very few films since have managed to match. 

From it's opening moments, The Raid feels lived in, delightfully grimy and worn-down in it's establishing moments of the complex that makes up nearly the entirety of the film's runtime. Cracks in the unpainted walls, dried blood still on the concrete, and visible signs of decay litter every scene, and even the streets outside are barren and abandoned, giving the film a near-dystopian quality. It truly feels like the raid team, a collection of supposedly elite police officers, are walking into completely hostile territory, and the brief moments of characterization we get with the team, like the quiet, dedicated Rama (Iko Uwais) to the fiery Bowo (Tegar Satrya) to the ambitious, sleazy Wahyu, call to mind the introduction of the Colonial Marines in Aliens. In their simple interactions, from the efficient elimination of a guard or Rama's heated debate with Bowo over what to do with a civilian trying to get back to his wife, we're given enough of an idea of the personalities and dynamics of the roster that the near-immediate collapse of the plan hits with a suitable amount of impact. 

And what an impact it is. Famously talked about as the very best of modern action fare, The Raid's action scenes are brutal and chaotic, brawls and shootouts with real impact where the hits hurt and every victory feels agonizingly earned. Evans, alongside excellent work from choreographers like Uwais, films these with a real weight behind them. Rooms are destroyed, wounds are inflicted and play major roles in fights, and the knock-down, drag-out fights often end with everyone involved winded and limping away. It's a film that, every time I revisit, I tend to come away from with a new favorite fight scene. While the initial ambush, an overwhelming fighting retreat that sees our protagonists literally tearing apart the rooms of the complex to escape a seemingly endless horde, is brilliant in it's flow, the duel between Jaka (Joe Taslim) and Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian, playing one of the all time great movie henchmen) always stands out, a vicious struggle that tells a story entirely in it's physicality as Mad Dog, an adrenaline junkie sadist, breaks down the defiant, stoic Jaka, culminating in a sad, futile struggle against a neck snap that leaves you feeling like the adrenaline got sucked from your body. 

While the action is exceptional, this would be a worse film overall should the rest of the film just feel like a loading screen between them, and it's the quieter moments that really sell those set-pieces. From the instant the initial ambush is over, we find our heroes in a much scrappier position, forced to hide and flee from the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. In one stellar moment, Rama and Bowo hide in the crawl space of the aforementioned civilians wall. Evans plays up the claustrophobia for all it's wall, practically shoving the camera into the wall as we see Rama strain himself, groaning in pain, just to turn his body a few inches. The tension escalates again and again, from Bowo fighting the pain of a missing ear to Rama having to gently wipe blood from a machete as it pierces the wall and slashes his cheek. There's a perpetual undercurrent of violence and danger in these quieter moments, that pursuers could burst in at any moment and force a losing fight, and when they do, it's often cathartic and punishing for everyone involved. 

Even the film's emotional beats, which the late, great Roger Ebert criticized as mindless and cheap as a great example of how even our best can miss from time to time, work in conveying exactly how much information is needed for us to care. What exactly drove crime lieutenant Andi (Donny Alamsyah) away from his family and into a life of crime, forcing his brother Rama to try and rescue him from the complex? It doesn't really matter, because all we need is that connection, played by Iwais, tragically squandered by Hollywood again and again, and Alamsyah in a mixture of bitterness and quiet affection. The connection feels real and sad, two men fighting over whether or not they can reconnect after finding themselves at a crossroad, and the emotional catharsis of them reuniting in a two on one brawl against Mad Dog makes for an incredibly effective, suitably gnarly climax. 

It's honestly difficult to find ways to praise The Raid that don't just feel like retreading old ground. It is, after all, a film that's influence can be found on everything from Daredevil to John Wick to Mission Impossible, effectively turning the page on the way a lot of modern action cinema presents itself. But, even with all that, it still stands head and shoulders above it's imitators as a triumph of the genre. It's a nonstop rush, scrappy and nasty but with an undeniable heart, and now with a glorious 4K remaster, you have no excuse to check it out if you somehow haven't. 

Film of the Week: Miami Vice

Miami Vice, Michael Mann's 2006 adaptation of the TV series of the same name of which he was also a major creative figure, opens and closes abruptly. In the film's opening minutes, we see our duo of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo "Rico" Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) already on assignment, in the midst of an undercover sting on a high-profile pimp, while the film's closing is Crockett en-route to the hospital, checking on a member of the team (and Tubbs's wife) as she awakens from a coma, much of the film's major conflicts seemingly unresolved. It's somewhat jarring, but rather than feeling as though the story is to a degree incomplete, it almost feels, fittingly, episodic. Rather than a sweeping, loud shoot-em-up, the film instead feels strangely intimate, a peek into the lives of our troubled heroes for just a little while. It's that emphasis on the human connection that helps Miami Vice, a reevaluated cult classic of 2000s cinema, stand out so beautifully.

While the focus of this review will largely be on the film's strangely human elements, it is worth mentioning that as an action-thriller police procedural, Miami Vice absolutely whips. Michael Mann, aided by Collateral, shoots the film in a unique mix of digital cinematography and close-up, shaky shots, giving it an often dreamlike energy as we seemingly exist as a third party observer to the action. The story, an undercover mission featuring the two detectives enrolled in an elaborate international conspiracy, is suitably tense, with a particular highlight being Crockett and Tubbs's sit-down with a cartel intelligence officer. What is on paper a basic conversation feels suitably tense as Mann highlights the sheer number of criminals surrounding the duo, it's escalation naturally fitting while it's resolution, Crockett pulling a grenade and channeling his best loose cannon, is effectively thrilling. Mann knows how to shoot a set-piece, and the film gives him ample opportunity, from car chases to stand-offs to warehouse raids, in his classic coldly clinical style.The final shootout in particular is vicious and to-the-point. There's no surprise ambushes, no last words, and no last-chance second winds. If you're hit, you're dead, and we regularly watch as both cartel goons and cops are ripped to shreds without mercy or exception.

Where the film truly sings is in it's quiet moments. Miami Vice is often fascinated by the personal lives and mindsets of it's subjects, and the humanity with which Mann treats them makes the film as a whole feel tenser and nastier when violence rears it's head. The film's establishing moment is truly when criminal informant Alonzo Stevens (John Hawkes) discovers that his wife, a hostage of the cartel taken to force him to give up information, has been killed. The depiction of the wife's death, her body sprawled in the background as a white supremacist hitman roots through her fridge, is chilling, and Hawkes absolutely kills what is ultimately a very minor role, and we see him go through a whirlwind of terror, desperation, and cold desperation in a matter of minutes as Stevens realizes she's gone before taking his own life. It's a sobering moment that makes the film's stakes feel very real.

These stakes hang over Crockett and Tubbs in every moment, especially as their own personal lives become dangerously intertwined. The portrayal of these personal lives do somewhat fall into a pitfall of Mann's, his tendency to make women accessory to his protagonists, but the quiet moments, like Tubbs taking a shower with his wife, are strangely moving. There's a feeling of quiet familiarity to it, of people who've known each other for so long that words just aren't needed to convey it, and it goes a long way to making these feel like real, established relationships. A particularly beautiful moment is Crockett taking Isabella (Gong Li), financial adviser and wife to cartel head Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), dancing, a first step in an apparent plan to earn her trust that rapidly evolves into something much more real. Crockett and Isabella talk about their lives and relationship with the world of crime, but when they're on the floor, no words are spoken, their bodies moving in motion with a mixture of mambo and, surprisingly. The chemistry between Li and Farrell is simmering, quietly erotic and seemingly evolving before the audiences eyes, and you genuinely come away feeling the two's connection, even as it explodes into tragedy.

This fascination with humanity even extends to Montoya, the film's ultimate villain. Rather than a generic, menacing cartel bad guy, Tosar injects a strangely affable nature to Montoya, who speaks calmly and plainly in his various interactions. The one peek we get into his relationship with Isabella, a calm discussion about her evaluation of Crockett and Tubbs, is not a fight or a husband exerting authority, but a simple, trusting conversation. Rather than defang the villain, it makes him intriguing and often unnervingly reasonable. Montoya is no ruthless gangster, he's a businessman willing to tolerate our heroes so long as they don't affect the bottom line, and it's the moment he, manipulated by the embittered intelligence officer with eyes for Isabella, betrays this idea that you instantly feel the noose tighten. 

I watched Miami Vice largely just to chip in on the inexplicable Twitter discourse surrounding it, and I'm delighted to confirm that it's supremely my shit. A beautiful, emotionally-driven action movie exactly within the wheelhouse of it's auteur director, full of thrills and ending on a perfect melancholy note. I guess you could say I'm a fiend for this type of stuff. 

Film of the Week: Secret Honor

 

The first thing you see in Secret Honor, Robert Altman's adaptation of Donald Freed and Arnold Stone's play of the same name, is the reassurance that the events depicted are entirely fictional, and that the Richard Nixon (Phillip Baker Hall) we see is simply a character rather than a true depiction of the former president. It makes sense, of course, given that the disgraced former president was very much still alive at the time, but it plays well with the film's general idea of the truth and how we communicate it even when we're by ourselves. Can someone as monstrous as Nixon, one of the most cynical and deluded men to ever hold the office, be honest with himself as he debates the severity of his actions and what got him to that point? Should he even attempt to? Secret Honor is a fascinating one man show, an electrifying portrayal of a man fighting against his own and conscience as he rages at a world that he feels didn't give him what he deserved. 

Adapting a source material as low-key as this, a one man show set entirely in a different room, is a fascinating challenge, one that Altman, a director whose work I'm ashamed to admit I'm not massively familiar with, handles very effectively. Nixon's office, where he records his memoirs amidst other rambling, mundane plans such as buying a sympathy gift of his gardener's wife, is shot to feel claustrophobic, a gilded cage for the man who once was able to kill thousands with a phone call. In one sequence, Nixon cowers by his security monitor, white-knuckling a revolver as he tries to get his cameras to work, convinced would-be assassins are right around the corner.  As Nixon paces across the office, we truly feel every small detail of it and it's significance to him, from his beloved mother's piano to the revolver sitting on his desk to the looming, seemingly judging portraits of past presidents on the walls, and by the end we feel just as trapped as he does. 

Nixon himself makes for a fascinating character, a toxic mix of self-loathing, righteous cruelty, and lust for power. Twitchy, bitter, and boiling with barely hidden resentment, Hall makes someone so odious into someone almost pitiful, as more and more layers of the former Commander-in-Chief are peeled away. His little tics betray his true psyche, from his tendency to let slurs fly as he gets more agitated in describing the American people turning on him to him interrupting a dialogue about JFK to talk about his brother, who he insists was the true favorite of his family. His memoir is less an organized biography and more of an extended airing of grievances, both real and imagined, and he often swings wildly between raging at his "superiors" and the dregs of society. JFK, his own mother, the mysterious "Committee of 100", even everyday American citizens, all are complicit in the betrayal of Nixon. It's this violent refusal to accept the culpability in his own actions that drives much of Secret Honor, even as it swings from mundane to sinister. 

The conspiracy element, an often underdiscussed element in conversations around Nixon's downfall, adds to his paranoia, as he rambles about the "Committee of 100", a collection of influential men who effectively groomed Nixon for power before he had even started his run for Congress. It is, effectively, a deal with the devil, with the power-hungry Nixon getting everything he thought he wanted in return for advancing the various pet projects of the Committee. The film, wisely, keeps Nixon's interactions with this Committee, and whether they even really exist to the level he claims they do, largely ambiguous. Perhaps Nixon is correct and that everything, from his bombing of Cambodia to his disgrace and resignation over Watergate, was the work of the Committee, or perhaps they're just another enemy, another thing in his life that used and discarded him when he wasn't up to snuff? The Committee, with it's schemes to prolong Vietnam and discard the Constitution, allow Nixon, racebaiter, war criminal, and the beginning of the end of the New Deal era of American society, to play the hero. His peace deals, Watergate, even his secret meetings with Kissinger, a Judas-esque figure whose portrait literally hangs over Nixon for the entirety of the film, were all in service to stopping a worst fate for the American people. Is he being honest, is he lying, does it matter?

Secret Honor is, despite it's minimalist appearance, a lot of things. Conspiracy thriller, political biopic, theatrical adaptation, but most crucially, it's a character study of a deeply damaged man, desperate for power and the acclaim he's always desired, and the depths he was willing to sink just to conquer the demons that plagued him. It's a fascinating, brutally grim portrayal of one of history's most fascinating figures that leaves you to draw your own conclusions, with nothing but the word of a serial liar as your evidence. 

Film of the Week: I Saw the TV Glow

 

I Saw the TV Glow isn't going to be a movie for everyone. It's a film by and about a generation raised in a specific cultural moment and have lived obsessed with that moment. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it's for the kids who all loved that one piece of 90s media (Power Rangers, Buffy, The X-Files, etc.) and had no one with which to share that obsession, trapped in the world of a small town that feels like all there will ever be. It won't click for everyone, but for me? I found this a unique, soul-crushingly sad experience that crawled under my skin with the intent of living there for a long time. 

I Saw the TV Glow is about nostalgia, less the No Way Home style of using nostalgia as an audience engagement tool and more about how nostalgia often violently clashes with the trials and tribulations of growing up. As a teenager, confused, shy, and reserved about the world, Owen (Justice Smith, using his sad-eyed charm to truly tragic levels here) finds solace, and a somewhat unlikely friendship with fellow outsider Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), in The Pink Opaque, a young adult horror series about psychic girls that battle the forces of evil. To Owen, it's the only time in his life he feels safe and like he can be his true self, and to Maddy, it represents the world she wishes she lived in. When Owen revisits it as an adult, however, he, having seemingly rejected his chance to truly escape into it, finds something tacky and garish, something to be embarrassed at having ever loved. The Pink Opaque didn't get worse, he just grew up and embraced the conformity he'd spent his young life fearing.

This contrasts against Maddy, who had seemingly run from home and uncovered the "truth" of the world in which they lived, and rejected every chance to conform. It makes her reuniting with Owen as adults deeply tragic and melancholic, two people who once had a special connection that have now wandered down different paths and fight like hell to pull the other off of theirs. Jane Schoenbrun, second-time director, plays with both visuals and storytelling to leave things just ambiguous enough to weave two narratives, each as enriching and bleak as the other to come to the same conclusion: Owen is trapped in a hellish, mundane existence, too scared of the unknown to break the mold and embrace what he truly is even as it slowly eats away at him. It works, both as a narrative of the trans existence and as a stunning piece of fantasy horror. 

And it truly is stunning. The entire film is lit with a dark, neon-tinted color palette, feeling otherworldly even as it frames characters simply going to work or watching tv, and the often supposedly crowded places like carnivals, schools, or arcades are framed at a distance, sparsely populated save for our protagonists. It feels isolated, sad, a world where one feels truly alone even when surrounded by people who don't "get it". Schoenbrun clearly knows her stuff in her usage of the visual language to convey the often very heavy ideas at play, and the glimpses we see of The Pink Opaque feel authentically like something of the era, from Are You Afraid of the Dark? to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to even Twin Peaks. (I would be shocked if The Return, a similarly brutal critique of nostalgia and the way it traps us, was not a major influence in this.) In an even more clever twist, the film establishes the idea of The Pink Opaque so well that the subversions of that aesthetic, Owen watching the show's shockingly violent and upsetting series finale and then revisiting his favorite episode years later, feel incredibly upsetting. Special kudos should go to the practical makeup and costume design for the show's monsters, with Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner), the moon-faced big bad, standing out in one sequence that had me physically shrinking in my seat, which go a long way to making this work. 

I Saw the TV Glow's commentary on nostalgia is a fear of the familiar, of being so complacent in an existence that you deserve better that you bury yourself in the small comforts of childhood and yearning for when the world is simpler. In the eyes of the film, the greatest tragedy is not taking the chance to live as you truly should, and Maddy's final message, a massive "THERE IS STILL TIME" etched in chalk on Owen's street, feels like a quiet reminder that it's never too late to live this truth. I've never seen something as unique and intimate as this film, and despite how deeply personal it feels, it speaks to a universal experience of a generation. 

Film of the Week: The Watchers

Anyone who knows my taste in movies knows that I love ambition. There's nothing more satisfying than watching a filmmaker, especially a less experienced one, swing wildly above their weight class with ideas and concepts and pull it off, and even the misfires of this variety (of which there are many) are often fun to think back on. The Watchers, the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, is definitely closer to the former category. In a way, it resembles the work of Ishana's father, M. Night, warts and all. It's got clunky dialogue and a third act that overstays it's welcome, but there's an undeniable visual spark and intriguing premise that make this one (mostly) a winner.

The Watchers very much leans into the idea of being watched by outside observers in its visual language, and even before Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds her way to the cabin where much of the film is set, Shyamalan and cinematographer Eli Arenson often set shots in a way as though we're seeing them from another's eyes, through windows, and from a distance. It gives the film an air of suitable menace that it manages to effectively keep for much of its runtime, giving the sense that the characters are constantly being stalked by the titular "Watchers" as they attempt to unravel what, exactly, is happening. This paranoia sews tension with every shot of the shadows, with the audience forced to listen and wonder if the Watchers are waiting, just out of view. The ambiguity, this constant uncertainty as to where the Watchers are or what they're doing, works a lot towards giving the monsters a decent amount of menace. Shyamlan wisely avoids showing the creatures in their entirety for much of the runtime, and the glimpses we do get are unnerving, from the lanky, treelike forms of their true selves to the not quite right human disguises they wear as the tension between them and the hapless travelers they've captured reaches a boiling point. Among the film's most creative ideas is the one-way mirror that serves as one of the cabin's walls, used by the Watchers to observe the main characters. The characters can see nothing, listening only to the screams and clapping of their audience. It's suitably creepy, wisely letting the audience fill in the blanks with their minds.

The film, unfortunately, does go off the rails as Shymalan abandons the "less is more" philosophy. While the reveal, the Watchers are vengeful faeries attempting to emulate human behavior, is inherently an excellent premise, giving the film a fantasy twist, it overplays it's hand in it's last third, delving deeper into the mythology and sacrificing what could've been an effectively creepy twist ending for a happier resolution. It lacks the bite it could've had, settling for something more sincere in its place. Fascinatingly, Ishana does tend to fall into the same pitfalls as her father, from his penchant for dropped balls in the third act to clunky dialogue. How the film gives exposition through dialogue never feels quite right, not quite surreal enough to feel fantastical nor realistic enough to feel entirely like real people. While it doesn't drag the film down too much, as I still found the characters charming enough to get by thanks to some very quietly affecting emotional beats, it's worth noting that it took me out of things just a tad.

The Watchers biggest strength and weakness, strangely, are one and the same: ambition. It grasps at concepts of grief, high fantasy, and trauma with a genuine passion and excitability that you can see on screen, but never quite devotes enough of itself to do any topic the full justice it deserves. Rather than sink the film under its weight, it makes it endearing and unique. It's got effective scares, cool monsters, and an undeniable eye for detail behind the camera that it's able to overcome these weaknesses and still weave an affecting, satisfying story. The Watchers definitely loses steam as it goes, but there's a spark of something here, and I'll be eager to see what its director has up her sleeve in the future. I guess you could say that I'll be an avid...watcher.

Film of the Week: Hit Man

I must admit, I am somewhat doubtful of the argument that the movie star is dead. On top of our current heavy-hitters, such as Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington, there's the younger generation, such as Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya, waiting patiently in the wings. One thing I do agree with, however, is that when a new star comes along, you just know it. Glen Powell, with his electric charisma and easygoing charm, is that kind of star, and while he's been a standout in the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, the latest from Richard Linklater, is the perfect kind of star vehicle to weaponize his talents most effectively.

Hit Man, somewhat based on the life of Gary Johnson, a college professor/tech guy turned fake hitman in police sting operations, initially seems like something of a strange project for Linklater. After all, it's a mix of dark comedy, romance, and thriller, but in a strange way, it's undeniably in his wheelhouse. Linklater, like his protagonist, is fascinated by human behavior, connection, and, ultimately, the lengths they will go in service of finding that connection. The film's strongest scenes are in the conversations between Gary (Glen Powell) and Madison (Adria Arjona), a potential client turned lover. Simmering with sexual tension, the two fall into an easy rhythm as Gary, under the guise of his Ron persona, begins to find someone on his wavelength while still operating under a degree of tension. How much of this is Ron, the swaggering, ultra-confident hitman, and how much is Gary finally opening up with someone he can trust?

Powell is firing on all cylinders as Gary and his various personas, clearly having a blast as he shifts his vocal tics and physicality to build a perfect idea of a contract killer for his hapless clients. Of particular note is his imitation of Patrick Bateman, a delightful gag, and his strange Tilda Swinton-esque disguise, though Ron, the one with the most focus, makes for a fun lead, as Powell blatantly channels the energy of 80s/90s Tom Cruise in his interactions with Ardojna. As the film goes, the disguise blends with the true personality, and the moment where it truly slips feels like a slap. You don't realize just how many little things go into creating "Ron" until Gary drops it in a hilariously dark moment of weakness. Like the various stings Gary is reluctantly conscripted in, the film wouldn't work without a man committed enough to carry it.

There are some slip-ups, of course. The film's visual palette is somewhat flat, with Linklater content settling on more simplistic, familiar shots in the service of his script, while the film's side characters feel nowhere as nuanced as its leads. He makes up for it, however, with some great sequences, like Gary and Madison acting out an argument to mislead a police wire, Gary silently directing Madison with the notes app on his phone and exaggerated, silent gestures. (Madison's quiet "fuck" as she realizes the police are aware of her life insurance policy on her dead, abusive husband killed me.) Surprisingly, it's quiet tense as well, as Linklater injects a sense of creeping anxiety into the film's back-half conflict, with the near-constant feeling that his double lives could collide at any moment hanging over the audience's head. Like any good caper, it's in these moments where we root for Gary to pull his escape, and the film's climax is fittingly clever and believably dark while still being satisfying, a natural endpoint for a film so focused on behavior and the difficult question of what taking a life entails. 

It's a real shame that Netflix, a company largely allergic to making any form of profit, didn't push for a wider cinema release for Hit Man, because there's a lot of fun to be had here. With attractive stars and a good sense of tone, this is a real crowd-pleaser, full of fun twists and good jokes. Netflix films can be hit and miss, but Hit Man, much like its protagonist, oozes charm.

Film of the Week: Paranormal Activity: Unknown Dimension

There's few things as fun to watch as a good making-of documentary. Nine times out of ten, this stems from the fact that it's just plain fascinating to find out exactly how the creators pulled off a particular moment in a film, game, or show, and it often leaves you with a greater appreciation for the finished work. After all, with how difficult the act of creating something is, every movie, no matter how bad, is something of a tiny miracle. Unknown Dimension, a documentary about the rise and fall of the once-dominant Paranormal Activity franchise, stands among the best of these works. It's not just an in-depth examination of how the franchise came to be, but it's also a shockingly honest, funny, and surprisingly brutal post-mortem on how it all fell apart.

There's an undeniable scrappy charm to the earlier installments of Paranormal Activity, an energy captured quite well with the documentary's interviews with Orin Peli, the first film's director, and Katie Featherston/Micah Sloat, it's stars. Listening to Peli describe his influences, both The Blair Witch Project and Cannibal Holocaust, and his willingness to put his livelihood on the line, ripping up his own home to make it easier to shoot in, is genuinely affecting. The first film, strange as it is to say, was a real experiment, a bold swing made on a shoestring budget by a handful of people, and it's satisfying to watch it succeed as we see just how much was riding on it.

With success, of course, comes a demand for more, at which point other producers and writers, responsible for the franchise's increasing emphasis on lore and continuity, come into play. Particular favorites of these talking heads are superstar producer Jason Blum (hilariously framed with an Emmy next to him and a poster for Get Out over his shoulder) and Christopher Landon, an honest, passionate writer whose attempts to weave a cohesive narrative enabled the franchise to limp along for as long as it did. These interviews are often frank and deeply informative about every step of the creative process. We see directors pitching their ideas and venting their creative limitations, producers discussing the advantages of working with low budgets, and actors earnestly discussing the roles that would serve as a springboard for most of them. (Katie Featherston is rightfully given praise for being the franchise's glue, both in terms of showing up in most of them and also for her great physical performance as a possessed Katie.) As the franchise hits its heyday, making wild profits and inspiring a deluge of imitators, you can see a real enthusiasm for the project, from Landon's intervention to ensure 2 is a stronger project to the inspired hiring of the directors of Catfish to helm the third entry. It's even full of fun "how did they do that?" moments, like Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman showcasing a camera attached to an oscillating fan and how they expertly used it to create tension. There's a creativity and apparently genuine passion to ensure these succeed, and that energy is strangely infectious.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and this franchise is no different. Like any great disaster, the retrospective takes a harsher tone after the third film as our various talking heads begin furiously pointing fingers. With zero hesitation, Jason Blum says 4 and Ghost Dimension are easily the worst of the franchise, while Christopher Landon mournfully admits to handing the finale's director an impossible job with a wistfulness that made me laugh so hard my roommates had to pause the movie. With the franchise dead and (at the time of production) buried, it allows for much-appreciated honesty from the interviewees. Jost and Schulman, in particular, have some great excerpts about the production of 4, discussing how their creative pitch for a road trip was quickly tossed aside in favor of a product where they had little autonomy. Laughs and smiles are had by all, of course, but the bitter undertone of it all adds a lot of bite. Even an effort by Landon in the director's chair (the very fun Marked Ones) can't quite reverse the woes, even if, hilariously, he breaks the supposed cardinal rule of the franchise by not making a haunted house movie.

The ultimate conclusion of Unknown Dimension is an interesting one. For all the finger-pointing and discussion of the sequel's shortcomings, you get the sense that everyone realized that the found footage fad had run its course. The ultimate surrender comes in the form of Landon and Peli, who admit to fighting tooth and nail against making the franchise 3D, only to throw their hands up for Ghost Dimension, a clunker that puts the final nail in the coffin. Even Featherston, whose presence makes for a fun treat throughout the series, didn't bother to appear. Blum, sagely, admits that he considers the film the series lowest point and subsequently washes his hands of the franchise, but subsequently uses the style of production when he founded Blumhouse. It's a surprisingly glum ending, but even in this moment, you can't help but feel fulfilled by the experience.

Unknown Dimension is a refreshingly honest take on the "making of" documentary, willing to dissect its parent series shortcomings while still treating it with a degree of fondness and reverence. It's everything you would want a movie like this to be: full of interesting filmmaking tidbits and a genuine emotional arc. And, like any good horror movie, it ends with the killer lurching to life with a hilariously foreboding tease for Next of Kin, a film that I'm certain will be the shot in the arm this series needs. Now, time to take a big drink of coffee and check out the reception... 

Film of the Week: The Batman

"What is the price for your blind eye?" is one of the questions asked by the Riddler (Paul Dano) in his mindgame, part a test of skill, part a ruthless war against the city's corrupt element, with Batman (Robert Pattinson). In context, it's an attempt by the Riddler, a product of the city's failed public works program, to shine a light on one of the many people who have exploited the system, but from an outside perspective, it's one of the many ways in which the film plays with perception and the way we see the world. The Batman, Matt Reeves's take on the decades-old character, isn't perfect, but when this central idea clicks, there's very few entries in the superhero genre like it.

Reeves's visual eye, the same that made his entries in the Planet of the Apes franchise so stunning, is unsurprisingly the film's strongest element. Alongside cinematographer Greig Fraser, Reeves plays with light and shadows to create a sense of creeping paranoia, a feeling that either Batman or the Riddler could be anywhere at any given moment. Even as it climbs inside their heads, the film portrays the two closer to that of a villain in a slasher movie, ever-looming. The Riddler simply...appears in his first scene, standing behind Gotham's embattled, corrupt mayor without a sound, while the excellent introduction of Batman is criminals jumping at shadows, staring into the darkness, and wondering if he's waiting for them. Despite the film's more grounded take, not quite to the militarized level of Nolan's nor the mythology-infused scale of Snyder's, it gives it a larger-than-life feel. Reeves's Gotham feels like a world just different enough from ours, operating within the realm of plausibility but still feeling very much it's own.

The duality in imagery is no accident. The connection between Batman and Riddler, two orphans forged in a life of trauma and pain, is represented by the similarity of their points of view. The Riddler is introduced watching the mayor with binoculars, peeking through his windows, while Batman later watches Selina Kyle (a gorgeous Zoe Kravitz) in much the same way. Both scenes create a sense of unease as the Riddler takes interest in the mayor's family while Bruce briefly watches Selina change, the purpose being safety or attraction to the aloof femme fatale left unclear. Later, the two both slink through the shadows of the Iceberg Lounge, with Riddler watching from afar while (in one of the film's surprisingly sparse action sequences) Batman tears through Carmine Falcone's (a delightfully unnerving John Tuturro) men, the gunfire of the panicked criminals the only source of light. Both have weaponized their pain to become monsters luring in the darkness, leaving the question of whether Batman will follow Riddler down that path.

This combination of visual and emotional connection may be why the film begins to lose steam a tad in its last third. With its two antagonists brought down, it shifts to a larger-scale climax as Batman battles Riddler's followers amidst a flooding Gotham. It's a fun setpiece, tense and creative, and while the sun rising over Gotham as Bruce realizes he can't just be a symbol of fear makes for a fitting capper, you can't help but feel as though the detective story had been traded for something less interesting.

Even a weaker third act, hardly an anomaly for superhero fare, can't really weigh down The Batman. When the film works, it really is something special: a creator-driven superhero project, bursting with visual creativity and confidence. From its opening to its final shot, a fittingly haunting end of Bruce watching Selina drive away as he ponders the life he could've had, it establishes itself as a real winner for a genre that risks growing stale.

Film of the Week: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Early in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Wes Ball's sequel/soft reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, protagonist Noa (Owen Teague) speaks to his father Koro (Neil Sandilands), the chieftain of his tribe. The conversation is terse, full of the classic "first act conversation between doomed parent and protagonist child" tropes, but in the end, Koro softens somewhat. Smiling sadly, he looks to his son and simply says, "Much to learn." After a hesitation, he adds, "Much to teach." This conversation, strangely, is an indicator of the film as a whole. Like Noa, Kingdom is a scrappy thing, living in the shadow of predecessors, but the potential for greatness is unquestionably there. 

The smartest move for the franchise was, unsurprisingly, the decision to timeskip 300 years into the future. This allows the audience to explore the overgrown ruins of the old world, giving it a far more fantastical, mythic feel as our protagonists explore crumbled cities and ponder what came before. The film's script, penned by upcoming Avatar 3 scribe Josh Friedman, delves into this as well, deliberately keeping details of the previous films vague, allowing them to fade into an almost mythic reverence, while its story resembles epic fantasy stories like Conan the Barbarian rather than the grim-faced war thrillers of War and Dawn or the sci-fi spectacle of Rise. For much of the film's runtime, it's similarly content to go for more simplistic ideas; at its heart, it's a road movie that slowly reintroduces us to the world. While this does make some of the film's bigger ideas feel undercooked, I suspect it may stand stronger once it's part of a completed trilogy. 

The direction, similarly, veers into a different direction, using the unsurprisingly excellent visual effects for some very confident direction. Ball wears his influences on his sleeve, and you can see everything from Avatar to the aforementioned Conan to the Last of Us in the various setpieces and the general visual tone of the world. While it's not as striking as Reeves's entries in the series, going for a brighter palette, there's some truly stunning stuff here. Ball expertly shoots things like a fiery attack on Noa's village by slavers or a tense climb through a flooding facility, ratcheting up tension and keeping focus throughout the increasing chaos. Kingdom is a big, bombastic adventure movie, and there's a lot of fun to be had there. 

No one understands that assignment quite like Kevin Durand, a genuine show-stealer as wannabe king Proximus Caesar. A swaggering tyrant who, in probably the film's most insightful commentary, takes the late Caesar's name and ideals, twisting them for his own use, Proximus is a dominant, genuinely charismatic figure. Durand plays him with confidence, using his body language to always feel like the largest person in the room as he preaches his gospel. With every word, you can see him try to plant the seed of doubt in Noa's mind—his mistrust of humans not without a grain of truth. The cast, given the difficult role of motion capture, all do a great job, but Proximus especially feels like a living, breathing character, intimidating and giving just enough depth to feel like a proper villain.

While Kingdom isn't perfect, suffering from some late-game twists that feel a tad jarring and could potentially feel like a retread if misused, it's hard to deny it's magic. The Apes movies are truly special as blockbusters, emotionally rich, and visually striking in their own unique fashion, and I'm happy to see that this is a worthy successor. In the first of three, the potential is there. They only have to grow it properly.

Film of the Week: Death Becomes Her

Do you all remember the era when Robert Zemeckis used to make good-hell, even great-movies? Making Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Back to the Future is an all-time run of hits, and even things like Contact and Flight are solid, mature movies made by a talented journeyman director who has since given himself up for CGI dreck, making his downfall frustrating in a very unique way. So imagine my delight as I watched Death Becomes Her, a charming 1992 black comedy-fantasy-horror mash-up, and was reminded of the often charming, genuinely innovative spark that Zemeckis once had.

Death Becomes Her's central conflict, beyond the idea of man vs. element in the two leads battle with aging, is between Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) and Madeline Menville (Meryl Streep), an aspiring writer and fading actress, respectively, and their decades-long rivalry hitting its peak. Hawn and Streep, who had not worked together, suit their roles perfectly: snippy, catty, and often vicious in the way only two people who have been "friends" for decades can be. One of the film's standout moments is a duel to the "death" between the two, a pouring of grievances and old wounds that slowly melts away as they realize the pettiness of it all. It's perfectly symbolized in the film's mystical element (and source of it's, par the course for Zemeckis, excellent VFX work) of a magic potion capable of making one immortal but doing little to protect their bodies as the ravages of time wear on them. In this potion, the characters find eternal outer beauty, but the festering nastiness of their personalities ultimately wins out.

It's this nastiness that often gives Death Become Her such a bite, lacking much of the earnest attitude of it's director's usual fare. At its best, the film feels like a garish Looney Tune, doling out slapstick violence to its protagonists, putting them through the wringer with a cruelty that works in its favor. The effects work, full of prosthetics, genuinely grotesque make-up, and (for the time) impressive usage of CG superimposing, add to this. While the scene of Helen, hole blown through her with a shotgun, is a famous standout, the way the film uses immortal bodies for comedy pretty consistently gets a laugh. A personal favorite is Madeline, deprived of a chunk of her spine, having to awkwardly keep her head from sinking beneath her shoulder, a funnier take on the surprisingly tense moment of her, now freshly immortal, rising up after being shoved down the stairs, her broken body snapping and creaking as she pays no mind to the fatal wounds on her body.

Of course, the true MVP is Bruce Willis, giving a wildly out of his element turn as Ernest, a squirrely mortician/plastic surgeon and object (heavy emphasis on this) of conflict between Helen and Madeline. Effectively trapped as a straight man between the two, Willis is nothing like the macho everyman persona he had cultivated to that point. As Ernest, he's cowardly, easily manipulated, and as quietly cruel as his manipulators, shrinking under their gaze and hiding his frustrations behind a tired, bitter gaze. It makes his arc, a rejection of an immortality spent afraid of everything regardless, fun to watch, a spineless (figuratively) man learning to stand up for himself. His increasingly frantic reactions as the film veers more into the supernatural give it a grounding presence, while Willis's performance does a master class in not just making Ernest a boring source of conflict.

In retrospectives, Robert Zemeckis has mentioned that he wishes that the film's tone could've been more decisive, closer to its origins as a Tales from the Crypt movie than the bigger Hollywood production it ended up being. While, in a way, you can see that in its ending, I found this to be a perfectly nasty treat. Sure, there's a pulled punch or two, but there's so much to enjoy that I'm hardly going to fault the movie for it.

Film of the Week: Challengers

Very rarely does a film so succinctly establish exactly what it's about quite like Challengers does in one of its opening scenes. As Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), Junior Doubles champions and lifelong friendly rivals, watch Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) play for the first time, the film, at this point established by the whip-smart, often funny banter of its protagonists, chooses to focus on expression. Luca Guadagnino expertly cuts between the game—Tashi's domination of an ill-tempered opponent—and the boys reactions—a mixture of slack-jawed awe and barely-hidden attraction—with the camera locked on them as they struggle to take their eyes off her, falling out of rhythm with the rest of the crowd. When Tashi hits the winning serve, her roar of victory and Pat's hand gripping Art's knee in a moment of impulse tell us everything we need to know: sport and sex are an intimate experience unlike any other, and the pursuit of that feeling of connection will drive these three forward for the rest of their lives.

"For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis," explains Tashi as she describes the match later. "We understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It's like we were in love." Tennis, in the film's eyes, demands intimacy, commitment that only another can help you find, and without it, it's, as Pat ignobly puts it, just hitting a ball with a racquet. Throughout the film's flashbacks, a showcase of how the trio came together and fell apart that breaks up Pat and Art's rematch at a Challenger event, we see the character's endless hunt for this connection and the often poor choices made to chase this high. It's a credit to the film's script, written by the potion seller himself Justin Kuritzkes, to sell this subject matter so beautifully, and each of the characters is written so confidently that everything feels like a natural conclusion to their clashing personalities.

Of course, the cast, dripping with sexual tension and easy chemistry, is fantastic as well. Zendaya, unsurprisingly, is a standout, shifting from the siren-esque allure and blunt attitude of young Tashi to the ferocious, quietly embittered Tashi of the modern day, forced by injury to live out a career vicariously through Art. A modern Helen of Troy, you instantly understand why both of these men have lived a life obsessed with her. Faist and O'Connor, like any great sports movie, settle into the role of eternal face and heel, their dynamic shifting into a toxicity and rivalry that was evident from their first scenes together. Faist's Art grows from a quiet, insightful sidekick to a weary champion, while O'Connor's Pat reeks of a bully all grown up and left chasing his glory days. Full of familiarity and resnetment that can only be bred with time, the trio's conversations often make for as exciting a back and forth as any of the movie's actual matches.

This is no slight against the matches, of course. Guadagnino, editor Marco Costa, and cinematographer Sayombu Mukdeeprom play each match as a visceral experience, focusing on individual hits and movements over sets as a whole. It creates the feeling of us along for the ride, feeling every moment like an enraptured audience. When Art swears in a moment of frustration, we feel it. As an enraged Pat smashes his racquet, we feel it. When Tashi suffers a career-ending knee injury, good god, do we feel it. This kinetic filmmaking ties around the intimate nature of the film, the audience effectively living inside the characters heads, their flashbacks allow us a viewing of exactly what plagues them as the tournament moves to its final match, a nearly silent showdown between Art and Pat that leaves you enraptured and chasing that high until the credits roll. "We've barely spoken two words to each other," bemoans Pat during a tense reunion in a sauna. An attempt to get inside his opponent's head, it also underscores what is obvious, from the homoerotic scenes of them as young men to the familiar back and forth of their match: Art and Pat don't need to talk when the intimate connection is already there. The real conversation is had without saying a word. 

Film of the Week: Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver

Rebel Moon, Part Two: The Scargiver resembles, strangely, its protagonists, a ragtag crew of soldiers, prisoners, and heroes brought together to save a farming village, in that it's scrappy, cobbled together from better parts, but ultimately capable of getting the job done. Is it on the level of Star Wars or Dune as a generational epic? Almost certainly not, but those in the mood for a fun, pulpy sci-fi action flick will almost certainly find a lot to enjoy in it, which puts it leaps and bounds ahead of its sluggish, wet thud of a predecessor.

One thing I will praise Rebel Moon for is that it is unambiguously a movie made by Zack Snyder, and love or hate the man, you gotta admit he's got a style to him. Imitating the visual palette of his usual collaborator Larry Fong (who is sorely missed whenever Snyder isn't working with him), Rebel Moon Part Two is full of striking imagery and creative setpieces. Superheated blades rip through armor in flashes of orange sparks and blue flourishes. An army marches through smoke and mist, more of its numbers revealed in every step. Gryphon-riding knights battle gunships atop the rooftops of an ancient palace. It's a film from a man fed off a visual palette of sci-fi and epic fantasy, a veritable blend of influences from Conan the Barbarian to Warhammer 40K.

Of course, in terms of influence, it's hard to discuss this film without talking about its origins as a pitch for a Seven Samurai-inspired take on Star Wars that subsequently fell to the wayside, a victim of the Disney buyout of Lucasfilm. Whether this would've really fit with the Disney plans for the universe is hard to say, but given Snyder's fallout with Warner Bros., perhaps it's for the best that he be allowed to operate on his own merit.

The DNA of Star Wars is all over this, but it's to the credit of Rebel Moon that it doesn't feel like a serial numbers-filed-off rebrand. It leans into a grimmer, more fantastical style of costumes and production value design, evoking something closer to David Lynch's Dune than anything Lucas created. The action, however, is pure, uncut Snyder, full of that classic slow-mo and loving depictions of the human form that he's so known for. While it's absolutely indulgent (there is a ten-minute wheat gathering scene that had me in absolute stitches as it kept cutting back to it), it's often delightfully over-the-top, with the film's final hour being occupied entirely by the battle for the village. It's a battle with real weight where anyone can die, a completely relentless scrap that just keeps escalating. Gunships, massive tanks, lightsaber duels, all culminating in a kinetic brawl down a collapsing hangar between former soldier Kora (Sofia Boutella) and vengeful cybernetic admiral Atticus (Ed Skrein). When the film hits its stride, it hits hard.

The issue, unfortunately, lies in getting there. While Part Two is much brisker than the first and actually takes the time to develop its characters rather than simply introducing them and then pushing them to the background, the cast still never quite feel as cohesive or fleshed out as they need to be for the stakes of this to work. Much of the depth is left to the (admittedly quite strong) ensemble, with Djimon Hounsou's mournful General Titus and Sofia Boutella as particular favorites of the bunch, grasping at a level of emotional complexity that the script doesn't quite have. It's hardly film-breaking to the level of some recent genre fare, but it's harder to escape the style over substance feel of much of Snyder's work.

Ultimately, if you don't like Snyder, I doubt this will do much to convince you. But for the superfans, or those like me for whom Snyder is something of a guilty pleasure, there's a lot to like here. But hey, an Anthony Hopkins-voiced robot climbs inside of a spider-mech and wipes out a squad of space Nazis, so it's definitely not nothing. 

Film of the Week: Late Night with the Devil

The Satanic Panic of the 70s was an underlying symptom of the social and political upheaval of the era, as America's transition from the New Deal era to that of the neoliberal, centrist political system began in full force. The shining smiley-face vision of America had fully melted away, the era of "love thy neighbor" was dead, in its place was a cultural attitude of paranoia. And with this paranoia came the opportunity for those who were callous enough to exploit attitudes and powers beyond their control.

The exploiters are the focus of Late Night with the Devil, the indie horror film framed as a collection of footage from the infamous Halloween episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a 70s late show and apparent rival to the likes of Johnny Carson. A mix of Ghostwatch (a real-time broadcast beset by the supernatural) and Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (frequent behind-the-scenes footage that depicts the slow, steady breakdown of its participants), Late Night is all about perceptions of what is real and what is not and how people are willing to exploit that for fame, fortune, or a chance to get their name out. For the most part, it works, crafting a unique horror experience that compels its viewers, even as it goes off the rails slightly in its climax. Much of the credit for this is the excellent costume and set design, which faithfully recreates the look of the era, from the sliding door sets to the garish sideburns and bowlcuts of its various guests. It makes the show, largely, feel lived in, something that audiences have watched for years rather than just a cheap imitation. 

The 70s talk show aesthetic is so faithfully recreated that the Cairnes siblings willingness to subvert and distort it makes it feel like a jarring intrusion on what should be a safe space, perpetually ratcheting up tension as the show progresses closer and closer to its climax. Of course, this also makes the film's usage of AI art even more inexplicable, a lazy shortcut that breaks immersion every time it "graces" the screen and reflects poorly in an era when artists more than ever need solidarity.

The cast, similarly, is immensely game, playing a mixture of skeptics, charlatans, and professionals confronted with a horror that, if real, threatens to spiral beyond their control. David Dastmalchian in particular carries it, selling Delroy as an affable, troubled figure whose true nature, a mix of grief and desperation, bubbles up more and more with every passing minute. It's a character whose motivations are more implied than truly shown, and he sells it well, playing with audience perception and sympathy even as the "truth" is revealed.

It's the idea of perception and how to weaponize it that makes the film so effective. It's characters, intentionally, are vaguely written, their exact motivations and relationships, such as Delroy's relationship with June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), the caretaker/psychiatrist of Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), or the exact circumstances of his apparent Faustian bargan for fame and fortune, are left up to hints and audience interpetation. Effectively, it leaves us as viewers to the show, only lucky enough to see what they show us. This playing with the medium helps keep a sense of immersion, from the strange audio/visual glitches throughout to a particularly memorable sequence in which the audience witnesses a hypnosis, only to in turn be hypnotized themselves.

Even a move that should be immersion-breaking—a shift to a modern, high-definition style during the film's climax—doesn't break things too much. It's jarring, but in the chaos of the film's final twenty minutes, a delightfully practical bloodbath where the tightrope of tension and uncertainty finally snaps, it adds to the overwhelming feeling of witnessing something that has gone completely out of control. It's this creativity, this "throw at the wall and see what it sticks" mentality, that makes Late Night with the Devil such a treat and a worthy follow-up to its clear influences.

Film of the Week: The Killer

John Woo's The Killer, a seminal action masterpiece from which much of the modern genre owes its influence, opens on a quiet, solemn note: Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat) sitting in a church, quiet and contemplative. It's a quiet opening, but an effective one that is violently contrasted with the next scene, as Ah Jong departs on a hit, easily eliminating his targets but leaving Jennie (Sally Yeh), a kind nightclub singer, partially blind in the crossfire. From the get-go, Woo manages to connect the dots of one of the film's central ideas, and arguably it's most compelling: violence, no matter how effective or cool, wears on the soul, it's inescapable grasp refusing to let anyone go.

Throughout each of The Killer's kinetic, exhilarating shootouts, there's a sense of weight and consequences to it that make the action far from mindless. Jennie's blinding. A group of hitmen critically injure a little girl in their effort to kill Ah Jong. Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee), Ah Jong's foil, is introduced as he rashly kills a suspect in public, only to frighten his hostage into a fatal heart attack. These actions, the kind lesser action movies wouldn't think on, take a real toll, both physical and emotional, on our heroes and the people caught up in their conflicts, from the short-lived supporting cast to civilians who have the fatal misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's an often shocking amount of heart from Woo for me, someone more familiar with his more explosive, over-the-top American work in the form of Face/Off (a classic) and Mission Impossible 2 (the worst Mission Impossible). And yet, it's this heart that makes the movie and its characters fascinatingly compelling. The Killer is just as willing to sit and let its characters breathe and ponder to themselves as it is to let them blast their way out of a beachhouse.

And man, the gunfights really rip. Goons are torn apart and sent flying by the force of the rounds blasted through their bodies in a glorious ballet of tightly coordinated chaos, our heroes pumping out endless rounds as they fight against wave after wave of foes. Even after witnessing decades of its derivatives, the work of John Woo remains fresh and a blast to watch. It even understands that any action movie worth its salt gives you characters worth rooting for, completely nailing its unlikely buddy cop aesthetic with the excellent chemistry between Fat and Lee, a delightful pairing of two men whose philosophies and mutual respect bring them together. As the duo's story moves to its violent conclusion, you find yourself pulled on a genuine emotional rollercoaster, equal parts exhilarating and heartbreaking.

It's the film's conclusion, I think, that gives it the most weight, as Woo brings his reflection on violence home with a bang. The church, once a symbol of serenity and escape from violence, is destroyed, our hero loses his life, and his newfound friend loses everything in search of vengeance. It's a shocking, brutal close—the final fate of a blinded Ah Jong crying out for Jennie as he dies just inches from her a genuinely heartbreaking sequence. It's gutsy, bold, and it sticks with you just as much as any of the glorious, influential action.

Film of the Week: Inside Man

Inside Man is the peak example of getting an auteur director to do the kind of project often saved for journeymen. What could've, on paper, been a standard crime thriller is, in the hands of Spike Lee, turned into a clever, tense caper full of great performances and biting social commentary that is just a blast to watch. Another thing that makes Inside Man such an interesting watch is that it simply doesn't feel like a movie you make anymore. Mid-budgeted crime thrillers of this nature used to be a dime a dozen; now very rarely do they grace our silver screens. (Perhaps if more of you had seen Steve McQueen's excellent Widows, things would be different, but alas.) It's a film very much of its era, but rather than feel dated, it gives it a sense of being tied into its cultural moment that the best works of Spike Lee often do. NYPD officers shake down a Sikh witness, his protests falling on the unsympathetic ears of a diverse duo of detectives, while the film's true villain is none other than a bank founder trying to cover his ties to Nazi Germany. It's efforts at social commentary, rather than distracting, instead enhance the narrative, creating something angrier and more intriguing than the usual genre fare.

It helps, of course, that it's also a very entertaining watch. Lee's direction propels the film forward, with clever usage of cuts and shifts in perspective being deployed to leave the audience guessing without ever feeling lied to. A particular favorite is the film's interrogation scenes, narrative flash-forwards that swing from humorous to quietly revealing, sewing seeds of paranoia in the modern-day scene. It's incredibly confident in how it chooses to tell a story, even down to its usage of humor, which could've easily fallen flat but instead breaks the tension and makes the characters feel real and believable. Without spoiling, I'll confidently say this has one of the funniest needle drops of all time.

Another major point in Inside Man's favor? The absolutely stacked cast firing on all cylinders. Denzel Washington, one of our greatest leading men, plays Detective Frazier, a put-upon hostage negotiator, as a witty everyman who is just clever enough that his battle of wits with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) never feels one-sided. Owen, in particular, is excellent, swinging from affable and witty to genuinely terrifying at the drop of a hat. One moment, he savagely beats a hostage for lying to him. The next? Quietly musing on the nature of violent videogames with a young boy unfortunate enough to be caught up in the robbery, a clever parallel is drawn between him and how the detectives similarly shift attitudes depending on the suspects they're interrogating.

In many ways, that idea, how clever people weaponize personality for their own ends, is the throughline of much of the film. From how the detectives switch from affable to harsh, to Dalton's willingness to dance between detached humor to seemingly casual cruelty, to Arthur Case's (Christopher Plummer) usage of charity to hide the bloodsoaked ways in which he acquired his wealth, Inside Man ponders the faces we wear to get the job done and how much, if any of it, is the real us. In this way, none of our characters are very different; all charismatic people who weaponize that charisma for their own means in a world where the lines of morality aren't quite so clear.

Film of the Week: The Zone of Interest

What does it take for one to become desensitized to some of the worst horrors mankind can inflict upon others? Can someone become so utterly tuned out of them that the screams of the dying become simple background noise? As we see on our own news every day as a genocide is committed with our support and funding, it is far easier than one would hope.

It's this conflict that drives The Zone of Interest, the Academy Award-winning latest from Jonathan Glazer, director of Under the Skin and Sexy Beast. In classic Glazer fashion, Zone of Interest is another new turn from him, an almost minimalist domestic drama against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The film focuses on Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his family as they go about their lives in apparent domestic bliss in a home that is directly next to the camp itself. Revealed almost immediately with a cut to the smokestacks towering over the walls surrounding the family's home, the camp hangs like a sword over every moment of the film. It's this contrast of idyllic family life against the backdrop of atrocity that serves as the film's driving force. Rather than attempt to moralize or exploit the suffering for visual horror, Glazer repeatedly and actively keeps the Holocaust in the background to an unnerving, spine-chilling effect, a clear effort to show the dehumanization that made it all possible in the first place. The screams and sobs of the prisoners quietly echo through the background, architects explain the operation of gas chambers the way one would explain the operation of a cash register to a new employee, and in one particularly grim moment, Höss fishes a jawbone from the river, his immediate concern becoming the health of his children playing upstream rather than the thought of how many had to perish for the river to become that polluted in the first place.

Zone of Interest's sound design pulled an upset win over Oppenheimer at the Oscars, and it's hard not to see why. Glazer wields sound incredibly carefully, almost entirely doing away with a score while keeping the background noise at just the right level to unnerve but not distract. It sells the idea of a Höss family as people who have attuned themselves to horror, content to profit off it with stolen clothes and pilfered gold teeth while pushing the emotional weight of it to the back of their minds. But, try as they might, their complicity is inescapable, and their attempts to avoid it simply rot their souls. Höss fights to stop himself from vomiting as he prepares to oversee an operation that will kill 700,000 Hungarian Jews, while his wife, Hedwig, fights against any attempt to take away her newfound luxury, from urging Hoss to keep their family at Auschwitz while he leaves for a promotion to angrily burning a letter left by her horrified mother, who left in the dead of night after visiting the family.

This cold detachment is perfectly played by both Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who, respectively, play Rudolf and Hedwig. Friedel plays Hoss with a sense of bueracratic pride and stoicism, his workmanlike management of the camp contrasting against the acts committed within it, from his calm oversight of a line of desperate prisoners being led off a train to his address of violent rapes of prisoners by guards being framed as a warning not to "damage the flowers", while Hüller is monstrous in her portrayal of Hedwig. Hedwig is immensely stubborn and demanding, lashing out at anyone who would attempt to pierce the picture-perfect world she has crafted in an effort to escape from the guilt of her knowledge of what that world is built off of.

But the guilt is inescapable, and the film's final moments, a jarring vision of the future (our present) of Auchwitz, seem to show both Rudolf and us, the audience, that history is the ultimate judge. While Rudolf and Hedwig are both assigned to the dustbin of history, their legacies little more than obscure accomplices to mass murder, that leaves us. As the credits roll, The Zone of Interest sits with you, leaving you to wonder how we will be looked back upon, even as we assure ourselves that we would never act as they did.

 

Film of the Week: Daddy Longlegs

The career of the Safdie brothers, the auteur duo behind Good Time and Uncut Gems, is often focused on getting their audience to root for characters that are largely undeserving of sympathy. From sociopathic criminals to degenerate gamblers, the brothers (and the very talented actors portraying these parts) manage to make their antiheroes often feel like real, living people, enabling them to walk a tightrope when it comes to capturing the audience's attention and empathy.

Daddy Longlegs, the first film in which the duo worked together as directors, is no different. Even with lower stakes, a slice-of-life depiction of a single dad enjoying his two weeks of custody with his kids rather than the nerve-wracking crime thrillers that make up the Safdies later work, the film bears much of their trademark tactics for building tension, from the grainy, shaky camerawork to the often overwhelming (complimentary) sound design employed throughout it's chaotic conversations. It gives Daddy Longlegs the energy of the audience stumbling upon a particularly upsetting home movie, one where the happy memories are instead a series of agonizingly poor decisions that play out like a car crash in slow motion. 

This is aided by the excellent performance of Ronald Bronstein, better known as the duo's cinematographer, as Lenny. Lenny is twitchy, ill-tempered, and increasingly shortsighted, struggling to find some level of meaning for himself outside of his sons, only to repeatedly realize he has little else. Even at his nastiest and most bumbling, Lenny never feels like a caricature, and it makes his screw-ups often agonizing to witness.

In a particularly standout sequence, Lenny drugs his sons to ensure they sleep through his shift as a projectionist, only to realize he wildly overdosed them, effectively putting them into a days-long sleep. His reaction? To halfheartedly check in on them while he dicks around in the city, too self-centered to directly face the consequences of his actions but not sociopathic enough to completely ignore them. Bronstein plays Lenny as a man on the cusp of self-realization, but unable to go through with it, leaving someone who lashes out at the world to make up for it. From his awkward, flailing lies to everyone around him to his treatment of his on-off girlfriend Leni (Elenore Hendricks), much of Lenny's arc is him realizing his mistakes mere moments after making them. It's frustratingly relatable, and it makes Lenny's actions in the film's final moments feel like a natural conclusion to his selfish nature rather than a cartoonish turn that a lesser story could've turned it into.

And good god, the ending. In a twist clearly inspired by the works of Abel Ferrera, the duo's self-admitted inspiration to the point that he has a particularly "fun" cameo as a foul-mouthed scalper turned armed robber, Lenny chooses to simply take the boys for himself, abruptly packing his things and taking them to parts unknown, a kidnapping committed out of a selfish desire for happiness. Rather than pull the punch, having Lenny's plan thwarted or some horrible karmic fate befall him, the film instead ends on an uncertain note, a static shot of a tram pulling away as Lenny and his sons seemingly get away, their ultimate fates uncertain. It's a fitting end for a work that treats its audience as observers. Our glimpse into Lenny's life is over, and we can only watch and hope for the best as he leaves us behind.