Film of the Week: Brick

 

In high school, everything feels like the most important thing in the world. No matter the stakes in the greater scheme of things, every fight feels monumental, every breakup an agonizing heartbreak, and social circle navigation feels like life and death. In a way, this is absurd, of course, a natural consequence of a hormone-addled mind grappling with the awkward middle ground of childhood and adulthood, but Brick, the directorial debut of Rian Johnson, uses this idea as a staging ground for a brutally effective neo-noir story of loss and pain that closely walks the line between serious and absurd without ever giving up the game. The melodrama blends beautifully with the noir tone, making the violent escalation of the story feel like a devastating punch to the gut. 

For some, the selling point of Brick is it's heavily noir-inspired presentation, owing more to the works of Raymond Chandler and Lynch's Blue Velvet than any traditional high school drama. Protagonist Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) talks like a 40s gumshoe, fast-witted and bitter, while femme fatales attempt to work their wiles on him, the vice principal functions as a "Da Chief" style figure, and a shadowy criminal conspiracy lurks from the shadows. What makes Brick work so well is the blending of traditional noir storytelling with it's high school setting. The drug ring that makes up the film's antagonists is comprised entirely of high schoolers, and in one deeply amusing scene, kingpin "the Pin" (Lukas Haas) attempts to make a deal with Brendan over milk and cookies served by his mother. 

While there is undoubtably a sense of stakes, dealing with Brendan's attempt to solve the murder of his ex-girlfriend, the cast and their manner of speaking gives the film something of a tongue-in-cheek presentation. It's clever, disarming the audiences so when the real violence and drama hits you feel every piece of the impact. These are kids acting as adults, and you're often jarringly reminded of that. Brendan's breakdown after days of both physical and mental abuse in the name of revenge is heartbreaking, and when gang enforcer Tug (Noah Fleiss) suddenly pulls a gun to execute an apparent rat, it's shocking. As soon as the gunshot fades, the characters are left to look at the very real consequences of the action, and you actively feel the film ramp up as any sense of normalcy is destroyed. 

Johnson's talents as a director are already blooming here, and he and cinematographer Steven Yedlin frame the rundown suburbia of the film's setting as something strangely beautiful and dreamlike, playing with light and shadow. It plays well to the surreal setting, and some of the film's most effective moments are just the characters framed by their surroundings. Brendan looking down the hallway of the Pin's basement, staring into the shadows in anxious paranoia as the silence exaggerates every creak of the old house, is a wonderfully tense moment, as is a very clever tracking shot showing the immediate escalation of a gang war a floor above Brendan, Tug, and the Pin. His talents as a writer, similarly, are very apparent, as he applies his now trademark subversive eye to the film's story by peeling away at the emotional layers of the characters. Brendan's relationship with Emily is revealed as a deeply toxic one, a controlling person so unable to let go of the only thing that made him feel normal that he ends up practically suffocating her, while a quiet conversation about Tolkien between him and the Pin exposes the formerly intimidating mob boss as a quietly lonely person just looking for some sense of connection. These are kids, trying so hard to figure out their way in the world that they fall headfirst into deadly consequences. 

Brick is one of my favorite directorial debuts of all time, resembling it's femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehtetner, so criminally good in this that it's a shame she didn't hit Levitt's level of mainstream success) in that it's a tragedy masquerading as something sillier to trick you into letting your guard down. Immensely creative and an ambitious start to a very strong body of work. 

Film of the Week: Banned from Broadcast: Saiko! The Large Family/The Cursed Large Family

The true trick with experimental filmmaking is committing to the bit. In order for your gimmick to work, you have to really be willing to go all the way on it, trusting the audience to "get it" rather than dumbing down the work or overexplaining it. If some don't get it, oh well. Banned From Broadcast's Large Family duology is a very good example of this ethos at place. On the surface, these are somewhat dry family drama mockumentaries, a peek into a slice of life of a troubled family unit doing their best to stay together. They're sweet, a bit dry, and at times a tad troubling. But those willing to scratch beyond the surface will find something a lot darker and compelling. They're films that reward patience, and those willing to approach with an open mind will find something worth discussing. 

Anyone familiar with the endless glut of TLC family content may find some initial familiarity in the premise of these. A documentary crew spends some time with an unusually large Japanese family, documenting their lives and discussing the upbringings of the various children against the backdrop of an apparent "curse". The "curse" torments the family in a variety of accidents, from an injury that prevents the original patriarch from working to claiming the lives of one of the family's children in a tragic drowning. All of it seemingly owes to a cursed photograph, obtained by the father, that curses anyone who looks upon it. From a j-horror perspective, it's certainly plausible, no different from the cursed tape from The Ring or the home of Kayako from The Grudge, and the film to some degree banks on that familiarity. It works in layers, a seemingly mundane family drama with elements of supernatural horror underneath it, but for the eagle-eyed viewer, the layers keep going. 

When I say the films commit to the bit, I really do mean it, with the often quiet, relaxed nature of the day to day activities of the family contrasted by harsh, jarring moments of tension. Ringo (Sayaka Fukita) is viciously dragged to another room and beaten for the crime of sleeping in, while in the sequel, matriarch Sumio cryptically barks at her smaller children that she doesn't care if they go missing, an oddly specific threat for a woman supposedly mourning her lost husband to say. The family's stepfather, a kind man seemingly largely out of the loop, is similarly beaten by teenager Riei, whose out of nowhere explosions of rage come off as deeply surprising, suggesting some sort of mistrust or abuse that we aren't privy to. It, along with the idea of the curse, effectively functions as a sleight of hand trick, drawing your eye (and thus, your mind) so heavily to these moments that you miss the smaller clues that paint a greater picture. The strange drawings of the youngest children, the quiet glances between the teenagers when they think the adults aren't watching, the way mother quietly looms in the background at crucial moments of the second film, all clues towards the real goings on. It expects the viewer to ask questions, but it very smartly also leaves us to puzzle out the answers. 

The focus on day to day life does make for somewhat dry viewing, very much relying on your investment in speculating the greater mystery, but there is a quiet, undeniable heart to the film's proceedings. The siblings dote on one another, and in the second film's most affecting moment, the stepfather stands up for Ringo when she is caught in the crossfire of one of Riei's outbursts, then tracks down the younger girl when she flees from home. "Why are you so kind to us?" asks Riei, a lifetime of abuse and fear pouring out of her as she's confronted with someone finally willing to treat her as a person even as she attempts to drive him from her home. This moment, unsurprisingly, proves to be a crucial one, a vital key to the film's apparently abrupt ending and an example of the duology's general philosophy. On the one hand, it's a sweet moment between family, but on the other, it reveals the quiet pain underneath all of the proceedings. 

Saiko! isn't going to be viewing for everyone. It's dry, understated storytelling that raises more questions than answers, but, strangely, it reminds of Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink. If you can meet the film at it's wavelength, it gives you something to chew on and think over, reaching your own conclusion and actively encouraging revisiting. It's an experiment, sure, but it's a damn fascinating one. 

Film of the Week: Cuckoo

 

There's few things in cinema quite as satisfying as a good creature feature. When done well, it gives particularly confident, creative filmmakers a chance to shine and introduce all manner of unique horrors on the audience. Cuckoo, the sophomore effort of Tilman Singer, is an excellent example of a good creature feature. While it hardly attempts to reinvent the wheel, one can see the blending of influences to create something unique, an eerie and disturbingly intriguing mystery box that unravels piece by piece, but never kills it's mystique by overexplaining itself. It's also a lot of fun! Hunter Schafer is endlessly battered on a quest for answers, the monsters are cool, and the GOAT Dan Stevens plays an endlessly slimy quasi-Nazi. What's not to love? 

Cuckoo's central idea is all about the idea of the "other", the outsider trapped in a situation they simply don't belong in. On the one hand, this represents Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a queer teenager reeling from the death of her mother and forced to live in a remote German resort with her father's family, but it speaks just as much for the monsters of the film: a brood parasite-esque offshoot of humans that place their females amongst humans to raise until they come of age. Much of Cuckoo is as much about Gretchen's struggle in this environment as it her uncovering the central mystery of the resort. She is isolated, bitter, and looking desperately for a connection of any kind to anchor her through the terrifying circumstances in display, be it through a (potentially ill-advised) relationship with aloof French musician Ed (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) or her tenuous alliance with undercover cop Henry (Jan Bluthardt). This fumbling for connection in the face of deeply painful loss makes up the true heart of the film, anchoring it for very real, very earned emotional beats as the film heads into it's climax. 

Schafer, unsurprisingly, is very good at selling this struggle and desperation. She mixes both the idea of the scream queen with that of a very real, grieving person with aplomb, her expressive eyes and agonized physicality as she finds herself beaten and battered again and again. You don't just want her to succeed, you feel every single hit for yourself. Opposite her is the always delightful Dan Stevens as Herr Konig, resort owner/mad scientist, who contrasts Gretchen's scrappy, aloof reality with a restrained sense of menace and cruelty. He's quiet, polite, but dripping with condescension, carrying himself as someone who feels in power at all times. It's all in how he carries himself, imposing himself in the space of others while remaining upbeat, just as likely to smile while describing a hotel clerk job as he is while witnessing one of the creatures attempt to force itself on Gretchen. It's affable cruelty, an uncaring face on a violence that brims with both social and psychosexual commentary. Every scene between the two feels increasingly like a game of cat and mouse, Konig hoping to crush Gretchen under his boot without a second thought while Gretchen to survive. 

And like I mentioned prior, Cuckoo, despite it's grim subject matter, never presents itself as a downer. It's a lot of creepy fun, full of spooks and tense moments, slowly uncovering the central mystery of the resort, and Singer has a really excellent visual eye, framing the gorgeous locale of the German countryside as something deeply menacing and isolated while playing with the shadows to create an endless feeling of paranoia. In one particularly fun sequence, Gretchen's bike ride home from work is interrupted by an attack by the creature, it's shadow growing closer and closer behind her while she rides along, completely unaware. The creatures themselves benefit from a similarly impeccable presentation, their largely humanoid features but animalistic, snarling body language pushing them into the uncanny valley. Their screeches, used as form of hypnosis and communication, are piercing and ethereal, and the depiction of the hypnosis, a time loop the victims recognize but are agonizingly unable to escape from, is a unique presentation that plays well into the ongoing mystery, while the death of the "mother" is quietly sad, a gurgling, undignified end of a creature that simply didn't know any better. 

It's the quiet moments of emotion like that which make Cuckoo such a strong film. There's an undeniable, quiet heart to the film's quieter moments, be it Gretchen listening to half-sister Alma's (Mila Lieu) message to her deceased mom or her outpouring of grief with the similarly mourning Henry, and the film's climax is ultimately settled not with an outburst of violence, but of love and ingenuity, as Gretchen finally accepts Alma as family and works with her to escape. It's a cathartic, unexpectedly sweet finish, and it makes the ending feel like the exhale of a breath you didn't know you were holding. Tense and scary without being grim and overbearing, this tonal balance makes Cuckoo one of the strongest of this year's considerable bounty of horror efforts. 

Film of the Week: Terrifier 3

What a fascinating indie success story the Terrifier franchise is. Damian Leone's ultra-gory slasher franchise, anchored by the now iconic Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton in the role of a lifetime), once struggled to find a distributor and had to resort to indie crowdfunding campaigns to get made, and now it's outgrossing the sequel to Joker at the box office. The screening I went to (the only one within about 100 miles, if you're curious about the state of film in Maine) was completely packed with a mixed crowd of people of all ages, including a distressing amount of young people. It's truly been the little indie franchise that could, and what makes it's success even more fascinating is that hasn't come at the cost of Leone's creativity. The latest in the franchise, Terrifier 3 is, for the most part, the movie Leone set out to make, a largely uncompromised, delightfully nasty thriller that shows a clear growth in the craft from it's creator. 

Terrifier 3 manages to walk an effective tight-rope between the lean and mean structure of the first film and the more long-form, story-focused structure of the second. The film has neither the paper-thin characters of the first, nor does it suffer as much from the sluggish exposition and set-up of the second, allowing it to hit the ground running very effectively. The film's opening scene, a perfectly grindhouse-style short film in and of itself, sets the tone very effectively as we witness a family befall the unfortunate fate of catching Art's attention. As a disguised Art takes his time working through the house, Leone wields tension like a knife, taking care to ensure we never see the clown's face until the terror has already started, and the violence is surprisingly restrained until it fully erupts in an explosion of non-stop carnage. Limbs are severed, chests are caved in with an axe, and blood flies like a sprinkler before we even get the opening title. It's shocking and mean-spirited, but the message: Art is back, baby, and not a soul is safe. 

This sense of tension hangs over every scene with the clown, and Thornton continues to be fantastic in the role. Never so much as making a sound, Art looms over everything, his childish, excitable demeanor contrasting his endless cruelty, Thornton exaggerating his motions to make everything feel like he's simply playing a game as he haplessly slaughters his way through the film's runtime. In one of the film's best moments, he listens in on a conversation between a couple, blissfully unaware of the monster looming around the corner, and goes through a rollercoaster of intrigue to joy to genuine anger, the gears turning in his head as he plots his next step, while the biggest laugh in the movie is his overjoyed reaction to seeing a mall Santa sitting in a bar. The insistence on silence feeds into the ambiguity of the character. Is Art truly childlike, a monster playing with the world like toys? Is he playing us for fools as he lures his targets into a false sense of security? It's a fascinatingly physical performance, one that immediately helps one understand the character's explosion in popularity. 

Of course, one of the strong points of Terrifier 2 is giving the franchise a proper protagonist in the form of Sienna (Lauren LaVera), and this film does the character justice once more. Freshly out of a mental hospital after Art's previous rampage, Sienna is a ball of barely contained trauma and rage, trying her best to keep things together as she finds herself settling in with her aunt's family. LaVera, a near immediate Scream Queen after her work in the last film, is very good, playing Sienna's emotional state very genuinely without losing the ferocious spark that makes the character worth fighting for, and the film does well to examine her trauma before she's forced into conflict with Art without just making it feel like padding in between the kills. Like the second film, Terrifier 3 also leans into the greater idea of a deeper mythology behind Art, set up largely by the presence of the demonic presence responsible for his resurrection. Rather than it simply being an implied force, the demon takes on a voice of it's own through Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), the sole survivor of the first film. Scaffidi has a lot of fun playing into the demonic presence, a cruel, boisterous force in contrast to the silent Art, and they make for a fun pairing in the times where the movie lets them play together. 

The peeks into the mythology, hints of some sort of cosmic war between good and evil with Sienna and Art as the respective pieces, are fascinating, and one of the film's most striking moments is Sienna witnessing the apparent forging of the magic blade that can kill Art seemingly for good. An Uruk-Hai-like demon, hunched over an anvil while a living statue of the Virgin Mary clutches a chain around it's neck, works away at the forge, and Sienna snaps back to the present before we can learn anymore. This, combined with the suitably grim ending, sets the stage for an epic conclusion in the franchise's fourth entry, and the set-up never feels like a forced pitch for a sequel. It intrigues the audience rather than demands their attention. 

Unfortunately, the ending is where the "for the most part" from the start of this review rears it's head. Leone has admitted to cutting about 20-30 minutes of the film to make it an easier theatrical experience, with the film's climax showing the most obvious sign of this. The climactic, terrifying reunion of Sienna and Art simply happens with little build-up, while two prominent characters suffer gruesome deaths entirely off-screen, a drastic departure from the series style. Another plot thread, a Christmas party attended by Sienna's brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), is set up with no pay-off, while Sienna digging up the sword is handled off-screen. It creates an uneven experience, a feeling that decisions were reluctantly made behind the scenes for the sake of pacing, and while it doesn't drag the film down massively, it still feels disorienting, feeling as though we're seeing an incomplete story. 

Even with it's minor pacing bumps, Terrifier 3 is a blast, standing among the strongest horror offerings in a strong year for horror already. It's kills are suitably nasty, it's inspired visuals evoke the sleazy slashers of the 70s and 80s, and while this sort of thing is obviously of an acquired taste, I'm all on board the Art train. Make way for the real Clown Prince of Crime. 

Film of the Week: Ghostwatch

Found footage is, despite being fairly cheap and relatively easy for anyone to create, a fairly difficult style to pull off effectively. On top of needing actors that are convincing (and often obscure) enough to pass as seemingly real people, it requires an often very precise control over tone and pacing. If you introduce the scares too soon, it can become comical to watch our protagonists (still inexplicably carrying the camera) flee from whatever off-budget horror they've caught the eye of. Introduce it too late, you leave the audience feeling creatively blue-balled. The best found footage films are ones that effectively use a concept that can give them a better handle on their own pacing, allowing the horror to bleed into the mundane until it becomes an invasive, overwhelming force. If you can't tell from the title of this review, I think the very cream of the crop when it comes to using this concept is none other than Ghostwatch.

One of the most notorious horror films ever made (it has never been re-broadcast in it's entirety and can be directly attributed for the suicide of a teenager shortly after airing), Ghostwatch fully commits to it's premise, a special Halloween episode of a British broadcast attempting to investigate the apparent haunting of a struggling family on Foxhill Drive. The program uses exclusively real broadcasters, such as Sarah Greene as the reporter on the ground and Michael Parkinson as the show's skeptical host, and save for the initial opening titles, presents itself as a very real piece of reporting, shooting on a real BBC studio while providing a phone number for fans to call in and provide stories or report sightings. While it can be debated as to how ethical this approach was to a public very unused to the idea (I personally deeply miss the era where a thing like this could have been possible), Ghostwatch handles this with a near masterful sense of aplomb, taking it's time to let us meet the various news crew members and their subjects and get a feel for their personality. It's a varied collection of characters, full of skeptics and believers, and as someone who works in broadcast news, there's a sense of realness in how they operate. Characters bicker and prank each other, personalities clash, and Sarah especially finds herself growing friendly with her subjects: exasperated, often frightened single mother Pamela Early and her daughters Suzanne and Kim. 

The hauntings of the Early family showcase the film's "slow drip" style, giving us long stretches of the family simply hanging out with Sarah and her crew as they wait for evidence of supernatural happenings to happen while the hosts in the studio discuss the history of the paranormal with a respected researcher and a noted skeptic. They bob for apples, they play board games, we get peeks into the strained relationships at play while strange things seem to occur out of the corner of our eye. A strange face in a window, a brief silhouette behind a paranormal researcher, phone calls that seem to go dead just as they try to share crucial information. Even the supposed ghost, Pipes, is vague, never seen directly while their backstory hints initially at the origins of the disturbing entity taking root before swerving into something far older and more sinister without ever giving us the real answer. The film feels like peeling away at something newly rotten, getting worse and worse as the film careens into it's climax. 

What truly puts Ghostwatch into terrifyingly special heights is the way in which it chooses to play with it's medium. As Pipes finally forces themselves into the forefront, outright terrorizing the Early family and seemingly driving them from the house, the broadcast itself falls under their sway. "Jesus, Mike," bemoans paranormal expert Lin Pascoe as the studio itself begins to break apart in a whirlwind of electrical failures and crashing monitors, "-We've created a national seance." The reveal that the entire film is effectively an entity, older than anyone could've anticipated, staging a coup on our very screens, effectively ripping through the fourth wall, escalates the events of it well past a simple haunting, dragging us as viewers into the story against our will. For a brief moment, Pipes stares us in the face, as if to brag of how thoroughly we've been gotten. 

From beginning to end, Ghoswatch is a masterclass in pacing, creating tension and letting us spot the scares without ever forcing on them. There's no cheap jump scares, no surprise outburst of gore, and no true reveal of what's really going on. It's a film that leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions, drawing them closer and closer until they realize too late that they're part of the show too. 

Film of the Week: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

If there's one recurring idea that permeates throughout the work of Wes Anderson, it's grief and the endless struggle of learning to live with it. There's always a sense of bittersweetness to his best work, which is consistently very good, and in how it approaches this struggle. More than any filmmaker, I think, Anderson's filmography is fun to go through because you watch his view on this idea grow and mature, becoming more nuanced but no less heartfelt in his unique, subtle ways. It's also fun to watch through because as he grows in maturity, he also grows in confidence and ambition, his work becoming bigger, more elaborate and with an increasingly talented ensemble in tow. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his fourth film and the last work of his to be distributed by Disney until their buy-out of 20th Century Fox, represents Anderson's growth into one of Hollywood's most visually fascinating directors without losing the quietly sentimental spark that made him so unique. 

A send-up of both the late oceanographer Jacques Costeau and of pulpy adventure stories like 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and Moby Dick, Life Aquatic is often incredibly pleasing to look at. The film's primary setting, the Belafonte, is an elaborately designed set masquerading as the ship of the titular Steve Zissou (Bill Murray, who has honed his talent for playing morose sad sacks with a heart of gold to science at this point), and Anderson expertly introduces us to it with a loving pan through the cramped confines of the ship. We see every room, every detail, from the side, giving us an immediate sense of scale and where, exactly, everything and everyone is. Many of the film's fantastical creatures, witnessed in Steve's expeditions, are rendered through claymation, which contributes to the fantastical feel of the film. It's quickly clear that this is something bigger, a more heightened reality than Anderson's prior work, which makes the very real emotions at play hit that much harder. 

At it's heart, Life Aquatic is a story about loss and learning to live with it, and that no amount of control or micro-management can do a thing about the random cruelties that life can dish out. Steve, an eccentric if charismatic oceanographer, begins the film on a quest for vengeance, hunting the rare jaguar shark that, by Steve's own words, "devoured" his lifelong best friend Esteban. While nowhere near Captain Ahab's level of fanaticism, it becomes clear that Steve's obsession with hunting the creature, potentially the only one of it's kind, is a greater attempt to lash out at the world for taking his friend from him, as he crudely announces his intention to blow up the shark with dynamite. Much like Ahab, however, Zissou drags along a crew heavily devoted to him, from the affection-starved, childishly petty first mate Klaus (Willem Dafoe) to the quiet, musically talented safety expert Pele (Seu Jeorge, who provides a series of beautiful David Bowie covers) to snarky, rarely clothed script supervisor Anne-Marie Sakowitz (Robyn Cohen), and several newcomers, like Steve's apparent son Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson, very quietly reminding me of his underrated talents as a leading man) and hard-hitting, pregnant reporter Jane Winslett-Richardsson (Cate Blanchett), who quickly becomes an object of mutual affection for the coarse Steve and the more gentle Ned. 

The film is a proper adventure romp, if a more subversive one than the traditional fare, depicting the struggles of it's eccentric, deeply dysfunctional crew in a series of mishaps. A clash with pirates is portrayed as less a tense hostage situation and more of an exasperating road bump as two equally incompetent crews run afoul of each other, while Steve's recurring rivalry with the wealthier, more suave Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum, because who else?) serves as host to a series of great set-pieces (the impromptu heist of a Hennessey laboratory got a good laugh out of me with the spiteful bluntness of it while the crew's rescue of Hennessey from the pirates makes for a surprisingly tense action sequence) with a strong emotional pay-off as the two bond over a shared experience. The cast, a mix of Anderson's usual actors and newer players who would become bigger figures down the line, have a very lived-in chemistry. They bicker, they grow closer, and the various personalities clash in both expected and unexpected ways, feeling like a very genuine found family by the film's end. 

Of course, the good times can never last, and it's not a Wes Anderson film without a suitably brutal gut punch. In this case, it's Steve's pursuit of revenge for his best friend claiming the life of another loved one, as his reckless attitude and poor care for equipment causes an accident that kills Ned. It's a devastating moment, and the film's decision to first raise our hopes (Steve finds Ned floating amidst the wreckage) before crushing them (Anderson brilliantly bobbing the camera above and below the water as it gets more and more red) and then ultimately letting us sit in our grief speaks to the very real feelings that we've found ourselves developing for this larger than life characters. The message is clear: Esteban is gone, and Steve's refusal to admit that he can't bring him back has claimed Ned as well. It's in this moment that Steve, like many of Anderson's best protagonists, lets go of his grief, letting those he's lost live in heart by choosing to embrace life. 

This is represented by the quietly profound encounter with the jaguar shark itself, a beautifully designed creature that swims around the submersible the crew is packed into. Face to face with the beast he's hated, Steve half-heartedly admits to being out of dynamite, and simply washes it circle them before vanishing into the depths. Eyes brimming with tears, he whispers, "I wonder if it remembers me?" While we get no answer, the point is clear: change is impersonal, uncaring as to whether or not you're "important", and while tragedy is destined to strike everyone, what matters is how you choose to live in the aftermath of it. 

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.