"Accomplishments"
In theaters: According to Dumb Money, we could all have made a fortune a couple years ago, but I think that's a little naive and one-sided. Still, for The Big Short Lite, it's fun enough. At least, once you get past the stocks jargon. Dumb Money recounts the events of the 2020 GameStop stock brouhaha as a comedy, focusing on the man who YouTubed the idea into the hearts of millions of Redditors, but also reaching out to otherwise unconnected characters who decided to invest in a failing stock - manipulating it into going up - and the billionaire leaches who were affected by it because they were shorting the very same stock. But can democratizing the market actually make it accessible to regular people. The movie says yes, but again, I'm not sure we're really equipped. Paul Dano is as good as usual as the unassuming everyman, probably more unassuming (and therefore sympathetic) than the real "Roaring Kitty". And the cast around him (and at the far ends of his story's hydra) are pretty great too (Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson - who has all the best lines as Dano's deadbeat brother - Clancy Brown, Nick Offerman, Sabastian Stan, America Ferrara - who I wanted to see more of - Anthony Ramos, Vincent D'Onofrio... a very nice bounty of talent). If you're wondering what happened there, you could do worse, but I'm not sure I understand the market any better. When my time machine arrives in the mail, I'll nevertheless go back to 2019 to buy some stock. Just about the only reason to go back to that dreadful time.
At home: What if Back to the Future were a slasher film? Totally KIller has Kiernan Shipka go back in time 35 years to 1987 to solve/prevent her small town's one serial killer incident, the murders of the school's mean girls, which includes her mother (and costs the latter her life in the present). There's a certain personal frisson to having the 1987 characters be exactly my age then, and seeing as the 80s are played for laughs, usually showing it as a time lax on security (definitely) and big on being a jerk, I frequently questioned just how true this was. True enough was my unfortunate answer, and not just because we were selfish teenagers. It's still pushed to the extreme here because Shipka is forced to run with the Heathers, essentially. A lot of this you have to take on faith - like the time machine element - but as a horror comedy, it's a lot of fun. Shipka's reactions are on point, the movie understands its own DNA (even if 80s cops have never heard of that), and the way it both leans into Back to the Future and twists away from it is entertaining.
In No One Will Save You, Kaitlyn Dever is a self-sufficient young woman isolated both physically (in a house on the outskirts of a small town) and socially (a dark event in her past has made her a pariah), but she seems to have a reasonably happy life until gray aliens start hunting her. It's X-Files material played as a monster movie, with some variety in the old Encounters of the Third Kind abductor species, and Dever home-aloning them with some difficulty. A COVID-era production that uses isolation, weird hobbies, home invasion anxiety and even someone spitting in our heroine's face. As part of its conceit, there's almost no dialog (a couple lines and that's it) since she has no one to talk to and the aliens' language isn't decipherable. It mostly works since the aliens' motives are meant to be impossible to grasp, but it calls attention to itself in the few scenes where Dever is in town. That said, I'm not sure I can make sense of the ending. What is it saying about trauma and guilt (the themes of the character's life) with that bit of strangeness? As a tense monster movie that uses UFO iconography (like Signs on steroids, though the silence rather evokes A Quiet Place, I suppose), it works. As one of those "elevated horror films" about trauma, it's a little too elliptical. As a COVID metaphor (isolation, there's something in your throat, etc.), it might justify that kind of head-buried-in-the-sand ending. I'm still trying to decide if those approaches to it conflict with one another.
Misery from birth, Run presents current horror queen Sarah Paulson as the mother of a premature child who grew up with various conditions (asthma, rashes, diabetes, paralysis...) and at 17, Chloe is now this very capable, home-schooled young woman (Kiera Allen) and ready to go to college. By outward appearances, her mom is ready for her to do so, but when responses from colleges are late to arrive and a mysterious new pill is introduced into Chloe's regimen, she starts to doubt she will ever be allowed to leave. As the story turns into a horror thriller, Chloe has to find a way out despite her physical challenges. Thankfully, she's a bit of a MacGyver, and her solutions are always interesting. Well-paced, with some surprises, Run loses steam eventually, when ambiguity meets certainty, and the climax is par for the course. It gets all its points back, however, with that delicious ending.
Pre-med frat boys pull pranks using actual human body parts and therefore must pay for their actions via a slasher in Terror Train (the original), but the film is timid about showing actual kills, if not the resulting dead bodies. Really, it's more interested in the stalking element, with death possibly coming from anywhere and anyone (the killer keeps changing disguises), and works best when there is a THREAT of death (like when they go after Jamie Lee Curtis), whether we get a money shot or not (usually not). David Copperfield is one of the suspects, so lots of magic tricks to pad things out, but this isn't so much a whodunit as perhaps a whoaretheynow. An early time jump narrows the field in that respect. So Terror Train can be a claustrophobic train thriller, but it doesn't always chuff along at high speed, we lose sight of passengers from car to car, and it doesn't always manage to keep our interest, especially given that Jamie Lee is the only likeable young person aboard.
It seems I'm predisposed to like Dario Argento's thrillers more than his
supernatural horror films, and Tenebre is no exception. Anthony
Franciosa plays what might as well be an Argento stand-in, here a
novelist who doesn't consider himself a misogynist, but his detective
fiction nevertheless IS. And so the film acts as a lurid slasher in
which the killer claims to be inspired by the author and seems to target
beautiful women who have some connection to his book (tenuous as the
link might be). And you never quite shake the feeling that the author
himself could have a Mr. Hyde persona, if his duality is to be made
manifest. The detective story itself is fine, but it's those shocking
murders, beautifully staged even as they are exploitative and grotesque,
that excite. His style doesn't really live in the bad dubs of talking
heads in hotel rooms and offices, but in the extreme close-ups, dripping
inserts, and crashing synth music, which in Tenebre is like Carpenter
in acid.
Argento's Phenomena (AKA Critters in its U.S. release, because of course) is quite the Frankenstein's Monster. On the surface of it, Argento puts a lot of his usual elements into the blender - serial killers in trenchcoats, straight razors, a creepy foreign school - but then it adds weird, wonky elements on top of it. A 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly is given the power to communicate with insects and partners with Donald Pleasence's sometimes-Scottish entomologist and his chimp nurse (yes, you read that right) to solve the crimes before she sleepwalks (yep) into the killer's way. Both stars are very watchable (ok, all three, let's add the chimp to the list) and the Swiss locations beautiful. The violence is relatively timid (at least at first) for Argento, but there are lots of bugs and maggots to make your skin crawl. And then there's that ill-fitting ending that uses a hoary old horror trope and a "monster" that hardly makes sense and an action ending. The third act just dumps a whole lot of ideas into a story that already had too many. But for a while there, it felt like one of Agento's better efforts (still does, in summation), a detective story with very unusual detectives and some really good moments of suspense.
What it the Seven Hells?! Blood Diner is... What IS Blood Diner?! This
hyperactive horror comedy takes Lovecraftian elements - the rebirth of
an ancient goddess dependent on tricking people to eat human flesh and
cutting up naked girls to make her a body - but parodied sometimes in
the strangest ways. Sure, random, gory kills that make no sense, a brain
in a jar directing our two goofy cannibals, comments that break the
fourth wall, even the odd juvenile humor, would have their place. But
sometimes, it's just bizarre: Out of place headwear, two-thirds of the
cops having think indeterminate accents, the rival diner owner's
ventriloquist dummy, the whole wrestling bit... Jackie Kong earns points
by even trying half of this, but the Airplane stuff (if that how's I'm
to take the seemingly random humor) doesn't always land, or perhaps the
lack of professional acting means there's no pilot to do so. Blood Diner
comes off as chaotic, but if you've seen it all, maybe you haven't seen
THIS.
Japan does Hammer Horror in The Vampire Doll, subtitled (or really supertitled) The Legacy of Dracula, and indeed, it's sort of a riff on the Dracula story, but I think people have made more of that than actually winds up on the screen. The look, with its spooky old European house and Igor-like caretaker really could have come out of Hammer Studios, but once your vampire is a young woman who refuses to die after a car crash and kills people with a knife, well, no matter how many Harker stand-ins you send at her, it's not REALLY the same story. And that purposeful Euro-style is, I think, more to the film's detriment than benefit because aside from an early flight of directorial fancy - of which nothing comes - it looks like dozens of other, pacier films. It's hard to judge it for what it didn't want to be, but while the Japanese location and its cultural touchstones create a different "Dracula" story, it's just not different enough (ending twists not withstanding). Starts off pretty well, but gets lost in the weeds.
I suppose the makers of An American Werewolf in Paris - which I partly confused with Seth Green's first Buffy episode in my head - though that in '97, throwing CG werewolves at us would be the equivalent of the 80s London adventure's revolutionary animatronics. It's not. One of these two movies has withstood the test of time, and it's not Paris. The wolves are ugly, and while I've seen worse in terms of integration, even from after 1997, you see too much of them, which takes away a lot of the horror. That's if the movie even recognizes that it's part of the horror genre. The original was tonally discordant too, but in a pleasurable way. This one leans too heavily into comedy, with its goofy hero (Tom Everett Scott) falling prey to incessant slapstick and dumb sex stuff (predating, but still evoking American Pie-type stuff), while he and Julie Delpy run around to try and stop Paris' unusually large werewolf population from taking over the city by shooting up with a drug that spoofs the lunar cycle (so it also evokes Blade). Delpy is apparently who you call when you need a French woman to fall for a travelling American, but her talents are absolutely wasted here. All the women in the movie are simply there to fall in love or lust with the hero (not that he ever deserves it), so yuck. Julie Bowen becoming undead and haunting his ass, trying to get him killed, is an element that gave me hope, but alas, they soon forget all about her. Irritating soundtrack too.
Couple weeks after reviewing the first couple seasons of Superstore, here I am with my account of seasons 3-6. There seems to be a point in any fairly long-running sitcom where even the "normal" characters become parodies of themselves. Superstore follows the trend with Amy, Jonah and Garrett becoming extra neurotic by season 4. I've seen worse, honestly. The show has been good about allowing characters to stretch and grow according to their ambitions, shuffling them around managerial positions and moving romances along, but also dealing with consequences, of Mateo's undocumented status, for example, and with some courage, the COVID crisis that hits the last season. If there's one workplace comedy that could keep going and address it, it's one set in the retail business. And so we have characters very often interacting in masks (the looping is unfortunately obvious), and at once mocking the lukewarm response to COVID and nevertheless heralding the workers who put themselves at riks through the period. It's a shared trauma that lends a poignancy to a season in addition to the usual feelings one gets when characters you've gotten to know take their last bows. The finale is a bit cursory for some characters, but works thanks to a sincere montage. I was happy to spend time at Cloud 9, which is ironic because actual big box stores make my anxiety spike considerably and I've been known to put back items and run home.
If there were ever a show concept that sounded like it came from Aaron Sorkin, it's The Morning Show. We have a high-profile television production that allows the writers to discuss topical issues, slanting towards utopia (real people in the biz rarely "do the right thing"), but where Sorkin would have given us a utopian cast, TMS has one "truth teller", and the rest are really rather selfish. But like a Sorkin production (whether Sports Night, Studio 60 or The Newsroom), there's something else you have to buy into: that the central show is as relevant and famous as it apparently is. Here, though there's a lot of talk of television dying in the internet age, that television morning show and its anchors are wayyy too famous/important. Maybe it's because I don't watch a lot of TV and have hardly ever watched a network morning program, but I do find it a little ridiculous in terms of the real world. That said, I have lived that life in miniature during my years as a French CBC radio producer, and have certainly done the morning shift, as well as news programs in other time slots. When the show uses real news - setting itself in the near past for better hindsight - it shines, but its MAIN theme is the #MeToo Movement. The show sparks off with the male anchor's sexual misconduct being outed and him being OUSTED from the show. Steve Carrel sticks around to show how a cancelled star reacts. Jennifer Aniston's prima donna co-star is left in a terrible position and Reese Witherspoon is the new, self-sabotaging journalist who fills the spot. However, it's Billy Crudup's oddball executive who's the most entertaining and intriguing. While the show skews towards drama, the cast is full of people who came up through comedy, proving once again that the discipline teaches versatility. The first season could have been a complete story, and the second is perhaps too focused on various characters' meltdowns in the wake of the first. It DOES drive towards Our Year of COVID and a pretty strong finale. But current events have definitely taken a back seat to personal drama and therefore to more something more ordinary. Still compelling, but it there may be a limit to how much you can take of Aniston's tailspins and 180s
Books: Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands collects various essays of his that, for the most part, deal with genre anxiety, arguing for his personal crusade to restore horror, detective fiction, science-fiction, fantasy, comic books, what have you, to the proper ranks of literature. He's preaching to the choir, in the case of this reader, but these things need to be said, and said by a Pulitzer winner, even if the mainstream has made strides in the right direction since the book's publication in 2008. The hardcover copy apparently doesn't have the last text on superhero iconography, but it's one of the best, so don't hold out for it if you've found the softcover or the ebook. At the mid-point, we get several pieces that discuss his own works, his writing, his inspirations, and there's that connection to genre again. I've always loved Chabon's prose, and these biographical essays are great, but like any collection of essays culled from all over (magazines, book introductions, talks), it can feel a little random, a little redundant even. At least there is a overall theme that can be glimpsed even in the pieces not directly related to it: The rehabilitation of genre stories that used to be myth and par for the course, and which are apparently fine for the classics, but need to be kept in a bookstore ghetto (and out of academia) lest "serious readers" accidentally stumble upon them. Fight the power!
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