The Fall of the House of Usher (1979)

Architect Jonathan (Robert Hays), is asked by his old school friend Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) to visit the Usher family mansion, situated in a dismal swamp, as quickly as he can possibly make it. Jonathan’s a pretty obliging character, so she packs in his new wife Jennifer (Charlene Tilton) and goes on a very peculiar version of a honeymoon with her.

As you can probably guess, Roderick and his sister Madeline (Dimitra Arliss) are the last of their line, and both are suffering from a curious hereditary illness that increases their senses so much, they will eventually lose their minds from exposure of the outside world and even die from it.

Roderick, the saner of the two siblings, has developed a curious idea. He believes that the decaying state of the Usher family is intimately connected to that of the family mansion, a place so dilapidated, it’s a wonder it is still standing. But, thinks Roderick, if Jonathan were to find a way to save and strengthen the house, this would in turn save and strengthen the Usher family, saving himself and Madeline.

Strangely enough, Jonathan’s early attempts at humouring is friend and strengthening the foundations of the building do indeed appear to begin to influence Roderick’s health for the better. However, Madeline seems to be beyond the point of anything but an increasingly murderous madness, and she has taken a bit of a dislike to Jennifer. There is also more to the connection between the Ushers and their house than Roderick lets on.

Though I wouldn’t exactly call James L. Conway’s TV version of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” a completely successful movie, it does go in interesting directions to turn the very short story into a feature length film. Stephen Lord’s idea of turning the connection between the Ushers and the House that is mostly metaphorical in Poe into more of a concrete element of the plot is rather wonderful, and enables the kind of actual Gothic horror plot Poe had no need for, while also giving proceedings, at least to my tastes and eyes, the kind of weird turn you could imagine Poe using if he’d been a 1930s or 40s pulp writer. It’s a clever and effective turn that at once makes some of the metaphorical construction of the film more obvious to the slower members of the audience, and enables the rest of the film to not just be a worse looking retelling of the Corman version.

Visually, the film isn’t great shakes – there are a couple of effective enough looking sets, and Conway is nothing if not professional, but only a very few scenes tell us much through forms, colours and movement instead of dialogue and performances. Fortunately, the performances are generally pretty strong. Sure, Jonathan isn’t terribly interesting a character, and Hays performance is on the bland side, but when has it ever been any other way with the romantic male lead in a gothic horror movie? Tilton, whom I mostly know from her Dallas days, on the other hand, is rather effective at looking increasingly frightened and freaked out by her surroundings and her rather threatening encounters with Madeline; Arliss is pretty great at making mad eyes, which really is all she needs to do here. And Landau, probably not the obvious choice for Roderick, is actually rather fantastic. He makes much out of the strangeness of his character’s regaining of vitality and mental fortitude later on in the movie, but his time as dramatically nervous wreck with age make-up is just as convincing.

All of which turns this into a rather more interesting movie than I expected going in. I still think more visual flair would have done it a world of good (a world of sickliness?), but I do appreciate it for having some actual ideas about what it is adapting, and having a good crack at doing something with these ideas on a TV movie budget.

Three Films Make A Post: A Comedy of Elf-fish Proportions

Elf (2003): That it has taken me two decades to see this apparent Christmas classic by Jon Favreau about a guy (Will Ferrell) who has grown up as one of Santa’s elves and goes to New York to connect with his true, human father (James Caan) certainly has a lot to do with my general dislike of Ferrell. I still believe the film at hand could have been improved by casting somebody who is actually funny in the lead role, but it’s pretty great anyway. In part, that’s on account of an otherwise great cast – James Caan alone would make this one worth anyone’s time – but mainly the film thrives through the absolute commitment to the bit of David Berenbaum’s script. Or rather, to commit to the bit and then use it to do actual worldbuilding with it, which is further enhanced by the film’s clear love for the kitschiest parts of US Christmas lore. The film’s tone always appears carried by the kind of genuine good naturedness that doesn’t preclude snark but always puts it in the service of heart, and pretty much makes this one of the perfect Christmas movies.

Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman aka 천박사 퇴마 연구소: 설경의 비밀 (2022): Some of the special effects in Kim Seong-sik’s fantasy-tinged horror movie about a scammy shaman (Gang Dong-won) finishing the work of his actual shaman father when called in to exorcise a young girl look pretty much as if taken directly out of a JRPG (I’ve never encountered a KRPG, sorry). Otherwise, this is a fun, if not terribly deep, film with a couple of fun set pieces – there’s a glorious scene where our hero has to fight off a series of possessed people while fleeing through a village with our female lead (Esom). It’s a basic story told efficiently and effectively, and carries itself with a general satisfactory air of an unfussy, straightforward genre piece done well.

The Abandoned aka Cha wu ci xin (2022): This Taiwanese serial killer thriller by Ying-Ting Tseng is at its best whenever it focusses on calm, careful character work, observing its handful of depressed core characters (particularly Janine Chun-Ning Chang) when confronted with an especially nasty series of murders on female itinerant immigrant workers and these characters’ various degrees of guilt. Whenever the film drifts in the direction of more traditional thriller scenes it can’t help but feel derivative of the hundreds of movies and TV shows that have gone through the same sort of material.

Until it arrives at its final act, that’s not happening terribly often, but once the film reaches its climax, one can’t help but think one is watching a film that’s losing sight of its best qualities in favour of a mediocre riff on tropes we’ve seen a hundred times before done better.

Short Film Friday: The Shrew Ash

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In short: Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his particularly bored looking cohorts Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames get into yet another McGuffin hunt to protect the world. A shadowy evil mastermind with the usual mad-on for our hero, a handful of returning characters (Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust and Sean Harris’s Solomon Lake) and a threatened ex-wife (Michelle Monaghan again) are there and accounted for.

This six hundredth or so Mission: Tom Cruise movie directed by repeat Cruise crony Christopher McQuarrie suffers badly from contemporary blockbuster syndrome, so it concerns a perfectly serviceable McGuffin hunt that would most probably make for a pretty fantastic hundred minute movie that has been blown up to inexplicable two and a half hours by the kind of franchise universe building rarely anybody will care about, not even this fan of superhero and supercar movie minutiae.

Because this is a Tom Cruise movie, there’s really not much to do with the additional runtime for the film: interesting characterisation is difficult to impossible to do in a movie where every other character is exclusively defined through their relationship to Cruise, and the guy must even be made to look absolutely awesome when he screws up badly. Most superheroes feel more human and relatable there, though ethically, this super spy series has by now totally bought into ideas of saving the little people and not playing the game of weighing single lives against the many, which I don’t have a problem with in the “kill everyone and let god sort out his own” world too many people apparently enjoy living in.

Inside of these parameters, the first and the final act of the film are serviceably fun popcorn cinema, but the lack of actual narrative drive beyond set pieces and the series’ tendency to waste potential awesomeness that could be provided through the on paper great supporting cast (Rebecca Ferguson alone can act circles around Cruise and looks more convincing in action scenes to boot) thanks to its extreme Cruise worship. Which becomes deadly for a middle act whose action sequences are as painfully by the numbers as the ones in here. Spectacles aren’t supposed to be boring.

In short: Rotting in the Sun (2023)

My end of year waltzing through films recommended as some of the best of the year by the more arthouse oriented side of film criticism sometimes leads to astonishing discoveries for me, like the films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi or Céline Sciamma, cinema that’s as mind-blowing – often in very quiet ways – as its proponents say it is.

At other times, like with this supposed satire by Sebastián Silva using some of the rules of POV filmmaking genres without ever becoming something as gauche (or entertaining) as a genre movie, I leave genuinely puzzled by what I am supposed to take away as being so damn brilliant here. What’s so great about watching a self-centred asshole portrayed by the director as a variant version of himself whining, looking away from dicks, doing drugs, sighing, reading Cioran and so on? Why am I supposed to care when he is never interesting, lacks interesting – or even just not boring -problems, does not encounter interesting people and certainly never gets up to doing anything interesting (not even when a sort of mystery plot ever so slowly crawls about after many, many scenes of observing this asshat doing nothing of import)? Who exactly is this aimed at as a satire? People who think criticising modern culture as self-centred to be really rather clever and new? Who believe showing the influencer life as empty is any kind of insight?

Visually, this goes for harsh handheld shots, much wobbling of viewpoints and the kind of consciously ugly look that in most cases screams “poser!” to me, and certainly does so here.

To be fair, this isn’t three hours of tedium, but not even two, so I can’t add “sucking away valuable time I could have spent playing videogames” to my list of complaints.

In short: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

I’m not writing about TV and streaming shows here very often – the play by play format best for this sort of thing just doesn’t work for me – but I do have to make an exception for house favourite Mike Flanagan’s final outing at Netflix, before he is going to fight those other Elder Beings at Amazon.

Usher turns out to be quite the high note to go out on, mixing every single thing that has always been great at what Flanagan’s doing in and with horror – the emphasis on character and the exploration of themes while still keeping the shocks and the dread going, his love for working with a recurring ensemble of actors, his disinterest in “realistic” dialogue and following interest in the stylized and the actually interesting and so on and so forth – with a surprisingly complex critique of modern capitalism I didn’t expect in quite this form.

He’s certainly aiming for the obvious, blunt targets a lot, but there’s also room for talking about how money and consumerism changes the small, human relations in the show.

As a Poe piece, the show is closer connected to its source material than Flanagan’s two Haunting ofs were to theirs. Apart from the names, the deaths and the quotations visual and verbal, and so on, the show often manages to drag the actual mood of Poe into a very contemporary setting, turning the hypermodern gothic whenever possible. Thematically, this isn’t terribly interested in Poe’s personal fixations, but uses them, and the way he expressed them in his works to talk about the things it is interested in – apart from capitalism also the vagaries of family - of course, this being by Flanagan –, the opioid epidemic, and the toxic nature of quite a lot of things.

Even the decidedly non-naturalist acting style the ensemble goes for this time around fits perfectly into Poe’s aesthetic world – Flanagan’s patented monologues and his clear love for letting actors actually go to town in ways usually only theatre directors do clearly draws out the best from a cast that’s pretty damn brilliant even in lesser circumstances, bringing characters and ideas to life not by imitating how real people are and talk, but by very consciously intensifying and stylizing.

This and Flanagan’s other shows are pretty much exactly how I wish more horror TV would be, without the empty posturing and boring maximalism of something like American Horror Story, with an eye, a brain and a heart instead of an “irony” gland.

Music Monday: Shadow, Doubt, Etc Edition

In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

Short Film Friday: Crannog Bay

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In short: The Sacrifice Game (2023)

Christmas 1971. A quartet of serial killers – psychopathic Jude (Mena Massoud), quiet muscle Grant (Derek Johns), semi-professional follower Doug (Laurent Pitre) and secret mastermind Maisie (Olivia Scott Welch) have literally cut a path through quite a few religious weirdos, cutting away parts of their skins carrying very curious looking birthmarks for what they call a “flesh puzzle”.

On Christmas Eve, they end up in a boarding school for girls, where one teacher (Chloë Levine), and two girls – Samantha (Madison Baines and Clara (Georgia Acken) have been left behind over the holidays. Maisie was once at the school herself and was thrown out when she dabbled in the occult, as so often happens at boarding schools. Not without taking a page of a magic book from the cellar library with her that contains the ritual she and her gentlemen friends are attempting to follow; a ritual that is supposed to summon a demon. Now, only the blood of innocents drawn at the school is left, and the ritual should be finished.

Obviously, things don’t go as smoothly as these four nincompoops expect. Turns out, Maisie has only ripped a part of the ritual from the book before she had to leave school, and has thusly misunderstood the nature of what she’s trying to achieve rather badly.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter Jenn Wexler’s The Sacrifice Game certainly isn’t. Subtlety, depth and complexity aren’t this film’s game (sorry). Instead, this is all about the fun of seeing various trope-heavy characters and ideas collide and enjoying the sparks that fly.

Thankfully, Wexler’s direction is focussed and stylish – with a particularly fine sense for the use of Christmas colours and those connected to 70s cinema - and the script by her and Sean Redlitz fast-paced and fun, with a couple of scenes – particularly early on in the film – that demonstrate admirable control over the language of suspense and thriller material. The film does get a little less impressive during its final act, as usually happens once a movie like this comes to the phase where contemporary screenwriting rules demand explanations and “twists”, something that’s by now so expected, I always find myself yawning a bit at the structurally not at all surprising “surprises”. Detailed explanations the film at hand would have worked without, as well, but this is, alas, how the sausage is made right now.

This shouldn’t overshadow how fun a little Christmas-set horror movie this is otherwise. I’m just an old man yelling at clouds tonight.

In short: Silent Night (2023)

Brian (Joel Kinnaman) loses his little son in a drive-by shooting. His unsuccessful attempt at doing a spur of the moment bit of vigilantism leaves him badly hurt and without a voice box. The now silent protagonist starts on a course of a lot of wordless emoting. During this he ruins his marriage by focussing on training up for some better vigilantism instead of recognizing he might not be the only one grieving here.

Once he’s ready, he’s going to murder a whole lot of gang members coming up on a Christmas Eve climax.

It’s nice that John Woo uses his latest stint in the West to try his hand at a formal experiment. However, the film’s high concept that an unspeaking protagonist means practically nobody else is speaking either never feels organic in the film as it plays out. Worse, the self-inflicted wordlessness undermines Woo’s ability to give the melodrama that always was part and parcel of his films beside the action the proper emotional weight. Turns out you can only show a perfectly game Kinnaman smashing furniture and murdering people as an expression of deep emotions so many times.

This leaves the action to carry everything here, and even though Woo clearly hasn’t lost his ability to show people getting shot, mauled, and so on in various exciting ways, the action does lack the kind of anchor dialogue and the kind of more complex characterisation that comes with it should have provided. Conceptually, the action sequences suffer from a certain video game quality – rather fitting to a silent protagonist, to be fair – that robs them of the impact really good action cinema is supposed to have.

Here, the escalation in violence feels less like a part of the film’s dramatic engine but as if Woo would drag Kinnaman into a new level in a third person shooter.

The Christmas gimmick, by the way, is absolutely wasted.

In short: The Pigeon Tunnel (2023)

Great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the re-inventor of spy fiction John le Carré, shortly before the writer’s death. It is a series of deep conversations during which Carré goes into some very private facets of his personality and life but also shows himself – rather expectedly when you’ve read a little about the man’s background – a great raconteur, looking back at his life with a distance towards those things he hates or loves about himself or what happened in his life. He still loathes Kim Philby, though, but also sees him as a mirror of his own failings of character and personality. Of course, the author would argue, he doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a core personality.

Consequently, much of what le Carré talks about with Morris circles around the flexibility of personality and truth, of autobiographical truth and untruth, speaks of masks and betrayals, and of how to take elements of reality and shape them into narratives. All of this clearly resonates with Morris’s own work as a filmmaker, his questions about truth, truthfulness and artificiality. It is clear Morris is little interested in le Carré’s biography as a simple, linear progression of facts but rather tries to talk with the writer about how one can attempt to be truthful about a subject, say oneself, even when it is impossible to be absolutely, abstractly truthful. Critical distance is not a concept that makes sense here, and if you go into the film expecting something more to contemporary tastes, interested in judging le Carré on his autobiography, you’ll probably go away disappointed. But then, that’s hardly what one should expect from Morris.

To my eyes, The Pigeon Tunnel is a fascinating, and often very entertaining, film that doesn’t quite try to hide its philosophical questions behind le Carré’s abilities as a storyteller, and that also happens to express rather a lot of ideas about human nature and the world I tend to share. At least on some days.

Music Monday: Colossally Wasteful Edition

UFOria (1984)

Sheldon (Fred Ward) is a small time crook, loving whiskey, women and Waylon – Jennings, that is. He’s rather low on cash right now, so he’s drifting into the part of California where his old companion in crime Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) has set himself up as a faith healer and preacher. Bud has about as much of direct line to a godhood as I do, of course, but he does know how to give a good show. He also has a thing for clearly bad plans, so his preaching business soon not only involves carting Sheldon out to be fake healed, but also transporting stolen cars over state lines, and using them in his preaching circus.

While he is working with Bud, Sheldon falls for discount market cashier Arlene (Cindy Williams), and she right back for him. It is clear that this kind of actual straightforward love leading to an actual relationship has never happened to him before, and Arlene doesn’t seem to have ever been really lucky in love. As different as the very straight Arlene and the very crooked Sheldon are, they might be able to be pretty good for each other if and when they manage to meet in the middle between the wild and the too normal life.

Things become complicated when Arlene, fed on UFO mags and TV, has a vision – or something of this kind – and becomes convinced she has been contacted by aliens. She even starts her own little UFO cult (not the nefarious kind). Bud does see this a prize opportunity to make some money, of course, while Sheldon is mostly flabbergasted at this development in the initially very down to Earth woman he loves.

This really obscure comedy is the only feature film directed by John Binder. Despite including some elements – the UFO cult and the scamming preacher business – that are usually more connected to the cultural air of the 80s, UFOria otherwise has a very 70s kind of feel to it. Its narrative style is loose and leisurely, featuring an approach to characterization and plot that finds much space to let people and things just breathe in scenes that would either end up on the cutting room floor going by our contemporary rules of filmmaking or would be dragged out to eternity. The film at hand does neither, and instead trusts in Ward, Williams and Stanton to fill these spaces with personality and those small bits of actorly business that can either drag a film down or heighten it. Mostly, they manage to do the latter here. I also have to admit I find it difficult to argue when a movie starts with a scene of Ward relaxing feet up in his car while driving down the Highway, singing along with a Waylon Jennings number.

UFOria isn’t quite a smooth ride, however, for it loses some its charm once it really begins committing to the whole UFO business and the usual talk about the power of belief/faith. It might very well be just my personal taste speaking here, but I was rather more interested in if, how and why Arlene and Sheldon will manage to find the place where they are better together than alone, and less in the question if believing in UFOs is going to save me. Sorry, Agent Mulder.

Three Films Make A Post: There will be no leftovers.

Thanksgiving (2023): This is probably Eli Roth’s best horror film – I haven’t seen his kids movies, so I can’t speak to that very different part of the man’s career. But then, this really isn’t saying much, given the things he has inflicted on us, and consequently, Thanksgiving is not much of a movie. It really, really wants to be a knowing modern version of the nastiest kind of grindhouse slasher, but apart from the misanthropy, it never gets at the specific charms of these films. And the “knowing” part mostly consists of the kind of jokes Roth finds clever, and which thusly isn’t.

Otherwise, this is just a boring mediocrity lacking in suspense, mood, characters, or even enough cleverness to understand that this specific filmmaker simply doesn’t have the abilities to make a decent whodunnit slasher.

There’s Something in the Barn (2023): The astonishing thing about Magnus Martens’s horror comedy is how by the numbers and utterly predictable in every detail it is despite concerning the Christmas fight between an American family and Norwegian barn elves, which is not something I’d call by the numbers or ordinary.

There’s not a single plot point, nor development, not a single damn joke that isn’t so obvious you’ll make it yourself a second before the movie gets around to it. It’s mind-boggling how obvious this thing truly is in every aspect of its script, and truly astonishing that nobody involved in the production seems to have had a single even half-original idea once the barn elves were scribbled onto a napkin. This makes Roth’s film look like a work of deep creativity and intelligence, which it isn’t.

Death Forest aka Desu foresuto kyoufu no mori (2014): So it is left to this unassuming little Japanese movie to save this triple post. Not by being terribly original either – though it certainly beats the other two movies by the sheer power of possibly having had at least an hour or two of thought invested in it, and by not hiding behind the “comedy” label. The characters are cardboard, the structure pretty old hat, but then, there’s really not much you can squeeze into an hour of runtime. What makes Death Forest and its tale of various characters stumbling through a, wait for it, deadly spooky forest, fun are some pleasantly creepy and disturbing monsters that carry the genuine weirdness of the dark side of much of Japanese folklore. Which is more than enough for a direct-to-home-video movie based on a web game.

There aren’t too many movies whose characters find their end getting their upper bodies chomped off by a creepy, cheaply digital, flying head, at least.

Is it that time of the year again already?

 Like every year, the stars are turning wrong and I have to go into hibernation for a bit. Our regular schedule will recommence on January, 6th.

Happy Holidays, or whatever tickles your fancy, dear imaginary readers!

In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

In short: Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023)

Bedraggled and just plain weird burger flipper Marcus (Andrew Bowser) is trying to reinvent himself as occultist Onyx the Fortuitous, following the teachings of YouTube occultist, rock star, and Satanic fitness video guru Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs). Onyx, let’s use his chosen moniker, is not very bright.

So he is exceedingly happy when he is one of the five Chosen invited to help Bartok with a ritual that will gain everyone involved immortality. Obviously, Bartok’s plans are mite more sinister than he’s letting on, and Chosen might actually be short for Chosen Sacrifices.

Andrew Bowser’s Onyx etc is a bit of an acquired taste, to say the least. Or really, if one is in the wrong headspace for it and particularly its high maintenance protagonist who never shuts up making noises with his very unpleasant voice, this could be a bit of a chore. Particularly during the film’s first half, Onyx the character is just a bit much, and his “funny” loser shtick never really loses those quotation marks. But then, I’m not a great candidate for appreciating this kind of awkwardness-based comedy at the best of times, and Onyx is really, really awkward. The situation isn’t helped by the sluggishness of the beginning of a film that takes ages to get to its early and most obvious beats.

On the other hand, even the film’s early stages are well shot, and well edited, and, even if you don’t like the tone it is going for, clearly well acted – it featuring Barbara Crampton, Olivia Taylor Dudley and Combs certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Once the preliminaries were finally through, Onyx actually won me over, though. Suddenly, ideas became silly but clever instead of completely obvious, character relations were rather more interesting than they at first looked, and the film demonstrated a likeable, big heart, while still having fun with movie Satanist clichés. Even the jokes in the later stages hit better – there’s nothing that isn’t funny about a seduction scene in form of a fake Meatloaf video with not-Thundercats.

In short: It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)

On paper, doing a modern gimmick horror version of Capra’s insufferable, inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life sounds like a grand idea, for its vague politics and Capra’s peculiar world view really could use a bit of an update; plus blood and guts go well with anything.

In the hands of director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy, this doesn’t turn out to be a worthwhile effort. The film never seems to be sure what kind of story it actually wants to tell, and for the handful of clever, fun or funny moments it squeezes in while not really telling much of one, there are dozens that simply fall flat. Unlike the film this is taking its basic idea from, the dystopic hellscape the town turns into when the slasher isn’t dispatched by our heroine is just too flat – dope smokers are now into crack instead! – and the curious attempt to change the role of our heroine when compared to the non-slasher version of the material neither makes much sense for the plot, nor does it result in anything much worthwhile thematically.

The attempts at doing the “society’s outsiders are awesome; lesbians are great” thing are certainly likeable, but never really come to life more than stating the obvious generally does.

Knife isn’t much clearer in its treatment of its supernatural elements, particularly when Justin Long’s evil mayor also turns out to have some random hypnotic powers or something, for some reason the film isn’t going into and the characters don’t seem to believe worth even thinking about. I can’t help but think rather a lot of things were lost between various versions of the script, and the film this ended up as is some curious undead abomination made from scraps.

Music Monday: Every Year Edition

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Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

In short: Ballerina (2022)

Original title: 발레리나

Our protagonist Ok-joo (Jeon Jong-seo) has a background in the security business Ballerina never really explains but that provides her with all kind of badass abilities. Apart from her close friendship with ballerina/cake shop seller Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), she seems to be virtually friendless, a loner by inclination. One might suspect a traumatic past, what with this being an action movie made in the 21st Century, but the film is never showing us one.

Ok-joo does acquire some acute trauma in any case when she finds Min-hee dead of suicide. Min-hee left a note in which she asks Ok-joo to avenge her, complete with a mildly cryptic hint about what the hell she means with that. Soon, Ok-joo is on the trail of mass rapist, killer, and all-around shitheel Choi (Kim Ji-hoon), who raped and enslaved Min-hee, causing her suicide.

Under normal circumstances, killing Choi would be about an evening's work for Ok-joo, but it turns out he’s just part of a large drug, forced prostitution and murder racket, which makes things rather more difficult for her.

Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is a nice little action movie, with some post-John Wick style gun fu, moments of absurd humour that seem to pop in from a different world than the rest of the film, and the attitude to genre tropes we know and love from South Korean genre cinema: tropes are excellent things, fun and really rather useful, but when the mood strikes, they are also optional.

There’s no large restructuring of the elements of the revenge flick here. Lee’s clearly trying to make an effective example of the form right in the mainstream of the cinematic language of our time for such a thing, just one that from time to time likes to turn things a couple degrees away from the completely straight and narrow, which keeps affairs more lively.

Colour schemes, camera work and editing scream POP! so much I’m pretty sure this is going to be a movie we’ll be able to read as a platonic ideal of how action filmmaking in the 2020s looked when we’re ten, fifteen years in the future. It’s certainly a fun example of its form and style, and though it doesn’t exactly have more substance than is strictly necessary for it to function, it still is a fine time.

Short Film Friday: The Archivists

The Archivists from Timelapse Pictures on Vimeo.

In short: The Killer (2023)

A professional killer (Michael Fassbender) botches an assassination attempt. After his middle-man sends people to his home that brutalize his partner, the Killer works his way up to his actual employer.

There’s really very little plot or direct characterization to David Fincher’s The Killer. Fassbender’s character is highly self-contained – or empty – except for a monologue that very pointedly does not really analyse or comment on what’s going on, even though it at first appear to do so. Rather, the repetitious monologue in his head is just another method the Killer uses not to have to connect with the world, to “stay in the moment” in the most nihilist way imaginable, just as he uses his own private The Smiths soundtrack for the same thing.

Everything we learn about the man’s actual inner life, or what little there is of it, the film shows us via the breaks in his facades, the physical injuries that begin to roughen up his slickness, and the way his actual deeds often are exactly the opposite of what his inner monologue never stops repeating. That this works as well as it does has a lot to do with focus: like the character at his best/worst (performance/morals), Fincher’s direction here is fastidious, neat and tidy, absolutely focussed on showing the things his main characters is not telling by insinuation, while always keeping up the appearance of this being a simple straightforward thriller.

This contrast between what we’re told we are seeing and what we are actually seeing does lend the film a surprisingly strong thread of humour. It’s a pretty grim sense of humour, of course, but that’s the only fitting kind of humour for this sort of thing – there’s something inherently funny about a guy telling himself quite as many lies as the Killer does, and a film presenting these lies with such a straight face, but murder is still murder. There’s some conceptual humour here as well: the Smiths as the best soundtrack to assassinate people to, the way the Killer’s philosophy mixes crap nihilism (the kind of nihilism only good for excusing one’s own shittiness with the shittiness of the world or universe) with wellness lingo that suggests a future influencer career for the Killer are things that not just work as elements of showing us a character but are also pretty great jokes, when you think about them for a minute.

The Creator (2023)

Some decades in the future. Somehow, humanity has developed genuine AI instead of the predictive language modelling that makes the hearts of our tech bros all a-quiver, and created various types of AI people. Following a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles for which they make AI as a whole responsible, the US have declared war on AI, not just outlawing its use and creation at home but going to war with anyone who isn’t quite this fond of what amounts to genocide. Particularly parts of Asia have become home to various ways of organic and inorganic people coexisting mostly peacefully.

Now, the US is officially winning its “war” thanks to a huge orbital weapons platform called NOMAD that hangs over Southeast Asia like the hammer of doom. In truth, NOMAD is the only thing that’s actually winning anything for anyone here, so desperate measures are called for when the mysterious scientific mastermind behind much of the AIs’ successes has apparently developed some sort of secret weapon against NOMAD.

To get at this weapon, a small strike force invades an Asian country that apparently isn’t Thailand anymore where intelligence believes the weapon is created. Because the US also want to finally get rid of its creator, they drag embittered veteran Joshua (John David Washington, giving a perfect performance) back in for his experiences in the area the attack takes place in. Five years ago, Joshua was undercover with the AI people, married to the scientist’s daughter Maya (Gemma Chan), and clearly teetering on the edge of changing sides for good. A botched attack killed Maya and their unborn child, and left Joshua rather unwilling to take part in much more of this.

Now, the military dangles Maya’s supposed survival in front of Joshua like a carrot. During the incursion into not-Thailand – which consists in large part of the US soldiers slaughtering civilians, AI (which aren’t “real” by their definition) or not – Joshua manages to get at the weapon the military is so wild about. The weapon, it turns out, is an AI that looks like a child. Instead of delivering Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), as Joshua will soon call her, to the Americans, he takes her on the run, in the hope she will lead him to Maya. Obviously, he is now hunted by all sides of the conflict.

For my tastes, Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a wonder of a big budget science fiction film that squeezes in the mandatory amount of – pretty great – action set pieces but stays thoughtful and focussed on the things it wants to say throughout.

Much of the film’s quality lies in the ability of its director to use the spectacular production design and effects to do much of the world-building heavy lifting. Consequently, all the pretty things we are looking at here are not only meant to look cool – though they certainly do – but also fill out all of the details that turn abstract ideas into a living world.

This fits in nicely with the often hyperrealist direction style Edwards uses, putting less emphasis on a sense of wonder than of the film as showing a lived reality where things that should put the inhabitants of its world to wonder and awe are just parts of an often dirty day to day struggle. Because yes, this is the kind of science fiction that’s not just of its time but very much about its time, using echoes of the Vietnam War and all of those military “police actions” that so seldom seem to achieve what they are supposed to, but leave a lot of innocent people dead, to talk about sometimes surprisingly complex ideas about the nature of violent conflict and imperialism.

We still get a proper Hollywood ending where shit blows up, mind you, just one the film trusts its audience to understand in context; it is also one that doesn’t shy away from showing even such things to have a price. We’re meant to cheer in the end, but we’re also meant to understand what exactly it is we are cheering, and what has been lost for it.

In general, the film trusts its audience rather more than is the fashion right now, not just in us understanding the ending, in understanding the parallels of its world to the here and now, but also in understanding the more subtle elements of its politics and how these are part of the actions of its characters. Thus, even the genocidal military people are allowed to make sense as people, and the film never exactly becomes some triumphant thing about heroic rebels struggling against oppression, but emphasises the price in guilt and violence and loss of even the best of ends.

In short: Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

Original title: サイキックビジョン 邪願霊

A small crew is shooting documentary footage about the idol business, specifically the production of the new single of idol Emi, a song with the somewhat curious title of “Love Craft”. There’s something strange about the song, or rather, the music itself, and the production is soon haunted by minor supernatural troubles that seem to be connected to the melody. Nobody seems to really know who wrote the music, or rather, those few who might know seem rather reticent to tell. Our intrepid female lead reporter does eventually finds out the music was written by a woman who committed suicide shortly after she finished the song, which connects in a somewhat disquieting manner to the strange appearance of a ghostly woman in the background of various shots of the documentary.

Supernatural anger will to come to a head on a production run though for the “Love Craft” music video.

Jaganrei, directed by Teruyoshi Ishii, was POV horror of the fake documentary style before that was a defined subgenre, even though of course far from being the first fake documentary. It is astonishingly good at prefiguring much of what came after in its POV horror subgenre. Ishii creates a feeling of real verisimilitude. From the empty business talk of the suits creating Emi and her image, to the girl’s professional sound bites and fake smiles whenever a camera points her way, the film has a wonderful feeling of authenticity that grounds its handful of supernatural events in a very believable world.

These bits of supernatural business already include a bit of the “blink and you’ll miss it, until we repeat it” tactics that would become so important for later Japanese direct-to-DVD (etc) POV horror, and uses that trick effectively, producing tension with simple (and cheap) tactics without feeling simplistic.

It’s a lovely, short forty-nine minutes of period detail and spookiness, and thus highly recommended.

Music Monday: Prince and Joni Edition

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

Warning: spoilers for pretty damn obvious revelations ahead!

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is still going about his very particular kind of vigilante business, now spending time as a Lyft driver to observe humanity, and, this viewer can’t help but think, find either some people in trouble, or people he can sadistically punish for making trouble for others.

Helping out the elderly, breaking the bones of rapists and scaring a kid from the apartment house McCall owns straight doesn’t quite make for the needed action quota – these aren’t the 1970s anymore – so one of McCall’s few genuine friends, CIA analyst Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) is murdered. The deed at first appears to be a break-in gone wrong, but McCall soon enough figures out there’s actually a mildly complex conspiracy involved.

Some people from McCall’s intelligence wet work past are channelling their violence in much worse ways then our vigilante does, and Susan stumbled onto their trail. If you’re surprised that McCall’s former best bud and partner (Pedro Pascal) is one of them, you’ve never seen an action movie or thriller in your life.

I really didn’t get along with the first Equalizer movie, a movie that seemingly doesn’t realize that its hero is more of sadistic serial killer than your typical movie vigilante (who are typically already sadistic and murderous enough), and finds him being cruel incredibly cool. Someone seems to have explained things to director Antoine Fuqua in the meantime, however, for the second Equalizer goes out of its way to emphasise McCall as someone who uses violence as a means of protection much more than one of punishment. There’s still a degree of sadism to the way he goes about things but not more of it than is to be expected from a contemporary action movie, and the film doesn’t seem quite so in love with this aspect of the character as the first one was.

Atypically for a big budget action film made in the last couple of decades, The Equalizer 2 leaves a lot of space for emotion and character development demonstrated through calm and curiously quotidian – at least for the kind of person McCall is – interactions between our protagonist and the various people he encounters, helps out, or brutalizes. This does the film and its main character a world of good, because it builds actual relationships between him and the world he inhabits, and so puts effort into selling the good he does as much as his badassery/violent temper. From time to time, the film does stray in the direction of the Very Special Episode here, but thanks to Washington and a fine supporting cast, it never quite gets there.

This looser structure and calmer pace also demonstrate a side of director Antoine Fuqua I didn’t expect – an ability to focus on the important parts of human interactions and a degree of patience and restraint his filmmaking usually lacks. I really didn’t think this particular director had much beyond “able to get along with Denzel Washington” to offer, but turns out that, given the right material, he can make a genuinely good movie.

Even once the action starts, Fuqua eschews his typical showiness in favour of mostly controlled set-pieces that don’t need overwrought editing or obfuscating camerawork and instead draw much of their power from an ability to put the audience beside the characters in what feel like actual physical places, which to me is still one of the important elements of an effective action sequence.

Three Films Make A Post: Now You Will Believe…

Night Skies (2007): Like Manchester, The X-Files have so much to answer for. To wit, this alien abduction thing about an RV full of unlikeable twats getting molested by aliens while the Phoenix Lights are doing their little dance. Jason Connery also pops in as an ex-marine trucker, because why not.

The script is sluggish and dumb, the characters unlikeable but not interesting, and director Roy Knyrim directs like someone who started their career with an Insane Clown Posse video. Admittedly, the big – theoretically gory - abduction and probing sequence is pretty funny, but digging through this much crap to reach that tiny nugget of comedy gold would be cruel and unusual.

Satanic Hispanics (2022): This anthology movie by Hispanic horror directors starts strong with a wonderfully strange piece by Demián Rugna, but after that it continues through tales of boring competence and ill-timed attempts at doing comedy that want to be Sam Raimi but only ever reach the effect of a bad third generation carbon copy. It’s a particular shame because most of these directors – apart from Rugna, Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, and Eduardo Sánchez – have made much superior films.

The Equalizer 3 (2023): But hey, it’s not as if the third Equalizer were any better – it just cost much more money to make. The third movie returns to the unexamined sadism of the first one, the unwillingness to take a long, good look at its hypocritical and self-pitying protagonist, and Antoine Fuqua’s all too typical inability to make a stylistically coherent movie.

Not making any of this any better are showy but uncreative action sequences without flow, weight or a sense of fun, so there’s very little to recommend. Even Denzel Washington is letting the side down with a performance so vain and filled with ill-advised actor business (just take a good look at his use of a teabag during one dialogue scenes), this only needed more shots of pointless and heroic poses to reach Tom Cruise levels of embarrassment.