Journey to the West (2021/3)

Original title: 宇宙探索编辑部

Tang Zhijun (Yang Haoyu) has spent his life hunting after UFO sightings and alien encounters, editing the magazine “Universe Exploration” about his obsessions. He’s never encountered anything extra-terrestrial, however, and public interest in his magazine has hit rock bottom. Today, a couple of years after the death by suicide of his daughter, Tang is sad and broken man, looking for alien contact in the static on his TV and trying to pay the heating bills of the magazine’s tiny office by holding lectures about UFOs in a psychiatric hospital.

After a sponsorship deal falls through under the kind of bizarre circumstances that appear to be part and parcel for Tang’s life, he encounters a video featuring strange aerial phenomena shot somewhere in Sichuan in Southwestern China. Tang decides to grab what’s left of his staff and go on one last big attempt at finding what he so desperately needs to believe in. It will be quite the odyssey.

Premiered in 2021, but only finding actual release a couple of years later, this first feature film directed by Kong Dashan is an astonishing thing. Stylistically, this begins with the look and tone of a fake documentary of the fly-on-the-wall, no commentary by the filmmakers type – including characters speaking directly to the camera in an interview setting - but one that grows increasingly peculiar and uses an increasing amount of visual and editing techniques of dramatic filmmaking, until it simply stops with the documentary approach altogether. This shouldn’t really work at all, or at least feel like a stark directorial imposition on the audience, but in Journey, these kinds of decisions feel like organic growth instead.

This sort of thing is absolutely programmatic for the film as a whole. Its wild mix of often very broad comedy, allusions to the Chinese literary classic it shares its English title with, in-jokes, moments of peculiarity that compare in their individual strangeness with somebody like Lynch (but have a very different emotional and intellectual resonance), science fiction, walking-based road movie, slow cinema with a touching movie about grief should not work at all. Instead of producing a series of tonally unrelated scenes, however, Kong manages to present all these strange idiosyncrasies in tone and style as parts that add up to an actual whole that expresses the feelings of a lost sense of wonder, loss of love and grief from loss that have nearly broken Tang much clearer than any more straightforward treatment could. Simply because lives, Tang’s, as well as those of the people he encounters and infuriates – and the audience’s - are this way, full of disparate elements that still become wholes in our minds. Seen from that perspective, the idiosyncrasies aren’t of course idiosyncrasies anymore, but actually a brilliant way to talk about some of our shared experiences in non-obvious ways, even though most of us – I presume – do not travel westwards to look for aliens.

Interesting for this old friend of the cosmicist, there’s also a bit of cosmicism in here, though the kinder, friendlier version of the philosophy that finds a bit of sadness and fear but also a sense of wonder that borders on joy in our own smallness in the universe. So more Clarke than Lovecraft. Seen from a certain direction, the film can be read as being about Tang’s journey from a softer, enthusiastic cosmicism through the harsher one, to a new, wiser version of it as much as it can be about him finally coming out at the other end of grief or about him learning to give up on dreams that have turned to poison for him.

Music Tuesday: Nothing At All Edition

PSA: Changes

Dear imaginary readers, for real life reasons, you can expect fewer write-ups on here for the foreseeable future. I hope I'll be able to manage a still pretty obsessive three movie posts a week, but we'll see how it goes.

Short Film Friday: SEPTEMBER 23, 2023 LIVE STREAMING

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Where the Devil Roams (2023)

A family consisting of Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) work as a very minor sideshow act on the carny circuit during a stylized version of the depression. For Maggie and Seven, their act isn’t really the point of their lives, but only an official reason to travel. In truth, they are serial killers, roaming the backroads, murdering mostly pretty nasty customers (and their families, squeamish, they are not). Maggie takes on the active part during the murders, because Seven, traumatized during the Great War, crumbles at the sight of blood. Eve just makes photos of the corpses.

Maggie believes there might be a future for Eve in stage acts instead of acts of murder, for while the young woman can’t speak, she sings in a very post-Depression era manner. In their way, the family appear to live an at least satisfying and loving life, if you overlook the murders.

That is, until one of their little murder sprees goes wrong. Seeing her family ripped, well, hacked, apart by victims fighting back, Eve turns to the Devil’s magic to save them.

By now, the Adams Family – mother Toby Poser, father John Adams, and daughter Zelda Adams – have really found their stride as filmmakers. There’s a very independent kind of individuality to their filmmaking that’s carried by high technical chops, and a love for the gothic and macabre as filtered through the last few decades of US alternative culture.

In truth, this should look and feel like a Rob Zombie movie – the filmmakers certainly appear to share some of the same aesthetic fascinations – but where Zombie’s movies always feel like products of a man who doesn’t have the talent or vision to turn the things he loves into worthwhile art (or entertainment), this family really manages to create a world of their own imagining on far less money.

There’s a growing sense of ambition to the family’s films, and Where the Devil Roams with its period setting, a larger canvas of locations and even some flashbacks to the Great War continues that trend. This is never an attempt to actually recreate the period, or a real carnival of the era – which would be doomed to failure on the budget - but instead turns the idea of the Depression and what a carny of the time might have felt like into an aesthetic that can then be combined with the other visual hallmarks of Adams/Poser movies.

In pacing, this is a calm and quiet film that knows when to increase its tempo and never overstays any idea’s welcome. The filmmaking is excellent, some of it clearly influenced by still photography and perhaps painting, but while the film does love tableaux and strictly composed shots, it isn’t static. Instead, everything on screen seems beholden to the very conscious creation of very specifically thought through moods and atmospheres of the macabre, the sad, and the grotesque.

Despite all of the film being deeply American, this doesn’t just remind me of some of the best regional filmmaking of the 70s from the US, where sometimes strong aesthetic ideas won out over narrative or budgetary constraints much more than is usual in North American art, but also of the great visual stylists of European fantastic cinema. This never actually looks like Rollin or Franco, but the film’s commitment to a personal aesthetic does suggest kindred spirits.

Of course, if you’re looking for a straightforward movie about serial killing carnies, this won’t make you happy at all. Butt then, I don’t think Where the Devil Roams wants to be that movie.

In short: Bullet Train (2022)

Half a dozen characters of the violent criminal persuasion converge on the same bullet train in Japan. Their diverse missions turn out to have rather more connective tissue than they are first led to believe, so it’s a good time to team up and betray or murder one another in various, changing constellations, while the laws of physics turn increasingly optional.

One could snark about how few Japanese people seem to populate the criminal underworld of the Japan of David Leitch’s adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka that features rather less white people. But then, I find it difficult to argue with a film that casts Brad Pitt as the Big Lebowski of killers, and has quite as much fun pitting him and the other comical grotesqueries populating the film against each other as this one has.

Like most of Leitch’s other films, this wants to be action cinema as POP! (a curiously British feeling idea of POP! for a guy from Wisconsin to boot); unlike most of Leitch’s other films, it actually achieves this goal with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm that I can hardly read as anything but a pure joy at creating cinema that’s absolutely free from all pressures to be serious and thereby can feel curiously freeing and subversive. Bullet Train clearly knows all the rules of character building and plot structure, when and how a film is supposed to use flashbacks, how much an action scene is allowed to break the laws of physics and logic. Having realized them, it then goes about very consciously breaking all of them in clever (sometimes clever-dumb) ways that’ll either leave an audience cheering, giggling madly, or throwing tomatoes at the screen. I found myself on the side of the gigglers here, more than a bit astonished about how seeming randomness can feel free and freeing when applied with as much thought as it is here.

In short: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

These turtles, be they heroes or ninjas, popping up in comics or animation form, have never been much of a part of my pop cultural universe, but I’d have to be pretty dead inside not to love this piece of absolutely brilliant animation by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.

It counteracts the often too great slickness of your typical US digital animation by using glitches, smudges, and influences of the parts of visual arts that aren’t slick, but never as a pose like those movies that add artificial burn marks tend to do. Instead, the added grubbiness and grit is part of the aesthetics as well as of the thematic mission of a film that’s telling us that old, true story of the deep worth of the weird, the freakish, and the slightly off in the proper way, by being all that itself. It’s also disarmingly charming, fast, fun, clever and energetic in a way only a very stubborn kind of anarchist would not call anarchic.

Really, the only element of the film I had some trouble with its need to make its moral (shudder) as explicit as possible during its final act, because if there’s one strain running through the most conservative and the most progressive US art meant for children and their families, it’s the assumption of such braindead stupidity, you apparently have to tell them badly what you’ve just shown them much more convincingly. Of course, the rest of the film is so riveting, fun and outright charming, featuring some of the best uses of classic hip hop and even ESG you’ll encounter anywhere, and so convincingly positive – not naïve -  in its outlook, I’ll accept the fall into needless obviousness as its cost of doing business (and of getting Jackie Chan to voice act Splinter?).

Music Monday: I Hold Something Edition

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.