Thoughts on "BoJack Horseman" Season Two

** Minor Spoilers follow. I recommend just going ahead and watching this wonderful show if you already haven't **

Superficially BoJack Horseman appears to be a form of lowest-common-denominator television: crass, cheap, disposable. It’s the farthest thing from that though. Sure, it’s yet another adult animated show with shades of the stoner humor and casual surrealness of Adult Swim and more recent animated Fox programming. The series is set in a world with anthropomorphized animals inexplicably right alongside humans. The show is also a fairly conspicuous Hollywood satire. In its second season, the show watches as its protagonist’s dream project, a film adaptation of the life of Secretariat, slowly gets ruined by Hollywood corporatism.

The series certainly has these elements to it, but it’s also a subtle, devastating psychological drama. The series strikes a delicate tonal balance that it has perfected in its second season. Moments of loony humor are followed by moments of bone-deep melancholy without either detracting from or feeling at odds with the other. The sillier moments feed into the sadder, darker moments by placing the latter in stark contrast. And some of the seemingly goofier things are almost entirely or simultaneously depressing upon second thought. 

The show centers on a washed-up former sitcom star BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett). The first season found BoJack in a deep, intractable period of malaise. The show wanted us to initially attribute this dissatisfaction to his empty celebrity lifestyle. It became clear, however, that this was just a surface-level cause of BoJack’s issues and that their root causes stemmed even further back. 

Give or take the recently departed Mad Men, BoJack Horseman is the most psychologically acute show on television. It takes as its primary focus the subject of clinical depression. BoJack has it pretty severely, but a number of other characters live with it to differing degrees, including Diane (Alison Brie). BoJack hired Diane last season to ghostwrite his biography and she now struggles to not feel trapped in her relatively stable marriage with the dog and former, well-adjusted sitcom star Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins). 

The show observes its characters as they fall into unhealthy, self-destructive patterns. They are prone to self-sabotage and rarely willing to take the necessary, hard-earned incremental steps towards change that go along with coming to terms with your shortcomings and problems. The show does this to allow for humorous shenanigans, but the series always pulls back to understand the pathology driving these behaviors. The series gets that the characters are attempting to believe that their dissatisfaction is situational rather than innate. Deep down they don’t truly believe that, but it’s always easier to pretend to believe this than to fundamentally change. In the great penultimate season two episode “Escape from L.A.”, BoJack flees California for New Mexico on a whim to escape his problems, but he ultimately finds himself just as unhappy and unfulfilled as before. He returns home having wrecked a path of internal and external damage in his wake. 

BoJack is constantly facing an impenetrable feeling of ennui. He’s a broken man (uh, horseman), who finds one new distraction after another to avoid dealing with his inescapable lack of happiness. In the process, BoJack keeps hurting everyone around him. He tentatively starts a relationship with Wanda Pierce (Lisa Kudrow), an owl and tv network executive who woke up from a thirty year coma and found that she was able to keep doing her job as if nothing happened. But BoJack finds ways to intentionally let the relationship implode. When given an opportunity to repair the relationship, he instead pursues an ex-girlfriend who’s now married. When he becomes frustrated with his latest acting job, he simply decides to stop going to set, much to the anger of his agent the cat Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris). BoJack lets his friendship with his lovable lay-about roommate Todd (Aaron Paul) slowly deteriorate through neglect. Of course, in this universe that means that Todd is snatched up by an insidious cult built around improv comedy. But the emotional climax where the two reconcile is strangely beautiful and moving. 

The show’s animation is consistently gorgeous at conveying this. There’s at least one moment in each episode that’s cut through with overwhelming wistfulness and longing, and that the show underlines less through dialogue than beautiful, poignant images. Each episode is visually ornate. There’s a density to the imagery that recalls early episodes of The Simpsons. Much of the humor can be found in tossed away visual jokes, from billboards and posters and characters in the background, crowding the margins of each episode. The series makes effective use of the Netflix binge-watching model in order to consciously utilize continuity to build jokes as well as emotional and character arcs across the season. 

This is a very funny show, and also a very weird one. But it’s also a show with moments that are strikingly profound and tragic. It will having you laughing, but it will also blindside you. These might be cartoon characters, but they have souls. They’re fragile and broken, and they’re still picking up the pieces. They’re oddly a lot like us.

Film Review: "Ant-Man"

Marvel movies are what people in the movie biz like to refer to as “too big to fail”. These are massive blockbusters with such gigantic budgets and huge marketing campaigns that they’re all but guaranteed to turn around a profit. They’re the type of movie that Hollywood has become content to put out and Marvel is only one of the better brands at constructing this type of film.

I’ve enjoyed all of Marvel’s output to varying degrees (even their lesser efforts have more personality and competency than the average mainstream movie that I’m never entirely turned off). But I’m also getting the tiniest bit tired with “The Marvel Movie”. Look at the basic storytelling structure and beats of almost every Marvel film and you will see that they’re really just doing variants on the same story. This becomes particularly obvious in the ways that the third acts of their films are almost indistinguishable, gargantuan, bruising, muddled CGI spectacles. It’s symptomatic of the too-big-too-fail model of filmmaking, where safe-guarding one's claim to the throne is more important than using that claim to re-invent the wheel. 

This is why it’s pleasantly surprising to watch Ant-Man. Its ambitions are as small as its protagonist. It’s a heist movie disguised as a superhero movie. It has moments of wry, almost self-aware humor that poke fun at its premise and Marvel movies in general and that make excellent use of Paul Rudd’s comic persona. There’s a romantic subplot you can recognize from a mile away that consummates itself in a hilariously low-key and self-deprecating way. This might be the most off-beat Marvel movie if Guardians of the Galaxy hadn’t already safely claimed that title. 

Ant-Man isn’t nearly as good as that other Marvel film, but it is fleet and light. It never appears to want to do anything more than hit its mark and get out of its own way. It scarcely bothers with tying itself to the larger Marvel universe. Instead, it tells an isolated story about an electrical engineer turned former career criminal Scott Lang (Rudd, his typically affable, appealing self) who wishes to go the straight-and-narrow for the sake of his young daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). Lang fancied himself a Robin Hood-type, using his tech savvy to burglarize (not rob, that implies threat of violence) to take away money from huge corporations. His ex-wife (Judy Greer, who seems to be taking a lot of these thankless wife/mother roles lately) and her new husband (Bobby Cannavale) refuse visitation rights to him until he can get his act together. 

Lang can’t find work due to his status as a former convict. Unable to pay child support, he falls back on old way and takes a burglary job suggested by his roommates (Michael Peña, Tip "T.I." Harris, and David Dastmalchian, providing occasionally unnecessarily wacky comic relief). It’s a robbery that as it turns out has been set up by Michael Pym (Michael Dougla), a scientist and corporate mogul who’s best remembered for his attempts to shrink the distance between atoms (and thus shrinking the size of people). Pym gave up on this project when he realized its dangers. His insanely driven, and possibly also just insane, protégée Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has reinitiated the project. Pym used the robbery to test Lang’s abilities. He’s chosen Lang to steal Cross’s shrinking suit known as the Yellowjacket.

What I’ve just described is roughly the first third of the film. It feels rushed and over-written (even my explanation of it sounds slightly convoluted). It takes unnecessarily elaborate and involved ways to get Pym and Lang together. The film’s plot contorts itself in strange ways to get at such a simple plot necessity (Why does Pym come up with this complicated scheme to recruit Lang?  It doesn’t make sense if you stop to think about it. Not that the film wants you to do that). While the film’s pretty entertaining in these early-goings, it becomes so much better once it get Lang and Pym together, along with Pym’s reluctant, skeptical daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lily). With Lang in the Ant-Man suit, training montage style, there’s a clarity and directness to the film because it’s in full-on superhero origin story mode by this point. The film begins to click on every level in the following two thirds and the films becomes so consistently entertaining from here on out that it’s easy to forget the early clumsiness.  

Perhaps some of this early storytelling messiness is due to the production shake-ups that made everyone hesitant about how the final product of this film would turn out. Edgar Wright was slated to direct the film but left production after complaints about too much studio interference (Wright still receives a writing and story credit along with Joe Cornish, while Adam McKay and Rudd also receive writing credits). New director Peyton Reed’s previous credits did little to assuage fears that the new vision for the film would be successful. Bring It On, The Break-Up and Yes Man aren’t necessarily bad films but they also don’t scream top-shelf quality. Ant-Man rarely features anything visually dynamic (it’s pretty boiler-plate and occasionally visually dull), but it’s not poorly made. 

Yet to say Ant-Man is completely devoid of dynamism would be untrue. For one thing, the action is the most distinctive and playful that Marvel has possibly ever done (McKay and Rudd’s late contributions to the script are easy to imagine as partially contributing to this. McKay’s work – Anchorman, Step Brothers – is ingeniously silly and sly). The film makes fantastic use of its protagonist’s abilities in order to construct fight sequences that are entirely unlike any from previous Marvel movies. Ant-Man moves back and forth between sizes, and he’s armed with technology that allows him to command armies of actual ants. There’s a final fight sequence fought shrunken down on top of a toy train set that is glorious. It’s funny, charming, self-aware, and still thrilling, and it encapsulates everything the film gets right. 

If Ant-Man never hits skyscraper-high heights, it’s just too grounded to care. Its mindset is scaled down, say to the size of an ant.

Film Review: "Trainwreck"

Trainwreck is the first movie directed by Judd Apatow that hasn’t been written by him. It shows. Apatow has made increasingly poor writing choices as he’s gained more clout as a super-producer. The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up were great films. But Funny People and This is 40 are films that have defenders not full-blown admirers (For the record, I think This is 40 is under-appreciated, but Funny People is, at best, a qualifiable mess). Apatow is prone to indulgence. He lets his performers (generally immensely talented) improvise and riff, and he has such genuine affection for them and their tangents that he can’t allow himself to cut much of it. He’s terrible at self-editing.

With Trainwreck, he’s constrained himself by telling a story that isn’t his own. The film is written by Amy Schumer (of Inside Amy Schumer), who also stars as the film’s lead Amy Townshend. Schumer has a distinctive voice and one that’s hard for Apatow to drown out with needless asides. There are funny bits on the margins here (particularly from a scene stealing LeBron James playing himself), but they never distract from the central story. 

Amy is a thirtysomething bachelor with no plans on settling down. She resents her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson, great with limited material) for getting married, raising a stepson, and generally having her shit together. Amy isn’t nearly close to being the titular trainwreck the film claims she is (There are distant shades of the odious arrested development of Charlize Theron’s character from Young Adult, but Amy is a far more redeemable and likable character). The title feels like the work of some studio head not anybody on the creative side here. The film never entirely passes judgement on Amy’s lifestyle choices. It observes them as if they were natural, if not also a little sad and self-defeating for any gender if glanced in the right light. 

Gender is important to accounting towards the film’s interests and success. Amy belongs to the pantheon of Apatowian Man Children (or, I supposed here, Woman Child). Gender swapping the character archetype might not on its face seem like a big deal. That is until you consider how constraining women’s roles in mainstream films typically are, especially in comedy. Until Rose Byrne’s down-to-play character in Neighbors, in films of this genre and focus, it felt like we got countless supporting female roles who were satellites and trophies of the male leads.

The judgement passed on an unrepentant female slob is not the same judgement we pass on their male equivalent (we might not even pass judgement on the latter). However, the film doesn't just flip the traditional gender and then not acknowledge what the realities of being this sort of woman would be. The film understands the different social expectations and notes them indignantly but without being brash. It calls out double standards of gender, the complicated sexual expectations of women, and the cultural shaming of women who choose not to have children. It's never preachy though, and these issues are never its primary aim. There’s an actual story here anchoring the thematic peccadilloes and improvisatory blind alleys, one with surprising pathos and warmth, and that has comedy first and foremost on its mind (and that is, in deed, very funny). 

Amy writes for what appears to be one of those horrid men’s mags. The magazine also gives off hints of the worst sections of BuzzFeed. It’s run by a strange, dismissive Brit (Tilda Swinton) obsessed with mysterious affectation. Amy seems to despise the job, has repressed this impulse out of a misguided desire to succeed in the workplace, and sticks with the job because her stunted psychological disposition refuses to acknowledge the limitations of her career choice. This lousy psychology derives immensely from her father (Colin Quinn), a raging, misognystic asshole who has instilled terrible life lessons into her about love and commitment. 

Amy is forced to reconsider her life and her choices when she falls for an athletes physician, Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), who she’s interviewing for a magazine article. Aaron is milquetoast but endearing in that way Hader is disarmingly capable of (he also put this to good use recently in the brilliant Inside Out). There are places where Aaron feels like he’s a paper thin character, the Good Guy to be won by Amy, almost a gender-swapped version of the romantic plots of practically every major Hollywood movie of a recent vintage. But Hader is able to provide Aaron a sense of insecurity and a goofiness. May be it feels peculiar simply because normally the actress not the actor would get stuck in this bland role. Consider that for a moment; it’s a little unnerving.  

I suppose one might call Trainwreck a romantic comedy. It is, though that feels like an oversimplification. It’s easy to see the genetic material of Nora Ephron and her descendants in the film. But like They Came Together it has the feeling of people who’ve consumed many rom-coms and have become fed up with how unrealistic and indulgent they are. It plays with the tropes of the genre. But it’s also smarter and bolder and less predictable than the standard cookie-cutter rom-com. The broad outlines are the familiar girl-meets-boy and romantic complications ensue but ultimately don’t matter. It should be light and trivial. But it bears the cynicism of Schumer, whose best work always seems just a little bit skeptical of well-tolerated, polite sociocultural conventions (i.e. bullshit that’s yet to be called out). Schumer clearly has more on her mind. The film is a response to the problems of the genre. Yet it also sneakily seems to believe that true love might not be a fairytale. That comes from Apatow, who behind all the raunch has always been a traditionalist and a sentimentalist. He seems like the type of person that feigns cynicism about love but whose heart swells at the clichéd happy ending. 

We can try to talk our way around it, but Schumer is only just breaking out now with this role because she doesn’t fit Hollywood’s clumsy ideals for female leads. It’s unfair that it takes a male producer like Apatow to swoop in in order to promote such self-apparent talent. It’s even more inexcusable when you realize that Apatow has made his best film in a while by giving himself over to someone else’s sensibilities.

Not all of this works, and Schumer's subversive touches are ultimately swallowed up by the tropes of the trade (and Apatow's worst impulses), but for long stretches it's hard not to admire what she accomplishes and laugh. 

The Best Films of 2014

Make no mistake: the list that follows was always going to be incomplete. No one, not even the most driven of film lovers, has time to watch every movie released in a given year, and my film viewing is notably missing a few major films that came out in the last quarter of the year. That said, these were the fifteen films I feel best represented what made 2014 a damn good year for film.

15. It Felt Like Love

This jagged, charged coming of age story is unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea. However, for all its faults -- a pretty terrible, overtly symbolic ending, the not-always successful or pleasing lengths it goes to to get confrontational and put off its audience -- its piercing look at adolescence and female sexuality is riveting and authentically discomfiting in equal measure. 

14. God Help the Girl

Few films brought me as much joy in 2014 as Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch's infectiously feel good, shaggy musical. Murdoch knows exactly what he wants his film to be and while that may be loose, rambling and inconsequential, it doesn't mean it isn't also just goddamn delightful. It's a pop soundtrack as film. And yet, it is not merely fluff, but rather someone bleeding their personal life and disappointment into something that's genuinely a breath of fresh air. We need more escapism that is this assured.

13. Joe 

Nicholas Cage gave in one of 2014's best performances simply by refusing to act like Nicholas Cage. Cage's performance as the titular character is so restrained that it's easy to forget that he's the one playing him. However, when called upon to express his Cage-ian rage, Cage is prepared, which is useful for the story of a man who befriends the son of an abusive alcoholic -- a figure who may just be the flip-side of the coin of who Joe is. Director David Gordon Green shoots this in his usual beautiful, lyrical style that he's been drawing upon since George Washington.

12. Blue Ruin

Films about revenge too often concern themselves with creating a moral high ground from which its protagonist can mete out justice. Blue Ruin has no interest in doing this whatsoever. The events that lead its hapless criminal Dwight (Macon Blair) to seek vengeance are long before the film took place and director Jeremy Saulnier demonstrates a complete lack of interest in going into too much detail of the specifics. In stead, Saulnier goes into the tricky business of haphazardly trying to violently get back on someone. It's a thrilling film, but it also rids its narrative of badassery. And that ultimately makes it even more exciting.

11. The Immigrant 

James Gray's latest film has been compared to silent films. It's story is old school: in early 20th century New York City, an immigrant Ewa (Marion Cottilard) just off the boat is taken in by a cruel pimp Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) and falls into a bizarre, unhealthy love triangle rounded out by the pimp's cousin, a magician named Emil (Jeremy Renner). Ewa slowly ends up debasing herself in order to try to save her sister, detained at Ellis Island due to illness. This is a slow, subtle film that relies on largely understated acting and classical compositions. The kink here to this narrative is the way Gray refuses to turn this into a story of simple good and evil; Ewa is no saint but a fighter, and Phoenix ensures that the volatile humanity of Bruno seeps through the cracks of his hideous facade.

10. Gone Girl

No film released this year made me feel like it was putting in as much effort to take me on a wild and crazy ride. In hindsight, there are quibbable things about Gone Girl (including whether it's misognystic or not). But they miss the point of David Fincher and Gillian Flynn's vision. This is a film that pulls out the rug at just the right moment on half-a-dozen different occasions, and nails every single one of its absolutely bonkers reveals. It's a thrilling film to watch because its so perfectly constructed and so completely willing to embrace its unhinged, nightmarish story.

9. Snowpiercer

The Weinstein Company wanted to release director Joon-Ho Bong's epic dystopian action film in a truncated form. Bong fought back and won, and that's fortunate; Bong's films are so distinctive for how they mix idiosyncratic visions with deeply affecting emotional cores. Blunt as the film's class conflict metaphor is, it's also powerful and far more nuanced than it's often given credit for. Oh yea, this is also simply an exhilarating film, filled with breakneck, ceaselessly inventive action-packed conflict.

8. The Lego Movie

The writer-director duo Chris Miller and Phil Lords keep proving themselves endlessly adept at adapting junk properties and turning them into solid gold. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their effort to make what essentially amounts to a commercial for a beloved toy. Yet this proves to be so much more than a cynical cash grab. Put simply, The Lego Movie is a whip-smart deconstruction of our pop culture today, one of the savviest and often most insightful of recent memory. It's also just an absolute treat. 

7. Ida 

Director Pawel Polikowski draws upon the works of Polish masters like Andrzej Wajda to tell this story of a soon-to-be-nun who learns some dark secrets about her family history. Polikowski relies on carefully planned compositions and gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to tell his story. This isn't a showy film and yet it's one of the most ecstatic and striking films released this year. But the simplicity and understatement of its direction mask what is a truly horrific story about the way the past lingers and the way people choose to forget because sometimes it's easier to.

6. Ernest & Celestine 

This animated story is a wisp. It looks gorgeous; it is drawn like a masterwork of watercolor painting, and it is told with the simplicity of a well-loved children's book. Ernest is a bear; Celestine is a mouse. One lives above and the other below in the sewer system. The two species fear one another. Ernest and Celestine befriend one another. Simple enough. But directors Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner lovingly build this world and use animation and story-book logic to craft something whimsical and utterly distinctive. 

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a terrific film, and Dawn deftly builds on its foundations to create something even more emotionally resonant and complicated. There are some great special effects work here and Andy Serkis gives another stunning performance. But what sticks with you at the end of the day is the way the film creates a no-win situation and then mercilessly tightens the screws. It's a beautiful, heart-wrenching tragedy. 

4. We Are the Best!

Few films I watched made me want to immediately revisit them like We Are the Best!, a small film about Swedish female adolescent punks. This is a film of pure joy, where it makes you giddy and the world seem a little bit better when you leave. And it does it in a totally non-cloying, non-saccharine way. It's observation of its three central characters is lovely and honest, and it tells a story rarely seen. It's a story of female friendship that places those friendships above everything else in its narrative.

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel 

Wes Anderson's films have always been meticulously constructed confections and The Grand Budapest Hotel is no exception. What Anderson's films have also always been is achingly melancholy. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the apex for both of these qualities. It's certainly Anderson's silliest film, but it's also his most haunted film. Anderson draws on classic Hollywood capers and the cultural decadence of Fin-de-Siecle to tell a film that is a lot of fun to watch, but also leaves you wondering if that fun wasn't a little bittersweet to obtain.

2. Boyhood 

Boyhood is an achievement. Richard Linklater spent twelve years gathering his cast together in order to watch the growth of one child, Ellar Coltrane (and Linklater's daughter Lorelai Linklater). But what makes this so much more than some ambitious experiment and, in stead, one of the best coming of age stories -- and films more generally period -- is the ways Linklater refuses to tell this story in any conventional way. Linklater captures casual, mundane moments, the sort of stuff that makes up the day-to-day but we wouldn't necessarily consider monumental, and turns these moments into the monumental moments they deserve to be. Boyhood has a sneaky cumulative power, building into so much more than the sum of its parts. It's stunning. 

1. Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer's abstract science fiction film is mesmerizing. Glazer strips its plot of everything but the bare necessities to tell the story of an alien seductress (Scarlet Johansson) who hunts unsuspecting victims along the coast of Glasgow. When Glazer isn't contemplating the eerily blank expression of his protagonist's deadly alluring face, he is showing the fate of her victims. These scenes are so abstracted that it isn't entirely clear what takes place. What is clear: they are hypnotic. The film's envelops us in a tonal poem and fills it out with gorgeous imagery, the likes of which were not seen in anything else in 2014.

Just Missed the Cut:

Coherence

Edge of Tomorrow 

Nymphomaniac Vol. 1

The Guest

Obvious Child

Starred Up

Guardians of the Galaxy

Captain America: Winter Soldier

Maidentrip

Night Moves

The Double

The Final Member

Cheap Thrills

Life Itself

Interstellar 

Review for "Automata"

I recently wrote a review for Way Too Indie about the Antonio Banderas-led sci-fi film Automata, an interesting and thoughtful but flawed movie. Here is an excerpt:

"Sci-fi thriller Automata’s obvious parallel – so obvious that it has dominated press publicity — is with I, Robot, both the film and the Isaac Asimov novel it was adapted from. But it is instructive to consider where the two works deviate. Automata is a flawed film, but it succeeds – or, at least, tries to succeed – in a number of places where the I, Robot film fails significantly."

My Month of Horror Movies

It being October once again means that it is time once more to embrace the weird, wonderful little niche of genre films that is horror movies. And as an unapologetic fan of horror movies, I take great pleasure in having a reasonable excuse to embrace watching as many as I possibly can.

I plan to spread my journey far and wide, both in terms of the types of horror and the years of release. I want this to be a full-bodied experience of spine-tingling.

Admittedly I began this enterprise two days late into the potential game. But, as you’ll surely soon see, that will be made up for in the days ahead as I’m a compulsive, avid watcher of movies.

There was no real method to the madness here. Entries get progressively longer, in some instances, as I moved along. I didn't begin this anticipating writing such lengthy entries, but rather merely brief check-ins on my progress. But as I moved along the project shifted into something distinctively different. I regret not having written more on earlier entries (There is far, far more to be written about some of these films, and they deserve better, in hindsight).

Keep checking this post out if this interests you, as I will be updating it regularly. 

Oct. 3rd - Slugs (1987): This truly awful, dismally low budget movie is laughably bad, and sometimes just plain bad. This begins with its strange, impractical titular movie monster, and spreads from there to all sorts of other stilted, dull and questionable choices — in dialogue, in casting, in music. There are, at least, some good, unintentional, laughs early on. But it quickly becomes, well, sluggish.

Oct. 4th - The Stepfather (1987): Having started this with a singularly terrible film, it was nice to follow it up with this cult horror gem. The Stepfather is far from subtle, but its central theme about the universal fears of having a new step-parent is a strong, resonant one in spite of this -- as is the critique of Reaganism's reductive, fatal idealism. It helps that Terry O’Quinn as said step-father is fantastic. Joseph Ruben’s direction is also rather effective. It’s economical and fleet, and he brings great tension to the film’s action.

Jug Face (2013): While watching Jug Face, an uneven but interesting rustic horror film, I kept having the same thought: this is Harlan County, U.S.A.: Horror Edition. Jug Face is at its best when it simply soaks up some local color of an unspecified patch of Midwestern rural backwoods. Any time it deviates to try to have overly familiar paranormal freakiness happen -- rather than real strangeness that comes from having a culture so insulated from the rest of society -- it loses much of its tension as well as its charm. The film's production design is so specific and detailed in building up this world that it almost feels a little disappointing that some by-the-books horror wins the day.

Oct. 5th - The Brood (1979): The masterful director David Cronenberg's terrific early horror film The Brood has long been read as metaphor for divorce. But Cronenberg, like the best genre filmmakers (and it should be said that Cronenberg is, in deed, one of the best), is also interested in creating something exciting and disturbing, and he crafts a few stellar horror sequences where he really gets under your skin. Cronenberg was working on a modest budget that is apparent throughout. But Cronenberg plays that to his advantage, building up suspense, emphasizing the bleakness of the Toronto winter landscape, and rounding out the story with a feeling of psychological fullness. And because he's sneaking through such compelling themes into a gory little chiller, it makes the buckets of blood and his signature body horror feel like so much more than unsettling shocks. Cronenberg, as always, is reaching for something deeper and harder to shake.

The ABCs of Death (2012): Owing to its anthology nature, ABCs of Death is wildly uneven. While that's reservedly understandable for the film's structural conceit, it doesn't make the experience of the many horror shorts (26 in all: one for each letter of the alphabet, hence the title) any more satisfying. For one thing, far too many don't even feel like horror movies (flitting around in other genres or conventions entirely) -- and some barely qualify as stories. This isn't just due to experimentation though (although there are infrequent glimmers of that), but rather a pervasive feeling of off-putting weirdness that the film continually traffics in. Having brought together a lot of exceptional talent, it is a shame to see the film manage to do so little with them.

Oct. 6th - White Zombie (1932): Living in a post-Romero, Post-Walking Dead world makes it difficult to remember sometimes that the current conception of zombies is not what the word originally referred to. Zombies initially related to possession through voodoo and it was often associated with Haitian indigenous religious practices. Since so few movies have actually taken advantage of this, it makes White Zombie distinctive -- dead-eyed individuals whose humanity has been switched off has its own unique chilling effect -- which is good because so much else about its story is generic (although, to be fair -- and that's more than an understatement -- White Zombie's originality comes from being the progenitor of the zombie genre). There is some damsel in distress-ing that isn't necessarily bad but never feels entirely convincing; and that primarily exists as a center for some atmospheric sequences. Thankfully much of this cinematography is largely effective and creepy. The similarly set and shot Val Lewton produced I Walked With a Zombie had a comparable minimalist expressionism. Besides Lewton's low-budget films, White Zombie tracks with a parallel trend of German Expressionist-inflected Universal Monster movies, including Dracula, which shares Bela Lugosi in an even earlier utilization of his sinister suaveness and alluringly deadly eyes.

Oct. 7th - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957): The Curse of Frankenstein is a wickedly self-aware film. This is a film that knows that the viewer knows the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his mad science scheme to create new life, and then it proceeds to use our knowledge of this against us. The Curse of Frankenstein is playing around with familiar iconography, but it deceives us by deliberately playing up its artifice. This is initially a pretty campy movie -- in that Hammer Film way -- with sets that look like sets (the laboratory never for a second looks like an actual lab but rather a theatrical shorthand for a lab), and it is a film that doesn't take itself too seriously. It's just re-telling a familiar tale, after all. But it's also, quietly, slowly, subversively, a darker vision of the narrative. This comes from continually pushing back against the character of Frankenstein, who little by little compromises any remaining integrity and moral code in the name of science. Peter Cushing is excellent here, especially as Frankenstein becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Because, simply put, this version of Frankenstein is bat-shit insane -- without qualifications or room for redemption. But its a restrained madness -- at first anyway. Taking us back to the years leading up to making his infamous monster demonstrates how Victor's ambitions and obsessions ultimately drive him towards exponentially self-serving and unjustifiable ends. He's crazy and ultimately monstrous, but he's also desperately, pathetically human.

Oct. 8th: Halloween II (1981): There's nothing truly bad about Halloween II. Sure, in the broad-strokes of the storytelling there are some questionable, ill-advised choices (setting so much of the film at the hospital, for instance). But it still mostly works -- and yet, even more so, it just feels like it exists on the right side of being shrug-worthy. Because if anything does in Halloween II, it's that it's unremarkable. And that is a major strike against a follow-up to one of the best, most influential horror films ever made. That isn't to say that it's poorly made. Rick Rosenthal took over directing duties from John Carpenter, and he makes the most out of the narrative's limitations. Rosenthal makes great use of space and frames the action well, but eventually it becomes obvious that a ludicrous body count -- and even more ludicrous demises for said bodies -- is the most pertinent thing on the film's mind. Michael Myers as credible mean of inducing fears swiftly diminishes; he's more supernatural anomaly than brute-force human. It's a stylish slasher, and occasionally a pretty scary one, but unfortunately it's also very little else.

Oct. 9th - The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963): The films of Alfred Hitchcock are only a few steps removed from being horror movies, constantly threatening to spill over to out-and-out horror -- and in one classic, seminal instance, 1960's Psycho, embracing that storytelling mode entirely. We politely describe Hitchcock's films as "psychological thrillers" because his artistry has earned him status, but his thrillers are, admittedly, pretty lurid. Mario Bavo, who directed The Girl Who Knew Too Much, on the other hand, is another auteur who worked in disreputable genres and who was most certainly a maker of horror movies -- and ones that were most definitely lurid. But here Bavo borrows liberally from Hitchcock (just look at the film's title, a nod to one -- um, two -- of Hitchcock's best known films), and that turns the film into one that's straddling genre lines between thriller and horror. This was one of the earliest examples of the Italian horror genre the giallo, a florid foreign -- often more artistically interesting and ambitious -- counterpart to the slasher movie. While the Hitchcockian overtones are hard to miss, this is undeniably a Bavo film. For starters, the plot is fairly clunky and primarily an excuse for some great compositions and thrilling sequences -- that might be somewhat nonsensical given a second-thought. But Bavo is bringing real craft to his little exploitation work. Note the way Bavo plays around with black and white cinematography to create atmosphere and suggest unknown horrors. And take the feverish, baroque ending (or, rather, the one before the exceedingly dumb, dated coda): that's pure horror; madness consuming almost every major character in a not-entirely-logical but emotionally powerful way.

Oct. 10th - Shadow of the Vampire (2000): Shadow of the Vampire is a horror movie about a horror movie; one of the most important, distinguished entries to the horror genre, F. W. Murnau's Dracula-inspired Nosferatu. The film follows the production of Nosferatu, re-imagining it as a troubled one defined by real terrors on set that influenced what ended up on screen. Max Schreck's performance as the vampire Count Orlock is legendary and his is a such a creepy, memorable performance that it inspires that feeling: "What if he really were a vampire?" We laugh to ourselves; it's only a passing a feeling. It's absurd, right? E. Elias Merhige's film imagines a scenario where Schreck (played by Willem Dafoe) is in deed a vampire and Murnau (played by John Malkovich) has made a Faustian bargain, offering Schreck up the film's female lead in exchange for his star turn. Initially, this plays somewhat like a twisted, almost farcical joke. But then it begins to dawn on us just to what lengths Murnau is going in the name of artistry and authenticity. Shadow of the Vampire is meta, yes, and a dramatically clever tribute to a beloved film. But it slowly becomes every bit as unsettling as its source. There is humor to be found in this concept and Merhge hits upon it, but it is simply a way for him to begin digging into the chilling implications of his brilliant conceit.

Oct. 11th - The ABCs of Death 2 (2014): As I've written up a piece on this that I'll soon be posting (and which I'll link to soon), I'll just direct you to my thoughts from a few days ago on the first of these anthology films. They should suffice.

Stage Fright (2014): Part of me wants to believe that Stage Fright was intentionally meant to be bad. Much of its appeal stems from a parodic Wet Hot American Summer-like send-up of summer camp movies, like Meatballs and, this being horror, Sleepaway Camp (a lot of which are pretty bad and when it digs into them it is winningly funny and charming). There are even some jabs that seem aimed at the Jonas Brothers-Demi Lovato Disney Channel Original Movie vehicle Camp Rock and other sunny tween programming of its ilk. That is to say that Stage Fright attempts to marry two very different genres, slasher films and musical comedies, and the result is a tonal and narrative mess. No matter how much of its quality is intended to be low-grade, what is completely certain is that the horror elements are utter nonsense. There are hints of what Stage Fright would be if it were merely a broad comedy about adolescent awkwardness and the foibles of young theater companies and summer camps. I'm not sure that this other version would be good, but it would sure be a heck of a lot more amusing.

Oct. 12th - Vampyr (1932): Carl Theodore Dryer's 1932 vampire film Vampyr, in almost no way, acts like a vampire movie, or really any horror movie for that matter. It lacks genre elements and it plays more like a straight drama at times. It isn't interested in being scary -- not in any traditional manner, anyway. Dryer's emotionally flush austere directorial style would initially seem antithetical to crafting a horror movie, but it makes sense for Dryer's recurring pet themes: spirituality and death. Vampyr is less a film concerned with vampires (vampires don't actually appear) than what falling prey to demonic spirits suggests for pious Christians. The biggest underlying fear is about falling out of the grace of God and how easy that can happen to even the most devout individual. But prior to getting to that heavy thematic unloading, Dryer builds up a waking nightmare where reality and dream blur together until they feel like they are one and the same. This is a gorgeous film with exquisite cinematography by Rudolph Maté (who had previously worked with Dryer on the emotionally overwhelming The Passion of Joan of Arc). Dryer and Maté build up the first third of the film as a series of hypnotically dream-like tableaus filled with haunting, inventive black-and-white imagery; each flowing one into the next. Much of this is amplified by Dryer's choice to make most of the film play out like a silent film, which serves to accentuate the creepiness at hand. Dryer's trick is to keep things grounded while also building up a creeping sense of dread. Things feel like they are set in reality but strange, otherworldly happenings keep upsetting the balance. But the supernatural here is simply a battle between Heaven and Hell. Few things could be more frightening than getting caught in the middle of something like that. 

Oct. 13th - Phantom of the Paradise (1974): Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise is unlike any other movie. It is horror, and comedy, and a musical. It is Phantom of the Opera meets Faust meets the pointed, shambling cultural commentary of De Palma's Greetings. Yet none of that does justice to this trippy, absurd, deeply bizarre film. It taps into the anxieties of its era -- political assassinations, vast conspiracies, labyrinth organizations snuffing out individual rights, corporate corruption -- and then proceeds to filter them through De Palma's outrageous, gonzo direction. At no points does it truly make any sense (it's a fiery condemnation of the music industry and its dubious practices. But it's also a hallucinatory fever-dream). By the time the film reaches is its over-the-top ending, it has made so many plot contortions that it has effectively lobotomized any attempt at rationalizing it. The film is not functioning on narrative logic but rather on the emotional, gut truth of De Palma and his obsessions. Like De Palma's other early comedies, it is never meant to work on a macro scale but, in stead, from moment to moment. Phantom of the Paradise's saving grace -- in spite of its ferocious, defiant strangeness -- is that its satire is eviscerating and darkly comical, and its larger vision is also quite frightening once you begin considering its implications. Yes, this is self-consciously, preposterously wack-a-doo, but it fully embraces its singularly excessive phantasmagoria. It is a one-of-a-kind work only De Palma could have made.

Oct. 14th - From Beyond (1986): Stuart Gordon's From Beyond marries the sophistication of Lovecraftian horror with the bad taste of splattergore, and, well, it's just a god damn delight. I haven't really discussed the enjoyment I've gained from the films I've watched, but it bears mentioning for From Beyond because pleasure is one of the film's interests. Gordon is working in the vein of early 80's horror of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson's splatter films and David Cronenberg's body horror. Like these films, it pushes the limits of what an audience will comfortably tolerate -- either for discomfiting or hilarious effect. Every one of the major setpieces is not only entertaining but intentionally morbid, icky and sinister. Gordon plays these moments out with a delirious excess that is at once incredibly unsettling and yet comically absurd. Gordon begins his stories, like the excellent Re-Animator (also featuring the inimitable Jeffrey Combs), from gothic horror sensibilities but he digs deeper and he makes what would be subtext in that sort of horror (i.e. the Universal Monster movies) and turns it into nasty, blood-drenched text. But it is done with a deep level of affection for things that are supposedly in bad taste. Gordon clearly takes a great deal of enjoyment out of testing the limits of what he can acceptably get away with. From Beyond is gleefully transgressive, and this is perhaps no more apparent than its uncomfortably erotic moments (There is sexual subtext and recurring, blatant phallic imagery aplenty, and bondage is also key to one fantastic centerpiece sequence). Gordon keeps equating pleasure -- especially sexual pleasure -- with pain, which makes scenes that would already be strange and discomfiting all the more disconcerting. Yet Gordon always keeps things just on the right side of ludicrous absurdity. It isn't high art, by any means, but it is High Trash, and that's perhaps an even higher, more difficult honor.

Oct. 17th - Bad Milo (2013): There is a low-budget, kitschy charm to Bad Milo!, which purposely apes a style of terrible schlock circa the 1980's. The film's premise even suggests the type of dumb high concept premise seized upon to draw in a crowd as well as the hopes that a couple of lurid, bloody kills would make up for a lack of any actual compelling narrative. However, Bad Milo! does in fact have a pretty good story; it just tells it in the cinematic language of bad horror movies. Director Jacob Vaughn and his co-writer Benjamin Hayes put a sick comical spin on their junky premise, turning the rubber-faced creature that gives the film its title into a colon-dwelling id inside of Ken Marino's stomach. This is a dumb concept, but the film's commitment to its tacky aesthetic ensures that the film is aware of how juvenile and crude all of this is. There are some scatological jokes, yes, but there is also a surprising level of pathos, as the monster becomes a really good, if overly obvious, metaphor for the fears of parenthood.

Oct. 19th - The Seventh Victim (1943): The horror of producer Val Lewton's horror movies is a foundational text for how to build a scary horror movie. His films built up the fundamentals of how to make something -- anything really -- frightening. It sounds obvious now, but it is as simple as the notion of suggestion. Suggest that horrifying things are happening and the audience will fill in the gaps in their mind, and they will inevitably let their minds run wild with something far worse than anything you could put to film. Lewton took his cash-strapped productions and turned their modest budgets into a crucial asset. Just note the way Lewton, director Mark Robson, and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca use light and shadow in The Seventh Victim. It makes it seem like something sinister and terrible is about to take place, and it creates an intoxicating feeling of dread. The Seventh Victim remains scary all these years later because Lewton's act of suggestion makes it timeless. There are no effects or too many production details to date it terribly so. In fact, The Seventh Victim's story becomes incredibly dark, in ways that may surprise modern audiences. Part of this is the patient build to the film's many reveals, and part of it is that building a film around deeply committed devil worshipers bent on murdering one of their own is still a very unsettling premise. But there are still other details that are considerably unnerving. For instance, they don't just want to kill this individual off but they want to force her to commit suicide. Then there is the structuring of the film's story, which essentially turns it into a film noir. The film is built around an investigation that slowly reveals an all consuming conspiracy. It's all hidden in the shadows, just out of sight. Nothing is more fear-inducing than that of the unknown.

The Fog (1980): John Carpenter's films are perfect examples of how to craft low-budget horror movies. Sure, Carpenter would get increasingly sizable budgets as his reputation grew, but, at heart, he has always been the same director who made Halloween. He ekes out a lot out of a little. He also takes premises that could be sort of dumb in the wrong hands and turns them into masterclass examples of tension -- and sustained entertainment of a Hawksian mindset (characters are defined through action and typically have a knack for down-to-earth, sharp wit). The Fog has a limited premise, but in Carpenter's hands it becomes a lean, efficient, highly atmospheric film. His films are economical and wonderfully shot, and Carpenter has a precision with the way he frames and shoots actions. Nowhere is this more apparent than how Carpenter utilizes the incoming fog and the eerie baddies that reside within. Carpenter may have made cultish genre movies but he had a classical sense of film-making. He knows that hinting at horrors is a much more powerful way of getting under the skin. The way he films the action is always careful to cut around the creatures inside the fog. We get just enough a sense of what they are to be thoroughly creeped out and convinced of the terrifying threat they present, but never so much that our imagination isn't on overdrive. It isn’t really in Carpenter’s wheelhouse to aim for something deep, but he makes up for this with plenty of smart filmmaking. His action pops; it’s thrilling and disturbing, and Dean Cundey’s cinematography has an eerie, ethereal beauty, fitting for the film's ghost-story narrative.

Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead (2014): The original Dead Snow was a horror comedy. It had its scary moments, but its central concept, involving Nazi zombies, made certain that the film did not take itself entirely seriously. But the film's humor derived less from its ridiculous conceit and more from its willingness to really push the boundaries of the gore and violence on display. It shared an affinity with Dead Alive and Re-Animator, where the horror becomes so over-the-top that it becomes absurd, and, in turn, hilarious. Dead Snow 2 is left in a tricky position. It's a sequel to an already excessive film that essentially has no place to logically go. But go it does, and with a droll awareness of how crazy it is to be making a follow-up to an already fairly ludicrous movie. Dead Snow 2 barely makes a claim for the horror half of its predecessor's genetics; in stead, it aims almost entirely to be a comedy. The kills lack any restraint and consistently ignore any sense of good taste, and at nearly every turn the film amps everything up, bravely skidding into the absurdity and weirdness. Logic has no business sneaking its head into a film like this; when you start from a premise of Nazi zombies, plausibility loses all meaning, and therefore anything goes -- and that anything is frequently funny. The film is choppy in places (primarily in terms of pacing and plotting), but there is too much amusement to be found here to outright dismiss it.

Oct. 20th - The Masque of the Red Death (1964): Roger Corgman was the master of the exploitation movie. He could turn around any low budget movie with a salacious hook and make it into not only a competent, well-crafted work, but occasionally something quite good. A lot of what Corgman did would never pass as the stuff of genius, but he respected the filmmaking craft (which is why so many great directors would learn how to make films under him) and he knew how to turn trash into treasure. The Masque of the Red Death -- one of his Edgar Allen Poe adaptations -- is one of the more tame films of his, and one of the more respectable. This starts from its Gothic horror source, which gives it an air of reputability, and it extends to the faintly theatrical Vincent Price's fantastic lead turn as the monstrous Prince Prospero. But Corgman is nothing if not a person with a sick sense of humor, and he fills out the story with all sorts of weird, dark touches. Because what The Red Masque of Death really spins its stories out about is centered on a bunch of casually, caustically awful nobles. And while the film has a theatricality to it -- playing up the artificiality of its sets and performances to emphasize the underlying messages of death and faith, as well as to ensure staying on budget -- it is often subtle about reinforcing just how terrible these aristocrats are. It lets small moments stand in for a larger story of statewide corruption, immorality, and excess, and it (mostly) avoids overplaying them (that is until its final deliriously impressionistic moments where Corgman cuts loose). Corgman is able to get away with this because Price is so good and reliable in the role. Like Poe's story, the film finds its strongest moments in the divide between the haves and have-nots, and the wealthy's grotesque, wanton, orgiastic-displayed ignorance.

Oct. 21st - The Fall of the House of Usher (1928): To my mind, there is a certain bitter irony to the title of Jean Epstein's The Fall of of the House of Usher. The downfall of the titular house is long in progress when we first enter the film. We are witnessing the tail-end to the story of the Usher family history, and it is a sad, morbid one. Epstein builds his film around an old, oft-used story: a seemingly decent guy -- who's actually a flawed bastard -- through hubris and selfish actions causes the demise of his devout and faithful partner. (It's the kind of story that we just can't get enough of. One recent example is Terrence Malick's terrific The New World -- which also shares a love of long, lyrical passages that exist for their own sake. And this year's Gone Girl is an excellent upending of this type of narrative's fallacies). While this might be the film's plot, it is far from its primary interest. The film plays like an unending nightmare, and Epstein uses the freedom of his modest tale in order to come up with all sorts of inspired imagery that is both beautiful and highly unsettling. Epstein builds up a setting that is impeccably designed, reeking of moral and physical decay (Citizen Kane's Xanadu comes to mind; so much wealth and yet so much lack of fulfillment and misery). What really distinguishes House of Usher is that feeling of it being an experimental film -- it has a surrealist tinge to it and Luis Bunuel worked as an assistant director on the film -- and once you understand that that's what it's aiming for it makes a lot of its weirder and clunkier elements work. This is pure cinema; a cinema of experience, where it is best to shut down the part of your brain that nags and just let the film wash over you. Epstein keeps coming at the story from jagged, oblique angles that make the film all the more unnerving (There is so much raw, bleeding pain, guilt, resentment, and, of course, madness. It cuts like razors). This isn't to say the story at its core isn't notable, in of itself. In deed, it's somewhat horrifying once you consider it. Adapted from an Edgar Alan Poe story and preserving Poe's accumulating tonal dread, it acts as a reverse engineered Picture of Dorian Gray with Usher slowly murdering his wife in the name of an artistic vision (or does he?). Even with its pseudo-happy ending, The Fall of the House of Usher leaves us with that feeling that nothing will ever be set back to normal and whole again in this world.

Oct. 22nd - The Mummy (1932): Of all the Universal Monster movies, The Mummy has to be the one that least features its monster. There is a mummy, played wonderfully by monster-movie actor extraordinaire Boris Karloff, but he barely appears as the now-stereotypical vision of a mummy. Writer John L. Balderston actively creates a story that avoids playing up the usual toilet-paper wrapped zombie, and he does it by emphasizing American fascination with ancient Egyptian culture. There is a bit of fetishization of Egyptian culture to get towards these ends (this is a film, after all, that contrives a way to get lead actress Zita Johann into a skimpy, revealing, horribly-cliched Nubian princess outfit). One might describe this as Orientalism, but I'm not sure anyone involved on the production would have been aware of the questionable nature of a fair amount of this. The film was released only a decade after Howard Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb, and the film is catering to the public's exoticized fascination with the "Far East" (Karloff's character even uses being from an "Eastern" culture at one point as an excuse). This does, however, open up opportunities for a story that is entirely unlike the rest of the Universal Monster oeuvre. There isn't any science run amok like Frankenstein and The Invisible Man and the motives of the Mummy are strikingly different from the similarly driven monsters of Dracula and The Wolf Man. There is room to believe these creatures could exist in the same universe -- as the studio would go on to suggest -- but Universal was wise to make all of these stories distinctive, not just carbon-copies with slightly different figures at their center. Ancient curses and complicated, highfalutin mythologies distinguish The Mummy even when it is resorting to a lot of the same expressionistic atmosphere and Victorian stateliness of other Universal Monster movies. While this is a fun, fleet and, yes, sometimes scary movie, it also is inflected with sadness brought on by Karloff. Karloff does so much excellent work with body language to convey a bone-deep sadness (Just look at those eyes of his. They are the saddest eyes ever). He's been on his quest so long that he's forgotten how to do anything else. That has always been what sets apart the Universal Monster movies from so many others that have tried similar storytelling. They are monsters, yes, but they also are all too human. They are tragic figures, monstrous yet relatable.

Oct. 23rd - Onibaba (1964): Onibaba is a distinctly Japanese production -- its pacing, its tone, its production design, even its big scares and the ideology driving them all strongly reinforce this. But it also has a Western feel in its sense of psychology, which, to put it in Western vernacular, would surely peak the interest of Sigmund Freud. There are two strands of horror underpinning Onibaba. One drives its narrative and one drives its ever present mood. Horror really is something that can appear in just about any genre (for instance, some of the most generic rom-coms feel more horrifying than many of the most mediocre horror movies). Technically the film is a war movie -- and also a melodrama -- but the film emphasizes the horrifying aspects of wartime. However, writer-director Kaneto Shindo isn't interested in the standard war movie story. Set during a civil war in the 14th century, Shindo sets his sights on the fringes of the battle where civilians find themselves indirectly (which is to say incredibly directly but without any explicit combat experiences) affected by the fighting. Desperation clings over the film: this is a film, in part, about debasing yourself in the name of survival. Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as a young woman and her mother-in-law have been forced to resort to murdering unsuspecting stragglers and deserters in order to steal their military equipment. Shindo's treatment of this is so causal and matter-of-fact that it can be easy to forget just how truly terrible this is. But Shindo means for us to understand that there is no other option for these circumstances; it's life or death every day. This isn't to say Shindo condones this behavior. Much of the production design and subtext of the film reinforces the feeling that this is taking place in a non-real, or rather beyond real, location. It's essentially purgatory. And Shindo is putting his characters to some sort of eternal/moral test. This brings us to where the primary horrors of the film come from: the mother-in-law doing everything in her power to prevent her former daughter-in-law from carrying on an affair with ex-soldier Hachi (Kei Satō). Her motivations are initially reasonable -- if entirely selfish -- but she slowly loses her grip on reality and earns the right to the English translation of the film: demon woman.

Oct. 24th - Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989): It should be said up front that I have never seen the film’s leading up to the eighth installment in the Friday the 13^th franchise. I have seen the original (which is underrated and actually fairly scary; with a great twist ending), but I have felt little need to visit the other film’s in the series, having heard they are pretty generic slashers. However, I made an exception for the gloriously titled eighth film in the series; a title that suggests the series would embrace the element of self-parody doubtless growing in the franchise. And occasionally Jason Takes Manhattan hints at being a bit more playful and satirical – and is quite funny and wonderful for it – but, on the whole, this film drags, as it gets bogged down in all sorts of terrible creative decisions (Why the hell are they on that boat for so, so, so long?). The film’s premise – Jason heads to Manhattan for some of his familiar killing spree -- suggests an embrace of the more comical and silly qualities of a long-in-the-tooth series. But it never materializes in the way it seems it ought to. And that’s just a shame; a really wasted opportunity.

Oct. 25th - Irréversible (2002): Irréversible is not for the faint of heart, to say the least. Most will not want to watch it, and I really can’t blame them. It is highly confrontational, and it rubs your face in some incredibly ugly things. More importantly, it seems to do this without purpose for about half of its run time. It is a problematic movie, but director Gaspar Noe has some meaningful things he is trying to say. However, it is really easy to miss them. After all, Irréversible is best remembered for its centerpiece scene: a nine-minute long rape scene, which is excruciatingly painful and uncomfortable to sit through. As it well should be. The scene is a response to so many revenge flicks that use rape as a catalyzing plot device (i.e. the steaming pile of garbage that is I Spit on Your Grave). Films, and really pop culture more broadly, too often use rape carelessly and thoughtlessly, cheaply deploying it for easy emotional manipulation. This comes at the expense of exploring the trauma of such a devastating experience, not to mention the larger culture of rape that allows for this to happen so frequently. Noe shoots the scene so that absolutely no enjoyment or pleasure will be derived from it. While the rest of the film is highly dynamic and stylistically adventurous (Noe’s camera is constantly swooping and spinning, leading to a great deal of disorientation), the rape scene is static and forces us to watch as the crime unfolds in all of its horrifying, disgusting detail. Not to read too much into it (or really much of the rest of the film), it feels like a response to the ignorant folks that shame and victimize – and objectify as well – women for these experiences. The first half of Irréversible, roughly everything leading up to this scene, doesn’t work nearly as well as the second half. The first half has all sorts of questionable elements -- excessive violence, casual homophobia, odious displays of masculinity – that don’t sit well at all, and Noe’s lack of commentary seems to suggest his tacit acceptance of the underlying values on display. But the second half -- less violent, more talkative and contemplative – initiates a conversation with that first half and revenge films more widely. This is far from perfect, but it becomes an incisive dissection of gender roles, masculinity, sex and sexuality, and societal expectations for men and women. The most crucial part of this is the way Noe utilizes this section to humanize Alex (Monica Bellucci), the rape victim. In this way, Noe is able to turn Alex from a plot device to a real person with opinions, beliefs and a sharp personality. Her agency is restored. So much of the film’s first half – and it should be said: the story is told in reverse -- finds Marcus (Vincent Cassel), Alex’s current boyfriend, and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), her ex and still close friend, hunting down the man responsible for the violence. But as we jump back, we see Noe criticizing this course of action and the men more generally. Noe’s attacks are initially aimed at the dumb macho Marcus, an easy enough task. But the even more invaluable critique is aimed at Pierre, a nebbish “nice guy” who is equally, if more subtly, awful. Again, it’s not a film for everyone, but for those who can stomach it, its horrors hold value. Sick, sick value.   

Why "New Girl" Remains So Enjoyable Even as Its Plot's Gone Wonky

 

Unlike those critics who felt New Girl declined a degree in quality between its second and third season, I never found the change in quality all that significant. To be sure, the back half of the second season was fantastic, charged as it was with Nick and Jess consummating their unspoken feelings. It’s unlikely the series will ever reclaim such a feeling of excitement. But then again, few shows ever can stake a claim to leaving you feel that buzzed throughout the entirety of their runs.

To be fair, New Girl’s third season had notable flaws. Its plotting was scattered. This was due to, among other reasons, Nick and Jess facing being a couple, Winston’s descent into craziness, and Coach’s re-arrival. But it remains difficult to write off New Girl, in part, because it has such a strong sense of who its characters are (besides Winston, which I’ve come to just accept). The writers have increasingly come to understand the strengths of all of their performers and they play to them incredibly well. 

This ensures that New Girl is one of television’s most reliably funny shows. New Girl sucks at plot -- not only because this is a lovable hang-out comedy but also because its comedy is more character driven than anything else. To some extent, tonight’s episode “Dice” is conceptually dumb. It uses a parody of Tinder as a central plot point. But what makes it work in spite of this sitcom huey is that the plot is focused on Jess and her very specific responses to this situation. The way Schmidt coaches her also creates very specific, very funny responses. On top of this, pairing these two characters together creates a distinctive comedic scenario from pairing these two characters with any other characters. 

Beyond its character specificity, New Girl continues to be successful thematically. At its core, this is still a show about growing up. It is about people who are old enough to be considered adults but still haven’t quite settled down and figured it all out. (Nick and Jess are the show’s center for a reason. Both are very child-like individuals). They keep striving for it though.

Take “Dice” as an example. Winston seeks to become a police officer. Schmidt admits he wants something more meaningful than hook ups. They’re slowly moving towards being full-on adults. Eventually that will mean not smoking pot or hooking up through a phone app. Not yet though. It’s going to be messy and it’s going to be fun. I think, anyway.