On Friday night I tried to poke at my newfound dislike of
watching movies at home – poke it so that it might die, you see – by once again
watching something light, hopefully fun, more than likely inconsequential. I
landed on the horror comedy Little Evil, made by the guy who
made another horror comedy, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which I’d
enjoyed somewhat, at least until it found a roundabout way of betraying its
premise. But Taylor Labine and Alan Tudyk were funny in that movie, and this
new one stars the indispensable Adam Scott. I didn’t laugh once.
* * * *
Over the course of the last few days, I watched all or
portions of I think maybe three episodes of a British sitcom I stumbled across
on Netflix called Fried. It’s about the employees of a fast food fried chicken
joint in Croyden. The main and possibly only thing I thought while the images
and sounds of Fried washed over and through me was that this is a large
world, and very full.
* *
* *
While out and about on Saturday, my wife and I listened to
almost all of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. It’s very, very, very
good. You know this. Bad songwriting is one thing: “My heart is full of
desire/I want you to take me higher/Our love is like a burning fire.” I get
that. What I don’t get are “Johanna” and “Poor Thing” and “The Ballad of
Sweeney Todd” and “No Place Like London.”
There’s a hole
in the world like a great black pit
And the
vermin of the world inhabit it
And its
morals aren’t worth what a pig can spit
And it goes
by the name of London
At the top
of the hole sit a privileged few
Making mock
of the vermin in the lower zoo
Turning
beauty to filth and greed…
I too have
sailed the world
And seen its
wonders,
For the
cruelty of men is as wondrous as Peru
But there’s
no place like London.
I mean…
* *
* *
Hey, I saw It, the new film by Andy Muschietti,
who made Mama. I didn’t like Mama, but I liked It.
The original Stephen King novel is fairly important to me, though it’s been
almost thirty years since I read it. Nostalgia is no doubt playing some part in
my positive reaction, but I don’t think that nostalgia would have been tapped
if the movie was garbage. It’s far from flawless – Muschietti falls back on
loud (really loud) music stings to
gin up his big scares like every other dickless horror director out there; as
Pennywise, Bill Skarsgard’s dialogue often seems like it’s courtesy of ADR,
which robs the character of some of its creepiness; and I couldn’t figure out
why Pennywise didn’t simply kill the Losers (the nickname for the group of
seven kids who are our heroes) as easily as he kills his other victims. But the
seven kids who make up the Losers are pretty wonderful, with MVP honors going
to Finn Wolfhard (taking a break from hunting Rob Roy apparently) as Richie
Tozier, the smartass, and Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh. Wolfhard gets all the
good lines but has to be funny saying them, and he is, while Lillis has by far
the most heavy lifting of anybody in the cast. She’s so on the money that I
thought Lillis must be in her 20s, playing very young, but she’s only fifteen.
Sheesh! She’s good.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and when Muschietti
isn’t telling his string section to give it all they got, he creates some
nicely creepy moments and images (pay close attention to the library scene). I
was even moved by the film at times. Whether that too can be chalked up to
nostalgia, I really couldn’t give a shit.
* *
* *
Because Little Evil did not, as it happens,
cure me of my issues with watching movies at home, I decided to step up my
assault on the problem by watching Decasia, Bill Morrison’s film (a
pairing with a symphony of the same name by Michael Gordon, which serves as the
film’s score) comprised of clips of old movies shot on celluloid now decayed
into abstraction and surrealism. Themes
of birth, death, and ever-present decay (there are images of babies here, but
since the actual physical film is falling apart, even these have the whiff of
the grave about them: as soon as you’re born, you start etc.) are not hard to
eke out of the experimentation, though Decasia is no less powerful for
that. Gordon’s music is extraordinary too, mournful and eerie when it’s not
being feverishly apocalyptic in a way that reminds me of the score Matti Bye
wrote for the silent film The Phantom Carriage at its most
intense.
Even so, it’s hard, or was for me, to not get
distracted while watching Decasia. Not distracted away from
the film, but away from the art, and start wondering about the particulars of
the decaying celluloid itself. Every piece of film seems to die in its own way,
but a common effect that I noticed here, at least, was that filmed reality,
when the film itself deteriorates, often makes that reality look animated. As
in, cartoons. A pair of nuns and a group of children approaching them look
rotoscoped. The prow of a ship looks like a pencil sketch. It’s an interesting
effect, and can help the viewer not think so much about dying.
(I should add for the sake of completion that I
also watched Morrison’s Light is Calling, which also uses a
decaying film, and is only eight minutes long. I won’t pretend I have anything
worthwhile to say about it.)
* *
* *
Energized by Decasia (my plan worked!) I decided
to finally check out Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello’s
much-ballyhooed political thriller about a large group of young terrorists who
plant bombs all over Paris (and shoot to death two bank executives, or that’s
who I took them to be), and then retreat into a large shopping mall-like
department store, where they intend to wait until morning and then escape under
cover of, er…sunlight? Anyway, they have a plan.About half of Nocturama is, as I’d heard it was, a tense, efficient, expertly constructed thriller, almost free of dialogue, just images and motion. The terrorists are Leftists, and while I can take a stab at guessing Bonello’s own politics and probably turn out to be right, when the bodies fall and the bombs go off, I got so sense that Bonello believed there was any kind of moral gray area: the acts are monstrous, the perpetrators are murderers.
But when we get to the store, it slowly starts to just get dumb, and Bonello’s cinematic ideas become thinner as they grow ostensibly bolder. For example, two of the terrorists don’t make it to the store. Nobody knows what happened, but a reasonable theory about the fate of one of them is floated by a character who was with the missing man. The others question him: is he sure? He’s pretty sure. Then, much later in the film, Bonello flashes back and we see what happened to the missing man, and guess what? The other guy’s theory was spot on! So why’d we go back? To what end? I’ve seen Nocturama compared to Godard, and since with few exceptions my very skin burns like a vampire in church when a Godard film is playing nearby, maybe that’s why choices like that made by Bonello for Nocturama make me pinch the bridge of my nose in agonized exhaustion. Then again, when Bonello starts nodding to Dawn of the Dead (that’s built into the very premise, as the terrorists hide in a symbolic capitalist hub, away from the mini-apocalypse they themselves started) and The Shining, all Bonello seems to want us to take away is that it’s interesting that he’s doing this sort of thing in a movie about terrorism. Which it isn’t, if that’s all it is.
And then, by the end, as everything goes
pear-shaped for our anti-heroes, I got the queasy feeling that Bonello was
making awful moral equivalence point. I think I was already quit by then, but
when that shit started seeping in, I thought, to quote Rick Deckard, “I’m twice
as quit now.”
* *
* *
It might have been nice if, when Tobe Hooper died,
his obituaries didn’t often lead with the belief that Poltergeist, the 80s
horror blockbuster he’s credited as having directed for producer/writer Steven
Spielberg, was not in fact helmed by him, but rather by Spielberg, for Hooper
being Spielberg’s front for legal-or-whatever reasons. This is apparently true –
nobody seems to be arguing the point anymore, and another on-set witness came
out to say it was Spielberg’s movie all the way just a month or so before
Hooper passed. But so what? I don’t think of this as a feather being removed
from Hooper’s cap. His best films are miles better than Poltergeist, and quite a
few of his second-tier movies are, too. So fuck Poltergeist, let’s not
talk about it anymore. Oh, but real quick: I was listening to a podcast
recently, and the hosts started talking about Poltergeist. Both hosts
talked about when they first saw it, the effect it had on them, and how they
each, in their estimation, saw the movie when they were “way too young.” When I
was “way too young” I was sneaking downstairs, where my brothers and their
friends were watching Day of the Dead so I could watch
Rhodes get ripped in half, but these guys were “way too young” to watch a
horror movie that was specifically designed to be enjoyed by families. What a
couple of wieners.
I bring up Hooper because yesterday I watched Djinn,
his last film. Set in the United Arab Emirates and featuring a Middle Eastern
cast, Djinn was quite clearly made for zero dollars and zero cents so
that the tiny production company could walk away with some beer money. For
about twenty minutes, this movie is really rough-sledding, and I wondered if I’d
be able to make it through. But as it happens, Hooper and his screenwriter David
Tully have a pretty solid little demonic hotel movie up their sleeve. It rips
off Rosemary’s
Baby, but only in its general idea. Otherwise I found Djinn
to be reasonably original and effective in a low-key sort of way. I don’t want
to overpraise the film, because quite frankly many people might well hate it.
But I think Tobe Hooper’s last film was a good one.
* *
* *
Yikes, it’s late! Okay, well, I just finished The
North Water by Ian McGuire. Set in the 19th century, mostly
on an English whaling ship, this 2016 novel is about a disgraced Irish surgeon
who hires onto the Volunteer hoping
only to make a little money and gain some distance from his past so that when
he returns he can start over, pretty soon he learns that a very mortal, worldly
evil is on the boat, and soon The North Water, which reads like a
bullet train, is sunk in Cormac McCarthy-esque metaphysical misery and
hopelessness, adrift on a sea of endless human cruelty, graphic violence, and
bodily disgust. McGuire’s novel is an evil chronicle of total moral repugnance.
Run, don’t walk!
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