VOD

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

October 21, 2021

(fubo/VOD) Yes, I know: everyone has seen THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Even if you haven’t, you are almost certainly aware of it and the broader beats. This is just a light-hearted horror-adjacent personal story about attending a screening of the film when it was released but, for the spoiler-adverse, I will note that it does include a detailed description of the final shot of the film.

It’s Chicago, August 1999. I’d been living in Chicago for few years now and was renting a cramped, very basic studio on an elevated floor in a large Lakeview complex, just a stone’s throw from Wrigley Field. It was one of the few places that allowed dogs — I did not have a dog — and was next door to a grade school — I did not have a kid — but was routinely woken by either dogs barking or screaming children or both.

Anyway, back to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I was familiar with the film well before it had been released, partially because of the internet hubbub but also because the studio had promotional folks hitting up the local goth/industrial club nights, including one event they had at Chicago’s long-gone SPIN nightclub, of which I walked away from with both a t-shirt and CD soundtrack — both of which I still have.

A few days after that promotional event, Chicago underwent a massive power outage and vast sections of the North Side of Chicago went dark for several days, during some of the hottest temperatures we’d suffered from in some time. I got used to taking cold candlelit baths and adding a pocket-sized flashlight to my keychain so I could navigate the concrete stairwell to-and-from my apartment, as opposed to taking the elevator like normal.

Given the extreme heat, the woman I was seeing at the time and I decided to do what most people with a few spare coins to rub together do during a heat wave: we went to the movies, and as we’d just attended a BLAIR WITCH PROJECT event, we thought that sounded like a good idea, which it was, because that film was a game-changer. It still stands as one of the best films of the found-footage genre. The final shot of the film, where you see Mike staring at the concrete corner of the room, then thud and Heather’s camera falls to the floor and then her camera’s pulldown mechanism breaks down, well, that’s one of the most effective horror endings of all time.

We reluctantly left the air-conditioned theater and headed back to my studio. By the time we arrived, dusk was upon us, and the entryway was pitch black. We fumbled our way through as I tried to get my pocket flashlight working, both grasping at each other as we struggled to make our way to the stairwell.

The flashlight finally lit up, and I found myself staring directly at a concrete corner. She screamed, then I screamed, and then we huddled together, laughing at the situation.

The next day the lights flickered back on in my studio, waking me up, and I felt the cool air of the built-in air-conditioner fall over me. Normality, restored!

THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION (2006)

October 20, 2021

(VOD) THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION — an episode of the SHOWTIME TV horror anthology MASTERS OF HORROR — is an oddity for director Joe Dante. Most of his works play with elements of horror, satire, and slapstick, however there are no laughs to be found here.

Dante’s THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION is an adaptation of James Tiptree Jr.’s short story of the same name. (If you aren’t familiar with James Tiptree Jr./Raccoona Sheldon/Alice Hastings Bradley, she was a brilliant-but-troubled sci-fi writer.) It’s a slightly modernized take on the original short, but essentially the same: scientists try to wipe out a parasitic insect, but the end result causes the insects to infect men and cause them to turn their sexual impulses to violent, murderous ones.

It’s not a subtle piece — and Dante’s adaptation is hampered by some overly clunky Spielberg-ish TV cinematography (too many canted angles, too many tight shots) — but it is extremely effective in showcasing how women rightfully are consistently fearful of of men. I also find it a remarkable piece because it’s also about men being afraid of themselves. This is horror at its exploratory best.

HOMEWRECKER (2019)

October 19, 2021

(AMC+/Shudder/tubi/VOD/Vudu) An intriguingly economical Canadian thriller from Zach Gayne. For once, I’m going to use the official description (with a few tweaks) because too many details might spoil some of the fun: “Middle-aged Linda (Precious Chong) befriends youthful Michelle (Alex Essoe), but one becomes obsessed with the other.”

The script was penned by Gayne, as well as the two leads (Chong and Essoe). It has a charismatic verve to it that I can’t help but appreciate, and while you may suss out the ending before the film expects you, it’s still a wild ride.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nA_wYWSt9A

READY OR NOT (2019)

October 16, 2021

(VOD) A darkly comic fusion of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME with Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, with an amazing cast that includes Andie MacDowell, Samara Weaving (BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC), Adam Brody, Melanie Scrofano (Wynonna as in WYNONNA fucking EARP), and Kristian Bruun (Donnie from ORPHAN BLACK). It’s a surprisingly well-executed and balanced film when it didn’t have to be — the concept and cast was good enough to just coast by, but they went the extra mile.

Even though I don’t believe in spoilers, I would stop the trailer after the first minute. There are a ton of fun surprises in the film that work great with the trailer, but even better if you experience them first in the film itself.

“So, there’s no way for me to win, right?”

WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)

October 11, 2021

(Hoopla/VOD) WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989) WICKED STEPMOTHER has horror elements, but is really a dark comedy. It is also best known as being Bette Davis’ last film — sadly, while she brings a ton of energy to the role that’s left to the film, she’s clearly ailing — but it’s also penned and directed by the legendary Larry Cohen (RIP). The on-screen direction is clearly tumultuous (you can read more about the troubled production here and especially here, from Cohen himself) but, in short, it boils down to Bette Davis quitting the production midway through because she said she was frustrated with how she was portrayed, but she eventually admitted it was because of health issues — which resulted in rewrites in order to get -something- usable to the screen that still included Davis, as well as a lawsuit against Davis

I’m not going to say that WICKED STEPMOTHER is a great film, but it is a lot of fun. Sure, there’s a lot of extremely schtick-y vaudeville camp involved, but it made me laugh, and it definitely aligns with the slapstick horror vein of the late 80s/early 90s.

DETENTION (2021)

October 9, 2021

(Cinemas/VOD) DETENTION (2021) This film is based on the previously featured videogame, but unless you played said game, it’s unlikely you would know it despite the fact that it mostly adheres to the original game’s story and visual design. Many of the sets are surprisingly detailed recreations of the game’s 2D environments, and Gingle Wang is a fantastic swap-in for Fang (ostensibly the protagonist, and I will fight you about that), but the script is rich enough that it doesn’t feel like an horror point-and-click game adaptation.

Yes, it takes a few liberties and makes a few feints — some characters stick around far longer than they did in the game — but it’s a far more nuanced and complicated expounding on the game’s narrative and characters, and it even improves on the already fantastic creature design.

Personally, I played the game first and then immediately watched the film and felt very rewarded. There are a number of easter eggs that aren’t just there to point at, including how deftly the film handles the game’s multiple endings.

I’ll note that there’s also a mini-series available via Netflix, which I have yet to watch.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

September 4, 2021

Predictably, I’m a big TWIN PEAKS fan, and have seen the entirety of the series and FIRE WALK WITH ME several times over, although I was a relative late-comer to the series. (I’m old enough that, when I was first watching them, it was via renting them through two-episode VHS tapes from the Hollywood Video two blocks away from my first Chicago apartment.)

The prior times I’ve seen the film, I’ve found it to be profoundly unpleasant, cruel and mostly unnecessary from a story perspective, but did believe it to be an artistic, auteur marvel. (There will be no specific spoilers in this piece regarding the series or the film, apart from Laura Palmer’s death and the fact that she was heavily traumatized so, if you haven’t seen any of it, don’t worry.)

If you haven’t seen it, FIRE WALK WITH ME scrutinizes the intense week prior to Laura Palmer’s death, the launchpad for the TV series. It doesn’t include much more than that — if you’ve seen the initial season and half of the second — there’s little you don’t already know, but director David Lynch leans into a hard-R rating intensity that is tonally brutal and bleak when compared to the original show.

When I saw it in early September 2021 — the fourth or maybe fifth time I’d seen it, but the first time I saw a projected 35mm print of it and, wow oh wow, the colors and contrast really popped and were slightly overwhelming — I finally found it to be necessary. It’s still profoundly unpleasant — even more than I remember — but I realized it’s Lynch feeling like he did Laura wrong with the TV show, his show which reinvigorated the ‘Dead Girl’ genre. (See Alice Bolin’s essay regarding TWIN PEAKS here and Bolin’s subsequent, insightful book on the subject, DEAD GIRLS: ESSAYS ON SURVIVING AN AMERICAN OBSESSION.)

As Bolin notes regarding Twin Peaks and the ‘Dead Girl’ genre in general: “[the] Dead Girl is not a ‘character’ in the show, but rather, the memory of her is.” While the show itself actively tried to demystify and complicate the idyllic memory that the residents of Twin Peaks had of Laura Palmer, it never quite succeeded in that regard, thanks to some languid plotting and how most of the details of her life prior to her murder were kept from the general townspeoples’ eyes. FIRE WALK WITH ME corrects that.

With FIRE WALK WITH ME, we live with Laura Palmer for the entirety of the film, and we are seated front-and-center to see the amount of abuse and trauma she’s had to endure, to witness her terrible and numbing coping mechanisms, and to well-up at her wilted attempts to reach out to those close to her. While Lynch unrelentingly puts Laura through the wringer, it’s to finally give Laura a voice, a scream, for her to be more than just a dead girl, to be more than a prop that sets off a number of soapy narrative devices. It’s the character profile she deserved, while also being an examination of how men take and take, and how folks often avert their eyes to exploitation and abuse.

I’ll confess that, due to watching a fully sold-out screening of FIRE WALK WITH ME while fretting about contracting a case of breakthrough COVID-19, I wondered why the hell I was attending a screening of a film that’s so focused on trauma and abuse, followed up by a Q&A with Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer herself. The film made me feel dirty enough that the prospect of a post-film Q&A with the actor who clearly had to endure and inhabit an extraordinarily difficult performance felt cruel. However, one of the first things Lee asked of the audience was:

“How many of you out there just saw this for the first time?”

From my estimate, ~15% of the audience raised their hands, and I knew one of the people seated behind me definitely had never seen it, because 1) they said so and 2) declared that it was way darker than they expected and 3) did not want to leave because 4) they spent a lot on their tickets and 5) wanted to hear what Lee had to say, despite the dude clearly wanting to further their initial date by getting a bite to eat afterwards and 6) who asks someone out to FIRE WALK WITH ME as an initial date?!

Lee then said: “I wish I could give you all a hug!” and I realized she knew what she was getting into, and is well-versed with managing it. A lot of the Q&A circled back to simply being an actor and rolling with Lynch and his scripts. In other words: you show up and you do the work and trust the director and live with what’s on the screen.

Lastly, this screening reminded me that I picked up a copy of Courtenay Stallings’s LAURA’S GHOST: WOMEN SPEAK ABOUT TWIN PEAKS from media writer Matt Zoller Seitz’s bookstore and while I have yet to read it — it’s top in my queue — given Seitz’s quality taste, I feel secure in recommending it.

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (Season Three, 2020)

August 27, 2021

(Paramount+/VOD) Apologies in advance for the massive preamble here, and the general length of the piece! I actually did whittle it down, but still …it’s STAR TREK.

Both my wife and I have been huge STAR TREK nerds since we were young. I watched the original series while it was in syndication before my family had cable, read all of the novelizations and extended universe books that my school and local library stocked, subscribed to The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation magazine, and even cried when my hairdresser botched my Spock haircut. (She was probably just looking out for my best interests, so thanks?)

At some point, I simply lost interest. I watched a few eps of every post-TNG series over the years, fell asleep during FIRST CONTACT (or was it NEMESIS?), but ultimately I was hard-pressed to care.

During lockdown, my wife and I figured it was as good a time as any to dive back in. We’ve been happily working our way through DEEP SPACE NINE together, and she started binging DISCOVERY on her own. Every time I’d walk through the room while she was watching, I’d witness some humanoids in a lift, talking at each other via overly-complicated and unnecessary camerawork. I was not impressed.

She indulged my optimism for PICARD, based on my prior love of TNG and the fact that the show runner was Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY). In the interest of brevity, I’ll simply state that was a mistake.

Once we hit the end of DS9’s third season, she implored me to watch DISCOVERY’s third season — which she had already seen — noting that I could get up to speed pretty quickly, and she wasn’t wrong. The opening recap lays out most of what you need to know: DISCOVERY takes place around the time of Captain Pike’s heyday, a bit before the original series. Michael Burnham (played by Sonequa Martin-Green) is an orphaned Black human woman — Michael’s name is a signifier that DISCOVERY started as a Bryan Fuller show, showcasing his love for masculine-named women * — who was adopted by Spock’s family, grew up on Vulcan, and has become a swashbuckling heroic-but-flawed Federation member serving on the USS Discovery.

The USS Discovery is a Federation starship with an experimental ‘spore drive’ which allows them to speedily navigate space without the need for dilithium crystals, however, someone has to be able to interface with them for …reasons. Thankfully, USS Discovery has brilliant-but-prickly Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) to physically interface with the drive. Stamets’ husband is Hugh Culber (MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s Wilson Cruz) who is USS Discovery’s Lieutenant Commander. Rounding out the ensemble is: Philippa Georgiou (a charismatically chilly Michelle Yeoh) who is there for …reasons, and she is complex, captivating, and knows how to verbally eviscerate anyone; Saru (an unsurprisingly heavily made-up Doug Jones) as a measured, by-the-book officer and newly-introduced species called the Kelpien; Ensign Tilly (Mary Wiseman) as the overly chatty, but intelligent and warm-hearted foil to Stamets, and Lieutenant Keyla Detmer (Emily Coutts) who serves as a steadfast helmsman.

Oh, and they have Tig Notoro and David Cronenberg as occasional cast members! Granted, both are rather under-utilized, but it’s always thrilling when they show up.

I won’t touch on any particulars of the third season’s plot, as doing so would certainly spoil matters for the first two seasons. Again, I haven’t seen the first two seasons, but based on the critical and fan reactions I’ve heard, the third season course-corrects quite a bit. I found it to be a very enjoyable, very satisfying self-contained season of STAR TREK, although I was initially hesitant as the opening eps primarily focus on Michael’s journey — STAR TREK has always excelled at ensemble work — and I had a number of quibbles with some of the retrofitting and a lot of the details concerning the ship interfaces, but they explained enough of it that made me happy. (This seems to be an unpopular opinion.)

Unlike PICARD, there were a number of times where I exclaimed: “This is my kind of STAR TREK!” as there were more than a few eps that focused on discovering new worlds with kind intent, recreating the wonder that drew me into the STAR TREK universe in the first place. While not all of the characters are terribly complex, their motives and Federation-centric willfulness to be as helpful as they can be was refreshing, comforting, and familiar. It felt like the show realized what it needed to do to recapture the original series’ magic, all while gamely moving matters forward.

When I stated that the season feels self-contained, I meant it. This season starts with a breaking point and ends with a two-parter that comes across like a spectacle-laden STAR TREK film (albeit an even-numbered one) with -huge- stakes and an extremely memorable and intriguing villain in Orion Minister Osyraa (an exceptional Janet Kidder) and, when the last episode fades to black, it feels like a chapter has ended; it feels like a series finale. A fourth season has been confirmed, and it appears that it’ll be a season that isn’t so Kurtzman-fueled but, instead, a STAR TREK show more like the ones I watched with awe as a youth: a show based on optimism, empathy, wonder for the unknown and, well, discovery.

I’ve included a STAR TREK: DISCOVERY S3 trailer below. Do not watch if you have plans to watch S1 or S2:

THE SUICIDE SQUAD (2021)

August 25, 2021

Okay, yup, THE SUICIDE SQUAD is pretty good. My second favorite DCU film, behind BIRDS OF PREY, but I’ve seen very few contemporary DCU films.

It’s damn stylish, it embraces the unique weirdness of the quirkier DC comics — I never thought Starro would be a featured creature in a big-budget DCU film. (On a CW show? Perhaps.) — and it features a lot of great character work and moments! There’s also a fantastic physicality to the film — not just with the stunts, but the squad members all have visible wounds: cuts, lacerations, abrasions, which you simply don’t see in bloodless MCU films.

However, it’s overly long and drags at times — it took me three days to watch it, although part of that was attempting to watch it while working, which was a mistake — and it takes a while to go fully bonkers. Also, very bad decisions were made regarding their subtitles. I don’t know what they were thinking when they chose that font.

Still, it’s a gory, ultra-violent fun time with a dazzlingly perfect cast. I’m ecstatic that Juan Diego Botto had a plum role, as he is criminally unappreciated. (If you haven’t seen GOOD BEHAVIOR, I suggest that you rectify that)

Lastly, I’m happy to see that ear cuffs are apparently back in style again. (You can’t believe how much I’ve hoped they’d make a comeback while watching STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE this summer.)

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

July 20, 2021

Context note: I previously posted all of the entries in this blog, mostly daily, via social media to my friends (apart from the handful of folks who signed up for the tandem Substack) to weather the pandemic. What follows is what I wrote for that day. (Spoiler alert: matters did not go back to normal.)

Programming note: it’s been a year to the day since I started doing these daily recommendations — albeit with a few breaks — and, with everything re-opening and with people returning to some sort of normalcy, I figure this is as a good time as any to go on sabbatical, so to speak. I’m sure I’ll want to post about a bunch of horror films during October, or start it back up during the freezing homestuck hellscapes that are Chicago winters, but who knows. It has meant a lot to me that many of you have read and engaged with these weird self-imposed posts, and I wanted to say thank you.

(HBO MAX/VOD) I’m ashamed to admit that, while I’ve been aware of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE for years and years — yes, I laughed at that old SIMPSONS joke about the MY DINNER WITH ANDRE arcade game just like everyone else — I had never sat down to watch it start-to-finish until I thought to quip about it regarding LOKI S01E03 and told myself: “You should really watch it before you make a lazy, common reference.”

Reader, I watched it.

It’s a work focused on emotional unburdening over dinner, and (to me) how masculine emotions and insecurities are meant to be suppressed, but doing so will only cause more issues later on down the line. While in the early 80s it was — I imagine; I’m old but I’m not that old — construed as a character study of an oversharing, over-emotional man, but it seems intensely relevant in a pre-post-pandemic time.

If somehow you aren’t familiar with MY DINNER WITH ANDRE: it’s about two weathered theater creatives who haven’t connected in years — one of whom doesn’t even really care for the other — dining together. It mostly consists of Andre Gregory (Andre Gregory) monologuing about certain steps and changes in his life and how he feels about it to Wallace Shawn (Wallace Shawn), who occasionally peppers him with questions. That’s it. That’s the film. It feels like an adaptation of a stage play but, no, it was an original screenplay from both Gregory and Shawn.

I’ve inferred in the past that these recommendations aren’t just recommendations, aren’t just an exercise to improve my critical writing skills, but are also meant to impart small facets of my oddball life to friends new and old. While these recommendations go out to some strangers who I do not know — thanks for reading and feel free to reach out! — I cross-post these to other social media outlets, and some recipients only know me as a ‘tech guy’ or ‘quiet spouse of their friend’. I’m not necessarily sure that I’m doing myself a lot of favors with these posts, but it’s a bit of earnestness and honestness that I couldn’t help but embrace while feeling isolated from humanity, while thinking others were feeling similarly.

All of this navel-gazing doesn’t do justice to the text of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. It’s about so much more. There’s a self-reflexivity to it that I adore; it’s reflecting on audiences and writerly goals, and then it goes almost completely, but intentionally, off the rails before pulling into the station and goes on to examine self-performative works as a human. It’s an extraordinarily controlled piece.

I thought I could watch it while working, given that it’s mostly (about) dialogue, but Andre Gregory’s intensity demanded my attention time and time again. For a film that’s just two men talking, it’s extremely visually compelling, and director Louis Malle and cinematographer Jeri Sopanen do a terrific job; it’s tautly edited, features extremely smart production design and camerawork — the use of mirrors to capture both characters’ faces is fantastic — and Gregory and Shawn are absolutely incredible. They knew what they wanted and Malle made it happen, although, allegedly, not without a few fights!

It is a fine film to wrap up this daily endeavor. A few weeks ago, I went out to safely dine at a restaurant with a friend for the first time in too long and — in retrospect — I was certainly being the oversharing, overly talky Andre. My cadence was too rushed and I was too frank and I said a few things out loud that I wouldn’t have said about myself two years ago but, still, it felt good. It felt earnest and honest and welcomed. I know this sort of acceptance of male emotional unburdening and free expression will be less acceptable as COVID (hopefully) dissipates, and I find it disheartening but inevitable. Back to normal, for better or for worse.