Freaky (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

Christopher Landon nails another feature, this one a deliciously wicked follow-up to Happy Death Day. Instead of being trapped in the "Groundhog Day" of her untimely and brutal murder, this time Landon's heroine finds herself trapped in the body of her murderer. Built and billed as a sort of Freaky Friday homage, Freaky skillfully sidesteps its inherent pitfalls and ends up sticking the landing almost every beat of its 100-minute runtime. And it has a fabulous soundtrack.

Bullied high schooler Millie (Kathryn Newton) performs as the ridiculous Blissfield Valley mascot during their homecoming football game. As she anxiously waits for her ride home afterward, she is attacked by the Blissfield Butcher -- a sort of suburban legend of a serial killer -- who killed four teens the night before. He stabs her with a knife from his previous crime scene, but before he can finish the job, he is chased off by Millie's older sister, a police officer. But the ancient dagger has magic properties, and by morning Millie realizes she is stuck in the Butcher's body. So, naturally, she goes to school.

Perhaps the funniest sequence in the film takes place within the school, as Millie (trapped in Vince Vaughn's body) wanders the halls looking for her best friends Nyla and Josh. Of course, their fight-and-flight response is riotously funny -- "You're black! I'm gay! We are so dead!" -- but Millie convinces them of the switcheroo just in time for them to confront the Butcher. Unfortunately, by this time, the killer has already killed two other people (both of whom are, interestingly, Millie's enemies) and has learned that in his innocent new body he is utterly free from suspicion in his crimes. He shrieks for help and then calmly turns toward new victims as the heroes flee the school guards.

With the Butcher becoming a mounting threat -- and the bodies piling up, casting more suspicion on Millie -- the three heroes have to research the dagger and how to reverse its effects while planning ways to stop the killer. And they have until midnight to complete the ritual. The clock is ticking, and the film never lags a single beat. But, as Landon masterfully does, the scares never overcome the heart of the story, and Millie learns valuable lessons about inner strength, dealing with her anxiety and awkwardness, and taking pride in being different and an outsider. It sounds trite when spelled out like this, but it's remarkably effective in this rollicking, violent comedy that rarely stops to ask for logic or explanations. It helps, too, that the two leading actors are doing some eye-popping, ballsy work (Vaughn hasn't shown this delicious side of himself before, except in Psycho and Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Newton makes a case for herself as a young and badass new action movie star) and are supported by enthusiastic secondary players, including Misha Osherovich, one of the few non-binary actors in such a prominent role in a mainstream movie.

Come Play (2020)

Score: 2.5 / 5

It's hard for me to feel jaded about any theatrical release this year, simply because I've missed going to the cinema so much. Come Play is one of those releases that, when not in a pandemic, I'd have been annoyed with and possibly even disliked. Not that there's really anything wrong with it formally, mind, nor is it ever less than absorbing during its 100-minute runtime. That's the magic of horror films for me, at least for the most part; I'd rather watch a slow, silly, or stupid horror movie than a comedy or romance any day because of pure adrenaline-fueled wonder at what might happen next. Plus, fear is a deliciously underappreciated sensation.

Young Oliver, a nonverbal autistic boy, primarily uses his smartphone to communicate with others, which has made him the victim of bullying by his classmates. His parents, both of whom are actually pretty darn good parents, are on the verge of splitting up. One night, Oliver opens a mysterious new app called "Misunderstood Monsters", which is apparently a digital picture book. Despite nightmarish drawings of a figure the book calls Larry -- the images seem inspired by Stephen Gammell's illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, if that helps you visualize something a child should absolutely not be seeing -- Oliver reads until he gets too spooked. Larry just wants a friend, the book says, and poor Oliver does too.

As it is, Come Play fits into a subgenre of horror preoccupied with the relationships of children to monstrosity: from James Whale's Frankenstein to The Babadook, the perennial dark fantasy of children being drawn to that which should terrify us. Could it be that they haven't learned to fear that which society hates? Could it be that they are uniquely susceptible to diabolic charms? A lack of answers helps the genre function in a culture that so worships youth and childhood as symbols of life and a future. This movie also belongs, in terms of adaptive form, to a sub-subgenre of flicks in recent years inspired by successful short films. This one, based on writer/director Jacob Chase's short "Larry", in many ways takes its cue from Andres Muschietti's Mama or David F. Sandberg's Lights Out. 

As in those, the best sequences are those in which the short is directly transposed into a centerpiece of the film. Here that means the father, working his lonely shift as a parking lot monitor, is surrounded by dark, open spaces in which shadows looks more scary than the void. However, I found the basic premise of this particular movie difficult to rationalize, as Larry increasingly tries to enter the real world, apparently able to move and manifest as a result of electrical devices and currents. If the movie were so interested in the monstrosity that is (or can be) the abuse of devices with black mirrors, I'm surprised that this flick was so determined to make Larry supernatural and corporeal. And then there's the bullying of Oliver, which makes up a significant part of the early plot but utterly vanishes by the halfway point.

Where this particular movie succeeds is in its masterful control of terror. This is a jumpscare factory, a veritable haunted house of boogeymen, lights flickering, doors and furniture moving on their own. A particularly, nastily effective scene involves Oliver and his bullying "friends" trapped in a sleepover together as they use their tablet to look for Larry in the house. By the time Larry indeed physically manifests in the house -- a la the Crooked Man from The Conjuring 2 -- we're suitably scared and ready for a showdown. And this one does not disappoint in terms of action and continued scares. Unfortunately, its logic begins to unravel in the final sequences, to the point that what should be an emotional climax felt cheap, cruel, and unearned to me.

Rebecca (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

Last night I watched a movie about Manderley again.

I was so excited when I heard Ben Wheatley was adapting the Du Maurier novel for a Netflix feature film. His work is often so intense, abstract, and disturbing that I could scarcely wait to see what he'd do with the iconic story, especially as it is his first adaptation of a classic. The hedonistic and nihilistic wonder of High-Rise, the fever dream horrors of A Field in England; it would certainly make for an interesting aesthetic when paired with the strictures of psychological drama and Gothic romance in pre-WWII England. And, since the only other noteworthy theatrical feature was in 1940, Rebecca was arguably due for a major remake.

And with an introduction of haunting beauty -- a mansion at night, lit by unearthly light as a woman walks away from us toward the front gates -- and the familiar opening narration, I was enraptured. We then jump unceremoniously then to Monte Carlo, where a young woman (Lily James) works for a darkly hilarious wannabe-socialite (Ann Dowd) while traveling abroad. The atmosphere is utterly escapist, with no mention of the Great Depression but all the sensory pleasures of a gilded Jazz Age, and cinematographer Laurie Rose works hard to make everything feel as old-school Hollywood as possible. The chromatic warmth is shared by the leading players: James, ever the wide-eyed doll thrust into a fantasy, is rescued from toil and social stagnancy by her Prince Charming, Maxim de Winter, played by Armie Hammer in an unspeakably monstrous mustard-colored suit. He summons her for drives along Mediterranean cliffs and even enacts sexual liaisons before suddenly proposing to her and sweeping her away to his estate in England.

Which is where the movie lost me. The aura of fantasy continues uninterrupted as the young unnamed protagonist -- and we -- are introduced to the de Winter home. The artificial color saturation grows, if anything, more pronounced in what eventually becomes clear to be a Gothic mansion. As the narrator becomes more keenly aware of the ghostly presence of Rebecca, the deceased former Mrs. de Winter, the movie continues its warmly lit aesthetic, making the proceedings feel increasingly soapy. Rather than fearing for the safety of our protagonist, or even her sanity, we're only kept in suspense to see what her next costume will be, where another monogrammed "R" will pop up, and if we'll ever see some eroticism between the married couple more than the Hayes Code softcore scene on a French beach.

The only visage not coated in candied hues is that of the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, played by a tight-lipped and ebony-dressed Kristin Scott Thomas in the kind of role she masters. As her dark eyes and skeletal frame slink through halls and doorways, we wonder if she stepped out of a whole different movie, perhaps even an audition for what will surely be Ryan Murphy's follow-up miniseries of a literary origin story to Ratched. But this film, written by committee, hamstrings her best efforts by hewing so damned close to the source material while simultaneously moving along between plot points without fleshing out that same source material.

The most potent power of Du Maurier's novel is in its bleak premise: Am I as good a wife/a woman/in bed as my dead predecessor? But this movie staunchly refuses to dive into that rich mystery, focusing instead on hitting all the recognizable plot points incoherently. When Jack Favell (a wasted Sam Riley) appears in a couple brief scenes late in the film, I vaguely wondered who he was, despite having recently read the book again. And instead of fleshing out crucial moments of character development, the film casts off its secondary talents in favor of a series of bizarre dream sequences with no real purpose. Mrs. de Winter follows Max sleepwalking into the west wing several times, where Rebecca once slept, in a fashion that would make you think he has an enchanted rose slowly losing petals; she later sleeps in a bed with a pattern of green vines before becoming entangled and eaten by a nightmarish Devil's Snare in her own hallway.

These kinds of scenes would have worked if director Ben Wheatley had delivered something akin to his usual fare. Whether he was handcuffed (in velvet, apparently) by Netflix, his producers, or perhaps the daunting idea of adapting the iconic piece, Wheatley's efforts here feel as watered down and inconsequential as a Hallmark adaptation. As the movie leers towards its finale, Wheatley seems more bewildered than I was; his courtroom scenes during what should be the climax demonstrate an ineptitude that borderlines on failure. And then there's the bizarre postlude scene in which Mrs. de Winter confronts a suicidal Danvers on a cliff, and the screenwriters should have been shot; it reminded me of the abject failure of Cinderella (2015) to explore Lady Tremaine's character and thus justify the remake's existence. Personally, I like remakes if only for the critical exercise of considering differing artistic interpretations on a similar work. If this had been a purely straightforward, honest-to-Daphne remake of Hitchcock's brilliant work but in color, I wouldn't have even been mad. But its own aesthetic inconsistencies and inability to make a case for its own existence makes this Rebecca about as haunting as a hangover.

I would have much preferred a version that mined the novel's suggestions and dramatized what Hitchcock could not in 1940: erotic thrills a la De Palma, a Luhrmann's Gatsby-style masquerade ball, a more pronounced necrophilic-lesbian presence, or even an out-and-out ghost story like Del Toro's Crimson Peak. True, perhaps this wasn't the place or venue for that, but this surely could have been entertaining, interesting, or fresh, if not all three. Maybe Mike Flanagan will use this mess to inspire The Haunting of Manderley Hall, which could (and should) do all that and more.

Capone (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

It was only a matter of time before Tom Hardy tackled Scarface as only he can. With his famous penchant for Method acting, he dives directly into the title role of Capone with characteristically balls-out gusto. True to form, he works unexpected magic in this movie partly due to its focus: we're in the final year of Al Capone's life, the opening text tells us. Hardy peers out from layers of makeup and prosthetics with his piercing eyes, playing the prematurely dying Fonz with the audacity and theatricality we would expect from his old-school style and his larger-than-life character. And it makes for a dazzling, rapturous performance. Hardy belongs to the rare class of actor -- like Marlon Brando or Orson Welles -- who delivers to the beat of his own drum, filtered through his own internal logic, often inaccessible and opaque. It's powerful to behold, but only works in the right context.

Hardy here rots away before us, disguised by the mask he wears and his typically arresting voice. Often unintelligible, he gurgles and grunts his way through this movie, intermittently spitting out imprecise and incorrectly pronounced Italian phrases. Be sure to watch this one with subtitles! It's calculated and chameleonic, to be sure, but this is a far cry from the technical genius of Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman; here it often feels as though Hardy's voice has been wrung through a strainer, filtered through a synthesizer, and then boiled in its own bile. As the necrotic gangster dwindles, the skin peeling off his pallid face and bodily fluids excreting themselves from his shorts, we become increasingly aware of the syphilitic fever raging in his brain. He's far from the fearsome legend he was, but when he handles a gun we see glimpses of his former horror. Most of the movie, however, comprises Hardy chewing an oversized cigar, puffing clouds of smoke, and muttering to himself as he wanders through his Florida mansion. In fact, that's about the length and breadth of whatever plot exists here.

Writer and director Josh Trank (Chronicle, Fantastic Four), despite dubious conventional measurements of "success," will never be less than an original filmmaker. In Capone, he works significant magic that cannot be overlooked, both in his remarkable skills as an old-school filmmaker and in his ability to wrangle meaning and emotional intelligence from Hardy's performance. It can't have been easy to plan this movie around Hardy's antics, but in fact Trank's mastery over the proceedings suggests that this movie was so carefully planned out it might actually be too controlled. Scenes are so choreographed, so beautifully shot (by cinematographer Peter Deming) with unexpected light and movement, so synchronous with sound and performance, and so deliberately cut and juxtaposed with other images or movements that I suspect Trank took Hardy's Brando/Welles inspiration and ran with it. He's not setting up cameras all around and splicing together "good" moments caught at random; he's dancing with his own Black Swan. Along those lines, he ends the film with an amazing sequence in which his storytelling matches the audacious theatricality of his star, erasing the line between reality and fantasy, history and character. I'm guessing that, apart from harnessing the power of Hardy, this sequence is the reason Trank made this movie.

I don't want to take away from the fascinating performance or direction here, but it is worth including that I don't expect to watch this movie again. Challenging and even, arguably, beautiful as it is, it is far from entertaining and less than engaging. Capone never tries to explain, rationalize, defend, or even explore its antihero's past, a decision I fully support. But it also never tries to dramatize anything resembling, well, dramatic. It's 103 minutes of watching a man die, a man who tries to reflect on his life but can't make connections due to his neurosyphilis; a man who still treats his family (specifically Linda Cardellini) and friends (including Matt Dillon) as though he's the pinstriped kingpin who could kill them with a flick of his finger; a man who shits his bed and plays hide-and-seek with ghostly visions in his five-star haunted house. I don't mind a tragedy, or even a bleak exercise in nihilism, but it's difficult to much care for Scarface in any capacity, especially as he's dying with so much suffering.

The Boys in the Band (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

The devastating brilliance of The Boys in the Band is back in a big way with its newest incarnation, which debuted on Netflix recently. This production has been lifted directly from its brief Broadway revival in 2018, including its entire cast and director, and though its stagey delivery will surely invite criticism from some, it allows those of us who enjoy the theatre to experience something of what we might see on stage. With most responsible theatre groups still shut down these days, heaven knows we needed something like this. (And of course Hamilton, but that's been on repeat all summer!)

It's one of the defining dinner-party-gone-wrong dramas, and remarkably noteworthy for many reasons. Mart Crowley's original off-Broadway play premiered in 1968 and was groundbreaking for portraying a group of gay men authentically. They weren't isolated, and they weren't a trope: the villain, the victim, the sidekick. They weren't even heroic, which wouldn't happen yet for many years. The entire play explores their lives in a way that, now, feels like a perfect experience dropped into a time capsule: only the next year, which brought the Stonewall riots, changed queer urban culture forever. Not long after, as AIDS claimed the lives of thousands, gay art grew urgent, preachy, tragic, and poignant. Because of the intersection of queer lives, mainstream media, and increasing social justice, it's terribly difficult for most young people today to grasp the revolutionary power of The Boys in the Band, even if it wasn't all that well-received in its day.

But it's still a magnificent drama on its own terms, and as long as we let its tempo, language, and profound truths guide us, this new film works wonders on the screen. Thankfully, director Joe Mantello and producer Ryan Murphy avoid any attempts to modernize or dumb-down the original text, making this film as important (if more accessible) than William Friedkin's 1970 film. The play doesn't need to be topical because it will always be relevant, and the artists here trust the work to stand on its own. With only a few added moments to make this feel less like it was shot on stage, the film takes place almost entirely within one character's apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. What begins as a not-quite-surprising birthday party turns into a night of chaos as the characters drink, play games, and reveal awful truths about themselves and each other.

Jim Parsons plays Michael, the host, whose recent sobriety is put to the test as he prepares for company. His former college roommate Alan has called and wants to visit, but when Michael tells him he's having friends over Alan won't like, Alan breaks into tears (something the very straight character certainly hasn't done before). Michael allows his friend a brief time to come, but before long the gaggle of gays show up and get a little rowdy. It would be easy to classify this bunch of queens as too campy, too effete, too much; but you'd be forgetting that this was a time that their behaviors -- even their identities, as much as the concept existed then -- were strictly illegal. Once in the privacy of a home, they could finally relax and be as flamboyant as they could not in the "real" world. And does that affect their mannerisms? You bet.

You could say the characters are fairly stereotypical, by today's standards, but that washes away the fact that these stereotypes had not yet been cemented as fundamental to queer representation in art. We have effeminate interior decorator Emory, tortured and hunky former lover Donald (who, it is suggested, is undergoing psychoanalysis in an early form of conversion therapy), artist Larry who prefers to sleep around and his live-in boyfriend Hank who is still married to a woman, and finally librarian Bernard, a hopeless romantic and the only black man. We know that, based on the time period and the verbal cruelty of these queers, before long someone will call him the "n" word. And I nearly forgot the guest of honor: Harold, played by a deliciously wicked Zachary Quinto, the lapsed Catholic and alcoholic riddled with a poisonous mix of vanity and malice.

As the night slowly becomes a nightmare, we're locked in the genius world of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee, in a party-hell that is as absorbing as it is repugnant. Its grotesquerie reaches a chillingly quiet climax during a particularly nasty party game in which the men take turns calling the one person they've loved the most and telling them. Revelations spiral out of control and the characters are each given chances to dramatically shine; of course the central issue, a now-cliché MacGuffin in which the one most repelled by gay men is probably gay himself, comes to the fore before all ends with tears. Of course, that's not to deny our own devilish pleasure at watching a member of the hegemony get what's coming to him when he is suddenly at the mercy of those he detests. I read that "schadenfreude" was the most-searched vocabulary word after Trump caught the coronavirus. The same concept is dramatic gold here.

If for nothing else, this movie is a delicious drama that perfectly captures real lives lived in a time before what most of us can remember. As such, it can foster lively and enlightening discussions about history, politics, and social justice as easily as it can about friendship, love, truth, and the tragedy of our lives. Boasting memorable performances, beautiful production design, and its timeless script, The Boys in the Band ultimately reminds us all that denying and disguising ourselves can only end with pain, but embracing and building each other up allows us to hope.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

"I'm thinking of ending things," the narrator repeats several times in the opening scene. The narrator is also the main character, played by Jessie Buckley, and she's sitting in a moving car. Amidst her not-quite stream of consciousness, including memory and hope, judgment and suggestion, her voiceover feels at once sad, bored, wistful. "I'm thinking of ending things," she repeats, seemingly contemplating dumping her boyfriend of six weeks, Jake, the man driving the car. He's taking her to meet his parents for the first time. On a farm. In a blizzard. It's not ideal. I'd think about ending things too, though by this point it's surely a little too late.

"I'm thinking of ending things," she says, framed by the window of the car and underscored by the sound effects of a whistling wind. The lengthy opening scene is entirely within the car. So is the third major movement of the film, when Jake and our narrator leave his parents' farm. These people spend a lot of time in the car and, thematically, get absolutely nowhere. They're trapped in the world of the film and by the film itself; the movie is shot in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio that feels unwelcome and uncomfortable in our days of big-ass-tv digital screenings. Her entrapment in these frames suggests another, darker meaning to her gerund thoughts: suicide. It helps that most of the shots are from outside the car windows, with the whistling wind and thick snowfall. It makes it that much harder to see their faces and hear their voices, which are the only things worth trying to see clearly. In fact, the first we see of the pair is the clearest we see them, in many ways. Things only get more cloudy, more strange from here.

"I'm thinking of ending things," but who is she? We never really know. Her name is, initially, Lucy, but it apparently changes when other people call her other names like Ames and Yvonne and she doesn't correct them. As Jake introduces her to his parents and their conversation develops, details of her life change from sentence to sentence, including how they met, her job, her past. She quotes poetry at length and, in one incredible scene I had to pause during to reference-check, imitates Pauline Kael while quoting her review of A Woman Under the Influence (a film in which that woman attempts suicide) as if she herself is creating the monologue. And she's not alone in this. Jake, played by Jesse Plemons, is apparently such a vapid man that he has essentially no character. Almost everything he says is a reference, a quote, or something he clearly lifted from another source.

Not long after they get to the farm and meet Jake's parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis), the film teeters close to psychological horror. In this haunted house of Americana, each time the parents -- who very much seem to have missed the memo they'd be receiving visitors -- leave the room and return, they jump to a different time in their lives. From dewy-eyed newlyweds to a couple on their deathbed, their aging follow no linear logic. By the time Jake and his girlfriend leave into a night repeatedly referred to as treacherous, we're fully engaged in an organized nightmare; the problem is, we have no access to the organization of it.

And that's really writer/director Charlie Kaufman's modus operandi. But unlike his other films, i'm thinking of ending things is almost inaccessible in its opaque artistry, its tedious dialogue that would require a reference appendix, its bizarre obsession with -- typical for the creator -- an utterly unlikable and deeply introverted man in the throes of agony simply because he's alive and can't cope. Here, I'd argue (based on the conclusion, which I'd rather not spoil but may need to), his main character is in fact much more fascinating than in Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, but then we'd have to discuss the issue of dramatizing mental illness in this way and with this very specific ending. It just gave me the willies, and not in a juicy frisson but in a guilt-ridden way. "I'm thinking of ending things" might be Kaufman's way of trying to end our understanding of his movies.

Of course, I'm sure a repeat viewing would help, especially now that I have a few notes of specific references these characters make. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to watch this hypnotic, bewildering movie again any time soon. It certainly doesn't help that it premiered on Netflix; this kind of experience needs to be seen in a blackened auditorium with absolutely no distractions. Netflix fare has to compete with all manner of food, cell phone conversations, family members interjecting, bathroom breaks ad nauseam, and to combat the soporific comfort of a viewer's bed or sofa and ambient lighting. I'd be surprised if this movie garners many fans, much like the beautiful and haunting I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Then again, Kaufman's work here is clearly a labor of love, and one that manages, despite its unfathomable ambiguities, to carry us along with it by sheer virtue of his control of the craft.

If you've seen it, or read the novel on which it is loosely based, let's have a conversation about it. I'm not at all convinced my interpretation holds all of the water. I'm not sure any interpretation would. I guess that's good, but it's also dreadfully dull in context of this movie. I guess I'd rather end things too.

The Devil All the Time (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

It's at least the devil for two hours, and that was more than enough for me. The new Netflix drama The Devil All the Time dropped this weekend, and I was ready for Spider-man to go full Southern Gothic. As I sipped pinot noir, I was treated to a haunting opening sequence of WWII in which American soldiers come across one of their own sergeants crucified on a battlefield by the Japanese. To end his suffering, Willard (Bill Skarsgard) shoots him in the head. After his return home in Ohio, he gets married and has a son named Arvin, whom he raises in their rural Christian faith. But, thanks in large part to Skarsgard's shell-shocked and glistening eyes, we know that Willard has seen actual horrors every time he beholds his religious crosses. It's this sort of timeless reminder of the bloody basis of Christianity I expected from the movie, and it's one that would have more than satisfied me.

But then the movie almost immediately falters, and never recovers. We are suddenly thrust into the lives of other, seemingly unconnected characters, and we quickly lose track of whatever timeline we should be following. The film rockets us across time and place, from Ohio to West Virginia, from 1945 to 1965 and several times between, and through crucial moments in the lives of no fewer than eight people. It doesn't help that many of them look and act the same. I was quite lost well before the halfway point of the movie, which seemed to consist of episodic scenes depicting depravity, violence, and cruelty. In fact, the violence is often so sudden and so graphic that I wondered if this was meant as a straight-up horror flick. But the melodrama greatly outweighs anything, which renders these scenes grotesque and the whole of the film little more than poverty porn.

The main plot follows Arvin (Tom Holland, unexpectedly flexing his acting chops) as he comes of age. He fiercely protects his step-sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) from any and all evil but of course is unable to stem the tide of evil in the world. He then embarks on a journey of revenge that costs many more lives than necessary, and in his bloody wake the hounds close in, notably the corrupt Sheriff (Sebastian Stan) seeking revenge for his sister (Riley Keough). His sister, mind, is a serial killer who was killed by Arvin along with her hubby Carl (Jason Clarke) after they attempted to abduct and kill Arvin. Oh, and I can't forget that Lenora's mother (Mia Wasikowska) was killed by her preacher father (Harry Melling) who handles spiders instead of snakes and starts hallucinating after one too many bites, thinking he can resurrect the dead.

Sound crazy? It is, and this is only the first half of the damn movie.

Indeed, I can conceive of little reason this movie exists at all, except to say that the American heartland -- at least its Appalachian foothills -- is populated by a cast of stupid, violent people whose religious fanaticism has long been its only social standard and who escape the sad realities of their lives through violence and vengeance. It is increasingly difficult to make narrative or thematic sense of any of it, partly due to the bizarre editing and unremarkable production design, partly due to the unfocused and broad scope of its screenplay. We're not allowed into any character's psyche because we are yanked between characters too often. Even the most delicious performance in the film -- I'd say the performances are wonderful across the board -- is lost in the messy void: Robert Pattinson, whose crisp, clean preacher with a campy, overbearing personality is as delightful as it is surprising, and I'm not sure it fits within its context. Which may be the point, but as nothing else here compares to it in tone or delivery, I find his relative lack of consequence troubling.

Ultimately, the movie feels like a vicious fever dream, an uninspired attempt at Gothicizing rural America by demonizing its religious foundations -- which arguably deserve this kind of treatment, and more -- and exploiting the impoverished and uneducated lower classes. For example, we derive a certain pleasure in seeing the insane preacher pouring live spiders on his face, sure, and even seeing him get his comeuppance, but the film's question of stopping the cycle of violence is made irrelevant by the cruelty and stupidity of its protagonist. There is little worth watching in this movie, from its incoherent plot incomprehensibly strung together by a laughably bad voiceover narrator (apparently the author of the book that inspired this movie) to its squandered cast of A-listers, and finally to its celebration of the banality of evil in the heartland. What a damned waste.

Dolemite is My Name (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

In the 1970s, Rudy Ray Moore is working a record shop by day and a nightclub by night, hoping to make it in LA show biz. It's not going well. His boss won't let him perform a stand-up routine, even though he's the emcee, and his wistful manner is just begging for inspiration. Thankfully, the city of angels gives it to him when a homeless wino stumbles into the store entertains and spellbinds everyone within earshot with his boisterous storytelling. The slick rhymes and tight meter of his stories and jokes are as brazenly audacious as the crude and vulgar content. Soon thereafter, a hypnotized Moore takes to the streets by night and absorbs everything he can about this urban ghetto talk, and in a magnificent scene around a trash can fire, he fashions his future stardom from the most unlikely of sources. But, in vino veritas, and what appears to us a Shakespearean fool appears to Moore a muse.

Indeed, Dolemite is My Name is the story of the man behind the pop culture sensation, the popularly dubbed "Godfather of Rap." A biopic of rare insight and frenetic energy, it carries us along with Moore as he develops his stage persona, Dolemite, a wisecracking pimp with excessive charisma that manifests in braggadocio and rhyming syncopation and no small amount of profanity. "Dolemite is my name," he announces himself to anyone who will listen, "and fuckin' up muthafuckas is my game." He details his bizarre sexual exploits along with his impossible feats of heroism, criminality, and social prowess, all the while strutting along in suits of vibrant hues, bedazzled and glittering, with his hat and cane akimbo.

The role is a perfect match for the unique talents of Eddie Murphy, who has been largely absent from the silver screen for many years now. This is not as clearly a dramatic role as his in Dreamgirls, nor is it remotely child-friendly as many might have come to expect. This is Murphy in rare form, spitting out so many profanities you might think this was a Tarantino flick. But he's no Samuel L. Jackson, and Murphy is here making a bold reclamation of his talents as a serious artist. Other worthy players buttress the film, especially Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Tituss Burgess, and even Ron Cephas Jones in a single scene, but the movie only works because of its leading man.

Moore eventually decides he's going to make a movie about his alter ego, and suddenly the movie takes a drastic turn and feels more akin to Ed Wood or The Disaster Artist than I was ready to handle (Fun fact: the writers of this film also wrote Ed Wood and Big Eyes). We get plenty of slapstick to mirror the foul-mouthed blasphemies, hilarious sex scenes, and downright absurd effects. The madcap comedy boils over to a fever pitch both in terms of content (the movie's production is bedeviled with setbacks, conflicting characters, and financial turmoil) and in terms of execution: fierce editing, heightened music, and increasingly voluptuous production design raise the stakes in every frame. They take over an abandoned hotel as a soundstage, employ (or, rather, "employ") a group of white film students from UCLA as tech crew, and heartily enjoy the shoot. Well, everyone except the director, who ends up walking out when he can't Moore's campy artistry and flippant attitude any longer.

By the finale, which depicts the premiere of the troubled and troubling kung-fu blaxploitation film, we understand that for all his faults and failures, Moore is an admirable and even endearing man. Moreover, as the on-screen text describes before the credits roll, Moore is in many ways the catalyst and safe haven of a specific subset of American culture at a time when culture was breaking. His amazing ability to signify (more properly, signifyin') is the touchstone for much of what we now appreciate as rap music, sure, but also largely establishes a foundation for contemporary Ebonics or Black Vernacular English. The film's amazing insight into the creation of culture carries along its messages of cultural appropriation in heavy doses, but they are quite easy to take along with its main course, the surprisingly heartwarming story of a down-and-out hopeful who makes it big. At least, big on his own terms.

And, ultimately, isn't that what really matters?

The New Mutants (2020)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

It's difficult to talk about this movie in glowing terms, as it rings the tragic death-knell of one of my favorite film franchises. Post mortem knell, in fact, as The New Mutants is indeed released not by 20th Century Fox but by 20th Century Studios, the new name of the old company now under the Disney corporate umbrella. Much as Disney cancelled the four magnificent Marvel/Netflix Defenders superhero shows, here they have effectively put a stop to all productions not in line with their vision for the MCU. For better or worse (much worse, I fear), we'll not be seeing X-Men the same way again.

Yet hope remained, while the company was true. Despite what some critics and fans might say -- given the ridiculous delays this movie's release has endured, and the studio's odd choice to have no socially distant options for press screenings or streaming -- The New Mutants is a lot of fun. It grants us a fresh take on a genre consistently on the verge of becoming boring. Keeping with its source material, the film works best when it fully indulges its idiosyncratic YA horror. The original three X-Men films featured notably older cast members and characters, and even young Rogue putting her boyfriend into a coma wasn't filmed as horrific, just sad and awkward. But put enough young people trying to understand and control their feelings, bodies, and minds in stressful enough situations, and horror is a perfectly logical way to branch out in this franchise.

Here, we follow young Dani Moonstar (played by Native American actor Blu Hunt), a Cheyenne girl whose reservation is destroyed in a freak storm that kills her family. She suddenly awakens in a remote hospital (or perhaps asylum), handcuffed to her bed and given the bad news by her doctor, Cecilia Reyes. Reyes is seemingly the only staff at this medical facility, and is played with austerity by Alice Braga. With Dani, we are quickly introduced to the other patients at this facility, all of whom seem to be the more sad, more rebellious, more angry versions of the students at Xavier's school. Their superpowers, we learn, have each been triggered by some trauma or dark secret, and Reyes tries to research them while helping them examine themselves. She also uses her own mutant powers to keep them locked on the premises, with the implied promise that once their "twelve steps", you might say, are completed, they can go to a better place under her superior's tutelage. It's gotta be the bald man in the wheelchair, right?

The very basic plot notwithstanding, we are mostly carried along by our understanding of these characters. In remarkably simple yet effective ways, the film twists a generic coming-of-age formula into troubling understandings of childhood trauma and its lasting effects. To give a brief rundown: a badass Russian girl who talks to her sock puppet and conjures magic, a hunky Brazilian boy whose sexual history isn't as hot as his powers, an abused sprite of a Scottish girl whose bite is far worse than her bark, and a battered and broken human torpedo from Kentucky. Then there's Dani who has no idea what her mutant powers could be, but she is plagued by nightmarish visions. After initial conflict with each other, the kids finally begin to band together and question the nature of their "treatment."

As a film, The New Mutants is nothing remarkable or groundbreaking, despite its depiction of a lesser-known branch of my favorite superhero team. Its editing leaves a lot to be desired, as does its leading actress; it relies as heavily on CGI and a dangerously vague screenplay as IT did, but is less effective in its scares and emotional depth (and nostalgia, but really there's no comparison to the two beyond the rising action of the plot). But as a work that finally gives me some of the Marvel mutant stories I've always wanted more of, I can't deny my absolute pleasure in having seen it. We finally -- finally -- get explicitly queer characters (in the most queer superhero comics) who aren't exploited by the camera, and whose queerness is as natural and organic as any trait of the other characters. Watching Magik and Sunspot and Lockheed and Wolfsbane and the Demon Bear come to life before my eyes was nothing short of awesome, even if the frame of the movie was less than spectacular. By the CGI-heavy finale, I was at once elated and exhausted, and even depressed that it was over.

This was supposed to be a spin-off trilogy of movies to buttress the already existing X-Men franchise. This was supposed to lead into the Essex Corp. plotlines, the rise of the Hellfire Club's Madelyne Pryor, and finally Mister Sinister (who was going to be played by Jon freakin' Hamm) bringing about the Inferno apocalyptic horror event. I'm devastated that won't happen now.

Underwater (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

I hadn't seen many trailers for Kristen Stewart's latest outing amidst the flurry of the holidays and pre-awards season, but it's been a long summer and I finally got around to viewing it. Having forgot almost everything in the trailers, I only knew the plot revolved around her getting stuck in a research station at the bottom of the ocean. I didn't know that the disaster would happen in the very first scene. I didn't know that Stewart has turned into a very physical actress. I didn't know that this movie would be so technically accomplished. And I certainly didn't know I was going to really enjoy it.

Underwater takes place entirely under water; at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in fact, so under a lot of water. Before we know anything about anything, Kristen Stewart's tooth-brushing is suddenly interrupted by an earthquake. The submerged station -- which seems to be a research facility as well as a drill -- is nearly destroyed, and the few survivors race against time to gather near the escape pods. But they're all gone. Knowing they will die in the facility, they don deep-sea suits and drop to the ocean floor (not without casualty), with the insane goal of walking a mile to another station. As if it weren't already a thrilling update to a disaster movie, we soon learn that they are being hunted in the pitch-black water.

*Spoiler alert*

In the impossibly dark atmosphere (or lack of), the movie often looks and feels like a space movie. In fact, substitute just a couple of visuals, and we have what amounts to Ridley Scott's Alien. People are forced to travel between relatively safe spots where they can recharge and clean their suits; the pressure is exhausting and claustrophobic; we suspect they will all die. And then there's the humanoid monsters hunting them. I was a bit bewildered by this because I simply didn't expect it, and while the scares are mostly effective and well-designed, the horror of this movie felt increasingly gimmicky. It's just that we've seen it all before, you know? Throw the Xenomorph into James Cameron's The Abyss, and that's this movie, right?

Wrong. Because in Underwater's climax, Stewart and the last survivors have to navigate a hallway that serves as a nesting ground for these creatures. Hanging like bats, they seem to be dormant for the present, until of course one is awakened by the clumsy intruders (to be fair, they are wearing those unwieldy suits). Once Stewart extricates herself from being swallowed by a particularly hangry monster, she fires a flare gun into open water for a distraction and for, you know, a little enlightenment. And suddenly we see with her that a titan has emerged from the depths. No, this isn't The Meg. 

It's Cthulhu.

I know, I know, it's weird. But honestly the shock of that single shot was enough to bowl me over, and I still haven't quite recovered. It's the money shot of the year. We could talk about whether the movie deserves to be in Lovecraftian canon all we want, but that revelatory shot is the single coolest, most effectively horrifying shot in any movie inspired by the Lovecraft mythos. There are a couple passing hints earlier in the film that something strange was going on behind the scenes with the drilling company, including a pentagram drawn on a blueprint of the first drill site. There really isn't anything like xenophobia, paranoia, racism, madness, or cult worship, which may be why the reveal is so damn shocking.

Sure, it's probably even a cheap ploy by the filmmakers. But before that point, it was already an effective movie in its own right, derivative though it is. It's lean, it's mean; it drops us literally as the action explodes, and it never relents its horror until the credits start rolling. It has no pretense, no unnecessary fluff; it gives exactly what it wants and takes exactly what it wants. It's perfectly self-contained, mercifully brief in length, and doesn't even give you enough time to consider disliking what you're watching. It boasts some real technical artistry, too, especially in sound design and cinematography from the criminally underrated Bojan Bazelli (Hairspray, Burlesque, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Ring, Pete's Dragon, A Cure for Wellness, and Spectral, among others). And then to have that big bastard come clomping out, Underwater totally won me over. I can't exactly articulate why, but I just really had a blast with this flick. What a ridiculous delight.