Spectre Collie

Category: Movies

  • Magic What We Do (Rewatching Sinners)

    Magic What We Do (Rewatching Sinners)

    There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube video titled something like “10 Things You Missed In <Latest Blockbuster Movie Release>!” Occasionally, it’ll be given the slightly more charitable title of things you might have missed, but the implication is always the same. I didn’t take two whole semesters of cinema studies classes in college just to have some YouTuber talking shit about my media literacy!

    But then again, maybe I should chill out a little bit. Especially considering that I finally got to watch Sinners for a second time last night, and there were plenty of details that I’d missed the first time.

    On the whole, I’m very glad I saw it again, because it reduced the scope of it in my mind a little bit. Not just because we didn’t see it in IMAX this time, but because I could stop thinking of it as this epic parable waiting for me to pick it apart and impose my own interpretation on it, until I eventually got a certificate from the filmmakers saying “Congratulations! You understood it!” Instead, I can just appreciate it as an outstanding movie.

    Some of the stuff that I’d missed is so obvious, it’s a little bit embarrassing. But I have enough trouble understanding dialogue in movies anyway, and it’s made harder when the characters are speaking in heavy dialect. Here are a few of the things I noticed this time around.

    The highlight of the movie is still the sequence where Sam performs “I Lied to You,” which turns into the montage of the power of music to span across time and across cultures. Even when I knew it was coming, it still made me involuntarily gasp and my eyes fill with tears. Still just a literally breathtaking combination of images and music and ideas.

    But throughout the movie, music is used as a representation of magic. Earlier I picked out the scene in which Annie is preparing a mojo bag for Smoke, and the music (titled “Why You Here” on the soundtrack) that has been playing throughout the scene perfectly syncs up with her striking a match three times.

    It suggests that the “background” music throughout the movie isn’t entirely non-diegetic. It represents the magic that surrounds these characters, and it goes into sync during the moments when the characters are able to tap into that magic. Or overwhelming emotion, which is depicted as the same thing.

    When Delta Slim is telling the story of how his friend was lynched in a train station, he becomes so overwhelmed at the grief and injustice of it that he can’t do anything but start humming a blues riff and stomping his feet. It’s a powerful reminder to the audience that “the blues” isn’t just some abstract style of music, but an expression of insurmountable pain and grief.

    And the earlier scene between Annie and Smoke is echoed near the end of the movie, after Smoke has sent Sam home and has taken out most of the klansmen who showed up to destroy the juke joint. He keeps having flashbacks to the previous night, and in particular to how he’s lost all of the most important people in his life, and there’s a sense that he’s feeling not just rage, but survivor’s guilt. As the music crescendos, he rips off the mojo bag from around his neck, and the music suddenly stops.

    When we see Annie again, nursing their baby, the earlier theme is repeated, now called “Elijah.” He’s smoking a cigarette, she calls him by his real name, and in a wonderful moment I’d completely missed, she says, “You don’t want to get that Smoke on him.”

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  • Bucky With the Bad Hair (One Thing I Like About Thunderbolts*)

    Bucky With the Bad Hair (One Thing I Like About Thunderbolts*)

    One thing I liked in Thunderbolts* was during the end credits, as a series of newspaper and magazine covers and clippings move across the screen to show how the media is reacting to the events of the movie. One item shown blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quickly is the quote “I like them!” attributed to David Brooks.

    Brooks is the commentator for The New York Times who’s become infamous — at least in the parts of the internet that I spend the most time in — for having some of the shittiest, most tone-deaf takes. I’m not completely sure that the quote was included with that connotation, but it fits perfectly with the tone of a self-aware, highly meta-textual movie about a team that describes itself with “we suck.”

    Based solely on the premise, you might think that this was just the MCU equivalent of Suicide Squad — or I read one comment online that it just looked like “Guardians of the Galaxy but grayer and less fun” — but I think it’s perfectly placed in the timeline of the MCU, both within the fiction and outside of it. The movies haven’t been subtle about gradually setting up a team of anti-heroes (and a team of younger heroes at the same time), and the public hasn’t been subtle about getting tired of superhero movies. There’s a strong sense throughout Thunderbolts* of “yes, we get it.”

    Since the story focuses on Yelena as its protagonist, it makes a lot of callbacks to Black Widow, which incidentally I still think is one of the most under-appreciated of the Marvel movies. But in retrospect, I feel like Black Widow was more or less the culmination of the “phase 1 formula” of the MCU: big action sequences, a great cast, a tone that was self-aware enough to be funny and charming but didn’t treat its over-the-top comic book moments as a joke. In other words, making Hollywood action movies out of comic book characters. Thunderbolts* feels to me more like making a 1990s comic book out of all the elements of a Hollywood action movie.

    In the late 80s and through the 90s, which is when I got back into the hobby, comics seemed to be in full-on metatext mode. Characters were getting rebooted and reimagined, with creators seemingly more interested in asking questions about what it means to be a superhero, and how these stories can be relevant to adults, than in making straightforward superhero stories. I never read any of the comics that the characters in Thunderbolts* were based on, but the comics I was reading in that era had characters fighting metaphors more often than supervillains.

    And Thunderbolts* is full of metaphors, most notably depression and grief, but also the explicit question “what are we even doing here?” That means it feels a bit more grounded than previous entries in the franchise. Characters swear more than usual, and there’s straightforward talk about drug use. (But still all within the confines of a PG-13 rating). I liked that John Walker was allowed to just be an unlikeable asshole, even if not an irredeemable one. And it doesn’t spoil anything to say that the villains in this movie are way too powerful for the team to defeat in a typical super-powered fight — they say as much in the trailer — but they still turn out to be uniquely equipped to defeat them.

    My main complaint, in fact, is with Julia-Louis Dreyfuss’s character of Valentina de Fontaine. It seems like she was cast largely because of her performance in Veep, which would’ve been an excellent addition to the MCU. But here, it seems like there are too many guard rails still up. She’s never allowed to just cut loose, and always seems to stop just short of being reprehensibly nasty.

    A bunch of ragtag misfits learning to work together as a team to beat a seemingly unstoppable foe could easily turn into the corniest, most predictable story. But I think Thunderbolts* works by having exactly the right combination of actors, writers, and a franchise that’s self-aware enough to recognize when it’s in danger of overstaying its welcome.

    It’s aware that its characters aren’t Marvel’s A-listers (or even C-listers), but it has a fantastic, charismatic cast. It’s aware that it can’t keep repeating the MCU formula over and over again and expect another Avengers or Infinity War level of response, so it tries to do something different and more relevant. It manages to honor all of its franchise commitments, not just with a feeling of obligation, but by making them feel fun again. And it dispenses with the wide-eyed “you’ll believe a man can fly!” wonder and optimism, but instead of descending into cynicism, it insists on reminding us why we watch these movies in the first place: for stories about heroes, redemption, and people working together to make the world a better place.

    PS I normally hate when studio marketing departments try cute things with titles like Se7en and refuse to use them (I’ll make an exception for M3GAN because it seems to be part of the joke), but I like the asterisk in Thunderbolts* and don’t mind using it because I thought it was so cleverly handled at the end of the movie.

  • One Thing I Guess I Like About Bodies Bodies Bodies

    One Thing I Guess I Like About Bodies Bodies Bodies

    Bodies Bodies Bodies is a horror comedy satire from 2022 about a bunch of rich, terminally online, awful Gen-Zers trapped in a house during a hurricane. I didn’t like it very much, but I was genuinely pleased to see a movie so completely unconcerned with whether I like it.

    I can’t even recall the last time I saw a movie that wasn’t making at least a token attempt to play to the Gen X crowd. Here, representing the out-of-touch old man community is Lee Pace, who’d I’d always assumed was a Millennial, but turns out was born right at the end of the 1970s. His character, and Pace’s performance, were my favorite things about the movie.

    He’s the character I identified with the most, for reasons that should be obvious. Pace, like me, is also supernaturally handsome and with a physique that has other men seething with jealousy. But even more than that, he’s trying to have a good, fun hang with a bunch of people in their 20s and finding himself completely out of his element.

    The part might not seem to give Pace a lot to work with. He’s basically just there to be older, super hot, and a little bit dumb. If it were under-played or over-played too much, he could’ve just ended up being either the butt of the joke, or just another arrogant beautiful person who’s completely unsympathetic. Instead, he makes the best use of his relatively limited screen time: a realistic expression of annoyance, a good-natured attempt to have fun with a bunch of the shittiest people, or a scene trying to make sense of the game that everyone but him seems to be playing.

    The movie’s structure would suggest that Bee is the audience’s entry point into this awful and close-knit group, but it’s actually Greg who’s the most human one in a group of monsters.

    Considering that it’s a horror comedy, I didn’t think Bodies Bodies Bodies was scary enough or funny enough. And I appreciate the ideas behind the satire, but the execution just didn’t work for me. I did like the description that I read from the filmmakers, describing it as being less like a slasher movie and more like Lord of the Flies, with the character completely breaking down in just a few hours without their cell phones.

    There’s a ton of dialogue throughout, but the only lines that I thought actually landed were Bee’s final line “I’ve got reception,” and an earlier one from Sophie. The other characters are asking if there are any guns in the house, Sophie says no with something like, “David’s dad is a jerk, but his politics check out.” They have no reference for anything genuine outside of social media.

    But to me, the rest of it felt like the movie wanted to have it both ways: most of the characters are both the targets of the satire and the ones doing the criticism, often at the same time. The scene at the end with Jordan, Alice, Sophie, and Bee all bringing their baggage to the surface seems like it’d be clever and funny on paper. And I can’t fault any of the performances, especially Rachel Sennott’s, since they’re all played as believable, instead of winking at the camera, or over-playing the punchlines. But the end result just seems like a bunch of shitty people with their Obnoxious dials turned up to maximum at all times. I didn’t get any sense of rhythm.

    Which is, I don’t think coincidentally, how I usually feel after using TikTok for more than a few minutes. I don’t actually know whether that was deliberate, but either way, I really do like the idea of something well-made that knows exactly the audience it’s trying to reach. Even if that audience doesn’t include me.

  • One Thing I Like About Until Dawn

    One Thing I Like About Until Dawn

    David Sandberg has had a strong presence on the internet for as long as I can remember, making how-to videos about his process of making short horror films and how he’s applied that mentality to big-budget studio movies like Shazam. It’s clear that he just loves the craft of filmmaking and sharing that with other aspiring filmmakers.

    As part of the promotion for his new movie Until Dawn, he’s made a great video about his desire to do as much of the horror movie gags in camera as practical effects, using CGI sparingly and only when necessary. He shows how he made quick tests with his wife, co-producer, and frequent collaborator Lotta Losten, to prove out how scenes like smashing someone’s face against the floor, or stabbing them through the chest with a pickaxe, could actually work.

    If it’s not clear, I highly recommend watching that video before you see Until Dawn, for a few reasons: first, it’s just interesting to have the process in mind as you’re watching it play out. Second, it’s fun to see the actors having fun with the process of making a horror movie, since the final product always just shows them being miserable. But most importantly: it was a perfect bait-and-switch to set me up for my two favorite scenes in the movie.

    I can’t say what those are without spoiling them, but I can say that the movie was kind of rough going until it hit my favorite scene. It has to set up its premise, of a young woman with a group of her friends traveling to the last known locations of her sister, who went missing a year ago. I guess that all of the exposition is effective for setting up everything it has to: those details, plus the relationships between all of the characters, along with the fact that one of them is at least a little bit psychic. But it sure is clunky.

    Even after the movie gets to the good stuff, and sets up the part of the premise that is revealed in the trailer — all of the characters are killed, after which time resets and they have to go through it all over again — it doesn’t seem to do a lot to make itself stand out as more than a b-grade millennial horror movie. That’s until the third night of the cycle, which is when the movie completely won me over.

    Until Dawn is only loosely inspired by the video game, more borrowing images and ideas than a concrete plot line. That’s not a problem for me, since I only ever got about halfway through the game before I lost interest. For people like me who are v e r y s l o w at getting through games, the time investment wasn’t worth the payoffs. But it borrows the best elements: the story of a mine cave-in, a mention of Rami Malek’s character from the game, the game’s monsters, and best of all, Peter Stormare coming back to play his creepy psychiatrist with a copious amount of beard dye.

    As the filmmakers themselves have said in interviews, making a live-action adaptation of the game would be a pointless retread, since the game was already cinematic and heavily relied on motion capture performances from recognizable actors. So I think taking it in a different (and in my opinion, much more interesting and fun) direction was exactly the right choice.

    Because more than anything else, it’s based on the idea of video games, and the way that having multiple lives changes how you think about stories. And it’s based around delivering the most memorable moments from exploitative horror and slasher movies: the kills that make you cringe, or laugh, or ideally both. There’s just enough story and character development to tie everything together, and I don’t think it’s at all dismissive to say that. Instead, it’s a sign that the filmmakers knew exactly the strengths of this format and what they wanted to emphasize, with as little as possible getting in the way.

    Now more about my two favorite scenes, and why I liked them so much, after a spoiler break.

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  • One Thing I Like About The Ballad of Wallis Island

    One Thing I Like About The Ballad of Wallis Island

    If I’m being honest, by the time The Ballad of Wallis Island started wrapping things up, I wasn’t sure that I even liked it. I’d expected it to be a small movie, and my choice to see it in a theater was only partly to make full use of my AMC subscription, but mostly to give it the best chance possible to charm me.

    The premise is that Herb, a musician who’d been half of the folk duo McGwyer and Mortimer before going off on a less successful solo career, is hired for a small performance on a remote island. On arriving, he discovers that the audience for the show will be one man, Charles, a McGwyer and Mortimer superfan who’d won the lottery and could therefore afford to pay for the exclusive show. He then discovers that Charles isn’t that interested in the solo stuff, and he’s also hired McGwyer’s ex and former partner Nell to come to the island to perform their duets, and that she’s brought along her new husband.

    But as much as I like the cast — in particular, I’ve liked Tim Key since Taskmaster and been a big fan of Carey Mulligan since she was in the best episode of Doctor Who — I didn’t find it quite as funny as I’d hoped I would. And while the music is very good, none of the songs had that transcendent quality I’d hoped from a movie devoted to the power of music to move people.

    Most of the comedy comes from the fact that Charles’s character is impossibly awkward and unused to being around other people, especially since the death of his wife. There’s a strong sense that Tim Key and Tom Basden are riffing their way through much of the movie, hoping that the chemistry of their friendship will come through via their script. It’s kind of a risky move, because there’s a delicate balance between “charmingly awkward” and “exhausting,” and a significant part of the movie depends on your being more charmed than annoyed.

    It also feels like a bit of a risk having Mulligan playing a part that is written like an actual human being would act in this situation. She’s essentially playing a happier version of the same role she played in Inside Llewyn Davis, as if we’d fast-forwarded a decade or so past her depression and into a well-adjusted life, but she still has no patience for men from her past who can’t get their shit together. It depends a lot on Mulligan’s charisma coming through, which she has in enormous supply. And the character of Nell is nice, friendly, and supportive, but it’s clear that she came to perform a concert and she simply has no desire to be a character in a romantic comedy.

    One thing I liked a lot was when Herb was showing Nell the cover of his next album, a collection of collaborations called “Feat.” It shows him in sunglasses and a bucket hat and ridiculously whitened teeth, surrounded by money. He explains that the title is a play on “featuring,” as in Herb McGwyer feat. Other Artist Name.

    The movie and the characters seem to focus on how shamelessly commercial the album cover is, how he’s posing at something that he’s not, while the McGwyer and Mortimer covers that we see feel a lot more genuine. I liked the slightly more subtle implication of it, which became more evident as the movie went on: not satisfied as a solo artist, he’s been trying in vain to recreate his most successful collaboration.

    Or at least, it was a subtle implication, before a character comes right out and tells him this directly in a later scene. Which is my main disappointment with the movie, that there’s basically nothing that’s left unsaid or unexplained. If it seems like I’ve given away too much in a “spoiler-free” post about it, that’s just because I have a hard time imagining anyone who gets 30 minutes into this movie without being able to predict exactly how it’s going to end. So it ends up being a long time watching two men who don’t recognize the things that are plainly evident to everyone else.

    But in the end, the movie is so heartfelt and so earnest that it was impossible for me not to be charmed and moved by it. And it feels like it’d be churlish of me to dismiss it. It’s ultimately a sweet movie about appreciating the time we get to have with people, and taking that with us as we move on.

  • Pick Poor Robin Clean (One More Thing I Love About Sinners)

    Pick Poor Robin Clean (One More Thing I Love About Sinners)

    I’m likely going to be thinking about Sinners for weeks, trying to unpack the various ways it works. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, since thinking about it is all I’m going to be able to do for a while. I looked into getting tickets to see it again with my husband, but just about every single IMAX showing in our area is sold out for the next couple of weeks.

    Bad for me, but I like to hope it’ll dispel the notion that you can’t get people into theaters to see an original movie not based on any existing IP. Even after Ryan Coogler has repeatedly proven himself, and even after he’s proven that with Michael B Jordan and Ludwig Göransson he’s completely unstoppable, I’ve still heard people describe the movie as a “gamble” on Warner Brothers’s part. Which seems ludicrous.

    In any case, this post contains tons of spoilers that could ruin the magic of the movie, so I strongly suggest avoiding the rest of it unless you’ve already seen it. And again, I implore you to see it in a theater, IMAX if possible if you can get the tickets, to get the maximum effect.

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  • One Thing I Like About Drop

    One Thing I Like About Drop

    The opening credits of Drop, after establishing that it’s directed by the writer/director of Freaky and the Happy Death Day movies, show a bunch of computer-generated signifiers of the restaurant that is the movie’s setting, all swirling against a black background before being destroyed.

    Plates shatter, glasses break, flowers fall, the distinctive archway into the dining hall spirals around the camera. There are chess pieces, and for some reason, dominoes instead of Yahtzee dice.1Maybe there was a last-minute script rewrite after the credits had already been commissioned? It’s all set to Bear McCreary’s tense score, and I think it does a great job of setting the mood for everything that’s to follow.

    The sequence doesn’t directly reference anything that I’m aware of, but the overall vibe is immediately reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie, Vertigo in particular. I don’t want to oversell the movie by suggesting that it stands up to Hitchcock’s classics, but the thing I like best about it is that it aspires to be that same kind of high-concept, experimental suspense thriller.

    The premise of the movie is that Violet, a widowed single mom, is on her first date since the violent death of her abusive husband. She’s nervously agreed to meet her date — who’s played by one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen, which if I’m being honest probably went a long way towards my liking this movie — in a top-floor restaurant surrounded by windows overlooking the city. During the date, she starts getting anonymous Air Drop messages on her phone, which gradually become more sinister and threatening, eventually ordering her to kill her date or they’ll murder her son.

    I think I kept thinking of the opening credits, and the implicit references to classic suspense thrillers, because the movie feels so deliberately constructed. It seems to be constantly experimenting with what it can do with its limited set, its small cast of characters, and its building sense of paranoia in a way that feels very old-school. You’re invested in what’s happening, but even more than that, you’re invested in the question of how the filmmakers are going to pull this off. Can they make an entire feature-length suspense thriller set entirely inside one restaurant? Can they keep raising the stakes without stretching the plausibility too far? Can they keep you guessing who’s behind the messages, and wondering how Violet is going to get out of the situation?

    As it turns out: mostly. There’s a clever gimmick where the incoming messages are projected as giant white words around Violet’s head. It keeps the pace moving, feeling like a conversation between Violet and her assailant instead of someone reading and responding to text messages. It also is a constant reminder of the artifice of the premise, reminding you that this is very much supposed to feel like a thrill ride.

    Probably my biggest criticism of Drop is that I wish they’d somehow completely committed to the bit. Things kind of fall apart and get predictable at the climax, and I can imagine an alternate scenario in which the action never had to leave the restaurant. What if Violet had somehow turned the tables on her assailants, using her own security system to help defeat the home invader? What if the reveal of the person who was sending the messages had been saved until the very end, at which point we get our action-packed showdown?2And while we’re at it, keep the action inside the restaurant and make a more direct reference to North By Northwest when Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint to safety?

    You could also make a reasonable argument that the movie is a bit exploitative of survivors of domestic abuse, but personally, I think it justifies itself. It shows how abusers try to make their targets believe that the abuse is their own fault, and it makes them feel trapped with no escape. I did appreciate that they included multiple references to resources for people to escape domestic violence, within the movie itself, instead of just at the end of the credits which most people will rarely see.

    Overall, I liked it a lot, much more than I’d expected to. It feels deliberately old-school, inviting you to suspend your disbelief, see how long they can maintain the premise without it all falling apart, and just enjoy the ride.

    • 1
      Maybe there was a last-minute script rewrite after the credits had already been commissioned?
    • 2
      And while we’re at it, keep the action inside the restaurant and make a more direct reference to North By Northwest when Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint to safety?
  • One Thing I Love About Sinners

    One Thing I Love About Sinners

    There’s a sequence in the middle of Sinners that’s such a breathtaking combination of music and imagery, performances and cinematography, spectacle and ideas, that my eyes were already full of tears before it was even over. If nothing else, that one sequence is why I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that experiences like watching Sinners in IMAX are why cinema exists in the first place.

    But I feel like saying anything more would ruin the magic of it, so I’ll pick another thing I love about the movie, which is how it’s so meticulously put together in a way that doesn’t seem at all sterile or artificial.

    Walking into the theater, I knew that it was going to be odd to go to a movie and not have it start out with a trailer for Sinners. It seems like it’s run before everything I’ve seen this year, and possibly it started with teasers last year? It’s been an effective but completely unnecessary case of overkill in marketing, since I was sold from the moment I saw the trailer for the first time. You had me at “Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson, Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, and Wunmi Mosaku1Although I admit at the time I only knew her as “that actress I really liked in Loki!” with a 1930s period piece about human-looking monsters attacking a nightclub in the deep south.”

    I don’t know if it’s because I had trailers on the mind, but I gradually started to realize that the entire 2+ hour run of Sinners was constructed with the best qualities of the best movie trailers. Not that it was in any way cursory or slight, but that there was a sense of rhythm and clarity to everything. Every shot is chosen to be the most impactful image. Each scene has a clear purpose and fits exactly into its necessary place. Characters give an immediate sense of who they are, before you know their names or they’ve even spoken a word.

    It’s worth calling out that last part in particular, since the introduction of Michael B Jordan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack was masterful. There’s a shot of the two of them leaning against a car, and you’ve already got a strong idea of each one’s character well before they’ve been named. And Jordan does such a fantastic job at inhabiting each distinct personality that you almost immediately forget that they’re both played by the same person. I just plain stopped even thinking about “how did they do that shot?” moments, because they were clearly two different actors, obviously.

    And like a trailer, the movie is filled with music. Not just as much as you’d expect from a movie featuring blues singers, and not even as you’d expect from a movie scored by Göransson. Music seems to be playing almost constantly throughout the scenes, when other movies would’ve let the score fade into the background to emphasize the dialogue. It never seems jarring or discordant — I was about a quarter of the way into the movie before I even realized there was more music than usual — but simply as if these characters are constantly surrounded by music.

    There’s one scene where Smoke visits the home of his wife (?) Annie after years of separation. Annie decides to remake the protective mojo bag she’d given to Smoke before he’d left. Throughout, the scene has been set to an instrumental blues guitar piece, and as Annie is lighting a candle for the preparation, she strikes the match three times, each strike perfectly in sync with a note in the background music.

    Sinners isn’t really a musical, even though there’s a ton of wonderful music throughout. It’s not really a horror movie that has breaks for musical numbers, either. The narrative isn’t told through the music, but is inextricably linked with the music. It’s difficult for me to even think of them as separate works of art, since even when it’s not the main focus, the music is such a huge part of how the movie feels.

    In other words, much like a movie trailer. On the way home, I was actually trying to rein in my post-movie hype and figure out exactly why I was so blown away by it. Why I was sitting through the end credits thinking of nothing except for how much I wanted to see it again right now. It’s not some huge, sprawling epic. It’s not a special effects showcase filled with spectacle. It wasn’t breathtaking or adrenaline-pumping as an action movie, and it wasn’t all that horrifying for a horror movie. The music is excellent but none of it was in a style that particularly resonates with me. I liked all the characters but didn’t really love any of them.2But Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim and Li Jun Li’s Grace came close. And the ideas in the movie are wonderful but not perspective-alteringly profound.

    What I realized is that, like the music perfectly coming in sync with Annie’s action before diverging again, everything in Sinners is perfectly combined. It’s got the attention to detail, pacing, and storytelling that has trailer creators working for weeks to distill the perfect encapsulation of a film into a minute or two, and it spreads that across two hours. The result is an experience that I didn’t just watch but felt.

    • 1
      Although I admit at the time I only knew her as “that actress I really liked in Loki!”
    • 2
      But Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim and Li Jun Li’s Grace came close.
  • The Love We (Choose To) Give

    The Love We (Choose To) Give

    One of the reasons Bloom worked so well for me is that I was already terrified before I even opened the book. I had no idea what to expect, but I was sure that it was going to turn viscerally gruesome. And as it turns out, the adrenaline-rush I’m in danger! feeling of a horror story is all but indistinguishable from the adrenaline-rush I’m in danger! feeling of falling hard for someone.

    The only other thing I’ve read by Delilah Dawson was a Star Wars novel based on a theme park expansion, and it had passages with a character flashing back to torture scenes.1That were, apparently, referencing scenes from her earlier novel Phasma. It was nothing beyond the pale, or anything, but it did surprise me to see the shift in tone. I was worried how far things would go when the author wasn’t bound by the constraints of licensed material.

    So I figured that it was worth the risk of spoiling Bloom for myself by doing a quick Google search on the overall vibe of the book. I didn’t find anything particularly revealing, but I did find people on Reddit doing what people on Reddit do best: having absolutely dogshit takes on fictional characters.2If you don’t use Reddit, reviews on Goodreads are a good substitute for the worst possible takes. There were tons of variations on the sentiment that “Ro had it coming” or “I wouldn’t have ignored all the red flags” or “It was implausible how long she ignored the obvious.”

    I guess I feel bad for people who’ve never had an intense crush, or otherwise they’d know that falling in love makes you stupid. Blissfully, deliriously stupid. My take on Bloom was that that was a key part of the suspense: readers spend the bulk of the book yelling “don’t go into that dark basement!” figuratively, until we’re yelling “don’t go into that dark basement!” literally, while the protagonist is spending the entire time coming up with somewhat-reasonable justifications for everything.

    One thing I particularly liked about the ending of Bloom, though, was that Dawson resisted any attempts to throw in an unnecessary But I still love her! complication. Once the protagonist realizes the situation she’s in, the infatuation is immediately broken. She runs off a checklist of all the red flags she either didn’t see or deliberately ignored, and then instead of beating herself up over it, she simply sets to work trying to get out of the situation. It was a smart way to handle a character who becomes instantly aware of exactly the type of story she’s in.

    (I was especially happy to see it after reading Dawson say that one of her primary inspirations was Hannibal, because I’m still bitter about the absolute character assassination Thomas Harris did to Clarice Starling in that book).

    While I was still thinking of Bloom, I happened to see a video about the movie Companion (which is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year). The hosts liked it as much as I do, but they had an interpretation that I completely disagree with when it comes to one of the main plot points. They said that the relationship between Patrick and Eli was different from the one between Iris and Josh, because Eli really loved Patrick.

    The reason I disagree so strongly is because it goes against what I think is the most interesting idea in Companion: that we own the love we feel for other people, and the love we choose to give them. No matter what happens afterwards, that feeling is still ours. Regardless of whether they felt the same way.

    Two of the main things I took away from Companion: 1) All the human characters are garbage, and 2) It doesn’t matter that the moments when the robots fell in love with their partners were chosen arbitrarily from a pre-generated list of cute meetings. They’re still real, because they’re real to them. Patrick was able to overwrite his programming because he still had such a vivid memory of first falling in love with Eli. And Iris says repeatedly in voice-over that the two moments of clarity in her life were meeting Josh and killing him. Even with everything she’s learned, that first memory was special to her.

    It’s such a great idea for a movie that deals with ideas about autonomy, control, and self-realization. That’s a big part of why I think the scene where Josh has Iris tied up and is explaining the situation is so important: he’s insisting on exerting control one last time, to say that this is all that their “relationship” ever was, and that it was never real.

    In context, it feels like exposition. But later, after we’ve learned more about the extent of Iris’s self-awareness, and the extent of a semi-sci-fi story using love robots as a metaphor, it’s easier to recognize it as the way that controlling people and narcissists prefer to end relationships (assuming they’re not cowardly enough to just leave the other person ghosted). To redirect all of the responsibility and blame on the other person, rewind time, and insist that nothing that they believed in was ever true.

    Iris’s autonomy and Patrick’s autonomy both involve taking back that first memory, and realizing that nothing that happened afterwards can erase how they felt in that moment.

    It’s worth calling out because it’s an idea that I hardly ever see emphasized in fiction, much less in real life. And it’s not just limited to romantic relationships, but friendships, working relationships, even the more mundane choices we make. We can get fixated on the idea that we can control what happens to us by learning from our mistakes and being wary of repeating them. But I think we have more control over our own lives when we give up that feeling of certainty and (false) security. When we accept that we can’t control everything that happens to us, but we absolutely can control how we respond to it, and how we think about it afterwards.

    Speaking for myself, it’s just nice to finally be able to look back at choices I’ve made with peace instead of regret. To think about crushes I’ve had that were unreturned, friendships that eventually went sour, trust in people that turned out to be undeserved, and instead of feeling embarrassed about getting myself into those situations, to be happy that I had the courage to put myself out there.

    Edit: In case the preamble didn’t make it clear, this was prompted solely by a movie I watched and a book I read, not by any real-life current events! Everything’s good!

    • 1
      That were, apparently, referencing scenes from her earlier novel Phasma.
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      If you don’t use Reddit, reviews on Goodreads are a good substitute for the worst possible takes.
  • It’s a good scream

    It’s a good scream

    Previously on Spectre Collie, I finally watched Phantom of the Paradise and although I still don’t really like it, I was forced to admit that I might have been wrong about Brian De Palma all these years.

    My friend Jake recommended that if I’m coming around on De Palma, I might be interested in Blow Out, the conspiracy thriller from 1981 that reworks Blow-Up from a 1960s mod fashion photographer into a Reagan-era movie sound designer.

    Based on its premise — John Travolta’s sound designer character is recording effects for a slasher movie one night when he hears a gunshot that proves a fatal car crash wasn’t an accident — and my familiarity of De Palma movies in the late 70s and early 80s, I’d expected it to be a more lurid and shallower version of The Conversation. This was backed up by the Criterion Collection’s cover for their version, which is technically accurate, but in my opinion so completely misrepresents the overall tone and look of the movie that it verges on false advertising.

    That assumption was one of the vestiges of my former life as an Arrogant Failed Film Student. “Failed” is key there, since it’s a snobbery inspired by resentment, the feeling of I could’ve done better than these hacks, if I’d only gotten the chance! I’m still in the process of putting that past version of myself to rest, where “to rest” means laying him down comfortably in bed, whispering You can rest now, your struggles are past, and smothering him quietly with a pillow. Preferably with a Quentin Tarantino movie blasting in the background.

    In actuality, Blow Out didn’t feel like a re-imagining, a retread, or a rip-off of either of its most obvious influences. It felt more like another case of De Palma making overt reference to his inspirations, borrowing the set-up of Blow-Up and the mood of The Conversation, and letting them form the structure of the very specific style of movie he wanted to make. I feel like I could’ve skipped the opening credits and still realized within a minute or two that this was a Brian De Palma movie.

    (more…)
  • One Thing I Like About Lake Mungo

    One Thing I Like About Lake Mungo

    For years, I’ve been seeing and hearing people talk about Lake Mungo with a kind of reverence that I figured must be overblown. People wouldn’t hesitate to call it the scariest movie they’d ever seen, or just as often “the scariest movie you’ve never seen!” since it didn’t get a lot of attention when it was released in 2008. I would frequently hear it described as a slow burn until that scene, which I could only assume was so shocking and horrifying that watching it would leave me forever scarred.

    One of the movie’s highest-profile evangelists was Mike Flanagan, which is a little bit ironic, since I feel like I might’ve had a stronger reaction to Lake Mungo if I hadn’t already seen several of the same ideas played out in The Haunting of Hill House.

    Familiarity with the work that was inspired by it, plus years of built-up expectations from hearing it praised so often, makes me think that I might have just waited too long to watch Lake Mungo. I thought it was very well made, and more importantly, that the most unsettling idea behind it is a smart and profound one. But ultimately, it just didn’t have a big impact on me.

    I should mention that I watched it in the worst possible conditions: on a bright afternoon, using Plex’s free on demand streaming, which meant there were two minutes of ads for every ten minutes of screen time. If you haven’t seen it and want the full effect, I strongly recommend spending a few bucks to watch it ad-free, and watching it alone at night.

    It’s made up entirely of interviews with the family and friends of a teenage girl who died by drowning, along with elements of “found footage” like photos, video clips, news footage, and cell phone recordings.

    A casual watch would suggest that everything that makes it a horror movie is in that found footage; there’s a lot of zooming in on photos to reveal a mysterious figure barely visible standing in the background. That’s a creepy gimmick that may still have been novel when the movie was released, but has certainly become overfamiliar now. If you watch it as if it were just another found footage movie, you’d probably go away declaring that it’s boring and not at all scary.

    That’s the most shallow possible take on the movie, though. The real depth of the movie comes from everything that we learn after the “jump scare,” when many of the ideas that had been seeded earlier in the movie all start to collide with each other.

    And the thing I like the most about it is also the thing that will likely turn off anyone looking for “the scariest movie you’ve ever seen:” its realistic feeling of restraint. It plays so convincingly as a documentary throughout. Most of the footage is too grainy, shaky, or too hard to make out details that it just doesn’t seem interesting enough for a horror movie. (And for the parts that do seem obviously scary, an in-story explanation is given).

    Even more than that, the performances from everyone are near flawless. No one is “bad,” and the worst you get is the occasional hint of artifice that reminds you that these are actors. Particularly good are the actors playing the girl’s parents and brother, who nail the tone of people who’ve gone through something horrible, but are repressing it because they know that they’re on camera. It probably helps that it’s an Australian movie, so everybody speaks with a matter-of-fact inflection that turns up at the end? Like every statement is a question? And there’s things that are being left unsaid because they’re being polite?

    It’s kind of the opposite of a found footage movie like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, since it deliberately avoids scenes that are designed to feel like they’re happening in the moment. In Lake Mungo, everyone is talking about events from some distance away, and they’re careful to say only the things that are appropriate to say in a documentary. The artifice of the documentary format actually makes it feel more real, since you’re never challenged by an image that seems implausible or an emotional outburst that seems melodramatic.

    Which all means that the implications of the photos and recordings you see in Lake Mungo are much scarier than the recordings themselves. The lingering weight of the ending comes largely from seeing the surviving members of a family that’s been through horrible events but can now speak about it calmly and directly with a documentary crew. Essentially, it becomes a haunted house story where the real horror comes after the family finds closure.

  • One Thing I Love About Paddington 2

    One Thing I Love About Paddington 2

    With everything that works so well in Paddington 2, it’s hard to pick a stand-out, but I’ll say that the most remarkable thing to me is the casting.

    Not just Brendan Gleeson and Hugh Grant, although they’re both great, very funny and clearly having fun. And Grant seems to love poking fun at himself. I especially liked how Phoenix’s home was absolutely filled with headshots of Hugh Grant throughout his career.

    What I really mean is the casting of the title character. I realize that Ben Whishaw is credited, but I know what he looks like. And I’ve seen three of these movies now, and I’ve never once had even the hint of a glimmer of a suspicion that Paddington was anything other than a real, talking bear interacting with a ton of UK character actors.

    I know that there was an extremely talented and likely gigantic team of modelers, animators, and effects artists all working on the character. And the movies even go out of their way to show off their work, like a stage magician pulling rings over his floating assistant, to prove that there are no wires. They have Paddington diving into water, getting fluffed up by static electricity or hair dryers, standing in rain, and probably a dozen other things that my ignorance of CGI means I don’t fully understand how difficult it is to pull off. But all that work is invisible, because he’s simply a fully real character.

    Part of the reason is because the movie never acts as an effects showcase, but just takes it as a given that Paddington is a real talking bear in the middle of London. (Which is also something that the effects work makes possible, of course). It never even enters your mind to wonder how something was done, because it’s obvious: he’s really there. I spend the entire runtime thinking about how a particular piece of 2D animation was done, or how exactly the screenplay is working, or how the themes are playing off of each other, all without questioning the main character.

    In fact, I spent an embarrassingly long time in Paddington 2 wondering how exactly they’d managed to have Paddington and Aunt Lucy walking so seamlessly through a computer-generated pop-up book.

    But my favorite scene of Paddington 2 is a brief one, where Mrs Brown is walking through Windsor Gardens, passing many of the same neighbors that we saw at the start of the movie. Now, the street is gray and colorless. The people are brusque or absent-minded, and they’re all clearly having a bad day.

    We’d just seen a fantastic sequence where Paddington had quickly had a dramatic effect on all of the prisoners and the prison itself, transforming the miserable canteen into a charming cafe. Here, we’re seeing what happens without Paddington around. It’s not quite as dramatic, but it’s clear that his absence is making life worse for everyone. Things are just so much better when he’s around.

    The way that Paddington 2 treats Paddington the “actor” and Paddington the character is what makes the movie, and in fact the whole series, so magical. By insisting that the character is real, it does for adults what we adults like to do for children in theme parks: treat the mascots as the real thing, and never refer to them as performers in costumes. It insists that the magic isn’t confined to the movie itself, but is all around us all the time. And by showing the transformative effect of kindness and consideration, and especially by showing us what happens without it, it reminds us of how much we can do with so little effort.

    Paddington 2 has the perfect ending, in that Paddington is rewarded not for his adventures catching a thief and retrieving a stolen book, but for making the lives of his family, friends, and neighbors better than it would be without him.