Spectre Collie

One Thing I Like About The Ballad of Wallis Island

Tom Basden and Tim Key’s story of lost loves and forced reunions manages to charm its way through in the end

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)

There’s one scene in Sinners that seems to be played for a laugh, but it’s packed with meaning that ripples throughout the entire movie. Long post with lots of spoilers.

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.

One Thing I Like About Drop

Drop places itself in the long history of high-concept suspense thrillers, then makes a reasonably convincing argument that it belongs there

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.¹ 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?²

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

The experience of watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in IMAX is why cinema exists in the first place

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 Mosaku¹ 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.² 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.

Blue Prince, or, Betrayal at House of Leaves

My take on the brilliant roguelike exploration puzzle house-building story adventure game Blue Prince

My obsession of the moment is Blue Prince, the outstanding first¹ game from the studio Dogubomb, written, designed, and directed by Tonda Ros. It’s been getting a ton of attention and buzz from video game fans, in addition to several perfect reviews calling it one of the best games ever made, and I think the praise is entirely deserved.

The premise is that you’ve been named in your great uncle’s will to inherit his magnificent estate Mount Holly. As with most fictional wills, there’s one significant stipulation: you have to find the secret 46th room in the 45-room manor. Each night, all of the rooms leading from the entrance hall shift position, and the house never has the same layout twice. As an additional complication, you have to start each day’s attempt fresh, keeping nothing from your previous days apart from the things you’ve learned in your exploration.²

My first couple of hours of playing, I wasn’t going for an optimal strategy so much as I was marveling at how many different types of game they’d managed to blend together. What if Myst and Riven were roguelikes? What if Betrayal at House on the Hill created a real 3D environment that you could move around, picking up pieces of environmental storytelling? What if a traditional inventory-based adventure game added the layer of making you responsible for placing the rooms containing puzzles and the rooms containing their solutions?

The initial experience is the best kind of overwhelming. Rooms are filled with enigmatic photographs and drawings that suggest every single detail might be a necessary clue for later on. I happily pulled out a notebook — which I never do in games, insisting “that’s what computers are for!” — and began furiously documenting everything. The photo library on my phone is now overflowing with screenshots of book pages and other documents found in the game. Some are probably useful for a puzzle later on, many are probably only there to establish the game’s lore and world-building.

In fact, that feeling of drowning in clues is the only criticism I have of the game so far.³ The game is very good at communicating its clues for puzzles, but not as good at communicating when or where the clues can be applied. And because the available rooms are semi-randomized, and the layout is up to the player’s discretion, there’s a disorienting sense that you’re missing opportunities to solve puzzles, or you’re wasting time going around in circles.

For me, the most anxiety-inducing case of this was with the pairs of related drawings that appear in most rooms. It was obvious that they had some significance, and it was straightforward enough to figure out how to decipher them. The game has copious hints to help you decipher them, but I was left at a loss trying to figure out how and where to apply them. I spent multiple rooms through the house trying out the permutations to find a connection, convinced that I was losing progress each time I had to reset. My husband, who’s usually better at puzzles than I am, figured it out quickly, and he gave me exactly the nudge I needed without spoiling it for me outright. (In case you’re in the same boat I was: notice that the rooms can change based on their placement in the house itself, not just based on their placement in relation to each other).

And as it turns out, if I’d been patient, I would’ve eventually encountered the room that explains how to solve the puzzle. I was thankful that I’d gotten a hint that let me feel like I’d figured it out mostly by myself, instead of the outright explanation given by the game. But the larger lesson was clear: even though the game’s premise can make it feel like overwhelming chaos, there’s a very thoughtful and carefully-designed curve of progression through it.

I reached the end credits of the game last night, after 20 in-game days and, according to Steam, around 20 hours of real-time play. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there is still a ton left to explore, puzzles I still haven’t solved, areas of the estate I haven’t yet opened, blueprints I haven’t yet placed in the house, and parts of the story I haven’t yet uncovered. Considering how I’ve never been a completionist, even before I got old and more precious with my free time, it’s a testament to how well the game is made that I’m still eager to dive back in and see everything.⁴

But even if the game had ended on its end credits, it was extremely satisfying. Not just a cleverly-constructed game, but a surprisingly engaging story, with an ending that felt moving because I’d been allowed to make all the necessary connections myself. It really is a masterpiece.

Here are some high-level, non-spoiler ideas to keep in mind if you’re planning to play the game or are still early in it, things that I wish I’d known that would’ve calmed my tendency to meta-game it:

Be patient and trust that the game will keep revealing new things.
When placing rooms, try to build out as much of the lower “ranks” as possible in the south of the house to build up your resources, before working your way up to the goal at the north end.
Whenever it’s possible without building yourself into a dead end, always favor placing a blueprint that you’ve never seen before.
Don’t forget to go outside! (Useful for both in game and out of game).

I’ve got more thoughts about the game that might veer into mild spoiler territory, so I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if you haven’t yet reached the end credits of the game and want to discover everything completely fresh.

1
In that it’s the first release of their own original concept, as opposed to making work for other studios
2
With several exceptions that are all, like everything else in this game, thoughtfully designed.
3
Apart from some issues that I’ve heard affect colorblind players, most of which seem like they could be addressed in a future patch.
4
Although I was feeling very proud and smart and accomplished for reaching the end goal last night, and then on my first subsequent day, almost immediately built myself into a corner and had to end the run embarrassingly early.

Look Back With Creepy Eyes

My experience on the Apple Vision Pro after a year

I guess there was an anniversary for the Apple Vision Pro a while ago, because I kept seeing people doing retrospectives on it, and I figured I should probably write about my own experiences. If only because I spent so much time leading up to the launch writing about how hyped I was, but then never did a follow-up after the honeymoon period was over.

But that idea, like the headset itself, went back to sitting unused on a shelf.

Even though I almost never use it, I don’t regret getting it, and I don’t have any real intention of trying to sell it.¹ With all my back-and-forth trying to talk myself into getting one, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was simply owning the device itself. Like the Apple Watch “series 0,” the first iPad, the first iPhone, one of the original iPods, and the used Macintosh SE I’ve got sitting on my desk, I like having it as a kind of landmark of consumer technology history more than for its practical utility. In other words: I still just think it looks neat.

I still think that a lot of the negative reviews early on had too much of a We were promised jetpacks! vibe to them. There’s still an amazing amount of groundbreaking technology crammed into the headset, all in service of trying to make the experience of using it as frictionless and approachable as possible, and it still seems short-sighted to be dismissive of all that to focus on frivolous complaints.² Essentially complaining that it’s only 10 years ahead of its time instead of 20.

Ultimately, pretty much everything I like and dislike about the Vision Pro is a result of one key decision Apple made when positioning it as a product: they want it to be a “lifestyle” device instead of an “enthusiast” one.

There’s nothing surprising about that, and it was pretty evident even before the device launched. The Vision Pro in its first incarnation feels like something that could only be made by Apple, because of the industrial design, the focus on interconnected devices, vertical integration, tight connection between hardware and software, and the years spent advancing and refining the state of ARKit on iOS devices. But that also means that Apple would need the device to sell at iPad or Mac levels to make any sense as an Apple product, and it’s probably impossible to get those numbers from being limited just to gamers or fans of the Quest.³

What did surprise me was how much that one decision rippled out into everything else, and how much it’s keeping the platform from feeling like it’ll find its audience.

1
And if any early adopters are still considering selling theirs: good luck with that! It sure feels like all the interest dried up not long after the initial hype did.
2
Such as, of course, the complaint that it messes up your hair.
3
And Apple just doesn’t sell hardware at a loss, which Facebook is more willing to do.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Songs For and/or About The Earth

Prompted by a new release from Dirty Projectors (kind of), presenting the extents of my awareness of modern symphonic music

A year ago, we went to see the LA Philharmonic perform Song of the Earth, a song cycle largely about climate change from David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. I enjoyed it a lot, considering that it’s more experimental than my tastes tend to run, and the subject matter is pretty heavy.

At the time, I said I hoped that one day there would be an album release, since even though I can’t say with much confidence that I understood it or even felt it to its fullest effect, there were still several themes from it that kept bouncing around in my head. Today is that day, and you can get a recording of it from bandcamp and streaming services.

For a “serious” work, it’s got an awful lot of hooks. Or I guess they’re more accurately called motifs or something. In any case, the best example of that is “Gimme Bread,” which has a repeated “Yeah yeah” and xylophone flourish that is carried on throughout the rest of the work. (And the drive home, and the months afterwards).

Another thing I said at the time was that because of my very limited frame of reference for modern symphonic music, I kept being reminded of Orion by Philip Glass. Not just for the sense of repetition, but because it’s surprisingly accessible for those of us who don’t typically like orchestral or classical music. My favorite is “Brazil,” which I first heard as part of the excellent soundtrack for the PSP game Lumines.

The Love We (Choose To) Give

A nice way of thinking about failed relationships, courtesy of Companion and Bloom (spoilers for both)

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.¹ 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.² 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.
2
If you don’t use Reddit, reviews on Goodreads are a good substitute for the worst possible takes.

It’s a good scream

Watching Blow Out by Brian De Palma and continuing my struggle to rethink how I watch movies

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.

One Thing I Like About Lake Mungo

Lake Mungo is a fictional documentary about ghost sightings that’s most horrifying for what it implies

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

The most remarkable thing about Paddington 2 might be its casting

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.

One Thing I Love About Paddington

The first Paddington is a perfect example of the difference between a family comedy and a kids’ movie

I couldn’t watch Paddington in Peru without confessing that I hadn’t seen either of the first two movies, and I’m still in the process of correcting that grave lapse in judgment on my part.

I loved Paddington, as I expected to. What I didn’t expect was that I’d go away thinking I’d watched them in the correct order. Paddington in Peru was a fantastic introduction to all of these characters and their universe, a celebration of joyfulness and kindness and creativity. Many of its most magical ideas — like the tree mural withering and blossoming along with the family, the dollhouse view of the Browns’ home, and the insertion of cutaways and beautiful animated sequences — were all seeded in the first movie, but I wasn’t disappointed to see that they weren’t wholly original. They felt not like retreads, but acknowledging what makes the storytelling of these movies so wonderful, with the benefit of a decade’s worth of advancements in visual effects.

But while I still love the third movie, I at least have a better understanding of the consistent criticism that it felt slight compared to the first two. The main reason, I think, is that Paddington in Peru‘s themes are more universal takes on family, belonging, and kindness. Paddington is more pointedly about refugees, taking care of people who are different from us, and how London’s multiculturalism is something to be celebrated. All an especially important reminder in the midst of the right-wing xenophobia that led to Brexit.

What’s remarkable is how it can have such a clear and specific message — amidst countless other family movies with much more generic messages like “believe in yourself” and “family is important” — without feeling like a lecture or a sermon. It all coexists happily with everything else in the movie, never fading into the background of a kid’s wacky slapstick cartoon adventure, but never becoming such a focus that you can quickly and simply say “this is what this movie is about.”

It’s like the calypso band that serves as the movie’s Greek chorus, seen as characters pass by without acknowledging, singing a song that reflects the characters’ current mood, reminding us of not only what’s happening in the movie but also that all the vibrancy of post-millennial London was because of multicultural influences, not in spite of them.

Even the xenophobic Mr Curry, the direct mouthpiece for bigots complaining about people moving into the neighborhood and bringing their “jungle music,” isn’t allowed to become the focus of the movie’s conflict. He’s a buffoonish side character, and the movie doesn’t bother making him out to be more than a nuisance. The main conflict, in what is the movie’s most ingenious gag, is a villain trying to turn Paddington into a stuffed bear. And I hate to undermine the joke by making it more explicit than even the movie does, but come on. That is just inspired.

There’s a long trend in family movies of making sure that all of the content is carefully compartmentalized according to age, sensibility, and demographic value. It’s been going on for so long, in fact, that we’ve fallen into the habit of praising the compartmentalization itself. How many times have you read the review of a “family movie” that has a line about references or jokes that “fly over the heads of the little ones?” And it’s described as the height of cleverness on the part of the filmmakers, for being able to deliver crass, commercial, zany slapstick to the kids while still giving the grown-ups the dick jokes they crave, so they don’t have to suffer through it alone.

Paddington responds with an alternate approach: why not just make the stuff for kids actually good? So that the adults enjoy it, too, instead of having to suffer through it?

There’s plenty of slapstick in Paddington, and the trailer makes it seem as if that’s the entire movie. But even the broadest, most trailer-worthy gags are part of what is simply a masterfully-constructed comedy, packed with jokes that work for any age level. Paddington uses the family’s toothbrushes to clean his ears, pulling out huge gobs of earwax; later, Mr Brown is brushing his teeth and looks suspiciously at the toothpaste tube. Mr Brown dresses as a cleaning lady and gets hit on by a security guard, a classic that goes back to Looney Toons and further; afterwards, there’s an extended gag about his not looking like the picture on his badge that is just a perfectly-executed comedy routine.

I felt like there was nothing in the movie that was aimed solely at one part of the crowd or the other; it’s aimed at everyone, and everyone could enjoy it to differing degrees. Paddington eats a suitcase full of marmalade on his trip, he’s lying over-full in a lifeboat, the ship’s horn goes off, he looks around embarrassed to see if he’s the one that’s made that sound. That’s the kind of timeless gag that appeals to both the 10-year-old boy and the 53-year-old man who still has a 10-year-old boy’s sense of humor.

And there are just brilliantly conceived and executed gags throughout. Just a few more of my favorites: putting Paddington into a van that reads “taxi” and then closing the door to reveal it says “taxidermist.” Paddington taking the “dogs must be held” sign too literally. The Browns arriving at the hospital as long-haired bikers and leaving the hospital as overcautious first parents in a beige station wagon. Nicole Kidman’s room full of stuffed animal heads mounted on the wall, then the secret doorway that reveals all of the animals’ rears are mounted on the opposite side.

Paddington does hit all the story beats of “a kid’s movie,” but to me they felt like natural parts of an action-comedy’s structure, instead of purely formulaic or manipulative. I did cry at a few points, but it was when the movie showed an act of kindness, like when the royal guard silently offers Paddington shelter and a selection of emergency snacks from underneath his own hat.

The overwhelming feeling I get from both Paddington movies I’ve seen so far is the reminder that none of the messages we get from family movies are supposed to be just for kids. There’s nothing juvenile or simplistic about having the courage to take risks, being compassionate to other people, or being kind. Considering how many adults seem to have forgotten the basics to such a degree that we all deserve a hard stare, it’s good to see a story that doesn’t encourage us to tune out the parts we think don’t apply to us. And it’s good to see filmmakers recognize that “family movie” means something you watch with your kids, and not just in the same room as them.