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 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.

Continue reading “Pick Poor Robin Clean (One More Thing I Love About Sinners)”

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.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

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 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.

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.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.
  • 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.

Continue reading “It’s a good scream”

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.

Literacy 2025: Book 13: Bloom

Delilah S. Dawson’s romantic horror novella about a woman who finds exciting new love at a farmer’s market

Book
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

Synopsis
After a betrayal and break-up, Ro moves back to her home state of Georgia to start her dream job as an assistant professor of literature in Athens. One day while at a farmer’s market wishing for something magical to happen in her life, she meets the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen, selling cupcakes and hand-made soaps and candles from a stall. The two hit it off immediately, and Ro quickly becomes intrigued with the idea of finding everything that’s been missing from her relationships with men, and completely infatuated with someone who seems to be naturally good at everything.

Notes
At the risk of stating the obvious, lesbian romances don’t typically give me anything to work with. So I was surprised as anyone to find myself almost squealing in the first chapters of this book, as Dawson somehow perfectly captures the thrilling feeling of falling hard for someone.

It’s that electrified sense of being simultaneously hyper-self-aware and wary of going too far, but also emboldened by new opportunity. We hear every one of Ro’s thoughts as she goes through all of the stages of a new romance, looking for signs that the attraction is mutual, tamping down sparks of unwarranted jealousy, making sure she’s not falling into patterns of obsessive behavior but then again who’s to say what’s obsessive and what’s perfectly healthy?

I especially love how Ro’s inner monologue hones in on specific phrases and facial expressions in her short exchanges with Ash. It reminded me of when I’ve been crushing hard on someone, and I could leave the briefest, most mundane conversations fully convinced that we’d just engaged in the most sparkling banter.

And because there’s no attempt to hide the premise that this is a horror story, it reads simultaneously like charming romance and suspense thriller. The writing itself gives no hints and definitely no winks to the reader; it is thoroughly the story of a smart, modern woman trying to navigate her way through feelings she’s never felt before. We’re listening to Ro making perfectly understandable and even intelligent choices at the same time we’re looking for all the warning signs and red flags that she’s blissfully blind to. Everything she describes as quaint or charming seems like it could be turned into something ominous and terrifying. The feeling of excitement and danger that comes from first kisses and first sexual experiences is something the reader feels viscerally, because we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to turn horribly dark.

The book is short, but it’s not slight so much as mercifully succinct. It’s also surprisingly funny in places, and it’s enjoyable to read a character in a horror story actually being smart, even when she doesn’t always have her wits about her. And even though we spend the entirety of the novella inside Ro’s mind, the worst moments still maintain the distance of fiction, reminding the reader that this is intended to be a fun horror story.

For other squeamish readers: the gruesome stuff is implied more than fully described, and it never felt as torturous as the other books I’ve seen it compared to. Still, I advise sensitive readers to check for content warnings available online. I don’t want to give anything away here, because a lot of the excitement for me came from having no specific idea how dark the story was going to get.

Verdict
I loved it. It’s the horror-story premise of “don’t go into that door!” played out as a story of romantic infatuation that’s clever, smart, genuinely charming, and embarrassingly (but also delightfully) familiar.

Literacy 2025: Book 12: The Watchers

AM Shine’s suspense thriller about strangers trapped inside a strange bunker in the middle of a dark forest

Book
The Watchers by AM Shine

Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.

Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.

And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.

Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).

It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?

Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.

The Future: Beef

I finally watched Phantom of the Paradise, and it prompted me to re-evaluate my snobbery and how I think of movies

There is exactly one moment in Phantom of the Paradise that works for me, without any kind of reservation or qualification. It’s the press conference where our villain Swan introduces the world to his new performer. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the future: Beef.” The camera pans over to a coffin, which is opened to reveal a curly-haired glam rocker in makeup, who looks to the camera and snarls.

Paul Williams plays it completely straight-faced — as does the movie itself — and even though the previous scene went through a line-up of possible replacements for the nostalgia band that the new act was replacing, the revelation of Beef still came as a surprise to me. It’s a weird, genuinely funny moment that still works over 50 years later.

My enchantment with Beef didn’t last long, since the very next scene shows him to be a stereotype of a queer man that honestly feels too lazy to be offensive. I was going to include a YouTube clip I’d found of Beef’s introduction, but I hadn’t noticed that the description of the video itself has the f-slur. Is it just homophobic, or is it a queer fan of the movie “taking it back?” I don’t care!

I did find an interview with Gerrit Graham talking about the process of coming up with the character, where “process” meant Brian De Palma trying to find euphemisms for what he wanted without actually saying “gay”1Including “like Little Richard,” which is almost charming, and Graham doing the first thing he could think of, and then sticking with that for his entire performance.2Don’t get too attached to Beef; he doesn’t last long (spoiler?).

It felt gratifying to hear that from someone who was involved in the production — instead of someone writing about the movie long after it’d achieved whatever “cult classic” status it has now — because it fit in with the overall impression I had of the movie: ultimately, it doesn’t really warrant all the re-interpretation and analysis it’s gotten over the years, because it’s just hell of corny. It feels like a comedy made by people who don’t have a very sophisticated sense of humor, that happens to include queer characters without actually knowing any queer people.

Beef’s big musical number seemed to me to be what you get if a bunch of extremely straight people tried to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show.3So basically, I guess: KISS. I’d initially thought it was derivative, but Paradise came out a year before Rocky Horror, but a year after the stage production that became the movie. So instead of going too far down that rabbit hole to figure out the specifics, I’m content to just conclude that they were two projects drawing from a lot of the same inspirations, made with very different mindsets.

The most obvious is that the musical in Paradise is on a set inspired by German expressionist movies, while Rocky Horror pointedly bases itself on more modern B-movies. Brian De Palma was a movie fan making movies filled with references to his favorite styles and directors, making a goofy slapstick comedy musical version of Faust. The glam rock elements were included not because of any higher-minded agenda, but simply because that was the flavor of the moment in 1974, just like Sha Na Na-style nostalgia bands had been previously.

Really, the whole idea of my trying to categorize everything into groups of Gross And Offensive, Fun But Dated Camp, or Genuinely Funny Absurdism is itself a post-Twitter phenomenon. That’s when I started trying to analyze whether I was enjoying stuff at the expense of other people, which most often takes the form of being offended on other people’s behalf.

Continue reading “The Future: Beef”
  • 1
    Including “like Little Richard,” which is almost charming
  • 2
    Don’t get too attached to Beef; he doesn’t last long (spoiler?).
  • 3
    So basically, I guess: KISS.