Category: One Thing I Like

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.

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.

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.

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  Maybe there was a last-minute script rewrite after the credits had already been commissioned?
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  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?

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.

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  Although I admit at the time I only knew her as “that actress I really liked in Loki!”
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  But Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim and Li Jun Li’s Grace came close.

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.

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.

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.

The two most genuinely good and surprising aspects of Death of a Unicorn are the performances of Will Poulter and Téa Leoni as two members of the awful rich family at the center of the plot. They took characters designed to be cartoonishly broad satire and somehow found a hook to make them more interesting.

Poulter does it by taking the familiar rich, arrogant, young dimwit and committing completely to his near-total lack of self-awareness. There’s something vaguely human at the heart of the cartoon, as he makes the character truly awful but somehow understandable: this is the natural result of someone who’s never for a moment in his life wanted for anything. Plus the hilarious detail that he’s perpetually dressed in short shorts.

But I think Leoni is the star of the movie, playing the matriarch/implied trophy wife of the family as a woman who’s spent so long spinning her self-serving nature into a kind of performative compassion that she never turns it off. Her face is perpetually twisted in an expression of heartfelt concern, her voice laden with sympathy as she makes it clear that she only wants what’s best for everybody.

It’s especially neat after seeing Mickey 17‘s much more blunt take on cartoonishly awful rich people. The characters in Death of a Unicorn are clearly horrible, but at the same time personable and even friendly. There’s always a sense that their selfishness and outright evil are enabled by generating enough plausible deniability. And not just for themselves, but for the people who work for them, who can tell themselves that they’re not really that bad, as far as bosses go.

But their performances are really the only inspired aspects of Death of a Unicorn, and nothing else in the movie stands out as original or even remarkable. I definitely wouldn’t call it a bad movie, since it works okay as a violent action comedy, and there are a few genuinely funny moments. It seems like all the elements are there for a can’t-fail, effects-driven black comedy.

You’ve got Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Richard E Grant as leads, all delivering exactly on the kinds of things you expect them to bring to a movie.¹And no more, which is part of the issue. Even the casting of secondary characters is spot on to the point of feeling like overkill: Sunita Mani is always great, Jessica Hynes is recognizably likable even when playing completely against type, and I was initially excited to see Steve Park, who I know mostly from his unforgettable scene in Fargo. But of everyone, only Anthony Carrigan seems to have enough to work with to turn into an actual character.

So I was more left with the sense that I’m impressed the movie exists at all. You just don’t see this much money and talent being devoted to a comedy these days, especially not one that is violent and gory enough to limit its potential audience.²For other people as sensitive to blood and gore as I am: it’s all kept at the Universal Horror Nights level, and I never thought it felt real enough to be upsetting or nauseating. If you’re super-sensitive to animal cruelty, it’s there in the title, and probably the most upsetting scene for me involved sawing off the unicorn’s horn. (Spoiler: it gets better). I was actually reminded of Death Becomes Her, and there’s even a similar shot to the well-known one in that movie, where a character is framed looking through the gaping hole left in another character’s body.

Before anybody objects to the comparison: this isn’t nearly as good as Death Becomes Her, because it’s not anywhere near as clever, original, and inventive. Also, Death of a Unicorn doesn’t have nearly the budget, even before being adjusted for inflation, so the effects feel more like an independent film than a showcase for ILM. But it feels like the kind of project that was more common in the 1980s and early 1990s: a one-off comedy project that wasn’t fully horror (like say The Substance), or sci-fi (like Mickey 17), or action comedy (like The Author of This Blog Post Is Drawing a Blank At the Moment), but a mix of multiple genres.

It might be damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about Death of a Unicorn is that it reminded me of better movies, but I think it’s more a case of its reach exceeding its grasp. Maybe the fact that the movie doesn’t feel shockingly inventive and original is a sign that we’ve become spoiled for choice in genre fiction, and that the problem isn’t that the concepts are too weird, but not weird enough.

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  And no more, which is part of the issue.
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  For other people as sensitive to blood and gore as I am: it’s all kept at the Universal Horror Nights level, and I never thought it felt real enough to be upsetting or nauseating. If you’re super-sensitive to animal cruelty, it’s there in the title, and probably the most upsetting scene for me involved sawing off the unicorn’s horn. (Spoiler: it gets better).

I absolutely adored Nosferatu for the first hour or so.

I’d heard it was beautiful, and that was underselling it. It seems to have taken “every frame a painting” as a challenge: can you make something with a run time over 2 hours in which you can pause at literally any moment and get a fantastically gorgeous image?

But more than that, I loved that it was so gloriously ultra-gothic in just about every aspect in just about every moment. Every member of the cast was completely committed to the concept, somehow balancing a sense of overwhelming Victorian repression with a director who must’ve ended every take shouting “MORE!!!”

Lily-Rose Depp deservedly got praise for her performance, since it required her not only to be sympathetic and believable in a world in which the melodrama was kept at dangerously high levels throughout, but also to contort her body and give in to violent epileptic fits. But I was almost as impressed by Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, for making the most interesting version of Renfeld that I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t content with the stock actor’s exercise of playing a madman, but took a character that had to be visibly over the top in a movie populated entirely by batshit crazy people, and somehow made it genuinely frightening and compelling.

I was also surprised by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, although I probably shouldn’t have been, since he’s well established that he embraces weird parts that don’t just rely on his being impossibly good-looking. His part is kind of a thankless one, requiring him to be the voice of reason and skepticism in a world that is clearly irrational, and he could’ve just disappeared into the background as nothing more than the guy who occasionally drives the plot forward. But from his opening scene onwards, he managed to give off a paternalistic arrogance that matched the energy of everything else. He seemed to love playing a cartoon.

All of the performances worked because the filmmaking itself was so committed to the bit. The story shifts between dreams and the waking world so frequently, and so abruptly, that it was never really clear which was which. Is the entire story a dream, or is the world so weird that the dreams are just as real as anything else? One scene I loved is when our heroine and her husband are at their friends’ home, their hosts bid them good night to take their bizarre children up to bed, and Thomas and Ellen kiss… and it just turns into a full-on make-out session right there. The door’s barely even closed before they’re going at it!

I think my favorite thing about the first half of the movie, though, is how the filmmaking itself becomes dream-like. With rare exceptions, it’s not prone to melodramatic flourishes like cross-dissolves or dutch angles or elaborate camera movements. There are hard cuts, sometimes timed so as to be disorienting, as a scene abruptly ends. And for the most part, the camera is either static or on a slow horizontal pan, as if the viewer is dispassionately taking everything in. When the camera does do something exotic, it stands out as especially significant and unnerving — our first time seeing Knock conducting one of his rituals, for instance, in which the camera sweeps up as if we’re watching him from above.

Black Bag (alternate title: Spies Be Talkin’) is about George and Kathryn, a long-married couple who work as spies for the British government. The title is a reference to the code phrase that agents use with each other when they’re asked a question that they’re not permitted to answer. The story begins when George is assigned the mission of finding out who within the agency has been selling confidential information, and the short list of suspects includes his wife.

I spent much of the movie feeling as if I had very little idea what was actually going on. For something advertised as a stylish spy thriller, it’s extremely talky, and the combination of accents plus mostly-naturalistic audio meant that I could only make out around 60% of the dialogue. I was certain that it was seeding bits of intrigue that I was missing, and that by the time the double- and triple-crosses started happening, I would be completely lost.

Plus it has such an aggressive sense of affected cool that it felt jarring. It’s all beautifully shot, and the score is excellent. And it’s more or less a given that Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are going to be flawless and captivating no matter what they’re doing. But what they’re doing here is a whole lot of talking, and it feels at odds with the movie telling us that these characters are some of the coolest sons of bitches you ever saw. That what’s really sexy isn’t shootouts or one-night stands with femmes fatale or baccarat, but just seeing hot people being good at their jobs.

To me, it started to feel like what would happen if spy movies stopped being aspirational and decided instead to be reassuring. Aimed at a certain crowd of wealthy middle-aged people, people who’d reached a point in their lives when they had no desire to hang off of airplanes like Tom Cruise, but still wanted to feel like they had It. Yes, dammit, your quiet, conversational dinner parties are thrilling.

The movie opens with an extended sequence that was filmed as one long, uninterrupted take. It follows George through multiple levels of a crowded nightclub to meet his contact, past dozens of extras dancing, drinking and partying, at a bar and a dance floor below. And to me, it felt like a distractingly unnecessary flourish, a sequence that felt far more complicated to execute than what the movie required.

In retrospect, I could interpret it as kind of a bait-and-switch to set the tone: if you were expecting a spy thriller that would take you through the exotic nightlife of the world’s most interesting cities, this is not that. I can interpret it as setting up the conversation that follows and the theme that runs throughout the movie: the contrast between this loud, hedonistic life and the quiet monogamy of George and Kathryn’s relationship.

And I can even interpret the decision to film it all as one take as being an introduction to George’s character. It sets up the idea that he’s calm, quiet, and professional, and he relentlessly moves towards his goal, immune to any distractions. But this doesn’t read as such in the moment (because he’s not really contrasted against what any other agent would do in the same situation) and besides, the idea is explicitly stated outright by other characters multiple times throughout the movie.

Instead, it just seems like the message of the opening sequence was “Bitch, I’m Steven Soderbergh! I do what I want! Just shut up and watch!”

And really, I should’ve just listened and followed instructions. Because there’s such a confident clarity of storytelling in Black Bag that cuts through any feeling of being confused by obtuse twists and turns. The movie is explicitly about trust, and I probably should’ve trusted that Soderbergh has spent his career mastering the art of cinematic storytelling. Even the scenes that are straightforward this scene represents that idea moments are so well executed that they don’t come across as too heavy-handed.

For instance, the scenes when George is fishing, the first in particular. He’s out alone on a lake, silently processing all the information that he has so far, when his line catches. He’s methodically reeling it in as images of all the suspects flash in his mind. Just as it seems he’s about to make a crucial connection, both the idea and the fish get away from him.

But my favorite scene in the movie is earlier, and it’s a small moment but it’s executed perfectly. Kathryn has an upcoming trip out of London, and when George asks for any details, she simply responds “black bag.” George has found a movie ticket in the trash, causing him to suspect that Kathryn has already had a clandestine meeting in London that she didn’t tell him about. He asks her about the movie, and she claims she doesn’t know anything about it, seemingly avoiding making eye contact. He suggests that they see it together, and she agrees, without giving anything away to suggest that she might have seen it already.

We then get a shot of George and Kathryn sitting next to each other at the movie, filmed as if from the screen looking directly into the audience. There’s a sudden jump scare in the movie, and every single person in the audience is startled, except for Kathryn. Afterwards, George turns to look at Kathryn, and she nonchalantly offers him popcorn. Then there’s another sudden scare in the movie, and she jumps along with the rest of the audience.

It’s such a great example of storytelling without dialogue, trusting that the shot (filmed without close-up, and if I remember correctly, with almost no cuts) and the performances are going to make its meaning clear, conveying an unsettling sense of growing suspicion that George is not allowed to comment on.

It all means that Black Bag is one of the most passive experiences I’ve had watching anything in a long time. I wasn’t sorting through some complex scheme, second-guessing everything, making predictions about what would happen next, but just absorbing everything I was being shown. And when it’s this well done, that’s not a bad thing at all. It didn’t need to feel like a huge, explosive spy thriller (although there is indeed an explosion), but a smaller, character-driven story that’s simply an entertaining time at the movies.

The best thing about Opus is its casting. As soon as I heard “A24 horror movie starring Ayo Edebiri,” I was on board before the trailer even finished.

And it delivers on the promise of “A24 horror movie” just fine. It’s got an overall message that lands well enough, although it lands with a feeling of “okay, I get it,” instead of being as stunning and impactful as it was probably meant to. That’s true of the rest of the movie as well. It all works in context, but nothing punches through as an image or a moment that demands to be vividly remembered.

Now that I’ve got an Apple Watch, it means that I watch everything with a heart monitor attached, and I can tell that Opus was suspenseful because it was buzzing about elevated heart rate every few minutes. It’s a testament to the maturity and confidence of the filmmaking that so many of the horror movie moments are suggested rather than shown.

But the perfect casting throughout is really what stands out. The protagonist is so in line with Ayo Edebiri’s public persona that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it was written specifically for her.¹Especially if you noticed that the character’s initials are the same as the actress’s. Like I didn’t notice for two days. She has to be grounded enough not to fall for all the trappings of fame, but still enough of a nerd to find famous people fascinating. She’s got to read as driven, ambitious, and under-appreciated, capable of far more than she’s allowed to do. The overall message only works if she’s a superstar in waiting. And she’s got to be movie-star beautiful, but it’s something that she can put on and take off; it’s not her identity.

(Is it too obvious that I’ve got a crush on Ayo Edebiri? Even if she is a nepo baby).

John Malkovich is, obviously, excellent at being a menacing and unsettling cult leader, as well as seeming like the kind of actor who’d love the chance to play an aging glam rocker. Murray Bartlett is great at being unctuous and self-absorbed but mostly sympathetic. Juliette Lewis is Juliette Lewising the hell out of things.

Even with the smaller parts (in terms of overall screen time), it becomes clear by the end that they were played by the perfect person, the only one who could immediately read as exactly the role they’re playing. This guy looks like mostly-silent, creepy henchman but can also read as a basically normal guy who’d become a fanatic. This woman is a bad guy but is somehow still trustworthy. And so on.

I was excited to see Amber Midthunder’s name in the opening credits, because I felt like she’d proven her star power with Prey and was going to get the chance to show her range. So I was initially disappointed that it seemed like Opus had wasted her for a thankless part. But put in context of the rest of the casting, though, I think they needed exactly what she brought to the part. Even without speaking, she gives off a sense of intensity and makes it immediately clear that she could mess you up without breaking a sweat.

In fact, there seemed to be an interesting age divide across the cast. For the most part, the older actors seemed to be capital-A Acting, while the younger ones were more grounded and naturalistic. I interpreted this as subtle reinforcement of the idea that younger generations would be savvy enough to see through the bullshit, while the older characters had been pursuing fame for so long that they’d stopped second-guessing it. They all speak as if they’d seen it all, but they were the most eager to get swept up in it, and even see it as a reward.

Nile Rodgers and The-Dream are credited for the music in Opus and also as executive producers, although I couldn’t tell if that were just the featured songs, or the overall score. The score is excellent, driving home the unsettling feeling of a creepy cult. But for the songs, it feels like another case of choosing exactly the right people. They have to come across as being brilliant enough to inspire rabid fanaticism. While I didn’t fall in love with them as much as the characters seemed to, the moments when the movie turned itself over to showcasing the music seemed the closest to punching through and becoming unforgettable.

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  Especially if you noticed that the character’s initials are the same as the actress’s. Like I didn’t notice for two days.

Black Sunday (originally The Mask of the Demon) has been on my to-watch list for years, partly because of its place in horror movie history as Mario Bava’s official directorial debut, but mostly because of its amazing poster. I finally watched it last night¹As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential.

I’m by no means enough of a movie buff, especially when it comes to classic horror, to be able to put the movie sufficiently in context. Honestly, I’m more of a fan of the overall aesthetic of classic horror than the movies themselves. Often, it feels like trying to dig through the detritus of censorship, dated performances, and special effects that are still in their infancy, just to find a few moments that feel relevant to modern audiences.

(An exception is The Bride of Frankenstein, which I’d always dismissed as another famous-for-being-famous relic of the classic Universal Monsters days, until I actually watched it and realized that it’s a straight-up masterpiece).²Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.

But despite all of the aspects that make Black Sunday feel too dated to be relevant — the melodramatic and often nonsensical plot, the weird dubbing throughout, the makeup that sometimes seems more comical than horrific — there are several shots and scenes that stand out like nothing I’d seen before.

Notably, its gruesome opening sequence, which shows an unrepentant witch cursing her inquisitor brother before having the spike-filled “mask of Satan” nailed onto her face. It suggests far more than it shows, but what it shows is brilliant: the brutal spikes coming straight for the camera, a POV shot of the executioner wielding a massive hammer, and a side shot of the hammer pounding the mask into place. I found a pretty good video from the “History of Horror” channel putting Black Sunday in context with the rest of Mario Bava’s work, in particular pointing out that the more shocking moments were part of Italian cinema reacting to a long period of censorship under Mussolini and after WWII.

To me, it set the tone that anything could happen, especially when I considered that Psycho came out in the same year, and I’ve been hearing for years how shocking and scandalous it was for that movie to even show a toilet.

Not to spoil anything, but the rest of the movie feels much more conventional. We discover that its pseudo-vampires need to be killed via a spike through the left eye, which is never shown explicitly but is still traumatic for those of us especially sensitive to that kind of thing. For the most part, the creatures just seem to have some kind of skin condition. One of our vampires can only be recognized as such because his hair has turned white and he’s got a five o’clock shadow. I’d been expecting it all to be much more lurid, but overall it feels more like a few stand-out images tied together loosely by a traditional classic horror movie plot.

But some of those images are amazing. Princess Katja’s appearance, standing in the ruins of a chapel holding two black dogs, is one of the most famous. There are long sequences that feel like a big swing for a filmmaker in the late 50s, with pervasive darkness punctuated by small areas of light. In particular, there’s a pretty lengthy sequence of a man following a lantern-carrying guide through the dark catacombs underneath a castle, and the shots get darker and darker until we can see nothing but the light coming from the lantern itself.

My favorite shots, though, are just before that. A carriage has arrived to pick up one of our protagonists to take him to the castle. It’s full-on gothic. Solid black, led by two black horses driven by a partially-decomposing man-out-of-time all dressed in black. Black Sunday doesn’t use camera effects anywhere else that I could identify, but the shots of the carriage are done in slow motion. The horses gallop through a dense, pitch-black forest through fog, and it’s strikingly dream-like. Or more accurately, nightmare-like.

Mario Bava is often named as one of the progenitors — if not the creator — of giallo. I’m still not familiar enough with the genre to be making any blanket statements, but it feels as if the roots are here, even without the addition of lurid color.³Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white. Stories that fade into the background to allow strikingly stylistic images take prominence and become unforgettable.

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  As is a common theme lately, as part of my break-up with Amazon, as I try to watch as much as I can on Amazon Prime Video before my subscription expires
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  Not to mention being even more of an influence on Young Frankenstein than the original Frankenstein, like I’d always assumed.
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  Or maybe more accurately, even if the lurid colors here are pure black and bright white.