All posts by Tom Bubul

Ad Astra (2019)

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(dir. James Gray)

Here’s the serious “Acadamy Awards”-facing version of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017), a “daddy issues in space” movie about how “being the greatest” means you’ve probably also succeeded at being the worst, with Chris Pratt prestige-upgraded into Brad Pitt, and Kurt Russell prestige-upgraded into Tommy Lee Jones, who plays daddy.

This time around, Brad Pitt has to get from earth all the way to Neptune to deal with daddy, who is doing some bullshit out there that’s causing a planetary catastrophe back home. (Brad’s the only man for the job, etc. etc.) The structure of the journey is very fun – a sort of space-planes/space-trains/space-automobiles where Brad Pitt has to get from earth ➡️the moon ➡️Mars ➡️Neptune, with a lot of inexplicable, weird little adventure asides and details sprinkled in at the first three stops. But you might as well turn it off once Brad gets back off Mars, where the interesting space stuff (and the movie’s internal sense of “space movie plausibility”) abruptly ends, and it settles into wack Hollywood theater about fathers and sons. It would be stone cold simple to write a better, completely standalone movie about just this movie’s concepts for Mars, the moon, or commercial space travel, which is deeply frustrating, because it means this movie has a load of good ideas that are left unexpanded in favor of a big cornball act three.

When I talk about Ad Astra I get so riled because of how close it got to being incredible without getting past being normal, which means I’m inevitably gonna end up rewatching it. As a coda here I’ll add that I’m due to rewatch Interstellar (2014) – curious to see whether I still feel that that movie is the high water mark for 2010s “serious space movies” or if I’ve just been saying so for long enough now that I convinced myself.

Shoplifters (2018), Our Little Sister (2015), Hana: the tale of a reluctant samurai (2006), I wish (2011) (all wr./dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

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Pretty excited to keep working my way thru the Kore-eda filmography in 2020, his movies were consistently among the best I watched in 2019, and there are still like eight or nine more that he wrote/directed out there.

Between these and Still Walking (2018), they all seem to be ensemble movies “about” family or group dynamics during moments of broader transition, with a huge range and depth on both the visual and character levels, overlaid on an idiosyncratic approach to plotting that’s “slow” and unpredictable and dramatically rich. They’re so good that I’m spacing out my viewing, saving them for special occasions. A very rough comparison might be, imagine a good Altman movie, but with a more deeply-felt and focused attention on slightly fewer characters, and set in (mainly) contemporary, heavily-articulated quotidian situations, and without any “movie style” antagonists.

Shoplifters seems to be the clearest entry point and the hardest-hitting, and I’d recommend it to really anyone trying to watch “an actually-good movie” any day of the week. From there I’d say Hana‘s retelling of “the 47 Ronin” (which doesn’t focus on the ronin really at all) feels like the most straightforward expression of the storytelling modality at work across these movies, and might work as a kind of key to them, and Still Walking is the finest. But again they all seem to be great and I can’t wait to keep going here.

Heaven Knows What (2014)

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Watched this one in the bath. If like me you found Mandy (2018) to be insufficiently and insincerely engaged with real darkness, then consider this harrowing piece of “young street people addicted to heroine in midtown” vérité, starring/written by Arielle Holmes for the Safdies, who met Holmes during early work on Uncut Gems in midtown, where she was spanging, and they correctly decided she “should be in movies.” A no-way-out nightmare movie that operates in the borderlands between “fiction” and “documentary,” matching “actors” with “non-actors playing themselves,” crossing the immediate, direct anti-logic/anti-meaning of addiction and on-the-street desperation with the insular privacy and psychodrama of abuse, loneliness, and doomed/dooming love. Typically great Safdie sound design, and with everything shot at high zoom levels from a distance, to ultra-claustrophobic, wobbling effect. Imo an incredible NYC movie, and roughly the evil opposite of Skate Kitchen (2018), which I’d recommend as a palate cleanser. For abyss-starers only.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

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1: No gods no franchises / The Matrix yet again

Welp, due to the vast influence of me and Davey’s movie blog, they’re putting Keanu Reeves in The Matrix 4, John Wick 4, Bill & Ted’s 3, Point Break 2, Bram’s Stoker Drac2la, Devil’s Ad2cate, and many, many other continuations of stories everyone thought were done.

Unfortunately this is a gross misreading of at least my half of the blog; I thought I was being pretty clear about my distaste for both nostalgia and the cultural hegemony of preexisting stuff. I like when a narrative’s core is still unknown, when actors are transforming into new characters, and the surprise and adventure of image and sound describing the unfamiliar for the first time. If familiarity and continuity were my thing I’d be blogging about TV.

Why more Matrix in 2020? I’ve certainly seen plenty of “we’re in The Matrix today, so a new The Matrix is R E L E V A N T”-type posting… but I dunno. Sure, we live in a world with 2.41 billion facebook accounts, and a burgeoning global surveillance industry, but The Matrix doesn’t seem like an apt or mature metaphor for either of those things. My guess is that it’ll be “about” social media, but that we’re getting it now because the Matrix has always been about “conspiracy theories,” “deep fakes,” and “fake news.” My basic prediction is that it’s gonna be a terrible movie.

The silver lining to the endless maelstrom of franchised-out new-old-stuff is that every new-old thing immediately offers a reason to poke around in the archive. For example, even though thinking about M Night Shyamalan’s movies makes me grind my teeth, Glass (2019) could at least be viewed as an occasion to dig into the last 30 years of Bruce Willis, or for exploring a caffeinated hypothesis about how Shyamalan’s particular middlebrow fake-serious mode prefigures the A24 era – how The Monster (2016), The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), The \\\///\\\///itch (2015), It Follows (2014), Midsommar (2019), and A Ghost Story (2017) (all A24) all seem to have been made by people who saw his movies when they were young. Which is all to say, I used the news of the new Matrix to do some re-watching.

2. A cinema of big wild failures

The Wachowskis haven’t written/directed a movie with the influence or popular success of The Matrix since. Their work in the intervening years includes The Matrix‘s sequels (both 2003), Speed Racer (2008), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Jupiter Ascending (2015). All of these movies are ridiculously grand, frequently ridiculous world-building projects, where the purpose of each world is threefold: as a stage for inventive action sequences; as a place to worship genre aesthetics; and as bargain-basement Philip K Dick thought experiments, that register at about the level of Keanu saying “whoa.” The Wachowskis make big, wild failures. I’ll add that I’m not hating here: I love all of these movies specifically because that’s what they are. Speed Racer and especially Cloud Atlas are Moulin Rouge-level bonkers – they’re not “good movies” at all, but the jaggedly stylized ways they’re great make them more urgently view-wanting than most other movies made this century. If you’re watching a Disney Star Wars movie this year, do yourself a favor and wash it down with a Wachowskis movie.

The Matrix is the only regular-successful “good movie” entry in this filmography because it’s the only one that shows any kind of restraint. That’s only because it’s the only one made with a sub-hundred million dollar budget ($64 million) – enough cash to finish the project, but not enough to overwork it into oblivion. The sequels are a mess precisely because they recede into the byzantiums that giant budgets ($150 million apiece) have allowed the Wachowskis to generate since. They’re like black midi movies: virtuosically and even astonishingly overwrought at the production level, but murky (and even corny) at the level of “being a movie.”

3: Case study: Jupiter Ascending

Consider Jupiter Ascending (2015; ~$200 million budget), a painfully pointless The Matrix-style movie the Wachowskis made sixteen years after making The Matrix. This time, the people of earth don’t realize that they’re being harvested by rich interstellar vampires, and that cosmic capitalism and politics are raging invisibly around them with maximum stakes. The situation on the ground is managed by alien repair crews who keep regular humans doing earth stuff through the assistance of Men in Black-brand memory wipers and Dark City/deus ex machina-brand tech for fixing damage to cities incurred during action sequences. Okay, sure.

Somewhere on a microscope slide in the cosmic milieu is Mila Kunis, playing a janitor named Jupiter in the earth city of Chicago, where her work is shown to suck and be boring. But then she gets drawn into an inheritance plot where she (100% coincidentally) has to go to the planet Jupiter, because she’s a reincarnated interstellar oil baron or something. Channing Tatum plays a supporting role as the disgraced angel soldier werewolf bodyguard, doubling as a romantic interest on the apparent basis of his being dutiful and muscular; his half of the movie is repeatedly having to prevent Mila Kunis from falling to her death, being assassinated in a doctor’s office, marrying a creep, and so forth.

The piled-on Wachowski approach and its many billable hours are evident from the moment the production company logos appear on screen: Even these have little gilded curlicues of After Effects flair. The best part of the movie is a jutting aside when Mila Kunis needs to go to the space DMV, where the Wachowskis switch from the movie’s default “cyberpunk/space opera/glam court intrigue” modes right on over to “steampunk/hell-bureaucracy/Santa’s Workshop.” Sure this is a really bad movie at the plot level, and at points is a CGI mess, but I have to emphatically underline that it includes at least those six style modes as it proceeds through its brutal paces. Even though it’s all completely insubstantial there’s so much going on here.

Eventually Mila Kunis wins a climactic victory in a fire-themed boss battle and goes back to hanging with her family in Chicago, but there’s no indication as to whether she was able to dismantle the system of interstellar vampirism that threatens the planet, beyond the immediate matter of disrupting that system’s main family’s inheritance game. But that’s a The Matrix movie for you: The Matrix doesn’t end with any big conclusive resolutions, it just ends with Keanu flying around. And that’s exactly what Mila Kunis does here too.

Some Kind of Monster (2004)

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Some Kind of Monster is a documentary about a 50-year-old record producer named Bob Rock whose rockstar aspirations finally look like they’ll be fulfilled when he’s asked to play bass during a 2003 Metallica record’s studio sessions. In Act 1, Bob Rock thinks he’s made it, and is legitimately in Metallica now – it sure looks like all the work he did producing the band since their fifth record in 1991 is finally going to pay off. But in Act 2, Bob Rock is crushed by the realization that the main Metallica guy does not respect him as a peer, and just views him as “part of the business.” Finally in Act 3, Bob Rock sort of skulks away, and is replaced by full-time “real” bass player, Rob Trujillo. Metallica celebrates Rob Trujillo joining the group by giving him one million dollars and debuting his membership in the group during their induction into MTV’s “Icons” series. (To date, the other MTV “Icons” are Janet Jackson (2001), Aerosmith (2002), and The Cure (2004).)

The movie ends happily with Bob Rock and Metallica amicably going their separate ways. Metallica continues to be a business that generates a large amount of revenue, and Bob Rock moves on to producing many more albums for other “successful business”-level bands who maybe appreciate him a little bit more. During a series of asides throughout Some Kind of Monster that don’t include Bob Rock, the other members of Metallica process the particular trauma and cursedness of “having reached success of a certain level” in their own ways. By recording a record together, they also gesture at the one-time importance of the creative process to the matter of their relationships with one another, and to the ongoing business they continue to run together.

Bob Rock’s pathos derives from the extent to which the fact that he is not a true peer to the rest of the group is achingly obvious to everyone but him. He’s a pure industry hand, focused on getting the record done so that everyone can get paid. His contributions to the recording sessions focus on helping the group identify moments in their jams or brainstorms that are or could be developed into song parts that might read as credibly “Metallica.” As he does so, the rest of the group takes on an air of condescension; Bob has a decent palate for what could be credibly Metallica, sure, but he absolutely lacks the ability to summon authentic Metallica himself. In this way Bob Rock reads like a studio assistant who thinks that it is he who is “really” making some artist’s work, while failing to realize that the work is located in the idea, not the gruntwork of rendering it. As Omar S iconically put it: “You cannot copy Omar S style, you can only copy a song that has already been produced by Omar S.”

“It’s really healthy for me to be here, away from anything related to the band or anyone who would remind me of the band.  And recognize what’s real.”

Kirk Hammett (Metallica; lead guitar)

Some Kind of Monster has three ideal audiences. Metallica fans, Metallica haters, and anyone who’s dipped their toes into artistic stuff on any level. All three can find a lot to like in this documentary about a famous metal band trying to make a record, and needing the help of an extremely expensive therapist to finish it.  For the fans, there’s intimate behind the scenes footage of their favorite band making a record. For the haters, there’s intimate behind the scenes footage of a gaggle of fools making a terrible record.  For creatives, there’s a hefty document about a group of people exploring the creative process b/w an illustration of how tying your personal worth to being creative can be destructive.

I can’t take the fans’ perspective, because Metallica are mostly bad (RIP Cliff), and I’ll skip the haters’ viewpoint, though I gotta say that the view from there is very nice… highlights include Hetfield explaining to Urlich that usually the drummer provides the beat; Hammett having a meltdown because they’re removing guitar solos from the record; and the bonus feature where they make a rap-rock song with Ja Rule. As a card-carrying underground musician, though, I’m in a good spot to speak about what Some Kind of Monster means to me on that level. 

I used to say that Some Kind of Monster was the best movie about what it’s like to actually be in a band, which was irresponsible hyperbole (my opinions now though… are very good ). In 2003 the men of Metallica have some good qualities(?), but “platonic ideal of a band” they are not. There’s too much noise between them now, all necessary to keep the business of being in a huge band going. So maybe it’s the best movie about business mediation? I dunno, but it is a pretty good movie about what it takes to get people to do something creatively together when they have completely lost interest in actually doing the “art” part of their successful ostensibly art-driven business.  You get the sense that most bands at this stage would throw in the towel or take a break, but Metallica to its credit soldiers through. After hundreds of thousands of dollars of therapy and two years in the studio, we the people receive the fruits of their sacrifice: one not very good record, and one pretty good movie. 

Some Kind of Monster was in pretty heavy rotation as a source of conversation amongst the dudes of underground music for a while. Probably due to the fact that it’s a very funny movie about a band that the world considers successful who are more or less exposed as being shams, but also because it’s a really deep and honest dive into feelings of male inadequacy that can come from being a musician.  This is the movie that has Dave Mustaine from Megadeth talking about how being kicked out of Metallica and then immediately forming the second biggest metal band in the world ruined his life. It also features the nightmare of Lars’s dad, a wizard with impeccable taste, who can see through his son’s band’s bullshit completely, and has no qualms about calling him out on it, something obviously very hurtful to his son. There’s also the sequence where Metallica goes to their ex-bassist Jason Newstead’s new band’s gig, who they kicked out for wanting to do a record with that band. Jason ghosts Metallica after the show, but they still stick around to mope about how they can’t finish their record, and how the guy they kicked out is playing a gig in a medium/small venue. There are plenty of other examples of this, in this tale of three dudes who tied their self-worth to their band, but have no way of accurately measuring its success anymore.  

I’ve mentioned that the record they make sucks, which is true (see what I said earlier about my opinions).  This is non-important for the music in the world, but great for the film. If they had made something great after this whole thing, I really doubt the the movie would have been such a compelling document.  “Famous band tries really hard to make a good record then succeeds after dipping into endless resources” is not a storyline for a movie. Probably the most important revelation they make is that they realize how bad it is and make peace with it (though it is possible that they’re able to filter out the muted expressions of every person they let hear the record, and the recommendation to “Delete the album” from a certain band member’s dad). What ends up being important to them is that at the end of the recording they seem personally refreshed, and that they like each other more.  Whether or not they’re the people who deserve this is an open question that I’m not qualified to answer (if you’re interested in seeing a similar dynamic play out with genuinely likable people, I recommend Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (2008)), but we definitely deserve what we’re left with – an authentic high comedy about known characters shown to be fools, who receive a happy ending against all odds. In other words, a delightful farce.

Recent bubul movies part 2

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I lassoed out the kid’s hair in the photoshop title but then I smudge brushed it, oh well can’t be bothered fixing. Maybe I should photoshop a title image for Davey’s posts? Anyway March is my least favorite month of the year by far so I spent it watching mad movies:

Recommended

Babylon (1980)
Upbeat reggae buddies movie becomes “walls slowing closing in” tragedy for a young british jamaican as he and his friends prepare for the big sound clash. a grand tour of male power dynamics and painfully resonant race/immigration/class stuff, skillfully and empathetically observed, and with at least three incredible nowhere-else scenes. the ending soundclash scene is absolutely bonkers and got me shook. strong recommendation.

Worth watching

Beach bum (2019)
I think we’re gonna be writing more about this one soon.

Elle (2016)
a conflicted, slippery late-era Paul Verhoeven movie where a woman gets into a rape-fetish relationship with her actual rapist en route to getting revenge on him for raping her 😬. with Verhoeven’s characteristic pitch-black humor fully on deck, and an amazing Isabelle Huppert performance. great movie if you want to think abt how consent can transform the monstrous into the beautiful, but jeez, be warned, the kind of movie that’s infuriating because you just know there’re nincompoops watching it and getting a very wrong idea.

Killer Joe (2011)
Pretty fucked up movie adaptation of a play abt a family of bad, desperate people who sex-trade their on-spectrum teen daughter to the devil, here played by hot cop/killer for hire Matthew McConaughey, and the devil ends up taking everything. a “make yourself feel bad and gross” movie (cf. Todd Solondz) par excellence with tons of capital-t Theatre capital-A Acting. with Juno Temple (Kaboom (2010)) once again in the nude.

Mr rogers documentary (2018)
wow mr rogers neighborhood really was a pretty crazy project when you think about it

Yaji & kita the midnight pilgrims (2005)
episodic wacky/surrealist/cartoon-body-horror roadtrip romp nominally “about” two gay Edo men (one with a wife problem, the other with a drug problem) on a pilgrimage to a shrine, with all manner of cra-a-azy diversions and characters, including a testicles gag so gonzo they show it twice. lots of good stuff in here comedically, visually, and regarding love/hate relationships. shoutout Jacob for the rec, on the basis of my loving Funky Forest (2005)!

The rest

24 Hour Party People (2002)
a cute & tragic coogan movie abt having your time and that time passing, that’s also a rave-adjacent movie. didn’t appreciate the glib & jokey way it depicts ian curtis’s suicide but otherwise felt that it aged very well. pairs with fiorucci made me hardcore (1999).

But I’m a cheerleader (1999)
Teen sex comedy set in a dictatorial conversion therapy retreat house, with a color palate out of the Ranaldo and the Loaf “Songs for Swinging Larvae” video, that reads overall like a PG-13 Gregg Araki movie; definitely worth checking if you like those. at one point the teens sneak out to a nearby gay bar called straight-up “Cocksuckers” to slow dance together; insane to think this came out the same year as American Pie. With Dante Basco, Hook‘s (1991) Rufio.

Apocalypto (2006)
We wrote abt this.

Shallow Grave (1994)
The first Danny Boyle movie, a misfire of a corpse-disposal caper(?!) starring a long-haired young Ewan McGregor, managing somehow not to be a hottie at all. Pretty cool that these two got the recipe completely sorted out for Trainspotting just a couple years later.

The lavender hill mob (1951)
Jovial British caper abt smuggling gold to Paris as miniature Eiffel Towers, featuring an almost realtime dizzying descent from the actual Eiffel Tower on a windy spiral staircase (i.e. my actual worst nightmare), as well as a scene where a cop oinks along to “Old MacDonald had a farm.”

Monty python holy grail (1975)
Never been a big Python head and kinda generally dislike John Cleese’s macho creep vibe but I feel doomed to rewatch this one every so often anyway. I enjoyed it this time, the horse riding gag especially grew on me, and I love the mic drop ending. Pairs well with Yaji and Kita as a zany episodic roadtrip movie.

Candyman (1992)
We wrote abt this.

The midnight meat train (2008)
What’s with “agents of the world behind the world” being dapper besuited old-timey guys? I hate this. Here youngish Bradley Cooper is an art world-striving photographer trying to take pics of a besuited madman serial killer who bonks ppl with a hammer in a fake NYC subway, in order, it turns out, to feed the corpses to demonic CHUDs. Bradley Cooper becomes the besuited old timey guy who serves the CHUDs in the end – that’s art world success for ya! A Clive Barker adaptation I watched to prep for writing abt Candyman; it’s bad.

austin powers 1 (1997)
Wild that this dominated culture for what felt like an eternity and is now pretty much completely gone. It’s not good but it’s VERY dated; kind of the best part is how low-budget and underproduced it looks. With Will Farrell in a bit part before his own movie career took off. Austin powers 3 (2002) costars no less than Beyonce, which feels Mandela Effect to me.

Frances Ha (2012)
I completely cannot stand Noah Baumbach or any aspect of his cornball Woody Allen-worship career or his extraordinarily wienery “mediocrity struggle” characters, but I do kinda like Gretta Gerwig, so I watched this back to back with Meyerowitz Stories, the latter on Davey’s rec, to troll myself. NYC portraiture just does not get any more annoying than these goddamn motherfucking Baumbach movies, period. Even within this very specific category-within-a-category you can save time and cover both movies’ bases by just watching relatively-much-better movie Tiny Furniture (2010) instead.

Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
Supremely cloying just like every other Baumbach I’ve hate-watched, tho it has to be said that Adam Sandler is great in it.

Ideal Home (2018)
We put this on cold because we like Paul Rudd & Coogan but it turned out to be a feature length unfunny taco bell commercial.

The trip to spain (2017)
We’d just watched Gavin & Stacey s01-s03, with Rob Brydon as Uncle Bryn, which I found very cute and funny, so figured it’d be good to check back in with him and Coog in the The Trip movies. This one is funnier and less dark than The trip to Italy.

The thirteenth floor (1999)
If you google “movies like the matrix” this is like, the main one, from the same year, but it’s really more like Westworld or Inception. Here, computer nerds have an MRI machine that they use to login to the Matrix for like, two hours, so they can have sex with prohibition-era simulation call girls. Things get nuts when a prohibition-era simulation bartender realizes he’s in the simulation, then even more nuts when the computer nerds realize they’re also in a simulation. It’s not great but it’s funny and crazy to think about this movie being the “primary text” for these concepts in an alternative reality.

The beguiled (2017)
Watched in the bathtub. For “tragedy & shenanigans afoot at the repressed girls boarding school” movies this just doesn’t come even close to the incredible Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), tho it shares a lot of similar costuming, light, and big trees. For “poisoned by a deliciously-prepared mushroom dish” go with Phantom Thread (2017).

Wuthering Heights (1992)
Pure-plot rendition of the classic, with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliffe, here remorselessly and relentlessly a dickhead to absolutely everyone. I’m not necessarily saying it’s good, but ppl who know it mainly as a Kate Bush song might be well-served; it’s got both the gothic “bad romance on the moors” vibe and the “histrionic billowing dress” energy both on deck.

Us (2019)
Peele is a national treasure and the complete Key & Peele should be required reading but tbh I just didn’t think this movie was that good. We wrote abt it.

Us (2019)

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Us is the movie Jordan Peele made after the era-defining Get Out (2017). The movie’s not that scary, but that’s fine; it looks good, and there are some good performances, and a couple funny jokes. But mostly, this one rides a “who Deserves to win” twist that’s effectiveness seems contingent on whether or not you’ve already considered what people Deserve generally, irl. If you’ve 1. thought about your social position and resources, and found that a violent revolution by (say) an invisible underclass that wants what you have enough to kill you for it (out of basic desire, but also to satisfy a sense of justice) is in some way understandable, or 2. thought for any amount of time at all about the deeply arbitrary nature of what body, year, and X/Y coordinate your consciousness was embodied in, then 3. there’s not really much else going on here. Us is a tableau on ultraviolent circumstances where everyone is in a bad place, with no explanation provided, no accountability, no lesson, definitely no justice, and no antagonist. Therefore: what, exactly?

If you’re as suspicious and distrustful of power and its pursuit as I am, you probably find it as false a choice in your own life as onscreen over “who the victim is” here. The question isn’t “which one of these families Deserves to escape,” because it’s both, duh; “we’re Americans.” And while I don’t “believe in” violence, I also don’t know that I believe institutional justice exists at all, and can relate to the irrational impulse to make an ugly and evil mark that stems from the powerlessness of that feeling. Which is to say, the main annoying tragedy of this movie is that it looks at a symptom, but never up at its cause; whoever Deserves whatever justice is not present in the movie. Instead all you get is an irrational false-choice survival struggle between bit players. This is a movie that’s supposed to be “about” ethical responsibility, but it’s just people commonly screwed by an invisible third party killing each other. That’s not fun or interesting to me; it’s what so much of regular life already just is.

If the movie really wanted to say something true and dark about “who is a Real Person and what they Deserve,” it would’ve ended with the mass murder of the replicants by military helicopters, as they stood exposed in their long line. But that larger point about the absolute safety and true ownership of violence by real power goes completely unmade.

Get Out was one the best recent films about race while also being a horror movie, with airtight connections between message, plot, and even sources of audience tension. Us takes a step back and is more of a funhouse-style horror movie with a loose metaphor floating in the background that’s entirely optional to your enjoyment of the movie.

Us’s opening 20 minutes have a real hangout feel, something that Get Out’s deliberately lean structure couldn’t accommodate. We get to know the Wilson family and their dynamic while they’re on vacation in Santa Cruz, a period of the film that’s positively breezy, which I would watch a whole movie of.  Eventually red jump-suited nightmare doppelgängers pop up and ruin the vibe. What follows is a kind of 80s/90s low-stakes dream-logic horror, punctuated with ample comedic respite to let the audience reestablish a baseline and relax.  Think Phantasm, or Nightmare on Elm Street, or even C.H.U.D., both of the latter of which Us shouts out in its opening shot. This isn’t the scariest movie – it has a lot of haunting imagery, but it’s more interested in having a good time. (Probably my favorite “scary” imagery was just a beach scene shown from the perspective of someone who just really doesn’t like the beach; kind of a deep summertime blues vibe.) If we were living in a period devoid of scorched earth horror films I could see this bumming me out, but we’ve had plenty of great genuinely scary and disturbing movies recently so I found it refreshing to see the film operate take a casual approach in this respect.

It’s also nice to see horror of this kind presented so well.  Horror movies like this often have a kind of workman-like quality to their actual construction, due to budget or the Barton Fink problem (“What’s all this egghead crap?!”). Since Peele has some serious filmmaking chops and a lot of fire behind him, we get to see what this style of film could be like with serious polish applied to wild ideas.  Some of these wild ideas work, some are a tougher pill to swallow. The world-building in Us doesn’t really stand up to much logical scrutiny, which is maybe an unfair standard to hold a film of this genre pedigree to, but I think that’s the kind of issue you’ll get when you make a movie that’s of such high quality in other areas.  The central metaphor the film is pushing is also lacking for most of the film, and while a great last minute twist does a lot to elevate and reframe it into something a lot more interesting, it also kind of plunks it into “I’ll have reevaluate on rewatch” territory.

While watching, though, I wasn’t really bothered by any of these bits which I feel are lacking now. It’s an extremely fun and generally good-natured movie, and it’s a lot funnier than I think it’s been getting credit for – I had more or less no idea it was funny at all before watching. While a lot of attention has been focused on Lupita Nyong’o’s wild double performance (using a very odd vocal trick for her doppelgänger; I saw it in a pretty live theatre, but when she first spoke, it got completely silent), everyone gives great performances, especially Winston Duke as “useless dad.” Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss are both great as well, and have something of an insane comic chemistry? All of which is to say I had a really nice time and left the theater feeling really relaxed, light and invigorated. While I gotta say that these feelings probably don’t bode well for this being a future horror classic, it does bode well for it being a really fun great movie, which I’d highly recommend.

(The cover image on this post contains a Robert Beatty sample and a Margaret Wise Brown sample.)

Candyman (1992)

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In Clive Barker-based movies, the monster’s a tragic/haunted Morpheus who sometimes has to kill or haunt dreams or torture or whatever to get their point across to some Keanu. These Morpheus characters in Barker are glum, professional, and pleasureless, but love to feel seen and understood. Barker movie plots often bracket the story to just this: Keanu’s disbelief/fear/curiosity eventually giving way to Morpheus’s red pill.

How this works is super consistent on a staging level. Here’s a Keanu inside the Matrix, surrounded by regular people doing normal stuff, and dear god is it boring, drab, and filled with petty behavior. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some more vivid world hidden behind it, where a Keanu can have a true purpose? Keanus are always in luck, because the Matrix always has a sketchy hinterland (a cemetery in Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) (1990); a locked attic room in Hellraiser (1987); an abandoned subway line in The Midnight Meat Train (2008); a graffiti-crushed housing project’s hidden room in Candyman), which is always inhabited by or leads to some kind of Morpheus (the Nightbreed; Pinhead; Mahogany; Candyman), who always eventually reveals a Keanu’s real place within the super-reality. Sometimes the super-reality is better, other times worse, but Keanu always ends up joining Morpheus in it, not defeating him; that’s never Keanu’s job.

Candyman is a pretty drunk rendition of all of this stuff. The super-reality its Keanu gets drawn into is one of cyclical fated reincarnation, that feeds on fear, sacrifice, and vengeance… or something. Candyman is a slave’s son, who invented a way to make shoes, and was a popular painter, but he got into an interracial marriage, and had his painting hand cut off by racists, who replaced it with a hook, and then covered him with honey, so he got stung to death by bees, and then the racists burned him, and because it was on the site of this housing project, he haunts it to this day… I guess. The editing and plotting are exactly this confusing too, and the middle “psychological thriller” portion where the Keanu is killing people (“but is it actually Candyman?”) is totally unconvincing; we know the Matrix is never “maybe just in Keanu’s head,” that it’s for sure definitely Candyman.

So what else do we get, other than some awkwardly-handled race stuff, a harsh 90s-exploitation rendition of “a housing project” and “poverty,” and some very arbitrary ghost rules around who gets comeuppance and when? A few great, bizarre images, and a gothic “obsessed love”/”burn the world” vibe not unlike Wuthering Heights (1992). Conceptually Candyman has nothing on Hellraiser – the mysterious alien presence of the cenobytes and the contours of an extra-dimensional realm of unknowable pleasure and pain are just way more fun to think about to me than the harsh, bleakly regular stuff here – but Candyman somehow manages to be more engrossing to actually watch. Maybe check back in on The Matrix (1999) first, and pair it with as many other Barker movies as you can handle – to me their effect is strongest and most interesting when they’re considered in aggregate, as instances of a platonic “Barker movie” form. Or for maximum flavor just check out Nightbreed (The Cabal Cut) and move on.

I don’t really believe in spoilers for a 27 year old film but this review goes well beyond vague plot points. If this is scary to you, the short review of Candyman is check it out, it’s great.  

Candyman is about a white grad student named Helen who summons a ghost by saying his name five times while looking in the mirror.  Candyman is the spirit she summons, a black man from 1890 who was killed by a white mob for fathering a child with a white woman. He’s full of bees and has a hook for a hand and lives in an abandoned room in the Cabrini-Green projects. This room can only be accessed by climbing through the bathroom mirror in a layout that mirrors Helens apartment that was a housing project that’s been turned into upscale condos.  Candyman steals a black baby, kill her middle class black friend, and gets her locked up in a mental asylum telling Helen that if she ‘believes in him’ that it’ll all end.  The movie ends with her crawling through a burning mound of garbage made by the residents of Cabrini Green with the stolen baby in her arms, saving the baby but dying in the process.  Horror movies from the late 80s early 90s tended to be unique if they had even a hint of intentional subtext but Candyman bucks the trend and has actual text out the wazoo.

Admittedly, this is pretty dicey territory for two white dudes from across the pond to take on.  The original Clive Barker story is set in Liverpool and is about class, a more quintessentially British preoccupation.  As much as I would have loved to see Candyman navigate a classic Upstairs Downstairs type of situation, moving it to the Chicago projects raises a lot of questions about who gets to tell these stories. While Candyman is told from a white perspective and would have benefited from an African American writer and director (something which we’ll get in the upcoming Jordan Peele produced remake/sequel) this movie by no means enters Dances With Wolves territory, and can be chalked up to people doing the best that they could with the resources they had at the time (i.e. a studio system that would balk at financing black films).

The movie can be read as a story about how we can make communities invisible or abstract  when the idea that they’re made of people becomes inconvenient. While Helen is wandering willy nilly through Cabrini-Green, something she is able to do because she pretends to be a cop, she doesn’t seem super interested in the conditions of the building or the people living in them.  That a woman was brutally murdered in the room she’s investigating is a distant concern compared to the idea that it maybe has a connection to an urban legend and would make good fodder for her grad school thesis. The baby Helen saves in the end? It was her fault Candyman stole it in the first place and when she dies it reads more as penance for her creating the problem than the heroic act of a white savior.  Honestly there’s a train of thought I could follow that the ending is arguing for reparations. If this seems a little wild for a film that also features a toilet full of bees, let’s just say there’s a lot here to chew on and many different ways the bite can break down. If you’re looking something cerebral that works on multiple levels that’s also a straight-up horror classic then check it out.

Tommy Tricker & The Stamp Traveller (1988)

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Tommy Tricker is a children’s film about a society ordered on the basis of stamp collecting.  This is a world where all ages can identify a rare stamp on sight, and where everyone is constantly grifting and wheedling to get ahead to improve their collection.  Tommy Tricker is a young scam artist who excels in ripping people off by using stamps. The movie spends a lot of time building up Tommy Tricker’s character, only to pull a real switcheroo and have the actual lead character be some kid named Ralph who gets into black stamp magic and is granted the power to get animated, shrink down, and travel on a stamp. This takes him to both China, and more notably Australia, which has funnier stereotypes.

Though there are plenty of wild, inexplicable moments, these are pretty well-balanced with a lot of grind, where you’re watching the movie manage its pieces in a fairly normal way while you’re waiting for the good stuff.  While there is a specific type of thrill when you realize for instance that Ralph’s parents don’t seem to know or care that he has been missing for weeks, followed by Ralph’s father’s blood-curdling scream when he suddenly appears in front of them, I found sadly that these moments were eclipsed by the grind getting to them.

I definitely don’t believe that good art necessarily has be connected to how well it achieves its intentions.  We have plenty of master classes in greatness achieved by creating a desired effect, but the rarer and potentially more powerful finds are the movies where you’re called on to create a “house effect” of your own, transforming a bunch of ill-considered choices into a meaningful and enjoyable experience.  Tommy Tricker toes the line into this kind of experience, but unfortunately the movie’s ability to coast by as a just-good-enough children’s film handicaps it. This innate understanding of a simple form keeps it from getting to the heights of a Roar, or The Room, or one of Neil Breen’s films, etc., movies where the allegiance of their intentions can have more in common with a reflex test at the doctor’s than a carefully-made plan.

There are some very inspired moments. The depth of attention Tommy Tricker pays to stamp collecting is bonkers, and everything in Australia is great, and the film operates on a different level – a highlight here is when a character “driven mad by having all of his zoo animals poisoned” chains Tommy Tricker to a didgeridoo in a pen with a bunch of “lying kangaroos.” On the whole though, I feel like this one is strictly for the curiosity heads. The movie’s director made another film called The Peanut Butter Solution, which while i think has some of the same problems as this one, I’d recommend more as it has a deeper, wilder undercurrent that comes from subbing out stamp collecting for prepubescent body horror. While there can be transcendence in ignorance of form and quality, this film as a whole reminded me of watching a meandering improv set, one that has moments of brilliance and a strangely singular tone, but is ultimately buried under a cloud of directionless noodling.

Rock Demers produced 22 movies in the “Tales for All” series between 1984 and 2004. I’ve seen “Tales for All” #2, Michael Rubbo’s The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), maybe ten times and I absolutely recommend it. It’s a character caper with seriously convoluted plotting, endless, strange non-sequiturs, and a visual humor that casually edges as readily into the slapstick as the nightmarish; its “fully-realized but completely mysterious world”-mode connects it to everything from The Room (2003), to Nightbreed (1990), to Peewee Herman, to Paper Rad. The most accurate description of the movie I have is: It’s fun to ask people to watch it, and then ask them to describe it to you. “Tales for All” #7, Tommy Tricker & the Stamp Traveller, is Michael Rubbo’s second contribution to the series (of four total), and I loved this one too.

Tommy Tricker takes place on a planet Earth similar to this one, except that all people are inordinately interested, each for their own reasons, in stamps or the mail. Many people collect stamps for their beauty, or to take pride in their rarity; others deal stamps as a speculative commodity; some have pen pals; one guy tries to commit mail fraud. There’s also a small hobo subculture of people who travel the earth by casting a spell that embeds them on a stamp for the duration of its mail-time, to be transformed back into a person on arrival.

The basic plot, unifying an episodic collection of on-location hijinks shot throughout suburban Canada, Australia, and China, is that a kid trades his hothead Dad’s coolest stamp to Tommy Tricker, and eventually figures out that he can use stamp travel to get to Australia, where he suspects he’ll be able to recover a book of extremely rare stamps, which he hopes to bring home to mollify Dad… got that? As in The Peanut Butter Solution, there’re so many unnecessary details, quirks, asides, and unanswered questions that I’m tempted to go ham and add a second post listing my favorite fifty, and possibly a third with a deep dive on the rules, physics, and various implications of stamp travel. (Me, on stage in a dark and silent auditorium, addressing no one: “And I will, if anyone is actually interested.”)

I found the movie notably more coherent on rewatch. I’m reminded that as a kid I’d view movies by “having them on,” and familiarity with the characters and “what happens” would become both assumed and total throughout all parts of a viewing, such that any given movie’s scenes could be watched in any order, partially, and so on. I appreciate that Tommy Tricker feels structured to anticipate this immersed, kid-style repetitive viewing mode, and I enjoy the particular kind of confusion it creates for me, as an adult viewer, who now sits down and watches things straight through, and usually just once.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

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This is 3. a “Keanu in the matrix” movie, 2. a Linklater “friends partying and riding around” movie, and 1. a Philip K Dick adaptation:

1. I was 23 when A Scanner Darkly (2006) came out, and remember being disappointed by it, not having any idea what it was supposed to have been about. How could partying with your friends be ugly, unromantic, and desperate? Where do good times ever ride a precarious death-wave of paranoia and addiction? That certainly wasn’t how things were in my dilapidated punk house.

But damn, rewatching this, it felt clear that I didn’t get it because I just hadn’t experienced adult doldrums yet, or seen my reflection in the desperation, powerlessness, and chaos that flow beneath it, or understood the temptation to withdraw from the world into something small, selfish, and strange. This haunted, lonely “my shitty dream is real”-quality is, for me, the main characteristic of Dick’s writing, and Linklater “nails it.”

2. I like Linklater’s “friends partying and riding around” movies – Dazed and Confused (1993), Slacker (1990), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – because I too like partying with my friends and riding around. These movies remind me how my friends make me feel more like myself.

A Scanner Darkly is unique in this group because nobody’s having fun and the situation’s bad. Keanu’s depressed; his drug friends are trollish, unpleasant, en route to the bottom. The movie opens with Rory Cochrane (the stoner dude in Dazed & Confused) with hallucinated bugs pouring out of his hair, furiously itching. Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior (both annoying “bad boy” actors, both here as annoying wastoids) are in drug-bender dangerous behavior/conspiracy mode, and Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder claims to be too coked-out to bear human contact. Prescient Alex Jones cameo too… woof.

All of Linklater’s buddy movies (including this one) are regional, of a time, and zoomed into a small group of people, and they all do the same trick of flipping that, to be from anywhere, timeless, “archetypical.” Whether anyone “likes” Linklater, I think, has to do mainly with whether his “archetypes” are relevant to their experience, and the extent to which they “agree” with what he ascribes to them. Mostly he does this for sunshine-y stuff, but here’s an absolutely bleak and negative one to think about. What if he’d made more movies in this tonal range?

3. There’s an early scene I found surprisingly moving where Keanu narrates the situation so far. It shows him remembering an earlier point in the house with his wife and daughters, in which he hits his head on a cabinet, and says:

“How’d I get here? The pain – so unexpected and undeserved – had cleared away the cobwebs… I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… nothing would ever change, nothing new could ever be expected, it had to end. And it did…”

It cuts to the present, cluttered, dingy state of the house, and he continues:

“Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

I love the vibration between “I got bored and decided to give up my family, and here’s where it got me” (into a hell zone), and the broader PKD setup, where Keanu is doomed, has no agency, and never sees the full picture anyway. He’s a cop, tasked with surveilling himself and his friends (unbeknownst to them), but his boss is pretending to be his girlfriend (unbeknownst to him), and the entire operation is made to feed his addiction and paranoia intentionally, grooming him for sacrifice to some other purpose entirely beyond his awareness. You don’t get a darker “Keanu in the matrix” movie than that.

Richard Linklater is someone who I’ve grown to admire more and more as a filmmaker as I’ve gotten older.  He has a curious ability to zero in on the mundane spaces where you wouldn’t find the traditional story beats in a movie, expanding them to bring in realities you don’t often see represented in film.  This is especially pronounced today, where it seems like entire film types have been “perfected:” notice the easy-going structural, tonal homogeneity in Marvel films, or any time you’re watching a film that has the same lines from so many other films in the past, like an echo of an echo of a movie.  Linklater’s able to sidestep all of that, opting instead to give attention to and elevate moments that are typically mundane and neglected, though hyper-shared. Playing to this strength, A Scanner Darkly could have been really interesting, but unfortunately Linklater uses it as an excuse to experiment by trying to adopt some of PKD’s strengths instead.  The results lead me to believe, that Linklater is lacking in Fake Fake energy.

It’s been a while since I read A Scanner Darkly but I remember thinking it was good but not one of his best.  But if there’s one area where the book has an advantage it’s that the whole thing wasn’t ding dang rotoscoped. There’s a specific feeling you get from Phillip K Dick’s novels, where you feel like you’re way too deep in whatever plot or system he’s got you trapped in – Linklater might have thought that filtering the whole film would have stuck you in this valley of mysterious structure, with the unusual technology doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The issue is that for a film to really get into your head, you should never see the hand that’s crafting it, and the rotoscoping is a heavy hand spread across the entire film.

The movie wouldn’t have worked without the rotoscoping either, unfortunately.  Way too much time is spent with Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson’s characters, both of whom seem to sense that this is their opportunity to experiment as well. They’re seemingly locked in a contest to see who can torpedo this film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, each blasting off acting solos completely disconnected from what’s going on.  They also highlight the limitations in the tech by using lots of “big faces” (shades of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where the unreality was used to much better ends). Winona Ryder fares better, but is cursed with an extremely thin character. Keanu Reeves ends up being the most watchable and compelling, his minimalist acting style clashing the least frequently with the animation, occasionally even cutting through the fog and connecting emotionally, but with no one to play off.  I’m a huge booster of Keanu’s work but I’ll readily admit that that’s really not where you want him to be; he excels in creating connections and servicing the story, but isn’t a real “carry the movie” kind of actor. It should be noted that in his band Dogstar, he’s the bassist, which is his pocket in acting as well – creating structure and form, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a movie about a nationwide drug crisis that’s slowly killing the US, A Scanner Darkly felt weirdly non-relevant.  The carefree attitude it uses to portray crippling addiction b/w the driving creative force of the film being experimentation (and not addiction) doesn’t really play as well in a time that in some aspects closely reflects the world it depicts.  Nevertheless the movie weirdly comes together in the last ten minutes or so. It begins to quote from the book’s more memorable passages while Reeves’s character’s life falls apart, trained into addiction by one system of control and then sent off to work creating the root of his addiction, in a ruse of being cured. The rotoscoping gets more interesting and ends up creating a somewhat mind-out-of-body experience here, by subtly tweaking the effect we’ve gotten used to, causing deep confusion in the mind’s eye.  The movie ends with the afterword from the book where Dick lists all the names of the people he loved that were addicts coupled with what they lost, both an extremely sad and beautiful moment. Then the screen fades to black, jaunty music plays, and cast and crew are shown in font that wouldn’t look out of place in a show on Nickelodeon.