Tag Archives: candyman

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.

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.