What to Watch This Weekend

Due to a convergence of social, technological and mental failures, there is no review this Thursday. So, instead, I offer you the next installment of What to Watch – a very special Halloween edition. Three recommendations that, for the moment, are all available to stream on Netflix.

Vampyr (1932) – (sometimes, oddly, called Not Against the Flesh)

This silent, while not as fantastic as Nosferatu, is still well worth seeing.  It’s atmospheric to the nth degree, and the film has a dreamy, almost drugged quality underscored by both its pace and the cinematography.  A young man takes a room at a sleepy little inn somewhere in Europe and then, almost like a sleepwalker, ends up far from where he began.  You have to be in the right mood for its slow pace, which almost seems to weigh you down by the end, but if you’re in the mood to be creeped out, it’s a solid choice.

Tales of Terror (1962) –

I was so thrilled to see that this was available to stream; it’s one of my absolute favorite movies to watch around Halloween. It’s actually a collection of three short films, all adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. Vincent Price is in all three; Peter Lorre appears in “The Black Cat” and Basil Rathbone turns up in “The Case of M. Valdemar.” It’s a bit campy, perhaps, to a modern viewer, but I love watching the theatrical flair while which they tackle Poe’s tendency to write high (terrible) emotion. And you can never have enough of either Poe or Price around the end of October.

The Sixth Sense (1999) –

I doubt there are many of my readers who haven’t heard of, yet seen, The Sixth Sense. For my cohort, it was one of those movies that everyone saw when it was out (sometimes more than once). But, before M. Night Shamaylan had made himself a joke – I have still not forgiven him for the travesty of film that was The Last Airbender – he gave us this chilling little ghost story. Rewatching it, you remember why, for a short time, there was talk of him being the next Hitchcock. The fact that it hasn’t happened, though, shouldn’t detract from how well done this movie was (does anyone even remember it was a Best Picture Oscar nominee?).  Eleven years later, definitely worth a rewatch.

 

Bonus pick:   Though I don’t recommend it as strongly as these other three, it’s also worth noting that those of you more in the mood for fluff and blood (or comedy) can pick up Zombieland (2009). I’m not Jesse Eisenberg’s biggest fan, and the screenplay is middling, but Woody Harrelson is astoundingly good, Emma Stone is enjoyable, Bill Murray’s cameo is amazing and the funny bits are really quite funny.  Not Shaun of the Dead, but a good movie to throw in while a few likeminded horror/comedy fusion fans are around.

The Architecture of Expectations

This is a story that began in 2005. I remember reading a book review in the New York Times; I must have been in Bronxville, given when it was published, but I have no real setting for it.  Just a vague memory that the review looked interesting, that I skimmed it because the words “revealing the premise” were in the first sentence, and that I vaguely thought, “oh yes, I should read that sometime.”

The book in question was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’d never read anything else by Ishiguro, though I knew of The Remains of the Day. Still, this was a book that caught my eye mainly because it managed to get itself taken seriously despite whispers of “sci-fi” and “thriller” in its wake.

But I didn’t pick it up right away, and there it sat, on my lengthly list of books to read, some day, when the occasion arose.

And then, a few months ago, a trailer hit.

It’s not a terribly good trailer, in some ways; it gives away the central conceit of the story, and it’s a tad melodramatic (but then, the film might be too, I suppose). But what it did do was trigger my memory of the original review.

So I ended up getting the book on mp3 from the library, to listen to on the train. Rosalyn Landor, the narrator, was really excellent, and I fell in love with the narrative through her telling of it. It was a great thing to listen to on a train, watching suburbs turn into city and vice versa.  The book does a really stellar job of fully exploring a conceit while, at the same time, not forcing it down your throat.  The characters are alien and human all at once, and they drive the novel forward.  It’s certainly dystopian, but it’s not Orwell; it reminded me a bit of The Handmaid’s Tale, in some ways.

But it was a curious thing. Because I’d seen the trailer, the characters were definitely shaped by the three lead actors in my imaginings.  Not perfectly of course; rewatching the trailer, I realized I’d switched some details up, filled in images differently, forgotten some things and misremembered others.  So the book, in my head, was neither the “pure” experience, unfiltered by the knowledge of who would play certain roles, nor was it shaped as it would have been if I’d seen the film first.

The upshot of my enjoying the book so much has been nervousness about the film, despite a great desire to see it. With the book so fresh in my mind, is it even possible that I’ll like the movie? Or will I like the movie more for the pleasant associations it will have with a book I just finished enjoying not that long ago?

Movie adaptations, after all, have a very fine line to tread.  On the one hand, part of their marketing relies upon people who’ve either read the book or intended to; on the other, it’s certain that many people who see the film will have no experience with the book whatsover.  At once, you have to make a film that stands as a film while being true enough to the source material to please those who are trading off the name in the first place.  It’s very hard, and I’ve had both experiences as a moviegoer – adaptations that are loose, but enjoyable, and those that are faithful, but still miss an essential spark.

With any luck, I’ll be reviewing the film of Never Let Me Go in this space sometime soon.  But in the meantime, I’m examining my expectations a little more closely.  What do I want from the film, exactly? And knowing my expecations might be disappointed, can I buffer myself a bit?  Perhaps I’ll be happily surprised, in fact, and the whole thing will be moot.

It’s going to be a thoughtful movie (no explosions and no true macguffins, I’m sorry to say), but it does have a complex, quiet scifi aspect to it that, I expect, will be ignored by those who wish it to be a serious film.  It is a DRAMA, not science fiction, because it is a serious movie about serious things.

To this, I say, someday maybe people will realize that it can be both. And for this alone, I hope the film succeeds, even if in a quiet way.  Because a good movie is a good movie, regardless of what sort of trappings its plot relies upon.

Sunset Boulevard

Recently, I was watching Sunset Boulevard (for probably the fifth or sixth time) with my roommate (who had never seen it before). It’s one of my favorite movies, though I don’t know if I agree with IMDB that it’s the greatest noir ever – maybe the greatest movie that is a noir, which is slightly different. Even there, I’m not willing to commit.

Regardless of such split hairs, though – great movie. Very few people will disagree with that.

My own personal definition of a great movie is one that not only holds up over multiple viewings, but improves over time. Much like a favorite novel, revisiting certain films opens up new avenues of thought and new reactions at different points of my life. Plus, of course, there’s just the advantage of having the luxury of hunting for little treasures.

This time through, it was the mirrors. I’d noticed the plethora of reflected images in previous viewings, but this time they felt inescapable. Norma running up the stairs the mirror while Joe prepared to leave the New Year’s party. The little hand mirror Norma seems to constantly have in hand in the car. The unforgettable scene after Betty leaves in which Norma notices the beauty strips still on her face and removes them before going in to find Joe packing.

In a house filled with images of Norma as she was, it’s intriguing that there are also so many opportunities for Norma to see herself as she is. They’re missed opportunities, of course; her delusions don’t allow Norma to register what she’s viewing. For Joe, the mirrors only amplify his sense of confinement. They continually bar his ability to pretend the situation is anything it isn’t.

Joe fascinates me. He’s a reactive hero, but we’re drawn in, largely because of the voiceover (which here, works beautifully, in part because it’s a film so very conscious of being a film). He’s really not a “good guy,” nor a very terrible one, but he’s complex, and in his way, he’s just as chewed up and spit out by Hollywood as Norma. They’re both damaged beyond repair; the difference, and perhaps the tragedy for Joe, is that he realizes it.  He can see that Norma is cracked beyond fixing but, in the penultimate scene where Betty finds out how he’s been living, his actions show that he realizes he is past the point of no return himself.  Even if he had been able to successfully leave Norma, he can’t go back to Ohio.

Joe is defined as both a writer and someone who is utterly without control.  From the first time we properly meet him, he’s attempting to keep his car from being repossessed; in a very real way, he is trying to cultivate and maintain agency throughout the film.  We see it eroded little by little, and there is an element of horror in the way he slowly becomes an accessory.  His first reaction to finding that all his belongings have been moved in while he slept is the sort of helpless protest that usually attends a very different sort of power dynamic.

(I’d love to talk about gender in this film, but that would be a much, much longer entry that would require quite a bit more rewatching to do properly. Maybe someday.)

There’s a reason Sunset Boulevard consistently makes lists of great movies in the history of cinema.  It is suspenseful, chilling, and ultimately takes the idea of noir and reflects it back through a prism of film’s self-criticism.

Check out the opening, though, to see why it gets firmly labeled noir, even if it is more or less detective-free. Love the score too. It would make a good Halloween movie, I think, in its own way. After all, what’s more scary than the erosion of identity? (My liberal arts education may be showing.)

Grade: A Indisputably fantastic, and one of my personal favorites.

TV Corner

As you well may have noticed, my updates have been spotty for the past couple of weeks.  Mainly, this is because I’ve been seduced from the big screen to the small screen.  The culprits aren’t the new fall season, however, but shows I’d been meaning to watch for ages and have been hooked on since starting them.

The first is Deadwood, HBO’s series set in the old west, loosely based on true events. As with many HBO or Showtime offerings, it’s got a heaping portion of nudity, profanity and violence, so do brace yourself for that if it’s not your cuppa; however, I have little trouble believing that all three happened in spades in the time and place depicted.

Much has been made of the acting, and rightly so.  Ian McShane’s Al Swearington is a tour de force, and would probably carry the series on its own.  Thankfully, it doesn’t have to – Robin Weigert’s Calamity Jane, John Hawkes’ Sol Star, Paula Malcomson’s Trixie, Brad Dourif’s Doc Cochran, and many others are all nuanced, intriguing performances, and the strength of the characters keep me hooked.

The story runs hot and cold; while the dialogue is always varied and textured, the plot can sometimes lag or meander. It’s interesting but sometimes problematic that the two characters who can loosely be termed the ‘romantic leads’ have almost no chemistry at all, and that the crackshot sheriff becomes the unmoving center of events, rather than the protagonist driving them. On the one hand, I do think that it was smart to make the show a series of overlapping arcs, rather than one epic story – it serves what the show is trying to do better. On the other hand, some arcs are more interesting than others, and it risks fragmentation at times.  Still, on the strength of its characters, it does better than most shows.

The production values are strong, as you would expect. The costumes, especially, are beautifully done, though I don’t have the knowledge to comment on their accuracy. There’s a sense of dust and detail and weight in all the design aspects of the show that serves as a vivid backdrop and both ties the series too and disconnects it from classic Westerns.

Grade: B I’m invested and entertained, consistently, even by the weaker episodes

The other show that’s to blame for my lack of film viewing is the BBC’s Being Human. I just finished series one, and I’m well and truly hooked.  I can’t remember the last time I cared so quickly about a character, much less three of them.  It’s the kind show where I constantly change who my favorite is, and I was instantly invested in all three main characters’ happiness and well being.

A classic “better than it sounds,” I expected kitch from a show that’s about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost as housemates.  And though it is generally a fairly light show, Being Human has a sweet sincerity that is incredibly disarming. The urban fantasy is well handled, neither ignored nor too heavy-handed.  There’s a bit of romance, a bit of suspense, some decent werewolf effects (for once) but the story is the heart of the show.

I can’t wait to get to series two. Being Human is fluff, true, but it’s thoughtful fluff with some genuine heart.

Grade: A- It knows what it wants to do, and does it well.  Hard to ask much more.

 

And, though not a full review for now, I am also rewatching the miniseries Jekyll with a friend. As of this writing, it’s available to stream on Netflix, and I highly recommend it if you enjoy thrillers, genre deconstructions, or just generally being entertained by a modern take on Jekyll and Hyde.