3 Short Paragraphs: The Tax Collector

2020, David Ayer (Suicide Squad) -- download

I am usually pretty loathe to say these posts are "reviews" and usually stick to just calling them "blogging" or "blog posts" to be more accurate. But even that seems off these days, given that the term has evolved long past that personal anecdote concept it started as. So... "one sided conversations", given the comments are few and far between, and that the things presented are rarely thought through before I pick up the keyboard (i do do that, as I have a Work Keyboard and a Personal Keyboard shared via docking station) and begin typing.

I know I said this before, but somewhere down the road, I guess I became a fan of David Ayer. Sure, Suicide Squad was a shit-show, but I have the distinct feeling he just stopped arguing and went with whatever flow the suits wanted that day. I have pretty much enjoyed everything he has done, to some degree, with a hearty acknowledgement of the flaws. At the very least, I applaud him for sticking to a distinctive tone & style, one that doesn't shrink back from the violence that men can do. Glorifies it? Maybe, probably, but as I said, "fictional violence is fun, real violence is entirely a different beast."

Ayer's second straight-to-alternative-source-because-The-Pause movie is a micro focus on gangs in LA, zoomed in on one gang leader Wizard having established himself as the highest of the high, collecting taxes of fealty from all others. David (Bobby Soto, Narcos: Mexico) and Creeper (Shia LaBeouf, Fury) are Wizard's tax collectors, steeped in the power they are provided, and Creeper's legendary status as a man not to be fucked with. The movie spends much of the time establishing these two men, from David's tight connection to family and how he separates that very Catholic part of his life from his work, to Creeper's straight up scary status on the street. And then someone comes along to show them he can be scarier, he can out creep the Creeper, and what happens if you say No.

The New Norm never has me watching a movie straight through, entirely in one sitting, unless it's a re-watch (and I am skipping posting those this season, as they out number all other media) where I can wander around the apartment doing things as a movie plays in the background. So, over the three acts of watching, the movie sorted itself into two acts, one very tight and one ... lacking. The establishment of David's family and his torturous separation of them from his work is finely craft lending itself well to my current fascination with how people live in LA. He's a good guy, you like him, but you know What He Does. Everyone in his extended family is involved in The Business, they are his Crew. When that all comes tumbling down, we see how David is something else entirely when it is taken from him, and to be honest, that all comes to an end far too quickly. The action of the third act of the movie quick, tight but drops a lot of the emotional weight the first two acts carried. I found myself marveling at exactly how small David's world was given we were told they controlled all LA. I also found myself re-writing the third act, having David seeking out real monsters to replace Creeper, who died far too quickly, far too easily to warrant his early movie rep. Real monsters who would make the cartel connected New Guy's scare tactics pale in comparison. I liked my ending better than Ayer's, and since we were all Davids, why not.

Of note, one of the scenes, where David's niece has her Quinceañera, I was struck that it all seemed familiar. Then I was reminded that Ayer had directed a couple of episodes of Deputy and it made sense, as the show did its best to shine another light on Latino culture in LA, while not dodging the reality of the crime controlled neighbourhoods. This movie also deals with the paradoxes inherent, from the simple beauty of a young woman coming of age, and her family celebrating it together, to the deep seated familial ties of criminal legacy.

Distraction: What I Am Watching (Or At Least Attempting To) Pt C: Abandoned Before I Really Paid Attention

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. Not that you care. But at least I am not telling you about my D&D character. The theme almost always comes in batches.

Pt. A is here. And Pt. B.

Abandoned Before I Really Paid Attention

Holy Fuck !!  Look at that post title !!

There is so much to watch these days. Even if I didn't download stuff, I couldn't watch everything available OTA or via the handful of streaming services I have signed up for. There is just too much that Is Good or too much Less Than Good But Genre. And yeah, I still watch too much that is Less Than Good. I also eat too many french fries and potato chips. I also have a tendency to flick flick flick through the listings until something catches my attention, even when there are Things I Must Watch right in front of me. That leads to one or a few episodes and then Next Shiny Thing.

For example, the new season of Westworld (Kent's post). I know I love the show, you know I love the show. So, why have I watched only one, maybe two episodes so far? I dunno, I don't have any deep insights as to my attention span, even if you remove The Pause (have to move past that label, as we are no longer paused, but changed) from the calculation.

As we have moved on from the Big Pause Button in the Sky, the series has moved on from the bubble lives that was imposed on the self-unaware Hosts (what the show called its robots), as some of them gain more awareness. Focusing on Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood, True Blood) who is taking the war to us, we are briefly shown her plans, while Bernard, Maeve and Fake Charlotte get intertwined in this Grand Scheme. Getting mixed into the intrigue is Caleb, a small-time crook who grabs jobs through an Uber-like gig economy crime app, and the family running the company in direct competition with Delos (the robot makers), with its world influencing big data fed AI.

Soooo much going on in such a short exposure. I ran away. Too heavy right now.

The same goes for Devs (same Kent post) which I only gave one episode. I had actually been waiting for this show to appear, having been enthralled by the trailers. I love Alex Garland's way of exploring topics, so this one yet again again focuses on the idea of an eccentric Big Brain Creator (Nick Offerman, Parks and Recs) running a programming company on the torrents of bleeding edge technology.

In his usual slow, deliberate, beautiful manner (which reminds me of the music of Max Richter) we are introduced to Lily (Sonoyo Mizuno, Maniac [another good show I abandoned for no good reason]), whose BF Sergei is invited by the head of Amaya (Offerman), a company making waves in quantum tech, to participate in their inner circle of coders. He sees something startling, makes the mistake of trying to sneak the info out, and is killed. And Lily is told he mysteriously committed suicide. She doesn't believe it.

So, groundbreaking tech that has such incredible ramifications that they would kill to keep it hidden. Strange, eccentric coder who has the persona of being an almost deific benefactor, but obviously is not. Or is he? Is he hiding something for a very good reason? Or is it and he just Evil? I really should find out.

Reality Z is the Brazilian rip-off of Charlie Brooker's (Black Mirror) Dead Set which itself was simply the idea of doing a zombie apocalypse on the set of Big Brother. I would love to be able to say these reality shows would be long dead more than ten years later, but nope, still going pretty strong.

In this one, set in Rio, the Greek God focused show is full of the usual vacuous stars and wanna-be stars and horrible staff all stabbing each other in the back or fucking each other in the back room, when suddenly zombies start eating their faces. With little real reason, they decide that the set is the best place to all congregate for safety's sake.

I actually watched enough episodes to get bored with it. Zombie Apocalypse seemed utterly perfect for this actual pandemic situation, as it was the jokingly extreme end of what we could have been dealing with. Seriously, did anyone see that video in December, of the Chinese couple who are set upon by state officials, on the street, and loaded into a secured box on the back of a truck? Who knows the actual source, but this is when Wuhan was the centre of this (seriously, when is the last time anyone even SAID the name Wuhan?) and nobody knew where it was going to go. We were dancing between thinking it was "just another flu" and ... well, zombies? Anywayz, this show was light enough to distract me until it actually annoyed me with the usual tropes as well as how much reality TV annoys me, which is why I never finished Brooker's show prior.

Snowpiercer (Kent, I still have your hardcopy on my side table....) is a wonderful idea, a whacked out idea of French scifi about a train that travels constantly, in circles, around the planet which was frozen solid due to a ecological disaster that makes Global Warning look like the mild effect people think it is. This massively long train has rich people in the front, poor people in the rear and a mass amount of privileged middle-classmen. Enter metaphors for classism.

And yes, the TV show is based on the movie.

But, we cannot run a series purely on the story from the movie, which focused on a rebellion led by Captain America, and how to reveals the failures inherent to the classicism built into its system, eventually bring about the downfall. Sure, they could have stretched that out, and I guess they will but they need more story for the filler. So, enter Murder Mystery and the Curtis character's pre-freeze background allowing him the part of investigating cop. The train has a delicate balance that must be maintained, and the idea of a murderer not only killing people but able to frame others, while continuing his acts, upsets the balance. So, Curtis asked to investigate in exchange for ... his soul?

I have only watched a couple of episodes but may favourite immediate Spoiler is that Jennifer Connelly plays a steward, but who is much more, maybe the real mind & skill behind the name Wilford, inventor and apparently false engineer of the train? I will have to watch further, as I was intrigued, just ... distracted.

Briarpatch is a typical weird murder mystery show, something that used to rather rare but is all over the TV map these days. I keep on forgetting why I was caught, albeit briefly, into watching it but then I recall the tenuous connection to Sam Esmail, the creator or Mr. Robot, and the first episode directed by Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night). It stars Rosaria Dawson (Daredevil) as the sister of a murdered cop, forced to return to her small Texan hometown "affectionately" referrred to as St. Disgrace. She is not happy to be there, and folks in town are less than happy to see her return. She left a long time ago, for a reason.

There is a definite mood to the opening episode, all that I watched. Allegra (Dawson) is glad to stand apart from the odd locals, with her haughty attitude and pressed outfits. There is that Small Town Gothic feel to it, as well as oddities (local owns a giraffe) and darkness, and a tiger wandering around. But seeing I didn't get past episode one, we shall see how the show embraces such. I am also curious to jump forward in time to see how they handle the second season, for the show is being billed as an "anthology" series, in that he second season will have little, if any, connection to the first season but for ... something? American Horror Story does this to some degree of success, but not sure, not sure. (note: it was cancelled, so no...)

Someone, somewhere on social media, stated that they see Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and the new Perry Mason as taking place in the same universe. Possibly, and I see what they are getting at, but I saw it more as two people having the same dream, and when they wake up and tell you all about it, you get each person's version, their personally tainted view of the dream. Both are 30s LA, both are about racial tensions, and both are focused around a murder case connected to a religious organization. And both are moody as fuck (AF as the kids say).

But wait, yes I hear your question. Wasn't Perry Mason a lawyer TV show from the 60s? Yes, you are correct but no, not the guy in the wheelchair -- that was Raymond Burr's other show, Ironside. But THIS Perry Mason is set prior to his law career, when he was a down-on-his-luck gumshoe. This Perry is a less than stellar individual, but oh so in tune with the classic schlub film noir P.I. I would have loved to be in the elevator as those two suited studio execs talk about this one, one getting progressively more confused as the pitch is made, "Wait, so he's not a lawyer? And it has nothing to do with him becoming a lawyer? Why again is it even called Perry Mason again?"

And yet, wow.

Matthew Rhys (The Americans) is an everyman, sad-sack in the role, both sympathetic and just head-shakingly a loser. And like the centres of all these stories, he gets hooked on the case he shouldn't, the one that isn't safe for him to investigate, mixing him up in all sorts of things above his pay grade. So, we underdog support him and sort of root for him, as long as he can stop just being a jerk. I definitely need to watch more, as I just excited myself recalling it.

European specfic is a thing right now, or I should more clearly say, European specfic actually appealing to North American audiences is a thing. I can remember the days when I would hunt blogs and entertainment sites from overseas, looking for the next weird & wonderful show to hunt down. These days, there are just so fucking many. I watch some, drop many, I tell you about a few.

Ragnarok is a Norwegian series about a small town at the head of a fjord which has a very personal connection to the Norse Gods. Something environmental is going on in the town when a new family arrives, one with a nerdy, awkward kid who almost immediately starts having ... episodes that lead us to believe he is probably Thor. It is the premise of the show, but with little explanation Magne begins to get stronger, lose his need for glasses and gets all sparky. He is Thor, but what does that mean?

I am not sure, as not a lot drew me in. I usually like the exploration of everyday culture in a part of the world I know little about, but the basic premise that something dire is going to happen and the resurrected Gods are required was a bit thin. And none of the characters were particularly captivating. Might go back, probably won't.

Into the Night is one of the few apocalyptic series released recently, likely ahead of a loooong list that will be released next year, if there is anything to be released next year. This is one of those "something happened" premises where we spend at least a couple of episodes not really knowing what or why, if we ever do learn. Deadly Global Event is the best way to describe, which has the ragtag members of a flight from Brussels to Moscow that is hijacked and forced to fly west, away from the rising sun, away from the sunlight that kills everyone it touches.

I dropped after a few episodes, because it was one of those shows where everyone mistrusts everyone, everyone has their own agenda and its own premise is unable to be sustained. At some point, as they fly west, trying to find airfields to land and refuel, in the circle around the earth, something HAD to go wrong. Oh, I was expecting it to do the season through a liberal amount of hand waving and pseudo science, which I can be OK with, but all the yelling was getting to me.

The Order, classic mid-grade Canadian specific, which we hit upon in one of those, "Well, we are finished watching, what is next?" It seems there was to be magic and monsters, and a secret order of spell casters embedded in a university, and our Hero was somehow mixed up in it, despite his lack of knowledge. Was he a secret wizard? Was he a secret monster? Who knows, but there is Matt Frewer playing the amiable grandfather to the main (grandfather? Fuck I am old) and Adam DiMarco basically playing the same character he played in the main magic-using-uni-students show The Magicians. And there is headmistress Katherine Isabelle, who will always be the werewolf from Gingersnaps, so, of course, I wanted there to be a werewolf in the show.  Guess what?

The show is serviceable enough, but not so much that we got past the first episode. It just didn't really have anything all that exciting going for it. Even look at that ad poster that looks like it was built by an algorithm. This is something I expect to show up on The CW later this year, as they have been plugging in Canadian shows, as they run out of American productions to air. Then again, Netflix has it, so why even bother.

Tru Crime (allathetime)...part 2

 (part 1)

Unsolved Mysteries Season 1 - Netflix
I'll Be Gone In The Dark (2020), d. Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane and Josh Koury - HBO

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Tru Crime is omnipresent, a never-ending parade of documentary films, tv series, books and podcasts.  The reality of true crime is that it's cheap to produce, and there's never any shortage of material, these horrendous and fascinating and horrendously fascinating things just keep on happening.

While Tru Crime was a genre before the emergence of Unsolved Mysteries in the 1980's, this was for an entire generation, our first exposure to it, and the mother of all true crime reality TV.  What made the original show so compelling was its mix of crimes and the unknown.  One segment about a sleepwalking murderer would lead into a tale about a UFO sighting, followed by an arson story and then, I dunno, bigfoot.  This blend of the real and the surreal was just the right mix to tell its audience to relax a little bit.  It's not that the cheesier mythic creatures segments diluted the potency of the crime segments, but they helped an audience deal with their anxiety by providing some content they could be skeptical about.  

Robert Stack as host provided an air of gravitas to the proceedings, his craggy, stern face and from-deep-in-the-chest delivery meant no nonsense, even for the more nonsensical segments of the show.  The original series had a tip line, and kept you coming back even during summer repeats hoping that the intense "Update" music would startle the shit out of you and Stack's voiceover breathlessly raced through the current details of the case.  Oh and that music, the end credits music, was certain to haunt my dreams every night after watching an episode.

The show lived beyond Stack's hosting to include stints by Virginia Madsen and Dennis Farina in a resurrected series in the late Aughts basically operating in the same formula.  Off the air for a decade, Unsolved Mysteries returned this spring on Netflix, guided by Stranger Things' Shawn Levy as EP.  

 It's a bit of a shock to the system going into the Netflix show if you were an avid viewer of the previous incarnation, for it is nothing at all like the previous show.  To start, it's a single subject per episode, features no narration or host, and its reenactments are delicately handled as opposed to the gauzy, melodramatic reenactments of the original.  The format is less pulp noir, and more modern documentary.  If it weren't so compellingly effective, often upsettingly so, I would be appalled that they would even have the gumption to take on the Unsolved Mysteries moniker.

But the inaugural six episodes are a wild mix bag in subject matter but each one fascinating in its own way.  It's hard to cite "production values" in a documentary but there's obvious experience behind the scenes here... the editing, the pacing, how the interviewees are captured, and information doled out...it's all very crisp, very methodical.  

Each story has its disturbing facets, whether it be the strangeness surrounding Rey Rivera's unusual death in "The Mystery on the Rooftop", Patrice Endres' vanishing in a 13 minute window between last sighting and a recorded phone call, the whereabouts of a patriarch who murdered his family and disappeared, the likely racially motivated murder of Alonzo Brooks, the seemingly verifiable alien encounters in Berkshire county, and a missing woman, likely murdered by her mother after threatening to go public with her involvement in her father's murder.  That these stories exist at all is a little harrowing, and just spending an hour understanding some of the details of the cases at play is like having the breath sucked out of you.  It's unpleasant.

But then we live in unpleasant times, and sometimes confronting that unpleasantness is necessary in order to deal with it.  As with Unsolved Mysteries past, there is a public plea for information.  Unlike UM past, the modern day has Reddit groups and other forums where armchair detectives actively pursue investigating these types of things, and the global exposure of Netflix allows for a story like "House of Terror" (a mystery from France) to have a reach that may actually wind up locating the murderer.  Updates these days will not be in-show, but online, and if you do one search on your phone of status updates from the show, you'll likely see news in your feeds for months to come.

A second half to season 1 is due in October.

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I'll Be Gone In The Dark sets a new bar for Tru Crime documentary.  This six part series doubles as an examination of the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer and crime writer Michelle McNamara's crucial examination into the case that ultimately led to the decades-old rape and murder spree being solved.

The first episode almost falls into the trap of many documentaries about serial offenders, looking at true crime from a standpoint of fascination, a source of entertainment that glorifies the criminal and/or obsesses curiously over their actions, rather than clinically examining or even hitting home the repulsive nature of the crimes.  Too often true crime filmmakers want you to share in their fascination, to communally absolve them of their morbid curiosities by partaking in them.  By the end of the first episode, we know this one is different.  

People were affected by these crimes, traumatically so, and this series, as much as it sits with the mystery of "who" and "why" also makes incredible strides in highlighting what the victims and survivors of the brutal crimes EAR/ONS perpetrated.  

McNamara is famous in true crime circles for her honest examinations of murders and murderers and her ability to remember the impact they had on the victims and the populations exposed to their crimes.  That human angle, the documentary postulates, is what elevated her as a true crime writer, her ability to empathize with the victims, to downplay the sensationalism and remind us the true fallout of the most savage actions of man.  

We get deep into McNamara's life, her difficulty with her mother, a traumatic grooming incident with a boss, marrying comedian-actor Patton Oswalt, becoming a mother, but also descending into obsession over the EAR/ONS case, and her accidental death.  After a resoundingly popular piece in an LA magazine she's contracted for a book which becomes both fixation and burden, as her level of meticulousness and empathy start to have an impact on her mental health.  Oswalt's fame enters into play for mere seconds of the 6-hour docuseries, and he makes pains to ensure his wife is portrayed as her own magnificent, intelligent being and not just an attache to his personality. Her story in itself is heartbreaking, the production regularly reaffirming her conflict between author, detective and mother.  

I found insight into their marriage, and particularly the text message captures of Oswalts resolute support for her endeavor to be both beautiful and gut wrenching.  Though they don't focus on Oswalt's battles with depression, McNamara's come to the fore at times, and it's clear that Oswalt understands.  At the same time, he understands the creative process, and his emphatic championing of her writing, supporting her with encouragement and time and space, is a testament to what marriage truly means: holding the other up while they struggle.  Oswalt being an executive producer could mean that any conflicts in their relationship didn't make it to final edit (there's a particular point where McNamara brings up having another child to which Oswalt firmly shuts it down, never to be brought up again), but for the most part it's two independent thinkers who found each other and seemed to be on the same tract as parents.

The split time between McNamara's struggles with the case, and the actual investigation of the case take a bit of getting used to, narratively, but it ultimately works.  One thing the series points out is her gift of being able to empathize with the EAR/ONS victims.  She had a gift in being able to approach them about the worst time in their lives and not just poke around for clues, but understand what they had to go through.  So often all we see in media as a result of a crime is the scene or evidence or analysis of the perpetrator... we so rarely get the victim's experience.  This documentary ensures the survivors and the victims are not forgotten.

It's painful, absolutely painful, to hear first hand some of these women (and one man) relate their experiences.  It's upsetting, but important that they are given the platform to do so, and I think in doing so this documentary honors McNamara's approach to true crime, and celebrates their bravery.  It's uncomfortable when these women will sometimes introduce themselves by number, but they're taking ownership of it.  The more they talk, the more they tell their story, their trauma, their pain, the more they can embolden others to do the same.  There's bravery face-front in this docuseries, just giving these people a high profile forum to tell their truth, and that's a rare thing.  To note that victims of crimes were (and likely still are in many cases) just treated as another piece of evidence, and not actually cared for in any human way, it's ghastly.

Through McNamara's diligence, her investigative tenacity, she started to bring people together behind the scenes.  It was after her passing that ideas about using DNA ancestry sites to try and track down the present-day whereabouts of the redubbed Golden State Killer finally led to finding him and a conviction.  Even with the unveiling of this horrible man, in the final episode, it doesn't completely descend into biography of the man, it still takes its time to see the effect it has on McNamara's friends, family, colleagues, and the victims and survivors.  It's never about glorifying the crime, but celebrating the people who endure.

The final shots of the show are, perhaps, its most brilliant commentary on the true crime medium.  It's a series of sequences pulling back from the tight focus on the talking heads, highlighting all the ediface --the cameras, the screens, the makeup, the lights -- and also pulling back from the made up rooms that they used repeatedly throughout that were all manufactured for the show to represent McNamara's workspace or bedroom, showing these sets being taken down, reminding us that even with this "true crime" examination there's a heavy level of artificiality to it, and that it's not the whole story that was put in front of us. 

Horror, Not Horror (again) pt 4: six weeks later

"Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan, but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see.

Anna and the Apocalypse - 2017, d. John McPhail - Netflix

The Girl With All The Gifts - 2016, d. Colm McCarthy - Netflix

Color Out Of Space - 2019, d. Richard Stanley - Netflix

Take Shelter - 2011, d. Jeff Nichols - AmazonPrime

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I tapped out on zombie stories a long time ago, and generally anything that smacks of zombie or zombie-like-flavouring gets a hard pass.  Every now and again I trip into a zombie story, either a show using a zombie pastiche or a comic book taking a sudden turn into the subgenre but I don't seek them out. 

 

So it may seem weird that I have two zombie movies to cover in this one post, but the simple reason is I completely forgot to note that I had watched Anna and the Apocalypse and promptly forgot about it until about 2 minutes ago when I searched this here blog for "zombies" and came across Toasty's review.   So it turns out, based on my Letterboxd recordings, that I watched a year ago.  I thought perhaps because it was Christmassy that I watched it amid our Hallmark-glut last year, but no, I watched it just before starting my Tarantino rewatch, for some reason.

 

Being so long ago, what could I possibly recall. I recorded no thoughts on the film in Letterboxd, just a 3* rating, so it wasn't all bad, and my lingering impression, now that I remembered I watched it, is that it wasn't all that bad.  I believe I confused this for Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter , at least a little bit.  The music was enjoyably peppy, but unmemorable, the scares were non-existent, and the horror sits below Shawn of the Dead in horrific-ness (which is to say, not very horrifying, mild intensity at best).  

 

There's a definite charm to a song-and-dance interpretation of genre films, but as Toasty pointed out, since Buffy The Vampire Slayer's "Once More With Feeling", genre has gotten all kinds of song-and-dance numbers on the regular, so a feature film needs to really punch it out.  Anna... comes close but doesn't ever flex past feeling like a one-off television episode of some teen dramedy (arguably, the quality of TV programming has been at amazing high for the past few years, the equal to most cinema in production values and talent on board).  If I'm less than plussed with Anna... I think it mostly has to do with it falling so readily into the trappings of zombie movies, perhaps even leaning into them purposefully.  It's like the production team thought "zombie christmas musical" as a premise was innovative enough and falling into rote teen drama and zombie cliche was as simple as it had to be.  

 

That's where The Girl With All The Gifts (watched only last month, not last year!) excels.  It presents a brand new take on zombies (at least, brand new to me, a non zombie-aficionado).  It's almost a half hour before we meet zombies proper, but that time is spent getting to know Melanie (an amazing debut for Sennia Nanua), the protagonist of our story, one of many children who were born infected with the zombie-creating fungus but not mentally incapacitated by it.  We follow Melanie through her routine for a few days, each day getting a different level of insight into what she is, and how she is different.  Melanie and her kind live in isolated cells on a military base, and once per day they are strapped to a specialized wheelchair and taken to class where Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton) treats them like real children and tries to teach them like a real class.  The children adore her, but as Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) points out, set free, and without the "blocker" cream they apply to mask their scent, these children wouldn't hesitate to feed on her.  

 

The point though is Melanie is distinctly different in her desire to restrain her inhibitions, and her ability to control her cravings (if only temporarily). Because she's so special, Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) wants to dissect her, believing she can find within the cure for the fungus that's spreading rapidly across the globe.  Before any further testing can be done, though, our small band (plus a few more) are on the run and survival will require even more dependence upon Melanie and her unique view of the world.

Based off a short story and developed into a book concurrently with the screenplay, notable comics scribe Mike Carey (Lucifer, Hellblazer, the Unwritten) has turned the zombie cliche on its head with this one.  It twists away from the non-descript virus of most zombie stories, and by turning it into something even more organic, a fungus that has almost symbiotic properties but also its own drive to spore and expand.  This unique pathogen creates an even more unique world to build, the zombies as we normally know them don't play by the expected rules, so there's more discovery here than I'm used to in a zombie movie.  

There are still obvious tropes that are inescapable even with the change in origin, but the film negotiates these tropes astutely, the characters always acting sensibly with never an instance of "no, don't do that!"  Everyone is competent at what they do, they have an ability to learn and grow, to change their mind and their behavior.  Sergeant Barnes certainly starts looking at Melanie a different way than he did before (he would wake them up, slandering them at all times, calling them "bloody abortions".  When later he hears Melanie quote this back to him, he feels regret for his treatment of her). This isn't a film that wants to jump scare you, it wants you to be intrigued, curious, even a little repulsed by what's happening.  By giving us Melanie as our point-of-view character, we're not as invested in killing all the zombies, or stopping the plague, so much as hoping she finds her place in all this.  It's wonderfully captivating, incredibly well made (evoking the world they've designed perfectly), certainly the best "zombie" picture I've seen in a very, very long time.

 

But are they horror?
Anna and the Apocalypse is horror-adjacent as it genre mixes and conveys a more jubilant tone, rather than scary one.  Girl With All the Gifts is just on the horror line.  It has so many established horror conventioms, but it breaks almost all of them.  It's almost more drama than horror.

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Color Out Of Space marks Richard Stanley's return to feature directing  after a 25 year absence following the debacle of The Island of Dr. Moreau (see the fascinating documentary on that - Lost Soul).  It's a weird selling point for a movie starring Nic Cage based on a Lovecraft story, but it's how the film was promoted.  Not really keeping up in horror chat rooms or wherever such fans congregate, I can't really say if Stanley has become a kind of legend at this point or not, the lost potential of a possible great horror director in certain people's eyes, but I do wonder if enough people know the tale or believe in Stanley's output from 30 years ago to put that much stock in marketing a film around him.  The more interesting part of his story is how he couldn't handle the pressure and got really weird, and not so much his creative storytelling or directing.

Anyway, Color Out Of Space is a gorgeous-looking hot mess of a film.  The titular colour from space is an ethereal electric purple that, following a meteor crash, slowly starts to seep into, and out of the farm land and its inhabitants where Nathan (Cage), Theresa (Joley Richardson) Gardner and their three kids are trying to make a new life.  They had retreated from the big city following Theresa's battle with breast cancer.  She's struggling with dodgy internet and cellular connections trying to retain her big city career, while Nathan has alpacas and is attempting to farm food.

Stanley does a good job in establishing the family, the dynamics between them, and the effect the transitional period they are in is having on them.  Cage, particularly, shows good restraint and is near-believable as a caring father and husband, that is until said colour from space's effect on him manifests by turning Nic Cage, professional actor, into Nic Cage, professionally unhinged presence.  When Cage first flies off the handle, it's the end of "acting" for him and he goes into a seeming fugue state where he's just a mess of crazy eyes and unscripted yelling.  In one scene Richardson tries to meet him at his level, and you can tell she regrets it instantly but still commits for the remainder of the scene.

Beyond its familial set up, and the creeping unease for the first, let's say half of the film, it's actually a pretty engaging picture, and it's cinematography from Steve Annis is really quite wonderful, but the second half seems to forget most of what made the first half work.  The familial connection and the unease broaden right out into assailing terror but it's largely ridiculous.  A character we meet very early on, Ward Phillips (a hydrologist in town surveying for a new dam), has very little influence on the story and remains peripheral throughout, as if Stanley just never really knew what his purpose was.  Plus, he's obviously a working professional so trying to draw a meet cute between him and teenage Lavinia Gardner -a practicing wiccan- seems highly inappropriate.  The whole wiccan thing is just a really bizarre sub-sub-plot which never feels appropriately integrated.  Then there's Tommy Chong, a hermit hanging out in a hommade cottage on the back of the property, a real conspiracy nut, who again seems there to set something up, but does absolutely nothing except be found dead later.

There's a complete loss of competent storytelling happening in the second act as "events" become the dominant force of the movie.  You're no longer watching characters react to things, rather you're seeing things happen to the characters, and there's a difference in how invested you can be when a story is presented that way.  I could see, say, Bong Joon-Ho making a real character-heavy meal out of this.

Perhaps it's Lovecraft's source material.  Having never read any of his work I don't really know if his stories tend to work out that way, abandoning character and mood for incidents of horror, or if it's just Stanley's adaptation that does it.  

 

I went into the film with an optimistic attitude, and came out thinking that Nic Cage should never be allowed to act in anything else ever again.  I'm sure he's starred in 12 things since the making of this movie.  Hopefully they're nothing I was hoping to see.

 

Is it horror?  Yeah, it actually is.  But is it any good?  A little bit... a little bit good, a lot not great.

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Take Shelter is a film I've been meaning to watch for a very, very long time.  So long, in fact, that I've forgotten entirely the reason why I'd been meaning to watch it...whether it was because of my increasing admiration for Michael Shannon, or to see Jeff Nichols' earlier work, or if it was just one of those movies I saw on a streaming service that intrigued me so I added it to a list (which originally was Netflix, but is now on Amazon Prime).

I know I had flagged the film before watching Midnight Special but it was after seeing that picture that I knew I had to go back in Nichols' filmography.  I did a pretty crappy job of it though (I still haven't seen Mud or Loving either).  I really dug Nichols' handling of sci-fi, very earthy and grounded.  He does sci-fi in a way that I would have hated as a kid, when I wanted flash and excitement, but love now, where it's teased out and blurs the lines between reality and metaphor.

With Take Shelter, Curtis (Shannon) starts having dreams, often daydreams, which shake him to his very core.  He's seeing things which start to affect his sense of reality.  Living in small town Ohio, he and his loving, devoted wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) have a calm and simple life, even with the complications of their young, deaf daughter.  But these visions - rain of oil, swarms of birds, foreboding clouds - he can't ignore.  He borrows construction equipment from his place of work and starts building an extension to his storm shelter.  But his fervent belief in a coming apocalypse is tainted by his awareness of his family history of mental illness, his mother a diagnosed schizophrenic. 

Even with knowing that he's possibly having issues mentally Curtis can't help but tear apart his life, so fearful for the enduring safety of his family.  His wife is equally furious at his actions but sympathetic to the fact that he may not be well.  For its fantastical trappings, the upsetting visions he's having, this is a story of mental illness and the effect it has on one's sense of self, and how destructive it can be to one's life.  The approach Nichols takes is one of compassion and empathy, and it sides with Curtis as a victim of his disease, while similarly showing us the fallout his actions have, and they're pretty detrimental to the life and plans of his family.

I like that the film doesn't muddy the waters, playing the "is it mental illness or is it reality" game.  It's clearly mental illness.  And it's a far better movie for it.  What doesn't work then is the ambiguous final mement which seems to imply that Curtis, while yes, suffers from mental illness, was also right about an apocalypse coming.  That's just kind of a slap in the face.

It's a very engaging, challenging film, portraying the rural sensibilities with equal parts appreciation and condemnation.  The "stoic man" of rural America leads to more problems than good solutions, but that's not to say that the steadfast stoic nature isn't admirable in its own right.

Is it horror? No, not really, but it does have its intense moments.  And I think paranoid schizophrenia is one of the scariest afflictions, not being able to discern imagination from reality is terrifying.

3 Short Paragraphs: Gretel & Hansel

2020, Oz Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House) -- download

From meh to wow, with a liberal bit of huh? This art house take on the faery tale is mystifying and captivating and more than a little weird. It fits well into that sub-genre that includes The VVitch and It Comes At Night (post conveyed to The Void), atmospheric horror where often the environment is scarier than the events, that relies on that childhood level of fear of the unknown, when you would sleep in a tent and hear twigs scraping on trunks and envision anything could be coming to get you.

Rather than do the twins wandering into the wood, we have older Gretel (Sophia Lillis, It) and Hansel younger, who are turned out to the wood, after not securing a servant's job in the house of a lecherous old man. Assisted by a woodsman, they are directed to head to the other side of the forest where they will find refuge... as long as they don't stray from the path. Buuuut after an encounter with some hallucinogenic mushrooms, they stray, and end up at the lovely A-frame cottage of The Witch (Alice Krige, Children of Dune), which reminded me of the Stave Churches of the Scandinavian region. Inside, the children see a table overflowing with a feast but nobody about. And thus they get entwined in the Witch's legacy.

Where the rest of the movie has this otherworldly lost in time feel to it, Alice Krige plays the witch like some kooky old American widow. She has nefarious plans in mind for Gretel, connected to a local legendary witch called The Beautiful Girl. In classic arthouse style, styles juxtaposed with the mood, often jumping from horror to social commentary to eerie beauty. While a bit rough around the edges, I rather enjoyed its atmospheric intent. Lillis really proves she is going to be more than just the Girl Who Was In IT, with Gretel also proving she is not to be the pawn in anyone's game.

3 Short Paragraphs: We Summon the Darkness

2019, Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer) -- download

This just showed up on Netflix, which is where I would expect it would eventually show up, assuming its not already on Shudder, where horror movies for horror movie fans should be, and what this is. What does that mean? Well, some movies are made for general appeal, and some are only made for the fans of the genre. Whether its intent or quality or style, you can easily see they won't appeal to anyone outside the genre fans. Well, as generalizations go.

Alexandra Daddario's blue eyes (San Andreas) star as Alexis, one of a trio of heavy metal fans on attending heavy metal concerts, partying with other fans. The radio tells them of the continued spree killings by a Satanic Cult, and since this is a heavy metal movie, we put two and two together pretty quickly. Afterall, this is the 80s when heavy metal and Satanic Panic were at their height, so how are the girls and the killings going to connect?

One such post-show party leads back to Alexis's house where the twist turns the knife. If you didn't see it coming, Alexis and her friends ARE the killers!! (dramatic turn of events music!) Her father, a fiery radio/TV preacher, has orchestrated the whole thing to draw more to his flock, to further fill the mattress with money taken from those seeking protection from Satan(!). If "horror" can be light hearted without being straight comedy, this is the path this one takes. Written by the same guy (Alan Trezza) as Burying the Ex, it doesn't have the same amount of flair, and would have fit well into the era it is set, when you would swing by the video store, grab a handful of B-grade flicks and one New Release, a large bag of chips and a large bottle of pop, to shout and laugh at the screen with your friends.

Distraction: What I Am Watching (Or At Least Attempting To) Pt. B - Binged!

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. Not that you care. But at least I am not telling you about my D&D character. The theme almost always comes in batches.

Pt. A is here.

Binged !!

P.S. Does that title read as "Bing-ed" to you too?

I generally do not binge -- TV shows that is; chips and cookies, yes. I like to spread it out, give myself some time to savour and not just jump from episode to episode. And to be quite frank, very little captures my attention enough that I just want the next and next and next until they are done. And yet sometimes something comes along that does hold my gaze, not always in a good way, but enough that, yeah, let's do another. And before I know, it's the end of the weekend and we are done with that season.

Upload, 2020, Amazon

Upload caught my attention on the idea of the trope of exploring a digital afterlife with micro-payments. Yup, pretty low bar, but I thought the joke worked ("It's not even real food !!") and I wanted to see what else they did with the premise.

Nathan (Robbie Amell, Arq), doesn't quite survive a car accident and is offered (Real) Death or Upload. His vacuous, but wealthy, fiance chooses for him, as she cannot imagine being without him. The death bed scene is rather odd, as he doesn't seem that injured but everyone is convincing him he hasn't long, so she Makes the Choice and ziiiiiiiip, his head is digitized, which comes with the bonus trauma of being disintegrated.

This 20 Minutes Into the Future world is of the classic opinion that the world is so inundated with social media, so The Future will just be turned up to 11. Why does scifi no longer explore "what can happen next" but is more interested in what we have now will be presented down the road. For the sake of comedy, gimicky things are always worth a chuckle, like rating people IRL, dating apps, delivery drones zipping around like nouveau mosquitos.

At its heart this show is a romcom, a little shaky on where it really wants to go, but close enough to its centre to carry through to the end. I was a little annoyed that they seemed to dump some plot points they were initially setting up (GF evil or not?) for a more milquetoast bad guy version, but really, in the long run, I didn't care as the "why did he die" plot was secondary to the romance between him and his handler Nora (Andy Allo, Chicago Fire). And along with the lovely romance between lovely people, they also had enough exploration of the world and its foibles (e.g. the different tiers of paid "worlds" the Uploaded dead lived in, the lower end being B&W with only ratty sweatshirts to wear) to keep my attention.

Dorohedoro, 2020, Netflix

My interest in anime has diminished over the years. Yeah yeah, what hasn't? Half of this blog is me going on about how I am not doing _____ as much as used to or as much as I want to. But at least with anime, I realized that the effort it takes to find a series that is going to keep my interest and not out-weigh that with the annoying tropes inherent to anime is so great, I stopped really bothering. Oh, there are plenty of seinen style anime out there (the genre I found myself mostly gravitating towards), plenty of giant robots and post-apocalypse scifi. But the amount of big-boobs defying gravity, gratuitous panty shots or inappropriately sexualized adolescents sours my taste for the style. It takes a lot of creativity to see me beyond the standards stuff.

Dorohedoro had one primary thing going for it that immediately attracted me -- a lizard-headed protagonist addicted to gyoza (japanese style fried dumplings), who doesn't remember why he has a lizard head. Gyoza, not lizard heads. It's set in a seemingly post-apocalyptic city called The Hole which is plagued by magic-users who are attacking the residents with their smoke-like magic for unknown experimental reasons. The magic-users are from their own realm called The Sorceror's World (I know, original!) which is accessed through magic doors. The former is a massive city falling apart, the latter is a virtual paradise, both entirely urban. No explanations are supplied.

Unknown is the immediate nature of this show, and it just keeps on jumping from one weird concept to the next, which honestly, was the reason I kept with it. Its humourous, violent and doesn't take itself at all seriously. And it has Gyoza. We are trying to understand how and why Caiman got his lizard head, and who he was before he got that head. Also, why when he puts people's heads into his mouth, do they see the image of someone else down his gullet? He wants to know as much as we do. So, Caiman and friends get mixed up investigating this mystery and we get giant walking/talking cockroaches, a villain whose magic causes mushrooms to emerge uncontrollably from everyone and everything, Caiman's original head on its own mission, meat pies food trucks generated by magic, and more gyoza. I would hearten to say this was like Twin Peaks for anime fans, but only in so much as there is so much weirdness and so little reason.

Space Force, 2020, Netflix

So, despite the mockery, the Space Force was a thing before Trump got his Cheeto coloured mitts on it. A division of the Air Force, it was tasked with the protection of the US and its interests when it comes to SPACE (yelled in a cartoon like voice) !! Yeah, its a real thing which is easily mocked and that mockery is the premise of the show.

General Naird (Steve Carrell Despicable Me) is given Space Force instead of the promotion he was expecting, but being a good soldier, he does his best with it, and tries to come up with a way he can raise its impact as a military force, without pissing off the head of research (John Malkovich, RED) too much. Along side his job, he has to deal with moving his teenage daughter to a Top Secret Base in the middle of nowhere, and the fact his wife (Lisa Kudrow, Easy A) is in jail, for a crime that we never learn about. Naird is the underdog in a Frat Boy cadre of generals who want nothing more than to watch him fall, who loves his family dearly and really wants to do right by his mandate.

The problem is that the show doesn't seem to know whether it wants Naird to be a likeable buffoon or a naive man dealing with a difficult situation. The farcical nature of putting the military in Space is exaggerated by the fact that nobody seems to know what the fuck they are doing.  Well, nobody but Malkovich but who is entirely bent out of shape that his original research mandate has been supplanted by the MAGA mindset. Amusingly enough, despite having constant issues with each episode we wanted to see where it was going, and Carrell was just so much fun, we had to see it through to the end. And Malkovich was just fucking brilliant.