Blurbing For The Weekend 10/18/24

Despite loving David Thewlis for decades, happy to watch him in anything where he’ll get monologues, it took me until this month to watch the 2021 miniseries Landscapers, where he and Olivia Colman play a real-life couple, Christopher and Susan Edwards, that murdered her parents, buried them in their garden and weren’t found out until he told his stepmother almost fifteen years later. I’m generally not a fan of true crime, particularly fictionalized shows where the writers almost can’t help but project a narrative and interior life onto actual incidents of violence & death. The lack of discussion around the miniseries, despite the presence of Colman, was also a red flag. The reviews were positive, but in a respectful, tepid way. I’m glad I finally gave it a go, because - whatever its validity in relation to the actual events - the creators and stars of Landscapers made a fantastic character study of codependency between struggling survivors of familial horror.

Colman, eyes darting about with fear and affection, does an outstanding job of conveying how the innocent child and the intelligent adult can co-exist in someone who’s experienced abuse, a mix of sweet sincerity and manipulative tendencies that can confuse those outside of it. And she’s well met by the reedy stoicism of Thewlis’ Christopher, haunted by loss, so desperate to be the hero Susan deserves, and finally be enough to keep someone “fragile” alive and appreciative of his devotion. As framed by the series, the British legal system couldn’t understand how a violent act in the supposed heat of passion could be followed by such intelligent maneuverings to exploit it. Would you really open a bank account in your parents’ name a day after accidentally killing them? Whether the Edwards actually deserve the defense or not, Landscapers shows how the survivors of familial violence and manipulation often can’t realize, let alone acknowledge, how that behavior has been normalized in their life and influenced their own. Which makes them the “imperfect victims” that confuse courts depending on simplistic binaries of innocence & guilt and good & evil.

Referencing the Edwards’ obsession with Hollywood heroism, Landscapers occasionally delves into fourth-wall breaking and cowboy pastiche, which neither elevates nor disrupts the bittersweet romance achieved by Colman & Thewlis (I could listen to him emphasizing words mid-sentence with erudite weariness all day). These flights of fancy are just kind of there, perhaps one reason the show hasn’t earned much word-of-mouth, either out of awe or frustration. But if you’re a fan of either actor, and of how a miniseries allows actors to create multidimensional characters beyond the parameters of a tight, three-act plot, Landscapers is a thoroughly rewarding watch.

I'll be posting a bunch of blurbs for recently rewatched and recommended Popcorn Classics for Spooky Season soon, but I'm keeping first takes on thrillers in this column. Feel free to write that on a post-it, or don't. I just wanted to tell you.

I was not prepared for how stupid I’d find No One Will Save You. I knew it was a mostly dialogue-free movie about Kaitlyn Dever hiding from aliens, something I was totally down for as a fan of dialogue free action sequences, horror, and Dever (actually, I don’t know if I ever saw her in anything other than Justified, but she was quite the little sparkplug there!). Sadly, it was soon clear that the movie was going to not just actively avoid dialogue (which is different than not needing much), but avoid telling us a Big Dark Secret about the lead character that everybody on screen already knows. A young woman alone in a house being attacked by aliens should be more than thrilling enough a premise, and cause for classic set pieces. Why would you need to have characters illogically mute and slowly trickle out backstory to keep us impressed & invested?

I was willing to let this lily-gilding slide as long as the shocks were solid, but boredom led me to an online plot summary, which led me to hatewatch to the end just so I could bitch about it here (spoilers ahoy!). It’s cliche enough when movies suggest a character has healed emotional trauma by surviving a supernatural, cataclysmic event. But No One Will Save You is the only film I can remember that implies the supernatural, cataclysmic event cares about your emotional trauma, and is impressed you have some. Writer/director Brian Duffield (frequently included on that Black List of Very Impressive Screenplays) may make it a point of pride that no one is allowed to verbally explicate these events, but that doesn't turn the movie into profound metaphorical poetry. It just makes it annoyingly conceited. The aliens looked pretty cool, though, as were the scenes where an alien takes one to the noggin. THREE BAGS OF POPCORN.

Jigsaw, a.k.a. Saw VIII, is another movie where people loudly try in vain to escape rusty subterranean deathtraps while police types sassily debate which of them might be yet another accomplice of the original deathtrap architect. It does a better job of living up to the original series than Spiral a.k.a. Saw IX did, probably because it’s not trying to convince you anyone can act, let alone a recently facelifted Chris Rock. Also, Jigsaw miraculously includes a scene where Jigsaw (despite dying five movies earlier!) does his “I’m not goring you, you’re goring yourself” bit, which gets funnier every time. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the director usually referred to as “Kurosawa”), made plenty of movies in plenty of genres between 1997’s Cure and 2016’s Creepy, but Criterion isn’t rushing to show us the non-spooky ones. And he sure is good at the spooky ones! Like Cure, Creepy is a police procedural about a haunted detective on the trail of harrowing evil. But this time there’s far less supernatural magic at work, just a terrifying degree of audacious psychopathy. It’s tempting to say the movie requires characters to make absurdly stupid choices, but if you look at how society rationalizes its engagement with murderous manipulators in high office, despite their transparent desperation and seeming incompetence, it could also be said the movie shows how easily people can be made to act stupidly when the alternative is to challenge the relentlessly destructive. There’s a sequence involving an esteemed police lieutenant respectfully removing his shoes before taking a right down the creepiest hallway you’ve ever seen just off the foyer, and that’s where I realized Kurosawa is up to some cultural critique. Unless a lot of Japanese houses have unfinished hallways just off the foyer. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

Pulse, from 2001, might be Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s most famous film, thanks to an American remake starring Kristen Bell. The original movie concerns college students learning about this new internet thing (we actually get to watch the male lead insert a CD and see Terms Of Use for the first time in his life), and almost immediately becoming haunted shells of themselves. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the cameo from Cure’s Koji Yakusho must be like Morgan Freeman showing up unbilled and smiling in the last five minutes of an American thriller. I might have missed where it’s explained whether the spirit world thinks there’s too many dead people or not enough. But, either way, the issue provides us some nice, eerie shadow business. Also, a 2001 movie where the world changes for the worst seemingly overnight because everybody’s focused on the internet? People choosing this lethal cyber-vacuum out of FOMO? That’s one enduring vibe. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

My movie rating scale is explained here. All thoughts, thanks and thattaboys can go to anthonyisright at gmail dot com.