Blurbing For The Weekend 5/3/24
Believe it or not, but I sometimes remove parenthetical asides from a blurb. When discussing Late Night With The Devil and the absurdity of alleged "documentaries" ending with jump-scares and zero explanatory postscript, I didn't acknowledge the most accurately constructed horror “doc” I've seen. Lake Mungo, a 2008 Australian film currently on Tubi, is all talking heads, still photos, and the briefest bits of raw footage. Like many actual documentaries, it concerns an inexplicable tragedy - in this case, a girl who goes missing on a family vacation. While the film is gripping, writer-director Joel Anderson sticks to the tricks documentarians actually have: slowly unveiling narrative threads only to undermine them, images haunting more through context than content, the grief and confusion of those left behind. It’s fiction, so Anderson can make the evidence as spooky as he wants, but he shows impressive restraint in keeping it "evidence," rather than abandoning the genre conceit once initial exposition is provided. Though less of a subversion of mindless “true crime” enjoyment than John Darnielle’s novel Devil House, it’s similarly proof of how great storytelling doesn’t require literal exploitation of human tragedy to be effective. It’s a POPCORN CLASSIC for sure.
I recently saw another found footage movie that makes similar effort, and, oddly enough, it’s also Australian! I can’t say whether that’s a coincidence or if there’s a cultural logic to it, but I’m pretty damn curious. The Tunnel, a 2011 film on Shudder (and initially released on BitTorrent!), concerns a TV news crew exploring Sydney's abandoned train tunnels to learn why politicians suddenly abandoned efforts to drain them during a water crisis. As with such on-location classics as Grave Encounters and Session 9, the filmmakers make hay out of trespassing in dark, dilapidated spaces. And, at least initially, the interspersing of talking-heads footage doesn’t diminish the eeriness at all, despite revealing who likely does and does not survive.
The first sign the filmmakers weren’t thinking ahead was the choice to name the first crew member that disappears “Tangles.” Yes, that’s a plausible nickname for a boom-mic operator. But hearing people repeatedly yell “Tangles! Tangles! We’re coming for ya, buddy!” with panicky concern, down echoey, dimly-lit hallways, would only work if “Tangles” was a dog (it doesn’t help that the shouter sounds exactly like Ken Marino crying out for his dog Rebel on Reno 911). Later text reminds us that “Tangles”’ first name is “Jim.” I think his crewmates’ dread and desperation would have been easier to to buy if it had led them to say "Jim," the time for pet monikers having passed.
Where Lake Mungo is a ghost story, The Tunnel is at heart a jump-scare creature feature, which explains why the filmmakers show long stretches of dead silence before shrieks and chaos. It’s a filmic choice that isn’t actually required by the narrative. Photos, and briefer sequences involving the creature, would get across what happened, allowing more time to be spent on the aftermath, as docs usually do. Instead, the cutaway commentaries feel more and more absurd and superfluous. We don’t need to see someone say “yeah, that was weird and scary” after six minutes of weird and scary footage. The Paranormal Activity movies get lazier and lazier about maintaining plausibility that someone would edit this footage for commercial release, because they know we just wanna get spooked real good. Announcing “the police saw this recording of gravity-defying murder and were like, ‘whatever’” would only distract from the goal. The Tunnel commits to the documentary conceit just enough to come off like a bad documentary as much as a good horror movie. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.
“Anthony, do you ever watch something other than spooky, supernatural bullshit?” Well, guess what, you jerk? I just subscribed to the Criterion Channel! Now I can watch all kinds of esoteric foreign cinema, underground arthouse works, buried treasures of Hollywood's past and even short form movies! If a beloved, canonical arthouse classic is too familiar to rewatch, I now have access to the expertly-made bonus features! This is delightful! Elegant! I’ll be drinking my Modelo with the pinkie out now!
Admittedly, what compelled me to finally pull the classy streaming trigger was I really wanted to watch the 1997 Japanese thriller Cure, which I couldn’t remember if I’d seen in my video store clerk days. I didn’t, but it’s great, chilly J-horror where a wizened, sad-eyed police detective already having a bad time now has to deal with a magic serial killer. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN. After watching it, I did a lot of flipping around the menus, impressed by the breadth and depth of the options on Criterion, before watching clips of Ethan Hawke, Bill Hader and Greta Gerwig loving the breadth and depth of the options on Criterion. Days later, I finally watched a second movie on the site. I chose an Oliver Assayas film, Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart. A film about some spooky bullshit that is also on Hulu. Phbbbt.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything by Assayas since those video store days, when I enjoyed Clean, his 2004 movie about a rock star’s junkie widow (Maggie Cheung) who loses custody of her kid, makes Tricky nervous, and eventually gets it together to record with David Roback. In the…uh…twenty years since, I’ve regularly heard Assayas is making striking food for thought about class anomie, people’s relationship with grief and regret, and the human condition in general. Which I’m all for. I’d seen plenty of raves about Shopper, and figured it’d be a good segue from my usual viewing choices to the more artisanal options I could be giving bags of popcorn to instead.
Kristen Stewart plays a distracted fashionista, self-diagnosed with ESP, killing time picking out clothes for a rich lady while waiting for her late twin brother to send her a message from the astral plane. She lives in an open-minded, if privileged, European world where nobody even blinks at this shit. I haven’t watched enough Stewart movies to know how self-conscious she is about her on-screen self-consciousness, so I won’t make any assumptions about her range. Plus, she’s perfect for a role that’s all about looking rattled when not being asked to try on something chic. Shopper an elegant, well-made vehicle for her, but unfortunately hits two of my least favorite crossover arthouse cliches (spoilers!). One, that the director knows the thriller plot is obvious, and meant to make it banal. Two, the lead looks directly into the camera in the final shot. I double-checked and Nicolas Cage looks slightly below our eyeline at the end of Raising Arizona. So I’m comfortable saying that I have never loved a movie that ends with the lead staring into the camera. Whether it’s Spike Lee desperately wanting us to consider the meaning of what we've seen, or a European director desperately saying he wants us to consider an actor for an Academy Award, it’s just too artless a demand for us to consider. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.
And now, some POPCORN CLASSICS I recently revisited.
The Descent: A group of ladyfriends around thirty go caving and learn that their mutual resentments and passive-aggressive bullshit might be even deadlier than any mutated hellspawn who might be living in those murky, collapsing crevices. One of those movies where obviously they had to build those crevices, but damn if they don't seem legit in the moment.
Bodies Bodies Bodies: A group of ladyfriends around twenty get wasted and learn that their mutual resentments and passive-aggressive bullshit might be even deadlier than some violent male dipstick they probably shouldn’t be friends with. A fun and frantic bit of zeitgeist-bait, with Pete Davidson and Lee Pace fantastic as the primary male dipsticks.
The Hunt: A group of right-wing hatemongers and left-wing elitists debate who dehumanized who first. I'm impressed how the film flirts with glib nihilism about the state of American politics without truly giving in. I need to see something else with Betty Gilpin in it, because her endless supply of gas faces and matter-of-fact authority here is Action Star Hall Of Fame material. A delightful mix of recognizable actors get to have fun in this before their heads explode. I won't spoil!
Cabin In The Woods: Totally holds up as a self-examination of professional film creators and their unquestioning commitment to genre cliche, this workaday indifference projected onto a primal, uncaring audience they fear more than respect. Director/co-writer Drew Goddard and (sigh) producer/co-writer Joss Whedon play to their wry, conceptual strengths, while the cast - including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth - milk the intentional subversion of slasher archetypes. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford play the providers of opium for the masses with just the right mix of droll self-amusement and cynical fatigue. The best joke remains the last one, where everybody turns out to be right.
I avoided season 1 of Them in 2021 after some scathing reviews by black women on Twitter, accusing the show of artlessly exploiting black trauma, both generational and physical. I hadn’t yet seen a similar reaction to the recently released follow-up, Them: The Scare, so I indulged. The creators definitely don’t make much of the choice to set the show in Los Angeles 1991, beyond the inclusion of a high-top fade and Fishbone t-shirts, and it’s one of those stories where the supernatural logic of who gets brutally mutilated seems more than a little arbitrary, especially after one learns the sympathetic origins of the murderous ghoul. But The Scare was an intense, gripping binge that (use of the Rodney King footage aside) didn’t strike me as considerably more tasteless than white-centric revenge slashers are. It was neat to see Pam Grier play against type as a Grandma with secrets, and I never would have guessed that psychologically shattered thespian Edmund Gaines, who looks like he’d be delighted to be mistaken for Dwayne Wayne, is played by Luke James, a smoldering, often open-shirted singer with Grammy nominations. That’s range!
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