the blackcoat's daughter: slow-burning doom

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Osgood Perkins) Two girls, abandoned by their parents over the school holiday, are left largely unattended in a snowed-in boarding school. The atmosphere, made of ambient sound and ominous, underplayed music, the institutional ugliness of a Catholic girls' school, the loudness of an empty place which is usually overcrowded with life, and a keen instinct for the unsettling image on a par with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's, makes this an exercise in psychic oppression that's hard to shake off. It might work as a metaphor for the America who voted for Our Vainglorious Dickwad, in fact. A weak person, feeling abandoned and unvalued, invites a devil in, finally finding purpose and a recourse for her stemmed-up tide of withheld strength in a terrible freedom. There's a stunning moment following the exorcism in which she watches the devil across the room and says plaintively, "Don't go." It's like the bullies who feel permission now, flowing down from the bully-culture of a White House and guided by the example of a Russian dictator, to emerge from the cocoon of civilization and bring the violence to whatever victims happen into their paths. To the undisciplined mind, even evil purpose feels better than none at all.

It's what they call a "slow burner", which I find to be its most impressive aspect, in the end. Long, hushed passages in which the girls' inner lives are quietly active and complex, brilliantly photographed by DP Julie Kirkwood for odd angles and discomfort. A subplot with really good turns by James Remar and Lauren Holly, neither of whom I recognized, seems at first at odds with the main story but, in the end, it turns out it's just very bold editing, very bold storytelling, all culminating in that bleak light of day which arrives after the monster has abandoned one to one's previous emptiness.

It gave me nightmares. It gave me an awful feeling before I slept that something unholy might come uninvited up the stairs, or, worse, something I'd invited by watching the film. It's the kind of thing that's so oppressive it feels like your life is a little changed, a little worse, and maybe a little bit doomed, once its images are in your head.

brimstone: pretending to be a woman's western

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2017. dir: Martin Koolhoven) Hollywood is having a problem creating "the Women's Western". So far there hasn't been a successful one, unless you count Sam Raimi's ancient and giddy paean, the Quick and the Dead, which succeeds as a feminist venture only because it ignores the formality of "women's issues" and gives us a fully-formed, wonderfully flawed woman whose strengths, after great travails and temptations, triumph over her weaknesses.

Don't get me wrong: I applaud the effort as well worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone will succeed, and the world will be a better place for it. Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is a magnificent film, approaching the Western from a woman's point of view, while presenting life on the Oregon Trail as a sort of continuing apocalypse, in which women, men, and children must band together as equals in the (often frighteningly mundane) fight for survival, like an old-timey Walking Dead.

The more recent, more conscious efforts to redefine the Western saga from the woman's perspective, have so far failed. The Homesman, fascinating in both its bleak outlook and its main character (brought to life by the inimitable Hilary Swank) who is strong in her ideals, not all of which jibe with our current politically correct norms, ready to take on work harder than anyone else will do, and who ends in suicide. The movie turns out to be a man's film, after all, because it is only the male character who has the autonomy to make mistakes and live with them. Jane Got a Gun seems to have been spoiled by too many cooks in the kitchen, too much pulling of punches, and a contrived ending arrived at by disingenuous means. I like the Keeping Room, a small film which survives, without flinching or anachronism, the incredible obstacle which is Political Correctness, while telling the story of black and white women colluding without men in the southern states. It has strange turns and beautiful moments and terrible violence.

Brimstone is that insidious thing, a movie purporting to tell the story of a woman's strength while in truth revelling in her torture and death. By the end, I was convinced that this guy really wanted to make an S&M movie, giving it an Old West gloss for funding purposes. It is the portrait of a sexual sadist, a diabolical Dutch preacher (who may or may not be the actual Devil, as we see him with his throat cut and body burned at one point before he magically reappears to haunt our heroine later) played by Guy Pearce. Two generations of women in his family FIND THEIR STRENGTH IN SUICIDE, as told in dubious narration by the third-generation girl. It resembles a Victorian Gothic, in that the woman is meant to be the angel who finds her strength only in passivity. Dakota Fanning seems to specialize in these characters. In fact, there is the obligatory scene in which she overcomes and kills the beast (again!) who is bent on defiling her daughter, and she does it in an absurd moment of apparently supernatural grace (the only kind of triumph allowed a female in the old Victorian Gothic tradition). Kit Harington gives a robust try at the Almost-Knight-in-Dubious-Armor, he who almost saves the girl, almost provides a love interest, but ends up a non-character. The whole thing is interesting, with some lovely story-telling turns, good visuals, interesting editing and back-and-forth in time, so it's a shame one feels ripped off in the end.

the divorcee and the magnificent robert montgomery

(1930. dir: Robert Z. Leonard)

Robert Montgomery is one of the best actors you'll ever see on film. Why isn't remembered, then, outside the narrow boundaries of TCM? Maybe because he never made a really great movie. Every time I see him he astonishes me with his abilities. His face is so responsive an instrument that he can communicate a thought across the room without moving more than the tiniest muscle. His physical discipline is exact in that effortless manner of Cagney or Kirk Douglas. When he plays a serious role, as he later did in his own directorial projects, he has to make concentrated efforts to make himself stoical, and achieves varying levels of success. In his late noir, Ride the Pink Horse, adapted from a work by the great noir writer Dorothy B. Hughes, his portrayal of a bone-weary gunman with nothing left to guide him but vengeance is the more convincing because the mask of stoicism which comes so naturally to a Bogart or a Mitchum takes a toll on him, working toward the overall effect of an exhaustion so great it leads toward despair, even madness.

The Divorcee is one of several films he made with Norma Shearer. It has the high energy of a Fitzgerald story, a great twenties bash with all the dated rompings and laughable slang terms. Then, when it turns to tragedy, it does so with equally high energy. We begin at a country party, where Shearer agrees to marry her playboy beloved (not Montgomery, who is the groom's best friend, a charming roue). Everyone piles into automobiles and barrels back to town, but a jilted beau of Shearer's gets drunk first and drives into tragedy. This scene is wonderfully photographed, the speed and barely-withheld chaos communicated so that it still feels dangerous, more so than any cut-and-dried blow-out you'll see in a Fast and Furious movie.

Shearer is terrible in the beginning, becoming more convincing as her marriage turns serious and complicated. When her husband turns up unfaithful and claims it means nothing at all, she speeds off with Robert Montgomery to "balance the accounts" in a wonderfully rendered series of silent scenes: the two of them drinking in a club while she ponders darkly, the two of them riding in a cab in sensuous but not yet decisive embrace, then a shot of the curtains of a room being pulled shut. The rest of the movie explores how the same fellow who insists his wife disregard his infidelity as a small mistake ruins both their lives from wounded masculine pride when she retaliates. We follow her through the divorce and her lost times, finding her path again and reconciling. The thing is so well directed that even if the thing had a different title we'd know the marriage was doomed from the sepulchral look of her as she's escorted up the aisle, wrapped in veils that seem like shrouds.

Montgomery worked a ton in the thirties and forties. He was often the co-star of choice preferred by the great leading ladies of the time (Shearer, Garbo, Lombard, Crawford), and yet when he is remembered now, it is as the father of Samantha in Bewitched. The Big House, Forsaking All Others, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: he shines in all of them, and yet I wouldn't watch any of them a second time. The only time he ever left me completely cold, in fact, was in the just-post-war They Were Expendable, and you can see my rant about that elsewhere. (Spoiler: like so many things, it's all John Ford's fault.)

tom hardy double feature: warrior and oliver twist

Warrior: (2011. dir: Gavin O'Connor) This is a good example of a project doomed from the start. The premise is contrived, hackneyed, gluey with sentiment, --impossible to redeem, even with the combined efforts of Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, so much talent in one space it ought to have worked magic. And, indeed, O'Connor does enough right with it that it edges up from the Hackneyed Hogwash into Watchable But Disappointing. Hardy and Edgerton are brothers, long estranged, who both, coincidentally, enter a super-contest for Mixed Martial Arts fighting. There's also a telenovella turn with a drunken father, now sober, but still unforgiven. Knowing just that much, you can guess the script, the plot-turns, you can fill in all the blanks without having seen a frame and hit pretty close to home. One brother has a wife, well-played by Jennifer Morrison, the same thankless wife-role that women have been playing since Calpurnia tried to talk Caesar into staying home on the Ides of March. The age-old Hollywood version goes something like this: "Please, please, DON'T do this very brave thing to save our family. I love you too much to watch... but I WILL watch, because I love you even MORE now!" There's a monstrous Russian fighter, NEVER DEFEATED, a great, hulking primate of a man without a hint of humanity in him, who offers one of the several cliched challenges to the brothers' dream of achieving their five-million-dollar paycheck. (Not from greed! Not from sloth! One brother has been cheated by the bank and his house will be repossessed within three months, despite his hard work as a professor of high school physics; the other brother is an AWOL marine hero-- justifiably so, as his whole platoon was wiped out by friendly fire --who needs to provide for his dead best friend's helpless family. They are both so noble! The heart is torn! For whom to root?) Frank Grillo (Rumlow in the Captain America movies) gives an excellent performance as one brother's trainer. Nick Nolte is creditable as the disgraced paterfamilias, without doing anything unexpected, or being given anything unexpected to work with in the script, outside a Captain Ahab trope (again with the hackneyed).

Even with all the crap working against it, Hardy is so great, both in the "cage" and out, that you get sucked in. His brutality while fighting is weirdly exhilarating, and he has two other extraordinary moments: one when he tortures his sober father back into drinking again, the other when he finds him the next morning, drunk and despairing, and puts him to bed, cuddling him in an understated, childlike manner.

The movie's great downfall is that Edgerton, the physics teacher, wins match after match against insurmountable odds, but the fights are not sufficiently well-photographed to convince us that he really does deserve to win. Why does the Russian tap out, since he has NEVER BEFORE BEEN DEFEATED? I can't answer that. I'm not convinced they actually showed us why, or that the character, as presented, would have done so. He does it because the plot demands it. We all know he's going to do it, because the brothers must face off against one another, so the Russian fight is a sham, ergo completely uninteresting. Even the end-fight between the brothers is uninteresting, badly shot and edited, and it, also, feels contrived. What we're waiting for is that sentimental-hogwash embrace after the fight, when they're stumbling down the hallway with their arms around each other. That's the money-shot this movie wants us to cheer, but they cheat too much in the build-up, and so miss the target.

Oliver Twist: (2007. dir: Coky Giedroyc) We all know Oliver Twist, know him from earliest childhood. "Please, sir, I want some more." Even if you don't read the novel, you watch countless film and television versions. It's considered fare for children; they make cartoons out of it. At a young age I knew its message: that if you are good, and polite, and stand by your principles, if you have a good heart, then you will be rescued from the iniquities of life and be rewarded with wealth, comfort, and ease in the bosom of a loving family. I knew this message subconsciously before I could put it into words. How is it, then, that it's taken half a normal lifetime for me to realize that the thing is actually a hideous, classist snob-fest, the REAL message being that if you are born with blue blood in your veins, your true quality will out even if you are surrounded all your life by criminals and yobs. Symmetrically, if you have a good heart and good intentions but the wrong parentage, you are doomed to whore and thieve and betray your friends from a cowardice inherent in your character, eventually dying bloody at the hands of your abusive boyfriend. Dickens, it turns out, was kind of a dick. Do I dare revisit my childhood favorite, A Tale of Two Cities? Was that transmitting some hideous message into my unsuspecting child's brain, as well?

The dickishness of Dickens aside, Tom Hardy is the best Bill Sikes ever, absolutely understanding the cowardice involved in the psychological make-up of the bully, and the rest of the cast (Adam Arnold as the Dodger, Julian Rhind-Tutt as Monks, Sophie Okonedo as Nancy) is well-chosen. The pace is never allowed to slow in the clutches of its authors sidetracks into moral lessons, and, in spite of its political awfulness, there's a reason this story has been retold continually for centuries. You never quite know where it's going next, and the characters still have the power to move one. You even swallow the most ridiculous coincidence: the one guy Oliver gets falsely nabbed for robbing, he turns out to be his long-lost granddad? Seriously? Except that it's NOT a coincidence, because IF you are blessed with the bluish in the veins, then GOD IS ON YOUR SIDE, and no mistake.

two-minute warning: the dawning of a bleak era

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1976. dir: Larry Peerce) About the time that Star Wars and Jaws were about to change the face of Hollywood, two variant strands of popular cinema were fading away: the blockbuster, cast-of-a-thousand-stars, disaster film (the Towering Inferno, Earthquake, the Poseidon Adventure), and those brilliant, American Paranoia films which began darkening the landscape as the sixties turned into the seventies (the Conversation, the Parallax View, culminating in All the President's Men). Two-Minute Warning, which seems to have taken its inspiration from Peter Bogdanovich's low-budget Target, is a clumsy attempt at the first, but finds its few bleak moments of epiphany when rising into the second.

It's Superbowl Sunday. We meet various folks, many of whom will be dead before the movie ends, follow their various paths to the Coliseum: a pair of pickpockets, a middle-class family whose paterfamilias has just lost his job, a pair of lovers, a schlub whose life depends on L.A. winning the game, a priest. We also watch, from the killer's point of view so we never see who he is, a random bicycle-rider shot dead from distance, through a hotel room window, using a sniper's rifle. We watch him, as well, pack his weaponry into a coat and smuggle it into the stadium.

As he stations himself above the crowd and the cops become of aware of him, we find ourselves trying to guess at his motives and his targets. It's all standard fare until the head cop (Charlton Heston, naturally) tells the the SWAT team honcho (John Cassavetes) that he's ordered all the politicos (mayor, governor, president) smuggled quietly out of the crowd. Cassavetes asks why, to which the stolid Heston responds, "To get rid of potential targets," and Cassavetes, in his best, flat-practical, cynical voice, says, "Everyone's a target."

It's interesting. It marks the dawn of a new era. Heston never gives up trying to make sense of the slaughter, finally shaking the dying shooter, demanding reasons, but all he gets is, "Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me." Cassavetes is right. In the end, we don't get our answers. Was he there to shoot the President, or the first black quarterback to lead his team to the Super Bowl, or someone against whom he had a grudge we don't know about, opening fire on the crowd when his plans were stymied? We never know. Cassavetes' nihilistic end-speech, which I wish to God I'd written down, is a baleful portent of our ongoing state of emergency today: there is no reason, there is no logic, and, by extension, no real hope.

in a valley of violence: the man with a name and a dog for a girl

(2016. dir: Ti West) If the directors from the Nouvelle Vague were the first generation of self-reflexive filmmakers, that is, to make films inspired by a lifetime of cinephilia, at least they used their own lives and experiences as grist for their mills. The American generation who are the grand old men now, --Spielberg, Lucas, --were the first to make movies entirely based on other movies, as if they grew up imprisoned within the confines of movie-houses and it is here, in this generation, in which life and movies become blurred. As years pass, the two become the same thing. The most obvious example today is Tarantino, who gives the sense that his personal memories are all earmarked by films: he'll remember being seven years old not because of where he sat in grade school or the pinata at his birthday party, but because that was the year he stayed up late and snuck into the living room to watch "Naked and the Dead" on his parents' black and white TV set. (I made that up, but it might as well be true, right?)

My point is this: I try to like Ti West. I do. I've given him every opportunity to win me. House of the Devil was cute, OK, it was zingy, but it was a nostalgia trip, with ultimately very little life of its own. Although I liked the Innkeepers and didn't dislike the Sacrament, I don't recall much about them, either. I think "very little life of its own" might so far be a key phrase in summing up West's work to date. And, like House of the Devil, West is back to movie tributes: this time, to the Spaghetti Western. I am not at all opposed to those: Sam Raimi's the Quick and the Dead sits on my shelf as a wonderfully flawed, recurring pleasure. West's Valley, on the other hand, has some inspired moments, but they are connected by long passages of filler, some of it so damn cute you want to puke, much of it anachronistically modern, most of it very badly written indeed.

Ethan Hawke (who is absolutely the best of the two or three things that were good about the Magnificent Seven remake) is the cheroot-smoking, stoical Man With No Name, although, disappointingly, his name this time is Paul. He travels with two girl-companions: his horse, Lady, and his dog, Abby, with whom he carries on an endless, one-sided conversation, only becoming stoical in the presence of humans. See what I mean? It's a cute idea, but it doesn't carry well. When we first meet them, they are, by Paul's description, starving and water-deprived and dirty, although he looks suspiciously healthy and clean, always the first warning sign that you're watching a faux-Spaghetti instead of the real McCoy. He is hailed by a man in trouble, a drunken criminal of a preacher, horribly written but gamely played by Burn Gorman. This is the Eli Wallach character. There's your second warning sign.

*SPOILER ALERT:* Once Paul's showed us his alpha-male cred by effortlessly stripping the treacherous preacher of his bullets and his water, he leads his girls into a town built on malevolence and cowardice. A recalcitrant hero, he's the fellow to set it straight on its true path. Call him John Wick of the West: today's movie-men are less likely to be motivated by love of humans than by vengeance for their pets. In fact, Abby the Dog is well established many times over as the love of Paul's life. The bad guy calls her his "wife", and the girl who will be his love-interest, when she first meets Abby, says, "We look exactly alike!" (The love interest is, by the way, sixteen years old, to Hawkes', what, fifty? The logic seems to be that since she's not a virgin, since she's already been debauched as a child, it's OK to "Woody Allen" her. Join me, please, in puking.) From them on, you know Abby is a goner; she has to die so Paul can move on to a human relationship (with a sixteen-year-old girl! Ewwwwwwww).

The other thing about Abby is that she's the dog from the Artist. Not literally, I mean; that dog was French, but she may as well be. She performs all manner of stupid dog-tricks, from rolling herself up in a blanket on command to covering her eyes with her paw to indicate a hackneyed emotional response to Paul's words. The only decent joke in the movie is that every time someone asks if Abby does tricks, Paul intones deadpan, "She bites." And she does, she's a killer guard dog (except, naturally, when it really matters), but she saves her adorableness solely for the eyes of her true mate.

The obligatory scenes are here, but often elided. In a true Spaghetti Western, the hero always gets the crap beaten out of him by the villains; it's from his pain and humiliation that he rouses up his own internal "murdering ministers", the dark rage which fuels the second half of the picture, the vengeance part. In this (*SPOILER ALERT AGAIN*), they take him by surprise (he's taken with ridiculous ease; if he was watching, Clint Eastwood would flip the TV off in that moment) and throw him off a rocky ledge, never checking that he's dead. I want you to read that again. They don't put a bullet in him, or a knife's blade, both of which are close to hand. They don't hang him from a tree, or even beat him up much. They just push him over a rock at night then head home for a pint. If he hadn't turned off the TV before, Clint Eastwood is definitely flipped over to the Weather Channel at this point, because when Paul rises in the morning from his rocky, rattlesnakey bed, he's FINE. Barely a scrape on him, but mad as hell.

I have to take my hat off to West's obligatory flashback scene, achieved with the greatest economy using a couple of flashlights to illuminate glimpses of a night-time Indian massacre. West went out of his way to avoid wasting our time with inessentials here, then threw us to the dogs in that respect for most of the rest of the movie. There's a bright spot, sure, in Toby Huss as one of the townsmen; that actor continues to be a downright inspiring presence even in the smallest roles (watch the Invitation. For God's sake, man, watch it!). John Travolta has the Kurt Russell/Sam Shepard role here, the one-legged town marshal, one of the few characters that is written in shades of grey. He does well initially, then stumbles as the plot grows shriller and the script drowns in sad little puddles of its own mediocrity. And the guy who plays the town bully, --I'm not even going to dignify him by looking up his name,-- he takes a scriptful of badly-written lines and masticates then over-masticates until you're done with him, absolutely done, by the end of his first damn scene. When will they learn that even in a Western, every villain should have one good, redemptive quality, as every hero should have a convincing darkness?

Believe it or not, it's possible that this movie passes the Bechdel test. It's got two women in it, young sisters running an inn. They're both named and they speak to one another; I'd have to watch it a second time to make sure they speak of something besides men. Still, even if they do, the way they interrelate is cartoonish, slapsticky, kind of awful. These days in Westerns, women are often given a "you go, sister" nod in what you might call the Grace Kelly Moment, when the noblest of the downtrodden females gets to step up with an uncharacteristic shotgun and deliver the coup de grace when it looks like The Chief Scurvy Varmint might have our hero on the ropes. (He doesn't, really, ever. There's always kind of a winking assurance that the filmmaker is just letting the ladies have some fun here, letting them feel important, when really Ethan or Denzel or whomever would play through his bloody wounds and kill the fellow just fine on his own, thank you.) This has one of those. It's not satisfying. And when the 16-year-old girl embraces the older man (who has abandoned a beloved wife and daughter of the girl's same age), although it never becomes overtly sexual, West is still winking at us, letting us walk out of the cinema with no doubt that Paul will come to his senses, overcome his nagging scruples, and bed the girl. Because he is the red-blooded alpha-male, and, apparently, that gives him the right to Woody-Allen to his heart's content without our negative judgment.

ADDENDUM ON ANTOINE FUQUA'S THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN REMAKE: It's not interesting enough to warrant its own review. It feels like it was assembled by committee: the whole is not good, and most of the parts are just serviceable. Granted, it was a tough assignment, since it was already done, not just right, but just about perfectly, TWICE, once in America, before that in Japan. So these guys did the right thing in making changes, but, alas, the wrong ones. In the Sturges film, each of the Magnificents has a definite character, you can describe each one not just by the actor who played him, but the vanities, fears, and aspirations which drive them. In this one, you've got the Comanche, the Mexican Bandido, the Mountain Man, the Asian. They're types or ethnic symbols, and nobody bothers to write them actual characters. Even Denzel-As-Yul-Brynner and Chris-Pratt-As-Steve-McQueen are not written well enough to register.

Only one character, Ethan Hawkes', inspired somebody to write well. He's the Cajun called Goodnight Robicheaux, an amalgam of Lee (Robert Vaughn) and Harry (Brad Dexter) from the earlier film, and he not only has been given some wonderful lines (when his cowardice kicks in, he tells his friend that he dreamt the owl called his name), but Hawke communicates his conflict beautifully and often wordlessly.

The other good part is Vincent D'Onofrio as the mountain man: his voice squeaks and his gestures are twitchy and awkward, a thoroughly convincing portrayal of someone who's spent very little of life in human company. Again, nobody bothered to write a decent role for him, so he has nothing of interest to do with his hard work, but you've got to give him credit for holding up his end.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: let's scare jessica to death

(1971. dir: John D. Hancock) The turning of the sixties into the seventies gave us a fascinating moment in horror cinema: Woman v. The World. Highlighted by Rosemary's Baby and the Stepford Wives, Let's Scare Jessica to Death is another in a series in which an ordinary woman finds her everyday world transformed in eerie, almost imperceptible increments, until it seems like a malevolent conspiracy and she cannot tell whom she can trust. In fact, in these films, she can trust no one. Even those who sincerely want to help her are powerless to do it, and the husband who seems at first benign and well-meaning always fails her colossally before the end. The question at the heart of the mounting tension is always this: am I crazy, or is the world conspiring against me?

Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a significant entry in the category for a few reasons. First, maternity is never mentioned. Even in the Stepford Wives, mostly concerned with connubial matters, there is a sense that our heroine might escape but is held back by thought of her children. A movie like this one about a couple trying to piece their marriage back together after a crisis in which children or the prospect of parenthood never comes up is a treasurable oddity. The other lovely factor is Zohra Lampert in the lead. Her performance, which we view largely in close-up, is mesmerizing. The director wants us inside her head, keeps us there throughout, where we hear audible voices, voices which only she and we hear, and which may or may not be her hallucinations.

And,in fact, we are left in the end with an uncertainty. Those other two classic movies leave us in no doubt as to the breadth of the evil mesh closing around our heroine, but this one is different. From the title, we go in with the assumption that we know something: someone is trying to drive the woman back into the madhouse. By the closing credits, we're not so sure. Which things we've seen are real, and which are hallucinations? Is there a conspiracy? The scars on all the locals are an eerie touch. Why are they all bandaged and wounded? ARE there vampires?

You could call it a lost classic, rounding out a trilogy with those other, unforgettable two. It was a movement rising directly up out of the feminist uprising, giving expression to the new uncertainty and angst in the feminine subconscious as we relinquished our "safer" roles and moved out into the places of greater potential power in the world. It may, in fact, be time for a new wave of such films, as American women woke on November 9th to find our country had banded together overnight to declare us second-class citizens, not only unworthy to make our own reproductive decisions, but unworthy even of basic human respect, as amply demonstrated by our sociopath-elect and his contempt for our gender. Our government, for the next four years, will be defining "human" as white, heterosexual males with, preferably, at least one million dollars in the bank and a cupboard full of guns. Because horror is always the bellwether, the genre in which the black bile and dread spew first from the collective underconscious, this might be a useful path. Although we often see women as the brutalized protagonists in modern horror, we tend today towards the physically tough, ridiculously resilient and resourceful grlz, leaving those of us who are normal women, with no super-strengths and no instinct for fighting or gun-play, without proper mirrors.

belated and truncated halloweenfest: a double feature of christmas grue

A Christmas Horror Story: (2015. dir: Steve Hoban, Grant Harvey, Brett Sullivan) Revisiting the classic "anthology" format, here's a foursome of holiday chillers bound together by a shared locale and a drunken DJ playing a Christmas music marathon as all hell breaks loose outside. William Shatner is wonderfully droll as the the DJ, and the performance values are high all around. There's a troll changeling, wickedly funny zombie-elves, the ghost of a mistreated convent girl, and it all culminates in a showdown between Santa Claus and Krampus. Or does it?

Krampus: (2015. dir: Michael Dougherty) Viewing this before and after the election are two very different experiences. When it came out, Krampus was a well-executed, twisted moral-fable fashioned from the darkest humor and exaggerated versions of every American's modern experience of the holiday. Mobs draw blood and show no mercy for the privilege of paying too much for products which will be stuffed into a closet and forgotten the day after Christmas. People you dislike crowd into your home and criticize your way of living, and you let them do it, because they're "family". The cynical and ruthless bully those dreamers who have not given up hope, and once the bullies have won, once we have all given into ennui and despair, that's the invitation to Krampus, and Santa Claus stays home that year. Toys turn into monsters: teddy bears grow jagged teeth, tree-top angels morph into translucent harpies, gingerbread men lure children onto hooks and into chains, and you don't even want to know about the jack-in-the-box.

Now, post-election, this movie leaves a newfound chill, a hideous reminder of how hellishly low we have sunk. It is, believe me, exactly the Christmas movie deserved by a people so fucked up and cynical they'll elect the embodiment of self-serving, capitalist pig-dog evil into the highest seat of power.

Keep the fire burning hot in the hearth, kids. Krampus is coming.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: the devil's pass

(2013. dir: Renny Harlin) Sucker that I am for horror films inspired by True Fortean Incidents, the most interesting aspect of a Fortean Incident is its inexplicable nature, and movies, perhaps necessarily, strip away that layer, rarely providing anything more interesting in its place.

This one rises from the mass death in the Dyatlov Pass in 1959. It starts out as the Blair Witch Project, almost weirdly so, becomes a video game later on when the characters are exploring the underground bunker, and ends with a cheap trick. Along the way, it references the Philadelphia Experiment and the Mothman Prophecies, but doesn't shed any particular new light on the mysterious story of the dead hikers (except for one moment when they realize the "strange orange lights" that were reported in the sky the night of the calamity may have been flares sent up in desperation).

This is a "found footage" movie which cheats, just a little, just at the end. A group of American hipsters are retracing the dead Soviets' steps (although when the main girl claims to be a student at U of O but says it's in YOO-jeen AW-rygun, you know for a fact she's never been anywhere near the place), and the acting is, at any rate, better than the script. I tend to enjoy some things about Harlin's work. The best thing about this one is the easy rapport amongst the hipsters before the hellishness breaks loose, but that's a mighty weak peg to hang a thumbs-up on.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: i, madman

(1989. dir: Tibor Takacs): And, for a change of pace, toss on I, Madman, a good-hearted, unpretentious slasher film built around beloved 80's-diva Jenny Wright as a girl who works in a used bookstore and finds herself menaced by characters in the dark fictions she reads. None of it makes much sense, but it doesn't matter, because the details are so engaging: an avalanche of misplaced books acting as a dream-quicksand obstacle, seamless travels from life into fiction and back again, twisting staircases and flashing neon. It's also bookended by the Art and Dotty Todd rendition of "Chanson d'Amour", a truly great song which evokes in detail an entire, lost era in one bouncy, repeating chorus: absolutely brilliant.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: deliver us from evil

(2014. dir: Scott Derrickson) A return to form for the Catholic Horror genre. As has become de rigeur in the past twenty years, the Catholic priest is allowed to wear a white hat only if he is a) sexy and fit, b) fully indulgent in harmless sins, such as smoking and drinking too much, c) obviously lustful after beautiful women, and, most importantly, if he d) fell into his calling only after "real life" so devastatingly disillusioned him as to drive him into it. This priest, played sexily by Edgar Ramirez, doesn't even wear the collar, working, as he puts it, "under cover", allowing hot chicks to hit on him in bars.

It's an exorcism film, and a good one, delivering some genuine frights and three-dimensional characters (including one obvious red-shirt who I really, really didn't want to die). Eric Bana gives his usual greatness as a tough New York cop with a talent for sensing the supernatural. Among other dark delights, the movie offers a sly joke about the instinctive association we make between cats and devils.

the belated, truncated halloweenfest: alone in the dark

(1982. dir: Jack Sholder) An overlooked classic from the eighties, it's a slasher movie, a home invasion film, a lunatics-escaped-from-the-asylum story. It's got a satirical message to deliver about the violence of society, and, although it's a little heavy-handed, its wry sensibility and near-flawless cast sees it through.

A blackout frees the most dangerous lunatics (termed "voyagers" by sensimilla-smoking head-shrink Donald Pleasence, uncomfortable with the connotations of "psychopath", a man whose laissez-faire approach leads him to allow matches on request to a pyromaniac) from an asylum and they target the family of a new doctor, convinced that he has murdered his predecessor, whom they respected. Imagine the joy of an underplayed (!) menace by looney-in-chief Jack Palance, truly glorious, or the infectious glee of Martin Landau's butcher-knife-brandishing preacher roaring, "Vengeance is mine, saieth the Lord!" It's got all the tropes, the punished-by-death teenaged-babysitter sex, gruesome murders by crossbow, cleaver, and baseball bat, and a creepy, neon-lit dream sequence to open the festivities.

It doesn't shirk the blood, guts, rising tension, or jump-scares, enjoying itself thoroughly the entire way.

horror triple feature: devil, plus one, enter nowhere

Devil: (2010, dir: John Erick Dowdle) This is an M. Night Shyamalan story from beginning to twist-end, just directed by someone else, and it fucks up and loses me in the exact same way that Signs did: with the cut-and-dried theophany, the indisputably straightforward workings of God in the lives of men.

Divine Grace is never cut-and-dried, never indisputable, not to the eyes of humans. It may be that His works make all kinds of perfect, symmetrical sense from the god's eye-view, but we can only see the limited pieces set in front of us, and from the vantage-point of the groundlings, Divine Grace always looks partial, or sloppy, or half-baked, or maybe like an accident. One human might have an epiphany, might, for one short moment, be able to encompass the fullness of a Divine Act, but it will rub so contrary to the grain of everyday human existence that even keeping hold of the memory of it will require a stubborn contrivance of faith and courage.

And that's why M. Night bugs me. Theodicy is not simple, and this guy tries to tell us it is, and that the evil which God "allows" is all for our own good.

Plus One: (2013. dir: Dennis Iliades) A meteorite strike causes a wrinkle effect in time and a Harmony Korine party of hedonist kids find themselves partying with their doppelgangers from moments prior. What might have been an interesting idea turns out to be a post-adolescent masturbatory power-fantasy when the main guy uses the anomaly to win back the girl who dumped him and then murder her other self. The girls shed their clothes at the drop of a hat and the smartest of them spends the evening making out with herself. Too bad.

Enter Nowhere: (2011. dir: Jack Heller) It begins as "No Exit" for three lost souls trapped in a cabin in the middle of an unfamiliar forest, then turns into something more interesting before the end. When it all comes out in the wash, it’s a moral fable about how the secret to living a good and healthy life is to be raised by the woman who gave birth to you: accept no substitutes! The acting is solid enough, including Scott Eastwood (yes, he looks just like his dad only handsome) as the audience surrogate. No gore, no chills, just a strange, twisty storyline that, although ultimately unsatisfying, is enough to keep you watching.

the female gaze: the invitation and strangerland

the Invitation: (2015. dir: Karyn Kusama) An extraordinary film which, if you look at the plot, might be classed as a psychological thriller, but it dredges up the kind of heavy loathing and dread that the best horror does. The acting is first-class (including excellent use of my two favorite actors from Carnivale, Toby Huss and John Carroll Lynch). A group of old friends gathers for a dinner party after a few years apart instigated by a tragedy, and these actors really do feel like old friends. It's set in a mansion in the Hollywood hills, and although the house itself doesn't feel like a character as in your haunted house films, the view from the terrace and the winding road up and away from the hoi-polloi makes L.A. feel like an integral, living part of the story. Kusama knows just when to take us up close into our main character's haunted head (Logan Marshall-Green, revealing a star talent) and when to come back into the world of tense laughter and conversation. This is a director who knows exactly what she's doing.

The ending gave me shivers, down my spine and along my arms.

Seriously, it's such a good movie it works on your mind for days after.

Strangerland (2015. dir: Kim Farrant) Bleak, fascinating movie about a disconsolate emotional winter fallen across a family (husband and wife sleep in separate rooms, the son walks all night and never sleeps) as the teenaged daughter's powerful onslaught of sexuality wreaks havoc. When both kids go missing during a dust-storm, Catherine (Nicole Kidman) begins to feel the weight of her own long-lost sexual power during the frantic search. Hugo Weaving is lovely as a small-town cop, and there's something about the Australian outback, something more than bleak or wild, something that feels mythical. Characters refer to the Rainbow Serpent, the water-bringer associated with menstruation and so with the protection of women. When Catherine asks an aboriginal elder-woman about it, the woman says, "Children go lost here. It's something in the land."

Since Farrant's interest lies with the sexuality of the girl and the woman, the shape of the story goes awry of our usual expectations. It looks like it's set to be a mystery, then a thriller, and a strong sense of dread builds, but all the mysteries (as in life!) are not solved, and it's Catherine's internal journey that is followed to a point of catharsis. It's a movie more akin to Picnic at Hanging Rock in that sense, a movie unconcerned with cut-and-dried answers.

Joseph Fiennes is probably miscast as the strong but befuddled father. His hugely expressive eyes, a boon in many roles, play against him here, and someone more quintessentially Australian might have been a better fit. Think of a young Bryan Brown, that jagged chunk of Aussie masculinity, and how devastating it would have been at the end to see him break down in cathartic tears with his wife. Whereas Fiennes always kind of looks like he's about to cry, doesn't he?

the female gaze: by the sea and the private lives of pippa lee

By the Sea: (2015. dir: Angelina Jolie Pitt) In what appears vaguely to be the 1970s, two beautiful people, married 14 years, languish at a secluded Maltese resort by the sea. She (Jolie) wilts gracefully across divans and sloths around on deck chairs; he goes down to the local, chats up the folks, tries to write, drinks himself into sloppy rudeness only to be forgiven by the generous old man who runs the joint. We can see their marriage is dissolving in icy distance, and there is some allusion to a past crisis which cannot be discussed. One of the great strengths of the piece, in fact, is that we don't know the nature of the crisis until late in the day. The film would have been all the better had it been left a mystery indefinitely, since the instigating event is not, ultimately, important, just the emotional and psychological fall-out from it, and naming it makes commonplace and simple what might have remained a tentacled monster of vast and Lovecraftian proportion.

Jolie captures well the strangeness of marriage, and how cataclysmic abysses can open between two people who know one another too well, an estrangement seemingly against both partner's wills, seeming to have an avalanche life of its own, gaining weight and matter as it gains speed. Mostly, though, the pace here is so unfailingly languid, and the clinching moment, the fulcrum upon which the climax turns, depends on so second-perfect an accidental encounter, that it feels forced and writerly.

*SPOILER ALERT*: In the end, we are told that her "tragedy" is that she is barren, but it is simple for us to see, although the characters never do, that her true tragedy is a lack of vocation. She thinks herself into dire maelstroms because she has no purposive action, no direction for her energies. We are told she was once a dancer. When asked why she stopped, she acidly says, "I got old." When he (Pitt) holds forth about the good old times to the tavern-keeper, he recalls himself having been once a great writer, and she a dancer with a great body; whether she had talent is not of value enough to mention. Like Scott with Zelda, he will own all the genius in the family, and she, like Zelda, finds herself a dancer whose access to the stage has been stripped away by the prejudice of the world against a woman aging.

Mostly, though, it's beautiful to look at, with great cars and perfect, groovy songs, reminiscent of a certain mid-20th-c. European ouevre.

the Private Lives of Pippa Lee: (2009. dir: Rebecca Miller) Miller directs her own script, and communicates truths about womanhood and the subtleties of the roles we play: how much of it is chosen, how much decreed for us? Maria Bello is startlingly good as the speed-freak mom, Robin Wright shines in the lead, a tougher, subtler role, as a woman whose tamped-down energies are pushing volcanically to the surface without her permission. Alan Arkin does that wonderful Alan Arkin thing, bringing his ever-spry intelligence to every line. Winona Ryder takes some furious glee in milking her own crazy-girl image, and Keanu Reeves shows up as the magical animus figure who cannot lie, and will save the day in the end.

It's a good movie, don't get me wrong. The characters are shifting and complex, Miller's interest in the main character, a rich, New York housewife, is true and unflagging and keeps our own interest piqued. Here's an idea, though: how about a movie in which a woman busts out of her old life, and DOESN'T have Keanu Reeves waiting to drive her away into the Mojave? Where's the movie about the woman who loses or gives up everything, then faces a life of solitude and the challenge of living it creatively? Where's the updated version of the Ellen Burstyn character in Grand Isle? And remember My Brilliant Career? Female audiences were unsettled by the Judy Davis character's decision to choose creative solitude over domestic servitude in marriage to the man she loved -- this was set at the turn of the twentieth century, mind, so there was no birth control. Had she married her man, she'd have given up her writing to launder nappies and, yes, have some glorious sex, but she would be giving over the tiller, surrendering her autonomy, and STILL the women of 1979 were threatened by her decision. Here it is, thirty years later, and Pippa Lee still can't just drive off into the desert by herself; even today, it's considered too hard and selfish a choice for a woman to make.

But, really, how difficult would it be to drive off into the desert with Keanu freaking Reeves? Does she really need a stockpile of courage to make that choice? In a sense, unless he is just symbolic of her own internal masculine side, how is it not its own cop-out, switching dependence on one man for another?

recent russell crowe double feature: the water diviner and a winter's tale

the Water Diviner: (2014. dir: Russell Crowe) Directing yourself is never easy, and Crowe does his best to avoid problems by keeping his performance simple and straightforward. The story is mixed: the interesting part tells the flip-side of the Gallipoli story, a deep scar in Australian history, an ill-conceived WWI campaign in which 36,000 ANZAC troops were lost or wounded. If you're American, you learned about it from the Peter Weir movie. If you're Australian, I assume it's ingrained in you as cultural heritage from earliest youth. This story looks at it from the Turkish angle, beginning in a trench where soldiers are preparing to die, but it's a trick, a mirror image of Weir's trench in which the Australians are pinning their photographs and final letters to the shorings before they run to their deaths: this time, it's the Turks doing the same thing, but when they reach the crest of the hill, they find the enemy has retreated.

It's the story of a farmer, a sensitive autodidact and preternaturally gifted water-dowser, who has lost all three sons on the Turkish peninsula and his wife as a later casualty of the same battle. In deference to her last wishes, he travels to Turkey to find the bodies of his sons and bring them home.

The story incorporates magical realism, as when he "intuits" the final moments of his boys as he walks across the ground which drank their blood, this without the film actually committing to a vision of reality in which there is an invisible dimension. The suggestion is, rather disturbingly, that this farmer loves his children more fully and successfully than us mere mortals do, and that's why he's able to follow their long-buried traces, while the rest of us are plagued by unanswered questions when we lose our own loved ones. The visuals are heightened into hyper-reality, as well: when he reaches Istanbul, the scarlets and yellows are saturated to an extreme, as if everything has been carved out of saffron and turmeric.

Most of the movie's flaws and saccharine sentimentality (there's an adorable Turkish urchin who has two jobs: to provide a conduit through which his ridiculously gorgeous mother falls in love with our aging, unprepossessing hero, and to administer the emotional blackmail that underhandedly plucks at our heartstrings) might be forgiven when weighed against the good (the bits about war feel fully and well done), except for the unforgivable love story. There is good acting in this movie (Yilmaz Erdogan, particularly, as the Turkish officer, and Ryan Corr as the eldest son), but not, alas, by Olga Kurylenko, whose character, in her defense, may be unplayable as written.

She is a Turkish war-widow who accepts that her dead husband's brother has the right to wallop her, and yet is a Strong and Independent Woman, as trademarked by Hollywood. There is probably a bridge between the two extremes, but Kurylenko and Crowe either could not find it, or failed to communicate it if they did. Crowe takes cliched shortcuts in mapping the Woody Allen-flavored romance (Crowe was 5O at the time, Kurylenko 34, and she looks younger than that, upping the ick-factor): syrupy music over a candlelit supper, at which my boyfriend wryly pointed out that if she were really a widow at the close of World War I, she wouldn't waste a hundred candles on a single supper, even if she had a hundred candles. The amorous brother-in-law who begins as an obstacle magically vanishes by the end, and with him any cultural obstacles, like, say, that the Turkish men, who are still at war against Britain, would kill our hero and probably her as well for sleeping with the enemy rather than allow the romance. You have to figure that even if our hero managed to spirit his lady-love and her absurdly cuddlesome son back to Australia, the union would still be villified by his own people in their postbellum xenophobia, and is this Strong and Independent(TM) Muslim woman going to be happy in the Australian bush? Yikes. Not likely. A happy ending, as someone wise once pointed out, is a story that's not finished yet. This one, though, just feels forced and false.

a Winter's Tale: (2014. dir: Akiva Goldsman) Ah, true love, true love. Always predestined, immediately recognizable, instantly cleansing away the flaws and sins of those who find it. The altar at which Hollywood worships.

This is a New Age fairy tale, lifted soggily above a slough of saccharine hogwash and held there, barely, by good performances and some lush photography. Its theology is dunderheaded, because in Hollywood, the only way to experience God is through true romance or parental love. The only third option is disinterested samaritanism, but Hollywood is uncomfortable with it and tends to make those folks into angelic figures.

It's long and slow, but Russell Crowe has some fun finding the tics and nuances of his villainous demon, and the only performance that falls flat, interestingly, is from Will Smith, who is an entirely unconvincing Lucifer, possibly because he can't help exuding so powerful a nice-guy charisma.

I do dig it at the end, when the bad guy turns into ice. Nice effect.

1971 australian double feature: wake in fright and walkabout

Wake in Fright: (1971. dir: Ted Kotcheff) As much a classic of Aussie cinema as Picnic at Hanging Rock or Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright chronicles the Christmas holiday of a school-teacher trapped in the bleakest part of the outback in a sort of indentured servitude. En route to Sydney to visit his surfer-girlfriend, he becomes trapped by circumstance, peer pressure, and bad choices in a mining town ("the Yabba!" the locals call it with enthusiasm), and undergoes a mounting nightmare made of drink, sweat, dirt, blood, and vomit. It's infamous for the gruesome and protracted, real-life footage of a kangaroo massacre at its center, fully as disturbing as it sounds, which is further grotesquified by a mano-a-mano between a badly wounded 'roo and a drunk-as-fuck muscleman. The whole thing, the whole movie, the word "disturbing" doesn't begin to cover it. Kotcheff is an American who went on to direct First Blood, among others, and it may be the outsider's look at a foreign culture that heightens the weirdness into a sort of barely controlled hysteria.

It's like one of Polanski's early psychological horror films, the Tenant or Repulsion, in which you feel like you're standing too close to someone, watching while they go insane. This school-teacher (Gary Bond) starts out the day a proper fellow, complete with posh BBC accent and Carnaby Street good looks, who dreams of shipping out to England and cultivates artsy pretensions. Once he's trapped in The Yabba (and it is one of the most nightmarish moments I can remember, when he steps out the back of the lorry to realize that he is, indeed, trapped, as in a sort of Purgatory, just as the driver hands him a rifle), the movie maps a descent into alcohol-frenzy. Watching these men at their berserk, rampaging play is a high-pitched nightmare, one without end, a sort of tornado skipping across the landscape and demolishing everything it touches, some things immediately, others more slowly, like the women trapped amongst them.

*SPOILER ALERT* Here's the clincher, though: it's not a horror film, because of the ending. You watch this guy go all the way down into madness, through suicide and out the other side, and, in the end, he walks back to the same school-house, dressed in the same clothes, and when his landlord asks how his holiday was, he says, through gritted teeth but with some gusto, "The best." And that's when you realize what you've been watching: an Englishman suffering a gruesome transmogrification into an Australian. You've been watching a sort of shamanic initiation, in which he's ritually eviscerated in a frenzy of bacchic idiocy, and when he's strong enough to survive it, he returns to walk the earth as a roo-killing, two-fisted Aussie, disburdened of his previous dreams and pretensions.

Walkabout: (1971. dir: Nicolas Roeg) ...and this, the darling of international arthouses at the end of the swingingest decade, bears odd similarity to its more provocative brother of the same year. It's another outsider's view of the outback, Roeg's vision evoking an incandescent beauty and vibrant thrum of life from within the apparent wasteland. Its instigating incident involves an Englishman driven mad by the same landscape, trying to murder his children before turning his gun on himself, and the children embark on an initiatory "walkabout", saved by an aboriginal boy who takes them under his wing. In this one, however, the transformation is resisted in the end, the children returning to the suffocating harness of "Englishness" (which Roeg points up as grotesque through use of radio broadcasts and cross-cut juxtapositioning of "natural" vs "white" ways of life), only to think back on it wistfully as a transient moment of freedom.

Partly because of Roeg's extreme stylings, it's a film much more trapped in the moment of its making than Wake in Fright, whose nightmare traverses boundaries. This is, at heart, a hippie vision, part of the Rousseau, back-to-nature movement of the time, embodied, perhaps a little leeringly, in retrospect, in Jenny Agutter's 17-year-old nakedness. The film's most striking scenes involve the Aborigines: the boy's final courtship dance, or when a nomadic community comes across the burnt-out car and uses it as a plaything, the white man's decaying body stretched gruesomely in the trees nearby, ignored.

the female gaze: proof and good dick

Proof: (1991. dir: Jocelyn Moorhouse) It's a strange movie, and well worth watching. A blind man (Hugo Weaving) deifies truth, photographing his world so others will verify through their eyes what he has experienced through his other senses. He endures a dysfunctional (like, Eugene O'Neill levels of dysfunction) relationship with his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), who is in love with him and spurned at every show of vulnerability. "I know she wants me," he explains, "and as long as she can't have me, she won't pity me." In punishment, she silently leaves ashtrays and coat-stands where he will trip over them and uses his beloved dog as a pawn in their power-games. Their lives are bounded in circles of longing, fear, and cruelty, until he meets an amiable and ingenuous dishwasher (Russell Crowe), whose friendship catalyzes growth, disruption, and endgame.

If it's the nineties, it barely is. Everything except the digital camera looks like the eighties, including an ill-judged musical montage of photographs and perky music designed to communicate to us the first night our two heroes bond. Mostly, it's an interesting portrait of how spurned love can lead to petty cruelties and power trips, and how impossible it is to learn trust, except to relax into it as a necessary part of existing amongst other humans. Moorhouse communicates beautifully the sensual experience that is the blind man's world, the acting is very good, and Russell Crowe is impossibly young and charismatic.

photo courtesy of Fanzone50 (http://fanzone50.com/Hugo/Proof2.html)

Good Dick: (2008. dir: Marianna Palka) This movie reminds me of two things: first, the Ballad of Tam Lin, in which a woman whose lover has fallen under a fair-folk enchantment must cling fast to him as he turns into all manner of creature and thing, and, in succeeding, the enchantment is broken and he is again hers. The second is a dream I had in my twenties, in which the guy I was seeing at the time tried to walk across a room and touch me, and I had to execute a complex series of dance-steps to freeze him. It worked, but each time I did it he'd be frozen for a shorter period, and the dance-steps took just as long, so it was inevitable that soon enough he was going to succeed in his approach. I woke up in a cold sweat before he did.

Palka has written and directed a bold character study in which an unassuming and well-intentioned video-store clerk stalks, lies to, and manipulates a woman who rents porn at his store until he insinuates himself into her life, then loves her in subservience, withstanding her violent torrents of abuse, until she takes charge of fixing her damaged life and in doing so finds the power to love him back. You've got to admire the guts of it: Palka doesn't so much defy the (sometimes, let's be honest, increasingly fascistic) boundaries of Political Correctness, she ignores them completely in her search for emotional truth, crossing over and back without seeming to notice.

It looks and feels exactly like what you think "quirky indie film" should look and feel like: short scenes, indeterminate time passages, indie-rock transitions, pauses and medium-shot to emphasize emotional distance, eccentric conversation between a group of male friends. It's hard to believe this is her first film, and that she directed herself in the lead. She avoids that fall into loss of perspective and vanity to which 99% of novice self-directors succumb. And, somehow, despite the dark subject matter, Palka and her co-star Jason Ritter manage to infuse the piece with a sweetness which prevails in the end.

exodus gods and kings: a superfluity of crocodiles, and not enough snakes

(2014. dir: Ridley Scott) You know what I miss about Biblical epics? Technicolor. That immersive, saturated, ultra-bright color of the Ten Commandments that made the blues and reds of Pharoah's palace so sumptuous you could feel the silk against your own skin. When the Nile ran red with the blood of the Hebrew God's plague, it was red like fire-trucks, like finger-paints. When the Plague of the Firstborn crept down from the sky in a green haze, it was greener than seaweed, greener than Kermit the Frog, and the thing itself, with its eerie, distant screams, its smears of lamb's-blood, it was the most eldritch night-scene ever.

In Ridley Scott's version, we begin with a mediocre script, filmed largely in earth-tones, and we get bumped along from one mediocre set-piece to the next without ever growing to care about any of the humans involved. There's a long Hollywood tradition, sure, of jumbling American and English accents together (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Dame Judith Anderson opposite Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price? Seriously? But, in retrospect, how do you not love it?), sticking in one "exotic" actor (Yul Brynner amongst the Wonder Bread), and calling it Egypt. Scott sticks with that (Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Tara Fitzgerald), and hopes that Joel Edgerton manages to look exotic enough to obscure his Aussie origins. (He doesn't. A blue-eyed pharaoh?)

The night scenes are teal and orange. The most interesting one involves the burning bush, which is all very blue, very LED, and Moses himself is buried in mud with only his face emerging, a fascinating idea, but then Scott brings God out in the figure of a little boy, and again we're lost. In the old days, they knew when to respect the source material. Yeah, MGM gave God a cheesy, pretentious voice, but they stuck with His original lines, which a lot of folks know by heart because they read the Book. And when you're writing lines for God, you better by gum have a vast talent, my friend. This God-Child just sounds like a Hollywood hack scribbled some things down on a napkin.

My own biggest disappointment in this failure involves the dearth of snake-life. Where are the serpents? That's one of my favorite things in the Bible, when Moses turns a staff into a serpent then Pharoah's thaumaturges replicate the "trick". I always thought it said something particular that was never again so particularly addressed, something about the ascension of man's cleverness obscuring the world's numinous nature. Scott just leaves it out. And, in this version, the Nile turns red because crocodiles run mad and kill everything? Well, alright, but isn't the point kind of that God turns it red because He can turn it red? In other words, shouldn't we be addressing questions of Faith?

Walter Chaw has written such a brilliant review of Hail, Caesar! over at Film Freak Central that it may be the last word on its subject, and it's relevant here in that he points to it being a movie about Faith. How is it that the Coen Brothers manage to explore the issue of Faith more compellingly in a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood than anyone else can with an actual Biblical epic? It may have something to do with our current problems with zealotry and terrorism, or there may be another factor at play. Michael Gebert addresses the idea in his Encyclopedia of Movie Awards while speaking of Hammer Films: "There's a nice Ph.D. thesis to be written on the subject of why horror films hint more effectively at the mystery of faith than Hollywood's lumbering Bible soaps... Why Peter Cushing's faith is so much more convincing than Charlton Heston's."

stephen mchattie double feature from another era

the People Next Door: (1970. dir: David Greene) This was originally a "CBS Playhouse" production, refilmed as a television movie two years later with the same director and a few people from the cast. It's an examination of a generational war, with its focus on drug use (mom and dad deplore acid and pot while partaking thoughtlessly of sleeping pills, diet pills, cigarettes, alcohol). McHattie is the hippie son who plays in a groovy rock band. Hal Holbrook and Chloris Leachman (as the couple next door whose clean-cut son turns out to be the dastardly pusher-man) give such lovely, nuanced performances that they make leads Eli Wallach and Julie Harris look clumsy and hamfisted. McHattie, of course, already feels practised and relaxed in his charismatic intensity.

It's a morality tale from an era that feels far more distant than it is, and it's interesting from an anthropological view.

Search for the Gods: (1975. dir: Jud Taylor) Seventies teledramas have an unmistakable flavor all their own. The production values are uniformly awful, the scripts are generally as bad (this was the era in which M*A*S*H was considered great TV. Try and watch it now, I dare you), and in those days actors were either in the movies or on television: you didn't do both. You chose, or you got stuck, and switching was rare. That changed in the eighties when Hollywood started mining the soaps and sitcoms for its next generation of stars (Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Demi Moore), but this was before that particular flood.

This is a pilot that never found a home, and it gives Kurt Russell top billing because he was at that awkward stage between the Disney Wunderkind of the '60s and his beloved reinvention as Snake Plisskin. It's McHattie who plays the true lead, though, in this pre-Shirley-MacLaine delving into what would ten years later be called New Age spirituality in New Mexico. Castaneda is the Great Father whose shadow hangs benignly over the proceedings; Journey to Ixtlan is lovingly brandished in more than one scene. There is hushed talk of visits from ancient astronauts. A rich-guy villain sits in London, forever obscured in shadow, trying to track down and procure "by any means" the nine sections of an ancient, broken amulet ("medallion", I think they keep calling it). Willie Longfellow (McHattie) is a young spiritual searcher, escaping the expectations of his wealthy upbringing amongst the Boston Brahmins, who stumbles into a piece of the puzzle by jumping into the fray when an old Indian is attacked. Ralph Bellamy is the congenial artificates-expert who digs up the information McHattie needs to decipher his puzzle-piece. There is, wonderfully, a ten-minute peyote trip, in which Longfellow proves himself worthy (to a god called "Willow Lane", the "Night-Spirit, the Power of the Smoke").

There's also a lot of rappelling, verbal sparring over the fair Indian maiden, soaking in natural hot-springs while contemplating Native American genesis stories, dynamiting heedlessly into ancient tombs and, of course, killing the bad guys, sometimes after protracted and sadly dated car chases through the desert. And, yet, who can resist it? I wish they'd made a whole season.