Where'd you go, Vance?

Two weeks could be the longest hiatus I've ever taken from this blog, though I'd have to go back and check on that. It's certainly the longest unexplained hiatus; I think there was a Christmas trip to the U.S. a couple years back that might have left you without a new post for longer than that, but at least I told you about it in advance. (I chuckle a little saying "left you without a post," as if I take any more than marginal measures to ensure my ramblings are for you, the reader, rather than just myself.)

I didn't die, you'll be glad to know.

I didn't go to Antarctica either, like the title character in the poster above (that's not a spoiler as they show it in the first few minutes of the movie, which was one of 15 I saw while I was gone, mostly on various flights). But as with that other long hiatus referenced above, I did go to the U.S., somewhat unexpectedly. I won't get into why. Just know that it was a family issue, but that everybody's okay. Something inevitable has arrived faster than we were expecting it to, but even within that context, everyone is okay, and better yet, happy.

I left the morning after my last post, which was exactly two weeks ago, and arrived back on Thursday, jet-lagged after three consecutive flights over a 24-hour period. I'm still fighting the jet lag, though last night's sleep was mostly a normal one.

I actually thought I might keep this blog updated while I was gone, as I began composing a post based on movies I watched on my first flight, in Microsoft Word on the plane since I had no internet access. If I'd finished that post, I suppose I would have posted it and possibly written others. But once I hit the ground, I had a lot to do, and typing up my free associations about movies did not seem like the most urgent use of my time. Plus, I didn't actually tell anyone on social media I was going on this trip, since it made sense to use all my available time for the purpose of my trip rather than seeing friends. Posting to my blog would have defeated that purpose, or at least given me excess guilt.

Instead of landing back here with a regular post, though, I figured I would give you a little grab bag of some of those thoughts I had while I was gone, in little chapter subheadings. I'll get back into the flow of regular writing over the coming week.

So without any further you know what ...

Having the time to take the time

On my August trip to Los Angeles, I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, cramming it into a busy schedule and starting it too late at night to fully appreciate it. After that viewing I placed myself squarely in the "I do not like Tarantino's latest" camp, defending that stance with scattered thoughts about there being a lack of "Tarantino scenes" (clever set pieces with surprising payoffs) and about the film ending with an explosion of violence that could be interpreted as misogynistic.

But I suspected I hadn't really given the movie its best chance to succeed, and over time, these arguments lost some of their vigor. Seeing the movie among my first flight's options, I decided I'd spend the proper time with it this time. Not only did I like it much better, I understood the connections between certain scenes that had evaded me when I watched it too late that one night. Just as one example, the scene with Brad Pitt's character and Bruce Lee was an extended flashback, something I hadn't properly understood when I first saw it, which therefore threw off my understanding of the continuity of the scenes. As I said, I was too tired to watch this movie back in August.

I could probably go into detail, but as this post is a collection of multiple thoughts, I'll just report that I doubled my original two-star rating to four. And am looking forward to my eventual third viewing.

Los Angeles plays itself

I didn't actually start the flight with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but rather, an episode of the Bill Hader-led HBO show Barry, which is also set in, and establishes a satirical perspective toward, Los Angeles. But it wasn't until my second movie, Stuber, was also set in LA -- and also tried to poke fun at the city's most risible traits -- that I realized I had a theme going. (I say "tried" because Stuber was awful, hands down the worst of the 15 I saw while I was gone.)

So to keep it going, I continued buttressing my various viewings with episodes of Barry (which had been my plan anyway) and made a hopeful choice of a third film on the docket, Yesterday. That's Danny Boyle's latest about a young musician who awakens from a head trauma in a world without the Beatles, and becomes famous by "writing" their songs into existence. (I never expected to be watching this movie on the plane, by the way; I missed it in the theater due to a busy viewing schedule at that time, but also because I thought it would be a good candidate to watch on video with my wife. When she turned her nose up at the suggestion a couple weeks back, I knew I was in the clear to watch it on my own.)

Sure enough, the largely British-set film does contain scenes in Los Angeles, and what's more, includes quite the parody of a Los Angeles type, in this case a record label executive played by Kate McKinnon, who lives in a fantastic beach house.

As I specifically allowed this flight to breathe -- doing some reading and other activities as well -- I didn't cram in a fourth viewing, so the entire flight consisted of LA-themed viewings. Which I thought was fun, even though this was my first trip to the U.S. where I didn't so much as leave the airport in Los Angeles on my way to the east coast.

A good get, gotten easily

Even though this trip was all business, I have to admit I had an eye toward catching a movie that had already been released in the U.S. but wouldn't be so before the end of the year in Australia, meaning I'd miss it for my year-end list. Could this time have been spent seeing friends? Shut up.

At least I reduced my guilt by catching this movie on my first full day in Boston, when my sleep was all screwed up and I would not have been a presentable social animal. And at least it was available at the movie theater in Burlington, the town right next to the one where I was staying, at the multiplex. Meaning I didn't have to drive in to an arthouse theater in Boston, and therefore take up an unjustifiable amount of my precious time in town, to see it.

What The Lighthouse -- which still does not have a release date in Australia that I can see -- was doing at the multiplexes is beyond me. I suppose Robert Eggers' previous film, The Witch, was enough of a crossover hit to have earned buzz and convinced some distributors of the commercial viability of its follow-up. But even that was a movie where much of the dialogue was hard to understand (I used the subtitles on my second viewing), so a follow-up about two lighthouse keepers, in black and white, with dialogue that's only marginally more intelligible, didn't seem like an automatic win. Who knows, maybe they just saw that it starred the former Edward Cullen and just rolled the dice. There were a decent number of people in my Tuesday night screening, in any case.

The movie has similar strengths and weaknesses to The Witch, ending in a similarly unsatisfying place for me. But I'm really glad I did indeed get it in before the end of the year.

How to watch a 135-minute movie on a one-hour flight

One of my top contenders on the aforementioned year-end list is Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, and to shore up exactly how much I liked it, I thought a second viewing was in order before the end of the year. Only problem is, it may not get released to U.S. iTunes before then, so I didn't know the likeliest way for me to get my hands on it, even with an Australian release date back in June.

Qantas took care of that problem for me by having it among its list of movies. But in part because I was following that LA movie theme, I decided to hold my second Parasite viewing for my return trip.

Only problem? My return flight was only a Qantas code share, meaning I took the domestic cross country flight and subsequent LA to Sydney leg on American Airlines. Which had quite the good movie selection, just not Parasite.

I did have one more Qantas flight, though, which was the hour-long Sydney to Melbourne final leg of my trip. It seemed foolish to start this viewing, knowing there was almost zero chance I could finish it, but already on this return trip I had spent an unexpected hour on the ground before leaving Boston (which fortunately did not cause me to miss my transfer in LA). With a handful of well-placed little delays that are part and parcel to the airline industry, I might get in close to an entire viewing.

Which is exactly what happened. I started Parasite the moment I got to my seat, and since I was one of the first groups to board, this was nearly a half-hour before the flight actually took off. With another hour in the air and delays on the ground in Melbourne due to needing to be towed to align with the air bridge, plus with me seated near the back of the plane anyway, I saw the entirety of the film's climactic scene, leaving only the postscript portion of the film unwatched. It was enough to confirm that indeed, with two months to go before my ranking deadline, Parasite will factor in very seriously to the top of my year-end rankings.

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Okay, there's a couple thousand words for my "starving" blog audience (ha). Back this week with shorter and more regular posts.

Which is Witch?

I’m usually pretty good at keeping different movie personalities straight, whether in front of the camera or behind.

But the confluence of three new(ish) young(ish) white men breaking through as horror directors in the past five years has thrown me for a loop a bit.

Those three men are Robert Eggers, Ari Aster and David Robert Mitchell, and the similarity may all be in my head. But bear with me.

The three came into our sphere of awareness in different years, but the fact that they’ve all had their follow-up to their breakout movie in the same year – this year – has kind of cemented their similarity in my head. Even though at least one of their follow-ups is not a horror movie. (Unsure about the third director’s follow-up as I haven’t seen it yet.)

Chronologically, the first to come on the scene was Mitchell, both in terms of his earlier films and also his breakout film. He’s also the oldest (45) and the one whose name I tend to forget because all three of his names are fairly indistinct in terms of the larger continuum of whitebread American names.

Mitchell grabbed our attention in 2014 with It Follows, which was the unlikely follow-up to a movie I still haven’t seen (but probably should), 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover. Suffice it to say that that one’s not a horror movie. Despite its flaws, It Follows really whetted our appetite for what Mitchell could do, and would do next.

Well, what he did next undoubtedly demonstrated a command of the language of cinema, but it was not a horror movie. Appropriately, it was also the first of the three follow-ups to come out this year, Under the Silver Lake. I admire that movie but boy is it tedious at times. I’m not sure how possible it is to like it, but it does present us a visual stylist at the top of his craft.

Next up was Eggers in 2015 with The Witch, or The VVitch, or however you want to write it. Although the subject matter is not at all similar to that of It Follows, I began to think of them in the same boat because they both represented new creative voices giving us something clearly outside of the standard way horror movies were being made by studios. And like It Follows, The Witch had significant flaws for a viewer to contend with, which similarly didn’t detract from the sense of being in the hands of a cinematic visionary. Eggers is also middle in age at 36, by the way.

Eggers’ follow-up to The Witch is the last of the three to be released, just this past week, which destroys a little of the nice chronological symmetry we had going. That’s The Lighthouse, the only one of the six films mentioned here that I have yet to see. Though I’m champing at the bit. It looks even weirder (in a good way, of course) than The Witch. I can’t find an Australian release date yet for that.

Then you have the prolific young prodigy, Ari Aster, who is only 33 and yet has now had buzzworthy horror opuses released in back to back years. Given the scope of the films he makes, it seems hard to believe that it was only last year that Hereditary came out. He followed it up this year with Midsommar, beating Eggers to the theater by a couple months. Both of Aster’s films can fairly be described as great, and both also have pronounced flaws. I see a pattern here.

I don’t actually have trouble remembering which guy directed which movie, though I do sometimes need to remind myself that it was Mitchell who started out with The Myth of the American Sleepover and not Eggers. If I’d seen that movie I’d probably recognize it as a lot more similar to the aesthetic of It Follows than The Witch, but I haven’t yet.

The point of this post is not really that I confuse them, but more, that we are living through an exciting period in which new horror names are regular presenting themselves as more than just any other studio hack. They’re coming with enough frequency that the possibility exists to confuse them. If we abandon my premise that I'm confusing them for one another, you could also mention Jennifer Kent, who has a similar career trajectory to date, having knocked our socks off in 2014 with The Babadook and then followed that up this year with The Nightingale – which could be characterized as a similar type of historical horror to the ones Eggers prefers. Then of course you’ve got Jordan Peele, who can’t be confused for the others in terms of his racial identity, but who has also had his sophomore horror film Us come out this year, following on the heels of 2017’s Get Out. He might be most similar in execution and aesthetic to Aster.

It is a rich time for horror indeed.

But it could be another white man who has me most excited, though we’ll have to wait until next year for his next. That’s Osgood Perkins, and a weekend rewatch of The Blackcoat’s Daughter – which has a release year of anywhere from 2015 to 2017 depending on festival/theatrical release – reminded me why I ranked it as my #3 movie of 2017. He’s also a bit different from the others as he had two movies come out practically on top of each other, the other being I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. That one kind of went in one ear and out the other for me, but considering that I saw it before Blackcoat mesmerized me, I should probably watch it again. Perkins has Gretel & Hansel coming out in 2020, and I’m really excited for it.

Who are your favorite horror visionaries to come on the scene in the past five years?