Small Giant, and 34 years to James Dean completism

James Dean made only three movies before he died in a 1955 car accident, and two of them were released posthumously. But you wouldn't know it from how long it took me to watch them.

Seeing East of Eden (1955), his first film, in my Art of The Film class my senior year in high school coincided with starting to think of myself as a cinephile. I can't say for sure if we watched it before Christmas (which would have been 1990) or after (which would have been 1991), but let's just round up and say it was 34 years ago.

Continuing in chronological order of their release with Dean's first posthumous film, I don't know exactly when I saw Rebel Without a Cause (1955) because it predates when I started keeping track of that stuff in 2002. But I have a feeling it was just before that, because I think I remember watching it in the apartment I moved into in May of 2001, the beginning of more than a dozen years living in Los Angeles. The viewing might have been sort of a cinematic rite of initiation to my new home, since the film is set in LA and I would have been geeked by the famous scene filmed at Griffith Park Observatory.

More than 20 years later, I have finally finished Dean's filmography with a viewing of Giant (1956), and it took being a captive audience on a plane to Singapore to do it.

Oh I considered watching it before now. But if I ever got close, I quickly veered away when I saw its daunting running time: 3 hours and 19 minutes.

Which happens to be a perfect way to kill nearly half of a seven and a half four flight.

Normally I watch new releases on international flights as it is a good way to goose my numbers before closing my rankings in January, and I did start the flight with Minhal Baig's We Grown Now. But my 2024 numbers are actually ahead of last year's pace (or at least were before I started watching all the Halloween movies this month), and the other options weren't really doing it for me (sorry Tarot).

So I was going through the A-Z listing of all movies (and have a second post I might write inspired by that perusal) and there was Giant, daring me to take this opportunity to watch it.

My Art of the Film teacher, Mr. Brown, would likely be horrified to hear that I watched a film of such expansive Texas vistas on a screen the size of a paperback novel, but at least I didn't watch it on a phone. And at least it wasn't shot in 70 mm, which would have made the crime all the more perverse. 

The thinking was, though, that I didn't know when else in my normal life I'd say "Okay, I am devoting the next 199 minutes of my life to this movie," especially since when you're watching such a long movie at home, you'll need to take breaks and will be lucky to finish the whole thing inside four hours. So if the options were watching Giant on a plane or never watching it, I think I made the right choice.

Especially considering how much I ended up liking it.

I have to admit I was a bit impatient in the first hour. The knowledge of the length of time that lay ahead of me felt onerous, even without many other alternatives to distract me, and at that point, I thought I had this movie worked out. Elizabeth Taylor is in a bad marriage with Rock Hudson and feels isolated on his Texas cattle ranch. Lo and behold, there is the steamy ranch hand played by James Dean, ready to restore passion to her existence - apparently over the course of three hours and 19 minutes.

This is not what Giant is in the slightest.

Imagine my surprise when Dean is not her savior, but rather, an eventual miserable oil tycoon who is a racist and all around bastard.

In fact, it would actually be a decades spanning story of perseverance and change between the 1920s and 1950s, where Taylor's character soldiers through what is a bad marriage for most of the time - until Hudson's character finally finds a form of redemption at the end, all the more realistic for the fact that he is essentially the same old world curmudgeon he's been all along.

Suffice it to say that the movie entirely reframed what I thought I knew about James Dean, starting with the fact that he's not even actually in all that much of this movie.

Knowing as I do that Dean became one of the most iconic movie stars of the 20th century, seen posing in Rebel Without a Cause on posters in the poster racks in department stores even when I was a kid in the 1980s, I imagined this was the 1950s version of a modern pop star, his every movie dictated by a publicist and calculated to make teenage girls swoon. Giant returns the opposite verdict entirely.

If I remembered East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause a little better, I'd probably already know Dean wasn't as superficial as that. I do know that he certainly was not a paean to machismo in those films, at least not the way the posters would have you believe. I seem to remember a fair bit of anguished crying in both movies.

But at least in both of those films he was the hero, or at least heroic. There is absolutely no way to characterize what he's doing here in those terms.

In that first hour, even though you could barely see his eyes under the brim of his ten-gallon hat, I figured this movie was prepping for us an image of the kind, studly hunk who is going to save Taylor's Leslie Benedict from her prematurely old husband. But then I started to notice that his attentions towards her are at least a little bit lewd. And then he disparagingly refers to the Mexicans working on the ranch as "wetbacks." And then before long he is revealing a dastardly vindictive and gloating side that is essentially his default condition for the remainder of the film. When he turns his romantic attentions to Leslie's daughter - her younger daughter at that - any idea of him as a man choosing roles in order to cultivate a particular public image is long gone.

So while I have had, to this point in my life, a sort of snide response to the ongoing cultural cache of James Dean, now I find myself wondering in how many fabulous ways he would have continued to challenge himself in a career that might have lasted another 50 years. Heck, if he led a healthy life, which was probably never in the cards for him, he might even be alive today. He'd be 93, and in theory might still be working.

George Stevens' film impressed me in other ways. The way it fully takes on white racism against Mexicans seems almost transgressive for 1956. That was surely in the source novel, but they could have sidelined it a lot more than they did.

In the end this feels like an essential American document of epic scale and importance, capturing a defining period of American history through gimlet eyes rather than rose-colored glasses.

And watching it on a screen the size of a paperback novel didn't make it any less so.

Welcome back, Jamie Lee

If it seems like the Halloween movies have been lacking something since Jamie Lee Curtis exited the series after Halloween II, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later seems to confirm that is the case.

There is a sudden shift to professionalism under seventh franchise director (out of seven movies) Steve Miner, and it's not only being anchored by Curtis -- and not only because she was the original star of this franchise, alongside Donald Pleasence. (You may remember Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was Pleasence's last Halloween, since he died before it was released. That movie was in his memory, and so is this one, which may be the first time I've ever seen an actor memorialized in two different movies in the same series. I don't think even Paul Walker got that.)

No, it's because Curtis is an actual competent actress -- more than that, a movie star, at least to some degree. The flotsam and jetsam that joined Pleasence in the other movies didn't do much before or much after (other than Paul Stephen Rudd, from the last movie). 

Halloween H20 is further stabilized by a nearly all-star cast, if not maybe at the time they made it, then what they've gone on to do since then. Here we get the likes of Michelle Williams, Josh Hartnett (in his film debut), LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Adam Arkin and even Psycho scream queen Janet Leigh in a small role, though I must admit that after seeing her name in the opening credits, I forgot to look out for her in the movie. After the fact, I do remember who she played.

So does this all add up to a good movie?

Almost.

I'm still not quite giving a recommend on Halloween H20, as it is still a little beholden to the standard structure of a Halloween movie. (I'm starting to think there may be no other way to make one of these movies.) But the 2.5 stars I'm giving it are easily the highest number of stars I've given since the original Halloween. Halloween III is also better, but I didn't watch that this time around, having just seen it for the first time back in January.

SPOILERS to follow.

The clear advantages of this particular film:

1) It feels like more of an adult movie, perhaps because the final girl is an adult. There are some good, character-building scenes between Laurie Strode and her love interest, played by Adam Arkin, the kind you realize the other films did not have time for. (Though H20 doesn't add on extra celluloid to accomplish this as it is still only 87 minutes.)

2) There is finally a Black character in a Halloween movie! Welcome, LL Cool J.

3) We finally get out of Haddonfield, Illinois, where all but one of the previous movies (thanks again for being something different, Halloween III) were set. Laurie we now learn faked her death in a car accident in order to throw Michael Myers off her trail, which has worked for two decades now. Somehow she took the wreckage of her early life and turned it into a false identity serving as a headmistress for a private school in California. Just changing up the setting did wonders for this movie.

4) Laurie finally, really, truly, tries to take definitive action against Michael. Not only does she go on the offensive against him, once setting aside an opportunity to escape so she can actively seek him out on the campus of this school, axe in hand, but after "killing" him several times -- knocking him off a balcony, hitting him with a car, and rolling that car down a hill, where it pins him against a tree branch -- she takes that axe and chops his head off. I guess that's why the next film is called Resurrection.

5) I also really liked the straightforward approach to Miner's filmmaking. It seems that only the previous film was mired in 1990s serial killer "slickness," which was anything but slick in the hands of previous director Joe Chappelle. 

One big qualm I did have: The lack of mentioning of Laurie's daughter Jamie, who was in each of the past three movies, dying in the last one. There is no attempt to make reference to her, why Laurie took her son (played by Hartnett) to California but not her daughter, or even that she exited. It's almost like the movie -- the first movie in the series that feels sort of like a reboot -- just said "Eh, that was a mistake. Let's just forget it happened." With Jamie Lee's return, the other Jamie -- who is now dead anyway -- had become superfluous. There can be only one. 

I'm sure I should say more about the film that gave me a little hope for the second half of this viewing series, but the truth of the matter is, I'm writing this as quickly as I can before I head out the door on vacation and don't take a computer with me. See you when I return early next week, refreshed and ready for the final five movies I haven't seen in the Halloween series. 

Blaxploitaudient: Ganja & Hess

This is the tenth film in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.

Blaxploitation and the arthouse don't often collide, but they have for at least the second time this series, though you could make an argument for three of the ten films I've now watched.

Ganja & Hess definitely put me in mind of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss (not checking the correct number of S's right now) Song in terms of its narrative approach, though you could argue it has more in common, thematically, with Lord Shango, which showcases a slightly inferior version of that approach.

Either way, this was an eerie affair that immediately jumped into the top couple movies in the series, a spot it shares with Sweetback but not Shango.

I'd saved Ganja & Hess for October, knowing that it was considered to be horror as a result of first hearing about it from the blaxploitation marathon they did on Filmspotting. I remembered little else about it from the Filmspotting discussion -- and continued to know little else about it for the first third of its running time.

It was then that I made the key decision to check on Wikipedia to see where I'd failed to properly orient myself, and that at least gave me some bearings. Wikipedia clarified for me that the movie was about an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant stabs him with an ancient cursed dagger. I suppose I saw the stabbing occur, but given the abstruse presentation style of many of the narrative beats of this film, I failed to recognize it for what it was at the time it occurred. 

Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind being lost within Bill Gunn's film. There are certain films you watch where you have don't fully know what's going on, but you know that's not because of clumsiness by the filmmakers. Rather, they are making a mood more than a conventional movie, and sometimes, that mood is all you need.

The mood of Ganja & Hess was indeed carrying me along, but to repeat a refrain that has become a little boring to me, I started watching this movie too late at night, and my new couch is too comfortable. I didn't succumb to any involuntary sleep -- as in, sleep without pausing -- but I did have to take a nap or two. I probably should have saved it for another night, but I'm trying to cram in lots of Halloween movies this month, and will potentially lose some key viewing hours as I go on vacation from Wednesday to Monday. Gotta fit in things when you can.

The good news is, even if you are totally alert or on some kind of uppers, Ganja & Hess is not the sort of movie that lays things out for you. From the jump it is clear this is a movie of gestures, canted camera angles, half-seen images, and particularly, chilling sound design. There is a repeated incantation of sorts in this film, accompanied by what sounds like the ominous humming of a guitar amp not being used properly. Any time this entered the narrative, which was a lot, I found myself going to a place in my mind that the other "horror movies" I'm watching this month (more appropriate to undercut the Halloween movies by calling them merely "slasher movies") were not taking me.

The anthropologist is the Hess, and he's played by Duane Jones. I saw the name in the credits and I saw the man on screen, but it still took me a little while to put together that I was looking at a true horror icon. Jones plays the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which I have to imagine was a factor in Bill Gunn casting him five years later for Ganja & Hess.

The Ganja is the widow of Hess' assistant, whom he killed after the vampiric stabbing. (Some of the sequence of events in this part of the film was a little lost on me, since it's the kind of film that might not be playing in chronological order.) She's played by the very charismatic and naturalistic Marlene Clark. Clark is an actress I recognized, though the only other things I would have seen that she was in -- Sanford & Son and a very small role in Enter the Dragon -- I doubt I would actually know her from, given the size of the role or the amount of time since I've seen it. She does a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half of the film, when she comes under the spell of Hess at his mansion, as she tends to be verbal and he tends to be not.

Again, this movie is more a vibe than a strict story, exploring sex, religion, power dynamics and other provocative isms. It's no coincidence that Hess is an anthropologist, as his studies of native peoples and their iconography also factors into the proceedings.

But again, Ganja & Hess is one of those films where the less you try to analyze it, the more you get out of it. Just letting it wash over you is the best way to go, and wash over me it did.

Just two more months to go. In November I will watch Coffy, and then December is TBD. 

Having to pay for Halloween, and introducing Paul Stephen Rudd

When I got this idea to watch all the Halloween movies I hadn't seen in the month of October, I thought it would be pretty easy since they all seemed to be available for streaming on my Australian streamer, Stan.

Well, they are not all available for streaming on Stan.

Stan typically seems to have all the movies available in a particular collection, if they have any of them. Examples in the past have included Harry Potter and James Bond. Why not Michael Myers?

Maybe because Halloween 5 and 6 are so bad that nobody wants to watch them?

Actually, there's a pretty big dropoff between Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. In the opening credits of the movies themselves, they don't have the series number, but retroactively, it seems to have been applied, perhaps to help us make sense of what goes where.

Some of this dropoff can be attributed to the abrupt change between 1980s filmmaking and 1990s filmmaking. 

Halloween 4 and 5 came out only a year apart in 1988 and 1989, and you may remember, I couldn't work up any specific hatred for Halloween 4. Halloween 5 -- directed by the series' fifth separate director, Dominique Othenin-Girard -- is pretty much of a piece with Halloween 4, as the actors all are about the same age and the filmmaking style is pretty much the same.

When you then shift forward six years to Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, bad 1980s horror filmmaking is then replaced by bad 1990s horror filmmaking, which is much worse than bad 1980s horror filmmaking. While there is a certain nostalgia to 80s horror cheese, especially for someone my age, 90s horror cheese has none of that, mostly because it tries to take itself seriously through darker lighting, ill-conceived editing and other showy gestures that are also empty. Nineteen ninety-five was also the year Se7en was released, and though they came out in too close proximity for one to seriously influence the other, both are indicative of a change in the way movies about serial killers are made. That was good for Se7en, not so good for Halloween.

I should pause to note that this is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of watching these movies back-to-back-to-back. Being scared by them is not even a consideration at this point, which makes it unfortunate for the month when I'm trying to be scared by movies -- but then again, I wasn't really scared by the horror comedy I saw last year either. Seeing how the same raw materials -- oh so much the same -- appear through the filters of different filmmaking techniques? Now that's a worthy exercise, even if in the case of Curse, it results in the least good Halloween movie I've seen.

But before we step back and start to go chronologically, I should probably finish my opening thought. Yeah, I had to fork over $3.99 for each of these movies. None too pleased about that. 

So I have two questions right off the bat about The Revenge of Michael Myers:

1) Why on earth does this guy need revenge? As far as I can tell, people might want revenge against him, but not the other way around. Just further proof that they'll make up nonsensical titles for movies just because they need a weighted word, not because that word applies to the story or character or franchise in general.

2) Why on earth does a vagrant living by the water nurse Michael back to health for a year, only for Michael to rise up and kill him after completing his convalescence?

It's this last one I really want an answer to.

Okay, to catch you up -- and I will pull out that likely unnecessary SPOILER WARNING just to cover my bases -- the latest method of allegedly disposing of Michael, at the end of the previous film, saw him shot into a pit in the woods that collapsed in on itself, supposedly burying Michael in building refuse and allowing Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis to quip that he'd gone to hell where he belongs. Just to be sure, though, they tossed a stick of dynamite into the pit.

At the start of this movie, we see that Michael actually wormed his way out of the pit and into a nearby river just before the dynamite exploded. A rather silly nod to "realism," because how could Michael ever possibly survive a stick of dynamite, right?

So apparently that took all the strength he had, and Michael collapses after pulling himself up on a river bank a little ways down. Which is where some vagrant is living in a little encampment that is more than just a single tent, but a fairly sophisticated little domicile where apparently no one bothers him.

That he takes this man wearing a frightening mask, whom he would likely know from local lore is the famous killer Michael Myers, into his care for a day or two is strange, but maybe not inexplicable. Perhaps this guy has a soft spot for famous killers.

But the really absurd thing is that when another Halloween strikes the following year, Michael sits bolt upright, and kills this man who has been looking after him for the past 365 days. 

There's obviously the problem of Michael's ingratitude. Without this man, he'd surely be dead, or as dead as Michael Myers gets, anyway.

But then, what's going on in this man's head that he keeps a comatose serial killer in his tent encampment for a whole year? How does he care for Michael? How does he feed him? How does Michael use the toilet? If Michael has been in a coma for a year, how long does this man plan to go on cheerily caring for him? What's in it for this guy? 

It would be one thing if this vagrant were made out as some sort of Satan worshipper, hoping for some of Michael's evil to rub off on him. But he seems more like a good samaritan who decided that holding some stew up to Michael's comatose lips for a whole year was a better medical approach then, I don't know, bringing him to a hospital. 

After that, Halloween 5 is fairly conventionally boring and unremarkable. Pleasence is back again for some outsized dialogue and general overacting, Michael hunts the little girl from the last movie (Jamie) again, everything you would expect. 

Though there's one other thing I wanted to mention before moving on to Halloween 6.

The "final girl" from the last film, played by Ellie Cornell, was Rachel, the adoptive sister of Jamie (Danielle Harris), Laurie Strode's daughter who is now the focus of Michael's bloodlust. Rachel was the one looking out for Jamie at the end of the film and the one who dodged all of Michael's knife thrusts successfully. 

She's back in this film, but is curiously used indeed. She has some time at the beginning and then appears again at the end as a corpse, though I don't believe we ever see her get killed. (I can't say for sure, this stuff is all starting to blend together, especially if I don't write about it straight away.) Instead, the woman playing this role in this movie is Tina, Rachel's friend, played by Wendy Kaplan. She's not your typical final girl in that she's got a slutty side and a really stupid boyfriend (who gets killed very early on) despite the fact that she also wants to come visit Jamie in the hospital for traumatized children where she lives. The film never properly establishes her connection to Jamie, though, so when Jamie spends the second half of the movie always crying for "Tina! Tina!" like she is her sole lifeline -- while never asking where her adopted sister Rachel has gone -- it just doesn't make any sense. 

That's all I remember about Halloween 5 at the moment.

I just watched Halloween 6 last night, so it's "fresh" -- though that is hardly the appropriate word to describe it. 

Other than looking like a really tawdry version of a "serious" 1990s serial killer movie, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers has one extremely noteworthy element:

Paul Rudd.

Only, he was Paul Stephen Rudd at the time, something I never knew.

This was actually released after Clueless -- and here I always thought of Clueless as a 1996 movie -- but Rudd still gets an "introducing" credit. 

Well, it wasn't a great introduction. I hope this guy can still manage to have a career.

Sixth franchise director Joe Chappelle, who would go on to direct episodes of The Wire, doesn't get much out of the young Rudd, certainly nothing of the impish charm that would go on to characterize the man. There isn't a hint of humor here, and some of his line readings are painful. He was probably always miscast, but there isn't a lot to be hopeful about here. You never know who is going to surprise you. 

Rudd does represent a form of continuity to the original film, though, in this, finally Pleasence's final appearance in the franchise. (He likely would have kept going, but dying on the 2nd of February that year kind of put a damper on that.) Rudd plays Tommy Doyle, who was one of the kids Laurie was babysitting for in the first movie. Not a character who, by any means, needed to pop back up again for the first time in five movies and in 17 years of time in the narrative, but hey, when you're desperate, you're desperate.

He plays kind of a weirdo 25-year-old who still lives across the street from the Strode house, where he gives people the creeps by watching them from his window. And guess who is the Strode house -- more Strodes!

That's right, the house still hasn't sold because of being the location of multiple acts of grisly murder, so the brother of the Strode paterfamilias moves into the place without telling his family he knew what happened there. 

(I'm getting a little confused about the timeline though. The original murder was, of course, in the Myers house, not the Strode house, because the Strodes adopted Laurie after her parents and older sister died and her brother was institutionalized. Was the Strode house the location of the climax of the first Halloween? Or was that the Myers house again? In any case, there have been dastardly deeds done in both houses at one point or another.)

So there's yet another Laurie Strode surrogate this time, not Rachel (R.I.P.), not Tina (R.I.P.), but this time Kara (Marianne Hagan), a Strode daughter, who is in Laurie's generation (Laurie's adoptive cousin I suppose), but has her own son, Danny. Is Danny a variation on Danielle? Everything has to connect.

In any case, it is for a moment suggested that this curse of Michael Myers might be passing to the youngest Strode -- even though the Strodes have no biological relationship to Laurie, and therefore, to Michael -- as Danny has a foreboding moment with a knife. But this is dropped like a hot potato and never comes back.

Oh, we have to get back to Danielle here. And because I already told you this was going to include spoilers, we have to reveal the fate of Danielle -- especially since that contributes to the absurdity of this movie.

I don't remember this happening in Halloween 5, but apparently, Jamie is taken at the end. All they really show happening is a mysterious man in black shooting up a police station and once again freeing the not-dead Michael Myers. If my memory of three days ago serves me, Jamie sees that Michael has escaped and has another of her anxious freakouts. (No shade on this actress, who was good.) Not taken, though. 

At the start of this film, she's definitely a captive, and -- only six years later, mind you -- she's shown giving birth to a baby. (Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you -- Michael is after a baby in this movie.) She's been kept by a bunch of creepy psychopaths led by this mysterious man in black (whose reveal later in this movie is utterly banal), and in a dungeon-like setting, she gives birth. Now, Jamie is Laurie Strode's daughter, don't forget. So in only 17 years from the original Halloween, Laurie Strode would have gone from a teenage babysitter to a ... grandmother? (Had she not died of course. Though of course, she's not dead, just "misplaced" until Jamie Lee Curtis decides to return to the series.)

So that makes this baby -- Paul Rudd's character calls him Steven, I think -- Michael Myers' grand nephew. Jeez. 

So that means that Jamie, who looked like this in 1988/1989:

Has been kept in captivity with the specific intention of producing an offspring, and looks like this in 1995:

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. I know a woman can give birth at age 13 or younger, but the actress playing Jamie here -- J.C. Brandy -- was 20 in 1995, and too right, considering what they put her through on screen. (We don't have to go into too much detail about how Jamie buys it.)

Also, what exactly are the rules regarding how many new generations of Myers there must be? If Jamie is held captive specifically to produce another descendant, was she ever in any danger in any of the previous movies? And does that mean this child will have to grow old enough to father his own baby before Michael can strike again? 

I am starting to ramble and have no hope of encapsulating all the ways this movie fails, so I'll just say it's a one-star stinker. 

Though, farewell to Donald Pleasence, a consistent if sometimes absurd pleasure in five Halloween movies, all of which I've watched in the last ten days.

I'll watch one more Halloween movie before going out of town for five days and giving myself a break from all this. I should probably write about that one on its own, because this combo post was way too long and you probably stopped reading long before now. I'm probably talking to nobody. 

Closing the barn door after the credits have rolled

I needed a bit of a palette cleanser from the themed horror viewing I am doing (and regretting) this month, so Saturday was "no Halloween movies" day. 

However, the universe seemed to be very much fighting me on my other attempts to see a movie in the theater.

The one I really wanted to see was the new Donald Trump movie, The Apprentice, so I could write a vitriolic review -- not of the movie, but of the man -- in time to influence, I don't know, any Australians planning to illegally vote in the U.S. elections. But nary had the title escaped my lips before my wife claimed it for a future watch with me, which will be so far off in the future that I probably will end up watching it in January after it's available for VOD and just before my ranking deadline. And if Trump gets elected in a couple weeks, I may just not want to watch it at all.

I then focused on the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, as it's been ages since I've seen a documentary in the theater. Reeve was my Superman, so this was a natural for me.

I left in what should have been plenty of time, even on a Saturday afternoon, for the 4:15 start time. But randomly, even though I never do this, I decided to take the highway to the Sun in Yarraville, just to see if it would get me there faster. That's the route they send you via Google Maps, but I always take a backroads way, one I've determined is a good compromise between the highway and the slower backroads route I used to take.

Then I remembered why I don't take the highway. They're doing construction, and sometimes the ramp is closed. Which it was today.

I was prepared to write off the possibility of getting to the movie on time, but then plugged the new ETA into my navigation system, now that I was being sent over the bridge and into the city, and definitely needed an optimum route back. It showed me still arriving on time, even though the Sun only plays about five minutes of trailers before starting the movie.

A few unlucky lights later, I was pulling up to the ticket counter by about 4:18. I secured my ticket and went up to the theater shown on the ticket.

Only that theater was halfway through The Substance. Much as I would have liked to watch The Substance again, I'd probably rather watch it from the start. So I scurried back downstairs to find that they had printed me a ticket for the 6:15 show, not the 4:15 show, which is pretty dumb but what are you going to do.

I never made it back to the counter, because the ticket taker circumvented the trouble of printing me a new ticket since he could tell how close my movie was to starting. So he just quickly looked up the correct auditorium and pointed me toward it, where I had about 30 seconds remaining of the final piece of pre-show content.

So I did finally get to see my movie, but that's not what the subject of this post is about.

At the very end, moments after the credits rolled, two female staff entered the auditorium and asked me if I had my ticket on me, since they thought I might be in the wrong session. 

This, I thought, was strange. The credits were already rolling. So I must be pretty dumb if I didn't realize I'd sat through an entire movie that wasn't the movie I was supposed to be seeing.

Here's what I figure happened. I was the only one watching Super/Man, which I thought was strange and a bit sad, considering the size theater they'd allocated for it, and what I thought should be a significant amount of love for our dearly departed Christopher Reeve. But since I shouldn't have been in there either -- my ticket was for 6:15 in the theater that had been playing The Substance two hours earlier -- that means they knew they sold no tickets for the 4:15 show, yet here was someone sitting and watching it.

I got a little uppity there for a second, repeating back their question: "Do I have my ticket on me?" It seemed like an absurd question for a film that was already over. What, were they going to frog march me back to the ticket booth so I could retroactively pay for the ticket?

But instead of going all Karen on them, I realized it would make sense to just explain what had actually happened: "Oh they gave me a ticket for the 6:15 show but it was supposed to be the 4:15."

They immediately sighed in relief as clearly they had not actually wanted to have a confrontation over this. 

I did feel a little annoyed, though, as it was only their poor apprehension of what session I was more likely to want to see -- the one that started three minutes ago or the one starting two hours from now -- that resulted in there being any confusion in the first place.

Of course, the whole thing was moot because I got the ticket for free with my critics card anyway -- another thing they might have remembered.

Halloween 4: The Return of Dr. Loomis

I said I was not going to write about each Halloween movie I watched in the month of October. So far I
am failing in that pledge.

But I haven't written anything else this week, and I've got some time on a Friday afternoon.

The fourth movie in the Halloween series, and third I've watched this month (I watched Halloween III only back in January), is subtitled The Return of Michael Myers, but the more noteworthy return, in terms of plausibility, has got to be that of Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis.

Now, it is entirely implausible that either Loomis or Michael Myers would have survived the explosion that ended Halloween II (oops, spoiler alert). But we are already giving Myers, an unkillable killing machine whom Loomis describes as the personification of evil, the benefit of the doubt. Considering that I believe this character is still alive even in the movies made the last few years, it seems clear that he's going to survive several more climaxes of several more movies that should have obviously killed him. That's just standard slasher movie tropes for you.

But Dr. Loomis? He's a human being, plain and simple. 

So how did he emerge from the explosion at the end of Halloween II with nothing more than a slight limp and a relatively modest scar on this face that seems to be only cosmetic in nature?

Well, folks, it appears that reboot logic and fan service logic was alive and well even in 1988. Loomis returned because they thought the presence of Pleasence in some way underpinned the success of the franchise.

And, spoiler alert, he's still alive at the end of Halloween 4, so we are certain to get at least one more movie with him.

I wanted to hate this movie. I really did. The fourth movie in any slasher series, especially series that had their origins in the 1980s (or late 70s in this case), are supposed to be terrible. Although I haven't seen them, I feel pretty confident that I could wave off the later Friday the 13th movies without a viewing, just knowing they are bad because they were made quickly and no one who was making them gave a damn.

Halloween 4 is not great, but I actually found it less egregious than Halloween II, which was poorly directed and silly. I'm not sure if Dwight H. Little is a better director than Rick Rosenthal, but he made a movie that I dislike a little less. And something happens at the end of this movie that redeems its otherwise unremarkable narrative. Arbitrarily, I won't spoil what that is.

I do of course have nits to pick.

1) Because Michael Myers must, it seems, always be motivated by killing his own flesh and blood, here he is going after a little girl named Jamie, played quite well, I thought, by actress Danielle Harris. She gets the fear down, which is what you need in a child performance in a horror movie. The character's name is a bit cheeky, as it is obviously inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Laurie Strode in the first two movies -- and is absent here except for appearing in a photograph.

Why does she appear in a photograph at all? Well because she's Jamie's mother, of course, now deceased.

Now, we know that Laurie Strode is not actually dead, because she's the main character in David Gordon Green's three most recent Halloween movies, which I'll get to sometime in the October 20s. And whether they were already setting that up for a long-term payoff, I don't know. 

But I thought it was very curious that this movie tells us both Laurie and whoever Jamie's father was are both dead, leading young Jamie to be adopted, yet the movie tells us nothing about how that happened, and does not make it a significant portion of the story. It's almost like they poochied Jamie Lee because she didn't want to come back for this movie, abruptly ending the storyline of Laurie Strode, at least within the context of this movie's narrative. "Don't want to be in this movie? Fine, you're dead. You went back to your home planet and died on the way."

But begging of an explanation even more might be the fact that in the ten years since that traumatic 1978 Halloween, Laurie not only recovered enough to get into a serious romantic relationship, but also to have a child who is now seven. That's a lot of recovering to do between the end of 1978 and sometime in 1981. 

2) Michael Myers' ability to show up in places he wouldn't otherwise be able to be, too soon after he was in a very different place, is equaled in absurdity only by his knowledge that Laurie had a young girl and this is where he can find her, when by all accounts he was lying in a sort of vegetative state in a prison hospital for all the years in between. That's slasher film logic for you.

The other details of the movie are a bit bland and are already fading from my memory.

There is quite a good chance that I will write a combined post on Halloween 5 and Halloween 6. But don't hold me to it. 

Halloween II - later that same night

I said I was not going to write about each of the 11 movies I'm watching in the Halloween franchise this October, because that's just too much writing. But I had to devote Halloween II its own post, for a number of reasons, but one in particular: This is probably the last Halloween movie with some sort of creativity purity, before the series succumbs to major sequelitis and presumably takes a huge dip in quality.

Also I found it kind of hilarious, and in a way that is noteworthy, rather than just the expected arc of any franchise that devolves into making more and more money with less and less artistic justification.

The biggest determining factor in the quality of the movie, I am inclined to believe, is the fact that John Carpenter was not back as director. He wrote much of the film (that's on him) and was expected to direct, but he had other directing assignments at the time (would have been either The Fog or Escape From New York) and he couldn't make it work. So in stepped Rick Rosenthal, whose only other film I've seen out of a dozen titles is the Sean Penn movie Bad Boys from two years later. Let's just say it was not a fortuitous switch.

The most problematic choice from a narrative perspective is to pick up the story at the exact moment that the original Halloween ends. 

A little lesson in viewer psychology: We like to think that the characters we were following in the first movie got a little break after they emerged with their lives. Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, just barely did at the end of Halloween. We know Michael Myers also only just barely emerged with his life -- at least, we have to assume it was a very narrow survival, after he was shot six times and fell from a balcony -- and so we assume he's still out there, ready to complete the kill on Laurie. But most supernatural serial killers would take the near-death experience to regroup and recover, and return stronger than ever at some later point -- you know, exactly a year from now, that sort of thing -- with the element of surprise in their favor.

Not Michael Myers. He's going to take as many shots at Laurie on Halloween of 1978 as he can possibly manage.

And while that isn't a problem for the end of Halloween, since we don't know at that point that they are going to take this tack on the story, it is certainly a problem for Halloween II, now that we know. 

I might as well give you a SPOILER WARNING for Halloween II at this point.

So equipped with the knowledge of the area he developed as a six-year-old before he was shipped off to a mental institution, Michael follows Laurie to about the darkest and quietest hospital you have ever seen in your life. I'm not sure if you have ever been in a hospital at 2 a.m., but if you have, you know that only the individual patient rooms are dark, while the hallways tend to be as bright as ever due to the need to navigate them safely and due to the 24-hour nature of monitoring patients and ensuring they don't suddenly start to die. This hospital has about one active staff and, as far as we can tell, no patients other than Laurie.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I suppose that is inevitable when you have so much to say about a bad movie that you can't figure out the correct entry point.

So let's back up a step and talk about Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasence.

Now, I tend to think of Pleasence as a good actor. He never got an Oscar nomination or anything like that, but he was a stage-trained British thespian who carries with him a certain serious and sober presence. At the very worst, he's a reliable professional you shouldn't have to worry about being the weak spot of your movie.

From an acting perspective, Pleasence is the weak spot here. I'm not sure if we can blame it on the passing of the directorial baton from Carpenter to Rosenthal, but to put it simply, Dr. Loomis has gone crazy in this movie. Because the film was shot fairly soon after Halloween and because it's the same character, you'd expect Pleasence's performance in Halloween II to be of a piece with his performance in Halloween. Nope. 

I already gave you a spoiler warning, so let's get into and address all of this silly things about Loomis in one paragraph. 

For starters, his manner is that of a crazy person, which is especially problematic since he's playing a doctor who treats crazy people. A generous reading would be that he's become unmoored from his previous calm demeanor because he shot a serial killer six times (a number he keeps repeating in Halloween II) only to watch him not die, but I'm not sure that adequately explains his increasing agitation throughout this movie, as well as certain specific line deliveries that suffer both from writing problems and directing problems, and make you laugh out loud. It gets really absurd when Loomis pulls his gun on a U.S. marshal in order to force the marshal to return to the hospital where he (correctly) believes Michael Myers to be. He waves that gun around like a fool for the rest of the movie. 

His final act actually requires a new paragraph because it's so silly in context. With the gun Loomis gives Laurie near the end of the movie, Laurie shoots Michael in the face, twice. We know this not because we can see a bullet hole in the mask but because there is now blood coming from Michael's eyes. Okay. Whereas Michael has now twice survived a round of bullets to his chest, most recently about 15 minutes earlier in this very hospital, being shot in the face really seems to bother him. He's now left semi-blinded and swinging a scalpel wildly at his targets in an attempt to continue his killing spree. It should be very clear to both Laurie and Loomis -- who has been stabbed, but not fatally -- that Michael is truly incapacitated this time, at least temporarily, and since they don't know what it takes to kill Michael, this is a positive development that should at least allow them to escape the room while Michael is wildly swinging his scalpel. (An image, I should say, that is quite silly in and of itself.) Instead, they release gas into the room and then Loomis stays to flick his lighter, which causes the room to explode and Loomis obviously to be killed. Michael staggers out on fire before finally face-planting, which seems to have really gotten him this time. Again getting a head of myself, the movie ends a few minutes later on a still of this flaming corpse, so we have no reason to believe Michael Myers is not dead. (No reason at the time. In retrospect, they were never going to let this newly iconic serial killer disappear entirely, not when he could keep making them money -- though it should be said that they allowed him to be dead at least for Halloween III, which has nothing to do with him.)

So why on earth did Loomis need to kill himself when he could have easily slipped out of the room and waited for reinforcements while a half-blinded Michael, now clearly operating at diminished capacity, swung around a scalpel wildly? No idea.

Incidentally, I now see that one of Donald Pleasence's few screen acting nominations of any kind was, get this, a Saturn Awards nomination for best actor for -- you guessed it -- Halloween II. 

So let's get into the big spoiler of this movie: There was a "secret file" on Michael Myers that showed that Laurie was actually his younger sister, little more than a toddler at the time Michael killed their older sister. The reason her name isn't Myers is because she was put up for adoption after her parents died, and the Strode family adopted her. Let's get into my problems with this:

1) Since Laurie was obviously too young to remember any of this, not even knowing she was adopted as far as we can tell, that means that her parents had to have both died immediately following Michael's killing of his older sister, in either one or two separate events that have no direct relationship to Michael. Perhaps that subject matter is explored in later films, but at this point in time, it seems pretty unlikely and worth more than just a throwaway comment. 

2) If you are going to put her up for adoption but then seal the records so that nobody could find out, wouldn't you prefer to adopt her off to, I don't know, some other part of the country? Rather than a family who lived on the same street as where the murder occurred? (It may not be the same street but it is at least the same town.)

3) Considering that Michael has, as far as we know, spent the entire time since his institutionalization essentially in a catatonic state -- just waiting, as Loomis says -- how does he even know that Laurie is his sister, let alone how to find her? I suppose we've already suspended disbelief on the idea that he can drive a car, as he did in the last movie, and that he would know how to get to his old home in the town of Haddonfield. But how did he know where to find her on that night? And is "he killed one sister and now wants to kill the other" really a rational motivation for a serial killer? To the extent that anything a serial killer does has any rational mental or emotional foundation. 

Okay let's finish our discussion of Halloween II with some quick-hit observations:

1) One of the bits of unintentional comedy in this movie occurs when, for a moment, they think Michael Myers might have been killed when an adult in a Myers-style mask is hit by a police car at full speed. The police car then collides with a truck, pinning the man between the two, and both vehicles erupt into a very localized fire that allows the police officer to escape the vehicle, but the man to immediately burn to a crisp, requiring the identification of dental records to determine whether or not it's Michael. The slapstick, almost sped-up way this crash plays out cannot be watched without bursting into laughter. 

2) There is also some fairly silly stuff in this movie involving a paramedic played by Lance Guest, star of The Last Starfighter a few years later. At first I didn't get that this guy Jimmy was a paramedic, so for half a second I thought it was the kid they had talked about in the first movie, whom Laurie wanted to ask to the dance. That would have been strange as that kid wasn't in the first movie at all, and now he's coming to the hospital to see Laurie? But that was an incorrect assessment of Jimmy.

So Jimmy is one of those creeping around the hospital with Michael potentially pursuing him, but he ultimately has no interaction with Michael, even though it seems like he would have been set up to be cannon fodder. Instead, he finds a dead nurse on a gurney with all the blood drained from her body. The silly thing about this scene is that Jimmy approaches her body apparently without any recognition of the fact that he's walking through a giant pool of blood, on which he slips and conks himself out after he's started to walk away again. Jimmy's only role in the proceedings is to get a concussion from his fall, which prevents him from being able to drive Laurie away from the hospital later on, when he passes out behind the wheel due to the concussion. And that's the last we hear from Jimmy. (To say nothing of the fact that none of the blood that should cover his entire back, from slipping in the puddle, is anywhere to be seen.)

3) This is less a nitpick than just an observation. Dr. Loomis introduces a discussion of Samhain in this movie, of course pronouncing it "Sam Hain" because that's how the word looks. Having watched the Netflix show Bodkin, I now know this word is a Gaelic word that is actually pronounced more like "Saw Win." Obviously this movie was never going to try to explain that to people.

4) Dana Carvey is in this movie! Though I never would have known unless I'd been watching the closing credits. He plays "assistant" and here is how he looks in the film:

I just watched the clip on YouTube and he doesn't even have a line of dialogue. He just nods to what this woman, a reporter, is telling him.

In fact, in watching this clip, which is very near the beginning of the movie, I just realized it reveals something interesting about the movie's narrative structure. Immediately before we close in on this pair, there is a male reporter speaking to a camera and talking about the three bodies found in the house behind him -- the house where most of the killing occurs in the first movie -- and that the suspect, Michael Myers, is thought to have burned to death.

I didn't notice that when I was watching the movie, but it indicates that this scene is taking place after everything we are about to see. While that also doesn't make sense on some level -- this scene is taking place quite earlier in the night, while Michael doesn't succumb to that fire until almost dawn -- it's an interesting choice as it gives away this movie's ending. I'm almost tempted to go back and re-watch the start of Halloween II to try to get a better sense of the purpose of revealing that Michael burned to death at the very beginning of the movie.

Almost. This movie is not good, and I have a lot more Halloween to watch this month. 

A thing I never do

Last night I was trying to watch this week's episode of Survivor, a task that requires me to switch to our HDMI 2 input and our Fetch box, which is what gives us access to a variety of free-to-air stations, their on-demand content that can be accessed for free any time, and any number of streaming apps, the only one of which we need to get through here is Stan. (We access Disney+, Kanopy and Amazon through AppleTV, and Netflix has its own button on our remote control.)

In order to get to these options, you first must get into a random free-to-air channel -- I say "random" though we probably chose it at some point in the past. We never change it because we basically never watch anything as it is actually happening. 

Well it turns out, the Fetch was having some kind of issue and couldn't load Survivor, or anything other than this free-to-air channel. Which was playing the last 20 minutes of A Few Good Men.

It reminded me of the olden times, when you might come in on a movie already in progress and just watch it to the end, just because you like it. My go-to option of a movie where I would do this is always Dumb and Dumber, even though that actual thing probably only happened once or twice if at all.

I usually don't like to do this, though, because ever since I've started keeping track of when I rewatch movies -- in other words, keeping track of every viewing I ever have, since it goes without saying I keep track of new viewings -- I've become anal about what constitutes a rewatch. In order to record it on my list, I want to watch most or all of it. And if I'm not going to record it, maybe just don't confuse matters by watching only some of it.

The other thing is that I don't want a random partial viewing to delay a proper full viewing of a movie I've been wanting to rewatch. Might as well just wait until I actually have the time to sit down with it from start to finish.

But as I saw A Few Good Men -- a film I liked, but never held in any special regard -- approaching its climax, I thought, "Might as well loosen my rules a bit."

My reasoning was simple and twofold:

1) A Few Good Men is a movie I had no immediate plans to rewatch, and it is conceivable I will never rewatch it.

2) It's so close to the end that it cannot be possibly be confused for a complete viewing.

Plus there's the fact that the most iconic, most repeatedly quoted part of the movie was still ahead of me:

"I want the truth!"

"You can't handle the truth!"

Those lines have been so often heard out of context that I thought it would be sort of instructive to actually remind myself what led up to them.

Little did I remember that there was some other good stuff here in terms of dialogue, like the extended rant from Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) that follows "You can't handle the truth," and then later on being badgered into spitting out "You're goddamn right I did!", thereby confessing to culpability in the death of one of the soldiers under his command.

It was fun and more than a little nostalgia-inducing to watch all this, to see these actors so young, especially Tom Cruise and Nicholson. But then of course there's also Demi Moore, whom I recently saw and loved in one of my favorite movies of the year so far, The Substance.

The experience was a reminder of another part of watching movies on free-to-air television: ads. Although there was really quite little left of A Few Good Men, they had to interrupt the final courtroom scenes, at a point that I don't even think made particular sense, to give us what seemed like five minutes of ads. If I hadn't been so close to the end, I might have just flipped away and found something on a service that was actually functioning properly. Given that I knew the credits were about to roll, I endured them.

A month of Halloween for the month of Halloween

When it came time to think what the theme would be for my Halloween viewing in 2024 -- having first chosen to watch 70s horror in 2021, before not choosing a unifying theme in 2022 and then returning with horror comedy last year -- I had the idea to visit Asia. I had recently watched Ringu, and though I would not say I loved it, I liked it quite a bit, and that temporarily stoked my thirst for more.

But it was, as I said, temporary. At first I couldn't decide whether to open it up to all Asian horror movies, or specifically to focus on J-Horror. And then ultimately I decided I wasn't feeling either of them.

So instead I am going to watch every Halloween movie.

You probably know, if you are a regular reader of this blog, how I like completism. I've scheduled several series to complete the filmographies of certain directors, or in one case, to finish watching all the best picture winners. 

Well, I'm not very close to completism on the Halloween series, having seen only three of the 13 films available. But I can get there with a month of concentrated viewing.

I started last night with the original Halloween, the only of the three I've already seen that I'll rewatch for this series. It had been a long time since I'd seen this classic and it was worth a fresh viewing. I saw (and really liked) Halloween III: Season of the Witch only earlier this year, and I saw (and didn't care for) Rob Zombie's 2007 remake only two years ago. No need to rewatch either of those again so soon, or in the case of Zombie's film, ever.

But that still leaves me with Halloween II (original), Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween II (remake), Halloween (second remake), Halloween Kills and finally (deep breath) Halloween Ends.

At first I thought I also had to consider some Freddy vs. Jason movies, until I remembered that Freddy and Jason are from different franchises. (If I don't totally regret doing this, I could at some point watch the remaining Friday the 13th movies and Nightmare on Elm Street movies.)

Am I setting myself up for developing a considerable aversion to these movies, very quickly?

Possibly.

But to at least give myself a break on the blog side of things, I won't write about each individually, grouping them together by two or three films -- or possibly more, depending on how it all fits into my schedule. 

The last three movies, from director David Gordon Green, have defied my recent tendency to try to see as much from the new release landscape as possible. But when I missed the first of his films, I intentionally skipped the second and third, which was maybe one of my indications that it was time for a project like this one, just to get fully caught up in case/when there is another.

I likely wouldn't have gone out of sequence at all except that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was assigned to me as part of a Flickchart viewing series back in January, and as it so happens, it doesn't involve Michael Myers and is really only adjacent to the Halloween narrative, existing in its universe more than involving its characters and storylines. And then of course the sequence is broken a couple times by remakes, which was why I was clear to see Zombie's first remake without seeing all the proper sequels to the original Halloween.

From here on out, though, we'll go in order, and I'll start with some thoughts on the original Halloween, watched last night for my third time overall.

The first time I saw Halloween, probably sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, I thought "Yes, well, a pretty typical slasher flick, albeit one of the first of its kind." The second time I saw it -- almost exactly 15 years ago, on August 28, 2009 -- I was overwhelmed by its perfectly 70s stylings. I fell in love with John Carpenter's camera traveling the streets of a suburban Illinois neighborhood, with all its olive greens and other woodsy colors, and the fact that the camera itself moved like someone watching Laurie Strode and her friends was the perfect combination of the era in which the film was made and a certain intentionality born of authorial voice.

Armed with that viewing recently in mind, I gave Halloween 4.5 stars on Letterboxd a few years later when I added all my films to Letterboxd and assigned them retroactive star ratings.

I still think the extra half star might be warranted just to acknowledge this film's place in the history of the horror genre and of cinema in general, but on this viewing I was struck by how basic it is. I know that sounds like a negative descriptor in almost every context, but I think more than anything, what I mean is, there are simply no frills on this thing. It barely squeaks over 90 minutes and at this stage in the history of the serial killer, there is nothing clever or particularly sadistic about Michael Myers as a killer. It's like he's the standard model of a serial killer, and every one who would come after him would contain bells and whistles and upgrades that cost extra.

This is not a bad thing. In 1978, the serial killer genre was brand new, though I suppose a real genre expert would probably tell me all the ways Halloween is indebted to other movies that came before. But at this point you didn't need killers to be adept with a clever turn of phrase to accompany a kill, something that talkative Freddy Krueger always did, but the silent Jason Voorhees never did -- to touch on the two other iconic franchise-carrying killers I've already mentioned in this piece. I suppose Freddy was his own variation that took things down a different path while Jason was more of a Michael Myers clone, only with a more supernatural ability to be anywhere and everyone and to recover from seemingly fatal blows. (Though I don't doubt we'll get there with Michael Myers later in this series. In fact, he survives plenty of fatal blows in just this first film.)

I do think Carpenter's filmmaking is good, but maybe never more so than those opening scenes where his camera approximates the POV of a killer. The filmmaking in the extended climax set between two homes in Laurie Strode's neighborhood is more straightforward and efficient than it is a real case of experimentation with perspective of other tricks, like the opening is. (The very opening of the film, set 15 years earlier when Michael kills his sister, shows what he sees through his eye holes as he walks around wearing a mask.)

For a second I thought I might have seen Seth Green in this film, and rushed to IMDB to see if it was the case. I thought it was possible Seth Green was around 12 in 1978. As it turns out, he was only four -- younger than I am -- so that this kid was definitely not him:

In fact it's an actor named Brian Andrews, who had about 20 credits prior to 1987 and then a few in the twenty teens. He's not great here, so it doesn't surprise me that his career never really went anywhere.

Because of my impression of Halloween as a clean, efficient serial killer movie and not a lot more to delve into, I'll leave off with any further thoughts for now. But I'm sure the original Halloween will come back plenty as I delve into the ten (!!) other Halloween films I plan to watch this month. 

Audient Outliers: Somewhere

This is the fifth and penultimate film in my 2024 bi-monthly series rewatching a single film I didn't care for from a filmmaker I otherwise love.

This Audient Outliers series required fudging of the rules right from the very start, when I chose Jonathan Glazer's filmography for February -- even though I had not yet seen The Zone of Interest, so I couldn't truly know if Sexy Beast was the only of his films I didn't like. The loose interpretation of the rules has continued throughout, as re-examining Frank Darabont's The Mist required not only factoring in his TV show The Walking Dead as a point in the win column for him, but having not seen one of his films either, The Majestic.

So it wasn't a perfectly conceived series. So what. I am not trying to please some outside body that judges my adherence to the rules. I'm trying to create a reason for revisiting films that gave me pause.

And so in October I have now watched Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, even though it is conceivably only my third least favorite Coppola film.

If Somewhere and Priscilla came up side-by-side in a duel on Flickchart, I'd probably pick Priscilla -- or would have before I rewatched Somewhere, but I won't reveal yet whether that viewing changed my choice in this duel. 

But if that duel were between Somewhere and On the Rocks, there is no doubt that Somewhere would win hands down -- before that viewing, after that viewing, and always. 

So why, you might ask, did I not choose On the Rocks if I wanted to finally break my string of four straight white male directors to start this series?

Simple: I knew there were no hidden depths to On the Rocks that would be revealed from a second viewing. Beyond featuring Bill Murray and the music of her husband Thomas Mars, On the Rocks is so little like what we would expect from a Coppola film that I suspect it will always seem like the outlier in her filmography -- objectively for us all, not just subjectively for me -- even after she has made her final film, which hopefully won't be for another 30 years.

Somewhere is probably nothing but hidden depths.

But how would they play for me on this viewing?

First a little background on Somewhere. In my family, it is most remembered for the funny circumstances of our original viewing.

When my wife and I first watched it in January 2011, our first child was only about five months old. So we weren't going to the movies together much, if at all. This was the closest we came, but it took some humorous logistics.

Basically, I went to the first showing of Somewhere at a theater relatively near our house. After it ended, my wife met me in the parking lot with our son, who was asleep in his stroller, while she went to the very next showing. I transitioned him back to my car and drove home while she went to the movie. So he went to sleep with mummy and woke up with daddy. I can't remember whether or not the expression on his face was particularly reflective of that surprise.

I wish the whimsical circumstances of this viewing had made me more favorably disposed to the movie, but they did not. (Maybe if I'd been the second viewer, rather than the first. At that point, I hadn't yet done the whimsical exchange of our child.) I recognized the filmmaking skills of the director, on a personal hot streak with me after she scored my #1 spot in 2003 with Lost in Translation and a big favorite with Marie Antoinette in 2007, which I did not see until 2008 so I couldn't rank it to determine where it would have landed in my year-end rankings. I just didn't vibe with what she was trying to accomplish.

The movie felt like 97 minutes of repeating the message that celebrity has hollow comforts and hollows out your sense of humanity. Stephen Dorff's Johnny Marco puts a rather fine point on this very near the climax of the movie, on the phone with his ex, when he says he is "not even a person." While each little vignette demonstrating this hollowness is compelling its own right, their collection adds up to less than the sum of the parts.

I still basically feel this way about the movie after my second viewing. I see on Letterboxd I retroactively gave this movie 2.5 stars (I added all my movies to Letterboxd around 2013), and that would probably get bumped up to three today. But that could also be because I am becoming a softie in my old age and I hand out three stars to movies as long as they did not offend me. (A little bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not as much of an exaggeration as I would like.)

Although the movie is fundamentally "boring" -- in other words, that's sort of by design -- I did not specifically feel bored while watching it. However, this might be a good time to mention the funny coincidence to this viewing. When I had not yet decided what I was watching on Wednesday night, tossing up a couple options including Somewhere, our family watched an episode of The Simpsons from 2011 over dinner, in which Lisa creates a social media service called Springface. (Probably not the show's only riff on The Social Network, but definitely the first.) In this episode, Homer talks about how he can use the site -- I can't really remember the relevance in the context of the episode -- to watch a Sofia Coppola movie on double speed, so it seems like a normal movie. 

Homer's comment was almost certainly intended in relation to Somewhere, which came out the same autumn as The Social Network, meaning the Simpsons writers had just enough time to write it up and animate it for air about a year later. That's the sort of "universe telling you what to do" moment that pushed me toward Somewhere as my viewing that evening.

Homer is right, of course, that Coppola's pace is purposefully slower. That doesn't bother me in films like Translation, Antoinette, The Bling Ring or The Beguiled, which are my four favorite Coppola films. It bothers me a little here because there is something inherently navel gazey about following a movie star who attracts the attention of every woman who crosses his path and has landed for a long-term stay at the Chateau Marmont hotel, almost by accident because it represents both the freedoms and the indulgences afforded by his position in the world. It is clear from the first moment of the movie -- the rather metaphorically obvious scene where Johnny drives his Ferrari in a circle in the desert -- that we are not meant to find this lifestyle as appealing as it would seem on the surface. But the fact that Coppola errs on the side of presenting, rather than commenting on, Johnny's life certainly does allow a viewer to dream themselves away into it, if they wanted.

In reality, Somewhere would be a weaker film if it damned Johnny's life choices in no uncertain terms, or if it showed him being truly neglectful of his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning, great even from this early age). Johnny is actually a pretty good parent when he's around. But he's also prone to sneaking in a quickie with a random woman in the hope that Cleo doesn't notice. 

There is probably a core truth to the depictions of the layabout movie star, though the actual truth, from Coppola's own life, is her perspective on being the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, and traveling with him to movie premieres. (The section of Somewhere set in Italy is probably my favorite.) The star's behavior is something she could easily glean from being in that world, and perhaps Johnny Marco is also a continued processing of the character based on her former partner, Spike Jonze, who exists in the form of the cameraman played by Giovanni Ribisi in Lost in Translation. 

So none of this rings false, and it does look like a peek behind the curtain at eccentric things that seem apocryphal, which only makes them more likely to have happened: the male masseuse who strips naked while massaging Johnny, because it's part of his process; the nearly twin dancers performing for Johnny on portable stripper poles they bring to his hotel room; playing Guitar Hero in the Chateau Marmont room that has become essentially permanently his, room #59.

I think we don't realize the full strength of what Coppola is doing here until the end, when Johnny has left Cleo at camp, and we realize just how comparatively empty his life is once the spark she brings is no longer there. That father-daughter bond is retroactively reinforced in the final ten minutes of the movie, when we are left with only Johnny, and see what a lonely place that is.

So am I talking myself into liking Somewhere a little more than I did previously? Maybe even a little more than boosting its rating by a half-star, which I already said is a sort of inflation, based on my changing temperament as a critic?

Maybe I am. But I can tell I am not that interested in watching Somewhere a third time. I still think it is a little less than the sum of its parts, still missing something that would steer it more firmly toward ... something.

It occurs to me that it is very hard to define what keeps a Coppola movie on the right side of this line between consequentiality and inconsequentiality. Lost in Translation is the clearest example of getting this ineffable balance right, even as it has some moments that feel like dead spots -- clearly more by design in that case, representing the vicissitudes of this connection between Bob and Charlotte. Marie Antoinette, my second favorite, gets huge points for the production design and the way Coppola uses modern music in a manner that was quite new back in 2007.

I can see that Somewhere would land on the right side of this line for some people. It doesn't quite for me, but that hardly makes it without virtues.

Okay, I will wrap up this series in December with an as-yet determined final title. All I can tell you for sure is that if it doesn't involve another cheat, I will be surprised. 

The Prodigy: The best music for fighting

It just so happens that the last two movies I've rewatched, Kick-Ass a few weeks ago and Charlie's Angels last night, both contain fight scenes set to music by groundbreaking electronic band The Prodigy.

The Prodigy was one of two bands who ushered me into this sort of music in the year 1997. The other was The Chemical Brothers. I still love both bands dearly, and I'm glad to say I got to see both of them at the same Coachella in 2005. (And Daft Punk a year later, in what is supposed to be one of their greatest live shows ever.) Sadly, The Prodigy (sometimes known as just "Prodigy") lost frontman Keith Flint about five years ago, but Wikipedia tells me they still exist and are still touring.

We know Matthew Vaughn really digs The Prodigy. He includes not one, but two songs from their 2009 album Invaders Must Die, "Omen" and "Stand Up," in Kick-Ass, released only the next year. When you take one song from an album, that's affection for the band, but you can't read that much more into it. When you take two, it means you think that band slays, and you might just be a stalker.

While "Stand Up" is among the cheerier songs The Prodigy has ever written, a lyrics-free banger that might be at home in the set of a marching band playing a college football game, "Omen" is more typically frenzied and insidious. And of course, it plays while the title character is making his first attempt at fighting -- and having his ass handed to him. (Though he survives the beating, and ends up scaring off the attackers through the certainty of his convictions.)

Of course, Vaughn wasn't new to identifying the combative electricity in The Prodigy's music. McG got there first ten years earlier in Charlie's Angels, where he used the then three-year-old "Smack My Bitch Up" -- released in the aforementioned year of my electronica conversion, 1997 -- heavily. He only uses it in one scene, but it essentially plays out in total -- all 5:45 of it -- or at least enough repeated bits of the same song for 5:45 worth of screen time. And yes, this is during an extended chase and fight scene between the three leads and the weirdo played by Crispin Glover. (Did Crispin Glover ever not play a weirdo? Discuss.) 

The almost instantly problematic title of that song probably prevented Vaughn from going to that well in Kick-Ass, but he had a brand new album of kinetic Prodigy bangers to choose from.

And the combative energy of their music was certainly what drew me to it. Not that I am particularly combative, but my love of Nine Inch Nails should tell you that I'm down with getting in touch with my inner rage through a song. And The Prodigy's first album that I knew, The Fat of the Land, did that and then some. 

In fact, when I made my friend who doesn't ordinarily like this type of music -- our main music connection is Phish -- a mix that included this sort of music, I called it "In Touch With Your Inner Punch Dance," because his joke was that you had to punch-dance to songs like this. The mix included the likes of Rob Zombie, Filter, Rammstein, Nine Inch Nails, Lo Fidelity Allstars, and yes, The Prodigy, which I then called just Prodigy -- "Smack My Bitch Up," no less.

I'm sure Matthew Vaughn and McG were not the only ones to think The Prodigy would kick ass as the score for some bone-crunching fisticuffs, but I'm not going to go down an internet rabbit hole to find the others right now. 

Though if the next movie I rewatch features someone kicking someone else's ass to the tune of Keith Flint et al, I will be quite surprised. 

Having the patience

There are always going to be a lot of unknowns when you make a documentary. I suppose it's kind of like writing a news story, if you're a journalist. You never know what somebody is going to say, what's going to happen, and whether either of those things takes you down a new avenue in how you tell the story.

However, if you are making a movie about a well-meaning program like the Dates With Dad program -- in which incarcerated men are permitted a whole evening at a dance with their daughters, despite their prisons otherwise restricting physical contact with loved ones -- it's easy to imagine how you might envision it playing out. 

You profile a couple inmates on the inside, and you profile their daughters, and likely the mothers of those daughters, on the outside. You show the events leading up to this dance, and the emotional crescendo of the movie is the dance itself, when the separated family members are finally reunited -- and then, almost cruelly enough that you wonder if it was even worth it, torn apart again three hours later. 

I mean, of course it was worth it, just for the intense cathartic emotions of the experience. In the Netflix documentary Daughters, the prison-side counsellor, who is liaising with these men, tells them it will be an emotional rollercoaster, and boy is it that. But probably much better to experience both the highs and the lows than the flat-line monotony of prison life. 

But that dance would make a pretty good climax, wouldn't it? Of course it would, easy peasy.

Angela Patton and Natalie Rae are not content with that. They know there's more to this story.

In a decision that required a lot of patience, the directors of Daughters waited not only one year after the dance, to see where everyone was, but a whole three years -- knowing that their best material might be how much this single event, with its increased emotional intensity and the promises of a better future contained within, would actually impact the lives of the people they profiled. 

There would be pressure -- if not from themselves internally, then from financiers -- to just put a bow on this documentary and release it with the indisputably good footage they already had. It could have easily made a complete movie, and we wouldn't have been any the wiser that there was more to see.

But they didn't, and they were right. 

I won't say what occurs in these final 20 minutes of Daughters, I'll just say it is an infinitely more complex portrait as a result of it. And quite likely the best documentary of the year.