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.