Bill Skarsgard seems like a good Crow

I go through long periods of neglect of my ReelGood email account, such that I sometimes come back after a month and discover I've missed invites to ten screenings I might have otherwise liked to attend. These are inexcusable lapses in doing my due diligence as the editor of the site, but I have an excuse that's even less excusable: I just don't remember to check. 

Yesterday I checked, though, and one of the emails hyping an upcoming movie was about the remake of Alex Proyas' The Crow, which I vaguely remembered was a thing but had not thought about in ages. As it is releasing in a couple months, it happens to be timed -- or maybe was intentionally timed -- to the 30-year anniversary of the original, which was of course overshadowed by the on-set death of Brandon Lee.

The original film had huge significance for me in 1994, when I was 20 turning 21, and when I was transported by its triumvirate of primary strengths: the soundtrack, the action sequences and the overriding sense of melancholy, which exudes from the themes of the movie itself, and then is expanded exponentially by Lee's death of a gunshot wound from a prop gun.

I'd ordinarily bristle at the idea of remaking it, or maybe more accurately, of re-adapting the comic on which it was based. I know Alex Proyas bristles at that idea. And I think this was one of the reasons, other than its incredibly poor quality, that I disliked The Crow: City of Angels as much as I did.

But the casting of Bill Skarsgard gives me hope.

The trick Lee pulled off in the original film was to be both sympathetic and a little -- or maybe a lot -- insane. That describes Skarsgard's cinematic attributes to a T.

In fact, I would go so far as to describe Skarsgard as one of the top two creepy weirdos introduced to us in the last five to ten years, alongside Barry Keoghan. 

Surely this impression was cemented by his role as Pennywise the Clown in It and its sequel. Whatever you ultimately thought about those films, it is inconceivable to me that you weren't scared as fuck by Skarsgard. He is so demented, so sinister, and so giving his all that, if I remember correctly, you see involuntary ropes of spittle emanating from him on multiple occasions. Many actors play evil. In these movies, Skarsgard was evil.

The thing is, this is not Skarsgard's only mode. Not by a longshot.

One of the great fakeouts (SPOILER ALERT) about 2022's Barbarian was the fact that Skarsgard is not the creep. Oh, he seems like he would be/will be, and they are milking our preconceived notions of the actor for everything they're worth. But as we are watching this charming man be charming and kind, and just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then realizing it isn't going to drop and we are just watching a charming man be charming and kind, it serves as a revelation about this actor and the things of which he is capable.

Well, I think he will get to use both modes in The Crow. At some point in this movie, Skarsgard will make you feel the pain of what has been taken from him, and then in the next moment do something with his eyes that will make you want to go run and hide in the corner. 

Another bit of hopefulness: Danny Huston is also in the cast, presumably as a villain. There's something alien in his aloofness, too, and I think the movie could use this to good effect.

Then again, The Crow is also directed by Rupert Sanders of Ghost in the Shell remake fame, which takes away a little of my hope.

Please drag Sanders, and this movie, to the finish line, won't you Bill?

Life hacks learned at the movies

Every time I change a doona cover from now on, I will think of Barbarian.

(In fact, I did this about an hour ago, which is how I know it's true.)

You might call it a duvet. I used to call it a comforter. In Australia it's a doona, so that's the term we tend to use most.

If you saw Barbarian, you probably remember the scene where Bill Skarsgard's character shows Georgina Campbell's character the foolproof method for putting on one of these covers without having to spend all this time stuffing material into elusive corners and generally sacrificing about 13 minutes of your day.

If not, I'll explain:

1) Turn the cover inside out.

2) Put your body inside the hole where the doona goes.

3) Stand up with the cover almost entirely covering your body and hold the inside top two corners one with each hand, kind of like you're a ghost right after an old timey hold-up guy yelled "Stick 'em up!!"

4) Have another person place two of the doona corners into your stuck-up hands.

5) Still grabbing both the cover and the corners, flip the cover up over your head and wriggle it down until the cover is fully covering the doona.

Some life hacks you see in a movie and forget, but not this. I don't know how many doona covers I've changed since I saw Barbarian about seven months ago, but I've never not done this. It works great. 

The other thing is that my kids love it. My younger son is especially tickled by it. The older one, who will be 13 in about three months, doesn't like to show you he thinks anything is all that interesting, but I could tell even he was taken aback by the comic efficiency of it. Suddenly changing his bed linens, which we try to have them do every Sunday night, didn't seem like such a chore.

I've got a second one, but it sort of breaks the theme because it's actually from a TV show.

In the final season of Better Call Saul, there's a throwaway moment involving Patrick Fabian's Howard Hamlin. I don't even remember what the context of it was. But I remember the life hack.

In the scene, a can of soda has gotten shaken up, leading the prospective drinker to moan about how long he or she will have to wait before consuming it. Howard says that's nonsense. He demonstrates that if you just stand the can up on a countertop and rotate it a few times to the left (or right I suppose), it entirely defuses the agitated bubbles within. Only five seconds of can rotations later, you're opening a perfectly calm soda.

I try to live my life without regularly allowing cans of soda to become shaken, but I did try this once too, and lo and behold, it works.

Are there others? Most certainly, but I can't recall them right now. If you can, add them in the comments.

Tusk man the Barbarian

A week ago, I saw Barbarian, a horror film starring Justin Long that has a lot of different tones and things going on. 

Yesterday, my son and I carved our jack o' lanterns for this year, and although he was trying to make a vampire, he said it looked more like a walrus.

These two events in combination could lead me to only one conclusion:

It was time to watch Tusk again.

I'd actually tried to watch Tusk again earlier this month, before I knew Justin Long was in Barbarian and before I knew my son would carve a pumpkin that he thought would look like a large flippered marine mammal. (Not its whole body, just its tusks.) But it wasn't streaming anywhere I could find, not without paying to rent it -- which shouldn't be such a surprise, as I don't think the movie was anything more than a morbid curiosity to most people. 

Me, I love morbid curiosities, and toward the end of this month, I'm not conserving money the way I thought I needed to earlier in the month. (We accepted an offer on our house in Los Angeles, a topic that probably deserves its own post some other time. We're still in escrow but the end now feels in sight.) So when the universe was telling me to rent Tusk from Amazon on Saturday to watch it on my projector that night, I complied.

The first time I wrote about Tusk on this blog, it was in this post, in which I bemoaned that the main thing about Tusk was being spoiled by people saying "Without getting into spoiler territory ..." and then basically just saying the thing. Eight years later, I don't feel the need to still preserve this sort of secrecy about the movie, though I'll still talk around it if possible -- before totally spoiling it with a photo at the end of the post. So this is your SPOILER WARNING for Tusk, even though the poster above, which obviously existed at the time, does a pretty good job previewing the morbid curiosity you are about to witness. (I can talk around Barbarian more easily but there could be mild spoilers for this too.)

So just some context about why I appreciated Tusk as much as I did the first time, which I think was out of sync with people's general thoughts on the film. Kevin Smith's most recent film before this had been Red State, which was my second favorite film of 2011. Especially on the heels of that unexpected pivot toward serious filmmaking, Tusk confirmed for me that Smith might be entering into a whole new period of cinematic exploration.

Alas, it was short lived. His next film, the Tusk spinoff Yoga Hosers, was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and he's followed it with a Jay and Silent Bob movie and a Clerks movie, neither of which I've seen, which could not be more a case of staying in his lane. Given that Smith has always been a fan of distributing by independent channels, one wonders why he couldn't also explore the new weird streak he established in his consecutive collaborations with actor Michael Parks. But it looks like that new Smith has well and truly vanished.

Barbarian, though, put Tusk back in my head. It was in my head more than it might have otherwise been because I edited and posted a review written by other writers later in the week. There are more similarities than you might imagine:

1) Both star Long in a screwed up horror that leaves you no idea where it's going, assuming you have not been exposed to spoilers.

2) In both movies Long plays an entitled douchebag. In fact it could almost be the same character if the character in Tusk made an unlikely comeback from what happens to him.

3) Both characters are going to get what's coming to them. 

4) Both movies are going to take us around in time a bit, and splice together things that would not necessarily seem related to one another. 

5) Both movies have multiple "oh no that's not right" moments that rely on something gruesome happening that you don't want to watch. (You could probably say this about many horror movies but maybe it particularly applies here. Part of the advertising campaign for Barbarian has shown stills of people recoiling from what they're seeing on screen.)

Anyway.

For me, Barbarian was a little overhyped. I definitely enjoyed it, but there are so many thematic issues going on that I felt like I failed to see the big picture, and I had questions about some loose threads that left me wanting more of an explanation -- not because they didn't provide answers that we deserved, but because certain occurrences in the plot, like the mix-up that informs the movie's first third, seemed to have little to no ultimate function in the narrative. But yes, the scene that's grossing out that audience in the ad is good, as are all this movie's disparate elements taken individually.

Tusk also has some really disparate elements. Last night reminded me of that strange, tonally jarring scene where Genesis Rodriguez gives a teary direct address to the camera about her boyfriend cheating on her. Where did this come from? I have no idea, but it renewed my sense of how alive Smith's cinematic engagement feels in this film.

And then there's just everything related to what happens to poor Mr. Long. I've talked around it but you certainly know by now.

So now it's time to include that photo of my son's walrus jack o' lantern, which was getting its trial run in our garage last night next to the one I made, along with the "real" walrus in the film: