Roundabout Purge completism on Halloween

I have an interesting history with the Purge series.

I loathed the first. The first movie, mind you, not The First Purge. That was the fourth movie.

I gave The Purge only 1.5 stars on Letterboxd, and ranked it #122 out of 128 films I saw in 2013. It might have been worse had I not given the film points for introducing a really fertile concept into the cinematic landscape. I don't remember a huge number of the details. But I do remember I couldn't get past the idea that a young man would use the excuse of the purge to try to kill his girlfriend's father (Ethan Hawke). That helps ingratiate you to your girlfriend how, exactly?

It was three years until I saw my next Purge movie, which was not the next Purge movie. I skipped over The Purge: Anarchy in 2014 as the bad taste of The Purge was still in my mouth. But by 2016 I had heard some encouraging things about The Purge: Election Year, though I still would have preferred to see the movies in sequence. What caused me to break the sequence was standing at a video kiosk I had walked 15 minutes to reach during my lunch hour, but not finding the movie I had expected to find. I was unwilling to come away empty-handed so Election Year it was.

You may remember how this one turned out for me. The movie ended up in my top ten for the year as it prompted an emotional breakdown during one scene, seeing as how I watched it about two weeks after the actual election. 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

It was another 3+ years until my next Purge movie, which was the next Purge movie this time. Though I guess my newfound Purge love had died down enough that I failed to see The First Purge during the year of its release (2019) in order to rank it with that year's movies. I did watch it earlier this year, and was again captivated by the left wing vs. right wing politics that have increasingly been central to the series as it has gone along. I've actually written about The First Purge twice (here and here). Four stars on Letterboxd.

As I now liked -- strongly liked -- 67% of the Purge movies I'd seen, it was about time to finally get to The Purge: Anarchy. You know, that oh-so-common 1-3-4-2 sequence to watching the movies in a (so far) four-movie franchise. But it took a suggestion from my wife to actually get it on the docket.

We were scrolling through the stunningly large collection of horror movies on Amazon when my wife said "Oooh!" upon seeing The Purge: Anarchy. All four of the movies are available for streaming on Amazon, so I think it was just a coincidence that she happened to stumble upon the one that would correctly be the next in the sequence for her. The titles don't give away their sequence, and my wife does not keep track of things like the order of movies in series she doesn't pay attention to.

She immediately got the idea to watch it on Halloween, which I thought was sort of funny as I don't really think of these as straight horror movies. They are more like social commentaries that use some of the iconography of horror. But as she has become increasingly interested in TV rather than my beloved movies, I'm not one to shut down any suggestion she makes, especially since I hadn't yet seen this. (But likely would have acquiesed to watching either of the later two movies as well, given how much I like them, and may on some future date, Halloween or otherwise.)

Given my injection of new enthusiasm for this series, I had hoped to like The Purge: Anarchy more. However, it ended up with only two stars on Letterboxd.

It starts out auspiciously enough, introducing the characters as they prepare for where they're supposed to be before the annual 12-hour window of lawlessness begins. During this time we are also introduced to a chilling gang of masked vigilantes, one of whom wears a white mask with the word GOD scrawled on the forehead. These appeared to be people of color, which worried me a little bit, but I wanted to see where it went.

Well, where it went with these characters kind of symbolizes the disappointing downturn of the movie on the whole. Yes, there are people of color under these masks -- and the one wearing the GOD mask was, surprise surprise, Lakeith Stanfield, before most of us would have known who he was. The good news? They are not the murderous psychopaths that the opening of the movie makes them seem. The bad news? They are trying to gather innocent citizens caught out on the streets and deliver them to the right-wing rich leaders of the NFFA (New Founding Fathers of America), for a hunt. Yes, Stanfield's character says they are really in it just for the money.

So yeah, I see why a friend of mine thinks the Purge series is racist -- even if the later movies work to correct that impression.

This movie also has an equivalent to the bizarre attempt by Ethan Hawke's potential future son-in-law to kill him. In this movie a woman chooses the occasion of the purge to kill her own sister for sleeping with her husband. What's weirder, she does it at 2:30 in the morning, after the purge has already been going for more than seven hours. First of all, she wouldn't kill her own sister. Disown her and never speak to her again, maybe, but kill her? Secondly, if she was really that upset, you'd figure it would be a crime of passion that would occur during normal times, not some kind of premeditated attempt to get away with it on purge day -- and in front of the rest of her family members as well. 

I could go through more details, but you get the idea. There's some cool stuff -- like, I liked the idea of an 18-wheeler driving around with a gatling gun opening fire on people -- but overall, the series still had not found its eventual sense of purpose by this second entry.

I also quibble with that title. What does it even mean? The subtitle Anarchy suggests that something outside the bounds of a normal purge occurs here, but really, that doesn't seem to be the case. Isn't every purge rather anarchic in nature? At one point there's a warning that someone is using a weapon that's at a higher grade than approved for the purge, and that this person will be prosecuted, but wouldn't that happen every purge? The title for this movie could have just as easily been Purge: Another Purge or Purge: Quite Purge-like, All Told. 

The interesting thing about the variable quality of this series -- earning from me 1.5 stars, 4.5 stars, 4 stars and 2 stars -- is that the first three films all have the same director, and all four have the same writer. That man is James DeMonaco, and at least you can say he's getting better at it as he goes along. Gerard McMurry -- a person of color, you will note -- directed The First Purge, which may be the best of the four in objective terms. It's hard for me to say because I don't expect Election Year would have had the same impression on me had I not been an emotional mess over the election of Donald Trump.  

I do think that it would be worth going back to watch the original Purge. Some series do take time to find their footing, but I think you are more likely to find that in a TV series than a movie franchise. Usually you only get to make the franchise because the first is good, or at least, the best of the bunch. It could be that my new perspective on the series will help with my feelings about The Purge ... if I ever want to give it that chance. 

In the meantime, The Forever Purge is scheduled to come out in 2021, making this series an even five. (IMDB says it's the "fifth and final installment," but I'll believe that when I see it.)

Hope whatever you're watching on Halloween does the trick for you. Happy Halloween! 

As the world burns

I don't usually like to let major world events, especially tragedies, go completed unrecognized by me on the blog. Only part of that is the fear of looking callous by prattling on about viewing schedule coincidences while people are hurting. The other part is that, while these things are on my mind, I do actually want to write about them, movie blog or no.

I haven't written anything yet about the death of George Floyd or the protests that have followed, or the riots that have followed that, and indeed, I have prattled on about viewing coincidences here on the blog. It wasn't an intentional decision to hide my head in a hole and escape from the world, though that could have been part of it. I suspect it has more to do with the good fortune of living in Australia, where police tend to kill a lot fewer minorities, and the very justified conflagrations in the U.S. this past week just don't need to happen.

But just as not writing anything about it on Facebook ultimately got the better of me, now my apparent neglect on the blog is too much for me to handle as well. So I'm going to come out from that hole, at least for a few paragraphs, and write the post I might have actually written at the start of the pandemic if I hadn't gotten behind.

As I watched the riots start to take hold in the U.S. -- as few as possible, as I have been selective in my video viewing -- my first thought was of a movie I saw only two months ago.

That was The First Purge, the latest in what I am starting to consider a very politically astute series hiding in an exploitation package. I had thoughts I wanted to share about it when I watched it on March 26th, but ended up making mention of it only in passing in a post that was otherwise devoted to Marisa Tomei. (The connection being that Tomei appears in the movie.)

The thoughts were that I was shaken by the world presented in The First Purge, and how little it probably differed from our own. The Purge: Election Year had, you may remember me saying, reduced me to a blubbery mess when I watched it a few weeks after the 2016 election, as it shows a world of evil fascists trying to wipe out poor people and minorities. The fact that it had a Hilary Clinton-like presidential candidate in it, and that she was nearly sacrificed by reprehensible white male politicians in the film's climax, just made the immediacy of it all the more relevant.

In this Purge prequel, we see where it all began. The same extreme right political party has only just taken grip of the U.S. political system, and introduced the concept of a single 12-hour period where all crime is legal. In order to assess the viability of the idea on the rest of the country, they select one confined area -- Staten Island -- as a test site. The site has been chosen, we come to realize, for its large percentage of blacks and other minorities.

Except it's not blacks and minorities who start the trouble that does, eventually, engulf the island. The actual residents of Staten Island kind of just think it's a hoot, and restrict their rebellions to innocuous behaviors like partying in the streets. No, when things flare up, it's because this extreme right government has sent in masked mercenaries with automatic weapons. They start to kill indiscriminately, with two clear goals in mind: 1) to exterminate as many blacks and minorities as possible, and 2) to make it look like they did it to each other.

Can you think of something more prescient for the days we are living through now?

The most chilling aspect of this past week's rioting is that I suspect much of it was started by people who didn't originate in those neighborhoods. I'm sure there are more videos out there, but one particular video I watched showed a figured dressed all in black, carrying an umbrella, his face totally hidden by a gas mask. The interprid cell phone cameraman caught him dispassionately walking along the front of a Minneapolis AutoZone, smashing all its windows with a hammer, then leaving the scene.

Suspicious of his motivations -- and rightly so -- a couple black bystanders follow him and try to confront him. Tellingly, their confrontation is with words only, and the only moment it verges on violence is when he lashes back at them. No, they want to call this guy out on what he's done. When he turns to lash at them, you can see this is a white agent provacateur who has come in just to foment chaos. His only agenda is to frame the black people who would surely be blamed for looting that AutoZone.

It boiled my blood.

How many versions of that guy were dispatched to different places around the U.S., with the single goal of creating the conditions where black Americans would be injured or killed, or at the very least, blamed for vandalism they didn't commit?

It made me think of the cold, military purposefulness of the First Purge mercenaries, let loose to destroy and marginalize and strike a decisive blow in a race war they had already been winning for centuries.

Counterprogramming

I haven't watched Contagion yet, but I have scratched that itch to terrify yourself indirectly, via other end-of-the-world/breakdown of society programming.

In the last week alone I've watched The Platform (discussed last post), Dr. Strangelove (only my second time seeing it -- I know) and The First Purge (a strong continuation of the series after Election Year, a personal favorite). I could and probably should write individual posts about each of those last two, but what can I say, I've fallen behind -- working from home has not actually, so far, afforded me the extra time I thought it would, in part because I've felt more tired at the end of each day, rather than less.

I decided to pivot to something more cheery on Friday night, but the viewing of The First Purge had something to do with it.

In that film, which came out in 2018, Marisa Tomei somewhat surprisingly appears as one of the only real names in the cast. You've got Lauren Velez from Dexter, but everyone else was pretty much new to me. And there were some good ones. I particularly liked the co-lead, Y'lan Noel, whom I could have sworn I'd seen somewhere before. Charisma out the wazoo.

But back to Marisa Tomei.

I marvelled how I didn't think she was ever going to start looking old, or if she did, she'd stay hot, just like Helen Mirren. Tomei is 55, if you can believe it, but in this movie, I wouldn't have had to squint too hard to think she could play 28. Now maybe that's heaps and heaps of cosmetic surgery, but it doesn't look like it. And I'm not going to google to find out.

And so it was that on Friday night, as I was flipping through my library of DVDs because streaming has become shocking from all the extra drain on the bandwidth, I came across the movie where she really was 28. Or, probably 27 when it was filming.

And until I started watching My Cousin Vinny, I didn't realize how much I really needed some counterprogamming.

I basically grinned from ear to ear throughout the nearly two-hour duration of this film, always a favorite, one I watched incessantly in the 1990s when I had it on VHS. But when I saw it in 2011, that was probably my first viewing of the 21st century, and this was my first one since then. Maybe I need to watch My Cousin Vinny more often.

Tomei won an Oscar for this role, of course -- I think of it alongside the one Kevin Kline won for A Fish Called Wanda as two of the times the Oscars have really surprised me by picking a performer only for their comedic ability. (Oh, and that's another movie I should definitely watch again during our home confinement.)

Tomei's performance is a lot more than that. I already had a thing for girls with New York accents from a couple summer crushes I had in the years before the release of this movie, but Tomei sent that affection skyrocketing.

Of course, I belittle her performance if I only talk about how it makes my toes curl. But the way she's charming -- in a bit of a vulgar way -- is just part of a fully realized character that feels considered down to the detail. Any number of the little looks she makes in this film are perfectly calibrated, but I think some of the gestures are even better. In fact, my favorite Tomei-ism is when, at the end of her very successful witness testimony, she extends her arms forward in a little preening gesture, her hands angled downward just at the end. Normally, preening is a sign of excess self-regard, but not here -- it's a physical release of her pent-up need to help her fiancee, which has been simmering unsatisfied the whole movie. And it's totally unconscious, or at least, it's unconscious in a premeditated way that only a really great actor can pull off.

I love that there's still a bit of the ballsy New Yorker in roles Tomei plays even now, most recently, as Aunt Mae in the new Spider-Man movies. She doesn't seem old enough to be anybody's Aunt Mae, but hell, she could almost be Peter's grandmother, given that she's 55 and Tom Holland is only 23. Two 16-year-old pregnancies would be all it would take.

Anyway, I came here to tell you more about the counterprogramming than the Tomei, but a person can get a bit carried away. (I'm a poet and I don't know it.)

But, back to the counterprogramming -- I intend to do more of it. Watching movies about the world ending or society crumbling have not, in the end, increased my stress level, I don't think. They may even help me cope. And I probably will watch Contagion again before all is said and done.

But the counterprogramming is magnifique as well.

Especially when it comes with a bit of hairspray and attitude.