Tag Archives: black and white

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte

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There’s this ’80s song by Kim Carnes called Bette Davis Eyes, which I had always previously assumed was about “her”[1] being super attractive in a golden age of Hollywood kind of way. It is not a song for which I have paid extremely close attention to the lyrics. But I think I will have to the next time I hear it, because after seeing her[2] turn as Charlotte Hollis, I have a very different impression of what Bette Davis eyes actually are.

The podcast randomization was normal people as the scare, and period piece as the style. And, okay, technically the first 10 minutes were in a different period, but I think it is fair to say that a movie made in 1964 and set in 1964 for the remaining two hours is not truly a period piece. Oh well, they’ve missed before, they’ll miss again. It’s not a big deal when the movies are good, or at least fun. And Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is definitely good, albeit not as good as it would have been if the one sentence description on Hoopla hadn’t been a massive spoiler. Oh well for that.

So the deal is, Charlotte is the daughter of the guy who owns the Louisiana southern gothic plantation town where they live and that is named after him. Well, probably after his daddy, or his granddaddy. Whatever. In 1927, Charlotte is about to elope with a married man, only her daddy found out and put a stop to it. So he breaks up with her at a big garden party, and next thing you know, his hand and head are chopped off and with a meat cleaver, Charlotte is covered in his blood, and the murder was never solved, and it’s 37 years later, and Charlotte is the old crazy lady in a decaying mansion who kids sing rhymes about because even though she got away with it, everyone knows she did it, oh and also they’re about to tear down her mansion to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so she asks her cousin to come help her out of this jam. Because with daddy long dead and her particular social circumstances, Hollisport doesn’t really belong to the Hollises anymore.

The rest of the movie is Charlotte slowly going crazy as time and circumstance and the people around her gradually close in on the last tattered shreds of her sanity. It’s a hell of a character study, and even if the best acting in the 1960s does not hold a candle to the best acting today, it still runs rings around average acting today. Plus, I’ll always be a fan of psychological thrillers from the point of view of the crazy person, because it’s impossible to know what’s actually going on. And that is my favorite way to watch a movie, not actually knowing what comes next. (Which I sort of did in this case, but also sort of did not. And that in itself is an impressive piece of storytelling, when even spoilers can be subverted.)

[1] The her in question regarding the line, “she’s got Bette Davis eyes”
[2] Bette Davis’s, I mean

The Addiction (1995)

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It’s been a while since I have been faced with categories this easy to remember. I have never heard of The Addiction, but boy howdy did it meet the intersection of vampires as scare and 1990s as style. You know how Clerks screams indie comedy, from the dawn of independent cinema? This is like that, but for thesis horror, here defined as “horror for people who would never admit that horror has value, so I made an art house flick instead.”

So what’s actually happening is Lili Taylor is an NYU philosophy student, grappling with important topics like who, at a generation’s remove from the events, was the actual bad guy in Vietnam? But between walking around town to the soothing strains of gangster rap, she gets introduced to heroin.[1] And then she takes the heroin to each of her friends and classmates and professors who she is also dating, and gets them addicted to heroin as well. At one point, a dude tries to tell her about Jesus, and he does not get addicted to heroin, but neither does she quit her addiction and move to the suburbs.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

Wait. You said this was a thesis horror movie dressed up as art house drama. That’s just purely arthouse drama. What gives?

Oh. Crap. Um. Let me do some quick rewrites here. Um, let’s see. Okay, what if she’s bitten by a vampire, and then wanders around doing soliloquies in dark sunglasses about who the bad guy really is, but also turning all of her classmates and friends and professors who she is also dating into vampires? And the vampirism is a metaphor for heroin, you see.

Ah. Yes, that would fix it.

Well there you go then!

[1] Or maybe meth, but I think it’s too early to have been movie meth, even in movie New York.

The Bad Seed

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Podcast movie, as I try to blow through some of them and reduce my enormous queue of podcasts to listen to. Scare was creepy children, and style was 1950s, and they claim (I think accurately) that The Bad Seed is literally the only movie that fits this intersection. Not least because I think about someone making a movie about a remorseless sociopath child in the 1950s, and honestly I’m stunned that even one such movie was made. It just doesn’t hit the same when you see it made in the ’70s, America had a much lower opinion of itself by then.

Imagine a 1950s family. You know the type. Father is a colonel in the army (probably) and went off to fight the Nazis, but that was a while ago, and now it’s all white picket fences. Mother has just the loveliest drink service that she rolls around the house to entertain people. Daughter is blonde-with-pigtails and practicing the piano on the regular, when she isn’t winning every prize at her private school.

Well. Almost every prize.

Before you know it, the little boy who won the penmanship medal is drowned off the dock at the town’s lake, the medal is missing, and wasn’t Rhoda acting ever so peculiarly toward him earlier that day? Alas, father is off to Washington for work for a month, and mother is left to deal with her simmering suspicions, her psychology-obsessed landlady, just the creepiest handyman ever, and the increasingly inebriated mother of the dead boy, by herself.

The acting initially came off as “1950s”, which, fair enough, but after a while it was stranger than that, with so many random monologues, but then I remembered this was based on a play, and I’m sure with the script lifted directly from the play. Aside from the question of what actually happened on the dock, the movie mostly concerns itself with examining the question of nature vs nurture, with every character coming down firmly on the side of nurture, and the title taking the opposite position.

Honestly, it’s pretty good, if you can tolerate 1950s acting. As with when I started this review, I really am quite surprised it ever got made, though. I know the ’50s were not the rose garden of American perfection that certain political parties would have me believe they were, but I really didn’t know 1950s America was aware of this fact.

But also: stay after the credits for actress on actress spanking. That is to say: not the characters, definitely the actors. 70 years ago certainly was A Time!

Village of the Damned (1960)

I haven’t even gotten to the end of the previous episode yet, to find out how we got to this movie, although I plan to provide an update in the footnote[1]. But it turns out even though I knew like 35-45% of the story, I had never actually seen Village of the Damned. And to be fair, I probably would have told you I knew more like 75% of the story, before I saw it.

It shares an astounding amount of DNA with WandaVision. See, there’s this village that’s cut off from the outside world, and before you know it, some magical children are the most important thing happening. If you leave out the witch and the android, it’s practically identical? Okay, but seriously, there’s this village where everyone falls asleep, including people from outside who get too close. After they just as mysteriously wake up, bam, wait a couple months and it turns out all the ladies in town are pregnant. Even the ones whose husbands had been at sea for a year, or who were quite adamant about being virgins.

Then, all the kids are creepy blond/es with glowing eyes who grow up too fast and know too much, and have other probably not magical after all properties that it would be a spoiler to mention, and basically it’s a race to analyze whether this is about the recent Nazi menace, or Cold War paranoia, or fear of the incoming generation, or what other underlying existential terror the writers and directors were grappling with.

The glowing eyed menacing stare part is pretty great, until you realize any time it’s happening, it’s a freeze frame. Even with that, though, I liked it. You can tell why it’s a seminal classic of the “evil children” horror subgenre.

[1] It turns out to have been style British, and scare Altered. I understand why they tried to stay away from werewolves, but at the same time, I’m not convinced the children nor the village were altered in any meaningful way. Oh well. Still a pretty great movie!

Nóz w wodzie

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As you have perhaps guessed by the title, Mary and I finally watched another movie in the so-called “weekly” letterboxd dot com challenge, about which I’ve said more than enough previously. This, the seventh in the sequence and representing the beginning of November[1], was Polish Film School[2] week. I had (of course) already seen most of these, but the first film by newcomer Roman Polanski caught my eye, and we decided to give it a whirl.[3]

Knife in the Water is the beautifully shot story of a middle-aged married couple who pick up a young hitchhiker and invite him on their overnight sailboat trip, while all three constantly pick at each other. Also, the hitchhiker has a fancy(?) knife.

Okay, that was a little dismissive. It’s a three-person character study of clashing personalities in tight spaces, even though the cinematography is ironically full of open skies and broad vistas most of the time. It’s not clear why the husband dislikes the hitchhiker so much, their initial encounter notwithstanding, and it’s even less clear why he invited the youth onto the boat, nor yet why the hitchhiker accepted. Nevertheless, the premise leads to simmering emotional and eventually physical tension that both promise to boil over before the credits… well, okay, it’s 1962 and end credits weren’t a thing yet. Allow me to correct myself to “promise to boil over before the screen fades to black.”

Was it good? I believe it was. Was it in fact the first Roman Polanski movie I’ve ever seen? It was not, but only because of Rosemary’s Baby a short while back. …which, come to think of it, shares this movie’s paradoxical claustrophobia.

[1] sigh
[2] Polish Film Movement might have been more explanatory, week title deciders
[3] To translate, I was able to find exactly one of the movie options on a streaming service I have access to, and it happened to have name recognition as a bonus.

Miracolo a Milano

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The theme for week three of the letterboxd dot com challenge was Italian Neorealism. For the uninitiated (which includes me, for example), that is a specific period in post-war Italian cinema that focuses on reality and daily life stories with no heroes. So from the list available, we picked Miracle in Milan, which is pretty much the opposite of those things? I may have done a bad job.

It is also worth noting that, wait, why is it so far past your week two review? The answer is, haha, we’ve been sick and got behind. Hoping to catch up over a few days? We’ll see!

So anyway, this movie is weird[1]. Like really weird. There’s this kid, Totò, who after experiencing a bizarre childhood punctuated by a cabbage patch adoption and multiplication tables, comes out of the orphanage as a relentlessly cheerful and giving adult who immediately finds himself in a homeless encampment[2], and proceeds to organize it into a pretty cozy and happy shantytown. (I haven’t yet gotten to where the movie is especially weird, to be clear, but saying more would go deep into spoiler towne, whose inhabitants are far less cheerful a bunch than these were.)

I guess the neorealism part is in the characters themselves rather than the plot, which shortly after I ended my synopsis above (about 15 minutes into a 90 minute movie) goes so far off the rails my metaphor is impossible to complete, but the words “wishing dove” and “timely to modern eyes class warfare” are involved, as are the words “ghostly top hat stampede”. But the characters, I was saying, the characters have a lot of daily life reality. There’s the rich family that has fallen on hard times but still has a nanny (also now homeless, natch), who spends most of their time in the shantytown trying to bilk lire from the populace. There’s the really grumpy outsider guy who keeps getting in fights with everyone else. There’s the black man and white women who arrived at the same time and are clearly mutually interested, but who keep staying away from each other because I guess Italy also had miscegenation laws?[3]

And there are more. What I guess I am impressed by, as an avowed watcher of movies that would not want to be called films, is how many of the characters in a cast of hundreds were, okay, not fully realized, but at least memorable. I’m not sure if that’s just difficult to accomplish in more plot-centric movies, or if we’ve lost something along the way, but I bet it’s some of both.

All the same, I’m glad my entry into this subgenre of film history was as plot-dense as it was, because I’m not sure how much I would have enjoyed something that was all aimless and bleak like the description of Italian neorealism reads to me. I know I said “entry”, and while I use the term advisedly, one of the other movies we contemplated, The Bicycle Thieves, is by the same writer and director, and I can’t help being a little curious. (I mean, it will not be capital-w weird, I already know that much. But still.)

[1] Also, I never saw Life is Beautiful, but I can tell you with high confidence that `the guy who made it has this movie as one of his major influences. Seriously, look it up later and prove me right.
[2] If you see the wry humor in that, trust me, so did the filmmakers.
[3] That plotline ends in a way that would be spectacularly cringey if I were to describe it, but in its own context was both progressive and earnedly hilarious.

Darling (2015)

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The most important thing I can probably say about Darling, I said to my wife a few minutes ago. “Oh no,” I said, “I forgot to finish my movie [that I was watching yesterday]. …wait. No, I did finish it.”

So anyway, there’s the 20-something house caretaker lady adjacent to what I think was a New York skyline, and she’s told by the person hiring her that it’s “the oldest house in the city, rumors of hauntings, last caretaker young lady jumped off the roof, haha, I shouldn’t be telling you this.” But no worries, she stays anyway. And the house is appropriately spooky and noisy at night, with lots of loud, 1-5 frame cutaways from her trying to sleep to disturbing close-up faces under blaring random noises.

Later, a businessman on the street returns to her an upside-down cross on a necklace that she found in a drawer and then left in the drawer, because she had just dropped it[1]. Also, there’s a narrow door at the end of an implausibly equally narrow hallway that she cannot open.  And the drain in the shower looks dissolved away by acid, more of a portal to the unknown than a proper drain. And then stuff starts getting weird.

And you know what? I should be there for all of this! Well, except the random loudness. I think the single most annoying thing was the “look what I learned in art film school!” moment when she was [spoiler removed] with a hacksaw, and the underlying sounds were street construction equipment instead of what that would actually have sounded like. But I digress.

My problem here is, there’s no payoff. Was she slowly going crazy because she’s imbalanced, or because the house? Did almost anything that happened actually happen, or was it all because she was slowly going crazy? Was the creepy room at the end of the legitimately creepy hallway[2] a real thing, or just some room with a stuck door? They’re calling it a paranoid freakout, and, I guess it was that. I just don’t know what character(s) my sympathies should lie with, or really, frankly, almost any aspect of what happened. You would think a 78 minute movie would not manage to be too long, and yet here we are.

Oh well, can’t win ’em all.

[1] That is, she shouldn’t have been able to drop it on the street because she returned it to the drawer. Get it? Spooky!
[2] Seriously though. 10-15 foot white hallway, culminating in a door maybe 1.5 thin people wide, and the hallway is exactly the same width as the door, with no other doors along the sides, and only a sharp corner to the rest of the house at the entrance end of the hallway. I think that creepy, creepy, “probably they built it for the movie because who would ever have that creepy of a hallway?” hallway was at least two thirds of the film’s appeal for me[3].
[3] I mean, even before I decided I didn’t like the movie in the first place; the 2/3 comment is supposed to highlight how effectively creepy it was as a visual, not how little i liked the rest of the movie. (It’s more like 95% of the appeal after the fact.)

Much Ado about Nothing (2012)

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MV5BMTgxNjQ0MjAwMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjI1NDEyOQ@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Legend has it that when Joss Whedon was filming The Avengers, he was forced by union rules into a two week break. During that break, he decided to adapt, direct, and score a Shakespearean comedy, because that’s just the kind of guy he is. (Okay, technically, probably only the principle photography happened during the fortnight and the rest came before and/or after, depending on what would make sense. But I have no way of knowing it didn’t all happen during his vacation, so!) It being the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death, the Alamo Drafthouse has been showing lots of adaptations lately, and Monday night, off we went to sup on the fruit of this legend.

Despite my utter lack of qualification to review Shakespeare, I’m kind of forced to by circumstance. The acting is as good as you’d expect[1], and the direction was modern and noirish, both of which displayed some… well, I can’t tell if flaw is right, but it probably is, and that’s my English Lit degree focussed on mid-millennium British masters bias showing. So, let’s say, displayed some flaws in Bill’s work and then see if I prove my case.

Much Ado about Nothing has two plots. In the first and far superior one, two acid-tongued frenemies reunite after the fellow of the pair returns from campaigns abroad, and their friends trick them into either falling in love or admitting their real feelings for each other[2]. As far as I’m concerned, this story has no problems and is basically 100% hilarious. In the second story (which contrary to my ordering appears to be the main plot of the thing and the source of the title), the prince sets up his best friend with their host’s daughter after the friend has fallen in love at first sight, but the prince’s bastard[3] brother arbitrarily decides to interfere in the pre-wedding proceedings.

That story… well, first it does the “we love each other after five minutes because we’re both so very pretty” thing that Shakespeare parodied in Romeo and Juliet, only this time he plays it straight, which while not a story-breaker is certainly an odd choice. But then when John the Bastard enacts his evil plan to make it look like the host’s daughter bangs random people on the verandah every night, the prince’s friend doesn’t just break up with her, he publicly humiliates her at the altar. Which, you know, some people are assholes, and that’s fine. But her father joins in on the humiliation, and that’s less fine, although I’m forced to acknowledge that virginity in the 1500s was more important than family, however insane that sounds.

But least fine of all is that she wants him back and everyone sets about proving her innocence to win him back. I mean, the innocence, sure, but she wants him back??? That’s too skeevy, even for the 1500s.

But okay, that’s Shakespeare and the 1500s, and what can you do? It’s central to the plot, and however delightful Benedick and Beatrice are, whether in banter or askew courtship, there’s not enough there to fill both reels. The biggest failure was Joss’s alone. At the big wedding scene in the finale, the prince’s friend (now penitent and set to marry the host’s other female ward by way of apology for embarrassing the first daughter unto death[4]) says that he’ll marry whoever he’s been asked to marry, even “were she an Ethiope”, while the camera lingers on a black lady standing nearby, who we had never seen before and, the movie ending some five minutes later, were certainly never to see again. And it’s like, I get what he was going for, “look how uncomfortable this line that Shakespeare wrote is, you guys!” But it just didn’t work. I can’t really explain why, scenes that were far worse have worked far better for me[5], but after my gasp of shocked laughter acknowledging what Whedon had pointed out, I couldn’t really agree that it was worth the scene existing.

But these are, if not nitpicks, certainly neither of them enough to detract from how wonderfully presented the so-called backup plotline was. Lovely film, would watch again.

[1] I mean, yes because they’re all Whedon alums, but also because it’s Shakespeare. I assume it’s that people won’t submit slipshod quality if it’s the bard rather than that his writing is so good, people are forced to be better actors.
[2] Reader’s / viewer’s choice, really. Take your pick.
[3] Bastards are evil by virtue of their ungodly births. It is known.
[4] Because, 1500s. JFAM, the past, what is wrong with you?
[5] Tropic Thunder springs frequently to mind. “What do you mean, ‘you people’?” “…what do you mean, ‘you people’?!”