Now THAT is scary. Also, there’s a mysterious figure in the background.

The Horror of Being Human.

The scariest thing in this movie is Helen Hunt’s face.

Hunt is Jackie, married to Detective Harper (Jon Tenney), with a teen son Connor (Judah Lewis). And she’s just had an affair that has driven her family apart irreconcilably. And something supernatural is going on in her house.

I SEE YOU starts as a generic supernatural horror (doors closing by themselves, TV turned on, records playing; Detective Harper even wakes up one night having wet his bed mysteriously!), and ends somewhere completely different. In a good way and a bad way.

THE GOOD

I SEE YOU moseys along its supernatural path with a certain throughline: boys are being abducted mysteriously, and the detective on the case also has a son in the age range of the abductees; his wife’s affair keeps the family dynamic estranged, and she believes that the unexplained occurrences around the house are the fault of their son acting up against her. Until midway, when the movie suddenly re-visits the whole first act from a different point of view, surprising us with its daring recant of what it was trying to set up as supernatural all along! But this turn is actually more dire than anything from the spirit world. Because ghosties don’t exist – but real-life ghouls do.

Written by first-timer Devon Graye and directed by relative newcomer Adam Randall (iBOY), with atmospheric soundtrack dissonance by William Arcane, I SEE YOU shows us how humanity is never all black and white, but shades of selfishness. Everyone is doing something that they feel benefits them, in the long or short run. And everyone is wrong. We feel we should root for certain characters and then our allegiances are turned on a twist, but then we realize that the person we are now rooting for is still doing something wrong. It’s the horror of being human.

The best scene has to be where Jackie must seek help from her husband – to bury the now-dead body of her lover! How it came to this blighted juncture is screenwriting gold: the Lover appeared at her door unannounced, is injured by a mug from the roof (thrown by son? by a haunting entity?), and is hidden in the basement until Jackie returns from taking her son to school. While in the basement, Lover is clubbed on the head by an unseen assailant, dies. Jackie returns to find him dead, thinking it was complications from the original wound – and her Detective husband is the only person she can realistically tell without her being dragged through the judicial system as a murder suspect!

And when we see the murder from the other point of view, the twists start coming thick and dirty.

THE BAD

It could be construed as jarring – the sudden left turn from supernatural horror to home invasion thriller – if you invested your emotions into viewing a certain genre of movie and are now being forced to watch a genre you never clicked on. It wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, but I felt the skid marks. Movie also introduces an eccentricity we’ve only encountered on the dark web and those disturbing YouTube cautionary tales – phrogging. (Home invaders who surreptitiously squat in your basement or attic, avail themselves of your wares when you’re out, and leave after a short period without being detected. And yes, their minute effect on your household would look “supernatural.”)

Mindy (Libe Barer) is the veteran phrogger – always filming and narrating, as is this wastrel generation’s wont – with Alec (Owen Teague) tagging along as the phrogger-in-training, whose boredom drives him to be as intrusive as possible without being discovered. It’s the horror of being human. We can now put a face to the doors slamming and records playing – but really, who would sleep through someone pissing on them? Unless you’re into that shit, Detective…

And is it too clever-clever then, for the family to JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE a frog mask lying around, for Alec to wear in trailers, as if he might be an apparition?

THE UGLY

Uh, Helen… Look, I don’t want to shame the poor woman, who is only succumbing to the ravages of time, like we all will (she was 56 at the time of filming), however, she always looked a little Romulan, even when young, and those features have been accentuated – her tilted eyes, the downward lines on the sides of her mouth, making her look like a puppet, and her dour, haggard resting face. YouTuber FoundFlix describes Hunt being in “a drugged-out haze” – but he’s being kind. Unless the drug he means is Botox.

And honestly, I don’t know whether that IS Botox or the lack thereof. Her face just looks… scary. It’s the horror of being human.

So the movie succeeds on all fronts.

END

If the kids won’t eat the Happy Meal, get the Happy Meal that eats the kids!

He pronouned me…

The children of a small town are terrorized by a demon, until they realize they can simply beat the shit out of it.

Stephen King’s novel It was a television B-movie in 1990, starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown, with a Cagney-gangster voice that is now dated and goofy. This big screen remake puts the IT back in “holy sh-IT,” as an eerie, fearsome Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) stalks teens in Derry, Maine, abducting them to feed on their fear.

IT opens in 1988, with young Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott) losing his paper boat down a gutter, where Pennywise suddenly peeps from the depths, tempting Georgie to come get his boat, assuring him that, “you’ll float too; everything floats down here.” It’s an iconic scene that is even reproduced well in the 1990 version, but then—JESUS CHRIST! Did the clown just amputate that kid’s arm?!

Our backbones straighten in our seats immediately, as Pennywise sprouts piranha-teeth and bites Georgie’s arm clean off! The visual of Georgie trying to crawl from the gutter with his lower arm severed, gouts of blood mixing with the rainfall in the street, jolts us to the realization that this sinister movie is going where its 1990 version feared to tread.

Director Andy Muschietti (MAMA, 2013) and screenwriters Chase Palmer, Cary Joji Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman dare to take on King’s gargantuan 1986 novel, reworking it as an R-rated chiller, with more blood, swearing and latent child porn than its predecessor. They’ve eschewed King’s non-chronological device of the kids as adults recalling their youth in flashback, and simply rolled with the kids’ tale. The kids’ futures are in a distant movie, as revealed by the film’s final title card: IT: CHAPTER ONE.

No matter the excellent production values of this remake, and its meticulous attention to King-ian detail and tone, Pennywise’s appearances bug me. Y’see, it is discovered that the clown is the manifestation of a demon, a supernatural entity that sustains itself on children’s fear. Why then, does it need to cajole Georgie into the drain? And in human English, no less? It’s the same intrinsic problem as that of the 1990 version, where Pennywise Curry boasted of being “an eater of worlds – and children!” (Like it’s harder to eat children than worlds?) Pennywise Skarsgard fares no better with his dialogue, “…and I’ll feast on your flesh while I feed on your fear!” (Uh, could you mansplain that gastronomic process, please?), the problem being not what Pennywise is saying, but that he speaks at all. Put it this way: do you converse with your food before you eat it?

Even so, Skarsgard’s personification of Pennywise eats Tim Curry’s alive; it’s almost on a Heath Ledger Joker level, twitching and oddly-accented, with inhuman contortions and spasms. And it is much scarier than Curry’s fruity rendition.

Georgie’s death would spur his older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) to bear a vendetta against whatever took him. Bill informally leads a group of 13-year-old outcast kids dubbed The Losers’ Club by the school bullies. Of the seven kids, only four can be focused on: Bill (because – leader), Mike (Chosen Jacobs, because – black), Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor, because – Meat Loaf meets Jack Black) and Beverly (Sophia Lillis, because – so startlingly Amy Adams I couldn’t tear my eyes away!). The rest of the three pasty white kids (Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer and Wyatt Oleff) are interchangeable pasty white kids.

Movie Night or Weiner Party?

School bully is mulleted Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton), who is later possessed by Pennywise to kill all the Losers– But waitaminute! Did he really need to be “possessed” to go on a killing spree? We meet this guy as he is about to knife-carve his name into Ben’s belly fat. Is being Pennywise’s puppet even relevant if this guy is already a reg’lar homicidal maniac anyway? And if Henry is killing the kids, how is Pennywise going to benefit from their fear? Or does it get channeled to Penny through some grandfather clause? I’m getting too cynical to watch horror movies aimed at kids…

At least Henry is a steady presence as a bully, while the mean girls who bully Beverly for being a slut are only plot devices to drive her into the quivering embrace of the Losers. Then we never see them again. Any wonder they insinuate she’s hot. She’s smokin’! And we don’t question the pharmacist flirting with her, as creeps are always sniffing around girls of her carriage (14 going on 24).

Fat Ben is smitten with gorgeous Beverly, and writes her a secret poem. And even though Beverly accrues intimate connections with Ben, she still hooks up with the skinny kid in the end, meaning the movie undermines its own message vis a vis the Losers’ Club.

In the novel and the 1990 movie, Mike is the historian on Derry; in 2017 it is Ben who discovers via his research at the library (that’s a building with books in it, chillun!) that every 27 years a spate of disappearances in Derry heralds the return of the child-killing demon. (No small coincidence that this version of IT comes 27 years on the heels of its predecessor! Dun-dun-daaaah!)

After Pennywise appears to each kid as their darkest fear (a leper, a werewolf, a painting come to life, Mike’s parents burning to death), they join Bill’s obsessive vendetta, deducing that Pennywise lives under the sewer plant, marching to meet him face to kabuki. Mike takes an air-gun (the type his grandfather brains sheep with, and chastises Mike for being skittish about using on the sheep: “You can either be out here – or in there with them”), because anything used to kill sheep is also effective on supernatural daemons if it gives your character a good arc.

Stephen King has a thing of pitting his characters against danger with no weapons (THE STAND comes to mind.) The walking-towards-danger-with-no-weapons trope is trying enough, but when his characters under extraordinary duress don’t take the opportunity to arm themselves with extraordinary weapons, it borders on silly.

Don’t hold your breath for the child orgy, Movie Maniacs, even though it would sit serendipitously in this gritty depiction. Beverly’s visions involve excessive blood because her darkest fear is womanhood. The advances of men, including her father, keep her fearful of developing into a woman. To conquer that fear, she must make love. Since she loves all her Friend-Zone guys equally, she must engage all of them! But again, the Gutless MPAA closes its minds to anything related to procreation or sexuality. Murder good. Love bad… Gangbang awesome!

Nonetheless, Beverly becomes the focal point of the boys’ spelunking adventures. Though the interchangeable pasty white kids were terrorized by visions that gave them opportunities to escape (the headless body chasing one of them is actually pretty scary), Pennywise just grabs Beverly by the Amy Adams, with no chance of her wriggling free. But then he doesn’t kill her or eat her, just takes her away to float with a bunch of other children. IT has officially devolved to damsel-in-distress trope. As all the boys trip over their knob-ends riding to her rescue like knights in shining armor. (This plot point lends credence to Bill’s theory that his little brother might be alive, yet every time we see Georgie, he is obviously dead – which sparks our pondering on Basic Supernatural Rules, some of which are definitely being contravened here.)

I understand the metaphor that the less the kids fear Pennywise, the less they have to use physical weapons, yet it is still anticlimactic to see a demon bargaining, “I can take Bill alone, or I can take all of you!” when it can easily stop with the talking and just Do It already!

IT is for kids to identify as heroes, to imagine themselves as those brave kids onscreen conquering their fears, all making a pact to return in 27 years when the evil rises up again. And when Beverly will definitely be legal…

END

How many B-Actors does it take to screw up a screenplay?

The B-Actors’ Club.

Back in 1990, STEPHEN KING’S IT was a reasonably successful and moderately enjoyable TV horror production, using B-Actors and basic practical special effects. After the release of its formidable 2017 remake, the 1990 version looks like a TV production using B-Actors and basic practical special effects.

Stephen King’s original novel, It, was one of his many epic masterpieces, and the filmmakers (director/co-writer Tommy Lee Wallace and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen) bravely attempt to bring that 1000+ page book to life on the small screen. Originally presented as a mini-series that spanned over three hours in two parts, it suffers the fate of every production made for the small screen – it LOOKS small screen! There just isn’t any substitute for that cool 24-frames-per-second cinematic grit. And it is dating exponentially. Each year, IT will look worse, as filmic technology ramps ever upwards. And the lackluster acting and editing and TV music and excessive fade-to-blacks (to accommodate commercial breaks) just add to the horror. And not in that pants-browning way.

IT follows a group of seven adults who were school friends, brought together again after 30 years, to defeat a recurring evil in their old home town. After a rash of killings that bear the hallmarks of that original evil, the seven uproot their successful careers (save one of them who stayed in town) to fulfill their oath and return to Derry, Maine (Stephen King’s fictional catchall county).

The movie frames the story from the adults’ perspective; as each is called, they flashback to that fateful summer 30 years ago in 1960, remembering their terrifying childhood encounters with the inexplicable It, represented as Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Tim Curry, eating scenery like sushi).

It is these flashback scenes that almost save the movie, as the chemistry between the seven teens is palpable; chemistry which the adult B-actors cannot seem to recreate. And no wonder – just cast your gaze on the wealth of talent: John Ritter (stutterer-pratfaller from THREE’S COMPANY), Harry Anderson (insipid judge on NIGHT COURT), Richard Masur (renowned “That Guy” from innumerable movies), Tim Reid (uh, this guy isn’t even a That Guy), Dennis Christopher (his coolness in BREAKING AWAY was a looong time ago), Annette O’Toole (the poor man’s hard-9, once Lana Lang in SUPERMAN III), and hey! there’s Richard Thomas (forever John-Boy Walton) as Bill, the group’s nominal leader, sporting a ponytail that even Steven Segal would call “kinda gay.”

Masur is the only adult who never makes it back to town, opting to slit his wrists in the tub rather than face It again. It’s TV, so reactions have to be homogenized, thus his wife discovers his body and reacts like she’s seeing a bad floral arrangement rather than the last pulses of blood exiting her husband’s veins.

Their kid counterparts are Jonathan Brandis (for Richard Thomas), his startling eyes reminding us of a young Jeff Fahey, Emily Perkins as Beverly (for Annette O’Toole), Adam Faraizl as Eddie the asthmatic (for Christopher), Marlon Taylor as Mike (for Tim Reid), the token black kid, Ben Heller as Stan (admittedly as vanilla as Masur), Seth Green as Richie (yes, THE Seth Green, Dr. Evil’s son, for Anderson), and Brandon Crane as bullied, fat Ben (for Ritter), who doesn’t really look fat but “built.”

Remember leafing through your dad’s Playboys in 1960?

The kids do such a fine job over their adult counterparts, we often wish the story would simply stay in flashback. (The 2017 remake would actually do this – tell the story in linear time, with the kids’ tale.  And only in that film’s final title will we read: IT: CHAPTER ONE…)

One by one we see the kids’ visions of Pennywise. He first appears to Bill’s young brother Georgie, in an iconic scene, when Georgie loses a paper boat down a drain. Pennywise appears inside the drain, offers Georgie a floating balloon, tempts him with his lost boat, then sprouts jagged teeth and drags Georgie down where “you’ll float too!” It is Georgie’s death that spurs Bill to revenge, and keeps his resolve strong 30 years later to face It and kill It.

One thing about this Warner Bros. production: they really work their rain machines overtime. Georgie follows his boat along the gutter puddles in heavy rain – while the sun slants shadows onto the ground from off-camera somewhere. Georgie’s funeral – in the rain. And later, while everyone is indoors – it starts to rain! We paid for this machine – and by jingo, we’re going to use it!

Beverly (O’Toole) is in an abusive relationship with a caricature of a misogynist businessman, and it is when she flashes back, we realize her father (Frank C. Turner) was abusive too, the movie reinforcing the psychobabble that women always seek mates who reflect their father; her childhood vision is one of blood that no one else can see, bursting from her sink and drenching her bathroom. When King goes cliché with the female coming-of-age metaphors, he soaks in it!

Richie (Seth Green) sees It as a werewolf (after being scared by the film I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF), and his reaction to being grabbed from behind by wolf claws is hilariously inept. Guess young Seth hadn’t finished his acting lessons yet. Or he was given advice by the director, “Imagine you’re seeing, like, a bad floral arrangement!”

Young Mike (who looks like Joe Morton) is the historian, researching the disappearance of people from Derry. He puts two and two together and comes up with Pennywise, the manifestation of an ancient evil that visits the town every 30 years to feast on the fear of children. And their brains, I guess.

“Honest, sir! Your balloon animals are not as distracting as your receding hairline!”

As much as talented Tim Curry is praised for his “horrifying” performance of Pennywise, Bill Skarsgard’s 2017 personification of Pennywise makes Curry look like an ass clown. And the movie is filled with lame reactions to supernatural phenomena: The kids look through an old photo album and see the photos come to life, showing Pennywise dancing down the street and into closeup in the photo – suddenly his three-dimensional claw shoots out of the photo album, grabbing at them! They scream and slam the book down. Then they, uh, just keep sitting there. And they seem pretty okay with the fact that a demon hand just reached out of a book where the pictures came to life! So, uh, no running screaming into the forest with your heads exploding in terror or anything? Okaaay…

Fat Ben pours his heart out in unrequited love to Beverly, in an anonymous poem. She thinks it’s the sexy kid, Bill. In this 1990 version, Ben looks “tough” with Beverly a head shorter than him, so it is understandable how she might be attracted to him if she found out he liked her. There is a better casting decision made in the 2017 version, where Ben is a short, tubby kid and Beverly is a stunner who must see through his physical appearance to the poet beneath.

Which brings us to the child orgy scene that isn’t in either version. So put your pants back on.

Then there’s the school bully, Henry Bowers (Jarred Blancard – not to be confused with Ray Brower, the dead kid in STAND BY ME), who christens the kids The Losers’ Club. The kids’ sequences are set in 1960, so the bullies get to “nigger” the black kid – probably one of the last times it was used in a film not about slavery. And not a Quentin Tarantino movie.

I love the way an officer busts the kids near the sewer entrance (where they’ve tracked Pennywise) and tells them alarmingly, “Another little girl was killed down by the river,” then instead of prohibiting them from being near the river, he advises, “If you come down here, come together like you are now.” What?! I guess murderers used to stick to the code of Don’t Kill Kids In Groups.

Pennywise grabs them in the sewer and boasts, “I am the eater of worlds. And of children.” — Uh, waitaminute… isn’t eating worlds MUCH harder than eating children? So shouldn’t “children” be before “worlds.” You don’t just tack on an easier task as if it’s an exclamation point. And why would a supernatural entity boast about its big mouth anyway? Just eat them if you really need them for sustenance. Why should this demon even consider the children important enough to communicate with, using English, no less?  I’ve found that things you can’t communicate with are MUCH scarier. Take a lion, for example: it won’t stop to boast or give you the respect of talking to you – it will fix you in its gaze, then pounce and maul you before your nervous system can even register you are dead; you will consciously see your own entrails being torn into its mouth, it will devour you that fast. That is more horrifying than any guy in baggy trousers telling me how great he is.

In the present, adult Henry Bowers (Michael Cole) is freed from a nuthouse by Pennywise, to go after the Losers as they close in on Pennywise’s sewer headquarters. Henry was more vital in the novel, while in the context of a movie, he ends up one of those inane characters that doesn’t progress the plot or the throughline; he stabs Mike, then is stabbed himself, and exits stage right.

John Ritter’s agent tried everything.

The adults find themselves in the sewer 30 years later. Bill (Thomas) explains, “It wakes up every 30 years and it feeds. And to feed, it needs to take on a physical form.” They go armed with, uh, Beverly’s slingshot… It is 1990, when automatic weapons can be purchased over the counter in America. But slingshots are fine against a supernatural demon.

Eddie (Christopher) confesses before their last trek, “I could never sleep with anyone I didn’t love and I never totally loved anyone except you guys.” Again, perish all thoughts this would lead to a handie by Beverly. We’re on TV.

I looked up anti-climactic in the dictionary – it said, “See the finale of STEPHEN KING’S IT on TV.” In the bowels of the sewer, the gang encounters a giant stop-motion spider-thingy. (Hooray for that lost Harryhausen art form!) It takes us awhile to realize this – is – the – demon. Excuse the pun, but This Is IT! A slow, hissing/roaring behemoth that rears up on its hind appendages and shines light on the Losers from its thorax, that hypnotizes them – until Beverly slingshots it! Only wings it. But it really discombobulates the spider-thingy. Who knew a slingshot would be better than a machine-gun?

Beverly resolutely grabs her spent rock and mumbles a prayer: “Please God, don’t let me miss again!” Uh, waitaminute – in a universe where It exists, where numerous kids have died due to It, where Stan suicided because of It, is it really any use praying to a god that obviously has some kind of master plan happening with It? Would Beverly have missed a second time if that narcissistic God didn’t hear his holier-than-thou name mentioned? “Oh, I’ll just dump my original plan of having It murder all of Derry, because Miss Sparkle-Britches over there said my name, and God how I love hearing my name!”

But it isn’t the slingshot that deals the death blow – all the Losers together attack this spider-thingy and rip out its heart with their bare hands. Geez, I’m still thinking how much faster this would have been with just one machine gun…

If you think I’m being too hard on the effects of the day, even Tim Curry (tragically confined to a wheelchair after a stroke in 2012) saucily comments on the IT remake, to big laughs from his audience: “I hope they make the end better, because on TV, I turned into a sort of giant spider [laughs] …and it was not very scary [laughs] … or convincing!”

Insipid subplot involving Bill’s wife (Olivia Hussey) being captured by the spider and cocooned along with other victims, like in ALIEN – meaning the person isn’t dead or eaten, just fulfilling the damsel-in-distress trope. Story furiously ramps toward conclusion like a TV movie tying up all its loose ends before a toothpaste commercial.

Then the toothpaste commercial.

END

“I guess the joke’s on me. I tried breaking my legs to get out of this production,
but they just wrote it into the script!”

Back to the Further.

I saw a man that was choking there,
I guess he couldn’t breathe…
— Alice Cooper, “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry.”

Old lady wanders around in darkness. Gets startled by people trying to kill her. Is this INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 or a visit to Granny’s?

Quinn (Stefanie Scott) is a sweet, smooth teen whose mother has just died, and Quinn would like to speak to her again. (Uh, someone should really explain “death” to this chick.) She visits retired old psychic Elise (Lin Shaye), who proclaims she doesn’t visit “the other side” anymore because it’s too dangerous. Whereupon she visits the other side, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again.

Dermot Mulroney is Cool Dad, Quinn’s widower father, who becomes alarmed for Quinn when oily footprints start attacking her in the night. They seek out Elise again, who says she doesn’t visit “the other side” because it’s too dangerous. Whereupon she visits the other side, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again. Am I sensing a pattern here?

She reports that waiting on the other side is a Man Who Can’t Breathe (Michael Reid MacKay, dandied up in mummy attire with a breath mask), who Vaders around in the fifth dimension and tries to drag salubrious Quinn in with him, being all insidious about it. Finding a crack in the dimension when Quinn called out to her dead mother, he’s trying to force his presence into Quinn so he can breathe again. That’s not so wrong, is it? Although, even with his current incorporeal ectoplasmic insubstantiation, he’s still doing a bangup job of leaving oily footprints, grabbing people, possessing people and ruining Dermot Mulroney’s serious drama career.

Hooray! Clothes have souls too. And so do scarves!

Also, there’s a bride in black trying to kill Elise. Reason? I wasn’t listening.

INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 retains none of the ominous creep of the film that started the series in 2011. This one is a “prequel” (and we know what that means, n.b. refer to THE PHANTOM MENACE) and subsequently busies itself with inserting all those sign posts that will lead us to INSIDIOUS (i.e. the bride in black, the meeting of Elise and the two comic relief paranormal investigators, etc.)

Leigh Whannell, writer of the first two INSIDIOUS chapters, now takes on writing, directing and acting. A triple threat, who does a good job on this stock horror movie that is not so much frightening as silly. Alongside his stockier buddy Tucker (Angus Sampson), he is called in as the Plan B paranormal team when Elise visits the other side for the third time, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again. Whannell is the Gilligan to Tucker’s Skipper – for all the comic relief we don’t really need in this film struggling to find a tone, although he does manage to eke out a story which is a cut above CHAPTER 2.

Besides the crazy old neighbors, the boy who has a crush on Quinn and a small silent cameo for Ele Keats as Mom, there is also a love interest for wrinkled old Elise – a dead husband – whom she will encounter in the dark places she keeps wandering like a granny with dementia. Elise calls the dark dimension “The Further,” which is apparently a name she makes up off the top of her head. And we thought granny was getting better…

CHAPTER 3 suffers greatly from the absence of Rose Byrne and Ty Simpkins. Not so much Patrick Wilson, who “indicated” his way through CHAPTER 2 like a novice… And every time they say The Man Who Can’t Breathe, all I think about is Alice Cooper in a straitjacket.

After a relatively serious tone, movie ends with silly jocularity that folds it neatly into the first INSIDIOUS movie, as Elise jovially tells her two new paranormal pals that they should go into business together, and to start wearing ties, and walks off with them arm in arm. Just like the oily footprints on the hardwood floors, it leaves us feeling dirty, after visiting the other side, wandering around in darkness, being attacked, and coming back saying we’re never going to do that again.

END

Not all there.

It’s the biggest Andy Kaufman joke ever played on the public, not played by Andy Kaufman.

Joaquin Phoenix takes Hollywood on a long ride in I’M STILL HERE, by proclaiming he is retiring from acting and starting a career in rap music. And Hollywood buys it.

It’s a strange animal, this film, because it was originally sold as a “documentary” – of Phoenix’s transition from actor to rapper – but we would realize in retrospect, it is actually a “mockumentary.” A lampooning of Hollywood’s nervous twitch; its desire to be hip and au courant, its peer pressure to be cynical and well-informed, and – ironically – being shown up as none of the above. As BORAT exposed the red neck of Middle America, I’M STILL HERE exposes the gossipy shallowness of the entertainment community and their readiness to believe any outlandish jape if shot through the prism of a documentary camera.

Co-written by Phoenix and Casey Affleck, and directed/shot by Affleck, there is some early inkling of the jive, as they both rumble over this idea on camera. We would only join the dots on this encounter after viewing the movie.

Looking as smelly as his unkempt beard, Joaquin (with Casey and camera hot on his heels) dives into the role of tortured artiste who seeks a new direction in his unfulfilled life, stepping out and rubbing shoulders with all the usual suspects – but wearing his new persona on his sleeve and taking them all along for the ride. To prove his bona fides as a rap artist, he takes the stage at rap events to incoherently blurt his wigga rhymes. In private moments to the camera, we hear he’s got some nominal poetic aptitude, so it’s only a case of securing a good producer to lay it down lucidly.

He seeks out Sean Combs (aka P. Diddy at this juncture), who graciously listens to his demos. When Phoenix asks to set some tracking dates, Combs deflates him, “Oh, you’re not ready to record with ME.”

Edward James Olmos philosophizes to the 35-year-old Phoenix that he is dissatisfied because he’s a drop of water; Ben Stiller goes Ben Stiller on Joaquin; rapper extraordinaire Mos Def gets told by Joaquin about his plans for an epic Bohemian Rhapsody of rap, and takes it seriously… And of course, we see the now-infamous David Letterman interview from early 2009, Joaquin by now unshaved for a year, fully into character as the distracted, incoherent, seemingly drug-addled tortured artiste.

At the time, we all wondered, “Wha–?” But now, we see it as the brilliant social experiment it was. That beard and ‘tude earned him a meme.

Throughout, we hear the detractors – who were in actuality, correct – asking, “Is this a hoax?” Joaquin and his publicist quickly shoot down those rumors.

Joaquin Phoenix is such a great actor that this movie will make you hate him as a person if you come to it ignorant of its premise. As the snot-nosed, privileged, entitled child of an entertainment family, with his First World Problems (not finding fulfillment in a profession that is earning him millions), this is the most challenging, most profound, most Method role of his lifetime. He wrapped ALL the idiotic “entertainment media” around his thumb, getting them to waste resources “reporting” on his “rap career” and doing serious reviews of his supposedly sincere rap appearances. The self-confidence and big balls!

The overarching gag itself is priceless, but the movie of the gag is tiresome; I’M STILL HERE is just not compelling. If I had believed it was real – as maybe 50% of viewers do – my first reaction would have been: Joaquin has lost it; the title must be irony because he’s obviously Not All There anymore. And to start the journey, as Joaquin does, making a whining phone call to his agent from his backyard in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the lights of LA, would have simply made it too tiresome to bear. Even understanding it is a social experiment only raises the interest level a little: the commentary that Hollywood is a twitching powderkeg of vapid assholes is nothing new. What might have made this experiment properly damning to Hollywood’s cred is if Phoenix had released some of his music.

Phoenix’s music and lyrics are willfully just short of quality – although an untrained ear could never tell. Proof of my statement? In Phoenix’s final live hip-hop appearance to a packed, ecstasy-sodden crowd of millennials, witness the blank-faced broads that are actually dancing to his crap rap. Whether it’s the environment conducive to just swaying their bodies in rhythm to anything, or the fact that he’s a celebrity, or the fact that the ecstasy is kicking in, it makes no difference – Phoenix could have SOLD his shit to this undiscerning pack of lemmings. He ends his performance by diving into the crowd and attacking a heckler. But then, he HAD to cause a ruckus to put a button on this event and make people dislike him – at the very least, not to take him seriously – or those dumb broads would have been placing advance orders on his unrecorded CD!

If he had released that mythic album – and if people actually bought it – THAT would have been an even more biting indictment on consumer injudiciousness. And a middle finger to Hollywood and the recording industry as well, proving without a doubt that something insincere, if marketed well, is just as financially viable as any form of “serious” art.

Hmm. Insincere but marketed well. Hollywood in a nutshell. Andy Kaufman would be so proud.

END

Arm around Chloe Grace Moretz, eyes on cellphone —
Definitive Portrait Of An Asshole.

I thought I was out. But they pulled me back IN….

Chloe Grace Moretz stares at herself sleeping. I can think of worse ways to spend eternity.

After a family car accident that puts her into a coma, 17-year-old Mia (Moretz) wanders the hospital as a ghost, wondering, IF I STAY… what’s in it for me? And that’s this movie boiled down to its essential motivation.

The tweensters and creamsters will pule it’s about true love and soul mates and unselfishness – but let’s put a pin in all that platypus platitude for a moment and get to the meat of this gaboon…

IF I STAY is constructed well (directed by R.J. Cutler, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO DICK CHENEY, who comes out of TV and docu mode to make this feature weeper), flitting between the Now – hospital coma scenes – and the Then – Mia’s life and love leading to the Now. The premise (whispered in her ear by a nurse) is that only she can choose to Stay or Go, no matter the attending doctors’ expertise or the machines that go ping, or even any unmentioned deity. And the structure of the story supposedly keeps us on edge as to what her choice will be, rollercoasting through flashbacks that alternately make us believe she has found her true calling with the cello (so she’ll STAY, right?), but then hearing that her parents didn’t survive the crash (so she’ll GO, right?), but in the next flashback, revealing she met a neato boy (so she’ll STAY?), but he’s leaving her to go on tour with his signed rock band (so she’ll GO?), then she’s accepted into Julliard Music School (so she’ll STAY?), but her little brother doesn’t come out of his coma (so she’ll GO?)… and on and on this tomfoolery bats us about like playing ping pong in Ding Dang…

An interesting structure, but at its root, merely about a person asking herself, What is there to live for?; ultimately, What’s in it for me? The story (written by Shauna Cross, from a Gayle Forman novel) displays an arrogance in making us wait around for her decision. If – as the nurse says – it’s up to her, then just WAKE UP. Why are you wandering around the hospital like a wet dog smell? Is this the christian version of limbo? Purgatory? And if your whole family is either dead or in a coma, where are they? And I’ll grant you that whole “ghost/disembodied state” or the residue of a soul blah blah – but since when do clothes have souls and ectoplasmic residue? I’ve railed against clothes-souls for decades now, and if there ever was a time when I didn’t want them to appear…

Mia’s cloyingly cool parents are Joshua Leonard and Mireille Enos, who used to be hippies (dad, an ex-drummer in a touring band), and relate to Mia’s attraction to the insurrectionist crowd. The new boyfriend is Adam (Jamie Blackley), guitarist in his own vapid mediocre pop band, who is somehow signed and put on tour with his unremarkable flat voice, second-rate songs and third-rate guitar ability. Gramps is Stacy Keach, shining above this crowd of actors like they’re dolly grips. Dialogue wishes it was written by Diablo Cody.

“I’m the King O’ The Slum!”

It seems at first like the movie is taking a risk by making Mia a classical cellist – a cool departure from tween norm – until we realize it is just a character device to make her “noble,” so that pining for a boy during her coma wouldn’t seem like typical girly whining. And though they made Adam a moderate musical success, the writers utterly disrespect his career and art by making him blab empty promises to comatose Mia that he is going to give up his career and follow her. If only she’ll STAY. Who cares about rock and roll, right? His actual record deal – which would probably dissolve ignominiously in a few months anyway (but that’s besides the point) – can go shit on a stick; contractual obligations be damned, he’s going to cleave to THE NOBLE CELLIST wherever she may lead. This theoretically makes him noble as well – at least in the eyes of 12-year-old chicks who think he’s dreamy. Let’s edit and distribute this maudlin tearjerker before anyone stops to think if his promises are going to hold water if she wakes up braindead or crippled, or if she can’t move her thighs into that angle he likes so much.

None of it mattered to me, as I was only here to drink in the glory that is – Chloe Grace Moretz. The most beautiful woman on the planet. Straight-edged nose, velveteen voice, blond abandon and those sensuous anemone lips. I’ll longingly gaze at her flickering frame-rate in whatever she chooses to appear, dreck or not. Our love would be pure. Our love would be chaste. Our love would be STAR WARS Cantina Sequence…

Movie would have retained more cred and enjoyment had it followed her cello career, but that is not the point of this manipulative teen romance disguised as a treatise on nobility. (Chloe’s onscreen playing is artfully composited, and if you look up how it was done, it becomes distracting, so I’d suggest just believing Chloe Grace Moretz learned how to play cello like a virtuoso.) After an audition, Gramps tells her, “You have something special. Your dad had it too.” Man, everyone’s got something special – but most people live in the real world where that specialness is stamped out in favor of pragmatism. We’d all like to be professional artists, Gramps, but try it and see what happens. Hell, look what happened to her dad – that other guy with “something special” – he gave up his drumming career to raise a family (- he couldn’t’ve been that special then…). Mia can “play her heart out” all she wants, but if no one in a position of power contracts her as a saleable commodity, she can go to her grave having something special, and the world will keep turning without ever knowing or caring.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW. (But they’re only Spoilers if you’re under-14. To everyone else, this denouement is obvious from the moment we viewed the trailer three months before the film’s release.)

Mia wakes. Crash to black.

It’s the predictable end to a tween tearjerker. Two cute people. She wakes for love. How “noble.” Yet not once did she check her chart to see if she had any amputated fingers, or if her spine was snapped. And has anyone considered that Mia’s conscious self now has to absorb the news of her dead family for the first time? We take it for granted she already knows – but that’s only her out-of-body self. When she regains consciousness, her memories will revert to prior to the crash. And her family will be ripped from her – but this dopey guitarist is still hanging around like a dog fart! Immobile, tubes, covered from chin to toe, exactly what injuries did she sustain? I don’t wanna be the cold bucket of water, but is Adam going to keep all those hollow bedside promises, or will he hope she never heard him and sweep them under the rug? These kids are 17 and 19 respectively, with career paths that are set to take them around the world separately. Does anyone in the film world or the real world believe this is an eternal love that will last longer than a lunchtime?

IF I STAY was released in August 2014, the same month I died. While I was wandering naked through limbo – after forcefully removing my clothes-souls – my wish was to GO, because no matter what I came back to, I was going to be checking out again sooner than later anyway. But then I remembered that if I stayed for Love, that other person would have to love me back, because of my devotion. Because my love is pure. Because my love is chaste. Yes, that was it! I would STAY for the love of a good woman.

And Chloe Grace Moretz still won’t return my calls…

END

In-Silly-ous.

Taking for granted the world has seen INSIDIOUS, writer Leigh Whannell and co-writer/director James Wan drop us into INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 like step-children being dropped off in the woods to fend for ourselves or die.

If you haven’t seen INSIDIOUS, you’re in for a treat of characters you don’t know appearing in places you never saw doing things you don’t care about.

The main cast return to pee their pants: Patrick Wilson as dad Josh (who gets to stare sinisterly from under his brow a lot), Rose Byrne as mom Renai (who screams a lot), Ty Simpkins as son Dalton, with The Gift (whatever that is, we’ll just have to find out the hard way), and Barbara Hershey as Josh’s MILF mom.

The family has moved into Mom’s place while “their house is being fixed” (again, for reasons we’ll never know – unless we watched INSIDIOUS). Thankfully, Mom lives in an upper class sprawling old chateau with lots of upstairs, downstairs, basement and attic for ghosts to skulk in and people to get chased around, instead of in a trailer park or a two-bedroom apartment where the neighbors just wouldn’t stand for all that hijinks.

The two investigators from the last film (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) return for comic relief. And a new paranormal investigator joins the cast to make things more confusing, Steve Coulter as Carl, whose forte is throwing lettered dice to make the ghosts spell out their messages. Better than twitter.

INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 is well written and produced, with a few eerie passages, yet is not a stand-alone film and feels disjointed and incomplete; the unestablished characters are a big part of that discomfiture, as they walk around looking through ajar doors into dark rooms and cellars. Amidst the loud noises, peripheral visions and jump scares, the plot involves the police investigating whether Josh killed the psychic old bat from the last movie (Lin Shaye as Elise). So the focus has shifted off the boy Dalton (who was possessed in the last film), and cast onto the father Josh. Yet they try to retain that youth angle, as we see Josh as a boy in flashbacks, being terrorized by an unknown entity.

There are also more physical “ghosts” here: instead of being eerie, this many apparitions walking around in whiteface and Avril Lavigne mascara just reminds us there’s a makeup trailer out the back somewhere. When a woman specter appears to Renai and slaps her, screaming, “Don’t you dare!”, the intent is to create mystery with the ghost’s enigmatic line – but when it is so obvious the ghost is just a woman in ghoulish makeup, we just shake our heads and call Avril Lavigne.

There’s a backstory of a boy’s mistreatment which made him kill people for his mother (–cough–PSYCHO). And that psychic old bat Elise is now a ghost in the spirit world! At last – logic! Of course in a world where ghosts exist, if one of the living characters dies, they should also become a ghost. So they contact Elise with a séance and Carl’s rolling dice.

Carl raises a lantern in the other dimension and ominously states, “Into the Further we go!” Another example of disjointed screenwriting. Elise called the ghost world The Further in the previous movie, but in this movie, we never hear that term until now. Which I’m sure prompted many confused viewers to exclaim, “What the Further?” Ghost Elise proclaims, “I’ve seen the Better Place but came back because I heard you calling.” Royt… That Better Place couldn’t have been that much “better.” Thankfully, the wrinkly old charlatan is wearing her ghost clothes! (I constantly question that same ignorant, incomprehensible concept in every single ghost movie: Why are ghosts dressed? Isn’t the ghost the supposed “soul” of the human? Isn’t the soul an incorporeal wraith? And if the soul does choose to manifest itself comprehensibly, what does it draw on to put clothes onto its ethereal form? Or do clothes have ghosts too? And the ghosts of the clothes just automatically appear with their owner?)

As they did with their SAW franchise, Whannell and Wan make a decision to link this movie inextricably with its predecessor. They reshoot some of the inexplicable apparition scenes from the last film from the point of view of the inexplicable apparitions. Thusly, though these scenes display real storytelling adroitness, inexplicable terror, once explained, becomes not terror. INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 becomes more of a thriller than a horror story. And all Avril Lavigne breaks loose.

END

The bromance escalates: It’s a metaphor NOW – but wait till tonight…

The Propaganda Never Starts…

Two American talk show numbnuts score an interview with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, and try to assassinate him in the process.

It’s THE INTERVIEW, banned by everyone gutless enough to believe the threats of North Korean nationalist hackers who said they would bomb theaters that screened it. How they planned to do that from their mother’s basement was a problem for the CIA to solve.

But Western capitalism won out in the end and the threat of losing millions was even more dire than the threat of losing a few limbs in a theater explosion, so Columbia Pictures somehow found a way to jam this mediocre media down our cortexes; he says, as he watches the movie from an alley while it’s screened on the back wall of a speakeasy, while holding a garbage can lid up to his face to ward off any shrapnel debris from potential explosions…

Seth Rogen and James Franco partner in bromantastic fury as producer and talk show star of Skylark Tonight, a tv show that specializes in populist dumbed-down television for wankers (in other words, American tv). Desperate to raise the integrity of the show, producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) books Kim Jong Un (a fan of the show) for an interview with Dave Skylark (Franco). In North Korea.

The Supreme Cucumber
Kim Jong Poff

The CIA (headed by Lizzy Caplan) swoops in and orders them to assassinate Kim (played by Randall Park). Now this is where the movie earns the first of its many kudos. Rapaport (and later, a North Korean official) points out that killing Kim is not a cure-all; that someone else will be elevated to Supreme Leader and the sadistic, dictatorship regime would continue. Another solution is found – after all the poison has been lost and before Kim’s trigger-itchy guards kill them – and it all happens during The Interview itself.

Now people, it’s a Seth Rogen comedy (written by Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Dan Sterling, and the second directorial effort from Goldberg and Rogen after THIS IS THE END). How deep and disturbing can it really get? Filled with talk of honeypotting and honeydicking, sex jokes, dick jokes and butt jokes (then more sex jokes, dick jokes and butt jokes), movie features a portrayal of a real life personality, but a personality so famous and publicly caricatured, it’s no worse than Trey Parker and Matt Stone poking fun at his dad, or Tarantino blowing up Hitler, or WATCHMEN having Nixon in office for five terms. It’s a satire, a parody, a jape, a fiction.

That doesn’t stop those nonces in their mama’s basements speaking on behalf of the North Korean dictatorship (whom I’m sure were as surprised as the rest of us when they were identified as the cyber terrorists) being offended like the illiterate unhinged uneducated humorless twats they are, and threatening to kill in the name of their beloved communist ethos. (The hackers call themselves The Guardians of Peace, unwilling or too ignorant to see the irony.) It’s always unfortunately the most vocal who are the least in number and the most dumb, who illicit the biggest reactions, from the biggest dummies. Even worse, they hacked Sony Pictures and leaked some upcoming movies. Jesus, Mary and Jehoshaphat! Now they’ve gone too far! Heaven forbid we see the new James Bond film before they finish rendering the CGI!

Thus, our perception of the movie is colored by the world events the movie stirred. We’re expecting some grandiose insult to the North Korean culture, a searing indictment of Juche ideology, an intellectual dismantling of the Kims’ cult of personality. And we get an assfaced comedy. By Seth Rogen. [Seth Rogen laugh: uh-uhh-uhh-uhh-uhh-uhh-uhh] Joke’s on you, basement boys.

Can James Franco overact this much and get away with it? Maybe that’s what the terrorists are so miffed about? They try to poison Kim with ricin (making the terrorists mad that BREAKING BAD is over?). Aptly named Diana Bang plays a North Korean official who bangs Rogen (the terrorists are right in that everyone would be terrorized at seeing a fat Jew mounting a petite communist); and Anders from WORKAHOLICS gets to insult someone and hang out at a bar watching TV (the terror of making a lateral move from WORKAHOLICS). And it’s R-rated (for offhanded profanity and surprising gore, which is always considered a terrorist act by the Gutless MPAA, who in turn terrorize us with their inconsistent hypocritical dictatorial ratings system).

You know why this movie is dangerous? Because Randall Park makes Kim Jong Un such a cool guy! (The writers wanted him to be robotic; he convinced them to play it cuddly.) The gullible Skylark is taken in by Kim’s wiles, who paints himself as a tragic waif, misunderstood by his father and the people he presides over; propaganda smeared by the Western World undermining his sincere attempts at leadership (“You know what’s more destructive than a nuclear bomb? Words!”); propaganda over his godhood, which he denies (“Yes, I have a butthole, and I poop”); he’s just a regular guy with an easy smile, who likes basketball (–cough–Dennis Rodman!–), Katy Perry and margaritas. And lots of pussy. Hell, even I’m getting to like him…

We wonder whether the Western world was the cause of all the fracas surrounding this movie, for its propagandizing that Kim was such a bro. And when Kim is eventually made to cry on international tv by Skylark during the titular Interview (thereby supposedly revealing he is not a god), that is regarded as the point where North Korean viewers who were under his spell might turn from him, and his dictatorship would fall… which would never happen in the real world of gaslighting, agitprop and demagoguery.

Now that THE INTERVIEW is being screened in various outlets, see how it started World War III? See how the cyber-verse was utterly decimated? See how everyone lost their jobs and had to forage for food and shelter on the unforgiving streets?

Oh, none o’ that happened? Joke’s on you, people terrorized by terrorists. Everyone’s having a laugh at the expense of everyone else. And for a comedy, that spells success.

END

Odyssey Three: When Surfer Dudes Boldly Go…

In his 2014 Oscar speech, Matthew McConaughey told us his hero was “himself, in ten years’ time.” Everyone thought he was a narcissistic jackass. Until INTERSTELLAR, when he travels to the future through a wrinkle in time and meets – himself!

Standing lofty on the shoulders of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and CONTACT, INTERSTELLAR is writer-director Christopher Nolan‘s modern masterpiece. A journey as much into the mind as into the farthest reaches of spacetime; a pondering of purpose, a savaging of the senses, an epic odyssey, urgent, terrifying, thrilling and intense; soundless space, boundless ideas, binary code in gravitational beams, a tesseract in a bookshelf, and the glittering organ from 2001…

As Earth dies, astronauts follow three beacons through a wormhole, seeking new habitable worlds, seeking the pioneers who went before them, and, led by the World’s Greatest Surfer Dude, seeking the Ultimate Swell, brah.

Written by Nolan and brother Jonathan, INTERSTELLAR is ultimately about salvation, but like all Nolan films, it is not salvation in the prosaic Hollywood sense, endorsed by the Gutless MPAA. For Nolan’s idea of salvation, we must journey through a glass darkly…

The most intelligent entity in the Universe,
and a Supercomputer named TARS.

McConaughey (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) is Cooper, engineer, ex-Shuttle pilot, loving father and begrudging farmer. In a lightspeed first act we meet his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), named after Murphy’s Law (who claims there is a “poltergeist” in her room communicating via Morse and gravity beams), his grounded son (Timothée Chalamet) and sad father-in-law (John Lithgow). We learn of Earth’s planetwide crop blight and Professor Brand’s (Michael Caine) theory:

“We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.”

We follow Cooper and his astronaut team (Wes Bentley, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi) into a wormhole near Saturn, created by entities known simply as “They,” following beacons sending back pings from 10 years prior. Habitable worlds? Signals from dead astronauts? All Cooper knows is, the time dilation of this journey will rend from him the life he knows and all those he loves; in essence, all that he is trying to save will be lost anyway…

McConaughey in a role that – ahem – rockets him to another stratosphere of acting, exemplified in one of the most searing scenes of his career, as he drives away from home for the final time, his face a mask of desolation, tears edging his eyes; his daughter having cursed him for leaving her, his heart lost, his world broken. On top of all that, he forgot his surfboard.

A bravura jump cut to the launch of Endurance. We are not cavemen anymore (you know, like people from the 1950s) – we don’t need to see Cooper arriving, suiting up, entering the craft, flicking switches… Nolan’s ingenious filmmaking efficiency shines through in every frame of this epic adventure quest. When we see exteriors of the craft, it is mainly from one truncated angle, sluicing through space or atmosphere; when we see docking maneuvers, we see only the clamps that latch onto the main ship. These funny little props could have been constructed in some corner of a studio set for $13.75 – we never see any other angles, but they convey what needs to be conveyed – either they lock or they don’t, creating the impetus for the next scene.

And I love that the spacecraft is called – Endurance! Tough gig, tough name. We have come to accept ridiculously platitudinous spacecraft names (Discovery, Explorer, Endeavor, Challenger, Intrepid, et al), yet none describe what a space journey of this magnitude truly is.

On Cooper’s team, Doyle (Bentley), last seen in THE HUNGER GAMES sporting a beard that cried, “Take me roughly from behind”; now with fully grown bush that cries, “Bearcub seeking daddy.”

Brand (Hathaway, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES), with lips too big for her eyes and eyes too big for her face, and a pageboy hairdo funnier than Wes Bentley’s beard in THE HUNGER GAMES; orating a scientific soliloquy on “love” and how it compels her to follow the beacon that belonged to her lover… Wait, the fate of the Earth depends on this chick’s itchy loins? Luckily, Cooper throws a bucket of water over her.

Romilly (Gyasi, CLOUD ATLAS), the team physicist, who utters the film’s most devastating line. When Cooper and Brand descend to a planet near a black hole to find a beacon, Romilly warns them that each minute spent on the surface is seven years of Earth time, due to time dilation. (It reminds us of Nolan’s own INCEPTION, where the deeper the dream level, the longer each minute drags to eternity.) Tragedy strikes on the planet (because they encounter mountain-sized tidal waves – perfectly feasible on a planet so close to a gravitational monster – and, as mentioned earlier, here’s Cooper without his longboard), and when they claw their way back to the Endurance, they ask a slightly gray Romilly how long they were gone:

“Twenty-three years.”

The world spun, my heart fell into my shoes. Endurance. Now we had a movie!…

Laughing/weeping inconsolably, Cooper watches 23 years of backlogged messages from his growing kids, as they slowly lose the will to communicate with him. Many critics call Nolan cold-hearted. It may be because he can pull plot stunts like this and then sit back impassively and watch his characters suffer their agonies, but I look at it the other way – if you can watch these characters impassively, you are ice, not Nolan. His powerful human relationships are all the more poignant because we feel every bladed nanometer of their losses.

This time dilation plot point is the grim difference between INTERSTELLAR and every science fiction movie ever made. It gives weight to relativity – the crushing obstacle to Mankind’s travel plans. Our lifespans are not long enough. We cannot travel to even our closest star (Proxima Centauri, merely four light years away, with no known habitable planets), let alone even communicate with our closest galaxy (Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away). The round trip for a light-speed message to Andromeda is five million years… Cities, civilizations, planets will birth and die in the interim. That is the rationale in the plot for the wormhole, and probably what many may consider the wormhole in the plot – if it weren’t for this wormhole, there would be zero hope of attaining another planet in one surfer dude’s lifetime, yet this wormhole throbs as a blatant deus ex machina…

It’s all about relativity. (Yup, that’s why McConaughey meets his relative – himself.) INTERSTELLAR is where Einstein’s relativity, Sagan’s terraforming and Hawking’s event horizon converge. What I like about Nolan’s films is that, like master filmmaker Woody Allen, he doesn’t take us for idiots, and no one in his movie is an idiot either. All the principals are scientists! Let me say that again: all the principals are scientists. And they’re not B-characters, played off as dweeby comic relief (although McConaughey always has a notebook and a pen protruding from his breast pocket, because, uh, that’s how dweeby scientists dress, right?), rather they are the drivers of civilization’s forward momentum. There are no military drogues to argue with over examine-or-kill, no politicians to red-tape progress, no civilians giving the army orders to shoot at Godzilla, no Annoying Kids. These scientists are fully formed, empathetic characters. INTERSTELLAR comes at the same time Stephen Hawking is being honored with the biopic, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING. (Think about it: even Tony Stark is an engineer, Bruce Banner is a geneticist, Barry Allen is a forensic expert…) Synergy for a new movie trope: scientist as hero.

Cooper’s daughter understands Morse code and physics, without having to explain why; one whole wall of her bedroom is stacked with books. I love it! No astronaut gives dopey exposition dialogue to other astronauts that should already know that information. Matter of fact, the first act is a little off-putting, as we are not accustomed to such smart characters in a tentpole movie.

Everyone speaks “universally” – of Mankind as a species, of the world’s fate, of generation-spanning solutions for humanity. People just don’t talk that way. (Let’s hope they start.) We humans are not wired to think past our own eyeblink lifetimes; the frailty of our minds reflects our bodies trapped in finite mass and function. As one character observes, “Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier” meaning thinking beyond your individual comfort, to the longterm welfare of the species.

Nolan presumes our general knowledge of spacefaring dialect in 2014, and doesn’t insult us with baby explanations of time dilation (a black hole’s mass creating extreme gravitation which affects even time itself, slowing it down), or terraforming. [See POFFY SEZ: Leggo my Eggo.] And there is minimal didactic talk about wormholes and event horizons. That doesn’t mean INTERSTELLAR is carved from ignorant fluff: CalTech physicist Kip Thorne (friend to Sagan and Hawking) is employed as consultant and exec producer to keep the physics honest.

And lo, INTERSTELLAR produces the most authentic black hole ever committed to screen, a startling void surrounded by a luminous accretion disk. It’s ALL theoretical speculation, even with the mathematics to support it, so the striking visuals for this and the spherical wormhole refracting star fields are anyone’s guess, yet Nolan and his effects team render visually what is hardly comprehensible even intellectually.

All we need to know is that Einstein was right all along when he said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Oh, and he was also right about all that physics gobbledegook as well…

“Open the pod bay doors, TARS.”

Cooper’s team have another member, a homage to 2001 in myriad ways – an artificial intelligence computer named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), an oblong monolith that speaks like HAL and walks like Gumby. Programmable for variable levels of Honesty (90%), Humor (75%), Sarcasm, etc., he can also assume various shapes to fulfill deus ex machina plot points. Even his demise is played like HAL’s sacrifice in 2010: ODYSSEY TWO (presumably with his Equanimity setting on 100%, as he goes without any complaints or metaphysical rap like “Will I dream?”). We imbue him with the same inexplicable screen-love we grant all anthropomorphized inanimate objects. He is Wilson, he is Hobbes, he is Number 5, and yes, he is even HAL. And Gumby.

“Now we’re just here to be memories for our kids.”

Cooper’s kids as adults are Casey Affleck (with a DUCK DYNASTY beard) and Jessica Chastain (ZERO DARK THIRTY) with enough angular thinness to slice bread. I know the future is short on food, but eat something, honey! She returns to her bookcases to crack the code for the film’s magnificent time-loop/poltergeist payoffs. With the aid of Topher Grace (desperately miscast as a fellow scientist), she tries to convince her brother to abandon the dying family farm. And to get her a sandwich.

Nolan makes two excellent counter-intuitive casting choices, specifically to throw the audience. Michael Caine is one of those choices (as old Dr. Brand), who cajoles Cooper and his team into the wild black yonder. We’ve grown accustomed to Caine playing the lovable lump comic relief, but watch carefully how he cloaks his agenda in the palliating Dylan Thomas verses, “Do not go gently into that good night…” The other surprise casting appearance is for the same purpose.

Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer bashes us over the head, then kicks us in the liver when we’re down.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is like THE GODFATHER of its genre. Untouchable. Undoubtedly, it is a movie for the ages, but no one dares unseat it as the cosmic yardstick by which all other space movies are measured. INTERSTELLAR unseats 2001. I said it. Deal with it. It’s not “better” or “more eternal” but unlike recent contenders (CONTACT, MOON, GRAVITY), it can be held up as a new yardstick. It entertains, terrifies, saddens, inspires, educates, intrigues; its production values are cosmic, its design celestial, its performances stellar; it moves us to ponder, to grieve, to examine our humanity in the farscape of eternity; and it makes a helluva lot more sense than that art film with the Monolith that nobody understood unless they were half-baked… McConaughey looks up from his new introspective ethos, “Did someone say ‘half-baked’?” He’s always been about the time dilation. Was anyone paying attention? “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man: I get older, they stay the same age…”

Glittering organ crescendo. Cut. Hall reverb out.

END

Cold War Mongering.

INVASION U.S.A. is made for one purpose. The government will tell you it’s to promote the draft, but the draft is only a euphemism for domestic terrorism.

What else would you call spreading fear through media; terrorizing the populace into bowing Head Down Ass Up to the American government, or their lives would be ended by Russians?

In this Cold War propaganda dog-whistle to maroon-necked patriots, we see a group of pasty white Americans gather in a bar, where a smug asshole television reporter (Gerald Mohr) is asking everyone’s opinion on the Universal Draft (that’s where not just people are drafted, but factories, companies, everyone and everything becomes government controlled, to contribute to the war effort. In other words, communism). Communism being the second dirtiest word in American media, movie slings it to great effect, having all the barflies disparage its stank when the government came calling on them to contribute their Texan beef and their doughy tractors. Yet there is one ominous patron with an enigmatic accent (Dan O’Herlihy, the Old Man in ROBOCOP 2; here, young, sexy, surfwave pompadour) who tells them all that wars are won by making sacrifices. He critiques their selfishness, swirls his drink and leaves. Suddenly, the TV news crackles with reports of 500 bombers approaching the United States…

INVASION U.S.A. might be the only American-made movie where America is attacked by another country – and loses. Oh, but it’s all a mass hallucination– what the Patrick Duffy?! That’s the only way it could pass the Idiot Gutless Censors.

After the news broadcast, we are treated to stock footage and execrably staged war scenes of America under attack (the process shots of paratroopers landing in front of the White House are hilarious); it’s the damned Russkies and they’ve brought their vodka and bad American-Russian accents.

B-story finds Mohr making time with the smooth blond he met at the bar (Peggie Castle), who walked in with some doughy guy, but leaves with Mohr. There might be a war on, but his call of duty is to see the blond Head Down Ass Up. He’s so slick and arrogant, Humphrey Bogart called and asked for smug lessons.

Reports of Russians in American uniforms storming the beaches – so the (snigger) “moviemakers” can just use stock footage of Americans storming beaches; the Texan farmer picks up his TV Family and gets swept away in a flood caused by Russian bombers destroying a dam; the doughy tractor-maker is shot when his company is infiltrated by a Russian window washer; a news anchor with a lisp reports that San Francisco is bombed all to hell, and he says the Russians dropped bombs on it as well.

A general tells the stubborn tractor-maker, “If your dealers are good Americans they’ll know that tanks are more important than tractors!” In which universe, General Fearmonger? As it happens, in a universe where COMMUNISM is the Great American Way!

Movie has the distinction of featuring both Lois Lanes from 1952’s ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (Phyllis Coates and Noel Neill), in bit parts as airline clerks. Their theatrical acting is worse than communism.

When movie ends with the patrons at the bar all snapping out of their collective trance (where they all presumably saw these same invasion scenes), everyone is cum-drenched in red white and blue, declaring their support for the war effort – mind you, the Cold War effort, as no major wars were being prosecuted at the time. This kind of dubious agitprop was constantly pushing the envelope of government encroachment. And due to their glad-mouthing, not one of the patrons or the viewing audience realizes the movie’s glaring contradiction: while advocating the United States needs a stronger military to combat communism, the process by which it proposes to stamp out that communism – is by instigating communism in the United States with the Universal Draft! While screaming “Go USA” in everyone’s faces, it’s saying GIVE UP your property, your work, your bodies, your children to the government – and we will let you die honorably for us. (!)

Head Down, Ass Up.

END