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

A man-size Jack in a girl-size film.

Saw this movie at the cinema with a male friend. We were two men – men who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. And AS GOOD AS IT GETS blindsided us.

The marketing was smart. Yes, Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson were probably going to end up a “romantic couple,” but the trailers appealed to the man of brawn in each of us, showing us off-kilter Jack; an obsessive-compulsive author who tells it like it is, insulting and alienating himself along the way with men, women and other social castes; he didn’t step on cracks in the footpath AND he put the weaker sex in their place. It looked biting. It looked cruelly funny. It looked… manly.

But in the film’s final moments, Helen Hunt spews a line that only a Girly Movie can’t be criminally prosecuted for, “Why can’t I just have a normal boyfriend?” Isn’t she a little old and cynical to be using that juvenile term? And is that all this farce was aiming towards? The pabulum of girlfriend/boyfriend-ism?

Cuba Gooding Jr. had to play feyer than a hairdresser for this? Greg Kinnear had to be a gay artist and get bashed and robbed by Skeet Ulrich for this? Helen Hunt had to be a waitress and have a sick kid which fortified her against Jack’s insults for this?

Jack Nicholson is someone’s “boyfriend”?

And suddenly – it didn’t feel so comfortable sitting next to another man in that theater. We gulped hard, hoping no one would see us two men attending this Chick Flick with no girly dates having dragged us here. Uh, we came to see Jack, really we did; we came for the insults and uh, the insouciant philandering and uh, the lies that make chicks cry inconsolably and uh – how about them Dolphins, hey?

END

TWISTER blows.

I have spent my life laboriously doing nothing.
— Hugo Grotius (on his deathbed 1645)

Mysteriously-funded and irrationally-driven “storm-chasers” gad about the American midwest in TWISTER, trying to throw an aluminum thingy filled with little aluminum thingies into a tornado. They say it’s to research these natural disasters. Cue joke about this movie being natural disaster.

Leading the pants-wetting charge is Jo (Helen Hunt) with her team of nonces, including a young, beatnik Philip Seymour Hoffman. Along for the sodden ride is Jo’s estranged hubbie and ex-leader of the nonces, Bill (Bill Paxton), with his new psychologist boo, played with closed-kneed stoicism by Jami Gertz; with the talented Cary Elwes as a rival storm-chaser, relegated to Dick Dastardly sniggers.

The aluminum thingy collects data from tornadoes (euphemized as Twisters for street-cred), to save lives… while risking countless lives driving maniacally down small-town dirt roads, recklessly through cornfields and private property, through gullies where kids could be hiding, smashing through houses – all the while, their computers effectively pinpointing tornadoes, their intensity, girth, location, speed, direction, their credit reports and bra sizes, long before any visual sighting. Yet none of these nonces is astute enough to resolve their goal by simply requesting grants to buy these fancy hi-tech gadgets for threatened locales.

Directed by Jan de Bont (SPEED), written by made-for-filming novelist, Michael Crichton (JURASSIC PARK) and Anne-Marie Martin, the very fabric of TWISTER reeks like a rain gutter gone stagnant.

Seems these pervs get their thrills by facing extinction, the nonces relating an absolutely pointless anecdote about Bill standing his ground before a tornado, railing at it naked and drunk, earning him the nickname The Extreme. So it is no surprise when, during the course of gadding about the Midwest risking their necks for no reason, Bill becomes estranged with his psych chick, when he realizes she is not psycho enough; seems she’s not enticed with the prospect of gadding about the midwest risking her neck for no reason. The very society renowned for its profusion of unnecessary therapists – schizoid Americana – insistently derides Jami Gertz’s therapist, who leaves the party when Bill gravitates towards ex-wife Jo (far more psycho!) who reconciles with him amidst the tempest and looks much better in a wet t-shirt.

Jo is obsessed with twisters because her father was taken by one in the scary opening sequence. So chasing them is catharsis – ironically, girl, YOU need that therapist more than anyone! This valiant attempt at three dimensional character went balls-up as soon as De Bont opened The Hollywood Cliché Handbook (Disaster Movie Edition) – hoping against hope we wouldn’t notice Jo’s vocation is itself sorely one-dimensional.

Since when is a “storm-chaser” (whatever that means) more noble than a therapist? Gertz is portrayed as a sex-with-the-lights-out prude; in one scene, she is made to look like an anal pen-pusher with misplaced priorities, as she consoles a distraught divorcee over her cellphone – while the fools in the car with her are driving into the maw of a tornado!

Poffy getting blown

Which begs the question: What, in fact, does a “storm-chaser” do? The grant-grabbing apologists pipe up: “They study tornadoes to aid predictability and consequently, survivability.” Which begs the corollary question: why don’t all those people in this film who live in a “tornado alley,” start the survival process by PICKING UP ALL THE LOOSE CRAP LITTERING THEIR YARDS? Their barn doors are practically falling off their hinges with rot, there are implements and tools scattered hither and thither – ironically, as if a twister has just slammed by! Jo’s aunt, Meg (Lois Smith), is out in her yard WELDING PIECES OF STEEL TOGETHER – definitely sensible recreation in a high-risk tornado area!; in effect, NO ONE seems to be taking any precautions for tornadoes anyway – what would a ten-minute warning benefit as opposed to a ten-SECOND warning?

And after all the cow-flying and tractor-slinging and wet t-shirts (and snippet of Deep Purple at THE CALIFORNIA JAM, with wrong Child in Time audio under the visuals – blasphemous swine!), when their last aluminum thingy (filled with Pepsi product-placement) is sucked into the vortex of a tornado, does the cheery, uplifting soundtrack mean the End Of Tornadoes? Is the world safe from natural disasters now that these intrepid swine risked their lives to throw extra aluminum debris into a twister (that probably came down somewhere and sliced a kid’s ear off)? Do we leave the theater knowing that when a twister hits us now, we can rest assured that it will damage exactly the same amount of stuff, but at least we had a warning?

Great! I could have taken my signed Pam and Tommy sex tape and all I got was my passport and Visa cards.

earth love disaster

We all know what constitutes Natural Disasters – quakes, fires, floods, tornadoes – but “disasters” for whom?

These “disasters” were occurring on this planet before mankind was a twinkle in the virgin Earth’s magma. Natural Disasters are Earth’s regulatory actions; EARTH is not harmed by these phenomena… WE are. So if you’re so Earth Friendly, why do you pray to your non-existent gods to please please please abstain from “regulatory actions” in your selfish little vicinity?

How do we ever exist if our luxuries are swept away?! Is this too callously capitalist? Consider: even when you escape with your life, it is still regarded as a Disaster. But if you cared nothing for capitalism, the possession of your life should warrant terming the event something less calamitous – “minor setback” mayhaps? But your sick society revolves around economic status, ergo Disaster.

But Earth goes on, regardless, shrugging off earthquakes and flash-fires and mythic floods like it has since its violent birth. Why carry on like sissies when Earth is simply doing its cosmic thing? You hypocritical greenies should be glad – you’ve been shriking about “taking back the planet” with your irrelevant plastic-collections and paper-recycling – well, the planet is just helping your puerile, ineffectual efforts with a slambang.

And the disaster movie genre rakes in millions on this drivel that is not really disastrous. And though these movies try focusing on “people at the heart of the story,” the viewing public is not nearly nuanced enough to appreciate introspection when they’ve paid to see MIND-BLOWING EFX.

In response to the success of TWISTER, a slew of Disaster Movies hits 1997: TURBULENCE (Jan), DANTE’S PEAK (Feb), ASTEROID: THE SKY IS FALLING (Feb), VOLCANO (Apr) and even TITANIC (Dec), not to mention the ten million COMET movies always orbiting television and movie screens on cyclic impact paths. Let’s not forget 1998’s two bloated entries, DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON…

Gertz actually spews the one sensible line in TWISTER: “You people are all crazy! Do you know that?!” No, they don’t – cos the Bad Machine doesn’t know it’s a bad machine. And the makers of this moronic maelstrom are part of the bad machine.

Michael Tunison speaks out in Entertainment Today: “The only thing that is going to stop this particular fad is a couple of real disasters… at the box office.”

END

Bosom buddies.

A Breath Of Fresh Island Air.

Chuck Noland (plump Tom Hanks), inextricably married to his time-sensitive, nerve-fraying job as a FedEx consultant, rather than to his quietly-suffering fiancé Kelly (Helen Hunt), finds himself suddenly and unceremoniously negated from Civilization’s jetstream when a plane crash leaves him Stranded On A Desert Island.

CAST AWAY seems to be nothing new: we’ve seen and heard it all before with Crusoe, the Robinsons, Thoreau’s elective isolation in Walden, BLUE LAGOON (1949 and 1980 versions), even Oliver Reed in a 1986 movie called, heh, CASTAWAY.

Why then is this CAST AWAY so absolutely compelling?

In our arrogant, present day technophilia, we feel ourselves masters of the world; we feel that Nature, once so forbidding, cannot scare us the way it did before we discovered fire and grocery stores and cell phones. But – like OPEN WATER or INTO THE WILD – CAST AWAY reminds us that Nature is still Master, that we are a hair’s breadth away from being overwhelmed by it; that knowing how to setup a HD TV is nowhere near as important as knowing how to start a fire with no matches.

“What am I gonna do with THESE useless blades and strings and leather shoes?”

Writer William Broyles Jnr. and director Robert Zemeckis audaciously acknowledge their audience’s intelligence in making Chuck’s island interlude all the more powerful and poignant by what they leave OUT. Chuck crashes in his FedEx plane (in an incredibly realistic sequence), so a few parcels wash onshore that he ultimately utilizes; other than that, the filmmakers go to great lengths to make Chuck discover the basics of survival with a learning curve so slow we would not be criticized in questioning his mental aptitude. But he’s not retarded, he’s just modern.

Minimal dialogue and no soundtrack; no computers, fridges, no undercurrent of electrical paraphernalia pulsating subliminally, no lawnmowers or leaf-blowers growling on faraway lawns, no iPods, piped muzak, TV commercials bombarding lies of “whitening whites” – a slice of heaven. If you can get past the small fact you may die a lonely death there.

“Mmm, looking good, Wilson.
Let me just make your mouth a little bigger…”

In one of the FedEx parcels, a volleyball, which soon attains a “face” made with Chuck’s own blood. Naming the volleyball Wilson, Chuck attains the “human” companionship that stops him going completely nuts. And there is a certain elegance in Wilson being forged from Chuck’s blood; he is, in essence, part Chuck.

Chuck has to learn fire, shelter, spearing fish without looking like a Keystone Cop, calendar-keeping (very cool to see him trace out the sun’s analemma on his cave wall), weather patterns, raft-building, all the while his only picture of Kelly keeping hope alive. Then there’s the problem of his escalating tooth decay…

To heighten the impact of Hanks actually looking the part of a man who has been marooned for years, Zemeckis and his crew took a year hiatus from this movie to make another movie – WHAT LIES BENEATH, a not-too-shabby thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer – before returning to commit CAST AWAY’s second half to film.

We meet Chuck “four years later” (a physically overhauled Hanks), now a sinewy hunter caveman, living on coconuts and crabs, and able to spear fish from twenty feet away without computerized targeting or iPad apps, which he devours raw and expressionlessly.

the death of wilson

When it comes to volleyballs drowning, we are ALL castaways…

Admit it – you cried over a volleyball. We all did.

CAST AWAY is a perfect example of not needing extraneous elements to “add excitement” to what is an extremely interesting thought experiment. On the island, Chuck never encounters headhunters or villains trying to tie him to railroad tracks – not needed; during Chuck’s raft escape, no sharks or Krakens. And yet, one event moves us more than any vaunted action-adventure possibly could.

Wilson the Volleyball had by this time become more than just a conversational equal with Chuck (Chuck would speak to Wilson, wait for a reply – which only he would hear – then reply to Wilson); he was Chuck’s conscience and psychological better half. Before they shove off on their escape raft, as the wind howls and the rains splatter, Chuck ties Wilson to a strut and instructs him, “You don’t have to do anything – just hang on!”

And hang on Wilson does, through the tempest of charging the breakers offshore. And days later, on a sun-dappled glass ocean, when the water and food is spent, as Chuck dozes exhausted on the raft, Wilson, whose bonds were loosed with the fury of the storms, plops quietly into the endless ocean. Chuck wakes, sees Wilson being taken by the tide, tries desperately to rescue him… but Wilson drifts helplessly away…

And heartbreak over inanimate objects took on a whole new meaning.

For thematic closure, Chuck must necessarily escape back to First World indolence, in a fourth act where he finds he cannot reconcile his new Life-awareness with that of society’s stultifying rigors, nor can he rekindle the “love” which kept hope alive whilst marooned. Though Kelly’s unavailability seemed like a death knell to Chuck at first, it actually enables him to embrace a free-wheeling optimism, only evidenced in the film’s final moments… as he delivers a parcel emblazoned with angel wings back to the farm from whence it came; the only parcel he never opened on the island, for whatever mystical reason.

Seems the parcel belongs to a spunky brunette (country singer Lari White) who just happens to live recently-divorced on this isolated farm. It may seem over-convenient, but the scene is written artfully (with its own tiny slice of backstory within the movie, if you pay very close attention), with Chuck realizing the brunette is the owner of the parcel only after she flirtily gives him directions and drives off — and he sees the angel wings logo on the backboard of her retreating truck. And he gets that man-glint in his eye…

Coconuts and crabs tonight, old son!

END