Paradise by the Jump-Scare Light.

If this movie didn’t have jump-scares, it wouldn’t have any scares at all.

Clichéd Haunted Houses Monthly awarded THE CONJURING its highest honor: “Best Movie With A Middle-American Family Moving Into An Obvious Haunted House Where Murders Were Committed.” The movie was also given a plaque by the Organization For Jump-Scares And Orchestra Stabs, with a special write-up and Behind The Scenes link on the website www.MoviesThatRipoff-THE-EXORCIST-Blatantly.com.

I think my job here is done…

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators (meaning they don’t have a real job), who must conduct an exorcism (meaning ‘read Latin and gesticulate’) for a family where a demon has possessed the mother and is trying to kill her daughter (meaning mom’s having a nervous breakdown and blaming ghosts again).

The most tragic aspect of this supposedly true 1971 horror story is that Ed and Lorraine Warren really do exist. They’ve been on the con since at least 1952, with the founding of their New England Society for Psychic Research, driving out intangible entities for some very tangible cash. Movie opens with one of their high profile cases – that of Annabelle, a doll which terrorized a family until Ed and Lorraine trapped it in a glass case of emotion. (I guess demons have a hard time navigating through glass.) This first sequence pummels us with classic primal terrors, like hearing banging on a locked door, opening it and seeing nothing but a lifeless doll outside. This whole sequence is unrelated to the story proper, serving to introduce Ed’s and Lorraine’s talents on their lecture tour.

Then we meet Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as Roger and Carolyn Perron, who move into a capacious country house with their five daughters, the youngest channeling Drew Barrymore lispily. Out comes the Hollywood Haunted House Handbook and writers Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes proceed to con the viewer into thinking this movie is original and real, as the Warrens conned the populace into thinking their “powers” were original and real.

James Wan, a very talented writer and director, helms the project with a sure hand, but achieves nothing noteworthy, constructing situations and scares by the numbers: house extremely cold, all clocks stopping at 3:07 a.m., horrible smells, doors slamming, little kid talking to imaginary friend, music box, hidden basement, rocking chair, hanging tree, legs being pulled while sleeping, infrared photos, voices on tapes, sleepwalking, disfigured spirits… the list goes on and on, hitting every single horror movie trope, in a quest to out-cliché them all!

In the final scenes, when Carolyn is fully possessed, with everyone screaming to hold her down, while Ed is screaming in Latin at her, movie has derailed completely. We wonder why Carolyn is tied to a chair with a sheet over her, but soon realize why, as she is levitated all over the place and thrown bodily across the room – oh right, Lili Taylor didn’t want to do these stunts, and it was too hard to disguise the stuntperson, so they just covered the stuntperson with a sheet. Awesome solution, James. The screaming in Latin continues.

Suddenly, the Warrens’ little girl is under threat. Ed and Lorraine’s daughter, a minor character, far removed from the main action, being watched by granny over at the Warrens’ house, is being tempted into their “Museum” of evil artifacts, where Annabelle the doll is trying to navigate past her glass case of emotion. Is this the same entity possessing Carolyn, or is it Annabelle? But I thought Annabelle had no more influence over anyone from behind that glass? Who knows? All that happens is, it diverts our attention from the main story, and loses our emotional involvement. Why did Wan set up two climaxes like this? Well, remember this movie is some sort of love letter to the Warrens, so it sought to make the entity feel threatened by them, so it terrorized their daughter as a distraction to the exorcism. (Did the entity get a peek at Ed’s address in his wallet, or has it been following Ed for awhile now?)

There’s a tragic backstory to the house and its inhabitants, involving sacrificing babies and suicide-hanging at the tree, but it all leads to the same jump-scares, so should we award any points?

Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Real charlatans investigating an unreal world.

“Psychics” Ed and Lorraine Warren are the real evil here.

This movie might have been a mediocre date-night horror diversion, but the fact the filmmakers are selling it as the “true story of the Warrens” is infuriating, since they are charlatans who have built an empire of nothingness on the backs of the  gullible. The movie itself becomes a tribute to two con artists!

“Investigating” over 10,000 cases, if only the Warrens had integrity like Harry Houdini or James Randi, and used their knowledge of charlatanism to explain supposedly supernatural phenomena and/or debunk supposed hauntings. Instead, they bilked traumatized people out of money, and both went to their graves (Ed in 2006, Lorraine in 2019) maintaining their avocation was real. However, their deaths proved conclusively – and ironically – that they lacked all credibility in life.

Think about it: for two people who knew ALL the incantations and demon-names and rituals and rules of the after-life dimension, they never found a way back themselves!

END

Faking Porn, Fart 2.

Somewhere along the way, the tween girlie movie series TWILIGHT transmorphed into the painfully overwrought “THE TWILIGHT SAGA,” like there was something extremely important happening between all these vampire models standing around doing nothing and all these werewolf models standing around doing nothing with their shirts off.

So we arrive at the conclusion of author Stephenie Meyer‘s series, fully titled, THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PART 2. There’s no real import or meaning to the title, but it takes up a lot of syllables, which in the minds of tweenies and weenies who haven’t yet read any real authors, makes it sooo grown up, like, totallyyyyy.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is now a newly-created vampire (a newborn) and she and vampire hubbie Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) have birthed a bouncing baby CGI monstrosity, which they name Renesmee (played by a real life Mackenzie Foy after she grows out of  computer diapers). Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is still hanging around the Cullen vampire residence like a dog fart after lasagna.

The usual crepuscular cast of Cullen vampires stand around and share line-reads (Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz). Meanwhile, vampire Maggie Grace (known for being TAKEN a lot) sees Bella’s child from afar, and thinks it is a human child that has been bitten and turned into a vampire (which is a sin, as the King James Bible tells us in St. Paul’s Letters To Dracula). She reports to Senior Vamp Dude, Aro (Michael Sheen, leader of the Volturi, which in Latin means “heavy mullet”), who is just waiting for a reason to kill something so that the movie can allow everyone to stop standing around and doing nothing.

This non-issue is what the movie turns on. All it takes is for someone to say to Aro, “Bella is the mother, and Edward is the father, even though we know he looks kinda gay, but trust us, he had The Sex with that brunette chick.” But a battle brews, and so the Cullen clan spend the better half of the movie “recruiting” sympathetic vamps from around the world who will “stand witness” for them, and say what I just said above. Torturous scenes of vampire models standing around pledging their allegiance to not making the movie interesting in the least. I swear, if these people didn’t have super-speed and occasionally run in fast-motion, there wouldn’t be ANY action in this movie at all! (And when they stand around, I find it hilarious that they always stand in pairs, coupled-off and each couple facing each other, like 14-year-olds at a house party scared that someone is gonna move on their boo. Hmm, I guess, exactly like their demographic!)

“You wanna have more of that Pretend Sex?”

Speaking of sex, again the movie goes to great lengths to tease youths with slow motion shots of Bella’s naked elbow and Edward’s nude hip bone, before cutting away to them covered in a bed together or in a field of flowers wearing clothes, implying that they did something that only your bigger brother does with cheerleaders. What it is, you’ll never know…

Which raises the whole “baby” question: Since when can vampires have children?! So their sperm and ovum still work like living tissue even though they’re undead? Which means vampires can theoretically overrun the world. Because they’re immortal. The TWILIGHT-heads are gonna counter with, “But she got pregnant as a human, and he ‘turned’ her (bit her on the bum) as she was giving birth, so the baby wouldn’t kill her on the way out.” Sound medical procedure. Which still means his seed is living tissue that carries genetic code; which means that vampires can still take over the world if they used this method on thousands of women.

You lost me at vampire sperm.

Movie opens with a montage of Bella discovering her powers, keeping her thirst for human blood and her acting in check. Instead of a nearby human, she kills a puma about to pounce on a deer, to slake her blood lust – oh, good decision! The predator-to-prey ratio is so low in these parts precisely because of numbskulls like you, who think that killing the puma is noble due to being raised on nature documentaries that paint the predators as “evil.” The millions of expendable deer deforesting the vegetation around here thank you, vampire maiden!

She arm-wrestles Kellan Lutz and wins because – woman empowerment. She can generate a mental shield that protects her loved ones from harm, while another vampiress generates shocks like Electro, while others just make up powers as they go along, because – vampires, yeh. She stands glistening in the sun: “I was born to be a vampire.” Sure, honey.

The art of Looking Menacing While Standing With Your Boo.

I must say, though, Stewart looks absolutely gorgeous here. No more the winsome pouty lass with the irritating pause-acting, she has lost her baby-fat and blossomed, with lush eyelashes, luscious waterfall tresses, desire-brown contact lenses, full cupid-blood lips, her straining A-cups propped up by a B-bra creating an hourglass figure, and even her acting has improved vastly, maybe up to the level of Shatner-adjacent.

But narration was a bridge too far. During the recruitment montage, Stewart narrates like she’s about to hiccup, with a passion reserved for GPS directions, expositing every character’s backstory and special power. Are we watching a movie, or listening to the audiobook?

Jacob, who is still somehow hanging around due to his insipid excuse of “imprinting” on both Bella and Renesmee, reveals his hairy ass to Bella’s father Charlie (Billy Burke), who was unaware he was in a movie series about vampires and werewolves until now. He comes to visit Bella at the Cullen residence, sees their freaky CGI baby, asks her what’s wrong, to which she answers ‘nothing,’ then drives out of the movie forever.

“Whoopsie! I’m a thriller!”

After nothing continues to happen quite a lot, the Volturi, led by pale-faced Aro, march to battle, all dressed like Michael Jackson. The Cullens and their allies are ready, all standing in the snow in couple-pairs, so that Aro won’t make a move on their boo.

Remember, these people are empaths and psychics and are endowed with other powers far beyond human reasoning and imagination, which means they all didn’t have to put on their sports bras and come tramping out here in the snow in the first place; Aro could have sent a trusted aide to mind-meld the relevant info and bring it back to him. But no. Here we are. The conclusion to the most anticipated Young Adult series in history. And it ends with – nothing happening.

Alice Cullen (stunning Ashley Greene) holds Aro’s hand – and there is a massive, pitched, badly-staged skirmish, where legends die and heroes fall. This is it, folks! It doesn’t get any more exciting! The final grand battle of Twilight! Destiny bellows and fates collide, and—-

Alice releases Aro’s hand. Oh, it was just a vision. “After what happened here today, they’ll never forget.” Uh, but nothing happened. In the distance, we see the breaking dawn… Oh, I get it! It all makes sense now—wait—

What?

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