*. Man Bites Dog (a not-very-literal translation of C’est arrivé près de chez vous) took me by surprise, and delighted me, when I first saw it sometime in the ’90s. So I was a little worried, returning to it, that it wouldn’t hold up.
*. I was happy to find that I liked it even more. The humour has aged well, even with the pervasiveness of the mockumentary form in twenty-first century comedy. There are laughs here that I either didn’t get the first time or had forgotten. This is still a very funny movie.
*. Curiously, the violence wasn’t as extreme as I remembered it. For some reason I had always conflated the eviscerated body of the woman who is gang-raped with the rape itself, so I thought that scene had played out as a necrophilic orgy. I don’t know why. The mind plays funny tricks of magnification and condensation with memory. I even had it in my head that there had been some cannibalism involved at the end of that scene but I was wrong there too. As I’ve had occasion to say before, the movies that play in our heads are unique creations. And they get stranger as we get older.

*. After such an auspicious debut none of the three filmmakers — Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred — went on to do all that much. Belvaux committed suicide in 2006, but I don’t think did anything after this movie. I couldn’t find much information on Bonzel either. Poelvoorde has kept acting, at least in Europe. But I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything.
*. Is that strange? I don’t know. I guess this movie is kind of a one-off sort of thing. As both a succès de scandale and a gimmick picture there was really no obvious next step. What did Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez do after The Blair Witch Project? And that movie made a lot of money.

*. Ben is most often described as a serial killer but if so he’s certainly an odd variation. He doesn’t have any cooling-off period because he doesn’t seem driven by any kind of inner compulsion to kill. While on the job he often seems either indifferent or as though he’s just playing to the camera. Nor is he a hit-man since nobody is paying him. Is he still a professional criminal? It seems unlikely that he’s making enough money robbing people (even if they are old moneybags) to be able to support the kind of playboy lifestyle he affects. Or am I asking too much in expecting his character to add up?
*. Who he most reminds me of is Johnny, the character David Thewlis plays in Naked (which came out just the next year). He’s the guy, a monologue artist, who knows a little bit about a lot of things, which in turn makes him think he knows everything about anything. He’s as ready to hold forth on the mating habits of pigeons as he is on contemporary architecture and building practices, modern poetry, painting, or how to ballast a corpse. As far as world view goes, he is racist and sexist, but with a smile. He doesn’t seem to have any friends but only knows various people he drops in on. Spending a bit of time in his company (say 90 minutes) can be entertaining, but any longer and he’d only bore and annoy.

*. The point, as I take it, mainly has to do with the complicity of the film crew. They’re gradually drawn in, doing things like helping dispose of bodies, but then effectively becoming not just accomplices but underlings. They don’t go along with Ben so much as they’re bossed around by him. I think that’s an important message, as it tells us something about how the media in general operate. A charismatic or entertaining figure like Ben can leverage those qualities and turn the tables on those who thought to use him for their own purposes. Now consider what someone like Ben could do on the Internet with a YouTube channel. Why hasn’t that movie been made yet? Or would there not be any point?

*. I wonder what the target audience for this movie was. I haven’t read any of the series of bestselling Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and the only person I know who has is someone who has never been inside a church in her life. She just liked the story. So it’s not like they’re only preaching to the choir.
*. At the same time, I don’t think these books are meant to proselytize. There’s certainly no attempt in this movie to make a case for Christianity, premillenialist or otherwise. I’m not sure the Bible is even mentioned, much less quoted from. Mrs. Steele has found Jesus (just in time!), but she never gets a chance to discuss religion with her daughter Chloe. She’s too busy in the kitchen, or gardening. But then, what would be the point of having that little talk? You’re either one of the chosen or you’re not.
*. Nor is there any explanation of how the Rapture operates, aside from the fact that babies and children are all swept up. Which may sound fair to a layperson but which I don’t think is correct theologically. As Gary Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, put it: “The film’s religious elements are shoehorned in and woefully tossed off. Worse, it’s hard to fathom where director Vic Armstrong and screenwriters Paul Lalonde and John Patus stand — if anywhere — on spiritual matters.”
*. The only point I think worth making here is that, while millions of Americans do believe in the Rapture, it’s a fringe belief, of fairly recent origin and relying on some pretty free interpretation of scripture. So when Captain Rayford Steele (he’s the hero, in case you couldn’t tell from the name) says that his wife knew in advance how this was all going to go down, right to the last detail, you have to wonder where she got the news. Maybe she read the novel.
*. Immediately when this film came out it was heralded not just as one of the worst movies of the year but possibly one of the worst of all time. I don’t know if I’d go that far. It’s bad, but I have to confess I didn’t mind it. I didn’t like it enough to ever want to sit through it again, but it has an innocent, goofy charm.
*. It’s primarily the innocence of a Hallmark production. There’s no violence or gore. The worst thing that happens to Chloe is that she has her shoulder bag snatched by a guy on a motorbike. There’s no bad language, despite the desperate situation the left behind find themselves in. And there aren’t any really bad people left behind either. Martin Klebba is probably the closest thing. The Muslim gentleman on the plane is a decent guy. Too bad he was worshipping the wrong deity. I thought the sexy stewardess (Nicky Whelan) was going to be a villain, a homewrecking Jezebel in a tight skirt and even tighter blouse, but it turns out she hasn’t done the dirty deed with Rayford yet and she didn’t even know he was married! I guess slipping your wedding ring off really does work some of the time. Or else she just hasn’t figured out the Internet yet.
*. Even the guy robbing the store with a shotgun lets Chloe Steele go on her way. The left behind aren’t evil. In fact, they still want to get in good with the Big Guy by saying prayers as their plane is going down. This was the one scene where I broke out laughing. You missed the bus guys!
*. How can you hate a movie so good-natured about the end of the world? Yes, it’s low budget and surprisingly low key. Nicolas Cage just shows up to get paid (apparently $3 million for ten days work). He sleepwalks through the entire film. And sure, I prefer my apocalypses with zombies. But you just have to go along with all the general goofiness. It may not be a much better movie than Battlefield Earth, which did come to mind, but it’s more congenial. Actually, being left behind seems like a pretty good deal. Wouldn’t the world be a nicer place with less people in it? And New York City looking as bright and shiny as Louisiana?
*. Things might have gotten darker during the time of tribulations, or whatever name it goes by, but there was to be no sequel. Given that this was actually the second kick at the can for the series and it failed utterly I suspect it will truly be the end of the line, at least for a while. And that goes for everyone.

*. Oh the curse of heightened expectations. When they are not met, do we blame the film or the hype?
*. But for the hype I might not have seen Raw. The glowing reviews, however, sucked me in. Mark Kermode called it the best film of 2017 and even placed it fifth on his list of his ten favourite films from the last ten years. That’s high praise from a guy who sees a lot of movies, and he wasn’t alone in dishing it out.
*. Such praise, however, is a double-edge sword. Because, while I thought Raw was a nice little movie, I didn’t think it was anything special. So instead of enjoying it I felt let down. But does that mean the critics were wrong?
*. In his initial review Kermode spoke of how Raw “manages to take an intimate tale of an identity crisis and somehow blend it with Cronenbergian body horror and humour and heartbreak.” I think this is fair, but is it enough to make Raw a great movie? Kermode mentions how it draws not just on Cronenberg but Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) and Jorge Grau’s We Are What We Are (2010; remade in 2013), though I think the more obvious influence was Ginger Snaps (2000). The two sisters in a coming-of-age tale mixing budding female sexuality with horror elements make Raw almost a replay of that film.
*. The coming-of-age angle is, I think, what the movie is about. It’s not really a horror film, and reports of people fainting at its premiere, and discussion of it as being an example of the new French Extreme are hard for me to credit. I don’t think the intent was to shock. But I also don’t see it as having much to say about the virtues of vegetarianism, or as a critique of veterinary medicine. I suppose it could be taken as saying something against freshmen hazing rituals, but I found the students here to be too young and imbecilic to be taken seriously.
*. Which leaves us with sex. It’s hard for me to shake the feeling that but for the feminist slant to the film it wouldn’t have received so much attention. It struck a chord with its message of dangerous female sexuality and empowerment. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but as I say, it’s nothing new. Even before Ginger Snaps (which had been nearly twenty years earlier) a film like The Hunger, or before that Daughters of Darkness, had played on the motif of the young woman being erotically inducted into the ways of the predatory female lifestyle.
*. First-time writer-director Julia Ducournau does a good job, but again I didn’t feel there was anything special going on. There are a number of long shots that I found self-consciously arty and inexpressive. The tease scene of Justine rolling around in bed with the shocking reveal of her rash was clever, but it’s nothing Eli Roth hadn’t already done. And I don’t think Cabin Fever made many “Year’s Best” lists.
*. The cultural references have been updated. Justine listens to raunchy rap on her iPod, gets a Brazilian wax from her sister (with disastrous consequences), and is shamed on social media. All very relevant, but, again, does it make Raw a great movie?
*. Justine’s dad is Laurent Lucas from In My Skin, Calvaire, and Alleluia, so you know something’s not on the level. By the time you’ve twigged to the fact that the penchant for cannibalism is some kind of genetic disposition you can guess the macabre joke at the end, but nevertheless it works pretty well. Still, it’s just a joke.
*. I definitely recommend it. Parts of it struck me as overdone (the score, for example), or utterly nonsensical (the technique the girls use to get victims), but the cast plays well and it has an interesting look. Just forget about the hype and enjoy a decent little horror movie.

*. We Are What We Are is a remake, or American version (maybe not quite the same thing) of Somos lo que hay (2010), a film by Jorge Grau. You’ll see that in the credits, but it’s scarcely mentioned during the DVD commentary done by the cast and crew. I don’t know why filmmakers are so shy about this. The most notorious case I know of was the commentary for Quarantine, which didn’t even mention Rec once. Are there legal reasons for this?
*. As a result I can’t say much about what they were thinking with regard to the process of adaptation. Grau’s film had more in the way of social commentary, whereas this one seems more typical of American horror. Once again the family are social and cultural isolates, surely only a generation or so away from Leatherface and his kin. This is backwoods, backward America: degenerate, religious, and cannibalistic. Pray your car doesn’t break down in one of these places, where even cell phone coverage is touch and go.
*. I made a note while watching about how the flashbacks to hard times on the frontier, the back story of the Parker family being some sort of Donner Party nightmare, were a mistake. Apparently the studio thought so too and wanted them cut but director Jim Mickle stuck to his guns. Unfortunately. The studio isn’t always wrong. Most deleted scenes I see on DVD strike me as having been justified.
*. I say the flashbacks are a mistake because they’re too much and not enough. Too much in that they clutter up the narrative, not enough in that they only confuse things. A taste for human flesh is an inherited characteristic? Is it addictive? And is the family inbred as well? That would be my reading, but it doesn’t explain much. Even the way they’re presented, intercut as montage and filmed in the same way, makes it hard to understand what is happening.

*. Once again the dysfunctional (to put it mildly) family is the source of all horrors. Oh those big, sit-down family dinners! Will we ever exorcise them from our collective unconscious? Or will they remain our nightmare tableaux till the crack of doom? They certainly haven’t left American horror films for going on fifty years now.
*. One understands that something is trying to be said about the ill effects of patriarchy and how family violence is passed down generationally, but for such a movie to work I think we have to care more about the family and here none of the characters is sympathetic. This isn’t a fault of the cast, but is more in the way they’re drawn.
*. I can’t buy the ending at all. Can we believe that these kids are going to just disappear? I don’t imagine they have much in the way of survival skills, or any ability to function in the modern world at all. Since the police will presumably be looking for them I can’t see them getting far.
*. The idea came out of a better movie, and would in turn be made into a better movie a few years later (the French-Belgian production Raw). That’s not to say this version is terrible. It’s actually well put forward in most departments. But while critics gave it a pass audience ratings were much lower. This is odd for a genre film.
*. Odd, but I can understand. In the end I found it just kind of morbid (well, obviously) and depressing. That it isn’t terribly original either, and even takes a step backward in this respect, doesn’t help. Oh well. They are what they are and it is what it is.

*. We begin with a nod to 8 ½, except Michael Douglas’s character isn’t going to be able to float off into the clouds, or even rise above the smog of Los Angeles. This is the film’s original moment of breakdown and it resonates all the more for being set in L.A., so famous for its car culture. Director Joel Schumacher talks about getting things started this way on the DVD commentary track, and how essential a fantasy he thinks it is. We all want to just walk away. That we can’t is something that can lead us to rage at our condition, our feeling of being trapped.
*. This is what William Foster (or D-Fens, as he is credited), and Falling Down more generally, represents: a wish fulfillment fantasy. But as the contrast with 8 1/2 shows, it’s not an escapist fantasy. D-Fens can break the rules and thus gain the super power, as screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith puts it, of being totally fearless. Or of having zero fucks to give, to be more precise. But he’s on a one-way trip. He can’t get back in his car and re-enter the rat race. Or the human race for that matter.
*. One not incidental side effect of his leaving his car is that Falling Down gives us a different vision of L.A. than we’re accustomed to. A pedestrian vision (it’s noteworthy that at one point D-Fens queues to get on a city bus but then gives up on the idea). On foot, he sees more, experiences more. He is a creature of the sidewalk, not the road.

*. D-Fens is under a lot of stress, having had his marriage break down and losing his job. But he is also, as Schumacher puts it, a dinosaur. His haircut and office attire tell you that (even though his is a look that has dated rather better than that of many of the more fashionable types we see in Falling Down). When he says he wants to roll prices back to 1965 he’s giving you the proper benchmark for the good ol’ days.
*. But while we can feel some sympathy for him (Roger Ebert found “the core of sadness in his soul” to be what made him fascinating), he really is a bad guy. Prendergast is no doubt correct in thinking that his wife’s, and maybe his daughter’s lives are in danger. This is the way such stories usually play out, and D-Fens has, after all, threatened as much.
*. Why do we want to be on Foster’s side so much then? Mainly because of the movie’s fantasy aspect. It is not an escape fantasy, but a revenge fantasy. Nearly everyone Foster meets has a snarling or sneering attitude that we want to join him in wiping from their faces. From low (the simpering manager of the burger joint, the lazy road worker) to high (the privileged old boys at the country club) they are all deserving of a few rounds being fired in their general direction. Is there any reason why the guy waiting for the phone booth has to be such a jerk? Blow it up and let him find another.

*. The revenge fantasy isn’t limited to D-Fens either. Robert Duvall’s Prendergast travels the same arc and experiences the same explosive breakdown: finally getting to tell his nagging wife to shut up, belting his jerky co-worker, and telling his asshole of a boss to fuck off on live TV. He also gets to kill someone, which is something D-Fens only does in a moment of extreme duress.
*. Such a fantasy is a kind of American revolution. D-Fens is big on talking about his rights. It’s the lesson he tries to teach the neo-Nazi. Smashing up the convenience store is just “standing up for his rights as a consumer.” At the fast-food joint he tries to explain how the customer is always right, and feels (justifiably) cheated by his Whammy Burger not looking at all as advertised. He has the feeling that he’s the victim of a giant bait-and-switch. As an American he was promised a dream, but was sold a bill of goods. It’s one thing to rage against immigrants and diversification and political correctness (and 1993 was around the peak of the first wave of political correctness), but it’s something even worse to feel ripped off.

*. It’s an idea with traction, and I think it deserved a better script. Are we meant to feel some solidarity with Prendergast? As I’ve said, he’s bullied as much as Foster is, but he just seems too bland and underwritten to me. Meanwhile, the rest of the people we meet are annoying caricatures. The homophobic Nazi who is a sadistic closet case was a cliché long before this film, or American Beauty. Prendergast’s wife (Tuesday Weld) is excruciating. None of these people are believable. But then, as we’ve established, it’s a fantasy.
*. I had to raise an eyebrow at Lois Smith playing Foster’s mom. She was only 14 years older than Douglas, and doesn’t look it.
*. Script as band-aid: When Prendergast returns to the house and finds Torres only now being taken away on a stretcher after being shot he asks “Still here?” The movie has to throw in that line to acknowledge that the idea that she would still be there is ridiculous.
*. It’s a movie that divided critics at the time, and I think still does. Is it sending up the whole Angry White Man Fights Back trope, or is it indulging it? Richard Schickel: “It’s hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness.”
*. David Ansen is one reviewer who wasn’t buying the film’s message. “Falling Down rants with forked tongue. While solemnly condemning racism and violence, it doesn’t miss an opportunity to play on the audience’s most paranoid instincts. It would be easy enough to dismiss this as simply a dumb (though expertly photographed) junk movie. But its pretensions render it pernicious. Pandering to the Zeitgeist, it becomes part of the problem it pretends to address.”
*. I don’t know if there’s any way out of this bind. Just look at the film’s poster, with Foster striking a pose like a new Statue of Liberty, representing a different set of values. Irony? Well, yes. But enough?
*. Here’s Roger Ebert providing an example of the kind of knots critics found themselves in: “Because the character is white, and many of his targets are not, the movie could be read as racist. I prefer to think of it as a reflection of the real feelings of a lot of people who, lacking the insight to see how political and economic philosophies have affected them, fall back on easy scapegoating.” Easy scapegoating? Isn’t that at least one definition of a racist?

*. My own feeling is that it’s a movie that was trying to have some kind of a political message about hard times in America but that it fails to get that message across. Economic distress, for example, is addressed in a strangely disconnected scene involving some guy protesting at a bank for not being able to get a loan because he was deemed “not economically viable.” What has this to do with the rest of the picture? It seems out of place, since Foster, despite having just lost his job, is not on the street. Meanwhile, the domestic breakdown never really achieves the kind of emotional traction it needs either.
*. The result is that we get to enjoy D-Fens as nerdish vigilante, but don’t relate to him beyond sharing his violent cathartic outbursts at the anger, fear, and contempt he provokes. It’s a movie that seems to want to be about something more but ends up just pushing our buttons.
*. If the political message is mixed the film’s tone is no less fuzzy. At times it plays as a comedy and at others it wants us to take it seriously. Foster’s predicaments can be both silly and threatening, he can be both hero and anti-hero. That makes him dangerous, then and now.

*. Hotel Artemis is one of those movies I picked off the DVD shelf at the library, surprised by the talent involved in a film I’d never heard of.
*. Well, it went under a lot of people’s radar. Box office was very poor, with the kind of quick drop-off that you get in movies that don’t find any audience. Was this a fair fate?
*. Unfortunately, yes. I say it’s unfortunate because this is a movie that has a lot going for it. I like the premise, which has us embedded in a secret hospital (or “dark room”) for criminals in a near-future Los Angeles. And the cast is excellent, from the leads to the supporting parts. But there are problems.
*. Jodie Foster. One of the most talented actors of her generation. And this is her first film role since Elysium, five years earlier. She came out of semi-retirement for this? What’s going on? Is she not getting any good scripts? I mean, she’s fine in both movies but I can’t see what she saw in either part.
*. Foster got a lot of praise from critics both because she handles the part well and (perhaps even more) because people liked seeing her again. But I like Sterling K. Brown better. I hope he gets a role soon where he can really break out. This isn’t it. Zachary Quinto is also weirdly wasted as the wannabe tough-guy son of the city’s crime lord. Given that he’s such a wimp, it’s hard to feel all that concerned about him as a villain. And Jeff Goldblum is an even bigger waste playing the crime lord. Again, he doesn’t even seem evil, much less threatening.
*. So a good cast, tossed into roles they can’t do much with. Sofia Boutella and Dave Bautista do their usual thing, which is pretty much the same thing except he is beefy and she is leggy. At least they seem comfortable. Charlie Day is the crazy comic relief. Again, comfortable.
*. What went wrong? Something just wasn’t coming through. Listening to the DVD commentary with writer-director Drew Pearce and producer Adam Siegel I was surprised to hear about things Pearce was trying to do that I hadn’t noticed at all. I’ll give a couple of examples.
*. In this future Los Angeles water is a scarce resource, which has led to a city-wide riot breaking out that we get news updates on throughout the film. In my preliminary notes I scribbled out a number of questions I had about this. What relevance did the water shortages or the riots have to do with the rest of the plot? Was any of it necessary?
*. I still don’t see why any of this was included, but in the commentary Pearce explains how he was thinking of the plot of Chinatown, and how this movie was reversing that film’s storyline about bringing water to L.A. by here taking water away from L.A. Which is fine, I guess, but in Chinatown bringing water to L.A. was an important part of the plot. Taking water away from L.A. doesn’t have anything to do with the plot here.
*. Pearce also refers to a “water theme throughout the whole movie.” This surprised me, because I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort. But apparently he was referring things like the presence of water as part of the murals in the different hospital rooms and the fact that Nurse’s son had drowned (or had been made to look like he’d drowned).
*. Even after having this explained I still didn’t really see it. But I also wasn’t sure what the point was. I’m sure Pearce had something in mind, but it wasn’t being communicated.
*. The other surprising moment on the commentary came when Pearce explained that the movie’s biggest inspiration was Casablanca. Again, this is something that I hadn’t thought of at all at the time, and that, even after the connection was explained, I still had trouble seeing.
*. The movie I was most reminded of was Bad Times at the El Royale, which actually came out the same year. The hospital is like the hotel in being a weird, isolated location that a bunch of violent crazies check into, culminating in the usual game of last man (or woman) standing.
*. The script here is scattered. Kenneth Choi shows up as a gangster in the early scenes and then just gets taken out with the garbage and disappears. Nurse has a fear of going outside that I didn’t understand the reason for. Zachary Quinto’s character welds the doors of the hospital shut and I still don’t know why. I know I must have missed something there.
*. It’s hard if not impossible to feel invested in any of the emotional cues. There are some stolen diamonds. Brown’s character loves his brother but is better off without him, so we don’t feel anything when he dies (a power failure knocks out his life support system, though the 3-D printer still works). Boutella’s character has been hired to kill Goldblum, but since we don’t know by whom or for what it’s hard to care about that either. Worst of all, Nurse’s loss of her son just doesn’t have any impact. Foster tries her best to sell it, but it was so long ago and we don’t know who her son was so it doesn’t register.
*. In Greek mythology Artemis was the goddess of the hunt, and also the moon and chastity. So why is this the Hotel Artemis? Shouldn’t it be the Hotel Apollo (brother of Artemis and god of healing) or the Hotel Asclepius? I’m assuming the use of such a name as Artemis had some meaning but I don’t know what it is and I don’t recall it coming up on the commentary.
*. The ending is even more disappointing than all of this suggests. If you were wondering “who’s going to live, who’s going to die” you won’t be surprised. I guess Boutella and Bautista can come back for a sequel. As can Nurse. And Waikiki. Here’s his final line: “Honestly I don’t know where I’m going next. First time in my life I can do whatever I want. Never planned for that.” Brown should have told Pearce that a line like that just wasn’t going to work, that nobody could sell it.
*. I kind of hope they do come back, though I don’t think there will be a sequel. There was some potential here. Maybe it would work the second time around. But it didn’t do anything for me on this visit.

*. Sure it’s an easy dig, but I’ll start by saying that Very Bad Things is a very bad movie.
*. It was roundly panned when it came out but has since gone on to collect a handful of supporters. It’s a black comedy, they say, so if you don’t like it that’s because it’s just too strong for your tastes.
*. I don’t think that’s right. I wasn’t offended at all by Very Bad Things. But I also didn’t find it provocative, and I certainly didn’t think any of it was funny. I don’t mean that I found the humour in poor taste. I mean that it wasn’t funny. The end is bitter and ironic in an Ethan Frome sort of way, but aside from Cameron Diaz’s one-dimensional turn as bridezilla there’s nothing I found I could even smile at.
*. I honestly can’t even tell you what I think it was that was supposed to be funny about Very Bad Things. The way everyone starts to crack under the pressure and then scream and fight with each other? The burial scene where the gang toss around the body parts of their victims after Adam unaccountably insists upon adhering to Jewish burial rites? The scene where Adam cracks up when he’s forced by his wife to buy candy for his kids at the gas station? When Michael kills his brother? When Michael tries to hump his sister-in-law at his brother’s funeral? I’m not upset at anything in the premise that this material could be funny. Hell, I’d even say some of it should be funny. But is it?
*. Or take as another example the way Michael keeps saying “Goosed!” at inappropriate moments after killing his brother. This isn’t edgy, dark, mean-spirited or offensive. I think it’s meant to be funny. I mean, why is he repeating the word “Goosed!” like that? But is it a funny line? I don’t think so.
*. Few experiences are as painful as a comedy that isn’t funny. In addition to failing at its primary task such a movie also makes you anxious because you feel like you’re missing something. Was it my fault I wasn’t laughing?
*. Christian Slater is the lone bright spot, in a star turn as a cynical heel. But the part isn’t that well written and it’s peripheral to some incredibly dull leads. I would like to have seen Slater play against Cameron Diaz, whose character matches Boyd’s psychopathy, but it never happens.
*. Whatever happened to Slater anyway? He was big in the 1990s and then kind of fell off the radar. I don’t think he had much range, but in the right parts, like this, he was usually pretty good.
*. Roger Ebert named this one of his worst films of the year for 1998. His review begins like this: “Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things isn’t a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you I don’t want to know.”
*. For the reasons I’ve tried to explain, I would reverse this. Very Bad Things isn’t a reprehensible movie (crime, in the end, doesn’t pay), but it is a bad one. Rather than a black comedy I think the best way to view it is as a kind of morality play, but even in this respect it is dull and obvious, ineptly put forward, and not in the least bit interesting.

*. Applesauce is a good little movie, but you get a sense of something being a bit off right from the opening. The radio talk-show host Stevie Bricks (Dylan Baker) is asking callers to confess on-air the worst thing they have ever done, and his delivery is too slow. He doesn’t sound like a radio personality. That’s not a big thing but it does get us off on the wrong foot.
*. The rest of the movie felt a bit the same. It’s smart and deft, but needed to be lighter on its feet. A darkly comic tale of two bickering couples in New York, it plays like a slightly ghoulish, slightly raunchy Seinfeld episode, only longer and not as clever.
*. That probably sounds a bit harsh. Like I say, Applesauce is a good little movie. So let’s talk about a few things I picked up from the commentary by writer-director-star Onur Tukel.
*. Tukel repeatedly says that he is not a professional actor, which I guess he isn’t by the strict definition of these things. Few actors are. But he’s pretty good and holds his own with the rest of the cast. The miscue was in making his character, Ron, into such an obnoxious figure. It’s hard to see how he manages to have any friends at all much less keep his job as a teacher. Is his insulting manner supposed to be charming? I must have missed something here. The opening dinner scene made me cringe.
*. Tukel also talks about how Applesauce is not mumblecore. This is a label applied to a fairly obscure subgenre that apparently everyone wants to now disown. Anyway, the reason this doesn’t qualify as mumblecore is that the script wasn’t improvised. I keep needing reminders about these things.
*. Finally there is the matter of the title. I’ll confess I pulled a total blank on its meaning. On the commentary Tukel explains that it has various meanings. It refers to being set in New York, the “Big Apple.” It ties in to the idea of a sauce being a mixture of different genres. And finally it just sounds jazzy.
*. I’m not sure why Tukel bothered with the radio stuff. Stevie Bricks doesn’t function that well as a chorus and he’s only attached to the main plot with some difficulty. His game of getting people to confess to the worst thing they’ve ever done gets the ball rolling, but after that he has no essential role to play. In a movie like this you expect things to be a bit tighter.
*. Still, there’s a neat story here that nicely evokes the physical and intellectual milieu. The locations and lighting, the language and wardrobe, all combine to give an authentic sense of a comfortable but not affluent urban class. There’s a tidy moral about empathy that is made messy enough not to seem preachy. There’s nothing hysterically funny about any of it, but plenty of moments to make you smile. It’s low budget, but the talent on both sides of the camera makes up for any shortcomings in that regard. Would Tukel be better served, however, by not playing both sides? Is it only Ron’s lack of self-awareness that holds the film back? I think his author might have benefited from the same distance.

*. Probably this film’s greatest claim to fame today is having anticipated, and perhaps inspired, Alien. Not so much in a visual way (a more suggestive precedent there might be Bava’s Planet of the Vampires), but definitely in terms of various plot points.
*. The basic set-up is the same. In the year 1973 (yes, you may laugh) a rescue mission lands on Mars to pick up the lone survivor of an earlier expedition that had been wiped out. The survivor is suspected of having killed the rest of his team and he is being brought back to Earth to face a firing squad (though nobody seems to believe he’s actually guilty of anything). Meanwhile, the real killer, an alien, sneaks on board the spaceship and once they leave Mars it begins killing off the crew.
*. In addition to this story outline, Alien also picked up many individual scenes along the way. The banter of the crew around the breakfast table is one clear example. Then there is a brief scene in a kind of air duct, the use of a welding torch (instead of a flamethrower), and the blowing of an airlock to kill the creature at the end.
*. I don’t think any of this makes Alien a rip-off (though apparently there was a lawsuit). I think a lot of people were impressed by It!, and given its obvious limitations in terms of budget and talent they figured they could take what worked and improve on it. That makes sense to me.
*. One filmmaker who probably had such an idea was John Carpenter. He introduced It! for Turner Classic Movies and praised it as “a little gem among a lot of really bad films that were made at that time,” with “a great little engine that drives suspense.” Carpenter might have even remade it himself, but instead remade a very similar film, The Thing from Another World.
*. I should note in passing here that The Thing from Another World was an influence on Jerome Bixby’s script. As was a story by A. E. van Vogt, “The Black Destroyer.” Once you start pulling out threads of influence you find they don’t have any end or beginning.
*. In short, material like It! is exactly the kind of thing any filmmaker should want to renovate. There are so many places in It! where you can see a better movie trying to break out and overcome the lack of talent and budgetary constraints. One just has to dump the silly stereotypes (the female crew members, including one medical doctor, serve coffee and nurse the wounded), and get rid of the corny dialogue (“Every bone in his body must be broken. But I’m not sure that’s what killed him.” “Mars is almost as big as Texas.”).
*. The monster, a shaky Ray Corrigan in a poorly-fitted rubber suit that looks a bit like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, needed a redesign, and Giger certainly delivered there. Various improbabilities had to be dropped, like setting off all those grenades to no effect, either on the monster or the ship. These are all easy fixes. Meanwhile, there are plenty of really good things to keep. The dead hand flopping down behind Carruthers. The discovery of the drained body in the air duct. And best of all the use of the strong vertical axis of the ship’s different levels, with the surviving crew being effectively treed by the monster as the film goes on. All the time the clock is ticking for both the crew and the monster: “it has to kill us or starve and we’ve got to kill it or die.”
*. That central series of stairways provides a solid visual spine to the proceedings, and it’s actually a bit surprising that later movies (like Alien) didn’t want to borrow it. But then I guess it’s kind of awkward to work around too. There’s a terrific moment when the crew come up with a plan to walk outside the ship and re-enter it on a level below the monster. Clever! But they initially have no idea what they’re going to do once they’ve pulled off this maneuver! And as things work out it really does seem to have been all for nothing.
*. I mentioned the curious way nobody seems to actually think Carruthers is guilty of anything, despite his being in some sort of very loose custody. I raise this point again because I’ve seen It! compared to plots like And Then There Were None. I don’t see this at all. The potential is there to play up Carruthers’ possible guilt in killing off the crew, but that’s simply a road the movie never even starts down. Everyone knows they’re up against a monster right from the start.
*. It’s very cheap, and though I’ve read some reviews that praise the acting I think it’s terrible. Indeed, I wouldn’t rate it much ahead of Plan 9 from Outer Space in either category. But unlike Plan 9 it’s shot through with good ideas and Carpenter’s “great little engine” of a story. A seed in space, I’d call it. And one that would grow.

*. The Lion in Winter is one of those movies with an unavoidable personal connection for me. For years I think I saw this movie on TV every Christmas. I guess the networks figured it was Christmas programming because it takes place at a family Christmas court in 1183. But it’s not a movie much informed with the Christmas spirit. “Shall we hang the holly, or each other?” Henry roars.
*. That line was one that Pauline Kael tagged for a self-defeating, bathetic “imitation wit and imitation poetry” characteristic of the script. Well, guilty as charged. The script is hilarious. But undeniably entertaining too. It also has just enough self-awareness to undercut some of its more extravagant flights. Henry (Peter O’Toole) even tries to coach Philip (Timothy Dalton) on how to deliver his lines. If he’s not roaring he’s not trying hard enough! Everyone knows it’s all bluster and a joke. Everyone is performing.
*. That’s an odd fit for melodrama, where the sincerity of strained feeling is more the style. Here the game is to try and figure out when the characters are being sincere. Since they’re all playing angles, and quite open about it, this can be quite a fun challenge. As Geoffrey (John Castle) explains to Eleanor (Katharine Hepburn) “I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We’re a knowledgeable family.” Presumably at some point they’re not just acting, but even at the end I don’t think they’ve all figured out when they were telling the truth.
*. The fact that I watched this movie so many times tells you how much I enjoyed it as a kid. Seeing it again so many years later I’ll admit the silliness comes out more, but I still had a good time.
*. Some things never go out of style. One such thing being high-stakes domestic drama. It’s why we love soap-opera historical sagas involving the Julio-Claudians and the Tudors so much. It’s fun seeing all these costume epics where everyone is behaving like the Soprano crime family. You can still see the same situations — the bed-hopping, the bitchiness, the political maneuvering — in cable dramas like Game of Thrones and The Tudors. This is something the contemporary review in Time twigged to, while missing the point. “Henry and Eleanor are reduced to a TV-sized version of the sovereigns next door, their epic struggle shrunk to sitcom squabbles.” But who doesn’t like sitcom squabbles, especially with a cast this good? I’d rather watch this than Becket any day. Or A Man for All Seasons, if I’m being honest.
*. The label camp sometimes gets applied too, but that may be going a bit far. Still, the scene in Philip’s chambers where everyone is hiding and eavesdropping on the latest arrivals (“That’s what tapestries are for”) plays out like a bedroom farce. And the homosexual angle, with Richard (Anthony Hopkins) crushing on Philip, something for which there is no historical evidence, is only good for laughs. Surely Richard should step out from behind the bedroom curtains and scream “You bitch!” But we weren’t there yet.
*. It was Hopkins’ first major role, and Hepburn had given him some advice: “Don’t act. Leave that to me; I act all over the place. You don’t need to act. You’ve got a good face, you’ve got a good voice, you’ve got a big body. . . . Just show up and speak the lines.” Hopkins later said he considered this excellent advice, and it is in this case. Hepburn and O’Toole are the ones chewing the scenery. Everyone else can play down, except for Nigel Terry as the sulky, pimply Prince John, who does a great comic turn.
*. For all the praise they received, I do find the scenes with O’Toole and Hepburn to go on too long now. Especially since they keep replaying the same stages of trying to get over one another. Of course, that’s the point as well, since they can’t. Which is a sweet sentiment, made all the sweeter by the significant age differential between them. In reality I believe Eleanor was nine years older than Henry, which was a lot in those days. But at the time of making the film Hepburn was 61 (Eleanor’s actual age) and O’Toole only 36.
*. What makes these dysfunctional family dramas so compelling is how much of ourselves we recognize in them, how modern and contemporary they seem no matter what the period. This is a family where everyone wants love, everyone needs it, but nobody wants to give it. That would be to give up too much power and control, which is a stronger currency.
*. I wonder if one of the reasons I liked it so much when I was a kid may hint at something else: the way this is a movie that isn’t very grown-up. Henry in particular is just a big kid, and in his whimsically expressed desire not to die what we really hear is his fear of growing old. Another universal feeling that.