The Sad Life and the Imaginary Fiend

A middle aged man and his young daughter go to live by the woods in upstate New York. Tragedy follows them, though, in 2005's Hide and Seek. Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning star as the man and his daughter in this movie with a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score. I wouldn't say the film is nearly as bad as that score suggests though I would say many of the specific criticisms are valid.

At the beginning of the film, De Niro's wife, played by Steven Spielberg's ex-wife (and Jessica Rabbit's singing voice) Amy Irving, is found dead in the bathtub. Dakota Fanning witnesses it and she remains traumatised afterwards, as you might expect.

De Niro's a psychologist and in his opinion the move to a distant house in the cold, gloomy woods is just what Dakota Fanning needs. His colleague, Famke Janssen, disagrees, but he calmly overrules her. How nice it was to see Famke Jannsen again.

This was back in the period when everyone thought it was a good idea to be the next M. Night Shyamalan so Hide and Seek has a twist ending. Most people will see it coming even though, as many reviews point out, it doesn't make sense. I wouldn't use the word "silly", though, because the movie is actually very dour. Whatever psychological weirdness and thriller stuff is happening, the bottom line is that there's this profoundly unhappy little girl who experiences trauma after trauma and every shred of hope for a better life is systematically taken from her. It's an extremely depressing movie, especially since Dakota Fanning gives a great performance.

That Old Swamp Magic

Kate Hudson takes a job caring for a paralysed John Hurt in 2005's The Skeleton Key. If she'd seen Dark Waters or Sister, Sister or any number of movies in which an innocent young lady goes to live in a large house deep in the Louisiana bayou, she might've thought twice about taking the job. But she straps in for all the familiar twists and turns in this predictable, formulaic thriller that's nonetheless moderately entertaining.

Peter Sarsgaard plays an estate lawyer who takes Hudson to the property where she meets Hurt along with his wife, played by Gena Rowlands.

Hudson starts to suspect something's up when Rowlands won't explain the absence of mirrors throughout the house. Rowlands gives Hudson a skeleton key and soon she's exploring every nook and cranny of the place, discovering a secret Hoodoo room in the attic.

The usual skittery editing and intermittent sepia tones are used for bits about the house's past which includes a couple witch doctor servants. The film ends up making a commentary on racism oddly reminiscent of Get Out.

Most of the interiors feel like soundstages although parts of the film were apparently shot at a real Louisiana plantation. Kate Hudson is fine as an average young woman. John Hurt manages to deliver a good performance despite being paralyzed most of the time.

A Disconnected Web of Shadows

A beautiful young American tourist witnesses a murder in Rome. Perhaps. It's hard to say what's really happening in Mario Bava's preposterous 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much ( La ragazza che sapeva troppo), aka The Evil Eye. But it sure is beautiful.

Italian actress Leticia Roman plays the tourist, Nora, and American actor John Saxon plays her Italian love interest, Marcello. Like most Italian films from the period, a lot of the stars aren't speaking the same language and everyone's dubbed.

One night, Nora's mugged and, lying dazed on the ground, she witnesses a woman being stabbed. Everyone says it's her imagination because she has a habit of reading pulp murder novels. Later in the film, a neurosurgeon she meets at dinner explains that she must have had a vision of a murder that had occurred ten years earlier. He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. And that's one of the more sensible scenes in the film.

It's a serial killer targeting victims who line up alphabetically--first a victim whose name began with A, then one whose name began with B, then one whose name began with C. Now it's Nora's turn because her last name is Davis (Drowson in the cut called Evil Eye). When the killer's revealed, it makes absolutely no sense of the clues that had led up to the reveal, particularly a fantastically creepy scene where Nora wanders into an apartment of white walls and bare, swinging light bulbs.

Bava brings the visuals to be sure. There are so many gorgeous shots of Roman.

And a few nice ideas, like when Nora decides to make a spider-web of yarn to frustrate any intruders.

If only the writing matched the visuals. Well, I guess it all kind of works in a sort of dream logic way.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye is available on Shudder.

No Mere Mortal Can Resist . . .

One thing led to another and I ended up watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" with a class of fifteen year-olds yesterday. I used to watch it over and over when I was a kid. I remember trying to get friends and neighbours to watch it with me so they could bask in how scary it was. None of them seemed to appreciate it. Yet it is from the supposed best selling album of all time.

I don't think a story needs a character you can identify with to be good but I suspect the love Michael seems to have for horror movies radiates from the song and video in a way I found satisfyingly relatable. He was at a point in his plastic surgery journey where he was still really handsome and charming. Seeing him tease his girlfriend about jump scares comes off as really sweet, certainly for many girls watching. That's one of the great things about beauty, it can elevate the ordinary.

It's still fascinating to watch him move. People can imitate his dance moves but no-one can really move like him. It's so quick and natural. It's like Bruce Lee but without the arrogance. You can see his heart in his smile or his demoniac grin.

Twitter Sonnet #1486

To finish sooner plucks the tardy quill.
To written wings the flight was given shape.
To make a foot's to nab a shoe to fill.
To drop a tail's to turn from monk to ape.
To choose a dream's to nail a track to space.
To go to bed's to shade the meaning late.
To summon ghosts about the road's to race.
To burn the key's to seal the only gate.
To pour the tea, descend the steaming spine.
To drink the blood, descry the drifting barque.
To catch the wind you mend the course's line.
To start the race you find the starting mark.
To speak the word you need a plot of land.
To listen close you need a savage band.

The Clumsiness of the Killer

Just because a guy's a serial killer, doesn't mean he's super strong or brilliant. One of the few movies that illustrates this fact is 1983's Angst, the story of a killer just released from prison who immediately starts seeking out new victims. The point of the film is well taken but as an experience in itself it is a little dull.

Erwin Leder's performance as the unnamed killer is admirably unrestrained and effective. Along with the framing and editing, his wide, darting eyes and jittery movements help create a sense of being in his head.

He breaks into a house and finds a family--an elderly woman (Edith Rosset) and her grown daughter (Silvia Ryder) and son (Rudolf Gotz). The son has a severe mental impairment of some kind and is confined to a wheelchair. As the killer sets about his plan to murder them all, we hear in voiceover how he maps his relationships with his own mother and sister onto them. As the situation changes, his assignment of roles to them shifts.

He has grand ambitions about a number of kills but all those he manages to perpetrate in the film seem due to luck and a strange, inexplicable, persistent lethargy on the part of the family. The daughter is pretty and oddly inexpressive and barely struggles against what seems a pretty flimsy job of taping her to a door. I think director Gerald Kargl may have made a deliberate effort to dehumanise the victims in order to put us more in the killer's perspective. I can kind of respect the idea but ultimately it leads to a less interesting film, especially compared to others that successfully give us the perspectives of both killer and victim, like Psycho or even When a Stranger Calls.

Angst is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1478

Connexions slow again across the net.
Electric plants were wanting space and meat.
Resounding brass proposed a music bet.
The giant legs obscure the tiny feet.
A fax machine digests the ancient bill.
A troub'ling storm rewards the watching mouse.
We carried hearts beneath the sandy hill.
The girl could barely fit the rabbit's house.
Arrangements differ 'cross the ocean deck.
We play for cards to make another game.
A match revealed a deep and empty wreck.
The shaking sand condensed and met the same.
Forgetting days, the child aged in years.
A kitten's sleep persists for deafened ears.

Who's the More Parasitic?

Class mobility comes only with blood, lies, and sorrow in 2019's Parasite (기생충). Like many of the best South Korean films of the past thirty years, it doesn't fit neatly into one traditional genre, having elements of black comedy, thriller, and drama. It could also be called a sort of dark fairy tale, certainly an allegory for social class relations. Like most Best Picture winners, it's good but leaves one asking, "Really? That was the best picture of the year?"

Also like most Best Picture winners, it's likely that politics played a big role. The Academy has received a lot of flack for not meeting the eternally unattainable level of inclusivity to make people stop complaining so it probably felt good to vote for the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture. But it also fits the more traditional political motivation of rewarding a director's latest, decent movie for the failure to recognise one or more of his earlier, much better films--like Shape of Water or Gladiator--in this case, Bong Joon-ho might have been better recognised for Snowpiercer or Mother.

Parasite is the story of a poor, chronically unemployed family and their successful scheme to get themselves all hired as a wealthy family's cadre of servants, only for everything to go terribly wrong. It starts when the teenage son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), gets a job as an English tutor for the wealthy family's daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ji-so). He's then able to recommend "Jessica", in reality his sister, Ki-jeong (Park So-dam), as an "art therapy" tutor for the wealthy family's rambunctious, pre-pubescent son, Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun).

One of the funniest moments in the movie is when Ki-jeong carefully asks the wealthy mother, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), "if anything happened to Da-song when he was in first grade?" Like the sucker she is, Yeon-gyo immediately reacts in shock to this keen insight.

Soon the rest of the poor Kim family are employed with the father (Song Kang-ho) as the family driver and the mother (Jang Hye-jin) as the housekeeper. It's this last job that finally introduces a wrinkle when the previous housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun) turns out to have been keeping her husband secretly in a bunker beneath the house. The rest of the film, while still having funny moments, becomes more of an action thriller where the conflict between the Kim family and the old housekeeper's works as a metaphor for the competition between members of a lower economic class for the rare opportunity of advancement. Do they just fight each other, or will the proletariat finally find some solidarity in conflict with the blissful and insensitive elite?

Despite several jokes at the expense of North Korea, there's certainly an unmistakeably Marxist philosophy behind the story, almost reminiscent of a Soviet propaganda film. While the story is entertaining and the actors give good performances, there's a lack of complexity to the protagonists and little in terms of distinct personality traits among them--aside from age and sex, there's little to distinguish the daughter and the father, for example. But this is often the case with allegory and propaganda, as is some improbability in some of the plot points, not to mention a climax that makes very little sense. But it works because there are plenty of good jokes and the actors all deliver good performances.

Shaken or Stirred, Just Keep Pouring

James Bond could've taken life a whole lot easier and Dean Martin shows how in 1969's The Wrecking Crew. The last in a series of four films in which Martin played Matt Helm, a sort of international government assassin, it's an adventure film in the James Bond mould with a little more comedy thrown in. Director Phil Karlson creates some exciting energy in the action sequences and there's some wonderfully campy production design but the film's showcase is Martin's chemistry with several beautiful women, particularly with a bumbling agent played by Sharon Tate.

We meet Matt Helm (Martin) already surrounded by gorgeous ladies wearing a variety of bizarre bikinis. What is the kink that necessitated one woman to wear a telephone, its base sewn to her bottom and its receiver sewn to her top? "Wait, my phone's off the hook," says Matt as a car drives him away to his next assignment.

Martin's famous booze fuelled, dry improvisational comedy he perfected on stage here aligns well enough with some conventional spy movie moments. My favourite was a bit where steel doors suddenly come down over one exit after another as he tries to leave. When one door doesn't close right away, he politely stands and waves his hand at it--when it finally closes he gives it the "okay" gesture.

The villain is Count Contini (Nigel Green) whose plan is simply to steal a whole lot of gold in weird, complicated ways. He's assisted by Elke Sommer, Nancy Kwan, and Tina Louise, all beautiful and devious women. Though Louise's scene mainly consists of her trying on various outfits while Martin works the lights.

It's kind of sexy, I guess.

Sharon Tate plays Freya, a guide assigned by the Danish tourism bureau who may have more--or less--to her than it might seem. A running gag throughout the film has Martin just about to make it with a lovely dame only for Tate to stumble in, ruin things, and sort of save his life in the process.

She seems to be a parody of the typically hyper-competent Bond girl, a broader take than the Britt Ekland character in The Man with the Golden Gun. But she shows herself to be a decent martial artist in a memorable fight scene with Nancy Kwan. Choreographed by Bruce Lee, both women markedly lack Lee's unique, lightning speed and precision but with a little help from careful editing the two have easily the best fight scene in the movie.

Martin seemed a little less enthusiastic about entering a fray though it's worth noting he kicks Chuck Norris' ass. Norris makes his first film appearance in an uncredited role as one of Contini's henchmen.

I love Contini's mansion with its chequered floor and gold furniture. Freya unfortunately blows most of it up before she and Matt escape on a helicopter. "This is fun!" she says in contrast to his visible weariness. A transparent babydoll nightgown she wears at the end helps ensure she outshines everything else in the climax.

The Car and Motorcycle Shuffle

I wish I could speed through Paris on a motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour and not worry about hitting a kid or a dog or something. Walking around at a shopping centre after seeing 2018's Mission: Impossible--Fallout, I felt irrationally frustrated by all the obstacles preventing me from moving faster. People crossing on the sidewalk in front of me seemed malicious impediments to me realising my potential as a cannonball. Good thing we have movies to address such needs and this one has very little slack in that department.

I haven't watched a Mission: Impossible movie since I saw the second film in the theatre in 2000. I remember it being better than the first one, which I also only saw in the theatre, but mainly I remember the evening because I ate a whole box of chocolate covered coffee beans. I certainly didn't leave the theatre feeling sleepy though as I recall the main hook for the second film was shots of Tom Cruise slowly creeping his way around the underside of a rock at high altitude.

Good old Tom Cruise. Fifty six years old and the biggest daredevil in Hollywood. Constantly doing his own extravagant stunts, including a super high altitude skydive in this film, has become an integral part of his fame. And it's certainly a benefit for M:I--Fallout--there are subtle, natural reactions an actor has to a physical situation that cgi simply can't predict. A truly talented artist can make cgi action interesting but such sequences are at their best when they're expressions of those artists' sensibilities. The personality in Spider-Man flipping about between buildings has a different appeal than the sense of volatility in Cruise suddenly, unexpectedly scrabbling on the side of a rooftop.

Henry Cavill gives a flat performance but he's a good refrigerator--I still believe it'd hurt when he slams into someone. Simon Pegg seems like he must have been a lot of fun when his character was introduced a couple years earlier and he's perfectly satisfactory now. Mainly, though, the film is about Cruise's relationships with women.

The film's primary thematic appeal is very traditional for the spy genre and some might say retrograde--it primarily revolves around a hypercapable male protagonist's anxiety over the increasingly difficult task of protecting the woman he loves, or even just the woman he feels a raw sexual attraction to, an anxiety especially complicated by the ambiguity of the woman's motives. I've always argued that the James Bond movies are really imitations of Hitchcock movies and the true originators of this genre are Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959)--but especially Notorious. That one put all of the details in place--a handsome, suave, resourceful agent (Cary Grant) and the beautiful female spy (Ingrid Bergman) whose sexuality seemed connected to the peril surrounding the mission. And, of course, there's exotic travel and uranium.

Plutonium turns out to be the deadly McGuffin in Mission: Impossible--Fallout. There are three women on Ethan Hunt's mind this time--Rebecca Ferguson as an MI6 agent with the cool name Ilsa Faust, Michelle Monaghan as a wife named Julia from an earlier film, and a sexy weapons broker called the White Widow played by Vanessa Kirby.

He protects the White Widow in the film's most stylish sequence set in a club with a corridor of mirrors that reminded me of the sabre fight in Phantom Menace. Ambiguities about who Ethan is, who she is, and what both of them want add spice to an action sequence with a lot of physical intimacy and the always lovely garter pistol Kirby produces at one point.

The film's effective cocktail of relentless, expertly contrived action and sexual subtext never quite hits the heights of the Raiders of the Lost Ark gold standard and the last act of Fallout sags a bit with some logical inconsistencies but it's still a very fun film.

Twitter Sonnet #1139

Required masks deflect inverted ice.
A row of microphones records the group.
A massive weight's in fact a thousand mice.
On tiny feet the horde traversed a loop.
Contented clouds but lately look below.
The paper's widely strewn on rows of crops.
There's something near the farm to say hello.
A trundling metal rabbit fin'ly stops.
A scholar's choice reversed the wind at sea.
For timing sharp the knife became the bread.
A teasing thorn remembers it the bee.
The dearer member claimed a ruddy bed.
The beetle workers make a metal think.
A million screws combine to make a tank.