I really loved the movie Robot Dreams and I've seen it twice now, but there is something extremely jarring about the number of shots where the twin towers are prominently featured in the background, especially since the film seems to have nothing to do with 9/11 sjdjjdjf

( brittany o’grady / demi woman ) WESLEY McCARRICK is 23 years old and is a SENIOR at thales university. SHE is majoring in FILM and is known for being THE MAVERICK as THEY can be HUMOROUS and OPEN-MINDED as well as DITZY and IMPULSIVE. every time i see HER/THEM, THEY remind me of PURPLE SKY IN THE DESERT, SKATING AS FAST AS YOU CAN TO FEEL THE WIND ON YOU, A JOKE TOLD WITH A TOOTHY GRIN.

hero’s back w character no. 2 and yet......

full name: wesley ‘wes’ elaine mccarrick

birthdate: february 2, 1997

age: 23

gender: demi woman

pronouns: she/her/they/them

zodiac: aquarius

nationality: american

ethnicity: black (louisiana creole) and white (irish)

hometown: santa fe, nm

languages: english, intermediate spanish

family:

theodore mccarrick, father

elaine barlow, mother

ruby mccarrick, older brother

delphine mccarrick, older sister

sherri barlow, maternal grandmother

many cousins

orientation: bisexual biromantic, pref. towards women/nb people but will date men

religion: agnostic

height: 5 ft 4 in

distinguishing features: eyebrows, hair, lips

character inspo: ilana wexler (broad city), harley quinn (dc comics), phoebe buffay (friends), prob more

𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐆𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃

TRIGGERS: divorce, mentions of crime, drug and alcohol use

the youngest child of ted and elaine mccarrick, wes was a kid who is full of life. she’s the kind of kid who did things to make you smile, and it usually worked. she was warm and inviting, a little naive, but she had a strong support system.

her parents divorce when she’s six, she doesn’t quite understand it but her dad moves out, and her grandma and multiple cousins move in. it’s a lively household, between her mom, who works as a nurse, and her siblings, and her cousins, it was never really quiet and there was never a lot of room.

despite the split, her parents maintain that their children have a relationship with both of them, and truthfully, wes is a daddy’s girl. she and her dad were cut from the same cloth, happy go lucky, fun loving, a bit silly, he’s the one who introduces her to movies. it’s their thing, watching and critiquing them together, and it’s not whatever is in theatres either. they went for all times of filmmaking, new wave, surrealist, and more.

it really stuck with wes, who herself had begun making movies, mostly horror/fantasy/scifi stuff with her friends-- she writes and directs and occasionally, she’ll don a costume and star in them. they’re silly little things, but her family always sat down for her “premieres.”

her formative years are marked with plenty of things, sports, deaths of distant family members, a cousin or two who gets caught in the wrong crowd and ends up in jail, and throughout this, wes remains a rock for her family.

she’s in high school, and she gets into the eclectic crowd, the outcasts, the weirdos, the ones who smoked under the bridge, and partied out in an abandoned trailer near the desert. these freaks were her freaks. they accepted her with open arms, as she them.  

she chooses thales because she always wants to see the east coast, and frankly, as much as she loves her family, she wants to be free of them. and they have a fantastic film program. so!

she meets steven in their first film class together, and they’re fast friends, despite her usual weariness of YET another film bro, steven proves to be a good egg. so she thinks. she finds out through him talking that he might not be the most faithful to his girlfriend, and as much as she doesn’t like meddling, she thinks it’s only right to let clarissa, who she doesn’t really know well, know. however, before there’s a chance, everything happens-- now she’s stuck wondering if she should reveal the truth, or let sleeping dogs lie.

nana is different, nana and her dated her sophomore year, nana’s freshman year. it wasn’t serious. but they were fond of each other. they eventually break up, but they stay friendly, waving to each other in the halls, chatting at parties.

both the disappearance and the murder is weird for wes, who by all accounts, isn’t great at dealing with bad shit. she prefers to laugh about things. laugh about everything. because if she doesn’t laugh, she’ll cry.

𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘

wes is a mess, a free-spirit, a walking contradiction. she’s very independent minded, the kind of person who does things without thinking so much about the consequences, this leads her into trouble sometimes. like nicking something from a convenience store, or stealing a stop sign as a prank. she’s definitely the kind to goof off and not exactly dedicate her full attention to something. and while she’s in genuinely good spirits on most occasions, she has a staunch ‘no asshole’ policy. the type to defend the underdogs, and go after bullies. she’ll punch you with a smile on her face, and yet it ends up being more unnerving than you realize. she’s a bit of a ditz, as well, never the best at school, but can talk your ear off about the going ons of the world. she’s a lovable dumbass, for sure, and loyal to a tee once you get her as a friend.

𝐓𝐈𝐃𝐁𝐈𝐓𝐒

horror movie fan! her favorites are some of the oldies, like dracula and  the bride of frankenstein! and some new ones! big fan of jordan peele’s work, as well as ari aster’s! but mostly really advocates for women directors and directors of color!

also does roller derby! she picked this up her first year at thales and fell in love with it, i can’t think of a name for her yet, but she’s a blocker, won’t hesitate to elbow some dick at the bar

kinda a tomboy? she’s always been! she’s rough and tumble and not afraid to get down and dirty with someone, i.e. will join those football games on the quad or crawl through the mud for a scene to shoot

doesn’t know if she wants to be a director/writer or a cinematographer honestly.... she loves the technical aspects of film as much as the making the stories

definition of a bruh girl, says it a whole lot, but also just if you tell her you love her, she’ll just roll her eyes and be like you’re an idiot (which means she loves you too) she’ll be affectionate if she’s close to you

kinda a wh*re oops....... texts multiple girls at a time and doesn’t want to hurt any of their feelings she doesn’t know how she keeps ending up in these situations... also a bisexual disaster

a stoner as well..... always has a massive jar of weed

unclear whether she lives on campus or off campus but if she does live off campus she has a pet turtle named elsa lanchester after the bride of frankenstein actress

a drummer! she’s in a band (name tbd) she started drumming at a young age and found it was a good way to manage her aggression

doesn’t really do well with emotions, so she’ll either be like there, there, or try to make jokes.... she really said kids can you lighten up

walking meme... such a walking meme... doesn’t know so many things she’s like a cute puppy with no thoughts head empty but she’s so fun to be around

life of the party.... nana she came fr ur spot and she took it and she’s not sorry but she does miss u a lot

doesn’t rly feel like she’s allowed to be upset anyways bc some people have it...... way worse.... can u say Imposter syndrome

kind of an enabler...... will be that person to push u to try things but not in a peer pressurey way, more like if u are unsure abt sending a text she says do it

wears fun earrings and socks! think lollipops or gummy bears or found objects like she collects that shit it’s her lifeline

boxes! she’s been boxing since she was abt 12, courtesy of her older brother (who is now a doctor thx ruby) and it’s a good way to exercise and release stress

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒

best friend -- two of a feather, cut from the same cloth, or complete opposites it doesnt matter to her (the abbi to her ilana)

roller derby friends -- she’s p close to the team, margs on her

makeup artist pal -- i think it would be neat fr someone to try and teach her makeup whether its normal or sfx bc she wants to look like a monster or smthn

she’s gullible, u take advantage of that -- u just tell her lies p much and she’s like yeah ok that sounds right

party friends

classmates

fwbs (f/m/nb) -- tbh she might have one or two of these but they literally are the def of pals who bone sometimes... like v good abt being like you good? u dont want more? cool me too

exes (f/m/nb) -- mostly dated women or nb people but def cld have had a guy

she smokes you out -- p much the only reason u hang out w her is bc she has good weed

someone she’s fought -- like fully decked in the face, prob said something that rubbed her the wrong way and it just devolved from there

people who dislike her -- she could definitely be seen as annoying bc shes loud and dorky and funny so ??

breaks someone out of their shell -- p self explanatory, pushes them to have fun, w everything happening shes rly like lifes too short to not take the opportunities around u

cousins! probably on her dad’s side! i figure she has some east coast fam 

anything? truly?

Mental Illness and the Horror Genre

An exploratory essay by Emma L. Gilbert

The relationship between horror media and mental illness is messy, and on many occasions outright screwed up. Today, I’m going to take you through various examples of horror films that utilize mental illnesses and disabilities, often as a central theme, and examine how exactly mental illness is used to benefit the tone of each film, and how some of them may or may not use it in a distasteful fashion.

Without further ado, here we go!

“Psycho” is the earliest film I know of at the moment that utilizes mental illness explicitly as a sort of evil or “villain”. The big reveal is that the character Norman Bates’s late mother developed as another personality inside his head which, very clearly, resembles Dissociative Identity Disorder (we will actually be talking about DID more than once today, as it appears to be the most common mental condition used in horror movies next to psychosis or schizophrenia).

I can only assume in the time of “Psycho’s” release, this portrayal was considered anything but realistic to general audiences (The term “psycho” is even considered a slur nowadays by a fair few mental health experts and activists). Mentally ill individuals were but a disturbed fantasy in the minds of the public, and in many ways they still are.

In more modern times, mental illnesses on the “scarier” side (like DID) are seldom understood or spoken about, and this makes them a very easy target to use as driving scare factors in horror films. We fear what we don’t understand, we know this, we’re talking about it a lot nowadays, but movies similar to “Psycho” that use such things as plot material for their stories still get made so carelessly.

Let’s dive into another example more thoroughly:

 “Midsommar” is a 2019 horror film directed by Ari Aster, the man behind “Hereditary” (which we will also be discussing). I know a lot of people love this movie, just like people love “Psycho”. It won just about every award from Fangoria’s 2020 “Chainsaw Awards”, which are completely fan influenced. But it completely missed the mark for me because of a couple instances involving disabilities. And while these instances are miniscule, it’s the fact that they are so miniscule, so “tossed in”, that bothers me.

My first problem begins at the start of the movie. We open with our lead fretting over an ominous email sent to her by her mentally ill sister, which is all well and good. But the ultimate result of this situation is that she was right to be worried, as her sister had hooked herself up to a car exhaust pipe which she used to poison herself and their parents, resulting in the death of all three.

This is… extreme. And while it’s absolutely okay to be extreme (I’m one of those horror fans that enjoys a little extremity), it’s peculiar, and yet not so peculiar, to have it alongside the aspect of the opening I’m about to explain.

The illness of the sister character is specifically labeled as bipolar disorder. Why is this specifically a problem for me? Mentally ill people can be dangerous, that’s an indisputable fact. But I’m gonna pause “Midsommar” here, because it’s a good time to shift over to a movie that I believe suffers the same problem.

 “Split”, both in the title movie and in the ensemble “Glass”, refers to anti-hero Kevin Crumb’s disorder as Dissociative Identity Disorder (there it is again!). This was a problem since the very conception of the first film, because it’s doing that thing where a mental disorder is used explicitly to make the villain of a horror film scarier. And while the character of Kevin isn’t ultimately seen as evil, the film still misconstrues many things about DID in order to keep its creep factor (like, people don’t wind up with evil alter egos who kidnap and kill people in a cult-like fashion, and people with DID do not go through extreme physical altercations when different personalities take the front).

This was many folks’ first introduction to the very concept of DID, just like back in the 60s with “Psycho”, and the movie does little to deter the audience from taking what they are seeing as factual. It really drives home the fact that Kevin has this disorder that is real, using that perceived realism to enforce the horror of its story. It uses a lot of typical “professional” imagery and dialogue, such as namedropping the disorder and having the character attend a therapist regularly on-screen. These things in film tend to equate in the general ignorant public’s mind to something bordering on or outright factual. While I choose to believe most people recognize the easy potential for illegitimacy in fictional movies, I still notice, even in myself, how further research is seldom enacted, and the information granted by that movie remains present in the back of our minds.

I’m not trying to say this is entirely the fault of the team behind “Split”, because I believe people should be responsible for recognizing that not everything they see is true, no matter how legit it looks. But the fact is that people are stupid and do take stuff like this as fact whether they realize it or not, and I think that filmmakers and storytellers should hold a little responsibility for making sure their highly fictionalized portrayals of real things (especially real people) don’t get taken as hard fact. Easy resources for understanding complex mental conditions are not popular enough or offered enough to garner the public’s attention; I’m sure someone would rather watch “Split” instead of reading a textbook on DID studies.

 All that being said, let’s go back to “Midsommar”. The mention of bipolar disorder is a one-time occurrence, but it still sticks out to me; both because I noticed a trend in Aster’s films of using mental illness explicitly (like I said, “Hereditary” comes later), and that this diagnosis is used at the ultimate expense of the sister.

Throughout the movie, Terri (the sister) is seen as a scary, taunting ghost through Dani (the lead)’s eyes. She is only ever depicted as that terrifying last picture of her, with tubes taped to her mouth and their parents beside her. She also seems to be looking right at Dani in these sequences, too, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s a fearful memory; her sister is a villain.

Using a disorder described as a “mental disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration, and ability to carry out daily tasks” to tie to a character that was unhinged enough to plug herself into a car exhaust pipe to kill herself and her family seems… like a reach, to me, at least. She would’ve had to plan that out- it takes serious dedication, supplies, thought, and time to pull that off. Bipolar people can be prone to sudden outbursts, not necessarily to planning and executing an intricate double homicide/suicide.

What I’m trying to say is that there’s no way bipolar disorder was the sole cause here. There were clearly more “things” she had going on, but the only thing they say is that she’s bipolar, therefore suggesting that is the reason behind what she did, and then treat her like a vengeful ghost the rest of the movie.

There is perfectly good reason for Dani to see her sister as something sinister, though. Literally the only aspect of this plot point that messes it up for me is that we have a “diagnosis”. It doesn’t feel right to me to use such a common and non-extreme illness for the sake of being like “ooh check this out, this is a real mental illness and mentally ill people do bad stuff sometimes, look at that! Look!” It’s lame, and unkind, and, like “Split”, borders on irresponsible. It’s times like this where a character’s mental condition could use a little more ambiguity, especially when it’s literally never brought up again. It’s so nonchalant, so careless, and that’s what bothers me.

Now, I’m gonna move away from mental illness alone for a hot second and explore how “Midsommar” treats its other disabled character.

“Midsommar” depicts an explicitly inbred character with a facial deformity named Ruben who lives with the Swedish cult and is treated like a sort of “higher being”. They are clearly treated with care, but through the gaze of the American characters, we see them as off-putting. And, again, this framing makes sense, as Ruben was purposefully conceived through incest because of some misguided religious belief that disabled people are closer to clarity.

But, stop; what is this portrayal doing, again? It is doing that thing where it uses a disabled character to give us the creeps. And this is made worse when Ruben goes on to kill and skin one of the American characters, and then wear his face as a mask.

Okay, listen. It’s wrong of the cult to purposefully bring a very physically and mentally challenged individual into the world for religious reasons, but that’s not relevant to my point. Yeah, it’s weird, but people like that character are real- and, no matter how they came to be, they’re here now. Why are we always looking at these people with pity or fear, and normalizing that reaction? It can be jarring to see someone who looks like that, sure, but they’re a person, and should be treated like one.

Oh, and not to mention having Ruben wear the skinned face of a “normal” person is absolutely representative of wanting to “look like everybody else”, which is a screwed-up narrative especially when you’re using the disabled person as a straight-up monster. I get the whole “skin the fool” thing, that was funny, but did we have to do that? This is Ruben’s “normal”, and that’s not an awful thing.

Before we reach “Hereditary”, I’d like to say that the utilization of deformed people as killers and monsters in horror is, I think, arguably more prevalent and inescapable than the use of mental illness by itself. It’s present to a point where we just have to deal with it and the amount of irreplaceably iconic villains with facial deformities, but I’d like to believe that we can do better and move past that. Make a monster, not a person.

 Let’s get cracking on “Hereditary” now, which I think uses mental illness as a much more core aspect to its story than “Midsommar”. Again, Aster makes it clear out the gate that our evil character (the grandmother) was indeed mentally ill, and this is, again, used at the character’s expense.

Now, I wanna keep this short, because with how much I went off talking about “Split” and “Midsommar”, I think that what I find troublesome about a movie called “Hereditary” about a mentally ill cultist grandmother passing on her “lifestyle” to her family is rather obvious.

I mostly want to discuss the character of Charlie, because her portrayal is what bugs me the most. My gripe with her is that she is very obviously autistic, or something along those lines, which is framed as a creepy thing about her. She’s supposed to be some kind of “chosen one” that her grandmother wanted, and I guess this was grounds to have her be the “creepy one”. But this can be done without making the character blatantly mentally compromised (and before anyone comes for me, I’m autistic, and despite the many wonderful things about it, it also does hinder me from some basic things in life, so, yeah, it’s compromising). It’s just so tacky, uninspired, and tired.

In regards to other characters, we see Annie speak of how her grandmother suffered from mental conditions (I can’t recall whether or not one was specifically named), and then watch her exhibit various “scary” symptoms herself (trying to set her son on fire, etc.), which grow worse post-Charlie’s death as she is wracked with grief. Annie’s case isn’t quite as terrible as things such as “Split”, as she never actually does anything, only attempts and then snaps herself out of it (before the end of the movie where everything goes to hell, of course). My main problems, as mentioned, are with Charlie and the grandmother, mostly Charlie. I just wanted to attempt to cover all “Hereditary’s” portrayals at least briefly before moving on to my next subject.

 Now that I’m done being mad, let’s explore another recent horror film that uses mental illness as a core aspect.

“Daniel Isn’t Real” is a 2019 film by Adam Egypt Mortimer about a boy (Luke) who experiences a traumatic event as a young child, which he copes with by manifesting an imaginary friend named Daniel. Daniel doesn’t stick around, though, as he tricks Luke into poisoning his mother, almost killing her, and resulting in the two locking Daniel away.

It’s incredibly easy to decipher the, once again, use of DID symptoms. One could easily push this movie aside due to this fact, as clearly, the mental illness is used as the spooky horror thing again. But I’m of the belief that this film handles itself a little better than the likes of “Split”, and here’s why.

It’s a bad thing to use mental illness as your villain, unless you do it right, and there is a way to do that. Luke (the mentally ill person) isn’t the villain, Daniel (the mental illness symptom) is, just like Kevin isn’t “Split’s” villain, but the important difference is that, in “Daniel Isn’t Real”, the audience sympathizes realistically with Luke, doesn’t turn his illness into something extremely outlandish. In “Split”, the audience is following the heroine, who is terrified of the outside force that is Kevin and his personalities. “Split’s” DID is otherworldly and threatening. “Daniel Isn’t Real’s” DID is threatening, but something the audience and Luke hold hands through and fight together.

Aside from some muddy metaphorical aspects (assuming I’m reading it right) and the use of some racial stereotypes common in horror films, “Daniel Isn’t Real” is on the upper end of horror featuring mental illness.

It is also worth noting that there is actually a specific mental illness brought to attention in the film, schizophrenia, as Luke is seen reading a book about it once he starts realizing he’s losing control of Daniel. But this is merely a suggestion, as he doesn’t actually know what is going on in his head and we never get an official declaration of his condition. This brief clip pretty much only helped in solidifying my perception of the story as about mental illness first, and a demonic imaginary friend second. If you ask me, I think dissociative identity disorder fits more with the film than schizophrenia, but my knowledge on both of these disorders is relatively “bare basics”, so take that with a grain of salt. And besides, from this point on I’m going to be looking at the portrayal mainly as an undefined trauma induced condition.

I view Daniel as a visual representation of Luke’s mental condition. He is rude, and childish, and malicious, nothing like who Luke is, who wants nothing more than to get rid of him. Mental illness can feel like there is some evil thing in your brain telling you awful things and threatening your existence, and Daniel represents this feeling perfectly.

Going even deeper, the movie opens with a shooter entering a small café and massacring multiple patrons and themself. One of the things that causes Daniel to manifest is Luke, having left his home where his parents are shouting at one another non-stop, coming face to face with the dead shooter. It is later revealed that Daniel, an ancient demonic “imaginary friend”, was inhabiting the shooter at the time, thus making him the cause of the massacre. And he chose Luke as his next host on that fateful day.

Pause now. We’ve got a blatant mental illness metaphor, and it’s the direct cause of a murder. Why am I more lenient on this and hard on things like “Midsommar”? It’s because this detail plays into what I view as a very interesting interpretation of mental conditions and their preceding trauma.

Looking past Daniel being a demon, I see this as the shooter struggling with the same or a similar type of mental condition caused by a past trauma. This person was sick, as all terrorists of this breed are. Again, this narrative is helped by the fact that we are following Luke and not someone on the outside of his problem, and therefor understand the real lack of control had by anyone Daniel (A.K.A. mental illness) has touched, and, more importantly, the helplessness they feel.

Am I saying people who enact gun violence are partially innocent and have no free will? No, that’s stupid. The real point of me bringing this up is simply that I find it interesting how the film looks at trauma as sort of a contagion. Hurt people can hurt people, and traumatized people can traumatize people. Whatever “demons” that killer hosted were passed on to Luke- and, if the film wanted to go for a broader subject and ditch the singular evil imaginary friend concept, passed onto many others, too. But, it didn’t, and I think that works best, as symptoms like Daniel typically only manifest in young children, assuming you wanna go with the DID/schizophrenia reading, which is what the film offers to us.

We see experiences and fears felt by everyone who has mental illnesses portrayed visually in “Daniel Isn’t Real”, sometimes feeling like a mixed bag of different symptoms from different mental conditions. I see myself and my own experiences in Luke, and it feels good to see the mentally ill person as the hero, and the mental illness being at least mainly a threat to the mentally ill person rather than the outside world, which is how it is more often than not.

And while the movie ends on a sad note, actually quite similar to Kevin’s end in “Glass”, what it does with its runtime is, for the most part, what I want to see more of in terms of mental illness in horror.

 Like I said at the beginning, we’re an easy target. Autistic, obsessive compulsive, anxious, depressed people like me are scary when you have no idea what you’re looking at. Yes, we can be dangerous sometimes, but to nobody more than ourselves. But much more than dangerous, we’re scary to ourselves.

I’ve lived in terror for long periods of time before due to my mental illnesses, and I’ve had this thought; “why doesn’t someone make a horror movie where the mentally ill person is the protagonist, and the mental illness is the monster?” “Daniel Isn’t Real” executed this idea almost perfectly, if not for the fact that Daniel was out to hurt other people, because what’s scarier than a person with a realistic mental condition hurting other people? Ooooo.

Living with mental illness can feel like a horror movie all on its own. The horror is in my head, and I can’t kill it, only keep it at bay, control it. And I think that is scarier than any Norman Bates, than any Kevin Crumb, than any Ruben. To live with a force in your head that wants nothing more than you for to be in misery is a horrific reality worse than any killer.

And before I close, I want to comment on one more little detail. I’m much more critical on recent movies that work with this subject matter than I am on older movies; that’s why I had so much to say about the Aster films and “Split” and so little about “Psycho”. This is because I understand how invisible the very concept of mental illness was in everyday society in “Psycho’s” time. It wasn’t just an easy target, it was a given, and nobody writing these films had any idea of what they were doing or the seedling of thought to look into it. It was that alien.

Today, we are talking about mental illness so much, and yet we are still so careless with what we use it for in our media. It is blasphemous to me that directors and writers still insist on using mentally ill people as villains and creepy characters. Mental illness is such a complex experience that deserves to be explored from the viewpoint of those of us who live with it, not as a toy for the bigshot horror director of the hour to toss around like a hot potato.

There was an excuse in the 1960s. There is no excuse now. We can do better.

Thoughts : Tusk (2014)

This one has been in the queue for quite a while.  I’ve been a fan of Kevin Smith since the late 1990s, and it has been a pleasure to watch him grow as a screenwriter and filmmaker.  His brand of humor has always stood out as unique, but the word I was hearing prior to finally seeing Tusk was that it was unlike most any film folks had seen.  

Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) and Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osmet) are the hosts of The Not-See Party, a popular podcast where the two discuss social media influencers and viral videos before Wallace travels to interview the subjects.  Wallace travels to Canada to meet the Kill Bill Kid (Doug Banks), a young man who accidentally cut off one of his legs with a katana, but Wallace arrives just in time for the Kill Bill Kid’s funeral due to his choice to commit suicide.  Stranded in Canada with no story, Wallace stumbles across a letter on a corkboard from Howard Howe (Michael Parks), an eccentric explorer searching for a lodger who promises endless personal tales of his adventures.  Desperate for an interview, Wallace seeks out Howe, not realizing that he is walking into a trap more bizarre than anything his imagination is capable of creating.

While Tusk is certainly not Kevin Smith’s first foray into the world of high concept contemplation, this is his first true dive into a realm as specific as body horror.  The high concept comes into play as he examines Wallace through the lens of bad life choices, and how these choices have ripple effects that can leave an individual isolated before they realize for far gone they’ve spun out.  Wallace is presented to us as egotistical, boorish, opportunistic and unfaithful, but in one of the rare tender moments he shares with his girlfriend Ally, we are told that he did possess desirable and admirable qualities at one time.  Based on his character choices, and his job as a host of The Not-See Party Podcast (a show name that creates a self-imposed hurdle), his turn into danger plays out in a perfect “boy who cried wolf” scenario.

Perhaps the most interesting and impressive aspect of the film is how Kevin Smith is able to serve as a bridge between the comedic stylings he made his name with and the high-level skills he has gleaned from two decades in the film industry.  A mix of absurdist, intellectual and low-brow humor is a given with a Kevin Smith affair, and Tusk provides it in spades.  Canada not only serves as the butt of a few jokes, but it manages to dish out a few zingers and quips full of Canadian personality.  Several characters are given carte blanche to embody outrageous characters and go nuts in that skin, with Michael Parks specifically getting the chance to show a handful of these looks.  The premise of the story is a randomly obtuse mix of Misery and The Human Centipede, and the periphery of the main narrative is peppered with mini-narratives that are proportionally ridiculous in their own right.  What really stands out amongst all of this, however, is the high production value of the film, as Smith finds a middle balance between the big budget comedy look of Cop Out and the darker, edgier look of Red State.

Tusk continues a streak of stellar, rejuvenated writing that began with Clerks II (if you’re willing to ignore Cop Out’s poor performance and critical reception), with Smith finding new and unique ways to expand his voice and naturally gifted ability to tell stories.  The production value on the Howard Howe home is stellar as well, with everything from the living quarters to the walrus dungeon providing a jarring tonal shift at each point of appearance.  The walrus effects and costuming are bold, but the final result is one that creates an image that will forever be burned into the minds of viewers.  The scoring is also strong, standing up to the high bar set with his previous film, the brilliant Red State.  The expository insert shots that accompany the Michael Parks monologues are a nice touch.

Justin Long jumps off of the screen with his ridiculousness broadness, with everything from his hilarious mustache down to his outlandish behavior setting viewers up for a shared journey down a path of darkness that could not be further from that initial stance.  Michael Parks plays equally ridiculous in his diabolicalness, with his madness and obsessiveness played so large that it nears the brink of insanity, and yet somehow, he finds a way to ground it all so that he plays sinister enough to incite fear.  Haley Joel Osmet finally gets a chance to break out of what seemed to be an eternal typecast as he gets to bask in a humorous light.  Genesis Rodriguez brings the emotion to the table, with her unconditional ability to share tenderness and be vulnerable making the main protagonist trio engaging.  Johnny Depp completes the trinity of ridiculousness, with his measured and specific take on his Inspector Clouseau-like character adding a different shade to the spectrum of humor in the film.  Appearances by Ralph Garman, Harley Morenstein, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Harley Quinn Smith, Lily-Rose Depp, Doug Banks, Zak Knutson and Ashley Greene also stand out.

BONUS THOUGHTS : Yoga Hosers (2016)

As if Tusk weren’t weird enough as a standalone, Kevin Smith followed it up with a comedic horror for kids in the form of Yoga Hosers.  Part lore expander and part “let’s throw a movie together with famous friends”, the film famously divided fans of Smith and the View Aswkewniverse, mostly due to the lead roles of the Colleens in the form of Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith (the daughters of Johnny Depp and Smith, respectively).

Colleen C. (Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen M. (Harley Quinn Smith) are a pair of friends whose job at the Eh-2-Zed convenience store has brought them minor fame due to their involvement in the rescue of a “man turned to manatee”.  One evening after sneaking in a practice for their band Glamthrax with drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody) while on the clock, the girls are invited to a Grade 12 party by seniors Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) and Gordon Greenleaf (Tyler Posey).  The girls accept, but on the night of the party, Colleen C.’s father Bob (Tony Hale) is invited to Niagara Falls by his girlfriend (and Eh-2-Zed manager) Tabitha (Natasha Lyonne), leaving the girls to cover the store and miss out on the party.  In a last ditch effort to exert control, the girls invite the seniors to move the party to Eh-2-Zed, but the Colleens have no clue of what was in store for them.

If held up to the standards of other Kevin Smith films, it’s easy to pick this one apart, as the tone is much more juvenile than films like Mallrats or the Jay and Silent Bob films.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, as it seems like this film was not meant to be taken seriously or held as high art… this film does, however, totally read as a gift to two daughters whose fathers believed in their desires to act, and due to their rare ability to facilitate those dreams, were given the chance to fulfill a wish.  You can see both actresses progress and become more comfortable as the film progresses, with Harley Quinn Smith especially showcasing that intangible growth where an actor or actress can visualize their place within a frame while on the set.  It’s also very fun to see a litany of familiar faces and famous friends pop in and out of the film.

Certain creature design choices and production design continuously serve as reminders of this film’s connection to the Tusk world, though the two films have very unique rhythms.  Much of the writing and humor drives home how the film is meant to be perceived as a bit of a “human cartoon”, with literal references to cartoons and comics sprinkled throughout.  Keen viewers will be able to spot the numerous references to nearly every other Kevin Smith film that are presented.

It’s safe to say that words and descriptions cannot do the film Tusk justice… this film is one that simply must be seen in order to be believed, and even then, it is still rather unbelievable.  Yoga Hosers is fun in its own right, but you REALLY have to be a fan of not only Kevin Smith the filmmaker, but Kevin Smith the family man to truly enjoy it… it’s definitely the one folks will see simply out of a need to be a completionist.  I may or may not be writing on Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, as I watched it on the same day, but I can say that I have not laughed that hard at a movie in a long time.  

@hitchcock--starlet

Aah thanks for the post! I go on and off Tumblr mostly as a lurker, so I rarely know how to actually interact with people. This was a nice surprise. Okay, I’m dying to know - I’m assuming you’re “younger,” or at least younger than me (I’m in my thirties). Why the heckin did you start watching this show? For me, I didn’t have a lot of options on TV so we literally watched what was on. Now there are so many options - you can watch anything at any time-what was it that made you pick up this one? 

Aah ran out of space. Secondly, I’m glad to know you’re cool with me stalking all your posts because I am majorly enjoying them!

Ha, I’m also pretty bad at interacting with people on here outside of just throwing posts into the void, but if somebody else gets the ball rolling I’ll literally never shut up again.

You’re right, by the way; I’m in my mid-20′s. 

And thanks for the compliment by the way! Glad to know my posts are appreciated! I’m really hoping to throw some more fan art and gif sets and generally more time-intensive stuff out there as well - the screenshots are fun, but somewhat simplistic - but I haven’t had the time yet.

As for the main question, this is gonna be rambly as heck and I’ll put it under a readmore, so TL;DR - it’s a comfy show that immediately made sense to me, and ticks all my Optimism Boxes. 

First of all, I found the show because somebody mentioned the blooper reel over on TV Tropes, a website that basically deals with media analysis, which, as an English major and general geek, is absolutely my shtick. Well, I love me some good bloopers (especially when they come with a “NSFW because cursing” warning, and, really, Julie London is such a gem), and the fact that all the actors seemed like cool people, combined with the age of the show, was enough to make me watch an episode at least. Nothing better to do that afternoon.

Thing is, I normally hate medical dramas and went into it expecting some entertaining vintage corniness at best. Took me half an episode to utterly fall in love with this show.

I’m never quite sure what exactly catches my attention when I find a new TV show, but I do have a hunch or two. First off, me being into slightly older TV stuff as such isn’t very surprising - I grew up on old TV and books as a kid, and continued that trend of my own volition later. Music, too - my first proper favorite band was ABBA, lol. Add my interest in history to that, and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that my favorite filmmaker is Buster Keaton. If one of your all-time favorite movies doesn’t even have sound, 70′s TV shows don’t even register on the weirdness scale anymore. This also means that I’m used to a slower narrative pace and episodic storytelling, which makes stuff like E! considerably less jarring.

I also do have a soft spot for old technology and objects of daily life, probably precisely because I grew up with a lot of media that was older than myself (and caught the tail end of the analogue era in person). This means that I really love watching technology progress over the course of the show - stuff like Rampart’s communications systems being upgraded, the workings of the Biophone, the technical limitations of the HTs, the vintage cars (always had a soft spot for those), all the ensuing Early Computer Shenanigans... Good stuff.

(the whole “old fire engine” subplot adds a hilarious meta layer here because it essentially features Johnny and Roy having the exact same reaction to 50-year-old stuff (for them) that I have to fifty-year-old stuff as well, except MY fifty-year-old stuff is their contemporary... well, you get the idea)

That alone was plenty enough to get my attention, but wouldn’t have made me stick with the show (like I didn’t stick with Starsky & Hutch a couple years back) - the characters and the tone of the show did most of that. 

I quickly realized that this show has some baseline rules, which I wouldn’t mind being standard for all medical shows (and just TV in general): Everything will be more or less alright, VERY few people are deliberately malicious, the characters are generally competent and thoroughly professional, even when they are personally involved, the show doesn’t usually try to be clever with the plot twists, and stuff that shouldn’t be dramatic isn’t played for drama. I summed it up as “sometimes, somebody just gets stuck in a dog door, and that’s alright” before - it’s just so comforting that rescues really are just that simple sometimes. That straightforwardness and nearly complete lack of cynicism is incredibly reassuring, and an attribute that almost all of my favorite shows share. The lack of personal drama also helps, even though some more information about everyone’s personal lives would actually have been nice, lol.

(Relatedly, the show frequently doesn’t point stuff out and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions. Gives me a LOT of stuff to dig into with my analyzing. Not really relevant here, but something that I do think is pretty fun)

And then, of course, there are the characters. I have been told I have a type when it comes to favorite characters, and that type seems to be “fluffy, dark-haired, nice cheekbones, eccentric and/or just slightly... Off, very easy to over-analyze”. Sounds familiar*? 

Though, funnily enough, it wasn’t Johnny that made me realize what a gem of a show I’d found; it was Dix and Brackett. The former because of her interactions with Johnny; the rapport between them and her Mom Friend tendencies (and Dix’s treatment as a character also made me semi-confident that I wouldn’t want to sock the writers too often), the latter because the first episode I watched was one of those that make it abundantly clear that Kel, prickly as he can be sometimes, is just as much of an idealist as the rest of them and really does care about people, and I love that. Add Roy and his friendship with Johnny, and the rest of the crew, including and especially Captain Stanley and his little charming oddities, and there’s no recurring character in this show that I don’t like. 

Combine that with all the other stuff I mentioned and there was really no chance of me NOT loving the show once I’d found it. 

*(if that ALSO sounds like someone ELSE: yes, I did watch Sherlock back in the day, but that one REALLY didn’t tick either the “not cynical” nor the “straightforward” boxes. Due South, on the other hand, did, just in case you ever watched THAT one. Bashir from Star Trek: DS9 is another fave.)

Friends. I am so unable to have coherent thoughts about Arrow at this point. I wanted to do a little 7x19 review (not much to say, tbh fuck I lied), but then again I also wanted to do a 7x18 review, and a 7x17 review, and...also talk about Arrow ending and EBR leaving. Yeah, ‘cause I still haven’t managed to do those things.

I keep thinking I have to have all my thoughts in order and arranged before I can say anything valuable, but the problem is my thoughts won’t comply. They refuse to be orderly and arrangeable. (Also I’ve tried just typing whatever is in my brain, too, but all I have to show for it is about 10,000 words of semi-coherent babbling hanging out in my Drafts. Probably never to see the light of day.)

So anyway 7x19 (🤞 that I stay on track here - update: I fucking failed! 😱😱😱): it was okay I guess.

As we draw to the end of the season - of the show, really - a few things keep bothering me, and unfortunately they’re coloring any and all enjoyment I may be able to squeeze out of the episodes so I have to just get them off my chest:

1. I keep getting stuck on the terrible production value. I can’t help it! It’s gotten to the point where I cannot help but see the production as much as I see the story, and it’s so jarring. I see the sets, the stage, where I only used to see the setting. It’s the (lack of) camera angles, the lighting, and the very obvious reliance on sets, rather than location shoots. 

And I can’t help but think: it didn’t used to be like this. Seasons 1-3 were so immersive, so atmospheric. Stylized? Yes, but in a way that was purposeful and enhanced the story. 

The most recent seasons make production feel only like a means to an end.

I think the production budget got cut a little after season 3, but seasons 4 and 5 still felt epic and captivating enough. But season 6′s production values were abysmal. And I thought it would finally improve in season 7 with the new showrunner, but instead it has only gotten worse and I realize now that it must have everything to do with budget. (And maybe this is my bitterness talking, but I can’t help but suspect that part of it is that increasingly, more and more of each year’s budget is being used to fund the crossovers. 😠)

The EPs seem to have forgotten something critical about filmmaking - production is always going to be a crucial aspect of story-telling, whether it’s intentional or not. There’s no such thing as an “objective” camera angle or edit. Every non-decision has as much an impact on the story as a decision would have, and by forgetting that, they have vastly reduced the overall quality of the show.

Anyway, I feel like I have to make one thing clear, since after all, I WAS ON THE SET and I MET THE CREW - literally shook hands with and spoke to camera operators, lighting people, and all other sorts of production people: they work hard and take their jobs seriously and in no way am I trying to suggest that any of them are bad at their jobs. They were truly lovely and professional and I was so impressed by them. I truly think the lapse in production values is entirely due to decisions made at the very top about money. It just has a very unfortunate, very obvious impact on the quality of the show they’re making. 

2. I can’t help but see and lament the effect of OVERPLOTTING and a lack of emotional foregrounding.

I comment all the time about how tight the story was in seasons 1-3:

Big Bads who had a personal connection to Oliver

seamless interweaving of the Flashbacks and the present

a clear, consistent, well-paced evolution of Oliver’s character that paralleled the action/plot

excellently-plotted storylines where all the characters were relevant to the plot - so that we had a reason to care, and focus on character actually forwarded the plot.

a good mixture of villains of the week that were both interesting unto themselves, and provided much-needed wins/breaks in the overarching plot, and allowed for plenty of character moments

generally, because of all of the above, a perfect sense of pacing and an excellent balance between plot and character, where plenty of time was given to dialogue and quiet character moments - which only served to enhance the plot

But then season 4 came along and things went south quickly, mainly due (in my opinion) to writing decisions that put plot over character, resulting in some seriously out-of-character stories that unfortunately had a huge impact on the show going forward. But even aside from Oliver’s uncharacteristic lying and Felicity’s unlikely decision to call the whole thing off, season 4 was already suffering from a clear lack of the things (above) that made seasons 1-3 so good.

It was the first time the BB had no real connection to Oliver’s past, which meant that suddenly the villain arc had to pull double-duty - drive the present-day plot and also somehow establish an emotional reason for us to care. Unfortunately, rather than pulling those two threads together into a tight, single focus, the writers created a sprawling story - a messy, confusing present-day arc and the absolute worst flashbacks of the entire show.

And it also saw the deliberate introduction of more comic-book elements to the show, with Damien Darhk’s (and Constantine’s) magic, which was a wrenching change in tone from the first three season’s grittiness. (I know a lot of the haters like to blame this shift in tone on Olicity - and even I will admit that the suddenly happy-go-lucky Oliver was a little too heavy-handed - but I fully believe the tonal shift has everything to do with the introduction of magic. And, of course, the horrible, clunky, meta-heavy crossover, which for the first time was used as a vehicle, rather than a chance for us to enjoy interactions between characters we loved.)

Then there was season 5. Lots of people love season 5, and I agree there were good elements, but for me it still suffers from a lack of those things that made seasons 1-3 so great:

most of all, with NTA there were suddenly too many characters - and they didn’t have a legitimate reason to be there. Their stories were arbitrary, inconsistently explored (or, more accurately, not explored), and had nothing to do with Oliver. And (maybe worst of all), their backstories/stories had nothing to do with the overarching plot of the season. So, again, the show’s focus was pulled in a million different directions, rather than the earlier brilliance of plot and character working together to drive the narrative. 

the introduction of metas as major characters in Arrow (rather than only being used in the crossovers) continued the cartoonish atmosphere which, in my opinion, made the consequences of all actions feel slightly less real, less impactful. To me it felt like a betrayal of Arrow, at its core. Because Arrow was solidly gritty for the first 3 years - even the League of Assassins storylines of season 3 felt grounded and real. Even The Count, Cupid, the Clock King - comic book villains to the core - still felt gritty and real within the universe. But (for me at least) the casual reliance on metahuman abilities let the writers be sloppy and careless with their plots, their resolutions, and their consequences. 

and I know most people love Prometheus, but I never loved him for two main reasons. First, while I appreciate the fact that they tied Prometheus’s origin to Oliver, the personal connection just felt forced to me. Prometheus, Talia, all of it felt untethered and hasty. I think they could have done a much better job grounding the story, planting the seeds earlier, but they didn’t. Second, Prometheus just won too much. The show had spent 5 years making us believe in Oliver’s abilities - as a fighter, an archer, and a strategist - and it was suddenly as if he were a bumbling idiot. The show made him seem incompetent in order to make Prometheus be always 10 steps ahead, and it was not only disheartening, it was unbelievable. Because not only did Oliver have 5 years more training than Prometheus did, he also had a team behind him.

Season 6 failed spectacularly in all ways, in my opinion. It was the ultimate example of overplotting, where the writers basically took everything that was so great about seasons 1-3 and did the opposite. Too many characters, uneven pacing, a sprawling, unfocused villain arc, and a lack of any given reason to care about any of it. And of course, everyone acting counter to their long-established characteristics.

I was really, really hoping that Beth and the new writers would use season 6 as a counterexample: what not to do in season 7. But (and again, I am not trying to place blame - I have no idea who is really in charge of these decisions, plus at this point there are already so many balls in the air that a lot of it is probably out of the writers’ hands anyway) as season 7 winds to a close, it’s clear to me that they’ve basically repeated a lot of the same plotting problems of season 6. 

Which brings me to 7x19. (And all of 7b actually, if I’m honest.)

Because this was supposedly a JOHN DIGGLE-centric episode, but it was way too little, way too late. (Setting aside the absolute tragedy that it’s been 7 years and this is the first chance we’ve gotten to look in-depth into John’s backstory beyond Andy.) Like others have mentioned, the focus on John felt superficial at best. We have a character with 7 years of characterization to explore, but the episode hardly touched on John’s character, his emotions, at all. And the little we got felt superficial. 

Instead, the episode was plot-heavy, convoluted, and tried to accomplish too many things. Things that, for the most part, had not been adequately emotionally foregrounded. By that I mean:

John’s story with his stepfather could have been awesome, except we’ve never fucking heard John even mention his parents before this episode. They planted and harvested those seeds all within a single episode.

Felicity’s struggle with her legacy...WOW. That was the first time we’ve ever heard her specifically say that she wanted her own legacy more than as Overwatch. Yeah, we have the “beacon of hope” stuff from 4x17, and some references here and there this season - and I don’t mean to be ungrateful - but I feel like there were ample opportunities to do a better job foregrounding Felicity’s struggle, yet they just haven’t.

Emiko and Dante. Yawn. Too little, too late - both in the season and in the series. 

Emiko and Oliver. Same.  

I have strong feelings about why it’s all going wrong, and for the most part I think it’s this: the writers aren’t trying to tell a complete, emotionally fulfilling story in season 7. Rather, season 7 seems to be divided into two discrete storylines:

7a, the prison arc, was pretty much its own thing. Sure, the writers attempted to establish a connection to 7b through the flash forwards, but it’s a very weak connection that relies on illusions and attempts to obscure the audience’s perception of events (mainly to do with the attempt to make us believe that Oliver’s prison stint caused a fundamental change in Felicity, making her become a villain in the future). But in reality, the 7a arc was pretty much self-contained - and, in hindsight, all the better for it.

7b, on the other hand, has lacked focus and direction, and as the season has worn on it’s become increasingly clear that rather than having purpose and emotional fulfillment of its own, it’s being used as a vehicle:

to drive the flash forward story, and/or

to drive next year’s crossover storyline, and/or

to drive season 8′s storyline.

(I’m using and/or there because I pretty much suspect all of those things are one in the same.) 

Seasons 1-3 (and even 4 and 5, to some extent) built upon each other. The writers planted seeds in seasons 1 and 2 that didn’t pay off until much, much later, meaning that we were invested in that payoff. We were adequately prepared, through plot and character, for those stories. But rather than continue to reinvest and build on elements of the earlier seasons, the latter seasons - especially 6 and 7 - have gone off in completely unprecedented directions. And for season 7, this means they’re trying to do accomplish too much at the very end. Too much plot, too late in the game, with too little emotional foregrounding.

We have THREE EPISODES LEFT after this - only THREE EPISODES left with Felicity - and there are still so many unanswered questions. Not only for the season, but for the show. And somehow each episode still manages to feel stagnant, refusing to answer our pressing questions, or worse - introducing new ones. 

And I guess that’s what’s really getting to me now. Because did I hate 7x19? No, not really. Aside from the general decline in quality discussed above, it was fine. I like the Team Arrow moments, I liked Olicity in the bunker, the team within the team. This is the sort of action and stories I wanted more of last season, and all this season too. It’s nice to finally have it again. 

But it’s time for resolutions now, and we’re not getting them. It’s time they start answering our questions about the flash forwards, time they start resolving the Emiko storyline - or at least building up to that resolution. (Remember how tight 1x19 through 1x23 are? The threads unraveling, the ever-heightening intensity?? Nothing like the plodding, disconnected feel of these late-season 7 episodes.)  

All of which makes me think they’re not really intending to resolve these questions this season at all. Rather than giving us a satisfying, complete story, they’re just rushing to the next thing - the next crossover, the next season. 

And it just bothers me, because this is the end for Felicity. We deserve character moments, goddammit. 

The showrunners seem to have forgotten that it was always character that made this show great. And it just makes me sad that it seems they won’t remember it in time to give us the proper ending that Felicity (and Oliver, and John) deserve. 

I’m seeing movies I should have seen before -- and writing down my impressions as part of my overdue education.

Edge of the City (1957)

What a fascinating, complicated movie -- now as well as in its time. It was groundbreaking then for its warm portrayal of an interracial friendship between Tommy Tyler (Sidney Poitier) and the troubled Axel North (John Cassavetes), as well as for showing Poitier in a position of authority among New York City stevedores. The movie was a commercial failure despite getting rave reviews -- in part because it wasn’t screened in the south.

But later criticism of the film wasn’t quite so full of plaudits, pointing out that Poitier’s character is undone by the “Magical Negro” trope, with Tommy dying so that Axel can find himself. It’s a criticism that was heard in the 1960s about Poitier as an actor: he made a string of black-white buddy movies that mainstream audiences applauded but critics in the black power movement saw as feeble and safe when the time for restraint was past.

That’s a debate where I’ll learn more by listening than talking, so I’ll confine myself to observing that there’s a lot to admire about this movie regardless of character critiques. First of all it’s frankly gorgeous, with sumptuous blacks and beautifully composed shots. It has real drive from the stylish opening credits, which contribute to the sense of weighty events being set in motion that will prove hard to stop. And pretty much every performance is terrific: Poitier and Cassavetes, of course, but also Ruby Dee, Kathleen Maguire, Jack Warden, Robert F. Simon and Ruth White.

Two scenes in particular stood out to me. First there’s Poitier’s understated acting as Cassavetes finally lets go of the family secret that’s been haunting him -- without saying a word, you watch him go from puzzled to pained to sympathetic while always calculating how to help. And then, even better, there’s Dee’s transformation from baffled grief to cold fury as she realizes how thoroughly Axel has failed Tommy. 

What makes that scene so powerful is that Dee, Cassavetes and Maguire are free to act without having to compete with the movie’s score, which is too often yowling and overwrought. I don’t know enough about movies to trace when and why movie music stopped being intrusive and overly busy, but I’m sure glad it happened.

Edge of the City also made me realize that for all the progress I’ve made as a moviegoer, I still have some big gaps. Edge of the City is generally discussed in the context of Poitier’s other buddy movies, which I haven’t seen, and compared to On the Waterfront. (Ditto.) So! Work to do!

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

My family watches It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas eve, so by now I’ve seen it at least a dozen times -- enough to appreciate its drum-tight, almost perfectly constructed story. Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, from a decade earlier, is  not perfectly constructed. It’s basically two movies welded awkwardly together -- a romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur and a courtroom farce in which Cooper, playing the supposed simpleton Longfellow Deeds, takes on the whole crooked system. 

The movie’s fun and marks the first of Capra’s consciously crafted social statements, but the narrative 180 is jarring and Cooper’s big speech doesn’t make the catatonic silence that precedes it any more believable. Also, Longfellow sure hits a lot of people. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that in a courtroom, no matter how many populist addresses you’ve just delivered.

Still, it’s entertaining enough. Lionel Sanders is a hoot as the cynical flack, one of many fine performances. The scene where Deeds realizes the woman he loves has betrayed him is particularly fine, and makes up for the parts that don’t work. Cooper’s performance in that scene is all reaction, and wonderful work. 

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968)

A limp lifestyle comedy made so mainstream audiences who’d never seen hippies could laugh at them. The sad thing is you can see a better movie trying to fight its way out of the mess. Peter Sellers is good as the repressed lawyer unhappy with his drab life but incapable of changing it -- his slow burn in the first half of the movie is fun to watch. The problem -- actually it’s more than a problem, it’s a fatal case of timid storytelling -- is that slow burn never leads to an ignition. We never see Sellers actually take a deep breath and make a move on his brother’s hippie girlfriend (Leigh Taylor-Young, who’s lovely); instead they’re suddenly just together. Similarly, when Sellers gets tired of having his apartment overrun by stoned, self-absorbed moochers, he doesn’t explode -- he just sulks a bit and things go back to how they were before. There are multiple scenes where we should get a delicious payoff for all Sellers’ good work -- a valve finally blowing, a catharsis, a realization. But the movie never has the guts to go there. It repeatedly settles for safe, easy and lame.

Bullitt (1968)

I thought I’d seen this Steve McQueen cop classic with its legendary car chase through the streets of San Francisco, but I was wrong. The movie’s perfectly suited for McQueen -- his Frank Bullitt navigates an uncertain and dangerous world with an icy stare that’s the only hint of all the emotions he keeps bottled up. (In other words, he’s Steve McQueen.) The story’s spare and businesslike too, with a refreshing lack of cop cliches. Rather than overheated How Dare You Sir-ing with supervisors, the story advances through the sometimes slow, always deliberate work of cops and doctors doing their jobs. It only falters when it drags us back to a DOA romantic subplot with McQueen and the luckless Jacqueline Bisset, who’s saddled with a truly awful What a Wicked World speech. McQueen ignores it; the viewer can only try to do the same.

If the car chase isn’t quite the 11 minutes of perfection it’s made out to be -- even a non-nitpicker will spot the green VW bug that manages to be everywhere at once -- it’s still better than most anything you’ll see from filmmakers who’ve had a half-century to take notes. I think it works so well because, like the rest of the movie, it excises dramatic clutter. One unlucky motorcyclist aside, there’s a minimum of empty garbage cans in weightless flight, acrobatic pedestrians diving miraculously away from bumpers, and dopey close-ups of speedometers. With all that shorn away, you get a visceral sense of being there with the drivers, in danger as they improvise. The sound is similarly spare: the music doesn’t intrude but lets the sounds of tires and engines do the work, and Bullitt and the driver he’s chasing remain silent. Instead of a bunch of yammering about what we already know, we get a single look in a rearview mirror and a hint of a smirk. It’s all we need. 

The Best Horror Movies of 2020

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2020 has been a tough year for cinema with theaters forced to close and release dates delayed. It’s a real rough break for filmmakers whose work was due to get a wide theatrical release and instead launched on PVOD or streaming services.

A double shame for horror since 2020 has been an excellent year for the genre in terms of quality, including a handful of exceptional debut films that in any other year would have been lauded in the same way as Hereditary, It Follows or The Babadook.

Den of Geek staff and contributors voted on their favorite horror movies of 2020 to produce this list – each is a gem worth seeking out.

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10. The Mortuary Collection

The problem with most horror anthology movies is there’s usually at least one segment that pales in comparison to the others, which tends to dampen your enjoyment of the whole thing somewhat, but The Mortuary Collection truly avoids suffering from the same malady.

In this debut feature from writer-director Ryan Spindell, beloved Highlander and Carnivale star Clancy Brown plays an eccentric mortician called Montgomery Dark who encounters a pretty young drifter looking for work. As Dark guides her through the strange inner workings of his mortuary, he decides to recount several unique and grisly tales that have all culminated in the need for his post-mortem services. Of course, all is not what it seems.

The Mortuary Collection immediately caught the eye of genre vet Sam Raimi, who poached Spindell for this year’s 50 States of Fright series over on the now-defunct Quibi streaming service, and it’s easy to see why: these macabre tales are all immaculately created to give horror fans the best anthology experience they’ll have had in years. – KH

9. The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Some might say that there’s only so much you can do with werewolf movies these days. Someone gets bitten, they get cursed, they’re doomed to kill innocents, and they’re mercifully done in by someone they love. Roll the credits. But Jim Cummings’ The Wolf of Snow Hollow breaks from that formula effectively while still remaining true to the spirit of the genre. 

Cummings, who wrote and directed the film, also stars as a cop in a ski town overrun with a rash of brutal murders. A recovering alcoholic with anger issues, Cummings’ John Marshall is the son of the town’s ailing sheriff (the wonderfully warm Robert Forster in his final role), and John finds himself trying to come to terms with the fact that there may or may not be a werewolf in their midst.

The film’s oddball approach and deadpan humor can be a little jarring, especially when contrasted with the truly grisly aftermath of the werewolf attacks. But The Wolf of Snow Hollow paints such a sympathetic picture of its characters, and effectively builds its tension through them rather than an over-reliance on werewolf tropes, that it’s a must for anyone who needs a little more lycanthropy in their life. – MC

8. Freaky

The Friday the 13th franchise has been dormant for more than a decade. Which is just fine if we can get movies like Freaky, the best horror slasher we’ve ever seen set on that date. Stuffed with loving homages to both the Jason Voorhees franchise, as well as Disney’s own classic Freaky Friday brand, Christopher Landon’s Freaky is a wild genre mashup every bit as whacky as his previous Blumhouse high concept, Happy Death Day. Except just so, so much gorier.

Filled with slapstick kills and splatter, the movie’s real life blood comes from the dual performances by Vince Vaughn as the Blissfield Butcher and Kathryn Newton as Millie, the shy teenager he accidentally swaps bodies with. Both actors have a lot of fun playing very against type, but Vaughn’s commitment to depicting a neurotic teenage girl is especially satisfying because he so earnestly leans into it. A winking throwback with teeth, it gives new meaning to the phrase ‘gut-buster’. – DC

7. Synchronic

Synchronic is the fourth feature film from the directing/writing/producing (and sometimes acting) team of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. It’s also their most ambitious yet in terms of the scope, genre, and the pair’s working with bankable Hollywood names.

Anthony Mackie stars as Steve, a single, alcoholic New Orleans paramedic who learns he has six weeks to live just as he and his partner Dennis (Jamie Dornan) respond to a series of bizarre deaths linked to a new designer drug called Synchronic. Where Synchronic comes from, what it does, and how it affects these friends propel them on a reality-shattering journey.

The two chief aspects of Synchronic that make it work so well are the overall correctness of the story at hand and the compassion that flows throughout the tale and its characters. Moorhead and Benson have addressed the themes of addiction and time in all three of their previous features, but here they mesh them together seamlessly. In some ways, the eerie Synchronic is a transitional film for Moorhead and Benson: working with Hollywood talent and more resources than they’ve had before, it may also be their most easily accessible and mainstream film to date. – DK

6. The Lodge

 As a movie that’s been unfairly overlooked, even before the pandemic, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Lodge is one of 2020’s hidden gems. The follow-up to the directors’ Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge is the rare horror movie where you don’t know where it’s going, and if you can trust anything or anyone you see.

The film works as both generational conflict between stepmother-to-be Grace (Riley Keough) and the new children in her life (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh), and as something of a ghost story. Once they’re snowed into a cabin, and one strange disaster follows another, the gnawing realization grows that more than one party could be unwell, and that nightmares from the past walk among them. The cataclysmic ending is rhapsodic in its despair. – DC

5.    Relic

This very personal story about three generations of women is the debut of Australia-Japanese filmmaker Natalie Erika James. It’s story about dementia turned into a supernatural body horror and haunted house movie with a very distinct visual style.

Emily Mortimer stars as Kay, a woman returning to her childhood home with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) when her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) goes missing for several days and can’t recall where she was. Edna flips between indignant independence and vulnerable confusion – the true horror of the film is in the idea of watching someone you love lose their sense of self. However this is very much a horror and not just a drama and the third act takes us into very dark territory turning the house into a labyrinth and dazzling us with some deeply unsettling imagery. 

Relic is compassionate and very female horror which has things in common with The Babadook, not least the emphasis on production design – it’s a gorgeous looking movie peppered with horrific moments, with a shocking but tender conclusion. – RF

4.    Host

The defining movie of 2020 is a horror that runs under an hour set entirely during a Zoom chat. This feature debut from Brit director Rob Savage is absolutely one for the archives. Made in just 12 weeks from inception to its Shudder release, starring actor friends of Savage who were already close mates, Host follows a group of pals who undertake a seance via Zoom. As hokey as that might sound, the film really isn’t. In fact it’s very scary and employs some ambitious stunt work, though the heart of the movie is in the performances. Semi-improvised and extremely naturalistic, the group already has a shorthand in place so that bits of backstory can be drip fed or implied without exposition. These are people you’d want to hang out with.

A lockdown movie (rather than a pandemic movie) of the moment, details like face masks and elbow touches make this the epitome of 2020 in film form. Savage and writers Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley have already inked a multi-picture deal with Blumhouse and production on their next project has already begun. A rare and well deserved good news story for the year. – RF

3.    His House

Ghost stories can be scary. More often though they’re thrilling; a bit of escapist camp about what goes bump in the night. Not so in Remi Weekes’ directorial debut, His House. There is a supernatural presence in the dilapidated public housing that refugees Bol and Rial Major (Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku) are crammed into. But long before the ghosts go bump, the terror of the refugee trail between Sudan and the United Kingdom is made manifest.

Technically Bol and Rial are two of the lucky ones, a pair of Sudanese survivors who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. Yet memories linger. As does the cruelty and judgment of a strange land that begrudgingly welcomes them, but also threatens to deport them if there are any complaints about their home—and there are. How can there not be when the ghosts they left behind whisper between their floorboards?

It’s a somber parable that couches real world nightmares into a genre one, teasing out that the greatest horror doesn’t need spirits to be haunting. – DC

2.    Saint Maud

One of the best films of the year of any genre is this feature debut from Brit director Rose Glass. In it, newly pious young palliative care nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark), comes to believe saving the soul of her dying patient Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) is her divine calling. Set against the faded glamour and squalor of a seaside town Saint Maud is social realism through a religio-horror lens, with some truly terrifying images, not least the utter gut punch of the final shot which will leave you reeling.  

This is an extraordinarily confident debut which explores the disconnects between the mind, body and soul. Ehle is terrific as the glamorous former dancer whose body is letting her down in illness, but this is Clark’s movie. Buttoned up and prim, with a fierce temper underneath, Maud believes she is on a mission from a God who talks directly to her, but glimpses of her past suggest something more troubling is going on.

Part body horror, part possession movie, part psychological thriller and part mental health drama, Saint Maud is beautiful, scary and sad and puts Glass on the map as one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch going forward. – RF

1.    The Invisible Man

 It’s been more than 70 years since the original cycle of Universal Monsters ended. And it feels like almost as long since Universal Pictures first began attempting to reimagine the creatures. The last decade alone saw three false starts at reboots. But that all changed with The Invisible Man. Writer-director Leigh Whannell, alongside producer Jason Blum, had the novel idea to lean into the horrific aspect of H.G. Wells’ original 1897 text, and in so doing make it terrifying for a new age.

By reworking that novel’s concept, as well as James Whale’s 1933 classic, the film pivots from following a mad scientist turned invisible to instead focusing on the woman he wants to possess. In the process, the dread of staring into the film’s deep focus corners and margins becomes overwhelming, and the concept lends itself eerily to our post-#MeToo moment.

Elisabeth Moss is devastating as protagonist Cecilia Kass, who begins the movie escaping her tech CEO boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) by the skin of her teeth. She then must look over shoulder the rest of the film. Experiencing as much a reimagining of Gaslight as The Invisible Man, Cecilia knows she’s being stalked by her supposedly dead ex, and when no one will believe her, she’s left to take extreme measures to finally break free. It’s a harrowing showcase for Moss, and a brilliant cover of an old standard.

It revives centuries-old nightmares and finds they look exactly like our modern demons. – DC

The post The Best Horror Movies of 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - A Flawed Triumph

After a few days of careful consideration, I’ve decided to divide my initial review of The Last Jedi into multiple parts for clarity and ease of reading. I have only seen the film once at this time, and these are my initial impressions. Once I see it again, any future impressions or predictions will be covered at that time separately. This series of posts is solely to cover my initial thoughts about the movie.

To keep from overwhelming anyone’s dash, I’ll be posting one impression a day until they’re finished. A list of upcoming titles and where we are in the series can be found below:

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - A Flawed Triumph ← we are here

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - The Thematic Heart

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Finn & Rose

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Rey

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Kylo

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Luke & Leia

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Rey’s Trajectory

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Kylo’s Trajectory

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Rey & Kylo

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - The Romantic Heart

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Misleading Love Polygons

[SW:TLJ] First Impressions - Schrödinger's Futures

The remainder of this first behemoth can be found under the cut. We’ll slay the rest in due course =)

Before I get into the narrative and the themes and the character development, I’d like to cover the more technical aspects of the film, the way it was constructed, and my general impressions from the initial viewing. Be warned, this is my significant complaints post; the remainder of this series will have some nitpicks, but on the whole my impression of the film was quite good, despite how bleak it is. ;)

The Last Jedi is on an objective level a mixed bag filmmaking-wise. There are some aspects that are positively stunning and some aspects that are disappointingly amateur for a director with such a fine reputation.

Prior to TLJ I’d never seen any of Rian Johnson’s work, but he appears to be well-respected in many corners of the internet, and I was hopeful that he could not only make up for the concerns I had about JJ Abrams as a director for The Force Awakens but also bring something new and original to the franchise. This I believe he did do, but in a haphazard fashion that isn’t entirely a credit to his talent.

Let’s start with cinematography. Many shots in the film are absolutely stunning and will probably be remembered by Star Wars fans long after the flaws are forgiven. The sweeping, epic location sequences are particularly notable--especially the Crait scenes. The Red Room sequence is Oscar-worthy in my opinion, despite some questionable editing choices in certain parts. The final sequence with Luke facing the sunset is unbelievably poignant and heart wrenching. The shot of Luke walking in on Rey and Kylo burned itself into my eyes like some of the best scenes of classic movies. The shot of Kylo and Luke facing each other down would go straight to the heart of anyone who loves westerns or samurai films. There is so much to love here in the cinematography. There is a great attention to detail in many scenes--especially on Ach-to--where you get the sense of life being greater than the characters and moving on in spite of their shenanigans, which is in my opinion a wonderful touch.

Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit that fails to meet the mark as well. Having seen only one of Rian’s films, I can’t speak for his general style, but my impression of his focus is that he has a knack for action and long establishing shots, but he has a tough time capturing relationships. Worse, this is a relationship film, not an action film. Relationships are one of JJ’s strengths, and despite TFA’s flaws (which are many), JJ was able to capture the charm of the characters with just the right framing, distance, and shot choices. Rian seems to struggle with this, especially in the pivotal Rey and Kylo scenes that are the heart of the story. Perhaps he hasn’t had much experience with crafting compelling relationships, which is JJ’s forte, or perhaps he merely choked due to the overwhelming responsibility of a film like this, but in a film where these two have to be sold as a compelling, growing relationship, this is a significant and unfortunate flaw that I find hard to overlook.

In general with romantic scenes, you want very little confusion, very little cutting, and room for the viewer to absorb what’s going on before you start moving in to close ups and building intimacy. With Rian’s Kylo and Rey scenes, we get the opposite, which works fine for the first force bond moment (meant to be disorienting for both the characters and the viewer), but not necessarily for the later ones. I found the scenes slightly disorienting, which made it hard to follow pivotal dialogue and fully comprehend the wonderful emotional nuance the two actors’ were clearly displaying in their performances. I realize Rian didn’t have much time to explore everything he wanted to in the film, but I didn’t feel the Poe scenes with Holdo were nearly as jarring as the Kylo and Rey force connection scenes. We really needed more time and lingering shots to help catch our brains up with the breakneck pace of the information being exchanged between the characters. On top of this, many of the shots are too busy and distract from the important interactions happening between the characters. Rian seems to have been trying to cram so much into the film in every shot that he didn’t know what he should emphasize and what he should downplay in certain pivotal points.

This brings me to Rian’s greatest flaws in this film, and the items that to me mark him as unprepared to enter the big leagues--the pacing is poor and the music cues are underwhelming and dull. In a blockbuster film like TLJ, we should not have these issues; these are a mark of an independent filmmaker who hasn’t figured the magic out yet. The viewer is given whiplash as we race between four plotlines (A, B, C and Darkside), never taking a moment to breathe or rest. Even TFA, a briskly paced film if ever I saw one, took its time to breathe and absorb the scenery or allow us to drink in the characters’ emotions. In TLJ, we zip through character deaths, zip through Rey and Kylo interacting, zip through Poe and Holdo, zip through Finn and Rose, zip back to Luke and Rey, onward and upward. We’re never in one location long enough to get a grip on it and get into it; the moment things get interesting, we cut away to another plot without fully delving into what these interesting moments mean for the characters.

What’s interesting is that this breakneck pacing, because it’s used in every scene of the film, actually deflates the effect of the battle scenes, which is where such pacing should be emphasized! The battles in TLJ feel oddly stilted, slow, and awkward with no tension and no stakes despite what the narrative implies. There’s one distinct moment where the First Order’s just hanging out watching the Resistance while the Resistance members are having a group chat and not fighting them! It’s the classic “villain stands and waits politely while the heroes get their shit together and transform” moment. My only answer to that was a facepalm in the theatre. The final battles are embarrassing--we have this wonderful initial set up of the new walkers moving in, and then we get this bizarre cannon (whose beam Finn is able to drive into without being incinerated, answer me that one), and rather than doing anything with them, they just sit there the entire film and attack single characters. Truly Rian’s heart was not in this part of the story, and it shows.

The slapdash editing doesn’t give John Williams enough time to work with to create compelling themes for the film, unlike what we received from him in TFA. This soundtrack is sparse and dead. It relies solely on the nostalgia factor of short snippets of music from the original trilogy. The most interesting song is the Canto Bight theme, and we only get to hear it for about a minute before we’re arrested and shuffled off to another dingy location where the sound design is forgettable! It’s a complete travesty when compared to the glory and beauty of the TFA soundtrack, where we received Kylo’s and Rey’s themes and compelling new resistance motifs all remixed throughout the film. For there to be nothing new for the Kylo and Rey sequences, or for the Finn and Rose sequences, or even for the Poe sequences is a travesty and one of the greatest flaws in the film as far as I’m concerned. At the very least Kylo and Rey should have had a new variant on the Force Theme to symbolize their connection, not a rehash of the same theme that was Luke’s! For goodness’ sake. I’m deeply hurt that the gorgeous, beautiful themes from the second trailer didn’t make an appearance in the film. It’s nothing but a shame when the best piece of music is a custom-made trailer theme that never receives its due in the film proper. This is one area where I’ll be glad to have JJ back in the final film--at the very least the man knows how to direct properly for sound.

And last, and probably least in that it’s far more forgivable, Rian just couldn’t resist the cheese. The two scenes I found the most laughable in the whole film--and they should not have been given their importance and narrative weight--were Space Leia and Rey vs. Snoke. I’ve never been a fan of asian flying films, but most of those were far better done than these two bizarre flying characters. What a disgrace to Leia’s legacy and to Rey’s importance. There were many other ways to make Snoke a terrifying character without having him fly Rey about the room in an awkward CGI manner, and the less said about Space Leia the better.

My complaints aside, let it not be said that there is nothing of value in this film. What Rian fails in pacing and musical timing, he more than makes up for with set design and color scheme. The red theme in key scenes is mind blowing. The salt flats are some of the most memorable locations I’ve seen in a film in a long time. The journey of Rey’s hair and clothing choices is perfect. The final shot between Kylo and Rey is the pinnacle of heartbreak thanks to lighting and set choices along with the performances. And although Canto Bight gets only a small cameo, the opulence and majesty of the scenery is truly a sight to behold. Rian pulls out all the stops for beauty, and it’s readily apparent. My only wish is that we were allowed to soak in and enjoy the scenery before getting shunted off to the next location. =P

If I were judging TLJ on presentation alone, I’d probably give it a C at best. Rian is so, so lucky his narrative has enough substance to make up for his insufficiencies as a filmmaker, though there are certainly flaws in the narrative as well (that I’ll be covering in future posts).  That’s how much power the themes and the story and the characters have in this narrative--they’re able to overcome amateur filmmaking and plot pitfalls. That’s a powerful movie. And that Rian can be proud of, even if I think he probably should reassess some of his choices on this one. =P

Up next, we’ll be diving deeper into the narrative and tackling the general themes! The narrative and the characters and their relationships are where this film shines, and I won’t be able to do it justice without multiple posts. If you enjoyed this, I hope you’ll enjoy the rest!

Until next time!

I Am Tired of Films Like Antebellum

By Angelica Jade Bastién - Sept. 14, 2020

This movie had the opportunity to show a more dynamic side of slavery narratives, but it ends up reaffirming the very horror it is trying to critique

I am tired. I am tired of pop-cultural artifacts that render Black people as merely Black bodies onto which the sins of this ragged country are violently mapped. I am tired of suffering being the primary lens through which we understand Black identity. I am tired of being so hungry for Black joy and Black representation that scraps feel like a meal. I am tired of films about slavery refusing to acknowledge the interior lives of Black women even as their beings become tools for filmmakers to explore the horrors of the enslaved.

I am tired of thin characterization and milquetoast social messaging being the kind of representation Black folks receive. I am tired of films like Antebellum.

The feature debut of writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz is seemingly poised — with an overly serious demeanor — to provoke a reckoning. Especially if you ask its directors, who, in an introduction that preceded the version of their film I watched, prattled on about their lofty goal to “activate a conversation” that is “of and for this moment.” Instead, Antebellum reaffirms the very horror it’s trying to critique.

Beginning with the ostentatious opening tracking shot — snaking its way through plantation grounds, noting the hard work of the Black folks on the land and the white Confederate soldiers watching their every move — we are plunged into a world both strange and achingly familiar. A world of picked cotton and casual cruelty, prim southern ritual and uninhibited brutality. But there is something amiss about the plantation on which Eden (Janelle Monáe) is viciously abused and from which she continuously tries to escape. The first cue that things are far from what they seem is the appearance of a golden septum piercing glinting in the light on the face of another enslaved woman as she futilely tries to break free and is unceremoniously killed for it.

But before we learn anything about Eden’s reality, before we even know her actual name, we witness profound violence against her, first in a harrowing scene in which she’s branded. After 40 minutes of unrelenting torture in antebellum dress, the film turns on its axis. Monáe is reintroduced as Veronica Henley, a famous writer and activist of considerable wealth, with a doting husband and young daughter. Here, we get more detail about her lavish home than the actual characters who live there with her, the camera panning across the luxe interior and photographs of Veronica competing in horse-jumping events (a subtle gesture to what’s to come in the third act). At one point in this contemporary setting, Veronica says to a friend, “My nana used to say our ancestors haunt our dreams to see themselves forward.” The line suggests a multitude of fantastical pathways for Antebellum. Is this story like something out of Octavia Butler’s Kindred? Is the Monáe we saw before a figment of the memories of Veronica’s distant relatives? Is there something supernatural afoot? No. Instead, the filmmakers choose a more banal explanation. Her link to the plantation we witness in the first act of the film is less imaginative than that slip of dialogue suggests.

Antebellum ends up being a noxious tour of historic violence against Black folks in service of a story that has nothing novel to say about the obliterating function of whiteness and anti-Black racism. Lacking a strong point of view to grant interiority to its characters, its approach to horror and social commentary becomes deadened. On the level of craft, Antebellum assumes beauty — the film is obsessed with depicting the magic hour in all its sherbet-hued glory — is inherently rich with meaning. As a result, the world-building is slapdash, confusing obfuscation with intrigue. Antebellum is an artistic failure of two directors whose goals supersede their ability to meet them, festering with not only aesthetic and narrative failures but moral ones too: It implicitly argues that depictions of suffering are the best means of understanding what it means to be Black in America.

In the wake of Jordan Peele’s success with his first two films — the exploratory Get Out and the beguiling but messy Us — Hollywood has realized that horror is an apt venue for excavating the grooves of Black identity and the mellifluous, dynamic experience of what it means to be Black throughout the diaspora. There is Misha Green’s overwrought Lovecraft Country currently airing on HBO, as well as Justin Simien’s Bad Hair and Nia Dacosta’s upcoming reimagining of the 1990s Tony Todd classic Candyman. The genre, at its best, lets us explore cultural taboos and fears with an unvarnished alacrity. I still think it’s possible to do a horror film that explores slavery in this country’s history, but that requires a sure hand, a strong point a view, and an even stronger sense of history — none of which is demonstrated in Antebellum. It’s hard to create any tension when the characters are so poorly drawn and the world they inhabit has little internal logic. Sure, there are scant moments of tension, but they fizzle out quickly thanks to the inert dialogue and rank stupidity of the story (much of which I can’t get into without spoiling the majority of the plot).

White people in particular are rendered as caricatures who seem to get an erotic charge from the violence they inflict, including Jack Huston as the leering Hugo Meadows, a Confederate solider of great standing who supervises the plantation — which isn’t necessarily a misguided approach so much as improperly executed, flattening rather than revealing anything about the nature of whiteness and its emptiness in America. Whiteness is an oft-told lie that powers much of the world, yet Antebellum is neither cunning enough nor intellectually ambitious enough to explain such a truth. So the white people have no internal logic, no gravitas. They evoke neither fear nor overwhelming hate, mostly just boredom, except for Jena Malone, who comes the closest to striking the necessary chord by foregrounding white women’s toxicity. But her performance is undone by the odd dishonesty of the film — the N-word is never uttered, for one.

The idea of doing a slave narrative, even one wrapped in a twist that puts a Black woman at the fore, is a risky proposition, given that slavery period films rarely allow the interior life of their characters to rise above the physical and psychological pain they endure. Who even is Veronica? When we see her onstage at a public appearance in New Orleans, staring out at the beaming faces of so many Black women, she speaks in empty, progressive platitudes that make it hard to understand the work she actually does. (I lost count at how many times she shoved the word “patriarchy” into her sentences.) A strange grasp of class snakes its way through the story, too; it’s as if the filmmakers are drawing a line from the worth of a modern-day Black person to the intellectual/financial class they inhabit. (One of the more important deaths in the film is of a character who is only referred to as “professor,” but given no defining features beyond that.)

The effect is wholly distancing. It’s worthwhile to explore the pain and grit of moving through America while being Black, but that exploration shouldn’t come at the expense of the humanity of the characters. Janelle Monáe is entirely miscast; she has been charming in supporting roles like that in Moonlight, but here she lacks the gravitas and precision to make Veronica feel real. But I can’t blame her for not bringing to life what obviously didn’t exist on the page. Antebellum is ultimately a travesty of craft and filmmaking with a perspective that hollows out the Black experience in favor of wan horror.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/09/antebellum-movie-review-i-am-tired-of-films-like-this.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

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Antebellum is a 2020 American horror film written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz in their feature directorial debuts. The film stars Janelle Monáe, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, and Gabourey Sidibe, and follows a modern-day African American woman who must escape from what appears to be a 19th-century Southern slave plantation.

Antebellum was released in the United States through video on demand on September 18, 2020. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who criticized the screenplay and lack of nuance, although Bush and Renz's direction and Monáe's performance received some praise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_(film)

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The “Antebellum” Directors on Ancestry and Purpose 

Antebellum is both jarring and polarizing, and that’s exactly the point. Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, their debut feature film follows a modern woman named Veronica (Janelle Monáe) as she is seemingly transported to the Antebellum South, where she assumes the name of Eden as an enslaved woman. What unfolds is a horrific and surprising look at slavery through a contemporary lens. The film—which draws from a short story written by Bush, inspired by his nightmare—employs a level of violence that at times feels gratuitous, but as the writer/director duo notes, the horror is meant to trigger and disturb you. “We felt that it was necessary to put the mirror up to this country,” Bush says. “Look at it. Look at it because it’s happening right now. I’d rather for people to be somewhat triggered within the safety of their own homes than for us to continue to lie to each other and live in an open air shooting gallery every time I leave my front door.” Below, Bush and Renz discuss the urgency of Antebellum, casting Janelle Monáe, and the polarizing nature of their film.

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/antebellum-gerard-bush-christopher-renz-janelle-monae

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Barry Keoghan Can Do It All

Barry Keoghan returns from the bathroom of a “members only” club on the Lower East Side in New York City and plops down a handful of Dubble Bubble in front of me and his girlfriend, Shona Guerin. “Here’s some gum,” the 25-year-old Irishman says. I grab one—not because I necessarily want any, but because Keoghan seems to be presenting the Dubble Bubble as some kind of ice breaker, and it’d be rude not to join in. But as I start to untwist the wrapper, he quickly interjects: “The question is, do you trust me?”

It’s a pretty fucked up thing to say, considering Keoghan knows I’ve just seen The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In the film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, Dogtooth) and costarring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, Keoghan plays a teenage boy named Martin who forces the surgeon who accidentally killed his father (Farrell) to make a dreadful compromise: sacrifice an immediate family member, or else watch each of them go paralyzed, bleed from their eyes, and then slowly die. How Martin is able to set off this agonizing chain of events is never explained; Keoghan plays him with an eerie matter-of-factness, blankly reciting the horrific rules to Farrell’s Steven Murphy like they’re lines from a book report. He uses a similar intonation to suggest that he’s poisoned the Dubble Bubble, clearly relishing the layer of wickedness that starring in Sacred Deer has added to his bright-eyed, innocent-seeming persona.

I put the gum down on the table.

Keoghan has had a remarkable few months: Before Sacred Deer, he played George, a naive, pure-hearted teen in a sweater vest, in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster World War II epic Dunkirk. It was a small role with a basic function and only a handful of lines, but Keoghan managed to capture a sense of idealism in the character—to the point that his sudden death is genuinely and tragically sad. “I always said, I want to work with good indie filmmakers, and if a blockbuster comes up and the filmmaker is great, I’ll do that,” Keoghan says. “And then I get the best of all that! It’s Chris Nolan! The best director who also makes big films.”

Still, Keoghan’s performance in Dunkirk hardly compares to his turn as the Sacred Deer’s grim reaper in blue jeans and a backpack. Sacred Deer is a movie about responsibility, consequences, and comeuppance, and Keoghan’s Martin is the center of gravity around which all of those themes revolve. Lanthimos, as always when it comes to his films, is the one who crafted the seemingly alternate, near-human universe of Sacred Deer—at once sick and sickly humorous—but Keoghan is his mouthpiece, morphing from a simple, sympathetic kid into a merciless but magnetic exactor of justice over the course of two hours. “His face, his physicality, his whole presence,” Lanthimos tells me, when I ask why he decided to cast Keoghan. “He’s just an interesting human being to watch. It would’ve been easy to create this one-dimensional evil kid, but his mere presence conveys many different things at the same time.”

“To get to play those two roles within the space of a few months, to show my range, that’s a dream,” Keoghan says. “I want people to go, ‘Fuck, that’s him? He’s completely different.’”

Keoghan was born in one of the grittier neighborhoods of Dublin, Ireland. He’s from the north side of the River Liffey, which bisects the city and acts as a socioeconomic dividing line between the underprivileged north and the more affluent south. His mother, who was addicted to heroin, died when he was 5 years old, and he was sent to live in foster care. It’s the only segment of Keoghan’s life he won’t talk about; when I ask him about his childhood he responds, “You’ve probably done your research, haven’t you?” as if to say, “The information’s out there, so let’s move on.” When he was 11, his grandmother took him in. He’s more than happy to tell stories from his adolescence, painting a picture of himself to be just as sneakily sinister as some of the characters he’s played. He got kicked out of his all-boys high school because “they weren’t having my games anymore. The last thing I done was, I threw a coin and it hit a teacher in the head. That was the last straw for them.” He tells the story bashfully, staring down at his feet and suppressing a smile.

It was around that time that Keoghan started acting. “I seen this note in a window that said this small Irish movie Between the Canals, they were looking for actors.” Keoghan, who had never acted before, saw an opportunity. “I took the number down on the sly, because I knew that my friends would take the piss out of me, and I rang it when I went home.”

“Acting? I don’t know—I just see money,” Keoghan says when I ask what made him audition for the movie, an admission that feels honest and understandable. Actors are especially known for treating their profession like a craft they were drawn to by Dionysus himself; to hear one flatly admit that it’s a job is both jarring and refreshing. For much of the beginning of his career, Keoghan played characters similar to the side role he landed in Between the Canals: troubled kids from the streets. In 2013, he appeared in six episodes of the fourth season of Love/Hate, an Irish television series about Dublin’s criminal underbelly; he played a homeless youth in 2016’s Mammal. They weren’t splashy parts (Mammal screened at Sundance), but they were enough to get Keoghan noticed.

As Lanthimos says, Keoghan just has one of those faces. It somehow seems to be in constant flux; one second he looks like a Dior model, the next he looks like if Cillian Murphy got hit with a shovel. Sitting in front of me in a white tee and gray, Superdry sweats, he looks kind, innocent, and young—much younger than 25—but his expression can quickly flip, either because the light hit the scar under his right eye in a funny way or because he wants to tease you about poisoning your food. It’s his greatest weapon, and he knows how to use it.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is full of disturbingly memorable scenes, but one stands out: About two-thirds through the film, Stephen Murphy’s wife, played by Kidman, confronts Martin in his home and begs him to lift the curse. Martin’s in his boxers and in the middle of eating a plate of spaghetti, which reminds him of a story about his father. As a kid, Martin remembers, he used to marvel at the way his dad ate pasta: so efficient, so brilliant. He demonstrates, twirling some of the pasta around his fork and eating it in one big mouthful. Still chewing, and with sauce covering his face, he continues the story, blankly recalling how devastating it was to grow up and one day realize that the way his father ate pasta is the way everyone eats pasta. The discovery made him feel betrayed, Martin says; as if the man whom he revered so much barely even existed. Meanwhile, Kidman’s character sits across from Martin dumbfounded, realizing how deep the boy’s scars go and perhaps coming to grips with the fact that the person who holds her life and her children’s lives in the balance is a teenager covered in marinara sauce.

It’s an outrageous scene, this kid shoveling spaghetti into his face while spouting an allegory about coming to realize your own insignificance—and Keoghan is unflinching, turning each forkful into a work of art. “You know, sitting in front of Nicole Kidman in your boxers is not an easy thing to do,” Keoghan tells me, hardly interested in talking about his performance or how he’s able to simultaneously capture pain, loss, and bald evil in one fell swoop. “I was just constantly like, ‘Can she see up there?’”

On the day we meet, Keoghan’s particularly giddy because Aaron Paul tweeted about how good he was in Sacred Deer. After six years of toiling away in mostly Irish productions, Keoghan’s performance as Martin has put him in a position where he can not only think about the future of his career, but the next five or 10 years of his life in general. Keoghan says, “It’s all a plan.” When he first signed with his talent agency, WME, this plan was already partially formulated: He had written down a list of directors he wanted to work with. Christopher Nolan and Yorgos Lanthimos were both on it. “I write everything down,” he says. “Directors, movies I want to do, that I want to produce, direct, start my own company, start my own boxing club.” Keoghan takes his roles in Dunkirk and Sacred Deer as proof that the first step to achieving a goal is putting it down on paper (or in his iPhone Notes). “I’m a big fan of the law of attraction,” he proudly states. He won’t show anyone the obsessively curated and growing list, but everything on it can be boiled down to one simple goal: “Have a successful, good career.”

Keoghan seems to know that, at 25, after two prominent roles in the films of two high-profile directors, his plan is coming together. He has two upcoming projects on his slate—an Irish movie starring Hugo Weaving and Jim Broadbent called Black 47, and American Animals, costarring Blake Jenner and Evan Peters—but he wants to ride this momentum even more. “I’m lookin’ for that script,” he says, leaning into the recorder, graveling his voice to sound tougher. “I’m lookin’ for that script!”

His personal life shows a different side of him, one that’s less scrappy and not so firmly tuned to survival mode. You might even call him a romantic. He met his girlfriend, Shona, at a bar she worked in in Kerry. He asked her out on the spot, but not to dinner or anything like that: He suggested they drive out to Dingle, a picturesque peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. “Luckily she had a car. I had no way to get to Dingle,” Keoghan notes. Two weeks later, he returned to Kerry with suitcases. They’ve been living with Shona’s mom since.

“He doesn’t put a lot of thought into things,” Shona tells me, with more admiration than admonishment. “But he’s very caring. He can feel when he’s done something wrong. It hurts him.”

Now Keoghan and Shona want to move to the United States. They don’t know where exactly—he prefers New York City, she prefers L.A.—but the idea of turning ex-pat is thrilling to them. “And we’re looking to get our own dog,” Keoghan adds. “A rescue one. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I just love them, don’t I? They just listen.”

“I have to try to be in the moment,” Keoghan says at the end of our interview. “Because these moments we’ve been having lately are great. Everyone is looking at you, and it’s like, you’re totally in control of everything. It’s something that you need to enjoy.”

I pick up the gum again, and Keoghan’s eyes follow me as I put it in my coat pocket. He says nothing this time. Walking away from the table, I pull out the gum and decide to eat it.

By Andrew Gruttadaro

@stelledue

Since shortly after release weekend, I’ve been corresponding with someone who worked closely on the production of TROS and works for one of the major companies I cannot disclose here. I have verified the source to my satisfaction. To protect the source, I am rewording what we spoke about over the last two weeks and am submitting it to you in bullet point format I have written based on what they told me. The TLDR is that they were upset with the final product of TROS and wanted to share their perspective on how it went down and where it went wrong.

The leakers for TROS had an agenda and are tied to Disney directly. My source confessed that they have an agenda as well in that they struggle with ignoring what’s been happening to someone who they think doesn’t deserve it.

JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.

Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.

JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.

WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.

My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.

JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.

Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.

Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.

JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.

JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.

JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.

May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October.

The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.

My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.

My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.

Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.

My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.

JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.

In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.

Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.

They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.

The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ's words).

The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.

Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader's breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).

They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.

The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg - those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).

Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.

Rey not only healed Kylo's face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn't Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben's to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn't possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people's heads with the Disney cut.

The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.

Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. In the 3 hour cut, it’s explicitly stated. There was a moment when Jannah and he were running on top of that star destroyer and Finn needed to unlock or move something and he force-moved it and acted surprised when it happened. This was replaced with a CGI’d BB-8 fixing whatever he needed to fix on there.

Babu Frik was nearly cut because some execs at Disney thought he would be the new Jar Jar. They are really surprised that people love him this much. He was JJ's idea and was created in collaboration with some artists and puppeteers. The personality was all JJ.

There were a bunch of scenes where Rey and Kylo (separately) went through quiet moments of reflection to deal with what they were going through. On her part, her going through the realization that there's something sinister about her past. Him going through regret and remorse but trying to shut it out. My source said that the Kylo scenes were especially amazing because of Adam's performance and how he managed to portray that inner turmoil. It provided much more context and added deeper meaning to both his battle with Rey and the final redemption arc at the end. It didn't happen so suddenly and it was more structured than what we got.

The Kylo/Rey scene where he dies was at least 4 minutes longer with more dialogue. Ben was always supposed to die. Source also added that if he wasn’t, then that might’ve been in an earlier draft which they haven’t read. The first draft they read included Lando (the first few didn’t). The Reylo kiss and Ben’s death was not part of the reshoots. It was a part of the re-editing. Even the cut that JJ thought was coming out earlier this month had a longer version of that scene than what was shown in the theatrical cut.

JJ was against the Reylo kiss (or Reylo in general). This was Disney's attempt to please both sides of the fandom.

JJ was not happy with where TLJ took the story. The final result is a mix of that story and the story told by Disney and whoever they tried to impress (“certainly not the fans”). JJ is gutted over the final result. Star Wars means a lot to him. He had to sacrifice large chunks of the story in TFA but he was promised more creative control on TROS and instead the leash they had him on was only tightened as time went by. A source said that this is the one franchise and the one piece of his work that he didn't want to mess up and instead it turned into his worst nightmare. When he found out that he was blindsided with the cut they presented, he said "what the fuck??" when Kylo was fighting the Knights of Ren at the end and the Williams music that was used for it was not what he wanted at all. He seemed to think it was out of place.

JJ's cut still exists and “will always exist”. We most likely will never see it unless “someone accidentally leaks it.”

Ok, so there you have it. If there are questions, I will try to follow up with my source but it’s up to them if they want to share more so I cannot guarantee an answer.

Edit: I forgot one thing that the source wanted included, concerning FinnPoe in TROS:

The source asked about FinnPoe after seeing Oscar Isaac's comment about how Disney didn't want it to be a thing. This is true. JJ fought to make this happen. This is why Oscar is blaming Disney. It's not just a random throwaway comment. He knows for a fact that it was Disney because these discussions happened. The main cast is insanely close with JJ and are just as pissed, though seemingly more outspoken about it than JJ. During TFA, Disney was hesitant to hire John Boyega because a woman was front and center so they deemed that risky enough so bringing in a male lead who's black made them nervous. JJ fought to make that happen for about nine months before getting approval. The same issue came up when JJ fought to have Finn&Poe in TROS but he lost that battle as he lost many creative battles for this film. Many people, JJ included, came to the realization during this production that the story really is told by shareholders/investors instead of the creatives or anyone at Disney specifically. He tried to make a lot of things happen and was shut down because of this. They had him on a leash and many blame TLJ for the stricter creative approach.

How to tell a true war story: Kyuu reviews Dunkirk

(idk why is this so damn long)

Now onto the review (spoilers ahead):

If there’s anything that gives Dunkirk away as a Nolan film, it’s the non-linear narrative structure. And for once, I’m not a huge fan of it. I’m not sure if I find it off-putting or not -- as someone who also has purposefully written complex (intentionally actively confusing) non-linear narratives as a stylistic choice, it would be hypocritical of me to say it’s not something to do. 

Dunkirk’s narrative structure is less than confusing than that of Inception or Memento, but more off-putting in the sense that I don’t think it’s fundamentally clever or adds anything to the story. I understand that it’s become Nolan’s thing in that it invites (ie, requires) viewers to watch his films at least twice, but that isn’t reason enough do it. Even with the understanding that the three narratives all converge at the end in terms of timeline -- which is why he’s chosen to structure it the way he has -- I wish he’d either made it a little more obvious upfront that there was manipulation of time. It was jarring as an experience to gradually realize one-third of the way into the film that the narratives weren’t on the same timeline when a night scene transitioned directly into a daylight scene in another narrative.

I realized retrospectively that the time note on the narrative name card was made to indicate the amount of time the story is told over, but a more obvious way to help clarify that would also be including a timestamp on that when each narrative began. This is a mostly petty grievance of mine, but also a comment on the fact that I don’t like to see things done for the sake of appearing to be clever rather than actually being clever. But it is quite minor and petty.

All the actors were unquestionably fantastic and each of their performances had weight. [On a tangential meta note, watching the press junket around this film has been absolutely fascinating and cringeworthy. Pairing Harry with Fionn Whitehead was a great choice to get Fionn the exposure he deserves for this role. Fionn -- who’s never done press before -- and Harry -- who’s probably done more press than everyone else in this movie combined. However, something about Harry’s presence just really seems to invite the absolute worst in media. Even disregarding this cringeworthy segments about asking him (multiple times) and the cast their thoughts on Harry having to cut his hair, there was an actual interview where the interviewer outright “joked” that Fionn should go wash dishes to stay humble. I’ve never seen a film press junket be as much of a circus sideshow, and no wonder his fanbase is so up in arms and protective of him. (This really seems to be an issue that follows him everywhere.) Considering the serious nature of the film, it’s not just disrespectful to him or Fionn or his costars, it’s really disrespectful to veterans as well.]

Unsurprisingly, my favorite performance of the bunch was of course Tom’s. As always, his presence in film always has such gravitas to it, which is why he’s such a joy to watch. Of all the characters, he had the least interaction with anyone in the film as he’s aboard his plane the entire time. I, once again, literally could not understand a single word he mumbled into his mouthpiece the entire film. And yet -- and yet, while the film was unquestionably about an act of collective heroism, Farrier’s singular act and decision to keep going was paramount to saving the lives of so many people who were grounded. Though he said so little about it -- the way that they edited those scenes, the weight and hesitance in his decision-making, was utterly brutal and gut-wrenching. I won’t lie -- my heart stuttered every scene he was in, desperately hoping he would make it. When he saw that last Luftwaffe plane, made his decision to stay up in the air even though he was out of fuel, my eyes started watering. If there was a singular act of heroism to be highlighted, it was Farrier’s decision to stay the course. 

Finally, like all good Nolan films, the ending was unsettling. As it should be. War stories shouldn’t end soppy, heroic, triumphant. The sentimentality of Spielberg’s filmmaking in terms of narrative -- especially those about war or the Cold War -- is always what I find off-putting about his work. There’s nothing to celebrate about war.

I love war literature, and I always love the candidness of the writing. My favorite book ever is a semi-autobiographical novel called The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran. And my favorite quote from it is from a chapter called “How to tell a true war story”.

–It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get to the real truth… You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.

At the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

The stories in Dunkirk are just stories, they aren’t real people, and yet it’s because they’re not real that the storytelling achieves its level of truth. There’s nothing triumphant about the guilt Alex will carry with him all his life over “Gibson”’s death or his self-perception of cowardice; there’s nothing happily ever after about Tommy or Cillian Murphy’s character’s haunted eyes, about George, so sweet and 17, getting his wish to end up in the papers. But there’s also nothing quite as ephemeral as the way Farrier’s plane glided to a landing, free in the sky, across the beautiful shoreline in sunlight. The way that his plane burned bright, as Farrier let himself be captured by the German troops. It hurt. It was the end, but it wasn’t closure and never could be. War stories don’t get closure.

Dunkirk was a brilliant film. It was beautifully shot, acted, produced; subtly scored. But its emotional resonance isn’t in the fact that it’s a good film, but rather in its authenticity as a war story.

Part 1:  Chris Nol: Serious Director Part 2:  How to tell a true war story: Kyuu reviews Dunkirk Part 3: I need 500 fics about RAF Ace Pilot Tom Hardy (coming soon)

How I’d Ruin It: MST3k

Inspired by @tyrantisterror‘s post on breaking the Batman universe, here’s an outline of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that I (and probably no one else) would like to see.

Kinga’s version of the Forrester experiment differs in one major way from Clayton and Pearl: the primary goal isn’t to drive Jonah insane. She tells us her real plan in the first episode: revive Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which was an in-universe television show during the days of Deep 13) and eventually sell the rights to Disney for a billion dollars.

This episode would take place a few years into Jonah’s imprisonment on the Satellite of Love. With the help of his robot friends, his riffing is as sharp as ever, but the ratings (we’ll ignore the Netflix format) are in a tailspin. Everyone makes fun of entertainment these days; MST3k no longer stands out in the comedy landscape it created. So Kinga decides it’s time for a mid-season shocker: she’s going to show Jonah a movie certain to break him once and for all. Not an abomination like Manos: The Hands of Fate or Invasion of the Neptune Men -- Joel and Mike endured them both and kept on trucking. No, she has a different approach in mind to make her father and grandmother proud. Her confidence in its success is such that she’s already set a trap to lure the next host: a Moon 13 internship. Unpaid, of course.

“I’m sure they’ll cause a flame war or twenty, but the fans always get over it.”

OPTION 1: UNRIFFABLE CLASSIC

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

A silent movie presents a unique challenge for riffing. The removal of sound beyond musical accompaniment gives you nothing to write around, forcing you to set your own pace. You also face a handicap: nobody’s voice can be mocked, and dialogue in general is minimal. MST3k never tried it. I don’t believe any of the writers’ later projects have either. RiffTrax has proven that classic films can be mocked the same as awful movies, but what if a film was both classic and silent?

The Passion of Joan of Arc, as a source no less reputable than Wikipedia states, is one of the greatest films of all time. Focusing on Joan’s imprisonment, trial, and execution rather than the battles she participated in, it draws much of its power from Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance. The majority of the shots in the movie are close-ups, and the majority of the close-ups are on her, capturing her emotional turmoil in haunting detail as she wages a different kind of battle for her soul. It’s a film as impervious to riffing as any I’ve ever seen.

The obvious alternative is to enjoy it. One problem: the Satellite of Love doesn’t have satellite TV. Or a Netflix subscription. Or a Blu-ray library. Jonah has gone years without seeing a movie he could enjoy on its own terms. The ‘Bots have it even worse. Joel programmed them with knowledge of classic movies, but once they returned to Earth, they never quite got around to watching any. (They also reveal that their post-Satellite riffing wasn’t limited to what was on their apartment’s TV. Servo: “We’re banned from every movie theater in the Twin Cities area!” Crow: “Sometimes before we even bought tickets!”) As Joan struggles to stay true to her beliefs, her audience rethinks their own beliefs about the power of film.

A moment I see as key to the success of either option for this episode is a jarring cut from familiar Shadowrama to a frontal or side view of Jonah, Crow, and Servo’s faces as they realize that something is amiss. In this case, it would also give them an opportunity to mimic the film’s many uncompromising close-ups, which has plenty of potential for comedy. I mean, c’mon, the show’s already parodied Bergman.

In the last segment, they watch the film in relative silence, then conclude with a round table discussion on the bridge.

OPTION 2: CORPORATE B-MOVIE

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016), dir. Anthony C. Ferrante

I despise Sharknado 4 with all of my being. Plenty of franchises have overstayed their welcome, but none have sold out as completely as the Asylum’s flagship series, which by its fourth entry is more a series of quasi-celebrity cameos and product placements than anything resembling a movie.

Jonah and the ‘Bots are aware of the Sharknado phenomenon; Crow and Servo even remember riffing the original with Mike when it first aired on the SyFy Channel. (”The new name’s so weird. Looks like you’re supposed to pronounce it Siffi.”) They’re surprised that Kinga is sending them such a recent movie, but they figure it’ll be standard fare: low-poly sharks and a 90210 has-been picking up a paycheck. And Sharknado: The 4th Awakens does turn out to have both -- but wrapped up in something much darker.

The blatant Xfinity plug and the Carrot Top cameo they can shrug off. What disturbs them is the fact that this movie wants to be mocked. All of their previous experiments were sincere (if frequently misguided) attempts at filmmaking. Kinga and Max were the ones passing judgment on their quality; our heroes’ jokes were just to amuse each other. Here, the laughs feel... hollow. Forced. Desperate.

But when they’re at their lowest, Kinga’s taunts give them their fire back. Isn’t she in the same business as SyFy, trying to turn the family experiment into a billion-dollar franchise? For the final stretch, they hop up on literal soapboxes and take pointed aim at the commercialization of schlock, targeting both the movie and the mad scientist herself.

In either version of this episode, Kinga is furious with Jonah’s adaptability, and decides she’s just going to kill him. Instead, the born Gizmocrat earns his episode-one praise from Wesley Crusher and defeats her in a Technobabble Battle, escaping to Earth at its conclusion. Crow and Servo make an increasingly detailed series of bets about what “the next guy” will be like.

Instead of a stinger, a post-credits scene shows Kinga scrolling through emails from applicants to the Moon 13 internship. One catches her eye, and she dashes off a reply.

“Say, Kate, what size jumpsuit do you wear?”

(Kate would be played by Kate Micucci. Blame the Kickstarter telethon.)

1st Quarter of 2017 If you had told me a few years ago that a sequel to Trainspotting would come out in 2017, and I wouldn’t be able to make the time to see it, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. Work and family life have really started to put the squeeze on my moviegoing. These are the best things I watched in an admittedly light quarter--one of them is a 2016 film that I caught up on.  1. The Lost City of Z- James Gray Knowing that I would see this movie, I avoided reviews, but I have no doubt they're employing the word "sweeping." To me though, that word implies a shorthand of emotion sacrificed at the altar of grandeur, a "they fall in love yada yada" that you have to exchange for scope. The Lost City of Z is not sweeping in that case because every minute of its running time seems essential, and the passage of twenty years only enhances the emotional acuity. It's lean and Lean. "Atmosphere": That's another word that people use for a vague visual texture. James Gray and Darius Khondji extend their collaboration to create visual layers--planes of smoke or fog that makes the images heavy in a literal sense. By the time they shoot the dappled sunlight and the faded green of the jungle, the screen already has a lather of sweat. On a more specific note, I appreciated that Gray found the through-line of such a complicated historical tale, and that through-line is his pet theme of obsession. Driven by the deficit of his ancestry, Percy Fawcett is motivated by risk down to his bones. On some level the film is something that we've seen before--though Robert Pattinson has never been better than he is as the obligatory shrewd guide. But the film taps into such a primal call to adventure that it feels as if it has always existed, as if it's The Story, and that's a compliment even if "sweeping" and "atmospheric" aren't. 2. Song to Song- Terrence Malick If you don't already like what David Ehrlich calls Malick's "twirling horndog" era--I prefer "metropolitan trilogy of self-absorption"--I won't be able to convert you by now. Especially when Rooney Mara is fingering meats in a Costco, this feels like a film made just for me. I do think that, compared to To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, this film's journey of mercy is fairly direct for Malick. (As far as that group of films goes, there might be a loose progression of detachment, wandering, and return/restore.) Fassbender's devilish Cook waves at his possessions early in the film and says, "None of this exists," and his empty promises pervert innocence at every turn, sometimes tragically. For a hedonist, he isn't being-in-the-world in the way that Malick would prefer. It's telling that, by the "end" of the film--and I say that hesitantly since the events seem to loop back on themselves--Faye inverts Cook in her narration. She says: "This. Only this," referring to love. Or at least, like, authentic experience. That's why Weightless is such a better title for this: As an insult for "having no mooring," it describes Cook; as a compliment for "free," it describes Faye and BV. How Malick is this, besides that interpretation of planes of existence? Very Malick. There's a sequence in which Gosling's BV returns home to console his bereaved family, and his brother says something like, "After being so hung-up on Dad for so long, he finally dies and--" Malick cuts to something else, so wary of something that feels like a treacly Movie Moment. And in avoiding those cliches, he creates his own. Characters still fall out of relationships and drift toward other thin, unnamed beautiful girls with hair in their faces, and it has become such a pet trope for him that a woman even gets in on the trend this time. But how many filmmakers have enough style in the first place for you to be able to make fun of their style? If it all adds up to a moment as alive as Gosling sliding in his sock-feet, then make fun of it all you want.

When Malick the classicist first started making films that take place in present-day, it was jarring to spot, say, a Target in the background of a shot. But now that I've adjusted to it, that topicality means...very little at all really, and that's why it's foolish to get hung up on why Mara has blonde hair in this scene or why Gosling is driving a different car in that scene. Austin City Limits or a Longhorns game are specific events, but the relationships are so elemental that they might as well be revealing themselves in a Middle Ages castle or a prehistoric cave. In fact, sign me up for Rooney Mara fingering meats in a prehistoric cave. 3. Personal Shopper- Olivier Assayas A film way more about the language it's told in than the end result of what it's telling. [initiate conceit] These most recent Assayas films feel like fancy cocktails with different levels of separation. There's the base, which is a woman who is stalled and unhappy. One of the sweet liqueurs on top of that is her job--meaningless for her taste--as a shopper for a celebrity, a go-between for someone too famous to interact in public. The Kahlua to balance that is her status as a spiritual medium, a go-between for someone too dead to interact in public. She has a heart condition that tethers her emotions, she has a boyfriend who is absent yet present through Skype, she has Youtube videos as conduits for the past, she has a person who has emerged as a literal replacement for her dead brother's widow. Maybe you just want a beer, but I don't mind paying a little extra to see a real bartender get all of those pretty colors together. [close conceit] The film's elliptical final third provides closure in one sense but not another; it verges on cop-out. Maybe more importantly, the film is a step backwards for Kristen Stewart, who is still magnetic but has slipped back into being mannered. There's a scene with a police officer in which the stammering is out of control. She has earned such goodwill, however, that I'm willing to evaluate anything the character does as a productive choice. Why does she take one sip out of drinks and leave them to make a ring on the table? Why does she type a space before a question mark? Why does she use default ringers and not turn off the clicky-type setting? She always gives me something to do. 4. Win It All- Joe Swanberg It ends abruptly and doesn't get as psychological as it could, but Win It All is designed for maximum pleasure. There are a few inventive gestures that make for a jaunty hang--I loved the superimposed counter that showed how up or down Eddie's bankroll was. Jake Johnson, who co-wrote, has real rakish chops. 5. Train to Busan- Yeon Sang-Ho Have you ever written a sonnet? You have to understand the form before you start writing, and part of the writing is understanding how powerless you are to the form. It's one of the only mediums of art that squelches originality: A great sonnet is one that exemplifies the form, not necessarily one that transcends it. Zombie movies are kind of similar, and Train to Busan gets the form through-and-through. The rules are clear about how people become infected and what the zombies can and can't do. Then we meet fully-realized characters, some of whom we're rooting for, some of whom we're not sure about, and some of whom definitely have a bite coming. The economy with which the film makes those divisions is breathtaking. "Oh, he let the girl go ahead of him at the bathroom. Cool guy." "He told that colleague to straighten her tie. He needs to die." The effects are SyFy channel quality, and everything runs a bit long. But the film barely ever missteps. The central character's journey to, ahem, humanity is a familiar one, but it's not like I would want the final couplet of a sonnet in lines three and four.

Since shortly after release weekend, I’ve been corresponding with someone who worked closely on the production of TROS and works for one of the major companies I cannot disclose here. I have verified the source to my satisfaction. To protect the source, I am rewording what we spoke about over the last two weeks and am submitting it to you in bullet point format I have written based on what they told me. The TLDR is that they were upset with the final product of TROS and wanted to share their perspective on how it went down and where it went wrong.The leakers for TROS had an agenda and are tied to Disney directly. My source confessed that they have an agenda as well in that they struggle with ignoring what’s been happening to someone who they think doesn’t deserve it.JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October.The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ's words).The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader's breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg - those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.Rey not only healed Kylo's face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn't Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben's to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn't possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people's heads with the Disney cut.The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. In the 3 hour cut, it’s explicitly stated. There was a moment when Jannah and he were running on top of that star destroyer and Finn needed to unlock or move something and he force-moved it and acted surprised when it happened. This was replaced with a CGI’d BB-8 fixing whatever he needed to fix on there.Babu Frik was nearly cut because some execs at Disney thought he would be the new Jar Jar. They are really surprised that people love him this much. He was JJ's idea and was created in collaboration with some artists and puppeteers. The personality was all JJ.There were a bunch of scenes where Rey and Kylo (separately) went through quiet moments of reflection to deal with what they were going through. On her part, her going through the realization that there's something sinister about her past. Him going through regret and remorse but trying to shut it out. My source said that the Kylo scenes were especially amazing because of Adam's performance and how he managed to portray that inner turmoil. It provided much more context and added deeper meaning to both his battle with Rey and the final redemption arc at the end. It didn't happen so suddenly and it was more structured than what we got.The Kylo/Rey scene where he dies was at least 4 minutes longer with more dialogue. Ben was always supposed to die. Source also added that if he wasn’t, then that might’ve been in an earlier draft which they haven’t read. The first draft they read included Lando (the first few didn’t). The Reylo kiss and Ben’s death was not part of the reshoots. It was a part of the re-editing. Even the cut that JJ thought was coming out earlier this month had a longer version of that scene than what was shown in the theatrical cut.JJ was against the Reylo kiss (or Reylo in general). This was Disney's attempt to please both sides of the fandom.JJ was not happy with where TLJ took the story. The final result is a mix of that story and the story told by Disney and whoever they tried to impress (“certainly not the fans”). JJ is gutted over the final result. Star Wars means a lot to him. He had to sacrifice large chunks of the story in TFA but he was promised more creative control on TROS and instead the leash they had him on was only tightened as time went by. A source said that this is the one franchise and the one piece of his work that he didn't want to mess up and instead it turned into his worst nightmare. When he found out that he was blindsided with the cut they presented, he said "what the fuck??" when Kylo was fighting the Knights of Ren at the end and the Williams music that was used for it was not what he wanted at all. He seemed to think it was out of place.JJ's cut still exists and “will always exist”. We most likely will never see it unless “someone accidentally leaks it.”Ok, so there you have it. If there are questions, I will try to follow up with my source but it’s up to them if they want to share more so I cannot guarantee an answer.Edit: I forgot one thing that the source wanted included, concerning FinnPoe in TROS:The source asked about FinnPoe after seeing Oscar Isaac's comment about how Disney didn't want it to be a thing. This is true. JJ fought to make this happen. This is why Oscar is blaming Disney. It's not just a random throwaway comment. He knows for a fact that it was Disney because these discussions happened. The main cast is insanely close with JJ and are just as pissed, though seemingly more outspoken about it than JJ. During TFA, Disney was hesitant to hire John Boyega because a woman was front and center so they deemed that risky enough so bringing in a male lead who's black made them nervous. JJ fought to make that happen for about nine months before getting approval. The same issue came up when JJ fought to have Finn&Poe in TROS but he lost that battle as he lost many creative battles for this film. Many people, JJ included, came to the realization during this production that the story really is told by shareholders/investors instead of the creatives or anyone at Disney specifically. He tried to make a lot of things happen and was shut down because of this. They had him on a leash and many blame TLJ for the stricter creative approach. via /r/saltierthancrait