Category Archives: Film

Horns (2013)

Posted on by
Reply

horns01Ignatius Perrish awakens and the crowd of reporters has already gathered around his house, asking him how it feels to get away with the murder of his girlfriend Merrin.  He threads through them alone (not having a friend like Robert Kardashian) and gets into his red AMC Gremlin.

There is a candlelight vigil for Merrin at the treehouse where she was raped and killed. Unknown to them, Ig is watching from above in the treehouse.  After the crowd leaves, he descends and takes a whiz on the flowers and candles.

The next morning, he begins growing the titular horns.  The skank he spent the night with begins acting crazy.  She seems cool with the horns, and also has a strange obsession for donuts, stuffing her face into the box; which might have just been payback for the previous night.

The horns also have an effect on a screeching kid in the doctor’s office.  The mother admits she’d like to kick her kid’s ass, or just drive off and leave her there.  Then she feels compelled to tell Ig that she is having an affair with her “jigboo” golf pro, and it’s true what they say about black cock.  She seems to think it is clever to call it her “5-iron.” While iron is certainly an admirable adjective, I’m not sure her golf pro would appreciate the five reference.  8  or 9-iron would be impressive, but they are ironically known as the “short irons.”

horns03Ig grabs the mother’s hand and has a Johnny Smith moment, seeing flashes from her life, mostly consisting of the golf pro humping her from behind.  Even her daughter is affected by the horns, saying she wants to get matches and set mommy’s bed on fire. Good luck finding a dry spot.  Even the nurse and doctor get a little crazy.

As he drifts off under the anesthetic, he remembers back to his youth, blowing up cherry bombs.  On a dare, he rides a shopping cart down a coal chute, and ends up almost drowning under some logs.  And meeting young Mirren.  They go to the treehouse, have their first kiss, and in a unfortunate edit, if you happen to reach for a beer at the right time, 13-year-old Mirren seems to get naked.  I did have to rewind it to realize their was a 5 year flash-forward that I missed.  When Ig wakes up, his doctor is humping the nurse.

horns07This goes on with very revealing embarrassing and uncomfortable truths thanks to the horns.  Ig finally wises up and uses his truth-inducing horns to learn what really happened to Mirren.  Along the way, he learns he has another talent involving snakes.

Using these new skills leads to some great scenes, great twists & surprises, and a couple of times where I actually gave an audible “whoa!”

Strangely, with a lot going for it, the movie the movie, as a whole, didn’t entirely work for me, but I’m not sure why.  Daniel Radcliffe is adequate,but nothing more.  The tone is a little too meandering even for a horror/comedy.  Definitely a thumbs-up, but less than the sum of its parts.  And there are some great parts.

It did make me want to read the book though

horns06Post-Post:

Mr. Jones (2013)

Posted on by
Reply

mrjones02I’m not sure I can be unbiased.  I started watching Cam2Cam and got so bored in the first 5 minutes that I had to bail — and I never do that.  Switching to Mr. Jones, in the first 15 seconds, I had a fun couple who don’t seem to hate each other, and even more rare, I didn’t hate them.  It banked about 20 minutes of goodwill immediately.  It would need them later.

Scott and Penny are on a road trip, and I am encouraged by the fact that they are lost. How quaint, to be lost on a paved road in daylight in the age of GPS.  The next morning, they arrive at their destination, a cabin not quite in the woods, but in a rural area.  I am again encouraged by a title card which says “DAY 1” as that always means the characters are going to start ramping up (or is it down) to Hell in a day or two.

The first day starts pleasantly enough with a lot of magic-hour photography, heavenly choir type music, and philosophical questions from Scott.  They have come to the woods for a year to “work on their relationship,” or was it to make a documentary?  I feel vindicated in fleeing Cam2Cam.

Frankly, this did not pan out as I had hoped.

Frankly, this did not pan out as I had hoped.

DAY 51 — wait, what?  That’s quite a leap.  Scott tells Penny that he stopped taking his meds, but we never learn what they were.  Possibly some of the last act could be attributed to that, but it really only seems to cloud an ending that wasn’t sky-blue to begin with.  Penny starts nagging him that she gave up everything to come out here with him, and he better start working on that documentary.  Maybe he just ran out of of meds, having doubled up listening to 51 days of that shit.

They do manage to get to sleep — in the same Queen size bed, so things aren’t too bad yet — but are awakened by noises downstairs.  Turns out to be birds flying into the side of the house and occasionally breaking through a window.

The next morning, Scott is giving a Survivor-style confessional to the camera, in the background we see a black-clothed figure steal his pack.  Going in search of the pack, they discover another house is near theirs.  Getting no answer, they go in and find a very junky house with parts of walls and the ceiling missing.  Luckily Scott has a special camera that can film both frontward and backward.  On the upside, we should never miss anything; on the downside, lots of distorted super close-ups of his face.

mrjones21Scott discovers a cellar door and asks Penny to be his lookout.  Scott quickly finds his pack, but now it is Penny that wants to stick around and look at the grotesque figures handing in the cellar.  Naturally the owner comes back, but they are able to escape.  Penny recognizes the figures as being the work of the reclusive artist Mr. Jones.  Penny compares it to living next door to JD Salinger or Banksy.  You know, if they lived in hovels and created creepy scarecrows out of branches and parts of animals.  Who’s to say there isn’t a first draft called Butcher in the Rye under Salingers’s floorboards?

Scott goes back to NYC and starts interviewing scholars and critics about Mr. Jones for the documentary.  Over the years, nine random people have received packages from Mr. Jones containing his artwork.  Those receiving the gifts seem to have nothing in common, but the works are valued in the six figures.

Penny stays in the woods, taking pictures of Mr. Jones works which are hanging from trees in the woods.  As Penny takes pictures, he creeps up behind her.  She asks him for an interview but is startled when he looks a little like one of his scarecrows.

When Scott comes back from New York, they discuss a plan to break into the cellar again to film.  I’m not sure why just knocking on the guy’s door is not an option.  The scarecrows are gone from the woods.  Scott returns to the basement and discovers another sub-basement.  He finds chambers with burning scarecrows, but has lost walkie-talkie contact with Penny.

mrjones34Scott finally finds his way out of the basement and goes back tom their house which has been decorated with scarecrows.  They decide to make a run for it in the morning, but by 9:30, it still is not light.

The old night never becoming day trope is one of my favorites, but it just does nothing for me here.  I leads into a very ambiguous final act which could be hallucinations, the supernatural, the missing meds?  The overlapping dialogue, callbacks to earlier scenes, and light shows are really in service of nothing.

Frankly, they would have been better off keeping it simple and making the sub-basement with the flaming dolls and shifting passageways be the final act.

There was one interesting concept, that Mr. Jones was actually a protector rather than the real threat.  Again, though, not enough, was done with this theory to even make it a good thought experiment.

So, decent couple, nice set-up, huge let-down in the final act.  The potential was there, though.

Post-Post:

  • From the writer of The Divide, which I don’t remember hating.

Travelling Salesman (2012)

Posted on by
Reply

travellingsalesman10“In 1956, renowned mathematician Kurt Gödel wrote a letter to John von Neumann postulating the existence of a single proof that could unlock the fundamental laws that bind our universe . . . Today it is considered the most important unsolved problem in computer science.  It is simply know as P vs NP.”

Well, it’s P = NP not P vs NP on the cover art, so maybe that’s the problem right there.

Four of the world’s greatest mathematicians are summoned to a tin shack.  Their research has produced the most dangerous weapon in history.  So they are meeting in a tin building with one glass wall.  While waiting for the team leader, the great minds get into a pedantic argument over whether all of the members had seen the addendum, as was the original agreement.

This is inter-cut with tape of a symposium introduction of the brilliant Dr. Timothy Horton, winner of the 2008 Fields Medal (also purveyor of a damn fine cup of coffee).

travellingsalesman11

When Mr. Big (a Mitt Romney doppelganger) arrives, he gives each of the men paperwork to sign to receive their $10 million per year’s work.  This is in addition to their hefty annual stipends for food, lodging and presumably hookers.  This is also tied to a non-disclosure agreement which effectively renders their discoveries top secret.

He tells the men this that the new cold war has begun and it won’t be fought with nuclear weapons.  It will be “a penny here, a penny there, an unresponsive power grid, a subverted stock exchange  The cumulative effect spirals the world economy and when the dust settles, the world is divied up.”  This new algorithm is the key to penetrating any encryption, rendering it as useless as Hillary’s firewall system.

There are extended discussions of the morality of their work, how it can be used to invade the privacy of citizens.  Mr. Big makes the absurd claim that because the four math geeks had the restraint to not abuse this power, then the government will also have enough self-control to refrain from using this technology against private citizens.

travellingsalesman12The four are also concerned that they will be identified by their peers as the ones who unleashed this monster.  In one of the few missteps, they trot out the old trope that the Los Alamos scientists are seen as evil for creating the A-Bomb that saved thousands of lives in WWII.  How many people outside of MSNBC believe still that?

I did appreciate that, for the most part, the discussions were not loaded West Wing style straw man harangues against the evil Republicans.  The discussion was political, but not partisan.  All of the mathematicians understand that giving this kind of power to the government is crazy (OK, maybe it was a little partisan, but not overtly stated).  After Mr. Big gets serious with threats to their families, they all sign the papers.

We see that later, Horton gets a letter from the White House signed by Obama thanking him for his service.  Holding it up to the light, we can see it has an Illuminati watermark.  This was the other misstep as it takes the film into the conspiracy theory arena.  Up to that point, it all felt very real-world.

Horton, has his revenge though.  Like Stephen Falken or Alan Turing, he has left a backdoor open.  He takes it upon himself to shut down the planet’s electrical grids, stock markets, airports and apparently trains like Snake Plissken.  So maybe Mr. Big wasn’t the biggest dick at the table.

These is a LOT of talking as you can infer from the action shots above.  But it reminded me of Primer or Margin Call — no traditional action, but it kept me glued to the screen for the entire run-time, even if I didn’t understand a lot of it.  Good stuff.

Post-Post:

  • Wow — what a cheap shot at Alan Turning!
  • The four greatest mathematicians in the country, and not an Asian or Indian among them?
  • Traveling has one L in US usage, but 2 L’s in other English speaking countries.
  • There could be no 2008 Fields Medal because it is awarded every four years, and 2008 was an off-year; even for the Winter Fields Medal.

Proxy (2013)

Posted on by
Reply

proxy001Esther Woodhouse is at the doctors’s office with some sort of enormous tumor; no wait, she’s pregnant. The doctor is running an ultrasound, and everything looks good.  Of course, they told Rosemary Woodhouse the same thing.  On the way to the bus stop, she is conked on the head by someone in a red hoodie who then repeatedly bashes her baby bump with a brick and robs her.

Fortunately, it seems that an ambulance is very quick on the scene.  Not so fortunately for her or me, she regains consciousness just in time to see the bloody corpse of her dead baby being cut out of her.

A detective comes to her hospital room.  Not much is learned except that the father was from a sperm bank.  Next she gets a visit from Mary Wilkins, a social worker at the hospital.  Esther doesn’t have any friends or co-workers to contact.  By the time she gets home, even her goldfish is dead.

Esther goes to a support group.  She is befriended by Melanie who lost her husband and son when they were hit by a drunk driver.

She returns aimlessly wandering in the hospital where she was treated, does jigsaw puzzles, applies for a job at a department store.  While there, she sees Melanie and stalks her for a while.  Melanie seems to be searching for her dead son as if he were merely lost in the store.  She makes a scene, crying, calling over the store manager.  She says she is going to look outside, then calmly walks to her car.  She gets a little boy out of her car and takes him into the store.

proxy014Esther and Melanie get together again for coffee in the park.  Melanie says she used to bring her son here.

Later that day, someone in a red hoodie breaks into Esther’s house and rapes her.  It turns out to be her lesbian lover Anika.  The first attack was a ruse that Esther dreamed up.  Lot’s of lying going on here.

Melanie calls late at night for another coffee klatch.  Esther tells Melanie that she was nine months into a healthy pregnancy and loved the way people treated her.  Not being much of a looker, she was unused to this attention.  But she never wanted to be a mother.  She tells Melanie she is the only one who understands and kisses her on the lips.

Melanie gets up to leave and Esther tells her she saw her with her son at the mall.  Melanie slaps her and tells her not to call again.

I could go on and on, and actually did — damn you Chromebook for not having a backspace key!  But there are so many interesting scenes and twists that that they have to be seen to be appreciated.  I was wary of the 2 hour running time, but the film fills the time.  It is slowly paced, but there is always something happening and your mind is constantly working to stay up with it or out-guess it.

Director Zack Parker has a few amazing scenes which are Hitchcockian in their twists and in the great use of Bernard Herrmann style scoring.  Really great stuff.

proxy026Anything else would be giving away too much.  For most posts, I spoil freely because it just ain’t that big a deal (and, really, who am I spoiling?  Searchbots?).  This should be seen with fresh eyes.

Post-Post:

  • Alexa Havins — wow!

Starry Eyes (2014)

Posted on by
Reply

starryeyes00Sarah starts out her day in front of a full-length mirror, trying to pinch an inch.  She fails admirably which is good because she works at a Hooteresque joint called Big Taters.  It is also good for her other career: aspiring actress.

She sees a casting call for a movie called The Silver Scream and registers to audition. One of her friends says she hopes that is just a working title.  Despite a performance-anxiety nightmare the previous night, she gives a great audition.

She gets a callback.  In the 2nd audition, she is asked to disrobe.  She is subjected to a strobe light which has a great effect on both her and the viewer.  It freaks her out so she is finally able to “let herself go”.  It keeps the viewer’s rapt attention with the bursts, the after-effects, and gazing intently to see if we get to see the titular Big Taters.

She finally gets to meet the producer, but he is more interested in slipping his hand up her skirt.  So she bails and begs for her job back at Big Taters.  Within 24 hours, she completely sells out and calls to beg for another chance with the producer.  Which she is given.  Actually, I’m sure that little pill her indie director friend gave her played a role also.

starryeyes11At the producer’s house, the pill is taking effect and she collapses on the floor.  Which is convenient as she gets in the casting crouch and services him.  She wakes up back in her own really sloppy bedroom.  She is still kind of spaced out and looks awful.

She gets progressively more disgusting, fighting with her friends, peeling off fingernails, drooling black goo, vomiting up maggots, killing her friends, and there is a thing crawling around in her stomach.

At this point, I am really reminded of Contracted and Pretty Dead where we see pretty girls devolve into vampires or zombies.  I would include Life After Beth in that category although Aubrey Plaza ain’t everyone’s cup of Earl Grey.

starryeyes24She is literally reborn from the ground.  There is a gift box awaiting here where she emerges from the earth.  As I recall — and it gets fuzzy here — it contains lingerie.

Whether she wears it to walk home or barter a cab ride is not clear.  In the next scene, her roommate finds her under the sheets of her bed, nekkid.  My interpretation is she walked home naked, but maybe that’s just me.  Then some stuff happens.

As I recall, she is now part of the vampiric cult, and puts on a pentagram.

Note to Self: Don’t send the disc back until you write the post.  Seems like I enjoyed it, but damn if I can remember how it ended, and I just saw it two days ago.  It was better than this post — that I can say with confidence.

Post-Post:

  • Many of the girls in this film seem to have enormous teeth.  And I say this having just watched Kimmy Schmidt.  Luckily I like big giant teeth.
  • Been trying to come up with a good slogan for Big Taters.  Nice Tots?  I da Ho?   Clearly I have failed.
  • I liked the title The Silver Scream.