It’s a busy movie weekend here in the Valley; here are quick
takes on a few of the openings:
It Follows—A young college student (Maika Monroe) has sex
with the guy she’s been dating, only to find out that he’s placed a curse on
her. She’s now being followed, albeit at a walking pace, by a malevolent entity,
invisible to those around her but visible to her in various hideous guises. She
can pass on the curse if she, in turn, sleeps with somebody else, but if the
being kills that unfortunate person, it starts following her again.
This simple, initially low-tech conceit gives quite a charge
to this indie shocker, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell and set in
the gloomy, economically blasted neighborhoods of Detroit. It’s got that
cautionary terror of sex in which so many horror tales are rooted, and the
inexorability of the zombie and mummy movies, but with a set of arbitrary rules,
a la “Casting the Runes” or “The Bottle-Imp,” that make dream-logic sense. Most
of the acting isn’t far above the high-school-play level, but the kids are
attractive and likable, so they have a poignant guilelessness.
For about an hour, It Follows is truly, nerve-janglingly
scary. But then there’s no third act. I thought I could sense Mitchell
struggling to figure out how to end it satisfyingly—it’s as if the being he’s
created is so implacable that even he can’t escape it, and he doesn’t, to his
credit I suppose, want to resort to the corniness of consulting some Van Helsing-type
authority. So the story stumbles one way and another in its last third, throws
in some unnecessary and (I thought) ill-advised special effects, and ends
vaguely.
But I feel ungrateful for these gripes, because it’s been a
long time since a new horror movie honestly chilled me, without mindless cruelty
and ugliness. To be legitimately harrowing for an hour is no small
accomplishment, and it may be enough to call It Follows a 21st-Century
horror classic.
A Girl Like Her—Another low-budget indie shot in Detroit,
this one is also a cautionary melodrama. The threat, this time, is not sex but
rather bullying—the movie was previously titled The Bullying Chronicles.
The story is told via video footage, some of it supposedly shot
by a documentary filmmaker (played the actual writer-director, Amy S. Weber),
some surreptitiously shot by Jessica (Lexi Ainsworth), a teenage girl who
attempts suicide and ends up in a coma. When we see Jessica’s footage, we see
the reason for the suicide attempt—horrific, criminal bullying by her popular classmate
and former friend Avery (Hunter King).
Weber makes us despise Avery for her vile abuse of Jessica.
But she really wants us to see the psychology of Avery’s nastiness, especially in
the not-much-subtler bullying she receives at home from her passive-aggressive
mother. The acting, especially by King, is top-notch, though I don’t know if it’s
enough to make us pity Avery more than we hate her.
Still, while I’ve long suspected the “anti-bullying”
campaigns of recent decades were well-intentioned but quixotically naïve, I
think it’s possible that A Girl Like Her could have some of the efficacy of
old-school anti-drunk-driving movies. It might just scare a mean girl or two out
of her meanness.
Merchants of Doubt—This is another of those lefty
documentaries which present, in a slick, amusing, graphically engaging manner, an
infuriating indictment. The director, Robert Kenner, takes on the general theme of the deliberate
sowing of doubt in the media by corporate powers against well-founded science
that they regard as bad for business. While the stooges and shills that do the
sowing are sometimes sincere ideologues, the corporate honchos paying them more
often are not—they frequently know perfectly well that the science is right,
and simply don’t care.
The tobacco industry is the obvious model for this, and Kenner parallels
the history of their manifestly fraudulent—but long effective—campaign to deny
the harmful effects of smoking, and even to make smoking a civil-rights issue,
with the current monkeyshines of the climate-change-denier lobby. The trouble,
as usual, is the preaching-to-the-choir objection—anyone who would go see this
film, based on a book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, probably won’t need to be convinced
by it. When this plays on TV, however, it might change some hearts and minds.
But there was a moment near the end of this film that, though
not ill-intended, hit a very sour note with me, and I can’t refrain from
mentioning it. Author Oreskes, in a talking head interview, is pointing out that the
disasters caused by climate change will cost human lives, and that this is her motivation
for activism, not “polar bears, or people in Bangladesh.”
I doubt that the shocking implications in this remark—assuming
I even heard it right—reflect Oreskes’ conscious feelings about the value of all humanity,
including people in Bangladesh; I suspect it was just an unfortunate choice of
words. But it occurred to me that if I wanted to distract from the point of
what she was saying, I could whip up a lot of outrage over it. I could probably
be a pretty competent merchant of doubt myself.
Home—On a lighter note, this animated kidflick, based on the
Adam Rex book The Real Meaning of Smekday,
is sweet and pretty funny. Jim Parsons of The
Big Bang Theory gives voice to Oh, one of the Boov, aliens who, fleeing a
scary-looking race called the Gorg, have invaded the earth and relocated the
humans to reservations. Rihanna gives voice to “Tip” (her real first name is
Gratuity), a human girl who gets separated from her mother. When Oh gets in
trouble with his own unashamedly craven race for accidentally tipping off the
Gorg to the Boov’s whereabouts, he, Tip and Tip’s cat become fugitives
together.
Steve Martin and Jennifer Lopez are also in the cast, as the
dumbbell leader of the Boov and as Tip’s mother, respectively, and there are
some pleasant songs on the soundtrack. Home
is nothing to write…well, you know, home about, but the bonding between the two
main characters has charm, and the movie has a generosity of heart that made me
like it.
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