Wednesday, November 22, 2023
SHORT PEOPLE GOT NOBODY
Friday, November 17, 2023
TROUBLE WITH THE CARVE
Opening this week:
Thanksgiving--Slasher movies of the '70s and early '80s were often holiday-themed. Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night, Deadly Night, New Year's Evil and April Fool's Day are all examples, while Friday the 13th and Happy Birthday to Me, though not strictly about holidays, are still tied to special dates and the convenient unity of time they provide. But Thanksgiving was somehow the major holiday the genre seemed to miss.
There actually were a couple of little-remembered attempts--Home Sweet Home in 1981 and Blood Rage in 1987. But neither seemed to count, perhaps because they didn't use the holiday in the title, or perhaps because they didn't sufficiently exploit the gruesome possibilities offered by the day's rituals. Whatever else may be said about it, the newly-made but self-consciously old-school slasher picture Thanksgiving works hard to include every classic Turkey Day trope.
A shoppers' riot and stampede at a store that shouldn't be open on Thanksgiving leads to bedlam and grisly death in a small Massachusetts town. "One Year Later"--as a subtitle traditionally informs us--a figure in the mask and garb of a Pilgrim skulks around exacting vengeance on those deemed responsible for the disaster. Everything eventually converges in a ghastly sit-down dinner.
The film traces its inception back to 2007, when two movies, the Robert Rodriguez shocker Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's stunt thriller Death Proof, were released as a double feature under the joint title Grindhouse. In and around the two features, the show included several "fake trailers" for fictitious grindhouse-style movies. Two of these have already wagged the dog as the basis for real features, Machete (2010) and Hobo With a Shotgun (2011); Thanksgiving marks the third.
Directed by Eli Roth, the Thanksgiving trailer in Grindhouse captured the nastiest, most low-rent atmosphere of a vintage gore movie, complete with scratched, faded footage, some really sleazo shocks, and the smarmy, glottal tones of the narrator (Roth himself?). You could almost believe it wasn't a put-on.
The new feature, directed by Roth from a script by Jeff Rendell, doesn't try for this level of faux-authenticity. The setting is contemporary, the budget clearly comfortable, and cell phones and social media figure prominently in the plot. But the movie still has a nice old-fashioned pace and structure and flavor, and the nostalgia of this is much of what makes it unsavory fun.
I'll admit that in recent years I've largely lost my stomach for slasher flicks. Moreover, I thought Roth's 2002 debut feature Cabin Fever was an interesting misfire at best, and I took a pass on his 2005 torture flick Hostel. But he strikes an affectionate tone here, and he employs techniques that distance us from compassion for the victims. Most simply and effectively, he makes many of them, especially the early ones, deeply and amusingly unsympathetic.
The cast is livened up by some veterans, like Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman and Gina Gershon, and the "final girl" (Nell Verlaque) has a lovely presence, and unlike so many heroines back in the day, she fights back, resourcefully and successfully. It was also great to see Lynne Griffin, the first victim from 1974's Black Christmas--and the Hamlet figure in the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew--in a bit here.
Most notably, the film keeps it light. As with two other movies from earlier this year, Cocaine Bear and Renfield, Thanksgiving goes in for extreme, over-the-top splatter effects, and they aren't scary, nor do they seem meant to be. They aren't even all that gross. There's no visceral substance to them; the bodies of the victims go to pieces like gingerbread men, and the effect, seemingly deliberate, is cartoonish slapstick. We're about as likely to take their suffering seriously as that of Wile E. Coyote.
Maybe it's how entertainment like this works best: as a sort of anarchic Punch and Judy show, using humans instead of puppets. Like Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn't be healthy to consume this sort of thing every day, but about once a year, it can hit the spot.
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
FORECASTING DIRECTOR
As prestige movie season approaches, Your Humble Narrator had the chance to chat about Oscar-bait movies with Lauren Gilger for this morning's edition of The Show on KJZZ...
You can listen to the interview here.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
UP AGAINST THE WALTZ
Check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about the 45th Anniversary of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz...
...presented at various theaters by Fathom Events.
Friday, November 3, 2023
(CHRISTMAS) BREAK MASTER
Opening this weekend:
The Holdovers--Nobody does bitterness like Paul Giamatti. From his earliest noticeable roles, as "Pig Vomit" in the Howard Stern movie Private Parts or as a pit bull owner on Homicide: Life on the Streets, he made his mark as a vessel of bristling, eye-bugging, impotent rage, and this has carried over into his best lead roles, in American Splendor or Sideways, or even in his miniseries as John Adams.
His seething high dudgeon generally is played for comedy, but even then this great actor brings it a stinging, near-tragic undercurrent; he makes his pained ineffectuality moving. With this latest from Sideways director Alexander Payne, Giamatti gets another vehicle for splenetic, barely-contained fury and defeated disgust. It's one of his best.
The time is 1970; the setting is a blueblood boys' school in Massachusetts. Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a brilliant, exacting Ancient History teacher. Paul is single and friendless in his personal life; in class he brims with acerbic, sarcastic contempt for his lunkheaded, entitled rich-kid students.
On the eve of Christmas break, Paul gets stuck with a miserable detail: supervising the "holdovers," the handful of students stranded on campus with nowhere to go for the holiday. Perhaps the unhappiest of this unhappy lot is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright kid with a troubled past whose Mom has excluded him from her holiday plans with her new husband. Paul's only adult ally is Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria manager and chef, who's in mourning for her son, recently lost in Vietnam.
It likely won't astonish you to learn that as this little group clash, and then get to know each other and their backstories better, bonding and compassion start to develop between them. Working from a script by David Hemingson, Payne shades this process carefully, generating genuine and plausible warmth without slipping into holiday-movie sentiment. Not only is the film set in 1970, Payne seems to be trying for the modest, unassuming style of a Hal Ashby or James Bridges flick of that period, right down to the opening rating card and production company logos (even the movie's trailer was crafted as a throwback to this time).
The Holdovers is perhaps a bit on the poky side; little in the story gives much urgency to the pace. But the actors bring their connections to life. Giamatti's initial bile is highly entertaining and his gradually rising empathy is touching. Tall and tousle-haired, with a look of stricken perplexity on his handsome features, Sessa has a pleasing, callow awkwardness as Angus. Carrie Preston gives the movie a lift in each of her couple of scenes as a sunny-natured school administrator. And as Mary, Randolph steers around any hint of overt pathos, and as a result makes the character heroic.