The Nanny (1965)

I'm kinda shocked I had never even heard of this little thriller. It's creepy, it's macabre, it has Bette Davis, and a splash of camp...what else could I want? Luckily I was able to catch it on TCM and I wasn't disappointed. Bette Davis plays the long-time nanny of a small family. The young daughter recently died, and the son is newly home from his stay in an institution following his sister's death. He's openly hostile to the old nanny when he returns and his parents wonder if his mental health is deteriorating again. What's really going on?

This was a fun watch. Bette Davis seemed to sprinkle a bit of her famous Baby Jane into a few scenes, and even though we might be able to guess where everything is going, it's fun to watch the film get there. The supporting cast is good too, especially Pamela Franklin (who appeared in one of my favorite spooky films The Innocents) as the cheeky upstairs neighbor. The story takes interesting twists and turns and it's perfect for this time of year. I can't be alone in my love for thrillers and horror the second it's autumn, right?

Nocturama (2016)

No matter what, violence is inherently cinematic. Filmmakers can make it horrific and traumatizing or they can make it ludicrous and comical, but the sheer kineticism of such acts cannot help but catch our eye. It goes right to that, “lizard brain” we hear so much about, and connects with us on a primal level. It’s the same sort of psychology that you hear about advertisers employing to make us want their their products. Do you think that ISIS and the Alt-Right have teleconferences to discuss branding? Somebody has to give the social media guy a set of guidelines to follow, right?

Inland Empire (2006)

On a recent rewatch of Mulholland Drive, I was observing how many scene transitions were simply hard cuts. One minute we are with one set of characters and the next we are with a whole new group of characters. We have no clue if they are connected but we go along with it. In-between those two scenes is where the cinema of David Lynch resides. We are shown one image and then another and it is up to us to make or find the connections and divine meaning.

Having been filmed in pieces over years, Inland Empire stretches that premise nearly to the breaking point. Lynch himself didn't even know he was making a feature until well into production. He'd come up with an idea for a scene and film it, then a few days or weeks later he'd have a new idea and film that. There was no finished script, the actors had no context of what came before or after. There's even an additional  90 minutes of unused footage this is available as DVD bonus material.

Unlike Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, I have yet to hear anyone give a coherent "reading" of this film and I don't think it's really even possible to give one. It's an immense collage of pain and sorrow (garmonbozia?) peppered with the occasional dance number. It's not a Disneyland ride with a narrative throughline. Inland Empire is one of those carnival spook-houses where shit just pops out at you. You don't wonder how The Creature from the Black Lagoon got to Transylvania, you just go along for the ride and have an experience.

Z (1969)

The Following Contains Vague Spoilers. Proceed With Caution.

Man that ending still packs a whallop. When I first saw this film a few years ago, it took me by absolute surprise. In a Trump/Brexit World, it's a painful reminder that sometimes the polls are wrong. Sometimes the bad guys win. There is no reassurance to be found here.

They say that films where the characters hold back tears are more likely to elicit tears from the audience. Here, Costa-Gavras is holding back Revolution in hopes that it will inspire the audience to start one. "Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE."

The People Under The Stairs (1991)

Not too long ago I was writing about "ideal" PG-13 films. These are movies that are perfect for middle schoolers to watch at sleepovers. They push the content boundaries enough to make kids feel grown up without getting too violent or sexy. But where do you go from there? Do you go head-on into Cannibal Holocaust? Perhaps? But there can also be a step in-between, and I think The People Under the Stairs fits the bill perfectly. In a lot of ways it should be PG-13, with its insanely over the top adolescent POV, but there's also just enough language and gore to make that rating a no-go. If Krampus is a film for 6th graders, this is a film for 8th graders. Leave your copy somewhere that your kid can easily "borrow" it and think they're getting away with something.

In the Cut (2003)

If I were a filmmaker, I would not want to get anywhere near this material. Due to my privilege as a straight, cis-gender male, I've never had to constantly fear for my safety the way a female, homosexual, or trans person does. I don't have to worry about roughly half of the world's population potentially wishing me harm. The threat of physical and sexual violence is completely alien to me. Yet, as an audience member I find this topic to be extremely compelling. Through Jane Campion and Meg Ryan I am able to glimpse that experience from the comfort and safety of my own sofa. Only a female, trans, or queer filmmaker could have told this story. Imagine some straight, male director talking about how the danger of everyday life can sometimes be a turn on. No way! What danger do they know? Although, a male person of color does know the unique terror of living in a world where black lives don't seem to matter. You know, the more I think about it, this story isn't very niche at all. The only group this is a foreign idea to is the tiny minority group of straight, white, cis-gender males. And that is the power of cinema.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Prior to World War II, America was A world power. After World War II, we were THE world power. Unlike Japan and all the various countries of Europe, there was no rebuilding necessary. It was much easier for us to get back to (more or less) business as usual. Suddenly we were top dog. So of course we suddenly became very preoccupied with maintaining this new status. Some might even call it paranoia. But can you really blame us? The Great Depression was still very prominent in our National Rearview. People could remember what it was like to be hungry. Trauma like that sticks with you. You might not be aware of it, but it's there. It's in the back of your mind waiting to be triggered. And so, practically overnight, New Deal Democrats like Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and a significant portion of America were primed to be activated by the Republican Party's message of blatant self-interest. So what if two Kennedys and a King had to die? They sure as hell were not going to go hungry again.

Crimson Peak (2015)

When Martin Scorsese decided to make The Age of Innocence, a lot of people were baffled that a filmmaker so synonymous with violence would be making a costume picture. What they realized upon seeing the final film was, that despite the gorgeous décor and costumes, the elite of 1870’s New York could be just as (if not more) vicious than the mafia. And that film didn’t even bother to try addressing the savagery of unbridled Capitalism which was just coming into full bloom thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Fortunately Guillermo Del Toro exists to address that oversight with the blood red, Gothic Romance of Crimson Peak.

Through lush imagery like moths stained with the soot of factories, and a house that has bled the land so dry that it in turn is bleeding as well, Del Toro is able to make clear what took Charlie Chaplin a whole overwrought monologue to drive home in Monsieur Verdoux. There are few filmmakers working today so in command of purely visual storytelling. Guillermo Del Toro and his collaborators were able to take the inherent violence of capitalism and externalize it in the most sensuous and grisly manner possible. It’s not a ghost story, it’s a story with ghosts in it.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Of all the various sub-genres in cinema, the paranoid thriller is pretty close to the top of my list. Probably the only sub-genre that could rival it in my personal pantheon is film noir. While revisiting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy I found myself musing on the similarities between the two genres. Most apparent is the fact that both rely heavily on ambiance. In both cases plot comes in as distant second to mood. I can be absolutely lost in terms of narrative (eg: The Big Sleep or Tinker) while still being absolutely enraptured by the overall tone of the piece.

It's particularly interesting that traditional noir died out in the late 50's and paranoid thrillers started to become a thing in the early 60's. Would it be too far of a reach to say that much like how birds evolved from dinosaurs, paranoid thrillers evolved from film noir? They do share a common skeleton on which everything else is built. At their hearts both genres share the basic human emotions of guilt and loneliness. It's no accident that when someone in Tinker gets shot in the cheek, the wound drips like a tear.

State of Siege (1972)

Essentially this movie is a dialogue. Like The Confession before it, this film is primarily built around two people talking. But don't assume that this is some sort of My Dinner with Andre situation. This is not idle chit-chat between friends. This is a conversation about socio-political issues that are still relevant today. This is a conversation where lives hang in the balance. But even the most serious conversation can be difficult to dramatize cinematically.

Earlier this month I watched Judgement at Nuremberg. While I agree with what the film is about and as much as I love the performances in it, I found it a bit clumsy in the telling. It too is a film about conversation. Like State of Siege it is based around the idea of two conflicting viewpoints butting heads. But in order to give context and flesh-out its characters and narrative, it resorts to what I like to refer to as, “train-car structure”. You open with a scene of Spencer Tracy out and about in Nuremberg, then you get him in the courtroom for a long while, then out and about again, then back in the court room. The film proceeds like this right through to the end. An endless train of alternating scenes that alternate between boring and fascinating.

Sometimes this structure can work, but it is very difficult since you are continually stopping and starting your narrative. Just as soon as something is getting interesting, you cut away to something else and have to build up audience interest all over again. You lose momentum. What makes State of Siege so interesting, is that it manages to integrate the exposition right into the narrative. Costa-Gavras trusts that his audience is capable of absorbing various bits of information simultaneously. Interrogation and exposition weave in and out of each other effortlessly and are often occurring at the same time. While less hyperbolic, this is very much a proto version of the hypertext style Oliver Stone would be worshiped for employing in films like JFK and Natural Born Killers. It’s also hard to imagine Steven Soderbergh pulling off something like Traffic without the influence of Z, The Confession, State of Siege and Missing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Costa-Gavras is one of our great filmmakers and should be honored as such.

The Vanishing (1988)

I’m pretty sure this is the most chilling film that I have ever seen. I’ve seen all sorts of screwed up movies about good and bad people doing awful things, but none of them have left me feeling as creeped out and helpless as this film. And while many chalk this up to the haunting end (which is apparently undone in the English language remake) I give all credit to a very deft and delicate implementation of score. Rather than sticking unrelentingly to dour, suspenseful and serious music throughout, director George Sluizer and composer Henny Vrienten brilliantly chose to underscore some scenes with music that is downright jaunty and silly. Not only does this create an interesting contrast that breaks up what might have been a one-note (pun intended) slog, but it also helps to enhance the banality of evil at play here. A sociopath does not view their actions as evil. What they are doing is merely the simplest and most direct way to get what they want. And so, the music which underscores the scenes of our villain in his home life, is the type of score you might expect from a pleasant film about a family man. And this is absolutely maddening.

Dressed To Kill (1980)

To most of his detractors, Brian De Palma is known as, “the guy who rips off Alfred Hitchcock”. The argument is valid but most people only deal with it on a surface level. The operatic camera moves and thriller plots really call attention to themselves. But the Hitchcock parallels don’t stop there. For De Palma it goes to a much deeper level. Beyond the visuals and choice of genre, what really unites these two auteurs is how they also seem to share a bizarre view of human sexuality that is somehow simultaneously both perverse and conservative. As kinky as things can get in films like Rope or Body Double, there’s still a strong undercurrent of heteronormativity and fear of that which diverges from, “normal”. It both repels and attracts them. While the horrendously dated views of transsexuality espoused in Dressed to Kill are certainly regrettable and reprehensible, I feel that on a deeper level they point towards an artist who is aware of himself and is trying to reconcile the two opposing sides of his personality. He had to be aware of the fact that he cast his then-wife as a hooker in multiple films right? I don’t think Hitchcock ever got THAT personal.

The Housemaid (1960)

After the release of Oldboy and Memories of Murder in 2003, South Korean cinema was everywhere. Suddenly cinephiles all over the globe were talking about the genius of Kim Jee-Woon, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. But this cinema didn't just spring up overnight. We in the West can be so egocentric some times. If we haven't seen it, it doesn't exist, right? Korea's domestic film industry dates back to the start of the last century. By the time Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid came along in 1960, the industry was more than half a century old.

It's interesting to compare and contrast this film with American films of the same time. Many of the concerns are the same (wealth, reputation, etc.) but this film addresses those issues in a way that Hollywood would have really soft-peddled. In fact, they probably would have considered this trashy, exploitative and low-class. Yet, thirty years later, facsimiles of this film (Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, etc.) were filling American multiplexes. I hope that fact prompted some Koreans to giggle. The Americans finally caught up.

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2015)

One of the greatest things about film is its ability to generate empathy. By watching a film we gain the ability to see the world from the perspective of another. Most often this occurs whilst watching foreign films. Suddenly you are able to see something of yourself in someone who lives a world away that you share little in common with. Cinema also allows us to empathize with the insane. The hack way to do this is by swinging the camera around, playing with film stocks and obvious music. The more subtle way to do this is simply by placing the camera somewhere unconventional. Move the camera a little to the right or to the left and what was once common and mundane can suddenly become something weird and alien. All of a sudden you can maybe understand how someone can watch a movie and believe that they can find the treasure that was buried on screen. It's kind of like how someone can watch a movie and suddenly decide that they have it in them to make one. We all have our own little delusions.

While We're Young (2015)

On the Criterion bluray of Blow Out there is an extended video conversation between Brian De Palma and Noah Baumbach. When this was first announced, I remember thinking the pairing to be rather odd. But the more I think about it, it makes sense. Just because Baumbach makes movies that look a certain way, doesn't mean that he only watches films that look like his own. As the child of a film critic I'm sure he grew up watching all kinds of movies and they're all there within him. Though the trailer wouldn't give you any indication of such, While We're Young has supplied Baumbach with ample opportunity to let some of his more genre oriented impulses out...and I couldn't be more pleased. It's not a case of a filmmaker pretending to be something he is not. Instead this is a wider embrace of who he really is as a person. Just as Frances Ha was his French New Wave film, this is his 70's Political Thriller. Of course it's still as cutting and hilarious as what we've come to expect from Baumbach, but that little bit of thriller goes a long way towards making this one of the strongest works in an already strong filmography. And oh what a charismatic "villain"! So far this is easily my favorite film of the year. See it while you're young.

Shutter Island (2010)

Sometimes great filmmakers just want to play. Lots of reviews at the time pointed out that this film wasn't awards material, but they're missing the point. Like Cape Fear before it, this was a chance for Marty to get his genre on. This film isn't about gold statues, it's about making audiences jump and gasp. This film is about taking little strips of celluloid and assembling them in an order that illicits dread. Sure it is over-long and that stretch in the cave is a chore to get through once you know the "twist", but by and large this film is an extremely effective creep fest. And that ending is absolutely shattering. I still can't believe people turned out in such large numbers to watch something that bleak on its opening weekend. The car rides home must've been dead quiet.

Nightcrawler (2014)

After World War I, Germany was so economically devastated that the entire country ended up allowing a genocidal madman to become its leader. Needless to say, desperation can lead to some pretty poor decisions. Desperation can lead an enterprising sociopath to become a freelance cameraman documenting grizzly crimes with absolutely no moral or ethical hangups. Desperation can also lead a ratings starved news director to indulge and encourage said sociopath. I believe the official term for this is, "codependency". Each side bringing out the worst in the other and allowing things to escalate so rapidly that even if one wanted to put a stop to it all, they couldn't. It's a slipery slope towards oblivion. The world depicted in this film is absolutely frightening. All the more so because it's the world we are living in.

Seven Days In May (1964)

After The President (Fredric March) signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff begin plotting a coup d'etat.

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Though I wouldn't go so far as to call this film a masterpiece, I love it for all the ways in which it deviated from the expectations set by its star, writer, director and subject matter. I went into this film expecting an unbelievably taught John Frankenheimer thriller (ie: The Manchurian Candidate), with a twist ending (courtesy of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling) and lots of overly sincere, bleeding-heart speeches by liberal do-gooder Kirk Douglas. What I got instead was a rather calmly told and very well-articulated defense of our political process. There are even large chunks of this film where Douglas is nowhere to be found! And while the title alone might suggest a countdown to some sort of BIG moment, this film opts instead to end on a quiet note of subtle victory. As someone who watches lots of films, I live for little surprises like this. Hopefully reading this won't saddle your first viewing with unrealistic expectations....

Lost Highway (1997)

A jealous saxaphone player (Bill Pullman) is imprisoned for murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette) until one night he transforms into someone else (Balthazar Getty) and is released.

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This was my first David Lynch film. I’d like to say that I rented it because I was an 8th grader with an amazingly sophisticated film palette. But that’s not the truth. My friends and I rented this movie because we heard there was a lot of nudity in it. Needless to say, by the time the movie came to an end, we were much more terrified than titillated. It is absolutely impossible to divorce the sex scenes from everything that surrounds them. You simply cannot ignore those darkened corners in the bedroom. Lynch’s images are already overpowering enough on their own, the sex just intensifies it. The slow motion, smoke, blurry focus and flashing lights all combine with the eerie and bombastic soundtrack to cast a haunting and uneasy spell over you. And I haven’t even mentioned Robert Blake’s character!

Some people might complain that the plot makes no sense, but that’s just because they are trying too hard. If you just take the images as they come, one after the other, I promise you the whole thing will make absolute emotional sense. And though it is clearly not a traditional horror movie, you won’t find many films more horrific than this on a lonely night.

The Parallax View (1974)

Three years after the assassination of a popular Presidential Candidate, people who were there start dying under mysterious circumstances. Enter ambitious reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) to figure out what's going on and how this might all connect to The Parallax Corporation.

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Like many film fanatics I'm prone to falling down rabbit holes. Sometimes it's a director, sometimes an actor, sometimes a genre. I have no control over it. I see a film or hear/read about something I want to know more about and then all of a sudden I am overtaken with the need to consume it whole. My latest obsession has been paranoid thrillers made between the late 60's and the early 80's.

By and large I find these films to be a pretty satisfying genre. Sure there's the occasional dalliance with by-the-numbers predictability and self-righteous earnestness (Three Days Of The Condor) but most are pleasurably taut exercises in cynicism and paranoia. The Parallax View is thankfully one of the latter.

At the start I was expecting something akin to my Condor experience only this time with Warren Beatty looking all rakish and socially minded. Fortunately this film was shot and directed by Gordon Willis and Alan J. Pakula. Their dark and distant aesthetic boarders on the experimental and virtually removes Beatty from the film all together while at the same time giving an eerie air to all of the proceedings. Who would have thought that long-shots of red, white and blue tables could illicit such chilling unease in an audience? Gordon and Alan did, and God bless them for it.

Bonus points for the presence of Thor in the brainwash montage!