As November staggers to its close, amid an endless avalanche of horrific revelations about terrible men and also whatever calamitous idiocy the U.S. President committed while I was literally writing this sentence, some things are still good. Twin Peaks! Everyone likes Twin Peaks.
I remember being shocked at how much push-back I received when talking about the completely explicit classism of the first Kingsman movie in 2014. Hopefully, now that the sequel is a gimcrack turd, we can be more honest: both the original and its 2017 sequel, The Golden Circle, are Horatio Alger stories with guns.
Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) — the preternaturally calm, quirkily rebellious titular protagonist who has renamed herself Lady Bird — seems awfully familiar. As the heart of Greta Gerwig’s adorkable coming-of-age-in-Sacramento writing/directing debut, her mannerisms, her slightly antiquated vernacular and social gestures, her entire mode of qualified suburban angst and dubiously offhand witticisms call to mind something or someone we seem to know.
There’s no corner of cinema so explicit about its role as an act of remembrance than documentary film. Any film, in any genre, carries within it an aspect of memory — as a material object that dates from a certain moment and reflects its conditions, and as something more ethereal, something personal, cultural, and collective, subject to revisiting and remapping.
It’s fundamentally irritating when someone is dead set on shocking you. Full of pride and vague malice, it’s a weirdly authoritarian impulse – a gesture of control that both insults you by assuming you’re a delicate flower who will wilt under the awesome power of the image, while simultaneously flattering itself by imagining the spectacle is so awesomely powerful in the first place.
Spooktober officially came to an end 2 days ago. Let’s wrap this business up!
You can find this year’s previous entries here, here, and here. I did not meet the criteria I set out for myself this time around, and I closed out Spooktober with a movie from the man who also brought us City Slickers.
There is a small, wordless scene very early on in Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project that, in its empathy and assured direction, could stand in for the film as a whole.
Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), the film’s constantly moving, relentlessly yammering 6-year-old protagonist, and her friend Scooty (Christopher Rivera) sit on the pavement, backs against a concrete wall emblazoned with a mural of oranges.
Now that we’ve established the Spooktober premise in the first outing and developed some of the bit players while starting to drive home previously implicit character motivations in its arguably unnecessary sequel, we reach the third entry in the franchise, where either Dokken, Sam Neill, or cathode-ray-deploying Celtic death cults will inevitably play a central role.
Yesterday, we kicked off our October horror movie run-down with an initial five viewings for the month. It would still be surprising if I scramble my way up the deadly, haunted heights of Spooktober to the eerie summit of 31 before Halloween, but it won’t be for lack of trying.
Last year, I took part in the Scary Time Festival of Fright and Terror known as Spooktober, and watched 31 horror movies over the course of the month. It was fun!
I had every intention of doing so again this year — I even have a list; a weird list, sure, but a list nonetheless, with relevant criteria filled and everything — but I’ve fallen way behind.