Sharp Objects (2006) by Gillian Flynn: Flynn's third novel Gone Girl got a lot of buzz when published and even more when adapted by David Fincher for the screen. Sharp Objects is Flynn's first novel, one she claims to have spent ten years writing.
Recently adapted for HBO, Sharp Objects is much in the line of Gone Girl and Flynn's second novel Dark Places insofar as it involves first-person narration from a woman with serious, partially unacknowledged mental problems.
Besides that, there's a murder mystery with a thuddingly obvious perpetrator(s) -- I guessed the murderer(s) from the back-cover copy. There's a whole lot of self-loathing, general loathing, body shame, misanthropy, and creepy small-towners. There are extremely dicey physical and emotional relations with young men and women, aberrant psychology on the level of a 1943 Batman comic book, and a narrative flirtation with that favourite of the 1990's, repressed-memory syndrome. Ten years of writing would put the genesis of Sharp Objects smack in the middle of that time when every other movie and TV show seemed to feature someone with repressed memories.
The narration keeps with the American first-person hard-boiled first codified by the crime fiction of the 1930's. Sharp Objects is lurid, improbable melodrama that brings to mind some of the first-person narratives of Jim Thompson, especially his crazy-ass Savage Night. In Thompson's world, men and women were equally capable of evil. Here, men tend to be near-saints or harmless nebbishes. Women, though... watch out for them. Am I right, guys?
Both glib and deeply unpleasant, Sharp Objects is a highly polished turd of a bestseller. The miniseries managed to bring that polish up to a blinding glow of fake intellectualism. The novel is almost mesmerizingly rancid in its ideology and character building. Reader, I hated it! Not recommended.
Nocturnal Animals (2016): adapted by Tom Ford from the novel by Austin Wright; directed by Tom Ford; starring Amy Adams (Susan Morrow), Jake Gyllenhaal (Edward Sheffield/ Tony Hastings), Michael Shannon (Bobby Andes), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ray Marcus), and Armie Hammer (Hutton Morrow): Fashion designer Tom Ford previously directed the Colin-Firth-starring A Single Man several years ago. That film prepares one in absolutely no way for the weird magnificence that is Nocturnal Animals.
In the past, we watch the characters played by Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal meet, get married, and fall apart. In the present, Amy Adams works as one of the directors of a very high-end, pretentious Manhattan art gallery. And in the novel that Jake Gyllenhaal sends Adams, a man's family is abducted by hooting rednecks along a lonely stretch of desert highway. Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist in scenes from that novel as imagined by Adams while she reads it.
Production design and cinematography separate the three strands of the narrative, beautifully (or grungily) dividing the dirty world of the novel from the naturalistic scenes from the past and the high-contrast colours of the artificial present. Adams and her cohorts at the gallery wear often hilarious outfits. A meeting of the gallery's directors, shot against stark white backgrounds, looks like what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick shot a talking-head ad for Chanel in the late 1980's.
Gyllenhaal and Adams are terrific, as is Michael Shannon as the vengeful cop of the novel. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is unrecognizable, and terrific, as the monstrous leader of the murderous thugs. He's got a scene on a toilet that's... startling. So, too, the opening few minutes of the movie, which depict a very... startling gallery installation.
This is an accomplished, witty, horrifying movie. I hope Ford doesn't wait 8 more years before doing another. He's already a better director than the vast majority of directors out there with many more films on their CVs. Highly recommended.
Sinister: written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Ethan Hawke (Ellison Oswalt), Juliet Rylance (Tracy), Fred Dalton Thompson (Sheriff), and James Ransone (Deputy) (2012): From the producers of the Paranormal Activity movies (which I mostly enjoy) comes another supernatural tale pitting dumber-than-average humans against the forces of darkness.
The title, as with the similar Insidious, has no specific relevance to the movie. It's a generic horror title, so don't start watching with the expectation that the monster's left-handed or anything.
Ethan Hawke plays a formerly best-selling true-crime writer who needs a bestseller to pay the mortgage. Juliet Rylance plays his wife, who's never in the house during the day but doesn't seem to have a job, either. Their older boy suffers from a combination of Night Terrors and sleep-walking, which seems a bit odd to me given that Night Terrors generally involve sleep paralysis, but I'll go with it. Their younger daughter likes painting on walls.
Hawke's character cleverly moves the family into a house where a brutal multiple murder took place about a year earlier. Ah ha, but he doesn't tell his wife! And as his wife apparently neither speaks to anyone in town or is in any way curious as to why they moved where they moved, she doesn't find out the truth until fairly late in the movie.
Anyway, the supernatural forces in this movie really enjoy recording everything on Super 8 film. Then they stick the Super 8 projector and carefully labelled film canisters in the attic for the next family to find. Yes, there are a series of serial murders taking place across America. As one of the murders involved setting fire to a car inside a garage in the dead of night, I'm a little unclear as to how the house in that case survived for someone else to move into. I assume they had really good fire suppression installed. But not monster suppression, more fools they!
Sinister is nicely photographed. Much of the horror comes from the voyeurism of watching (fictional) snuff films along with Ethan Hawke. But boy, is everybody in this movie dumb except for Sheriff Fred Dalton Thompson and Vincent D'onofrio in a cameo as an expert in occult mythology and iconography. There's probably a pretty good movie to be made about D'Onofrio and his trusty coffee-dispensing sidekick Jessica, but I'm not sure these filmmakers could make a movie about what happens when smart people deal with occult forces, and do so by actually going to a library instead of relying solely on the Internet for potentially life-saving information. Lightly recommended.
The Awakening: written by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy; directed by Nick Murphy; starring Rebecca Hall (Florence Cathcart), Dominic West (Robert Mallory), Imedla Staunton (Maud Hill) and Isaac Hempstead Wright (Tom Hill) (2011): Broody ghost story set in 1921 follows the efforts of professional debunker Rebecca Hall to solve the mystery of whether or not a boy at a boarding school in the North of England was a-scared to death by a ghost.
World War One is the major intertext here, as Hall lost her fiance and several of the teachers fought in the conflict and came home with both physical and mental wounds. Hall's character also has a somewhat bizarre past, as she was adopted after her parents were killed and she was mauled by lions.
Debunking and debunkers are again portrayed as sad bastards screwing it up for everyone else, which seems to be the default setting of every fictional movie that ever dealt with debunkers. Given the real-world cost that awful, awful 'psychics' such as Sylvia Browne exact when they insert themselves into police investigations (which Browne has never once actually helped solve) and the lives of the bereaved (whom Browne has put through the wringer on numerous occasions by describing horrible modes of death for victims who in fact did not actually die the way she described), it would be nice if a movie dealt with this fairly important aspect of debunking: namely, that it keeps 'psychics' from doing terrible things to innocent people in the name of publicity.
In any case, once you realize that Hall's character is indeed another sad orphan who really wants to believe, you know where the movie is going. Well, sort of. The final major plot twist verges on O. Henry Playhouse territory, though it is somewhat foreshadowed. Enjoyable and atmospheric. Lightly recommended.
Trouble with the Curve: written by Randy Brown; directed by Robert Lorenz; starring Clint Eastwood (Gus), Amy Adams (Mickey), John Goodman (Pete) and Justin Timberlake (Johnny) (2012): Once you get through the hilarious scene of octogenerian Eastwood talking to his bladder, this is a slight, pleasant movie about an old baseball scout, father-daughter issues, and how wily old baseball scouts are way better than computers at locating baseball talent, even though in the real world they actually aren't. Lightly recommended.
They Live, written by John Carpenter, based on the short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson; directed by John Carpenter; starring Roddy Piper (Nada), Keith David (Frank) and Meg Foster (Holly) (1988): John Carpenter's snarly dystopic satire looks as fresh and relevant now as it did in 1988. Maybe moreso, given the increasing ascendancy of corporations Uber Alles in the interim, the Occupy movements, and all the other stuff that's happened since then.
Wrestler Roddy Piper makes an engaging hero as Nada, an umemployed manual labourer who arrives in Los Angeles looking for work and instead discovers a conspiracy aimed at destroying the middle-class and working-class. Nada's a man of action (he is played by a professional wrestler, after all), and soon he and his initially reluctant compadre Frank (the always marvelous Keith David) are going toe-to-toe with the Secret Rulers of the World.
Is this a perfect movie? No. Some of Piper's witticisms fall pretty flat, though others ("I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.") have justifiably become classics. The cinematography looks amazingly crummy, which fits the film without necessarily being intentional (Carpenter's films often look crummy, as if they were shot on videotape and then transferred to film).
Nonetheless, this is one of the two or three best science-fiction films in the sub-genre of Paranoid Conspiracy That's Actually True. It may not look as good as The Matrix, another film in that sub-genre, but the eight-minute fight between Nada and Frank, as Nada tries to get Frank to on the sunglasses that allow a person to see what's really going on in the world, beats almost any fight sequence I can think of for sheer stubbornness on the part of both the characters and the filmmakers. Highly recommended.
The Muppets, written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, based on characters created by Jim Henson; directed by James Bobin; starring Jason Segel (Gary), Amy Adams (Mary), Chris Cooper (Tex Richman), and the Muppets (2011): The Muppets return to the big screen after more than a decade away thanks to the slightly unlikely Muppet-love of Jason Segel. It's great to see all of them again, and the gossamer-thin plot doesn't get in the way of an assortment of great Muppet moments and the occasional song. Segel, Adams, and Cooper strike just the right note of earnestness mixed with gently self-mocking metafictionality. Recommended.
Waiting for Guffman, written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Christopher Guest (Corky St. Clair), Fred Willard (Ron Albertson), Catherine O'Hara (Sheila Albertson), Parker Posey (Libby Mae Brown), Eugene Levy (Dr. Allan Pearl) and Bob Balaban (Lloyd Miller) (1996): It's Blaine, Missouri's 150th anniversary, and resident little-theatre guru Corky St. Clair will write and direct a musical tribute to the history of the small town. Oh, boy, will he ever.
Writers Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy hit pretty much all the right notes in this affectionate but clear-eyed tribute to the delusions that theatre can bring on in people who long to be something other than what they are, even if they dream of being something they're not actually good at. It now looks like a satire of the American Idol generation, though of course it isn't -- in tone and execution, it hews closer to Stephen Leacock's scathing, sympathetic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Highly recommended.
