Imaginary and Real Horrors: Predators (2010) and The Thin Blue LIne (1988)

Predators (2010): written by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch; directed by Nimrod Antal; produced by Robert Rodriguez; starring Adrien Brody (Royce), Topher Grace (Edwin), Alice Braga (Isabelle), Walton Goggins (Stans), Oleg Taktarov (Nikolai), Laurence Fishburne (Noland), Danny Trejo (Cuchillo), Louis Ozawa Changchien (Hanzo), and Mahershala Ali (Mombasa): Overcrowded with characters and gifted with a hilariously miscast Adrien Brody, Predators is nonetheless mostly entertaining. Producer Robert Rodriguez's fingerprints are all over it, though Nimrod Antal is a slicker director than he. Lightly recommended.

The Thin Blue Line (1988): written and directed by Errol Morris; score by Philip Glass: Errol Morris' riveting documentary, backed by a hypnotic Philip Glass score, got an apparently innocent man out of jail. Randall Adams spent about ten years in a Texas jail for a murder that the film overwhelmingly suggests was committed by another man. The film shows how the justice system can go horribly awry, even after Adams finally goes free -- Texas releases him in such a way that he can't receive any wrongful imprisonment funds from the State. Thanks, assholes! One of the essential documentaries (and films) of all time. Highly recommended.

Frailty: directed by Bill Paxton; starring Bill Paxton (2001)

Frailty: written by Brent Hanley; directed by Bill Paxton; starring Bill Paxton (Dad), Matthew McConaughey (Meiks), Powers Boothe (Agent Doyle), Matt O'Leary (Young Fenton), Jeremy Sumpter (Young Adam), and Derk Cheetwood (Agent Hull) (2001): Bill Paxton's feature-length directorial debut should have resulted in more directorial opportunities. Set in a small town in Paxton's home state of Texas, Frailty is easily one of the ten best horror films of the last twenty years. It also features Matthew McConaughey in his finest acting performance prior to the recent McConnaissance. 

But even with praise before its release from Stephen King, James Cameron, and Sam Raimi, Frailty never got the audience it deserved (and still merits). This is a genuinely great work of very specifically American horror, with that American-ness expressed in everything from the details of small-town Texas life to the peculiarly literal-mindedness of American fundamentalist Christianity.

McConaughey narrates events to FBI agent Powers Boothe in the (then) present day in order to explain the identity and origin of a serial killer dubbed "God's Hand" who has murdered six people over the past few years. The bulk of the movie occurs in 1979, as McConaughey explains the role he, his brother, and his father play in the history of God's Hand.

McConaughey's widower father, a small-town auto mechanic, rushes into the boys' shared room one night to tell them that one of God's angels has appeared to him in a vision. The Apocalypse is close at hand, and Paxton and his sons have been drafted into the war. Paxton is to find three magical items and, having found them, await another vision that will tell him what to do next.

What comes next is a list of demons Paxton has to destroy (not kill but 'destroy'). But the demons live among humanity and look like people. However, as Paxton has been given their names and the ability to not only see them for what they are but to also see the atrocities they've committed, he can track them down and destroy them. And Paxton's character is convinced that his sons will also gain the ability to see the demons, as God's plan also involves the boys carrying on this new family business.

So clearly Paxton's character is a loon. And the revelation of the magical items -- a pair of work-gloves, an ax, and a length of pipe -- doesn't make him seem any more believable. One son believes him from the beginning; however, McConaughey tells us in the narration, he himself never believed his father, and would eventually either have to find the courage to stop his father's string of murders or at least run away.

Paxton's direction isn't showy, as befits the tone of the material: this is a tale of the normative surface of things under which, in men's minds, swim terrible creatures in dangerous depths. The actual killings are never shown in all their bloody detail; Paxton leaves it to the mind of the viewer to imagine what's happening just outside the frame. There's a verisimilitude to Paxton's depiction of the day-to-day lives of this strange family, a lived-in, working-class aesthetic to the way things look.

Everything would fail, however, without the performances of Matt O'Leary and Jeremy Sumpter as the two boys in 1979. Paxton gets terrific, believable performances from both of them. They anchor the movie. They also present the two sides of the mental conflict going on: one is convincing as a True Believer who loves his father, while the other is equally convincing as a horrified child who also loves his father, and thus finds it difficult to act against him at first. 

In the frame narration, McConaughey delivers a subdued, haunted performance, without a glimmer of that RomCom smarm that derailed his career for more than a decade. And as the initially skeptical FBI agent, Powers Boothe also shines. McConaughey's detailed story gradually convinces Boothe's character about the reality of the identity of the God's Hand killer, leading to a strangely convincing conclusion that's been carefully and fairly set up by everything that's been shown and told to us.

In all, this is a great movie of horror and madness and the bonds of family. While much of the film plays out with growing, horrific inevitability, Frailty also presents some startling surprises, including a scene of awful pathos involving the family and the arrival of the town sheriff at the one boy's request. Brent Hanley's script is terrific, and there's an attention to period detail that makes 1979 seem like 1979. Highly recommended.

Robert Crumb and Jack Jackson: Horror Comix, Funny Comix

God's Bosom and Other Stories: The Historical Strips of Jack Jackson: written and illustrated by Jack Jackson (1967-1992; collected 1995): The late and much lamented Jack Jackson was a Texas cartoonist of terrific ability with an unusual-for-comics interest in history. Much of his best work from the 1960's onwards, including several novel-length comics works, examines the history of Texas and some of its most famous and infamous characters.

God's Bosom collects the eponymous piece and more than a dozen other pieces devoted to history. These include cartoon op-eds on then-current Texas problems, comic strips about why Texans hate Yankees, and brief histories of Zap Comix and Apex Novelty Press. The bulk of the volume comprises lengthier historical pieces that range from G-rated histories of famous Texas highways and the Colt revolver to graphic treatments of both fictional and factual horrors of the past.

The two masterpieces of the collection are "God's Bosom" and "Nits Make Lice." The first is a partially fictionalized retelling of a Spanish shipwreck in the New World in the early 16th century. The survivors undergo a harrowing quest for safety that goes almost as badly as such a quest can go. It's a graphic, stomach-turning tale of survival and death. "Nits Make Lice" is, if anything, even more graphic and disturbing. It tells of the massacre of a band of Cheyenne in pre-statehood Colorado by the U.S. military in the late 19th century. It's as tragic and awful as it sounds in its indictment of America's genocidal foundation. The other pieces don't come up to these levels, but very few short works in comics do. 

Throughout the collection, Jackson's art -- mostly realistic, but with a clever gift for caricature and 'cartoonyness' when appropriate -- shines. It's beautiful stuff even when it depicts the horrible, with a sure command of line and an attention to telling detail. Jackson was a master with an unflinching eye. One can't unsee some of the things he depicts here. Highly recommended.

Complete Crumb Comics Volume 5: written and illustrated by Robert Crumb (1968/Collected 1990): It took four volumes for Fantagraphics to get to the public beginning of Robert Crumb's career in cartooning. Volume 5 of the Complete Crumb Comics offers a grab-bag of Crumb's late 1960's "Hippy Comix," with such familiar characters as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat making early appearances. And the infamous Angelfood McSpade. Can't forget her. And the cover to that Big Brother and the Holding Company album.

This is a series for completists, after all. It's all fascinating stuff, and while much of it really is for completists only, Crumb is such a towering talent in the history of cartooning that even his throwaway material is worth pondering. Some of the material here is graphic and disturbing, and Crumb's problematic 1960's and early 1970's use of violence (sexual and non-sexual) towards women is on full display. Never has one cartoonist so unapologetically, exhaustively and fearlessly exposed the contents of his own Id, to such great and disturbing artistic effect. Highly recommended.

Cottage Country (2013) and Lone Star (1995)

Cottage Country: written by Jeremy Boxen; directed by Peter Wellington; starring Malin Akerman (Cammie Ryan), Tyler Labine (Todd Chipowski), Lucy Punch (Masha), Dan Petronijevic (Salinger Chipowski), Benjamin Ayres (Dov Rosenberg), and Kenneth Welsh (Earl Chipowski) (2013): Ontario's cottage country mostly plays itself in an amiable, occasionally blackly comic bit of horror-satire. Cast against type as a buttoned-down office drone, Tyler Labine is appealing. Malin Akerman, while about 1000 times too attractive for her role as Labine's obsessive girlfriend, also does solid work as an increasingly demented Bridezilla wannabe.

More gore and more laughs would be nice, but I've certainly spent 90 minutes with far worse movies with far bigger budgets. And there's a bit involving the extrication of an ax from someone killed with said ax that's both funny and weirdly authentic. Lightly recommended.

Lone Star: written and directed by John Sayles; starring Chris Cooper (Sam Deeds), Elizabeth Pena (Pilar), Kris Kristofferson (Charlie Wade), Matthew McConaughey (Buddy Deeds), Ron Canada (Otis), Joe Morton (Del), and Miriam Colon (Mercedes Cruz) (1995): Perhaps the most satisfying of all the films of writer-director John Sayles. While the backbone of its plot is a fairly traditional mystery, that mystery allows Sayles to move back and forth across a gulf of 40 years as Chris Cooper's Sheriff of a small Texas border town investigates a murder linked to his late father, the much beloved former sheriff of the town.

Sayles assembles a fine cast and gives them lots to work with. As in most of Sayles's films, there are very few villains -- in this case, exactly one, Kris Kristofferson's odious sheriff, seen in flashbacks to the late 1950's, when Chris Cooper's father was a young deputy played by Matthew McConaughey. 

Several plots intertwine over the course of the movie, all of them tied into the murder plot because in this small town, everything is connected. And while Cooper tries to figure out this particular bit of the past, the larger history of Texas, particularly Texas in regards to race relations, also gets argued over in local politics and in a meeting of parents with the school over its "controversial" attempt to offer something other than a valedictory to white people during history classes. In all, it's a fine piece of writing, directing, and acting, true to its genre antecedents but also grasping at something larger than just the solution to a mystery. Highly recommended.