Better late than never edition!

Gehenna– This was a fun low budget horror movie. A real estate developer goes on a location scout where she and four others find a bunker from World War II. Once inside, they become trapped by evil spirits and the race is on to figure a way out.

Mostly a ghost story, Gehenna uses darkness and claustrophobia to great effect. The excellent make-up effects are also worth bringing up. Since the movie called for very few locations, it looks like a bulk of the budget was available for quality creature effects which are quite gruesome and do the most to sell the story. The worst quality of the film is the acting, which slides around from good to bad through the entire runtime.

Storywise, it’s a neat little tale that’s revealed through the objects that the characters find in the bunker. And since this is a ghost story, the evil spirits bring out the worst fears in the unfortunate people who found this damned space. The secret of the movie is set up well but it’s easy to figue it out long before the characters do, so I ended up waiting a while for them to catch on. I think the secret works well but the movie treats you like an idiot as it holds your hand and spells it out exactly for the last few minutes. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t figure it out on their own so the last bit felt like a waste of time. So yeah, this movie does have its fair share of flaws but it’s a good watch.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe– This is a surprisingly great movie! Father and son coroners, Tom and Austin, get the body of a young woman from the police who just found her at a crime scene. Along with the multiple murders at a local residence, she was found half buried in the basement. It’s a strange crime scene and the police ask Tom to finish the autopsy and get the report to them in the morning so they have something to tell the media.

So Tom and his son get to work on Jane Doe and with each step, they discover more bizarre clues. For example, she has no trauma visible on the outside–her skin is in perfect condition–but the internal damage is shocking. As they get closer to the truth the secrets of Jane Doe start to come for them.

The concept for this movie is terrific and each element is done really well. Fantastic make-up effects, the pacing is perfect, and it’s really creepy. Much like Gehenna, the entire movie takes place in almost one location so a lot of the budget went to the terrific special effects. Unlike Gehenna, the acting is terrific, the very small cast lead by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch.

The gore is limited, kept mostly to the autopsy work, and the movie doesn’t rely on it for its scares. It’s much more location and the growing presence of an evil force that creeps up on you. I really liked the reveal of who Jane most likely is and the end works really well. A treat of a movie.

In the Tall Grass– This one lands right in the middle of the road for me. A good concept that is probably better off as a short story as there’s not enough to it. Even at about 90 minutes, it felt too long.

Becky and Cal are siblings driving through Kansas on their way to California. Becky is pregnant and Cal pulls the car over when she gets sick. On the side of the road, they hear a boy in the field of tall grass yelling for help. He can’t find his way out, so the two decided to go in to help him out.

With the story by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, you can pretty much guess what happens. The field is not a normal field, it’s inhabited by some kind of being or spirit that’s sole purpose is trapping people for…some reason? And the people drawn into this field, maybe they have some secrets of their own? Yeah, they do.

There’s a good amount of backstory to the characters strewn about to give more depth to people teleporting around a field which is…okay? I can’t think of a stand out scene and I didn’t find it scary at all. Every angle of this felt like it’s been done before and done better elsewhere. Digital effects take over in the last half and they look alright. Gore and violence are middle of the road with the exception of one grisly death. If you skip this one I don’t think you’re missing anything.

Happy Death Day– Take the movie Groundhog Day, set it on a college campus, and add a murderer and you have this fun movie. Tree Glebman wakes up in a boy’s dorm room on her birthday. She goes through the day and is murdered by someone wearing all black and the mask of the school mascot. On her death, she wakes up back in the boy’s dorm room and lives through the same day until she can stop her murderer. A pretty clever movie, enough is done to keep you guessing on who the murderer is and Tree is a smart character. She works to widdle down her suspect list and naturally finds out clues and picks up on things that are wrong. My guess is that this script was worked on for a while, it’s way more clever than I thought it would be. Rated PG-13, this movie is light on violence and almost absent of gore. The most you see is a knife handle sticking out of someone. More thriller than a horror movie, this is a good movie for scaredy-cats (it’s not scary at all) to watch with their friends who like horror movies.

Happy Death Day 2U– The sequel starts on the same morning as the original. Ryan, the roommate of Carter, opens this movie by showing the audience where he goes after Tree leaves Carter’s room. The big hook of the movie is that it explains what caused Tree’s time loop–Ryan’s science thesis project. Just when Tree thinks she’s out, Ryan ends up making it worse and before long it’s more than just Tree’s life on the line in this alternative timeline. This movie almost changes genres, adding science fiction to the thriller aspects while keeping the dash of horror movie influences. I give credit for the effort in making this movie stand out and unique. By pushing the time idea, it remixes the events of the first movie offering different routes for the characters to take and changing the mystery of who the killer is. I did find it weird and disappointing that despite Ryan being the focal point of the movie at the start, he falls to the wayside and Tree headlines the movie again. That said, what they do for Tree is well done and interesting. She doesn’t do the same motions as the first film and more opportunities are made with the timeline change to give more depth of her character. She has to make a few hard choices which help make for a more interesting story in the end. While I like the first one more, this is a worthy sequel.

Green Room– A punk band travels to the woods of Portland, Oregon on a last ditch effort to make some money on their sputtering tour. The gig is at a neo-nazi bar but they’re reassured they’ll be playing early in the day so the crowd won’t be too gnarly, the contact at the venue is cool, and the amount money they’ll get for playing a few songs will be enough for them to get back home. The kids end up seeing something bad–essentially being at the wrong place at the wrong time–and they are forced to fight for their survival. This movie is awesome from start to finish. A good set-up with a fun cast you get to know and like quickly and then the decent into chaos ratchets up perfectly. Patrick Stewart is in this with a role I’ve never seen him do before. The late great Anton Yelchin is fantastic in this as well so watching this kept me at the edge of my seat the entire time. There’s a good amount of violence and gore on display but it isn’t gratuitous which I think was a good move. What’s there sells the horror and that’s enough. The whole movie takes place almost entirely in one location and the set is used really well. The band tries various ways to get out so the pacing has these great peaks and valleys of action. The only thing I didn’t like is that I didn’t watch this movie sooner.

Have you ever heard the saying “The feel good movie of the year”? Joker isn’t that movie. As one would expect, nothing good happens to the man we watch become the Joker.

Gotham City is a rough place to live in. Arthur Fleck is one of its citizens and every day is a challenge. Struggling to make ends meet while living and caring for his ill mother, Arthur doesn’t have too much to look forward to. He has to maintain his own psych meds along with his mother’s medication and scrape up enough money for rent and food. There are times when he forgoes food to ensure his mother has something to eat. He takes small jobs as a clown (store sales, hospital visits) with his ultimate dream to be a stand-up comedian. He also has a condition called Pseudobulbar Affect which causes him to laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate times. The highlight of his day is watching the Murray Franklin Show with his mom.

The movie wastes no time in starting Arthur’s descent into madness. He’s mugged and held financially responsible for the loss of the store’s sign. A co-worker gives him a gun for protection and the man soon lies about the gun to make Arthur look worse when he gets caught with it, leading to the loss of his job at the entertainer placement agency. Layer by layer, a man who for a long time has questioned his place and identity in the world gets more and more taken from him. This pollutes his mind and when cornered on the subway, he fights back with violence. At first spooked by the ordeal, he quickly comes to terms with it–with no remorse. On top of that, news of what he did hits the media and while no one knows it was him who killed those men, for the first time he feel useful. That he’s done something that people have noticed, he’s changed the world. Even though that change is bad, the feeling becomes intoxicating and he becomes more aggressive.

Joker isn’t the first movie to explore a person psychologically breaking, so it doesn’t really tread new ground in that regard. The main character being from comic books changes the expectations though. But let’s be clear, this isn’t a superhero movie. Despite the Joker not having a definitive origin (there are many stories over the decades) everyone knows what he is in the end: a monster. So where this movie goes is no surprise. With all of the violence reported in the world today, it makes a character like this all the more topical and scary.

And the movie does use the fear of mental illness as one of it’s biggest attention-grabbing features. “‘Crazy’ people are dangerous” is the lazy and untrue go-to idea everyone tends to lean on. I never got the feeling that it exploited this idea though as Arthur is a complex character. I was watching someone’s world fall away bit by bit and left with not knowing which way was up anymore. When someone needs help and they have no support, it compounds problems.

Arthur’s problems aren’t simple. Pseudobulbar Affect–caused by brain trauma or other brain degeneration conditions–is painful both physically and emotionally. He gasps for air, he chokes on his saliva, and it’s embarrassing because it’s loud and uncontrollable. It’s a social nightmare he’s had to deal with for as long as he can remember. Long before we meet him, Arthur has been struggling. Then he loses his social worker due to budget cuts, removing his access to his medication and one of the few people he’s able to talk to about his life. Couple that with physical violence and a massive revelation about his mother, Arthur loses any kind of grounding he ever had. I never got the impression that I was supposed to be sympathetic to what Arthur does.

I will say that Joker has a very narrow view of the world. The whole thing is from Arthur’s perspective and it never looks past what he sees. What happens around Arthur–due to his actions–the movie never explores. So any kind of social commentary is pretty vapid.

I see the arc of Arthur to be a bit like Erik Killmonger, the villain from Black Panther (for me the biggest highlight of that movie). Their backgrounds are completely different but the storytelling goal is the same, to give you plausible history and reasoning to make you understand why the antagonist wants to cause so much harm. You can understand what they are saying but recognize that it doesn’t justify what they are doing.

Nor do I think Joker glorifies violence as none of it is celebrated and there are no allusions to it being good or helpful.

I did find this to be one of the most suspenseful movies I’ve seen in awhile. Joaquin Phoenix is going to get a ton of acting award nominations for playing Arthur. I give him my highest praise as I completely forgot it was him on screen. He moves differently, he has all of these personal tics that become noticeable as you watch. The character truly changes from the beginning to the end. Arthur does his best to try to fit in, he’s constantly at war with himself. It’s like he’s so unsure of who he is, he looks to other people to mimic how they behave. He’s just guessing how to get by, like “Is this it? Is this ‘normal?'”

It’s a fraught journey through two acts and when Arthur puts on the full Joker outfit in act 3, it really blew my mind. I was literally seeing the comic book villain on screen, it’s him. And that’s really scary. You don’t want to be anywhere near this guy. Even the big bads like Two Face, Penguin, and Killer Croc are really nervous around him. What is he going to do was all I could think of. Joker is anarchy and there he was in the flesh for the second time (Heath Ledger being the first).

I really liked seeing the mixture of current social issues and comic book Joker. Here, since this is the beginning of the character, he has no grand plans. He’s not filling balloons with poison gas or putting bombs around a city. Here he sees the start of being able to influence and manipulate people. That’s always been a huge part of the character. And there are real world parallels that the movie uses here. The influence of media, the rampant economic inequality that’s spurning anger, and the growing phenomenon of the mob mentality. Everyone is chanting for justice and for Joker, that’s cold blooded revenge.

Joker pulls on a few more familiar source material motifs. From the amazing hospital scene with Joker talking to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight:

You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
[Joker hands Two-Face a gun and points it at himself]
Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!

This is basically what happens with Arthur’s confrontation on the subway with the men who turn out to work at Wayne Enterprises. People get abused and killed on the streets of Gotham all the time and no one bats an eye. But if it’s a well off white-collar worker? Tragic, headline news. This is one of Arthur’s biggest grievances with society and leads him to another keystone of the Joker manifesto: everyone sucks, everyone is mean, everyone is cruel.

And in the end, I think that last bit is what we’re all fighting against and the biggest message of this movie. Good versus evil means we all have to work together to make the decisions that keep us on the right track. Cynicism isn’t a virtue, don’t let that make you jaded, bitter, and isolated. The forgotten are people too, empathy goes a long way (which I think there is a huge lack of now with all the budget cuts to many social programs that will do way more harm than good). Work for other people the same way you would work for yourself. When society pulls up together, we all benefit.

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After last week’s crackling season preimere, I thought the train would keep barreling through but instead Sam Esmail turned the burners down to “keep ’em sizzlin'” which was a surprisingly good idea.

The show opens with Price giving the background of how Whiterose became so powerful, starting is opening in the late 80s when the Berlin Wall came down. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it left an opportunity to fill in the power vacuum with an eager cabal of investors that Whiterose assembled. This group, called The Deus Group, is the conspiracy theorists Illumanity come to life. Deus runs the world behind the scenes but the rest of the investors were fooled into thinking they had any say in what the company did. Whiterose steered the ship from the start for the sole purpose of getting her Congo installation done. Price, having saved Elliot’s life from the OD, tells him there is nothing he can do, even pulling off the hack he wants to will barely dent TDG. Much like the late Angela, Elliot is too stubborn for that message. He convinces Price to try to get all the members together while he works on a way to hack the group when they are together. He just needs an appropriate entry point. Susan Jacobs, who worked for ECorp as a liaison for the Cypress Bank is the best bet, but she’s the one who had a bad run-in with Darlene…but no one knows that.

With some kind of plan in mind Elliot gets a call from Darlene. She got a call from the assisted living home informing them that their mother has died. To say the kids didn’t have a good relationship with their mother is one way to put it so neither are invested in having anything to do with her. Being last of kin, they are forced to handle their mother’s stuff.

This episode mostly serves as a reconciliation for Darlene and Elliot. They’ve been drifting different streams of misery for some time now, and those streams have come to merge. Elliot is so pre-occupied with tracking down Susan Jacobs, that he barely registers anything. Darlene gets pulled in as they start to clear her room. When Elliot finds his old Walkman in a drawer, it makes Darlene think and evaluate their past. They also stumble upon a bank receipt that says their mother had a safety deposit box, Darlene insists they go see what’s in it. Annoyed that his sister is putting any value to anything their mother had or has, he reluctantly goes with her. She needs some kind of closure, she can’t detach like Elliot. At an E Bank branch (ugh) there’s nothing to find.

This entire sequence was fascinating to watch. Fantastically written and acted, I liked how this experience brings the two siblings together. Back in Elliot’s orbit, she notices he’s much more fidgety than normal and manages to get him to talk about what he’s up to. That leads into her admitting–but not officially saying why–he won’t be able to find Jacobs. That’s a huge speedbump in the plan but this also puts Darlene back on the hacking team. Elliot won’t be doing this hail mary to stop Whiterose by himself. This conversation also drops a massive bomb on Elliot.

She mentions Fernando Vera, that he approached her outside Elliot’s apartment. Blindsided, he doesn’t recall her telling him that and she replies, you didn’t seem to care when I told you so I didn’t either…should I worry about him? Vera’s been gone a long time, the ordeal with him was horrific, so him sniffing around is bad news. Elliot doesn’t let on. He also doesn’t let on to his sheer panic that she didn’t tell him, Mr. Robot kept this info from him. When Darlene leaves, he confronts Mr. Robot about it and he swears up and down that he doesn’t know what Darlene is talking about. He hasn’t kept any secrets from Elliot. So that means, Elliot has a third personality…

This scene with Darlene shows off one of my favorite visual storytelling techniques Esmail uses. Here, right after she says Vera’s name, Elliot’s eyes flick away from her, off to the right. There, in the pews behind her, Mr. Robot sits. To Darlene, he’s just checked out, she doesn’t know where his mind went. She steps over, unknowingly blocking his view of Mr. Robot, into his line of sight, forcing him to focus on her. She knows how to reengage him when he retreats.

Earlier in this episode, when Elliot gets frustrated with Price, he tags out of the conversation. Mr. Robot has been shown to be sitting behind Elliot has he talks to Price, and he starts talking to Price instead. Last episode, a similar moment happens when Elliot gets frustrated with Darlene and he taps out, with Mr. Robot quickly taking over, taking care to talk to Darlene gently as she’s in a bad state of mind.

If you don’t watch the show, you’d think that it’s a three–person conversation, not two personalities of one person navigating challenging moments. It’s deftly done and a treat to watch with subtle set-ups and follow-throughs (Esmail is such a good director).

While Elliot is with his sister, Dom is doing as she told to keep the Dark Army happy. She’s being interviewed by a superior about her partner Santiago. As far as they know, he’s AWOL, only she knows he was murdered with an ax in front of her. Right when you think she’s going to tell them the truth, she goes with the lie, Santiago was working with a drug cartel. Janice calls her that night and Dom tells her that she’s 99.9% sure the agent believes the cover story. It turns out Janice is a real stickler for efficiency and has the agent killed. This woman really loves her job.

Finally, Price visits Whiterose (who is decorating a Christmas tree as Zhi Zhang) and pulls the only card he can to get the Deus Group members to gather quickly: he’s retiring. Whiterose is pissed–which Price rather likes–because this throws her timeline into chaos, she had no plans for this to happen. With about a week to go before the Congo delivery, everyone has their back pressed to the wall.