Stories We Tell (2012)

  Managing to get more than one movie out this weekend.  Look at me go.

Actress Sarah Polley creates a documentary to explore the circumstances of her birth and parentage from the perspectives of everyone involved, from her parents and siblings to her mother's friends and contemporaries in order to examine the ways stories shape and are shaped by the people who live them.

It does devolve a little into a meta rabbit hole, especially at the end, but it remains a thoroughly engrossing documentary that seems so personal and yet universal.  The circumstances may be different, but who hasn't gone back to relatives as an adult to hear about family drama or gossip they didn't understand as children?  I think we all love to know where we came from and about the people who are in many ways strangers to us while still being as close as half our DNA.

Stories We Tell is currently streaming on Tubi.

Rush (2013)

  This pandemic has been hell on my attention span.  I tried to watch Tangerines.  Made it half an hour.  Ditto on The Danish Girl.  Just could not make myself be in the mood to watch either of them.  Thank God Rush exists or I would have nothing to write about today.

The 1976 Formula 1 racing season was marked by one thing:  the rivalry between hotshot playboy James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and coldly analytical Nikki Lauda (Daniel Brühl).  The two had hated each other since starting in the Formula 3 leagues and over six years built up an enmity that drove both men to their peak performances.

This movie required the bare minimum from me and that's okay.  I'm a little burned out on every thing that is happening right now, both micro and macro, and it was nice to kind of let go and just think "haha car go fast.  Whee."  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Midsommar (2019)

  Happy Summer, everybody!  Yesterday was officially the solstice and for many people today is a solar eclipse, which is probably two more spots on Apocalypse Bingo.

Dani (Florence Pugh) has had a rough year.  Her family died and she's pretty sure her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), wants to break up with her.  That's probably why he didn't tell her until the last minute that he was going to go to Sweden for a month to hang out with his foreign exchange friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), anthropologist Josh (William Jackson Harper), and asshole Mark (Will Poulter) --there's one in every friend group-- to experience Pelle's small, rural commune's midsummer festivities.  Christian guiltily invites Dani, but things just go from sad to weird.  Pelle's family has an ...eclectic approach to life, aging, and nature.

This is Ari Aster's follow-up to Hereditary and while I don't think it's as much of a tour-de-force, it is still very good.  Also, it is one of the rare horror films to actually be scarier on mute.  Most films use the orchestra to prime audiences or provide cheap jump scares but muting Midsommar puts the focus on horror visuals and not the dialogue, which is quite light-hearted.

It's also very forthright.  There are no surprises.  The movie tells you upfront what is going to happen and then follows through with no bait and switch.  Yes, there are definite Wicker Man parallels but Midsommar hits the same beats for me as The Shining.  Like, just a sympathetic view from Jack Torrance's perspective.  I'm interested to see more of Aster's deconstruction of community and family.

The Player (1992)

  This was the wrong day/month/year to try and watch this movie.  It was supposed to have gone up last Monday but it took me six days to get through it.

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is a Hollywood studio executive currently being harassed by a series of anonymous threatening postcards from, he assumes, a writer he ghosted.  There is also external pressure in the form of studio rumors that Griffin is about to be replaced by a younger, hotter up-and-coming exec (Peter Gallagher).  Griffin decides to confront writer David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) to see if Kahane is behind the postcards but ends up beating him to death in a parking lot.  Now Griffin has to beat a murder rap, scuttle his rival's ambitions, and possibly woo Kahane's bereaved girlfriend (Greta Scacchi).  Just another day in Hollywood.

A smarmy white guy exercising his extreme wealth and privilege to gatekeep while also distancing himself from any rule of law is precisely the wrong energy to bring to this our Cursed Year of 2020.  This is considered a classic self-referential dark comedy and maybe.  Any other year but this one.  My cynicism meter is pegged out from *gestures at everything* reality so I just don't have the capacity to find this film funny right now.  What you SHOULD watch it for is the absolutely jaw-dropping number of cameos.  I can't even list all of them.

Honestly, this is an incredibly well-done film and would make a great Evil Hollywood double feature with Sunset Boulevard but if feels so tone-deaf this year in particular.  It's currently streaming on The Criterion Channel if you're up to it.

Arthur Christmas (2011)

  Yay, Christmas in June!  Maybe you could use a little joy and goodwill right now to balance out the horrors of 2020.  I know I could.

Arthur (James McAvoy) is quite happy being in the mail room at the North Pole instead of delivering presents like his dad, Santa (Jim Broadbent), and older brother, Steve (Hugh Laurie), but when a present is left undelivered to a little girl, Arthur realizes that despite their hereditary occupation, neither Claus actually cares enough to go back and deliver it.  Santa is happy just being a beloved figurehead and Steve is seething over his long-overdue promotion.  It's up to Arthur, his forcibly retired grandpa (Bill Nighy), and a wrapping paper-obsessed elf (Ashley Jensen) to get the present to the intended recipient before sunrise.

This was made by Aardman Studios, the company responsible for Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Chicken Run.  The animation is lush and gorgeously colorful, the humor is brisk and a little dark, and the emotional beats are cleanly paced.  It's not blazing any Christmas trails but I do think it's one of the only Christmas movies I've ever seen where every Santa is a selfish dick.

It's currently streaming on Netflix.

The Awakening (2011)

  This is a lovely little ghost story, teeming with atmosphere that more than makes up for the rather clichéd twist ending.

Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) debunks spiritualists preying on the bereaved in 1921.  A modern woman of science, Florence has no time or use for charlatans.  When she is offered a job at Rookwood, a private home turned into a boys boarding school whose inhabitants claim they've seen the ghost of a murdered boy, she turns it down flat.  But the teacher, Robert Mallory (Dominic West), is insistent that she come put these rumors of a haunting to rest.  Florence quickly uncovers a surface mystery but is soon drawn into the horrors of the past and her own personal ghosts.

It doesn't quite live up to The Others or The Orphanage but it's a solidly done ghost story.  I would maybe run it with The Woman in Black or even Crimson Peak.  It's got that almost campy, gothic vibe.  It's currently streaming on Shudder, which I have through Amazon Prime, but if you have a library card, it's also available on Kanopy for free.

Severance (2006)

  Obviously this was supposed to go up yesterday but I fell asleep super early and didn't wake up until 2 a.m.  So now I'm writing it before I log on to work.

A group of employees on a team building exercise get a rather more pointed lesson in group dynamics when they mistakenly wander into a murder forest in Eastern Europe.  The bad guys are either escaped lunatics, the descendants of escaped lunatics, war criminals, or sexy nymphomaniac nurses, depending on which story you believe (not the last one).  Either way, heads are going to roll in the Sales Department.

Severance is billed as a horror comedy and it would make a pretty good don't-go-in-the-woods double feature with Hatchet.  Both are lean slashers with low production value and high body count.  Severance isn't quite as funny so I would watch it second to escalate the tension, especially if I was throwing a third movie in there.

Severance is currently streaming on Tubi.