Halloween Goodness

It’s interesting to me how Halloween has slowly morphed from being one day at the end of October when you run from house to house to get candy into a month-long bonanza of elaborately decorated houses, costume parties, and an endless string of costumes that all begin with the word “sexy” – sexy witch, sexy firefighter, etc. Halloween has grown from a fun, little holiday into a full-fledged pumpkin-spice flavored cultural phenomenon.

Certainly, the movie industry strives to take advantage of this trend. Scary movies start coming out in late September and peak around Halloween before giving way to other holiday films in November. What I notice about Hollywood’s efforts to be part of the Halloween fun is that its product breaks down into just two categories. Spooky October films end up either being either strictly for kids (Hotel Transylvania 2, for example) or specifically for intense-fright loving adults (such as the latest Paranormal Activity installment.) Generally, adults are bored by the kids’ movies and there’s no way I’m taking my six year old or even my 14 year old to see Crimson Peak. There seems to be less and less of a middle ground these days, movies that are legitimately scary but not excessively gory, sexualized, or intense.

I have three older, more obscure films I’d like to recommend as spooky, but not gory, good ghost stories rather than horror films.

The first is 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods. It was produced by Disney during a period when the company was targeting young adults and trying to shed its just-for-kids image. A young family moves into a stately country manor owned by a menacing, mysterious old woman named Mrs. Aylwood. The family finds out that their daughter looks almost exactly like Mrs. Aylwood’s daughter who disappeared during a séance-like ritual in the nearby chapel years before. The woods surrounding the house are haunted and clues about the missing daughter keep turning up in unexpected and unsettling ways. The film is somewhat notorious because it was released briefly in 1980 and then taken out of circulation so Disney could tinker with the ending for a year to make something a little less dark. It was rereleased in 1981. Of course, parts of the film are a little cheesy, but it also has the inimitable Ms. Bette Davis as Mrs. Aylwood on its side, and her angry, piercing stare is by far the movie’s best and most frightening special effect.

Next is 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Set in the Norman Rockwell-esqe village of Greentown, Illinois, the film tells the story of Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, two boys fretting over the end of summer and their own potential shift into young adulthood. As if on cue, the carnival comes to town, signaling not only the end of summer, but the end of innocence. The carnival is run by Mr. Dark who may or may not be the Devil come to claim the souls of Greentown. The film is a combination of lyrical meditation on innocence and straight-up freak-out. The scene with the spiders always get to me. 

Last is 1988’s The Lady in White, a small but evocative ghost story starring a very young Lucas Hass. Hass plays Frankie Scarlotti, a kid who sees a ghostly reenactment of a murder that took place in his school years before. He feels it’s his responsibility to solve the crime and give the ghost of the murdered little girl some peace. Like Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Lady in White is set in an idyllic small town, this time upstate New York in the early 1960s. It’s nostalgic and sweet at times, but there are a few scenes of genuine menace and fright throughout.

These three films are precisely the kind of movie you can watch with your kids at this time of year, confident that you’ve scared them but not traumatized them.

The Martian

This is the third year in a row we’ve seen a big-budget, A-list talent, awards-season movie about how outer space is trying to kill us. Two years ago, there was Alfonso Cuaron’s harrowing survival tale Gravity. Last year, Christopher Nolan released his metaphysical mind scrambler, Interstellar. And now we have Ridley Scott directing Matt Damon in The Martian, the story of Mark Watney, a botanist slash astronaut who is mistakenly left behind after a manned mission to Mars is suddenly aborted. Like the other two films in this unofficial space survival trilogy, the movie focuses on one lone individual trying to understand and survive forces much, much bigger than he is and having varying degrees of success.

 After discovering that he’s been left behind, Watney doesn’t spend any time panicking or wallowing in depression. Instead, he gets right to work, assessing his food, water, and air supplies. He tries to find a way to communicate with NASA back on earth to let them know he’s still alive and then works to figure out how to stay that way until someone can rescue him – which, he estimates, ought to be in about four years. 

Watney uses his own natural fertilizer to grow potatoes on Mars, he adapts decaying plutonium to power his Martian dune buggy. He finds the long-lost Pathfinder rover buried under red sand and basically uses it to have an interplanetary Skype session with NASA. Yes, it would seem that astronaut Mark Watney is a cosmic MacGuyver.

While Gravity was an allegory for the human will to survive despite everything and Interstellar was a trippy sci fi tone poem about how love is a physical, measureable force acting in the cosmos, The Martian is all about the science. It occurred to me in the middle of watching the movie that all my engineer friends are going to love this film because it’s basically a big, fat love letter to STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. It’s all about problem solving though physics, chemistry, and mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering.

At one point, it almost became repetitious – Watney faced some seemingly unsolveable problem that would send any normal, non-genius into hysterics, but he thoughtfully gazes out into the Martian landscape for a second and then suddenly says, “I know how to fix it! And he does. In fact, if the narrative has a weakness, it’s that the first half of the film almost makes things seem too easy. Watney’s calm competence combined with Matt Damon’s natural guy-next-door affability makes being stranded alone on a planet 35 million miles away from earth and facing almost certain death seem pretty lightweight. Things get more interesting as things go wrong for Watney here and there, and there’s real tension at the end when he tries to get off the surface of Mars to reconnect with his team that has returned for him. But the movie is ultimately more about the science than the people. 

 Ridley Scott’s direction here is sharp and economical. Scott is one of the streakiest working directors we have. He can make powerful, influential, entertaining films like Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Blackhawk Down, and Gladiator, but he can also make bloated, ponderous bumblers like 1492, The Kingdom of Heaven, and Prometheus. When he focuses on just telling a story instead of trying to make a statement with a capital S, he ususally does his best work. And whatever else you can say about him, nobody knows their way around a sweeping vista like Ridley Scott. His storytelling is hit and miss, but his visuals never fail to be striking, evocative, and lovely.

So maybe outer space is trying to kill us, but I figure as long as I stay on earth, preferably nestled inside a movie theater, I should be safe for a while yet.

Fall Film Preview

 Well, it’s fall and that means big budget, high gloss, prestige films start arriving in theaters right about now. It’s as reliable as the seasons themselves – round about mid September, films made by A-list directors and starring actual movie stars begin to appear and they don’t stop until New Year’s Day. The reason for this flurry of cinematic activity, of course, is that the eligibility cut-off date for both the Oscars and the Golden Globes is December 31^st. Big awards mean more publicity and therefore more money for movies. So studios carefully strategize about which films to release when. They line up their strongest contenders, the films that are most likely to be award-winners and release them as close to the cut off date as possible so those movies will be fresh in the voters’ minds when it comes time to cast their ballot. 

So here are some movies we have to look forward to over the next few months and a couple of modest predictions about their award-worthiness.
 

This week, The Martian arrives in theaters. Starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, it’s the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut accidentally stranded on Mars, trying to survive long enough for the people back home to realize he’s still alive and needs rescuing. Damon is a reliable performer who always brings a very grounded quality to his work whether he’s the lead or playing a tiny cameo. Ridley Scott has directed two of the most influential and memorable sci-fi movies of all time – Alien and Blade Runner. But, he also directed Prometheus – so I guess you just never know. I predict The Martian will be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor.

Also coming out in October is Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, the fourth on-screen collaboration between Tom Hanks and Spielberg. The film is based on the true story of James Donovan, the Brooklyn lawyer asked by the CIA to negotiate the release of a U2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Spielberg is clearly in his gritty historical mode here, but this is likely to have more of a cheerful ending than, say, Munich or Lincoln. I predict nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.  

November brings us The Secret in Their Eyes, an American remake of an Oscar-award winning Argentine drama. Julia Roberts makes a rare appearance here as Jess, an FBI investigator partnered with Chiwetel Ejiofor. The two of them work closely with a DA played by Nicole Kidman until their team is demolished by the news that Jess’s daughter has been murdered. The film rejoins the trio 13 years later when Ejiofor’s character thinks he’s found the girl’s killer. The original won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2009 and was universally praised. If the filmmakers manage the adaptation well, I anticipate this one earning nominations for Best Picture and possibly Best Actor and Actress for Ejiofor and Roberts.

Several interesting award-contending films will come out in December like Quentin Tarantino’s western The Hateful Eight and Will Smith’s pro-football drama Concussion. But frankly, everything will be eclipsed that month by the release of Star Wars episode VII: The Force Awakens. It’s unlikely that it will be nominated for any of the so-called big categories, but it will undoubtedly rack up nominations for technical awards for sound, hair and makeup, costuming, and visual effects. It will also thrill nerds the world over, but that’s another show for another day.

So enjoy the changing leaves this week and the pre-pre-pre-Christmas sales, but make time in your busy schedule this fall to catch some of these fascinating, award season movies coming your way.

The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

One thing that can be said for the new teen dystopia sequel The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is that it doesn’t waste any time. As the movie opens, we get a 60 second flashback recap of the last film and then it’s on to more running. It makes sense for a film that has “runner” in the title to have a lot of running, I guess, but man, there is a lot of running in this movie. It should have just been called Maze Runner 2.0: Now With More Running.

The premise of the series overall is that, in the future, a giant solar flare lays waste to most of the earth and somehow triggers a massive outbreak of a virus that turns people into zombie-like monsters called cranks. A few young children appear to be immune to the virus and so they are taken and experimented on like rats in a you-know-what in hopes of finding a cure. In the first movie, they are placed at the center of a giant, monster-filled maze and they are studied as they attempt to find their way out. They do escape and the sequel begins mere moments after the last film ends.

Now the Maze Runner himself, a young man named Thomas, and his friends are out in the ruined part of the earth known as the Scorch. Supposedly, they were rescued from the organization that was experimenting on them, but the very end of the last film revealed that their so-called liberation is actually just another phase of cruel testing. So the world becomes their maze – the remains of a shopping mall buried under the shifting desert sands, the narrow stairways of slumped over skyscrapers, underground tunnels filled with cranks. Thomas and his friends try to track down a resistance movement that’s fighting against their captors and hopefully make it to a safe, non-scorched part of the world.

The film does get a bit repetitious. Four different times in the film, our little group of runners enters some new, vaguely threatening compound and gets introduced to the “man in charge” only to discover that they have to make a narrow escape yet again.

But the film looks great and director Wes Ball films some mean chase scenes, managing to imbue them with a real viscerality and menace. The dread and fear during the underground mall sequence in particular is surprisingly intense for a movie supposedly aimed at teenagers.

Thomas is played by Dylan O’Brien whose sharp-eyed good looks remind me of a young Paul Walker but with stronger acting skills. He makes a convincing leader, and the film overall is not bad, but it does suffer from a mild case of middle-film-it is. Last year’s Hunger Games sequel had the same problem. It’s that feeling that you’re not watching a film that could stand on its own but rather that you’re just seeing one exciting but ultimately incomplete part of a bigger picture.

The middle film of a trilogy doesn’t always have to be like that. I’d argue that The Empire Strikes Back and second Godfather film were both the strongest in each of those series. A middle film can have a strong beginning, middle, and end while still being part of a larger narrative. But I also realize that kind of success is more the exception than the rule.

The Scorch Trials is more about exciting action set-pieces than about character development or even overall plot. It never slows down long enough for most characters to become anything more than place holders or for the story to really coalesce. Still if you’re just interested in a fun, somewhat lightweight action movie, you should run right out and see it.