Seth Harris

Pop Cult Book Club Review – The Secret History of Twin Peaks

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The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost
(2016, Flatiron Books)

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Almost forgotten in the hype and cult following of the early 1990s television series Twin Peaks is co-creator Mark Frost. I, like many other, only really bring up David Lynch’s name in association with the short-lived phenomenon. But that does a great disservice to Mr. Frost who was just as an essential component of Twin Peaks as Lynch. While Lynch provided the style, atmosphere, and general tone of the show, Frost pushed for mythology building and concrete plotting. Without both, Twin Peaks would not have struck such a chord with audiences of the time and continue to resonant with new viewers. Mark Frost wrote this tome that doesn’t serve to bridge the 25-year divide between iterations of Twin Peaks but rather acts as a supplement to the original run with some hints peppered in about where season 3 may be going.

Don’t get your hopes up to have 1992 through 2016 in Twin Peaks covered. There are two distinct moments where we get the fates of a couple characters revealed, but nothing that would spoil or even set up where the third season will be starting. That’s totally fine, and the book is still an entertaining piece of metafiction. The premise is that a lockbox of historical papers and writings has been recovered by the FBI from an undisclosed crime scene. Gordon Cole (the hearing impaired supervisor of Agent Cooper) pens an introduction letter to an unnamed FBI agent who is tasked with making an inventory of and analyzing the material. Someone referring to themselves as The Archivist is responsible for this assembly and the main text is accompanied by footnotes from The Archivist and the FBI agent.

So what does Mark Frost divulge about the inhabitants of Twin Peak? He chooses to focus on a small handful of tertiary characters, for the most part, mainly Andrew Packard and Douglas Milford. If you’re scratching your head about who these two are it’s understandable. Packard was the returned from the dead husband of Josie and Milford was the newspaper-owning brother of Twin Peaks’ octogenarian mayor. Pretty obscure but I suspect in need to not cover any territory the show plans to, Frost took the safe bet with these figures. However, we do get the prominent development of The Log Lady and Major Briggs. The Log Lady, in particular, is the focus of an op-ed by Dr. Jacoby’s brother, Robert, where he seeks to tell the citizenry that they habitually mock a woman with a tragic past who is an outstanding member of the community.

Beyond that, the mythology of the world is very subtly built out with pieces that directly take place in Twin Peaks and some that are thousands of miles away and only tie in thematically. Early in the book, we have a guest story written up in the Twin Peaks Gazette by a young Eagle Scout Andrew Packard where he details his troop’s bizarre experience in the woods outside of town on a camping trip. A similar story is shared by Douglas Milford about an encounter with a strange giant, who later reports attempt to correlate with Bigfoot, and an owl the size of a man.

The book starts as far back as the expedition of Lewis and Clark and their encounter with a Nez Perce tribe that refers to a place of the spirits that lies in the valley between two mountains. Frost ties in the conspiracy addled death of Meriwether Lewis and in this version he was wearing a ring bearing the sigil of an owl when found. Frost goes on to link in the Roswell Crash, UFO sightings in the 1950s in the Pacific Northwest, Richard Nixon, Jack Parson and the Church of Thelema, L. Ron Hubbard, and more into the twisted tapestry of Twin Peaks. Some moments get quite a bit off track, and I found myself wondering what this has to do with Twin Peaks. But the esoteric nature is very much in tune with the sort of thinking characters like Agent Cooper exhibited throughout the series.

One of the creepier moments happens just after the story of Lewis and Clark is wrapped up. In a small, almost forgettable vignette, the fragmented journal of a Gold Rush-era miner is presented. He talks about him and his partner coming upon a cave, referred to by the indigenous people as “Owl Cave”. His partner disappears, and footnotes reveal that it is believed the author of this journal was murdered. His vanished partner’s name was Robert (BOB?).

The Secret History of Twin Peaks is book that a new fan of the show will likely not get much from. But if you have been a long time fan and want to get lost in the strange, confusing and mysterious world of conspiracy theories and Frost’s point of view of the series, this is a pretty fun read.

Movie Review – Get Out

Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele)

Get Out

Andre is about to meet his girlfriend’s parents. This is made more awkward by the fact that they are wealthy privileged upstate people and he is a young black man. While the family seems to not make a big deal out of the racial differences and the father, in particular, wants to make sure he looks “woke,” Andre can’t help but feel something is off. There are two employees of the family: a housekeeper and a gardener, both black who behave in unusual ways. As the weekend progresses, it becomes evident Andre has stepped into the midst of a dark secret and may not leave intact.

I’ve written quite a bit about horror films on this blog, and I have a very particular taste for the elements of the genre that appeal to me. While Get Out doesn’t nail it as a horror film, in my opinion, it is still creepily effective and serves as a huge statement from a first-time feature film director. Jordan Peele has appeared on the directing scene fully formed, shaped by his years in comedy and writing, to produce a movie that resonates in our contemporary setting but also has a great understanding of film tropes.

On reflecting I realized Get Out is essentially a B-horror movie from the 1960s or 70s that has been freshened up with the element of racial elements and observations about how black people are fetishized in American culture while having their individuality discarded. Black people and their culture have become fashion statements for a disturbingly large percentage of the population. The stranger elements of the horror are kept under wraps until deep into the third act which is a brilliant decision because it keep us grounded up until the last moments. As the story progresses, Andre’s experience gets weirder and weirder in very controlled and plotted beats. There is a moment in the second act where we know things are going to get bad. This sequence was the moment where my wife said, “Oh, now I know why they are looking at Peele to direct the live action Akira film.”

The film is carried on the shoulders of Daniel Kaluuya who has had some supporting roles in American films, most notably Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. Kaluuya is a British-born actor who appeared in one of the best Black Mirror episodes (“Fifteen Million Merits”) and was a writer-actor on the original production of Skins. At the age of 28, he’s one of those actors I’ve noticed in supporting roles and small lead roles that was brimming with talent. Get Out is proof that he is a fantastic lead and was able to carry this feature. I always think an actor’s ability to play nuance and subtlety is more important than big sweeping performances. Kaluuya plays the awkwardness and uneasiness right down the line but is able to seamlessly bring out those larger emotional moments. When the death of his mother becomes a subject of the conversation, he showcases some truly believably pain.

The supporting cast has three greats among them: Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, and Stephen Root. Each of them has such a strong sense of who they are playing, particularly Root whose character appears briefly, and they help build out this strange world Andre has stumbled into. Andre’s girlfriend is played by Alison Williams, an actress who I typically find annoying as hell in Girls, but is actually very effective in Get Out. Her brother is played by Caleb Landry Jones who ends up being the only distracting element in the film. On Andre’s side of the conflict is his friend Rod played by Lil Rel Howrey. Rod’s role in the movie is what feels the most reminiscent of Peele’s comedic work on Key & Peele. The banter between these two men will be very familiar if you have seen that show. The ending of the film also feels like a less humorous version of the way one of the sketches on that show would have wrapped up.

What I love Get Out the most for is that its target of satire is not a lazy one. The villains here are not backwoods Southern racists. These are people who believe they are enlightened/woke/progressive. By talking about how much they love black people and “would have voted for Obama for a third time” they believe they are accepting black people. Instead what happens is that they systematically pull individuality from the black characters in the film and essentially appropriate for their own whims of fashion. This is a much more interesting target than cliche racist hillbillies or neo-nazis. There’s no surprise in a neo-nazi being racist, but the villains here are more complicated, and thus there is a greater mystery and stronger payoff. My hope is that the success of Get Out would lead to two things: more writing/directing work for Jordan Peele and acknowledgment that less than conventional types of horror and science fiction have a big audience for them.

Movie Review – Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, dir. Tobe Hooper)

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It’s been thirteen years since the events of the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre and stories still surface from time to time of bizarre killings and bodies found on the side of the road in pieces. The local police don’t seem to take the sensationalized version of this stories seriously though Lt. Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper) believes. His niece and nephew were two of the young people slaughtered back in 1973, and he is on the hunt for the people who did it. Lefty’s path crosses with radio DJ Stretch who has a recording of a killing that occurred during a call-in on her show. This recording leads them into a direct confrontation with the Sawyer family in their new home, the amusement park Texas Battle Land.

Director Tobe Hooper was reportedly unhappy with how grim, and serious audiences took the original film when he personally saw a lot of dark humor woven throughout. This sequel was his reaction to that, and it most definitely shows. TCM2 is most definitely a horror-comedy, and I personally think it is a great one. When it comes to horror, I’m not a big fan of the slasher/gore sub-genre. So many times it just feels like an excuse to showcase a large number of special effects that, while impressive, don’t really scare me. And I feel the best horror is the kind that gets under your skin and leaves you unnerved. Hooper’s original plan was to make the sequel about an entire Texas small town full of cannibals running riot, but the producers opted for something a little smaller and readily achievable. That isn’t to say TCM2 is a subtle film, it is over the top crazy, particularly with Dennis Hopper’s character.

Hopper plays Lefty as a completely unhinged religious zealot, unhinged being something Hopper was great at. Early in the film he goes to purchase a chainsaw for his coming confrontation with the Sawyers and ends up getting one large saw, plus two smaller ones so he can duel wield. He tests them out on a log designed for this purpose outside the store. The scene reminded me of the weirder moments in Cabin Fever where you have no idea why characters are doing or saying what they are in this scene. It’s both funny and really effectively creepy. This is just one instance of how heightened all the characters are across the picture. Stretch is overly spunky, and her transformation that leads up to the ending is both hilarious and terrifying.

The Sawyer Family is played in a fascinating way, particularly in how Hooper undercuts a lot of their menace in the latter half of the film. Leatherface and The Cook are present in the first act but in the background. It’s not until the new addition to the family Chop Top’s arrival at the radio station one night that our protagonists are met with their enemies. Bill Moseley’s portrayal of Chop Top continues the scary and funny dynamic Hooper is attempting. The character is implied to be a Vietnam vet turned washed up hippie with a metal plate in his head courtesy of the Viet Cong. He wears a wig when he first appears and habitually lights the hook of a wire hanger and scratches the scabbed skin around the plate. If that wasn’t bad enough, he picks the skin off the hook and nibbles on it. The grotesque is heightened to that level of cartoon absurdity, and I think this was a better choice than the way the Michael Bay reboot franchise has gone completely grimdark.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is not a film that is ever going to appeal to a mass audience. It’s way too gross for most moviegoers and way too silly for hardcore horror fans. It is definitely the work of its director and screenwriter, L.M. Kit Carson’s views on Texas and America in the 1980s. Instead of a quiet farmhouse, the Sawyer’s inhabit a grossly elaborate bone covered compound beneath the earth. Seeing the film, not as a pure horror experience, but a personal comment on a particular ideology of the time adds a lot to understanding what the filmmakers are doing and why they went in such a strange direction.

TV Review – The Young Pope (Season 1)

The Young Pope – Season 1 (2016)
Created by Paolo Sorrentino

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Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) has just been ordained as Pope Pius XIII, and his first act as the head of the Catholic Church is to do…nothing. He’s not giving a big speech in St. Peter’s Square. He won’t talk to the press. He won’t even allow his photograph to be taken. The leadership at the Vatican quickly learns that Pius plans to close the Church off from the public, an attempt to reverse any progressive ideas pushed by former popes. As we delve further, we learn that Pius is an orphan, raised by Sister Mary (Diane Keaton), whom he brings to his new papal palace to act as his chief of staff. There is also his mentor, Cardinal Spencer (James Cromwell) who was considered the traditional favorite to be chosen as pope. Due to back door machinations and Spencer having ill will from some of the other cardinals, a bet was taken on the wild card, Belardo. What follows is the strange story of Pope Pius, the orphan pope, the mysterious Pope, The Young Pope.

I had a passing familiarity with the work of Paolo Sorrentino but had never actually watched any of his films. I have to say I was happily blown away with my first introduction. Throughout the entire ten-episode run I was reminded of David Lynch and Twin Peaks. In the same way that that television series was so singularly an introduction to the style and storytelling of a sole creator, The Young Pope is a fresh, energetic opening to the work of Sorrentino. From the first scene your expectations are challenged, and with each subsequent episode, as soon as you think you know what this show is, it shakes its head and pulls the carpet out from underneath you. I think such an inventive and surprising style of show matches the surreal nature of the Vatican itself. The institution is such a strange thing to think about existing in a 21st-century context so a show about it shouldn’t attempt pure realism. There are many flashbacks, dreams, and visions and Sorrentino doesn’t necessarily concern himself about signaling when we are switching into one or away from one. The audience’s intelligence is respected enough that the literal and the metaphor intermingle and we are expected to understand the larger meaning.

The visuals of The Young Pope are so striking. In the first episode, we have a fantasy benediction played out in the daydreams of Pius that features the Cardinals falling backward as they faint, their feet up in the air. Later, a kangaroo is frequently seen hopping around the papal gardens. The phantom of a young woman being offered up for sainthood rushes past Pius on his walks. The pope is visited by a Congress of popes from history whom he asks for and receives lackluster advice. Sorrentino’s camera is so fluid, reminiscent of Kubrick and Malick. The music of the series is also entirely unexpected and playful. Modern tracks appear throughout, most notably LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy, and I Know It” as Pius prepares for his first address to the College of Cardinals. Andrew Bird’s “Logan’s Loop” is used multiple times to convey moments of levity or the softening of the Pope. The opening credits of the series are a cover of “All Along the Watchtower” that is an immediate sign this is not going to be a stoic observation of what life is really like inside the Vatican.

It is not an exaggeration for me to say I think this is Jude Law’s finest performance to date. Pius is a tremendously difficult character to portray. He is a direct contradiction to what the audience might expect. A young, American pope is anticipated to be a modernist and progressive, but Pius seeks to bring the Church back to an era thought gone forever. He is highly acerbic and unlikable, yet deep into the series events conspire that cause a shift in the Pope’s mindset. My early perceptions of the series are that it would be the story of forces working against Pius and his battle against them. Instead, the show becomes one of redemption and about how people can change, given time and people who will listen to them. And more importantly, people who will challenge them.

I can confidently say there is nothing on television like The Young Pope. It is a type of show that asks questions about spirituality and God most networks seem nervous to let a program ask. It’s a show that is most definitely about human beings, the fallibility, and the power to come back from those failings and try again.

Movie Review – Other People

Other People (2016, dir. Chris Kelly)

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John David is back at his childhood home in Sacramento under heavy circumstances. His mother, Joanne has a severe form of cancer to treat, and the family is coming to terms with the fact that she will not last much longer. David had a falling out with the family in college when he came out as gay and that history resonates now. He feels awkward and out of place with his sisters and father. He does bond deeply with his mother though, and their story is the crux of the film.

Other People is the writing-directing debut of Chris Kelly, a former Saturday Night Live writer who bases the film on his own life and experiences with his late mother. I was admittedly a little trepidatious when starting this movie. The loved one dying of cancer trope has been mined pretty deep by Hollywood for decades, and the results usually feel like emotionally manipulative tripe. The disease is often a lazy way to quickly get the audience to feel for characters without actually building the relationships between the characters on screen. Kelly successfully avoids this and ends up with a beautiful character-focused film, carried firmly on the shoulders of Molly Shannon and Jesse Plemons.

I have never been quite a fan of Molly Shannon’s work on Saturday Night Live. Her style of hyper-maniac, emotionally awkward acting in that venue never clicked with me. Since then though, I have found her film work to be amazing. Her collaborations with Mike White (Year of the Dog, HBO’s Happiness) have been my favorite and it’s because she works so well with White. Other People reveals a new potential fruitful partnership because she arguably gives her best performance to date. Shannon’s sense of humor is present and meshes with the real world around her. She’s not over the top or larger than life. She plays Joanne like a real mother would be, hiding the worst of her illness at times and others allowing herself to vent, only later to feel a bit guilty. The journey she takes Joanne through is remarkable and the inevitable death scene is never played for cheap tears. It’s done off screen and we only see the family seconds after she has passed.

Jesse Plemons is another actor whom I have felt fairly neutral about. I didn’t watch much of Friday Night Lights but saw him in Breaking Bad, The Master, and a few other roles. I’d never actually seen him take a leading spot so I wasn’t quite sure how he would do in Other People. He ends up being quite captivating. The character of David is written so that he’s not an infallible protagonist. He’s often quite selfish and unthinking of anyone outside himself and his own neuroses. There’s definite justification for his hostility towards his father, but the film never just gives him full allowance to be an asshole without consequences. The resolution between he and his father isn’t neat and tidy, lots of questions still hang out there. Once again, like with Joanne’s portrayal, this feels incredibly true to life. Those deep cuts don’t ever get fully healed and family typically either splits or learns to adapt around them. The supporting cast of the film is one of those that you dream of. Lots of improv actors, faces from Saturday Night Live, and great character actors. Paul Dooley, Bradley Whitford, John Early, Matt Walsh, Paula Pell, Retta, Lennon Parham, Zach Woods and more.

Other People is a very well done family drama that exceeds the bar set by our last few illness-based comedy-dramas. It’s characters feel true to life, and they are allowed to breathe and develop so that the death of Joanne feels like it has consequence. You will likely tear up or cry, but the film earns those tears.

Movie Review – The Void

The Void (2016, dir. Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski)

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Deputy Daniel Carter is enjoying a quiet night in his squad car on the side of the road when it’s interrupted by a crazed man stumbling out of the woods. Carter quickly delivers the man to the hospital which is being staffed by his estranged wife, two other nurses, and Dr. Powell, a beloved town physician. Things get weird when one nurse seemed to be possessed by an evil presence, and strange hooded figures appear en masse outside the hospital. Everything’s coming up Lovecraft in this homage to everything from cosmic horror to Lucio Fulci.

If you are a fan of pulpy cosmic horror, then The Void has been made for you. It hits every trope you can think of Crazed Cultists? Yup. Portal to the other realm? Got it. Body horror/gore? It’s all here. There’s even some nods to John Carpenter’s The Thing but also Assault on Precinct 13 and even the underrated Prince of Darkness. In fact, The Void as a whole is a massive homage to low-budget 1980s horror films.

The practical effects are pretty top notch. Almost no CG is used, and the craftsmanship of puppets and makeup effects is very impressive. The gore is very much that Kayro syrup style lost to the popularity and expediency of computer effects. Physical gore in a horror film of this genre is so much more effective in making the audience feel the revulsion.

While The Void is an homage, it is still an original story on its own. It plays some clever tricks on our perceptions by starting with a scene where we are intentionally not told all the facts. The story is very simplistic with a few twists along the way, but it keeps you entertained as you go. Moments seem unimportant at first, and then later they end up being critical to the plot.

Where the film began to lose in was in some of the less than stellar cinematography. It starts out great, but somewhere in the middle of the movie it becomes very sloppy and hard to follow in some of the action sequences. The story is also such a great build up only to fizzle when we learn the villain’s master plan. For all the dread that was developed it left me with just an “oh, that’s it?” The Void ends up being one of those films that are a fantastic showcase for the physical effects crew but falls prey to a weak story.

Movie Review – Split

Split (2017, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

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It takes only seconds for Casey and her two classmates to get abducted. They wake up in a bunker, being held captive by a strange man with apparent OCD about cleanliness. Later, they overhear conversations between this man and a woman. The door opens to reveal the same man as before but now posing as a woman. Casey quickly realizes they are dealing with a man that is experiencing dissociative personality disorder. The man is also seeing Dr. Karen Fletcher, a psychiatrist who is beginning to understand that the stability she believes she has instilled in her patient may be falling apart.

Split is not a great film. It is an entertaining movie. And I find it impossible to discuss the movie outside the context of Shyamalan’s body of work. Not too long ago I did a Revisit on Unbreakable and found myself remembering how much I loved the director’s early 2000s work. It wasn’t without significant flaws. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are pretty flawless in my opinion, but starting with Signs the “twist” element of the work begins to wear thin. However, the aesthetic and technical aspects of this film, The Village, and even Lady in the Water is strong. The shots are interesting, music adds to the movie, and (sans Lady in the Water) they are cohesive narratives that make sense.

Then we entered the next period of Shyamalan’s work The Last Airbender/After Earth. These feel like the bid to become the Spielbergian blockbuster director, and I think most people agree they are disasters. Then he shifts again with The Visit and now Split, both produced by Blumhouse. One thought I had after watching Split last night was that if you showed me this film and Unbreakable, I would never think the same director made both movies. Unbreakable shows restraint and an intentional absence of clear exposition. Split is a film with too much exposition, and it feels like it is embarrassed about itself and needs to explain that it is “really super serious, you guys.”

Betty Buckley’s role of Dr. Fletcher mainly seems like an exposition delivery device. Rather than trusting the audience to figure out what is going on, the script has her spell out exactly what the man’s disorder is and even states how to bring back the original personality if there was a need to do so. As many reviews have pointed out, the entire picture feels like a higher budget exploitation film from the 1970s/80s. There’s nothing wrong with making that sort of pastiche/homage film, but something feels off throughout the entire experience.

Anya Taylor Joy plays Casey, and it is nowhere near as interesting a role as the one she had in The Witch. She is still an excellent actress given the material offered to her. And she is the only actor in the cast who gets to exhibit an iota of subtlety. She gets a lot of silent moments to show her reactions and thoughts. The final “twist” feels horribly crass and almost seems to say “Oh thank goodness for childhood abuse and trauma, it saved the day.” There is ambiguity about what Casey will choose to do in her final scene and to leave that open isn’t terrible though.

While Anya Taylor Joy plays things subtle, James McAvoy as the mysterious man turns it up to eleven and keeps it there the entire film. His performance is simultaneously impressive and embarrassing. He does show skill transitioning smoothly between personalities in the same scene, complete with facial expressions melting from one to the other. The problems are less with McAvoy and more with the script’s handling of mental illness which is incredibly exploitative and not clever in any way.

I am never opposed to a director changing their aesthetic and experimenting, however, what Shyamalan is doing in the last decade seems not to be moving towards a stronger mastery of his craft. His current work feels more amateurish than the films that initially garnered him acclaim. It’s hard to see what the future holds for Shyamalan, and a deep part of me hopes he can find some grounding because I believe he has a great talent for filmmaking.

Movie Review – Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin (2014, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

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Blue Ruin opens on the image of a bearded man in a vulnerable state. He’s settled in for a bath when the sound of a door disturbs him. We quickly learn he doesn’t belong in this house and is, in fact, a homeless man. Dwight Evans is living along the East Coast, foraging from dumpsters and sleeping his car. An empathic police officer who knows Dwight lets him know a man convicted of murdering people close to Dwight has been released back home in Virginia. Dwight makes the decision to travel back and get revenge. But, to the film’s enormous credit, this man is not a trained assassin and is not taking into account the disastrous series of events he is about to trigger.

Before Green Room, director Jeremy Saulnier helmed this meditation on the price of retribution. Saulnier did not have many films under his belt, but his technical prowess is already apparent here (and if you have seen Green Room). Light and shadow are used effectively to set the tone, and figures emerge from shadows in a way that adds to their menace. Saulnier shows he has an excellent relationship with editor Julia Bloch (also on Green Room). Together they construct such palpable tension and anxiety through minimalistic cutting techniques. Shots linger for just the right excruciating amount of time and cut to the perfect reaction or follow-up shot. That strength in editing connects to the pacing of the script. The story doesn’t get too heavy too earlier. The dissemination of information to the audience is also heavily controlled. The full details of the crime committed that sent Dwight into a reclusive state isn’t revealed until over halfway into the picture.

The lead performance rests on the shoulders of Macon Blair, a loyal Saulnier collaborator. Blair delivers what audiences might misconstrue as “too subtle” or “non-emotional, ” but there is a density of emotion and history in what he is doing. Dwight is a character who crossed a line of emotional exhaustion years ago. He couldn’t survive in the world if he didn’t pass through the tears and rage. So now Dwight approaches each obstacle with a cold duty. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies anymore, he only feels he has to keep living to carry on an obligation. You might not notice, but he barely speaks for the first 20 minutes of the film, about only one line in that time. So the story is being told in his face, and thankfully Blair has a face, particularly eyes that tell a story.

What hit me hard about Blue Ruin is how relevant its themes are personally and globally. At first, this seems to be a straightforward revenge film, but the revenge comes very early in the movie. I found myself shocked at what the rest of this film would be about. Then both the audience and Dwight realize his first error which compounds into more and more. This compounding of errors leads to Dwight forced into killing more people, and this breaks him down. He seeks out help only to keep himself long enough to try and remedy his errors. When the full revelation of the inciting crime comes to light, we enter a space of moral ambiguity. People Dwight believes are guilty of things may not be the ones who did it. They are not innocent by any means, but the circumstances are significantly more complicated than first revealed.

In a world where we hear the phrase “good guy with a gun” uttered often or people spending hours of their lives attempting to justify an assault on people, they disagree with politically, Blue Ruin, without being didactic, asks us to question this. Someone most definitely harmed Dwight and people he loved, there is no doubt about this. But for every act of violence, he commits he doesn’t honor the memory of the people he lost or bring any peace to himself. Violence compounds violence, as I’ve talked about before in the context of Arya Stark. The film ends with a character who makes a choice not to commit violence. They walk away as others destroy each other. This character’s future, and could end up in the same situation we find Dwight in at the start, but by choosing not to kill they are free of the curse, two families have inflicted on each other for years.

PopCult Book Club – April 2017 Announcement: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost
(2016, Flatiron Book)

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27 years ago, David Lynch and Mark Frost brought Twin Peaks to television. Sadly, after a lackluster second season, ABC canceled the series on an intense cliffhanger. Now, Showtime is bringing the series back for one final season of 19 episodes to wrap up what was started all those years ago. To begin the journey back, I will be reading co-creator Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks for this month’s book club. The review will go up May 1st to kick off Twin Peaks Month on my blog. Hope you will join us in reading and getting hyped up for the revival.

Movie Review – Ouija: Origin of Evil

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016, dir. Mike Flanagan)

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It’s 1967, and Alice Zander works her spiritual medium con with help from her daughters, Lina and Doris. Since her husband died, Alice has struggled to make ends meet and manipulating grieving people eager to believe barely helping. Enter the Ouija board that young Doris quickly takes to, communicating with what she believes to be her father’s spirit. Well, as you can expect from a film like this, things get bad, and the entity using Doris becomes increasingly more malevolent as the plot progresses.

I’ve been watching director Mike Flanagan’s films since his 2011 debut Absentia and have always viewed his work as okay. It’s never risen to the top as my favorite horror, though he always has some interesting ideas in his scripts. Ouija is sadly the most generic of his films to date. It comes off as a Blumhouse styled horror film (Insidious, The Conjuring, etc.). And like those films, the horror is incredibly formulaic and predictable. If you have ever seen a horror film from the last decade, then you will be able to see the plot points coming miles away. As a result, Ouija commits the worst sin a horror film can: it’s not scary.

Stylistically it’s admirable that Flanagan attempted to make a pastiche of 1960s horror cinema. The title card, the warped soundtrack, the crackles in the audio track, the “burn marks” on the screen signaling reel changes in the projector room. However, the tone of the horror works in bold contrast to these stylistic flourishes. These are yawn-inducing jump scares that never make you jump. The evil entity becomes way too physically aggressive to be truly scary. I find the horror from Absentia to still linger with me because of its ambiguity and unpredictable nature. The same with the mirror in Oculus, the things it does are much more interesting and skin-crawling than just using invisible force to throw someone across a room.

The acting is fine with the main weight of the story being balanced between Elizabeth Reaser as Alice and Annalise Basso as Lina. They aren’t amazing, but I blame a lot of that on the weakness of the script. Henry Thomas pops up as a faithful Catholic priest who will be the inevitable Exorcist, another plot point you see coming as soon as he’s introduced. Doris is played by Lulu Wilson and does most of the villainous acting. She is painfully an “acting kid, ” and that is seen in the way she delivers her lines. After watching Dafne Keen in Logan show nuance and strength in her mainly silent performance, this is like looking at a Disney kid overemote. On top of that, the computer generated effects they use to make her monstrous end up being comically bad.

Ouija: Origin of Evil seems to be getting praised due to its juxtaposition with the first film in the franchise. I’ve successfully avoided the first picture due to the incredibly negative buzz it’s received. I assume it must be catastrophically bad if this sequel is being considered a magnificent film in comparison. Origin of Evil is not the worst film you could watch, but there are many other you would be better spending your time on.