8/10 In the entire lexicon of ill-advised Halloween sequels, Halloween Ends is certainly the best love story.
Even a basic discussion of Halloween Ends spoils it because the entire movie is the twist, so if I can only say one thing, it’s this: I’ve never been more shocked by a Halloween movie. Spoilers below-
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8/10 I waited until the middle of the week to see Bros when it released in September to $4.8 million, a pitiful opening below even Universal’s extremely conservative expectations, and by that time I was sitting down, writer/star Billy Eichner had already called to tell me that it was my personal fault his film did so poorly. It sort of added an obligation to collect it as I reach back now, so for anyone still interested, it’s really good!
Manhattan, pre-pandemic- Bobby Lieber (Eichner), host of the prominent podcast “The Eleventh Brick at Stonewall” and curator for the in-progress National LGBTQ+ History Museum, strikes up a tentative new relationship with local estate lawyer Aaron Shepard (Luke Macfarlane). Somewhat-together, the pair navigate expectations of the public, both the queer community and the more hostile public at large, and their own desires.
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2/10 Smile is basic. It’s a basic horror movie.
In Smile, psychiatrist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is exposed to a smile demon-ghost thing, a tedious and obvious metaphor for post-traumatic stress that causes victims to hallucinate that people are smiling at them before causing them to kill themselves.
Smile is a synthesis of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Ring and It Follows with some scenes ripped out of a small but terrific horror movie called The Wind. That makes it sound killer, but it isn’t.
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4/10 I like Olivia Wilde as an actress. I’ve never met her, but I’m sure she’s a very nice lady.
Now that’s out of the way, Don’t Worry Darling is a lukewarm mess, not terrible, interesting enough to be as bad as it is but not interesting enough to be as dumb as it is. There are some specific stock plot twists that are very difficult to take seriously – like a child’s poorly performed magic trick, everyone’s seen it before. What really amazes about the performance is its naivety and the second-hand embarrassment it conjures. Both the film and the furor surrounding it are revealing about Hollywood social politics and how they unfurl outward into the culture at large. Wilde’s background and personality are deeply entwined with why the movie is the way it is and why it’s being talked about the way it is, so we’re going to get more personal than usual here.
Somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, 1950s- Alice and Jack Chambers (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles) live in marital bliss in a secret nuclear weapons testing industry town to which only married men are recruited and in which an extremely gendered social order is maintained outside the office by the boss, Frank (Chris Pine). As she makes their home never knowing where her food comes from and never able to leave the town, Alice Chambers begins to notice glitches in reality.
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8/10 In March, A24 released writer/director/editor/producer Ti West’s X, a time capsule of a slasher film set in 1979 in which amateur pornographers run headfirst into exactly the kind of sadistic murderers who would fill the void pornography was about to leave on the big screen. The film features Mia Goth in dual roles as both the lead character and the elderly Pearl. Days after X started rolling, it was announced that West, Goth and much of the same behind-the-scenes team had, on the same set at mostly the same time, produced another film set in 1918 about Pearl as a teenager. That’s simply titled Pearl, and it came out in September.
Texas, 1918- as the Great War draws to a close and the influenza pandemic chokes domestic life, Pearl (Goth, who also produces), despairs. She knows she has that “X” factor, that she could be a star in those newfangled pictureshows, but even without the pandemic, she’d be stuck on the farm with her abusive mother and infirm father, and she knows when her husband returns from the trenches, she’ll never escape. As she desperately prepares to audition for a Hollywood crew in town, she begins to take her frustration out through compulsive sex and murder.
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