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Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Review: In Fabric


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Peter Strickland, director of Berberian Sound Studio, a meta-fictional romp about a sound designer working on an Italian horror film slowly going unhinged or is it the film that is going unhinged, and The Duke of Burgundy, a poetic study of masochism and power dynamics, is a director who exemplifies the notion of the director as artist, the auteur. His films are so deeply personal, so explicitly obsessive, they are at once almost completely unassessable and completely alluring in their fetishism and necessity. He clearly needs to create these films, and we are the better for them. He is one of the few modern masters of cinema, and his newest film, In Fabric, may just be his greatest creation yet.

One of the hardest things to do when you review a film is to attempt to pick apart the film, to understand it so you can explain it to the people reading the review. But, as a film lover, you don’t really want to know a film inside and out. You want to live inside it, to submit to its strange rhythms and textures. In Fabric is a film that almost defies one's ability to review. It is this phantasmic collage of different horror tropes, all perfectly assembled without the slightest stitchers seam to see how he put it together. 

Inside this strangely disorientating clothing store, sinister whisperings can be heard. A cabal of seemingly witchlike retail workers enchant customers into buying their wares. Their sales pitches are almost spell-like, absurd poems of sinister salespeak. This beautiful score, something that sounds like it came from the heyday of the European horror film, envelops everything in its sensual embrace. One of the customers, going out on a date with a man she met on a dating site, buys a dress, something to help her hopefully catch a new man. But, this is no ordinary dress. It is this creeping, dread-inducing thing, a haunted, or maybe cursed, thing that lurks, silently floating in the dark. Meanwhile, this strange clothing store, sends out these television commercials, maybe diabolic transmissions would be a better name, a cancerous technology, dangerous to view, infecting the late-night stations. 

In Fabric is this weird mix of the old school ghost story like The Innocents, shades of elegant Euro-horror films like Suspiria and Daughters of Darkness, the Cronenbergian techno-panic of Videodrome, a strong dose of the schizo drug-induced humor of Adult Swim programming, and the experiments in terror of the 90’s Japanese horror film like Ringu and Kairo. And it plays as this aggressively surrealist satire. Meant more to disturb than make light, but without losing sight of the humor of its disturbing subject matter. Like Eraserhead, you could watch it one day and laugh your ass off, then watch it again the next day in anxious silence. And somehow this all works, and it works perfectly. I was amazed at how this film is all of this and absolutely uniquely its own thing. It just may be the greatest horror film of the 2010s. Its only competition being Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution and Eggers’s The Witch.  I have the feeling that I will be watching this one over and over and over again, a contagious film fetish captured on celluloid. 


Monday, January 13, 2020

Review: The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt.


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Sometimes the greatest of reading experiences kind of come out of nowhere. After reading all the books your friends recommend and just feeling cold to them, all the masterpieces that you could not get past ten pages into, sometimes you just pick up a book that you had maybe heard one or two reviews, maybe mentioned once on social media, you pick it up, take it home, and within a couple pages, you know you are in the hands of a master, after a couple stories, you know you are reading a new all-time favorite. I just had that experience reading The Dark Dark, a collection of short work from Samantha Hunt. I knew next to nothing about this book and was completely unfamiliar with the author. Now, as it stands, The Dark Dark is one of my favorite books. 

I think one of my favorite things that art can do, whatever film, literature, etc, is, as David Lynch puts it, “ leave you room to dream “. Samantha Hunt creates these seductive mysteries of narrative, these little shards of dreamlike delirium, always grounded in reality, grounded in people you know and maybe, just maybe, are just like you, and with just the slightest touch, a seeping unreality slowly creeps in, coloring everything with an impenetrable haze. You think you are reading one kind of story only to end up someplace strange and unexpected. I think to give an idea of what her work is like, you would take the extreme ambiguity of Aickman, then take the willfully corrupted narratives of Evenson, and add a pinch of the playful meta-narratives of Calvino. Which is to say, Samantha Hunt’s work here is challenging and thought-provoking to say the least. These stories are kind of like some strange creature, recombined from familiar animals into something strange and compelling, like a chimera or a manticore. You think you know what you are seeing, then the landscape of skin and flesh changes, and you wind up in the dark, entangled in strange limbs and just falling into darkness.

To give an example of the stories in The Dark Dark, one of the tales, All Hands, concerns a coast guard officer inspecting a cargo ship in the Gulf of Mexico. One night while on duty, he falls overboard into the black ocean, almost getting trapped under the ship. All around him, deep in the water, are thousands of abandoned holes, former oil wells. He is later visited by his lover, a teacher at a grade school. She just got done with a meeting with some students and the principal of the school. Apparently, there has been an unexplained outbreak of teenage pregnancies. At the school, there are over a dozen girls pregnant, all seemingly impregnated at the same time. It’s also hinted at, that there may be a widespread epidemic of unexplained pregnancy, reaching maybe into the thousands. But all of this comes in underplayed plot points and hints. The story focuses on the inner life of the two main characters, their frustrations and worries, their desires and longings, you could almost miss the underlying themes. And what is this story about? What links these two themes, the abandoned holes in the ocean floor and the inexplicable pregnancies? There seems to be some subterranean meaning buried in the narrative, and you can’t help but keep going back, thinking about this story. Pretty much every story in this collection had me thinking about what I just read, hours later, days later, trying to figure out the mystery, trying to see through the fog and the obscuring gloom of the stories to discover just how deep they go, what meaning I can take from them. These aren’t just random exercises in surrealism, to be clear. These are heart-rending, subtle, powerful examinations of the human condition, at turns melancholy, despairing, cynical, or painfully hopeful. These are characters lost in the darkness of an unknowable world, but there is someplace even worse they find, the dark dark inside themselves.  

Sunday, January 5, 2020

The Top Ten Horror Films of the 2010s.



The horror film scene of the 2010s were this mix of post-Anti-Christ art-house horror, post-Ringu/Kairo creeping dread, post-Existenz/Crash Cronenbergian body horror, and post-Adult Swim bizzaro acid humor. Adult swim and streaming services like Netflix have acted like this decades midnight movie experience, bringing all the subversive pleasures of cult cinema to your television. And I think that horror cinema is actually in a great place right now. In a way that no one seemed to notice, while everyone seemed to be talking about remakes and franchises, we may have had the most vital decade for the horror film since the 1970s. While the 1970’s horror film subverted reality by exploring strange dream states and nightmares made reality, the 2010’s horror film dealt with a reality that has disappeared, a world of simulation and unrealities made normal. Central themes of this new era of horror filmmaking seem to be trying to find some semblance of the real or the human inside the labyrinth of unreality that we are trapped in, and the having to deal with an actual political and environmental nightmare unfolding every day on social media and the nightly news. And can we comment on what an amazing job independent film company A24 is doing? Almost half the films on this list were produced by them. All in all a very interesting period for the horror film. Here is my pick for the ten best horror films of the 2010s.

1. In Fabric ( Strickland, 2019 )
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2. Evolution ( Hadzihalilovic, 2015 )
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3. The Witch ( Eggers, 2015 )
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4. Under the Skin ( Glazer, 2013 )
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5. The Neon Demon ( Refn, 2016 )
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6. The Lighthouse ( Eggers, 2019 )
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7. Hereditary ( Aster, 2018 )
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8. Enemy ( Villeneuve, 2013 )
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9. 10 Cloverfield Lane ( Trachtenberg, 2016 )
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10. The Human Centipede 2 ( Six, 2011 )
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