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THANKSGIVING Serves Up a Bloody Good Time for the Holidays
Thanksgiving is the most entertaining film Eli Roth has made since his debut Cabin Fever. What that’s worth depends on your taste for juvenile humor and gleefully splatterrific violence. It goes without saying that your mileage will vary. I ran out of mileage for Roth’s frat boy antics around Hostel Part ll. Either I haven’t matured as much as I thought I had, or I watched Thanksgiving at the right time, because I found it to be pretty amusing.
Following in the footsteps of Hobo With a Shotgun and Machete, Thanksgiving is the third feature born from a fake trailer made for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. In expanding the trailer to feature length, Roth and credited writer Jeff Rendell drop the pastiche 80’s aesthetics in favor of a sleek modern slasher. It’s a change that probably needed to happen, but it feels like it saps some of the personality of the trailer.
The movie opens with an anxiety-inducing riot at a Black Friday sale that leaves multiple people dead. A year later a Pilgrim-attired killer stalks survivors of the riot and picks them off. Those survivors include Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Gabby (Addison Rae), Ryan (Milo Manheim), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport), and Jessica (Nell Verlaine), the daughter of the owner of the store where the riot takes place. Patrick Dempsey is the local Sheriff tasked with stopping Carver before he makes a full meal of the town’s inhabitants.
The setup is about as simplistic as possible, sturdy enough to set the plot in motion, but flimsy enough to make it clear the plot isn’t the main course. The whodunit aspect of the story is arguably the least interesting, and the big reveal is a bit too obvious. It feels perfunctory. The real engine of the film is the dispatching of the victims. As the 2007 trailer promised, “white meat, dark meat, all will be carved.” That’s the ethos that fuels the film’s best moments. Roth channels a Looney Toons ethos, with kills landing with cartoonish delight.
Thanksgiving is a fascinating little time capsule. It channels the raucous energy that once upon a time marked Roth as one of horror’s Next Big Things. At the same time it’s easy to see where the edge to Roth’s humor has been sanded down over time. His earlier films relished chances to insult and offend. There’s a racially charged joke in Cabin Fever so brazen in its tastelessness that it leaves you gobsmacked. Thanksgiving is relatively tame in comparison, with the most memorable jokes being visual gags. There’s a 50%-off joke that still has me laughing the morning after seeing the film. Perhaps the clearest sign in the shift of Roth’s sensibilities lies in the comparison of Thanksgiving to the trailer that spawned it. Roth recreates nearly all of the big moments from the trailer and tones down the more puerile parts. Not necessarily a bad or good choice, it’s just something that’s noticeable. After a fall of underwhelming theatrical horror releases, Thanksgiving lands like a plate of apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
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THANKSGIVING: A Gory, Gnarly, Grisly Slasher for the Holidays
At present, the world can be easily divided into four distinct camps: Those who know and appreciate Eli Roth (Knock Knock, Hostel I and II, Cabin Fever); those who know and simply don’t appreciate Eli Roth or anything in his filmography; those who’ve never heard of Eli Roth but might be moved to catch his latest directing gig on a big-, medium-, or small-sized screen (depending on interest, budget, or availability); and those who’ve never heard of Eli Roth and simply can’t be bothered one way or another.
Assuming you’re either camp one (1) or camp three (3), then Roth’s sixteen-years-in-the-making slasher, Thanksgiving, a long-promised, semi-anticipated expansion of the faux trailer Roth directed in 2007 for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double-feature, Grindhouse, just might be the anti-holiday treat you’ll need to get you and other like-minded moviegoers through the last two weeks of November. Then again, a great deal depends on (a) your love of the slasher sub-genre and its tried-and-true tropes and (b) your stomach’s tolerance for literally gut-churning practical effects as the masked slasher slices and dices his way through a small Massachusetts community.
Setting those questions aside temporarily, Thanksgiving opens somewhere around the present (i.e., last year or the year before) as Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman), the greedy, atavistic owner of a Walmart-inspired chain, Right Mart, decides to keep his flagship store (and others too, presumably) for Black Friday sales. With a roaring, rapacious crowd, turned by capitalistic excess into unthinking, zombified shoppers and only two security guards on hand, it’s only a matter of time before the police barriers fall and an uncontrollable stampede breaks doors and bodies in equal measures.
Fast forward twelve months to the next Thanksgiving and everyone involved has moved on, leaving memories and traumas behind to once again celebrate overstuffing themselves with too much food after exchanging thanks, then starting the Black Friday cycle of heedless consumerism all over again. There’s one exception, of course: The masked killer, dressed all in black, wearing a gurning, off-the-shelf John Carver mask and a Pilgrim’s hat. He’s also fond of carrying around a sharply honed ax and a grudge against those directly and indirectly involved in the previous year’s fatalities.
It’s an old-school, giallo-influenced mystery, though Roth and his writer, Jeff Rendell, put only the barest effort into the “who” or even the “why” behind the masked killer. It’s enough that he (or she) has a grudge and with Thanksgiving fast approaching, he’s checking his list and slashing with extreme prejudice. Everyone from an obnoxious waitress to a cowardly security guard shows up on the killer’s hack-and-slash list, but he saves the worst for last, the teens who, through the usual mix of narcissism, self-entitlement, and self-indulgence, inadvertently started the stampede and once it began, did next to nothing to save everyone. At least one teen recorded it all and, of course, posted it to social media.
The cast of characters includes Wright’s daughter, Jessica (Nell Verlaque), and her tight-knit high-school posse, a posse that includes Gabby (Addison Rae), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Yulia (Jenna Warren), and Scuba (Gabriel Davenport), Jessica’s current boyfriend, Ryan (Milo Manheim), a drip by any definition, and her ex, Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), a onetime baseball star recovering from a potential career-ending injury, round out the pool of potential victims and/or the slasher hiding in plain sight.
Typical for the slasher sub-genre, local law enforcement’s onscreen presence, this time led by an ineffectual, if well-meaning, sheriff, Newlon (Patrick Dempsey), rarely does anything to help, always arriving too late to save the killer’s latest victim(s). The police’s uselessness usually isn’t perceived as some kind of real-world moral or political judgment, but it’s hard not to come to that conclusion, especially as the dwindling survivor pool realizes the killer can strike at any time and they need to take their safety and security into their own hands.
By the time Thanksgiving gets to its climactic showdown between the killer and the final survivor(s), Roth and his team of practical effects magicians have delivered a handful of memorable kills. They’re as gnarly, grisly, and grisly as expected for a contemporary slasher, though Roth’s decision to go as extreme as an R-rating gives audiences equipped with cast-iron stomachs the chance to laugh and gasp rather than recoil in terror or disgust. It’s a lesson Roth’s fellow Grindhouse filmmaker, Edgar Wright, has long understood (the more extreme the violence, the more absurd and thus, the more likely to accept as unreal/fantastical).
The cast of relatively unknown twenty-somethings mostly make for credible, serviceable, not particularly sympathetic teens. That, of course, makes their individual exits or potential exits from Thanksgiving before the end credits roll, if not entirely deserved (i.e., the punishment fitting the “crime”), then at least plausible in the grand scheme of slasher film conventions. No one really stands out positively or negatively, but at least that means a bad performance here or there doesn’t undercut the audience’s overall enjoyment of what, by default, qualifies as Roth’s best film in years, possibly even his entire career as a filmmaker.
Thanksgiving opens theatrically on Friday, November 17th.
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The Archivist #144: A Warner Archive Double-Header with ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD (1951) and DEATH ON THE DIAMOND (1934)
Baseball season may be over with a historic World Series in the record books (a first-time win for the Texas Rangers, making them no longer the oldest American professional sports team without a championship, since their founding in 1961). But if you’re not quite ready to say goodbye to watching America’s pastime just yet, we’ve got a couple of recommendations for classic baseball-themed movies – both older than the Rangers – from the archives at Warner and MGM!
Today’s matchup: it’s the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals in a double-header that covers the bases from charming family comedy to obscure murder mystery oddity.
Angels in the Outfield (1951)
The Pittsburgh Pirates are in a rut, and it doesn’t help that their abusive manager Guffy McGovern (Paul Douglas) berates and lashes out at everyone from his players to the umpires, and even the media. Guffy’s quick to lay out anyone who crosses him, with his words or with his fists.
The film keeps things G-rated, cleverly and rather humorously masking Guffy’s profanity-laden screaming rants as a wall of garbled incoherence that’s the aural equivalent of grawlix.
Guffy’s rage-fueled antics aren’t just detrimental to his team’s performance, but to his entire organization, capturing the attention of journalist Jennifer Paige (Janet Leigh), who makes no secret of being deeply unimpressed by his boorish behavior.
In a divine twist of fate, Guffy’s fortunes change one night when, while walking through the outfield alone, a heavenly voice speaks out to him with a proposition, explaining that someone out there has been petitioning on his behalf. Therefore if he can clean up his act, a heavenly team of angels (made up of former ball-players in life) will provide divine assistance to the flailing Pirates.
Guffy agrees to the angel’s terms, and begins making an earnest effort to temper his rage. When an orphan girl, Bridget (Donna Corcoran), sees the angels on the field, invisible to everyone else, she becomes Guffy’s advisor, and an unlikely friendship develops between the cranky manager, the precocious orphan, and the reproachful lady reporter who observes the change. After a life of loneliness and selfishness, Guffy opens up to the joy of loving other people.
The film came out just a few years after Miracle on 34th Street, and has a similar third act possibly inspired by that film: Guffy’s sanity is called into question and he faces an inquisition (essentially a trial) with the league. The trial’s arguments become a question of whether angels exist. This is raised as a point of gauging Guffy’s mental fitness, which seems intellectually dishonest and beside the point (many people believe in the existence of angels and other supernatural beings without impacting their ability to work). A better question would be whether heavenly assistance, if it exists, qualifies as cheating!
One minor observation I have is that Guffy looks and seems notably older than Jennifer, detracting a bit from their onscreen romance because his natural demeanor and position of authority make him come off as more fatherly than a romantic interest. In real life, the actors are indeed 20 years apart; when the film was made, Douglas was in his 40s and Leigh in her 20s. Not that there’s any problem with consenting adults having an age gap in a relationship, just pointing out that it’s a noticeable difference. Of course lots of other classic films like Charade and Sabrina have similarly pronounced age differences, though in these films it seems to be part of the plot, or at least acknowledged.
Angels in the Outfield was remade by Disney in 1994 as an effects-filled spectacle which is also quite charming (and which fittingly changed the team to the California – now Anaheim – Angels), but I really love the original as an enchantingly endearing and lovely film. On rewatching it, I found I loved it even more than the first time. The film also notably has some impressive cameos. These three legends – Joe Dimaggio, Ty Cobb, and Bing Crosby – still resonate today.
Angels in the Outfield is available on Warner Archive DVD, Digital HD, and streaming on Max.
Death on the Diamond (1934)
With their team’s ownership riding on the season’s outcome, the St. Louis Cardinals add a hotshot player, Larry Kelly (Robert Young) to their roster in an effort to seal their bid for the pennant.
With several powerful interests and gamblers invested in the Cardinals’ performance, things start to get dangerous and the team begins to suffer casualties, with never the same method of killing. At one point a mobster tries to get friendly with Kelly, who rebuffs. But as the body count increases, accusations fly and fingers start pointing – with “the new guy” as the prime suspect.
In a historical context, I think the film was made and released in a time where the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which several Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series, was still a somewhat recent memory.
Major League Baseball reorganized and spent some years rebuilding its tarnished image, and fifteen years later enough time had passed that a movie about baseball scandal could be viewed as an evening’s entertainment rather than a commentary about present corruption.
Death on the Diamond (1934) 
The Killing (1956) The film isn’t gruesome or horrific, but the deaths are memorable. One particular POV shot, focusing on a rifle held by an unseen assailant as it locks onto an onfield target, feels both impactful and familiar, echoed in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (sniper at a race track) and Two Minute Warning (sniper at a football stadium).
The film has a strange tone which mixes a lot of zany comedy and a rather silly twist ending with its macabre murders, which some viewers may find off-putting. I kind of appreciate the oddness.
I’m a Cardinals fan so for that reason I’m a little predisposed to like this, and I do. But it’s definitely the less memorable and certainly less endearing of the two films.
Death on the Diamond is available on Warner Archive DVD.
– A/V out.
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A STILL SMALL VOICE Reveals Life in the Shadow of Death
Death is an inescapable part of all our lives. There is the obvious way it hangs over all people, in that it is the ultimate end that awaits all of us. But perhaps even more painfully, we are all destined to at one point lose someone dear to us. The agonizing process of grief, especially in the immediate aftermath, can create spaces for crisis. This is where others may need to step in, to walk us through the complicated, painful process of imaging our lives without someone we love. One such calling is hospital chaplains, who must remain on call to provide spiritual and emotional support to those facing some of the most profound grief imaginable.
A Still Small Voice, a new documentary from director Luke Lorentzen, explores this vital role and the harrowing impact it has on the people who choose this path. It focuses on Margaret “Mati” Engel, a Jewish chaplain on residency at New York Mt. Sinai Hospital. While no year is given for when filming took place, it is clearly during the height of COVID precautions. Chaplaincy in the best of circumstances is standing with people in their most vulnerable moments; doing the same in the height of pre-vaccine COVID pandemic is excruciating. The impact it clearly has on Mati throughout her time at Mt. Sinai is immense, as she struggles with burnout and empathy overload.
While Mati is part of a cohort that we get to see and know in passing, Lorentzen keeps his focus firmly focused on her experience. The portrait then is quite intimate, as we see just some of the difficult scenarios Mati walks into. Perhaps the most harrowing is having to step into performing a Baptism, a rite she’s not even entirely familiar with, for a couple who has just lost their newborn infant. She performs the ritual for the departed, held in the arms of her mother, both parents still slowly processing precisely what has happened. For them it is a harrowing moment that is derailing the life they had planned before them. For Mati, it is part of the job. Her whole existence in living in these moments, of having to be there for those she serves.
Mati’s personality can come across as prickly at times. She is compassionate and present for those she is serving, pouring out her own vulnerability and pain as a means of providing empathy and connection. But she also will one moment ask for harsh criticism, but act defensively once she receives it. She commonly will relate other people’s pain back to her own, both connections to losing her father at a relatively young age, but also generational trauma as a Jew still coming to terms if it is worth it to serve a God that allowed the Holocaust to occur.
Most remarkable about Lorentzen’s style as a documentarian is the degree of access he is allowed. Not to necessarily classified information, but certain intimate ones. Sometimes the film is forced to watch Mati’s interactions from a distance, but often they are up close and personal. The quiet wisdom and recognition discovered in cancer patients realizing their time is rapidly running out, speaking out their life’s wisdom to Mati, who serves as a sort of sounding board. For most of the run time, there isn’t much a specific singular narrative to draw from the film, though a tension between Mati and her supervisor does pop up throughout. Rather it is a sampling of interactions, all heartbreaking. In just an hour and a half, you can only imagine how exhausting living here must be.
The beauty of the work, and the film, exists in that pain. Mati is told over and over again that she needs to work on making boundaries, and it’s in her inability to do that where she comes across as both vulnerable and noble in her pursuits. The tension between those callings, to take care of herself and give herself over to others, we see the ultimate tension of being so intensely human. After all, all of us will die, but most of us try not to dwell on it. It takes someone special to live the shadow of that all the time.
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MAY DECEMBER Blurs Lines of Cruelty and Complicity to Disturbingly Effective Ends
Todd Haynes’ latest peers into the performative and parasitic relationships between an actress and her controversial subjects
Still courtesy of Netflix. In Todd Haynes’ latest film, May December, popular TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) descends upon Savannah, Georgia to explore the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton), a longtime married couple eagerly awaiting the graduation of their twins Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung). Elizabeth is about to play Gracie in an adaptation of her romance with Joe, and the couple are initially eager to divulge a lifetime’s worth of secrets and anecdotes to ensure their story is portrayed accurately. But layered amidst the family barbecues and polite smiles is something darker and repulsive. As much as everyone tries to ignore it, Elizabeth embodies the same uncomfortable truth behind Gracie and Joe’s relationship that she doggedly pursues for her impending performance. When their romance met the world’s spotlight, Gracie was 36–and Joe was in 7th grade.
The camp and melodrama that defined much of the director’s previous work takes a more reserved backseat in Todd Haynes’ latest outing, yet the sumptuously raw emotion of the performances remains a constant and provocative virtue. May December is a challenging, morally grey examination of how two women weaponize the truth to their own similarly insidious ends, blurring lines of victimhood and agency until it isn’t quite clear which of the two leads is the better actress.
Samy Burch’s screenplay, developed alongside Alex Mechanik, teases out the exact nature of Gracie and Joe’s relationship beginning with Elizabeth’s arrival. At first glance, the couple’s age difference seems apparent yet not out of the ordinary–yet with disturbing details cropping up amidst picturesque scenes of their lakeside suburban life, Elizabeth’s fascination tempers our natural initial shock. Elizabeth is earnest in her determination to mine the minutiae of Gracie’s life as research for her portrayal of her subject, which warms the couple to what would in other circumstances (a true crime podcast or streaming special, for example) be equally predatory or dubious behavior. But Elizabeth has an unerring drive to get answers to questions that Gracie and Joe haven’t bothered to ask themselves–and for good reason. In tandem with the revelations behind understanding Gracie and Joe’s relationship, all three confront ugly yet necessary questions about agency and complicity that threaten to upend lives and personas that they’ve meticulously developed for themselves.
All three actors walk an incredibly fine line for their characters that push the audience’s natural empathetic inclinations into necessarily provocative and uncomfortable places. Portman’s Elizabeth, who seems to have taken on a dual acting-producing role in the adaptation of the Gracie/Joe story, corners her subjects with innocuous lines of questioning to get her timeline straight, which forces everyone to reconsider just where their acts of rationalization led them to further acts of denial or delusion. The insidious thing about Elizabeth is that there’s no hint of malice or judgment in her actions; her pursuit of emotional truth in preparing for her role leaves her blind to the trauma that she dredges up as a result of her actions. There’s no stone Elizabeth leaves unturned, interrogating not just Gracie and Joe, but her ex-husband, her first kids (some now the same age as their half-siblings), and even the manager of the pet store where Gracie and Joe first met and were eventually caught in the act. No act of immersion is off limits for Elizabeth–and by the time she worms her way into re-creating a pantomime of Gracie where she was caught with Joe, her earnest pursuit of emotional justice for Gracie has crossed nearly as many moral boundaries as Gracie herself.
But even then, Gracie and Joe are wrapped up in decades of performance themselves, compartmentalizing their lives into an ideal relationship as a husband and wife facing an empty nest, all while downplaying or ignoring their own arrested development. In his fleeting interactions with his children and stepchildren, Melton’s Joe comes off as much as a sibling to them as a parent. Whether it’s preparing these teens for graduation or fumbling a shared joint between them, Joe shares our own increasingly uncomfortable awareness that both “parent” and “child” are experiencing these milestones for the first time. In seeing these children navigate between teenagerdom and adulthood, Haynes and Burch painfully illustrate how much Joe has been prevented from doing the same himself.
Gracie, however, tries to turn a blind eye to all of this, wrapped up in the idea that she’s succeeded in overcoming her trauma and has come out the other side as the ideal mother and wife. In a delicious parallel to her performance in Haynes’ earlier Safe, Gracie’s attempts to remain blissfully unaware of her inner pain only create the perfect environment for it to fester beyond control. In the film’s most gripping scene, in which Joe finally tries to confront what he means to Gracie, Moore deftly attempts to turn the tables on Melton regarding just who is/was the victim and perpetrator. By the conclusion, however, it’s clear that the only way this couple can survive is by labeling each other as equally complicit rather than acknowledging anything more disturbingly definitive.
In balancing this trio of delusion and repression, Haynes provocatively pushes us to question any initial positions of moral superiority. Whether it’s picking at the scabs of the past, negging the choice of a graduation dress, or taking advantage of victims for their own curiosity or satisfaction…everyone in May December has their own trauma they long to repress. Each of them has dealt with it in a myriad of unhealthy ways that, arguably, in turn, beget more trauma. There’s no clear way to break this cycle of abuse and abuser, not when there’s potentially something to gain from the propagation of this process on both an individual and societal level. There’s always a reward to be gained for our lack of self-awareness–which, as the cameras roll on Elizabeth’s production, suggests that any attempt to search for the truth will only leave us blindly hungering for more.
May December opens in limited release on November 17th courtesy of Netflix, followed by a streaming debut on December 1st.
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Criterion Review: NANNY (2022)
Nikyatu Jusu’s spellbinding Sundance-winning psychological drama marks Criterion’s latest streamer collaboration
Stills courtesy of Criterion. The first horror film to earn the top laurels at the Sundance Film Festival, Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny exquisitely blends fantastic folk horror and all-too-real terrors of immigrant exploitation and maternal anxiety.
Aisha (Anna Diop) is a Senegalese immigrant who takes a job with a wealthy Manhattan family as a nanny in order to earn enough money to bring her young son to the United States. The allure of the job quickly fades, however, as Aisha’s time and labor are casually exploited by employers Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector); pay is deferred or forgotten, and overnight visits become common last-minute demands. Amy and Adam’s attitudes towards Aisha also devolve from respectful to dehumanizing, treating Aisha like an ornament or appliance. She’s dressed up in order to impress visitors, complete with unexpected and unwelcome touch; in the midst of Amy and Adam’s crumbling marriage, Adam comes on to Aisha–while Aisha resists, she can’t quit and jeopardize her income; and as Aisha becomes more of an active maternal presence in child Rose’s life, mother Amy’s microaggressions become vocally abusive lashes. In the vein of Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl, the promise of a new, better life outside of Senegal quickly reveals itself to be an empty one–another tool employed by affluent white people outsourcing domestic burdens to those they treat as less than human. Jusu wryly updates these themes with a neo-progressive bent, with Adam and Amy’s indifference or cruelty masked by a veneer of socioeconomic blindness that only underscores just how blind they are to their own privilege.
Where Nanny shines, though, is in how the casual torment Aisha faces is augmented by supernatural forces rooted in West African Folklore. Anansi the Trickster Spider and water spirit Mami Wata hide in the shadows and waters of Aisha’s life, often accompanied by violent visions of drowning or repression. Their presence alternates between beguiling ambiguity and outright horror–yet the visceral emotions they evoke are always rooted in Aisha’s current anxieties. Jusu and cinematographer Rina Yang drench these horrors in contrasting, colorful tableaux, blending folklore by way of Dario Argento or Mario Bava. With this approach, Nanny richly expresses universal fears through the cultural specificity of its characters’ personal experiences–granting Western audiences not just an understanding of Senegalese nightmare imagery, but a deeper, emotional understanding of the angst and suffering of the experiences of immigrant mothers separated from their children.
In recent years, Criterion has seized the opportunity to diversify the film canon it has helped shape since its inception, reviving and re-contextualizing films from BIPOC and Queer filmmakers from Charles Burnett, Donna Deitch, and more. With Nanny, Criterion dovetails this cultural course correction with a continued cultural appreciation of Horror as a crucial societal lens, recognizing how films across the globe have the power to give a provocative voice to our deepest fears regardless of borders. Nanny is a thoroughly modern and terrifying film by a striking debut voice in American indie film, one with deeply unsettling imagery and dynamic performances by its female leads.
Video/Audio
Criterion presents Nanny in a 1080p HD transfer in its original 2:1 aspect ratio, sourced from a 4K transfer provided by Amazon Studios and approved by director Nikyatu Jusu. The transfer is accompanied by a 5.1-Channel DTS-HD master audio mix, also sourced from the Amazon master. Both English subtitles and Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing are available for the feature film.
In a continued collaboration with Amazon, Criterion’s presentation of this once-streaming-only film decadently preserves Nanny’s surreal, color-soaked imagery. The muted colors of Adam and Amy’s apartment pop against Aisha’s vibrant presence, while the multicolor neon lights of Manhattan nightlife bleed and merge with one another as Aisha hits the town with love interest Malik (Sinqua Walls). The accompanying 5.1-Channel mix champions the musicality of the film’s dialogue as it alternates between English, Wolof, and French, punctuated by skin-crawling sound design as Aisha’s visions take hold. Segments set underwater are notable here, with each speaker’s muted yet oppressive channel creating an immersive and claustrophobic experience.
Special Features
- Truth and Terror: In a new program for Criterion created by Amazon, this is a 17-minute compilation of interviews with Jusu, actresses Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan, and cinematographer Rina Yang discussing the intricate, intimate indie production of Nanny. Of particular interest is how Jusu and Yang delve into the dreamlike yet grounded cinematography of the film, down to the color palette bible used for the production.
- Suicide by Sunlight: A 17-minute short film by Jusu, about a Black vampire mother who must suppress her hunger for blood in order to regain custody of her estranged twin daughters.
- Trailer for Nanny’s theatrical release.
- Essay: Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastien breaks down how Jusu skillfully employs tropes of fantasy and horror to interrogate the real-life terrors that BIPOC and immigrant mothers face as a reality of daily life, as well as how respite is found within the community protagonist Aisha is able to create for herself.
Nanny is now available on Blu-ray and DVD courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
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THE MARVELS Reminds Us How Much Fun the MCU Used to Be
It’s been five years since Brie Larson stepped on screen and instantly became the most divisive entity in the MCU. Not only did she have the audacity to be an empowered woman in the testosterone soaked comic book universe, but she also made a point when doing press to try and be more inclusive, actively granting more access to women and women of color, so that the coverage isn’t predominantly from the white male perspective. It was something that effectively put a target on her back by purposefully ignoring the most vocal and entitled fanbases in recent memory. This of course led to review bombing and just some of the most negative, and as a comic book fan, embarrassing behavior by a group of fans.
I however, personally enjoyed Captain Marvel, it was a look at the toll of being forged into a human weapon and what that does to a person. Of course the fish out of water stuff is fun and nostalgic, but the meat of the story is the soldier who loses faith in both her country and the war she’s fighting. It was a very poignant metaphor and one that was sadly lost on a big chunk of its audience because of the gender of the character.
Now here we are about 5 years later and it appears the MCU has heard the gnashing of teeth from the basements, because this story is less a meditation on the female warrior and more your standard team up film. I have a sneaking suspicion that the original intended Captain Marvel sequel was what was eventually turned into Secret Invasion, which is why it felt like it was missing something. Instead this has the infinity powered Danvers teaming up with not only the young girl she left behind in the first film who is now a S.W.O.R.D. agent (Teyonah Parris), but the ray of joy that is Kamala Khan or Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). The three women have to stop a Kree warrior Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) who is robbing resources from all the planets Carol Danvers calls home in an act of vengeance. This is because we soon discover, that when Marvel destroyed the Supreme Intelligence that ran the Kree homeworld of Hala, a civil war broke out that had the planet of warriors destroying their natural resources in the process.
Surprisingly enough given its 105 minute runtime, each woman gets their own throughline. We have Monica Rambeau reconnecting with Captain Marvel whom she believes abandoned her, we have Carol coming to terms with the consequences of her actions from the first film and finally we have Ms. Marvel learning why you should never meet your heroes. Captain Marvel’s journey is probably the most interesting since we have a hero who believes she was saving a world only to destroy it, and the weight that puts on her shoulders. I mean while the film gets gloriously weird, and hilarious in a gag filled third act, it feels like it’s to soften the blow that basically the main hero was responsible for nearly committing genocide on the Kree home world.
While the film honestly lacks an opening act, I think that was a smart move. I think especially with these MCU films, you should have done the required reading before coming to class and this film rewards that, by throwing you right into the thick of it. From there the film is planet hopping whimsical joyride that has the trio learning to put aside their respective traumas and differences to try and be a real team. One of these scenes of team building I swear was inspired by one of my favorite episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, “Dance Like You Want to Win”, where the Eva pilots are charged with being in perfect sync to a musical number to take down a monster. There’s that playful team building vibe to the requisite MCU needle drops here as the women have to learn to control this anomaly that is affecting them, that causes them to switch places with one another whenever they use their powers.
While the film thankfully has one of the best Disney+ series to lean into for its supporting cast, who are as charming as they were on the small screen, this time they are teamed with my favorite version of Nick Fury – the one who can’t stop playing with his favorite flerken. While the toxic fanbase will of course cry foul sight unseen, The Marvels more than lives up to its name as far as I am concerned. With the current slump the MCU has been in, this film does its best to remind us of the characters and stories that kept bringing us back to the MCU thanks to the story of not only our war torn hero and her estranged niece, but her biggest fan, who is essentially one of us – who never gives up hope. In a MCU phase where most films really struggled to engage with its viewers, I think those who give The Marvels a chance will be pleasantly surprised. It’s wonderfully weird, charming and just a hell of a lot of fun. I haven’t laughed this hard at an MCU film since Thor: Rangarok, seriously.
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The High School Perspective: Killers of the Flower Moon
Scorsese and DiCaprio didn’t want to make another “white savior” movie. Instead, they produced a nearly 4-Hour opus of sympathy for a man who conspired to murder his wife and her family.
Additional reporting by Michael Lovaglio
At the premier of Martin Scorsese’s 30th directorial feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, Christopher Cote, Osage language consultant, gives an immediate raw assessment. “I was nervous about the release of the film,” admits Cote. “Now that I’ve seen it, I have some strong opinions. As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that. Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people. But this story is being told, this history is being told, almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart, and they kind of give him this conscience, and they kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love… that’s just beyond abuse.”
Cote offers a powerful critique of the film while acknowledging the filmmakers’ desire to service the story with respect, giving renewed voice to the intimate and acute violence perpetrated against Mollie Kyle, her family, and the Osage Nation. Yet, Cote’s critique has been muffled by overwhelming praise for the film, as well as the decision to center it around Ernest Burkhart. “He was a supporting player in [David] Grann’s book who was arrested for allegedly mixing poison in the insulin he was injecting into his diabetic Osage wife,” explains Valerie Complex per Deadline. “DiCaprio and Scorsese liked the conflict faced by Burkhart, who in their telling loves his wife but still does what he is told by his uncle, William Hale.”
A National Book Award Finalist, Killers of the Flower Moon investigates the murders of the richest people per capita at the start of the 20th century- the Osage. The young director of a new and fledging government agency, J. Edgar Hoover, seized this opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his methods and model of federal law enforcement, appointing a former Texas Ranger to make arrests and ensure convictions. Naturally, studios were salivating over the premise; bidding on the film rights a full year before the book was published.
In his book, Grann does not just investigate the killings, but the larger conspiracy at play- to murder the Osage for their inheritance, their “headrights” to oil. The crimes were not just heinous, but the conspirators arguably changed the course of American history. These domestic terrorists systematically murdered scores of Osage men and women usurping generational wealth, and stymying Osage descendants from centuries of financial prosperity.
Local and state law enforcement were either disinterested or incompetent, as were the agents sent by the Bureau of Investigation until Hoover appointed Tom White. White was a full-bodied iteration of the kind of fictionalized character mostly found in the pages of dime store paperback novels. He was resolute in his belief in protection under the law. His oath to the Constitution was not cynical or self-serving.
“White was an old-style lawman,” writes Grann. “[H]e was attracted to the darkness, and in 1917 he took the oath to become a special agent for the Bureau of Investigation. He swore, ‘I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies… SO HELP ME GOD.”
In our most cherished fables, darkness is exposed by men and women who are attracted to it yet resist it. Few linger in the darkness longer, or find more comfort there, than William Hale, the architect of the conspiracy to murder Mollie’s family, including, if accounts are accurate, his own unborn child to Mollie’s sister Anna.
Grann writes, when White eventually confronts Hale with the necessary evidence to convict, he worked hard “to contain the violent passions inside him.” Discipline, self-control, a steady focus on justice for victims: all in service to the law. It’s the kind of story needed in 2023, a reminder of the potency of protection under the law and an example of why a strong federal government can be used to uphold the law and protect democracy. But the film’s architects went another way.
While early iterations of the screenplay focused more on White than Earnest Burkhart, Scorsese, DiCaprio, and De Niro “grew uncomfortable telling a ‘white savior’ law-and-order story that had been a staple of Westerns for decades”, explains Complex. Telling the story from the perspective of Burkhart, the man who plotted to murder his wife’s family for profit, and was slowly poisoning her, is an odd choice. Bordering on astonishing, there is little conversation, as Cote notes, that the story should be told by Mollie. After all, it’s her story. Mollie’s family was targeted and murdered, yet she is a supporting character in Scorsese’s adaptation. Even if Burkhart’s “dilemma” is compelling, a fuller, more nuanced approach to this uniquely American horror story would be to give depth and understanding to White’s bullish intent to expose, and more time to Mollie. Much more time to Mollie. Lilly Gladstone brilliantly depicts Mollie as stoic, with a silent, vibrant strength even though the film’s structure sidelines her for large parts.
Scorsese comes close to offering viewers something profound but stops short. Killers of the Flower Moon could have been more than a film about a moment in history. It could have spoken to the ongoing endemic of white nationalism.
Through news footage, Scorsese shows images of the Tulsa massacre of Black Wall Street. In that act of domestic terrorism, in that act of war against American citizens, more than lives were taken, more than wealth was stolen. Future generations were robbed of their birthright, their inheritance. Countless descendants of the victims of Black Wall Street are due justice for the opportunities taken away. Stealing the future, maintaining a white nationalist America, was the point of the massacre. 50 miles away, in Osage County, men like William Hale, and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, were doing the same. Yet, there is no examination of the perpetual virus that infects large populations of white Americans, over generations, who feel entitled to take what is not theirs. With only breadcrumbs to follow, Killers of the Flower Moon missed an opportunity.
The FBI made its reputation on prosecuting those who perpetuated crimes against the Osage Nation, specifically crimes against Mollie Burkhart and her family. There was no justice until the federal government intervened. The power of the federal government as a stabilizing force of justice could have made for brilliant cinema. It certainly would have been more powerful than a nearly 4-hour drama into the mind of the right hand of the conspiracy to rob generational wealth from the Osage and their descendants.
Still, in 2023, it was nice to see a nearly 4-hour Martin Scorsese epic in IMAX. Better yet, seeing a movie made for grown-ups in a theater at the start of awards season is a throwback to an era that needs an awakening. His ability to delve into complex and layered narratives, especially in the realm of crime and historical drama, is well established. Scorsese’s passion for exploring the darker aspects of American history and crime could have been a perfect fit for this story, rooted in the Osage murders. Furthermore, his experience adapting real-life events into compelling film, as he did with Goodfellas and The Irishman, could have added depth and authenticity. Yet, when the protagonist of the film conspired to murder Osage men and women, his wife, and her family, depth and authenticity are lost. Victim’s voices are drowned out by a play of sympathy for the perpetrator.
Please, do not mistake this critique for poor quality. The entire cast is brilliant. DeNiro’s Hale grins like a Cheshire cat, never trusting, always plotting; he’s gorgeously malicious. Jesse Plemons adds a much-needed jolt of energy, and conscience, when he enters a little more than 2-hours in. All performances deliver. The crisp cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto transports viewers to an era with vast plains, gorgeous homes, magnificent turn of the century architecture, and a crispness that mirrors an early evening Fall walk. It was undoubtedly a captivating cinematic experience. And, it should have been more.
Mollie Burkhart, the Osage Nation, deserve more. The Martin Scorsese who delivers the final lines of the film would agree.
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TWILIGHT Reviewed By Someone Who Knows Nothing About TWILIGHT
[15 Anniversary 4K UHD Review]
IMDb Twilight hit theaters in the United States on November 21st, 2008.
Those good at The Maths can deduce, then, that the film is celebrating its 15th anniversary. In celebration, a grandiose boxed set of 4K UHD discs (the sequels are making their debut on the format here) are releasing as a Best Buy exclusive (perhaps one of the last of their kind). The first film and its physical media release is covered in depth here.
In 2008 I was a 28 year old bachelor who had no reason in the world to be interested in the Twilight books and movies, which were aimed squarely at teen girls. Mind you, I bore them no ill will and always loved a book series that got young people reading. As those 15 years have passed, however, series stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have grown into some of the most revered and wildly accomplished actors of our time. And the swirling rumors of just how gonzo these vampire/werewolf love stories become in the latter entries has intrigued me. The time has come for me, a roundly middle aged husband and father who knows nothing about Twilight, to take a deep dive into this series and recount my adventures to you in written form. I’m going to write about each film as I see it, knowing little about what will happen in each successive installment.
There will be full spoilers throughout. Won’t you join me?
[Read my full coverage of the sequels here]
IMDb Twilight (2008)
I wasn’t sure if I would get it… but I think I get it!
This is teen girl angst unleashed upon an expansive fantasy landscape. And that’s totally okay!
When Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan arrives in Forks, Washington to stay with her divorced Dad for a while, she’s the immediate center of attention of literally every character in Forks, Washington. It’s like the town was just sitting in frozen stasis waiting for her to arrive. There’s a fully formed group of friends, including Anna Kendrick’s Jessica, that immediately accept her and talk about nothing but her. There’s her sheriff father (Billy Burke as Charlie Swan), his townie friends at the diner, and Gil Birmingham and Taylor Lautner as Billy and Jacob Black (old family/childhood friends who literally come bearing the gift of a classic truck restored by hand just for Bella). I do know enough about Twilight to know that there’s going to be some vampire vs. werewolf angst coming down the pike. Even I couldn’t escape the #TeamEdward vs. #TeamJacob rows of the late aughts.
And then, there are the Cullens. The pasty and gorgeous vampire clan essentially have a Bollywood style, windswept introduction as they enter the high school for the first time and Jessica narrates their entrance to Bella personally. Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen is the last to appear, and I immediately get it. This guy is a James Dean-ass vampire. Aloof, cooler than cool, and the immediate new obsession of our teen girl protagonist.
The longing, the aching, dramatic, pubescent desire of Bella Swan… it’s the raw nerve at the center of this story and at the center of the entirety of Forks. I’m aware that author Stephanie Meyer created a phenomenon with her novels and that the film series only elevated that fandom to a fever pitch. Meyer’s somewhat overdramatized accounting of teen angst, desire, and repression is likely a byproduct of her roots in the Mormon faith, and I can recognize and identify with some of the feelings Meyer and Bella are grappling with as someone who myself came up in the era of “purity culture” in the evangelical church. There’s this air of mystery to sex and dating that everyone experiences. But when you add a religious zeal to the proceedings, the longing, the withholding of ones purity/virginity, the promise of a one, true, holy and God-ordained love, is the most exciting thing imaginable for a teenager.
And so, Bella wants nothing more than Edward and to know and understand his deep dark secrets. Edward, of course, is like a hundred damn years old, so of course there are some real concerns to be considered around this kind of grooming behavior that this ancient creature is displaying towards this child. But let’s just acknowledge that and move on for now. The purity culture dynamic that most strongly and immediately makes itself known is the fact that Edward and his vampire clan have chosen to abstain from feasting on human blood. They are trying a different path, feeding only on animals. Edward describes the lifestyle as almost eternally unsatisfying. And his own assessment of himself and his “strength” hinges upon whether he can resist his intense desire to drink Bella’s blood and turn her into a vampire. So longing, sex, and abstinence are directly at the center of this fantasy romance.
Twilight mostly clicks and works for me so far because it’s the kind of thing that absolutely hangs on its casting and chemistry. The teen idol heartthrob phenomenon of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and others, sort of simultaneously turned the film series into a global smash and also made it cool to hate and make fun of. This is the way with all teen fandom. I’ve admitted that part of my own interest in seeking this series out is due to the fact that Stewart and Pattinson have deftly broken through the teen idol barrier and become true artists with agency over their own careers. Other stars from this series went on to less stellar success. But damn if the smoldering and mystery between Stewart and Pattinson doesn’t cook. The Twin Peaks-like allure of the pacific northwest all around them, the extremely pasty white hoodie wearing Hot Topic mallcore vibe that defined a generation splashed up on the big screen, it is all there and while I know it isn’t made for me, I’m here for it.
Meyer and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg also tap into pre-existing vampire and werewolf lore to drape this high school romance in the trappings of a fantasy world that has intoxicated us for generations. Edward Cullen is no Dracula, but we immediately slide into the thematic explorations of previous vampire storytellers like Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. We get that vampires are sexual. We get that a teen girl fantasizes about being the center of attention and creating a feeling in a boy that he describes as nothing short of a heroin high. Twilight is about longing, desire, the need for acceptance and answers, and about which hottie to choose from when both hotties’ entire personalities seem to be “I’m hopelessly in love with you”.
While I’m intrigued and fascinated and couldn’t be happier to be exploring this series, I will say that the visual effects and overall visualization of Edward and the Cullen family’s vampire abilities are awful here. While director Catherine Hardwicke did this series a real solid with her casting and the overall look and feel, Iron Man (fascinating that the MCU launched with this title in the very same year that Twilight hit theaters) this is not. There’s allusions to Edward’s abilities being like those of a superhero. But every time the vampires are supposed to be doing cool shit like running crazy fast, or scaling a tree, or hitting a baseball into the heavens with their super strength, it looks terrible. Today I think we have higher expectations for action, choreography, and how super heroic antics are portrayed on the big screen. But it’s safe to say that Twilight is succeeding when it’s relying on its heartthrobs and failing when it’s trying to be action packed.
Lionsgate The Package
Much like our friend Bella, I’m somewhat emotionally torn regarding this physical release. On the one hand this feels like undoubtedly the definitive home video edition of these films. You’ve got brand new 4K UHD scans, Blu-rays, AND Digital Codes for all of the films. Each film is packed with bonus features that I must confess I haven’t delved into yet. (A five film commitment is all I can break off at the moment). AND this Best Buy exclusive has new art work emblazoned across this Steel Book presentation. It’s all packaged in a sturdy looking cardboard box with an individual compartment for each film. And therein lies the rub. These damn movies are stuck in their box. Like, the movies do not come out. I’ve learned so far that if I use a lot of banging with my palm, gravity, and a little luck, I can get enough Steel Book to pop out that I can pinch and pull and get the movie out. I am not exaggerating. This is not a bit. I’ve owned many a Blu-ray box set in my day, and I’ve never encountered a problem such as this. It’s deluxe and definitive and damn near impossible to pull discs out of.
Special Features
(Provided By Lionsgate)
4K UHD and BD:
Twilight Tour…10 Years Later featurette (10 mins)
A Conversation With Stephenie Meyer (23:34)
Music: The Heartbeat of Twilight (5:35)
Becoming Edward (7:28)
Becoming Bella (5:23)
Catherine Hardwicke’s Vampire Kiss Montage (2:43)
Catherine Hardwicke’s “Bella’s Lullaby Remix” Music Video
Edward’s Piano Concert (2:34)
Twilight Cast Interview: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson
Twilight Cast Interview: Cam Gigandet (5:41)
Twilight Cast Interview: Edi Gathegi and Rachelle Lefevre
Twilight Premiere On The Red Carpet (7:36)
Cast Interviews On The Red Carpet (4:56)
Stephenie Meyer Talks About The Twilight Saga (34:45)
And I’m Out.
The Twilight Saga 15th Anniversary Steelbook Best Buy Exclusive releases 11/14/23 at Best Buy
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THE DEVIL COMES TO KANSAS CITY Comes To Tubi
Now streaming as a “Tubi Original” exclusive to that platform, The Devil Comes to Kansas City is a strange and uneven film that makes good use of its shot-on-location Kansas City environs.
There’s no denying that the film aims high, mixing a classic folk legend, a sober modern sex-trafficking plot, and a supernatural element (the “devil” in the title? It’s literal).
The film opens with a depiction of the famous legend of Robert Johnson, a real blues musician who, as the story goes, met the devil at a midnight crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for otherworldly guitar skills – a tale which will have future repercussions, setting the stage for elements of this story.
A former mercenary with a checkered past, Paul Wilson (Ben Gavin) now lives a quiet family life in rural Iowa with family. But when his wife and daughter are suddenly attacked by sex traffickers while visiting Kansas City, his killer instinct kicks back in and he set out to find them, no matter the cost – even to his soul.
What follows is a wildly uneven film that’s both more and less serious than, say, the rollicking “badass action” approach of Taken. On the one hand, it tries to treat its subject matter with appropriate weight. Paul isn’t a hero, and in setting out to retrieve his daughter, he’s willing to cross any line. It’s an approach fraught with darkness and brutality. On the other hand, the film goes into strange supernatural territory which is also a cool idea, but has a hard time meshing with the sober approach.
Turns out Paul’s old war buddy Randall (Robert Coppage) is a descendant of Robert Johnson, and like all men of his family, inherited the family’s association with Satan, and also gained a superpower – his is the supernatural ability to locate people.
With Randall’s intervention (and involving a gate to hell in the basement of KC’s famous Grinders restaurant), Paul discovers his daughter’s location and gets his own chance to make a deal with the devil (Kirk Fox) before storming the traffickers’ compound.
As a KC area resident, I enjoyed the hometown aspect of the movie, trying to spot locations and paying attention to addresses and street names referenced. This isn’t one of those movies that tries to pretend Australia is New York; the KC vibe is evident and it’s clear that a lot of the film was shot here. That said, the city depicted in the movie is a hotbed of sex trafficking, murder, corruption, and a literal gate to hell – not really a good look (or a particularly accurate one, I would like to think).
Overall the film’s vibe is kind of all over the place and I’m not sure what lesson it’s trying to impart. It seems unsure of whether Paul is good father or a vile torturer and murderer (bit of both?), and seems content to raise a lot of moral questions while having no interest in answering them. I really like the local talent and locations in this movie, but I didn’t particularly care for the movie itself.
– A/V Out.
