One Balrog, Two Recommendations, Three Links
Go back to the Shadow!
Like Gandalf slaying the Balrog, there is a bittersweet catharsis in banishing a half-written essay to the depths from whence it came.
So I feel today — a day I’d earmarked to triumphantly publish an essay on Werner Herzog’s new(ish) memoir.
Alas, this morning, I realised I had a great opening followed by several paragraphs of meandering guff; guff that I’d spent several hours half-heartedly shuffling around like a kid pushing a squirrel carcass with a stick. “Are you alive? Do something!”
Well, I can officially confirm that the essay is dead. Consider the Balrog slain.
Instead, I’ve pulled together a couple of movie recommendations and some links.
I’ve limited myself to three of the most interesting pieces I’ve read recently — a takedown of Elevated Horror, a post-mortem on the death of studio development, and an ode to auteurist indulgence.
Before we get there, a brief moment of shame(less?)(ful?) self-promotion. People seem to be digging my piece, Why Does Editing Work?, which was included in various links round-ups. If you missed it, check it out here.
Recommendations
A Different Man (2024)
Sebastian Stan is Edward, a severely disfigured actor consumed by social anxiety and self-loathing. He volunteers for a miracle cure that enables him to peel away the growths on his face (cue a dash of eye-watering body horror.) Like a butterfly from a chrysalis, a conventionally handsome face emerges from his shredded flaps of skin. Seizing the opportunity for a new identity, Edward changes his name to Guy and pursues the life he feels he’s always been denied.
But here comes Oswald. Played by Adam Pearson, Oswald has the same condition (neurofibromatosis) as pre-transformation Edward yet has the temerity to live his life with effortless, gleeful, unashamed abandon. As Oswald and Guy’s lives intertwine, Guy begins to envy both the man he never was and the man he’s still struggling to become.
In a film brimming with sharply observed commentary on the intersection of appearance, morality, and identity, perhaps the most biting sequence is a corporate video that gushingly presents people who don’t look ‘normal’ as pitiable victims — they’re just like us, really — who should be gently humoured like nervous toddlers. This wince-inducing interlude doubles as a thesis of sorts for the movie, whose opening sequences — an Elephant Man-like tale of a bullied man navigating a cruel world — encourage us to extend that same othering pity to Edward. But just as we settle into this familiar story structure, it flips, upending our neatly packaged preconceptions and, Judo style, using the weight of our own pity against us.
Adam Pearson is the highlight as Oswald, a charming, deceptively complex cuckoo-in-the-nest whose affable manner and Live Love Laugh body positivity — sunset yoga in the park, sing like nobody’s listening karaoke — masks a savvy, devious undercurrent. Or does it? There are no easy answers here, and mileage will vary as to whether the film’s thematic slipperiness reads as careful ambiguity or half-baked fuzziness. Even if you lean towards the latter, there’s lots to love, from the moody, paranoid, ‘70s-coded score to the disorientating flourishes of darkly absurd humour.
In cinemas now - go see it!
The Wages of Fear (1953)
We are in a desolate South American village, a purgatorial wasteland filled with lost souls.
A washed-up ex-gangster viciously trying to reassert his dominance. An avuncular Italian suffering from a fatal illness. A charming but capricious unemployed Corsican (this film is a linguist’s dream). These are dead men walking.
It is a place of poverty, of despair. A pressure cooker, simmering, simmering, simmering, but never reaching the point of release.
A domineering American oil corporation provides the only work available. But it’s never enough to escape. Until now. Opportunity knocks — four men are offered a chance at a life-changing payday. The catch? They must drive two large trucks loaded with the volatile explosive nitroglycerin 300 miles through dangerous terrain to an oilfield. The slightest spill will see them blown to pieces.
For nearly an hour, we have seen the power dynamics between our characters unfold. We think we have a measure of who they are and what they want. Their desperation has been laid bare. Naturally, they leap at the opportunity. Surely, nothing can be worse than this?
Christopher Nolan, discussing Dunkirk (2017), cited the Shepard tone — an auditory illusion of infinitely ascending pitch — as inspiration. The Wages of Fear (also an inspiration for Dunkirk) is the tone’s cinematic equivalent.
The final 90 minutes are a series of escalating setpieces, each a perfectly self-contained miniature of knuckle-whitening terror.
Maintaining enough speed to glide over a disused road’s potholes (cue the Fury Road (2015) and Speed (1994) comparisons). U-turning on a rotten, cliffside wooden platform. Detonating an ill-placed boulder. The result is a vertiginous rise in tension, a rollercoaster that keeps ratcheting up.
As pressure mounts, our protagonists are pared to the bone. The affable becomes evil, the evil turns weak. Power shifts and contorts. Friendships form and shatter.
These are dead men walking.
Links
Against Gentrified Horror
Over at The Baffler, John Semley, coming in hot after a screening of the “crappy” Longlegs, published a bloody takedown of “Elevated Horror” (think Hereditary, Get Out, The Witch, etc).
He argues that Elevated Horror is a response to the ‘meta’ horror of the 1990s and 2000s when films like Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011) taught us to knowingly roll our eyes at familiar tropes. Elevated Horror pushes back against the winking quality of meta-horror while internalising the idea that old-fashioned scares have become too predictable. The result is a set of films that draw their power from being about something - usually some form of psychological or social trauma.
Hey, this sounds like a cool example of how movies are an evolving art form, constantly in dialogue with previous generations. It shows how new styles and preoccupations emerge from this conversation. I’m all for it!
The trouble is, Semley argues, in trying to be ‘about’ something, these films overplay their hand:
“There is not much to do with Scream, or The Cabin in the Woods, or Get Out, or Midsommar other than to say, “I get it.” Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or “elevated”) any buried subtext to the level of text.”
Most unforgivably, they forget to be scary:
“These films cast implicit aspersions on the horror’s baser appeal. And not just the jump scares, gore, and promise of co-eds going full frontal. In their heavy psychologizing, and insistence upon their sophistication, they take for granted that terror, anxiety, and disgust are insufficient emotional responses. But a truly effective scare or gnarly gross-out is more difficult to put across the screen convincingly than some Psych 101 bunk about grief.”
I don’t agree with everything Semley says, but it’s an interesting piece throughout.
Burn Baby, Burn
Roger Ebert’s Matt Zoller Seitz argues that critiques of Megalopolis as ‘indulgent’ are symptoms of an inert, anti-intellectual cinema culture:
“Movies were always a popular art form, but it used to be understood that sometimes you’d deliberately seek out something different, challenging, and perhaps obscure or ‘arty’ just to have a reaction to it and be able to discuss it with others. Movies like this only seem “indulgent” because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it, or else it’s considered a waste of time—or worse, a form of acting-out by some bratty person who thinks they’re an artist rather than what they presumably are, an employee of whomever bought a ticket.”
He argues that movie culture is richer when directors can burn a load of money on fever-dream passion projects. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Either result is good:
“If you’re going to blow a massive sum on one huge thing, why not a thing that people who don’t know you personally can experience and evaluate and maybe even enjoy? Better “Megalopolis” than a yacht, or a Vermeer locked away in a New York townhouse.”
Here here!
This reminds me of the brouhaha around Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023), which, unlike Megalopolis, was financed by a studio (A24, at the time their most expensive film to date). I didn’t particularly care for the movie, but I never understood the voices knowingly saying, “Ah he was given far too much money and let off the leash, of course this would happen!” Do the people making this argument realise that they are ultimately saying, “I wish this artist had been a good boy and limited his ambitions to make sure he didn’t blow this Hollywood studio’s money!” Whose side are we on here!
The Death of Development
One of the main throughlines of Brian Raftery’s breezily entertaining Best. Movie. Year. Ever., which examines why 1999 was one of the best years for American movies, is that the 1990s were a halcyon era for screenwriters. Studios were snapping up unconventional, original scripts left, right and centre, from Being John Malkovich to The Matrix.
It won’t come as any great surprise that this is no longer the case, but I didn’t realise the extent of the problem until reading this piece from Puck’s Matthew Belloni.
According to the article, of 505 major live-action studio releases from 2022 to 2026, only 10% came from an internal original development slate. The rest came from a combination of acquisitions, distribution deals with other entities, speciality corporate divisions, and I.P. priorities like sequels/remakes, etc.
In other words, studios/streamers very rarely develop original material from scratch (which was pretty much the definition of what Hollywood did for 100 years or so).
Instead, the traditional system has “turned for the most part into a brand-management business and distribution system for development risks taken elsewhere.”
It’s an interesting wrinkle on the default critique that studios only churn out sequels and spinoffs, which turns out to be somewhat of a myth —“the vast majority are actually not sequels or spinoffs. In fact, excluding books, only about a third were based on preexisting IP.”
I confess to being a little confused here — if that last part is true, then lots of original material is being produced somewhere and finding its way into the studio system, so why does it matter where it originated? It clearly does matter, but I’m struggling to work out exactly why.
Worth a read.
Thanks for putting this on my radar. Seems like Seb Stan is having a moment. Sounds fascinating