Category: Thriller

Cut to Black

The Lighthouse – 2019

I’m a romantic about lighthouses.  I love their symbolism, beacons of light in the darkness, sources of strength, guidance, and hope. I carry around a Lighthouse Passport and collect stamps for every one visited. Friends shower me with gifts with a lighthouse motif. I’m a proud card-carrying member of the U.S. Lighthouse Society looking forward to the time when I can join their lighthouse travel tours. Then comes this movie. Well, where to begin? The Lighthouse was shot in black and white and used filming techniques that mimic the silent movie boxy look. The effect was like watching 110 screen minutes squinting through a square storm cloud. The nostalgic benefit of a silent movie is lively organ music bubbling up from the orchestra pit. The sound effect of this movie was the unrelenting deafening and deadening moan of a fog horn. At first it jarred me. Eventually it sedated me and for a short while I oozed along in morbid rhythm with the drab and drizzle.  Disrupting my fog horn catatonia were crashing waves of fights, farts, mud, blood, and vomit bracketed by grotesque scenes of repulsive cistern contamination, mermaid masturbation and seagull penis-pecking. Set at the end of the 19th century on a remote, bleak island off the New England coast, two men, Keeper Thomas Wake (Willem Defoe) and flunkie Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), find themselves tending the lighthouse together for a one month watch. Dipping into Herman Melville manuscripts to salt the dialogue of madness and drawing from maritime superstitions and seafaring tales of mermaids, seabirds, sailors, and tentacled monsters, we are held captive in this noxious cinematic hallucination just like Thomas and Ephraim are held captives on their claustrophobic, wave-pounded, misery-making, isolated island of horror. No way off. For them. No way out. For me. Somewhere after the drunken ax attack but before the psychotic Fresnel lens lunacy, I considered packing up and walking out. Instead I sat, stubbornly believing that a lighthouse movie would eventually flicker with a tiny ray of redemptive illumination. Well, it didn’t. There is an inside joke in my household about “cut to black” movies. Sensing unrequited plot resolution, the inevitable fate of many indie art house films, one of us will lean over and whisper “cut to black.” Predictably, the screen will simply go dark and the credits roll, a feeble, faux-creative strategy pressed into action when (1) the director runs out of ideas about how to end the movie, or (2) the producer runs out of money. So there you have it. The Lighthouse. Cut to black. 

Getting the Willies

Gemini Man – 2019


Will Smith carved a forever fan heart into my movie loving spirit with his “Welcome to earth” alien knockout scene in 1996’s ID4 Independence Day. Happily in Gemini Man I get not one, but two Wills, 23-year old cloned Junior, the top gun mercenary of the bad guys, and 51-year Harry Brogan, the top gun assassin of the good guys. A third Will crops up later but doesn’t get much air time before a newly united Harry and Junior snuff him out. Shades of Whack-a-Will. Junior, the bad guys’ mercenary is sent on a mission to kill his DNA donor dad, Harry. Of course, neither donor nor son know this test tube genesis story at the first or second round of assassin mayhem as the Wills chase and fight each other across three continents. Then the good guys and bad guys switch roles asking the audience to entertain a philosophic interlude between popcorn refills: What if it were possible to breed emotionless, conscious-free, combat-perfect clones in order to save the lives of American servicemen and women? The august and dignified UK, we’re reminded, started it all with Dolly the cloned sheep. Why stop at sheep or pigs, why not create the flawless soldier? All heads turn to Junior. What about him? Well? Well? Fortunately we weren’t held captive in the philosophy of ethics movie class for too long before we were back dodging grenades, reloading Uzis, and careening, cartwheeling and somersaulting across sky, earth and water, finally plummeting to the catacomb depths landing in skull piles. It is the face-to-face, mano-a-clono encounter that pivots the story from science to humanity, from head to heart. The last 30 minutes of this nearly two hour film presents haunting moments of moral decision and indecision, choices between loyalty and integrity, duty and decency. Don’t worry, the human insights are framed in the midst of a barrage of clever special effects and tumultuous action. No softness dare compromise blazing bullets and broken glass. No sir! But, trust me, the deeper questions don’t fade away in the grenade smoke. You be the Gemini judge. 

Happily Ever After

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – 2019

When I see “Quentin Tarantino, Director,” I proceed with caution. The violent nonchalance of Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) so stupefied me that I swore off The Hateful Eight (2015). Given six years of a Tarantino respite, when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rolled in, looking both ways and over my shoulder, I slid way down into the theater’s recliner and settled in for two hours and forty minutes of Tarantino trepidation.  It wasn’t exactly a kinder, friendlier Tarantino film but it was far more fantasy than savagery. Rick (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Cliff (Brad Pitt) are evenly matched as actors and a ton of fun to watch going up against each other in this Hollywood period piece full of classic jargon and memorabilia. If you lived through the Helter Skelter 1960s and the terrifying 1969 slaughter of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) by the psychotic, sociopathic Manson Family, this film kept you on edge wondering when and how a combined Tarantino-Manson bloodbath would blow up the big screen. Then in a stunning reversal, what didn’t happen did. What we, the entire cringing auditorium audience, were expecting was over…kind of. Personally, the ending left me flattened in my movie house lounger, swindled, bamboozled by a slick Hollywood makeover. Tarantino trickery taming the carnage was so unexpected that I couldn’t even begin to appreciate the fantastical story twist towards vengeance. In fact, sometimes a moment in history is so sadistic, so brutally horrible that it’s etched into sacred space and can never be repackaged as entertainment.  Mea culpa. My bad. I should have known better. Sigh. I sense this Tarantino respite may be permanent. But give me another six years or so. You just never know.