I Have Something For You to Watch on Halloween

One of the more memorable scenes from the film. Can't tell you what's going on though, and it's hurting my soul.

The VVitch came out of nowhere, and I do mean nowhere. Shot in some desolate woods in Canada over 25 days by a freshman director who looks like he just stumbled out of the most hipster hipster bar in Los Angeles, I had heard things about it. Mostly that it was legit the most terrifying, unsettling film that will make your blood run cold. I was assuming this was coming from people who had never seen The Shining, or Rosemary's Baby, or The Exorcist. But now that I too have seen it, I will gladly put The VVitch into that group. I've read Arthur Miller's The Crucible more times than I care to remember and the Salem Witch Trials were never handled with that much honesty and brevity since. 

Does this not remind you of a certain famous painting?

But this is not about that. And the parallels between it and the New Testament were so subtle, nuanced, and brilliant it made me think; 'wow, hipsters can direct'. Robert Eggers, barely 32 (so exactly my age) cast a film with an all British (with the exception of one Scot) cast for this unsettling horror-type movie. I'm hesitant to call it a horror movie, even though that's how it's been marketed. To me, it's a period piece; a bleak drama much like There Will Be Blood with a lot of seriously disturbing images and themes. This is not a film for your parents or for the faint of heart, seriously you've been warned. 

I am not going to give away any spoilers, what I will give you is the premise. Set maybe a few years prior to Salem, a Puritan family is banished for the patriarch's disagreements with his elders about interpretations in the Bible. Defiant, he moves his family; wife Catherine, daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, and two really annoying twins around 5 or so to the wilderness...oh and there's a newborn who's pivotal to the story. What he was thinking I don't know, but it's his pride that spurred the journey and that's already giving stuff away. Now, anyone who is a horror purist knows that only bad shit can happen to you in isolation in the woods. The daughter Thomasin is the central character, who is about to reach 'womanhood' i.e. puberty, and the parents discuss selling her to another family so she can properly deal with it, which was not uncommon at the time. They are completely isolated save for their farm animals one of which is a surly black goat with giant horns called Black Phillip. The twins claim that he speaks to them and they speak back, and as we know, when animals do that and only little kids notice it, it's a common horror trope. But then it launches into a whirlwind of bizarre and such visceral happenings that you WILL have trouble sleeping at night. Even though you live in the middle of the city and don't own any goats. 

Black Phillip

What is beautiful about the film is the pacing (borrowed no doubt from Ingmar Bergman) where it emphasizes the feeling of degradation and isolation and eventually hopelessness and loss of faith. The other major aesthetic (borrowed from Kubrick no doubt) is the decision to shoot exclusively with natural light. And anyone who has ever made a movie, whether a 3-hour opus or a student film knows that negating your Omni's is basically film suicide. But to get the authentic feel the director strove for, it paid off.

Again, can't say what's happening. It's not a cliché exorcism I can tell you that much.

Now, you're probably thinking, they are in the wilderness near creepy woods, the film is called The VVitch...there's a witch in the woods, bam, you solved the puzzle...NOPE! And if you want to know what's actually up, guess what, WATCH IT. Stay home from the lame Halloween party you were invited to where everyone will be dressed as either Donald Trump or someone from Orange is the New Black, and just cuddle up with a pet or a stuffed animal like a child because no matter how tough you think you are, this movie will crawl under your skin and scare the life out of you. 

The climax of the film...have I left a good cliffhanger?

It was so impressive to see a film that was not only shot for under 2 million, made the rounds at Sundance and got picked up by A24, but that resurrected a genre that's basically become a parody of itself. If we label it a horror film, it's definitely up there with the aforementioned Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, etc. And it was directed by a guy who's basically the bastard child of Polanski, Bergman, and Kubrick; not a bad label to have. AND it's his first film. This was such a relief and single handedly restored my faith in the genre while making me slightly suicidal. Just kidding, but it did stick with me for so long and so strongly that I'm still not able to shake it off. 

Oh and in its defense, people were wondering why the fuck it's spelled the way it's spelled and that's because that's what pamphlets that made rounds in the colonies around that time looked like when they were asking people to beware of VVitches. It's not a hipster thing...well maybe a little bit. There I just gave you Halloween plans, you're welcome. 

Trailer below. 

Compliance: The Most Contraversial Film of this New Decade

Dreama Walker reduced to sitting naked in the backroom with nothing but an apron to cover herself up with, not even knowing how much worse it's about to get for her.

If you thought the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) were rough to swallow, once you turn on compliance make sure you have an air sickness bag nearby. Here are a few reasons why, and they may be double standards, but those exist for a reason too. 1, the torture occurring in this dark indie sleeper hit are occurring in your very own back yard and not in a black sight somewhere not on a map in the middle east. 2. They are occurring to a woman, basically a girl barely out of her teens rather than some nameless affiliate of the Taliban. Here's the plot and I'll try to avoid spoiler alerts when I can. 

In the beginning of the film Becky (Dreama Walker) was just another 19 year old girl working a part time job at a fast food restaurant.

based on more actual occurrences we would like to admit, the film takes place mostly in a low-level fast food restaurant where a mysterious caller phones in telling the easily manipulated manager that he's with the police and a woman who matches the description for a young thin blonde, which of course could be anybody was caught on surveillance stealing money from a customer. She is then subjected to increasingly degrading and dehumanizing tasks, most of which involve forced sexual activity on another. After the mysterious caller is realized to be a prankster, basically the manager who has forced this poor employee to such horrors is beside herself and can't ever recover for how she was manipulated into doing something like that to an innocent person.

Anne Dowd, the Fast food restaurant manager being asked not only to perform a strip search without a supervising witness but to comply with things much worse.

his film cuts immediately to the bone. It tugs at our most vulnerable heart strings, as do most things when we see innocent people punished and dehumanized in such cruel ways, and what's more difficult to believe is that this happens basically all the time all over rural America where people don't even think twice to ask proof of law enforcement such as a badge or a search and seizure warrant. It's cinema verite style makes it even more difficult to take in, but that much more relevant and important. Not only is Dreama Walker brilliant as the innocent victim in all of this, but the star is Anne Dowd, who is actually perhaps the bigger victim as she gets blindly conned into subjecting one of her employees to such horrors. This is a vital film for everyone to see, not only because of the daring exposé on something that has been rather glamorized in our culture, case and point 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Sometimes it's good to take a deep breath and look at the darker side of sadomasochism, and this is just the film to do that. 

Trailer below: 

It's Good to Be Back in a Queen

I was going to do a cliche pun on the term queen, but then decided to make an Arrested Development (2003-2005) reference because a voice inside me was saying 'you can, so do'. I am talking about something nothing to do with that nugget of wonderful television, but a new documentary (well, not new, it premiered last January called The Queen of Versailles (2012). It follows the eccentric lives of Timeshare mogul David Seigel who is not unlike notorious embezzler/worst human being of all time next to Hitler, Bernie Madoff. More importantly, it focuses on his wife Jackie, who is also not unlike any given Real Housewife, only smarter and yet worse not only as an excessive narcissist and materialistic shrew.

The two share a San Simeon-esque type of estate, not nestled in the valley of San Luis Opisbo, but in the marshlands of Orlando, FLA, or as I refer to it, God's waiting room. We all know that an American self-made man loves to basically show off his money and scream it into the face of whomever is willing, and usually has deplorable taste. And that is exactly the stereotype that David Seigel lives up to. 

Mrs. Seigel and her eight kids. Watch the full film and she'll tell you just why she has so many.

David Seigel is his generation's William Randolph Hearst, a man with too much money, not enough empathy, and minimal regard for anyone around him. He is always about acquisition and superiority, which eventually lead to his demise because below the facade of large and grand material things, his life is more or less empty. Filling that empty void, to an extent is the Queen of Versailles, Jackie Seigel, his wife. She is so called because the house, rather estate that the two set out to build was named after the palace of Louis XIV of the 17th century. Now, I know what you're thinking, who is classless enough as to try to replicate one of the most famous landmarks of the world's history and the answer is a billionaire white trash couple in the Everglades. 

Well long story short, you can guess what happens. What does Timeshare offer? Expensive real estate sold as vacations at 10% when it's worth 90% of the original cost. Why did the stock market crash? Real Estate sold at 10% when it was worth as 90%, so who went under? David Seigel. What happened to his mansion Versailles (which was bigger than the white house by the way) it got put up for sale? Did anyone buy it? What do you think. 

Anywho...just watch it. It's one of those that I cannot find any snide, cynical, or pessimistic comments that would make it stand on end. This is a film that needs none of that. So I suppose this serves as an introduction.