OVP: The Fly (1986)

Film: The Fly (1986)

Stars: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

Director: David Cronenberg

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Makeup*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

I have come a long way when it comes to horror, especially in the past year.  Films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Child's Play that I avoided for years because I assumed they would be too scary for me, I'm now able to handle.  But the one subgenre of horror I don't know that I'm ever going to actually enjoy is body horror.  This is a type of horror that deals with disruption of the human body that is, to be frank, too much for me, to the point where I don't find it enjoyable even when it's done well.  I didn't like this about me as a film critic (I often say, "all genres are capable of making good movies"), and so I wanted to throw a couple of the biggest body horror films in this month, and we're going to get to two in the next couple of days.  We'll start with one of the rare horror films to not just get an Oscar nomination, but to win one.  The Fly won Best Makeup (which weirdly the Oscars are stingy about handing over to horror despite this being a genre perfect for the category), and is generally considered to be a classic of the body horror genre (some even consider it to be David Cronenberg's best movie), and so with the OVP giving me a "just watch it, you have to eventually anyway" boost I got sucked into the world of Jeff Goldblum's The Fly.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is relatively short, and pretty simple (it's actually a remake of a 1950's horror film starring Vincent Price).  It's about Seth Brundle (Goldblum), a quirky scientist who takes a woman named Ronnie (Davis) back to his lab, and later learns she's a reporter.  She wants to write a story about the incredible invention he's created-a machine that can transport matter from one end of the room to the other.  Inevitably, he starts to move onto live-action matter, first a baboon, and then in a drunken stupor, himself.  When he does this, he's not smart enough to realize that there is a housefly in the chamber with him.  Initially, the change is incredible-he has super strength & his virility increases to the point where he exhausts Ronnie sexually (you gotta love the implied joke that it's Science Fiction if a man can last longer than a woman in bed).  But he starts to change for the worst, craving sugar & showing fits of anger.  Eventually he grows intense amounts of body hair, and drives Ronnie away.  When he finally calls her, he's transformed, now a grotesque mutant figure.  What's worse, Ronnie is pregnant (possibly from post his transformation), and could be carrying a mutant baby.  He kidnaps her to prevent her having an abortion (which given the situation, even Ted Cruz would've told her was the best course-of-action), and tries to fuse them together in a mutant state, before she eventually kills him, the film ending with the man she loves shot by her own hand.

The film itself is impressive.  Borrowing in a lot of ways from Franz Kafka's The Metapmorphosis (shut up, I've read the book, I'm allowed to reference it without it being abysmally pretentious), the movie shows the ways we are willing to give up our own humanity if it means feeding our ambition.  Jeff Goldblum & Geena Davis are both good in their roles.  This is about the most "Jeff Goldblum-y" performance the actor has ever put to screen, and other than Jurassic Park, is where most of the impressions of him come from.  And the makeup design is impressive-the realism isn't quite what it'd be in 2023, but in 1986...it feels appropriately grotesque.

I am not a fan, though.  I'm willing to admit at this point that really well-done body horror will probably never be my thing, because even if this is good...I never want to see it again.  The way that Goldblum's face looks when Geena Davis pulled off his jaw with her bare hands...I've been clutching my chin multiple times since to ensure it's still there.  I also think there are some gaps in the story, perhaps a little bit too much of an ode to the 1950's horror film in that they allow for serious plot holes.  For example, isn't Davis at all concerned about the woman that Goldblum had a one-night stand with also being pregnant...like, is no one thinking that that might be a different kind of horror moment for that poor woman (or is that the plot to the sequel?)?  It's a good movie, I fully acknowledge that...please never put it in front of me again.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: The Blair Witch Project, Scream

John's Worst Films of 2017

Tonight, I will officially be announcing in my real life my favorites of the year (I do a teensy little awards show every year), and you’ll be getting my Top 10 best films list of the 2017 tomorrow on the blog.  However, in a year that was such a disaster in terms of the news, it has to be said that it wasn’t just politics that was causing anguish: it was also the movies.

While there was no egregiously-bad film like Stonewall that I managed to catch this year, there were surely a lot of bad movies that came out in 2017, or perhaps more damning, bland films.  Movies in 2017 were consistently “fine” or “okay” and rarely fascinating in a daring way, making going to the movies dull.  For that reason you’re not going to see movies that I thought took risks (like, say, mother!) mostly because I want filmmakers to take these kinds of chances, even if they aren’t always successful (it’s also because mother! is still better than all of these pictures, and that Razzy nomination for Lawrence in particular is just horrendous, as she’s good in the picture and not a little bit “the worst of the year”).  Instead, we go with the below failures, all of which I count as the last pleasant of the year (listed alphabetically):

Beauty and the Beast (dir. Bill Condon)

How do you ruin one of my all-time favorite movies?  Perhaps by draining it of humor, panache, or singers who can properly sing (sorry Emma, I love you but no, just no).  The film is underwhelming from the original in literally every way, and the sets look less like an organic castle and more like something you’d see in a Disneyland theme ride.  The cash grab clearly worked, but must Disney destroy everything special it makes with heinous duplication?

The Disaster Artist (dir. James Franco)

Franco’s last minute miss at the Oscars was almost certainly due to the sexual harassment allegations against him.  It should have been because he plays his role as Tommy Wiseau as a joke, a comic look at a man who has no understanding of himself.  He’s mysterious because Franco doesn’t do any homework, claiming “it’s just Tommy!” in a cheeky frat-boy move that cruelly tries to be a message movie about people without talent succeeding, but instead is a passionless, dull affair that feels less like talent letting loose and more like actors tricking their fans into paying for a bad film.  Also, Dave Franco gives arguably the most listless performance I recall seeing all year.

Downsizing (dir. Alexander Payne)

Stuffed to the brim with interesting ideas, Payne’s script ignores all of them, giving the audience just “passage of time” jumps when the picture itself could be at its most fascinating.  Weighed down by Matt Damon as a character that clearly has never had an original thought in his life, the movie meanders around major questions of the purpose of life, the foolishness of man, and the selfishness of “sacrifice,” but it doesn’t have a point-of-view on any of them.

The Greatest Showman (dir. Michael Gracey)

Though the music is occasionally fun (I liked “Never Enough” and “Rewrite the Stars” in particular), but this is a terrible actual movie.  No one is bringing their A-Game with the acting, with particularly awful performances from Jackman and Zendaya, both weakly connecting to their costars and in Jackman’s case, being in strained voice.  And that “This is Me” number might sound great coming out of Keala Settle, but the lyrics and back-half of the plot is so hackneyed it would have been cast out as too syrupy even in the fourth season of Glee.

Marjorie Prime (dir. Michael Almereyda)

Like Downsizing, this is not short on ideas or fine actors in the cast, but it has few answers for these questions.  It’s hard to criticize a film that finally gives Lois Smith a leading role, but her supporting cast does her no favors, with Jon Hamm playing his character as merely a plot device, and Geena Davis/Tim Robbins phoning in their roles with little care.  Coupled with a bizarre ending that feels so toss-away it’s difficult to figure out not only the purpose of this film, but also the point.

Marjorie Prime (2017)

Film: Marjorie Prime (2017)
Stars: Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Tim Robbins, Geena Davis
Director: Michael Almereyda
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of my favorite moments in all of cinema, perhaps my favorite moment in any Steven Spielberg film, features Lois Smith.  In Minority Report there's a terrific scene where she and Tom Cruise are in a greenhouse, surrounded by animated plants, and Smith is giving Cruise a lesson in the pre-cog system.  In the hands of a less capable actor, this would come across as lazy writing, using an unlikely meeting to unload a host of world-building expositional dialogue onto the audience, but Smith doesn't play it that way.  She creates a fascinating, brilliant but creepy scientist who infuses the action-adventure, already smart and well-structured to this point, with a sense of danger and a bit of malice.  You leave wanting more for her, assured she knows even more than what she's telling Cruise's befuddled John Anderton. Smith's ability here is a trademark skill of a longtime character actor, and I was fascinated by someone wanting to put her in the center of a film, rather than on its periphery.  Sadly Smith's acting ability is not able to help this long, draggy sci-fi film encumbered with ideas and "how smart are we's" but never actually connecting with the audience.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around a woman named Marjorie (Smith), who is in her 80's and battling dementia.  The film is set in 2050, and she lives in a posh seaside house where her daughter Tess (Davis), with whom she has a complicated relationship, has purchased a holographic projector that simulates her late husband Walter (Hamm).  The movie is almost entirely a series of conversations between two different people, in the first half Walter talking to Marjorie and her son-in-law Jon (Robbins).  The back half looks into the future with Marjorie and then Tess dying and becoming holographic "primes."

The film's premise is interesting, perhaps looking at how we sacrifice our current situation so fully by living in the past, or how we never really resolve conflicts with loved ones, or the loss we experience when they leave us.  But Marjorie Prime is more intent on thinking it's interesting than actually becoming so.  Central to the story's plot is a family secret, about how Marjorie's son Damien committed suicide 40 years prior, but this feels so tacked on and never properly addressed.  The idea of a family skirting around the same unspoken horror as the death of a child tearing them asunder has made dozens of great movies in the past, but Marjorie Prime treats it almost with the same importance as a forgotten first date.

This "great idea, poor execution" is consistent throughout the film.  We never really understand why Tess and Marjorie dislike each other, nor what Jon's opinion on his wife's family is, or really anything knowable about Walter.  Smith is the centerpiece, and too compelling to make this a complete failure, but Davis & Robbins add little to these roles, including understanding; both were actors who once sung onscreen, but years of inactivity or minor roles have left them unable to coast off of their once formidable onscreen personas and there's nothing "new" at play here.  Hamm has the hardest role, but is a complete miss as a robotic presence trying to find his programmed self.  I know it's become fashionable to diss January Jones whenever she's not Betty Draper, but honestly-has Hamm done anything worthwhile outside of Mad Men?  He's wooden and does little other than be handsome in Marjorie Prime.  The movie is a slog as a result, boring when it should be thrilling, and without enough central conflict to get anything out of its concept.

OVP: When Marnie Was There (2015)

Film: When Marnie Was There (2015)
Stars: Hailee Steinfeld, Kiernan Shipka, Vanessa Williams, Catherine O'Hara, John C. Reilly, Geena Davis, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Bates
Director: Hiromasa Yonebayashi
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

It's bizarre welcoming in what may well be the final Studio Ghibli film (I'm still stumped as to why the studio feels it can't function any longer without Hayao Miyazaki at the helm, but that's a discussion for a different day), and I suspect that the nostalgia for decades of quality entertainment made this an easy nomination that a lot of Oscar pundits failed to anticipate this past season.  The film's narrative is classic Ghibli, with enough magical realism thrown in amidst a story of a struggling young girl who can't find a way to fit in or acknowledge her status as a child of foster parents.  The movie's artistry is on clear display, even if its plotting is a bit off and not quite to the caliber I would have expected for a film that displaced the blockbuster likes of The Peanuts Movie and The Good Dinosaur.

(Spoilers Ahead) The problems here lie in the hopeless predictability of the main character, Anna (Steinfeld, and yes I got the English-dubbed version rather than the Japanese even though I always prefer the original-it's so difficult to find in the United States though!).  Anna is a girl who is raised by loving foster parents, though they receive money as a result of their status as foster parents from the government, which makes Anna distant and aloof.  They send her, as she suffers from asthma, to the country to live with relatives, and while there she comes across an abandoned mansion which feels deeply familiar to her and which occasionally is well-lit and restored to its former glory.  Eventually we learn that a girl lives there that only Anna can see named Marnie (Shipka), and along the way we find out that the girl is in fact the ghost of her grandmother, who is haunted by the fact that she cannot disconnect from the past, and in particular her horrible relationship with Anna's mother.  As the film progresses, everyone finds absolution, including Anna and Marnie, and the film ends happily with Anna moving on with her loving foster parents, realizing that there is family there.

The film's plot, though, is apparent from the outset.  It's pretty obvious, especially since the film underlines with a bold pen that Anna is biracial, that this girl is in some way her relative and likely her grandmother, and so a lot of the mystery, which is a big part of the story, feels taxing and starts to drag because you've already filled in all of the gaps.  When it finally comes time for the big reveal it felt a little like the finales on every season of Desperate Housewives-we'd already pieced together every angle so what was the point in replaying it like a recap?  The characters also get lost in translation a little bit, as it's not apparent why Anna suddenly realizes that her parents had received money from the government (do these children not understand such things?), and why she has such violent, cruel outbursts to those around her but not to Marnie.  The main character doesn't have the 3-dimensional appeal that I've come to expect from Studio Ghibli, which is disappointing.

The artistry on-display is, of course, divine, but even here it's questionable whether we're hitting new heights.  The film exhibits none of the inventiveness of Inside Out, the beauty of The Good Dinosaur, nor the perfect nostalgia of The Peanuts Movie.  The film plays with yellow and blue in some fun ways, particularly in the way the lake looks at night, but the movie's painting is just so-so and never comes close to, say, The Wind Rises which was so sensational a few years ago.  Overall I feel like any pangs of love I had for the film were tinged by memories of the movies that came before it, and sadness that this might be my last trip with such an important artistic force.

Those are my thoughts on When Marnie Was There-how about yours?  Where does it rank in your personal Studio Ghibli lineup?  Do you think they'll ever reopen?  And how do you think this beat out Peanuts and Dinosaur for a coveted Oscar slot?  Share your theories in the comments!

Ranting On...Gender Inequality in Film

Considering just this morning we were discussing the strength of one of the oldest Best Actress lineups ever, I think it is appropriate that we do our Friday rant on Jessica Chastain's comments earlier this week regarding Meryl Streep and the lack of roles for women Meryl's age that don't go to Ms. Streep.

First off, anyone who has learned more than two licks about Jessica Chastain knows that she clearly wasn't advocating for Meryl to take less parts (Jessica Chastain is in roughly eight million movies a year, so obviously she isn't advocating for that...kidding, I've met her and she's a sweetheart-this isn't how ardent film fan Jessica Chastain operates).  What she was advocating for is that "women of a certain age," including the talented women that she name-checked (Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, and Viola Davis) seem to fall by the wayside, and the extremely limited number of parts that go to Streep shouldn't be so limited-there should be more and more interesting parts for actresses in their 50's and 60's.

Chastain of course has a point (though I always wonder if Viola Davis, who is considerably younger than Streep, Lange, and Sarandon, doesn't feel a bit of a twinge when she gets lumped in with these women as they are not in the same age group).  While Lange and Davis have both enjoyed recent success on television (more on How to Get Away with Murder later next week when I manage to get through more of my DVR), cinematically the only American woman over 55 who consistently gets giant lead roles is Meryl Streep.  Most of the women of Meryl's generation like Sarandon and Lange, as well as Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates, Geena Davis, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, and Kathleen Turner (amongst others) all struggle mightily to get major film roles.  In the past decade, some of these women haven't even had a lead role, much less a role that would be critically-praised and widely seen (only Close has managed an Oscar nomination amongst this crew).

The question here, though, is two-fold.  Will people actually see critically-acclaimed films from these women if Hollywood were to producer them?  Hollywood does have a finite number of films that it can release each year, even if it seems like there’s an infinite number of screens to play films upon.  However, I think that it has been proven that with a combination of strong female-driven films over the past few years that there is a large appetite for women at the Box Office.  Bridesmaids, The Help, The Heat, Sex and the City, and It’s Complicated all cleared $100 million domestically.  The specific lead women in these films (save for Viola Davis) seem to have seen a bit of an increase in their overall cache since then, but it still feels like (save for Meryl) none of the women have been showered with the sort of adulation and roles that greet a new male member of the A-list (see how Ryan Gosling basically got any part he wanted after Blue Valentine but Michelle Williams didn’t get remotely as many).

It’s worth noting, looking at Bridesmaids and The Help in particular, how Hollywood doesn’t seem to have a farm team system when it comes to female actors in the same way that it does for male actors.  You get a hit like Wedding Crashers, and you see how Hollywood sees the potential in someone like Bradley Cooper in a supporting role, but then groomed for stardom.  This happens with someone like Zach Galifinakis in The Hangover films or any number of supporting players in the movies of Judd Apatow.  The same cannot be said for smash hits like Bridesmaids and The Help.  Yes, Jessica Chastain and Melissa McCarthy were plucked out of obscurity and given stronger parts, but McCarthy was the only supporting player who got major Box Office opportunities as a result.  Ellie Kemper, Octavia Spencer, Wendi McLendon-Covey, and even Rebel Wilson continue to get supporting parts despite having been major crowd-pleasers in these films.  They are either given continued supporting parts in comedic movies or are relegated to television even though they’ve proven they have potential in cinema.  This is clearly a gender-biased problem for Hollywood, as breakout male stars continually get limitless roles even when their potential is clearly tapped out (you think that a woman could have as many flops as Taylor Kitsch or Ryan Reynolds have had and still be working?).

If you expand beyond just looking at women of a certain age, and really expand to all women (as I have clearly done, though we’ll get back to Chastain’s point in a bit), you see an even more startling set of statistic.  The Geena Davis Institute (founded by the Oscar-winning actress) took a recent study of films from 2010-2013 (rated lower than R, as their focus is frequently on how women are perceived by younger women), and found some damning results.  Amidst some 5800 speaking or named characters, only 31% of them were women-nearly seventy percent of all speaking roles in films from that period were men.  This gets even worse if you look specifically at American productions, where 29.3% of characters are female, and only 30% of films had female leads or co-leads. 

The statistics get even more dire when you look at specific attributes of female roles.  Only 23.2% of employees in work-place scenes in American films are female, compared to the actual workforce, which is 46.3% and continually growing (a disparity nearly as high as large as the 23.2% of women in films, meaning that the number of women in these scenes would have to double to be accurate to real life).  If you look specifically at STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), you get perhaps the most disgusting imbalance: of the STEM jobs onscreen from the United States, only 12.5% were represented by women (half of what is true in the real workforce).  These statistics may seem nitpicky, but the reality is that they add up to a startling under-representation of women in cinema.

And they add to Chastain’s point in general, which is that women are under-represented.  That being said, the better question is why can’t we see more major films with our favorite actresses in their 50’s and 60’s.  This is a true conundrum, because Meryl Streep should serve as an indication that there is a hunger for these sorts of movies.  Streep’s films frequently gross over $100 million (even lower-tier hits like Hope Springs managed to do that), but she’s not the only one who is able to wow on the Art House circuit.  Look at the recent movies of Judi Dench (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel made $130 million on a $10 million budget), Maggie Smith (Quartet made nearly $60 million on an $11 million budget) or Helen Mirren (The Hundred-Foot Journey made nearly $80 million on a $25 million budget).  And this is just having these films play limited art houses across the country.  Imagine what would happen if they were to follow Streep’s lead and give them wide openings so that people across the country are able to see these films.  When a comic book movie or fairy tale movie plays well and makes a lot of money, Hollywood assumes that others will work-why don't they think the same when a comedy about a woman over fifty is successful?  You'd think this would be a no-brainer.

But for some reason Hollywood refuses to listen, and Hollywood directors refuse to be inspired, so we as an audience need to take matters into our own hands by supporting the works of women until Hollywood is beaten over the head enough to take it seriously.  That starts, for the record, today, and you can do it in a number of ways.  For starters you can:

1. Go out and add ten female-led pictures to your Netflix queue.

2. Make a point to catch a female-led picture from an actress over forty this fall (in fact, try to do it multiple times).  Some obvious contenders include Julianne Moore in Still Alice or Maps to the Stars, Meryl Streep in Into the Woods, or Maggie Smith in My Old Lady (this is a pretty sad indictment that there are so few, but if you see others on your screens, make a point of seeking them out).  Eventually Hollywood won’t just think it’s a fluke or “this one actress” but instead that it’s both this one actress and a number of her extremely talented peers.

3. Follow a favorite actress that you aren’t currently following on Twitter that you aren’t currently.  May I suggest Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Ellen Barkin, Marisa Tomei, Goldie Hawn, Kyra Sedgwick, Cher, and Marlee Matlin, though there are countless others.

4. Write to your local theater when they aren’t playing a Still Alice or Philomena or Quartet and demand to know why these films aren’t playing-the more they know that people want to see these films, the more likely they are to play them and give more women stronger opportunities to prove they can demand a strong box office.

5. And because it’s so easy-look for a female-driven television show that you’ve been meaning to Netflix but haven’t because you’re too into Breaking Bad or The Wire or Dexter or…well you get my point when it comes to shows that aren’t Orange is the New Black in the zeitgeist.  See what Scandal or Nurse Jackie or How to Get Away with Murder is like and you might just enjoy it.

These are just some ways that you can help Jessica Chastain’s mission.  The reality is that this is a larger issue that affects everywhere from Congress to the board room to the theater, and only through demanding it with your time and money will we see more of these incredibly talented actresses in roles that are worthy of them.