The Scariest Movies of My LIFE

In my continuing efforts to disavow all holidays, I will be celebrating Halloween by working at my dad's network tonight. Nonetheless, the last vestiges of my holiday spirit cropped up yesterday and demanded that I do a film-based retrospective.

So here we are. It should come as no surprise that the subject of this retrospective will be horror, one of my favorite of all movie genres. Something about the grotesque... the unknown... the tangible becoming intangible... intangible becoming tangible... it gets me.

Horror fans tend to obsess over their pet genre, tracking down obscure gems and popular turds alike for voracious consumption. My knowledge isn't nearly as encyclopedic as most horror enthusiasts, but hey, that's what the rest of my life is for. In the meantime, I'll focus on what I have experienced.

What you are about to see is not a list of the best horror films I have ever seen. You won't find horror masterpieces like The Thing, The Shining, The Cabin in the Woods, or Psycho. Rather, this is a list of the ten films that scared me the most when I saw them. It's a purely personal compilation. Well-constructed horror films are more likely to terrify, but each of us is frightened by such idiosyncratic things. Bob 1 might find insects terrifying but is unfazed by the threat of stalker psychos in a character's backyard. Bob 2 is unafraid of insects unless they talk, and unafraid of psychos unless they don't. Bob 3 finds anthropomorphic appliances disturbing on a deep existential level. It's a crapshoot: one that I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I would love to hear about your scariest movies.

I'm not a person who scares easily--it takes a lot for a movie to elicit any sort of visceral reaction from me--but we are about to embark on a tour of the ten movies that have done the most to shape the disturbances of my conscious and subconscious imagination.

As they say in the I Spy: Haunted Mansion computer game that I used to play: Enter if you dare... you're in for a scare.

Everything rhymed in that game.

ALL IS LOST: A Silent Monologue

In which a seventy-seven year old actor loses 60% of the hearing in his left ear because he decides to do his own stunts.

Director: J. C. Chandor

Writer: J. C. Chandor

Cast: Robert Redford

Runtime: 106 mins.

2013

All Is Lost asks the question: Why would anybody go on a boat?

The movie begins with a brief Hemingwayesque voiceover in which Robert Redford's character shares a few sparse sentiments. "I tried to be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't." We don't know who he's speaking to--us? God? a loved one?--but he goes on to say that all is lost now, and that he is sorry.

This is the only significant dialogue in the entire movie, and it is dispensed with in the first thirty seconds. It's not specific, and the words aren't especially beautiful in and of themselves. But the essentialist quality of these phrases hangs over the essential action that is to follow, such that it gains much meaning and nuance and significance as we witness the eight days leading up to these words. There are many trials in this movie--the protagonist wakes to find his boat skewered by a shipping container filled with tiny sneakers, and he patches the ship up just in time to encounter a series of massive storms brewing on the horizon--but the focus is always on the man at the center of it all. Or maybe the trials are the man. And the man is the movie. It's hard to separate them.

String Theory: The Trailer for AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

I've never done an analysis of a trailer before. Trailers are such contentious pieces of entertainment. Some people wait with bated breath for the release of trailers, and ogle them ten, twenty, a hundred times before the movie arrives in theaters. For them, anticipation reaches a fever pitch--and they are often disappointed, as I was with the release of Spider-Man 3. I had watched the trailer so many times that the real film paled in comparison to the ideal film that reeled around in my head. My feelings were kind of hurt.

Other folks avoid trailers as if they were sources of eye infection. The idea behind swearing off a trailer is that you want to come into the movie fresh, on its own terms, free of bias and expectation. I believe I adopted this method before seeing The Grand Budapest Hotel. I knew it was a critically acclaimed Wes Anderson film, so I needed no further information to convince me to see it. Thus, I had an excellent movie-watching experience in which Anderson's colorful world unfolded before my very eyes, complete with unexpected cameos and untainted gags.

Right now I fall in between these two camps. Ideally I like the purism of the second approach, as it seems the most fair to let a movie express itself outside the dirty, necessary confines of advertisement. On the other, trailers are exciting. They give you a glimpse into a new world and let you hope for the best.

It's with both of those attitudes in mind that I dig into an analysis of the hot-off-the-presses Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer. There was no way I was going to avoid this one, especially because we all already have loose expectations about the film. Why not use it as a platform for speculation and observation? Besides, the movie doesn't come out until May. We'll both have forgotten that I wrote this by then.

See my Age of Ultron review here.

GONE GIRL: Gone in 149 Minutes

In which Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are both cast in a thriller for the first and last time ever.

Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
Runtime: 149 mins.
2014

David Fincher feeds on twisty structures and mind games. It's his lifeforce. His body of work is one sinister game after another: Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, House of Cards, and the most cheekily named The Game. He thrives on these house-of-mirror thriller structures, generally at the expense of real, convincing, or meaningful characters. Go ahead and try to name one truly memorable character from Fincher's filmography--and before you say Tyler Durden, Frank Underwood, or Mark Zuckerberg, let me add one more caveat: a memorable character who isn't a sociopath. The list runs thin, doesn't it?

Fincher has made a career of taking trashy source materials/ideas and elevating them to the level of Serious Cinema. To be clear, I love trashy stories. They don't have to be mere entertainment, although they can be. They can also be fodder for all sorts of interesting intellectual interpretations. Fincher clearly believes this, and he has always walked the fine line between giving genre fiction the attention of craft that he feels it deserves, and taking it all rather too seriously to the point of losing perspective. His best work tends to be the former, and if it can be said that any of his films have "failed," they belong to the latter category.

Lucky for us, Gone Girl features both a twisty-turny thriller structure, and characters who are designed more to be avatars than believable people--a Fincher special! Double lucky for us, Gone Girl may be a serious affair, but it never mistakes itself for what it's not. This movie is a thriller all the way down.

PRISONERS: Scares and Scars and Cares and Cars

In which we have fun watching twitchy Jake Gyllenhaal twitch.

 

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Aaron Guzikowski
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, Maria Bello, David Dastmalchian
Runtime: 153 mins.
2013

Before seeing the movie, there was nothing in particular that enticed me about Prisoners. The promotional posters were dour, the trailers forgettable. The title didn't inspire. Jackman and Gyllenhaal can be strong actors, but have an equal propensity for coasting. Even the premise itself, a dark gritty child abduction thriller, feels been-there-done-that.

It took a very direct and specific recommendation for me to seek the movie out, and I'm glad because most of my preconceptions were askew. As far as thrillers go Prisoners manages to be thrilling for most of its bloated 153 minutes, which is high praise for a genre subject to more cliches than most.

HER: Artificial Emotional Intelligence

In which I am uncharacteristically honest and sensitive.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Runtime: 126 mins.
2013

I try to sound smart on my movie blog. I try to identify and engage with what I deem to be the key aspects of any given movie. I talk about things I know a little bit about, like performance or story. I talk about things I really know nothing about, like sound design or editing or cinematography. I try to be honest. But perhaps more than that I try not to sound stupid or inane.

I do this because I'm afraid of being wrong. That has always been my fear. So I try to make ironclad arguments instead of tossing out a bunch of unsystematic sensory impressions. Sometimes, during the act of watching a movie, I am already formulating what sort of points or narrative I want to craft in a potential future post.

That's probably the right tactic for a movie blog, but it's not the conversation I want to have about Her. The golden rule of criticism should be to approach a piece of art or entertainment on its own terms, and evaluate how successful it is within those parameters. As I was watching Her, it became apparent that the right way to talk about the movie would be to share how it impacted me on a personal level.

Top Ten TV Time!

More than any other entertainment medium,* the way we interact with television has changed the most in my lifetime. It used to be that our lives were structured around the TV. If you cared about a show enough to keep up with it, you had three options.

*A good argument could be made for video games. I might respond that even as the games themselves have taken massive leaps, the way we orient ourselves to video games has stayed much the same, with the clear exception of online gaming. Not being an online gamer, I'm not in a position to compare. Though it's interesting that in both cases (online games and streaming television) the new factor is the internet.

1. Make sure your schedule was clear every ___________ night at __ o'clock.
2. Finagle with your VCR with the hopes of recording the episode on a VHS.
3. Hope like hell you could catch the missed episode in a re-run.

Television lent itself to tradition. Families like mine set aside sacred time every week to watch the new episode of Survivor or CSI. People squirreled away tapes of their favorite shows collected over the course of months, like I did with The Simpsons and Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Folks surrendered their fates to unpredictable re-runs, maybe a previously unexperienced morsel of entertainment, maybe a purgatory of that one episode you've seen half a dozen times and then some.

The Netflix model changed everything. Of course it had its precursors in TiVo and other digital recording services, but the sea change happened with Netflix. It killed the video stores.

Netflix, and streaming television in general, gave television viewers what filmgoers had for years: agency. No longer do we have to respect the sacred space-time of a regularly scheduled program. Instead, television bends to our individual humanistic whims. Sneaking bits and pieces of TV on public transportation or binging a show in the middle of the night, we have profaned television with our vulgar desires.

I like it a lot better that way.

NOAH: An Ark of a Different Color

In which the Bible gets weird.

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth
Runtime: 138 mins.
2014

Noah could have gone one of two ways.

It could have catered to its Christian audience, presenting a souped up but conservative Noah narrative that would please the religious crowd and hopefully nab the sad group of Russell Crowe fans that remain loyal. In other words, it could have gone the way of God Is Not Dead, a fundamentalist narrative about the triumphs of faith that was released around the same time as Noah, and is of course laughably inept from a filmmaking perspective. But it makes the Christian audience happy. I don't mean to pick on Christian movies, fundamentalism in general makes for bad filmmaking: we need only look at the recently released conclusion to the Atlas Shrugged trilogy, which is apparently one of the most embarrassing excuses for a movie trilogy to ever be ejaculated onto the populace.

Alternately, Noah could have abandoned the Christian (and Jewish, though I can't imagine they would mind nearly as much) audience by taking loads of silly liberal liberties with the Noah narrative, in an attempt to appeal to the sort of folks who get excited about a Hercules movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Fundamentalist Christians would have become this film's enemy, going on crusades about how the Hollywood machine has tainted Truth yet again. Most others would have ignored it as a version of Evan Almighty that didn't pretend to be funny.

I let Noah slip under my radar because I wasn't interested in watching either of those possibilities. I made a mistake. It turns out Noah is a PG-13 action movie that doesn't fall into either of the above categories. It falls into a category of its own. It is like nothing you've ever seen before.

A lot of people called it bad. Everybody called it weird. I call it confusing, exciting, beautiful, and tremendously uneven. I don't understand what it all means, but I have a review to write, so I'm going to pretend.

PROXY: A Dead Baby Joke

In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.

Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013

Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.

So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?

THE LEGO MOVIE: Everything Is Meta

In which we behold Will Ferrell's face with a sense of awe.

Directors: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Writers: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Cast: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Ferrell, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Will Arnett, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman
Runtime: 100 mins.
2014

There are three types of movie watchers. (Okay, there are a million types of movie watchers, but I'm trying to construct a framework here.) Thoughtless movie watchers, Thoughtful movie watchers, and Thoughtfilled movie watchers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Thoughtless movie watchers. Most folks watch movies this way. Passive entertainment to be digested and promptly set aside. They're the kinds of folks who think that another Transformers movie sounds pretty good, why not. Or another Marvel movie. Or another Liam Neeson action thriller. Or another kids' movie based on a familiar property. If it strikes them as good and comfortable, they'll see it. You could get into ethical/political arguments about this type of filmgoer, and whether they should be more thoughtful about the ramifications of their choice of media consumption (the studio system gets screwed up by the popularity of movies like Transformers and ends up churning out more crap like it--not to mention the dangerous sexism and racism and political sentiments those movies espouse, etc. etc.). But that's another argument for another time. Thoughtless movie watchers are fine. They would enjoy a movie like the movie I'm writing about today.

For Thoughtful movie watchers, passive digestion isn't enough. They bring a critical eye to their consumption, and tend to appreciate films more on the level of craft. They're careful about what movies they spend their time and money on, and they want to discuss them after the fact. They go crazy with writing self-important movie reviews to post on a blog nobody reads. They are the kinds of people who would be immediately suspicious about everything surrounding a movie like The Lego Movie, which has Corporate Cash Grab written all over its cylindrical yellow face. They would be primed to dismiss the movie as capitalist tripe and move on to the next Scorsese or Tarantino film. Until they started hearing glowing reviews for The Lego Movie pour in, which would pique their curiosity. They couldn't help but investigate the hype, and they would watch The Lego Movie, wary but cautiously open-minded. And once they acclimated themselves to the strange animation style and gag-heavy energy of the beginning of the film, they would be totally on board.

Thoughtfilled movie watchers are a different matter. They are the folks who are trying to be critical and thoughtful about movies, but are unwilling or unprepared to approach a film on its own terms. Instead, their heads are filled with mountains of preconceptions and assumptions about media that they have not yet digested, and as a result their perspective will often be skewed. Like the Thoughtless movie watchers, they will give you a weird look whenever you talk about a movie that is somehow foreign or off-kilter to their sensibilities (although the look from the Thoughtless movie watchers will contain more confusion, and that of the Thoughtfilled will contain more condescension). Like the Thoughtful movie watchers, these folks will come to the conclusion that The Lego Movie is a Corporate Cash Grab immediately after it enters their radar. They might even look down on the ignorant masses who will no doubt flock to the theaters to throw their money at such a ploy. They will avoid this movie if they can, reviews be damned. And if they happen to see the movie, they will cynically pick it apart as well as they can, because no movie based on a kid's toy property could possibly be an intelligent, unique, energetic, engaging, worthwhile, socially conscious piece of cinema. Right?

RIGHT????

Surprise surprise, The Lego Movie defies all expectations and somehow manages to be all those positive qualities I just mentioned. And you know what? I think my theory might be wrong in this case. Unlike other movies like this, I honestly believe that if you managed to sit a Thoughtfilled movie watcher down in front of this movie, they would be converted by the end. That's the unprecedented power of The Lego Movie.