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.