Williston Observer

It Takes Two to Terrorize

3 popcorns

By Michael S. Goldberger

film critic

Point of disclosure: Save for classics like “Dracula” (1931) and “Frankenstein” (1931), I’m a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror films. I’m not simply afraid of them, but rather, in the parlance of childhood, ‘a-scared’ of them. That is, until now. Gripping my armrests in anticipation of a body-elevating jolt whilst viewing film auteur Jordan Peale’s “Us,” his unconnected follow-up to the highly praised “Get Out” (2017), the epiphany dawned on me. Having lived through the last two years of the real-life horror that has masqueraded as American politics, I am immunized. Any fiction purporting to be horror pales in comparison to what the genuine article bodes.

I’d have just as soon sailed along on the River Styx of frightening movie entrees, cowering in the dark with each film I opted to review. But I am now from innocence tossed, legitimately terrified. You may be familiar with the hackneyed but all the same ominous scene I’ve been relegated to play out these recent months. I see the monster, but despite all my frantic screaming about his treacherous presence, most of the burghers in the village pay no attention …some of them even trying to censure my exhortations: “He’s blinkin’ blimey crazy, he is.”

So, while I sat there in anticipation of involuntary launch, I appreciated the finely skilled dabs and streaks of the cinematic art with which Mr. Peale is so obviously gifted. But I saw the fiction for what it ultimately was…a baby rattle that might temporarily distract me from my discomfort. All of which suggested that the only thing left for me to do was to turn my attention to the multifarious metaphors Peale was actually crafting, as opposed to the ones I concocted.

In short, there is much to munch on here if the basic fact of doppelgangers terrorizing the Wilson family as they attempt to enjoy their summer vacation isn’t entertainment enough for you. For starters, you’ll want to figure out from whence these Bizarro-type doubles emanated and, as the Wilsons oft plead in high-pitched fright, what exactly do they want?

Although the catastasis and wrap-up kind of explain it, I found said recap even more confounding and, worried that I might do myself harm, have finally stopped scratching my head over the matter. Besides, the wise path here is probably to just take the surface cataclysms as the chaff, the action to keep our hearts palpitating, while the headier, philosophical propounding is for us to theorize après theatre at the local diner with the Glucksterns. It’s their turn to pay. You offer to leave the tip.

Interestingly, and perhaps a slight sign of social improvement in the American landscape, Peale never calls conscious attention to the fact that the Wilsons, Adelaide and Gabe, and their children, Zora and Jason, are African-American. Rather, they are, apparent from their trappings, simply upper middle class. The one exception, which also informs that Gabe has been to college, is the Howard University sweatshirt he wears throughout the harrowing proceedings. However, while those of an analytical bent may read more or less into it than Peale himself intended, the symbolism of the plot’s two entities, one fulfilled, the other deprived, lends itself handily to a cornucopia of sociological conjecture.

That said, whether frightened or not by the often gruesome goings-on as the duplicates invade the Wilsons’s summer manse, we are soon put in the uncomfortable, bloodthirsty position of rooting for our previously happy family to kill the interlopers by any means possible. All thoughts of political correctness go flying out the window when it comes to movie demons. You’re free to hate, hate, hate as much as your blood pressure will allow.

But of course, muddled as the message may be, the parable at play here suggests that guilt for being a Have in a world teeming with Have-Nots is in order. Whether you can do something about it aside from being a human sacrifice is another matter. The visitants’ steady, petrifying encroachment, oblivious to all beseeching, seems hell-bent on revenge and not remediation.

Making all this illusoriness as real as your suspension of disbelief deems acceptable, Lupita Nyong’o earns a gold star as both Adelaide Wilson and Red, while Winston Duke as Gabe Wilson and Abraham is also commendable in his double duty stint. And, doing their fair share of representing the typical American family and its evil alter ego, both Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are aces as the kids.

Granted, the “scare me, scare me” crowd may be disappointed by the dearth of old-fashioned, unremitting shocks to body and soul. But if one gives serious thought to this feature-length affirmation of cartoon pundit Walt Kelly’s theorem that we have met the enemy and he is “Us,” it’s probably the scariest prospect of all.

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“Us,” rated R, is a Universal Pictures release directed by Jordan Peale and stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke and Shahadi Wright Joseph. Running time: 116 minutes

For Whom the Loneliness Tolls
3 popcorns
By Michael S. Goldberger
film critic

My mother was beautiful. Not just pretty, but beautiful. At family gatherings, it was inevitably brought up: Who is more beautiful, Dora or Elizabeth Taylor? It was Mom’s cue to blush, although she kept serving and rarely sat down. Intentionally or not, her splendor impacted nearly every aspect of our lives. Whether taken to the shoe store or a visit to the doctor, it was a given: A beautiful woman had just walked into the room. People like beautiful. It fascinates them, whether wondering what it must be like to be beautiful or intellectually deliberating just what it is that makes one beautiful.

Here’s why I raise the subject. Inarguably beautiful Julianne Moore stars in Sebastián Lelio’s “Gloria Bell,” about a middle class, middle-aged divorcee who earns a living in a nondescript office job by day and hits the L.A. dance clubs by night in search of Prince Charming. While the makeup doesn’t accentuate Ms. Moore’s comely visage, neither does it purposely attempt to deter from it. The latter would surely be an awkward mistake. But that the fact of her exquisiteness is simply avoided, especially in light of a screenplay that is otherwise so commendably realistic, is perplexing.

My thesis here isn’t so Philistine to recommend that Gloria is liable to fare better in her eventual relationship with dance floor find, Arnold, also divorced, because of her pulchritude. It might just be my excuse for seeing how many synonyms I can find for beauty. But the thing is, Moore’s appearance can’t help but play in contrast to the regular gal she’s been assigned to portray. However, as we take it for granted that most movie actors, save for character types, are far more attractive than a random sampling of folks walking down any street U.S.A., most viewers won’t share my piddling reservations. Plus, that Julianne Moore is also as much a thespic talent as she is a Venus doubtless helps ameliorate the miscasting.

But whether because of her humanity or also for her loveliness, we like Gloria, and hope that John Turturro’s suitor turns out to be at least a reasonable facsimile of the gallant knight on the white horse come to rescue our gal from dying with her song still inside her. But again, leave it to me to also have a trifling problem with Mr. Turturro’s character.

While it’s completely understandable that we soon become impatient with Arnold’s sometimes quirky behavior, there just may be an unexplained answer that director Lelio should have at least broached. There’s something amiss…something happened here. A former Marine who runs an apparently lucrative paintball park, he is inordinately in the thrall of his ex-wife and two obnoxiously demanding daughters. And it just isn’t enough for me to simply recognize Arnold’s inability to compartmentalize his role as super breadwinner and emotional support extraordinaire. He is a main character and not a convenient widget or a mere sounding board to help delineate Gloria. I want to know just a little more.

All the same, attesting not only to Miss Moore and Mr. Turturro’s superb performances, but also to my status as a hopeless romantic, I nonetheless rooted enthusiastically for this pair of lovelorn souls. In a classic case of invoking that the end justifies the means, especially in the cause of something as sacred as amour itself, and lending dispensation over my detractions, I defer to Joe E. Brown’s wacky rejoinder in “Some Like it Hot” (1959) when Jack Lemmon’s Jerry tells him he’s a man: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

So, while “Gloria Bell” isn’t the definitive statement on a woman of certain years left in the lurch through the sometimes unkind vagaries of marriage, among the parade of middle-aged actresses who’ve taken their turn at this entranceway to roles for older ladies, it is one of the most genuine. Ms. Moore, especially when her character is expressing the seemingly endless hours of loneliness that can overtake every other aspect of singlehood, proves a master of evocative nuance. Although we all know, especially through the canons of the modern woman’s movement, that no one should be defined by whether or not they have a life partner, here we witness that there are challenges nonetheless to overcoming old modes and conventions.

I mean, there’s a reason why we’ve generally attempted to pair off over these vast millennia, whether to swing from chandeliers together, to have someone there in the middle of the night to call the EMTs, or for any number of those infinite proclivities that seem unfathomable to others. Before the current awakening to self-determination, folks who didn’t participate in the mating game were often considered either selfish or undesirable…termed old maids, confirmed bachelors and, only in the rarest of positive estimations, exonerated as free spirits. But of course there has always been much more to it, and in Moore’s “Gloria Bell” the savvy glimpse beyond the stereotype rings true.
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“Gloria Bell,” rated R, is an A24 release directed by Sebastián Lelio, and stars Julianne Moore, John Turturro and Michael Cera. Running time: 102 minutes

As in, Letters of…
3 popcorns
By Michael S. Goldberger
film critic

One has to be either a fool or a complicit coward not to recognize the mercilessness regularly perpetrated on humankind by immoral governments and their tyrannical leaders. Equally clueless are those who don’t realize that the worldwide, mass immigration being used as a scapegoat by said guilty-as-sin autocrats is in essence a product of their regimes’ greed, racism and ineptness. Ever notice that the really bad guys are never ever wrong? While Rick in “Casablanca” (1942) occasionally confesses to a lack of judgement, you’ll never hear good Nazi Major Strasser admitting a mistake. Civics Lesson #1: Rick is good; Major Strasser is bad.

What all this has to do with “Transit,” adapted by director Christian Petzold from Anna Seghers’s 1942 novel, is just about everything, albeit in an artistic, symbolic, poly-metaphorical way. Read the plot synopsis and it seems rather clear-cut: A man fleeing France from the invading Germans assumes, at first unintentionally, the identity of a dead author whose wife he falls in love with upon their chance meeting. She doesn’t know her husband is dead. However, in weaving his muckraking tale of turmoil and inhumanity in the world of borders, checkpoints and provincialism, leave it to Petzold to invariably take the more obscure path.

Perhaps it’s his form of audio-visual touch-n-feel in an attempt to make us appreciate the uncaring horror inflicted on those caught in the vice of tyrants playing at government. And just to make it a little more murky in an art house sort of way, especially for those watching it stateside with subtitles, while Ms. Seghers’s story takes place in the 1940s, when the Nazis are indeed invading and occupying France, Mr. Petzold asserts a current poignancy by setting it in the present day. To further complicate matters, subtitles or not, you can’t help but feel a tad disoriented by actors speaking German playing the French people who are being forced to flee from the Nazis who would “cleanse” them.

We are tossed headlong into the discomfort of the protagonist, Georg, ably played by Franz Rogowski, an everyman attempting to find some sort of mental and physical terra firma on which to stand in this never-ending upshot of a Babel toppled for its overweening vanity. Marie (Paula Beer), the starry-eyed wife who simply won’t believe that her famous writer spouse is dead, co-represents the face of immigrants. They weren’t born immigrants with DNA denoting that, but flung into it, putting a face on it. In short, people just like you and me. They once went to work, watched TV at night, rooted for Bernie at the little league game on Saturday and agonized about not being able to find a good, honest handyman. Now someone wants to see their letters of transit, and more often worse.

The film is a refresher course in what goes on if we blink too long and miss the signs alerting us to a democracy in jeopardy. Sadly, I know the story only too well, not because I am astute, but because I have been around for a while and those ignominious powers that be rarely take a break from their blatant attempts to evaporate our freedom. They are the bully in the playground who grew up without benefit of a life-changing epiphany. This isn’t happy viewing. Still, while it would be more enjoyable were I a college sophomore parsing the recently screened film in a coffee shop with my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed cohorts, and planning how we will change the world, I’m grateful the discussion is still in progress.

Granted, it is esoterically embroidered. Yet even after we’re confident that “Transit” is like something Aesop may have written were he determined to challenge the wiles and wherefores of contemporary totalitarianism, we’re still at a bit of a loss. You can’t help but feel that there is yet another cryptic element of human psychology to be deciphered, that there is a gene in some folks that not only precludes them from calling out obvious tyrants, but actually causes them to vociferously side with them. Organisms in good health move toward pleasure and away from pain. Thus, one needn’t be Dr. Freud to understand that any aberration thereof is, well, aberrant, and in human beings specifically, downright unsociable.

Plopped atop all this highminded contemplation, director Petzold submits a mini thesis on bravery and sacrifice in the face of world upheaval. And, proving that brilliant minds do indeed think alike, one should note that while the windup in “Transit” bears heroic similarities to “Casablanca,” the two stories were written at about the same time. Both are primers of civic-mindedness that essentially ask, would that candidate you’re about to vote for give up his or her letters of transit so that Victor Laszlo and Ilsa could continue their fight for freedom?
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“Transit,” not rated, is a Music Box Films release directed by Christian Petzold and stars Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer and Godehard Giese. Running time: 101 minutes

Guilty Thrills

2 popcorns

By Michael S. Goldberger

film critic

In my bedroom when I was little, a sloppily misplaced piece of clothing on a chair in the dark of night sure could look like a saber-toothed tiger. Experiencing this and other such optical illusions every so often during those tender years, I estimate that I adequately satisfied the quota for horror that one must endure in a lifetime. Hence, it should go without saying that horror and all its filmic relations are my least favorite forms of cinema entertainment. Nevertheless, in the esprit de corps of being an equal opportunity film critic, I like to think I approach every such movie with open-minded challenge. But hark, in every instance I am also on a mission. It is my great white whale. Someday I will at long last find out, why do people like this stuff?

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