the long night of joy and sadness (inside out)

Pixar has proven itself capable of great pathos before--Jessie's story in Toy Story 2, the prologue to Up, the climax of Toy Story 3--but it has outdone itself with Inside Out, dealing quite literally in emotions while also playing with (and if you know the premise, this makes perfect sense) the emotions of those emotions and the emotions of the audience.

Consider the following a minor SPOILER, because it offers up more than the trailers do. Inside Out is about an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) whose life is falling apart after her parents move the family from Minnesota to San Francisco. But really, the film is about so much more, and the personified Joy (Amy Poehller) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and the imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) are the real show here. Joy and Sadness get accidentally removed from the headquarters in Riley's mind and (major SPOILERS ahead) Riley's internal world starts literally falling apart just as her external world figuratively does. Most of the film takes place over the course of a single night and day in which Joy and Sadness, with the help of Bing Bong, try to get back to headquarters so Riley will not be an emotionless preteen.

The plot is actually fairly simple, but insightful dissection of this little girl's emotional state works quite well as a representation of all of our emotional states. There is truth to this film--just as there has been in many a Pixar film. And, not to be too obvious about it, there is great joy and great sadness as well. Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) have their moments, as do the emotions of Riley's parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) and of several other characters at the end of the film (living in a house with three cats, I must say the representation of a cat's emotional life was dead on).

The design of the headquarters and the rest of Riley's mind is not, as one might expect--and as its simplistic version early on might seem), arbitrary, but quite logical, and the reason for the simplicity is explained--SPOILERS, simple version, Riley was a child so her interests were narrow, more complicated version, Joy was overbearing and overprotective.

Ultimately, the idea that we need sadness to get by is not a novel concept but it is a powerful one.

Inside Out is Pixar on top of its game once again.

"it follows" the old formula

It Follows is a well made, (mostly) well acted horror film that relies more on suspense and some interesting camera work than jump scares. But, it is built around a rather antiquated horror-film-theme--that sex is dangerous. It almost plays like a mid-80s slasher film just with more modern cinematic sensibilities. The danger in It Follows...

SPOILERS AHEAD

The danger in It Follows is rather literally tied to sex. Potential victims can pass the danger along through sex, which both promotes casual sex--surely, if you must pass on the danger to survive, you'd rather give it to a stranger than someone you know and love--and suggests repeatedly that sex at all is a bad idea.

We are never offered an origin story for It, but it seems important, and telling, that the first time we see It it is a naked woman and another time we see It it is a half naked woman, her clothing torn. There seems to be a suggestion of origination in sexual assault, which ties so nicely into the casual sex line that it seems a bit too on-the-nose. Furthermore, toward the end of the film, when the main characters attempt to fight back against It, there is a Freudian angle in It appearing as the father of the lead character--Maika Monroe, carrying the heavy load while supporting cast members are occasionally superfluous... I forgot to mention that, as part of the sex-is-dangerous theme, It can appear as a stranger or as someone you know. The danger is everywhere. It's like an abstinence-only PSA got together with a horror film... In fact, other than a bit of CGI trickery here and there, the script would probably sit quite well in the 1980s, or the swinging 70s.

The film plays on a strangely anachronistic nostalgia, as well, but not for the 80s or the 70s but the 1950s. Characters regularly watch old science fiction films, including at a silent movie theater equipped with an organ for accompaniment. Like many a slasher film, the political bent of It Follows is quite conservative. So, of course the film yearns for a simpler time, for childhood. Jay (Monroe) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist, who seems vacuous in some scenes and quite brilliant in others) talk repeatedly about the time when they were younger and they kissed. Ultimately, this is a lead up to their having sex near the end of the film, but it also reinforces the idea that the more innocent past is the better reality.

All of that being said, It Follows is definitely worth viewing, especially if you are a fan of horror films. Imagine it's a film from the early- to mid-80s and it will play so much better, though.

and so it begins, the groundhog day project

I’ve never written a review of Groundhog Day, as far as I know. But, I’ve seen the movie many times, and I used it in nearly every round of impromptu when I was doing competitive speech and debate in college. That last one—that’s because you can use the movie to cover just about any theme. Phil Connors is not only a great central character for a good comedy like this—not that there are many comedies like this—but he works as an everyman and he goes through all the emotions we all do every day of our lives. There is time in the film (not to mention the many parts of his journey we don’t see on screen) for joy, for sadness, for arrogance and humility, silliness and seriousness, flippancy and philosophy.

The trailer for the movie gets a lot out of the idea of “living life like there’s no tomorrow.” That is perhaps the central idea to the film. But, for Phil, it’s not just a question of doing anything and everything; he starts out arrogant and self-centered, so his early attempts to live like there’s no tomorrow are shallow and simplistic. He manipulates his way into a date, to get money, to eat a lot of junkfood… put simply, he does what any of us might do if we had the opportunity to repeat one day over and over. But, there are consequences, not the least of which is boredom.

There is a telling moment early on in the film, when Phil asks Gus and Ralph, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” Ralph’s response: “That about sums it up for me.” Most of our lives are already repetitive. Day in, day out. We work our day jobs and spend our nights watching television—not all of us, certainly, but it seems the case that most of us simply cannot live life like there’s no tomorrow. We’ve got responsibilities: school, work, family, friends. Maybe the reason the film works so well is that, despite deeper philosophical themes, there’s an absurdist fantasy at the heart of it; it’s not that we want the chance to repeat a day, though fixing some mistakes could alter our lives completely, but we want the chance to spend a day doing whatever comes to mind. We wish that we could operate by our whims and whimsy. We could dress like Clint Eastwood just to go to a movie. We could eat without worrying about weight gain. We could even drive on the railroad tracks.

Or, maybe it’s just funny.

What makes Groundhog Day a good comedy, regardless of larger themes? Is it Bill Murray’s ability to play a loveable scoundrel? Is it the remarkable balance between comeuppance and growth that Phil experiences? Is it the one liners? Is it possible the subject of repeating a day, though it has been done for dramatic effect—notably, I liked ABC television’s Day Break, but it did do poorly in the ratings that maybe it proves the following point—works best as comedy because of the way comedy works, the way jokes work. Comedy often is about the subverting expectations. The classic, and obvious, example is, Why did the chicken cross the road? We want an answer that gives us insight into motivation and maybe even the human condition (well, maybe not with the chicken, specifically). But, the classic response both subverts expectation and gives us just what we want, a real answer. The chicken did cross the road to get to the other side. Sure, we might want to go a few more steps up the list of causality, figure out why the chicken wanted to get to the other side, but comedy doesn’t work that way. In an interview with The Weekly, emmy-winning comedy writer and producer Ben Karlin had this to say about the challenges of writing comedy:

I think the challenges of writing comedy differ from person to person. For me, it’s always a struggle to find something interesting to say, to find a unique point of view or a way of expressing something that hasn’t been said before. Comedy is about subverting expectation and audiences are so sophisticated. They have read and watched and experienced so much that the biggest trap you can fall into is writing something that has been done before – and often done better.

Groundhog Day not only plays with the usual tropes and expectations of comedy but presents us with a plot built entirely on repetition, not only doing what’s been done before, but doing it again and again and again, providing us clear expectation in repetition then subverting that repetition. Sure, it’s a giant fantasy about living without consequences, and it’s also about seeing just how crazy Phil Connors can be in that situation, just how much can he get away with—we live vicariously through Phil and often the simplest comedy in the film comes from the subtle and not-so-subtle (Phil punching Ned Ryerson, for example) differences from day to day. Mostly, it’s played broadly, but then deeper points gets injected. For example, in the same scene that Phil has his table of desserts, Rita quotes a Sir Walter Scott poem to comment on his egocentrism. A little bit of depth to counterbalance and even augment the comedy.

Or, maybe it’s just funny.

Despite the repetitive structure, Groundhog Day still manages to have a pretty basic 3-act structure like most any other film out of Hollywood. Phil exploits his circumstances, he learns the failings of it, then he figures out that the key might not be making the best of the situation but making the best of himself. That’s Groundhog Day put simply. But, I don’t want to just put it simply. I want to break it down, tear it apart, look at its parts and what those parts tell us about life, the universe, and everything.

So, the plan: I will watch Groundhog Day every day, and I will explore its aspects and research into its tangents. I will run the film into the ground and, I hope, build it right back up again. Like Phil Connors with his day in Punxsutawney, I will probably have some crazy ideas early on, I will probably get sick of the film after a while and watching it and writing about it will become a chore. But, sometime later, maybe I can explore the film in such a way that I rebuild it, rebuild myself, and maybe help my readers, whoever they may end up being, to rebuild themselves with a better grasp of, dare I say it, the human condition.

Or, maybe it will just be funny.

Anyway, welcome to The Groundhog Day Project. Don’t forget your booties ‘cause it’s cold out there.

In the future, follow The Groundhog Day Project at http://groundhogdayproject.blogspot.com/.

Darth Maul’s weird little brother… AKA Insidious

The opening shot of Insidious promises lame visuals the likes of numerous online websites purporting to have evidence of ghosts, you know blurry shapes in the background of photos, shadows in windows (except the opening shot of the film doesn’t bother to let us know that there’s no one there to cast this shadow, so this is in no way scary or even necessarily interesting), an old grandfather clock at the end of a hallway… because clocks are so scary (and, SPOILER alert: the clock is never relevant to the plot in any way).

The opening titles, and the music cues (with screeching violins that someone thought would be reminiscent of old gothic horror films but which in practice was taken too far) are lame. For no reason other than maybe the director thinks older horror films are cool, the shots during the title sequence are in black and white, with red smoky titles, you know the kinda stuff that would be cool to add to your homemade video maybe but that was silly anywhere else for at least a couple decades now… if not forever.

And then, the story begins. Mother and son have matching pajamas… no reason, and she never wears them again, it’s just something to make cute a scene that isn’t already, shouldn’t be, and really still isn’t even with the matching pajamas. Insert Chekhov’s photo album—for those who don’t get the reference, Chekhov’s gun, aka the gun on the mantle, is a fairly basic trick of drama. You introduce the gun in the first act, it goes off in the final act. Of course, the real trick is to not make the gun so obvious, but oh, no, there are no photos of your father as a child, at all, is such a silly detail that there’s absolutely no way that won’t come up later.

But, anyway, on with the story. Seems, a couple who seem to be barely middle class—he’s a high school teacher and she, well, briefly it seems like she’s a songwriter, but that is a useless detail inserted to add some depth or something (and to have one of their boxes go missing and have it matter to these characters… except she barely seems concerned, finds it like one scene after she’s noticed it’s missing and husband can’t be bothered to care it’s gone, so I guess he doesn’t care much for her songwriting… except there’s an attempt at a “cute” bedroom scene in which she asks which of her songs is his favorite, he suggest she write a song about him, laughter ensues and if there’d been a cinematically appropriate sex scene to follow, maybe there would have been something good in this film…

Anyway, backtracking, there are boxes (one of which went missing and shows up in the attic) because husband and wife and three kids, one named Dalton, and the other two named extraneous and superfluous, have just moved into a new house. And, despite random box from moving showing up in attic, the attic is in no way scary. Still, Dalton  finds his way up there when the door opens itself, which really doesn’t jibe with the rest of the film, as the spirits don’t need him up there, and his going in the attic serves no actual plot purpose… seriously, though he falls off the broken ladder (another Chekhov’s gun set up maybe two scenes earlier when wife ventured into the attic and found her box of sheet music, even though she will only be seen near the piano once and that is probably just because the filmmaker thought it would be more interesting than her doing something housewife-ish) and hits his head—somehow hurting the front of his head even though he obviously hits the back of it, by the way—this ISN’T the cause of his coma… oh wait, “it’s not a coma, they don’t know what to call it,” as the line in the trailer goes, except yeah, it’s a coma, the doctor says it’s a coma, he just doesn’t know what’s caused Dalton to go all comatose. But, “not a coma” is so much more mysterious than “coma of unknown origin” I guess.

Anyway, Dalton into coma, jump ahead a few months, wife is all depressed—maybe that’s why she isn’t wearing her pajamas anymore, except such a detail of characterization seems far too complicated for this script; it’s more likely the costume department lost them. But, she’s sitting at the piano, writing a song and hears a voice over the baby monitor. So, she heads up to baby superfluous’ room and there’s no one there. And, the scares begin… (at this point, I wish that “not” line from Wayne’s World hadn’t gotten old, because that is exactly the lame joke I need)

Some other stuff happens, husband stays late at work (and there’s a drawing of the clown from Saw (a much better film that I now must assume was entirely because of the script, because James Wan is an awful director) just to make us hope Jigsaw will show up, or maybe this film is actually our Jigsaw trap, and we have to chew through our own eyes so we don’t have to see anymore of this) for no reason except wife is annoying, extraneous says he doesn’t like how Dalton walks around at night—oh, forgot to mention, Dalton is now at home, with medical stuff hooked up to him and everything; there’s even a brief scene in which the nurse shows wife how to insert a breathing tube in his nose, and there’s some cheesy line in there, the nurse telling the wife that the universe messed with the wrong woman, or something like that, even though we have no reason to a) think the nurse knows anything about wife, b) believe that wife is at all capable of caring for her comatose kid or c) care.

There are some ghosts, a kid who changes the song on the turntable—yes, wife has a turntable to go with the grandfather clock, because in this film there is nothing new, no new ideas and no new technology—and laughs and runs around, which doesn’t make him scary so much as a) potentially cute and b) mildly annoying. There’s also some large man in a trenchcoat who paces on the balcony then shows up in bedroom to lunge at wife and… well, not make contact because… well, I’m not sure why. Several times in the film, these spirits, be they ghosts or demons are simply scared away by the light being turned on—which really means there’s an easy way to protect Dalton, just turn on the lights in his room, but that’s too obvious—but in this instance, I think he just went away. And, eventually, there’s also the titular (well, Darth Maul’s Retarded Little Brother should’ve been the title at least) Junior Sith Lord,  who’s a demon, who likes to paint half his face red, sharpen his fingers on an old grinding wheel and listen to “tiptoe through the tulips” mostly because, apparently, the filmmaker thinks that song is creepy. Except, combined with Junior Sith Lord, it’s just good for a laugh at how pathetic this film has gotten.

Enter husband’s mother, who tells us about a dream she had with Junior Sith Lord hanging out in Dalton’s room, and she tells us his voice is scary and unforgettable, but we don’t actually get to hear it. But, anyway, husband’s mother calls psychic lady, who is preceded by her comic sidekick investigators, who check out the house… oh, and this is another new house, because husband believed wife just enough to move out of the other house but not enough to trust psychic lady later—his scale of appropriate responses to wife hallucinating is a bit mixed up. There’s still a grandfather clock, which serves no purpose (well, possibly to tell the time, but that is hardly relevant to the plot), and there are still ghosts and demons and whatnot. Turns out—another classic line from the trailer—“it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s your son” or rather it’s loser couple-that-are-trying-to-act-way-too-much-for-such-a-bad-film’s son. Enter psychic exposition lady to explain the plot. SPOILER ALERT, if anyone cares: Dalton can astral project when he sleeps, but he’s gone too far away this time into a place psychic lady calls “the further.” It’s this dark place where the souls of the dead are, all scary and tormented, but I guess “hell” was trademarked, so they couldn’t use that name. And, all these ghosts and Junior Sith Lord are hanging around to take Dalton’s soul’s place in his body. Now, this is a little weird in the case of Junior Sith Lord because, well, what good is it to be in some little kid’s body when you could instead be a demon? A demon can freak people out, maybe even whisper in their ears and get them to make really bad horror films to, you know, ruin the world. A little boy—he tries something and you just gotta smack him around a bit. But, apparently, Dalton’s body is a good place to be… but there’s more. Chekhov’s gun come home to roost, to mix metaphors—seems husband has no childhood photos because his mother stopped taking pictures of him and hid away the few photos she has because there’s some old woman that kept showing up in them; see he was just like Dalton, and this old woman ghost kept hanging out trying to get inside his body when he was young, and so psychic exposition lady made him forget he could astral project and apparently made him forget that normal kids sometimes get their pictures taken.

Husband rightly thinks psychic exposition lady is crazy and kicks her out of the house, but changes his mind like a scene later when he realizes that the same Junior Sith Lord psychic lady’s comic sidekick has scribbled is in Dalton’s drawings on the wall. So, then there’s a séance, with an inappropriately funny gasmask, and some lines about innards being torn out, and I’m wishing these people had their innards torn out, just to make things interesting, but no.

So… the climax: Husband has to astral project all over again, go to Hell, I mean, “The Further” to rescue Dalton. And, Hell is mostly dark and empty, except for a scene with some girl who apparently shot her family to death and they all have smiles on their faces—because smiles are scary—and there’s Darth Maul’s retarded little brother sharpening his fingers and listening to “tiptoe through the tulips” and I’m wishing he was listening to “jeepers creepers” because even in their worst scenes, those two films were far better than this one. So, husband grabs Dalton and runs, because anyone who’s seen any of the Hellraiser films knows that is how one gets away from demons… and how much better would this have been if Pinhead showed up? But I digress. Dalton wakes up, everything is fine…

SPOILER ALERT, but if you’ve read this far, what do you care? Husband seems all normal until psychic lady looks at him weird then takes his photo. He strangles her, but wife and husband’s mother and Dalton can’t hear from the next room because Dalton is gorging on spaghetti, because that is what one needs after a good coma, to fill one’s stomach as fast as possible. Anyway, wife finally hears… something, finds psychic lady dead—which means no more exposition, so wife has no idea what’s going on, until she picks up psychic lady’s camera, because, you know, getting that camera off the floor is more important than, say, calling the police. She sees photo of husband, rather, photo of old woman from his childhood photos, and husband comes up behind her as she’s looking at the camera, and cut to the INSIDIOUS title and screeching violins again and finally, we’re free.