Review: LONGLEGS

After an intensely creepy prologue shown in rounded 4X3 we meet Lee Harker, young FBI agent at a briefing. She is burdened by something and seems barely there. When she and her partner hit the road for a doorknock she reveals an intuition the house they're looking for which proves true. A brief testing scene later and she is considered gifted and put on the case of a serial killer who appears to be manipulating his victims to do his work. Lee feels an increasing connection with the killer. The two are bound to meet but what happens when they do is less and less certain.

Osgood Perkins (aka Oz Perkins) has a famous father but on the strength of his directorial outings you wouldn't bother calling him a nepo baby. His previous rap sheet includes The Blackcoat's Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House which approach the horror genre through its more disturbing entry points. Not one for jumpscares, Perkins focuses on malaise and disintegrating order to reveal the horror of his situations. So, when he was attached to a serial killer story I was curious.

Serial killer movies ruled the '90s. Like any fad sub-genre, the gems gleam out from a mass of mediocrity in which a frenzies copying renders all pretenders indistinguishable from each other. In quest of ever more disgusting M.O.s and elaborate murder setups the movies spewed out racing from stories where we might question ourselves to gore fests with baddies who killed people we also wanted killed and themselves were dispatched with enough time for us to side with the good guys. It was a sleazy and self-destructive strain. (For the record my personal favourites (however generic they were) are Seven, The Ugly and pretty much none of the others.) Audiences had tired of them by the early '00s and they faded. So, what was left for a serial killer movie to say in 2024?

Well, first, most of the generic traits are omitted. Maika Monroe's Lee gives us a steadily haunted agent who might well be drifting away from the hard reality she needs to do her job. We don't get the frequently used countdown to climax of these films which only adds to the unease; it's just going to go on with little reward or justice if it ends. My own take, which is spoiler-free, is that this is a fable about domestic violence and the spectre of its victims and the blame they often suffer. While this is not grandstanded, the grinding darkness of the influence of the titular character made me think of figures currently in our ether, preaching the ideation of control. The sickness that we feel in the muted pallet and slow-fuse story is that of our own screen life and its compulsions.

This film is not for everybody. Anyone expecting an upgrade on Silence of the Lambs will feel short changed. As Blackcoat's Daughter used demonic possession to examine depression and Pretty Thing to talk about isolation, here his funereal tone bids us heed our own news services. Apart from a late exposition dump scene that robs the climax of some of its power, there's really not a wrong footed moment, here. But its insistence on melancholy and the bottling of grief are not the stuff of The Bone Collector or Kiss the Girls. The film is poignantly set in the heyday of serial killer fiction while pushing the worst aspects of the genre to one side.

As said, Maika Monroe carries the film with a deep, studied burden and is only making herself essential to the genre and beyond. Much has been made of Nicholas Cage's over the top performance but it didn't strike me as such. Cage has done a lot of fan service recently, showing how aware and accepting he is of his own kitsch (while humbly dazzling us with the likes of Pig). Here, he is beyond control but uses his silences between the storms to suggest his power. Someone few are making a fuss about is Alicia Witt who is consistently icky as Lee's mother; a thankless role but a committed performance.

Hype is a deadly weapon and can sink a movie through the disappointment it generates in audiences. Longlegs has been served by a trailer campaign that suggests its a blood spattered action crime thriller but it really doesn't play that way. It reminded me of how inaccurate the trailers were for The Babadook, promising a creature feature rather than a dark fable. The pity of it, here, is that the film might well sink from its perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes toward the lowest percentile all because it was oversold. It is not a gorefest nor is it a contest of good and evil. It doesn't have to be the scariest film of the year. It is quiet but resonant which is the best that should be said of a serial killer film so out of its time.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY @ 35

Sally and Harry share the driving, both going to university in New York. In an extended meet cute, Harry's cynicism sparks against Sally's fastidious ambition but there's a clear attraction. The plots of rom coms are mostly minimal. Everyone knows where they're going but it's the ride that's fun. Rob Reiner's direction of Nora Ephron's screenplay disturbs this by adding documentary interviews of old couples telling how they met. When this contrasts with the tension between the pair of the title over years of acquaintance, the usual end of a rom com is awarded that smidgeon of uncertainty.

So much of this is enlivened by casting. Billy Crystal brings his rapid fire deadpan standup style to Harry. His dead-eyed assertion that there can be no genuine friendship between men and women, the proposition that fuels the plot and that uncertainty abovementioned, is handed to the audience like an entry token. Meg Ryan's explosive rejection of it takes her character from the rude keynote moment of breaking up a kiss with a barmp of a car horn to the completing antagonist role. While Bruno Kirby's idealist friend of Harry is mostly little more than a soundboard for Harry's quipping, he does emerge with some integrity (not easy, given his screen mates). 

For me, though, it's the thankless and stellar turn by Carrie Fisher as Kirby's counterpart who only ever shines. Her role is better written and might well be Ephron's autobiographical sketch. Marie is a mentor who, in those days prior to the introduction of a mini cosmos on a screen, carries a card index of eligible men (and needs, now and then, reminders to perform data clean-up while at lunch). Fisher's eyes absorb every single thing they see and calculate its value in nanoseconds. This is warmed up with some New York sass and makes me wince that she wasn't in more comedy, rising to writing like this and showing herself naturally funny in person.

As I followed the progress of this film on rewatch (the first since I saw it all them years ago) I was struck by how slow it felt. It's barely past the ninety minute mark but feels much longer. It's never less than engaging but its structure depends on the audience's tolerance of continual circling back to square one with a diminishing return. While this is appreciable as a narrative attack after the credits roll, at the time it can feel draggy. When fresh, there was little pushback when calling When Harry Met Sally Woody Allen lite. As Woody Allen had reinvented the rom com with Annie Hall over a decade before, there had been a strain of them in the interim that had attempted the same but, unless you really know what you're doing, most attempts are doomed. This works because it rolls back the harder edges of the Allen movie and keeps things soft all the way through. 

The swearing in the dialogue, while not remarkably new, is used so judiciously it lands percussively every time but then it's a cue to roll another restaged old couple moment and everything smooths back down. Seeing this again, I was reminded of another late '80s revisit in Broadcast News which got everything wrong in its attempt to rekindle the bottled lightning of Network, making what was edgy cute. Harry Met Sally doesn't fail the way that one did, but it doesn't reach further, either. It's what a lot of culture felt like in the era as the tougher and more inventive approach were absorbed into the mainstream for easy digestion. The '90s would bring disruptors like Hal Hartley whose arthouse rom coms played like punk records and Tarantino whose homages to '70s kitsch felt more violent and funny than their source points. With this filtration and the nosedive of Woody Allen's reputation, Rob Reiner's classic remains a classic in the sense that any popular karaoke number remains, defanged and subject to copying error.

When Harry Met Sally is still a fun and funny movie with a wealth of good talking points for coffee afterwards. I personally think that, although the Allenish echoes in the Louis Armstrong needledrops and authentico interviews give it a softening sense of quirk, the better comparison is the younger relationship in The Graduate which is rich with brash disruption. 1989 was not prepared to dig in to heavy fun with the genre, so we got this exercise in charm instead of a barnstormer. It's why both film and the people it characterises feel a lot older than the '60s movie. The certificate of enjoyability this movies comes with looks shiny rather than fresh ... but is that such a bad thing when it is still funny?

Review: NOPE

OJ runs the horse wrangling business with his sister Emerald after their father died in what was thought to be a freak accident when objects like coins and keys rained through the clouds as though dropped from a plane. Ok, local western showman Ricky Jupe Park believed from a strange experience as a child star on a sitcom that he has control over animals. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, OJ is noticing strange lights at night and then sees a flying saucer dart through the clouds. Emerald soon sees it, too. She hits on the idea of getting video of a real alien craft and involves the local help desk guy at the tech store who's a wire wiz and a ufologist. Together, they can make history and money in the face of slow ruin form their business slowing down. Got all that? It's just the first act of Jordan Peele's new movie Nope.

Unlike the psychological thriller of Get Out or the social horror of US, Peele has taken on the sweeping scope of a Spielbergian sci-fi blockbuster. So, he puts in effortless world building, seamless action and big visual effects and a muscular score to wash them down with, some constantly clever commentary on the state of cinema at the moment, and a host of ingenious tropes and character epiphanies. This film is packed. So why don't I care about it?

Full disclosure, I've never been particularly impressed with Spielbergian cinema where the long introduction leads to the big action finish and the dazzle of it all is meant to impress. I was a naysayer on that kind of movie to extent of boorishness back it its day and haven't grown that soft on it since. The presentation of this story is for the majority of cinemagoers who loved the Jurassic Parks and Close Encounters. But even with Peele leaving out the schmalz of the Big Steve this still rings hollow, for all its clear merit: I just don't like the influence. To me it doesn't feel authentic, it just feels long.

That means that, while I am not in a hurry to see it again and won't be grabbing the eventual 4K discorama version, that you shouldn't be interested in it. This is neither of Peele's earlier films and is definitely not attempting to be. Daniel Kaluuya is deliberately a quieter and more introverted figure in opposition to his magnetic turn in Get Out. Keke Palmer's Emerald makes up for that and her development is credible and welcome. Michael Wilcott's turn as the cinematographer Holst is a pleasing leathery cinema veteran in the style of Clint Eastwood's John Huston in White Hunter Black Heart. The thing they call Jeanjacket is strongly realised and provides a genuine dread. It's not what I want in a movie but I think that anyone who had problems with Peele's first two, whether at the perceived preaching of Get Out or the plot holes of the high concept US, might well find this one easier to love. Me, I just want my Jordan Peele funnier, nastier and more disturbing. But that's me.

THE MATRIX @ 25

Cat suited agent Trinity battles and escapes authority figures ending in a strange action where she seems to have disappeared down a phone line to dodge the massive truck that crashes into her phone booth. Across town (or is it?) young Thomas Anderson is troubled by messages that keep coming up on his screen at home, telling him to follow the white rabbit. A knock on the door reveals a crew of cool folk who pay for a disc of something less than legal. They notice his distress and invite him out clubbing. Seeing the white rabbit tattoo on one of them, he follows his curiosity. At the club, he is approached by the woman from the beginning who bids him follow her. His world is about to change from nature up.

So begins one of the touchpoints of modern cinema from a year rich with them. 1999, as I'll be saying in a few of these anniversary blogs this year, was a time of cinematic refitting. I'll continue with this film in a moment but will now ask you to contemplate the following: Being John Malkovich took whimsy to dizzying heights, inviting anyone to do as much; Fight Club used the imagery of advertising and the grinding fiction of the men's movement to produce what satire would look like moving forward; The Blair Witch Project reinvented horror cinema with an Easy Rider nonchalance; Run Lola Run gave us the reboot action comedy; and The Matrix gave us a blend of espionage, dystopia, martial arts, cyber-action and philosophy in a hard sci-fi package that required bettering by its close imitators.

Another thing is gave general culture is the red and blue pills. The blue pill that Morpheus offers Neo (previously Thomas Anderson) lets him continue believing in his normal workaday life. The red pill introduces him to reality in all its grinding ugliness. Most of the crew of the resistance craft that moves through the sewers of the desiccated old city have been given this choice and have all taken the red pill to fight the good fight against the AI that rules the Earth. Morpheus thinks Neo is The One, the saviour. When Neo chooses the red pill, he chooses a tough fight for freedom.

Red pilling is a term adopted by the libertarian right who use it to describe deprogramming from the alleged tyranny of things like feminism, identity politics, and so on, so that they emerge as independent thinkers (instead of just finding a tag to legitimate their "good old days" bigoty which is what's really happening). There are two ironies to this. The Wachowskis who created this film are both trans women, the very beings to generate fear responses in the looney right. Also, the red pill effectively wakes the one who takes it to reality (so they can start spouting delusional bullshit in public). Try calling a red piller woke and see what happens. Anyway ...

The Matrix gave us bullet time. This is involved slow motion photography/effects but is not simply slow motion. When Neo goes from the wirework of his Kung Fu bouts with Morpheus to flying through the air in evasion of a blow and later to dodging bullets as they speed by him in light-penetrating courses, he is experiencing bullet time. Action movies still appropriate this trope in some form and it has become so endemic to high stakes action sequences that its use is long past feeling derivative.

But the thing that keeps The Matrix pulsing along without losing its audience to a devastated setting and keeps us in touch with its central struggle is how it incorporates the look and sensuality of the AI's fantasy world. To meet the Oracle or run sorties against the AI's agents the crew must re-enter the twentieth century city for their actions. We know that we are looking at an AI construct but we also know that we'd rather see them fight there than in the older-school wreckage where the resistance actually live and fend off the squid like drones. There needs to be some of that but if it had been all that this movie would be an hour shorter in run time and decades shorter in its reach. We go where we can see Morpheus at the hands of the agents and Neo's skills develop so dramatically.

The internet of 1999 had been browser dominated for over half a decade by the time The Matrix was made but, while growing towards daily-use importance, was still representable as the stuff of enthusiastic nerds. Digital communications in the film are kept to an ASCII screen with blinking prompts and stringed commands. This gives the technology the look of having been rebuilt from disaster and allows a kind of steampunk feel to the VR tech used by the crew to manifest as people in the city. Put even basic representations of contemporary browsers in there like Netscape would have felt jarring. The tech, overall, is carefully managed to sit somewhere between the magic of experts and what people used throughout the day. Add that to instances of protean illusory moments like the tracking bug injected into Neo which sometimes looks organic and sometimes like a mechanised syringe, and the effect only heightens the need to keep attentive in a film that not only requires your constant attention but rewards it regularly.

Speaking of technology, this film that uses every trick available to the film maker of 1999 holds up triumphantly these many years on. Some moments reveal their vintage but almost every processed sequence carries the narrative along with such muscularity that I barely noticed anything feeling dated. Details in the viewing notes but I can report the deluxe means of viewing this at home presents it with the film grain of the source material and the bravura effects.

If the casting and dialogue can shift this film towards old B-Actioner movies that feels intentional. If the gravity heavy Laurence Fishburne intones his baritone wisdom in a thick whisper it still works as show don't tell dialogue. Carrie-Anne Moss also brings weight to the cast as Trinity, physical and intense. Joe Pantoliano brings the sleaze of his best characters (see him in The Sopranos and Memento). Hugo Weaving uses all the humanity he can must to convince us he's a machine. And then there's Keanu Reeves as Neo who is unfairly remembered for lines like, "whoa!" but performs his role as a conflicted and disturbed would be hero in perfect accord with the conceits of the film around him. If you are noticing a lot of Australian accents in the supporting cast (including the little boy who delivers the line about the spoon) it's because this was among the first of the offshore productions of the deacde just ending that moved to Australia for shooting. The Sydney skyline is clear to all who recognise it when it's on screen.

The Matrix describes a future while carrying its seedstock into its future as a film. It has sprouted a number of sequels. Having seen the first of these convinced me against bothering with any further as it seemed to ignore why the first one remains so special. The Wachowskis continue working in and around sci-fi/fantasy and enjoy consistent success. But anything that stops audiences as much as The Matrix did back in 1999 has so far not appeared. They aren't flashes in the pan but this monument to imaginative cinema that appeared so early in their career will shadow every new thing they deliver. Then again, when that hound of memory is as both lean and substantial as this, I can't imagine they'd feel any resentment as the change it made to movies was for the better.

Viewing Notes: I watched the 4K disc of this film. It's considered a reference for the format. Deep blacks, pleasing film grain and strong colours within its noirish pallet are a delight. If you see it this way (it will be in print for the foreseeable future) and you are equipped for it, go into the settings menu and choose the Dolby Atmos audio option. I have seldom experienced something so strongly at home as I did when I saw it at a state of the art cinema in 1999.

DARK STAR @ 50

The Dark Star, an unstable-planet disposal ship, is years into its mission into interstellar space, making way for the real estate of the future. The crew are sick of it but also resigned to their lives which might as well play out to the end like this. If they've gone so far beyond getting sick of each other, as well, there is always someone who'll rub the others the wrong way.  One day (why do they even bother with the concept of days, now?) one of the sentient bombs they use to destroy planets is accidentally activated and has to be persuaded to disarm itself and return to the bay. Does possible always mean necessary? Not on Earth but that's so far away it has become an abstraction. The cosmos beckons.

A black and white, glitchy recording from Earth opens the film, aligning it to a similar communication in Kubrick's Space Odyssey and letting us know we're in for a comedy. The news is not good and it's old. Essentially, there is no assistance on its way to The Dark Star; they're on their own. We'll be getting to-screen moments from the crew leader (in absence of the deceased commander) and the paranoid and whingey Pinback. The verité style of these recordings is largely due to the actor playing Pinback, Dan O'Bannon, who co-wrote the screenplay and went on to the impressive world building dialogue of Alien six years later. This has a lot to do with why Dark Star works: Carpenter brings the sci-fi and the spaceship as submarine/wagon train/lost patrol/etc and O'Bannon pours in the workaday realism that, both mixing it up in a comedic approach, makes this zero budget effort fly out of the gate.

Carpenter knew that intimate closeups as well as endless vistas can make an epic if your story supports it. This requires credible performances and gets them. They don't have to be Oscar winners to get the tale across but what we get is also a notch above contemporary tv acting. So, when Pinback prepares the bomb for its job, he sounds like he's calling a friendly colleague. Later, deep in the kind of frustration that acts of biology would otherwise quench, Lieutenant Doolittle gruffly orders the crew to find another planet to blow up. At the outer reaches of where humans have explored, these guys just live with it. Talby is the exception but his withdrawal to the observation bubble has turned his wonder into a formless chain of suppositions.

If you are new to this film and wince at the lo-fi effects remind yourself that apart from a tiny fraction of them, they are practical setups. If you want to know how the interior of the aircraft-shaped ship has Earthly gravity, you do not deserve this movie. If you scoff at the beach ball alien, you will never get this film. This is the story of a crew first but the convergent path of some serious sci-fi concepts bring the comedy into focus until it's revealed in all its existential details. It might look like a student film (that's how it began) but it plays like something much deeper.

Of course, this piece is overshadowed to the point of obscurity by the beginning of the Star Wars saga but for all the orchestras and dazzle of Lucas' epic I feel more cinema from Dark Star and its gaffer taped sets and home made electronic music. Lucas put a samurai quest in space but Carpenter asked us to consider space itself, its horror and the laughter that much come from sight of that. Later, when O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien had the characters talking seriously about their working conditions, it felt even more like what life in a spacecraft might be like and this early collision with a master of suspense would prove one of the most durably fruitful.

Viewing notes: I watched my old U.S. Blu-Ray of this but failed to find it on streaming or in physical form locally. Sheesh!