Say what you will about Annette, but it is spectacular at the very least because as it’s such a spectacle. This operatic melodrama or melodramatic opera of a musical about a tragically fated love affair of a comedian and a soprano is definitely something to behold. But what…
     What is that undefinable something or, more appropriately to this wildly international production, je ne sais quois. What is holding together this laboriously long and exhaustively strange cinematic fantasy?
     Well, it’s the music, of course. The music is a glue or every proper musical. Created by Spark, whoever they are, the music here is strange, repetitive, unconventional, ranging from Greek chorus style back up singers of the comedian to the epic death scene arias of the soprano. And yet, at times its simply purely melodically haunting, like the deceptively basic and beguilingly irresistible We Love Each Other So Much track, the backbone of the doomed romance.
       And it’s the very committed performances by legitimately musical age defying Marion Cotillard and the impressively dedicated pale giant Adam Driver, who sang on screen before to much less fanfare in Marriage Story and has obviously taken some singing lessons since.
      Mind you, this is a story of a couple with a child, but primarily this is very much an Adam Driver show, he is very much in the driving seat of this vehicle. In the movie his vehicle is a Triumph motorcycle, because he’s so hip. Tragically hip, in fact. Loafers and no socks kinda guy. Beanie with a suit kinda guy. You’d wanna slap him if he was any smaller.
       The thing is he isn’t even a funny comedian. What he does is mostly performance art driven by a sort of inner rage. Eventually the rage spills over into tanking both his act and his personal life.
      There are interesting relationship dynamics going on there (think The Star is Born) where in a famous couple one star is ascending while the one is descending, since his wife is the one with genuine talent and he’s more of a fad.
      And then there’s Annette, the titular creepy child of the two. A celebrity child as a prop…that’s done by a prop. A Chucky style gingerhaired doll that (whew) inherits her mother’s voice and morals. And subsequent child talent exploitation.
       There’s even something of a love triangle, the third wheel being the lovelorn conductor, a man too small and physically tiny to even register next to Driver’s enormous (literal and figurative) appeal, though it plays out mostly posthumously and occasionally just to lift the tone.
     Is that a lot plot wise? No, not at all, not for the 141 minutes you’re in it. Can it be viewed as a character driven drama then? Absolutely, but prepare for all the singing. There’s so much of it. Cottilard had an opera singing stand in, but majority of the work is done by her and Driver and it’s pretty good. Driver is an actor who tries more than most. The most European of all American actors, he doesn’t shy away from absurd, abstract or abstruse, which makes him fascinating to watch. Not the most natural of singers, for sure, but he manages. Plus there’s such an awesome physicality to him, he’s muscle bound but gaunt at the same time, he hunches, looms, menaces and caresses, he loves and hates on such a physically expressive scale. The man is essentially a sentient mighty oak of surprises and quirks straddling the divide between leading man handsome and weird looking, turning from drama to comedy on a dime. In other words, he’s good. You can just watch him and be satisfied here.
       Seriously, someone give this guy an Oscar already. Two consecutive nominations for best supporting and best actor just aren't enough. Driver proves time and again that he will do whatever it takes to get that statue, including but not limited to performing cunnilingus (and the rest of the sex scene) while singing. What more can you as from a guy? Seriously. This message is brought to you by Oscar for Adam committee.
      The doll (though understandable in use) is creepy as dolls are. Well done, but very creepy.
This is, essentially, very much a European style arthouse cinematic experience, you should expect the pacing and dynamics accordingly. It isn’t for everyone. It doesn’t have the universal appeal of the recent musical epics like Lalaland and The Greatest Showman.
      This is the kind of movie where a director is referred to as autheur. One I’m not familiar enough to speak of, but it’s obvious this man would never direct a conventional blockbuster to save his life. But the thing is there’s definitely a space for these kinds of movies there, something strange, something different, something…other. An unconventional beauty. A mesmerizing oddity.
       And for anyone craving those things…this is just the ticket.
       It also stands to mention I absolutely love, love that poster.

​     Once upon a time there was a married couple, who build a fancy house with the latest technology in it. These people quite possibly had love in their marriage but cheated on each other left and right all the same. This marriage ended up as a murder suicide, brains on the wall and the house for sale.
     One of the man cleaning the brains off those walls was a character played by Shawn Ashmore. One of the Ashmore twins, the cute lanky Canadians who always seem to be in these types of movies. In fact, here’s a question how do they know which one to cast? They look the same, the act the same. The main difference for Ashmore expert wannabes is that Shawn was in X Men movies and Aaron was in Smallville.
     Anyway, so this guy sees this house and thinks “Yey, a murderhouse, just the thing to win back my cheating wife and save our relationship”.
      And the wife goes “Well, he means well and it is a fancy house and such a good deal, why not”.
     And their dog (an awesome shaggy fella) Odi goes “No, you freaking lunatics, no freaking way, this is a murderhouse”, but goes along with it anyway, because he’s their dog.
     Once they get there, things predictably enough start to get freaky and no, not in that let’s rekindle our marriage freaky way, the other kind, the kind where objects get relocated and strange creepy sh*t occurs. And escalates. And goes from kinda sorta explicable to proper WTF territory. They even involves the cops, but alas, the home security cameras show nothing. Is the lady of the house (played by the pinchy faced Green) simply too impressionable?
       Anyway, in the end of the day, as you might have predicted, those were no hallucinations. There is something profoundly creepy about the house and there’s a fun twist about it. Only it’s too superficial of a twist and that’s the main drag of the story. Yes, that, not the 114 min. leisurely length, but the sheer preposterousness of the twist. Not to give too much away, but if you do watch the movie, just take a moment to think about the logistics and mechanics of the plot? Like how would it have worked and why? It’s a sort of ending that doesn’t even remotely hold up to the lightest of scrutiny and after the initial Aha, gotcha moment, there’s just nothing there.
      But alas, apparently the movie makers just didn’t think that through. It’s a shame, because the rest of the writing is actually decent enough and Ashmore is likeable enough to drag the plot along (not as likeable as Odi, but who would be) and some of the scares are genuinely jumpy. But that stupid freaking ending…is a disappointment.
      So that’s the aftermath of watching Aftermath. And what is after math, anyway? Calculus?
 Think what you will of it as horror,  but this can easily be used as a motivational tool to make smarter homebuying decisions.

​    Few years ago Get Out was just about universally proclaimed to be the latest word on social satire in horror comedy genre. It wasn’t. It was terribly one sided and nowhere near as clever as it thought itself to be. Jordan Peele has since redeemed himself with his follow up Us, which was, in fact, almost as clever as it thought itself to be and featured phenomenal Oscarworthy acting turn by Lupita Nyong'o. Us didn’t gather the same accolades, either because by then Peele has already busted his bubble or because it was indeed too clever and nuanced for general public as opposed to the dumbed down every yell Get Out at the screen movie.
     But now the movie came along that is indeed a perfect horror comedy social satire and it is indeed the latest word on the Pacific Ocean sized left/right divide in the US. The name of this movie is The Hunt. It has been dreamed up by the mad geniuses Cuse and Lindelof, the team behind Lost, (the latest) Watchmen and more.
      This is a movie that can be simply described as liberals hunting conservatives in a sort of PC version of hunger games for adults and it would still be fun tom watch it at that, just on a purely superficial level, without thinking twice about any of the plot’s more complex implications.
      I wouldn’t recommend that, because I don’t believe in dumb entertainment and I believe people are doing themselves a disservice by selecting things that will actively not engage or straight up disengage their minds. But of course, any major network’s or Netflix line up will prove me wrong. Dumb is very in these days.
     So let me tell you how smart this movie is, how cleverly it takes on every ugly stereotype from both sides of the sociopolitical divide and plays it up.
      Fair warning…in telling you these things I will absolutely be discussing all the major plot turns, so if you like surprises, I suggest you quit reading this review, go watch the movie, then come back and see if you agree with me.
      Ok, you’ve been warned, let’s continue…America is red and blue, there’s white there too, but that sounds too much like a race conversation and this movie actually isn’t about race, refreshingly so. This is about class, that thing no one in America really talks about and which exists anyway, because it isn’t a fairy and its existence isn’t contingent on your belief in it.
      On one side, the extreme left, you have wealthy educated (coastal) politically correct elites, on the other…there are the denim clad, mulleted, ignorant racist homophobic dumb news conspiracy prone hoi polloi.
      The latter are usually the ones with all the guns, but what if they tables were turned and the elites, despite their gun control principles, took up the arms and went on a slaughter spree in the name of…good taste and population control and maybe, just maybe, just a hint of personal vendetta?
     Well, then you’d have The Hunt.
     A bunch of strangers wake up in the middle of nowhere, gagged. As soon as they are given the means to defend themselves, the gunfire starts. Not just gunfire either. There’s a number of creatively gory deaths right to begin with, including the two blandly pretty victims disposed of right away. Their faces are recognizable, one’s a scream queen, one’s a tv actor from a popular show. The rest are mostly a bunch of nobodies and nobody adjacents, with a notable exception of Amy Madigan and her fascinating wrinklage.
     Because, because, because this is a Betty Gilpin show through and through. And she does an awesome star making job here. Gilpin is an interesting actress. She’s built like a Barbie doll and named like a Golden Girl. Her real name is actually Elizabeth Folan Gilpin and there’s a number of different versions of that you can come up with and not make it sound like a cute old lady, but she must know what she’s doing and in the end it shouldn’t matter anyway, because she’s good, people, she’s genuinely good.
   Mostly known to the world as Liberty Bell, the woman who thoroughly and consistently steals the show from Alison Brie in Glow, Gilpin is the American version of Toni Collette, an offbeatly attractive, wildly talented and versatile actress.
    Her Barbie doll proportions are actually kind of insane, unignorable even in the grimy workman get up she wears in the movie. But she also can kick serious ass, although stunt doubles surely did most of the work, she’s still blatantly in a number of scenes. And she’s got a terrific comedic timing. That quality of stillness punctuated by minute expressions that convey plenty. She does that.
    Her opponent is Swank, a formidable force, who finally landed a juicy role, possibly to make up for the embarrassment of Fatale.
    Their final showdown is pure cinematic action magic. It’s brutal and hilarious in all the right ways.
    But before they get there…there’s all the political commentary to weed through. The right are stupid, the left are insane. Both spend too much time on social media. Both get hoisted by their own petards, the liberals by their own rampant political correctness (Swank’s character Athena gets fired for one text referring to the conservatives as deplorables, which is really, really not that terrible in the grand scheme of things), the conservatives get trapped in the very conspiracy theory of Manorgate they’ve created and been wrongly feeding fire this entire time.
    The reason Gilpin’s Crystal gets out at all (and no, not because everyone screamed Get Out) is because she’s actually an innocent who gets dragged into this mess because white trash loves the name Crystal so much, there are two of them in her hometown. So this Crystal is a mixed bag of things, she’s got a white trash accent and appearance, but she’s also army tough, willing to help and has (to Athena’s endless surprise) read a book in her life. And, of course, she’s a fine tuned killing machine. Booya.
      The main thing is Crystal is a kind of person that it’s easy to make assumptions about and, unlike the rest of the cast, who live up to every single assumption you can make about them, she turns out to be considerably more nuanced. Enough to bring the entire thing down.
     Is that the message here? Has the entire country gone mad with making assumptions about each other and forgotten how to get along? No, that would be entirely too reductive. But there’s something there, no?
     The interesting thing about it is that the blue color/no color character definitely triumphs over the white color liberals. In a movie written by Lalaland’s liberals. It’s a movie that makes fun of both sides of the spectrum so aggressively that it can probably be interpreted easily enough in favor of the either side. The main thing spoofed, though, of course, is the insane divide itself.  The fact that such different mentalities, attitudes, lives can exist in the same country. It explains a lot. And whatever side wins in the movie for you, in real life it’s pretty obvious who does. If it isn’t obvious, you should probably rewind and study in slow motion the American history of the last, say, 5 years.
    It’s the movie the deplorables probably would loathe without pausing to think it might actually take or at least understand their side, which is probably just another reason to see it.
    But either way, it’s also just pure fun. And funny. Ambitious, sure, it its intent and probably not quite hitting all the right notes, because the overall message comes out much too mixed. The ideal hero of the people, the one who’ll share the fancy food with the flight attendant and look just as good in a fancy dress is Crystal clearly the one who shall inherit this country. And she is far from meek. Did you expect something different from a country built on that much violence?

​      I’ve only just began reading Cullen Bunn in graphic novel form and wasn’t sure I was a fan, having found my first read to be somewhat young and way too drawn out for my liking, but this movie is definitely for adults. And no, I’m not saying it’s all X rated and covered in gore, guts and boobs the way one might associate with adult minded genre productions. I’m saying this is a smart scary movie geared toward mature audience aka people who don’t mind the slow boiling pace and the general bleakness and the creeping unease that measuredly rolls down right to the terrifying resolution.
     And to think it might have been just another take on the creepy mythos come to life. Something that was so ubiquitous in the 90s and not as much since.  The eponymous being is an abstract, something wished by concentrated mind and seemingly random but  specific actions. So the concept is simple and the concept is familiar, but the overall production is so much more.
    This delicious claustrophobic nightmare begins with its ambiance set all the way up on the creepometer by a hiking adventure in Bhutan that goes horribly wrong. A very long, very atmospheric opening sequence that sets up the mood of the story. Then it forwards back in time a couple of decades and takes you all the way to Missouri, a seemingly arbitrary location since no one sounds or acts or looks especially Missourian. Our lead played with subtlety and restraint by James Badge Dale is a former cop turned security equipment salesmen who drinks heavily to forget an unforgettable tragedy.  The man lives a solitary quiet lifestyle, but he is friendly with his neighbor and her 18 year old daughter and the latter (after an ominous visit) disappears.
    Since she is legally an adult and since the local cops aren’t likely to do much, our protagonist decides to dust off his investigating chops and find her himself. The journey he embarks on to do so with change his life forever.
    And that’s it, probably, I don’t think I can say much more without giving away crucial plot aspects and with a plot like this you really are in for a twist or two. Suffice it to say this entire thing involves a mysterious cult. See, me, I’d have been sold right there. Cult stories are awesome.  But this…this takes it many, many steps further.
    So yeah, I liked it. A lot. It was exactly the kind of scary movie I enjoy, a smart dark psychological nightmare.  The smart thing, though, doesn’t go over so well with the public at large hence this movie’s negative reviews and low box office totals. This is more of a collector’s item, cult classic, something like that. Something for the discerning audiences.
     I watched it in the same week as Freaky 2020. Another genre movie, dumb as they come and totally teen oriented, that did well and gathered good reviews. So dumb definitely sells in these increasingly stupid times we live in.  But you and I…we’re not dumb, are we? We want more out of our entertainment that cheap laughs and silly gags. We want well written scripts that prey on the most profound fears and well acted stories that (safely) take you away to the darkest corners of the night.  And so we look for movies like this one. And then enjoy them. In the dark.