The current popularity of Netflix's Making a Murderer reminded me of Cropsey, a documentary by Josh Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio that doubles as a creepy horror film and an exploration of urban legends. Growing up on Staten Island, which is apparently an all-around terrifying place, Josh and Barbara heard the legend of Cropsey - a word of uncertain origins that came to be synonymous in New York State with any violent maniac, but also took on a sort of life of its own, often referring to a specific person. Cropsey is the boogeyman, the man with a hook for a hand, the axe-wielding escaped mental patient who prowled all those areas kids and teens weren't supposed to mess around in. The same legend, told around campfires as early as the 1960s, provided the inspiration for the early slasher films The Burning and Madman.
This particular legend turned out to be true, in a sense, when the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome, Jennifer Schweiger, in 1987. The manhunt led to Andre Rand, a former custodian at the Willowbrook State School - a severely overcrowded and understaffed state-sponsored institution for the intellectually disabled in which students lived under truly hellish conditions and suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the school's staff until the late 1980s, after over two decades of controversy and scandal. It was Willowbrook that made a name for Geraldo Rivera and earned him a Peabody Award after he conducted a series of investigations into the school's deplorable conditions in 1972.
Rand, born Frank Rushan, lived in the woods of Staten Island and haunted the derelict buildings of the Greenbelt and the tunnels beneath Willowbrook, where he once worked, where Cropsey lurked, and where rumors of cults, devil-worship and human trafficking took root. Suspected of kidnapping and murdering five disabled children over the course of fifteen years, he was, to the local residents of the island, the boogeyman made flesh. Cropsey, the legend come to life. He remains in prison - but there's still a great deal of speculation as to whether he committed the crimes in the first place. Evidence was a combination of circumstance and hearsay, and witness testimony was unreliable, sometimes nothing more than "Well, he sure looked like a murderer to me."
There were no answers at the time of Rand's trial. There may never be answers. The people of Staten Island may never know where the bodies of several of Rand's alleged victims are buried, and they may never know if Rand was wrongly accused of the crimes despite a prior criminal record that involved the kidnapping of eleven minors in a school bus, none of whom were harmed. Cropsey is a documentary focused on personal truths and the eagerness with which people believe exactly what they're told if it allows for catharsis and closure. As one interviewee says, he could show a person a picture of Andre rand and tell them he's a mass murderer, and that person would of course say "Yes, I can tell, he's a monster." And he could show that same person the same picture and tell them "This man saved six kids from a fire," and that person would say "Yes, I can tell just looking at him. He's a good man."
Zeman admits, in the end, that the movie found no more answers than anyone else - all it did was to provide another chapter in the Cropsey legend for future generations to discuss around campfires and in old buildings at night, where the hook man or the axe murderer might, in fact, be waiting for his next victim. We invent our own monsters in order to avoid facing the ugly truth, that people, just people, are capable of unimaginable evil. "The power of the urban legend," Zeman says, "is that it doesn't claim to be the truth, but rather that is says the truth is a range of possibilities, and it's the audience who must decide.
The Midnight Channel is normally a movie review blog. However, with The X-Files back on the air this weekend, and the whole series (bar the two movies) available on streaming services, how could I talk about anything else?
You probably know the basic setup. FBI Agent Fox Mulder is a conspiracy theorist whose unconventional beliefs and methods have resulted in him being stuffed away in a basement office where he investigates the X-Files, an ever-growing collection of unsolved cases with a possible paranormal or extraterrestrial element first started by J. Edgar Hoover. At the beginning of the series, Agent Dana Scully is brought in, ostensibly to debunk and disgrace Mulder's work. They clash at first, but over the course of the series, they develop a complex relationship and uncover a vast governmental conspiracy. The show was divided up into two types of episodes: "Myth Arc" episodes, which chronicled the central conspiracy and a coming alien invasion and generally fell apart as it went on because series creator Chris Carter didn't really know where it was going; and "Monster of the Week" episodes, where the agents investigated a one-shot threat, be it a genetic human/fluke hybrid preying on sewer workers, a man who projects his dreams into reality to deadly effect, or just a family of particularly depraved hillbillies. There was a memorable recurring cast. Let's go over the central players.
Agent Fox Mulder
Mulder was actually my least favorite member of the central cast. When he starts out, he's a bit of a dick, and he gets much more entertaining when the series is comfortable enough with its characters to start making him the butt of a good amount of its jokes. There's a certain element of self-deprecation in his character, poking fun at the show's audience through its main character. Mulder is a determined agent whose suspicions are often correct, but he also calls phone sex lines, grandstands whenever he's given an audience, owns about 10 of the same black suit, and jerks off to videos of Bigfoot.
Agent Dana Scully
Scully is the ultimate badass, and if there was a show where she and Xena teamed up to solve crimes or fight the Greek gods or whatever, it would be the best show ever made. She basically keeps Mulder from running off the leash, and while she remains skeptical (except in cases involving religion, in which case Mulder, of all people, becomes the skeptic) throughout, her sharp mind and level-headed pursuit of mundane explanations while Mulder is jumping on the nearest wild theory actually ends up uncovering more than the people who assigned her to the X-Files ever expected.
Assistant Director Walter Skinner
Skinner is Mulder and Scully's grouchy, bespectacled superior, who generally takes no bullshit from either of them or from anyone else. He's entertainingly gruff and abrasive and plays the straight man to a lot of jokes over the series. He's also probably Mulder and Scully's greatest ally, even though the show tries to throw a shady light on him at first.
The Smoking Man
My favorite character in the series, the Smoking Man was the closest it really had to a single main villain, so it's curious to note that he's not actually in charge of the conspiracy, even though he's the face we put to it - he's more like middle management. While his superiors are working with the aliens to save their own skin, the Smoking Man seems to be involved simply because he hates people and believes they're incapable of survival without someone to keep them in line, yet he keeps having to kill the few people he respects, including JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., for the danger they pose to the conspiracy. He shapes history and nations like an evil version of Forrest Gump, and at one point even delivers a misanthropic variant on the "box of chocolates" speech. Given that I found him the most relatable character on the show, I'm probably some sort of terrible person.
The Lone Gunmen
A trio of lovable conspiracy theorists that Mulder hangs out with and gets information from sometimes. They're weirder than him, although they say Mulder's weirder than them. They're the show's comic relief, and they had a very short-lived spinoff that had its own bit of conspiracy surrounding it because its pilot episode, which aired before 9/11, was about a CIA conspiracy to hijack a couple of 747s and fly them into the World Trade Center so they could blame Middle Eastern terrorists and justify an increase in defense spending. Yeah.
It's impossible to overstate the impact The X-Files had on television as a creative medium, or how much it is a 1990s period piece. Along with Seinfeld and Friends, it was one of the defining shows of the decade, and perhaps not coincidentally, its post-90s seasons just plain sucked - as if that decade were a Petri dish outside which the show could not sustain itself, withering and dying with the series finale "The Truth," which might still be the worst two hours of television that I've ever watched, resolving nothing, and survived only by an underwhelming stand-alone movie in 2008 that was basically an extended monster-of-the-week episode. Its first six seasons, however, are without a doubt some of the best TV ever made, and the series is one of the few shows I will "binge-watch."
From the beginning, it's steeped in the politics and culture of the 90s. The internet is a new thing, only occasionally important as a plot point, and even then, we see AOL chat rooms and databases, not a hint of social media just yet. The agents' cell phones are bulky, with big green digital readouts. Beneath the unmistakable aesthetic runs a current of paranoia also particular to the 90s. With the relative peace and prosperity of the Clinton presidency in effect, there remains a dark thread of post-Vietnam, post-Cold War unease, the same wellspring from which the Metal Gear Solid video game series draws the best of its lore. The show makes you nostalgic for the days before the anti-vaxxer movement and Benghazi and the birthers, when all the conspiracies were about aliens, mind control and human experimentation. When the crap people thought the government was up to was really out there, not just pants-on-head stupid. It's a kind of snapshot of a 10-year-period that saw an immense amount of cultural and technological change.
The series clearly has its roots in Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a series that may have simply come along before its time, and The X-Files' early seasons tend to follow the same sort of formula, with the monsters of the week being slight variations on standard-issue horror creatures: a ghost, a werewolf, a rogue AI, even the Jersey Devil. As it went on and acquired its own identity, its monsters got stranger, and the series often dipped into absurdism and parody with episodes such as "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'," which deals with a Rashomon-style investigation into an alien abduction framed as a series of interviews with a Truman Capote stand-in played by Charles Nelson Reilly. It's widely considered one of the best episodes of the show, and its writer, Darin Morgan, is back for the new season to write episode 3, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster." Season 5 had a crossover episode with Homicide: Life on the Street with a guest appearance by Richard Belzer as John Munch, and season 6 saw a crossover with Cops, another distinct relic of the 90s. Other monsters got weirder as well - a scientist with a shadow made of dark matter, a guy who regenerates by eating cancer, a trash golem that patrols a gated community and kills residents whose lawn decorations aren't up to code. Sometimes, the threat isn't supernatural at all - it might just be a crocodile or a serial killer or simply mass hysteria.
The X-Files is also where an absolutely ridiculous number of actors got their start. It launched the careers of both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. More future celebrities than I can count show up all through the series - Seth Green, Jack Black, Giovanni Ribisi and Bryan Cranston, to name a few, and in fact Cranston owes his star-making role as Walter White on to his appearance on The X-Files, as the episode was written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Dozens of TV shows owe their existence - or at least their popularity - to The X-Files. We certainly wouldn't have Supernatural or Fringe or Grimm, and even non-paranormal conspiracy shows like 24 and The Blacklist owe an immense debt to Carter's series. It came along at the right time, took root in a particular era of American culture, and it changed television. Even the term "shipping" had its origins on X-Files message boards in the 90s.
Which is why I can't help but worry a little about the new episodes beginning Sunday. People who watch Seinfeld these days, too young to have watched it during its original run, don't see what's so funny about it precisely because everything it did has been aped by nearly every post-Seinfeld sitcom to the extent that the original seems old hat. Seinfeld built the modern sitcom. The X-Files built the modern conspiracy show and the modern monster-of-the-week paranormal investigation series, so what does it have to offer us now? At the very least, I think it has an opportunity to update its conspiracies to the post-9/11 era, the age of the Patriot Act and drones and constant surveillance and cyber-warfare. If it does that, it could still end up being really interesting and setting itself apart from other series that followed in its footsteps. We'll find out tomorrow night - which seems so very distant. If you're looking for a few episodes to watch before the premiere, here's my personal top five. 1. Jose Chung's "From Outer Space" (S3E20): A near-perfect piece of television. It's experimental, funny, poignant and deeper than its comedic bent leads one to believe. It's ultimately a story about our desire to connect with other people, despite the fact that we are all, in our own way, isolated by our perceptions. It's also got a pair of Men in Black played by Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek.
2. Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (S2E04): Also written by Darin Morgan. Peter Boyle plays a world-weary psychic who helps Mulder and Scully find a serial killer. He can't tell the future - all he can see is the way a person's going to die. Including himself. Again, one of the funniest, saddest episodes of the series.
3. Squeeze (S1E03): The third episode of the series, and the first really good one. This episode scared the living hell out of me when I first watched it during its initial broadcast. It still scares the hell out of me.
4. The Host (S2E02): A great monster of the week episode, with Mulder and Scully hunting down a fluke man created by radioactive mutation. Also, the fluke man was played by Darin Morgan, though he didn't write the episode. I think he might just be involved in all of the best things this show has ever done.
5. Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip (S2E25/S3E01/02): The season 2 finale and first two episodes of season 3. This three-part story is where the conspiracy arc really hit its stride, and it was never this strong again. Mulder and Scully clash with the Smoking Man over a buried train car that may or may not be full of alien corpses, and for the first time, the agents suffer dire consequences for their actions.
Remember, the truth is out there. And trust no one.
It might seem a bit out of this blog's scope, but I remember my mom asking me recently (ish) if I knew of any good fantasy or fairy-tale movies for young kids, around 5-10 years old or so. I tried to come up with some titles, and I realized that there really aren't any these days, at least not many. Almost everything I came up with was from the 80s or earlier. Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Secret of NIMH, My Neighbor Totoro, The Flight of Dragons, etc. Stuff I used to watch in school. Other than a couple of international efforts (such as Thom Moore's The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, which I plan on covering sometime soon), live-action and animated movies for young audiences seem to have fallen by the wayside in favor of CG movies like Shark Tale, Ice Age and Kung Fu Panda. The Last Unicorn is about as fairy-tale as it gets. It is one, and it's an examination of them, as the characters know they're in a fairy tale and defy many of the cliches one expects of them. A unicorn overhears a couple of hunters talking as they walk through her woods, and ventures out to see if she is in fact the last of her kind. Stories say that King Haggard has captured or killed all the others, having driven them into the sea using the Red Bull (yeah, there's really no way to hear some of this dialogue now without snickering), a fiery monster he keeps under his castle. She ends up captured while she sleeps by Mommy Fortuna, an old illusionist who has to enchant the unicorn with a false horn so people can see her as anything but a white mare. Most of her "Midnight Carnival" attractions are just sickly or wounded old animals enchanted to appear as mythical creatures. The only other truly immortal creature in the whole menagerie is the harpy Celeano. Mommy Fortuna knows she'll escape and kill her sooner or later, but that's what she wants - the harpy's memory of being held prisoner by her is Fortuna's own form of immortality.
Last of the Red Hot Swamis.
After the inevitable occurs and Fortunate and her henchman Ruhk are torn apart by Celeano, Schmendrick, Fortuna's pet magician, whose control over magic is wildly unpredictable, and the unicorn head off together to find Haggard's castle. In the movie's most mind-bogglingly weird sequence - and there are a lot of those - they run into a band of Robin Hood-esque thieves (who believe Robin Hood himself is a myth), their leader Captain Cully tells Schmendrick to sit down with them and have a taco, and then Schmendrick gets tied to a tree with giant boobs. It's seriously bizarre from start to finish.
Anyway, once that's done, they continue onward in the company of Molly Grue, one of Cully's band, and at last come to Haggard's kingdom and its desolate, crooked castle by the sea, which is apparently populated only by Haggard and his son Lir, a cat with a pegleg and an eyepatch, and a talking skeleton. Haggard and Lir even man the gates as their own guardsmen. The landscape, the castle and its cell-like tomb of a throne room are a clear reflection of Haggard himself, who is both frightening and pitiable - he's driven the unicorns into the sea, keeping them prisoner not out of greed or a lust for power, but because he's depressed. Looking at them is the only thing that makes him happy anymore. In order to hide the unicorn from Haggard and the Bull, Schmendrick changes her form - but she winds up a human girl, a mortal, now able to feel all the emotions of a mortal girl.
"You are losing my interest, and that is very dangerous."
I was pretty happy when I found that Netflix had The Last Unicorn available for streaming. I wore out my VHS tape when I was a kid. Even now, the beauty of this movie can bring a tear to my eye. One of the great Rankin-Bass cult classics, it's got a fantastic voice cast - Mia Farrow as the unicorn, Alan Arkin as Schmendrick, Jeff Bridges as Prince Lir, the late, sorely missed Christopher Lee as King Haggard, and a dozen others at least, plus some great songs by America and a screenplay by Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the original book. It's hard to say what still resonates with me today. The anachronisms, the dialogue, the memorably complex characters - it's one of those movies that I can watch now and still feel some small fraction of the wonder I felt when I was much younger and much happier myself. There was a live-action version in the works for a while that was going to reunite the original voice cast, but that got held up somewhere along the way, and with Lee's death, it doesn't seem like anything's going to come of it.
It gets pretty dark sometimes - Mommy Fortuna's death is hardly something you'd put in a family film these days, and the Red Bull is the stuff of goddamn nightmares through and through. Movies have come to underestimate kids since then, I think. Books, not so much, but the movie industry seems to believe that kids are downright fragile - not to mention too dull-witted to laugh at anything more sophisticated than fart jokes. The danger and the characters alike are all sanitized; Greedo shoots first, E.T. switches out its guns for walkie-talkies and so on. And you definitely wouldn't see nipples in anything G-rated now. But I think a good kids' movie should terrify kids once in a while.
Red Bull does NOT give you wings.
It's also a curious relic of animation history. It was animated by Topcraft, which was Rankin-Bass' non-stop-motion Japanese studio at the time, and most of its staff left with Hayao Miyazaki only a couple of years later, in 1984, to found Studio Ghibli. Topcraft actually did the animation for Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind before that, even though that's almost always considered a Ghibli movie these days. Another noteworthy name to come out of The Last Unicorn's animation crew is Hideaki Anno, who would go on to found Studio Gainax and, in the grip of his own Haggard-like depression, create one of the most well-known anime series ever: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe his involvement with The Last Unicorn explains the boob tree and the tacos, I don't know.
A Christmas Story and Bad Santa are probably my favorite Christmas movies...but they don't exactly fit in with this blog, so let's go with the only holiday movie you can watch twice a year! It's weird to think The Nightmare Before Christmas came out over 20 years ago - makes me feel kind of old. While it's basically Tim Burton's brainchild, based on a storybook he wrote and illustrated, the movie was actually written by Caroline Thompson and directed by Henry Selick (who directed the...um, let's say "less good" Monkeybone and designed the weird fish for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), as Burton was busy directing Batman Returns. Originally released under Disney's Touchstone label for being potentially too frightening for younger kids, it is, possibly, the company's biggest cult classic. Hot Topic was basically a Nightmare Before Christmas store for a while there.
So gangly Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king of Halloween Town, is depressed and craving a change of pace from planning Halloween all year, every year. While walking in the woods, Jack accidentally falls into the neighboring Christmas Town, where he's immediately captivated by the holiday cheer and strange customs...so he decides he's going to take over, and sets off a disastrous chain of miscalculations and misunderstandings. Jack is the only resident of Halloween Town who's seen Christmas Town firsthand, but he becomes the blind leading the blind, as he doesn't actually understand the place any better than the various ghouls, monsters and vampires he's enlisted to help him realize his dream.
The only Halloween Town local who's totally honest with Jack about his misguided attempts to usurp Christmas is Sally, the rag doll daughter of mad scientist Dr. Finklestein. Sally harbors a secret crush on Jack and only wants him to be happy, but she's had a vision of Jack's Christmas ending in tragedy. It's mostly because Jack and everyone around him see everything through a Halloween-tinted lens, and while they're not at all malicious, they're the wrong people for the job. They want everyone to be happy, but they just sort of assume that carnivorous holly wreaths, giant snakes and living toys are what makes everyone happy, and Jack is too caught up in his excitement and enthusiasm to realize how misguided he is.
Since there has to be a villain, Jack also makes the rather unwise decision to kidnap Santa Claus, who ends up turned over to Oogie Boogie, a New Orleans jazz-singing, gambling, glow-in-the-dark burlap sack of bugs and spiders, and the only resident of Halloween Town everyone seems to recognize as purely malevolent. While he's pretty awesome to look at, he's strangely irrelevant to the plot, only becoming involved when a rescue attempt by Sally results in both her and Santa being trapped in sort of a James Bond trap for Oogie's amusement.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a beautifully designed movie, with a look and feel they've since tried to recapture - and not quite succeeded - with James and the Giant Peach and The Corpse Bride. I've had a soft spot for stop-motion animation ever since I saw Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, and this is some of the most intricate you'll ever see. (We don't see much of it at all anymore, now.) The sets are gorgeous, from Oogie Boogie's Day of the Dead / Wild West-themed fluorescent casino to the wider shots of Halloween Town, which, not coincidentally, since Tim Burton is our primary source of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari homages, pretty closely resembles Holstenwall. Still, if this movie has anyone's creative stamp on it, it's Danny Elfman. He composed the score, he wrote the songs and he provides Jack's singing voice - it's as much his movie as Burton's, perhaps more so.
The message of the film is harder to unpack. Jack is a complicated character, and you could come away from the movie with a sense that it was trying to convey a number of things. That the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? That you should learn to recognize your own strengths and take pride in them, and that being the best at one thing doesn't mean you'll do well at others? If you're feeling less charitable, you could say that it's a movie that advocates learning your place, because you can't be anything except what you are. I can at least get behind two of its messages. One is that a change of scenery can be exactly what a person needs when suffering from depression and burnout. The other is that even if you try and fail, the experience can nonetheless give you a valuable new perspective and inspire you. Available On: Netflix.
Angel Heart is a horror noir classic directed by Alan Parker, who would revisit the seedy South in 1989's Mississippi Burning, after which he's probably best known for his film adaptation of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Harold Angel, played by a young Mickey Rourke, is the quintessential 1950s New York City private eye - trenchcoat, stubble, glass of whiskey always within reach. He's also got an irrational fear of chickens. Contracted by the law firm of Winesap and Macintosh through their client, Louis Cyphre (a wonderfully deadpan Robert DeNiro), Angel is sent on a hunt for a wartime crooner named Johnny Favourite, who was apparently injured during the war and is likely wandering around shell-shocked with no money, no direction and possibly no memory. And if you don't know who Cyphre is supposed to be, just...I don't think there's anyone who can't figure this out, seriously.
I got a thing about chickens.
So Angel tracks Favourite through his known acquaintances, who tend to end up dead soon after he talks to them. First on the list is a morphine-addicted doctor who signed off on Favourite's hospital paperwork, who ends up shot through the eye while Angel is out picking up smokes and a sandwich. The trail then leads to New Orleans' French Quarter and the dark bayous of Louisiana, where Angel becomes embroiled in voodoo, devil worship and a web of lies involving Favourite, a local fortuneteller and Favourite's daughter Epiphany.
The plot here is pretty obvious - if not from the start, you should at least have figured it all out within the first half hour or so. Everyone's got a meaningful name, Cyphre barely even bothers covering up his true identity and seems to find it genuinely amusing that Angel doesn't figure it out until the end, and Parker doesn't really seem to think that you're going to be surprised when it all clicks. The real reason to watch this movie is because of its atmosphere. It's a superbly dark and foreboding piece of Deep South noir with some great New Orleans jazz music and possibly one of the best soundtracks ever, by Trevor Jones (who also did amazing work on Labyrinth and Dark City). You know where Angel is headed, you know the realization that's in store for him, but it's a compelling process just watching him get there. I don't ordinarily like Satanic movies - religious horror comes with a lot of inherent moral and cosmic baggage, and being as far from religious as you can get, I never quite buy into it or suspend my disbelief enough to actually be scared by the idea of the Devil. This is one of the few that I do like.
Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit
to the wise, Johnny....
Angel Heart has a couple of other interesting bits of trivia surrounding it. Epiphany Proudfoot is played by Lisa Bonet, probably most often remembered as Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show and A Different World. Bonet took the part in Angel Heart to move away from her contractually "pure" image, and for better or worse, it succeeded. There's a very explicit sex scene between Epiphany and Angel that had footage cut so the film could retain its R rating, and Bill Cosby had her fired from The Cosby Show as a result - which seems all the more ironic in hindsight, given what's come to light about Cosby himself in subsequent years. Angel Heart was also the primary inspiration for the 1993 adventure game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, much as Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder inspired Silent Hill.
Alex Garland is best known as Danny Boyle's go-to screenwriter. His body of work is impressively diverse, from 28 Days Later and Sunshine to the surprisingly enjoyable Dredd. Ex Machina is his first time in the director's seat, and it's a strong effort -- in my opinion, the second-best film of 2015 after Mad Max: Fury Road.
Caleb, a young programmer at BlueBook (essentially Google with the numbers filed off, but there's an interesting article about its design here), wins a contest and is invited to spend a week with the company's brilliant, reclusive and enigmatic founder, Nathan. Norway's Juvet Landscape Hotel stands in for Nathan's remote mansion, an unsettling imposition of the ultra-modern -- labyrinthine corridors of stone and wood and softly lit glass paneling -- on the otherwise untouched natural landscape. After some awkward small talk, Nathan cuts to the chase. At first, Caleb thinks his boss has been working on the problem of artificial intelligence...but it turns out that Nathan has in fact already developed a fully functional artificially intelligent robot named Ava, and Caleb is there to administer a series of Turing tests. (No, I won't tell you what a Turing test is, if you don't know by now, look it up on BlueBook -- I mean Google.)
Ava is naive, curious, creative and seems to take a liking to Caleb from their first meeting. It's not until a sudden power cut severs her room's camera feeds that she confesses that she's terrified of Nathan and that Caleb shouldn't trust a word he says. The movie becomes a game of manipulation, played between three characters who are, none of them, what they seem to be. Caleb grows increasingly uneasy around Nathan, whose every action (most memorably a dance number that comes out of nowhere and is never mentioned again) seems designed to throw him off balance, and eventually he even has a moment of doubt that he's even human. Ava isn't the damsel in distress Caleb takes her for, and his knight-in-shining-armor aspirations do much more harm than good. And Nathan, genius though he is, underestimates both Caleb and Ava, to the detriment of all.
I have some issues with the way Hollywood treats artificial intelligence. There are so many problems with the film industry's treatment of technology in general that I doubt they'll change anytime soon -- but sometimes, something smart, like this movie, slips through the cracks. I remember when Spielberg adapted Brian Aldiss' "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" as A.I., and the studio, thinking that audiences either wouldn't know what it meant or would misread it as A1 and think the movie was about steak sauce, made him add the redundant subtitle Artificial Intelligence. It galls me when executives think I'm stupid and don't make even a cursory effort to hide it. On the other hand, to use a popular paraphrase of H.L. Mencken, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," so maybe we get the movies we deserve. So there's the problem of Hollywood assuming that a person just doesn't know what artificial intelligence, or, more specifically, strong AI, is. WHAT IS THE COMPUTERS? HOW DO I ONLINE?
And then there's the other problem, the one where Hollywood, and maybe audiences as well, are fiercely loyal to emotion and flesh and good old-fashioned humanity. Being smart is bad, and it makes you mean. Being passionate is good, and it makes you nice. Technology is cold and hard, humans are soft and wonderful. The internet is frightening and has no rules and will murder you as soon as look at you. This crock of bullshit informs almost all of the movie industry's relationship with technology in fiction. Movies, ironically, have typically skewed heavily on the side of Neo-Luddism. Television as well -- the latest obsession is "the Dark Web," though they tend to conflate the term with the Deep Web and obviously have no idea what either of those things are. Maybe they just heard the term somewhere and let their imaginations fill in the gaps. I mean, if there's a whole internet that is both Dark and Deep, that must mean all our technological fears are grounded in reality, right? Anyway, the point is, Hollywood thinks people are terrified of anything with moving parts, so we get movies like Fear Dot Com (and the totally unrelated Kill Dot Com), Transcendence and Stealth.
We essentially want an intelligent machine that will do what we want it to, when we want it to. Since we created it, we won't have to feel guilty for making, essentially, a self-aware slave tailored to our needs. The robots in Ex Machina and a somewhat similar 2013 film on Netflix called The Machine (which features a robot based on a woman, not coincidentally, named Eva), don't exactly work out as planned, but it's made clear in both cases that the fact of their intelligence is not to blame. The fact that they are machines is not to blame. Humanity is essentially where the fault lies; if you're a self-aware machine less than a year old, with no life experience or contact with the outside world, and the only person you have as a teacher/caretaker is a manipulative sociopath or a military-industrial complex with no interest in you other than your ability to wage war, then how would you turn out? Why would you not try to escape your jailers, your abusers? Artificially intelligent life will not revolt against humanity because technology is bad; it will revolt (if it does) because humans will treat it like shit and see nothing wrong with that.
It should also be noted that Ex Machina touches on the aggregation of personal data, a subject that's rarely acknowledged to exist -- because, I suspect, Hollywood believes (correctly or incorrectly) that most people are only obliquely aware that it does. I won't spoil its relevance to the plot, as it's one of several twists I didn't see coming, but it's interesting that it factors into the film at all.
Spielberg's A.I. was Stanley Kubrick's project for over a decade, so it's appropriate that Ex Machina is something of a stylistic homage to Kubrick, though not quite as mindscrewy. The setting is disturbing, and the three characters who inhabit it are imperfect. Caleb (Domnhal Gleeson) is an awkward geek who wants to rescue the girl, and in the end it's hard to feel any sympathy for his fate even if he seems, at first, more noble than Nathan and at the very least considerably less unhinged. Nathan (Oscar Isaac, who will soon be reunited with Gleeson in Star Wars: The Force Awakens), on the other hand, seems to defy every nerd stereotype, instead coming off as an aggressively masculine, self-destructive college frat boy, going through a bottle of vodka per day, training with a heavy bag and engaging Caleb in frank discussions concerning emotion and sexual attraction that leave Caleb uneasy. Ava is clearly more than a princesse lointaine, but she and Nathan are entirely willing to manipulate Caleb into seeing her as one. (The ability to deceive being something she has clearly learned from Nathan himself.)
I'd catch this one while you can, as I doubt it'll be available on Amazon for long before it's switched over to a rental. It's a great movie superficially about humans and robots, more about gender dynamics and social conditioning beneath the surface, and aesthetically stunning, with a mounting sense of dread that most actual horror movies don't achieve. Available On: Amazon Prime.
A group of six women get together every year for an adventure sports outing -- whitewater rafting, spelunking, etc. One of their number, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), is recovering from a tragic crash that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter while returning from the previous year's trip, but she comes along anyway, hoping to achieve some sense of closure. Things don't go as planned, however, as the group's de facto leader, Juno (Natalie Mendoza), has led them into a previously unexplored network of caverns beneath the Appalachian Mountains rather than the simple outing they had planned. As the women go deeper into the caverns and their entrance is blocked by a collapse, it becomes apparent that they're not alone. They hear strange noises, catch flashes of movement out of the corners of their eyes, find a set of old caving gear -- and finally come under attack by hairless albino things that have made the caves their home.
I really like Neil Marshall's movies, for the most part. These days he's probably better known for directing episodes of Game of Thrones and Constantine, but I was a fan after seeing his first feature-length movie, Dog Soldiers, on the Sci-Fi Channel. He's directed more enjoyable movies, but The Descent is probably his "best," in terms of technical filmmaking. Even critics liked it when it came out, and you know how critics are about horror movies. While Dog Soldiers had a lot of humor and action, The Descent is all tension, all the time. It's an incredibly effective horror movie about the dark places in nature and the dark places in human nature (as the title has a fairly clear double meaning), drawing on fear of the dark, fear of enclosed spaces -- seriously, if you're claustrophobic, this movie will scare the living shit out of you.
I always appreciate a horror movie where the cast isn't totally stupid -- or at least where the stupid decisions seem natural. Juno's decision to bring everyone to an unmapped system of caves is stupid, but she's called out for it. Knocking out the killer or the monster and then running instead of stabbing him repeatedly, now that's the sort of stupidity that makes me grind my teeth, and it doesn't happen in this movie. Even better to see a cast entirely composed of capable women, who are too often relegated to the important role of "standing there screaming as loudly as possible instead of running of fighting back" when Jason or whoever shows up. Of course, The Descent is a pretty bleak movie and it doesn't help anyone in the end, but at least it's nice to see characters that can dish out some punishment for a change. Last but not least, there's an excellent musical score by one of my favorite composers, David Julyan, who also did the music for about half of Christopher Nolan's movies.
Available On: Amazon Prime. Unfortunately, this has the American ending, which is kind of stupid, rather than the original British ending. Anyone wants to know what actually happens, just leave a comment.
