I know someone who said that mother! was a movie that he warned people against seeing because of its subject matter and wondered if it should even be made. And then, I know people who fell in love with the film, lavishing it with praise. Still, others were shocked by its violence or upset by its biblical imagery. Me? I thought it was fucking hilarious.

After 2014’s Noah, Aronofsky was working on a children’s film (!) when he came up with the idea for this film. During that process, he came up with the idea for this film, writing the screenplay in 5 days. He claims that the film is “a psychological freak-out. You shouldn’t over-explain it.” But that doesn’t mean that people didn’t fall all over themselves trying to! 

Star Jennifer Lawrence — also Aronofsky’s muse during filming — Lawrence claimed that the film as an allegory that “depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth. I represent Mother Earth; Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam, there’s Cain and Abel and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.”

Sure. That works.

Or it could be about the environment and how we’re killing it.

Or it could be about what it’s like to be a creator and see your work destroyed.

Or it could be a cover version of Rosemary’s Baby that gets way too out of control.

Or you could see it like I did, a movie that somehow got into the hearts and minds of the movie intelligentsia and demanded an explanation when you can see that it wears its narrative beats and allegories on its bloody sleeve. At one point — spoilers if you made it this far — I said, once the baby is born, that’s the end of the Old Testament and there will be a break in the action and then they’ll start eating the baby like it’s Holy Communion. I’m certain that folks were really upset by this scene (my used copy from Family Video has a WARNING – NO RENTAL UNDER 18 sticker), but it’s almost like a punchline. Or I’m insane. Probably.

But then why is Ed Harris a doctor? Why do we spend so much time in the laundry room? Why do vaginal openings show up in Ed’s back (yes, he’s Adam and that could be where his rib was taken from, I get it, I get it) and the floor? Oh the questions mother! will make you ask and immediately regret for putting any thought behind a movie which had to have been a piss take.

This is a movie that wants to be an allegory and then wants to be a narrative film. Like — why does 911 answer the phone like this is in the real world when we’ve already accepted that mother is Mother Nature? And why does God need a starship (sorry, I wanted to get a Star Trek V: The Final Frontier reference into this).

What’s with that yellow water? Oh, that’s just a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Of course. We all knew that.

While the film had generally positive responses from critics, it got a cinema score of an F*, which suggests that the film goes out of its way to upset audiences. When confronted by these numbers — and diminishing box office returns — Aronofsky blamed moviegoers’ rejection of science, saying, “You have other people who basically believe in the power of an iPhone that they can communicate to 35 million people in a blink of an eye, yet they don’t believe in science in other ways. We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish and I wanted to express it.” 

Incredibly, IMDB reports that Paramount canceled the upcoming Friday the 13th film in order to move ahead with this film. I have no idea why both of those movies couldn’t exist in the same universe — other than the fact that this film was originally due to come out on October 13.

I love that the director wrote a letter to audiences before the film came out. With phrases like “From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness, I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me like a fever dream” and “I can’t fully pinpoint where this film all came from. Some came from the headlines we face every second of every day, some came from the endless buzzing of notifications on our smartphones, some came from living through the blackout of Hurricane Sandy in downtown Manhattan, some came from my heart, some from my gut. Collectively it’s a recipe I won’t ever be able to reproduce, but I do know this serving is best drunk as a single dose in a shot glass. Knock it back. Salute!” this letter is full of as much pretension as the film and made me giggle just as hard.

Has there ever been a film that equates the Great Flood with an improperly braced sink and the struggle of home repair? No. There sure hasn’t, up until now.

In case you didn’t get that Javier Bardem was God when he says, “I am I” and that the end of the world was what we saw at the end by Patti Smith singing The End of the World, well, then now you do.

This is the kind of movie that people will rent on Netflix and tell all of their friends not to watch. Or they’ll be shocked. Or they’ll fall asleep (the last ten minutes of this film were a Bataan death march of me battling against ennui and boredom). Is it the most shocking film ever, one that sends millennials crying into their blogs? Dude. In a world where A Serbian Film, The Men Behind the Sun and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom exist — fuck, any number of grindhouse faves like Dr. Butcher, M.D.,  The New York Ripper and Cannibal Holocaust fit the bill — this film is a trifle. I just love that we’re insulated ourselves from culture and art attacking us that we can be upset by such a glancing blow.

Should you watch it? Man, don’t ask me what to do. Decide for yourself.

UPDATE: You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime.

*Only 19 movies have received this score so far. They are: Alone in the Dark, The Box, Bug, Darkness, The Devil Inside, Disaster Movie, Doctor T and the Women, Eye of the Beholder, Fear Dot Com, I Know Who Killed Me, In the Cut, Killing Them Softly, Lost Souls, Lucky Numbers, mother!, Silent House, Solaris, The Wicker Man and Wolf Creek.

Feed Shark

James Pope never left home, content to live with his parents. His only concern in the world is his obsession with a children’s television program titled Brigsby Bear Adventures, writing detailed recaps of the show and debating each episode online with other fans. But what if the world he lives in isn’t reality?

James (Kyle Mooney, SNL) has spent his life underground with his parents, Ted and April Mitchum (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams). Forced to stay underground because the rest of the world has been contaminated by radiation, James fills his days with Brigsby Bear, always wearing a shirt from the show, collecting merchandise and watching every episode, which he has on VHS tape. This may hit a little close to home.

As he dons a gas mask and sneaks out to the roof to watch the desert, James sees police cars approaching his home. He, Ted and April are taken away. He meets Detective Vogel (Greg Kinnear, Little Miss Sunshine), who tells him that what he has come to accept as reality is untrue. He has a real set of parents and a sister. And even more shocking, Brigsby Bear wasn’t a real show, but was created by Ted just for him. No one else knows anything about his greatest obsession — even the people he talked to on the internet were his abductors.

James needs to learn how to relate to his real parents, Greg and Louise Pope (Matt Walsh, a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade and Michaela Watkins, an SNL cast member from 2008-2009 and The House) and their daughter Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins, Revolutionary Road and The House).

You instantly realize that everyone has been living in a different version of reality. For James’ real parents, they had spent 25 years looking for him and can’t break the behavior patterns that allowed them to mentally survive. And his sister has grown to resent the brother she has never met. But this isn’t a cookie cutter movie — she has the capacity to love James and even takes him to a party.

You might expect the drinking and drugs in this scene to lead to tragedy, but instead they allow James to open up and discuss Brigsby with a large crowd, including Spencer, who is an aspiring filmmaker. They agree to finish the story of Brisgby Bear.

Detective Vogel gives James the show’s props and show of his videotapes, which he uploads to YouTube, creating a new audience for the show that only he has seen and building anticipation for his movie. However, James’ parents and therapist (Claire Danes) don’t approve, thinking that this is holding him back from accepting reality.

While filming in the woods, James creates a giant explosion, shocking everyone and drawing the police. He loses all of the costumes and props as the result.

One night, determined to tell his story, he leaves in his parent’s car and goes to his old home, which now seems just as alien as the world he has re-entered. This reminded me of Room, but not in a bad way. On his way back to his new home, James decides to find Whitney (Kate Lyn Sheil, You’re Next), a waitress who played the Smiles sisters on Brigsby. She’s the only woman that he’s ever loved — sure, it’s been through a fake TV show created by his abductive father — but it’s love nonetheless. She tells him how badly she felt once she learned what the truth was, as she had been led to believe that the show was created for Canadian public access. As the police arrive to arrest him, he confesses his love for her and asks her to be in his movie.

James is institutionalized, where he meets Eric (Andy Samberg), who keeps his spirits up. One night, he decides to run away, but once he gets home to grab clothes, he learns that his family, Spencer and Detective Vogel have been working on finishing his movie. The scene where Aubrey stands up for her brother and shows them how the power of creating a movie has helped him be normal and make friends felt powerful and honest.

There’s only one thing missing, but only James would know: Brigsby’s voice just isn’t right. He goes to jail to visit Ted, who offers to explain why he abducted him. But James has already made peace with his “old dad” and just wants his help to finish the film.

The film is completed, with Detective Vogel getting to live his dream of being an actor and Whitney getting to escape the diner to act again.

On the night of the movie’s premiere, James is nervous to the point of nausea, worried that people won’t enjoy the culture that had once belonged only to him. Yet when he walks into the theater, he only sees pure joy. His mother and father are crying in happiness, his sister welcomes him with an embrace and when he looks to the stage, he sees Brigsby, who waves goodbye and disappears.

The end of this film reduced me to tears. Seriously, I found this whole movie to be near perfect.

Brigsby Bear was co-written by Mooney and Kevin Costello, and directed by Dave McCary — three friends who went to high school together and later formed the sketch group Good Neighbor with Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford (who also appear in the film). So much of the film was based on their years of making videos together, Mooney being a nostalgic introvert and the worries that no one will love what you spent so long creating.

They based the videos within the film on the aesthetic of 80’s kid’s shows, like Prayer Bear. Mooney is a big collector of strange videos, like the stuff that shows up at the amazing Found Footage Festival.

This was one of my favorite films this year and would be a perfect way to close out your 2017!

This movie is brought to you by our friend Paul Andolina, who created the website Wrestling with Film.

On the day I rented The Elf, I also rented Mother Krampus. Mother Krampus is a film from the United Kingdom where it is titled more aptly 12 Deaths of Christmas. A mother, Vanessa and her daughter, Amy have come to spend the holidays with her father, Amy’s grandpa as it turns out Amy’s father is spending time with another woman. It is based on the tale of Frau Perchta but has more to do with tales of witch hunts gone bad as a local lady is blamed for the deaths and disappearances of children back in the 90’s. The disappearances are happening again and the townsfolk are quite worried. You see the townsfolk disemboweled and hung her. Now she or something has seemingly returned to enact vengeance as she said would happen when she cursed the townsfolk before her death.

This film is a bloody, dark, Grimm’s fairy tale with a heaping dash of mystery. You never really quite know what the hell is going on. People are dying, disappearing and getting cut up with cookie cutters and fried up extra crispy. If you like your horror movies dark, bloody, and confusing this will be right up your alley. At times I forgot this movie was even set during Christmas because it’s set in England and there isn’t a drop of snow. The festive lights, candy, and trees seem to be there to remind you this does indeed take place on Christmas. I knew Frau Perchta was known as the Christmas witch but sometimes you just don’t feel the festiveness that comes along with these sorts of films.

There are some odd choices made in this movie, especially the part where Perchta roars like a bloody Tyrannosaurus for no apparent reason at all. I think I may have enjoyed this a bit more with some liquor but it was a competently made film. I may have just been done with movies for the day and was being unfairly sour towards the film but it just didn’t seem to fall in place and work for me. Others may enjoy it and I did to an extent but it just left an odd taste in my mouth. By the time they reveal what is actually going on I was already checked out but I will probably give this movie another shot sometime. Unless you are really into folklore and slashers you may want to give this one a Christmas pass.

This movie is brought to you by our friend Paul Andolina, who created the website Wrestling with Film.

It’s mid-December and it’s finally starting to look like Christmas outside. Last week Star Wars The Last Jedi premiered and I was excited to see it in theaters opening day but deep down I was looking forward to another movie just as much. I had stopped at the local Family Video early in the day prior to the premiere to pick up some rentals and there it was on the shelf. I had originally preordered this film back in November but I had to cancel it due to some financial issues. The movie I was specifically there to rent was The Elf. I had looked up the trailer because I had heard there was a movie about a killer elf on the shelf type toy. The trailer had me hooked and I knew I had to see it. Elf on the shelf has become a tradition in some households. A small elf doll mysteriously moves throughout the house doing whatever the fuck it wants and spying on the children to report back to Santa Claus. Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for a horror movie to capitalize on that premise.

The Elf is centered around Nick and his fiancee Victoria it’s Christmas Eve and Nick heads out to the town he was born in to appraise an old toy store. While in the back of the store he discovers a weird chest with an odd saying on it. It says who ever opens the chest will be the soul of its contents. Inside the chest is an elf toy with a knife. He reads something about a hunt and how he can’t interfere or it will end all bad. It says he can take people off the naughty list as well. As he holds the elf creepy Christmas music plays and it begins to snow inside. The elf runs off. See Nick hates Christmas because of something he witnessed when he was young; an event that has lead to night terrors through adulthood. When they arrive home the elf is waiting on them. His fiancee invites her family over and the murderous elf is unleashed.

The plot runs much deeper than I’m leading on. Souls, seals, and ancient magic thrive in this film but just beneath the surface. In fact it draws its plot from the legend of the Wild Hunt as documented by Jacob Grimm. Given a larger budget I think this could be quite spectacular. Since this movie is a new release I’m not going to spoil anything about it. It has pretty low ratings on IMDb but I enjoyed it a lot. The ending really cemented my enjoyment of it. I thought it was a tense movie with something fresh to offer to the genre of Holiday horror that is so often plagued by killers dressed as Santa Claus. The biggest complaint I have is that the music is so loud that it’s almost impossible to hear the dialogue at times. This wouldn’t be an issue but even the subtitles don’t have all of the dialogue. The visual effects aren’t the greatest ever but that is to be expected with a direct to video release. If you’re a fan of low budget movies you might enjoy this. However, I don’t think it will be everyone’s cup of tea but with copious amounts of eggnog spiked with bourbon everyone could make it through the hour and a half run time. If you’re not a drinker than some of the holiday herbage could be used in place. All in all I think The Elf is a welcome addition to the storied past of Holiday terror.

Hey — a new Christmas themed horror movie on Netflix! Is it worth watching? Well, that depends.

To me, this seemed even more stressful than Home for the Holidays. It concerns a family that nearly hates one another, all made up of stereotypes, who meet in the Australian outback for the holidays. Eh, let’s get into it.

Twenty years ago, an abortion clinic was bombed but a baby survived. Cut to today and that aforementioned family gathers at the home of matriarch Diane (Dee Wallace, Critters, The House of the Devil). Meanwhile, Cletus, a man in rags and bandages, shows up to upset everyone before the film turns into a slasher.

There are some creative kills and an interesting take that Diane ended up raising a son with Down’s Syndrome but may have wanted to abort him. But Cletus is near impossible to understand without subtitles and no one is likable enough to worry about them when they are murdered.

It also has a misogynist pro-life slant: abortion is wrong. Women that get abortions are evil. Substitute people that have abortions for people who fuck in the woods and you have a movie. Sadly, it’s not a very good one. Supposedly, this is a dark comedy. I found it dark, but nowhere near humorous. Your mileage, however, may vary.

Few things get me more emotional than Andy Kaufman. Even hearing a few words of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon” makes my eyes well up. I remember watching his early appearances live on Saturday Night Live and the night he got into a fist fight on Fridays. And while I was alive for his descent into pro wrestling mania and his battle with cancer, I don’t remember much of the end. Maybe I didn’t want to process it. Maybe that’s why I believed — to this day — that Andy is just waiting to pull the curtain back on all of us and come back. And maybe not coming back? Perhaps that’s his best trick of all.

Conversely, I’ve never liked Jim Carrey. Unlike Andy, who undermined his own popularity and resisted the mainstream while simultaneously making a living from it, he seemed too eager to please. Too happy to take and take from the blockbuster machine, to be in works that didn’t challenge him. That’s why The Cable Guy surprised me. Here as the buffoon who mugged his way through Dumb and Dumber forcing viewers to contemplate the pain behind the character. He followed that movie with later challenging films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The Jim Carrey that appears here is not the rubber-faced maniac who seemed to cry out, “Watch me! Love me!” This is a graying, faded, bearded, rougher man who has been through no small degree of personal loss and pain. And this is also a man who willingly gave his identity over to not just Andy Kaufman, but to Andy’s more frightening side, the villainous Tony Clifton.

In a recent Newsweek article, Kaufman’s sister gives some insight: “I think that Jim Carrey was a vessel,” she said. “This may sound a little wooo-hooo, but I do believe he allowed Andy to come through him. I also chose to believe that Andy was coming through him. When he looked at me, I’m not kidding. [It was like] speaking to Andy from the great beyond. I felt like he was coming through as the evolved, astral Andy.”

I’ve watched Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon numerous times. And I’ve read plenty of books, digested plenty of articles and watched every appearance Andy did on TV. I look to him in the way that I extend to few performers: he’s more of a truth-speaking prophet than just a person. Do I give him too much credit? Do I see things in him, do I project magic that he wasn’t able to perform?  I think — I fervently believe — that he was something more. A force. Someone who was able to push buttons, upset people and be a real-life wrestling heel while at the same time delivering childlike moments of whimsy and wonder. Just the footage of him inviting everyone to join him for milk and cookies after his Carnegie Hall performance makes me weep openly. It feels too real, too loving, too honest and much too true.

Carrey claims that Andy Kaufman appeared to him and telepathically “tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Sit down. I’ll be doin’ my movie.” He added that “What happened afterward was out of my control.”

The Kaufman family wasn’t happy with Man on the Moon. They felt it presented Andy as a jerk, unlike the person they loved. It was too sappy. Too much a Hollywood story. Michael Kaufman, his brother, takes issue with the role that Bob Zmuda and Lynne Margulies claim they had in his brother’s life. They take special umbrage with the book they wrote in 2014,  Andy Kaufman: The Truth Finally, that claims that Andy really is alive and simply waiting to reveal himself.

This September, Jim Carrey caused a stir at a Harper’s Bazaar party where he said that he was there because “I wanted to come to the most meaningless thing I could come to” before ending the interview by claiming that he didn’t really exist. It was the most Kaufman of interviews. And ironic, considering that after twenty years, this footage would finally be shown.

Man on the Moon hits the beats of Andy’s life, but maybe I love it not for the movie that it is, but for the spirit of the man that it resists showing properly. To me, what takes a Kaufman performance beyond a routine and into transcendent bliss is the moment where you are confused. Or where you can see that he’s waiting for the punchline as much as you are. He can’t wait to sing the Mighty Mouse chorus. He is still Foreign Man under all of Elvis’ swagger. He’s a kid in his room wishing he could be Fred Blassie for a day without having to deal with the very real danger Blassie faced, such as 21 stabbing attempts and an acid attack. The film — and Carrey — get very close. And maybe the spirit of Andy is inside Carrey in the film.

But I find more of him in the interview that Carrey gives in this documentary. It feels truer than any of the antics he aped for Forman. Even the moment where he takes off his microphone and says, “We really got into some wild shit here,” you sense that he’s bewildered at the experience, even decades later.

Can anyone else even be Kaufman in a world where everything is seen as fake news and a conspiracy? Where media is already meta and simple tricks like playing with the vertical hold on a TV wouldn’t make sense any longer? If Andy had survived or stayed in the pop culture world, would he remain relevant? Or is the fact that he went away and could still take over another actor’s life remain his best and possibly final trick?

To me, the real difference between Carrey and Kaufman are their signature lines. Carrey found that he wanted to free the audience from concern, to say “Alrighty, then” and become the Hyde to his everyday Jekyll, to unleash the monster within himself and ignore any worry that anyone wouldn’t like him. It no longer mattered. But for all the ways Kaufman chased his audience away, his “thank you very much” was honest and pure, respecting the members of the audience that put up with the insanity and pranks and reality-bending nonsense to come through to the other side, to savor the moment of being entertained, to sit and devour milk and cookies before finding him on the Staten Island Ferry the next morning, where the show would just keep going.

Do we need a fourth installment in The Conjuring film series? More to the point, do we need another origin story for the evil doll, Annabelle, after 2014’s Annabelle? And can directed David F. Sandberg, whose Lights Out showed such promise only to ultimately be a failure, helm a feature that’s true to the quality James Wan brought to the original films? And finally, just how much should you expect from a prequel to the sequel to a spin-off?

Turns out that I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I honestly expected nothing, given how much disdain I had for Lights Out, a film that made me want to leave the theater from its opening story beats. Instead, Annabelle: Creation takes plenty of time building its roller coaster structure, introducing us to Sister Charlotte and her pack of orphaned girls. They come to the farm of Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia, Empire Records) and Esther Mullins with nowhere else to go.

We gradually get the backstory of how the Mullins tragically lost their daughter, Annabelle, and are trying to atone for some past sins by allowing the girls access to their home. At the films heart is the relationship between Linda (Lulu Wilson, Deliver Us from Evil and Ouija: Origin of Evil) and polio sufferer Janice (Talitha Bateman, the older sister of Lights Out star Gabriel Bateman).

Sandberg claims that he was influenced by The Haunting and The Shining for this film, dropping the meticulous planning and storyboards that had been such a part of his style. I can point to several other prime influences — the dumb waiter scare at the end references the basement elevator sequence in Halloween II, the hiding in the closet has the primal feel of the original Halloween and the gory treatment of Mrs. Mullins near the end looks like the crucified Schweick of Fulci’s The Beyond (one could also argue that her ceramic adorned visage at once references the Annabelle doll features and 2016’s The Boy). I also saw a similarity to the glowing, possessed eyes of Janice with Canadian Exorcist ripoff Cathy’s Curse (look, we could just say the film ripped off The Exorcist, too, but the image of Cathy on the cover of Severin’s recent Blu-Ray release is more fresh in my brain).

The last thirty some odd minutes of this film use all of that previously built roller coaster track to not give up — at all. I haven’t seen a film so intent on providing thrills and non-stop scares in some time. We saw the film in a raucous, teen-filled opening night, packed with kids who weren’t afraid to scream as loudly as they could. The film rewarded them with some genuine scares, such as when Annabelle continually grows until she becomes inhuman.

Along the way, there is some universe building, with one scene that almost feels like a DVD extra where Sister Charlotte and Samuel discuss a photo of her with some Romanian nuns. Valek, the evil nun from the other Conjuring films makes a brief appearance within the image. And the end of the film provides a neat bow, showing how all of these events bring the Annabelle doll and Janice back together for the opening murder in Annabelle (inverting the original films setting, a neat trick).

Becca liked the first one better, but still thought that this was a very decent movie. I left the film buzzed, excited to have taken a summer popcorn thrill ride. There are some great touches (there was some lighting near the end that I felt could have used a softer color palette but I’m always going to approach horror lighting from the Bava school), such as the moment two girls are hiding under a blanket while a ghost draws near, continually ringing a bell, rendering their attempts to scare one another moot.

Modern horror ends up a homogenized pile of muck for the most part, but for my money, you can’t helped but be entertained by this film. Well done.