Hello everyone, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Are you all enjoying the spring weather? It’s finally gotten warm enough to allow for regular weekly jogs, which is certainly helping to improve my day-to-day mood. It’s pretty fucked up that proper diet and exercise actually do work, and not only are you healthier, but you also genuinely feel better pretty much the moment you commit to them. Along with enjoying this miracle of human chemistry, I’ve also been munching through a variety of interesting films, and even considering checking out a weekly anime or something. I know, I shouldn’t get too crazy here, but what I’m hearing about Spy x Family seems like it might actually be my sort of thing. But before I do anything so hasty as that, we’ve got a pile of feature films to sort through. Let’s break down the latest bounty of the Week in Review!
Our first feature of the week was a recent neo-western called Hell or High Water. The film features Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers committing a series of bank robberies, all in hopes of preventing a local bank from foreclosing on their mother’s home. Meanwhile, Texas rangers Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham take up the scent of their trail, all leading towards a thunderous final confrontation.
Hell and High Water is an eminently handsome film, with its distinctively wide-shot photography finding great beauty in its dilapidated farming towns. There’s a sense of fatalism in both sides of its drama; the brothers are attempting to “steal back” something that is rightfully theirs, while Bridges and Birmingham are protecting a social order that both know is far from justice. The film’s thematic heart is announced outright by Birmingham, when he states that “your people stole this land from mine, and now it’s being stolen in turn by the banks.” Justice is a fantasy in our capitalist prison, but even a fantasy can give you a sense of purpose.
The heist sequences are heart-thrummingly messy, the cinematography is elegant, and the performances are strong throughout. In spite of a script that occasionally overplays its hand, Hell or High Water succeeds as a moral statement and a personal drama, complicating the aesthetic touchstones of classic westerns with a story that questions what modern lawmen are truly defending.
Next up was another horror revival, as we checked out Rob Zombie’s revival of the Halloween franchise. Rob Zombie’s Halloween is a pretty weird film, and not for the reasons you probably expect. As a horror craftsman, Zombie does fine enough work – the film moves well, looks good enough, and has plenty of satisfyingly crunchy violence. Zombie’s great specialty seems to be gore that feels fun rather than grim – his payoff scenes verge on the macabre lunacy of a Tarantino movie, successfully toeing the line between horror and comedy.
Rather than its aesthetics, Halloween’s major failings are all structural ones. Turning the clock back even further than the original, this Halloween spends its first half exploring Myers’ childhood, and diving deep into his relationship with Dr. Loomis. Embracing the sequel’s supposition that Laurie and Michael are siblings, the film then goes on to closely recreate the events of the original, with the added context of their bond offering a slight tonal riff on the original.
Watching Halloween, I experienced the awkward progression of first feeling impatient for the child Myers stuff to be over, and subsequently wishing we could return to the child Myers stuff. The young Myers material isn’t revelatory or even particularly exciting, but it is at least new – in its second half, Halloween hews so very closely to the beats of the original that all you can really engage with is its significantly inferior cinematography. The original Halloween’s Mike Myers was a figure of inhuman mystery, popping over hedges to contaminate otherwise serene suburbia. In contrast, this film’s Myers is actually the perspective character, draining the film of its mystery and urgency while also abandoning the original’s uniquely discomforting compositions.
I think there’s a reason for all of this. I think that, as a man who calls himself “Rob Zombie” and styles his work the way he does, Zombie finds something relatable in cinema’s masked monsters, and thus constructed a Halloween that makes Myers the protagonist. Though doing so inadvertently undercuts many of the original’s best qualities, I can’t help but sympathize with his sympathy, his desire to lay a tender hand on a cold and shadowed mask. Anyone who doesn’t fit in probably has at least a little sympathy for the devil inside them.
After that we checked out a lesser Coppola feature, Peggy Sue Got Married. On the night of her twenty-five year high school reunion, the titular Peggy finds herself overcome with doubt, on the verge of divorce with her high school sweetheart, and wondering when it all went wrong. After collapsing on the stage, she awakens to find herself back in high school, with a second chance to choose her life path. And so, of course, she fucks up basically everything, bumming liquor from her parents’ cabinet and treating school like a dating sim where she’s going for the harem ending.
Most of these blast-from-the-past time travel narratives lean heavily on nostalgia, and seem to buy into the idea that high school is a uniquely special and influential time in your life. Not this one; coming from a clearly adult perspective, Peggy Sue can see the inanity and inconsequentiality of high school for what it is, and runs circles around her insecure classmates. Peggy Sue cuts through the grand frivolity of high school appearances like a chainsaw, with her conflicts coming less from any difficulty in managing school for a second time, and more in grappling with the fact that all of our choices are compromises, and no path through life is the truly “correct” one.
As you might have guessed, I kinda loved this movie, and found its proud disregard for high school drama extremely refreshing. Peggy’s still got a few years on me, but I’ve spent enough time pouring over adolescent media to feel equally disinterested in these passionate yet ephemeral dramas. On the other hand, Peggy’s midlife crisis feels more relatable by the day, and I appreciated this film’s unwillingness to embrace any easy solutions. “Life is tough, people are complicated, and marriage is hard work” – not the sort of themes that might inspire bright young hearts, but welcome reassurances for an old-timer like me.
Next up was a Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I first saw The Life Aquatic in theaters in 2004, back when I was a sophomore in high school. I was too young for the movie then, too immersed in actually being a son to really grapple with a film about fathers and sons. But I’m older now, and my father has passed on, and Wes Anderson is capable of synthesizing every confession we dare not speak into a charged electricity between actors. As a result, his story about fathers and their sons struck me very, very hard.
Bill Murray does not want to be a father; he wants to be an explorer, and his children are the films he creates. Owen Wilson is not sure he needs a father, and not sure this man could possibly fit the bill. The two pace around each other in an awkward simulation of intimacy, Murray only able to express sentimentality through his choices of lighting and titling, Wilson alternately desperate for validation and disgusted by Murray’s callousness. It doesn’t work, but sometimes it does, and those few moments make all the agony worth it. Are all parent-child relationships so broken? Perhaps it only seems that way because broken people make art, and few of our relations can fuck us up more effectively than our parents.
The Life Aquatic’s approach to fathers and sons feels like spying a beautiful flower encased in glass, and then shattering that glass with your bare hand, fingers tightening round the stem as the shards pierce your skin. Its reflections on aging out of artistic relevance are equally biting, relayed with the soul-crushing nonchalance of Murray at his best. The film is full of charming performances and wacky incidents and ornate compositions, but its soul screams with the insecurity of any aging performer, too attuned to their craft to feel safe in their legacy, too jaded to find solace in the lives of their descendants. An intimate, articulate, and almost perfect film.
We finished off the week with a grand Hollywood adventure, checking out The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt star as Dobbs and Curtin, two down-on-their-luck Americans in Tampico, Mexico. Teaming up with a wily old prospector named Howard (Walter Huston), the group set out hoping to strike it rich, facing all manner of treacherous obstacles on the way.
Sierra Madre might well be the quintessential classic Hollywood adventure movie, brimming with chases and shootouts and deadly betrayals. Its gritty aesthetic and nigh-episodic tempo surely inspired future features like the Indiana Jones films, with escalating threats bound together by the ticking time bomb of Bogart’s mental state. All three of the leads are excellent in their own way; Bogart’s intensity is genuinely frightening, Huston feels like the Platonic ideal from whom all other rascally prospectors descend, and Holt balances gracefully between them, caught between greed and his better nature.
There’s a great deal to enjoy in this film, but I think my favorite element must have been Huston’s blithe acceptance of his group’s impending demise. Having spent a full lifetime watching gold fortunes rise and fall, Huston is aware from the start that their chances of claiming this gold are slim, even if they actually find a suitable vein. He’s just in it for the love of the game, and as his companions fall into deceit and despair, it’s hard not to appreciate his point of view. Fortunes come and fortunes go; in the end, any adventure you can look back on and laugh is a successful one.
