Movies (and a limited series) in review: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Killer, Nyad, and Prey

I have already said some of this on social media, but I'm up to pee and feed the cat and it always helps to take the brain for a walk before I try for sleep two. Here's a few recent-ish entertainments, recently consumed...

The limited series on Netflix, The Fall of the House of Usher, was entertaining and made clever use of Poe, though occasionally a bit overtly (a lot of Poe gets read aloud). I don't know Poe exhaustively so I couldn't name ALL the references, but they're constant and carefully interwoven; in terms of the Poe-I-know, I loved that it gave pride-of-place to one of my favourites of his stories, "The Cask of Amontillado," which has been under-mined cinematically, given how much Poe has been adapted for screen. Some nice use of Vancouver locations, too, though aside from the obvious use of St. Andrew's Wesleyan, you probably won't recognize any of them. Once the production's backstory came to my attention, I kept wondering what it would have been like if Frank Langella had been allowed to remain in the cast. I like Bruce Greenwood a lot -- and weirdly like him even more for having seen him just takin' the fuckin' bus in Vancouver, around when Meek's Cutoff had its theatrical run; something about celebrities who ride public transit (hi to David Suzuki, in this respect) appeals to me. But Greenwood generally presents as virtuous and sympathetic, while Langella could have brought some Boris-Balkan-style evil and Grand-Guignol excess to the role, which would have been quite appropriate. And Zach Gilford, the actor cast as a young Roderick Usher, looks a lot more like Langella than he does Greenwood; in fact, when I began watching the series, I had not recalled the Langella firing, and found myself wondering what the hell they were thinking, casting someone who looked nothing like Greenwood for the role (below: Langella-Gilford-Greenwood).

Of course, Langella was busted for alleged sexual misconduct; apparently he had a love scene with a character and was a bit spontaneous about where his hands went. Somehow, though, even in the #MeToo era, there's not a story out there about it that I've seen that wasn't framed sympathetically towards him. I was not on set, have only read these media-filtered reports, but they make it very easy to imagine that someone who came up as an actor in the 1970s might have been accustomed to playing by different rulebooks than a younger female co-star, framing him as a victim of changing times. On the other hand, if the actress in question DID feel uncomfortable, and Langella DID have direction that he did not follow (from the "intimacy coordinator"...?), what other option was there? I can only say that I think the series would have been better for his presence.

It was still very entertaining, but the best things about it were seeing Mark Hamill and Mary McDonell rendered pretty much unrecognizable, disappearing into roles unlike any I had seen them tackle before. I never thought much of Hamill as an actor, but do now; whereas I have long loved McDonell from her work with John Sayles (not to mention Donnie Darko), yet actually had to Google the cast to figure out who I was seeing -- she's THAT unrecognizable. So both actors gained quite a bit of respect from me.

Also on Netflix, David Fincher's new film, The Killer, was kind of empty, feeling like a somewhat less-stylish update of, maybe, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, about how emotionally demanding, cool, and dangerous it is to be a professional assassin, which, it turns out, has somehow become a yawnsome, hollow-feeling archetype for me; I think I began feeling this way with The Grey Man, also on Netflix, and may just swear off stylish existentialist lone assassin stories for the time being, as having no value worth mining.

The film, of course, is still visually pretty and easy enough to watch, and Tilda Swinton is always welcome on my screens, but when the high point ends up being a running gag about the title character using names from sitcoms as aliases -- where the moment in the film where my brain perked up the most was Googling "Reuben Kincaid," which character I had forgotten (unlike Howard Cunningham, Felix Unger, Oscar Madison, and Archibald Bunker, to name a few names that get dropped), there's something amiss, especially since the use of memorable and obvious aliases in fact undercuts the very nature of the character, who goes on about anonymity and professionalism and blah-blah-blah. One wonders if Fincher did it because he himself was bored to death with the material and wanted to make it all a bit more fun -- for himself as well as his audience? Certainly, once the story got going, besides waiting to see what the next alias would be, I found myself in no surprising places whatsoever. Sure, there's some good fight choreography and a couple of somewhat inventive tools of killing, but where the letdown really comes is afterwards: "Huh, there really was nothing worth thinking about there." Unlike The Fall of the House of Usher, say, which at least leaves you with the impression that you could understand new things about ambition, success, and the arc of your life if you bothered to do the work.

Nyad is also vastly richer in terms of applicability to life, even if, like almost all sports dramas, the final takeaway -- I guess I should offer a spoiler alert here -- is kind of predictable, because there are very few sports-themed movies about people whose determination to succeed ends up NOT paying off, y'know? The whole point of the long-odds-eventual-success-story trope is to banish the thought of failure and pump yourself up on the inevitable victory, even if that often is not how these stories end in the real world. What would the market value have been if the real life Diana Nyad had drowned or gotten eaten by a shark or stung to death by jellyfish or so forth (all of which it seems might have happened to her?). The project would likely never have gotten greenlighted; it would be like making a movie about casino gambling that ends with the main character going home in massive debt, or something -- who the hell wants to consume THAT experience? Whereas it's relatively easy to sell a film where the message is, if you don't give up, you will succeed.

Still, as inspiring true-life sports stories go, Nyad is a good one, based on the determination of a 60+ year old lesbian obsessed to realize her dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida. Inevitable victory aside, the story is quite fresh and filled with real-life human emotion and insight (as well as archival footage) and places interesting emphasis on how it feels to be part of the support team for someone so determined. It's nice to see Annette Bening (whose last significant role I cannot recall; I've probably missed a bunch but have felt her too-absent from the screen for quite some time) and Jodie Foster (the only time I can recall seeing her play a queer character) getting meaty and interesting roles (Rhys Ifans gets a fine part, too). There's footage of the real-life people they play in case you want to see how perfectly all three were cast. For awhile, watching it, I found myself contemplating whether I would enjoy the film more if in the end, the main character just kept failing, or died. I can think of only one sports movie about an underdog trying something momentous that does NOT end in eventual, hard-won success, a very compelling documentary called Deep Water, about the Donald Crowhurst story -- also fictionalized in Robert Stone's novel Outerbridge Reach -- but one of the reasons that the Crowhurst story is so fascinating is how against-type it is (I guess those mountain climbing movies where half the characters die count, too, though some characters succeed there, too).

Where I really was left by Nyad -- rather than feeling empowered and motivated -- was contemplating what would it be like to have a sports movie that was about something OTHER than winning or losing, as with a movie I saw a VIFF ago, called The Mountain, which I would love to see again, which has a very different kind of athletic endeavour at its core, and ends up in a much richer, more interesting finale: it's not about how you may win or lose in your contest with nature, but rather, about how you will be transformed by the experience. That's a film I'll be thinking about years from now, and want to see again. Nyad, while fine, will pass through me like popcorn, easy come, easy go.

Ultimately, in terms of filmed entertainments consumed in the last while, the most fun I had -- the biggest moments of catharsis, the most visual pleasure -- was with Prey. I have a few reservations there, too, mind you: I wish it had been filmed in Comanche, not just peppered with a phrase here and there and then optionally dubbed into the language (though I like that this was done and appreciate that it's a historical moment in the preservation of indigenous languages; I hope it's even more than that, too, that somewhere there are Comanche-speaking elders who never learned English all that well -- if such people exist! -- who can now watch a movie in their first language, or that there are Comanche audiences watching it together and getting pumped up. I hope it's more than just a political gesture, y'know?). We tried the dubbed track, in fact, but it was too obviously dubbed -- the lips were out of synch with the voices, which further had that recorded-on-a-soundstage echo to them, so we just switched to the original English... which, it turns out, has problems of its own, as late in the film, there is a scene where a French trapper identifies the main character as Comanche, says he speaks lots of languages, and switches to what is meant to be her language, but is English (which would not have necessitated his comment about being polylingual, as other French trappers would also speak English, of course). We can accept as a price exacted by Hollywood the everyone-speaks-English effect up to that point, especially when you consider that there are probably a lot more Comanche actors who speak English as their first language than their historical tongue -- the cast members I looked up were not even Comanche by birth -- but when language itself becomes an overt issue for the film, you get taken out of the narrative for a moment, as you do with the hokey language shifts that you find in The Hunt for Red October or Judgement at Nuremberg, where you just wish that the dialogue had BEEN in Russian or German, respectively. If Mel Gibson can make a Christ story in Aramaic -- of if Werner Herzog could prepare equally good English and German versions of Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo -- it seems like it could have been at least possible to go further. Prey is good, and Comanche dubbing is laudable, but making the whole film IN Comanche would have been even better.

That aside, Prey is a great little thriller: an empowering rite-of-passage movie and probably the best Predator movie ever (certainly the prettiest, in terms of its (Alberta) landscapes; I have great fondness, of course, for the first AVP film, as well, based wholly on the overt Lovecraft thing, but it's kind of inhabiting a franchise of its own). Amber Midthunder is a compelling lead and gives the film a grrl-power element, playing a tough young woman who is unwilling to bow to male-dominated ways of her tribe. Don't know if any of that is remotely historically accurate -- there is much about the film that is not. But it's a wholly entertaining, well-told tale, and has at least one really nice intertext with the other films in the series. I don't want to give it away, actually, but as you watch Prey, a moment will stand out: "Why are they emphasizing this?" The answer will be readily apparent if you follow up the film by watching Predator 2. That's the film in the franchise that feels most like an action packed b-movie, rather than an A-list production, but it turned out Erika had never seen it, so we went directly from finishing the one move to beginning the other, whereupon -- as Predator 2 drew to its climax -- we stumbled on this moment quite by accident and were very pleased. Call it a "throwback" moment! Nice to see Bill Paxton in the film; as with Boxing Helena, I had quite forgotten he was in the film, which I had not seen in some time.

We also watched The Bride of Frankenstein this weekend, and caught up on lost sleep (but in my case, this morning, not so much). I want to see Gods and Monsters soon. That's about all I've got...