A Postscript on Candyman (Or: The Trouble with Me)

A friend made me feel really stupid about my review of the new Candyman. He said I was “way wrong about a lot of fundamental things.” Pressed to explain, he wrote: “In a nutshell, that the movie was designed for people like you and me – for a prototypical white-person audience. I’d argue that that’s the very reason DaCosta doesn’t give us the scenes we expect, and why the only violence we see is directed toward white people. Black people don’t NEED to see more violence toward Blacks. It’s fine for it to be implied.”

Double Trouble

Just like us, only different

Jordan Peele’s Us didn’t really scare me, and that’s not a complaint. I didn’t find it particularly suspenseful, which is also not a criticism. Those two sentences reflect not the craft of Us as a horror movie but the writer/director’s use of metaphor and symbolism – an area where he overplays his hand and gets into serious trouble.

Failure in a Moment

A race against dementiaSometimes the success or failure of a movie, book, or television show hinges on a short passage. If that small part works, so does the whole; if the crucial bit comes up short, the entire enterprise falls apart. For me with the third season of creator/writer Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO series True Detective, the moment comes late in the finale when former cop Wayne Hays drives up to the house of a person he strongly suspects is Julie Purcell, who disappeared with her brother Will 35 years ago and has eluded him ever since.

Finding Darkness in the Light

Revisiting Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House helped clarify the fundamental dissonance of the show – that running counter to its hopeful, tidy conclusion is something far messier in both its ghost and family stories. Yet the early episodes carve out room for readings that substantially darken the whole, undermining without negating the tone of its final minutes.

The Derivative Begs to Be Taken Seriously

Sissy Spacek in 'Castle Rock'When the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock – titled “The Queen” – immediately felt very familiar, we shouldn’t have been too surprised that it drew not from Stephen King but from a famously excellent episode of another TV show whose DNA had been plainly evident in this one. And then from a great movie.

Attaboy, Jim

inception-pinwheel.jpgIn my hastily keyboarded notes after seeing Inception last weekend, I spent much time faulting Jim Emerson for his dismissal of Christopher Nolan and of the movie. Emerson made sweeping, unsupported generalizations in the service of his obvious dislike of Nolan’s movies. His pieces (and his responses in the comments sections) represented an attack rather than an argument. It’s only fair, then, to praise Emerson for his essay yesterday, which restates his problems with the film but does so much more cogently and generously.

Christopher Nolan’s Dead Women

In at least four of Christopher Nolan’s seven feature films, the plots and/or fixations are initiated or propelled by the death of a man’s spouse or girlfriend. Considering that Nolan’s primary thematic interest is obsession, isn’t this a little strange? The realization struck me the day I saw Inception, in which everything Cobb does involves “being with” his dead wife Mal or being reunited with his kids, from whom he’s separated because of how Mal died.