Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

 Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:

Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.

Terminal Invasion - Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.

I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. Terminal Invasion is a cross between Pitch Black and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a small dose of Assault on Precinct 13 thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.

The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.

What I appreciated about Terminal Invasion is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.

That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during Terminal Invasion, the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.

However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how Terminal Invasion came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.

Still, with expectations set properly, Terminal Invasion is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and Terminal Invasion would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.

Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and his own short film, Frankenweenie, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.

Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked Dark Shadows more than Frankenweenie. Nobody else did, but Dark Shadows isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.

 Frankenweenie could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original Frankenweenie has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) Bambi Meets Godzilla reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately Frankenweenie overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.

 Zombeavers - I didn't go into Zombeavers expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch Sharknado and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*).

 So imagine my surprise to discover that Zombeavers is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like Blood Car or Rise of the Animals. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of American Pie, Cabin Fever, and The Ring" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps Zombeavers (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.

 I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "Your Body is a Wonderland"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.

 You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that Zombeavers gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...

 John Dies at the End -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.

 That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read John Dies at the End don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig John Dies at the End, and if it ever happens, I'd watch This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.

 World War Z - One could suppose that if Warm Bodies was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then World War Z is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer 28 Days Later. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless World War Z must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie.

 Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, World War Z is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.


 World War Z is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in World War Z's release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. Doctor Who fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).

 There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for World War Z 2.

The ABCs of Death 2 - is like V/H/S 2 in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. The ABCs of Death had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in The ABCs of Death.

The ABCs of Death 2, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder Betty Boop cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me.

 As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in The ABCs of Death that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.

 Horns - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.


 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Inherent Vice

 Well, let's start the uphill battle that is putting Inherent Vice on a "Best Of" list, because everywhere I look, there's hate for this movie. Like, serious, seething, "how could you like that movie?!?" hate for Inherent Vice. To me, it's mind boggling the negativity surrounding this film, and I've read articles like "How to Make a Movie People Will Walk Out Of" or listened to Red Letter Media snarkily insinuate that anyone who says they "understood" Inherent Vice is "lying" and trying to look cool to their film snob friends. I would say that Inherent Vice is a divisive film, but it feels like there's not much of a divide: everybody hates it, and the people who don't (and I haven't found many) are somehow deluded or outright lying to maintain their "cred".  So I get that you don't like it, but I'm not sure why, and I'm not delusional or trying to earn "hip" points. It's not "Paul Thomas Anderson's worst movie," although I've seen that one a few times.

 Was is because the trailer made it look like Paul Thomas Anderson's The Big Lebowski and it's not? Because it's not: it's Paul Thomas Anderson's The Long Goodbye, but we'll get to that? Is it because of some perceived "impenetrability" based solely on the fact Anderson adapted it from a Thomas Pynchon novel, and you've heard Thomas Pynchon novels are notoriously impenetrable? I suppose it's not going to matter to you that I read Inherent Vice, and not only is it easy to follow, but Anderson dropped two subplots and half a dozen characters, making the movie easier to follow. Was it because most of Doc (Joaquin Phoenix)'s dialogue is mumbled? Okay, I'll give you that one. Yeah, you're going to have to pay attention. It is a mystery, and yeah, there are a lot of pieces in the air for Anderson to juggle. You're going to have to do a little bit of work keeping up, and both the novel and film throw a lot of names at you.

 (The following paragraphs are going SPOIL plot elements in an effort to clarify lingering questions)

 On the other hand, there are only two that are really important: Larry "Doc" Sportello and Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). Throw in Lieutenant Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) if you want, but most of the rest of it is window dressing. The Golden Fang (boat and organization) is pretty much a MacGuffin, but if it helps, it's a government run operation designed to get people hooked on heroin, clean them out, and convince them to work as double agents in the counterculture. That's exactly what happens to Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), who was planning on spending his fortune to make free housing possible. (Anderson drops the part of Pynchon's book where the government also wants him to invest in a run-down Las Vegas casino in order to get a foothold in the area). The entire Golden Fang operation is explained during the scene when Doc and Sauncho (Benicio Del Toro) are in the seafood restaurant.

 I'm not entirely sure why it's hard to keep up with, because in this regard you don't even need to read the book, but all of Doc's cases are tied together: Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams) is looking for his associate Glenn Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who is killed when Doc goes to visit the housing development. Glenn's sister, Charla (Beladonna) comes to visit Doc later. Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), left his family to be a government informant, and ended up working for the Golden Fang. Bigfoot's partner was killed by Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie) and Puck Beaverton (Keith Jardine), so Bigfoot uses Doc to even the score and then steals the Golden Fang's heroin shipment. Doc uses the heroin as leverage to make a deal that returns Coy to his wife, Hope (Jenna Malone), solving that case. All of this happens in service of putting Doc and Shasta back together, even if "this doesn't mean we're back together."

 Yes, I left out a lot of other characters, but just like The Long Goodbye (directed by Robert Altman, based on a Raymond Chandler novel), many of the supporting cast members are for decoration. It's not really important that you remember who Denis (Jordan Christian Hearn) is other than he hangs out with Doc. Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short) is there to give you some idea of how reckless the Golden Fang is. Penny (Reese Witherspoon) provides Doc with the evidence that ties Coy into the conspiracy surrounding Wolfmann. Japonica Fenway (Sasha Pieterse) exists so when Doc meets with her father (Martin Donovan) at the end, there's history between the two and they don't just kill Sportello. So, yeah, I'm not sure why so many people insist that there's no "there" there, or that the story doesn't make any sense.

 Anyway, I didn't really want this review to just be a defense of the film, because when I sat down to watch it, the negativity hadn't really settled in online. At the time, I didn't know much about it, other than it kind of looked like Paul Thomas Anderson's The Big Lebowski. As the film unfolded, it was pretty clear that it wasn't, that Doc's attitude less resembled The Dude and was much closer to the way that Elliott Gould played Phillip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. This makes sense insofar as Paul Thomas Anderson has stated that Robert Altman is an influence to him as a filmmaker. Doc wouldn't be like The Dude: he's less befuddled and more playing indifferent, which may be by design or may simply be a side effect of not being sure when he's hallucinating and when he's not. For the record, if Sortilège (Joanna Newsom) is narrating or appears onscreen, he's usually not. If she isn't (for example, the last scene with Bigfoot), there's a chance you might not take everything that happens to be real.

 It took me a little while to get used to that fact, because Doc's laid back attitude tricks you into thinking he's a more reliable main character than he is. As a matter of fact, it makes even more sense for Anderson to expand Sortilège's role and make her the narrator to give us someone more reliable as an anchor at key points in the film. Doc is the focal point, but he's really just another character in his own story, which is why Inherent Vice begins with a shot of Sortilège and then transitions to Shasta in Doc's apartment. What she's saying is, almost verbatim, Pynchon's prose, which Newsom continues to do throughout the film. It's a helpful technique that differentiates Inherent Vice from The Long Goodbye, which drops you in and hopes you can keep up with Gould's even harder to follow mumbled dialogue.

 While I keep going back to The Long Goodbye, a friend of mine feels the film is more strongly linked to Chinatown. Swap out real estate development for water management, and I guess you could make that case, but I think Doc has more agency than Jake Gittes did. He's certainly more in control of his own destiny, and ends up in a happier place by the end, even if the crucial details of the case are totally out of his control - Doc really only helps Coy, and sort of ends up with Shasta again as a byproduct. However, it is better to understand Inherent Vice as a film in the context of those cinematic precedents over an implied connection to the Coen brothers, based mostly on the trailer. Inherent Vice is, quite often, a funny movie, but it's not funny in the same way. Tonally, it's completely different, even if the main character is stoned most of the time. Doc Sportello is not a "slacker" in the same sense that The Dude is, and the grudging respect that Bigfoot has for him (in spite of himself) should clue the audience into that.

 I spent most of Inherent Vice chuckling, at many points because it's not what I thought it was going to be. It's better than that, and despite the apparently rambling narrative, it has a laser focus on what's important. Anderson keeps all of the various characters and seemingly disparate plot threads up in the air with ease, in a way that makes sense when it comes together. It's true that you might need to take some time to digest it, and it wouldn't hurt to read the book, but by no means are you required to. As an adaptation, it boils much of the story down to a useful core, dropping a lot of background detail that help sets up surfer culture in the early 70s in the way that Pynchon could, but that Anderson doesn't have time to. It's the same hazy world that Marlowe was dropped into by Altman (for those of you who haven't seen it, The Long Goodbye the film takes place in the 1970s), with the same kinds of lowlifes looking to make trouble.

 Like Anderson's last film, The Master, I found the performances to be continually engaging. Joaquin Phoenix internalizes most of Doc's mannerisms and reactions, a 180 from his role in The Master (where he played the Id to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Ego). It's sometimes such a laconic performance that you aren't sure when he's genuinely confused and when he's just playing dumb for the client. As much as I enjoyed him, I've found myself leaning towards Brolin's Bigfoot Bjornsen as my favorite role. Bigfoot has the potential to be the most one dimensional character (in the book and the movie), but slowly we realize there's more beneath the surface than "star cop." His phone conversations with Doc are some of the funniest scenes in the film, but also hint at their professional relationship when he's not on duty. The trailer makes a joke out of Bigfoot ordering pancakes at a Japanese restaurant (specifically ordering more in Japanese), but the best part of the scene is when he explains why he eats there. In case you want to see Inherent Vice, I'll let you discover it, but it's a throwaway line that tells you everything you need to know about Bigfoot. Brolin's final scene in the film is... unusual. I choose to chalk it up to Doc hallucinating - it's not in the book the way it happens in the movie - but read it as you will.

 So I know I haven't changed a lot of minds, because this is the internet and well, opinions get entrenched. I still think that Inherent Vice has the chance to grow on people over time, and even if you have to insist it's PTA's "worst" movie, unless you hate all of them, that's not such a bad place to be compared to some of the films I saw this year. I guess 2014 ended up being the year of movies I had to invest a little bit in, to do more work with than the average matinee film. It's been the case with a lot (maybe not all) of the higher end of the recap, and it certainly applies to the last film, which should be coming soon. I can dig it if that's not your thing, and not in a condescending way. I'm not saying that you didn't "get" Inherent Vice, which always reads like an insult that snobs would say, but I am saying that anybody who walked out didn't give it a fair shake. Maybe this will mellow with time. Probably not. Oh well, it's sitting pretty at number two on my list, so it's all good for the Cap'n.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Snowpiercer

 You might say that I'm being overly lenient with my definition of "films released in 2014" to include Snowpiercer. It is true that Bong Joon-Ho had finished the film in time to be released in 2013, and that a protracted struggle within the Weinstein Company kept Snowpiercer out of theatres until the following year. At the heart of the debate, it seems that Harvey "Scissorhands" Weinstein wanted to cut thirty minutes out of the film in order to make it more "palatable" for audiences. To be honest, having seen Snowpiercer, I'm not sure what parts he thought cutting out of the film would improve it in any way. It doesn't need improving, and there's no amount of editing that could turn this cerebral, at times surreal film, into a crowd pleaser. The failure of the more crowd friendly Edge of Tomorrow is a testament that sometimes, the audiences just aren't going to come in. Eventually they came to an agreement that Snowpiercer could stay at its original length, so long as it only saw limited release. The good news is that word of mouth really made a difference, and like the even more bizarre Under the Skin, Snowpiercer was being talked about, even when it was hard to see it.

 Based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer is deceptively simple in its premise: in an attempt to curtail global warming, climate scientists an experimental compound, which backfires, freezing the entire world. Humanity has been all but wiped out, save for those who managed to board a luxury train designed by Wilford Industries. It was designed to run almost perpetually, and it's the only thing left that can traverse the frozen wasteland. For 17 years, the train has been going, never stopping. The social strata that makes up the remainder of humanity correlates with the sections of the train: the very poor, destitute, who could not pay for their way aboard the Snowpiercer are in the back, and the rich live near the front, in opulence, near the reclusive Wilford, who conducts the train. The back section is tired of the inequity, and Curtis (Chris Evans) finds himself leading a push from to the front - violently, if necessary.

 Embedded into the protein bars, someone has been sending Curtis messages, and with the advice of the former conductor, Gilliam (John Hurt), he thinks that now might be the time. Their only contact from the front of the train comes through Mason (Tilda Swinton), an officious, pompous bureaucrat who loves nothing so much as to remind them of their place. If they can capture her, and get past security with the help of Namgoong (Song Kang Ho), who designed the doors but also has a debilitating addiction to the train fuel's byproduct, there's a chance to confront Wilford* and stop the train. Or better conditions. Or, it depends on who gets there first. One of the interesting things is that despite the fact that Snowpiercer is a metaphor for class struggle and revolution, it's also fairly evident that this doesn't mean everyone has the same agenda. What Curtis wants is very different from what Namgoong wants, and how Gilliam and Wilford respond are fascinating unto themselves.

 Some people, like Tanya (Octavia Spencer) or Andrew (an unrecognizable Ewen Bremner) want their children back. Every now and then Mason takes them up to the front, for reasons no one in the back know, and they never return. Others, like Edgar (Jamie Bell), who were born on the train, want a sense of justice, of agency. They've never known anything but misery, undernourishment, and subjugation. We learn later in the film what life was like in the early days, moments that give considerable weight to character moments at the beginning of the film. Before that, as Curtis and company move to the front of the train, things get weird.

 This, perhaps, is what Weinstein thought he could "help" Snowpiercer with: each section of the train is distinct from the one that came before it, often in truly unusual ways. There's no way to adequately describe the surreal classroom sequence featuring Allison Pill (The Newsroom) as a Wilford Propagandist Teacher. It's not the last time the film is willing to get truly odd, which is saying something about Snowpiercer. Because the structure of the revolution is back-to-front, we often get information (particularly symbolism, like dipping axes in fish guts) before its significance is addressed. What seems like an outré moment becomes, not long after, significant in the larger structure of the world. I still love the point where a large contingent of security guards, led by Mason and Franco the Elder (Vlad Ivanov) and Franco the Younger (Adnan Haskovic) meet our heroes in a long car to battle. It abruptly comes to a halt when the train crosses a long bridge, which marks the passage of another year. The brief celebration (on both sides) and cheers of "Happy New Year" come to an end when Namgoong's assistant / translator, Yona (Ah-Sung Ko) informs Curtis that they're about to enter a "really long tunnel," and only the guards have night vision goggles. It's these unusual touches, which often collide with the brutal, post-apocalyptic reality, that give the film its distinctiveness. Trimming them out in order to "improve" the run time would have robbed Snowpiercer of many of its best moments.

 Without spoiling too much, I'd like to return to the moral ambiguity of the film by briefly discussing the inevitable conclusion when Curtis reaches Wilford (I won't say who does or doesn't make it along the way, but Bong Joon-Ho doesn't hesitate to thin both sides of the herd). There's a customary "talk with the Devil" scene, where our hero faces temptation, but this time, you have to hand it to Wilford. The case he makes is, to be honest, a fair one: what did Curtis really expect to do when he made it to the engine? Is he really going to risk wiping out all of humanity by stopping the train? It was established earlier in the film - in a horrific way - just how long a person can last exposed to the outside world. Wilford has been responsible for some horrible, unforgivable decisions, and it's during his speech that many of the seemingly "weird" moments begin to make much more sense. We've been introduced to everything that's happening in the movie well before we realized it, and the case that Wilford makes, however ghoulish, is pragmatic. From his perspective, as the steward of all of humanity, what else can he do?

 I'm not necessarily justifying either side here - before meeting Wilford, Curtis explains exactly why he's been so hesitant to lead, and what happened in the first few years, and it's not necessarily the sort of story you tell proudly. Evan's face during the monologue is riveting, and the revelations are every bit as disturbing as the discovery of what the protein bars are made of. It's the first of many revelations that contextualize dialogue you'd largely considered to be standard "I'm not fit to lead" conversations earlier in Snowpiercer. In many ways, it's a far more complicated movie than its premise would suggest, and the fact that neither side is necessarily "right" in what they want to do and how they want to do it give more heft to the ending.

 Across the board, performances are high level. Anyone who thinks that Chris Evans can only be stoic and "goody two shoes" need only spend two hours with him as Curtis to wipe that notion away. Swinton and Pill border the closest to "cartoonish" in the film, with Mason resembling a caricature of Margaret Thatcher (by design) and the Teacher being part of what is Snowpiercer's oddest moment. Both serve a purpose in the film, as does Ivanov's largely silent Franco the Elder, who doggedly pursues the rebels up the train. Special kudos to Kang-ho Song (Thirst) and Ah-sung Ko (The Host), who are more than what they seem and whose impact on the story is significant. If there's a missed note in the film, it might be from Emma Levie as Claude, Wilford's assistant, who is underdeveloped to the point of being superfluous, even late in the film. Otherwise, most of the ensemble cast is more than capable of following the story in whatever direction it takes.

 To be frank, I'm happy that we got to see Snowpiercer in its original form. There was always a chance of it lingering on the shelf in obscurity, because of debates surrounding its "palatability" with mainstream audiences. I'm not sure that the masses would or could embrace a film as nihilistic as Snowpiercer is willing to be, but now it's out there for the world to decide. It was a great year for science fiction, and Snowpiercer is near the top as far as the Cap'n is concerned.




 *I'm deliberately leaving out who plays Wilford, because it's more fun to find out, although you're likely to see the name of the actor before you watch the movie. Just not here.

Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (High Expectations, Maybe Diminished Results)

 As has been pointed out to me a few times over the course of last year, I didn't review a number of movies that I had been open about looking forward to. In some instances, like Nymphomaniac, I never got around to watching them. When I do, we'll see what happens, review-wise. What happened with many of them was that I watched a movie I was really looking forward to, spent some time digesting it, and realized I just wasn't interested in writing about them. There are a few exceptions - and I will include links when we get to them - but by and large there wasn't much to add to the general consensus. That, or I really didn't want to rain on the parade of folks who really loved some of the films I'm about to cover.

 Bear in mind that it's not that I hated them, but rather that I wasn't blown away by any of them. A few were pleasant surprises, or technically impressive, but I've struggled with recommending any of them strongly. However, it didn't seem fair to recap 2014 and not mention a few of the most anticipated movies, particularly when two of them were nominated for Best Picture.

 On that note, let's start with Boyhood, which I'm not going to pretend isn't a very impressive achievement for Richard Linklater. That said, I think we all know the talking points about how long it took to shoot and the uncertainty about what direction (if any) the story was headed during that time. And yes, it's quite a feat to stick with it for that long, creating a mini-fiction version of the 7 Up series. Some of the transitions in time are quite clever, and it retains much of Linklater's signature "talking about stuff" dialogue that, when done right, is a fine variation on naturalism. When it's done wrong, well, then you have Waking Life. But Boyhood isn't about monologue-ing its way through Life, The Universe, and Everything - it's about the micro moments of growing up, avoiding the easy traps of movies about adolescence. And I give him a lot of credit for that. Linklater manages to keep the Philosophy 101 crap out of Ellar Coltrane's mouth until just before he gets to college.

 And that's about where I'm going to run out of nice things to say about Boyhood, because the movie didn't do a whole lot for the Cap'n. Maybe it was the choices of music at the beginning: a litany of "it's 2002!" that starts with Coldplay's "Yellow," continues with The Hives "Hate to Say I Told You So," and sneaks in Britney Spears before closing with Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun." I got it - it's 2002. Yup, got it. In Linklater's defense, the choices in music to indicate what year we're in becomes more subtle - it's almost easy to miss Gotye playing in the background at the bar in Austin - but to open the film, I found it off-putting. It actually sticks out more than the "campaigning for Obama" scene or the "what's wrong with the war in Iraq" bowling alley monologue from Ethan Hawke.

 When I watch a Richard Linklater movie, to be honest, I'm expecting a bit of aimlessness - there's less of it than you think in Dazed and Confused, but much of what he excels at is just spending time with people. It's exactly why the Before films work so well; even if they are scripted, it feels spontaneous. Boyhood has a lot of that, but at nearly three hours, I got the impression that he really wasn't sure how or when to end Mason (Coltrane)'s story. Maybe he enjoyed watching the young man that Coltrane grew into, but there are four or five points in the last forty five minutes of Boyhood that would have been more thematically appropriate than when the film does end. Is it in keeping with the "small moments?" Maybe, but considering that Boyhood just tapers off instead of making this ride feel like it was worth taking left me disinterested.

 It has been suggested that because I'm not a parent that I can't really "understand" Boyhood - or, at least, that was the implicit part of a conversation I had with a stranger who liked it more than I did because he saw his son growing up through the movie. While I understand his position, the counter-argument is that I shouldn't have to be able to directly relate with the film in order to enjoy it. I've never been an assistant hotel manager, or been to deep space, or been a hitman whose wife died, but I can relate to and enjoy films with those protagonists. I will say that Boyhood lacks a certain experiential quality to growing up that The Tree of Life has, at least for me. That may very well be an apples to oranges comparison, but there are small moments in The Tree of Life that stirred memories of being young in a way that Boyhood never did.

 Maybe that's not the point of Boyhood - maybe it's more of a "meta" project that condenses something like Michael Apted's "Up" series into a more manageable time frame. It is, in many ways, a spiritual successor to the Before films, which follow a relationship over the course of 18 years. That said, I think that Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight work better as films than Boyhood does. For every fine performance: Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are both great as Mason's biological parents, there's a wonky performance like Marco Perella as the stereotypically abusive, drunk stepfather. For a film that relishes in small moments, that lacks a real narrative arc, having Arquette marry her teacher, then leave him, become a teacher and then marry her student is less about poetic irony and more groan inducing. Sorry, that's just how I felt about it. I did enjoy Lorelei Linklater as Samantha, Mason's sister, who manages to make an impression despite never having much to do.

 The acclaim for Boyhood has, as far as I can tell, been part and parcel with the admittedly very impressive willingness of Richard Linklater to slowly make a movie for more than a decade. You do literally watch Coltrane grow up over the course of the film, and you watch everyone around him change, too. In that regard, yes, I find Boyhood to be admirable, but I don't know that I really liked it.

 While we're on the subject of "admirable," - and I suppose that will be most of this post - I never really warmed to Gone Girl, despite David Fincher's exhaustive attention to detail. I have a very hard time making the case that Gone Girl isn't a very well made film, or that structurally it's not successful, but like Boyhood, I was underwhelmed when it ended. I haven't read Gillian Flynn's novel, and I know she made some changes in the process of adaptation. If I understand correctly, the ending is a little more cynical, but the ending wasn't really my point of contention with Gone Girl.

 (By necessity, the following paragraphs are going to SPOIL the major twist of the book / film, so tread cautiously if you know nothing about the story)

 If I had to pinpoint the problem, it's actually more of the middle, when we know what's really going on, yet the film seems to lag, dragging the parallel arcs of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) out while he defends himself from a well orchestrated plan to assign guilt for her death and she makes mistake after mistake while in hiding. The beginning, when you don't know what's happening with any certainty, as Nick is still basically a blank slate and we're learning everything from Amy's diary entries / flashbacks, is riveting stuff. Our only real insight into Nick is through Amy, and it bleeds over (no pun intended) to the way we perceive him during the investigation into her disappearance.

 And then Gone Girl makes a hard right turn, revealing that we've been listening to an unreliable narrator who then tells us that everything we thought about Nick and Amy's relationship is designed to tighten the proverbial noose around his neck. But that's not the problem - actually, it's a great twist to introduce mid-movie, because now it's a question of whether the person we thought we couldn't trust and the person we thought we could are capable of meeting two very different agendas. So why, then, is the middle of Gone Girl so lethargic? I'm not certain that it's because Amy's story in hiding is much less interesting after she reveals her real plan, or that I just didn't buy that she could plan all of this and then allow hubris to drive her to desperation. What happens with Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris) serves only to show us what Amy is truly capable of when she feels she has no other option, but isn't it clear how far she'll go when we know that Nick really didn't kill her?

 The other problem, and one I still haven't been able to reconcile after watching the film again, is that we don't really know Nick. What we know about him is primarily from how Amy portrays him in her manufactured "diary," which means that even the "meet cute" and wooing parts could be total fictions. We know he was cheating on Amy with Andi (Emily Ratajkowski), and that his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) loves him, but doesn't necessarily trust him. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) has her doubts, but Officer James Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) is positive he's guilty. Celebrity lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) doesn't care - he likes the challenge and the media attention. But Nick? Well, we spend the lion's share of Gone Girl with him and I still don't have a reading on the character.

 Despite the obvious joke to be made, I don't blame that on Ben Affleck the actor. I think that he and Coon have some great scenes together, and that he does his best to give Nick a fighting chance when the deck is stacked against him. But I don't believe that the way the film ends is something he'd acquiesce to so easily, implied threat or no. It reminded me of the end of Proxy, which tells a similar tale of people desperate for attention. I also didn't like Proxy. And even if Gone Girl is a better made film, I'm still on the fence about whether that mean I should forgive its bloated running time in service of a great beginning, clever twist, and bleak ending. I do like that Fincher tells you almost immediately about Amy's relationship with her husband, just by showing you the board games in Margo and Nick's bar. Attention to detail runs rampant, Affleck's growing biceps aside (hello, Batman), but structurally, Gone Girl doesn't seem to sustain itself. So can I admire its construction without necessarily being crazy about it? I guess that's how it's going to be for the time being...

  The Cap'n wrote at length about Christopher Nolan's Interstellar a few months ago, and much of what I said still stands. Here's a piece of the review, as it transitioned from the positives of Nolan's scope to the failings of its emotional core:

 "If I'm being honest, I would have liked more of the exploring the other planets instead of the part of Interstellar that you don't necessarily get from the trailers: the back and forth between Coop (McConaughey) in space and his family on Earth. Instead of focusing on relativity and black holes, we have to keep jumping back home to see that Murph stills hasn't forgiven her father and now she's grown up and is Jessica Chastain. Murph is working with Professor Brand (Michael Caine0 on how to save everybody on Earth because they haven't heard from the ship in 23-ish years (2 years to Saturn plus another 21 thanks to a disastrous turn of events on the first world they land on). It's here that the Nolan brothers introduce the theme of Interstellar that isn't about exploration: that love may be a tangible concept that transcends dimensions and we just don't understand it yet. Oddly enough, the internet's least favorite person (Anne Hathaway) delivers the best monologue about it, but it leads Interstellar down a path I maybe could have done without. The space exploration was so much more interesting, and the Earth plot isn't."

 One of the other things I did between watching Interstellar the first and second times was to sit down with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which only exacerbates how foolish the climax of Nolan's film is compared with Kubrick's. Coop literally explains everything as it's happening in the "other" dimension, which seems even more ridiculous when compared to what happens to Dave (Keir Dullea) when he reaches "Jupiter and Beyond." I'm not saying that Interstellar needed to be as opaque as the end of 2001, or that Nolan was wrong to appeal to a wider audience, but when it's abundantly clear what sort of movie you're trying to emulate, you have to understand that fairly or not, you're going to be held to that standard. Interstellar's moment of cosmic transcendence is almost comical when held up against 2001.

 Still, I probably have a more favorable opinion of Interstellar than Boyhood or Gone Girl. Maybe it's the apologist in me, or maybe it's a subconscious reaction to the "Christopher Nolan is teh suxorz" kneejerk internet reception to his films. I don't find any of his films perfect, but I have enjoyed almost all of them, the lone exception being Insomnia, and only because I saw the original first. Even within Interstellar is the desire to reach for something greater, to bring a mass audience to something they don't see much in theatres anymore, and that's appreciated. It didn't necessarily work this time, and didn't connect with audiences (it clearly didn't connect with his peers, or whoever qualifies as "Academy Voters") but if this is what qualifies as a notable failure for Christopher Nolan, I can live with that. Would it be a bad idea to go back to something smaller, intimate? I don't even mean Memento; The Prestige is comparatively scaled back when put against Inception or The Dark Knight Rises. We'll see what Nolan has in store next time.

 "Next Time" seems to be an oft repeated phrase for Terry Gilliam fans like the Cap'n: every movie since 12 Monkeys has been pretty to very good, but falls somewhere short of the far he set so high with Brazil. And it's not just comparing everything to Brazil, because I think Time Bandits and The Fisher King are also among the most interesting work he's done, post-Python. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes the closest to his mad, glory days, but The Brothers Grimm, Tideland, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus all feel like there was a great movie in there somewhere, but it didn't quite make it to the finish line. Some from interference, one from an untimely death, and I'm not really sure what to make of Tideland. I always look forward to a new Gilliam film, and always hope that this time "they" - whoever "they" are - left him alone and we get a pure, undiluted experience.

 Which brings us to The Zero Theorem, the first of two movies on this list that I suspect you didn't even know came out in 2014. Like many Gilliam films, I heard about it the year before, waited patiently, and eventually it did have a (limited) release / VOD, and then mostly disappeared. That's not a value judgment on The Zero Theorem (we'll get to that), but what seems, increasingly, to be the case with how his work is going to disseminate from here on out (up next: another stab at The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which may or may not have benefitted from the decade of being abandoned). If you've seen any of the reviews for The Zero Theorem, you've probably noticed that it's been compared to Brazil, and not always favorably.

 The comparisons are not unfair: The Zero Theorem deals with a man very much in his own world, Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), who refers to himself as "we," or "us" works for Mancom in service of his own agenda. Qohen believes he's waiting for his "call" - in this case, a literal phone call to the apartment he's made out of an abandoned church. In the meantime, he tolerates Joby (David Thewlis), who can't quite seem to remember his name and is an exemplary representative of all "middle management." Speaking of which, Management (Matt Damon) has his eye on Qohen for a high level programming project, one which resembles a video game but is designed to solve mathematical problems. Management wants Qohen to help him solve the titular theorem, with or without the assistance of Joby, Management's son, Bob (Lucas Hedges), and Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), a woman he meets at a party that might have other hobbies. To keep Qohen on track, Mancom allows him to work from home, as long as he consults Dr. Shrink-Rom (Twilda Swinton), a program designed to monitor his mental state as he pursues the impossible task at hand.

 For the record, I've really just given you the set up of The Zero Theorem, a film stuffed to the gills with visual metaphors, which is always just one step away from collapsing entirely under its own weight. Once you get used to the barrage of information - Gilliam takes the concept of micro-news and runs wild with it - the film can be pleasantly entertaining, but it never feels cohesive. I never got a sense of what point Gilliam was really trying to make, but rather he was quite interested in dissecting the way that media and religion and business operate now. Some of the smaller gags, like "The Church of Batman the Redeemer," are quite funny, even if they add nothing substantive to the story. Of course, it's possible that the story itself isn't especially interesting, as we have little doubt of what Qohen will do by the end of the film. Also, once we're introduced to the virtual reality "fantasy" zone that Bainsley brings Qohen into, it's not hard to figure out where everything is going for the idiosyncratic, mostly misanthropic protagonist. Everyone seems game in the cast, and Gilliam's production design is, as always, a feast of details in every direction. But by the end, there's a sort of sensory overload coupled with, "oh, that's the point?" that just doesn't quite work. The Zero Theorem is an almost, but ultimately misses its mark, whatever it was aiming for.

 There is little doubt that The Zero Theorem is a Terry Gilliam film; his stamp as an auteur is unmistakable at this point. Such is true with Wes Anderson, whose distinct style draws praise and groans alike from audience, and who in 2014 doubled down on his cinematic "signature". When I reviewed The Grand Budapest Hotel earlier this year, I closed the write up by saying:

"I will openly admit to a giddy sensation during the beginning of The Grand Budapest Hotel, as I often have when seeing a Wes Anderson film for the first time. As the film went on, I alternated between admiration for the technical aspects of the Auteur and realizing that I was more impressed with the story than I actually enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, this is not a film that's a chore to watch, nor does it ever drag, but The Grand Budapest Hotel didn't grab me in the same way that some of Anderson's films do. I would be hard pressed to call this a "lesser" film in his catalog, but I can see why it might end up being another dividing line, as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was. I concede that, for the moment, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a (very entertaining) exercise in form over function. Is it possible that changes the next time I see it (and I will)? Quite possibly. The Cap'n is predisposed to follow Wes Anderson down the rabbit hole - less so his imitators - but it's hard to argue that this is not his most "Wes Anderson"-y film to date, for better or for worse."

 Technically speaking, framing your film for three different aspect ratios is an impressive achievement, but it still surprises me to see The Grand Budapest Hotel alongside the likes of Birdman or Boyhood in the Academy Award nominations. To reiterate: it's not a bad film, and I enjoyed watching it most of the time, but I would hardly put it at the top of any list of Anderson's films. The Grand Budapest Hotel is an exquisite trifle, which might be an oxymoron, but I have a hard time making the case that it is in any way exemplary of the best films of last year. While I do know quite a few people who love it, I also know several people who saw it, said "Oh, so this is just what he does now," and moved on. I don't suspect they - or I - will stop watching Wes Anderson films, or even looking forward to them, but my enthusiasm is slightly muted in a way it wasn't before I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 In the realms of enthusiasm, you will perhaps find the Cap'n no more anticipatory of one with the words "a David Cronenberg film." Despite the fact that he's been mostly in "adaptation" mode since eXistenZ, I haven't seen one from A History of Violence to Cosmopolis that wasn't worth sitting with, digesting, and having conversations about. Even when I didn't love one - as was the case with A Dangerous Method - it sparked conversation and made me want to write about the film. I'm in the minority who really enjoyed Cosmopolis, and have had a number of great discussions about its relative merits with people who truly hated it. So it must be telling that I spent most of 2014 sitting silently on Maps to the Stars. As far as I can tell, the screenplay by novelist Bruce Wagner isn't based on anything, but it has a certain "lived in" approach because of its subject matter.

 Many fans of Cronenberg have lamented his shift away from "body horror" in the last decade, although I'm not sure it's entirely accurate. Yes, we're long past the days of the New Flesh, but I think Cronenberg has moved from exaggerated, external forms of "body horror" and internalized it. One doesn't make a film about Freud and Jung without at least spending some time on the way the mind affects the body. That said, people miss the "gonzo" days of Cronenberg films, and Maps to the Stars isn't going to change that much. That said, there is a fair degree of body scarring, immolation, drowning imagery, and implied incest in his ode to Tinseltown. There's also something I can't recall ever having seen before in a Cronenberg film: ghosts. Maps to the Stars is weird, and that's what I've been telling friends since I watched it. Sometimes because there's not much else to it. It was described to me as "David Cronenberg's Arrested Development," which is probably not inaccurate, but don't go in expecting comedy.

 Cosmopolis alumni Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon appear in Maps to the Stars, albeit in smaller roles, one as a driver for Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) and the other as the apparition of actress Clarice Taggart, who haunts her daughter Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana is lobbying for the role of Clarice Taggart in a biopic, even though in Hollywood she's seen mostly as washed up. Covered head to toe, Agatha's presence in Hollywood is less clear - she arrives from Florida and explains to Jerome Fontana (Pattinson) that she struck up a friendship with a celebrity over Twitter (it's the only "playing themselves" cameo, and I wouldn't dare spoil it) and is here to work. Jerome has a screenplay - who doesn't? - and also works small parts on TV shows. Agatha likes him, but he's a bit superficial. Meanwhile, and seemingly unrelated, we have the Weiss family: New Age Guru to the stars Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), manager mother Christina Weiss (Olivia Williams), and child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird). Stafford hawks his inspirational books on TV and is also a Yoga instructor / Masseuse to Havana, while Christina tries to negotiate her son's latest sequel while assuring producers his drinking problem is long over with.

 How the three storylines converge becomes apparent fairly early on, especially once the aforementioned celebrity cameo hands off Agatha to Havana as a personal assistant and Stafford and Christina find out about her. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of moments of drug use and self doubt and threesomes with directors, interrupted by ghosts. Havana has her mother instilling doubt into her every move, and Benjie is inexplicably haunted by Cammy (Kiara Glasco), a girl he visited in the hospital for publicity. There are reasons for their hauntings, mostly tied to Cronenberg's dueling fire / water visual metaphors, although it's less important to how the film is than the very real threat that Agatha poses to the Weiss family. It takes most of Maps to the Stars to get around to why she's really in town, and her connection to Benjie and the vacant lot she frequents when not at work.

 By the end, plenty of cyclical imagery and thematic elements have come and gone, with a few accidental murders, and while I suppose it was worth watching, I'm not sure about much else. One must tread cautiously when using the word "weird," let alone "weird for David Cronenberg," but Maps to the Stars is definitely not like his usual output. I find myself on the fence about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, because while not as aggressively stylized as Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars does share its "go ahead, try to empathize with any of these people" ethos. Is the self-immolation of a major character supposed to be tragic or funny? The dodgy CGI doesn't help if it's meant to be the former. There's some semblance of comedy in Maps to the Stars, although it's rarely funny. Actually, tonally the film is all over the place, and not to its benefit. Perhaps I've avoided discussing Maps to the Stars because I'm not sure what to say about it. As a result, it's hard to recommend it to anyone other than die-hard Cronenberg fans, and what they make of it is anybody's guess.

 Coming up next, the Cap'n will reflect back on what turned out to be a very impressive year for science fiction, and then we'll move into the final stretch before the Best of 2014. Stay tuned...

Shocktober Revisited: The Shining

 This is the first part of a three part series posted earlier this year. Parts two and three, devoted to Room 237 and Kubrick's shorter cut of the film - released internationally - will be posted tomorrow.

 I've been slowly working my way through Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, which is much better than I expected it to be (his recent output has been hit-or-miss). For those of you who managed to miss out on the hoopla surrounding its release, Doctor Sleep is a sequel (of sorts) to The Shining, one that centers on a grown Dan Torrance who crosses paths with a roaming "family" that feeds on people with the "shine." In a lot of ways, King is doubling down on the differences between his book The Shining and Stanley Kubrick's loose adaptation, which has come to dominate popular culture. When people think of The Shining now, they predominant image in their minds is going to be Jack Nicholson.

 Since I'm not done with Doctor Sleep yet, it wouldn't really be fair to compare the book(s) with the film, although I'd recommend you read The Shining before you read Doctor Sleep (people coming to King's sequel with only the knowledge of what happens in the film are going to be very confused by the immediate appearance of a character that dies in the movie). Reading the book did put me in a mood to watch The Shining again, and since Room 237 arrived from Netflix, that seemed like a good time to revisit the film. (I'll look at Room 237 separately tomorrow).

 At this point in time, The Shining is such a part of our cultural zeitgeist that even people who haven't seen the film know about it. "Here's Johnny!" is nearly as universally recognized as the shower scene from Psycho, and whether people have seen The Shining or not, it feels like we know the basic beats of the film: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel while it's closed from November to May, and brings along his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Never mind that the solitude drove Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) mad enough to murder his wife and children with an axe, and then kill himself. Or the fact that Jack seems.. maybe a little unstable and has issues with his wife and son. They'll be fine. And everything is going, let's say pretty well until a snowstorm comes through, and they're stuck inside. But it isn't the solitude that gets to them. Nope. Something is... off about the hotel, and after a series of potentially ghostly encounters, Jack loses it and tries to kill his family. Danny has "the shine," which gives him visions and allows him to reach out to Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the Overlook's cook, but can her arrive in time to help?

 What people tend to forget - or simply don't know because they haven't seen it - is how deliberately paced The Shining is to keep audiences off kilter. It's not simply that Danny's imaginary friend "Tony" has an inherently creepy voice, or that the film is punctuated with slow push-ins on Nicholson staring, often ending in smash cuts to title screens, but the overall atmosphere of The Shining is one of discomfort. Before it's even clear that the Torrance family has serious issues, the film exudes a sense of foreboding doom, one that builds to a fever pitch well before Jack finally snaps.

 At the same time, Kubrick is careful to never explicitly acknowledge whether The Overlook is haunted or if Jack is simply feeding off of the isolation to finally abandon his façade of being a good husband and father. (SPOILERS AHEAD) In every shot involving Jack talking a ghost, you'll notice that there's also a mirror, save for the scene where Grady unlocks the storage closet and let's him out. It is, aside from Wendy's journey through the hotel at the end, the only time the dead patrons of The Overlook go from phantoms to active participants in the madness. Danny's visions of Grady's daughters and the blood flowing from the elevator can, one could argue, simply be a reflection of his "shining." This doesn't necessarily explain who opened room 237, although Wendy never sees it, and she's the closest thing we have to a "reliable" protagonist in the film.

 The Shining has a strong undercurrent of "is this happening or isn't it," and is punctuated with lots of odd details you might take for granted the first time you watch it, but with repeated viewings become more and more obvious. Danny and Wendy are watching a television that isn't plugged in. Jack's typewriter abruptly changes during the course of the movie. The layout of the hotel doesn't seem to match where the characters are at the end of the film (pay close attention to where the Torrance's room is in relation to the front of The Overlook when Dick arrives compared to the paths Jack and Wendy take to get to the lobby). Every moment, every scene, is slightly off kilter, designed to keep audiences from ever settling in. The Shining is a masterful example of a horror film where very little actual horror occurs, but where the viewer is terrified of what will happen.

 Remember, Jack only kills one person in the film. That's it. He threatens Wendy and chases Danny through the hedge maze, but the only person who is murdered on camera in The Shining is Dick. We only see Jack after he's frozen to death, right before the final shot, the ambiguous extension of Jack visiting The Gold Room of the 1920s. Grady tells him earlier in the film that "you have always been the caretaker," so how much of what happens in The Shining really did happen?

 After the film premiered in the United States, Kubrick insisted that projectionists remove a two minute coda where Ullman visits Wendy and Danny in the hospital. He tells them there's no trace of Jack's body, but then gives Danny his father's tennis ball, and laughs. It's certainly a more conspiratorial ending, and I can understand why he dropped it, but that's not the only change Kubrick made to The Shining.

 I'm not sure how many American fans of the film are aware of this, but as a result of the critical reaction to The Shining (it was, in case you didn't know, nominated for two Razzies*), Kubrick recut the film for international release, removing thirty minutes. There's an ongoing debate about which version is his "preferred" cut, with many insisting the shorter version is, in fact, the one Kubrick intended to be "his" cut. The person who wrote IMDB's "Alternate Versions" page claims "the144 minute 'US version' is often erroneously called the Director's Cut when in fact director Kubrick regarded the 113 minute version as the superior cut of the film" but somehow the longer American cut is still primarily the one available on home video. I only bring this up because the original Stanley Kubrick collection released on DVD in 2000 was approved by Kubrick (before his death) using masters from 1989, giving him plenty of time to decide which cut of The Shining to use.

 While I am waiting to watch this shorter, 119 minute version (the disc should be arriving soon), the list of scenes removed makes the film seem more overtly supernatural: much of what's cut involves the strong hints of marital and familial discord in the Torrance household, including the examination of Danny after he passes out and the subsequent conversation between Wendy and Danny's pediatrician about the dislocated shoulder incident, or half of Jack's interview (the part specifically about him being a teacher and looking forward to the solitude). Parts of the tour of the Overlook are missing, including the explanation that there's no alcohol, and Danny and Dick's discussion about parts of the hotel being able to "shine" are gone, as are parts of scenes with Jack and Lloyd the bartender. The "skeleton" scene with Wendy has been removed, as are Hallorann's attempts to contact the Overlook before he flies from Miami to Colorado.

 All told, it sounds like serious tonal shifts in the film, and some of the transitions have been described as jarring, so I'm looking forward to seeing this shorter version. As it is, the 144 minute version of The Shining has an ominous, hypnotic quality to it, one that feels designed into keeping you off balance and unnerved. I'm curious to see the effect of dropping so much of the secondary details about Jack, Wendy, and Danny on the film. Expect a supplementary review after it arrives and the Cap'n has had time to digest it.

 As it is, I'm still continually evolving on The Shining: it's a film so layered with details, with apparent contradictions within the story, that I can forgive abandoning much of what King wrote in favor of a more ambiguity. Yes, it's impossible not to see Jack Nicholson and know that he's unbalanced from the first interview, and yes, Shelley Duvall's Wendy is already teetering on the brink of a mental collapse before the family leaves Colorado (due, in large part, to Kubrick's deliberate cruelty to the actress during the nearly year-long production). It's up for debate to how much of the long shoot contributed to what could be continuity errors and what might be deliberate (as we'll discuss in the Room 237 review), but I suspect many of those will go largely unnoticed until you've seen The Shining many times. For a first time viewer, it adds to the sense of unease about the world being presented to you in the film. While The Shining might not be my all time favorite horror movie, I certainly contend that it does a damn fine job of creeping me out.


* Worst Director and Worst Actress, if you can believe it.

War of the Doppelgängers : Enemy and The Double

 It seems to happen every few years: two films come out at roughly the same time that have a similar narrative "hook". You might remember this from years past: asteroids (Armageddon and Deep Impact), magicians (The Prestige and The Illusionist), biopics (Capote and Infamous). fighter jets (Top Gun and Iron Eagle), or, uh, insects (A Bug's Life, Antz). This past weekend, I decided to look at such a pairing, this time dealing with a favorite subject of mine: the doppelgänger. Both films are from 2013 but were widely released this year: Enemy and The Double.

 Okay, so I'm going to need you to bear with me here: after finishing a doppelgänger double feature, my head is swimming a bit. I'm trying to avoid Foreigner jokes, so feel free to make them yourselves. Enemy and The Double are distinct enough that they haven't bled together, but there is one unusual, albeit tertiary, connection: The Double is adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella of the same name. Enemy is also adapted from The Double, but not Dostoevsky's; it's based on José Saramago's novel of the same name. So even the source material has a "doppelgänger effect."  Still following me? We've only scratched the surface of these strange films.

 Starting in the order I watched them, Enemy is adapted from The Double by Javier Gullón and directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendes), and is ostensibly the story of Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a history professor in Ontario. On a whim, he decides to break from his daily pattern and rents a film, and in it he notices something very strange. The actor playing a bellhop looks exactly like Adam. Obsessed with finding out more about the local background actor, Adam follows a trail of breadcrumbs to Anthony Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is, in every way his physical double. When Adam foolishly calls, Anthony's pregnant wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon) answers, and thinking she's speaking to her husband, suspects him of cheating (again). Intrigued by Adam, both Anthony and Helen decide to meet him (separately), but for the sheepish professor, it's too much to take in. Unfortunately for Adam, Anthony isn't going to back off so easily, and when he turns his eye to Adam's girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent), it's only a matter of time before the line between identities blurs.

 Or has it already? Enemy is thick with suggestive imagery, particularly of arachnids. The film actually begins with Anthony and the doorman from his apartments (Tim Post) entering a "hush hush" club in the sort of building you'd expect to see in Hostel. The main attraction for sweaty, uncomfortable businessmen, appears to be a woman wearing nothing but heels crushing a tarantula, which may or may not have a direct bearing on the narrative. Depending on how you interpret the "web" imagery throughout Enemy, or the eventual presence of a spider floating above the city, it's hard to miss the cyclical nature of the film. Villeneuve and Gullón spell it out early in the picture, both through Adam's lectures but also in the repetition of his day (teach, go home, sex with Mary, Mary leaves, visibly upset).

 What the spiders represent and their connection to Adam and Anthony is also a matter of interpretation, as nothing is directly spelled out. A few visual clues sprinkled throughout Enemy suggest what might actually be going on, and there's a telling conversation between Adam and his mother (Isabella Rossellini) the nearly gives it away. But there's no real "twist" in Enemy - only a gradual unfolding of the repercussions of Adam's first lecture(s?). The final shot is, depending on how you read the spider metaphor, either a puzzler or the last piece of the puzzle, but I suspect that one could come to various "readings" of what Enemy "means."

  The entire film is cast in a sickly, yellow pallor, indicative of the state of mind of at least one (but probably all) of the main characters. Gyllenhaal distinguishes Adam from Anthony so well, both in physical performance and in delivery of dialogue that I never doubted they were two distinct characters, despite knowing it was the same actor. Laurent is in less of the film than Gadon, but makes an impression that's hard to shake. Gadon carries much of the emotional arc of the film - she meets Adam before Anthony does, and her perplexed reaction to him (he doesn't know who she is) is crushing. The impact of his existence hurts her more deeply than it does Adam, a meek and shrunken individual every bit the opposite of the confident, scheming Anthony. That is, if either really exists. Without giving too much away, there are elements of Enemy that reminded me of Mulholland Dr, but in a more abstract sense. The shared dreams and experiences of the doppelgängers don't directly point towards a revelation in the story: Villeneuve and Gullón are content to imply, to suggest, right up until the very end. Or the beginning.

 The Double is a less abstract but in many ways more impressionistic film exploring similar territory, albeit based on an older (and arguably more bizarre) story. A colleague of mine mentioned that he was impressed anyone would even try to adapt Dostoevsky's "weirdest" novel, which he described as "Jung 50 years before Jung." If there was anyone with a sensibility to make it work, The Double landed in the capable hands of Richard Ayoade (Submarine), who crafts it into a film that I can only describe as unique. I feel like doing The Double an injustice by suggesting that it resembles Fight Club by way of Brazil, but there's an element to Ayoade's stylistic approach that is highly reminiscent of the latter, with elements towards the end similar to the former. That said, The Double isn't quite like anything most of the time.

 The universe seems to hate Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), a shy, withdrawn employee of a nameless corporation run by The Colonel (James Fox). His supervisor, Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn) calls him Stanley and assumes he's new - Simon has been there for seven years - and his security badge has somehow gone corrupt. The surly security guard downstairs (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) insists that Simon is a visitor and threatens him at every opportunity. His printer doesn't work. He loses his briefcase on the subway. The waitress at the restaurant he frequents (Cathy Moriarty) is openly hostile to him. His mother calls him a "disappointment." Even the elevators refuse to work when he's on them. And yet, Simon takes this all in stride. This, it would seem, is his life.

 His one bright spot is a fascination (or is it obsession) with Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), his co-worker who lives in the apartment complex across from him. He senses they're kindred spirits, but can't muster the courage to tell her. Instead, he spies on her with a telescope at night. It's the highlight of his otherwise miserable day, it would seem. One night, he looks up and sees a man staring back at him with a pair of binoculars. The man waves, and them leaps to his death. The police sent to investigate (John Corkes and Craig Roberts) ask Simon a few questions and determine he's a "maybe" for a future suicide attempt. This won't be the last time someone tells Simon he's going to kill himself, but let's not get too far ahead.

 After being ejected from a mandatory company ball, Simon has a bit of a break, mentally, and the next day at work, James Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) starts in a similar job. Everybody loves James, and no one seems to notice that he looks exactly like Simon, much to Simon's consternation. Simon's co-worker Harris (Noah Taylor) admits that "maybe" they look alike, but that Simon has a forgettable face. Now, much to my surprise, unlike Enemy - which puts Adam and Anthony together sparingly - Simon and James are frequently inhabiting the same space, interacting, getting into trouble together, and pretending to be the other ("How can we get in trouble? We have the same face.") The outgoing, gregarious James gives Simon advice, and helps ease him out of his shell, while Simon gives James the necessary assistance to do a job he knows literally nothing about. But, of course, as with any doppelgänger, James has an ulterior agenda.

 There is a predictability built into the story structure of The Double that worried me early on - the deck is stacked against Simon to almost comical extremes, but rather than make me sympathetic towards him, I kind of disliked his willingness just to take it. Ayoade asked Eisenberg to study Buster Keaton, whose body language epitomizes a man who accepts the rotten luck in life, and Simon is just content to take it. But there's only so much I could take at the outset of the picture. Thankfully, James is not immediately antagonistic, and the building of their relationship (if it exists in the first place) provides The Double with a breath of fresh air, like Sam Lowry's dreams in Brazil. The inevitable betrayal of that trust, coupled with Jame's conquest of Hannah, at least happens after Simon feels confident enough not just to take it. He begins to fight back, not always successfully, but a late revelation about the nature of his doppelgänger loops the film back on itself, and allows Simon to take advantage of James in a way the latter couldn't anticipate.

 Ayoade's visual presentation of The Double gives it the feeling of a lucid nightmare, of a dystopian future that's simultaneously retro (while I don't think it's ever stated, The Double seems to take place in an alternate 1980s). It's doesn't draw attention to itself, but the television program Simon is fond of and the computers they use are clearly several generations removed from the 21st Century. His scene transitions are often inspired, capitalizing on isolated faces in darkness that suddenly emerge in new settings. While Enemy sparingly uses split screen or digital technology, Eisenberg is almost constantly interacting with himself, and the seams aren't apparent in the slightest. Simon and James are so different that it only becomes confusing near the end of the film which is which (you have to look at the shoes). Hannah is introduced in another subway car, bathed in an impossibly angelic light that I can only compare to cut-aways of Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers. Like Fight Club, that's not something I would imagine I'd be using to reference in The Double.

 The screenplay by Ayoade and Avi Korine (Mr. Lonely) doesn't spend too much time worrying about the nature of Simon and James - there's a visual suggestion of when it happens, but not why. The film is, instead, focused on not wasting a single moment on superfluous information; everything (and everyone) is in some way relevant to how The Double ends. Every plot point, or seemingly irrelevant detail, comes into play as Simon goes barreling off the rails, to the final scene, which can be interpreted in a few ways. Oh, and without spoiling anything, Simon isn't the only person in the film who has a doppelgänger. It's a small scene, but one that hints at something larger in the world of the film.

 Eisenberg is good - maybe too good - as the put-upon Simon, so much so that I was happy when James appeared to make the little weenie stand up for himself. James is less sketched out - Eisenberg plays him as an Id out of control, and it's easy to loathe him late in the film. It would be easy to suggest Wasikowska plays Hannah as the newly coined "Manic Pixie Girl" type, but there's something much more interesting about her performance. She taps into a longing that Simon senses, but not one that requires him to be complete. Her arc with James is arguably more interesting as the film goes on, reaching a conclusion that improves the overall narrative. There are a number of cameos from well known names and faces, some of whom worked with Ayoade in the past, but I won't spoil them for you. I will say that I didn't recognize Sally Hawkins, who has a tiny role in the film, but I did immediately catch the extended cameo from Dinosaur Jr. frontman J. Mascis as the janitor in Hannah's apartment building.

 When it comes to this particular doppelgänger double feature, I'm not sure which one I would recommend more. On the one hand, Enemy is more abstract and relies on a serious reality "break" to make it clear what we're seeing isn't necessarily what "is." On the other, The Double is much less concerned with the "why" than its repercussions, but is more impressionistic in its presentation. Another friend of mine couldn't finish The Double - he said it was "too weird," and it does take a certain willingness to accept Ayoade's world on his terms (and, I would gather, Dostoevsky's). I wish I could speak to either of them as adaptations, but in this instance I can only judge them as films. Enemy makes for a great discussion piece, but might be too frustrating in its unwillingness to do more than imply for audiences. The Double is reminiscent of a number of films I'm very fond of but might alienate viewers at the outset with a protagonist who is only barely likable.

 I don't wish to make it sound like I didn't enjoy either film. Quite the opposite is the case, and I'm hesitant to give either one the edge. Unlike, say, The Prestige, which I prefer to The Illusionist, it's harder to say clearly that Enemy or The Double is the better "doppelgänger" film. Each has its own merits, its own problems, and I feel like either film could spark a fascinating conversation between viewers. One is a distinctly suggestive mystery, filled with unaddressed symbolism, and the other is a very black comedy that makes little effort to suggest reality applies. I enjoy them for different reasons, and find the contrasts help, rather than hinder, the act of seeing them back-to-back. That said, I think you'd be just fine watching one or the other on their own, depending on which suits your tastes more. Double doppelgänger features might be too much to digest. At least you have two appealing choices.