Lean on Pete

Only in retrospect you realize how relevant to our current times and how anachronic in terms of our media culture is Lean on Pete, the story of a teenager (Charlie Plummer) who becomes an orphan and must face homelessness right away and without warning. He does not see it that way though, and as in real life stories, things happen to you while you are busy looking other way. In this case, the focus of that look is a race horse called Pete. The kid has developed a close attachment with the horse, an attachment that defies all of our cinematic clichés about a boy and a horse: there is not an exciting and triumphant riding lifting our spirits and no racing awards at the end of the road. There is only the distressing journey to the unknown, the hope of a better future and a feeling of precariousness in the middle of a happy ending that the young and courageous main character more than deserves. British director Andrew Haig has conjured a sort of discreet, reluctant masterpiece, the kind of film that, unfortunately, endears critics and goes unnoticed by the bulk of moviegoers. Beautiful and compassionate, this is one of the best movies I have seen this year so far.

The Snowman

I saw The Snowman yesterday. It took me more than 24 hours to digest my disappointment at the movie and also at myself. Let me explain. In the trailer you see great actors and a beautiful photography in a cold Nordic environment (Norway). Perfect, I thought: a serial killer story. Everything checked to be awesome except for the terrible reviews but I thought, “What do they know?” Then again, at the end I realized that the movie actually sucks. Big time. The director apparently apologized and explained something about an unfinished script even after they started filming. Not the first time I hear something like this but it is the first time that I noticed how terrible the results can be. Maybe Tomas Alfredson was not skilled enough to deal with the situation, I don’t know. But at the end you have wonderful actors delivering wonderful acting… that seems from another movie, pieces here and there that barely make sense, and me losing all interest way far away from the plot resolution. What a waste of time.

Making It scary

I think that Stephen King is so good depicting horror because he is good depicting everything else —the whole range of what is being human, that is. That’s the success of It, which takes its time fleshing out its charismatic young characters with realism and consistency to make the scares believable too. In their world, adults are cold and cruel, complicit in a way to the darkness beneath their town. You may notice Argentine Director Andrés Muschietti’s attention to detail in every scene, from the recreation of the late eighties, to an effective score that is always present but never overwhelming, and of course in the grittiness of the heavy action/special effects scenes that seem to be an effective mix of mechanic and digital artistry. Even Pennywise is scarier since he is awfully smart, and this second version of It (the previous was a 1990 2-part TV show) allows us to grasp that too. Even at a length of 2 hours plus you feel the narrative economy of a tight script. This is commercial moviemaking at its best. Do not miss it.

Wind River

Taylor Sheridan directed the quasi neorealist Hell or High Water before Wind River, a slow-moving thriller that freezes your bones to their core not for the Wyoming mountains snow, but because it reminds us the dreadful reality of Indian reservations and the white-male macho violence always ready to erupt in this America that wants to be great again. Never been more impressed with Jeremy Renner who is a wildlife agent who helps to investigate a crime in this harsh environment. He actually has to act – with moving results I think – which is something we barely see in action movies anymore. Hope you can see it at the theater.

War is a beautiful stranger - "Dunkirk" (2017)

One of the most beautiful war movies ever done, Nolan’s Dunkirk is also one of the strangest ones. Dialogues are scarce and the characters and stories we follow seem kind of generic, as if telling an abstract tale about British survival and heroism. The real story took place before the entrance of the US to WWII when nearly 350 thousand English and French soldiers were rescued from an almost sure death and abuse at the hands of the German troops. The real drama was impressive and thousands of soldiers could not make it alive. You can just imagine the grittiness of war must have been at its fullest. But there is no gritty here, the hundreds of soldiers onscreen look impeccably dressed and mostly clean – you can just gasp at what the costume budget must have been – as if coming directly from wardrobe room, perfectly armed and geared but scared to death from invisible Germans that besides a blind gunfight at the beginning only have a presence via the German Luftwaffe planes bombing ships and soldiers perfectly lined up as sitting ducks at the beach and attacking British Spitfire planes. I guess, Nolan’s goal was to show the war from the British side, the hopelessness, the fear and finally the relief of being rescued. I am not sure if he succeeds creating an emotional denunciation of the ravages of war though, given the austere view we get from the few characters we follow, but he certainly creates beautiful scenes on air and sea, with open landscapes and harrowing air battles that will become the reason why Dunkirk will be remembered. The large views of open skies and pristine seas make us involuntarily think of the catastrophic effects of war on the environment, and the resilience of humans and nature alike to its own efforts of self destruction –abstract thoughts of an almost abstract, impressionist film that will soar the spirits of artsy moviegoers but that probably will baffle all others.

The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

Reading The Scarlet Gospels (MacMillan, New York. May 2015, available in print and ebook editions in amazon.com) is, as you may expect from a book by Clive Barker, a strange adventure. At times it recalls the inventive fury that inhabited his early Books of Blood, each one a compilation of short stories where a series of perverted worlds are depicted in insane detail and magnificent prose. It counts as a back-to-shape statement, I think. The kind of Barker book that I was waiting for a long time.

After the big success of his Blood books and other stories – applauded by the master of horror himself, Stephen King – Barker decided to move permanently into the realm of the infernal, conceiving entirely cogent demonic worlds of a richness and vastness that, in a way, seemed propelled by a sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the netherworld.

I must confess though that, along the way, the Barker’s magic dissipated for me. Next to his determination to show off his infernal acumen, his work got vacated of compelling characters and his plots passed from being refreshingly fantastic to be just weird and hallucinogenic. Way back remained those atmospheres where a unique mix of cruelty, poetic fantasy and sensuality – or sexuality indeed, since he never avoided any valid chance to go into the physical detail of sexual encounters among humans, ghosts or demons – was powered by the surgical precision of his writing style.

Barker is an ambitious messenger of the otherworldly. He has dabbled into novels and short stories as mentioned, but also in movies as a script writer, director and producer. The most famous of his works is of course Hellraiser, directed by Barker himself and, in my opinion, the only one of the movies based on his books or any of his scripts – or at least inspired by them – that was capable of recreating the sweetly disturbing atmosphere that is the trademark of his best works.

The main character of The Scarlet Gospels is Harry D’Amour, a private detective that realizing his special ability to perceive and attract demons decides to make a career out of it –a little bit like Barker himself. I remember the D’Amour characterization by Scot Bakula in Lord of Illusions (1995), a film also scripted by Barker. We also get reacquainted here with one of the most famous infernal devices from Barker’s world, a “Lemarchand box,” which is described as being no bigger than a Rubik cube that lures men into playing with the apparently innocent “Lament Configurations” carved into its walls. This is the box that creates havoc in the first place in the plot of The Hellbound Heart and in the movie that it inspired, Hellraiser, by simply leaving ajar one of the doors to Hell so that its inadvertent players discover the limits of human pain at the hands of one of most nightmarish dwellers of the infernal, Pinhead.

I might be wrong, of course, since I have not read all of Barker’s body of work, but it seems to me that this is the first of his books that mixes the destinies of D’Amour and Pinhead. It makes wonders for a plot that has apocalyptic keys aplenty and that drives the unsuspecting readers to Hell and back, introducing, in a display of daring inventive that never waivers in the face of the unthinkable, to the master of Hell himself, Lucifer.

With the stakes so high it was almost impossible to leave unscathed. But Barker is not only able to pull it off with brilliance but also creates a resonating story that ignites our imaginations with enduring creative fire.

Whiplash (2014)

In Whiplash we are confronted with the meaning of artistic greatness and what we can, would, and should do for it. The story of a student jazz drummer in a prestigious music school and his submissiveness and eventual confrontation with his tyrannical instructor does not seem to be an original theme to start with, but the usual teacher-student Hollywood clichés are rendered useless here almost from the beginning, as any sense of our current sense of “fairness” and political correctness is destroyed with impunity.

It is up to the audience to decide if the instructor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is a good-intentioned monster or if he is just a monster, plain and simple. He challenges his students with demands that seem to be absurd, creates jealousy among them and shakes any sense of comfort that they could legitimately aspire to. On the other side, Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), the student, is not painted with rosy colors either. He is serious, he is ambitious, and his bleeding hands are a testimony of his dedication. However, we detect a scent of arrogance in his interventions during a family dinner, and he unexpectedly severs his relationship with a nice girlfriend that we have barely seen onscreen and who provides a tenuous link with normalcy in his life.

Director Damien Chazelle takes both characters to a sophisticated and cruel confrontation on the limits of sanity. Showing restraint and economy in every scene, supported by amazing actors, and achieving a top-notch technical level during the music performances, Whiplash delivers punch after punch of intense, unpredictable, and genuine situations.

This might be my favorite nominee for Best Picture in the Oscars 2015.