Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)

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Based on the stellar novel by Jonathan Lethem, MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019) is a neo-noir crime film written, produced, directed, and starring Ed Norton. Not a faithful adaptation, but Norton reinvents the source material in a way that’s still compelling. Overall, I liked it a lot.

It’s New York in 1957, and Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) runs a private detective agency staffed by the Minna Men, men plucked from an orphanage and given mentorship. One of these men is Lionel Esrog (Ed Norton), a man plagued by Tourette syndrome. When a mysterious job goes wrong, Lionel decides to step up and solve it, putting him against the city’s most powerful men.

In the novel, Lionel is sort of a mascot, regularly ridiculed and overlooked because of his condition, which provides him the perfect cover as a private eye. Because nobody takes him seriously, nobody considers him a threat. In the end, he alone cracks the case, only to find out it’s not the stuff of his mentor’s romanticized PI noir affectations but far more mundane. In the film, Norton interprets the character differently, treating Tourette’s as an inconvenient disability but allowing the other characters to regard it with more sensitivity and him with more respect. I wonder if Norton went too far; honestly, the trait could have been dropped, and it wouldn’t have changed the film much at all.

In the film, Lionel ends up tangling with powerful forces seeking to demolish parts of Harlem to make way for new roads and bridges, which will enrich wealthy men, bringing in great actors like Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones, and Ethan Suplee in a 1950s New York that is immersive and amazingly constructed. Overall, it’s very well done, and the whole is compelling, though it was missing something that would have made it a far greater film. I believe it’s Lionel himself. The character is plenty likeable, but he doesn’t really undergo any change, he doesn’t really have to conquer his disability or much stemming from it. He starts the film smarter than everybody else and somewhat misunderstood, he ends it that way.

Overall, I liked the film and even admire it, though it fell far short of knocking me out.

GRAVITY (2013)

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In Alfonso Cuarón’s GRAVITY (2013), a doctor (Sandra Bullock) conducting a research project on the space shuttle is wrapping up and on her way home when the Russians shoot down one of their own errant satellites with a missile, starting a chain reaction of super fast debris hurtling around Earth’s orbit and shredding everything in its path. What follows is a breathless fight for virtually you-are-there survival using every bit of meager means at her disposal.

There’s not a lot to talk about when it comes to character. Dr. Ryan Stone is in long and deep mourning, which draws her to the solitude of lifeless space. When she’s challenged with a fight to survive, she has to decide if she really wants to live and what she has to live for. Otherwise, really this is a Michael Crichton-scale series of escalating tension and horrible challenges, with a roaring, ominous soundtrack ratcheting the tension to 11, flawless CGI putting your brain in outer space, and plenty of sweat as a single misstep will send you hurtling off to die of asphyxiation alone and in the dark.

In short, the film is beautifully shot, riveting, and pretty spectacular, surprisingly effective to an extent it makes you physically uncomfortable to watch it at times. On the downside, there isn’t much going on other than an astronaut fixing one problem only to be confronted by another bigger problem in a very plot-driven story. Overall, I found it pretty compelling.

SQUID GAME

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In SQUID GAME (Netflix, Korean), a group of financially desperate people are recruited to participate in a series of games for a cash prize worth billions. I absolutely loved this gripping, violent, and emotionally devastating show, with a few reservations.

The first episode introduces us to Seong Gi-hun, a divorced chauffeur heavily in debt, who dips into his mother’s savings to gamble. In the opening, we see him as a boy playing a children’s game called the Squid Game, how when he won he felt on top of the world. Years later, he’s not as good at the game of life and gambles to get above water financially and hopefully reclaim that feeling of winning from long ago. True to the best South Korean films, we have a protagonist who is a heavily flawed loser but also eminently relatable and likeable.

When a mysterious organization invites him to participate in various games for cash prizes, he volunteers. Suddenly, he’s competing along with 455 other people in a series of children’s games. It looks like fun, only the trick is the losers die, and with each death, the cash prize for the winners goes up. The games break them down into smaller groups until it’s basically every person for themselves, and they realize they’re not only betting their lives, they’re selling their souls and very humanity, showing what they’re all truly made of. Along the way, we meet and sympathize with other terrific characters, each with their own personal reason for competing, making this their story as much as Seong Gi-hun’s.

The show has been compared to ALICE IN BORDERLAND, a similar Japanese series, but I personally found SQUID GAME far superior and more compelling, as it goes far deeper into character and theme, which invested me so much more heavily such that I found it emotionally devastating while I found ALICE only titillating. The games are just brutal, absolutely riveting stuff, and the stakes are devastating, with plenty of physical challenges and psychological twists. The sets and costumes in the game world are terrific. The theme is pretty simple: Capitalism brutalizes people, resulting in a boredom among the rich and a desperation among the poor uniting them in psychopathy.

I had two criticisms. One is that a side plot produces a terrific perspective on what’s going on but doesn’t really go anywhere except possibly to influence the events in a second season. The second is the ending, which I found pretty disappointing as it chose a resolution that didn’t resonate with me.

Overall, SQUID GAME is just great storytelling: people you care about challenged and absolutely brutalized by games with the highest stakes–your life and more money you could spend in a lifetime.

MIDNIGHT MASS

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Just finished MIDNIGHT MASS on Netflix, and WOW. If you’re looking for a brilliant horror story that also serves up a powerful analysis of religious belief, you should stop reading this dumb review and start binge-watching now.

If you’re still with me, here goes: MIDNIGHT MASS is the creation of Mike Flanagan, one of the creators of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which I also enjoyed. In this story, a mysterious priest arrives at a declining fishing island to take over a Catholic church, but he’s not alone. Soon, miracles and deaths start occurring, forcing the ensemble cast of locals to choose sides in what some seems as a spiritual war and others as a threat to the entire world.

Flanagan gets pretty much everything about this miniseries right. As a creator, he often leans heavily on theme, and MIDNIGHT MASS is no exception. The theme here is the search for meaning in life when all things die, how this affects people differently in good and bad ways, and the struggle to know an all-powerful God that seems to be unknowable. I tackled a lot of these themes in my novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, and while I went for it and produced something I believe is at least thoughtful, Flanagan utterly dominated it. His script contains these long, wonderful monologues that are really meditations and shaded views on purpose, meaning, life after death, and more. He overdoes the expository dialogue at times, but I didn’t mind as it’s good stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated by this theme, which is a tough one to tackle right: the question of whether life has any inherent meaning if death is final, and the question of whether a higher power is guiding us to a higher purpose. I’ve always felt if you strip out the human longing and projection, take out the idea that God has a paternal love for each and every one of us, God is actually a source of cosmic horror, an all-powerful being that inflicts great suffering and occasionally helps us based on its plan and that maybe can be appeased with the right behavior and sacrifices. Flanagan shows us all this and makes us feel it while being respectful to all sides of the conversation. Flanagan asks the question, and the characters provide a multitude of answers.

Back to the show… The acting is terrific, with some familiar faces from previous Flanagan works like Kate Siegel, and led by Hamish Linklater, whom I’d only seen previously in THE BIG SHORT. Playing Father Paul, he chews the scenery and absolutely dominates every scene he’s in. Paul is such a greater character, a deeply spiritual and religious man who is at heart good but who deludes himself into interpreting a great evil into something miraculous and Godly. Bev is another great character, a very religious and proper lady who uses her religion to justify her prejudices and spite, and who has a Bible verse to rationalize pretty much anything she wants to do. All the characters are great, in fact, all of them feeling real without the usual “small town stock” cast. The show has been compared to Stephen King’s work, which is justifiable as we have a small town of good, plain folks encountering and seduced by a great evil, but Flanagan goes so much farther with character and theme that in my view he comes out ahead in a league entirely his own.

I could go on, the terrific horror element, the absolutely terrific bloody climax, the organic and realistic pacing, etc. Suffice to say, I thought MIDNIGHT MASS was brilliant and loved it, another example of the golden age of television we’re currently in.

FORTITUDE, Season 1

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In the British crime/bio thriller drama FORTITUDE, the residents of a small town confront a violent crime in their midst, while the melting permafrost produces something far more horrifying. This is a weird series, part crime procedural, part melodrama, part medical thriller, part WTF am I watching and why am I watching it. In short, I had a complicated relationship with it.

Welcome to Fortitude, population 722, where violent crime is almost nonexistent, the locals eke out a living in the Arctic wilderness, everybody walks around armed in case of polar bears, and a startling percentage of the population is good looking. When children discover a fossil exposed by the melting permafrost, it produces a bizarre murder and a strange disease. The sheriff must try to contain and resolve the bizarre murders, while a police inspector from London (played with the usual high acumen by the great Stanley Tucci) arrives to dig into the old wound of an even older murder.

What a ride. I came into it expecting a bio thriller, based on what I’d heard, and instead for the first episodes we’re thrown headfirst into a police procedural that by the end becomes a bio thriller. From the get-go, Fortitude, which has never known violent crime, starts racking up what will become by the end an almost comedic number of murders and brutal assaults over its roughly 13 hours of runtime. At various points, it seemed the show didn’t know what it wanted to be, so it threw all the spaghetti against the wall, sometimes straight into TWIN PEAKS territory. Near the end, a character sums up the theme–roughly that people sometimes do bad things for good reasons, but no matter how good the reasons, there are always consequences–which tries to lend gravitas to a show that is otherwise kinda bonkers, and is belied by the fact almost none of the violent crime in the show is actually punished.

There’s a lot to like here. The Arctic setting is absolutely fantastic, and I have to admit I’m a sucker for Arctic noir. The town and its culture appear distinct and real. The acting is terrific, led by notables like Richard Dormer, Christopher Eccleston, and Michael Gambon. There’s plenty of intrigue, the police procedural plotline led by Tucci works, and the bio thriller element is pretty cool. There are plenty of places where I was thinking, okay, this is cooking with gas now, and then the show would detour into wacky melodrama and numerous subplots that didn’t really go anywhere.

So overall, I have no regrets, though I’m not sure I would recommend it, as it’s one of the most YMMV things I’ve ever watched.

PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (2021)

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In PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (2021), a lot of great gonzo elements come together not unlike spaghetti against the wall, but the whole didn’t quite gel for me.

I was really excited about this one for several reasons. First off, the trailer is off the hook, promising a great gonzo experience that its director, Sion Sono, is apparently known for. It stars Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, and Bill Moseley. And it’s produced by XYZ Films, which has a solid track record.

At first, the film delivers on its promise of utter weirdness with great production quality. The governor (Moseley) rules Samurai Town, a settlement in a region of Japan abandoned after a nuclear power plant disaster. He keeps a harem of women, including Bernice (Boutella), who escaped into the Ghostland, where refugee outcasts eke out a meager living in the apocalyptic ruins, caught between life and death. Enter Hero (Cage), a notorious criminal, whom the governor fits with an explosive suit and sends out into the Ghostland to bring his Bernice back.

Samurai Town is a mashup of samurai and American Old West culture, and there’s enough weirdness to it that it’s all very promising. The costumes and artistry apparent in the cinematography, costumes, and weird apocalyptic culture come across as something Terry Gilliam might have made.

Unfortunately, it all kind of falls apart with an over reliance on these elements at the expense of good pacing, plotting, and character development. As a result, I was surprisingly bored for much of it. Now, when you’re doing a gonzo film, you can skimp on anything and break any rules you want, but it has to come together with a certain magic. For me, it just wasn’t there. The director seemed to fall in love with certain elements and pushed them too far until they almost became grating, rather than letting me react with a sense of wonder.

So overall, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND offered a lot for me to like in the parts but nothing I fell in love with in the whole, which was a bit of a bummer as I really wanted to love it and I went into it with high hopes. Still, it checks many of the boxes of an enduring cult film, so time will tell on that.