remove. thy. shift. ... wait, what?

Guess there's nothing to get one writing again like finally seeing a super-shitty Halloween movie that everyone somehow loved.

One of the giveaways that 2015s The Va-Vitch wasn't as good as everyone thought was the wide diversity in ratings: 91% from Rotten Tomatoes but only 3.5 stars from Ebert. Not that ratings count for much, but Very Serious Professional Movie People love nothing else if not consensus, and the question of what makes a film good is about as boilerplate as one can get.

Anyway, The Va-Vitch is a beautifully shot, surprisingly historical farce that tries to straddle between a slice-of-life period piece about early American puritans in the new world and full-blown supernatural horror. Things open with a family patriarch getting kicked out of an unnamed settlement -- Anytown, USA c. 1680 I guess -- for being too puritanical for the puritans. What led to this point is unclear and never explained, which serves as the first of many, many plot letdowns to come. Not that the audience would get it anyway: dad's mix of gravelly voice and period dialog make just about everything he says a series of unintelligible grunts anyway.

The Va-Vitch was billed as some kind of feminist landmark for it's portrayal of young Tomasin, but the camera spends so much time on mom, dad, Black Philip the goat and dad's abs it's difficult to see her as the protagonist, let alone the movie being told from her point of view. Let's get this out of the way now, since the movie wastes no time either: yes, there's a witch in the woods. So even though we get some chilling scenes of the family discussing whether to marry Tomasin off for extra money and supplies and treating her and her budding feminine wiles as the cause of their woes (instead of, you know, getting fricking exiled), it's all rendered moot by the literal existence of the literal, baby-eatin', boy-screwin', plague-bearin', shape-shiftin' witch.

In this light, I saw the movie from the father's point of view: trying to comprehend supernatural things that don't fit within his narrow, Biblical frame of reference. Faced with an enemy he can't defeat with either shouting or flexing his stomach muscles, he goes slowly insane. Aside: I doubt that's what the filmmakers were going for, but I wonder how much of the hype, reviews, and cover shot of Tomasin stick in the audience's head beforehand -- perhaps she is the protagonist because viewers are told she's the protagonist, but in watching what's actually in the movie, I saw it differently.

Historically, the Salem Witch Trials happened because a kind of grass mold native to the New World, of which Europeans had no knowledge, caused hallucinations in the populace, and their behavior was only explained away as demon possession. This gets hinted at in the Va-Vitch but never developed or explained, and that's what I thought they were going for, until the male heir of the family, Caleb, stumbles across a hut in the woods and the super-sexy witch therein.

At that point, and after the sexy lady has a hot body but an off-camera messed-up arm that snags Caleb and by extension the audience from the far side of Planet Jumpscare, I was completely kicked out of the narrative and couldn't take it seriously anymore, and I also managed to guess the ending. Black Philip is the literal Devil, and invites Tomasin to "live deliciously," (whatever the hell that means, like, open a food truck?) he gores dad to death and Tomasin hacks up her mom. Like other slow-burn horror movies, particularly anything from James Wan, it fulfills the plodding psychological terror erupts into an orgy of blood and violence just before credit roll. In the end, Toamsin gets naked and runs though the woods, finds a whole group of witches doing witchy stuff around a ridiculous bonfire and flies away.

The Va-Vitch (or I suppose to it should've been called The Va-Vitches) has the same problem The Last Exorcism did. Both movies set up as humanistic dramas about ordinary people pulling demons from the pages of the Bible to replace the demons in their own heads, and Last Exorcism was actually quite effective. That is, until you get to the last 60 seconds and a monster-demon lizard baby is born in front of another bonfire and eats a camera crew. I suppose it's a way to reassure an audience of the vast untruth that the monsters on the outside are scarier than the monsters on the inside by always making the monsters on the outside real, tangible and literal.

The thing is, The Va-Vitch is not a bad movie, and I get why people liked it. It's visually arresting and visually immersive, and does use the setting to tell the story to great effect (because I don't know about you but I couldn't understand a thing those mofos said). But by the time Tomasin was flying through woods in her birthday suit, I felt like the end of a 100 minute joke.

* * * * *

A far better movie with demons far more terrifying is 2016s Under the Shadow. Set in Iran in the last year of the Iran-Iraq war (what simpler times: I was 5, my parents were still together and the USA loved Saddam), a missile impacts a middle-class apartment complex in Tehran and bring with it the djinn. In the spirit of getting things out of the way, yes, the djinn are real and literal, but there's more going on here.

Young mom Shideh and her daughter Dorsa wait at home while husband-daddy Iraj is on the front lines as a field medic. Shideh is a med student herself, but because of her involvement in the Iranian revolution, is blacklisted from finishing her studies, becoming a doctor and going back to work. The movie opens, in fact, to a disinterested university admissions director brushing her off while an airstrike takes place in the distance. It's a heartbreaking scene that gives clear context for the rest of the movie -- something the Va-Vitch turns it's crooked nose up at from minute one.

Under the Shadow is, at it's core, an homage to 80s haunted house movies, most notably Poltergeist. The audience spends most of the time in Shideh's apartment and gets to know her daily routines. The scenes of her playing or doing lessons with Dorsa, repeated breakfasts and escape into Jane Fonda workout tapes before the scares build tension for the audience but also build Shideh and Dorsa as human beings. And because the audience is aware of Shideh's political past and why she's stuck in the apartment all day, every day, it allows for a good deal of sympathy -- something The Va-Vitch and its va-vagueness never address.

While it's not as stunning as its naked-in-the-woods counterpart, Under the Shadow pulls off an even more amazing feat in that it's relevant. Shideh and Iraj's brief discussions about the Iran-Iraq war, at the time the largest war that had ever been fought, illustrates the conflict in their marriage but also imparts a good deal of history not well known outside the Middle East. Shideh's clashes with Iranian culture do this as well: her coveted VCR is illegal. And in a twist on Poltergiest et. al., Shideh makes a run out of the haunted house only to be arrested by cultural enforcement police who catch her outside without her head covered. Actress Narges Rashidi manages a good long scene doing her best kicked-puppy face in the movie's most oppressively tense moment at the police station. This kind of period piece is one that is pertinent because parts of the world still function this way.

And that gets back to the final reason I was disappointed in the Va-Vitch: too much is left up to the audience. The hallmark of lazy writing is when names or keywords are used in place of showing. The audience doesn't know why Puritan dad and fam are exiled, but hell, they're Puritans and they're all nuts, am I right? The audience never knows if their life in the settlement is better because it is never shown.  It is serviceable enough to feel bad for Tomasin as her kin start to turn against her, but there's no base for their life before, and if history is any lens, it probably sucked just as bad, and having more people around an adolescent woman really just equated to more work to do and a better chance at getting assaulted and then blamed for it. Well to be fair they blamed the devil for most things but she'd have gotten her ass burned at the stake anyway. Puritans riding dirty, that's for damn sure. The audience only ever sees the va-victims of the va-vitch as victims, so it's difficult not to feel bad. But because they aren't people, the audience feels sympathy because it's told to, not because they deserve it.

Alright that's harsh, the baby does. He didn't do nothing. But nobody else. You get one. Damn Puritans.

the oscars music criticism hour

Another awards show dead and buried.

Honestly, what are we even supposed to say about it, besides the fact that everyone seems to have forgotten their history: Straight Outta Compton's only nomination was for its two white screenwriters, which happened to the (vastly superior) Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing in 1989. Of the entire movie, only Danny Aiello was nominated for best supporting, and Public Enemy's seminal track Fight The Power, which was played at the 2016 show, lost to -- of all god-forsaken things -- Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid.

Quickly: I am glad that Spotlight won best picture. It was an underdog production from start to finish. The state of investigative journalism in the U.S. and, hell, around the world, is patently pathetic. Even the much-lauded war journalist is labeled by the official Defense Department as an "unprivileged belligerent" -- basically a thin notch above "enemy combatant." Even former actor and "Great Communicator" Ronnie Reagan hot-mic'd himself back in 1986 by calling the media "sons of bitches." Much like the troops themselves and to a similar extend police, journalists are the heroic risk-takers of American legend ... just as long as we don't have to see them, know them, deal with them or think about any of the things they say.

Additionally, while I was rooting for Mad Max: Fury Road all the way through (which cleaned up with six creepy gold statues of Klaatu), I'm glad all of the recognition was for crew, design and stunts -- the non-glamours parts of film making we slobbering media-whore consumers rarely see. The fire coming out of that guitar was real and Sunday it got it's due.

You've seen this before but I reiterate that it's a goddamned guitar that shoots fire and you will see it again and enjoy it!

And there's not a whole lot one can say about Chris Rock's admirable but supremely awkward attempts at addressing the everyday racism of Hollywood, except that somehow Asians ended up as the ass of the joke? I guess there's a valid criticism there but some more focus would've helped, particularly that there were no Asians* up for anything this year, with the exception The Look of Silence, a second-half of the documentary The Act of Killing that approximately nobody saw (but really you should see both). This comes soon after word that Scarlett Johansson will take the lead in an American live-action reboot of the seminal cyber-punk anime Ghost in the Shell. I'm not trying to put people in boxes or anything, but I don't know many Jewish women native to NYC who go by Motoko Kusangi.

[UPDATE: I started this post several days ago and it seems her entry for the movie has been removed from IMDB. This is what listening to the internet gets you.]

* * * * *

If there was a high point -- or low point? -- of the night, it was Lady Gaga losing the best song award to Sam Smith. Let's be clear: Gaga is effectively the most overrated** musician working today. Depending on what side of spectrum you come from, she's either Amy Winehouse without the deeply tragic personal demons and far better adapted to fame, or Tori Amos on bath salts. Her performance was great comparatively, but without her patented Gaga-ness -- the ever present need to charge her fans a few hundred a ticket so she can light a baby grand on fire or something -- it didn't exactly stand out.

But this was the "issues" Oscars and issues it brought. Until It Happens To You was written for the documentary film The Hunting Ground. It tracks the many, many failures many different social and legal systems as they pertain to the epidemic of college campus rape, and her performance brought dozens of rape and sexual assault survivors out on stage. That Brie Larson won for Room, a movie that heavily features the dis-empowerment of women, doesn't exactly seem like an accident (like Spotlight, it was an underdog movie that came out of nowhere, adapted from a best-selling novel that came out of nowhere).

The other two songs paled in comparison. The Weekend's Earned It is a forgettable little bit of pop/soul/R&B crud that somehow posits that women "earn" their domineering and abusive partners by, being better victims I guess? It was written for 50 Shades of Gray, after all. And given what astute readers who don't forget or block out that the mega-successful PG-13 semi-smut is elaborate Twilight fanfiction, twin Mary-Sue heroines Bella Swan and Ana Steele "earned" something between jack and shit.

But it really sticks in my craw (and I'm a dude so, ya know, use your imagination) that Sam Smith's James Bond crooning of The Writing's on the Wall won. The thing that made Skyfall stand out was that it was also a good movie on top of being a James Bond movie, and the titular Adele theme actually had something to do with the movie itself. Smith's Bond song hammers home the idea that Bond is old and soft and just wants to settle down. Spectre the movie takes absolutely zero of such advice into consideration. And that the risk of crossing into dudebro territory: when one has even an inkling of a shot with Monica Belluci and you aim for a skinny blonde French chick, that is basically worthy of psychotherapy.

The Writing's on the Wall is just a bad song, squeaked out by an equally forgettable singer who I can't tell apart from all of the other equally-forgettable singers blasted out with strobe-light frequency on Q102. And I'd like to imagine, since part of our theme here is forgetting history, that after Sam Smith's acceptance speech, his agent backstage told him with much fluster, "Mr, Smith, Elton's on the phone and he sounds pissed."

* Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose film A Girl in the River, won best short-subject documentary, is Pakistani. Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen's jokes were clearly aimed at East Asians. Incidentally, Leo was allowed to go way over his time talking about climate change -- a subject that (as Chris Rock noted early in his routine) that people who don't have to worry about ritual killings get to think about -- way over his time, but Obaid-Chinoy was played off halfway through explaining that her movie actually caused Pakistan to outlaw honor killings.

** You'd think this label would go to Taylor Swift or Beeb but I don't think it applies as nobody actually expects anything of them. Swift's entire persona and music are based around being a really dumb, white chick. Gaga, you know, tries.

THE TRUTH IS OUT -- just shut up

Guess I should get off my lazy ass and write something, yeah? It's been a kind of long dry spell thanks to not taking any time off work for the string of winter holidays ancient man invented to keep Western civilization from committing mass suicide from lack of endorphin and vitamin D deficiency (Merry Christmas friends; I just got you some insight.)

So the X-Files wrapped up Season Ten last night and mercifully it was shorter than the basically unwatchable Season Nine -- the one were Gillian Anderson reads her lines as great as ever, but her face makes all the words come out as, "Holy shitballs I am so done!" I can't tell of the flash of THIS IS THE END after the credits was a signal that the rebooted series' six episode pseudopod lurched out of its hardened bunker where it's been holed up eating baked beans for the passed 14 years into warm and familiar waters where an adoring viewership and gentle caress of renewal awaited, or the entire thing got cracked open with shucking knife and slurped down with butter to a guttural sucking noise, or it was just trying to be clever.

It wasn't clever, in any case. The intro tries to make sense of the fabled X-Files core mythology and while my memory of the original series is only partly intact, I get the feeling it skipped about half. Mind you, this wasn't for time constraints: the seasons of writing ignored to make the finale work were the bits that make the entirety of the show make not a solid but of fucking sense. The truth is indeed out there. And it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really dumb.

The sendoff felt more like an X-Files medley than an actual episode, but then again, that was the general feeling and indeed the likely purpose of the reboot in the first place: the next station stop of the Reboot Train. The first and last episode are the weakest of the six, and not just because they try to take root in a fictional narrative that has long since duct-taped itself to the wall for fear of self-harm. More time is spent showcasing Soup host Joel McHale's character -- a kind-of Glenn Beck spoof who serves as a jumping-off point for Mulder and Scully's eventual reunion and also as a one-man Greek chorus to remind the viewers were we left off. Much of the dialog follows suit. Mulder's final confrontation with The Smoking Man is laughable, and aside from a quick fight scene that's somehow never resolved, he's barely in the episode. Most of Scully's lines are wasted explaining things to the viewer as they're happening on the screen, and then after commercial, we get McHale's Tad O'Malley repeating them. I won't spoil the end but suffice to say it wraps up kind of awkwardly with Scully explaining the plot of more episodes to come before credits roll. Look, I get that people felt the original show didn't explain itself that well but this isn't really the best way to -- where the friggin' crap that UFO come from, come on guys!

The thing that feels so un-X-Files this go around is that it's all just so fast. X-Files didn't invent the slow burning story but honed to almost perfection, doling out breadcrumbs of both the FBI's most unwanteds' burgeoning love plot and the fate of the human race through 24-episode seasons. Like the way it tapped into the everyman's distrust of his government in the 90s and American's fascination with and indeed willingness to believe urban legends, it was really a show of its time. Syndicated shows gave you something to look forward to every week -- a kind of way to mark the time passing -- and allowed for a real dedicated fanbase to grow, not unlike that layer of orange slime you wipe out of the vegetable crisper every few months. Nowadays, you can binge Orange is the New Black in a coffee and pizza-fueled day, and then its over. The discussion lights up like a supernova for a few weeks, and then eventually it all fades to black and silence until the next season drops. The irony is that the delivery of more content instantly leads to less of an impact. Back in X-Files time, you got a big moment every week for months on end. Now you get one a show, maybe once a year.

The only episode that came close to good was the third, a kind of obligatory joke episode with a reverse-werewolf plot. It takes a while to get there, and most of it is Mulder discussing life's harsh realities with monster, whose turned into a man, and whose brush with humanity is turning into a monster, while Scully slowly and methodically discovers the real monster is only too human. It's almost like watching Scooby Doo on acid and thinking the entire experience is, like, transcendent, only to come to your senses amid urinating on your own couch.

But it hit that sweet spot of being funny but meaningful, and outlandish but allowing the viewer to hang disbelief on the coat rack for the evening. None of the other episodes quite did that, and worse, every time I felt like getting on board with the finale, a line of terrible dialog or the fact that the next generation of Mulder and Scully are named Miller and Einstein (sweet Jesus!) would curb-stomp me down back on the pavement. And can someone please explain how an 80-year-old intubated burn victim took down Mulder during a commercial break, after Mulder totally kicked some much younger dude's ass?

My hope is that this puts the final nail in X-Files coffin and we can bury that shit for good. Fiction is the world's magic mirror: it doesn't always show us exactly what we want to see -- when the Queen asked who was fairest she was left shouting at her glass, "You had one job!" -- but it shows us something about ourselves we perhaps don't realize or accept. We still need myths to explain the things we can't quite comprehend or reconcile, and those are what become handy placeholders for facts. The X-Files was not so much about the gap between myth and fact, but the journey from one to the other. From belief to evidence. Feeling to truth. Will it ever get there?

Not in six episodes.