About a Boy; Nut Loaf with Parsnip Gravy

About a Boy (2002)

Directors: Chris and Paul Weitz

Had I seen this before: No

December absolutely got away from me this year, which is surprising because after twenty Decembers in a row getting away from me I really thought this was the year I would have it under control. But here we are, and my tree is still up, which means it's still The Holidays and therefore plenty of time to slide another non-Christmas Christmas movie into your stocking where it will go unnoticed and get packed up to the attic until next year because who adds things to stockings on December 29th?

I wonder if this is a movie that I would have lingering fondness for if I had first seen it twenty years ago, the way I do, say, Bridget Jones's Diary, because it is not entirely devoid of charm and it is very much in the category of British dram-com that I sometimes have a soft spot for. Even now it's pretty watchable and moves from scene to scene quickly enough that it's easy to not overthink things when you're in the midst of it. But I can't say time has been especially kind to this one, and I suspect time has not been especially kind to Nick Hornby properties in general if you happen to be someone who considers women full-fledged humans and not just sexy irritants buzzing around insufferable man-children, who are the real heroes at the end of the day.

About a Boy is basically a sitcom plot stretched out to 101 minutes and spiked with weirdly heavy drama and era-appropriate rampant sexism. Hugh Grant plays Will Freeman (get it? he is a free man), a middle-aged playboy who has never had a job because he lives on the royalties from a Christmas song that his father wrote in the 1950s. He is sad about this. He is happy, however, about his lifestyle, which involves owning and doing anything he wants all the time and trying various proto-pick-up-artist techniques to sleep with beautiful women. One of my main issues with this film is the fact that it never succeeds in making Will's life seem in any way unappealing, no matter how many two-dimensional female characters abrasively harp on him about its meaninglessness. If I could live in a nice London flat with a top-dollar espresso maker and smoke cigarettes all day while I watched British game shows and shopped for CDs (I am also being transported back to 2002 in this scenario) and ate out at restaurants every night, would I really need the loving stability of substantial emotional connections? (This is 100% a failure of the film's storytelling and not of my own moral weakness in the face of on-demand espresso drinks.)

Through a series of cynical lies in which Will passes himself off as a single father in order to sleep with all the single mothers in the area (haha, just kidding--not the sad average-looking ones, as indicated by a jokey smash cut), he is introduced to Marcus, played by little baby-faced Nicholas Hoult, a 12-year-old outcast whose social crimes include having a bad haircut and an offbeat wardrobe and a mom who is depressed. The degree to which he is bullied for these things gives me real concerns about the British secondary schools of 2002. Said sad mom is Fiona, played by Toni Collette in a role so thankless that the subtle in-movie reference to The Sixth Sense in which she plays an emotionally compelling character feels offensive. We know that Fiona is depressed because she cries all the time, famously the only way major depression manifests in real life. She is also a touchy-feely hippie who earnestly sings Roberta Flack with her middle-school-aged son. The movie genuinely hates all this about her. The movie hates her. Just, so much! Toni Collette does have a very appealing pixie cut in this, and that's the only nice thing I have to say about the rendering of Fiona.

The film plays out in the most obvious way, which is that Will and Marcus discover that they both needed each other in their lives, but there are just so many strangely mean-spirited stops along the way to this destination. I know I indicated earlier that I did not hate watching this in the moment, which you might be starting to question at this point, but the fact is, Hoult and Grant's chemistry and individual charisma sort of paper over a lot of weak spots. Anna spent some time working out her feelings about Hugh Grant, whom she has previously only seen in Paddington 2 and a very quick cameo in a recent popular movie that I will not spoil: "I'm only rooting for this guy because his face...it's not kind, but it is interesting." "Maybe he has the hair of a jerk and the face of a nice guy. But with a jerk expression." Which is basically this whole movie in a nutshell: the face of a nice guy with a jerk expression.

Line I repeated quietly to myself Exchange that made my eyebrows go the highest, like almost all the way off of my head: Ellie: You like rap? Marcus: A little. It's by black people mostly. And they're pretty angry most of the time. But sometimes they just want to have sex.

Is it under two hours: Yes

Is it actually a Christmas movie: Two Christmases briefly occur in this film, including the final scene, and the protagonist (?) is hilariously haunted by a novelty Christmas song that only serves to remind him what a piece of shit he is. The lessons about needing other people are vaguely Christmasy, but overall the Christmasness of it makes up a very tiny percentage of the movie. 3/10

Classic Vegetarian Nut Loaf from The Kitchn with Parsnip Gravy from Affairs of Living

When Will attends Christmas festivities at Marcus and Fiona's house, he is served nut loaf with parsnip gravy. This is very funny to us, the audience, because Fiona's vegetarianism is one of the ways that we are alerted to the fact that she is a crazy person and possibly also a bad mother. Lol hippies and their plant-based diets!! She probably has some sort of ethical and/or ecological basis for her life choices, what a loser. Anyway, now that I know that this meal took two and a half hours of work not counting the amount of time I spent trying to find parsnips at my grocery store, I am even more mad about it. Good thing I have a tasty nut loaf to soothe me.

Up next: Anybody's guess!

Catch Me if You Can; Chopped Salad with a chilled fork

Catch Me if You Can (2002)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Had I seen this before: Yes

'Tis the season for everyone to give the beleaguered FBI agent for whom you have a complicated mix of adversarial and filial feelings in your life a quick phone check-in! That's right, Christmastime is here and, as we all remember, that's when our beautiful scamming boy Frank Abagnale Jr. touches base with lovably gruff fed Carl Hanratty, year after year. Or maybe if you, like me, had not seen this movie in a long time, you don't actually remember the Christmas motif that runs through it--maybe you just remember Leonardo DiCaprio in the pilot uniform, surrounded by grinning flight attendants, with Tom Hanks closing in on him in a way that somehow seems as friendly as possible. If you're lucky, what you remember is the superlative opening credits sequence, a combination of Saul Bass-inspired animation, a jazzy 60s John Williams score, and a minimalist recreation of the plot of the movie that lights up the reward center in my brain so aggressively I'm afraid to revisit it too many times for fear of burning out my dopamine production. But whether you recall it or not, this is in fact a film in which Christmas seems to roll around every 20 minutes or so, and that's why we're here.

It's interesting that this movie opens with not one but two flash-forward scenes: first, here is Frank appearing on an episode of To Tell the Truth, introduced as one of three potential Franks, looking spiffy and enigmatic and being grilled by Kitty Carlisle. Next, we go backward from there to a dire Christmas Eve when Hanratty arrives to take Frank from the French prison where he is in very rough shape and makes one last escape attempt before collapsing. So when we zip back several years to a 16-year-old Frank picking up his first lessons in mild con artistry from Frank Sr., played by Christopher Walken, we as an audience already know two things about his impending schemes: 1) they end badly; but 2) maybe not all that badly in the long run. It's like if Double Indemnity had an extra scene in the beginning where Walter recovers from his wounds and ends up on television where a celebrity panel is fascinated by his exploits. And that's because Catch Me if You Can is no noir, it's Steven Spielberg in fine crowd-pleasing form, and Stevie knows that unless the crowd is made up entirely of 2016 Oscar voters, they are probably not all that interested in watching Leonardo DiCaprio suffer too brutally.

I think the structure of this film gives us permission to root for both Frank and Hanratty at the same time, because on some level we know that they both come out of this thing winners. It also makes it all feel more like a game, which is a quality that I consistently enjoy in movies. When Hanratty first tracks down Frank in a Miami hotel room filled with check counterfeiting equipment, the question is not whether Frank is going to jail at that moment, because we know for a fact that it's simply too early in the story for that to happen. The questions is, instead, how on earth is he going to get out of this situation? And the answer is as delightful as it is unlikely--he just talks his way out. It's more thrilling than any shootout, more satisfying than any car chase. When Frank is successful in his lies, it's sublime; when he is less successful it's often funny. As a person who is abysmal at lying or making phone calls or talking to strangers or doing very detailed paper-and-glue crafts, I watch Leo's performance as Frank the same way I would any other of Spielberg's alien movies, such is the vast and mysterious distance I feel from such a creature. And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Spielberg is great at making alien movies.

Some other big director trademarks make an appearance here, likely highlighted for me on this watch by virtue of having recently seen The Fabelmans--we've got a teenage boy distressed by his mother's infidelity, we've got divorce, we've got Sad Dad and complicated Father Figure. When teenaged Frank is confronted with his parents' divorce and asked to choose which one to live with, his reaction is to literally run away--to run, as fast as he can, down the street and away from his problems. I found the childishness of it all very touching on this watch, and still felt the sort of visceral appeal of it--what if you could just sprint away from your difficult choices instead of making them? Of course, escape is never really that easy, and Frank spends the rest of the movie frantically trying to glue his family back together with his ill-gotten gains. It's a string of glamorous adventures--pretending to be a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and (briefly) James Bond--punctuated by lonely Christmases, filled with longing and frustration and usually a phone call with Tom Hanks.

If you've never seen this movie you should watch it, if it's been a while you should rewatch it. Everyone should go watch the opening credits immediately. No one should inform me that the real Frank made up most of the stuff in his book because I could not care less. Merry Christmas to all and to all the agents on your tails.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "You're not a Lutheran?"

Is it under two hours: Nope

Is it actually a Christmas movie: *Slaps the roof of this film* this bad boy can fit so many Christmases in it! I wouldn't say this movie leans into any particularly holiday-related feelings other than melancholy, but it does contain: Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song," "Mele Kalikimaka," Leo wearing a Christmas sweater, and several chyrons informing us that it is either Christmas or Christmas Eve. 5/10

Steakhouse Chopped Salad from The Defined Dish

At his first reunion lunch with his father after leaving home, Frank Jr. has to inform him that the cold salad forks are intentionally chilled because it's a fancy restaurant. Frank Sr. seems uncomfortable, we assume for class-related reasons, but as my children can now tell you, it may have been entirely because chilled forks are actually very unpleasant.

Up next: I don't know yet because blog planning has slipped way down my to-do list this month, so it will be a somewhat Christmas-adjacent surprise!

Die Hard; Twinkies

Die Hard (1988)

Director: John McTiernan

Had I seen this before: Yes

I can't say with certainty where we are in the "Die Hard is a Christmas movie" discourse at the moment. It started as a lightly amusing observation--a sort of "huh yeah I guess so" passing thought--then due to the nature of the internet became a deeply annoying and weirdly combative stance, asserted with increasingly irritating confidence. But then, like many annoying internet things, it shifted into a sort of ironic "I'm saying the annoying thing but I'm winking" bit, and I suspect we may even be past that now--if anything we may have all memed it into the actual holiday canon. So I guess...good job, everyone. At any rate, here I am, bringing up the rear on this fading cultural quirk, ready to spend the month diving into films that are not necessarily traditional but do involve some level of Christmas ornamentation.

I feel like I should explain that I had seen Die Hard before this viewing but it had been a long time and it was never one of my go-to movies. My inordinate affection in this genre is reserved almost entirely for 1994's Speed, and usually all I have left to give other movies of its ilk is muted appreciation. Now, Speed director Jan de Bont was the cinematographer for this movie, which does give it a slight edge, because visually, the L.A. of Die Hard is 100% the same as the L.A. of Speed, so I am immediately in a comforting and familiar environment. You know who is not in a comforting or familiar environment? John McClane, who is looking pretty tense on an airplane, prompting the man next to him to give him some unsolicited post-flight relaxation advice: ditch the shoes and socks and "make fists with your toes" in the rug. Little does this anonymous frequent flyer know, he has just single-handedly bumped this film from very good to iconic, because Bruce Willis's bare feet are about to be the real star of this show.

One of my thoughts in the first few minutes of this movie was that it was surprisingly absent of any real 80s signifiers--the clothes are pretty muted, the plane just looks like a plane, the airport looks like an airport--and then about one second after my synapses had floated that idea, McClane lights up the first of I want to say 273 or so cigarettes right there at baggage claim. John McClane smokes more cigarettes in this movie than any of last month's noir characters ever dreamed of. This is fundamentally a movie about a man whose lungs exist outside any understanding of modern science. McClane, who is carrying a comically large teddy bear, is greeted by his limo driver, the enchantingly-named Argyle. We learn that John is a New York cop, here in L.A. to see his estranged wife and kids for Christmas, and hoping to salvage his marriage. First stop: said wife's company holiday party at Nakatomi Plaza.

Of course, McClane is only at the party long enough to be annoyed by everyone there and California in general, squabble with said estranged wife, and dig those feet into the carpet before the building is taken over by ostensibly German but uhhhh let's say "European" thieves who are preposterously well-supplied and prepared and led by one of the decade's great villains, Hans Gruber. One of the reasons this movie works is that it is smart enough to know when to just let us look at Alan Rickman's face for a minute. You're never going to go wrong letting an audience look at Alan Rickman's face. John, however, cannot see Alan Rickman's face because he was not with the rest of the party-goers when it became a hostage situation, so he is loose in the building and ready to cause some trouble for the bad guys, in between cigarettes.

Most of the rest of the movie is some fun cat-and-mouse stuff, a lot and I mean a lot of gunfire, things exploding, the LAPD being worthless, the Feds being straight up evil, the media being parasitic, and John McClane finding superhuman strength through the nourishing power of nicotine. I wasn't kidding about the bare feet being the elevating factor here--the jokes really hit and the action is, you know, actiony, but Bruce Willis' look is really the thing that makes this movie a classic. Being shoeless and having only an undershirt makes McClane more vulnerable but also more stealthy, and offers up an easily-assembled Halloween costume, which is a boon to any film's longevity. 

It's also not quite the copaganda situation I was dreading, it's really only about one resourceful and slightly insane man running up and down flights of stairs while breathing smoke like a dragon. As much as I rolled my eyes at John's whole bit in the beginning where he's like "I had to stay in NYC because I'm a New York cop, can't be supporting my wife's apparently very very successful career on the west coast," once you are actually introduced to how the LAPD operates in this movie, I have to say, I sort of understood what he meant. Is it partly just that the guy in charge of the scene is the "mess with the bull get the horns" principal from The Breakfast Club? Well, it doesn't help. There is of course one LA cop we are rooting for here, Reginald VelJohnson's Al, who is in communication with and supportive of McClane from the ground, and whom first we meet buying just a remarkable haul of Twinkies. I personally am a child of the golden era of ABC's TGIF programming, and therefore have a warm and nostalgic reaction to RVJ's face, so it was especially jarring to be reminded that his character arc is "cop we feel sorry for because shooting a 13-year-old caused him to not want to shoot people anymore" to "cop who overcomes his past trauma of shooting a child in order to triumphantly start shooting people again." So..a lot of high highs and a few pretty low lows in this one, but sometimes with movies of a certain age you just have to dig your toes into the carpet and get through it.

Odds and ends: most of the actors playing the "terrorists" are not actually German, but Bruce Willis was born in Germany; one of the thugs reminded me of a big angry version of James van der Beek; gas cost 75 cents a gallon in 1988; knowing how gray sweatsuit guy is going to end up does take some of the tension out of his scene; the "yippee kay yay motherfucker" line is tossed off much more casually and amusingly than I remembered; my favorite character bit is Bruce Willis admonishing himself with increasing volume to "think, THINK" throughout the movie; I would like Reginald VelJohnson to tell me to hang in there.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane."

Is it under two hours: No

Is it actually a Christmas movie: Just one long holiday party, when you think about it! It can be argued that McClane's major motivation, aside from saving innocent people, is to get back to his wife so that their argument isn't the last exchange they ever have, which could be categorized as an "importance of family" sort of lesson. 7/10

Homemade Twinkies from Brown Eyed Baker

Although Hans is hilariously munching on some party appetizers at one point in the hostage-taking, it was impossible to get a good look at what he had on his plate, so Sgt. Al's Twinkies it is. Please know that I individually crafted these cake molds from aluminum foil, in case you were worried that I had lost my ability to sacrifice significant amounts of time at the altar of deeply unnecessary blog posts.

Up next: He can learn to pass as a pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor, but can he learn the true meaning of Christmas?

Les Diaboliques; Fish with vinegar and onions

Les Diaboliques (1955)

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Had I seen this before: Yes

And now we say au revoir to Noirvember with a movie that is probably more accurately classified as a thriller-bordering-on-horror than a strict noir, but it is in black and white and involves an impressively dispassionate murder and some excellent cat-and-mouse shenanigans and a Citroën 2CV Fourgonnette that I am obsessed with, and it is French and I love it. I am hesitant to go all-out on selling this movie to you because I really believe the fact that I went into it the first time with basically no expectations enhanced my experience tremendously, therefore I am going to do my best cold, calculating, noir-heroine impression and simply give you the facts. Not to mention that it ends with a title screen admonishing you not to spoil the movie for others, in French, and I do not want this movie to be mad at me.

The film opens with my favorite character, the Citroën Fourgonnette delivery van, pulling up to the gates of a boys boarding school outside of Paris. To my 21st century American eyes, this little fella looks like a delivery van for ants. It's the cutest, funniest vehicle possible to exist at the center of an extremely dark story, and I want one very badly. I would be so good at parking a Fourgonnette. Making my little deliveries. Anyway, the person driving it in this case is not a jaunty delivery person, as one would hope, but rather the principal of the aforementioned boarding school, Michel Delassalle. Michel is not jaunty. He's a huge jerk. He does not deserve this charming vehicle. He does not deserve the staff he treats poorly, or the students he terrorizes, or the wife and mistress he abuses physically and emotionally. He is sadistic and appalling and frankly, with all due respect to actor Paul Meurisse, he is simply not handsome enough to pull off this level of assholery.

Michel's long-suffering wife, Christina, is styled like Dorothy Gale--gingham and twin brunette braids--and presented as a worryingly delicate due to an oft-referenced heart condition. Michel's mistress, Nicole, is a surly blonde with a take-charge demeanor who is styled like Rizzo from Grease. Both of these women work at the school with Michel and apparently everyone in the building is fully aware of their tangled relationship. This situation is a real mess. Très unprofessional. Nicole sulks in to work one morning wearing shades, which are hiding not a hangover (well, not just a hangover) but a bruise. Christina consoles her. The staff shakes their head in bewilderment. But Nicole is fed up--Michel has to die, and she has a plan. Christina, who is not only very delicate but also very religious and jumpy and superstitious, takes some convincing, but is eventually onboard.

Now, I am going to spoil some things up to a point and then I am going to slowly lower my shades and walk away. The first half of this movie is probably the most noir-ish. The two ladies have a plan, and we watch them unspool it. They lure Michel out to Nicole's family home in western France, where they put sedatives in his whiskey and drown him in the bathtub. Christina almost can't go through with it, but Michel just manages to be that much of a dick that she gathers all of her homicidal strength. Once the deed is done, the tension shifts to whether they can move the body undetected from Nicole's house back to the boarding school, where they intend to stage it as an accidental drowning in the neglected campus pool. There are several close calls and many tense discussions in the cab of the most adorable van to ever transport a human corpse in a giant wicker trunk. But they do make it back to the school, where in the middle of the night they unceremoniously dump the remains of this horrible man into the murky water.

The next day, both ladies eye the still, dark surface of the pool with mounting anxiety, until eventually Nicole "accidentally" drops her keys, requiring that they drain the pool to find them. So drain the pool they do, and there at the bottom are...the keys. And nothing else. Needless to say, this is a concerning development for our murderesses, who are now missing a corpse. Things very soon go from bad to worse when the dry cleaners deliver the suit that Michel was murdered in, freshly pressed. *Slowly lowers shades.*

This is the point where the movie really gets cooking and I am doing my best not to over-hype it, but a sort of proto-Columbo rumpled ex-detective gets into the mix and the mind games get intense and the first time I watched it I almost covered my eyes with my hands in the last ten minutes, which is an incredible achievement in tension for an almost 70-year-old movie. Alfred Hitchcock was a fan, and Hitch had a lot of issues but he did know from building tension. Anyway, this is probably the last black-and-white French film I will attempt to entice you into watching until this time next year, but if I have led you to discover any midcentury gems in the past month and you are absolutely brimming with gratitude, I will point out that there is now an all-electric version of the Citroën Berlingo 2CV Fourgonnette available and I'm almost certain it would fit snuggly under my Christmas tree.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: One of the troublemaking students is ordered to write on the blackboard 20 times "I provoke my comrades' frivolity with my absurd comments," which I is something I personally aspire to with every blog post.

Is it under two hours: By un cheveu

How fatale are les femmes: Well, they don't smoke much, but the movie is called "The Devils" for a reason. 8/10

Apple Cider Vinegar sauce from Big Oven on cod over onions

One of the more stomach-churningly villainous scenes for Principal Delassalle is early in the movie, when it becomes clear that not only is he feeding everyone fish that is past its prime (half-heartedly disguised by vinegar and onions), he humiliates Christina in front of everyone when she struggles to swallow the rancid seafood. I promise I used perfectly good fish here and hardly had to threaten anyone at all.

Up next: I don't know if you realize this but it's actually a Christmas movie

The Third Man; Sacher Torte

The Third Man (1949)

Director: Carol Reed

Had I seen this before: Yes

I want to quickly point out--and I don't know whether this is a brag or a sheepish admission--that this is the 1000th entry I have posted here since 2010, and furthermore, I'm going to kick it off by discussing the zither.

Your relationship to the sound of the zither will go a long way in determining your relationship to the 1949 film The Third Man. Personally, I enjoy it (although perhaps not as much as mid-century Britain, who collectively went so wild for Anton Karas's bouncy score that he became a top-selling musician of the era, then opened a nightclub called The Third Man which he ran for the rest of his life). As the opening credits roll and the strings of the zither sing, I feel that I am being promised pleasant and lively European vacation. It isn't at all ominous, like the opening notes of many noirs, but it is appropriate. For as much as this film is about dark opportunism and elastic morality, the structure holding it all together--essentially the main character of the movie--is post-war Vienna itself, with its 18th century busts and paintings and marble and tight spiral staircases and rainy cobblestone streets, all in various states ranging from timeless elegance to age-worn disrepair to literal piles of rubble. The juxtaposition of the shady dealings of a desperate post-war population and the towering Old World grandeur surrounding them gives the movie its vibrant tension, and the cheerful strings contribute to the sense that no matter what becomes of any of these people, Vienna will go on, shimmering and zithering far into the future.

It also serves as a constant reminder that if you weren't mixed up in some nefarious nonsense--the "you" in this case being Joseph Cotton's dime novelist Holly Martins--you could simply take one step to the side into das Cafe and have a lovely evening. In fact, various characters spend the movie encouraging Martins to forget about his concerns and go back home, which emphasizes the degree to which he truly is not as trapped as anyone around him, until of course he is. But it's also hard to blame the guy--he shows up in Vienna looking for his dear old friend Harry Lime, who theoretically has a job lined up for him there, only to discover--hat and coat still on and suitcase still in hand--that his dear old friend Harry Lime has very recently been struck by a car and killed. So recently, in fact, that Martins goes directly to Lime's funeral--suitcase very much still in hand--and stoically dumps a scoop of dirt onto his casket.

One would think that Martins would find himself utterly alone in this foreign city, with his one friend unexpectedly deceased and his prospects apparently vaporized, but one would be wrong. By the end of his first day in town, he has been given a lift and treated to a perhaps inadvisable amount of alcohol by a British police officer, been both punched in the face and complimented on his writing by another officer, been offered a guest lecturer gig by the concerningly-titled head of cultural reeducation, and received a phone call from a baron friend of Harry's. He has also started to notice that not all of the pieces of what happened to Harry add up in a satisfying way, and that different people seem to have different versions of what occurred. Is anything as it seems? Generally not, in this genre. The police have strongly indicated to him that Harry was mixed up in some sketchy business and it's better for everyone that he's gone; Harry's friend the baron calmly responds to this by informing Martins that "everyone in Vienna is--we all sell cigarettes and that kind of a thing." 

Martins soon connects with Harry's grieving girlfriend Anna, a stage comedienne with a fake passport, a preposterously beautiful apartment, and a landlady who is, for me, the most relatable character in the film--just showing up to yell in irritated German about the cops and so forth trampling through her building, always wrapped head to toe in what can only be described as a large duvet (I don't want you to picture a regular blanket here, this thing has some real heft). Who hasn't wanted to scold annoying people while wearing a full set of bedding? Anna seems sad but also stoic and world-weary, one of several people to tell Martins "You shouldn't get mixed up in this." What Martins soon wants to get mixed up in is Anna herself but she politely declines his advances, sadly and stoically throughout, even when he drunkenly tries to engage with a cat in a manner that is, to me, extremely charming.

The Vienna of The Third Man is a city where everyone is a little suspicious but almost no one is directly menacing. As Martins begins to tie some of the various threads together, the action naturally picks up, including a chase scene through the bombed remains of buildings, another through the intricate underground sewer system, a very tense conversation on a moving Ferris wheel car, an absolute crash and burn stint as a guest lecturer, and one of the greatest character introduction shots in all of cinema. Dutch angles abound. The rumor that both the producer and director of this film were on a great deal of speed at the time is interesting, because I don't find anything particularly frantic about the pace of the film--if anything, as I said, there is almost a sort of amused detachment from the frenzied goings on of the tiny humans and their wee dramas--but maybe operating on two hours of sleep a night is sometimes what it takes to make a movie this good. Come for the cobblestones and the high ceilings and the gleaming marble, stay for Orson Welles pronouncing the phrase "cuckoo clock." You won't be disappointed.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "I don't want another murder in this case and you were born to be murdered so you're going to hear the facts."

Is it under two hours:  Yes

How fatale is la femme: Poor Anna is not a femme fatale, she's just a pretty lady with questionable taste in men, trying to get by in a city back on its heels and minding her own business. No scheming, no double-crossing, not a single corpse to her name, but she does make cigarettes look very appealing and if she ever had a mind to start causing the downfall of greedy saps I really believe she could do it. 2/10

Sacher Torte from King Arthur Baking

Martins mostly--say it with me now--smokes and drinks. But one of the buildings prominently featured in this film is the Sacher Hotel, as it served as the British headquarters during Vienna's occupation. Aside from being a world-renowned luxury hotel, it is primarily known for producing the Sachertorte, an apricot-filled dark chocolate cake and one of Austria's most famous exports. Between this movie and this cake, the fact that I have never been to Vienna grows increasingly distressing by the second.

Up next: Some French ladies getting up to no good

Double Indemnity; Chicken Enchiladas

Double Indemnity (1944)

Director: Billy Wilder

Had I seen this before: Yes

I don't know about y'all, but to my mind, this is probably one of the most entertaining films ever named after a semi-obscure insurance policy clause. Director Billy Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, who apparently detested working together, nevertheless combined forces to adapt James M. Cain's 1943 crime novella into a crackling, propulsive screenplay with a dynamite cast. My favorite thread running through the trivia for this movie is the open disgust with which Chandler constantly referred to Cain's work--he's quoted as saying that "everything he touches smells like billygoat," not an insult you hear every day--while Cain loved the film adaptation and saw it multiple times. Anyway, I know which guy I would rather chain-smoke in a dramatically-lit room with, discussing how great this movie is even if one of the screenwriters was sort of a jerk.

The opening credits are full of menacing music and a shadowy figure on crutches, inching ominously toward the camera. Already I'm hooked--who is this hobbled man and what does he want with me? Answers come quickly, as Wilder gives us the end of the story at the beginning (a trick he would use again a few years later in one of my all-time favorite movies), opening with insurance agent Walter Neff stumbling into his near-empty office building and sweatily starting to unload a murder confession into his dictaphone. Worth noting that even in this entirely wretched state--we learn up top that this man has done unthinkable things for "money, and a woman...and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman"--he still can't help being low-key pleased with himself as he unravels the sordid tale. Walter is another classic 1940s American white man for our cinematic collection, less guileless than Oliver "I Don't Understand The Concept of Unhappiness" Reed, but just as accustomed to things going his way. The difference is, Oliver credits his charmed life to luck, whereas Walter undoubtedly credits his to his own cleverness. This aspect of the character, and the way Fred MacMurray strides through every scene with six feet and three inches worth of pure self-confidence, makes for an excellent noir antihero whose dramatic fall we are instantly excited to see unfold.

This downfall, is of course, precipitated by a dame. And listen--unlike Mary Astor's chilly villainess, Barbara Stanwyck comes in hot as Phyllis Dietrichson. I mean, she literally enters this movie wearing a towel and a mischievous expression (and, it must be said, a real beast of a blonde wig, with which she must spend the entire movie capably and impressively wrestling for control of each scene). Her voice is husky and her flirt game is lightning-quick, and sure she's unhappily married but she's only interested in taking out a great deal of insurance on her oil-industry husband because she's so worried about potential accidents, not that she wants something bad to happen to him, what are you even suggesting, Walter?? I'm not saying this specific performance rises quite to the level of Judy Maxwell please ruin my life for me, but I am saying...I get it. Walter is very clearly outmatched here, and I wouldn't give myself great odds in the ring with this one either.

He might have a better shot at keeping a clear head if he didn't have a classic noir appetite for booze--especially noticeable if you are aware that one of the reasons Wilder did not like collaborating with Chandler was that he was allegedly quite frequently drunk and allegedly inspired Wilder's next film The Lost Weekend. (In comparison, Chandler's complaints about Wilder included that he allegedly spoke too fast and allegedly wore a baseball cap indoors.) When Walter visits Phyllis in the early afternoon, he asks for a beer, settles for an iced tea, then casually muses "Wonder if a little rum would get this up on its feet?" A perfect line in a movie full of perfect lines, and a character trait that perhaps contributes to some slight shoddiness in their intricate scheme.

Rounding out the main cast is Edward G. Robinson, playing Walter's boss Keyes, the man to whom the voice-over murder confession is addressed. Robinson was a pint-sized actor, especially next to the towering MacMurray, but a huge presence on screen--probably best remembered for his singular voice and accent, most familiar to people my age as the inspiration for The Simpsons' Chief Wiggum. In this movie, his character is a pretty straightforward one--just an insurance manager with a strong gut instinct regarding fraud, but everything about him pops in in a very amusing way. He's forever patting down his pockets for a book of matches that aren't there and talking about the "concrete" he gets in his stomach when something isn't right. In some ways Keyes is the main antagonist for our leads, as he's the one closest to the case and closest to sniffing them out. But in a different framing he is, of course, the hero, and the only one with the correct take on our leading man--"You're not smarter, Walter, you're just a little bit taller."

Line I repeated quietly to myself: The dialogue in this movie is so delightfully constructed and delivered that I repeated many, many lines out loud just to hear the sound of them again. I think the one that made me laugh the most was when Walter hands Phyllis a drink in the kitchen and then, for absolutely no reason, says "See if you can carry this as far as the living room."

Is it under two hours: Yes

How fatale is la femme: Can't say enough good things about the bad Mrs. Dietrichson. Seductive, dangerous, plausibly convincing, great legs, amazing wardrobe, killer line delivery. This lady murdered her way into and out of the same relationship, you have to respect it. Slight deduction for failing to get off that second shot at the end. 9/10

Chicken Enchiladas inspired by The El Paseo Inn and Mexican Rice from The Kitchn

You will not be shocked to hear that Walter does not eat, Walter only drinks and smokes, but at one point he does take Phyllis's stepdaughter out to a "Mexican restaurant on Olvera Street." The El Paseo Inn on Olvera Street in Los Angeles has been in operation since 1930, so I figure there's a decent chance that was the spot. I attempted to recreate the Avila Adobe Enchiladas from their menu, and I can't say whether they're accurate, but I can say they garnered enthusiasm from every member of my family, which is not...usually how dinner goes.

Up next: What if there were...a third man? 

The Maltese Falcon; Pork Chops and Sliced Tomatoes

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Director: John Huston

Had I seen this before: Yes

Welcome to Noirvember, where we are kicking things off with one of the true classics of the genre, John Huston's directorial debut The Maltese Falcon. Now, John Huston is one of my personal most-watched directors (is a phrase that I could leave alone if I wanted you to infer that I have spent a great deal of time considering celebrated and influential films such as Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, or The Night of the Iguana when in fact it is) because I have seen his 1982 Albert Finney-starring adaptation of Annie approaching somewhere around 2,000 times in my life. So it's of course exciting for me to discover what he can do outside of the musical theater realm.

Picture it: Malta, 1539. Thus beseeches our opening crawl, an exciting tale of ancient Knights Templar and a lost, unimaginably valuable treasure in the form of a bird statue. I would estimate that 95% of the times I have referenced this film in my life have been in order to provide an example of a MacGuffin--it's possibly the most important unimportant item in 20th century film. A real slippery fellow, that falcon. Nearly as slippery is the beautiful Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), who slides into the San Francisco office of detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) with a fake name, a suspicious story about a missing sister, and an even more suspicious amount of money to throw at the problem. The cigarette smoke is drifting, the blinds are slanted, the characters are clever but wary--we're really noiring it up, right out of the gate. Spade's partner Archer goes to stake out the situation and is shot dead in the process, at which point we are made aware of several things at once--Spade does not seem especially alarmed at the news, indicating that he did not like his partner all that much and is not easily excitable in the face of danger, oh and also by the way he was having an affair with Archer's wife. I appreciated the efficiency of establishing this character, who could perhaps have been mistaken for more of a straight-ahead good guy in the opening scene with Brigid, as the anti-hero that he is. No soft-boiled guy, this. When they boiled Sam Spade they boiled him hard.

He also talks to his loyal secretary Effie as though she is a golden retriever--"good girl, angel, darling, sweetheart, precious," etc.--and when he reports the news of Archer's death, he sternly admonishes her "now, don't get excited." To be clear, Effie rules in this movie--she's one of those pleasantly competent side characters who enhances every scene she's in. She manages to put up with a man who is perhaps a good detective but is, I'm sorry, a very bad boss, and never breaks a sweat. More than once my notes for this movie indicate that whatever Sam is paying Effie is certainly not enough. Now, to be fair, calling his 40-year-old employee "precious" is actually one of the less condescending tones he takes with other characters. He is amusingly dismissive, for example, of the cops, who again to be fair, are sort of whinily asking him for help most of the time.

Obviously the situation with Brigid and the dead partner and the unsubtle guy tailing Spade spins out of control, as these things are wont to do. The movie doesn't really start cooking until my two MVPs show up--Peter Lorre, my favorite bug-eyed Hungarian as Joel Cairo, a character we are meant to understand is a homosexual because this is the 1940s and his business cards smell like gardenias; and stage actor Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut, the inspiration for the "It's too hot today" Simpsons meme and (truly, I say this with nothing but respect and awe) an absolute unit of a man. I genuinely appreciate the way his physical presence is used here--the other character refer to him as the Fat Man, but he never seems like the butt of a joke. It adds to his gravitas as an unpredictable villain. His character is wonderful to watch, lightly amused by even the most threatening of Spade's jabs, dangerous but charismatic, focused and not at all easily deterred.

If I'm being completely honest, I don't love Bogart as Sam Spade--I know that's probably approaching blasphemy for the TCM set, but to my eye his energy never quite settles into the character in a satisfying manner. The way he grins like he's an animal barring its teeth makes him a little too unsettling and distant, not nearly as magnetic as the strange and compelling Lorre or Greenstreet. I think he's better suited to something like Casablanca, where he is just as world-weary but less sharp, or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where is allowed to go Full Dirtbag. And I never really buy the chemistry between him and Mary Astor, which is unfortunately a pretty crucial element of the story. I never feel any heat there at all, just strangled breathiness and coldly arched eyebrows.

That's not to say that this movie isn't well worth your time, of course--the dialogue is snappy and the air is smoky and the villain is oddly enchanting. Everyone is wearing hats. When the cops want to haul a bunch of people down to the station they bark "Get your hats!" Wonderful stuff. The violence is realistically random and almost comical--a wild kick, a punch in a mouth. The lit up San Francisco skyline behind Spade's office is intoxicating. The moment when Effie the competent secretary arrives with a priceless treasure bundled in newspaper and calmly hands it off to a room full of people who are all half-insane with greed and paranoia as though she's fulfilling a grocery order is deeply satisfying. The fact that they keep referring to a gunman who is clearly nearing 40 as "boy" and "kid" is charmingly inexplicable. And that maddening bird--the stuff that dreams are made of--is always in the wind.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Our private conversations have been not been such that I am anxious to continue them."

Is it under two hours: Yes

How fatale is la femme: Mary Astor's take on the duplicitous Brigid O'Shaughnessy is more on the flustered, breathy, buttoned-up side than anything approaching a smoky siren. This is, of course, part of her character's act, but I never feel like she makes a turn into convincingly calculating trickster--she's all hats and stoles and ruffles for days and "ah, oh no, ah, oh my"s. Such long skirts that we never even see the gams. 4/10

Garlic Butter Pork Chops from The Forked Spoon

Food tie-ins are going to require a little more stretching this month, as the only substances consumed in most noirs are cigarettes, whiskey, and black coffee. In this case, as in The Haunting, I had to reach for the source novel, wherein we find Sam Spade dining on "chops, baked potatoes, and sliced tomatoes." I did not include any greenery on the plate, not even a sprig of parsley, because Sam Spade is too hard-boiled for that sort of nonsense. 

Up next: Time to closely examine the terms of that life insurance policy

Bram Stoker's Dracula; Garlic Knots

Dracula (1992)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Had I seen this before: Yes

I first saw Coppola's Dracula as a young teen, at which point I believed with 100% certainty that it was a Good Movie made by a Serious Director, a notion that I had no reason to question for a long time. Eventually it came to my attention that perhaps not everyone was on board with that read, but by the time I revisited it this week (in the theater for its 30th anniversary!) I became aware that there was some vague murmur in the culture about reclaiming it as Actually Maybe Good. Which took the wind out of my sails a bit, as I was ready to stand before you, wooden stakes ablazin', declaring this property as iconic and beautifully over-the-top, a maximalist fever dream of Gothic melodramatics, but I guess people are already out there doing the work. And having now actually rewatched it as a middle-aged person and not an adolescent, I can admit that those who said this is a Bad movie....may have some points.  And those who complain that no one make horny movies anymore (everyone has muscles, no one has sex, etc.) certainly have some points, because you simply cannot find a film packed with so much writhing per square inch as this one these days. There is a nearly inconceivable amount writhing and moaning, particularly in drapey fabrics with exactly one breast exposed.

You know what else this movie has that you rarely see anymore? Wall-to-wall practical effects. Aside from one (unnecessary, imo) ring of blue flames near the beginning of the film, everything in the movie was done in-camera. PAs just milling around with buckets of fake blood as far as the eye can see, one imagines. Beheadings and stake-driving and insect-eating and succubi appearing from under the dang floor and monstrous transformations and shadows moving about independently of their casters and growling wolves and a tower of rats--none of it CGI. It's all old-fashioned movie-making, for which I have an inordinate amount of affection. And the costumes, I mean--these costumes. Apparently Coppola initially wanted to have extremely sparse, impressionistic sets using mostly shadow and light in order to spend more of the budget on costumes. This is the kind of prioritizing I personally would like to see more of in filmmakers. Take a tiny fraction of the "things blowing up" budget in Hollywood to put Gary Oldman in twenty layers of gray and little round blue glasses, I'm begging you. Quibble with the acting, the accents, the story--when newly-undead Sadie Frost waltzes back into her crypt carrying a screaming child and wearing the most gorgeously demented burial outfit in history, it's positively mesmerizing. It's literally art, the entire spread.

Because I watched this in a movie theater and am a courteous cinema attendee, I did not take notes on my phone like I usually do, so am left with only general impressions and not a beat for beat recap. I will reiterate my previous point that I no longer believe there is "good" or "bad" when it comes to Keanu Reeves, there is only Keanu, and you can either get on board with it or you cannot. I know that this film and The Devil's Advocate are often cited as proof of Keanu's exceedingly loose grip on accent work, but I swear to you every time he responded with a surprised "Oh" and it was the most chill surfer Keanu-sounding "Oh" that could possibly exist, it only endeared him to me more. Your mileage may vary on that front. Also throwing his generously-budgeted, period-appropriate hat into the accent arena is Sir Anthony Hopkins, one year out from absolutely terrifying the entire world as Hannibal Lecter, loosely committed to being Dutch but fully committed to having the best time of his life as Van Helsing. I dare you to not enjoy any scene that Hopkins bulldozes his way through, hollering about the devil's concubine and so forth. Honorable accent mention to Billy Campbell, one year out from delighting me personally in The Rocketeer, who aims for Texan but hits The South, but is too adorable to be held accountable for this in any way.

You know I appreciate a director who makes choices and this film is like the director choice-pocalypse. We're cutting, we're fading, we're zooming, we're showing you three things happening in different places at once, we're using a Pathé camera from the Silent Era to introduce young-looking Vlad in the streets of Victorian London, we're seeing pulsing red blood inside of living bodies, we're tracking characters on novel-esque maps. At the end of the day I feel like my eyeballs were simply too busy to stop and register any complaints in a meaningful way. "Wait that's silly--" I would start to think and then, wham--Gary Oldman is collecting Winona's tears in his hand, where they turn into diamonds, and I am leaning forward in my seat.

Line I repeated quietly to myself unironically because even the corny emotional beats of this movie work for me: "I have crossed oceans of time to find you."

Is it under two hours:  Look, you can't be expected to contain this story in 120 minutes, what part of "oceans of time" didn't you understand

Thing that I will now be avoiding; for safety: International real estate transactions

Garlic Knots from Bon Appétit

The human characters do eat some roast chicken and potatoes and such, but, come on. It's clearly garlic time. "Oh, thaaaaat's the problem with being a vampire," Anna noted, "no garlic bread."

Up next: Grab your rye whisky and your cynical outlook, Noirvember is coming!

Cat People; Apple Pie

Cat People (1942)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Had I seen this before: No

Before you get too excited by the title of this film (I assume everyone reading this has the same level of obsession regarding felinity as my daughters) I should warn you that this is really only a movie about a singular cat person. Or is it?? No, it is. She's a cat person. But if you ask me, she's also a grand gal who gets railroaded by the Hays Code. Railroaded, I say!

We open on an attractive woman at a zoo, sketching a black leopard. There is an element of Kelly Clarkson in her face and I immediately love her. She crumples up her sketch and tosses it in the general direction of a trash can but misses by, I'm sorry to report, a pretty significant margin. A tall, bland slice of white bread in a hat picks it up and disposes of it before pointing to a sign--the only reason I have related the opening moments of this film in such detail, because it is a delightfully 1940s sort of sign--which reads Let no one say, and say it to your shame, That all was beauty here, until you came. I'm talking hand-painted on wood. I want one of these for every room in my house. Litterers are getting absolutely roasted out here. Anyway, this is what passes for a meet-cute between Irena, our main character, and Oliver, the worthless man she is going to marry. This may already be apparent, but I am fully on Irena's side for the duration of this movie and blame her for absolutely nothing other than a tendency to be careless with her trash. 

We soon learn that Irena is a Serbian immigrant who believes that she is a victim of a mysterious curse passed down from wicked ancestors in her village. She also riles up the pets at the pet store something fierce (one of the best things about this film is the little asides from random characters, like the sweet old pet shop lady who reports that animals are quite psychic, and while she has nothing against her sister-in-law, for example, the cats can tell something isn't right with her), but I ask you--is it worse to have an aura that distresses a room full of birds or to have bought someone a whole entire kitten after a first date, requiring it to be returned to said pet store, Oliver? Anyway, Oliver dismisses her concerns as backwoods fairy tales and in the same breath describes himself as a "good plain Americano." Ugh, Oliver.

Despite Irena's reservations, Oliver eventually convinces her to marry him, but she is still afraid to be physically intimate with him--even kiss--due to the curse that she believes will turn her into a killer cat if her passion is aroused. When, on their wedding night, she asks him to be patient with her, he says "Darling, you can have all the time there is in the world if you want it." Hoo boy, start that timer! He arranges for her to start seeing a psychiatrist who is significantly more horrible than Oliver himself--his general advice is "stop believing what you believe" and also "consider kissing me instead?" THE WORST. When this therapeutic technique somehow doesn't immediately fix her problems, Oliver becomes frustrated and confides to his beautiful coworker Alice, verbatim: "You know what's a funny thing? I've never been unhappy before. Things have always gone swell for me. I had a grand time as a kid, lots of fun at school, and now at the office with you and Commodore and Doc. That's why I don't know what to do about all this! I've just never been unhappy." Oliver...I absolutely believe you and also this is a hilarious thing for a grown person to say. Being a white man in America in 1942, whew.

Less hilarious is that Alice sees an opening and is immediately like "well guess what, now that you mention it, I'm in love with you and I'm a good plain Americano as well!" Lady, they just got married! What is wrong with all of these people? Before long Oliver and Alice are discussing lawyers and such with Dr. Unprofessional and the fact that "you can't divorce an insane person" which--is that true? I thought mental illness was historically grounds for divorce? Anyway, I will tell you that one of these four people gets what is coming to them one of them gets what is not coming to them and that is because certain things had to be punished in American motion pictures in the year 1942, regardless of whether they were that character's fault or if she had literally spent the entire film being like "I'm trying to tell y'all."

Despite all that, I found this to be a tremendously enjoyable film with some very striking and suspenseful scenes, and if you enjoy movies of this era I highly recommend it. It's even credited with establishing the horror movie trope of the jump scare that turns out to be something benign, which means that roughly one million movies owe some credit to Cat People. And in the end, all I will say is: Dynamite the black leopard innocent!

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Things have always gone swell for me."

Is it under two hours: Mister, it's barely over one hour

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: The Motion Picture Production Code of 1934

Perfect Apple Pie from Pillsbury

Oliver's only redeeming quality is that when he is upset, his instinct is to go to a diner and order a coffee and a slice of apple pie, seemingly for breakfast. A good plain Americano indeed.

Up next: Can't wrap up spooky season without a single vampire, that would be spooky malpractice

The Ring; PB&J

The Ring (2002)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Had I seen this before: Yes

The Ring is a 2002 American remake of a 1998 Japanese horror movie about a very creepy VHS tape that wants to kill you. You, specifically. I mean, also me. This tape is pretty indiscriminate, it's really a chain-letter sort of deal. Anyway, this means The Ring deserves most of the credit for ushering in the J-horror trend in the U.S. and also the blame for the many inferior knockoffs that followed. I recently watched The Cabin in the Woods with the 13-year-old and didn't have to explain very many of the references, but when they threw to the situation in Japan, I was like "ah, right--J-horror has a lot of spirits and creepy children and everything is sort of bluish green," which I now realize was just me describing this movie specifically, despite having seen many actual Japanese films in the intervening years. It makes an impression, is what I'm saying.

We open with one of my favorite things, which is: a gimmick. The FBI warning glitches, everything glitches, we're entering a theme park and the theme is glitchy tech. Two high school girls are chatting and watching TV and the conversation turns to an urban legend going around about a cursed tape that kills you seven days after you watch it. One of the girls confesses that she did see a tape like that..................seven days ago!!!!! Oh no! It was at this point that I gently warned Anna that Amber Tamblyn was not going to be a Final Girl and she said "No, she is a what's-her-name from Scream." I did not point out that Amber Tamblyn in 2002 was nowhere near as famous as Drew Barrymore in 1996 and therefore it is an imperfect comparison because the audience expectations are very different in those two instances, but rather said "Yes, she's a Casey." Sorry, I know it's annoying when people low-key brag about their parenting.

At any rate, Amber Tamblyn gets good and Casey'd but we don't really see what happens--one of the things I appreciate about this movie is how it selectively hides the ball from the audience and then BAM whips the ball right at your face when you aren't expecting it. For the most part it is a pretty standard modern mainstream horror movie with a lot of familiar beats, but it does subvert expectations a couple of times in the way it tells the story. In this case, you escape that opening scene thinking "well that wasn't so bad" because everything scary was implied rather than shown, and then a couple of scenes later in the middle of what feels like a very safe, daytime scene between two characters talking in a kitchen you get a quick flashback to what Amber Tamblyn's corpse looked like when they discovered her and it is straight up horrifying. My guard? Well, it sure was down. So kudos to Gore Verbinski for that one.

Cursed tape established, we meet our main characters, Rachel (played by Naomi Watts) and the young son she displays absolutely zero interest in parenting, Aidan. Turns out Amber Tamblyn was Aidan's cousin and they were very close and he's having a tough time. Rachel does not seem particularly concerned about this or about the tragic and inexplicable death of her 16-year-old niece but she is very intrigued when some teens at the funeral describe the cursed tape rumor, because she is...........an investigative journalist!!!!! She excitedly tells her editor "I'm cooking up too good a story" with absolutely no hint of grief for her extremely dead niece at the center of it. This is because work is her life and Aidan is just her sad little burden who distresses his teacher with his death-related drawings and makes his own lunch and walks himself to school and, spoiler, selects his own filmed entertainment because no one is ever supervising him. 

Rachel watches the tape. It is basically the scary boat ride scene from Willy Wonka but in black and white. She enlists the help of her ex, Noah, another hot person who absolutely does not want to be a parent, which is a shame because he is Aidan's father. They spend so much time together not parenting their shared eight-year-old. At least we see at one point that Aidan has a babysitter, who reports that he was very good and easy to take care of, like, maybe you should try it sometime, Rachel or Noah. They can't though, because they are busy investigating. Eventually Aidan watches a copy of the tape that Rachel brought home and just left sitting there for him I guess. She pays some lip service to the fact that she's really gotta figure this thing out now that her kid is in danger, but I gotta say, you do not really see the hustle on the screen.

Several horror tropes come at you pretty fast: people affected by the tape show up blurry in photos and security cameras; multiple people have nosebleeds that indicate, I dunno, something scary; a patient in a mental institution is cryptic rather than helpful; animals act strangely. At one point Rachel is on a ferry and tries to pet a horse (?) that is also riding the ferry (?) and the horse is like "no thank you" but she keeps trying for reasons that I absolutely do not understand. When a horse says no, it means no, Rachel! So she's shushing it and shushing it and still trying to touch it and eventually it fully loses its mind, breaks out of its little cage, jumps off the dang ferry, and gets chopped up by the propellers. It's a genuinely shocking and awful scene and also is 100% Rachel's fault.

Eventually the pieces of the puzzle start coming together and it is a satisfying sort of mystery with nicely creepy clues. The fact that they have this physical object--a tape--and a bunch of equipment to science it with is pretty great. I'm not going to explain everything that happens in the back half because despite my personal reservations about the character of Rachel as a human I do recommend that you watch this if you haven't seen it. But I will say there is a terrific rug pull near the end of the film that elevates it above a lot of other things in the genre--this movie basically lulls you into thinking you're at the happy ending and then puts all of its actual scary shit after that. Respect.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "I'm sure it's a lot scarier at night."

Is it under two hours: Yes

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Low-rise jeans

Simply Sandwich Bread with Peanut Butter and Jelly from Simply Recipes

No one in this movie eats anything (except that one horse who ate some ferry propeller sorry sorry sorry it really did upset me so much) but as mentioned above we do watch Aidan the parentless child make and pack his own little lunch complete with peanut butter and jelly on white bread.

Up next: A rousing 1940s game of Cursed or Neurotic?

Paranormal Activity; Butter Chicken with Naan

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Director: Oren Peli

Had I seen this before: No

One of the things I touched on in my Blair Witch post was the movie's funny-in-hindsight hyperbolic marketing which implied that the events in the movie might be real and also that the terror of seeing them might be fatal. But of course I am now a seasoned consumer of both cinematic horror content and cinematic horror advertising, a worldly and skeptical sort, not some nervous teen. And it is with that worldly and skeptical voice that I say to you now aaaaaaauuuuuugggggghhhhhh you guys. I can't believe I fell for this movie's over-the-top marketing for so many years. I was genuinely afraid to watch this film, which as it turns out is mostly about an annoying boyfriend and a door that swings open or shut once in a while, neither of which are the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.*

Released in 2007, Paranormal Activity took up The Blair Witch's found-footage torch in a major way, spawned seven sequels and counting, and kick-started a low-budget horror empire. It borrows a lot from its spiritual predecessor, including a chyron at the top of the film thanking the families of of Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat (the actors' real names), setting up the idea that this video footage was turned over to the filmmakers by the victims' families. (The fact that the last shot in this movie--spoiler spoiler spoiler obviouslyyyyyyyyyy--is of Katie's face morphing into a literal demon, makes that idea is very funny to me, like their families saw that, shrugged, and were like "well here you go I guess.") And like Blair Witch, it involves far more scenes of scared people arguing with each other than it does of scary things happening. 

It also thoroughly convinced me that it was too frightening for me, a suburbia-dweller who is often alone in my house, as the premise seemed to be "your suburban house is constantly doing weird stuff when you're not looking and probably wants to eat you." In that sense it is also continuing a different legacy, that of John Carpenter's Halloween, which spends a shocking amount of its fairly short runtime on various characters just walking down the sidewalk through a quiet neighborhood in order to impress upon you that your nice suburban neighborhood might be harboring dark things, such as an inexplicable gentleman in a Star Trek mask. The dark thing in this case is not a seemingly motiveless knife-wielding maniac, but rather a demon who is attached not to the house itself but to the main character Katie. When I thought we might be dealing with a ghost, I was interested, because I find ghosts to be compelling and scary and good vehicles for storytelling because there are all manner of things that a ghost might want from you and figuring what that is can be pretty fun as a viewer. I have absolutely no use, on the other hand, for cinematic demons. Demons in movies are almost all the same, just raging asshole bullies who are overly attached to Latin. And like human asshole bullies, they are very boring to me. What does a demon want? To make you unhappy and cause pain. But...making someone unhappy is the easiest thing in the world! That's not narratively intriguing at all! Like, try tip-toeing through life trying not to cause other people pain if you want a real challenge, demons.

Anyway. This particular demon spends the days sleeping I guess (?) and the nights just sort of wandering around Katie and Micah's big ugly house, so Micah buys a video camera to try to record the goings-on. Now, I am personally in possession of one (1) camera-adoring husband, so I do have some immediate empathy for Katie on this front, but I want to point out that Dan is nowhere near as annoying as Micah is with that thing. I guess this is in the grand tradition of characters in horror movies being irritating so you don't mind later when a demon stabs them (spoiler), but ugh. For reasons knows only to the entity itself, it does a lot of things that don't wake up the house's residents but do look spooky when played back on a laptop screen. So is it just showing off for the camera? At one point it moves a planchette around a Ouiji board and then lights it on fire, but there is no one in the room when that happens. What was that for?? If you were trying to get a message across, why not do it when someone is looking? This demon is a bully and a weird show-off. YouTube was a brand new platform when this movie was shot, but it seems like it might have been a natural home for Katie's entity, a true stunt queen.

Anyway. The funniest character in the movie is the paranormal expert who comes over twice and both times is like "sorry, I do ghosts not demons, I'm getting out of here." Same, man. Same. And the most inexplicable decision made by the main characters is to pull the very cozy-looking comforter off their bed every night and just sleep under a flat sheet. Upsetting.

*The kind of thing that keeps me up at night: Victorian children, ventriloquist dummies, bad things happening to eyeballs

Line I repeated quietly to myself: "Knock it off Micah" (I might have improvised this line)

Is it under two hours: Yes

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: San Diego

Butter Chicken from What's Gaby Cooking

At least Katie and Micah eat one solid meal before things really go sideways, and that meal looks to be some very tasty Indian food.

Up next: Gonna watch this VHS tape I found and hope nothing horrifying happens seven days from now

Over the Garden Wall; Potatoes and Molasses

Over the Garden Wall (2014)

Creator: Patrick McHale

Had I seen this before: Yes

Over the Garden Wall is an animated miniseries that first aired on Cartoon Network in 2014, but that I personally discovered last year with an overwhelming sense of why didn't anyone tell me this existed? So here I am, telling you that this exists, trying to spread the autumnal vibes as far and wide as possible. This show is everything I want in the month of October: funny, spooky but not terrifying, full of pumpkins and crunchy leaves and trails of candy, safe for (older) kids but still entertaining to adults, or at least this specific adult. I have indicated that I consume a lot of "horror" content, which is true, but I should clarify that I am very picky about what kind of scared I prefer to be, which is: quietly unsettled and is not: grossed out or depressed. I like mysteries and cobwebs and nice wool coats and creaky floorboards. I do not like viscera. Think British people in drafty old houses looking mildly alarmed, not maniacs with masks and chainsaws. Somehow this cartoon fits essentially all the things I like into ten 11-minute episodes and still has time for several musical numbers.

The story follows two brothers, serious teen Wirt and his hijinks-inclined little brother Greg. We meet them wandering through a perfect set of breezy fall woods--Wirt is wearing a tall conical red hat and an old-fashioned button-down cape (nice wool coat check) and Greg is, for reasons that will become apparent late in the series in my favorite reveal of the whole show, wearing an upside-down teapot on his head. He also has a pet frog whose name changes frequently, my favorite of the list being Dr. Cucumber. They are joined by a cagey talking bird who is clearly harboring secret motivations of her own. It is soon apparent that they are lost and attempting to get home, but they will first have to make their way through various places that range from slightly strange to deeply creepy. There is a gruff woodsman, a mysterious beast, a town of dancing pumpkins, a child-eating witch, an eccentric old tea baron in a labyrinthine mansion, an archetype-populated tavern, and a ferry filled to the brim with anthropomorphic frogs. There are clear references to Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as a lot of general visual throwback to cartoons from the early 20th century. All of those allusions combined with the simple but lovely 2D-animation style manages to create the feeling that you are watching something old and comfortingly familiar, but fresh and interesting at the same time. It's like taking a bath in a giant mug of apple cider. 

Here are some of the voice actors that appear in this series: Elijah Wood, Melanie Lynskey, Christopher Lloyd, John Cleese, Shirley Jones, Chris Isaak, Bebe Neuwirth, and Tim Curry. Even though this blog is an avowed spoilers-whenever-I-feel-like-it zone I don't really want to give away any of the secrets of this show, but I will tell you that the character Tim Curry voices is named Auntie Whispers. So I assume with that information you either know for sure that this is not something you're interested in or there is already a you-shaped hole in the wall left behind in your pursuit of watching it.

Line I repeated quietly to myself: I've been singing the "Potatoes and Molasses" song (see below) to myself for daaaaaaaaaays

Is it under two hours: Yes, even all added up

Thing that I will now be avoiding, for safety: Expressing my feelings via mix-tape

Perfect Mashed Potatoes from Favorite Family Recipes (and Molasses)

Oh, potatoes and molasses

If you want some, oh just ask us

They're warm and soft like puppies in socks

Filled with cream and candy rocks

Oh, potatoes and molasses

They're so much sweeter than algebra class

If your stomach is grumblin'

and your mouth starts a mumblin'

There's only one thing to keep your brain from crumblin'

Oh, potatoes and molasses

If you can't see 'em put on your glasses

They're shiny and large 

like a fisherman's barge

You know you've eat enough when you start seeing stars

Oh, potatoes and molasses

It's the only thing left on your task list

They're short and stout

To make everyone shout

For potatoes and molasses

This is a "Big Top Candy Mountain"-esque song performed by Greg in an old-timey schoolhouse full of animal students while an escaped gorilla rampages outside. I really don't know how else to sell you on this show.

Up next: A movie I have actually been too scared to watch until now; if there are no further entries you should assume that I simply failed to work up the nerve