It’s hard for me to think of any film that I’m as eager to see this year as Blue Is The Warmest Colour. The film already won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and it’ll be interesting to see if it duplicates the success that the previous Cannes winner, Amour, achieved in the U.S.
For my latest guilty pleasure, I want to take a look at Terror In The Family, a well-intentioned, out-of-control youth film from 1996.
Certain moments of Terror in the Family felt painfully familiar because, much like the film’s main character, Deena Marten (played by — yes, it’s true — Hilary Swank), I went through a period, when I was teenage, where I was seriously out-of-control. Much like Deena, I would sneak out of the house, I would hook up with guys who were obvious trouble, I had absolutely no impulse control, and I said and did a lot of hurtful and self-destructive things that I still would do anything to take back. I was 16 while, in the movie, Deena is portrayed as being 15. The main difference between me and Deena is that I was out-of-control because I was having an undiagnosed manic episode. Deena, however, is out-of-control because she comes from one of the most dysfunctional family in the history of dysfunctional families.
And that’s why, despite the fact that I can relate to the painful subject matter, Terror In The Family amuses me more than it disturbs me. Seriously, anything that can be wrong with a family is wrong with this family.
Consider this:
Father Todd Marten (Dan Lauria) spends all of his time down in the basement, making wooden bowls and then taking pictures of them. Usually, he avoids his family but when he’s finally forced to confront Deena, she ends up smashing his fingers with her bedroom door. “HOW CAN I WORK NOW!?” he bellows while holding up his bandaged hand.
Mother Cynthia Marten (Joanna Kerns) is an alcoholic who spends her spare time standing in front of a mirror and rehearsing being a disciplinarian. When Deena flees the house, Cynthia attempts to win her back by bringing her a huge, home-made pizza. “I made your favorite!” Cynthia drunkenly cries before accidentally dropping the pizza on the floor.
Grandmother Ivy (Nan Martin) is, without a doubt, one of the most evil and unpleasant characters that I have ever seen in a movie. When Cynthia tries to tell her about the difficulties of raising Deena, Ivy responds by literally punching her in the face.
Deena’s younger brother, Adam (Adam Hendershott), is a talented pianist who deals with his family by playing video games and literally sleeping with a bottle of vodka in his bed.
Finally, there’s Aunt Judith (Kathleen Wilhoite). Judith seems to be the only stable person in Deena’s family. That’s mostly because Judith left home when she was young and was apparently some sort of groupie for several years.
With this family, is it any wonder that Deena is spending all of her time with Garrett (Andy Kavovit), her 17 year-old boyfriend who, along with introducing her to drugs and sex, also speaks wistfully of killing his mother and her boyfriend? Garrett, not surprisingly, has a band and Deena soon finds herself staying out past curfew so she can perform with him at various seedy clubs. The film blames a lot of Deena’s bad behavior on Garrett but you know what? Back when I was 15, I would have been totally in love with Garrett too.
Seriously, Deena, you go girl!
Anyway, with all of this going on, can we really be shocked that Deena eventually ends up swinging a landline phone at her parents and demanding that they stay away?
Terror In The Family shows up on Lifetime occasionally and recently, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, it even turned up on Showtime, playing in between showings of Dexter and The Seduction of Misty Mundae. It’s worth watching because it really is the perfect marriage of good intentions, over-the-top melodrama, and intense cluelessness. For the most part, future Oscar winner Hilary Swank gives a good performance as Deena but the best parts of the films are the parts where she joins the rest of the cast in going totally and completely overboard.
The mix of melodrama and hindsight combine to make Terror In The Family into a true guilty pleasure.
Today’s dance scene that I love comes from 2006’s Step Up and it proves the importance of chemistry between dancers. Watching this scene, it’s easy to see how Jenna Dewan and Channing Tatum became a couple after filming it.
A lot of people, like me, felt that Matthew McConaughey deserved an Oscar nomination earlier this year for his performance in Killer Joe. It looks like he’ll get a second chance this year with his performances in both Mud and the upcoming Dallas Buyer’s Club, the trailer of which can be found below.
According to this trailer, All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is “finally” going to give horror fans “what they’ve been asking for.”
So, I guess the question now is — what exactly have we been asking for? Myself, I know that I just want a genuinely scary film that features interesting (and occasionally, even intelligent) characters and is intense enough to be get under my skin without descending to the level of torture porn. I also know that I’ve been asking for more films that are not a part of the whole found footage genre. Also, as far as slasher movies are concerned, I prefer female characters who fight back as opposed to just running and screaming.
If All The Boys Love Mandy Lane can deliver on that, then it’ll definitely be what I’m waiting for. It’s a little hard to tell from the trailer. However, this has been a year of good horror films and therefore, I’m going to take a chance on All The Boys Love Mandy Lane and hope for the best.
Today’s dance scene that I love comes from 2000’s Center Stage.
Center Stage is one of those films that can be fairly criticized for a lot of reasons but — oh my God, y’all — I used to love this movie so much! Actually, I still do because every time I watch it, I feel like I’m 15 years old again and I’m just so in love with dancing and performing that I can’t even begin to put it into words. I think everyone has a film that they irrationally love because it reminds them of a certain time, place, or state-of-mind. For me, Center Stage is that film.
The scene below is a long one and the video is not the best quality but I still love it because it captures the excitement of both dancing and of being on stage. Add to that, I’d love to be in that show… (I look good in both black and red.)
So, when I saw You’re Next last weekend, I also saw the second trailer for Machete Kills.
The audience I saw seemed to be really excited about the trailer but I have to say that, after seeing it, I’m actually a bit worried about Machete Kills. The first Machete was a parody of grindhouse filmmaking but it was an affectionate parody. As over-the-top as it was, it still felt like it could have also been a genuine grindhouse film.
This trailer for Machete Kills, however, feels like the exact opposite. Instead of celebrating the excesses of the grindhouse, this trailer feels more like it’s inviting us to mock the films to which it claims to be paying homage.
This trailer almost feels like it’s for a film that was made by somebody who has never seen an actual grindhouse film but who has seen plenty of YouTube videos.
Hopefully, I’ll be proven wrong.
This trailer has been around for a little while but, seeing as how I’m really looking forward to seeing this film, I figured I’d go ahead and share it here on the site.
Inside Llewyn Davis is directed by the Coen Brothers and it stars Oscar Isaac! Seriously, what else can you ask for?
Today’s dance scene that I love comes from Ti West’s 2009 horror classic House of the Devil.
I love this scene because I usually do the exact same thing whenever I have the house to myself.
On January 1st, 2009, a young man named Oscar Grant was executed in Oakland, California. Grant was returning home from celebrating the New Year’s in San Francisco when he and several other young black man were pulled off a train by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police. According to the police, Grant had been involved in a fight on the train. In a moment that was recorded by several cell phones (and later broadcast across the world), Grant was shot in the back by a BART policeman. According to the police, Grant had been resisting arrest and his executioner had meant to use his taser but had grabbed his gun by mistake.
The death of Oscar Grant made the news even down here in Texas and I can still remember discussing it with my friends. As a bunch of good, white liberals (and yes, believe it or not, I was once a little bit liberal, though even back then I was, at heart, more of a civil libertarian than anything else), we were all properly outraged by what happened. At one point, I declared that this proved that police hide behind the power of their tasers. We all agreed that it was a terrible thing that had happened and that the cop involved needed to be held responsible.
Only recently did I realize that, even as fashionably outraged as me and my friend were and even though we did feel that this was a classic case of police overreactions, we also automatically assumed that the cop was telling the truth when he said that he meant to grab for his taser. For all of our righteous indignation, we — as a bunch of white people who had spent most of our time living in white neighborhoods and white towns — still had a hard time accepting the idea that a white police officer had intentionally executed a black man. As outraged as we were, we were assumed that we were angry about an aberration. As such, we assumed that the shooter would be held responsible and we went on with our comfortably sheltered lives. Needless to say, we were incredibly naive. While the death of Oscar Grant made national news, it made far less news when the man who shot him was eventually sentenced to only two years in prison. (He was paroled after 8 months.)
I’ve been thinking about Oscar Grant (and the way that my friends and I initially reacted to the news reports of his death) ever since I saw Fruitvale Station, a devastating independent film that also marks the directorial debut of Ryan Coogler.
Starting in the early morning hours and ending in the first hours of 2009, Fruitvale Station follows Oscar Grant (played, in an award-worthy performance by Michael B. Jordan) as he lives the final day of his life. In between doing such every day things as buying a birthday card for his mother (played, in a luminous performance, by the great Octavia Spencer) and picking up his daughter from daycare, Oscar worries about how he’s going to pay his rent and struggles against the temptation to return to his former life of dealing drugs.
While we watch the film knowing what Oscar doesn’t — that this is the last day of his life — the film itself manages to be a lot more than just a recreation of a tragic event. There’s a vibrancy and sense of hope to the scenes where Oscar drives through Oakland or hangs out with his family. That vibrancy makes the film’s inevitable conclusion all the more powerful and devastating.
As for the actual shooting, Fruitvale Station leaves it to the audience to decide whether Oscar was intentionally executed or if he was shot by a cop who thought he was holding a taser. As the cop who shot Oscar, Chad Michael Murray is only on-screen for a split second. As the other cop on the scene, Kevin Durand (who played Martin Keamy on Lost) shouts and bullies as only Kevin Durand can do. If the film leaves it ambiguous about whether or not Oscar was intentionally shot, it’s not ambiguous about the fact that Oscar was killed because, as a black man, he was automatically viewed as being a potential threat by the white police officers. Whether the intention was to tase him or to shoot him, the ultimate goal was to reassert the authority of the police.
As Fruitvale Station makes clear, the shooting was both an individual tragedy and a piece of the larger tragedy that’s still being played out across this country. The film’s triumph is that it makes Oscar Grant into both a compelling individual and a powerful symbol of the struggle that many Americans face as they try to survive under a system that’s been designed to keep them down.
So, have you seen Fruitvale Station? If you haven’t, you need to. It’s one of the best films of 2013.
