Here Are The 2022 Nomination of Georgia Film Critics Association!

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The winners will be announced on January 13th!

Best Picture
“After Yang”
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Decision to Leave”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“The Fabelmans”
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”
“Nope”
“RRR”
“Tár”
“Top Gun: Maverick”

Best Director
“Decision to Leave” – Park Chan-wook
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” – Daniels (Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert)
“The Fabelmans” – Steven Spielberg
“Nope” – Jordan Peele
“Tár” – Todd Field

Best Actor
Austin Butler (“Elvis”)
Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”)
Park Hae-il (“Decision to Leave”)
Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”)

Best Actress
Cate Blanchett (“Tár”)
Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”)
Tang Wei (“Decision to Leave”)
Michelle Williams (“The Fabelmans”)
Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Best Supporting Actor
Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Brian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”)
Judd Hirsch (“The Fabelmans”)
Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)

Best Supporting Actress
Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”)
Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”)
Jamie Lee Curtis (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)
Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”)
Janelle Monáe (“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”)
Keke Palmer (“Nope”)

Best Original Screenplay
“The Banshees of Inisherin” – Martin McDonagh
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” – Daniels (Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert)
“The Fabelmans” – Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner
“Nope” – Jordan Peele
“Tár” – Todd Field

Best Adapted Screenplay
“After Yang” – Kogonada
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” – Rian Johnson
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” – Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins, Gris Grimly, Patrick McHale
“She Said” – Rebecca Lenkiewicz
“Women Talking” – Sarah Polley, Miriam Toews

Best Cinematography
“Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” – Darius Khondji
“The Batman” – Greig Fraser
“The Fabelmans” – Janusz Kaminski
“Nope” – Hoyte Van Hoytema
“Top Gun: Maverick” – Claudio Miranda

Best Production Design
“Avatar: The Way of Water” – Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, Vanessa Cole
“Babylon” – Florencia Martin, Anthony Carlino
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” – Hannah Beachler, Lisa K. Sessions
“Elvis” – Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, Beverley Dunn
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” – Jason Kisvarday, Kelsi Ephraim

Best Original Score
“Babylon” – Justin Hurwitz
“The Batman” – Michael Giacchino
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” – Ludwig Göransson
“The Fabelmans” – John Williams
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” – Alexandre Desplat
“Nope” – Michael Abels

Best Original Song
“Carolina” – Taylor Swift (“Where the Crawdads Sing”)
“Ciao Papa” – Alexandre Desplat, Roeban Katz, Guillermo del Toro (“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”)
“Hold My Hand” – Lady Gaga, BloodPop, Benjamin Rice (“Top Gun: Maverick”)
“Lift Me Up” – Tems, Rihanna, Ludwig Göransson, Ryan Coogler (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”)
“Naatu Naatu” – M.M. Keeravani, Kaala Bhairava, Rahul Sipligunj (“RRR”)

Best Ensemble
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“The Fabelmans”
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”
“Women Talking”

Best International Film
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Argentina 1985”
“Close”
“Decision to Leave”
“RRR”

Best Animated Film
“Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood”
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”
“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”
“Turning Red”

Best Documentary Film
“All That Breathes”
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
“Descendant”
“Fire of Love”
“Good Night Oppy”
“Navalny”

Breakthrough Award
Danielle Deadwyler
Stephanie Hsu
Tenoch Huerta
Gabriel Labelle
Amber Midthunder

Oglethorpe Award for Excellence in Georgia Cinema
“Bad Dream” (short; Camilo Diaz Caro, Colby Hollman)
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole)
“Devotion” (J.D. Dillard, Jake Crane, Jonathan Stewart)
“Emergency” (Carey Williams, K.D. Dávila)
“Glitter Ain’t Gold” (short; Christian Nolan Jones)
“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” (Adamma Ebo)
“I Want You Back” (Jason Orley, Isaac Aptaker, Elizabeth Berger)
“The Menu” (Mark Mylod, Seth Reiss, Will Tracy)
“Refuge” (Erin Levin Bernhardt, Din Blankenship)
“Till” (Chinonye Chukwu, Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp)

The National Society Of Film Critics Honors TAR!

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Here are the winners from one of my favorite groups of critic, the National Society of Film Critics!

Best Picture
Winner: TÁR (61 points)
Runners-up: AFTERSUN (49 points) & NO BEARS (32 points)

Best Director
Winner: Charlotte Wells, AFTERSUN (60 points)
Runners-up: Park Chan-wook, DECISION TO LEAVE (47 points) & Jafar Panahi, NO BEARS (36 points)

Best Actress
Winner: Cate Blanchett, TÁR (59 points)
Runners-up: Michelle Yeoh, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (38 points) Tilda Swinton, THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER, and Michelle Williams, THE FABELMANS (27 points)

Best Actor
Winner: Colin Farrell, AFTER YANG and THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (71 points)
Runners-up: Paul Mescal, AFTERSUN (55 points) & Bill Nighy, LIVING (33 points)

Best Supporting Actress
Winner: Kerry Condon, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (57 points)
Runners-up: Nina Hoss, TÁR (43 points) & Dolly de Leon, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (35 points)

Best Supporting Actor
Winner: Ke Huy Quan, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (45 points)
Runners-up: Brian Tyree Henry, CAUSEWAY (35 points) & Barry Keoghan, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (27 points)

Best Screenplay
Winner: Todd Field, TÁR (61 points)
Runners-up: Martin McDonagh, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (42 points) & James Gray, ARMAGEDDON TIME (18 points)

Best Cinematography
Winner: Michał Dymek, EO (62 points)
Runners-up: Hoyte van Hoytema, NOPE (37 points) & Kim Ji-yong, DECISION TO LEAVE (34 points)

Best Nonfiction Film
Winner: ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (46 points)
Runners-up: DESCENDANT (40 points) & ALL THAT BREATHES (27 points)

Best Film Not In The English Language
Winner: EO (43 points)
Runners-up: NO BEARS (37 points) & DECISION TO LEAVE (34 points)

A Blast From The Past: What Made Sammy Speed?

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From 1959, here’s a short film that asks the question, “What made Sammy speed?”

(I’m going to guess that the title is meant to pay homage to the novel, What Makes Sammy Run?)

Sammy Robertson (played, in flashbacks, by David Felshaw) was a popular high school student until he was killed when his car collided with a truck. A local detective tries to figure out what caused the accident to happen. To be honest, I’m not really sure why there’s any question as to why it happened. Sammy was speeding. He ran a stop sign. The truck crashed into his car. It’s tragic and there’s definitely a lesson to be learned about paying attention to the road but it’s not particularly complicated. It really doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would require a massive criminal investigation. It’s not like Sammy was smuggling drugs or drinking or driving or anything like that. At most, the cops might want to ask themselves why the stop sign was at such a strange angle.

Still, since there’s apparently no other crimes being committed in this town, the detective spends a few days talking to Sammy’s relatives and his friends and trying to figure out why Sammy felt it was okay to speed. (The driver of the truck, meanwhile, is totally let off the hook. How fast was he going because it looks like he really messed up Sammy’s car.) The detective learns that Sammy’s father wasn’t a particularly good driver. He learns that Sammy’s little brother looked up to Sammy whenever he would drive fast. He learned that Sammy’s friends were impressed by his car and his total lack of concern when it came to safety. (That said, most of them still refused to ride with him. They knew better than to risk their chances to attend the next sock hop.) He learns that, shortly before the accident, Sammy’s boss couldn’t give him a raise and that Sammy failed in his attempts to join the school’s baseball team. Broke and not destined for athletic glory, Sammy needed to feel like a man so he ignored the speed limit and the stop sign. He had issues with authority, the detective tells us.

Yes, the detective tells us a lot. That’s because this is a Sid Davis production and no Sid Davis production was complete without a judgmental narrator. In this case, the narrator decides that everyone was to blame for Sammy driving too fast so I guess the message here is to let a bad player on the team and always give your employees a raise whether you can afford it or not. If you don’t, the worst possible thing that could happen will happen. That was another frequent Sid Davis lesson. The worst always happens, no matter what. That said, my main takeaway from this film was that Sammy was just naturally self-destructive. It really doesn’t sound like anyone could have saved Sammy. Sammy’s enemy was not the coach, his boss, his father, the cops, or even his little brother. Sammy’s greatest enemy was himself.

Anyway, here’s a blast from the past from 1959. Watch it the next time you’re tempted to drive too fast.

International Film Review: All Quiet On The Western Front (dir by Edward Berger)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From the first scene of Germany’s All Quiet On The Western Front, it’s made clear that there is no glamour or romance to war.

The year is 1917 and the Great War (or World War I as future historians will call it) has been underway for three years. On the Western Front, soldiers hide in trenches and wait for the inevitable order to try to advance to the next set of trenches. Most of the soldiers are cut down by machine gun fire and explosions as soon as they go over the top. Many more are killed as they try to run across the killing field. We are introduced to one soldier who has been ordered to charge. Within a few minutes, he is dead and his uniform has been taken, washed, and sewn up so that it can be given to whoever will be the next to enlist. The whole process plays out with a disturbing efficiency. That several men have just died in a attack that seems to lack any strategic purpose does not matter. What matters is that the uniform be ready to be worn by whoever follows.

The uniform is next handed to Paul (Felix Kammerer), a 17 year-old who not only enlists in the Imperial Germany Army but who plays a key role in convincing his friends to enlist as well. Paul has been moved by the patriotic speeches that he heard from his teachers. He expects war to be an adventure. Upon their arrival on the Western Front, Paul and his friends are surrounded by death. With their uniforms on and their gas masks over their faces, they are nearly unrecognizable as individuals. Instead, they look like what they are, cogs in the war machine. Paul spends his first night in the trenches while bombs explode all around him. His friend, Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald), cries that he wants to return home. By the next morning, Ludwig is one of the many who is now dead. Only Kat (Albrecht Schuch) is willing to look after Paul and his friends. Kat is considered to be a weathered veteran because he has managed to survive for nearly a year on the Western Front.

All Quiet On The Western Front is based on the classic anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque. (A previous adaptation won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1930 and is generally considered to be the first truly “good” Best Picture winner.) Th film takes some liberties with the book’s plot while still remaining faithful to Remarque’s theme of the futility of war. One change is that, along with following Paul’s day-to-day life on the Western Front, the film also details the efforts of diplomat Mattias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl) to negotiate Germany’s surrender. It’s a fairly big departure from Remarque’s narrative but one that definitely stays true to the spirit of the book. Despite the fact that Germany knows that it has been defeated and that it will have to surrender, Paul and his friends are still expected to fight and sacrifice their lives for a victory that is no longer attainable. Indeed, the closer that Erzberger comes to signing a cease fire, the more determined General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) becomes to launch one final, great offensive before the war ends. The soldier have no idea what is going on during Erzberger’s negotiations and Erzberger has no idea that Paul has lost the majority of his friends and has been forced to do things that will forever haunt him. They may not know about each other but Paul’s fate depends on Erzberger’s decisions and the legacy of Erzberger and all the other diplomats and commanders is to be found in what happens to soldiers like Paul.

All Quiet On The Western Front is a brutally effective anti-war film. Director Edward Berger puts the viewer right in the middle of combat and it is absolutely terrifying. Paul goes from being an enthusiastic patriot to a hollow-eyed cynic, one who knows that he is considered expendable by both the enemy and his commanders. The viewer, like Paul, quickly realizes that there is no way to win this war, other than to somehow survive long enough to return home. But even the soldiers who do survive understand that they won’t have much of a home to return to. (In a particularly shocking scene, one solder stabs himself in the neck with a fork rather than return home crippled.) While the the commanders negotiate in luxury, the soldiers live in mud and die almost randomly. The commanders may talk about strategy but the soldier know that survival comes down to luck.

It’s a harrowing film but it’s also exactly what an anti-war film should be. There’s a chance that this film could be the second adaptation of All Quiet On The Western Front to receive a nomination for Best Picture and it would certainly be deserved.

Guilty Pleasure No. 60: The Running Man (dir by Paul Michael Glaser)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Killian, here’s your Subzero… now plain zero!”

Uhm, excuse me, Mr. Schwarzenegger, but a man just died. He probably had a family who just watched you kill him on national television….

Oh well, it happens! In the role of Ben Richards, Arnold Schwarzenegger kills quite a few people over the course of the 1987 film, The Running Man, but they were all bad. In fact, when we first meet Ben Richards, he’s a cop who is trying to save lives. His superiors want him to open fire on a bunch of protestors who simply want enough food to eat. When Richards refuses to do it, he is framed for perpetrating “the Bakersfield Massacre” and is sent to prison. When he is recaptured after escaping, he is given a chance to compete on America’s number one game show, The Running Man! Hosted and produced by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson, oozing smarm in a performance that — in a fair world — would have received Oscar consideration), The Running Man is a show in which prisoners are given a chance to win prizes like a trial by jury or maybe even a pardon. While the audience cheers and puts down bets, the prisoners are stalked by professional killers like Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch), Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth), Fireball (Jim Brown), and Sub-Zero (Professor Toru Tanaka). Along with Killian, Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) provides commentary and analysis on how the game is going. Ben soon finds himself joined by Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso), who proves herself to be just as tough as he is.

Seen today, The Running Man feels more than a bit prophetic. Due to worldwide economic collapse, the poor are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer. The American government has become both increasingly corporate and increasingly authoritarian. The citizens are entertained and manipulated by “reality” programming. On camera, Killian is a charismatic host who delivers his lines with faux sincerity and who loves to meet and give away prizes to the public. (There’s something both undeniably creepy and also rather familiar about the way that Killian sniffs the hair, rubs the shoulders and holds the arms of the audience members to whom he’s speaking. It’s all very calculated and one gets the feeling that Killian washes his hands as soon as the camera are off of him.) Behind the scenes, he drinks, smokes, curses, and is full of contempt for everyone around him. He may not be happy when Ben outsmarts and kills the show’s stalkers but he definitely cheers up when he hears how good the ratings are. The film is set in 2017, which was 30 years in the future when The Running Man was first released. Seen today, The Running Man’s 2017 feels a lot like our 2017….

That said, The Running Man is also a big, flamboyant, and undeniably entertaining film. It’s also surprisingly funny, at times. Living in a dystopia ahs turned everyone into a quip machine. None of the bad guys die without Schwarzenegger making a joke about it. (“Buzzsaw? He had to split.” Yes, he did.) The show’s vapid studio audience, who go from cheering the prospect of witnessing a bloody death to crying when their favorite stalker is killed, is both disturbing and humorous. (Also memorable is the faux somber dance number that is performed while the show memorializes all the dead stalkers.) For all the costumed heroes and villains, the film is practically stolen by an older woman named Agnes who becomes Ben Richards’s favorite fan. The gaming “quads” may be dark and dangerous and full of angry people but they’re also full of advertisements for Cadre Cola. Dey Young of Rock and Roll High School and Strange Behavior fame has a cameo as Amy, who pays six dollars for a can of Cadre. (That may seem like a lot for a can of anything but Cadre is the official cola of The Running Man! Damon Killian endorses it! And, of course, when The Running Man was produced, the studio was owned by Coca-Cola so the jokes about Cadre’s corporate dominance also serve as a “take that” towards the corporation who put up money for the film. Either that or Cadre is stand-in for Pepsi.)

It’s easy to compare The Running Man to The Hunger Games films but The Running Man is infinitely more fun, if just because it doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself as seriously as The Hunger Games did. (Add to that, The Running Man manages to wrap up its story in 90 minutes, whereas The Hunger Games needed four movies.) Like The Hunger Game, The Running Man is based on a book, in this case a very loose adaptation of one of the pulpy novels that Stephen King wrote under the name of Richard Bachman. While King said that he enjoyed the film, he also asked that his real name not be listed in the credits because the film had little in common with his book, which is fair enough. The Running Man may have been inspired by a Stephen King novel but it’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger production through-and-through.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Shock Waves with #ScarySocial

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Shock Waves (1977, dir by Ken Wiederhorn)

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1977’s Shock Waves!

That’s right! It’s John Carradine, Peter Cushing, and Brooke Adams in the best underwater zombie film ever made!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime, YouTube, and a few other streaming sites. I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

This Saturday, join us at 9 pm et for the first #ScarySocial of 2023! Join us for SHOCK WAVES (1977)! The film is on Prime. #DontWatchAlone pic.twitter.com/mvyzN3BPKn
— Scary Social (@SocialScary) January 3, 2023

January Positivity: Gold Through The Fire (dir by Edward T. McDougal)

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s just take a look at the poster for 1987’s Gold Through The Fire.

Wow, exciting poster, right? At the top of the poster, we’ve got the Kremlin and a sinister looking soldier firing a gun. One thing about Russia is that it doesn’t matter when the film was made or who was in charge of the country at the time, the Russian government always makes for a good villain.

The film’s tag line reads, “Peter’s American dream came true but the trial of his faith had just begun.” So, we now know that Peter (who we presume is the backpack wearing guy at the top of the poster) is probably going to escape Russia and come to America. And, just to make sure that there aren’t any doubts, there’s an American flag prominently displayed on the poster. There is also what appears to be a small town church and a few two-story houses. Peter’s heading to the heartland and good for him. Small town America comes under a lot of criticism but I’ve been to and lived in a few small towns and I usually had a pretty pleasant time. Despite their reputation, small towns are often more hospitable to newcomers than big cities.

Hey, so far, so good! The villains are Russian. The setting is small town America. Peter appears to be a totally decent teenager. This poster features a lot of reasons to be optimistic. Or, at least, it does until you look in the bottom left corner and you see that Peter appears to be playing soccer….

OH NO! IS THIS A SOCCER MOVIE!?

Well, fear not. Yes, the film does involve some soccer but, to be honest, the inclusion of soccer kind of makes sense. When Peter enrolls in his new American high school, he struggles to fit in. He can barely speak English. He is confused by most American customs. When someone asks him if he has any “records” from his previous school, he says that he enjoys music and this leads to the following comment from one of his classmates:

Poor Peter! As we saw at the start of the film, Peter has not had an easy life. He was born in Russia and when the communists discovered that his family was secretly Christian, Peter’s parents were shipped off to a reeducation camp and Peter was tossed into an orphanage. He eventually escaped, running all the way to Finland and then on to the American embassy. He defected and briefly became a celebrity. After being placed with a new American family, Peter enrolled at the local high school and discovered that American teenagers can be cruel.

But, we were talking about soccer, right?

Eventually, the few friends that Peter has made encourage him to try out for the team. Peter does start playing soccer and it turns out that he’s the best player in the school. And again, it makes sense as he’s the only student in the school who was born in a country where soccer is more popular than American football. (Of course, today, it seems strange that any high school would only have one student who wasn’t born in the U.S.) Unfortunately, since Peter insists on carrying his Bible around with him everywhere that he goes and trying to lead a prayer group on school ground, the school’s principal is not sure that Peter can be allowed to continue playing. The principal’s office is decorated with a print of Normal Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, just in case you had any doubt that the school was being run by a Lefty version of Frasier Crane.

Not only does Peter have to deal with the school and its rules but the KGB is also after him. And his foster brother has lost his faith! Peter has a lot to deal with. Fortunately, his new foster family has a station wagon that he can drive around town while he’s thinking.

The best part of Gold Through The Fire is the beginning of the film, when Peter is trying to escape from Russia. That part of the film moves at a steady pace and, even more importantly, it captures the feel of living in a situation where you’re not allowed to think or speak for yourself. It perfectly captures the drabness of dictatorship. Unfortunately, once Peter gets to America, the action starts to drag, the actors are a bit less convincing in their roles, and the film gets bogged down in trying to convince us that America is just one step away from turning into Russia. There are also few too many awkward pop cultural references, as if the filmmakers were desperate to convince us that they understood what high school students were into despite not being in high school themselves. Today, the film works best as a time capsule. Everything about it, from the cars to the clothes to the hair to dialogue, simply screams 80s. Watching this film is like stepping into a time machine.

And hey, the soccer stuff isn’t actually that bad. That said, it’s hard for me to watch anything featuring soccer without being reminded of this:

Live Tweet Alert: Join #FridayNightFlix for The Running Man!

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting the first #FridayNightFlix of 2022! The movie? 1987’s The Running Man!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

The Running Man is available on Prime and Paramount! See you there!

Here’s The Trailer for Emily

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Everyone gets an origin story!

Right now, on Netflix, you can see the origin story Edgar Allan Poe in the film, The Pale Blue Eye.

And, on February 17th, you can go to theaters and watch the origin story of Emily Bronte in Emily.

Here’s the trailer:

January Positivity: The Gathering (dir by Daniel Carrales)

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1998 film, The Gathering, is about people who keep having visions.

Michael Carey (Daniel Kruse), for instance, is a successful advertising executive who suddenly sees a portal forming high in the sky and people turning into globes of light as they are transported upward.

His wife is at the playground, talking to her best friend about what a drag her husband has become ever since he got on the whole religious kick when suddenly, she has a vision in which all of the children have vanished.

Michael’s mother-in-law gets the worst of it. She’s a professor at the local college and she’s introduced explaining to a student that the only way to pass her class is to be an atheist. (The student needs to call a lawyer, to be honest.) Suddenly, the professor is having all sorts of visions, that majority of which involve her betraying people to a shadowy government organization. She betrays her best friend and colleague. She betrays her own daughter. She betrays everyone.

While his wife and his mother-in-law shrug off the visions and claim that there must be a normal explanation for why they’re all visualizing a similar future, Michael turns into an evangelist and starts telling everyone about what he’s seeing. He is especially upset when he discovers that one of his clients is going to be at the forefront of encouraging everyone to get a microchip inserted under their skin. (We already know from the professor’s visions that people who don’t have the chip will be hunted down and killed in the streets.) People start to feel a bit uncomfortable around Michael. He loses his job and his family but still, when the portal appears in the sky, he’s among those who vanish. His wife and his mother-in-law are not lucky, which sounds like the start of a really sexist joke. (“Those seven years between the rapture and the second coming were the first peace and quiet I got during my entire marriage!”)

Clocking in at 57 minutes, The Gathering was produced and released at a time when the Left Behind books were climbing the best seller charts. It pretty much follows the same formula as those books, with the emphasis less on being a Christian and more on imagining the misery that awaits everyone who isn’t. In this film, if you’re not a believer, you’re going to be stuck in a world where all of the color has been desaturated and everyone has to wear really ugly, communist-style clothes. It’s a world where the government monitors everyone’s actions and where questioning those in charge can lead to you being either executed or sent to reeducation camp. When viewed today, the film feels more like a political tract than a religious one, with the smug but bland and process-obsessed villains serving as a perfect representation of what almost everyone hates about dealing with the bureaucratic state.

Not surprisingly, the film’s budget is low. There are a few effective shots. I liked the way that the clouds would “speed up” whenever anyone was starting to have a vision but then the extremely cheap-looking portal appeared in the sky and ruined the illusion. The film is quickly paced and its portrayal of life under a dictatorship feels believable. At the same time, a lot of the acting is amateurish and the film itself seems to be more about scaring people than making a case for its beliefs. It really does seem like the intended audience for this film were people who just wanted to imagine their atheist neighbors having to dress like Trotsky. But, hey, at least it’s less than an hour long.