To be honest, I thought that someone had already done a remake of Black Christmas but I guess we’re getting a new one. Maybe it’s going to become a new holiday tradition. Every year, we’ll get a new Black Christmas and we can go to the theater and all yell out, “The call is coming from inside the house!” at the same time.
And you know what? I think that’ll bring people together. I mean, we can only spend so much time hoping that the MCU will continue to bring filmgoers together. Myself, I’ve been a bit disenchanted ever since Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame and the fact that the most charming member of the MCU has apparently been taken out of the MCU and sent back to Sony kind of makes me wonder if perhaps the MCU’s glory days might be over with.
My point is, we need a new franchise to bring us together and an annual remake of Black Christmas might just be what Doctor Strange ordered.
Anyway, here’s the latest trailer for Black Christmas, which will be released on December 13th. Hopefully, somebody in Hollywood learned a lesson from the mismarketing of David Fincher’s version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and they won’t advertise this as being the “Feel Bad Movie Of The Holidays.”
(Yes, 8 years later and I’m still bitter about that.)
When he was just a child, Anton Shaw disappeared, the victim of an apparent kidnapping. He was missing for days until he was found with little memory of where he had been or who had abducted him. He’s haunted by dreams of his mother being taken away from him, her farewell cry of “Adieu,” ringing in his mind.
As an adult, Anton (played by Tony Eusoff) is a private investigator, working in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. He’s not a particularly successful detective. In fact, as the film begins, it seems like he spends more time reading old paperback novels about other detectives than doing any investigating of his own. Even as an adult, he’s haunted by dreams and random flashes of memories, all linking back to the trauma that he suffered as a child.
When Anton is hired to investigate the disappearance of a college student named Lumya (Jurias Hartman), he soon finds himself plunging into the underworld of Kuala Lampur. Everyone from Lumya’s dance instructor to her art teacher seems to have something to hide and, for once, Anton’s problem is not having enough options but instead having too many. Everyone seems as if they may have had something to do with Lumya’s disappearance and the more that Anton digs, the more he finds himself obsessing on his own disappearance. Could these two mysteries somehow be linked?
While Anton investigates, he also reads a book. The book, with is credited to no author and no publisher, appears to be a choose your own adventure-type book from the 1980s and the choices that it asks the reader to make are unmistakably similar to the choices that Anton will have to make to solve not only Lumya’s mystery but his own as well. Does the book hold the answers to Anton’s questions or is both his disappearance and Lumya’s destined to just be another unsolved mystery in a world that’s full of them?
Shadowplay is a wonderfully surreal mystery from director Tony Pietra Arjuna. Tempting as it may be to call Shadowplay a film noir, perhaps a better label would be neon noir. The city of Kula Lampur is definitely one of the stars of the film with, Arjuna capturing the urban landscape with its mix of beauty and danger. The neon of the city glows in each scene, adding a progressively more and more menacing tint to each chapter of Anton’s story. When Anton’s investigation leads him to a bar, Ich bin ein Berliner glows, in purple lettering, from a wall, a reminder that all things will ultimately be commercialized. Towards the end of the film, when Anton meets some very bad people, the neon gives off a red glow that warns us of the blood that will soon be spilled. Throughout it all, the synthpop score (provided by Stellar Dreams) pulses in the background, adding to the film’s dream-like feel.
Shadowplay is a film that keeps you off-balance. It’s a film that keeps you wondering what’s real and what is just a fragment of memory or a figment of imagination. It’s a film that welcomes a second viewing, just so you can pick up on the clues that you might have missed the first time around. In the lead role, Tony Eusoff makes Anton into a sympathetic character and, even as the film grows progressively more surreal, the sincerity of his performance keeps you watching. You want to know what’s going on in his mind. You want to know the answers to his questions and the solutions to his mysteries.
Playing out like a filmed dream, Shadowplay is an existential journey worth taking. It’s played in some theaters and is currently available on VOD. I watched it on Vimeo.
When I first started high school, quite a few people told me that I needed to follow my sister Erin’s example and try out for cheerleader and I have to admit that I was occasionally tempted to do so. I never did because I already had ballet and drama club, I wanted to establish my own identity, and Erin told me that being cheerleader meant that I had to be perky all the time and, quite frankly, I’ve always needed my time to sulk. Add to that, I’ve always been a natural contrarian so my usual response to several people telling me that I need to do something is to do the exact opposite. (That was perhaps even more true in high school than it is today.)
On the one hand, I can honestly say that I have never regretted not trying out for cheerleading. On the other hand, it’s only natural to occasionally wonder, “What if?” Would I have been the nice, responsible cheerleader like the type that Kirsten Dunst played in Bring It On? Would I have been the bitchy cheerleader who cruelly maintained the school’s status quo? Or would I have been the one trying to make fetch happen? Personally, I like to think that I would have been the cheerleader who dressed in all black and who came up with snarky cheers that sarcastically commented on modern culture.
That question of “What If?” is one of the reasons why I always make sure to catch all of the Lifetime cheerleading films. The other reason is that I enjoy making Erin watch them with me so I can ask her if they’re a realistic depiction of what it was like to be a cheerleader. For instance, earlier today, I made Erin watch The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders with me and I asked her, “Is this an accurate portrayal of cheerleading?”
“Maybe if you were a cheerleader in Hell,” she replied.
In The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders, Savannah May plays Ava. Ava and her mother, Candice (Denise Richards), have just moved to a new town and that means that Ava is going to be starting at a new high school. With her mother’s very strong (some might say too strong) encouragement, Ava tries out for cheerleading and makes the squad. Soon, Ava is not only a hit with the other cheerleaders but she’s also on her way to becoming the most popular girl at school! That doesn’t sit well with Katrina (Alexandria DeBerry), the cheer captain and homecoming queen who is all about three things: trying to control everyone’s lives, hazing the Hell out of all the new recruits, and being more popular than everyone else. When Ava makes it clear that she’s going to date whoever she wants (even if he isn’t a starter on the football team) and that she’s not really that happy with all the hazing either, Katrina plots to take down her only potential rival.
There’s not a subtle moment to be found in The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders, which is why it’s perhaps the best Lifetime cheerleader film ever made. From the minute that Katrina gives Ava the side eye, we know that we’re in store for an epic battle between two differing philosophies of high school popularity, with Ava representing the way we wish things could be while Katrina represents what we secretly suspect the world to be like. The film’s signature scene is perhaps the moment when Katrina and Ava get into an impromptu dance-off on the football field. It’s so thoroughly and unashamedly over-the-top that it’s also more than a little brilliant.
I mean, seriously, this is a Lifetime cheerleader film. You don’t watch a film like this for a subtlety. You watch a film like this for scenes of Katrina live-streaming a hazing and forcing her rival to stand on edge of the roof of the school. We watch a film like this for the moment that the entire high school breaks into applause as they watch one of their classmates get led away in handcuffs. Savannah May and Alexandria DeBerry are well-cast as the rival cheerleaders and DeBerry especially deserves credit for making Katrina the most joyfully evil cheerleader in recent memory.
Whether it’s an accurate portrayal of high school cheerleading or not, The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders is an undeniably entertaining Lifetime film. It fully embraces the melodrama and we’re all better for it.
Hotshot venture capitalist Joel has a multimillion-dollar deal go up in smoke, and he and his actress wife Jessica are forced to move in with her parents and start from scratch. At the lowest and most desperate moment in his life, Joel meets old friend Nicolaus
and his business partner Lester, who are seeking investors in a new technology known as XVR—Xtreme Virtual Reality—from their company Empathy, Inc., which is said to offer the most realistic and moving experiences for users by placing them in the lives of the less fortunate. Joel gets the startup its funds but soon discovers that the tech’s creators have far more sinister uses in store for their creation and that the reality it provides its customers isn’t virtual.
Review:
I got sucked into this movie from the minute I started watching. And I’m still not sure if I’m watching real life or a VR of real life. Eric Berryman steals this movie and Zack Robidas closes the deal. Yedidya Gorsetman takes you on a fantastic ride of real life and what real life could be. There are other VR movies out there, but I don’t think I have seen one as completely put together as Empathy, Inc. is in a long time. They are two people (characters) in this movie that I haven’t even mentioned that their performance is so amazing I got lost in them.
Would I Recommend this movie?
Absolutely! Yes! Go spend your bitcoins and virtual dollars on this movie!
Now that I recommended it where can you watch?
Empathy, Inc. will have limited theater releases by Dark Star Pictures on September 13th and on VOD September 24th
If you are still hesitant and want to see a trailer first, here you go into a VR world you might not escape from!
It’s time for me to share my early Oscar predictions! With the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals currently underway, the Oscar picture does seem to be a little bit less murky. But then again, we should remember that appearances can be deceiving. Last year, at this time, most people were still expecting a First Man vs. Beale Street vs. A Star is Born Oscar race.
These predictions below take into account the reports that have been coming back from Telluride and Venice. If you want to see how my thinking has evolved over the year, be sure to check out my predictions from January, February, March, April, May, June, and July!
And now, for what their worth, here are my predictions for August:
Best Picture
1917
A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood
The Farewell
Ford v Ferrari
Harriet
A Hidden Life
The Irishman
Little Women
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Waves
Best Director
Kasi Lemmons for Harriet
Terrence Malick for A HIdden Life
Sam Mendes for 1917
Trey Edward Shults for Waves
Martin Scorsese for The Irishman
Best Actor
Antonio Banderas in Pain & Glory
Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
The year is 1919 and a brutish young man named Al (played by Rod Steiger) has just arrived in Chicago. He’s got a new job, working for the city’s top mobster, Johnny Torrio (Nehemiah Persoff). Torrio is the second-in-command to Big Jim Colosimo (Joe De Santis) and is impressed enough by the young Al to take him under his wing.
It’s an exciting time to be a gangster in Chicago because prohibition is about to become the law of the land. Alcohol is about to become illegal, which means that there will soon be an unregulated underground of people smuggling booze into the United States and selling it in speakeasies across the land. Those speakeasies are going to be need men to watch the door and to toss out troublemakers and it turns out that’s a perfect job for someone who isn’t afraid of violence.
Someone like Al, for instance.
It’s while Al is working as bouncer that he receives a long and deep gash across his face. When the wound heals, it leaves him with the scar that will come to define him for the rest of his life. As much as he hates the nickname “Scarface,” it’s what Al Capone will be known as.
The 1959 film, Al Capone, follows Capone as he works his way up the ladder of the Chicago underworld until he eventually finds himself sitting atop an empire of corruption and crime. Along the way Capone kills the majority of his rivals and finds the time to fall in love with Maureen Flannery (Fay Spain), the widow of one of his victims.
Well, perhaps love is the wrong word. As played by Rod Steiger, Al Capone isn’t really capable of loving anyone but himself. This film does not provide us with the superslick or diabolically clever Capone that has appeared in other gangster movies. Instead, Steiger plays Capone as almost being a caged animal. Capone comes to power through violence and betrayal and he uses the same techniques to hold onto power. The film suggests that the secret of his success was his complete lack of conscience but that the same arrogant stupidity that makes him so fearsome also leaves him doomed to failure. There’s really nothing subtle about Steiger’s performance but then again, there was probably nothing subtle about Al Capone, either. Steiger’s tendency to overact every moment works well in the role of a man who constantly seems to be striking out at anyone who makes the mistake of getting too close to him.
Though many films had featured characters based on Capone, Al Capone was the first biographical film to actually be made about the infamous leader of the Chicago Outfit. (Up until the mid-50s, the Hollywood Production Code expressly forbade anyone from portraying a “real” gangster in a movie.) With the exception of the character of Maureen Flannery (who was a heavily fictionalized stand-in for Capone’s then-living widow), Al Capone is fairly faithful to the know facts of Capone’s life. The film not only includes most of Capone’s violent acts (i.e., the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre) but it also explores both how Capone was protected by Chicago’s corrupt political establishment and how prohibition actually enabled the activities that it was meant to prevent. Director Richard Wilson directs in a semi-documentary style and the film’s harsh black-and-white images capture the idea of a shadowy world hidden away from “respectable” society. It’s a fast-paced film and fans of classic character acting will be happy to see James Gregory as an honest cop and Martin Balsam as a not-at-all honest reporter.
If you’re looking to put together a quick cinematic history lesson about the origins of the Mafia before you watch Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman later this year, Al Capone is a worthwhile addition to your curriculum.
Usually, I only share trailers but I simply had to share the first official movie poster for the MCU’s Black Widow, which will be coming out in May of 2020.
Seriously, this is so kickass!
Now, before you read any further, I guess I should say that I’m about share a spoiler from Avengers: Endgame. I think everyone in the world has seen that movie by now and, if you haven’t, you probably don’t care about the MCU or any of that other stuff. But still, just in case, consider this to be your SPOILER WARNING:
I really liked Avengers: Endgame but I do have to admit that it really pissed me off that they killed off Natasha. Storywise, there was no reason to kill off Natasha. If anyone in that scene needed to redeem themselves by sacrificing their life for the greater good, it was Clint! After all, Clint’s the one who spent the past few years going around the world and killing anyone who he felt didn’t deserve to still be alive. (And yes, Clint killed a drug lord at the start of the film and drug lords are evil but he also killed everyone who worked for the drug lord and some of those people were probably decent people who were doing what they had to do to survive or provide for their families.) The whole movie felt like it was set up for Clint to finally prove he deserved to be an Avenger by sacrificing his life. Instead, they killed off Natasha and it just felt totally wrong.
(It also felt rather cynical. Of course, they couldn’t kill Clint. They needed Jeremy Renner around to appear in the show about Hawkeye’s daughter that’s going to be on the new Disney streaming service.)
As the first woman to be prominently featured in multiple MCU films, Natasha was always my favorite Avenger and killing her off before she even got to star in her own movie just felt totally wrong to me. (The fact that Brie Larson’s dull Captain Marvel got her own showcase before the Black Widow will always bug me.) Still, I did take some solace from the fact that, even after Natasha’s death, there was still a Black Widow movie scheduled to come out and Scarlett Johansson would be starring in it.
Of course, then I found out that the Black Widow film is a prequel and it also sounds like the film’s ultimate goal might be to introduce Florence Pugh as the new Black Widow. Don’t get me wrong. Florence Pugh is one of the best actresses around but still, Scarlett Johansson will always be the Black Widow to me and the character’s pointless death will always bother me. So, up until a few minutes ago, I was not quite as enthusiastic about seeing the Black Widow film as you might normally expect me to be.
But, seriously, this poster is freaking perfect. It’s everything you would want a poster for a Black Widow stand alone film to be. I hope the movie itself lives up to fierceness in Natasha’s eyes.
Shortly after this 1961 film begins, 17 year-old Susan Slade (Connie Stevens) announces, “We’ve been sinful!”
She’s talking to her first lover, Conn White (Grant Williams). You would think that anyone — even someone as unbelievably naive and innocent as Susan Slade — would know better than to ever trust someone named Conn White but no. From the minute that Conn and Susan met on an ocean liner heading from South America to California, it was love at first sight. In fact, Susan was so sure of her love that she spent the night in Conn’s cabin, fully knowing that it would mean surrendering her status as an Eisenhower era good girl.
Conn laughs off her concerns about sin. He also tells her that it makes perfect sense for her not to tell her parents (played by Dorothy McGuire and Lloyd Nolan). “When we’re married,” he asks, “are you going to tell your mother every time that we make love?”
Wow, Conn still wants to get married even though he’s already had sex with her!? And he’s also extremely wealthy and stands to inherit control of a multinational corporation! He sounds like the perfect guy! Way to go, Susan!
Unfortunately, it turns out that Conn does have one flaw. He really, really likes to go mountain climbing. In fact, he’s planning on scaling fearsome old Mt. McKinley. While Susan and her family settle into life in Monterey, California, Conn heads up to Alaska. He promises Susan that he’ll keep in touch but, when she doesn’t hear from him, she fears the worse. Has he abandoned her? Was he lying when he said he wanted to get married? Then one day, she gets a call from Conn’s father, informing her that Conn fell off the mountain and died. Susan’s almost father-in-law tells her that Conn’s body cannot be retrieved from the mountain. Though it’s neither confirmed nor denied by the film, I decided that this was because Conn faked his own death to get out of having to spend any more time listening to Susan talk about sin.
Anyway, Susan’s single again but, fortunately, she does not lack for suitors. For instance, there’s the spoiled Wells Corbett (Bert Convy), who is kind of shallow and arrogant but who has a lot of money. And then there’s Hoyt Brecker (played, in reliably vacuous style, by Troy Donahue), who is poor but honest and who is also an aspiring writer. “Someday,” Susan declares,”they’ll say that Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Hoyt Brecker wrote here!” Who will Susan chose? The sensitive artist who loves her unconditionally or the arrogant rich boy who smirks his way through the whole film?
Complicating matters is the fact that Susan is …. pregnant! That’s right, this is another one of those movies from the early 60s where having sex outside of marriage always leads to an unplanned pregnancy. And, because this movie is from 1961, the only solution is for the Slades to move down to Guatemala for two years, just so they can fool the people on Monterey into believing that the baby is actually McGuire’s and that Susan Slade is not an unwed mother but is instead an overprotective older sister. Will either of Susan’s two suitors be waiting for her when she and her family return to California?
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I do understand that there’s a big difference between 1961 and 2019 and that there used to be a lot more scandal attached to sex outside of marriage and unwed pregnancy. In fact, I guess that difference is really the only thing that makes Susan Slade interesting to a modern viewer. As soon as we see that this film was directed by Delmer Daves (the poor man’s Douglas Sirk) and that it stars Troy Donahue, we know who poor Susan is going to end up with so it’s not like there’s any real surprises lurking in the film’s plot. And none of the actors, though Connie Stevens sometimes to be trying, seems to be that invested in the film’s story. Instead, Susan Slade is mostly useful of a time capsule of the time in which it was made, a time when sex outside of marriage was unironically “sinful” and the only possible punishment was either pregnancy, death, or both. Indeed, Susan Slade is less concerned about the hypocrisy of a society that would force Susan to lie about her new “brother” and more about whether bland lunkhead Troy Donaue will still be willing to marry Susan even if she’s no longer eligible to wear white at their wedding. The film seems to be asking, “After being sinful, can Susan Slade become a good girl again?” As a movie, it’s fairly turgid but as a cultural artifact of a time in which everyone was obsessed with sex but no one was willing to talk about it, Susan Slade is occasionally fascinating.
Poor Susan Slade! If only she had gotten pregnant in a 1971 film instead of one made in 1961, her story could have been so different. But no, she was sinful in the early 60s and that means she’ll be have to settle for Troy Donahue.
After, which was released back in April, tells the story of the world’s most boring college romance.
Tessa (Josephine Langford) is a beautiful, intelligent, but shy good girl who has just started college and who is struggling to fit in with her fellow students. Her new roommate has tattoos and a nose ring and Tessa’s just not sure if she can keep up with a group of campus rebels who drink, vape, and play extremely anodyne games of truth or dare. Tessa’s roommate demands to know why Tessa has so many old books. It’s because Tessa loves to read but we soon discover that her literary tastes seem to be dominated by her old high school reading list. In her lit class, she says that Pride and Prejudice is a “revolutionary feminist novel,” in a tone of voice that indicates that she googled “revolutionary feminism” for the first time the previous night.
Hardin (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin) is a bad boy because he has tattoos and he tends to smirk before leaving a room. Hardin seems like he’s …. well, I guess he’s supposed to be dangerous. He’s cynical and he says there’s no such thing as love but actually, he just needs someone to help tend to his emotional wounds. We know that he’s not really a bad dude because he likes Jane Austen and he has a copy of Wuthering Heights in his room, one that’s full of book marks, indicating that he is an actual serious student of literature. He also says that The Great Gatsby was all a dream. (Seriously, you know he’s serious about literature when he owns copies of both Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby. I imagine if the movie had lasted a few minutes longer, he would have said, “Hemingway was the poor man’s Hemingway,” and everyone’s mind would have been totally blown.)
Anyway, from the minute that a towel-clad Tessa returns to her dorm room from taking a shower and discovers Hardin sitting in the corner (and reading, of course!), it’s pretty obvious that they’re destined to fall in love. (Of course, considering that Hardin refused to leave the room so Tessa could get dressed, it was perhaps just as likely that she would end up filing a harassment complaint.) Of course, the path to true love never runs smoothly. Tessa has a sweet boyfriend that she’ll need to dump. Hardin has all sorts of emotional baggage that he needs someone to unpack for him. Still, while Hardin and Tessa are swimming in the nearby lake, Hardin says, “We could never be just friends….”
If this all sounds like bad fanfic, that’s because it is. After is based on a novel by Anna Todd. The novel started out as fan fiction and Hardin was originally named Harry Styles. Anyway, the novel sold a lot of copies and developed a reputation for being an innocent version of Fifty Shades of Grey so I guess it’s inevitable that it would later be adapted into an amazingly bad movie. I mean, the sex was the only good thing about Fifty Shades so I’m not sure why someone would say, “Let’s make a chaste version of this book!”
The main problem with After is that both Tessa and Hardin are such inherently boring characters and all the soft-focus shots in the world can’t make them interesting. It doesn’t matter how much time they spend interlocking their fingers, they never seem like people who you’d want to get stuck in a conversation with. Tessa may claim to be into “revolutionary feminism” but she only exists to find a man. She’s defined by how she feels about Hardin and Hardin seems to be the only thing she’s interested in. Meanwhile, Hardin is the worst type of phony intellectual, the self-centered rich boy who has a convenient tragedy for every occasion. Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes-Tiffin are both attractive in a “I just shot a pilot for the CW” sort of way but neither has much screen presence and, together, they generate so little chemistry that they might as well be two wax figures staring into each other’s glass eyes.
“I’m a mess,” Hardin says and Tessa agrees, “I think we’re both a mess,” and everyone who is a real mess replies, ‘Oh, fuck off, you two.”
I always worry a little bit about Chloe Grace Moretz.
Seriously, it seems as if every film in which she appears features her either losing her entire family or getting stalked by some psycho or both. It’s rare that she ever gets to play someone who is happy with their life. Even when she was cast against type as a spoiled, vacuous brat in Clouds of Sils Maria, she still came across as being the saddest spoiled, vacuous brat imaginable. Obviously, Mortez has the dramatic talent necessary to play these type of roles and, out of all the young actresses working today, she seems the most likely to still have an interesting career 30 years from now. Still, it’s hard not to wish that she could just do a nice, romantic comedy at some point in the future, if just to give her a break from constantly being menaced on screen.
This year’s Chloe Moretz Gets Stalked film was Greta. In this one, Moretz plays Frances McMullen, a waitress living in New York City. Frances lives in a nice loft, has a fantastic roommate and best friend named Erica (Maika Monroe), and a strained relationship with her wealthy father (Colm Feore). As is typical of any character played by Chloe Moretz, Frances is still struggling to come to terms with the recent death of her mother.
After Frances finds an expensive handbag on the subway, she returns it to its owner, a piano teacher named Greta Hibeg (Isabelle Huppert). Greta claims to be French and says that she’s been lonely ever since her daughter left home to study music in France. Frances needs a substitute mother. Greta needs a substitute daughter.
Can you tell where this is going?
If you said, “Together, they solve crimes!,” — well, you’re wrong but you’re still my hero. Instead, what all this leads to is Greta becoming rather obsessed with Frances. When Frances discovers that Greta has a whole closet full of handbags and that she’s not even French, Frances decides to end their friendship. However, Greta will not take no for an answer. Soon, Greta is following both Frances and Erica all around New York City. Greta even goes to Frances’s place of employment and makes a scene that leads to Frances losing her job. (Considering the amazingly ugly waitress uniform that Frances was required to wear, I’d say that Greta was doing her a favor.) Eventually, it all leads to a kidnapping, a drugging, and an unexpected visual gag involving the Eiffel Tower.
About 30 minutes into Greta, there’s a scene in which Isabelle Huppert spits a piece of chewing gum into Chloe Moretz’s hair and it was at that moment that I knew that I was going to absolutely love this film. I mean, there have been a lot of films made about people being stalked but it takes a certain amount of demented genius to have one of the world’s most acclaimed actresses actually spit a piece of gum into someone’s hair. Brilliantly, the film follows this up with a scene of Frances and Erica trying to press assault charges against Greta, all because of the gum incident. The cop is so cynical and unimpressed by their story that you just know that Frances is probably like the hundredth person to get attacked by chewing gum in just that day.
My point here is that there’s absolutely nothing subtle about Greta and we’re all the better for it. As directed by Neil Jordan, Greta is a thoroughly excessive and deliberately campy little film and definitely not one to be taken too seriously. Everything, from the lush cinematography to Greta’s sudden rages, is wonderfully over-the-top. While Moretz wisely underplays her role (because, after all, someone has to keep things at least vaguely grounded in reality), Maika Monroe and especially Isabelle Huppert dive head first into the film’s melodramatic atmosphere. Huppert, especially, deserves a lot of credit for her ferocious performance as Greta. Whether she’s cheerfully celebrating a murder by doing an impromptu dance or suddenly screaming in Hungarian, Huppert is never less than entertaining while, at the same time, remaining credible as a very threatening individual. One of the great joys of Greta is watching this masterful French actress play a Hungarian who is obsessed with Paris. (It’s also probably not a coincidence that Greta is obsessed with someone named Frances.)
There’s an interesting subtext to the Greta and Frances relationship, one that goes beyond a girl who needs a mother and a woman who needs a daughter. In many of the scenes where Greta stalks Frances, Huppert plays her as if she’s a spurned lover, crying out, “I love you!” and demanding that Frances return her phone calls. As for Frances, she’s portrayed as being an almost absurdly repressed single girl who spends all of her personal time with two very different women, the accepting and fun-loving Erica and the predatory and destructive Greta. (When Erica tells Frances that a guy who is interested in her is throwing a party, Frances says that she already has plans with Greta.) Watching Greta, it occurred to me that the film was really about Frances coming to terms with her own sexuality, with Greta representing her fears and Erica representing the peace of accepting who you are. The film may be about Greta stalking Frances but it’s also about Frances struggling to decide whether to give in to her fears or to accept her own identity.
Then again, it’s also totally possible that there’s no intentional subtext at all to this film. It might just be an entertaining film about Isabelle Huppert stalking Chloe Moretz. And that’s fine, too! Either way, it’s a fun movie.
Through the Shattered Lens 