PG-13 for suicide.  While the topic of suicide is throughout the piece, including seeing two separate people commit suicide, the rest of the content is almost making up for the fact that there isn't much offensive material in this.  If one truly wanted to be bothered by the content, there are discussions that imply sexuality, but nothing actually sexual happens on screen.  But the suicide thing isn't to be ignored.  I'm actually kind of floored that The Hours managed to avoid an R-rating.

DIRECTOR: Stephen Daldry

Oh Lord.  I'm writing on an empty tank.  I want to collapse and run away from the world, which is appropriate when writing about Virginia Woolf.  I've always had a hard time with Virginia Woolf.  Virginia Woolf is...difficult.  When people praise her works, it's not that I'm coming from a place of disrespect.  I am always in awe of how her work challenges me.  But I also have a hard time distancing elements of Woolf from my own personal moral philosophies and upbringing.

It's a challenge, let me tell you. In the back of my head, I'm struggling with the following phrase: "If you dislike Woolf and similar feminist novels, you cannot be a feminist."  To that, I don't have much retort.  There are waves and splinter philosophies of feminism.  To drop a specific branch of feminism to which I ascribe, I would be lacking. It's just that Woolf and similar writers always frustrated me.  I understand the goal. I empathize and support the goal.  However, there's something about Woolf that always seems to glorify suicide.  Part of what is leading me to that result is the outcome of history.  Woolf, as shown in the opening scene of The Hours, kills herself.  Like Sylvia Plath, it's part of her mystique.  Can I really say that is something that Woolf is about when she's still contextually within her own history?  I don't know.  Woolf was suicidal for an unfortunate amount of her life.  She dealt with mental illness and ultimately succumbed to that mental illness. But part of me wants to hold Woolf to the fire when it comes to suicide.  It's not that I'm unsympathetic.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  I'm overly-sympathetic.  It's just that we see these thoughts in the followers of Woolf.  

Lord knows I have been frustrated with Kate Chopin's The Awakening.  I keep being told that it is a work of brilliance and yet the idea of abandoning one's life and commitments always gets under my skin.  I will never know what it truly means to be a woman.  I may indulge traditionally feminine traits.  I may consider myself an ally.  But I'll never know enough of what it means to be a woman to speak from a place of authority.  But these stories are more depressing and despondent than they should be.  With The Awakening, Monsieur Pontellier definitely sucks.  And a lot of it has to do with the historical context, but his suckiness is never really reflected back at him.  From an outside perspective, we see these toxic elements and we beg him not to indulge these behavioral choices.  But Mrs. Pontellier?  She rarely vocalizes her frustrations with mental illness and the burdens of being a mother.  When she abandons her family and eventually kills herself, any critical analysis may consider the question, "Why did she do that?" From Mr. Pontellier's perspective, this all just seemed so random and unhinged.  The same kind of holds true for Woolf and me.

There's something glamorous about mental illness in feminism.  While Woolf's suicide has been analyzed and deconstructed numerous times, the other stories in The Hours also harken to a need to escape the burdens of family.  Laura goes to a hotel to kill herself by overdose.  Richard, a gay man, kills himself in a stunning display of mania.  (If I had the patience or time, I wouldn't make the quick connection between Richard's homosexuality and feminism.) Clarissa wants to flee the confines of a restricted marriage and parenthood.  That need to flee is overwhelming.  But I wonder if The Hours takes the same ignorant perspective on mental illness that I do.  I can't deny that The Hours is smart.  It worships at the altar of Virginia Woolf.  The portrayal of the character and her need to die is never directly criticized.  But my frustration with the feminine plight is the fallout that comes in the unwritten epilogue.  It bothers the heck out of me what comes out of the glorified suicide.  And maybe the film is a bit critical of that.

Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is the Macguffin of the story.  It's almost this cursed object, similar to the Ark of the Covenant.  It's something of great beauty, but it ultimately poisons the beholder.  Laura is reading the book and seems sad a lot.  I kind of get where the book might appeal to her.  She feels smothered by this relationship to a dumpy husband, played by John C. Reilly.  Poor John C. Reilly.  He's the dumpy husband who can't bring his wife happiness. From all evidence, Dan is trying to be the supportive husband.  He doesn't criticize his wife.  He buys flowers for her, unlike Mrs. Dalloway's wayward spouse.  It's even his birthday.  He has low expectations which he never verbalizes.  Yet, Laura has an almost hatred for his attempts at perfection.  She doesn't express that outwardly, but she gives the vibes that she can never live up to the expectations of society.  She's criticized for never being able to bake a cake.  But she does these small, almost silent cries of help.  She romantically kisses her neighbor, who doesn't view that as something inappropriate.  (I know that there are different personalities than me, but I can promise you that I've never been so overwhelmed by someone other than my wife that I have to kiss them.)  We are absolutely meant to sympathize with this lonely housewife.  But look how that directly correlates to Richard.

Richard commits suicide.  Laura never kills herself (despite the absolutely shameless mislead), but she leaves him.  There's this binary answer that the story provides that implies that troubled women have two choices: commit suicide or abandon your family.  Chopin's Awakening merges those two options.  But Richard's life is dictated by his mother's leaving.  When Laura returns upon Richard's death, there is a pall of shame cast over her.  It's not absolute.  It's there, but Claire Daines treats her with dignity and understanding.  Clarissa probably sympathizes with Laura's decision to leave her child, who worshipped her.  Is there poison in worship, I wonder?  Both Dan and her child worshipped Laura and she hated them for that.  Maybe not hated, but held it against them.  Virginia verbally assaults her husband for trying to keep her alive.  It's a form of worship and we are punished for trying to keep our gods alive.  But yet, from any other perspective, we would see these family members bending over backwards to protect a loved one as noble.

It's just this big muddied message and I kind of like it more than I thought I would.  But I also feel like The Hours stoops itself to my stupid level.  It does feel like it doesn't forgive women for leaving or for committing suicide.  There are repercussions.  This leads me to my weird final thought.  Is the message muddied because it is made entirely by men?  The novel was written by a man.  The screenplay was written by a man.  It was directed by a man.  It starred women.  What an odd approach to something that should have a degree of nuance.  Of course I'm going to applaud the discussion of fallout because that casts judgment upon these women for taking what would be considered a cowards way out for a man.  I've been avoiding saying that because it's a bit of "whataboutism", but it's on my mind.  These women needed mental help.  And the film's ultimate message should be that the 1920s and the 1950s needed to have proper mental health services.  But they didn't.  But 2002 did have proper mental health services.  And yet, the cycle continues.  It's dark and it's brooding and it feels like it was made by dudes.

So I liked it, but I almost feel like I wasn't supposed to.  Is the glorification of Virginia Woolf a condemnation of her as well?  It's well acted (for the most part) and it's well made.  But it isn't the complex piece that some people make it out to be.  I think it has the problem of wanting to play both sides of the argument.  But that's okay, because that's what I do.  

Rated R for slasher movie violence.  Again, Scream tends to stay away from the outright nudity, but the notion of sexuality isn't something it shies away from.  If anything, the overall repeating motif of sexuality is central to the story, even if it doesn't quite seem like it.  The language is pretty typical for a Dimension Films horror movie, so keep all of this in mind when watching.

DIRECTOR:  Wes Craven

I don't regret watching this one for a second.  I mean, I thought I was going to regret watching this one.  Scream 3 was always the stinker in the series for me.  For a guy who really dug the Scream movies as a doorway to horror movies, the third entry always seemed like a disappointment to me.  I didn't realize that Kevin Williamson didn't write this one, but it definitely feels like someone else with some different sensibilities took over writing on this movie.  Everything that made Scream special was somehow tacky in this one.  The ending, with Roman being the sole killer, somehow read as stupid to me.  And I'm not saying that Scream 3 is a genius movie.  But I will tell you...Scream 3 might have been a gutsier movie than what I thought it was back in 2000.

I'm not sure what direction I want to take this blog.  I think I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room, and then end on the disappointments that this movie presents as a movie in-and-of-itself.  This movie watches so much better in 2022 because Ehren Kruger was writing something so darned confrontational that I can't believe that the movie was being made.  It's a full-on attack on Hollywood that we took to be one big meta joke.  The problem is, it kind of wasn't a joke?  Please forgive me, because I'm going to be speculating quite a bit while writing this.  I'm looking at Kruger's other credits and none of them stand out as original or particularly amazing.  I mean, people really preach Top Gun: Maverick, but it's a direct knockoff of Star Wars.  So what I will be writing may very well be an alternative history to what was going through Ehren Kruger's mind. (Sidenote: Wes Craven is directing a movie written by someone named "Kruger"?) 

The movie is a full-on assault of Hollywood sex scandals, in particular Harvey Weinstein.  Now, this is where we go on two different timelines.  One read of the movie is tongue-in-cheek, laughing at the "boys will be boys" attitude of the studio system.  That's the way I viewed it in 2000.  I apologize. I was in high school and also living in 2000, a beacon for political incorrectness.  I don't want to forgive a social sin, but everyone viewed this stuff as normal.  But I'd like to think that Ehren Kruger saw the trope of the casting couch and really wanted to say something about it.  I want to believe this reality because he brought it to the Weinsteins to make.  Harvey Weinstein, the monster whose crimes inspired the #metoo movement, directly oversaw a film where a movie studio producer would rape girls in exchange for choice movie roles.  His sexual assault on women led to lives being destroyed in its wake.  Roman would never have been rejected, leading to the survival of Maureen Prescott.  Billy Loomis may have had a normal life, under the caring parentage of both a mother and a father.  All of the events of the Scream movies find their origin in the avatar for Harvey Weinstein and his sex dungeon.

Now, we can't use Scream as a documentary.  It's clearly a work of genre fiction.  But using John Milton (okay, that's a pretty lazy name) and his privilege as a starting point for a conversation works really, really well.  It's the notion of fallout.  From Milton's perspective, he's doing what Hollywood royalty has always done.  Meeting Rina Reynolds / Maureen Prescott was borderline forgettable to him.  If Maureen Prescott wasn't murdered in a public way, Rina Reynolds would have been lost to history.  When Sidney confronts Milton, he's defensive because he doesn't really see how any of this has to do with him.  While what he says is played up for a joke, Milton's pleading with Roman stresses his complete naiveté towards his culpability in the story.  He offers Roman fame and creative control over movies.  He can't imagine that his actions had led him to this moment.  And maybe one of the reasons that we can't understand that is that the movie doesn't really let us.

This is where the alternate interpretation of Kruger's script comes in.  Milton is a bit part in this movie.  In all of the Scream movies, we have deaths that overall don't contribute to the overall narrative.  They're often for the sake of body count and to keep the film suspenseful.  I'm talking about Principal Himbry from the first film.  Cece Becker in the second movie is there to connect dots to the first film, but she has nothing to do with the story.  John Milton is there as a tertiary plot point.  Kevin Williamson kept a lot of things to the background of the Scream movies.  But Milton is key to the motivation of Roman to do all the things he does in the film.  Because Milton is treated as almost a joke or a walking corpse, it makes Roman completely unhinged in that last sequence.  Roman and Cotton Weary actually have a lot in common, acting as lost opportunities for storytelling.  As I mentioned in my Scream 2 entry,  Cotton Weary should really have a great story and characterization behind him.  The same is true for Roman.

Roman is perhaps one of the more forgettable killers in the franchise.  He's the first one who is a solitary killer.  Okay.  That's fine. But we're never really allowed to empathize with Roman, despite the hand holding in the final moments of the scene.  (I'm going to go as far as to say Roman's final, predictable scare undoes what little sympathy Craven imbued to the character.)  Roman grew up unprotected by the monsters around him like John Milton.  If it helps, keep reminding yourself that John Milton is an avatar for Harvey Weinstein, the producer of the movie.  He's an artist, albeit a troubled one.  And he sees men destroy women and those women destroying families.  I do want to criticize the portrayal of Maureen Prescott in this movie, but give me a minute.  He begs for normalcy and the evil keeps on happening.  I don't want to excuse a serial murderer, but from a fictional world, he should come across as nuanced and tired.  Instead, Roman is a character screaming with gleeful sadism.  He's killing Sidney, yes, out of jealousy.  But he's also ending the legacy of Maureen Prescott.  There should be something suicidal about Roman's march on the Prescott lineage.  

When Roman is killing these people, he leaves behind pictures of a young Rina Reynolds.  These are things that Gale Weathers never touched on.  I really have to stress that I'm not defending Roman so much as forcing us to look at the character from his perspective.  From his perspective, he's the hero of the story.  He has this legacy in front of him.  (Oddly enough, the sequels to his movie stay away from Roman's master plan because Scream 3 is considered one of the lesser Scream movies, but that would make almost no sense from Sidney's perspective.)   If he's the hero of the story, he's shedding light on the monster factory that is Hollywood.  He's fashioned his entire persona as director to try to shut down sex scandal after sex scandals.  He's trying to stop future Maureen Prescott morality plays.  Yes, he goes off the deep end, choosing the selfish narrative of destroying Maureen's actual legacy.  But I find it odd that John Milton is not his primary focus.  He understands the victimization that Maureen / Rina went through, and yet chooses to redirect that energy into Sidney?  I mean, I guess.  It does make him mighty villainous.

Okay, so I got that argument out of the way.  It wasn't well done and I acknowledge that.  But I do have to talk about why Scream 3, unfortunately, kind of sucks?  In terms of actual genre storytelling, Efran Kruger and Wes Craven really like something that Kevin Williamson does not: ghosts.  Williamson's entire treatise is grounding the slasher genre.  Yes, it goes off the rails eventually.  But if the Scream movies are commentary for horror in general, there needs to be a grounded element for it.  The idea that Sidney is going to hallucinate her dead mother doesn't really work.  Couple this idea that Roman is going to play up these hallucinations by setting up scenes with the dead Maureen is a bit of a stretch.  In the first Scream, the story of Maureen Prescott is in the background.  Yeah, I can see that, in the epic conclusion of a trilogy, that one might want to bring that to foreground. But all it did was make the story tacky.  Ghosts and moving corpses doesn't really scream Scream (I'm proud of that, by the way).  

​Also, Randy should have been the mastermind.  

Rated R for nudity, sex, violence, and language.  If the original Shaft felt a little tame, this is Gordon Parks letting a bit more loose.  By no means is it necessarily vulgar or shameless, but it is definitely less ashamed to be what it is.  I'm going to make the comparison to James Bond a lot in this blog, so just be aware that Bond also pushes the envelope a bit more.  

DIRECTOR:  Gordon Parks

I am struggling for air.  There was some dramatic news today at work that might affect if I can ever write this blog again.  Blogging about every movie I watch is one of those habits that is good for me, but is part of my stress.  It's not that I won't choose to do it.  It's just that I don't know if I will have time to do it.  Do you know how some people say that you make time for the important things?  If things go poorly, finding time to write a blog about every movie I see will be like squeezing water from a stone.   But let's make the most out of it while I can.  Sure, I'm emotionally drained, but maybe I'll find joy from writing for half-an-hour.

Now, this is what I thought Shaft was all about.  I sometimes see people wearing Superman T-shirts or having Superman decals on their cars.  I don't want to gatekeep.  If Superman is just the logo to them, that's completely reasonable.  We kind of understand that Superman, as a concept, transcends Superman as either a cartoon, a movie, or a comic book character.  For a long time, that's what Shaft was for me.  It was the Isaac Hayes thing.  It was an element of cultural literacy.  He was the face of Blaxspoitation and he just seemed really cool.  But my first real exposure to Shaft was the 2000 movie with Samuel L. Jackson.  Sure, he was cool then, but it was more about seeing Samuel L. Jackson beat dudes up to the Shaft theme song.  When I finally watched the first movie, Shaft became something very different for me.  It was an MGM film that kind of fed into what a lot of the '70s were already feeding me.  It was a detective story that didn't make a lot of sense.  The name was supposed to sell it, kind of like I mentioned with Klute.  I was actually pretty disappointed to find out that the Criterion for Shaft came with Shaft's Big Score! because I wasn't planning on writing on all of the Shaft movies.  But I might just have to change that.

I told you that I would be making comparisons to James Bond and here's the pay-off.  What Shaft's Big Score does for Shaft is what From Russia with Love does for Dr. No.  Everything about Dr. No, divorced from the cultural understanding of what James Bond would eventually become, is actually kind of a forgettable movie.  I'm sorry.  I like it, but it definitely reads as a detective novel based upon the world of Ian Fleming.  Bond's jokes are blunted.  He doesn't really have that many flings so much as women are interested in him.  While the eponymous Dr. No is doing some heavy hitting crime, the world of that crime is basically localized to Jamaica.  It all feels...small, for a James Bond story that is.  But when From Russia with Love came out?  Everything changed. Everything gained a sense of scope that made us realize that James Bond was not just one thing.  The hero would be the same, but the stories would be different.  The irony of everything that I have written is that Bond would eventually become a formula.  But Shaft never really had that many movies.  It didn't really have time to fall into the realm of formula.

I mean, it's like they took the Bond playbook and applied it to Parks's film.  Even down to the fact that there's a second theme song that is not nearly as well known as Isaac Hayes's classic is kind of a testament to what was going on with this movie.  The story actually kind of makes a lot of sense. I'll go as far as to say that the first Shaft has a lot of the same plot problems that Dr. No has.  The characters kind of just end up where they are supposed to be, take a lot of damage, and save the day.  But with Shaft's Big Score!, there's a story that absolutely works and has some sense of cohesion.  I'm not saying I get every beat.  I really don't.  The whole subplot with Kelly playing off the separate criminal groups is a bit confusing. But the story of Shaft trying to beat out everyone to finding the lost money?  Holey moley it works.  On top of that, everything just feels tighter when it comes to storytelling and editing.  I'm actually kind of shocked that Shaft's Big Score! gets kind of ignored considering that it was just considered a bonus feature on a Criterion double disc set.

In the last Shaft blog, I talked a little bit about Shaft's murky morality.  Shaft enters this area of Grey Jedi (I'm going to make a confession.  I haven't actually seen that season of The Clone Wars yet, but know enough to fake it) where that kind of becomes his code.  Much like a Ronin, Shaft has to dabble in questionable morality for him to succeed. For the sake of the story that the audience watches, Shaft is the good guy.  The movie actually locks in that he's a good guy by saving the money for the Bronx children's hospital or center. (I now forget and refuse to look it up.)  But Shaft also is quickly comfortable with buddying up with bad dudes in this one.  Yeah, he ends up taking them all out, but only once they abuse their relationships with him.  I do appreciate, once again, the Bondian influence of bad guy in this one.  There's a guy whose entire persona is playing the clarinet and being polite.  And Shaft beats the living daylights (pun intended) out of him.  It's just so on brand for what I understood Shaft to be that I can't help but smile while watching the movie.

But my biggest takeaway from this movie is Gordon Parks himself.  Gordon Parks did the first film.  He does a pretty good job.  He made the studio a lot of money.  He quickly turns around and makes another Shaft movie.  It's adapted from a series of books, so it at least makes sense how he can get a script together in an absurdly short amount of time.  But Parks was kind of a revolutionary.  I read the insert from the Criterion Blu-ray, something I never do.  (I appreciate the books and booklets, but who has the time?)  Parks is genuinely being a filmmaker here.  He fights an uphill battle to get Shaft part of the mainstream, but then makes a movie that ramps up all the stakes?  I mean, Shaft chases a helicopter, drives a boat, flees a helicopter on foot?  How does this movie exist?  It becomes way more of a fun movie.  Yeah, the first film ends with Shaft massacring a hotel full of bad guys.  But there's almost no choreography in that sequence.  (Except for the rappelling in through the window, which is admittedly peak Shaft.)  Sure, it gets absurd that Shaft doesn't die in this sequence, especially when chased on foot down a path that the guy can't miss.  But that sequence would hold its own against a Bond movie any day.  It's really fun and the whole film is just a good time.

I went from being "Let's get his over with" to actively watching this and wanting to finish the franchise.  I mean, I admitted to having already seen the 2000s edition.  Why not watch it again with the cultural context I drastically needed?  Shaft's Big Score is good enough to merit watching Shaft in Africa and the reboot of Shaft.  That might be a testament to the film itself.

Rated R for some really odd nudity and sexual content, mostly juxtaposed with gore and violence. It's not even so much sexual, but with the knowledge that the sexuality is happening off-screen somewhere.  The movie goes for upsetting at times, despite the fact that the majority of the movie plays into suspense.  The movie also talks about concepts of rape and language.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Zach Cregger

I told myself that I wouldn't watch this movie.  Like with Black Phone, the same student told me that this movie was unwatchable because of how disturbing it got.  But I really liked Black Phone.  Then Henson told me how good Barbarian was and I had to view it for myself.  I've learned a couple things. The main thing I learned is that my student and I have drastically different tastes.  

But I should tell you ahead of time: I had a different experience than most people did with this movie.  When my student told me not to see Barbarian, I asked him what it was about.  I'm somehow fallen off the grid of seeing movies in the theater.  It's not that I don't love going to the movies.  I do.  But I have too many kids and it feels like we need to save babysitters for emergencies at this point.  I also like talking to my wife on the few times that we can get someone to watch the kids.  So I asked the student to tell me about it and he spoiled the whole incest monster thing.  I didn't mind.  Again, I thought that I wasn't going to be watching this movie because grossness isn't my favorite subgenre of horror.  But honestly, Barbarian ended up being one of my favorite horror movies that has come out in a while.  I mean, I like other horror movies.  But in terms of sheer quality, Barbarian has it going on.

But the big pull for me was that this movie was not going to be en vogue in a few years.  Heck, I'm kind of damning myself by being simultaneously for-this-movie and being aware that maybe something is just a bit too off-color when it comes to this movie.  From a frightening perspective, the movie really works.  I'm over-paraphrasing Hitchcock that it's more about the anticipation than it is about the gun going off.  That's what this movie is.  Like with Jaws, we know something is wrong.  We see the effects of scary things happening in the background of this AirBnB, but we don't actually have a lot of experience with the Mother herself.  Even knowing what the big twist on the story was, I was confused how the film planned to get to its final destination.  And even when talking about how we were going to get to secret incest tunnels, Cregger uses some real meta casting to make it happen.  Henson swears that Bill Skarsgård is too weird looking to play a normal dude.  I disagree with that.  Yeah, I'll always know him as Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.  But the movie made him seem like a handsome and charming dude.

But even when he's acting like a handsome and charming dude --or even because he's acting as a handsome and charming dude --I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Everything in the film seems part of it.  It is almost a movie built on a foundation of red herrings.  The weird part of the movie, for a long time, has to do with the unlikely idea that two people shouldn't be double-booked for the same home.  Cregger plays with expectations, telling the story of how it is like being a single woman in a patriarchal society.  Everything that Tess does is strategic, even when Keith is doing the things that society encourages men to do.  It actually, oddly enough, makes him creepier when he's being a perfect gentleman.  Now, part of that comes from the fact that the casting is Bill Skarsgård, but the other point comes from Cregger and his stressing of themes that ultimately do not play a large role in the overall role in the story.  But even that comment is a bit dismissive because these are themes that somehow make the tapestry all that much more rich.

Even up to the moment when the shoe drops, we're questioning Keith's intention.  I love that we get a mislead about who the villain is until the absolute last moment.  Keith, crawling out of the cave, swearing he was bitten and that the Mother was right behind Tess is such a great fake out.  We just get this idea that this man has to be predatory.  And the crazy part about the theme is not that Tess should learn to trust guys.  It's that the world has forced Tess to be so paranoid that she can't stop herself from trying to parcel toxic data from society.  It's heartbreaking in an interesting way.  Then we have to contrast Tess as the proper heroine of the film to AJ, who is just the worst. Honestly, if Keith and Tess were the entire movie, I would wonder about what Cregger is trying to say with the movie.  But AJ really clears up the message.  Tess comes across as neurotic until we see characters like AJ. And, yeah, if you want to look at AJ as being a bit on the nose, you do you.  AJ, to me, is the problem that Hollywood has been trying to unpack for a while.  

AJ is a fairly likable guy.  He's played by Justin Long, for goodness' sake.  I mean, from the moment he's accused of raping the girl, there's something instantly distrustful about him.  We are meant to question whether or not he actually did it because the movie preys on the worst elements of ourselves.  It's just that AJ's introduction comes after Tess's distrust of Keith got him killed.  If AJ was a good dude, Tess's internal conflict would have been problematic.  But it is guys like AJ that remind us why Tess is nervous around guys like Keith.  If anything, Tess's resolve to be cautious around people is confirmed because it is Tess's decision to save AJ that gets her thrown off a water tower at the end of the film.  You can see Zach Cregger's comedy background in his pacing with AJ.  AJ has this fantastic speech (that's sprinkled with a hint of irony) about the role of sin in life.  There's this internal conflict that AJ faces, wondering about the goodness of the self.  There's the fakeout that AJ would turn his life around, given a second chance at life.  But when facing his own mortality, we see how bad of a person he is.  He runs when he should fight.  He shoots when he should evaluate.  He throws Tess off the roof of a water tower to save his own skin.  And yet, his default is to turn back and to tell himself that he's a good person.  It's interesting.

But, like I said, this movie will probably be out of style, given enough time.  We don't really make freak-movies anymore.  As much as I like the film for its suspense and it's execution, there is the notion of demonizing disability.  To a certain extent, it's ableism.  But even more so, the Mother is a literal superhuman monster.  Because she's the product of incest, she's as tall as the ceiling.  Her skin is rotting and she lives like a beast, kidnapping and killing to allow her to indulge her childlike understanding of what it must be to be a mother.  Now, you might say that it is pretty okay to comment on this element of society, especially considering that we have an appropriate taboo towards incest.  But the crime of incest wasn't done by the Mother.  She is the victim of this crime. Yeah, it gives the Mother a moment of sympathy.  But really, imagine being the product of incest.  It can't be easy, living this life.  And then a horror movie comes out and depicts products of incest as literal monsters. It's kind of the same way we're probably going to stop pointing out deformities as something to be feared. If the movie wasn't so good, I'd probably be railing harder against it.  (Which is kind of my point.  I'm a bad person for forgiving it so quickly.)

But the movie absolutely stunning.  I don't know if it felt like Detroit outside of establishing shots, but I'm always glad to see Detroit represented.  I know it works for horror movies, which is odd that I'm letting that element go.  But still, big ups for the D.