The Banshees of Inisherin, Armegeddon Time and conclusion to Horrorfest 2022 on Monday Morning Diary (November 7)

 

 

by Sam Juliano

Election Day is tomorrow (Tuesday, November 8th).  I think we all know what is at stake.

The Banshees of Inisherin and Armegeddon Time at Teaneck multiplex

Lucille, Sammy, Jeremy and I watched two films over the weekend at the Cedar Lane Cinemas in Teaneck – on Friday and Saturday evenings. Though both films received strong reviews, we needed to see ourselves if the glowing notices were warranted. Alas they were. Both films for me get 4.5 of 5.0 and contend mightily for the end of the year honors, when I compile my “Best of 2022” list. The black comedy “Banshees”, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, is an allegorical, indeed existential meditation on loneliness which incorporates Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch and features breathtaking cinematography, shot on the sandy shores of Galway Bay, (a remote island off the coast of Ireland) and segues into a gruesome revenge fable that is brilliantly performed by Colin Ferrel, Brendan Gleason, Barry Keoghan and especially Kerry

Condon, who plays the independent-minded foil to the warring males.

James Gray’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama, “Armegeddon Time,” set in the 1980’s in Queens, during the Reagan era when Fred and Maryann Trump are dramatized making an appearance at a school – depicts an 11 year-old Jewish boy (Banks Repeta as Paul Graff) who befriends an African-American classmate, and gets into trouble after they smoke pot in the bathroom. A disciplinary scene where a belt is employed, evokes the era and underscores bad choices made by young and old, and how guilt isn’t easily overcome, as time moves forward. The film explores how race and class determine how one’s life will play out after young people are failed by the education system. Elegiac and bittersweet, the film is provocatively lensed by Darius Khondji, and the period is superbly evoked by the music and set design. Anthony Hopkins is excellent as a Holocaust survivor who warns his grandson of antisemitism, and the rest of the cast, including Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong and the aforementioned Repeta are first-rate. This is the “lightest” film of Gray’s career, but overall it may well be his best. THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN 4.5 of 5.0 ARMEGEDDON TIME 4.5 of 5.0

Jamie Uhler’s final entries in his stupendous 2022 Horrorfest:

Titane (J. Ducournau… 2021) sci-fi/body horror

Titane, the follow up to Julie Docournau’s 2016 breakthrough Raw, again teases an interesting new voice to Horror, specifically the body horror genre that her two features have darkly delved into. Raw was a visceral blood-letting, as much a political statement on vegetarianism as it was savagely cannibalistic, the results of a sorority hazing gone terrible wrong. But, as is the issue with so much media partially created in the age of social media posturing, the heft of the point was driven somewhat moot—can a ‘proper’ hazing ever go right? But thankfully Ducourau packs her film with enough stylistic film grammar and philosophical underpinnings that I didn’t read it as sophomoric. Instead, I thought it so strong that when the initial Cannes premier of Titane was announced I’d eagerly hoped a genre I know and love could maybe sneak away with the festival’s top prestigious prize.

Remarkably, it did. Only the French would see it fit to award the Palme d’Or to such a singular genre statement. But, you can see why, it couches so many of its ideas of body dimorphism, sadism and automotive sexual politics in hot-button progressivism that it’s hard to see it badly if you’re playing along to social media’s twisting ethic turns and concerns. This isn’t to say it’s not a good picture, I’d offer I quite liked it, but I’m more on the wavelength that its plot sometimes resembles a checklist of topics it’s attempting to please. No worries though, as I spent a good portion of the days and weeks afterward thinking about it and having my appreciation for it increase the more I tossed its ideas around in my head. The film, a sleekly futurist tale of Alexia, who’s unbuckling of a seat belt causes her father’s car to crash, badly scaring and altering her appearance. Most notable is a large titanium plate fitted to her skull, a scar we see when we pick back up with her as an adult working as a showgirl/stripper at car shows that border on fetishistic S&M displays out of JG Ballard’s Crash. Later, we learn she’s a serial killer, but, up to this point, the futuristic ambiguity has laced everything as partially not real or at the very least that her early car accident has fused her partially into an asexual machine that warrants off suitors by inflicting pain on their advances, herself getting off by that end of the interaction. A sexual interaction with a car furthers this reading, a scene Ducournau injects with just enough obscuring that we’re not sure if another human was present, but nevertheless, is mostly squashed when Alexia begins emitting motor oil from her vagina. Soon, all the killings mount up and Alexia is wanted, a fate that the futuristic setting puts into a dire situation because her image is plastered all around town on video screens and a 24-hour news cycle. Posing as a boy, under the hide of Vincent, a lonely man who’d lost his son, Adrian, years earlier. Becoming Adrien is obviously a challenge—Alexia is carrying the offspring of what we believe to be from a car, and she’s an adult female. Vincent is too emotionally scarred to care, and it’s becoming a nice arrangement for the clearly emotionally adrift and heavily wounded Alexia as well. But given her ever swelling stomach and painful physical constraints of wrapping her torso/breasts to look sufficiently like Adrien is outing her to Vincent’s fellow firefighters that he oversees. This plotline adds even more ambiguity, as the male camaraderie closely resembles the homoerotic nature of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, where we’re not sure if the boys dislike Alexia/Adrien because they know she’s a fake boy or because he/she threaten’s the hierarchy boys have worked for years to develop with Vincent, their god-like father figure.

In the end it all more or less coalesces, offering a delicate mix of just enough clear resolution for cinematic finality, while providing payoff for the investments in frayed philosophical readings in how the images and subtext collide and crash about that the film has so nurtured. Like Raw, I sit eagerly awaiting her next feature, because as much as I liked those two, their reliance on knowing the specific genre touchpoints she loves (here JG Ballard’s Crash, Cronenberg’s seedier efforts—including his great adaptation to the aforementioned Ballard—automotive and kinky cyberpunk and Verhoeven’s American works, specifically Showgirls meets RoboCop) drive many of the initial understandings to get into the film. Eventually, I have absolutely no doubt she’ll make a few great, wholly original works. But nevertheless what’s already been provided make any genre hound ecstatic.

Cape Fear (J. L. Thompson… 1962) thriller/classic

Cape Fear (M. Scorsese… 1991) thriller

Doing the remake first in my rewatches, I wondered a bit why Scorsese decided to do his version. It’s not that the source material and original J. Lee Thompson film aren’t terrific, but given he’d done a sequel to another 1960’s American classic with A Color of Money, I speculated in my mind what his real tie to the film was. I mean, I’ve heard Scorsese talk more about, say, The Sniper (1952), but perhaps he saw he’d covered some of that ground with Taxi Driver? No worries, a few simple production readings clarified things; Spielberg had optioned the book to be readapted, apparently wanting to do a crime-picture and Universal had begun financing the project. But eventually he deemed it too dark, so he asked Scorsese to take it off his hands in trade, taking back a Holocaust project called Schindler’s List which he’d earlier given to Scorsese. Scorsese, as an act to a friend agreed, while also doing Universal a solid, it was that production house that has rewarded him with The Last Temptation of Christ, the film he’d wanted to do for years that had depressingly alluded him to the point of near retirement. It’s easy to see why the project was attracting such heavy hitters, the source novel is gripping and complex pulp, which the original film more closely mirrors; the tale of prosecutor Sam Bowden who sees a man, Max Cady, rape a girl and testifies to put him behind bars for 8 years. Once Cady gets out, be begins a series of escalating harassment towards Sam, his wife and daughter (including the killing of the family dog) that when Sam tries to counteract it, eventually puts him in danger of being disbarred. Eventually the score must be ultimately settled, and the chilling thriller moves at a breakneck speed to conclusion. The remake meanwhile, follows much the same plot, with a few noticeable and important details, mainly that Sam didn’t see the initial Cady rape, and instead saw enough evidence to know within his heart that it had occurred to the point that when a few pieces of evidence emerge that could sway the jury in Cady’s favor Sam works to bury it so that it never comes to light. Not only that, the new script tacks on 6 years to Cady’s sentence, nearly equal to the age of Sam’s only daughter when Max Cady finally sees parole.

But how they really differ is in the Scorseseian attention to inner personal turmoil, the ability of a human racked with existential guilt to square past or present wrongs, even if they weren’t outside their already established ethical framework. When this conflict is presented against Robert De Niro’s interpretation of Max Cady—truly one of the most frightening characters in cinema history—the ever increasing violence builds to horrific effect. Alongside this Scorsese drafts a nuclear family dynamic in turmoil, his interpretation of the gorgeous Sirk technicolor melodrama’s or, perhaps more apt Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, so that anything Cady shakes loose will only grow that much more toxic and that more troubling (Scorsese visually achieves this with fake Technicolor[ed] skies over the Bowden home and an incredible reuse of Bernard Herrmann’s score from the original film mixed with brooding Elmer Bernstein additions). Thus, as he sexually preys on daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis in her breakout role) it’s closer to the dangers of Nabokov’s Lolita or when he leers at Leigh (the always tremendous Jessica Lange) it’s to flaunt Sam’s old and current fidelities. In the end it’s much different from the conflict of the tight family unit of Thompson’s, to the point that Sam’s battle with Max could just as easily be the two sides to his persona, one the loving, stable careerist family man, the other a power-broker with an ego, wanting to keep everyone close to him very much under his oppressive control, whether they like it or not. The Thompson ’62 version pits that squabble as systemic, the horrors of a newly flush society achieving global Super Power status neatly cleaving those in power and those in not. So Mitchum’s Cady is no less dangerous, but so is Sam (the stately Gregory Peck) and Sam’s ability to easily manipulate the legal system through a good ol’ boys network becomes a Kafka-esque nightmare, easily blurred to audiences only because for much of the film we know what Cady is eventually going to get up too. But we should also know reality, and how societies like this do operate and the Horrors they do extol on those financially or systemically ill-equipped to offer the necessary and often life saving opposition (both versions run from an even more shrouded reading of Cady’s brutality from the source novel that has him an illiterate brute whose pain is painting as a potential byproduct of heavy PTSD trauma from World War II and a system unwilling to offer anything to help ease his transition back to normal life). It brought me to quick realization that one film isn’t better than the other, but rather a very telling and interesting reading of American life post-World War II, how the three branches of government have been welded for horrific ends towards the individual, and the only thing that’s changed is how our art—and life—had read and acquiesced to them. In short, we’ve become more insular and more individualistic—the jump from Peck to Nolte is striking—so we’ve lost the desire to bond in togetherness to fight either fright and instead become ever more susceptible to be shaken from both.

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