Still Reeling: David Bowie Just Died and I Can't Even Deal With It

It was just announced a couple hours ago on the official David Bowie Facebook page that everyone's favorite rock & roll extraterrestrial has died.

You can read more at The Hollywood Reporter, including a fairly extensive biography of the icon. Here's the statement from the family:

"January 10 2016 - David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family's privacy during their time of grief."

UPDATE: David Bowie's last release, Lazarus, was a 'parting gift' for fans in carefully planned finale

David Bowie is probably my fifth-favorite musician of all time, right up there with Faith No More, Pink Floyd, The Clash, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. He's always been a part of my life — from when I was a little kid and I stole my brother's Bowie poster because I thought he looked cool, right up to these past few days as I've listened with euphoric levels of glee to his latest release, Blackstar. He seemed like Mount Rushmore, or the Golden Gate Bridge — a musical monolith, as precise in his artfulness as he was stolid and apparently eternal.

My fandom for the Thin White Duke has ebbed and flowed over the years, hitting a peak somewhere around 1991-1992 when I was in my weirdo 70s music phase (that's also when I fell in love with Frank Zappa), and probably sinking to its lowest point around 1997-1998, when I was all caught up in the whole death metal thing. Over the last fifteen years or so his music has steadily wormed its way back into my soul. The man was an absolute genius. There will be never be another like him.

As sad as I am over this news, I'm so grateful that he was able to give us Blackstar before he passed. It's his best, most adventurous album in years, and it's a genuine inspiration that he managed to remain so vital and boundary-pushing right up to the end.

I don't have a whole lot more to say about this. I'm still trying to process. But I know I want to celebrate him and his genius, so in no particular order here are my 10 favorite David Bowie songs:

Lazarus (2016)

Let's start with his most recent. Blackstar, written and performed with some of the world's best jazz musicians, is a truly amazing achievement — particularly now that we know it was made while he was dying. The single "Lazarus" was originally written for a new off-Broadway musical that was inspired by his 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. It's the best track on an already brilliant record, and in retrospect it seems obvious that it was planned to be his swan song. I can't think of a better one.

I'm not going to have much to say about the rest of these. Just enjoy them.

Heroes (1977)

Station to Station (1976)

The Hearts Filthy Lesson (1995)

Even when I moved away from Bowie for awhile, I took this song with me.

Life on Mars (1971)

Just so goddamned pretty.

Suffragette City (1972)

Where Are We Now? (2013)

Bowie as an older man reflecting on his memories of Berlin. So beautiful and melancholy. It's actually a little too painful to listen to this song right now.

Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (1983)

This song got re-popularized after Tarantino used it in Inglorious Basterds, but I'll always remember it as the only good thing about Paul Schrader's terrible remake of Cat People, Val Lewton's 1942 horror classic.

Queen Bitch (1971)

Ziggy Stardust (1972)

Keep in mind I'm not arguing these are the definitive 10 best Bowie songs. These are just my favorites, the ones I enjoy the most, and this list could change at any time depending on my mood. There are so many others I could talk about — "Space Oddity," "Fame," "Starman," "Changes," "Diamond Dogs," "Rebel Rebel," "Golden Years," "Modern Love," "Sound and Vision," "TVC15," "The Jean Genie," "Young Americans," "All the Young Dudes," and on and on and on and on. The list is almost literally endless.

R.I.P.

The Hateful Eight and Joy (2015)

Okay, let me start off by saying how much I fucking hate Tarantino's whole "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino" thing. I know he's been doing it for awhile, and I'm sure he'd say he's trying to call back to the grandiosity of classic cinema in some way. But I'm sorry, it's just really annoying. We get it Quentin. You're you.

With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and say that The Hateful Eight is probably my favorite Tarantino film since Reservoir Dogs. This isn't necessarily saying all that much because I haven't really loved a Tarantino film since Dogs (or maybe Jackie Brown). I appreciate most of them and only actively dislike one (Django Unchained), but after the new-car smell of Pulp Fiction wore off back around 1996 or so I've just never really been able to plug back into his aesthetic the way most people seem to. 

I've always said that Tarantino is like the most genius 13-year-old boy in the world. He can craft a brilliant scene (the opener of Inglorious Basterds, the "oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?" scene in Pulp). His movies are, by and large, full of such scenes — even in Django, which I found pretty repulsive, I watched the "white cake" scene with my jaw on the floor. But, in the end, he just can't help but get in his own way. The constant movie references, the baroque violence, the scene-stomping monologues... over the course of two hours or so I just find it all pretty wearying. Not offensive or distasteful. Just... kind of boring. I know I'm not the first to say this, but I ultimately find his hyper-referential approach more alienating than entertaining. Whatever substance might be there gets buried under all the "isn't this cool?" posturing, and I just check out eventually.

There's something about The Hateful Eight that feels a little different, though. It's still a Tarantino film, with all that that implies, but it's sharper and more purposeful than anything he's done in years. And, for once, it really seems like he has something he wants to say here. 

This is a mean fucking movie — maybe the meanest he's ever made — but in its way it's an oddly moral one. Tarantino has been oft-derided for his liberal use of the N-word, and I'll admit that most of the time I've felt that he uses it for shock value and little else. But in The Hateful Eight he really digs into the word — its meaning, its power to hurt and to be wielded as a weapon, and how it can be turned against the person wielding it. While I think The Hateful Eight is one of his best and most cohesive films, it actually has fewer of those amazing scenes we've grown accustomed to. But there's one right before the intermission (I saw the 70mm roadshow version) that's a true show stopper. Tarantino rips the scab off the country's long racial wound and lets all the festering ugliness just flow right out. In the era of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, that feels necessary. 

Tarantino also explores some interesting and similarly dark territory in regard to gender. Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is one of the vilest, most disgusting characters in recent years (she reminded me a more dangerous/psychopathic Gollum). We spend much of the movie rooting for her to die — and to die painfully. Yet, Tarantino constantly pulls the rug out from under us and fucks with our sense of empathy. She'll do something truly awful, but when one of the much larger male characters responds with a vicious punch, pistol-whip, or elbow to the face — well, it's hard not to wince and feel a little disgusted with ourselves.

For all its nastiness, however, The Hateful Eight is also supremely entertaining. I think it's no accident that I responded to this in a way I haven't since Dogs; by locking the characters in one place and forcing them to bounce off each other like pinballs (or grenades), both movies strip away so much of what I tend to find so maddening in the rest of his work. The film is clearly influenced by John Carpenter's The Thing (he even uses some of Ennio Morricone's unreleased music from the 1982 horror classic), but it also owes a huge debt to Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The use of the wide-format 70mm in the confined space of the snowed-in cabin that serves as the movie's primary location heightens rather than takes away from the claustrophobia. The aspect ratio tends to crowd the characters together in an interesting way, rarely letting any one person own the frame him/herself. The film starts relatively quiet by Tarantino standards, but he uses that claustrophobia brilliantly and lets the tension build until it explodes in a truly impressive carnival of violence that feels more earned than gratuitous.

I still don't love The Hateful Eight, or at least not as much as I love Dogs. But it's Tarantino's first movie in a long time that reminded me what he's capable of when he gets serious.  

****

I've always been a bit on the fence about David O. Russell as well. His movies tend to be an odd mix of mania and ponderousness that undercuts whatever comedy he might be going for. Occasionally it clicks (Flirting with Disaster, American Hustle) but too often his films can kind of sink under their own weight (I Heart Huckabees). 

I saw Joy the same day that I saw The Hateful Eight, and two more different movies I couldn't imagine. On paper, Joy shouldn't work at all — the story of the woman who invented the Miracle Mop does not seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. 

But, while The Hateful Eight is maybe the better and more ambitious movie, Joy is a hell of a lot of fun. It's loose and breezy in a way that reminded me of Flirting, and O. Russell rides that line between just-enough-quirk and way-too-much like an expert rodeo cowboy riding the bucking bronco. There are moments where I felt like Joy was about to tip over into preposterousness, but O. Russell unerringly pulls back at just the right moment.

Sort of based on the story of Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence), the aforementioned Miracle Mop inventor, the film is actually a pretty insightful (if at times too on-the-nose) study on the ways our society conspires to thwart the ambitions of women. Joy is a single mom saddled with two kids, an ex-husband and a father who won't move out of her basement, and an epically dysfunctional extended family that seems determined at every turn to stomp whatever sense of industriousness and entrepreneurial self-worth right out of her. She risks everything to bring her damn mop to market, but it all nearly comes undone because of a family member's stunning act of presumptuous incompetence. 

But this isn't a weeper or a tragedy. This movie is fucking funny. Lawrence showcases the same comedic chops that she did in last year's Hustle, and she's balanced perfectly against a supporting cast that includes an in-rare-form Robert de Niro and a giddily vampiric Isabella Rossellini. 

When he's at his best, O. Russell is a master at zeroing in on those little moments of interaction that can be at once fraught with tension and absolutely hilarious. I don't think he's been as sharp in his observations of the sometimes cannibalistic nature of the American family since Flirting with Disaster. 

No "Winds of Winter" before season 6; a note on writing and GRRM and how the fans need to shut up

Warning: A few spoilers below for the previous books.

So the worst has happened and all of our darkest fears have been realized.

George R.R. Martin has not finished "The Winds of Winter," and the book will not arrive before season 6 of Game of Thrones. 

You can read his blog post from earlier today explaining what happened.

"Here it is, the first of January. The book is not done, not delivered. No words can change that. I tried, I promise you. I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I've now blown the end of the year deadline. And that almost certainly means that no, THE WINDS OF WINTER will not be published before the sixth season of GAME OF THRONES premieres in April (mid April, we are now told, not early April, but those two weeks will not save me). Even as late as my birthday and our big Emmy win, I still thought I could do it... but the days and weeks flew by faster than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of the choices I'd made and began to revise... and suddenly it was October, and then November... and as the suspicion grew that I would not make it after all, a gloom set in, and I found myself struggling even more. The fewer the days, the greater the stress, and the slower the pace of my writing became."

Cue the howling from the fans. Cue the shouts about how GRRM is getting old and he's going to die before the series is done. Cue the crying about spoilers in season 6. Cue the claims of betrayal, of laziness, of disloyalty, etc. 

"George should have stopped with all his other appearances so he could just write," some people will say. "He should have quit updating his blog. He should have stopped watching football. He should have sold (or never bought) the Jean Cocteau Cinema. He should have just sequestered himself in his office, with an IV drip to keep him going and maybe a little camping cot in the corner so he could grab a few hours of sleep here and there, and just KEPT WRITING."

Here's the thing: I'm willing bet good money that most of you people saying these things are not writers. Or if you are writers, you're not serious writers, because no serious writer would be so stupid.

Here are a few points.

1) George R.R. Martin doesn't owe you a goddamned thing. Might he die before the books are finished? It's possible. Not likely, but shit happens. We could all be obliterated by an asteroid, too, or by the Wyoming supervolcano. 

You know what? Deal with it. You don't own him and you don't own his creativity. You'll get the book when you get it. Or you won't and we'll all be dead and it won't matter anyway.

2) The writing process just doesn't work like we, the fans, may want it to work. Sure, deadlines are important — as a screenwriter, if you miss a deadline you're likely to cost a production hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars and you'll probably be fired. If you're a TV writer, the pressure is just that much more intense.

But writing a 90 to 120 page screenplay (or a 47 to 55 page TV episode) is not the same as writing a 1,500 page novel set in a highly detailed fictional universe with literally thousands of years of history, hundreds of characters, and an entire world mythology to deal with. Aside from the drastically reduced word count, most screenwriters and TV writers are working off some sort of an outline that can, at the very least, serve as a lighthouse in the distance showing them which way to go. If you're a novelist like John Grisham or Sara Paretsky or James Patterson, you might be doing something similar. This is why those writers can turn out tightly plotted, entertaining books with seeming clockwork regularity. 

But if you're GRRM writing "The Winds of Winter" — or Stephen King writing "The Dark Tower," or J.RR. Tolkien writing "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Silmarillion," or even Jonathan Franzen writing "Freedom" or David Foster Wallace writing "Infinite Jest" — that's probably not going to be the case. If you're one of those folks, you're more like Jim White after he discovered Carlsbad Caverns — pushing forward with nothing but a lantern, unable to see more than three feet in front of you, swallowed by a darkness that's seemingly without end. 

I'm sorry to disappoint, but you don't just sit down in front of the computer and churn out 20 pages a day like you're doing data entry. If you do do that, you're likely a pretty shitty writer. Writing is very often a process of indecision, false starts and painful course corrections. Even if you're working off an outline, you rarely if ever get it right the first time. 

And it doesn't happen in a vacuum. To be able to write effectively, you need to live an active, purposeful life. To be inspired, you need to put yourself in position to encounter inspiration. That only happens through experience and engagement with the world around you. You never know where the next idea will come from — it could be a conversation with a friend, or a drive through the mountains, or a war, or even a bloody shootout with bank robbers. But I can tell you that it almost never comes from sitting in a dark room by yourself. It's no accident that most of our best writers — Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Maya Angelou, on and on and on —lived big, messy, complicated lives. 

GRRM's life is hopefully less messy than, say, Charles Bukowski's. But I can't begrudge him his afternoon football games, his movie theater, his convention appearances, his life with his family and friends, or his engagement with the New Mexico film and arts community, because I know that those things are just as integral to his process as the actual typing. You need to get out and do things so that you can refill the well of wherever the inspiration comes from. 

3) If avoiding spoilers is important to you, then avoid them. It's not always easy, but it can be done. It takes a certain amount of work and discipline to resist clicking on this episode recap or that Facebook post, but it takes far less discipline than it does to, say, write a 1,500 page novel from scratch. Maybe just maybe it's on you to do some of the work.

But I watch the show TOO! you whine. Am I supposed to just give that up?

Yes. You are. If the books are more important to you than the show, then that's the choice you will have to make. This is the real world, kid. Life is full of hard choices, and you don't always get what you want. 

But what if something does get spoiled? What if one of your stupid friends says "Holy shit, can you believe that Dani turned out to be a man?" without knowing that you've stopped watching the show and have been engaged for months in a monk-like process of ascetic self denial.

So what? I'm guessing you have a favorite book or movie, and that you have not read or watched that book or movie only once. I'm sure you enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the second, third, tenth, twentieth time through it. 

Here's a little secret: good stories may be about what happens, but great stories are about HOW it happens. They're about all the little details and character choices that lead up to the thing happening, not the thing itself. 

When I started reading "A Song of Ice and Fire," I managed to spoil two big things for myself early on: Ned's fate and the Red Wedding. I learned about what happened to Ned because some magazine profile on GRRM mentioned it. I was pretty pissed at that reporter for not putting a spoiler warning up front until I remembered that the book came out in 1996 and it was now 2011. I'd had plenty of time to get caught up beforehand.

The Red Wedding was my own damn fault. I went to A Wiki of Ice and Fire to look up something else and I just sort of stumbled on it. I think I was halfway through "A Clash of Kings" at the time so it was a pretty solid punch to the gut.

But did either of the revelations ruin the books for me? No! In fact, in a way they almost deepened my experience. There was something exciting about the dread that came from reading and knowing what dark shit was just over the horizon. When Ned had his conversation with Cersei in the godswood in "A Game of Thrones," I wanted to scream at him because I could see him make the choice that would ultimately lead to his death. It was like watching a slow motion car accident.

In "A Storm of Swords," when Robb arrived back to Riverrun with Jeyne Westering and introduced her to Lady Catalyn as his wife, I had a similar reaction. My stomach fell into my shoes because, since I knew the Red Wedding was coming, I could recognize that as the moment where he had sealed his fate. Everything that came after that, including all the negotiations with the Freys, were infused with a sharp sense of tragedy. 

Would it have been nice to experience either of those major events without having had them spoiled for me? Sure. But I can't say it made me enjoy them any less, or weakened their impact when they happened.

I stopped watching Game of Thrones after season 4, partly to avoid upcoming spoilers and partly because, frankly, I just don't think the show is all that good anymore. I found that I was hate-watching the show more than I was enjoying it, so I decided to stop bothering with it altogether. 

But I did hear about the whole Stannis/Shareen thing. For one thing, I'm not convinced it's a spoiler because the show has gone so wildly off down its own path already. But even if it is... okay, well now I'm curious how that's going to work. If anything, it's made me more intrigued about "The Winds of Winter" than I was before.

Look, I get it. I get the impatience. I read an update like this and there's definitely a small part of me that wants chain the guy to his chair and make him finish the book at gunpoint. 

But I want the book to be good more than I want to have it now. I was a rabid fan of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series, but I wasn't all that satisfied with the direction he took it in the last two books. He had been subjected to some very similar fan pressure and I can't help but think his decision to write the last three books in a rush didn't do the series (or the fans) any favors in the long run. I still love the series, but I always wonder what might have been if we'd all just shut the fuck up and let him get on with it in his own time. 

I don't want to see that happen with "A Song of Ice and Fire." 

So, George, just keep doing what you're doing. 

I'll be here when you're ready.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Note: I'm REALLY going to try to avoid major spoilers here, but if you want to go into this movie knowing absolutely nothing, you should probably stop reading now.

2015 has, for whatever reason, become the year of the Long-Awaited-Sequel-to-a-Flagging-But-Beloved-Franchise. This really could have been a bummer. As luck would have it, though, these sequels have by and large not only held their own, but have managed to be pretty great films in their own right.

The biggest of these, of course, is Star Wars: The Force Awakens — which could just have easily been called Star Wars: The Rescue of the Franchise. It's not the best; both Mad Max: Fury Road and Creed are, for my money, much better films (I'm holding onto my reviews of those for my end of the year list). 

But overall it's pretty damn successful. Director/co-writer J.J. Abrams had a pretty daunting task ahead of him — not only did he have to bring new energy and excitement to a nearly 40-year-old series, but he had to erase everyone's collective memory of the prequels in one fell swoop. He basically had to save Star Wars from itself ("itself" being George Lucas, of course). And, with The Force Awakens, he mostly does so.

I won't spend a lot of time on the setup, because at this point I think most everyone knows the broad outline. We pick up about thirty years after the Battle of Endor.  The Empire has broken up into what Abrams described as a banana republic-style successor called The First Order:

"That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again. What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire? Could the work of The Empire be seen as unfulfilled? And could Vader be a martyr?" — J.J. Abrams.

This is a pretty fantastic concept, rendering The First Order in some ways even scarier than the Empire because they're desperate. Unfortunately, Abrams doesn't quite do enough with that. It wasn't entirely clear to me that The First Order wasn't the Empire, and I don't know why the opposing force — led, of course, by Leia — is called "the Resistance" when they basically represent the existing government of the New Republic. But whatever. Moving on.

The film picks up on the desert planet of Jakku (it took me a little while to realize it wasn't Tatooine, which is entirely my fault because I was trying to put my jacket under my seat during the opening crawl), which — according to Wookieepedia (yep, that's a thing) — is where the last decisive battle of the previous war took place, and where the Empire was finally crushed for good. A hotshot Resistance pilot named Po Dameron (Oscar Isaacs) has been sent by Leia to recover... well, let's just say something Really Fucking Important. 

He hides this Really Fucking Important Thing in the body of his little droid friend, BB-8, just as a a legion of Stormtroopers descend — also looking for the Really Fucking Important Thing. A battle ensues, Po and BB-8 are separated, and one of the Stormtroopers, FN-2187 or "Finn" (John Boyega), is faced with a sudden crises of conscience.

BB-8 rolls off into the sandy wastes where he(?) meets a teenage scavenger of mysterious origin named Rey (Daisy Ridley). At first Rey wants nothing to do with the droid, but soon realizes that there's more to this little bleep-blooping metal beach ball than meets the eye.

I'll leave it there, other than to reiterate that, yes, most of the original gang at least makes an appearance. Han and Chewbacca get the most screen time, but all the old characters have at least a solid moment of fan service.

In general Abrams not only nails the tone of what makes the best entries in the franchise so special, but he's able to inject a genuinely fresh sensibility as well. Remarkably (after the debacle of the prequels) he gives us new characters that have the potential to be as indelibly iconic as the originals. Both Ridley and Boyega are fantastic. Finn has some of Han Solo's wit and swagger, but he's much more conflicted and unsure of himself, giving him a darker and more complicated edge that elicits some genuine audience sympathy. Rey has a bit of Luke's wide-eyed innocence, but she's much more hardy and self-sufficient than he was until at least Return of the Jedi, and she doesn't whine once. 

I'd seen and liked Boyega in 2011's Attack the Block, but Ridley was entirely new to me. I see online that some people are already dismissing her as a Keira Knightley clone, but that's really doing her a disservice. She and Boyega are both relative unknowns. But they bring real humanity to their characters, which is something that more than a few of the biggest actors in the world — Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, etc. — never could manage in the entire run of the prequels. 

The big revelation for me, though, is Adam Driver as chief villain Kylo Ren. I never much liked Driver before, (granted, I only really knew him from the few episodes of Girls I managed to sit through), but here he's absolutely chilling. The less said about Ren the better, but I'll posit that Driver has created a villain every bit as compelling as Darth Vader. We'll have to see what they do with him in the subsequent films, but I'm officially a fan now.  

None of this is to say that The Force Awakens is without its problems. As I said, I wish Abrams had done more to make The First Order feel distinct from the Empire. And frankly, as well made as the movie is (it's certainly more cinematic than anything in the series since The Empire Strikes Back), overall it's pretty predictable. Plotwise, it's basically a retread of A New Hope but with some of the roles mixed up and/or reversed. And for what it's worth, I saw the big "twist" coming about halfway through the second act. 

The most grievous misstep though — and I promise to tread lightly here — is what the movie does with the original characters. It's almost criminal how listlessly they're handled. I want to talk in vague terms here, but if you're looking forward to seeing the old sparks fly between Han and Leia... well, you're liable to be disappointed. 

The Force Awakens stands head and shoulders above the prequels, and I would say rivals A New Hope in the pantheon (I agree with everyone that Empire is the best, but I'm one of those weirdos who actually thinks Return of the Jedi is better than the first). I've never been a Star Wars fanboy to begin with, but this was the first movie in maybe twenty years to make me remember why people love this franchise so much. It revels in nostalgia but isn't a slave to it, and it opens the door to some exciting new possibilities moving forward. 

Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper) will be taking over the franchise from Abrams for the next two films. I'm excited to see what he comes up with.

Someone's Watching Me! (1978)

In between his 1976 exploitation classic Assault on Precinct 13 and his 1978 horror megahit Halloween, John Carpenter made a TV movie starring Lauren Hutton for NBC. Unavailable on video for many, many years, Carpenter's fans came to refer to it as his "lost" film.

Someone's Watching Me! was finally released on DVD in the mid 2000s, and it's now available to stream on various online platforms (I finally caught it on Amazon). It would be a bit much to say the fans rejoiced, but there was certainly a renewed flurry of interest in the film, at least in certain corners of the Internet geek-o-sphere.

So I watched it last night. Final verdict? Overall, pretty good!

It may seem strange to imagine Carpenter doing a movie-of-the-week, but in an odd way the medium of late 70s network TV actually suited his talents pretty well. Due to Halloween's influence on the nascent slasher genre, Carpenter is often thought of as a gorehound. I've always found this strange — really, the only bloody movie from his early days is The Thing, and he didn't go full splatter until 1998's Vampires. Carpenter was always much more of a technical craftsman than his contemporaries (Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, etc.). The only one who really rivaled him in terms of sheer filmmaking ability was George A. Romero (David Cronenberg wouldn't hit his stride until the mid-late 1980s).

What Someone's Watching Me! manages to do is take the essence of what makes those early Carpenter films so great and distills them down to the bare essentials. Someone's Watching Me! is not much more than lean and efficient thriller, but as such it (mostly) succeeds marvelously.

Now I really don't want to oversell this thing. Someone's Watching Me! is definitely a TV movie, with all the inherent flaws you'd expect. It's not terribly original (it's sort of a reverse riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window, where a woman is terrorized by a stalker watching her from another apartment building). The conclusion leaves much to be desired. And it's pretty laughably dated in parts.

But Carpenter's talent is such that he was able to take as standard a potboiler setup you can imagine and infuse it with a very palpable sense of dread. I was surprised by how genuinely scary this movie is. In fact, up until the end I actually found it more unsettling than Halloween.

Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a young live television director relocating from New York to Los Angeles to escape a collapsed relationship (because in the 1970s, apparently women couldn't just move for better career opportunities). She rents a swanky high-rise apartment in the aptly named Arkham Towers (even in a movie as fundamentally boilerplate as this, Carpenter couldn't resist a little Lovecraft reference), where she immediately starts receiving strange phone calls. The calls are followed by a letter from a company called "Excursions Limited" purporting to offer her an expenses-paid vacation. The only catch is she has to correctly identify the destination by a series of "gifts" to be delivered to her over the next several weeks.

Of course, Excursions Limited doesn't exist and the "gifts" are not as benign as they at first seem. Leigh finds herself psychologically under siege, ignored by the police and being driven mad by a mysterious psychopath who seems to know everything about her.

Carpenter uses this pretty standard setup as a hook upon which to hang a surprisingly effective little thriller. A devotee of both Howard Hawkes and Alfred Hitchcock, one thing Carpenter has always been better at than any of the other low-budget horror practitioners of that period is classic suspense technique, and an intuitive grasp of what not to show. Specifically, at his best he is an absolute genius at how to use depth and the edges of the frame to suggest threats just outside of our field of vision (he truly mastered this with Halloween later the same year). And no one can stretch a beat right up to its breaking point like he can. For all its 70s TV goofiness, Someone's Watching Me! is startlingly cinematic. Little things,like a quick dolly move to a wrapped package or a subtle rack focus to a ringing telephone create a real sense of mounting anxiety that builds steadily throughout.

Another thing Carpenter often doesn't get enough credit for is his skill as a writer (I think it's no accident that the quality of his work diminished the less involved with the scripts he became). He's great at structuring a story and finding unique little details that set his work apart from his hackier genre competitors. This is true of Someone's Watching Me! as well; while the setup is familiar, the way the plot unfolds holds some real surprises. In particular, the "Excursions Limited" motif is a great, original, and unsettling hook. The idea of an anonymous "company" exacting a personal vendetta on someone is uniquely disturbing in our capitalist, Kafka-inflected society. Carpenter's use of the concept here reminded me a little of Bentley Little's better horror novels and Stephen King's short story "Quitters Inc." My only complaint is that he could have done more with it.

Carpenter also can be pretty great at character. Halloween — his biggest hit — is actually not a great example, but just listen to the sharp crackle of his dialogue in later films like Escape From New York and, especially, The Thing (he was always at his best when writing for Kurt Russell). Again, Someone's Watching Me! is unexpectedly sophisticated in this regard, and Hutton's performance as Leigh is really pretty engaging. She's a heroine not quite like any I've seen before: alternately tough, polished, silly, vulnerable, and charmingly awkward (she constantly chatters to herself and drops obscure jokes that no one else seems to get). Leigh could very easily have been a standard victim archetype, but Carpenter's script and Hutton's take on her infuses her with some real personality and charisma.

Carpenter's future wife Adrienne Barbeau is also fun in a supporting role as Leigh's friend and co-worker. Unfortunately the other characters don't fare quite as well. Grainger Hines shows up as a predictably lecherous co-worker (this is the 70s, where workplace sexual harassment could still be played mostly as comic relief) and David Birney is pretty underserved as the requisite, milquetoast love interest. But Hutton (and, to a lesser degree, Barbeau) bring enough to the party to make the film memorable.

As good as it is given all the limitations, Someone's Watching Me! is still really only mid-level Carpenter — better than much of his late-period work, but in the end nowhere near as exciting as early masterpieces like Escape, Halloween, The Thing, and The Fog. It probably lands somewhere right around Christine/Assault territory. I might have been willing to place it higher in the canon (I actually find the filmmaking in parts more interesting than what you see in Halloween) but for the truly godawful ending. The movie really falls apart in the last ten to fifteen minutes, when everything that had been interesting about it is tossed aside in favor of a by-the-numbers conclusion that's as lackluster as it is unmotivated. And the final reveal of who the stalker is redefines the entire concept of "lame."

So, no, it's not a masterpiece. But Someone's Watching Me! is definitely worth a look, particularly if you're a Carpenter fan and want to see him begin to perfect the techniques that would serve him so well later in his career.

Truth (2015)

I've been meaning to write reviews of The Martian, Sicario, and Goodnight Mommy for weeks now. All of those are much better and more interesting films than Truth, and each deserves attention in its own right. I'll get to them. But I just saw Truth, written and directed by Zodiac screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and as I'm sitting here it's making my blood boil.

On a purely cinematic level, there's really nothing wrong with Truth, and indeed as I was watching it I was basically caught up in its mix of political thriller and melodrama. The ostensibly-behind-the-scenes story of the infamous CBS Killian documents scandal at "60 Minutes" that brought down producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and legendary anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) is more than watchable. It's often gripping, and is even quite moving in parts. It starts off kind of stiff and fakey (the scene where Mapes is being "interviewed" by her seven-year-old son really should have been left on the cutting room floor), but it quickly picks up steam once the central narrative kicks into gear. It's thrilling to see Mapes and her team (including Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, and Elizabeth Moss) put the story together, and more so to watch the story then fall apart.

It wasn't until after I left the theater and really thought about it that the movie started to get under my skin. It's like a competently made gourmet dish that tastes good while you're eating it but gives you the rankest gas on the car ride home.

I don't talk about it much (or even really think about it anymore, frankly), but I was a journalism major in college and very much wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I graduated right at the end of the 90s, when the Internet started taking its toll and newspapers started conspicuously slashing budgets and selling out their credibility for more advertising bucks and deeper political connections. I saw this happen even at the small-town paper where I worked, and it quickly left a sour taste in my mouth.

But for four or five years there, I was quite serious about it. I was one of the many, many teenagers who heard the story of Woodward and Bernstein and thought "I want to do that." I studied the history and internalized the code of ethics that makes objective news reporting one of the most important pillars of a functioning democracy. And that respect — even reverence — for the profession has stuck with me. It's what made the whole "Rathergate" scandal (as this controversy came to be known) so hard to take when it went down.

Let's face some hard facts here. CBS, Mapes, and Rather fucked up. They fucked up big. They had a pre-existing narrative they wanted to tell (that President George W. Bush had not only used his family connections to get out of Vietnam, but that he hadn't even lived up to the bare minimum of his duties in the Texas Air National Guard) and — under pressure to deliver the report before 2004 elections — made a series of grievous, frankly unforgivable errors in bringing the story to air. The documents that served as the linchpin of their story were not properly vetted and, while never definitively proven to be forgeries, should never have been used. They then spent weeks digging their heels in as the story imploded, going to absurd lengths to defend it before finally throwing in the towel.

The most maddening thing about the scandal to me (as a liberal) is that the substance of the story is very likely true. But CBS's epically shitty reporting became the story, and Bush sailed right on into a second disastrous term.

Now, more than 10 years later, Vanderbilt has adapted Mapes's memoir and brought forth a piece of cinematic apologia as stunning in its disingenuousness as any major motion picture I've ever seen. Both Redford and Blanchett are very, very good in this film, and I have no reason to question the earnestness of their portrayals. But their considerable talents have been put to use in a way I find truly nefarious, in a film that simply doesn't deserve them.

Truth would have us believe that Mapes is the victim here. It glosses over the many, many mistakes she made as a journalist and then, when she is challenged on those mistakes, presents the challengers as a bunch of mean, chauvinistic bullies looking for any excuse to bring this principled woman down. It presents the mistakes as almost unavoidable, but spends so little time on the bad decisions that lead to those mistakes as to have us believe they didn't happen at all. It presents Rathergate as something that happened to Mapes and Rather, not something they brought upon themselves. Blanchett is given an Oscar-baity speech at the end where she gets to rail against the system that has put her career on the line, and the way the scene is staged and the music swells triumphantly, we're very clearly meant not to question her. When someone finally does, he's literally shot as if he's a Bond villain. They should have just given him a white cat to malevolently stroke and been done with it.

It's true that Mapes was a celebrated news producer whose work brought to light some very important pieces of news, the most important of which was the Abu Ghraib scandal (a story for which she won a Peabody after being fired from CBS). I did not want or expect this movie to be a hit job. But by trying to tell her side of the story, it overcorrects so wildly that it only reinforces the negative image she has been saddled with for the last decade. There was a way to tell this story — dramatically, honestly — as the human tragedy it was without vilifying her any further. That's the movie I wanted to see.

I love movies about reporters and wish there were more of them. But this is not one I'd recommend.

Everest (2015)

I'm going to try not to have too many spoilers in this review. But I will be referring to the true story here and there, so I'll probably end up giving a few things away.

After watching the trailer for the new film Everest and seeing the tagline "NEVER LET GO," you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is just another one of those rousing man-conquers-nature, triumphs-over-adversity movies like Alive or Apollo 13. 

But if you have even a passing recollection of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster upon which this story is based, you'll know enough to suspect that's not going to be the case. Man didn't conquer shit in 1996, and there wasn't a lot of triumph to go around — unless you count losing only your nose and both of your hands to frostbite as a triumph.

I've read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's first-person account of the disaster, a couple times, and it's one of the most harrowing non-fiction books I've ever encountered. Everest isn't based on his book (in fact, Krakauer is pretty pissed about how he was portrayed), but from what I remember of the story it seems to be a pretty accurate retelling, even if a lot of the edges have been smoothed over and spackled under a layer of Hollywood gloss. 

But even with its faults, it's a pretty riveting film.

Jason Clarke plays Rob Hall, an Everest guide from New Zealand whose company Adventure Consultants was one of several expeditions stranded on the south face of the mountain during a blistering storm on the night of May 10, 1996. Hall's friendly rival was Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal, oddly underused here), whose Mountain Madness team was also caught in the "Death Zone" (a third expedition, comprised of a group of Tibetan police officers, was trapped on the north face and isn't mentioned in the film). A few of the people in Hall's group were Texan doctor Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Seattle mail man Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), and Japanese businesswoman Yasuko Namba  (Naoko Mori). 

And, of course, there was journalist Krakauer (Michael Kelly), whose employer, Outside magazine, had been paid by Hall to document the excursion and (hopefully) bring some good press to his company. It didn't really work out that way.

Everest, for its first half, is a pretty able if not terribly impressive adventure film. There are some good performances. Clarke is the standout, but Hawkes and Emily Watson (as Adventure Consultants base camp manager Helen Wilton) are also quite good. Gyllenhaal is fine, but he doesn't have a lot to do. I expected there to be more focus on Kelly, but maybe that's because I'm mostly familiar with Krakauer's account. He's also underused, but has a few nice moments here and there. 

Director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik, 2 Guns) doesn't overload us too early with the sort of majestic/terrifying vista shots we saw jammed into the trailer. The focus is (rightly) on the characters, which would be great except none of them are terribly interesting. Hall — a professional mountaineer profiting (perhaps against his better judgment) off a bunch of rich wannabes — is the most developed. Clarke paints a portrait of a decent, well-meaning guy who's so able at what he does that maybe it doesn't occur to him he might screw up.

For about an hour, we do get some nice (if a bit clichéd) triumph-over-adversity stuff, and we get a few little glimpses into the family lives of Hall and Weathers (Brolin is ostensibly the second lead, but frankly I can't say he brought a whole lot to the table here). The trek up the mountain certainly feels triumphant, but we get a few little shadings of what's to come: logjams on the way up, an uneasy partnership between Hall and Fischer (whose Sherpas inexplicably seem to hate each other), rumblings about bad weather on the way.

Things go sideways as the groups reach the top, and Hall — wanting to see his buddy Hansen, who tried and failed to summit the year before, succeed — makes an understandable but tragic mistake.

It's in the second half that the film really comes alive (sorry about the unintended mordent irony there). When disaster strikes, Kormákur throws us right into it. It's stunning (and likely pretty true to life) how quickly things fall apart when there's literally no margin of error for survival. A few minor mistakes and miscommunications early on lead to an alarming descent into chaos. The film necessarily skips over some details (if you want more, read Krakauer's book), but it captures the sudden and inexorable sense of doom as the situation goes rapidly from problematic to absolutely dire.

Kormákur also heaps in a few heavy shovelfuls of rank emotional manipulation, but I don't fault him for it. He's got a highly developed, almost Spielbergian sense of how to play an audience's fear and empathy for maximum effect. And Clarke quietly delivers a performance of such crushing tragic weight that you don't notice the incredible feat of it until the movie is over. The final shot of the movie will haunt me for awhile.

Everest isn't a great movie. It doesn't quite reconcile the disparate tones of its first and second halves, and too many of the characters are underdeveloped (likely unavoidable with the size of this cast). But overall it's a damn effective one, and worth seeing while it's in theaters.

I didn't see it in 3D, and for that I'm glad. I'm not sure I could have hung with it when shit gets dark.