However, at the end of August, I actually did see a new movie in a kind of theater. It was New Mutants, making me one of the very few people to have seen it. However, I saw it at a drive-in in New York state. I was in my car, a safe distance away away from everybody else. The experience was terrible for a number of reasons. Drive-ins suck, as it turns out. The sound is bad, the screen is bad, there's distractions everywhere, and it is hard to find parking. Drive-ins are about the worst way to see a movie. Yet they are better than risking your life to see Tenet at Christopher Nolan's beloved IMAX.
Again, don't go to the movies. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you have ever listened to me as a critic, do it now. No theaters.
Anyway, August's movie theme was Kaiju Films, that special Japanese style of giant monster cinema. Turns out a large number of classic Sixties and Seventies kaiju films from the great masters of the genre, Toho, are available on HBO Max and Amazon Prime right now. I am a massive kaiju fan, so much so I run an unpopular series of reviews years ago on this blog. I tried to review every giant monster ever made. And failed. Godzilla is my personal favorite superhero. He's been a major part of my life since I was a child watching him fight Gigan and Mechagodzilla on VHS. My mom and my uncle used to watch him on TV in the Seventies in their childhood. So if my family was in Game of Thrones, our sigil would have the King of the Monsters on it. However, it was only last month I finally saw all thirty-five Godzilla theatrical releases. (It will be thirty-six come next year with Godzilla vs Kong, assuming the plague goes away.)
Still, I konw kaiju films are often boring, have very cheesy effects, and have aged terrible. So this month I have a lot to say about a lot of really not-that-great movies. If ever I have indulged in 100% Glorified My Shit in my writing, it is right now.
10. Maniac Cop 1 & 2 (1988, 1990), dir. William Lustig
What is Maniac Cop about? Well, what do you think?? It is grimy
Eighties Manhattan, before Seinfeld and Rudy Giuliani sanitized everything to
turn the island into a theme park for the ultra-wealthy. Late at night there’s
a giant psycho-killer on the loose. But this isn’t Jason (who would have been taking
Manhattan at just about this time), it’s a Maniac Cop! The entire city is
locked down in fear, not knowing if their next traffic stop might be their
last.
...So Maniac Cop 1 & 2 are the perfect movies for 2020.
Never trust the police, kids. They are actually all maniac cops until proven otherwise.
As movies though, Maniac Cop 1 & 2 are about as solid as
you can hope. They are VHS-era straight-to-video slasher movies. This is not high art. But there is some production value. They are mostly shot
in New York City or equally dirty parts of LA. You can do have genre legend Bruce Campbell starring in the second half of the first movie and the first half of the second movie. He plays an
innocent cop framed as the Maniac Cop. The real star though is the late Robert Z’Dar, a genre legend himself. He's a
huge hulking actor with a huge hulking chin, who is our titular maniac. You might think just being a scary silhouette is not much of an acting challenge, but Z'Dar does a lot with very little. He would have made a good Godzilla if Americans ever put somebody in a big rubber suit.
These are strange movies structurally. In both films, we are introduced to
a police character who seems to be our hero, then Maniac Cop gets them halfway
through. Maniac Cop 1 stars Tom Atkins, then switches to Bruce Campbell. Then Maniac Cop 2 is first about Bruce Campbell, before switching to Robert Davi. By the sequel, however, Maniac Cop is really the star of his own movie. That's the film where Maniac Cop strikes up a friendship with a fellow
psychopath. The two killers move in together, They plan massacre together. It is a surprisingly sweet bromance.
Maniac Cop 1 has the better overall story thanks to
the mystery aspect of who Maniac Cop actually is and why he’s killing. But
Maniac Cop 2 has really great chase scenes. Maniac Cop has some sense of
humor, like when he handcuffs a police psychiatrist to a car and sends it rolling
down a hill. Both films are directed by the same guy, William Lustig. So the series flows together great. Think of these two pieces as one singular Maniac Cop epic.
I hear the third movie sucks, so I guess I’ll skip that.
9. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994), dir. Kensho Yamashita
Heisei Era Godzilla might be my personal favorite Godzilla. If you do not know, Godzilla has had several continuities and reboots. Heisei is the second era, following the Showa Era (both named for Japanese Emperors). I
love the original Showa Era and its wonderful cartoon cheese. I love the gritty
seriousness of the third era, Millenium. But Heisei is where I think the balance was
perfect. Godzilla by this point hit was a quiet antihero. This is the stoic
personality he’s had ever since. But he was not so serious to not have no
personality at all. Unfortunately 21st century Godzilla appearances have been rather dry. Heisei effects look great, especially the miniatures of
cities. It isn't CG, but I think it holds up fantastically. Plus the increase budget means these films now could have incredible action climaxes. And the continuity was better
than ever before or since. The Heisei movies just flow directly. Godzilla had a
baby in Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II, and by Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, that
baby is now a toddler kaiju. An adorable tyke the size of a small office building.
Let me talk about Baby Godzilla, because I fucking love Baby Godzilla. He’s so goddamned cute in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla. Minilla, Godzilla’s first son from the Showa Era, was ugly. I'm being brutally honest, he was cute, but cute in a way newborns are cute. A misshapen lump. But Baby Godzilla, or Godzilla Jr. is perfect. In his first movie he’s this human-size velociraptor creature. By SpaceGodzilla, he’s grown up into a chibi version of his father. I keep wanting to call him "little" but he's about five-stories tall already. This would be the best Godzilla movie of all time if this Baby Godzilla interacted with his dad more. Son of Godzilla is not a great movie, but at least Minilla bugs his daddy while the Big-G is trying to sleep. Godzilla gets to teach Minilla how to breath fire by stepping on his son's tail. The Showa Era was great for monster interactions like that.
As for SpaceGodzilla, this movie is weirdly close to the Raditz storyline of Dragon Ball Z. Godzilla is Goku, Godzilla Jr. is Gohan, and Raditz is SpaceGodzilla. So a mutant evil Godzilla from space lands in Japan, kidnaps Baby Godzilla, and tries to take over the world. Dadzilla teams up with the Japanese military, who come with a new anti-kaiju mecha weapon. That would be M.O.G.U.E.R.A., a reference to the obscure alien invasion movie, The Mysterians, which I reviewed on this blog about a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the human characters mostly watch. They're not boring at least, which is a big plus for most kaiju films. There's two couples. One soldier has gone a bit mad and wants to kill Godzilla. Then he gets better as he discovers there's a worse SpaceGodzilla to deal with. There's the recurring psychic character Miki (Megumi Odaka) who was in every Nineties Godzilla movie. She gets to use the Force at one point to save herself. Then everybody teams up to beat SpaceGodzilla.
It isn't sophisticated. But it's efficient. Solid entry in the series.
8. New Mutants (2020), dir. Josh Boone
If there had to be a movie to break my Covid theater dry
spell, it is perfect it was New Mutants. Of course, it would be this poor accursed film. This is a movie I’ve been waiting
about three years now to see. The first trailers for New Mutants came out in
October 2017. Those trailers promised a young adult horror movie starring super
hero teenagers that seemed much more Nightmare on Elm Street 3 than X-Men.
Since then the movie has been hit by everything you can imagine. The Fox executives wanted recuts, then Disney bought them, New Mutants ended up lost in the shuffle, and then Disney wanted recuts. Finally, a goddamned global plague stopped New Mutants from coming out and guarenteed when it was released, it would be a massive flop. Movies are
just unlucky sometimes. Cabin in the Woods sat on a shelf for three years. Now
it’s a beloved cult classic. Can New Mutants do that same?
I don’t think so. New Mutants is more interesting as a cursed object than a real movie. Howver, I do think it is better than
the reaction it is getting from critics. Scott Mendelson at Forbes titled his
review “The Worst X-Men Movie Ever”. And no, it is nowhere near as bad as X-Men
Origins: Wolverine. Still, New Mutants is not something you need to risk your life
to see. I don’t think any movie is that. It is also was not worth the normal effort of seeing it in theaters either, however. It is fine. Merely okay. Again, the backstory is more interesting than the final product.
New Mutants does not get the most out of its cast of solid young
actors. (Anya Taylor-Joy’s Russian sounds positively Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
Foolishly director Josh Boone assumed he was making his own First Class, the opening
episode in a long series of movies. So much of the plot is held back, the whole
thing feels like a minor adventure. This is clearly not the most these actors could do, but they're not asked of much. I think the results are mixed, maybe even poor. Yet, the overall product is just weird enough that I kinda recommend seeing it.
There’s six major characters, mostly one location, and a breezy hundred-minute runtime. It is a superhero B-movie, for better and worse. Better in that the movie is short and sweet. Worse in that this is not how you would want the X-Men film franchise to finish its storied twenty year run. Most of New Mutants is set in a claustrophobic creepy mental hospital where weird shit happens to our weird cast. Massie Williams turns into a wolf. There’s Slendermen with smiley face masks. Anya Taylor-Joy summons a laser sword from another dimension to fight a kaiju demon Bear monster. Maybe that is why I recommend this movie. Because of that sentence: Anya Taylor-Joy summons a laser sword from another dimension to fight a kaiju demon Bear monster.
New Mutants is inconsistent. It has
an LGBT Native American lead, but is full of racism from other characters I
can’t really give it credit. It never feels like a movie that wasn’t recut dozens
of times. However, we could do a lot worse with a YA adaptation of Michael Crichton’s
Sphere starring superheroes.
7. Boys State (2020)
A lot of people have this fantasy that once the Baby Boomers die off, we can finally fix the world. That the older
generation is some kind of inertia holding us back. If Millennials and Zoomers were
to team up, we’d flip Texas Blue, and create our socialist utopia. This is a fantasy I think every generation has had. In 1969 some
Baby Boomers must have thought that once their parents died, they could have had Peace
and Love forever. But instead those Boomers turned into Reaganites and the Moral Majority
and screwed us all over. What are the odds that Millennials will just fail too?
What if there is no savior generation? Instead we’re just the same corrupt
assholes over and over? Or, to put it another way, as long as the structures exists to create corrupt assholes, we'll still get corrupt assholes?
Boys State is as disturbing a documentary as I’ve seen since
the 2006 exploration of White Evangelical brain washing, Jesus Camp. This is a documentary
about the “Boys State” program. It is a group of Texas politically-active teenage
boys gathering together to form a mock government and pass mock legislation. (This
is the kind of nerdy shit I did a lot in high school. I did debate clubs, mock trials,
and the Constitution Competition – I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory at
any of them. Maybe I'd have done better if we talked about Godzilla more and less about Federalist No. 10.) This group of boys - no girls - are brutally Conservative. They’re
Southern, overwhelmingly White, and many have connections with Republican
political machines. So, these kids do not represent their cohort all that
accurately. However, they still believe themselves to be their generation's future leaders,
and if these kids are our leaders, our future will be as fucked as our present. I'm not saying it is too late for these kids. But it is too late for the system that created kids who act like this.
Abortion is not a popular topic here. Gun rights, however,
are. The two brown kids who given major focus, Steven Garza (called “Garcia” by mistake in one telling gaff)
and Rene Otero, have to justify themselves to be here at all. Rene is very
nearly impeached because he insists the other kids not do a joke impeachment
vote that was against the rules. Garza’s big scandal was being politically
active in left-wing causes. As the minorities, they have to work harder for
less – weak compromises against an overwhelming stream of right-wing White
myopia. You can see here how our politics creates Cory Bookers (an alumni of
this Boys State program), unimpressive men who need to compromise
themselves to even keep their Black butts at the White table. If anything is changing, it’s
changing the other way. The Zoomers are innovating, but with
an admiration for Trump’s adolescent posturing and, of course, they have lots of lazy, shitty memes. Because that's what this country needs more of. Memes.
If Boys State is our future, we’re fucked.
6. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966), dir. Jun Fukuda
I’ve read several histories of Godzilla. The established
wisdom of most authors I have read is that Godzilla started to suck sometime in the
mid-Sixties. Everybody agrees the first movie, Gojira, is a horror masterpiece. But many people believe the “bad” Showa Era Godzilla starts after Destroy All
Monsters, sometimes even as early as this movie, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.
Godzilla in this period started as the painful tragedy of the atomic age in 1954 and
just a decade later was a fun mascot. His features softened and his eyes grew
bigger to be more emotive. I recall one author, in a particularly dickish mood,
compared friendly Godzilla to Barnie the Dinosaur. Critics all agree that by
1975 Godzilla was tired, his studio Toho was nearly bankrupt, and the franchise
was a pale imitation of its former self. The darker and more serious 1984
reboot, beginning the Heisei Era, was a grand revival of a dying franchise.
I will not say Showa Era Godzilla was particularly
consistent or even all that dignified. But it was a ton of fun, especially if you are a child or remember being one. Who can’t love Godzilla’s victory dance? Japan was invaded by
cockroach aliens, gorilla aliens, and aliens that turned into liquid metal
slugs. You need to be able to appreciate some particularly nonsensical B-movie SciFi logic to love these movies. But it all has a charm of its own.
Eibrah, Horror of the Deep is usually listed as one of the worst Godzilla movies. People think of it has a bad example of Showa Era cheese. This movie is well-known as a failed King Kong script which had Godzilla pasted into the story after the fact. That’s why Big-G moves from his usual urban disaster environment to a tropical island adventure. The King of the Monsters himself does not appear until the final act, after being rudely awoken from his underground slumber. Until then this is about four young men getting caught in a storm then landing on a mysterious island. (A lot of Matango vibes so far.) The heroes then discover this island does not have killer mushrooms, but instead a military base for an evil Bond villain, and a giant killer lobster named Ebirah. Also, Godzilla briefly falls in love with a Native Woman.
Maybe she's Minilla's mom?
I think I would have had a lot less patience for these annual Godzilla movies if I had lived through them at the time. Maybe once the MCU stops being so omnipresent in pop culture I'll learn to love those movies too. So looking at Ebirah today, I can appreciate the shifts Godzilla's formula. Sure, this is a movie made on the cheap, but so what? What's wrong with an adventure movie that just so happens to have Godzilla in it? Oh, also, Mothra is here. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is way underrated. Showa Godzilla was not at its worst when it was cheesy and weird, it was at its worst when it was boring. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep is never boring.
5. Destroy All Monsters (1968), dir. Ishiro Honda
The only movie I can compare Destroy All Monsters to is Avengers: Endgame. By the time both movies were made both their respective franchises had been going on for the better part of a decade. They were immense studio investments, the biggest blockbusters of their time. Destroy All Monsters was, until Endgame, the largest crossover movie of all time. Endgame demands you have seen twenty-one other MCU movies and a few TV shows. In order to fully appreciate every reference in Destroy All Monsters, you would have to have the previous eight Godzilla movies, along with the films Mothra, Rodan, Frankenstein Conquers the World, Varan the Unbelievable (a movie that is unbelievably terrible), King Kong Escapes, and probably a few other movies I'm forgetting too. Destroy All Monsters was undeniably the high-water mark of this era of Toho as a studio. They would not attempt something half this ambitious again until Godzilla: Final Wars forty years later.
The interesting thing about Showa Godzilla movies, even in this grand epic of kaiju action, is that they're not about the giant monsters. They're SciFi thrillers that have kaiju action on the sidelines. Destroy All Monsters has a massive cast of about a dozen monsters, but none of them are really characters. Not even Godzilla. A lot of Showa Toho movies have the same plot. Aliens invade the Earth, and mind-control our local population of kaijus to fight for them. This was the plot of Invasion of the Astro-Monster. It would be the plot of Space Amoeba just two years later. Hell, the idea even came back in the final Showa-era kaiju movie, Terror of Mechagodzilla. In DestroyAll Monsters, Godzilla gets a few seconds to attack a miniature of New York City, then he's absent from the movie until the end. The plot instead is about the adventures of Captain Katsuo Yamabe (Akira Kubo), a daredevil with a cool rocketship, flying from Earth to the Moon and back. He's fighting a race of sexy female aliens named the Kilaaks.
That focus on the humans also is the great critical flaw of the Showa Era. Akira Kubo is an okay actor. He does swashbuckling future space captain stuff well enough. But he's not why you're here. You want to see fucking Godzilla not this guy! These older movies are great ones to watch while folding clothes or just bullshitting on the internet. You can stop paying attention for ten whole minutes and miss nothing of the plot. I like the cheesier later movies because frankly, these films get really boring sometimes. Even Destroy All Monsters has dull stretches.
Destroy All Monsters does end in a glorious kaiju climax where every giant monster Toho ever made all join together on camera for a single epic reveal shot. (Think that scene in Endgame where all the heroes jump out of Dr. Strange's portals, and everybody who wasn't me wept for joy. I was weeping for joy seeing Gorosaurus on screen with Manda, however.) They all team up to take down the great arch-villain of the Showa Era, King Ghidorah. King Ghidorah is massively out-numbered and does not put up much of a fight. It's sad seeing ol' Ghidra killed so brutally.
But still, no kaiju movie before or since has topped Destroy All Monsters for sheer scale. This is also the last Godzilla movie where Godzilla was not the definitive star monster. He's one kaiju among many here. From now on after this, Godzilla would be the King of the Monsters.
4. Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), dir. Ishiro Honda
In probably one of the wackier twists on the Mary Shelley classic
character, Frankenstein becomes a kaiju. I love that Frankenstein Conquers the
World exists. It is the kind of movie that is as much to describe as to watch. I just want to torture people by forcing them to listen to my plot summary of it.
Maybe I'll torture you, dear reading: during WWII, the Nazis stole the
still-beating heart of Frankenstein’s Monster. Then, for whatever reason, they
chose to pass the heart over to the Japanese via U-boat. (Cryptonomicon much?)
The heart then lands in Hiroshima just in time for President Truman to create
angry 2020 Twitter arguments by nuking the city. Twenty years later, the
now-radioactive heart has either grown into a young boy or maybe the kid ate it... that part is really unclear. Either way, there’s now a feral boy in Hiroshima, slowly
growing into gigantic size.
Frankenstein Conquers the World is more of a monster tragedy than a horror tale or even a fun children’s kaiju rumble. Frankenstein is just an innocent childlike person, who sadly has the entire nation of Japan out to kill him. (And later a totally different kaiju monster, Baragon, that just shows up entirely unrelated to that Nazi heart business.) Frankenstein’s life is sad and difficult. This movie is as close to a King Kong or Mighty Joe Young as Toho ever made. The poor thing is just too big for the world around him.
Part of what makes Frankenstein Conquers the World so American
is that this was actually an American-Japanese co-production, one of several
from the mid-Sixties. Toho teamed up with the B-movie distributer, American International
Productions. That meant this was one of two kaiju movies starring Nick Adams in
all his conspicuous White guy glory. Nick Adams does a lot in his Japanese
movies despite working with very little, he’s as good in Frankenstein as he is in
Invasion of the Astro-Monster. He brings a lot of anger and passion that these
Japanese SciFi movies generally lack. Dr. Togami (Kumi Mizuno) gets to be Frankenstein’s
adopted mother figure and that gives us more of a personal relationship with the monster.
Frankenstein is not a man in a big rubber suit. Instead he's a
half-naked guy in a bit of make-up, standing in a set of miniatures. That makes
the effects just amazingly ridiculous in the most charming B-movie ways. But it
also means Frankenstein can be faster and nimbler than any other kaiju, and much
more expressive. That’s because he isn’t a special effect, technically. He's a guy. At
least the production looks a lot better than the American movie, The Giant Gila
Monster, where filmmakers just tossed a normal-sized lizard into a train set. This movie uses a lot of clever rear-projection to sell Frankenstein's size.
Frankenstein Conquers the World moves quickly. It has a lot of big weird plot points and a lot of weird special effects. I think this is a real underrated classic of the era. There’s also a direct sequel, War of the Gargantuas, starring two of Frankenstein's kids (somehow). I didn’t like that one as much.
3. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), dir. Guy Ritchie
I’m not a marketing expert or anything, but I feel like the
only reason this movie failed was because of that title. What kind of acronym
is “U.N.C.L.E”? Also, does anybody remember the Sixites spy show it is based on that isn’t
a million years old? (And I'm a guy who is reviewing Sixties horror movies for fun right now.) At least “Mission Impossible” still sounds cool – and was
rebooted twenty years ago when the TV show was not quite entirely ancient. To
me, the word “Uncle” means racist rants about Black football players, not cool guy spy
action. I can see why people wouldn’t be excited for this movie. I wasn’t
excited for it either in 2015, mostly because of the title. If it was “The Man from S.T.E.P.M.O.M.” maybe it
would fit the 2010s zeitgeist more.
A lot of movies flop. A lot of blockbusters flop. Usually they
fail in uninteresting ways and are not worth a second look. I have no intention of ever checking out how Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur movie
from 2017 turned out. But Guy Ritchie's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a movie I kept hearing about over the years. It also helps that the main
stars of U.N.C.L.E. have only grown bigger in my mind since 2015. Henry Cavill,
Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, and Elizabeth Debicki were not an exciting cast
five years ago. Now? That’s two certified male movie stars, an Academy Award winning actress,
and finally an actress I think is still massively underrated. Debicki killed in Widows, why don't people love her yet?
Ignore that title. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is not old or
conservative. It’s got two of the hottest male actors of the last decade
sharing the screen. While nothing homoerotic explicitly happens with Cavill and
Hammer, everything homoerotic implicitly happens in your head. U.N.C.L.E. is
basically a James Bond movie with two Bonds who spend a large chunk of the
movie arguing over dazzling 1960s fashion. If your favorite 007 movie was On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service for the mod style, U.N.C.L.E. could be
your movie of 2015 in 2020. Elizabeth Debicki is legitimately fantastic as the villain.
There are several great chase scenes, including one where Cavill’s character
watches all the action parked in his rear-view mirror while casually eating a sandwich. The
Man from U.N.C.L.E. is hot entertaining action.
Henry Cavill plays a guy named “Napoleon Solo”. That’s really all you need to know.
2. She Dies Tomorrow (2020), dir. Amy Seimetz
I really cannot talk about She Dies Tomorrow without
bringing up the unfortunate bullshit around it. I would really rather avoid
this topic altogether. It's depressing. I'll throw it all in a footnote if you'd rather skip the backstory entirely. Just know director Amy Seimetz has a problem with an ex*.
She Dies Tomorrow’s first half hour was incredible. While at
home watching movies, I am endlessly distracted. I know I should be a good
critic and focus on one thing at a time, but I can’t. I watch most of my movies
in one window on my PC while playing Solitaire in another. It helps when a lot of my movies are kaiju films with predictable plots. But She Dies
Tomorrow hooked me deeply. I had to full screen this thing right from the
start, and I could not look away. This movie had this bizarre hypnotic nightmarish energy. There's one moment where the film turns on this strobing red and blue light. It was
incredible. An almost Lynchian effect of pure mindscrew. The actress was staring into the camera, her expression
changing with every flash of light. Her face twitching between grimaces,
laughs, sobs, and then blank nothing. I was stunned.
Then I figured out what She Dies Tomorrow was actually about and it
never quite hit that high again. I turned Solitaire back on. The last
forty-five minutes were fine. Once She Dies Tomorrow explained any of what was
going on, it lost me. The tension was the mystery, what it does after that mystery breaks is far less interesting. At first this movie is just about this one woman, Amy
(not played by Amy Seimetz but by Kate Lyn Sheil), alone in her new house,
freaking out. She’s guzzling wine, blasting classical music, and seems deeply
unwell. She’s nervously awaiting some unknown event. Then her intense, almost suicidal anxiety starts to spread to the world around her.
I should clarify something when I use the words “She Dies Tomorrow explains
something”. This movie does not explain why Amy thinks she will die. It does
not explain even if she will die. There’s no Ring video or government virus
creating the mass hysteria. We jump into this movie in Act 3 of Amy’s story
with no sense of how she got there, and without any conclusion. This is not a
movie for regular audiences. If you want a laugh, read the audience reviews on
Rotten Tomatoes. This movie is all mood, it has no time for small stuff like exposition or coherence.
Ultimately, I wish the movie had gone in a different
direction come the second half. It starts off as this unbelievably grim
exploration of a woman’s last night alive. Then it turns into a much sillier
idea. “What if the entire world thought they would die tomorrow. How weird would
we act?” seems to be the central premise. There’s some good stuff here in there
in the sillier side of this movie. But I wish we had never left Amy’s house. The satire we end in is less rich than the pure emotion we started from.
(Deep sad breath) Shane Carruth, director of
such incredible movies as Primer and Upstream Color, had a Twitter
moment a month ago. Amy Seimetz is Shane Carruth’s
ex-girlfriend. She also starred as the heroine of Upstream Color while Carruth
himself played her romantic interest. This is distressing to me personally since
2013’s Upstream Color is easily the greatest movie I’ve seen this year. It is
extraordinary art. The relationships these two had is directly linked to the film's story. Then Carruth used the film’s dead Twitter profile to have a public temper tantrum all through July.
Carruth has struggled for years to get another movie made.
One would assume it was simply the industry’s own stupidity stopping this legitimatley brilliant man from making more movies. But turns out,
Carruth seems like a really troubled person. He posted photo of the vinyl version of the Upstream Color soundtrack. He went out of his way to leave in the corner of that picture a restraining order Seimetz had filed against him. Supposedly he just "accidentally" left it in the shot. There are
reports that Carruth had been abusing Seimetz for years. His insane behavior
lately seems to be yet more attempts to manipulate her and insert himself into
her story. It is despicably calculated. Carruth tweeted that just days before
Seimetz’s new movie was about to release. This is why I feel gross even bringing him, I am playing into exactly what he he wants. He wants to remain part of Seimetz's story. He sure has me writing about him when the movie I want to talk about has nothing to do with him.
Anyway, congratulations, Shane Carruth. You probably ruined Upstream Color forever for me, which was something I loved very deeply. Now I can’t think about Upstream Color anymore without imagining what a toxic creepy asshole you are.
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