Category: ArtsFuse

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“The Life of Chuck” — More Schmaltz Than Substance

Read my review of the Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck, now live on the Arts Fuse.

The problem with The Life of Chuck isn’t that it’s bad, per se, but it’s nowhere near great, and that’s a waste of a lot of talent and potential. Imagine Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life turned into a made-for-TV afterschool-special…

Stephen King is amazing. Over the past 50 years he’s written 65 novels and hundreds of short stories — more than four times the lifetime output of Dickens, over 30,000 pages in total, according to one calculation. Throughout this steady production, he consistently delivers compelling and innovative premises, relatable characters, and solid — sometimes beautiful — writing, time after time.

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Review of Thordur Palsson’s “The Damned”

The Damned is a perfect little ice-cold January horror gem blending historical, psychological, and folk chills into a bleak midwinter’s tale to keep you up through the longest nights of the year.

Robert Eggers’ art-house Nosferatu is topping both box-office charts and award short-lists, so it’s a good time to take a closer look at what’s going on in the world of horror, a too-often-disregarded genre that is capable of supplying so much more than just jump-scares and gore-fests. Remember, horror is among the original forms of narrative fiction (along with “romance” and “epic/quest”). Long before Friday the 13th or Scream VI spine-tingling campfire stories and seriously grim fairy tales served as outlets for our deepest fears, cautionary fables to warn and ward us through an uncertain world.

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Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

A world premiere is always an exciting thing, and all the more so when it’s a midnight horror screening at the Sundance Film Festival. You can read my review of the throwback psychological-horror thriller Censor on The Arts Fuse.

Censor deftly explores the interplay of censorship, free expression, public morality, violence, sexism, insanity, human nature, and even the line between truth and beauty in art. (One key insight worth pondering: the more absurd and over-the-top the gore is, the more obviously fantastical it must be — and thus, paradoxically, the more acceptable.)

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Thankfully, Bailey-Bond’s touchstone here is empathy, not prurient sadism. As we witness the effects of a toxic blend of images on Enid’s psyche as she confronts the world’s horror, we fear for her, but we feel for her as well. Most impressively, the director — one in a growing cohort of women directors intent on saving the horror genre from gratuitous sadism and its past gorification of misogyny — reminds us of what we should truly fear: the scariest thought imaginable is not to be the victim of a monster, but rather to become a monster oneself. (In this respect, Censor can actually be considered a direct descendant of a deeper horror tradition: tales of Dracula, the werewolf legend, and most pre-Walking Dead zombies were all terrifying not for what they might do to us, but for what they might make us do.)

This one is a bit of a departure from our normal “city in film” fare, but it was also a real scream — quite literally — with a lot to say about the interplay of media and society. Read the full review here.

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Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

I had a lot of fun reviewing Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland for The Arts Fuse, which was nicely paired with a commentary from Peg Aloi.

In the same year you got your license, you saw Easy Rider at the drive-in and were turned on by Canned Heat singing “Going Up the Country” at Woodstock, followed by a steady diet of “Going Mobile,” “Going to California,” and counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. The highway was calling and you rose to answer — but then life intervened, with a husband and a mortgage and a job at the gypsum plant and shopping lists and gutters to clean and 1,001 other daily responsibilities and hassles, and being on the road was just something Willie Nelson would sing about on the jukebox.

And then like that, decades later, with a whoosh of the undertow and a great sucking sound, the plant closed and the bottom dropped out of the world and everything that was once stable evaporated – husband, job, house, community – and all that was left was you and the road again….

To read more, see The Arts Fuse — and be sure to also read Peg’s commentary on the site as well. (And for fun, check out this Nomadland “filmerick”, too.)

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Herself (Phyllida Lloyd, 2020)

Now out on the Arts Fuse, my review of Herself, Phyllida Lloyd’s new feature produced in partnership between Amazon Studios and Screen Ireland.

Through this classic cinema framing, we come in for the close up: by watching Sandra’s story — by attending to this particular life, as lived and experienced slowly, by this individual — we may hope to understand a more general story playing out elsewhere.

Sadly, this “elsewhere” is more accurately an “everywhere,” as there are loads of Sandras not just in Dublin, but in Dayton, Durban, Dallas, Dubai, Delhi, and Da Nang — as well as right here in Boston and its suburbs. Based on a true story and reminiscent of too many others, Sandra is a mother fleeing an abusive spouse, hoping to find a safe home for her children in a world where even something this simple would seem to require a miracle.

To read the full review, click here. To watch this film, head to Amazon Prime.

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