Like the infamous, invasive Cane Toad that nearly destroyed Australia, the past decade of Western culture has been inundated with two particular pests: vampires and reality shows. Both beasts had sort of noble beginnings (don't laugh: done right, a serialized documentary is perfect for TV), but have been perverted and distorted to the point that they often feel irredeemable. What We Do In The Shadows is at once a send-up and a celebration of these sapped phenomenons. Starring Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (a director on the HBO series), the New Zealand film purports to be a documentary exploring the culture of vampires in Wellington, particularly a trio of flatmates – a tyrannical pervert, a dandy, and a bad boy whose ages range from 200 years old to about 700. The film putters along with them as they go through the daily gears of immortality and house chores. If you think culture has become bored with vampires, just imagine how the vampires feel. What We Do In The Shadows is, at it's best, a comedy of banalities – though there are plenty of bursts of horror and gore that will satisfy fright fans. But it's in the banalities where it succeeds most as a lambast of reality programming. Putting a lens on someone's day-to-day, even if they're an undead monster, is the best way to reveal the absurdity of it all. Depending on your experience, the fake documentary genre has become just as stale and vampires and reality TV. This is Spinal Tap has long been the benchmark, and for the longest time Christopher Guest and the gang were the only game in town. Partly thanks to The Office, we're now assuaged with talking heads and shaky, handheld storytelling. But What We Do In the Shadows never feels stale. Like Flight of the Conchords, much of the humour comes from a fish-out-water innocence. Like with any overdone genre, the temptation is there to start winking, but most of the laughs in What We Do In The Shadows come from playing it straight.
Since It Follows started making the festival rounds last year, it's gained a reputation as both a successful throwback to the, lurking, stalking, atmospheric horror of early John Carpenter, among other 70s and early 80s horror films. About a sexually transmitted curses, demons, and death cults, David Robert Mitchell's sophomore feature has inspired and hopefully earned hyperbole from critics and fans alike, all of whom are surely tired of the phoned-in gore and jump-scares of contemporary horror. Unfortunately, like a regular civilian, I've got to wait until we open It Follows on Wednesday to have a look for myself. But because that's unacceptable, I did my best to get a sneak peek – or whatever the aural version of a sneak peek is. For the past week, I've been "previewing" It Follows by listening to the soundtrack with headphones on, as loud as I can get. As a result, the jeepers have been effectively creeped out of me. The composer, Disasterpeace (aka Rich Vreeland), made a name for himself doing video game scores. In particular, the big deal Fez was backed by his nostalgic-sounding 8bit dreaminess. It Follows nods a few times to the chiptune, flute-y quest music of 80s video games. The score does get dreamy sometimes, but with that twist of dread that evokes the tone of David Lynch. Sharp ears will also pick up on similarities to the trilling conversational noises of moments in The Shining as well as the stabbing strings of Psycho. The other comparison that doesn't need to be subtle is to the simple, devious melodies of John Carpenter, who scores his own films. But while there are comparisons to be made, the music of It Follows is it's own beast. Indeed, for how synth-heavy the score is, there's a sweaty, hairy organic-ness to Disasterpeace's contribution. The sounds move from pounding to drill-like shrillness, the distortion of the synth almost taking on a growl. At times the tones drop so low and guttural that they achieve this physical feeling of rumbling wind that I've only experienced in real life from a struggling woofer. There are sounds on this album that I could only get around to describing as wind chimes made of meat and bone. At times, a sustained tone becomes discomforting, and I'm reminded of Eraserhead, with its industrial soundscape feel that actually serves to illicit nervousness and a bit of nausea, and a gut-deep dread when played through a quality presence. What this boils down to is that Disasterpeace's soundtrack here is presented as a both a presenter and a place, describing something that both pursues you and surrounds you all at once.
If you want to disrupt your life for a spell, I recommend walking around with the album on in headphones for a week. You won't know what you're looking for, but you'll be keeping your eyes peeled for something.
I keep thinking of some far-back interview with John Carpenter in which he confesses that Halloween didn't work as a horror movie until he added the score. Then all the tumblers clicked and the movie became an instant classic. This doesn't disparage the movie, but speaks to how far you can go with little. The individual, almost laconic elements of Halloween aren't astounding, but they combine in such a way that their sum becomes enormous. Again, I haven't seen It Follows yet, but from what I've read about it, it similarly cooks up a complicated dish with just a few ingredients.What many massive, mainstream, CGI, orchestrally scored horror moves miss is the fact that it doesn't take much to scare someone. All it takes is the perfect amount of little things.
I look forward to TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) every year. Pouring over the lists of films on offer is exciting. Bingeing on up to four films per day can be mind-altering in a good way – or a bad way. Any of you who have participated in the science and whimsy of selecting from those lists realize that it is a bit of a crap shoot. Will you get the films you wish for? And will those films live up to your expectations? Last September my TIFF binge was at the last minute with no preparation. I left my film selection up to the TIFF movie gods. On my last afternoon, loitering outside of one of the theatres, I was offered a ticket to a film starting momentarily. The gods had spoken. That ticket was for Seymour: An Introduction, a documentary I had heard nothing about. This turned out to be the best film I saw at TIFF. This is the best film that I saw last year. The reason that the film was made is as interesting as the wonderful story that it tells. From a dinner party that sounds right out of a Woody Allen film (complete with New York psychiatrist) Ethan Hawke (famous actor guy) discovers Seymour Bernstein (formerly famous classical pianist guy). They bond over shared vulnerability, performance anxiety, and the drive to create great art. Hawke becomes obsessed by a story that he wants to tell – a story about art, artistic pedagogy, and the fear of performing what you love. This film is full of music and full of humanity. Have a look at this brief clip of Bernstein talking with Hawke, recorded live in Toronto in September 2014. Don’t miss this film. - Doug
In an oft-told anecdote, Stanley Kubrick calls Stephen King late at night, out of the blue, to gab about ghosts. At some point in the conversation, Kubrick wonders if ghost stories, scary though they can be, aren't essentially optimistic. To Kubrick, the reality of a ghost implies the reality of an afterlife. By extension, the way at looking at the supernatural gives a sort of comforting logic to the possibly-unnerving illogical.
In this passing observation, Kubrick sort of inadvertently puts his finger on and fiddles with the linchpin of horror: we're scared by what we don't fully understand or perceive, but when we tell stories about these things we risk improving understanding and perception, diluting the fear. The problem persists: how do we talk about and describe something mysterious without demystifying it? How do we talk about ghosts without talking about the afterlife? The yarns of old had it figured out. Take, for instance, the story of Hansel and Gretal. When those squirts wander out into the woods, it's taken for granted that a witch lives out there. Never mind why the witch lives there, she just does. Narratively speaking, this puts a lot of faith in the audience – a faith that's dwindling more and more – that something horrible is just there and has always been there. In the storytelling landscape we live in now, however, an entire movie would be dedicated to that witch's backstory. How she became a witch, how she came to live in the woods, how she acquired a taste for children. You could even devote a movie to the history of the woods. This love of unraveling backstory has become the bane of horror and suspense movies because all the mystery, and therefore all the threat, inevitably gets wrung out. As a horror or suspense movie The Babadook is good in a way that shines a light on why its contemporaries are so bad.
For this reason, The Babadook will
be inevitably frustrating to fans of mainstream horror, but this is
looking at it through the lens of the past thirty years of decreasingly
scary scary movies. We're inoculated to movies where the source of fear
has franchise in mind, and so inevitably becomes elaborate and awkward and thin, shining
light on all the crannies where the legitimately frightening stuff
hides. But Mister Babadook hovers in that ill-lit, classic spot between a
literal and a psychological presence.
Coming out of Australia, The Babadook is an objectively slight movie with an objectively big feel. Amelia is the widowed mother of Sam, an odd seven-year-old with an interest in magic and homemade self-defense weapons. He has the devotion of a knight, charged with protecting his mother. From what exactly, we don't know. On the surface, it would seem Sam is adopting the Man of the House roll on his lost father's behalf. What he's protecting against, however, becomes a bit more specific after an ashen pop-up bedtime book, Mister Babadook, pops up out of nowhere.
After the book appears – and then re-appears – Amelia and Sam's reality takes a pounding. But what is Mister Babadook, and where did book – as an object, it seemingly lets him into this world – come from? The thing's origins and intentions are never clear and its the fact that its reality is both obvious and obscure that makes it a palpable threat. Is this an actual, sinister being, or the psycological manifestation of inchoate grief? There's no easy answer. And this lack of easy answers sets The Babadook apart. Monsters become less scary the more literal they become. The more they become included in reality, the more they have to adhere to a logic. And logic is rarely scary. At least anecdotally, The Babadook shares some commonalities with Kubrick's The Shining. For what's supposed to be ghost story, there are not clear ghosts in Kubrick's film. Almost – stress that almost – nothing happens that can't be explained by Jack's delusions. So too in The Babadook, what is supernatural and what is psychological is never clear. Kubrick's question to King can be read as a sort of an insult. In King's novel, the supernatural is literal – as dark as it might be, it's finally optimistic in Kubrick's terms. But telling that story with no certainty of ghosts dials up the tension and the horror, making possible the much more troubling story of a father twisted enough by his own mind that he'd slay his family. With a similar vagueness, The Babadook manages a similar, rare horror.
As soon as the new month's calendar comes out, we start getting asked about the next one. At this point, we can't quite reveal the full April program, but we can hip you to a few standouts that we've so far nailed down. But this is all hush-hush still; just between you and us. THREE GREAT DOCS SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
We get a lot of book clubs coming through the bookstore. Oftentimes it's a member of a club looking to get to get a book in that they've spun their wheels with at the last minute, but we never judge. Because we think these tiny communities are so important to the larger cultural community of Guelph, we're looking to shine a bit of light on them.
Are you a book club or a member of the book club that would be interested in being profiled by The Bookshelf? The idea is that we would infiltrate your group for one book / session and report back: who you are, how you started, what you read, what your meetings are like.
Being profiled wouldn't be without its discounted perks to your club if you chose to get the books through us, but otherwise the real perk is validation and elevation. It would be a sort of Jostens portrait of your group of readers. If you and your club would be interesting taking part, send an email to contribute@bookshelf.ca
Maybe it's because I don't find the subjects of golf or groundskeeping particularly compelling in and of themselves, but I can't help but imagine that if you excise all the gags and non-sequiturs Caddyshack would be a terrible movie. Take the bobbing O'Henry out of the pool, so to speak, and here's what you're left with: at a fancy-schmancy country club, where the rabble-rousing caddies tug the stiff upper lips of the wealthy patrons, one caddy, aided by a rebellious child of privilege, aspires to rise above his station. It's about as Shakespearean as plots come. That's the A story. The B story concerns the arrival of a gaudy, loquacious, disrespectful nouveau riche – who can't get no respect – to the club seemingly hellbent on enervating the status quo. In the C story, a groundskeeper with an unidentified affliction – possibly an adult version of Benjy from The Sound and the Fury – is tasked with tackling invasive vermin, ultimately emphasizing that any attempt to civilize the wilderness is quixotic. Ostensibly we're meant to care whether or not the young caddy will abandon his class values in order to be accepted by the well-to-dos, but does anyone really care about what happens in Caddyshack? The famous last line of the movie, let loose by Rodney Dangerfield, sort of implies that even Caddyshack doesn't care what happens in Caddyshack. It's maybe one of the best lines in cinema history, right up there with "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.": "Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!" Is it a problem that there are no stakes in this movie? Absolutely not; Caddyshack is great. But it's great on account of the dramatically irresponsible stuff. The jokes that add squat to the plot are what we remember, what we quote and describe. No one tries to recreate the tension of Danny's final putt, which is meant to be the climax of the movie. It's the chocolate bar loose in the pool or Bill Murray's "Cinderella Story" monologue that survive. Dramatically-speaking, wacky comedies are odd ducks. On the whole, they observe the basic Aristotelian structure of desire, conflict, and resolution, but this observance is often hollow, like grace said habitually by diners who never give God a thought. Was anyone on the edge of their seat when Danny was taking that final
put? Did anyone gasp when Maggie revealed that she may be pregnant? Did
we stand up and cheer when the gopher emerged mostly unscathed from
Carl's last stand? No. So why have a story if no one's really going to care
about the outcome? Comedic fidelity to conventional storytelling is at first blush confounding,
especially when most comedies are no more than vehicles for jokes. Most contemporary
mainstream comedies end up top-heavy, cramming their first 30 minutes with
premise before spending an inordinate amount of time building to conclusions – Adam Sandler or Paul Rudd-types rushing to airports or
realizing that family is the most important thing – that are nothing if not foregone. No one
watches these movies to see love triumphing over immaturity, but rather to see the lead
get an erection at an inopportune time or let food poisoning ruin a
company picnic. Yet many comedies are stupidly devoted to the illusion of stakes and nearly all fail to make anyone – themselves included – care past the first third. Or else comedies will go the other way and wiggle out of the leash, becoming a melee of jokes that fail on account of not being connected to some structure. Caddyshack is a classic, I think, because it figures out the formula by becoming a kind of meta-narrative. There are no real stakes in the movie, but it manages somehow to remain dramatically interesting. The power struggle presented in the story is between the anarchic caddies and the ordered club members, but the real power struggle in the movie – the reason we come back to the movie – is between the anarchy of comedy and the order of conventional narrative. Most contemporary comedy fail because they either lack or eschew this tension, becoming instead movies about the comedic anarchy being tamed and learning a lesson.
Caddyshack represents a sweet spot for screwball comedies, a stand out in an era of similar temperaments. It has an awareness and an intelligence – whether intentional or instinctual – that is disappearing from comedy. I know that as kids we dream of removing all the grain cereal from Lucky Charms and just eating the marshmallow charms. Of course we eat it for the candy, but it's hard to deny that there's something important about the boring cereal part that no one likes.
More importantly, though, is the assurance that we're all getting laid.
