My wife was away for the weekend, so I decided to catch up on a few movies that I knew wouldn’t interest her while doing my best to stay dry. The remnants of the Pacific hurricane known as Patricia crossed into the Gulf of Mexico, bringing with it an impressive amount of rain. The most recent total I saw for our community was something like 5.7″ between Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon. Parts of downtown Houston got as much as 10″. There was some localized flooding, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Everything was pretty dry before this batch of rain came.
On Friday night, I saw Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. This film has a few genuine scares, but it is mostly a Gothic movie that revels in atmosphere and setting. It’s about a young woman who marries a mysterious man and moves to England to live with him at his isolated and crumbling estate. The ceiling in the main entrance hall has collapsed, and a constant stream of stuff falls through it: leaves, petals, snow. It’s a magical and captivating concept. The young woman has prior experience with ghosts, and her new home has more than its fair share of them. They are depicted in an innovative manner: crawling specters that look like they are composed of the humans’ circulatory systems, with things (blood?) streaming off them at the edges in wisps and swirls. The whole thing is visually impressive, worth seeing on the big screen. Stick around for at least the first section of the credits for more of these fantastic visuals. Oh, it’s also a very stabby movie.
On Saturday morning, I saw Sicario, which is a good follow-up to the Netflix series Narcos, where I first heard that word, which is defined as “hit man” in the context of this movie. Emily Blunt is an FBI agent who volunteers to attach herself to a task force led by Josh Brolin whose intent is to do some major damage to Mexican drug lords operating near the US border. Also on the team is a mysterious figure played by Benecio del Toro (unrelated to Guillermo), a man with some odd quirks and a way of speaking in philosophical metaphors. Blunt’s character is highly motivated because her team was damaged by a booby trap, and she’s coming to understand that the normal ways of doing things simply aren’t effective. She’s the audience’s avatar, the person to whom the film is explained, and there’s a lot more going on than she at first realizes, which places her in some difficult situations. It’s all very impressive and disturbing because it seems real and realistic. Possibly one of Blunt’s best-ever performances, and del Toro is terrific.
By the time I left that matinee showing, the rain had started, so I hunkered down at home for the rest of the weekend. Yesterday I finally got around to seeing Chappie, which was not at all what I was expecting. William Gibson has been talking about the movie a lot on Twitter (very favorably). I thought it was going to be something like Short Circuit, and the trailers I saw in the distant past didn’t give me any sense of its South African setting or its “hip hop” sensibility. It stars Dev Patel (from the Marigold Hotel movies) as the inventor of robotic police, one of which he implants with consciousness. However, this robot is stolen by a bunch of criminals played by members of a rap/rave group called Die Antwoord. They give surprisingly effective performances as they “pervert” this sentient robot, implanting their particular South African accents and jargon onto it and convincing it to do things that are against its fundamental programming. Lurking in the wings is Hugh Jackman, who has built a prototype of a much more expensive robot that the company won’t give him the green light to test. The movie got a critical drubbing, and only middling audience response, but it’s really quite good. Funny and sad. A little maudlin toward the end, and a tad tidy, but it’s well worth the journey, especially since I got a coupon to see it free OnDemand.
