Looks like we’re going to be getting new next door neighbors fairly soon. The SOLD tab has gone up on the realtor’s sign. I can’t say we’ll miss the previous neighbors and their increasing pack of barky dogs. We never really got to know them. The neighbors, not the dogs, I mean. We got to know the dogs very well.
At least they didn’t bring as much baggage with them as the family that moves into the new house in the excellent thriller The Gift, which we saw yesterday morning. The husband and wife move from Chicago to L.A. for his job. She had to leave her job behind, though she’s doing some stuff online. There are hints of possible instability in her past. It’s a new start, perhaps time to add to their family, though that has been problematic in the past. Then he (Jason Bateman) runs into someone from high school while they’re out shopping. Dude is a little creepy. A little stalkerish. The guy is played by Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed the film. Bateman’s Simon (as in Simon Says) remembers him as Gordo, though in private he recalls him as Weirdo. He seems a little off kilter, and he keeps showing up, often bearing gifts. Is he obsessed with Simon’s wife, Robyn? Did he do something to the family dog, Jangles? And what really happened back in high school?
There are a few jump-scares, but mostly this is a taut thriller with a very well developed story and characters. Edgerton’s script leads you in all manner of directions and raises any number of suspicions, some of them legitimate, some of them red herrings. He also manages to shift the viewer’s allegiances throughout, until he punches everyone in the stomach with a wholly substantiated but unforeseen revelation. My wife, who generally doesn’t like scary movies, really enjoyed The Gift, because it was all about the characters. No guts or gore. Highly recommended.
We also watched a documentary called Iris, about Iris Apfel, though I’m hard pressed to explain what it is she’s famous for. She became renowned for her rather quirky fashion taste, I guess is the easiest way to say it. She likes gaudy bangles and intriguing textiles and somehow parlayed that into celebrity. She’s in her early 90s and still does all these interviews and talk shows about fashion. Her husband, who turns 100 at the end of the movie, just died this month, I see. It was an oddball film—were she less famous, she could have been featured on an episode of Hoarders, or perhaps even an entire season—but a look at something with which we have no direct exposure, so that’s always interesting.
Hannibal went out with a bang and a few stabs and lots of blood. It was a very strange, entrancing series. In this incarnation, it’s almost a love story between Hannibal and Will Graham, and the final moments were very Reichenbach Falls, although if you didn’t wait for it there was a post-credits scene not to be missed in which Gillian Anderson looked quite ravishing and delectable. Even if there is never a Season 4, which looks like less of a possibility with each passing day, it was a good way to end things.
