'Candyman' Thrills, But Would Rather Preach
#143: "Candyman," "Worth," "The Card Counter," "The Killing," "Only Murders in the Building," "What We Do In The Shadows," "Archer"
Edition 143:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: Forgive me for getting up on my soap box to talk about racial inequity in Hollywood, through the prism of the new horror thriller Candyman. Plus we’ve got a new 9/11 movie just in time for the anniversary, and frankly just a bad Paul Schrader movie to avoid. To stream there’s the grandaddy of all heist movies and a handful of half-hour comedies you’ll enjoy. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we look at arguably the greatest movie cast ever assembled.
Candyman
(Theaters)
The “Bechdel test” was first published in a comic strip in 1985, when Alison Bechdel laid out a character’s criteria for female representation in movies: 1) the movie must have at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.
Seems pretty simple right? Yet you’d be surprised how many giant movies fail to pass the test. To name a few: Avatar, The Avengers, the original Star Wars trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Social Network, even female-led movies like My Best Friend’s Wedding, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and on and on and on.
Why bring that up when discussing the racially-themed horror adventure Candyman?
Because it might be time to create a new test, designating movies in which two black characters are allowed to have a conversation that isn’t about white people.
Now, this movie would pass that new test. But only barely.
It would seem, at first glance, like this particular movie would be unavoidably racial. The story is adapted from real life events that took place in the Chicago projects back in the 1980s, when a brutal murder captured the attention of the city and raised to the surface many of the issues with the city’s public subsidized housing program. The question that was raised then, which the movie tries its best to capture as its thesis statement: was this woman killed by a bullet, or by the larger system of oppression in the projects?
Except that in the real life story, both the victim and the murderer were black. It wasn’t until the 1992 Candyman adaptation that Hollywood inserted a white graduate student as the protagonist (a ploy for more commercial appeal, which is its own problematic can of worms).
That first movie worked, and worked well, for a far more elemental reason. It’s a scary-ass horror movie with a really simple premise: say the name “Candyman” five times while looking into a mirror and he appears in the mirror to murder you with his hook for a hand.
When you think about invocation horror movies, like The Ring (watch a cursed videotape, die seven days later) or It Follows (have sex with the person who is being followed and you start being followed), the setup is so easily communicated there isn’t a need for complicated secondary motivations. (I don’t know about you, but if a guy was chasing me with an axe that’s all the motivation I would really need to run, and I probably wouldn’t stop to ask why the axe murderer is so angry.)
This new movie is a “spiritual sequel” to the first movie, picking up in the newly-gentrified apartment buildings built over the former projects, and following a young, successful black artist who gets inspired to research the neighborhood’s history. He ultimately decides to create an art exhibit around the urban legend. As you’d expect, things go horribly wrong from there.
Those basic horror elements are what this movie does so well. The whole journey is edge-of-your-seat tense, building moments of extreme stress and delivering on legitimate scares throughout. The technical aspects of production are on-point, and really even better than that. The movie is stylish and really effective.
Still, one could tell the entirety of this story, including the hardships of the projects and the neglect of the white power class, without ever actually featuring any white people. The conclusion reached by our artist protagonist, and this is no spoiler, is that the community created and maintained the Candyman myth in order to cope with the hardship of their conditions (until, of course, soon Candyman becomes much more than a myth).
But at the helm of this new movie is Monkeypaw Productions, Jordan Peele’s company, which has pioneered a wave of “racial thriller" projects. So Peele, with a screenwriting co-credit and a co-producing credit, along with director Nia DaCosta, seek to elevate the classic genre tropes as Peele did so masterfully in Get Out and Us.
The result is a movie that’s fighting against itself. The propulsive horror thriller slows down at frequent occasions to masquerade as an op-ed think piece, more essay than movie, delivering racial injustice theory that’s not incorrect but is totally incongruous with the story being told. It leans on oppressive white stereotypes like a crutch (albeit a historically accurate one).
Candyman himself doesn’t discriminate. If you say his name five times in a mirror, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, brown, green, blue or purple, you’re gonna get chopped up into little pieces.
In my personal opinion — acknowledging I’m just a dumb white guy — it would’ve been more powerful to see the community deal with this insane problem entirely on its own, emphasizing that the white people are only interested in them when they want to come reclaim the land. Times like these, they’re nowhere to be found.
Last year, when talking about Minari and Tigertail, I laid out my theory about the Second Wave of minority movies. In the First Wave, minority characters are nothing more than cartoonish stereotypes. I believe we’re in the Second Wave, when minority filmmakers are given the authority to tell stories, but only on their personal experiences. Too often, those Second Wave movies only get to present these groups in relation to white people (as immigrants, slaves, or victims of police abuse).
The huge box success of both Candyman and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, way above projections, shows the commercial appetite for stories that could finally push into that Third Wave.
We’ll know we’ve reached that next echelon of racial equality when minority communities, and the movies made about them, can have their own nightmarish monsters cutting them into little pieces no reason whatsoever.
Something New
Worth (Netflix): You probably know that Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. From a cinematic standpoint, there’s World Trade Center and more successfully United 93 that have tried to dramatize the events of that day (no easy task). If one is willing to take a more broad definition, then The 25th Hour, Man on Wire and even Zero Dark Thirty offer much better 9/11-adjacent options if you’re looking for a movie to commemorate the occasion this weekend.
Worth is a tough movie to watch, as it should be, because it focuses on the attorneys who were tasked with securing agreement from victims families to accept a payout from the government rather than suing. But really strong performances from Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci anchor a gut-wrenching exploration of the subject matter that feels important as an extension of history. Even if it’s not a Great movie, it is at the very least a high level “people in rooms talking” drama.
The Card Counter (Theaters): Very rarely does ya boy score early access screeners, but I got the hookup from Focus Features to check out Paul Schrader’s latest directorial effort before it hits limited theater release this weekend.
This is the guy who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, which helps explain why a talent like Oscar Isaac would sign up for the joyless slog of an ex-convict who crawls casinos across the country winning low-level poker events. Tiffany Haddish’s charisma as Isaac’s manager is all the more impressive considering she’s given nothing more to do than be a love interest; meanwhile, Tye Sheridan has passed the threshold of overrated and entered the Dane DeHaan Zone of “if this guy is in the movie watch out it’s probably bad.”
The filmmaking is competent it’s just pointless, providing little reason for viewers to continue their interest in the events of the story and failing to build a convincing case for itself as to why any of it matters. On a crowded weekend, feel free to skip.
Something Old
The Killing (1956, Amazon Prime): If you’re a fan of Ocean’s 11, or The Italian Job, or Baby Driver, or any other ensemble heist movie that’s come out in the last 60 years, you owe a debt to this classic directed by the great Stanley Kubrick. The movie is dated, no doubt, from the overwritten voice-over to the sing-songy dialogue, but it’s also well beyond its years technically (no surprise from all-time perfectionist Kubrick) and really clever.
The narrative is built around overlapping points of view, so we get that cool trick where we see the same events play out from different perspectives that reveal new details, creating a jigsaw puzzle of quirky characters and funny coincidences that come together into a high stakes heist of a racetrack. A really fun watch and as a cherry on top…only 80 minutes long!
Something to Stream
I get asked a lot about what TV shows I’m watching regularly, since it’s not something I track in the way I do with movies. These three fun streaming comedies are weekly appointment viewing:
Only Murders In The Building (Hulu): Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez are true crime podcast obsessives living in the same swanky New York City apartment building. When an actual murder happens in their building, they try to solve the case, and more importantly, make their own hit podcast. They’re equally incompetent at both tasks, leading to the sort of light-hearted and good-natured fun that goes down easy when you flip it on at the end of the night.
What We Do In The Shadows, Season 3 (FX, Hulu): For the uninitiated, this show is adapted from the 2014 movie of the same name, written by and starring Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement. The movie is great, especially if you’re a fan of their brand of humor (“Flight of the Concords,” Hunt for the Wilderpeople etc.), but the show is somehow even better. The premise is basically like “The Office,” except the documentary crew is following around a group of vampires in modern day Staten Island. It’s bizarre but endearing and absolutely hilarious.
Archer, Season 12 (FX, Hulu): By now, if you’re not onboard with TV’s rudest super spy, the show probably isn’t for you. But the level of clever writing has sustained every season, with a particular brand of bumbling a-hole humor that continues to crack me up. The voice cast is stacked. RIP to Jessica Walter.
Trailer Watch: Don’t Look Up
It was a massive week for movie trailers: blockbusters like The Batman and The Matrix: Resurrections, awards darlings like C’mon Cmon and Belfast, and of course Netflix’s The Guilty. This fall is going to be insane.
But I’ve got to tip my cap to Adam McKay, because he’s making the kind of old school Hollywood mega drama that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s an issues-first piece of awards bait that’s like straight out of 1995, with a good budget and one of the most mind-boggling casts ever assembled: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, Matthew Perry, Ariana Grande, Tyler Perry, Kid Cudi and like a half dozen others that could get top billing elsewhere.