The Skin-Crawling Brilliance Of 'Longlegs'
#280: "Longlegs," "Fly Me To The Moon," "Panic Room," "Federer: Twelve Final Days"
Edition 280:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: An impressively creepy new horror thriller, an unimpressively corny space race movie, and an early David Fincher gem. Oh, and I finally got around to that Roger Federer doc. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a peek behind the papal curtain with an all-star cast.
Longlegs
The best place a movie can ever hope to get to is exactly one step ahead of the viewer. Any more and it’ll confuse us. Any less and it’s boring and predictable.
That’s not as easy as it may sound. It takes a director with a true confidence in his abilities to toy around with where that line is drawn. Oh you were thinking horror? Here’s a moment of comedy. You relaxed for a second? Boom here’s a scare. We’re going one direction only to set up a swerve the other way.
Turns out, Oz Perkins is one such director. Here he uses the cultural familiarity of Silence of the Lambs — female FBI agent with intuitive abilities tracks a heinous serial killer — as a common starting point and then leads a viewer through a metaphorical labyrinth of funhouse mirrors as his story gets deeper and darker. Straightforward police investigation plot this is not.
As I always say, with horror and comedy success is measured on a one-criteria system. Is it scary/funny? If yes, people will like it. And what’s interesting about Longlegs is that yes it is quite scary, but it does not rely on a bunch of jump scares or cheap horror tropes to induce screams. Instead it’s creepy, unsettling, inducing more of the sensation of making one’s skin crawl.
Everything about the movie just doesn’t feel quite right (purposely!), whether it’s the stress-inducing score or the vintage color palette. The aforementioned serial killer is played by Nicolas Cage, sporting so much facial prosthetics you’d be forgiven for not recognizing him, and an all-white outfit because Perkins says “killers in movies always wear black,” the kind of simple subversion that unsettles a viewer and makes this movie feel fresh, if not outright iconic.
Even our heroine, played by relative unknown Maika Monroe (already a hall of fame scream queen for her starring role in It Follows), tunes her performance to a frequency that leaves viewers unsettled.
For me to recommend this movie so strongly, and put it as high as No. 3 for the year so far, says a lot since I’m not naturally predisposed to like a movie that says “hail satan” three times (though to be fair the movie is hardly endorsing that opinion).
A legitimate good movie gets better upon close inspection rather than worse, and one could make the case after a long discussion that it’s not a movie about serial killers or satan worship at all but rather about the sacrifices parents make to make a better life for their children, and the lies they may tell them (or not tell them) in order to maintain their blissful ignorance. For me to leave a movie as visceral and thrilling as this one and have that takeaway says a lot, especially in a year where getting even one of those two things is a rare treat.
Something New
Fly Me To The Moon (Theaters): Apple has been accused of being starf—ers plenty of times since launching their streaming service in 2019, paying top dollar (and then some) to put A+ talent in all their projects, even if in fairness it’s just a more aggressive version of the strategy Netflix employed to disrupt the industry and become the leader in the clubhouse of the streaming wars. That’s their prerogative. But the thing I’ve noticed about most of their original movies and shows (even the good ones like Presumed Innocent), is that they aren’t able to suspend our disbelief. The sets look like sets, the actors like actors, the costumes like costumes. They look like a very expensive game of dress-up.
Fly Me To The Moon is probably the most egregious example of this, boasting not a single authentic bone in its competently constructed body. Scarlett Johansson stars as a public relations person for NASA who is tasked first with making the space race popular again for flight director Channing Tatum, two people that are way too hot and way too colorfully dressed to A) work at NASA and B) have any of the problems they pretend to have in this movie.
The movie is full of rim-shot worthy punchlines, the kind that you laugh at in a particular way — a mouth-closed chuckle softly in the back of your throat (try it now). And it’s so dedicated to its cutesy charm offensive that it expects viewers to sit through enough plot for a season of television…2hr12min, for this? Seriously?! More than an hour in, the movie reveals its actual story, which is creating a fake moon landing to broadcast to the country if the real one goes south (headed up by a cartoonish Woody Harrelson).
The only way to justify this movie is as targeted programming for older audiences, who are ready to close-mouth chuckle about the days of bob haircuts and high-waisted pants. We’re already seeing this on television, where the average age of network primetime viewers is 69 years old and programmers are responding with more “Blue Bloods” and “The Golden Bachelor.”
But in my mind there’s no way to justify this movie’s $100 million price tag when Damien Chazelle’s First Man, a borderline masterpiece and my favorite movie of 2018, covering the exact same time and place in history, only reportedly cost $60 million. Then again, it’s entirely possible that my personal contempt toward the public relations profession ruined this movie before it even began.
Something Old
Panic Room (1996, Max): This was the only David Fincher movie I had never seen before, and even for a guy with just about the best track record of any director in history (Se7en, Gone Girl, Zodiac, The Social Network etc.), I don’t know why but I was still surprised at how insanely good this movie was.
The entire movie takes place in a New York City brownstone, where Jodie Foster’s recently divorced and newly rich single mother has just moved in with her daughter, played by a teenage Kristen Stewart. A group of thieves break in, sending Foster and Stewart to their new state of the art panic room, unknowingly foiling the plans of the bumbling robbers — played by Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam (yes, THAT Dwight Yoakam).
The movie is claustrophobic yet has an excellent sense of place, moving its characters around like pieces on a chess board and clearly communicating where they are at all times so the viewer can follow. It’s essentially a problem solving movie, using its limitations of space to spawn new creative situations and solutions. It’s pretty intense yet has plenty of very funny moments, and from a character standpoint, Foster and Whitaker in particular give true movie star performances and bring pathos to the proceedings. Just an absolute banger start to finish.
Something to Stream
Federer: Twelve Final Days (Amazon Prime): From a dramatic perspective, there’s very that’s “interesting” about Roger Federer. Among any public figures of his level of fame and success, he’s just about the most beloved and unblemished of all of them. But seeing the way he handled his retirement in this behind-the-scenes documentary, and reflecting on his incredible tennis career, is inspiring on a personal level. We should all want to pursue greatness the way he did, with perspective of what’s really important off the court as well as grace and humility.
I’ll admit, I got a little misty eyed during the final scenes as we see him crying through his farewell, and also the way it brings his rivals Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic also to tears. Imagine the effect you have to have one others to make your fiercest career rivals cry for you when you retire?! What an incredible guy.
Trailer Watch: Conclave
At first glance, this is a curious choice for director Edward Berger — a hot director with some juice after the success of All Quiet On The Western Front. A serious drama about the papal selection process had better be an Oscars contender, especially when it looks this expensive (read: good) and has Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Jon Lithgow in the cast, because nothing about it screams box office potential.
Still, they cut this trailer as if it were a 1990s thriller, somehow managing to make a bunch of old dudes in rooms talking look super exciting. And they put it on the calendar for November, prime awards season. So my expectations are pretty darn high.