Delayed Reaction: Life After Beth

The Pitch: There aren't enough zombie love stories.

A boy discovers his dead girlfriend has come back to life and soon realizes that it's not a good thing.

Zombie comedies are nearly as prevalent as serious zombie movies at this point. This is the Sundance take on the subgenre. I often talk about what the typical Sundance movie looks like (drama movie with comedy stars, coming of age, fairly bleak). That's really the definition of a specific, prevalent kind of Sundance movie. There's also the Sundance movie that's a comedy, normally with an edge, that's an excuse for a bunch of comedy actors who all have the same friends to make something that won't get noted to death by a studio. That's what Life After Beth is.

I appreciate the slow build to the bigger punchlines. It starts as an off-kilter drama before revealing the "alive" Beth. Aubrey Plaza is able to disguise her sarcasm as sincerity, which makes the performance funny in an uncomfortable way. By the end, she finally gets to go as big as possible. I like how the movie goes to the mundane for laughs, and I got a real kick out of the scene when Dane DeHaan's character realizes he's stereotyping by assuming the Haitian maid caused this to happen. I love the cast, pretty much from top to bottom. If Plaza and Anna Kendrick just want to keep getting each other jobs in each other's movies, I'm fine with that. John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon have a lot of fun rationalizing the return of their daughter.

The big problem with the movie is that it never quite justifies why it needed to be more than a Funny or Die sketch. Other than the occasional good bit (like a dead Beth falling from the cliff with an oven strapped to her), the latter half of the movie has trouble finding new jokes to make. Dane DeHaan is probably not the right lead for this. He's a little too intense. When things move to the absurd, he has trouble moving along with it. And he's not really being the straight man either. I'd much rather see someone like a Thomas Middleditch in the role.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Lighthouse

Formula: The Light Between Oceans ^ The Witch

Yep. This is a Robert Eggers film. It only took two movies to find a pattern. His first movie was The Witch: a period movie about people in a remote location that starts to play with their sanity. The characters speak in thick, accurate dialects. While the movie is simply categorized as horror, it's better described as a moody, haunted fable. This is all true of The Lighthouse too except even more so. Instead of an isolated family, it's just two men. Rather than a forest outside of time, it's an inaccessible lighthouse. Instead of witches, it's mermaids and sea creatures. Rather than a cursed goat, there's cursed gulls. The moody atmosphere is dialed up even further by shooting the movie in black and white with the square frame of an early silent film. So, the very short assessment of this movie is, if you found The Witch off putting, then stay far away from The Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse is very much about mood. The plot is thin to the point of being forgettable. Two men take a job running a remote lighthouse for a month. Willem Dafoe plays the supervisor. Robert Pattinson takes a contracting job as the wickie (i.e the guy who does all the work). In their isolation, Pattinson starts losing it. The gulls bother him. Dafoe is a taskmaster. There's visions of mermaids and other sea creatures. Probably worst of all, Pattinson is an alcoholic who falls off the wagon while he's there.

The movie successfully rots away at you. The square picture ratio and black-and-white cinematography gives it the feel of an old silent movie that you are trapped in. And, even though it has sound, it's shot in physically exaggerated ways like there isn't sound. The fact that half the time, I could barely understand what Dafoe or Pattinson were saying added to my unease. The crudeness of Dafoe added to my annoyance. I must say, I love Richard Eggers' approach to horror. Instead of going for scares, the movie is more like a scab that keeps getting picked at. It's odd and uncomfortable and unsettling. It stops even being about whether or not Pattinson has gone insane. He has gone insane, but is he also in an insane world?

Pattinson and Dafoe are great at what they are doing. Dafoe is scummy. Pattinson is a raw nerve. They chafe against each other the entire time, but I was never sure if a scene was going to end with a hug or a punch to the face.

I respect what the movie is doing more than I liked it. The amount of - well - everything, overwhelmed me by the end. The mood, as expertly calibrated as it is, is just a hair too unhinged for my taste. The thick dialect crossed a line where it was more impenetrable that mood-setting. I love that Eggers spent his Witch capital on something so weird and specific, but I wouldn't mind if he welcomed a general audience back a little more with his next project.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Current War: Director's Cut

Formula: The Prestige - The Illusionist

Some time in 2011, on a bored night working third shift at work, I was looking through the On This Day section of Wikipedia for random days and came across this one:

January 4, 1903 - Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The Edison film company records the film Electrocuting an Elephant of Topsy's death.

(At the time, I think it said something even more jarring, like "Thomas Edison electrocutes an Elephant")

That was my introduction to what the new film dubs The Current Wars*. It's a fascinating bit of history that, if done right, is a great idea for a movie. I mean, any story that drives a man to electrocute an elephant has to be good, right? As soon as I saw the first trailer for this movie, I was pretty excited. The problem is, that first trailer I saw came some time in 2018, and that was actually a year after the movie was originally set to be released. Thanks to the Weinstein scandal and a series of recuts, The Current War finally arrived in theaters in wide release this weekend, over two years after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. At this point, it carries none of the Oscar buzz that it started with, and the nationwide release is being specifically called The Current War: The Director's Cut to emphasize that "we fixed it". The last movie I remember with this much pedigree and release turmoil was Tulip Fever, which is not a movie any project wants to be compared to.

*The term wasn't invented for the movie.

While The Current War definitely never shouldn't've had Oscar aspirations, I did like the movie a good deal. It covers a little over a decade. The stakes are a little dry to explain but easy enough to understand. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his company have by far the best lightbulb available but uses direct current to light it. Direct current is weak but safe to touch. Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) uses a lightbulb design that rips Edison's off and powers it with alternating current, which is what we're familiar with in the present day. It's very powerful but the wires are dangerous to touch. Also, the technology to harnass its potential hasn't been invented yet. Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) has only figured AC out at the theoretic level. With their parallel but seperate technologies, Edison and Westinghouse compete for the contracts to light up cities across the country. Edison has his incredible fame and the backing of JP Morgan (Matthew Macfadyen) to get an early lead. Westinghouse has a better, cheaper product which allows him to take the lead later. Edison combats this by stressing how dangerous Westinghouse's alternating current is, resorting to demonstrations that kill animals with AC. It's a story of hubris and the ways in which men will compromise themselves in order to win. And it isn't simply a win for the sake of winning. Both Westinghouse and Edison believe that their technology is the morally superior option. Edison favors safety and the right of the inventor. Westinghouse values the ability to bring the technology to even more people even easier. They each have a moral code which guides and betrays them during the movie. It's a very interesting story, although, with the wonky details and span of time covered, it is probably better suited for a good non-fiction novel.

Virtually every actor is squarely in his or her wheelhouse. Cumberbatch's Edison is a headstrong maverick with poor interpersonal skills, much like his Sherlock or Dr. Strange. Michael Shannon plays Westinghouse as a very reasonable man who doesn't understand why everyone else can't see his vision as clearly as he does. He's progressive but carries himself like the "old guard". Nicholas Hoult plays Tesla as the smartest guy in the room and doesn't apologize for it. His part of the story is always the first to be cut, partly because Tesla's life was marked by failure at the time. He doesn't fit as neatly into the story except he has to be present for a couple key points. This was filmed before Succession, but it's funny how Macfadyen's JP Morgan is the man Tom imagines himself as: confident and able to wield his power successfully. Tom Holland plays Edison's assistant/protege and brings a similar Peter Parker-to-Tony Stark reverence. The stealth MVP of the movie is Katherine Waterston. She plays Westinghouse's wife and is the classic powerful woman who makes the powerful man. Had this been a fictional narrative, she would've ended the movie sitting on the Iron Throne.

This was an odd choice for director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon after his 2015 Sundance success Me & Earl & the Dying Girl (one of my favorite movies of the last decade). The movies have similar energies, although they employ different techniques. Me & Earl's structure allowed for a lot of cutaways and asides. The Current War is very invasive. The camera often pushes in like the camera operator is fighting for position to get the shot. Close-ups feel hectic and almost accidental. It felt to me like the movie was literally having trouble keeping up with everything happening in the story. It took some getting used to it, but I liked the effect. It tricked my braining into thinking that a lot of this patent discussion and business strategy was more exciting that it really was.

The movie has some clear problems. It juggles a lot of story, drops the ball occasionally, then stops to try to pick it back up (i.e. the flow is awkward at times). It stumbles in its attempts to make the driest subject matter more interesting. The acting is more sturdy than spectacular. I really like the subject matter though and am likely to rewatch this.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend