First up, the found footage, supernatural horror flick The Taking of Deborah Logan. You may have read about how this movie suffered from dismal preview audience ratings and was dumped by its distributor, only to be snatched from the bloody jaws of total obscurity upon finding its way to Netflix, where—surprise, surprise!—it found its audience.
All in all, it’s far from a classic, but it is a very effective, if workmanlike, specimen of its genre. And it does have a few elements that push it into the realm of being recommendation worthy.
For one, it’s chock-full of jump scares, which makes it a great date night movie. Also, it’s got some genuinely uncanny moments, guaranteed to inspire chills in all but the most stoic of viewers. And, most importantly, it’s got a legitimately awesome, courageous, balls-to-the-wall performance by the wonderful Jill Larson, who is utterly believable, both as an upper middle class matriarch dealing with the ravages of Alzheimer’s, and as a terrifying hag, possessed by the evil spirit of a serial murderer of children, a practicing black magician who was the town pediatrician way back in the day, before he disappeared off the face of the Earth.
A word of advice: If you’re thinking of watching The Taking of Deborah Logan, please refrain from researching it first. Every article about it seems hell-bent on revealing the best scenes, totally robbing them of their shock value. You’re going to want to go into this one fresh, trust me.
Next up, I watched Vox Lux, a film in which Natalie Portman plays Celeste, a talented, gentle, guileless young girl who gets swept up in the wake of a Columbine-style tragedy and rides it all the way to Lady Gaga-level mega-celebrity status. Jude Law plays the savvy producer who spots her potential early on, and both give career-best performances.
Written and directed by actor-turned-auteur Brady Corbet, who last gave us the magnificent Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux also serves as the final offering from recently deceased musical genius Scott Walker, who provided powerful, experimental scores for both of Corbet’s films. Willem Dafoe provides sporadic “God’s Eye” narration, reminiscent of Kubrick’s use of this technique in such differing films as The Killing, Dr. Strangelove, and Barry Lyndon.
Vox Lux is nothing if not lofty in its ambitions, exploring as it does such varied topics as the continually evolving nature of celebrity in our surveillance-saturated, post-9/11, social media Panopticon world, as well as the moral issues involved in exploiting tragedy (or, for that matter, other people’s talents) for personal gain. It’s a film that asks what we all owe each other—friends, family, partners, strangers—in terms of responsibility as fellow human beings, being.
The reviews for Vox Lux were befuddlingly mixed for such a substantial, ambitious, and (I would argue) successful work of cinema. I suspect it suffered from comparisons to the widely-lauded A Star is Born. Or perhaps some of the critical ambivalence towards it might have to do with the last act, which definitely represents an extended formal detour from that which it follows. Despite this, Vox Lux is one of the more impressive films that I’ve seen in a long while. However, just as with The Taking of Deborah Logan, the less you know about it going in, the better.
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