“The People on the Island” (2005)

I liked this story by T.M. Wright from The Weird. I liked it when I read it and I liked it even more the next day. Editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer compare it to Shirley Jackson in their intro and that sounds close enough. There is something deeply normal about the two main characters even though little else is normal in their circumstances. They are alone on an island. It’s not clear how they got there or what they are doing there. It’s been long enough they no longer seem to question it. It could be an afterlife. But there are few explanations for anything here. Other people show up in other houses. They seem to be corpses but they are not decomposing or perhaps they are doing so slowly, because finally that changes. They seem to be engaged in activities—a woman on an exercise bike is the first they discover. The narrator and his wife, Elizabeth, don’t like them. They provoke anxiety. No one knows how they get there. The wind is often blowing and howling. They also hear something that sounds like a stray dog but they never see it. When they finally do, eventually, they can’t be sure it’s a dog. It feels like they’ve been there a long time. Time itself feels off in this place. It doesn’t pass in the same way. It may not be passing at all. Eventually Elizabeth disappears, though the narrator still thinks he sees her sometimes. The story is all very straightforward simple description and dialogue. At times it’s so simple and the circumstances described so bewildering it feels like a trick being played. More and more people show up on the island. It’s starting to feel crowded. The weather is pretty weird too, I should mention. Always cloudy and then, seemingly after years, occasional sunshine and warm temperatures. We know the narrator’s relationship with Elizabeth extends back to childhood, “before we started noticing, in earnest, that we were different sexes.” That struck me as a slightly disturbing way to describe it, almost as if they are closer to brother and sister. Nothing in this story sits exactly right and that’s what makes it great. Wright was more of a novelist and wrote several. I’m curious now what they might be like.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

I had high hopes for this picture by director and cowriter Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), even after I started noticing the mixed reviews. These reviews were not only mixed, but they also tended toward extremes of love or hate. Well, I didn't hate Last Night in Soho myself, but I have to count it as underwhelming and ultimately a disappointment. The story is about a girl from the English sticks, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who dreams of moving to London and becoming a fashion designer. She is infatuated with 1960s "Swinging London," but perhaps not surprisingly, Repulsion style, she finds the big city a cold and frightening place when she gets there. She ends up in a peculiar rooming-house and at night has strange and vivid dreams. She finds herself back in 1960s London, inhabiting the body of Sandie (Anna Taylor-Joy), who is trying to make it as a singer but has acquired a sleazy manager who is pressing her into prostitution. It's all glamorous and tawdry and harrowing and then Eloise wakes up. Her alarm clock sounds just like mine and was very annoying. I was happy to see her smash it finally. During the day Eloise shows talent in her fashion design studies but is up against catty and unfriendly fellow students. Eventually, as the detailed explanations start to emerge (and everything is explained in detail), it turns into a kind of formal ghost story that is not particularly interesting. But it does tie everything together, which might be what people like about it so much. I think more likely it's the fantasy depiction of Swinging London. It surprised me I couldn't work up a plausible nostalgia, even with authentic London-based hits of the era crowding the soundtrack (the Who, Cilla Black, Walker Brothers, etc.). The cast is impressive: I've seen good and bad from the widely exposed McKenzie (Leave No Trace and Lost Girls, respectively). Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot to do except look '60s-gorgeous, which is a shame in a way because she has showed how much she has in both The Queen's Gambit and The VVitch, excellent in such different ways. Diana Rigg as the colorful landlady of Eloise's rooming-house is excellent and a wonderful surprise. I didn't even realize it was her until the credits ran. But these various parts, however good, did not add up to much of a whole for me. Approach with caution, bearing in mind you may love it wildly.

See DoestheDogDie report.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

[Original 2010 Movie of the Year ballot here.]

USA / UK / Canada / Japan, 112 minutes
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright, Bryan Lee O'Malley
Photography: Bill Pope
Music: Sex Bob-Omb, Beck, Nigel Godrich, Broken Social Scene, etc.
Editors: Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss
Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Alison Pill, Kieran Culkin, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons

Set in hipster precincts of wintertime Toronto, based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a movie that obviously feels free to dress up any old way it likes, cycling through its modes like wardrobe changes: romantic comedy, teen sex farce, indie rock band bio, quest or journey tale, superhero comic book fare, and, perhaps most oddly of all, video game set piece. Director and cowriter Edgar Wright is the kind of filmmaker in love with making movies for the pure fun of it and it's almost always infectious. His shameless genre slumming, which reminds me of Joe Dante in its pure glee, has already produced a number of great pictures and maybe one or two interesting failures: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver, The World's End. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may be the best thing he's done yet (I know I might get some argument on that) but Wright is still young and not close yet to being finished, whatever it is exactly he's doing.

A frequent complaint about Scott Pilgrim is Michael Cera in the lead role—with Jesse Eisenberg, Cera was the quintessential millennial pincushion target of 2010. Born on TV's Arrested Development, Cera established himself in the movies in such exercises as Superbad and Juno. He's starting to age out now, basically always playing the same guy, a gentle, daffy, ineffectual mumbling model of sensitive male youth—Woody Allen as undriven by sexual compulsion. Or, put it this way, Cera may be possessed of toxic masculinity (it shows up in Pilgrim a couple of times unexpectedly) but he has the sense to feel actual remorse about it. Scott Pilgrim's task here is to dump his rebound "fake high-school girlfriend," Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), in pursuit of dream girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead)—and defeat Flowers's seven evil exes in battle. Presumably the reason Pilgrim is up for it at all is because he has spent his life playing video games.

Baby Driver (2017)

Despite its relative star power—Jamie, Foxx, Jon Hamm, and Kevin Spacey, along with handfuls of familiar who's-thats—Baby Driver is all car chases and lovingly crafted soundtrack. It's the new movie from director and writer Edgar Wright, director and cowriter of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which I love, Shaun of the Dead, which I like, and Hot Fuzz, meh. Before we go any further, let's linger a moment on the best point, the soundtrack: the Beach Boys, "Let's Go Away for Awhile" ... Bob & Earl, "Harlem Shuffle" (the Foundation, "Harlem Shuffle") ... the Commodores, "Easy" (Sky Ferreira, "Easy") ... the Damned, "Neat Neat Neat" ... Focus, "Hocus Pocus" ... Golden Earring, "Radar Love" ... Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, "Bellbottoms" ... Barbara Lewis, "Baby I'm Yours" ... Carla Thomas, "B-A-B-Y"—kind of a theme song for obvious reasons. That's a fraction, it's all great stuff, and it's pretty much nonstop, though too often it slips into the background. The story is a bunch of gangster cliches about a getaway driver named Baby. He's young but has tinnitus so he plays music constantly through earbuds to help handle the condition. While the technology of interest in Baby Driver is mainly the old-fashioned screeching and skidding internal combustion engine on wheels, the homely old iPod gets its share of the glory too. Baby carries around a bunch of them because he has so many songs (and most look like Classics too, because he's just that kind of guy). The tunes chill him out and help him focus when he's ditching the scene of the crime with carfuls of henchmen and often the cops in pursuit. Which brings us to the carbon-spewing main feature of this attraction. There is some mighty fine stunt driving on display here, if perhaps a bit too heavy in the sound design on a certain stuttering, chattering skid noise (reminiscent of a Hanna-Barbera sound effect from the '50s and '60s). Oh lordy, that Baby cuts around those Atlanta streets like nobody's business. These scenes may not be up to parts of the Mad Max / Road Warrior franchise or certain Asian action pictures (thinking of some Jackie Chan scenes), but if it's not too old school to say, they're at least as exciting as Bullitt, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point, all of which thrilled me. But that was circa 1971 and this is 2017 and I'm sorry to say the massive carbon loads of these scenes brought me down, notwithstanding that some of the best action is actually on foot. The story is studiously stock boy meets girl desperation hit the road heat and flash stuff, often dependent on wincing coincidence to move it along. The leads—Ansel Elgort as Baby and Lily James as Debora—are adequate, young and attractive and fitted out with strange and unbelievable backstories. The movie is not really about them, however, and they and the rest of the cast rarely get in the way of what the movie is actually about, which as I said is car chases and the soundtrack. When that's pumped up good, which it often is, this movie rides a soaring wave, as long as you don't mind seeing figurative plumes of carbon billowing off the digital screen.

Native Son (1940)

Native Son is a remarkable American novel, with Richard Wright mixing up two oppositional elements. The first is a novel of social realism, by one more 20th-century writer influenced by John Dos Passos, reminiscent of, say, The Grapes of Wrath for fitting its narrative into the stream of great American stories. The context is Chicago, decades after the Civil War and the great postwar migration to the cities of the North. Wright expertly details the realities of life in Chicago, the de facto racism which Northerners have always specialized in, using the blunt force weapon of the police (and the National Guard as deemed necessary ... watch Donald Trump on this one) to intimidate, ghettoize, and segregate Negroes and whites. Within this nicely worked out context, however (including lucid observations on how "Communist" efforts toward change fit into the social and political milieu), Wright has inserted phantasms of horror: huge rats infesting tenement apartments, unimaginable poverty and violence, and finally a crime that goes ludicrously over the top. This is a great novel, a really great novel, with narrative currents like a flooding river. The first of its three long sections (named "Fear," "Flight," and "Fate") is best for the shock and awe impact Wright pulls off here, over a hundred pages uninterrupted even by line breaks, unfolding unbelievable and horrific events of a single day. Bigger Thomas, our hero—bearing one of the great names in American literature—commits the worst crime possible for a black man, the murder of a white woman. (The murder of his girlfriend Bessie is actually much more heinous, but Wright obviously knows black on black crime holds little interest for white majorities.) Not to go white on you with the comparison, but this is some clear forerunner to Eminem's "Kim," a fantasy adventure that travels deep into the interior of a brooding vengeful mind, where what we experience is shocking in a casual, almost light-hearted way even as it throws a spotlight on our worst taboos and sometimes seems to be laughing about them. Bigger Thomas is no thug, he is one of the most complicated characters in American literature, probing at the perceived limits of assimilation, racism, American justice, and the soul of a human being. Indeed, Thomas's crime is so terrible, so extreme, it is hard to have sympathy for him. But it's not hard to understand him. One of my great struggles with Native Son is how exactly to take Thomas. This novel cries to be read more than ever. Fresh and powerful and still amazing.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Going Native (1994)

This very strange novel by Stephen Wright—hollow at its core, infinitely detailed at its edges—attacks with a strategy as baffling as it is compulsively readable. The main character stalks the action in a series of perfunctory cameos, flickeringly, almost not there at all, his name, even his appearance, constantly changing. He is on his way out of each scene even at it opens, yet each section is developed with the studious attention of observing the petals of a flower open in the summer sunshine of a brilliant day in July: the usual suburban America, vicious annals of true crime, tawdry sex of a certain stink, street drugs, dark rooms, sensational movie rentals, lonely truck drivers, sleeping under bridges, hitchhiking at the crack of dawn, rundown motels of course (you could have predicted that), mixed-up kids, grungy cops and doughnut jokes, screenplays in progress, depressed women, always the TV on, shades of gray and streaks of yellow. Don't pay any attention to the comparisons with On the Road. This is way beyond Jack Kerouac.

In case it's not at the library.