#32 — Essie Davis as Amelia Vanek in The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) In some ways, actors in horror movies have it easy. There is a clear vernacular to the art of duplicating terror, honed through decades upon decades of … Continue reading Greatish Performances #32
I’ve come to realize how thoroughly Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook has stuck with me by how often my mind slips back to it while watching other movies, specifically those that show, however briefly, a mother in distress due to a domestic meltdown involving offspring. Whether it’s Jane Hawking enduring a household of shrieking children in The Theory of Everything or the frontier misery of The Homesman, I find myself thinking of the beset matriarch, ‘She shouldn’t have opened that Babadook book.’ That’s not simply a case of the film settling in as some kind of cinematic earworm. It speaks to the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2014 — Number Seven
Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946). Cocteau’s take on the famed French fairy tale is elegant and unsettling, standing as a cunning exploration of the ways in which imagery and mood can reshape a familiar story. Beginning with opening credits written on a chalkboard (and then promptly erased) and an explanatory that calls for the film to be viewed with the appropriate childlike wonder, Cocteau also establishes a terrific playful quality. The resulting mix of the sublime and the goofy gives Beauty and the Beast (or, if you prefer, La Belle et la Bête) an absolute surplus of charm. … Continue reading Cocteau, Keaton and Crisp, Kent, Reed, Welles
Coffee for Two 