Backrooms (5/5 Stars)

Conversations about Backrooms tend to always include tales of its inspiration. People want to know where this came from. The curiosity can be explained by a brief summary of its unlikely creator and subject. It is an excellent debut feature of Director Kane Parsons, who just turned 21 in June. So he was all of 20 years old when he made this movie. The movie itself is a film expansion of a YouTube series that Mr. Parsons started when he was all of 16 years old. That series was inspired by what is now a famous image of an abandoned backroom of an OshKosh furniture store. I've included it at the bottom of this review.

Mr. Parson’s YouTube series costs next to nothing to make, which having seen it, I can attest is incredible in and of itself. The Backrooms movie cost $10mm. It has so far grossed near $400mm in the box office as of my writing this. Mr. Parson’s has set numerous records for the youngest director to make a certain amount of money at the box office. An Oscar nomination for Best Director may be a bit of a reach, but my God, the Academy would have a hole in its head if it didn’t nominate this movie for Best Production Design, because you have not seen anything like it.

I came in cold not knowing anything about 4Chan’s creepypasta subforum or the apparently very popular webseries. I have had some familiarity with inherently creepy spaces though due to my origination in the Southwest of the USA. Suburban development in the deserts of the Southwest have a tendency to create man-made spaces that are just a little bit too large. Since there is nothing living in the natural landscape, there is nothing to displace, and thus no constraint on bigness. But since it is a desert, it feels weird that there should be anything at all. So you get these giant buildings, think McMansions and Costco Warehouses, that seem to be plopped down by aliens, especially when the development comes all of a sudden, which in the case of exurbs, it usually does. The movie Backrooms takes place in a big-box furniture store in inland California or the outskirts of Las Vegas or somewhere outside of Phoenix. It actually isn’t specified but it could easily be any of these places. They all look and feel the same. Down in the basement of this furniture store, where there is even more furniture, the store’s owner finds a door that leads into another dimension: the Backrooms, like to his store or something else, that just go on forever, like you were playing a game of Minecraft that was comprised of nothing but yellow carpets, yellow wallpaper, and florescent lighting.

This store owner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a former architect and recent divorcee selling cheap furniture. He explains what he has found to his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, as if someone had described a dog to somebody else who had never seen a dog, and then that somebody constructed a dog. It has all the correct details, but something is off. It looks like a dog, but is also not a dog. This is also a pretty good way of describing the “uncanny valley”, a phenomenon in animation where the closer an object or image appears to being human, while also not being non-human, the more it elicits uncanny or eerie feelings in the viewer. Zombies, dead humans that act alive, are a very good example. And the numerous liminal spaces in Backrooms are very much like Zombie Rooms, they look man-made but also are clearly not man-made.

Most of this movie is direction and Kane Parsons demonstrates a preternatural ability to draw out suspense from his built environment. Take the first five minutes, which comprises “found footage” of someone exploring the Backrooms. There is no actor on screen. The character is holding a video camera and we only hear him speaking. “Found footage” can be naturally suspenseful because the video camera’s aspect ratio is less than that of the human eye and we can only see what we are being directed to see. So when something scary starts chasing our characters through the Backrooms it's like being chased in real life with a bag over your head or something. What makes much of Backrooms scary is what made those other low-budget horror films like Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity scary, but Backrooms is undoubtedly a better product. I didn’t watch those other movies and look up the director’s name nor was I surprised when all they did with their careers were sequels. I expect Backrooms to have many sequels, but I also expect Kane Parsons to move onto bigger and better things maybe after only one or two of them.

Let’s say something about Chiwetel Ejiofor who is an interesting choice to lead this movie. It also says something that Mr. Ejiofor accepted the role. You usually don’t see an established 49-year-old actor taking direction from 20-year-old directors in feature film debuts. It’s not like Mr. Ejiofor needs a comeback or anything. There is a certain nobility to Ejiofor, and it seems natural for him to portray a NASA scientist in The Martian or the titular character in Shakespeare’s Othello. For the same reasons, he is also very good at playing characters that are not quite where they should be, whether it is an African surgeon turned illegal immigrant in London moonlighting as a hotel worker in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) or a professional violinist kidnapped and sold into slavery in 12 Years a Slave (2012). Just two years ago, he was walking around another liminal space, an abandoned suburb during an apocalpytic event in The Life of Chuck (2024). Here he is a professional architect, now divorced and nursing alcoholism, who is forced to sleep in one of the beds of his under-performing furniture shop in the middle-of-nowhere. An actor brings their baggage (previous roles) with them as they move forward in their career. For Ejiofor, seeing him in this movie with this character, it's like he never got out of those awful situations he was in fifteen-twentyfive years ago. And he’s bitter about it. He should not be here at this point in his life. There is this simmering resentment that he takes with him into the Backrooms, and you should see what the Backrooms does with it in return. This is one of his best performances.

This is the first role I’ve seen Renata Reinsve in. She is very good, but I have limited things to say about her. Mark Duplass shows up in a limited side-role. He is a good presence to have in any low budget movie as he made his name making good movies with no budgets. His involvement as a veteran of the genre feels like a stamp of approval.

I Love Boosters (1/5 Stars)

Writer/Director Boots Riley's first and last movie was Sorry to Bother You in 2018. In my review of the same, I stated that the movie felt like a half-decade worth of material backed up wrestling for position at the floodgates of creative fulfillment. On an originality scale from 1 to Being John Kaufman it was around 8 or 9 Charlie Kaufmans.

This applies to I Love Boosters too, a second feature that inexplicably took another 8 years to make. (Having said that, he did write/direct/produce a TV series in 2023 that I did not see). In addition to my original comment about the creativity and originality of Boots Riley, I will add a favorite observation of Roger Ebert, which is that the worst movies are made by the best directors. A bad director usually puts out a boring, mediocre product. Only a truly talented director can take a bad idea and run it right into the ground.

I Love Boosters is a bizarre movie that doesn’t make any sense in the beginning and somehow makes even less sense by its end. It is about a group of shop-lifters, named the Velvet Gang (played by Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, and Naomi Ackie) which target (exclusively, I think) the high-fashion stores of Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore). The stores are mono-chromatic, which means all the clothes in any particular outlet are all the same color. This looks cool but lacks practicality. After stealing all these same color clothes, Keke Palmer then hits on men in clubs at night and takes them to her place. At that point, she explains that she is not interested in sex and tries to sell them discounted shoes. This is arguably the worst business plan I have ever seen on a movie screen.

The high-fashion stores of Christie Smith do not appear to have any customers. Instead, Christie Smith seems to make her money by requiring her employees to buy the clothes she is trying to sell, which cost like $2,000 for a set. This too is an extraordinarily bad business plan. Christie Smith works out of a tilted, but somehow not collapsing, skyscraper. The metaphor, if it is one, is never explained.

About halfway through the movie, the Velvet Gang gets hired to work in one of the Christie Smith stores, and as they are working up their plan to steal all the clothes, the clothes get stolen first by a Chinese woman with a strange technological device. What she has, depending on what knobs are twisted at what point, is something that can either 1) teleport objects/people/whatever back to China; 2) Shoot continuous blasts of liquid (water?) that Deconstructs whatever has been blasted; or 3) Shoot continuous blasts of liquid (water?) that Resolve Contradictions in whatever has been blasted.

And now maybe we can piece together why this doesn’t make any sense. Boots Riley is trying to implement the ideological tenets of communism. Just because someone is a communist, doesn’t mean that they can’t make good movies. Boots Riley’s first feature was a good movie. I took exception to his rosy view of slavery but otherwise liked the movie. But communists who try to make communist movies generally make terrible movies because the ideology is so wrong about people, about history, about everything. You can knock your head against the wall and try to make sense of ideology, but you ultimately never will. It's just so stupid.

Let’s take a fairly good example of how dumb this movie (and communism) can be. The United States is a democratic/capitalist country. China is a communist dictatorship. Christie Smith is an American fashion magnate whose clothes are manufactured in China. The Chinese people who manufacture the clothes work in poor conditions, even having to sand-blast denim without proper protections. They are also underpaid. Boots Riley lays the blame for this at the feet of Christie Smith and capitalism. That is stupid.

Safety regulations for businesses are imposed by governments. In America, our democratic government imposes these regulations on businesses because the people demand it and elect representatives to make the laws. In China, the government does not impose these regulations on businesses because the people don’t have a say in their government and can’t elect representatives to make the laws. If poor working conditions were the outcome of capitalism, it would be America that would have poor working conditions, not China, which is communist.

Boots Riley seems to think that the workers should unionize and go on strike to get better working conditions and better pay. That is something that can happen in a democratic and capitalist country where the government, management, and labor are separate entities and the people have constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Boots Riley doesn’t seem to understand that workers can’t go on strike in China because the government is both management and labor and the people have no constitutional rights to act independently of the government. The government, management, and labor are all headed by the same people and not surprisingly, the people that represent management don’t have the interests of labor at heart. The fact is that workers in China have poor working conditions because their government dictates that they should have poor working conditions. If working conditions were controlled by American businesses, then you would expect the same, nay you would expect even worse working conditions to exist in capitalistic America. But they do not. It is the other way. Try to resolve that contradiction, dipshit.

Communist ideology results in heartless evil outcomes. One of this movie’s parodies involves the weeping of an unnamed black woman on the nightly news. She believes that there is too much crime in the neighborhood and wants more police protection. Boots Riley does not believe that this type of person is anything but a capitalist pawn. In one particular scene, she and a few other like individuals are ordered at gun-point to remove their expensive Christie Smith suits. They not only strip off their clothes, but their skin as well. They are not humans. They are things wearing human suits. I’m not sure you can get a better demonstration of how communist ideology dehumanizes its ideological opponents. Boots Riley believes that the police are a capitalist conspiracy. So, anyone that complains about high crime must not be fully human. With this sort of thinking, you begin to understand how communist governments justified the wholesale murder of tens of millions of their own people in the 20th century.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be communist related is the Lakeith Stanfield character who pops up with a french accent and repeatedly tries to seduce the main character. Apparently, he is a demon that sucks the soul out of women via the vagina while performing oral sex. We see an extended and disgusting scene of this and I could not begin to tell you what it had to do with the rest of the movie. For that depraved scene alone, I would suggest not watching this movie.

Widow's Bay: Season 1 (3/5 Stars)

Widow’s Bay, Season 1, starts off with a bang. Four especially good, indeed excellent, episodes of TV. So good in fact, that the rest of the season must only be explored as a cautionary tale. Whatever went wrong here, and we can guess and will guess as to the bureaucratic and structural reasons, should not be allowed to happen again to any other TV series.

Widow’s Bay takes place on an isolated New England isle, just like the setting of Jaws (1975) and Midnight Mass (2021). Indeed, while watching the first several episodes of this series, one is gripped with the anticipation that this series might make a perfect trifecta. It is helped in large part by the direction of Hiro Murai of Atlanta fame who helmed Episodes 1, 2, 3 and then 9 and 10. Hiro earns the comparison with the Coen Brothers with what he has achieved first in Atlanta, then the best parts of The Bear, and then here in Widow’s Bay. It shares the feeling with the best of the Coen Brothers’ movies that the world outside the frame holds more than what is in the frame. (Whereas inferior movies barely can hold what is currently in the frame. I spoke about this in depth in my review of Atlanta.)

We are presented with the mayor of a small island town (Matthew Rhys) who is desperately trying to boost the tourism trade and bring in fresh money from the mainland. Holding him back are the skeptical locals, including one downright hostile old coot (Stephen Root) who believes it would be irresponsible to bring any new people to the island as the place is and always has been cursed. Rounding out what will effectively be a three-person main cast is Kate O’Flynn as one of the Mayor’s administrative assistants. None of these actors are known for being comedians. (The biggest leap, Kate O’Flynn, is not known at all) But the surehandedness of the script, the keen direction of Mr. Murai, and the tone set by creator Kate Dippold, draw from them some excellent comedic performances. The first four episodes of Widow’s Bay are especially funny and increasingly scary.

They are also tight in space and time. Which perhaps unfairly promises the viewer that the rest of the episodes will be as perfectly constructed. Unfortunately, after what appears to be a storyline in which most, if not all, of the scenes matter, it then devolves into a series of stalling maneuvers until you get to the final episode where you realize with a sort of angst and dread that the story-lines might never resolve. A shame indeed that this very promising TV series might actually be transforming before our eyes into a commercialized TV series doomed to continue forever, elongated by its own popularity, until it gets so bad that no-one wants to watch it anymore.

For the life of me, I do not understand why we are in this predicament. This is a TV series on AppleTV+. It is a subscription service. There are no advertisers. Why is there pressure to have more material than is needed to tell the story? Why are there 10 episodes, when six would do just as well for the first season? The audience does not require nor need at least 10 episodes in any given season of a TV series. This is a strange holdover from broadcast TV series, which gave us the format as a necessity for advertisers. If the audience is footing the bill, there should be no pressure to give them more than what the story requires (wouldn’t it be cheaper to stop sooner rather than later). We draw the line at 3-hour movies. Why is anyone insisting on a 10-hour television series?

Much has been said about when a television series “jumps the shark”. This relates to an episode of Happy Days from the 70s (no, I’ve never seen it) when a character visits the beach, goes water-skiing, and just so happens to escape a shark attack. This was a TV show about a bunch of teenagers in high school or something. But after so many seasons, the writers were desperately looking for ways to up-the-game in order to keep the audience engaged.

If Widow’s Bay hasn’t had that exact moment yet, it is getting there. The thing is, the better a dramatic piece of story telling is, the earlier the “jump the shark” moment occurs. You simply cannot have dramatic revelations in every single episode before you start wondering why the characters don’t change.

And that is the second thing. For a comedic television series to have any legs, the characters can’t change. Seinfeld is a great example of this in practice. There was a rule that the characters “wouldn’t hug, wouldn’t learn”, because if they did either, then it wouldn’t make sense for them to continue to be funny in the same way. A series like Widow’s Bay which starts out both funny and dramatic needs to have a clear game plan, because the longer it goes on, the less funny and less dramatic it will be. Those elements will cannibalize each other. To put it another way, comedy comes from characters being ignorant and drama comes from realization. That arc only goes one way. Once the characters definitely know the island is cursed, no further comedy can be mined from a situation in which they do not know it yet.

(If a dramatic TV series eventually “jumps the shark”, a similar occurrence can happen to a comedic TV series when it eventually devolves into parody. That is, the unique storyline of the TV series plays itself out and then the writers start commenting on already existing pop culture because they are at a loss for original plots. Widow’s Bay may or may not have “jumped the shark”. It has definitely devolved into parody. This undoubtedly occurred in Episode 8, Your Baggage, in which Kate O’Flynn did her best Jamie Lee Curtis running and screaming down abandoned suburban streets being chased by a masked killer a la Halloween.)

And once the revelations occur, in particular the revelations in the father-son dynamic between Matthew Rhys and his teenage son, to work effectively, they demand resolution of the story. You can’t have a never-ending drama. After a while it loses its effectiveness and, worse yet, harms the memory of the earlier episodes. For as strong as Widow’s Bay started, by the ending of the last episode, it has itself a major problem that I doubt can be solved.

(By the way, I stopped watching Severance half way through the Second Season because they didn’t solve this same kind of problem. This issue may just be an AppleTV thing).

Here is my proposal for a remedy. The haunting of Widow’s Bay becomes publicly known, but instead of driving away tourists, they create a marketplace for the kind of tourist that seeks out haunted places. The main characters try their best to make people stay away and/or leave, but the harder they try, the more weird shit occurs and the more the island becomes famous and draws in more crowds.

In this way, the plight of Widow’s Bay can become a metaphor for the nightmare of success that many TV series find themselves in. Everyone wants to end the show, but they can’t.

The Christophers (3/5 Stars)

 

About a decade and a half ago (probably somewhere between 2013-2015), I attended a NerdNite lecture whose subject was Paul Cezanne’s Card Players. A princess from Qatar had just purchased it for approximately $250,000,000. The question we wanted to answer was why? What about this painting demands such a value? Directly below is said painting:

As you can tell just by looking at it, it is a painting of two men playing cards. Is it a decent portrayal of the same? Sure, I guess. I mean, it isn’t obviously bad. We could go through its details, it’s Post-Impressionist, its made with oils, Cezanne took this and that long to create them. None of that matters, at least not when we are talking about what makes a painting’s value rise over six figures. And you can’t just lay the blame at money laundering and dubious tax write-offs. This painting was purchased by this Qatari princess for the National Museum of Qatar, where if I am not mistaken, the general public can go see it. So, this princess really thought it was worth $250 million. 

Two major things. One is fame. Cezanne is famous. Imagine a normal used toaster and how much you would pay for it. (Probably nothing, you would go buy a new toaster). Now, what if I told you that this toaster had been owned by Marilyn Monroe. Now how much would you pay for it? Some of these paintings that are bought for dumb amounts of money are not only painted by famous people, but then owned by famous people, multiplying the fame quotient when they are subsequently auctioned. But for Card Players probably the single most valuable thing about it was that it was one painting in a series of five paintings. And where are the other four Cezanne oil paintings of dudes playing cards? 1) The Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; 3) the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, France, and 4) the Courtland Institute of Art in London, England. It seems that this princess thought that by purchasing the fifth Cezanne, she was acquiring prestige. Now, a Cezanne completist would have to travel to some of the world’s most prestigious museums in New York, Paris, London, Philadelphia to see them. And then also Qatar. 

(Maybe also, having never worked a day in her life, the Qatari princess doesn't understand the value of money.)

The above should explain the behavior of the children of a famous artist Julian Sklar (played here by Ian McKellan) at the beginning of The Christophers. They are meeting with a little-known but talented artist Lori Butler (played by Michaela Coel) and proposing that she surreptitiously pose as an assistant for their aging father with the ulterior motive of completing a series of paintings, in storage in his attic, that he started and then abandoned a few decades ago. These paintings are “The Christophers" Series 3, which as is explained, is a set of paintings that themselves are the third installment of two previous series, which are already famous. One of the paintings from Series 2 has just sold for 2 million dollars. What makes up the value of a painting, as noted above, will explain why the paintings themselves don’t seem to matter. What is important is that Lori Butler use the old man’s paints and materials, that way when the completed paintings are “found” after the old man dies, they can be authenticated as his own. The story behind the paintings (they are portraits of a gay lover back when that was taboo), Sklar’s fame (he hosted a popular TV show called “Art Fight” in which he said mean things about amateur paintings), and the fact that they complete a series, is what makes them valuable. The children are confident, with good reason, that they will sell for millions regardless of what they look like. They’ll cut in Lori Butler for a third of it.

Dare I say, this ruse is the most interesting thing about the movie. The majority of it concerns conversations between Lori and Julian in which he pontificates about art and Lori has conflicting emotions about the scheme. Lori is a big fan and a talented artist, but she was once a contestant on “Art Fight”, wherein Julian joked and insulted her, and then thought so little of it that he doesn’t even recognize her when she shows up to steal from him. A fair amount of the movie concerns Julian directing Lori to destroy The Christophers, either by shredding them or by burning them, and her keen attempts to out-psyche and thwart his directives.

This is tiring. Why do we care whether The Christophers are shredded or burned? Would we feel bad for the children (played here by James Corden and Jessica Gunning) who would be denied an inheritance? No, of course not. Do we feel bad for the general public who won’t get to see the great art which is The Christophers, Series 3? Maybe, but are we sure? Because we never get to see The Christophers. So, what is convincing us that they have artistic worth? We just assume they have artistic worth because the characters describe them as having such. The writer/director Steven Soderbergh deliberately keeps the paintings out of view. In one elongated scene, Julian Sklar deliberately completes one of the paintings in a self-described awful fashion, applying pink paint, glitter, and feathers. I say self-described because Soderbergh keeps the camera behind the frame the entire time, so we never get to see what Julian is doing or how it turns out? Why don’t we get to see it? Isn’t that a telling choice?

The answer here is that if we could see the paintings, we could judge them for ourselves, and then we might have our own opinions about them. By keeping them out of our view, we have to play the movie’s game and assume what the characters are saying about them is true.

The problem here of course, and what makes art in general irritating, is that we have to listen to speeches about how the industry is hypocritical by characters that are hypocritical. Well, if we are denied the ability to judge the art on its merits, isn’t it the children that are the least hypocritical characters here? They, along with the movie, are the only ones who seem to intuitively know that it doesn’t matter what the paintings look like. And, let's be honest, you wouldn't make this movie about a not-famous artist who had a bunch of incomplete artwork in his attic. So, why do I have to sit through Julian Sklar’s sanctimony? Someday, I would like to see a movie about how rich people use high art to obtain tax write-offs. I still don’t completely understand how that is done. I bet that would be really interesting, at least more interesting than this.

I’m being harsh on the subject matter, not necessarily about its execution. Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh continues to show off his malleable style. Here is a man who directed Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, and Haywire, and The Knick, amongst many others in his near 40-year career, who continues to operate towards the subject material, not the other way around. This is a conversational movie. Soderberg uses long takes and wide framing allowing the actors room to give expansive performances. Ian McKellan is 87 years old. Really, we should celebrate him for being upright and memorizing his lines. I’m not sure this is one of his best performances (I haven't seen enough of them), but it is good enough, and he is old enough (i.e. famous enough), to the point where it’ll likely land him a nomination. Michaela Coel is new to me (I know she has been around awhile) and I’m still undecided with her. James Corden does a great job of being greedy and shameless. He should be in more movies. I don't know what exactly happened at the end. One thing I am curious about is: who got paid and by how much? The movie, hypocritically, pretends not to care and aims to keep it vague. But if that was the case, and they were being honest, the paintings would have been shredded and/or burned. Because we still don’t get to see the completed series. All we get to know about them is that they are now famous.