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.

The One I Love (4/5 Stars)

It is impossible to write about this movie without revealing the twist so hinted and hyped in the online movie trailers. This is because the twist is revealed in the first twenty minutes of the movie. So it's not so much of a twist as it is a premise. I figure that makes it fair game in my blog. The premise of the movie is such: A couple, Ethan and Sophie (played by Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss) are seeing a marriage counselor (played by Ted Danson). After a few sessions that do not seem to break new grounds of understanding between the couple, the counselor suggests a weekend trip to a retreat.

The retreat is a villa in an orange grove. There is a swimming pool and a guesthouse. The guesthouse already has people in it. Specifically the people in the guesthouse are Ethan and Sophie. For clarity’s sake, let us refer to them as Fake Ethan and Fake Sophie. They look, talk, and sort of act like the real Ethan and Sophie. But they only show up in the house when only one of either Ethan or Sophie steps inside. So if Real Ethan is inside, Fake Sophie shows up. If Real Sophie is inside, Fake Ethan shows up.

Who are these Twilight Zone people? That is actually up to interpretation, as the movie does not fully explain how they are formed or what their purpose is or even if they can be entirely trusted with the information they supply about themselves. What makes them interesting is that Fake Ethan seems to be a more fun, more exciting, more laid back version of Real Ethan. Fake Sophie pins her hair back and would rather not argue, two things that Real Sophie does not do.

This movie, directed by Charlie McDowell and written by Justin Lader, is what I would call a five star three star movie. It is done perfectly but within the scope of a very small movie. Almost the entirety of the movie takes place within the confines of this one retreat location. There are basically only two actors (Duplass and Moss play themselves twice over) and the action in the story is talking: Lots of talking about people and relationships. This is done very well. It is not entirely an easy thing to keep a story moving along smoothly and unpredictably when the budget and locations and characters are confined as such. I give kudos to newcomers McDowell and Lader on their very good first movie. Mark Duplass is becoming exceptionally good at making and producing these very low budget movies.

I had the pleasure of being apart of the Nitehawk Five Dollar Film Club for this movie and last Saturday we had a fun group discussion about the movie. Before the movie I wondered whether the discussion would go the way of a certain scene in the movie. At one point Real Ethan is obsessed with understanding how the guesthouse works. Real Sophie tells him to stop ruining it. Remember that magic show you took us to and couldn’t stop explaining how all the tricks worked. You completely ruined it! Well, would this Film Club focus the discussion on how the Guest House worked or would it talk about the relationships between the characters (i.e. the marriage counseling)?

Here was my theory on the movie: It is revealed that an incident of infidelity on Real Ethan’s part led to the marriage counseling. The couple cannot get past it. Fake Ethan, the funnier more exciting (more untrustworthy) Ethan, is Ethan in the past at the time he committed the infidelity. Fake Sophie is a version of Real Sophie in the future where in she accepts the fact that Real Ethan has changed from the unfaithful exciting guy into a faithful more boring guy. Who leaves and who stays at the end plays off of these unsaid descriptions and the guesthouse is revealed to actually work as marriage counseling. What makes this movie so strange is that the character arc of growth takes place before the film begins. At the start, Ethan is already changed. What makes this movie stranger is that it takes the guy’s side in the relationship battle. Generally a romantic comedy is about an immature man that matures and the woman just waits out the transformation. Here the problem is that the man has matured but the woman is still in love with the immature version of him. She does not understand that the aspects of Ethan’s personality that made him fun and exciting also made him prone to infidelity. She wants Ethan to be faithful but not boring as well. I can’t tell you how the story ends (another twist!) but whether she makes it out of the retreat is really up for debate. I think it was at least ambiguous.

Nobody at the film club agreed with me. They were overly concerned as to what made the guest house work. Who was Ted Danson? Are they aliens or robots? Did Elisabeth Moss really grow up in Scientology? Et cetera.

I’m being a little mean to the film club. It was a fun discussion, but I feel I did the majority of talking about the relationships during the two hours. Then I had to duck out early because of a basketball game.

Well, what do you think? Go see the movie for yourself and bring along the significant other. There is a lot to talk about here provided you are willing to talk about it. Maybe you should just break up instead. 

Safety Not Guaranteed (4/5 Stars)

The source material for this movie is a real classified advertisement from 1997 that received thousands of responses. It went like this:

Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. I have only done this once before.

In the early 2000s, it became an Internet sensation when a photo of a man with the most serious 80s mullet in the world was added to classified advertisement. Now it is 2012 and there is a movie. Given the source material you would probably expect a dumb action/comedy with plenty of low budget action and at least one great mullet. And you would be completely wrong. The movie, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” written by Derek Connolly, directed by Colin Trevorrow, and starring Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza, has action and comedy but also comes with several fully developed characters, a totally unpredictable plotline, and a really sweet romance. It is a far better movie than the source material commands or requires.

The story starts with the classified advertisement. A magazine writer finds it and pitches writing a story about it to his boss. He gets permission to take two intern, a nerdy Indian and the sarcastically depressed Darius, played by Aubrey Plaza, with him on the road trip to hunt down the weirdo.

A movie like this has two storytelling traps in it that would doom the ordinary independent movie. The first trap has to do with time travel and the fact that it ought to be impossible. At some point in the story the writer is going to have to give us a decent explanation as to what is going on there. The second is the presence of a sarcastically depressed character. These people overpopulate indie movies. They usually are underemployed artists/actors/writers/dancers who are depressed, most of the time because they aren’t famous and successful artists/actors/writers/dancers. The problem with this sort of character is that they tend to be pretentious and annoying (because seriously only a pretentious and annoying person would be depressed that they can’t be famous and successful for doing something profoundly useless like, for instance, art.) An intern for a small magazine seems to fit that mold pretty well.  

It is a credit to this movie that both of these traps are deftly averted. The main reason for this I believe is the movie’s treatment of the advertiser, a middle-aged supermarket employee named Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass. The character is one of the most weirdly endearing characters in movies. He truly believes in his mission and is sincerely looking for a partner to go back in time with him. In fact, it is revealed that he has been seeking out theoretical physicists over the Internet and engaging them in discussions about time travel. And yes, he is actually building some sort of big mechanical thing in his garden shed.

But more importantly he also happens to be shy and protective. When the magazine writer shows up at his door and asks to help, he flatly rejects him because he rightly senses that the writer doesn’t really want to go back in time. This guy may be delusional enough to believe in time travel but he can also tell when somebody is making fun of him. Darius is more sympathetic in her introduction and succeeds in gaining enough trust to start Kenneth’s brand of time travel training, but it is still a long time before he feels he can trust her enough to actually tell her the reason he is going back in time. It is a really nice reason that I am not about to spoil it here.

How the movie portrays Kenneth avoids the traps because at some point I started to not really care whether the time machine worked. And I did not care because Darius starts enjoying the sincerity and enthusiasm of the strange guy in the woods to the point where she loses much of her sarcastically depressed persona and stops caring whether the time machine works too. The story becomes more about a romance then about time travel. As far as plots go, that’s ridiculously original. What’s more ridiculous is that it really works. 

Now I can probably guess what you are thinking, and that might be that what I just described is a great cliché in romantic comedies: the oft-seen and inexplicable romance between an outlandish out-of-shape comedian and a ridiculously tolerant supermodel. Believe me this is not the case. This romance is not inexplicable. This is brought out by a superior performance with some very tricky material by Aubrey Plaza. It should be mentioned that it is never suggested that her attraction to Kenneth is a normal thing. This is even highlighted in one of the best scenes where Plaza interviews for the article a sort of ex-girlfriend of Kenneth, played by Kristen Bell, (who you may fondly remember as the ex-girlfriend in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). She gives a totally understandable explanation of why she did not get too involved with the guy and does so without coming off as a total bitch. Instead, the attraction Darius has to Kenneth isn’t just a foretold conclusion because the screenplay necessitates that the guy has to get the girl in the end, but something that develops between two fully realized imperfect personalities that just happen to be perfect for each other. Darius has actual reasons for wanting Kenneth that make sense. It’s a pleasure to watch a comedy go through the trouble to do that every now and then.

I have yet to not be impressed by an Aubrey Plaza performance. Of course, I have only seen her in this and in her small part in “Funny People,” but I’m already at the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her in plenty of other movies. I have finally added “Parks and Recreation” to my Netflix queue.

Cyrus (4/5 Stars) July 6, 2010

Comedy on a shoestring budget

Cyrus is the title character of the new comedy by writers/directors Mark and Jay Duplass. It stars John C. Reilly as a man in a post-divorce funk that finally meets the woman, Marissa Tomei, who might just revitalize his life. The only problem is that Tomei has a grown son named Cyrus, played by Jonah Hill, who is, to put it mildly, a bit territorial about his mother’s affections. What results is a sort-of skewed love triangle that starts off in the territory of awkward situations and polite laughs and then veers into the country of outright hostility and comedic threats before settling into a safe conclusion. 

All of it is pretty funny, but the most inspiring and at the same time limiting thing about this movie is the budget. Mark and Jay Duplass seem to have nothing but a camera and some editing equipment to their name. They have no sets, no special effects, no costumes, and no sound effects. The big splurge seems to be the hiring of the cast and the extras for the wedding scene. Other than that the most technically audacious shot is the outside of a car driving down the freeway. In fact, I would venture to bet that the Catherine Keener character, Reilly’s ex-wife, who works as a movie editor is probably using the very computer equipment that the Duplass’s used in post-production of this movie. (I don’t have any evidence. It’s just a hunch. I also think the guy in “Paranormal Activity” used his computer to edit his movie also. Another hunch). The point of all this, of course, is to implore any would be writers and directors with nothing but a camera to go out and watch this movie. There is very little stopping you from doing exactly what the Duplass’s did: Produce a pretty good movie with almost no budget. 

Since the makers of this movie were limited by the ways they could tell the story, they have focused on two very important things that don’t really cost a thing: Writing and Performances. Almost the entire movie is simply people talking, most of the time within one location, Tomei’s and Cyrus’ house. The fact that the movie succeeds on being entertaining the entire time is a testament to both. If you want to see a movie that has everything but Writing and Performances you can watch “Date Night.” That had an enormous budget and utterly failed to be funny. It just goes to show that Comedy is not something that you can throw money at. It is one of the only two genres that are budget irrelevant. (The other is horror, but only because those people have absolutely no standards). 

It’s well known that Oscar nominees John C. Reilly, Marissa Tomei, and Catherine Keener are fine actors, so it isn’t a surprise that they all do a good job in this movie. Only quibble I have is that Tomei is too good-looking to the point where it becomes almost unbelievable that she would fall so hard for a guy with a mug like John C. Reilly. I’m not just being a jerk, Reilly agrees with me. One of his funniest lines is, “Are you flirting with me. I’m like Shrek. What are you doing out here in the forest with Shrek?” It may have been a better idea to cast someone who looked a little more like Reilly but you know I don’t really care all that much. I’m not about to be that hard on an actress because she looks too good. (Now that I think more about it, I feel stupid for even mentioning it.)

The revelation in this movie is that Jonah Hill has some acting chops. He is usually cast as a bombastic blowhard that yells all his lines, but in this movie he takes on much more mature, sensitive, and subversive. The result is a character unlike any he has ever played. Since I enjoy comparing Hill’s career arc with Michael Cera’s as much as I like comparing Matt Damon’s with Ben Affleck’s I will conclude that with this movie, Hill has nudged a lead over his Superbad partner. Whereas Cera is consistently a lead in big movies, he has always played a variation of the same role. Jonah Hill on the other hand has taken on a varied amount of supporting roles and in the meantime seems to have become a more rounded actor. Finally, he has shown a willingness to appear in little movies like this one in order to play roles that should allow him to break his Superbad typecast as an angry loudmouth. The result is his best performance yet. Let’s just see what Cera in the upcoming Scott Pilgrim v. the World has to say about that.