Rebel Ridge (2024)

The plot is a ‘chirmol’ and there are loose ends to deal with as the credits roll, but Rebel Ridge is gripping from start to finish.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last movie Hold the Dark (2018) featured an extravagantly violent, high body count police/suspect gun battle, and I am sure that for some, expectations had been set for some sort of reprise here, but instead the near final shoot out is almost comically chaotic and imprecise.

 

Indeed the material’s USP is the subtle frustration of viewer expectations (e.g. an ex-Marine Corps protagonist who apparently has a Wikipedia page detailing how good he is at Asian martial arts who doesn’t really do any of that stuff in the movie, which is named after a completely subsidiary location in the story etc), yet we never felt properly frustrated and a large part of this has to do with the commanding persona of Terry Richmond, played by Brixton-born Aaron Pierre— a late substitution for John Boyega — and now surely on the path to Hollywood mega-stardom.

Don't Turn Out The Lights (2024)

The trouble with genre horror movies is so often that whilst they openly tease so many possible explanations for what's happening to a given group of unlikeable 'teens', the resolution, when it comes, always feels a bit disappointing.

So here Andy Fickman gives us instead something far more unsettled (perhaps in the hope that jaded audiences will find this more unsettling), and not in the Henry James ambiguity kind of way either, rather a constant stream of ill-defined potentialities, up to and including the final shot.

Overall this results in an exploration of how abnormal or paranormal events are interpreted by those on the sharp end of them, rather than of these happenings themselves.

Does it work? Kind of. Something both formulaic and yet lacking that creeping expectation that habitually rides with these formulas is gripping, if ultimately imprecise in its narrative payload.

 

(The title seems to be an instruction to home viewers rather than a reference to anything that occurs on screen.) 

 

 

Amateurs and Antis

There’s a beautiful kind of amateurism — the kind we saw in say The Detectorists on the Beeb — and a toxic kind, which is little more than ignorance on steroids, a clear perversion of professional perspectives. 

Technology has unleashed both kinds, inevitably, but this is one area where we tend to feel the poison all that more because of the ‘gentle’ nature of the benefits of the empowerment and the higher-viz nature of the nastier kind of crank. 

Such an imbalance surely existed prior to the age of technology. If one were to conduct a survey of medieval cranks, one would undoubtedly find that the wilder, more fundamentally unhinged members of this fraternity encountered the greater number of followers. (Oddly enough, 'charismatic' is often a euphemism for spiteful sociopath.)

Digital media were supposed to represent a shift away from the broadcast model, yet ended up simply democratising it, thus amplifying the massed voice of those more interested in the talking rather than the finding out aspects of their disciplines. 

(When I started working formally in digital media and comms one could already detect a bifurcation between the residual amateurs and a new breed of self-styled professionals and if you were looking for people who knew what they were on about the former remained your best bet.)

In this context, open-minded niceness becomes almost esoteric. 

Back at the start of this century Oliver Sacks was invited on a tour of Oaxaca state by the American Fern Society. In his journal he would write...

“This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public.”

A Flickering Light

 

The question of whether Nazism was the product of the Enlightenment or the anti-Enlightenment remains an open and fascinating one, with unquestionable relevance to today’s ‘border’ mindsets.

Hitler himself seemed quite adamant…

 

“National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression...We have no desire to instill in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine…For the National Socialist movement is not a cult movement...Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult...In the National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must not be tolerated.”

 

The trouble is, “I am not a cult member” is always a bit of a giveaway. And however ‘reality-based’ and ‘sharp’ it aspired to be, Nazi science was essentially a form of pseudo-science. 

 

American historian Eric Kurlander has recently attempted to revitalise the connection between Nazism and the supernatural, in the face of evidence that the Gestapo actively conducted surveillance and repression against occultists (and more trivial irrationalists like Tarot readers), in particular after it came out that Rudolf Hess had consulted an astrologer before embarking on his harebrained solo peace mission. 

 

Many of his claims have largely been debunked by Third Reich expert Richard J. Evans, yet how the Nazis behaved once in power should not be the entirety of the story, as it is in the very nature of all revolutions to persecute the assorted charismatics and other weirdos that made them possible. 

 

Indeed, fringe thinking is always relevant to this mix. Kurlander looks at our own political debates and concludes that ‘a renaissance in supernatural reasoning, shadowy conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial powers, and the omnipresence of a hostile ethno-religious other has begun to correlate with illiberal political and ideological convictions, influencing national elections, domestic social policies and matters of war and peace.’

 

It is certainly true today at least, that an interest in Nazi fixations correlates with a kind of obsession that could be characterised as ‘religious’. And when this becomes more esoteric, it expands the pool to more seemingly-secular ideologues. 

 

The crossover effect in the discourse is still very much present, with the enemies of these contemporary cultists depicted verbally and visually, Kurlander notes, as ‘vampires, zombies, demons, devils, spectres, alien parasites and other supernatural monsters’, adding that the end result was ‘an ideological and discursive space in which Nazism’s enemies could be dehumanised, marginalised and figuratively transformed into monsters requiring physical elimination’. 

 

Freemasons and Communists are no longer on the hook so much as they were, but Jews are very rarely off it. Add to them certain kinds of migrant, and other distinct groups perceived as a threat to organised irrationalists, and the modern parallels become that much clearer. 

The frontier between reasoned and magical thinking has become even less firm than it was a hundred years ago. As a result irrationalists now seem unsure how to safely select their allies and adversaries from amongst the friends and enemies of the Enlightenment.

The Sympathizer (2)

There are a number of different dualities bouncing off each other here. East and West, obviously, but also bourgeois and revolutionary consciousness, the nature of Revolution itself, before and then after the triumph and nothing, the kind that is really nothing and the kind that is actually something.

Halfway through I might have complained more confidently about the psychological make-up of the narrator, in part because he’s the only character in the story whose mind in shown to us with the requisite depth. And in part because he is battling another duality, that between being less than his two halves and twice as much as them, which to my estimation makes him the victim of either a chip or an inverted chip, character traits I never particularly warm to, and here they tend to accentuate an apparent weakness in his descriptions of others. Specifically almost all the non-Asian characters are white, middle-aged and somewhat crudely caricatured, but as the novel proceeds to its conclusion, one begins to appreciate how the author has covered himself rather well against such objections, for the entire written account turns out to be a) a confession to a Communist re-educator and b) a polemic about the denial of proper representation.

Some of the dust cover blurb suggests that this is a ‘novel about friendship’. It isn’t. It has lots of interesting things to say about a whole load of topics, but friendship, although it features, isn’t one of these.

Anyway, herewith the second batch of memorable aphoristic observations that I have culled from the text...

Confessions are as much about style as content.

Never underestimate what you can do to your worst enemy.

The anti-American already includes the American.

The only cure for being a bastard is to take a side.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

The loudest voice in the world is the voice of one’s own tortured stomach.

Happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game.

It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man.

What one should never do was to require other people to imagine they were just like one of us. Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them.

If you know how to steal it, time is on your side.

Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

The only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

And although some say that America is a welfare state, in actuality it is a dream state.

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.

Whereas women could look at us as much as they wanted, and we would appreciate it, we were damned if we looked and hardly less damned if we didn’t.

What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.

I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you.

Beauty is not needed to make a milieu more attractive. A very ugly object can also make an ugly room less ugly by comparison.

That omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious.

If Adam and Eve had debased God’s knowledge, we had in turn debased Adam and Eve.

She was a professional who had seen the likes of me a thousand times, which I could hardly complain about, given that I had seen the likes of her a fair number of times myself.

The true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus.

People who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed.

And, again, a pair of longer ones...

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in.

No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably. Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. One only needed to dig deep enough to find that white, fleshy tuber of their secret self, and the sharpest tools with which to do so were always their own words.

Trap (2024)

 

On some levels a sort of shameless promo for the director's daughter Saleka’s talent and/or eyelashes.

 

Is there another active director so able to craft 'experiences' which register simultaneously as rather fun and utterly terrible? 

 

M. Night Shyamalan's signature silliness pervades every aspect of Trap. 

 

I’m not sure if any description of the plot counts as a spoiler, but here’s one for sure: the body count is not what you would expect with this sort of material.