Streaming Shuffle
Shocking but true: this anthology film does something that almost always annoys me, but here I liked it.
We’re getting close enough to October that I ought to be saving up the horror films I haven’t written about yet, but as a (very) slight and (very) occasional chill crept into the air over the last few days and as it’s starting to get dark at a reasonable hour again, I feel the urge to get a jump on the spooky season.
2017’s Ghost Stories was originally a 2010 play by Jeremy Dyson1 and Andy Nyman, who also co-directed the film. Their opening-up of the original stagebound production feels seamless: We have multiple key outdoor locations here, all gorgeously filmed and cinematic in feel, and the camera even makes use of their sprawl. There are occasional frights and reveals I wish I could have seen on stage, especially where some torn wallpaper rips away one set for another, but this never feels like an obviously second-best version.
The film’s frame story conceit is that skeptic and debunker Philip Goodman (Nyman) has finally gotten to meet his hero—and as we’ve all heard, that tends to be a mistake. The aging anti-psychic icon looks back on his career with disdain, and he sees Goodman as a smug coward who wraps himself in false certainties and refuses to meet his subjects’ horrors head-on. He tasks Goodman with following up on three reports he could never explain, and those tales form the meat of this anthology film with a twist.
Those tales are simple exercises in providing chills, and they gain a kind of verisimilitude from their shagginess: In each case, it genuinely feels like the narrator Goodman questions is telling us about the worst and strangest thing that ever happened to him, and real-life anecdotes of terror, what with being told by survivors, are often a bit shapeless. It was scary, it was scary, it was scary, and now here I am, telling it to you. But this isn’t aiming for a documentary vibe. The actual importance to how these stories dissolve off at the end is elsewhere. It’s a writer’s saving grace—Dyson and Nyman are saved from offering mini-explanations for each—and it pulls the focus back to Goodman, listening and taking it all in. Has he got it yet? Will he be as changed by this as his subjects have been?
There is, Goodman’s idol and harshest critic might argue, an arrogance to his insistence that he won’t be and shouldn’t be. When you meet this kind of darkness, even secondhand, maybe you’re supposed to change. Everyone else here does, for good or ill. The security guard in the haunted hospital once again makes the trip to visit his daughter with locked-in syndrome; the teenager who runs over the devil out in the woods succumbs to trauma and terror; the high-powered financier plagued by a poltergeist and a demon baby goes for broke in a spectacularly jolting moment. But what is Goodman processing, and how is he processing it?
Somehow—and my own opinion feels controversial to me this time, since I would normally reject this kind of storytelling move out of hand—the film manages to raise and answer that in a familiar but not wholly insufferable way. We’ve seen this before, but, well, that’s the thing about ghost stories anyway. If there’s any genre where doing something old hat is forgivable, it’s the one where the past literally returns to us. And Dyson and Nyman execute the frame story’s shift with a real sense of panache, providing a genuine reward for the audience’s attentiveness and, ultimately, a more punishing bleakness than the anthology segments themselves ever offered. In a way, Goodman is validated after all, which makes it a kind of happy ending. Just one that feels like hell.
Ghost Stories is streaming on Kanopy, Tubi, and Shudder.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
One of the show's worst husbands has a bad time in Vegas.
“So … you cheated on me because of your road rage?” / “I guess when you hear it all at once, yeah.”
Anthologized
A worthwhile revision of a radio classic.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Thirteen, “The Promise”
“I know you’ve had a lot of vile men in your life. So I know this isn’t the first time you’ve had a gun pointed at you.”
“Goddamn, Raylan, your timing sucks!”
“I’ve been told that.”
“What’s it prove, lettin’ him live?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“You’re the most stubborn man I’ve ever known.”
“Beats angry.”
“Every long-time fugitive I’ve ever run in has expected me to congratulate them for not doin’ what no one’s supposed to be doin’ anyhow!”
“We dug coal together.”
“That’s right.”
Welp, that’s Justified. What a beautiful show. This is one of those shows where it’s more of a full-stop at the end of a sentence – not as Great as Angel in this regard but still functional and good. Raylan is a guy who does his job and stays within the letter of the law; Boyd is a sentimentalist; the former stays out of jail and the latter doesn’t. I’m not terrifically surprised by any of this but it was fun to watch – the most surprising element is Raylan apparently forgiving Boyd as long as he’s in prison. Gonna have an essay on the show up not next week – that’s Lenin in October but the week after.
Wynn Duffy, of all people, getting away is hilarious to me. Love the actual book The Friends of Eddie Coyle showing up.
Biggest Laugh: “There! You dumb son-of-a-bitch!”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “You’ll need either a badge or a pair of tits.” / “Art, show him your tits.”
Top Ownage: Boyd defending himself by throwing dynamite like a fucking Fallout character.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Four, “2026: A Virtual Insanity”
Not an absolute banger but still great. Really great basic gag here that the Gang actually would be more comfortable with their technology – not in any preachy way, just a mild observation. Funniest gag here was Frank’s concern with people getting into his holes, and also Frank missing his teeth at the end. I also did enjoy Dennis and Charlie completely forgetting their role in Cricket’s situation; this was another rare example of those two getting paired up.
The Naked Kiss
A woman trying to integrate into regular society after an adulthood as a prostitute. This came up in a discussion about opening scenes showing that we’re not fucking around, and indeed, there’s no fucking around. The fascinating thing about Sam Fuller movies is that they’re just regular movies of the time but he uses more lurid content and puts the camera in a different position; sure, it makes more sense now, but it’s really weird when you put it next to Goldfinger.
Loved The Friends of Eddie Coyle turning up at the end. Beautiful touch. And I always liked the bittersweetness that even a more at-peace Raylan hasn’t made things work out with Winona, despite their mutual good intentions.
Boyd and Ava’s son wearing his shirt buttoned all the way to the top is such a cheap joke, but it keeps making me laugh when I think about it.
The bizarre disconnect I have with Graham Yost and Elmore Leonard (by proxy) that I’ve mentioned before is about Wynn getting away, because it threw me that Yost seemed to feel in interviews like he had to justify (ha) why he’d allowed it to happen, and he said that sometimes Leonard would let a bad guy get away in one book and then he’d get caught in another one. Whereas it seemed so obvious to me that Wynn Duffy is exactly the kind of enjoyable cockroach character who could survive a ton of apocalypses, and I was fine with (and highly entertained) by that, and it felt weird that Yost needed to account for that in an almost Hays Code-like way.
Also, fuck yeah, The Naked Kiss. So intense, and then positively Lynchian at times.
Hahaha, I didn’t even notice Baby Boyd’s shirt – which is funny, because I always thought of his habit of wearing his shirt buttoned all the way up as very childlike.
That Yost statement would become sublime comedy if Duffy got caught in Primeval City.
I actually looked up whether or not that happened! I will not spoil it one way or the other, though.
Zachariah! “The only man in my life who never wanted anything from me.”
It’s a great touch since Dutch accredited that book to changing the style and subject matter of his subsequent work.
I don’t know if THE NAKED KISS is as much a film of its time or the end of a particular era of small town melodrama, reduced from the more extravagant technicolor spectacle to tawdry black and white. As I’ve said before, it feels like KILL BILL in Mayberry. As much as I love Constance Towers in this, due to biographical circumstances, Lana Turner might have been even more effective.
Elementary, “Worth Several Cities” – Sherlock is strong-armed by a drug dealer into investigating who killed his favorite smuggler, and discovers the smuggler stole something from a North Korean ship to sell for himself: the legendary jade seal of China. Which does in fact exist and has in fact been missing for centuries, and was purportedly sold once in exchange for fifteen cities. Before long, representatives of both the PRC and rhe ROC are offering a ton of money for it, but our heroes aren’t interested in the money, they want justice (and also want to prevent the drug dealer from brutally killing anyone). The bad guy is a rich dude played by Ron Rifkin, but while this does adhere to the “biggest name guest star is the killer,” it’s not even a little surprising when Ron Rifkin is the bad guy. Other guests include Jon Huertes as the drug dealer, Annie Q as the daughter of a Chinese official, and Nelsan Ellis as Shinwell. Who is going to be the person Joan tries to help this season. He was introduced in the first episode but I wasn’t sure he’d be back till now. He is a ex-con whose live Joan saved on the operating table years ago, and now she is working to help him go straight. Thus far, his desire to change feels a bit pat.
Barney Miller, “You Dirty Rat”- After a drug bust, two kilos of pot go missing. The stationhouse has a rat problem. Fish has kidney stones. And an unhoused man is arrested sleeping in a department store. These threads all overlap, and it’s all very funny. Abe Vigoda really was the best at deadpan humor. And the guests are character actors J. Pat O’Malley (the unhoused man), Ned Glass (the exterminator), and Val Bisoglio (a cop from Narcotics). Everyone is pitch perfect.
Seinfeld, S9 “The Strike” – aha! So this is where one of the most famous Seinfeld concepts originates: it is the Festivus episode. And that part of the story is spectacular, Jerry Stiller furiously stealing the episode. Kramer’s story is also very funny, especially the suggestion that he’s been hiding his unemployment for 12 years, and Elaine’s plot about her fake phone number ties into Kramer’s misadventures nicely. Jerry’s story lets the episode down a little alas, his girlfriend looking attractive or unattractive depending on the lighting feels a bit hacky, but everything else in this one is great so it barely matters.
Twilight Zone, “The Last Flight” – I liked this one very much, more tomorrow.
Year of the Month updates:
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 6th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Lenin in October
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
Here’s how we’re wrapping up August:
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
And here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
Honestly a relief to hear. The stage show got such high praise, and there’s not nearly enough horror theater being made these days, that I was hoping the adaptation wouldn’t be awful.