13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016)

A Michael Bay film about the Benghazi attack and subsequent death of Ambassador Chris Stevens sounds like one of those things that shouldn't work. In a satirical skit about the dumbing down of America, a character would joke about wanting to go see Michael Bay's new film, "9/11: The Movie," in which a CGI American flag destroys every evil terrorist from sea to shining sea. And while that's perhaps a bit unfair, it's also kind of not, because this is the reputation Michael Bay has created for himself, all while working for the same Hollywood system that's entirely open to taking a real-world tragedy and turning it into profitable exploitation. We've had Twin Tower films, Osama Bin Laden assassination films, hijacked 9/11 plane films, and with 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, we have the Benghazi film – the worst terrorist attack the United States has suffered since September 11, 2001. And the mere idea of Michael Bay announcing such a film was the stuff of cynical eye-rolls and immediate dismissals.

In Hollywood, there’s an understanding that directors with prestige are, and generally should be, the ones to bring such real-life tragedies to life; i.e., Steven Spielberg with Schinder’s List or Paul Greengrass’s United 93. Though whether or not such true-life horrors becoming fodder for movie theaters is a tasteless move is constantly up for debate, but if they’re going to be made, it’s best they’re helmed by people with a history for quality output and adept at presenting real human drama.

Using his money-printing Transformers series as clout, Michael Bay – the director of five films (so far) about robots turning into other robots and fighting evil robots from outer space (all while destroying Chicago) – elbowed his way to the front of the line to helm 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Though it does contain the same kind of violent, operatic destruction for which Michael Bay has been known since his directorial debut, it also contains something a bit unexpected and absolutely welcome: a bit of restraint from the director of Bad Boys 2, as well as a bit of maturity.

Make no mistake – though screenwriter Chuck Hogan (The Strain) was the one to adapt the nonfiction book by Mitchell Zuckoff and the Annex Soldiers, the script still manages to fall victim to the usual Michael Bay-isms. Though based on very real men, characterization falls by the wayside. Played by lesser known actors (which works to the film's benefit), each soldier is given a modicum of background and some personality quirks to differentiate who everyone is, but except for lead soldier (as presented by the film) Jack Silva, played by The Office's John Krasinski, the men's identities are tough to distinguish. 'Boon' (also The Office's David Denman) reads books. 'Tanto' (Pablo Schreiber) cracks jokes. 'Rone' (James Badge Dale) seems to really like war. These could very well be close to the real men, but their translation to the screen filters out much of their needed characterization. Bay, to his credit, does manage to include a handful of scenes in which the men either talk about or communicate via Skype with their wives and children (one of these instances, taking place at a fast-food drive-thru is actually one of the best and most human moments Bay has ever directed), but once shit hits the fan and everyone is covered in soot, it's legitimately confusing at times to see through the black faces and heavy beards and figure out just who is who at any moment.

And again, being that this is a Michael Bay film, scenes striving toward drama can border on the overwrought, overly patriotic, and emotionally manipulative. Silva hasn't been at the annex for five minutes before he's sitting alone on his bed and thinking about his family in flashback form. We can fault a somewhat clunky script (which sports no less than six sarcastic uses of the word "fun") containing some truly heinous dialogue, as well as an odd amount of jokes that never seem to gel with the very serious conflict in which the soldiers soon find themselves engaged. (I wasn't there so I can only speculate, but if the real soldiers made at least half these jokes during the actual firefights, then I am speechless.)

Still, the shortcomings of the script are counteracted by Bay's extravagant yet restrained – and at times, downright graceful – direction. His quick-cutting style is severely dialed down, replaced by gorgeous sweeping exterior shots of the conflict as it's unfolding. He also resurrects his “bomb POV” shot from 2001’s recklessly stupid Pearl Harbor, in which the camera tracks with a bomb released by its aircraft and follows it down, watching it whirl through the air until landing near its intended target. It’s less Bay cribbing from himself and more his acknowledgment that whether here or abroad, war has to begin and end somewhere – and that includes conflicts we understand, like World War II, or those still mired in questions and controversy, much like our unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cinematography by Dion Beebee eschews Bay's normal living painting style in favor of ground-zero witnessing, relying on scurrying handheld cameras to put the audience directly in the middle of the fight. It's been done before, of course, but not by Bay, and seeing him employ its use forces you to examine him as not just a director, but a filmmaker.

Did you see what I just said?? 

It's a shame that 13 Hours didn't do well financially at the box office, as not only was this a film that more people needed to see, but it just seems like one more nail in the coffin for directors leaving their comfort zone to make something "important" before heading back to their franchises and brand names that print money while killing brain cells. Better than your typical Michael Bay fare, but not in the same league as other relevant modern films The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, or United 93, 13 Hours presents a refreshingly Michael Bay-lite take on a very true story. As to be expected, the action scenes are phenomenal (while thankfully managing to skirt political agenda), a somewhat clunky script and uneven tone are what holds back 13 Hours from the kind of prestige its colleagues have gone on to earn. Removing the mindset that this was a true and horrific thing which really took place and examining it only as a piece of entertainment, 13 Hours makes for a thrilling, visceral, and unrelenting experience and perhaps even one of the best action films of the 2010s.

RELIC (2020) AND THE RAVAGES OF REAL-LIFE HORROR

Toward the end of her life, my grandmother developed dementia after having suffered a then-undetected series of  mini-strokes while living alone in her Philly row home of many decades. She was someone I’d always known to be fierce, strong, and stubborn (I come from an Italian family, so no surprise there); she was also someone for whom the expression “suffered no fools” was coined. Her bullshit detector was well-oiled and frequently maintained, and though she treated her grandchildren with great care, if you were anyone else – look out. Because of this, she loomed large in my childhood mind and I always took for granted that she’d remain a towering, untoppable figure until her end…but after silently growing old in the home where she raised my father and uncle, a home which she refused to abandon in that stubborn elderly-person way, she was finally carried out against her will – literally, as she sat in an armchair, like she was an Egyptian queen – after suffering a fall caused by her stroke. In spite of her profane promises, she’d never see her home of sixty-plus years again. Like many other poor souls, she lived out her final days in an assisted living facility, where she wasted away into a crooked mass of bones and thinning white hair until she no longer resembled who she was.

The last two times I saw her offered two polar extremes on what dementia can do to a person; it was my first time witnessing how someone can be abandoned by their own retreating mind and realizing how little in control we are of our own ends.

Being that my father maintained routine visits, her memory and knowledge of him was always fresh and available. But me…she didn’t know. Not at first.

“You remember Joey?” he asked her, motioning to me after we entered her room during my first visit.

From her oversized bed where she looked like a shrunken doll, she nodded at me politely but indifferently and said, “Hi, Jerry.”

My father, by now well used to her fleeting mind, softly laughed and said, “Not Jerry, Mom. Joey…your grandson.”

She looked at me again, confused and wary, like a trick was being played on her…but then her recognition of me kicked in and every corner of her face changed. She softened. A smile of remembrance and love replaced her tight-lipped expression of forced civility. Within a few seconds, she looked and felt like an entirely different person – the person I’d known since I was old enough to know anyone at all.

“Hi, Joey,” she said in a quivering voice, her smile growing wider, and the miseries of her life and her new depressing environment were entirely gone. I sat down next to her bed, took her hand, and we talked. The specifics of what we talked about have faded since that day, but I seem to recall her saying she was looking forward to getting out of that place and going back home, just as soon as she was better.

As awful as her eventual ending was, I wish this had been our last time meeting.

I went to see her again later on, but this time by myself. My father had warned me ahead of time that, without him next to me, she might not know who I was. I understood this, but reasoned I had to try; she obviously didn’t have much time left, and if the choice was to either see her or not see her, it didn’t seem like much of a choice at all.

She wasn’t in her room this time; she was sitting alone in her wheelchair in the common area. I sat down next to her, but she didn’t acknowledge me. Finally, I said, “Hi, Grandmom.”

She looked at me with cool, dismissive eyes.

“…What?” she responded, like I was some random solicitor at her door pretending to know her while selling her something she couldn’t have needed less. It was evident she didn’t know who I was, and after looking at me for a second, she looked straight ahead again.

“It’s Joey,” I told her. “Your grandson.”

“My what?” she asked harshly. “What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I tried every association I could think of. My father – I was his son. My uncle – I was his nephew. I said their names over and over, and though she remembered them, her memory of me had been lost. It was a situation I didn’t know how to navigate, and even though I knew this was a possibility, I didn’t come prepared for the event it actually happened. The more I tried to engage her, the more I realized she suspected I was facility personnel, and once that idea settled into her mind, instead of my being some random stranger, her demeanor warmed a bit, so I remained with her and talked in general terms for a few more minutes. I asked if the staff were treating her nicely, and if she was comfortable, to which she offered noncommittal responses. I soon ran out of things to say, so we sat in silence for a bit before I stood up to leave. The last thing I ever said to her was, “I’ll come back to see you again real soon, okay?”

She shrugged at me, like this were no big thing, because why should she care if some anonymous staff member whom she didn’t know ever saw her again? “Okay…” she muttered, as if I were offering her irrelevant information she’d never need to know, as if she were telling me, “You can go now, whoever you are.”

I nearly ran out of the place – like I’d done something wrong and an orderly would be chasing me down any moment. I left feeling like an emotional catastrophe. I felt terrible for her because this was going to be how she ended. I felt irrationally embarrassed and hurt because she didn’t know who I was. And I felt afraid because I couldn’t help but wonder if this miserable fate would eventually befall my own parents, and all the people I ever loved, and then me. She passed away not much longer after that, and I realized with sadness and shame that my last ever interaction with her involved me pretending to be someone else just so she would talk to me.

John Carpenter once said that fear is the most universal emotion we have – that we’re born afraid, we die afraid, and in between, we’re all afraid of the same things. We can be afraid of the mythological: werewolves, vampires, and other monsters; the philosophical: ghosts and demons and the darkness inside us all; and the scientific: aliens, bad biology, species long thought extinct, and a planet rebelling against us for having treated it so poorly. As vicious or scary as any of those concepts and cryptids might be, we always have that safety net of fiction keeping us at arm’s length from terror’s implications. Sure, even the most fantastical titles can be used as parallels for real-world horror, which is what the genre does best – you can be just as afraid of George Romero’s zombies as an old spooky house as Jason Voorhees cutting your midsection off with a pole saw. Subterranean sand worms, Maryland witches, mirror-dwelling ghosts, telekinetic misfits – you have no choice but to pick your poison. But ultimately, every single horror movie ever made was about the same thing: our innate fear of death, in what form it will come, and through what avenue our lives led us to such an ending. Will our deaths be quick and peaceful, or drawn out and painful? Will the last thing we ever see be a familiar face by our bedside, or the back of the nurse as she updates our file on a hospital computer? Will we feel someone’s warm hand in ours, or nothing but cold air? Will we still know who we are when the time comes, or will our minds be trapped inside a darkened room that no longer feels familiar to us?

This year’s Relic, directed by Natalie Erika James, is perhaps one of the most terrifying films you could ever see – not because it’s the kind of horror experience that shares shocking, boundary-pushing imagery like a Hereditary or presents something more epically-scoped like a Night of the Living Dead – but because it’s one of those rare films where the real-life horror informs the cinematic one, as opposed to the opposite. Night of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers were blank slates – their roving mass threats could embody whatever real-life horror you wanted. Romero said Night of the Living Dead was about one culture devouring another and changing everything. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an allegory for communism, while the 1978 remake was about the various revolutions American citizens were taking part in at that time: protesting the Vietnam War, decrying the corruption of the Nixon White House, cheering on sexual liberation – rejecting the machine that was turning everyone into soulless automatons who wouldn’t question authority. Relic isn’t front-facingly about something while secretly being about something else. It is very much about the horrors of slowly losing a loved one to dementia, and how that horror can escape the brain it’s already infected and leak out onto those forced to act as the caregiver. It can twist relationships, warp the very home in which you live, and reinvent a person you’ve known and loved for so long that they are no longer someone you recognize or understand, mutating them into something monstrous and villainous and a sobering portent of things possibly to come. And you can either fight, rebel, and flee from this monster, or embrace it, because you know, deep down, that person you’ve always known is still there, and you will never be able to change what is.

Kay (Emily Mortimer, Shutter Island) and her somewhat estranged daughter, Sammy (Bella Heathcote, Neon Demon) are heading to Kay’s mother’s isolated home in the middle of the Australian woods. Edna (Robyn Nevin, The Matrix sequels), prone to forgetfulness from an encroaching mental illness, has been missing for a few days, so Kay and Sammy examine the house, speak to authorities, and walk the woods, with no sign of her…that is until she comes home in the middle of the night while Kay and Sammy are asleep; her feet are dirty, she’s spacier than usual, and she’s not talking about where she’s been, but otherwise she seems physically fine. As time goes on, what Kay assumes to be a rapidly deteriorating mind turns out to be much more terrifying, and as a black mold begins to overtake Edna’s house, in the same way a black nothingness overtakes her mind, Kay is forced to navigate caring for a parent with dementia while also contending with the strange and potentially paranormal presence transforming the very home in which all three generations are currently living.

Considering its own trailer seems to have been heavily inspired by that of Hereditary, while also showing off familiar “Boo!” imagery from the likes of The Conjuring, you might be surprised by what Relic offers. That’s not to say Relic isn’t scary, or even a horror film – it’s both – but it moves at a purposely slow place, revealing pieces of the mystery a little at a time, or sometimes showing you potential pieces of the puzzle, leaving the viewer to put it all together. If you come looking for quick-paced, mainstream horror, Relic will fight you at every turn, but if you’re a patient viewer who enjoys a good mystery, Relic will not only prove a satisfying spin on the haunted house story, but will hit you hard in the feels with its intensely emotional finale – and it’s all due to the realistically flawed characters.

Early on, in spite of Kay’s worry, it’s easy for the viewer to see her as uncaring and unconcerned – not because of any action she fails to take, but because of her ambivalent reaction to her mother’s odd behavior. We, the audience, know from the start that something unnatural is unfolding, and Mortimer willingly and bravely takes on the role of a hands-off daughter, risking the audience’s aversion to her. In reality, Kay’s sins aren’t outlandish or unique to anyone who has ever been in that situation. She’s the first to admit she could’ve been around more, and maybe she should’ve been, but she spends the entire film contending with this and refusing the “easier” resolutions to Edna’s growing mental instability, eventually visiting a “five-star living” retirement home but later crying in the parking lot because she knows she doesn’t have the heart to follow through. During the first act, it’s revealed that Kay’s great grandfather had suffered a similar malady and died in total isolation on the family’s property, so when she says, “His mind wasn’t all there in the end…I don’t think he was cared for like he should’ve been,” that’s the crux of the film’s conflict and what has to be overcome.

The character of Sammy closely parallels the audience; because of her presumed estrangement with her mother, whom she calls by her first name, her sympathies lie with her grandmother by default, assuming her to be the victim of an impatient daughter unwilling to reconcile Edna’s wayward mind and her need for independence. In a way, Sammy represents idealistic ignorance – someone young and lacking real-world experience of how shitty life can be, someone who is burdened only with the knowledge of what’s going on, but without the full scope of its implications. During a sweet moment with her grandmother, Sammy offers to move into the house permanently to help her with every day tasks; within minutes, however, following a nasty confrontation directly caused by Edna’s illness, Sammy gets her first taste of how life would be as Edna’s caregiver. Suddenly, things don’t seem so easy.

Nevin brings Edna to life in equally horrifying and heartbreaking ways. There are very few moments where Edna is lucid and seemingly the way she used to be, though she never shares any of these moments with Kay. Their relationship is tense and worsens throughout the film, with Edna only softening during the scenes where she tries to convince Kay that someone or something is coming after her. Relic packs these emotional punches several times, offering the viewer a full view of how wrenching this kind of existence can be. Edna is consistently presented as both the villain and the victim, never comfortably resting on one side versus the other – and when dealing with something like a mental illness, this hews close to reality when relating it to an outsider’s perception. Edna’s increasingly dangerous behavior isn’t a result of anything more than bad biological luck, and the emotional toll it takes on those around her results in perhaps irrational but completely understandable fear, anger, and frustration. It’s easy for someone in Kay’s position to fear someone who was once a mother but now acts like a complete stranger, to grow angry at her for “allowing” this transformation to take place, and to grow frustrated at many, many things: her mother’s wandering mind, the brutal life cycle that enables this kind of misery, and herself for not being as present as she could’ve been. Kay is railing against life itself, and why it's filled with so much hardship and heartache, but she's also railing against her own fate...at least until she comes to accept it. We're all of us in for a very similar battle; we can refute, rebel, and reject, or we can accept it. Like the bumper sticker says, none of us get out of this life alive.

All these years later, I know who my grandmother was and I know who she wasn’t. She was the pint-sized woman who wore her golden hair in that tight and curly schoolmarm look, who took the bus everywhere she went, whose favorite store was Macy’s, who was that typical sitcom grandmother who was infamous for giving us kids the kinds of embarrassing clothes that would’ve gotten us beat up at recess had we actually worn them to school. I know that who she was at the end wasn’t a fair and accurate reflection of who she was in life. I understand that…but I haven’t made my peace with it, either. I can’t think of her without thinking of that, and that’s horrific and unkind, but necessary and perhaps unavoidable. Cinematic horror screams one thing in your ear while whispering something else behind your back, but real-life horror like Relic looks you right in the eye and shows you, directly, what fear looks like and warns you that you’ll never be free of it.

THE IRISHMAN (2019)

“I heard you paint houses.”

“Yes, I do. I also do my own carpentry.”

A friend of mine once said that Martin Scorsese makes the same movie over and over, and I had to do everything in my power to avoid picking up a nice-looking pen off a bar and kick-stabbing him in the throat until he was a bloody mess on the ground. (I’m kidding.) (Or am I?) In a really superficial way, one could believe this was a sound observation: it’s not just because the most well-known portion of Scorsese’s filmography has taken place in the world of the Italian mafia (though relegated to only four films, including The Irishman), with a single detour into the world of Irish crime in The Departed, but also because Scorsese’s own style and techniques carry over from film to film, giving them an almost brand-like feeling. There’s the first-person narration, the “crime is awesome” montages, the Rolling Stones soundtrack, the gorgeous spot-lighting, the frenzied smash-cut editing, and an ensemble of familiar faces like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, the somewhat obscure Frank Vincent, and pretty much the entire supporting cast of The Sopranos. “I liked it the first time I saw it…when it was called Goodfellas,” a mid-90s SNL oddity known as David Spade once said about Casino. Gestating since at least 2008, The Irishman was predictably lobbed from the start with the same kind of shallow proclamations that Scorsese and De Niro were going to make yet another version of Goodfellas, even before a single frame had been shot. Once the film finally made its long-awaited debut on Netflix, twelve years after it was first announced, the camp was still split on what kind of film The Irishman was vying to be. Was it just another Goodfellas riff, or was it something decidedly different?

In case you haven’t deduced it for yourself during one of my typically elongated lead-ins, The Irishman is, indeed, something decidedly different. Is it about the mafia? Yes, it is. Does it involve a fair number of Goodfellas et al. cast members? Yes, it does. But where Goodfellas was a Scarface-ish allegory about opulence, power, and the eventual fall from grace, The Irishman is an Unforgiven-like examination of a misspent life immersed in dirty tasks for dirty people at the expense of one man’s family. That the film is headlined by an aging De Niro wasn’t just the result of the film being in pre-production for a very, very long time, but it’s also the point of The Irishman entirely. It’s about sin, regret, mortality, and legacy. And yes, De Niro, as one tends to do, has aged. For lack of a more respectful word, De Niro is now an old man. His elderliness has crept into his take on Frank Sheeran that both benefits and handicaps his performance, guiding him in his role of a soft-spoken, somewhat slowwitted boob eager to please his masters like a loyal dog, but which is also occasionally at odds with the visual technology being employed to shave decades off his real age. In a way, De Niro’s appearance and performance sum up the experience of The Irishman as a whole – still engaging, still artfully made by one of cinema’s remaining old-school masters, but maybe, perhaps, a couple decades too late.

Based on prosecutor Charles Brandt’s “non-fiction” book I Heard You Paint Houses (I say “non-fiction” because it was based entirely on Sheeran’s version of events, which many have claimed to be dubious), The Irishman is a sprawling epic where genuine history and possible artifice intermingle in ways that, regardless of the film’s ultimate dance with reality, is still a compelling story. The Irishman weaves a complex narrative of many characters, many conflicts, and many intersecting timelines. With a running time of three and a half hours, that’s not surprising. What is surprising is how quickly those three and a half hours go by. Surrounding the main cast of De Niro’s hired hitman Frank Sheeran, Joe Pesci’s mob boss Russell Bufalino, and Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is an extensive ensemble cast who bring to life many of Philadelphia’s crime figures, including infamous mob boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Canavale, sporting a “rescinding” hairline), and an unexpectedly excellent Ray Romano as attorney Bill Bufalino. (In a weird bit of my family’s history, The Irishman makes brief mention of crime figure Frank Sindone, who helped plan the hit on Bruno and was later found dead in an alley with three bullets in his head. My Philadelphia-born father once unknowingly shared a car ride with Sindone and others from the neighborhood and later described him as “pretty fuckin’ intense.” My father also had a cousin [for whom things didn’t end well] who worked at the Latin Casino, which is featured during Sheeran’s “Appreciation Night” after he becomes President of the teamsters’ local union 326. I keep telling him he needs to write his own book about 1970s Philly because he’s seen some shit.)

In a way, even though any film should consider a comparison to Goodfellas extremely flattering, The Irishman works much better as its own beast. The gliding cameras, the eclectic oldies soundtrack, the voiceover: sure, those things are all present and accounted for – but The Irishman is measured, calm, patient, and mature. It’s a film that stands on its own, of course, but it’s also an acknowledgement of the long and very successful careers of those who made it. It’s Scorsese touching base with audiences and gently reminding them that his on-screen mafia tales are what’s attracted the most eyes, garnered his best critical notices, and punctured pop culture in ways that many of his other films didn't. And let’s face it: Scorsese wouldn’t have gone back to this same well so many times if he, himself, wasn’t so fascinated with a life of crime. What began on a small scale in something like 1973’s Mean Streets, made with a guerilla-style, low-budget scrappiness, has culminated forty-five years later with The Irishman, a two hundred-million-dollar epic that likely hit more eyeballs in its first day on Netflix than did his 2016 Jesuit priest drama Silence during its entire theatrical run. Indeed, Scorsese trots out many of his trademarks, though the occasionally abrupt editing by longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is much more restrained, in keeping with The Irishman’s slower pace. Though Scorsese still falls back on voice-over from a few characters, now they directly address the camera like they’re confessing their sins to us, the audience. As for his new bag of tricks? Yes, the controversial de-aging technology, which landed with audiences in extremely polarizing ways. “It looked great!” versus “It looked terrible!” flooded reviews and talk-backs. Snotty backseat drivers uploaded their own “deep fake” videos to Youtube to show how it could’ve been done cheaper and with better results. But here’s the thing: the de-aging technology itself actually looks fantastic, removing the deep creases and weathered appearances of our charming older men. The problem, however, is that those brand-new youthful faces are then pasted over their still-old dumpy bodies, and the additional decision to have De Niro wear blue contact lenses to “look Irish” (even though he played an Irishman in Goodfellas and wore no such thing) only does a disservice to the millions of dollars spent on those faces. Despite what the actors and choreographers tried, old men can only move like old men, and when it comes time for De Niro to knock down and kick-stomp the local grocery store owner, he kicks like an old man, and it’s hard not to notice.

Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran is an atypical performance for the De Niro we’ve come to anticipate from a Scorsese film, but perfectly appropriate and in line with not only the real Frank Sheeran, but the work De Niro has been doing as an actor since the early 2000s. Throughout his collaborations with Scorsese, or during the “nod” roles he’d play after the fact that painted him as a mob boss of sorts, De Niro was always in a position where he wielded power and influence (or in the case of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, baseball bats). Audiences have spent the last several decades affiliating themselves with De Niro the boss, from Goodfellas’ Jimmy Conway to Casino’s Sam Rothstein. This time, however, he’s the bag man, the hired gun, the administrative assistant who just so happens to steal and kill. Hell, he’s not even comfortable pulling the car over unless someone else says it's okay. “I was a working guy,” Sheeran says early on before he made his way into the crime world, but even after that, he was still a working guy – it’s just that the things he did are what changed. Sheeran, as presented, is a pathetic figure, only finding worth in the eyes of the crime figures who want him around while barely making time for his own family. One gets the impression that De Niro, for the first time in his life, is actually wanted around, and it renders him a purposely toothless presence, putting him into certain situations to perform acts he doesn’t have the guts to refuse. When Sheeran retreats to an empty bedroom to make a private phone call he’s been dreading, it’s the most pathetic De Niro has made one of his characters look in his fifty years of acting – even more than his famous scene in Taxi Driver where he’s being consistently rebuffed over the phone by Cybil Shephard’s Betsy, whom, after a disastrous date, wants nothing to do with him. “What kind of man makes a phone call like that?” Sheeran later muses during one of the film’s final scenes. De Niro, the boss who stomped on Billy Bats’ skull, who tore through the pimp underworld to save a young girl, who refused to be knocked down by Sugar Ray Robinson, has become a spineless, subservient slave, and he was the one who let it happen.

Sharing the screen with De Niro for the first time since 1995’s Casino is Joe Pesci, who makes a welcome return to Scorsese and co.’s world, his last high-profile project being his good friend De Niro’s 2006 directorial project, The Good Shepherd. Let me just say this: he was incredibly missed, and he offers up the film’s best performance. Gone are the days of the volatile Tommy DeVito and Nicky Santoro. Though his Russell Bufalino is “the boss,” he exacts that title almost manipulatively in soft-spoken but firm tones. He never, once, goes big, mirroring De Niro’s more neutered approach, and it’s quite honestly one of the best performances in his career. But don’t worry! Al Pacino is definitely ready to take on everyone’s yelling for them. Speaking of, though Pacino offers a fine performance as Jimmy Hoffa, he seems to be playing just another version of Pacino instead of the real man; if we must compare, it doesn’t come close to Jack Nicholson’s take from 1992’s Hoffa, directed by Danny Devito.

Though The Irishman is about ugly things, it doesn’t glamourize them in the same ways as Goodfellas and Casino. In some respects, The Irishman feels like the thematic third part of a trilogy that includes those two titles. It’s the end result of long lives spent creating and depicting stories of crime, but also of the real lives that inspired those stories, the toll taken from living on the wrong side of the law, and that no matter what one’s calling in life may be, eventually, everything comes to an end. And if, at the end of your life, you’re haggling with the salesman over the price of your own coffin – when you’re the one making the arrangements for your funeral because your family won’t do it – you know that’s a life that was lived selfishly, cruelly, and deeply alone.

As much as I loved to see the likes of De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, and Keitel sharing the screen together again, it pains me to say that The Irishman could’ve been a flawless endeavor if our primary trio of actors had been relegated to playing the last two time periods depicted in the film, while falling back on younger actors for the previous two. (Hey! Like they did in Goodfellas!) Having said that, The Irishman is still top-tier filmmaking for everyone involved and showcases a director who, despite his age, has no intent on slowing down. 

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

THE 15:17 TO PARIS (2017)

I’ve yet to see every film Clint Eastwood made as a director, yet I’m still confident when I say that The 15:17 to Paris is his absolute worst yet. For the last decade, he has been on a downward slope, receiving partially undue accolades for his adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (which doesn’t hold up) and lots of ironic praise for his addition to the unsubtle “racism is bad” sub-genre with Gran Torino. If you know the filmmaker, especially in his most recent years, you know he has a penchant for maudlin dialogue and “naturalistic” characterization, neither of which transport well to the screen. Even his musical scores tend to be sparse piano or acoustic guitar pinged or plucked at random; they’re about as lifeless as the last decade of his directorial work. The minute you hear the same kind of no-pulse piano-coustic during the opening scene of The 15:17 to Paris, you should be surprised to note that Eastwood didn’t actually score this one himself, instead farming out the duties to Christian Jacob, to whom Eastwood likely said, “do the same kind of boring, rote stuff I normally do.”

With The 15:17 to Paris, Eastwood decided to try his hand at atypical casting, not just in casting the three real heroes from the Paris train attack (Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler) to play themselves, but in also casting actors known primarily for comedies in dramatic supporting roles. Jenna Fischer (The Office) and Judy Greer (Arrested Development) play a couple of mothers, Thomas Lennon (Reno 911) a high school principal, Tony Hale (Veep) a beaten down gym teacher, and — wait for it — Jaleel White as yet another teacher. (Yes, TV’s Steve Urkel.) Why? Who honestly the fuck knows, and I’d be very curious to know why Eastwood would cast such a throwaway pop culture figure in such a small role, and who does absolutely nothing of note.

As for our hero trio — and nothing against them, because they’re not professional actors — they can’t act. They try, and the minute they begin, it’s terrible, and you groan, because you know you’re going to be spending much of the film with them.

And speaking of an entire film, since the pictorialized terrorist encounter amounts to nothing more than 20 minutes tops, that means the remainder of the running time has to be filled with…something else. And that’s what you get. The trio as kids, the trio as older kids, the trio on vacation, stints in the military, and not a single of their moments is interesting. Eastwood seems to be vying for Boyhood meets Before Sunrise meets United 93 and, impressively, he botches all three. The 15:17 to Paris might as well be called Three Mini Biographies of Those Three Guys Who Eventually Took The 15:17 to Paris and Did Some Heroics.

No one would ever argue that what these three men did wasn’t brave. They intervened in a terrorist plot, subdued a would-be murderer, and saved lives. Did they deserve a movie about their efforts? I’m not sure — maybe — though not every single heroic act warrants a 90+ minute dramatization. But I do know they deserved one much better than the one they got.

FLANNAN ISLE LIGHTHOUSE MYSTERY

I recently discovered the webseries Bedtime Stories and I'm pretty hooked. I've only watched a dozen or so episodes, but this one's definitely my favorite. 

Somewhat related, also check out a flick called The Vanishing with Peter Mullan and Gerard Butler (I know, but he's pretty good in it) that came out this year. Though it's never specifically stated, it's directly inspired by this real-life mystery and offers a possible explanation for what may have happened. I'm too lazy to write it up, but just take my word for it and check it out. It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime. 

OLD MIKE

“Old Mike put to rest after 64 years,” the front-page headline in the now-defunct Nevada County Picayune trumpeted after the burial. Even though no one knew Old Mike’s real name or much of anything about him, his burial was big news — it had been a long time coming. Old Mike died Aug. 21, 1911, his death bringing with it notoriety he likely would never have experienced while living. Actually, what happened after he died accounted for his macabre celebrity status.

For 64 years, Old Mike’s embalmed body was on public display at Cornish Mortuary in Prescott, the wizened figure in its glass case becoming a fixture in the Nevada County seat as townspeople and tourists alike gawked and speculated. Some said Old Mike — a name bestowed upon the corpse by the mortuary staff — had been a traveling salesman who hawked pencils and other small items. Others thought he was a man down on his luck, who had been forced into the life of a hobo. Whatever his profession or origin, this man no one really knew was found leaning against an oak tree in the Prescott City Park with nothing on him offering information about who or what he was.

More.

MADAME

"Contemporary sources mention the death of the young slave girl who hurled herself from the roof and confirm the discovery of seven chained and maltreated slaves in quarters near Lalaurie's kitchen, but confirm none of the more lurid allegations regarding buckets of genitalia, makeshift sex-change operations, brains stirred with sticks, women nailed to floors by their intestines, tongues sewn together, mouths stuffed with excrement and stitched up, females flayed to resemble caterpillars, suits of human skin, sliced penises, 'human crabs,' bottles of blood or 'grand gore chambers'; nor do they detail scores of victims, no evidence for which can be traced in accounts published at the time."

 

 Delphine LaLaurie.

WEAPONIZED ANIMALS OF WWII

Anti-Tank Dogs

Anti-tank dogs were dogs that were taught to carry explosives to tanks, armored vehicles and other military targets. They were intensively trained and developed by Russian military forces from as early as 1930...The intended targets became just tanks and instead of releasing the bombs and running to safety, the dogs would now have fixed bombs attached to them which would detonate as a lever was pushed while crawling under the vehicle. The resulting explosion would kill the dog, effectively making them suicide bombers.

Bat Bombs

At the time, most dwellings in Japan were still made out of wood, bamboo, and paper in the traditional style, and were therefore highly combustible. In 1942, a dental surgeon by the name of Lytle S. Adams considered this potential weakness and contacted the White House with the idea of strapping small explosive devices to bats and dropping them over a wide area. According to the plan, the idea was for millions of bats, specifically the plentiful and easily obtainable Mexican Free-tailed Bat, to parachute toward earth in an egg shaped container carrying small incendiary devices strapped to them. At the designated time, the container would open and the flying mammals would disperse to find their way deep into the attics of barns, homes, and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded.

Pigeon-Guided Missiles

During World War II, the U.S. began developing a missile guidance system under the code name Project Pigeon, which later became known as Project Orcon, for “Organic Control.”... In the plan, the pigeon would ride in a compartment aboard an unpowered, gliding missile as a screen was displayed in front of the bird showing the target. The pigeon would be trained to peck at the target on the touch sensitive screen and the missiles flight control systems would adjust according to where on the screen the pigeon pecked. This was a one way trip for the pigeons but they were seen as cheap, plentiful and fairly easy to train. 

Rat Bombs

The British Special Operation Executive developed a method of delivering explosives that involved the use of dead rats. The rat carcasses were to be filled with plastic explosives and left in targeted locations, namely factories, where it was speculated that stokers tending boilers would dispose of their revolting find in the furnace, thereby detonating the bomb and destroying the factory. 

Read the entire fascinating article.

TIME BOMB

When Ana Elvia went to feed her cows in the morning, four men quickly approached her and put a bomb around her neck. They ran away, leaving a tape that asked for a large sum of money. They also warned her that if she disarmed the bomb (or tried to) that it would go off.

A bomb tech (Jairo Hernando Lopez) showed up later that morning, without any of his tools, and tried to dispose of the bomb. He also came without his bomb-suit so he wouldn’t scare her. He was given a bandsaw and penknife which he failed to disarm the bomb with. Elvia didn’t think she was in any real danger; she kept telling her sister she had an idea who one of the men were. Later in the afternoon, they decided to take a break and the bomb went off. It killed Elvia and took off Lopez’s arm. Lopez later died in the hospital. The people responsible for the bomb have not been found and the case remains unsolved.

This photo was taken a couple of hours before the bomb exploded.

MEDICAL TOUR OF THE PAST

Masks worn by doctors during the Plague.

Woman with artificial leg, circa 1890-1900.

Early plastic surgery.

Dr. Clark's Spinal Apparatus advertisement, 1878.

Lewis Sayre's scoliosis treatment.

Radiology nurse technician, France, WWII, 1918.

One of first surgical procedures to use ether as an anesthetic, circa 1855.

Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, Soviet general practitioner,
performs an appendectomy on himself.

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THE STAIN

There is a stain on the top floor of the Athens State Hospital in the shape of a woman - Margaret Schilling - who died there nearly thirty years ago. Margaret’s story is shrouded in myth; some say she was a deaf mute who hid from the staff when they were vacating the hospital and ended up locked in the upstairs wing, unable to call out for help when she saw it was too late. The truth seems to be that she was simply a woman with profound mental disabilities who managed to lock herself in a ward which had been used for infectious patients and had been abandoned for years, on the top floor of ward N. 20. She disappeared on December 1, 1978. It wasn’t until January 12, 1979 that they found her, dead on the floor of heart failure, probably due to exposure in an unheated ward during the coldest part of winter. As she was dying, oddly enough, she took her clothes off, folded them neatly beside her, and laid down on the concrete floor.

Weeks later, her decomposing body was found lying on the floor next to a window. When authorities attempted to move her body, they found that it had made a permanent stain in the outline of the woman’s body on the concrete floor. It seems as though the stain had been caused by the combination of her body naturally decaying, coupled with its position in front of big bay windows that allowed the sunlight to shine down on her. Despite constant scrubbing, the stain would not come up. Even more, people walking past the asylum at night would sometimes see the ghostly image of a woman staring down at them from the window where the body was found.

It is true that her body left a stain. You can still see it today. People sometimes leave flowers and other trinkets around it. Some say that Margaret Schilling’s spirit wanders the building at night. They say that other patients, especially those who died at the hospital, also wander the building at night. Rumors about patients shackled in basement torture chambers add fuel to the legends.

Tours of the Ridges are a popular Halloween event in Athens—so popular, in fact, that they had to cancel one year’s tour because of the unmanageably huge turnout. Other parts of the grounds are off limits, however.

AN EXORCISM

A terrified mother claims she watched in horror as her demon-possessed 9-year-old son walked backwards up a wall and ceiling. Her claims would be easy to dismiss if a child services case worker and a nurse weren’t reportedly there to witness it all.

Latoya Ammons claims all three of her children showed signs of being possessed, including “evil” smiles and strangely deep voices, the Indianapolis Star reports. The mother says she also witnessed her 12-year-old daughter levitating in their Gary, Ind., home.

Strangely enough, the scary-sounding incident is outlined in official documents. Further, Gary police Capt. Charles Austin told the Star that he is a “believer” after making several visits to the home and interviewing witnesses. He first thought the family was making stories up as part of a get-rich-quick scheme.

Ammons’ home was “exorcized” by a catholic priest in a number of ceremonies that were reportedly authorized by the Diocese of Gary. The story apparently became so believable that officers with the police department said they were too scared to stay at the house and some city officials wouldn’t even step foot on the property.

The 32-year-old mother says the spirits that haunted her family’s house were only vanquished after she moved away and underwent several exorcisms. The unbelievable story has come to light after the Indianapolis Star obtained hundreds of pages of official documents relating to the case.

The Ammons family moved into the rental house on Carolina Street in Gary, Ind., back in November 2011. They soon noticed strange occurrences, including swarms of flies around the house, footsteps in the basement and wet footprints streaking across the living room floor.


But what happened next made those incidents seem pleasant.

In March 2012, Ammons claims she rushed to check on her 12-year-old daughter after hearing her screams. When she entered the bedroom, she says she witnessed her daughter levitating above her bed unconscious.

The family and some of the guests they were hosting prayed over the girl until she returned back to the bed. The girl reportedly didn’t remember anything about it.

The torment reportedly continued and the family wasn’t in a position financially to flee the home. So the family contacted churches and clairvoyants for help, but they received little relief. The clairvoyants allegedly told the family their house was haunted by more than 200 demons.


The house where Latoya Ammons lived with her family was on Carolina St. in Gary. [In the] photo taken by the police, a figure appears to show itself in the window at right. Photo provided by the Hammond Police Department.

Ammons claims her childrens’ eyes bulged and they regularly sported evil smiles, effects of their possession. Her youngest child would reportedly sit in a closet and talk to an invisible child that no one could see. She also claims he was once thrown from the bathroom when no one was even near him.

Most of Ammons’ allegations are backed up by her mother, Rosa Campbell, who also lived in the house.

Later in 2012, child protective services in Indiana was contacted to investigate the mother for possible child abuse or mental illness. A psychiatrist reportedly evaluated Ammons and determined she was not mentally ill.

A family case manager reportedly interviewed the family and witnessed a number of strange occurrences. Valerie Washington confirmed that she witnessed the youngest boy growling before his eyes rolled back in his head.

Washington also claimed she saw the 9-year-old boy flash a “weird grin” and then walk backward up a wall to the ceiling. Her account was corroborated by a nurse.

“There’s no way he could’ve done that,” the nurse told the Star.

After being sent to investigate Ammons, Washington concluded that an “evil influence” might be affecting the family.

Source.

THE RED RIPPER

Warning: Graphic.

Andrei Chikatilo, a.k.a Butcher of Rostov and Red Ripper, was a Soviet serial killer who sexually assaulted and mutilated a minimum of 52 women from the late 70s to 1990. As you have probably guessed, the majority of his murders were committed in the Rostov Oblas of the Russian SFSR.

Chikatilo was a very awkward kid especially around women. He was impotent and once ejaculated while wrestling with his crush. That’s when he says his hatred for women started as they all laughed at him. He went on to become a teacher and had multiple reported sexual assaults on young girls. This only got worse. Sexual assaults then turned into murders as his 1st victim was a 9 year old girl named Yelena.

Chikatilo was finally arrested when Soviet cops found evidence linking him to murders, but according to their law could only hold him for 10 days before they had to either charge him or release him. He gave a full confession of every murder he ever committed. One of the things he confessed to was ripping the victim’s genitals, lips, nipples, and tongues with his TEETH.

He was convicted of 52 of the 53 murder charges. Sentenced to death for each of them. The bottom picture is of a severed head of one of his victims used in his trial. He was executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear on February 14.

IMPACT

Zeppelin commander Oberleutnant-zur-See Werner Peterson decided that he would rather jump than burn with his ship in 1916. Along with leaving behind a story to tell, he left behind this impact impression.

CRASH LANDING

Warning: Graphic.

Vladimir Komarov was a Soviet test pilot, aerospace engineer, and a cosmonaut (in the 1st group selected in 1960). He was extremely brilliant and knew what he was doing. Even though he was declared medically unfit for training or spaceflight twice while he was in the program, his perseverance and superior skills and his knowledge as an engineer allowed him to continue playing an active role. He is  known as the man who fell from space.

He flew in the Soyuz 1, which started to malfunction as soon as it started orbiting. Antennas didn’t open properly, power and navigation were compromised, and much more. Some say he was sent on a mission they knew he wouldn’t return from. This happened to many cosmonauts during that time.

When the capsule began its descent the parachutes failed to open. Komarov screamed in rage as he plunged to his death. The bottom picture is of his body after the crash.

CONFESSION

Warning: Graphic.

In 1923, Marianna Dolinska, a Polish native, walked into the police station and said that she hung her four kids (ranging from six months to seven years) so that they would no longer starve. Her husband had been murdered, which left her family without any support. The police checked in on her claim and found the bodies of her four kids on a tree. They arrested her and she died five years later in a psychiatric hospital.

OUIJA

Three Americans who were reportedly playing with a Ouija board in a Mexican village have been rushed to hospital after showing the sort of disturbing signs and behavior more commonly associated with demonic possession.

Alexandra Huerta, 22, her brother Sergio, 23, and their 18-year-old cousin Fernando Cuevas were playing with a Ouija board in the village of San Juan Tlacotenco in south-west Mexico before all three became allegedly possessed by evil spirits who used the Ouija board as a gateway to enter the land of the living.

Minutes after the trio had started dabbling with the Ouija board, also known as a spirit board or talking board, Alexandra is reported to have fallen into a “trance-like” state.

The youngster is then said to have started growling maniacally like a dog and thrashed around uncontrollably like a wild animal. She is also reported to have started laughing uncontrollably and when asked why, replied, “We’re going to die.”

The Daily Mail reported that Sergio and Fernando were also said to have demonstrated visible signs of “possession” after using the Ouija board to make contact with the dead.

Alongside feelings of disorientation, blindness, and deafness, the two were also reported to have suffered from vivid hallucinations after using the Ouija board.

Alexandra’s parents explained that their child was forcibly restrained to prevent her from hurting herself and paramedics were called to the house where the Ouija board was used to take the three “possessed” friends to hospital.

According to Alexandra’s parents, paramedics were only called after a local Catholic priest had refused to preform an exorcism on the three friends because they were not regular churchgoers.

In place of holy water, crucifixes, and prayers, the paramedics used a combination of painkillers, anti-stress medication, and eye drops. The treatment apparently appeared to do the trick when it came to clearing up any symptoms caused by the Ouija board.

The director of public safety in the nearby town of Tepoztlan, Victor Demeza said:

“The medical rescue of these three young people was very complicated. They had involuntary movements and it was difficult to transfer them to the nearest hospital because they were so erratic.

“It appeared as if they were in a trance-like state, apparently after playing with the Ouija board. They spoke of feeling numbness, double vision, blindness, deafness, hallucinations, muscle spasm and difficulty swallowing.”

Mr. Demeza would not comment on whether the trio who dabbled with the Ouija board were really possessed or had simply convinced themselves that was the case in an outbreak of group hysteria.

Many religions and some occultists have long warned against the dangers of using a Ouija board, and have advised that casually trying to contact the dead is never a particularly good idea.

 Source.

IN NO WAY PENITENT

1/7/1947 - Newark, OH.

Mrs. Laura Bell Devlin, 72, who murdered her 75-year-old husband, Thomas, then dismembered his body with a hacksaw and scattered the parts in the backyard, today professed her dislike for jail. She protested vehemently when officials tried to fingerprint her, saying, "that ink will make my hands dirty," and again when she was placed before the camera. "No," she asserted. She kept repeating "Can I go home now?," unmoved and in no way penitent for the alleged crime.

GRIN

Jeff Franklin, 17, grins from the backseat of a police car after using a hatchet and sledgehammer to murder his parents and critically wound three of his siblings. March 10, 1998.

FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE

After stabbing a woman to death in 1945, serial killer William Heirens carved this message onto the wall: 

“For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.” 

This earned him the nickname The Lipstick Killer. He was the longest serving US prison inmate (65 years) and was imprisoned until his death in 2012. He confessed to three murders.