Tag: Jodi Foster

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Film/TV TV Features

True Detective: Night Country

Kali Reis and Jodi Foster star in True Detective: Night Country (Courtesy HBO)

Since its debut on HBO in 2014, True Detective has been a galvanizing show. Showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s first season featured Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives searching for an occultic serial killer in Louisiana over the course of two decades. It was unique in television, in that Pizzolatto wrote all eight episodes himself, and Cary Joji Fukunaga was the sole credited director. (Normally, TV shows have several writers who collaborate on scripts. The mandatory minimum size of these writer’s rooms was a major issue in last year’s Writer’s Guild of America strike.) 

Each subsequent season of the anthology show has featured a different pair of detectives who can barely stand each other solving weird crimes. For season 2 in 2015, it was Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams; season 3 featured Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo in 2019. Pizzolatto started to develop season 4, but then left HBO in favor of a new deal at FX. Barry Jenkins and Issa López took over as executive producers, and took the show in a new direction — or least to a new locale. 

Season four carries the subtitle Night Country because it is set in the fictional Alaskan town of Ennis, located above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn’t rise at all during the depths of winter. Jodi Foster stars as Liz Danvers, Ennis’ chief of police. It’s a major casting coup, since Foster hasn’t been a regular in a TV series since the mid-1970s. And it pays off. Foster is one of the best actors of her or any other generation, and the greatest pleasure of Night Country is getting to spend six episodes watching her construct and tear down a complex character.

If I had to describe Capt. Danvers in one word, it would be “harsh.”  She’s hard on everyone, from her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc) to protege Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), to her off-and-on lover of twenty years, Capt. Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston). But Danver’s harshest of all to her former partner, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis, a former professional women’s boxing champion.) Navarro and Danvers split after their response to a murder-suicide case fell under scrutiny from their superiors, and led to both being reassigned to the backwater (or should I say “back-ice”) of Ennis. 

Navarro sees ghosts, but that’s apparently not unusual in this town, where the veil between worlds seems thin. The former partners are forced back together when the entire crew of an arctic research station is found dead on the ice, frozen together in what Danvers calls a “corpsicle.” One of the few clues is a severed human tongue left behind in the station which belonged to a Native American woman named Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen), whose murder Navarro has been obsessively investigating for years. How are the two crimes connected, and what do they have to do with the mining company that is polluting the community’s water? 

Foster’s virtuosic performance brings it all together, even as some of the subplots spiral off into the arctic darkness. She’s a manic ball of snarling energy, hinting at the secret pain that causes her to lash out at everyone around her. 

Lopez’s direction on all six episodes is exceptional. She brings elements of Lynchian surrealism (quiet northern town exists in uneasy proximity to an ancient supernatural force) and the John Carpenter horror classic The Thing. She knows how to produce a good jump scare, and how to hint at unknowable horrors lurking just offscreen. Like True Detective’s first season, Night Country benefits greatly from being the product of a singular artistic vision. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Money Monster

The 2008 financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession will be remembered as the moment capitalism lost the mantle of inevitability that had kept the philosophy beyond questioning since the end of the Cold War. The financial crisis meant millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity, and very few people really understood why. The promise of the meritocracy was that if you got a good education and worked hard, you would be rewarded with, if not always material gain commensurate with your abilities, at least stability and freedom from want. In the financial crisis, normal people who worked hard and followed the rules got punished because bankers who reward themselves hundreds of millions of dollars each year for their stewardship of the sacred markets failed to appease the dark gods of capital. I’m sure there are many wonks out there who have very good explanations for what happened, but from the ground level, it was as invisible and mysterious as black magic.

Even now, two Obama terms later, the question “Why did that have to happen?” still lingers in the American consciousness. It’s behind both the rise of Bernie Sanders and, perversely, Donald Trump, and it’s the question on the mind of Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) as he sneaks into the studios of the Financial News Network with a pair of suicide bomb vests and an automatic pistol. Neither one of the vests are for him. They’re intended for the host of the FNN show Money Monster, Lee Gates (George Clooney) and the owner of Ibis Global Capital, Walt Camby (Dominic West), who is the scheduled guest on today’s show. Kyle lost all of his money on a “safe” investment in Ibis recommended by Gates, and now he wants to know why.

Gates is a flamboyant cable host in the mold of CNBC’s Jim Cramer. He opens every show by dancing his way into the studio with a couple of fly girls, before dispensing the latest in financial news and daily segments like “Stock Pick of the Millennium.” Gates is the kind of guy who sets a producer named Ron (Christopher Denham) off to get a tip on the FDA approval of an erectile disfunction cream, then orders Ron to try it out to see if he should recommend it on the air.

And that’s the kind of movie Money Monster is: boner cream jokes are mixed in with serious and complex economic subject matter. There’s an absurdist comedy lurking deep inside Jodie Foster’s would-be hostage thriller, giving it the same kind of schizophrenic tone as the classic film it was clearly inspired by: Network. Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece walks the line between office romance and black-as-coal satire, but it’s the latter parts that will always live in cinematic history because they quickly came true. If anything, Money Monster is better at balancing its two competing halves, largely because of the charisma of Clooney and Julia Roberts, who plays Patty, Gates’ long-suffering producer who talks him through the hostage situation via in-ear monitor. Foster is clearly an actor’s director, as everyone gives lively performances. Roberts is tighter and more engaged than in any film in recent memory. O’Connell is sympathetic and a little dim, and Clooney walks his buffoonish anchor through the stages of fear into a heightened self-awareness and eventually a kind of heroism.

Foster and company seem to delight in putting up a cliche solution to the intractable problem of a live TV hostage situation and then shooting them down. As it wears on, it veers too far into allegory and away from the credible, but it’s still a worthy and surprising ride, and at a taut 98 minutes, it never outstays its welcome.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs

FILM TITLE: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

ELAPSED TIME: 100%

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Hannibal has an old friend for dinner.

I usually make a policy of not reading reviews of movies before I write my own, but after finishing (that’s right — I finished it. All of it.) Silence of the Lambs last night, I went on a minor googling tear about the movie’s creation and initial reception. Because as soon as you see a movie as good as Silence of the Lambs, the next thought is necessarily, “How the fuck did they do that?”

I found a Roger Ebert review, penned in 2001 following the release of Silence of the Lambs’ underwhelming follow-up, Hannibal. Ebert writes that though Silence of the Lambs is not slasher-film disturbing, it has several genuinely frightening moments: Clarice’s first meeting with the eerily still Hannibal, the Kafka-esque removal of the moth from a victim’s throat, the elevator scene after Hannibal escapes, the back-and-forth cuts between Buffalo Bill’s real house and the false one, and the extended sequence in Bill’s basement at the end. Ebert’s point is that these moments aren’t just gross or suspenseful, but psychologically unsettling in a way that makes them timeless. Because they take place within an airtight character drama, they feel necessary, rather than excessive.

Silence Of The Lambs would be a character drama, except this happens.

As a first-time viewer and someone with little-to-no horror watching experience, I have to say that Silence of the Lambs was revelatory for me. Imagine if you thought you hated comedy but the only comedy you’d ever seen was Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. You’d probably think comedy sucked, right? But then someone showed you Airplane! You’d realize you were wrong. I thought horror sucked because I’d never actually seen a horror movie before Horrortober, and of the handful of very good movies I’ve watched, Silence of the Lambs is the one that has felt the most worth it. The element of fear is engaging, not gratuitous, because it is presented a part of that old question: what, exactly, is evil?

Jodi Foster as Clarice Starling

I think the movie’s greatest accomplishment is that, despite the grandiosity of its subject matter, it manages to feel understated the whole way through. The scariest moment in the final sequence, when Clarice confronts Buffalo Bill, is not the scene where she sees his skin suits, but the scene where he contorts his face and asks of Clarice, faking ignorance of a previous victim, “Was she a very fat person?” It is scary because Ted Levine, as Buffalo Bill, perfectly captures the hairs-breadth difference between how that question would be posed by an innocent person, and by someone fucking crazy. It is way more unsettling than the half-decomposed body in the bathtub that we run into moments later.

Ted Lavine as Buffalo Bill, animal lover.

So, readers, I think I get it now. It is possible to make a great horror film if the point is not blood and guts, but if blood and guts are a necessary byproduct of a truly frightening inquiry of human darkness. Of course, it also helps if you have Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster leading your movie. But to make horror into art, you mostly just need to take Hannibal Lecter’s advice: “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” 

Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)