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Over the crazy morass of social expenditure that was last weekend, as I've said, I found myself in the Annex for the first time in literal years, right next to Suspect Video. (And Queen Video, which turns out to have an even better stock of stuff I might like to watch--they have Honeymoon, for example, which I still haven't seen. But that doesn't matter, because it isn't worth my while to travel and hour either way to borrow fucking DVDs; I obviously need to just get Netflix, like a normal person.) So I ended up renting both Starry Eyes and Penumbra, and here are my thoughts on both.
Starry Eyes is, from its very opening seconds, the tragedy of a soul-death foretold; it's a fable about Hollywood which posits that some people--our heroine, in particular--will gladly destroy themselves from the inside out if they think it gives them a chance to get in front of a camera. We never really get a clear answer on WHY Sarah (Alex Essoe) is so obsessed with gaining cinematic fame, but it drives her through the film like some awful tapeworm hunger: she needs to be noticed, to be adored, to be the focal point of everyone's desire...to infect audiences, perhaps, with the same ill germ the movies seem to have sown inside her. It's like a religious impulse, so much so that it really only makes sense she quickly collides with a studio that appears to be run by Satanic/Lovecraftian cultists who see the films they make as a delivery-system for their own ideology, with Sarah their next all-too-willing star/idol/avatar.
The thing which sets Essoe apart from the beginning is her willingness to look ugly in front of a camera. We witness her trying to split her time between auditions (all unsuccessful), socializing (her aimless, fake and vaguely malign pack of Millennial "friends" is the film's single least interesting aspect, comprising as it does three other aspiring actresses who all relentlessly neg each other for being potential competition vs. two indistinguishable, constantly high dudebros and a guy who swears he's going to make his own movie someday, even though he's living out of a van in a motel parking lot) and a fast food day-job that combines all the crappiest aspects of corporate brainwashing.
Tall, a bit too thin and only vaguely pretty--I described her to Steve as being "sort of the female Doug Jones," and I'll stand by that, because her jointedness and her physical language slide from awkward to frightening with really creepy ease--the one quality which does immediately set Sarah apart is her propensity to freak out and punish herself after failing to snag a part, retreating to the nearest bathroom to scream, throw a fit and tear whole handfuls of her mouse-brown hair out. After her audition for a slasher film called The Silver Scream, she emerges from her stall to find one of the casting agents standing in the bathroom, smiling at her approvingly. "Can you do that again?" she asks. "I mean...in front of a camera?"
And so it goes. Over and over, at every step on her downward slide, Sarah is told that what she brings to the table is her ability, her willingness, to punish herself to the point of transformation, epiphany, rebirth. She is a sacrifice, herself unto herself, and she sheds her own former humanity like a literal dead skin: goes bald in clumps, develops a constellation of sores, vomits maggots, pries off her fingernails, stares into the mirror in horrified ecstasy, unable to recognize herself. She has visions of herself transfigured, a film noir siren in a green velvet dress; she quits her job, kills her "friends", is buried in a coffin filled with an amniotic sack, then claws her way free. She becomes what she has beheld: Goddess Hollywood, the whore of Babylon. Roll credits.
Summation: Obviously, if you don't like body horror, then this one's not for you! But I was queasily fascinated, and I think both Essoe and the guys behind the camera--writer/directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, who (like the makers of The Guest and It Follows) also seem to be going for a faux-eighties vibe, down to the title font--bear watching.
Penumbra, OTOH, comes straight from Adrian Garcia Bogliano, the same guy responsible for the over-the-top oddity of Here Comes The Devil. So you go in expecting it to be sort of rude, messy and not terribly well-integrated, like Alex de la Iglesia without the candy-coloured punk-rock energy. Instead, it's probably one of the most well-crafted things I've seen from him thus far, drawing an increasingly tight, suspenseful line from its initial black-comedy-of-no-manners kick-off to its nihilistic and genuinely weird ending. Marga (Christina Brondo) is a high-powered, arrogant businesswoman from Barcelona who has to travel to Buenos Aires for work one month out of the year, and hates everything about it; she's openly contemptuous of the city and its people, relentlessly money-minded and impossible to deal with unless you're paying her for the privilege. ("When I work for my clients, I'm a slave," she tells a character she's trying to impress with her own importance, "and only money sets me free.") Her sister's moved to Bolivia with her boyfriend, so it falls to her to get rid of an apartment they've inherited in a shitty area. We watch her stand on a street-corner for the first ten minutes, arguing with everyone she meets while taking calls on her cellphone, dressed to the nines all in white and a pair of huge spike heels; no one likes her, and she doesn't much care. But she will, by the end.
The city has taken on a carnival air because a total eclipse of the sun is approaching, but all Marga wants to know is where the hell that real estate agent she was promised is. At the end of her patience,s he goes inside, only to find a man in a suit loitering right by the apartment, down on his knees, trying to look under the door. "Are you the agent?" she demands. "...yes," he replies, after a moment's pause, and she takes him at his word, immediately launching into a tirade about him keeping her waiting for 45 minutes. Soon enough, however, she's showing him through, expecting him to blow her off--the place is a dump inside a dump, after all. The man, however, claims to have a big client who wants this particular apartment, and will pay anything to get it--and when she hears how much, all of a sudden Marga's blowing off her next meeting, lying to her boss about why, and waiting with this guy she doesn't even know in the apartment for the rest of the day, constantly told be a stream of arriving strangers that yes, the paperwork is coming, and so is Mister Salva...no, no, there's no trouble, he's just eccentric. What's in those boxes they brought? What boxes? Who used up the minutes on her phone? No one, is she sure she's okay? Maybe she's mistaken, overtired; maybe she's under pressure, having a nervous breakdown...no, of course there's nothing in that room she can't unlock. Ignore that sound. Wait, just wait, and it'll all come out in the end....
Short story short, the "real estate agents" are cultists, Mister Salva their leader, and the apartment--which proves to have a creepy mural hidden under its living-room wallpaper--is the centre-point of a ritual ending a cycle first started in 1885, one involving sunspots, astral travel and human sacrifice, plus possibly the end of the world. Accidentally caught up in this madness, Marga is reduced to an increasingly frantic struggle for survival, all her pretensions to civilization stripped away. But whose worldview is really the accurate one here, and whose is founded on mere delusion?
Anyhow: two very different films on surprisingly similar themes, both equally worth checking out. And this officially concludes the reviewing portion of my day.
Starry Eyes is, from its very opening seconds, the tragedy of a soul-death foretold; it's a fable about Hollywood which posits that some people--our heroine, in particular--will gladly destroy themselves from the inside out if they think it gives them a chance to get in front of a camera. We never really get a clear answer on WHY Sarah (Alex Essoe) is so obsessed with gaining cinematic fame, but it drives her through the film like some awful tapeworm hunger: she needs to be noticed, to be adored, to be the focal point of everyone's desire...to infect audiences, perhaps, with the same ill germ the movies seem to have sown inside her. It's like a religious impulse, so much so that it really only makes sense she quickly collides with a studio that appears to be run by Satanic/Lovecraftian cultists who see the films they make as a delivery-system for their own ideology, with Sarah their next all-too-willing star/idol/avatar.
The thing which sets Essoe apart from the beginning is her willingness to look ugly in front of a camera. We witness her trying to split her time between auditions (all unsuccessful), socializing (her aimless, fake and vaguely malign pack of Millennial "friends" is the film's single least interesting aspect, comprising as it does three other aspiring actresses who all relentlessly neg each other for being potential competition vs. two indistinguishable, constantly high dudebros and a guy who swears he's going to make his own movie someday, even though he's living out of a van in a motel parking lot) and a fast food day-job that combines all the crappiest aspects of corporate brainwashing.
Tall, a bit too thin and only vaguely pretty--I described her to Steve as being "sort of the female Doug Jones," and I'll stand by that, because her jointedness and her physical language slide from awkward to frightening with really creepy ease--the one quality which does immediately set Sarah apart is her propensity to freak out and punish herself after failing to snag a part, retreating to the nearest bathroom to scream, throw a fit and tear whole handfuls of her mouse-brown hair out. After her audition for a slasher film called The Silver Scream, she emerges from her stall to find one of the casting agents standing in the bathroom, smiling at her approvingly. "Can you do that again?" she asks. "I mean...in front of a camera?"
And so it goes. Over and over, at every step on her downward slide, Sarah is told that what she brings to the table is her ability, her willingness, to punish herself to the point of transformation, epiphany, rebirth. She is a sacrifice, herself unto herself, and she sheds her own former humanity like a literal dead skin: goes bald in clumps, develops a constellation of sores, vomits maggots, pries off her fingernails, stares into the mirror in horrified ecstasy, unable to recognize herself. She has visions of herself transfigured, a film noir siren in a green velvet dress; she quits her job, kills her "friends", is buried in a coffin filled with an amniotic sack, then claws her way free. She becomes what she has beheld: Goddess Hollywood, the whore of Babylon. Roll credits.
Summation: Obviously, if you don't like body horror, then this one's not for you! But I was queasily fascinated, and I think both Essoe and the guys behind the camera--writer/directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, who (like the makers of The Guest and It Follows) also seem to be going for a faux-eighties vibe, down to the title font--bear watching.
Penumbra, OTOH, comes straight from Adrian Garcia Bogliano, the same guy responsible for the over-the-top oddity of Here Comes The Devil. So you go in expecting it to be sort of rude, messy and not terribly well-integrated, like Alex de la Iglesia without the candy-coloured punk-rock energy. Instead, it's probably one of the most well-crafted things I've seen from him thus far, drawing an increasingly tight, suspenseful line from its initial black-comedy-of-no-manners kick-off to its nihilistic and genuinely weird ending. Marga (Christina Brondo) is a high-powered, arrogant businesswoman from Barcelona who has to travel to Buenos Aires for work one month out of the year, and hates everything about it; she's openly contemptuous of the city and its people, relentlessly money-minded and impossible to deal with unless you're paying her for the privilege. ("When I work for my clients, I'm a slave," she tells a character she's trying to impress with her own importance, "and only money sets me free.") Her sister's moved to Bolivia with her boyfriend, so it falls to her to get rid of an apartment they've inherited in a shitty area. We watch her stand on a street-corner for the first ten minutes, arguing with everyone she meets while taking calls on her cellphone, dressed to the nines all in white and a pair of huge spike heels; no one likes her, and she doesn't much care. But she will, by the end.
The city has taken on a carnival air because a total eclipse of the sun is approaching, but all Marga wants to know is where the hell that real estate agent she was promised is. At the end of her patience,s he goes inside, only to find a man in a suit loitering right by the apartment, down on his knees, trying to look under the door. "Are you the agent?" she demands. "...yes," he replies, after a moment's pause, and she takes him at his word, immediately launching into a tirade about him keeping her waiting for 45 minutes. Soon enough, however, she's showing him through, expecting him to blow her off--the place is a dump inside a dump, after all. The man, however, claims to have a big client who wants this particular apartment, and will pay anything to get it--and when she hears how much, all of a sudden Marga's blowing off her next meeting, lying to her boss about why, and waiting with this guy she doesn't even know in the apartment for the rest of the day, constantly told be a stream of arriving strangers that yes, the paperwork is coming, and so is Mister Salva...no, no, there's no trouble, he's just eccentric. What's in those boxes they brought? What boxes? Who used up the minutes on her phone? No one, is she sure she's okay? Maybe she's mistaken, overtired; maybe she's under pressure, having a nervous breakdown...no, of course there's nothing in that room she can't unlock. Ignore that sound. Wait, just wait, and it'll all come out in the end....
Short story short, the "real estate agents" are cultists, Mister Salva their leader, and the apartment--which proves to have a creepy mural hidden under its living-room wallpaper--is the centre-point of a ritual ending a cycle first started in 1885, one involving sunspots, astral travel and human sacrifice, plus possibly the end of the world. Accidentally caught up in this madness, Marga is reduced to an increasingly frantic struggle for survival, all her pretensions to civilization stripped away. But whose worldview is really the accurate one here, and whose is founded on mere delusion?
Anyhow: two very different films on surprisingly similar themes, both equally worth checking out. And this officially concludes the reviewing portion of my day.
