“The Autopsy" Found Profoundness in Friendship and the Right Actors to Build it.

“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.” - That's the way David Fincher's seminal detective vs serial killer showdown “Seven” ends. In its own way My favorite episode of Guillermo Del Toro's captivating horror anthology “Cabinet of Curiosities” will end that way too. The episode is titled “The Autopsy”. It is a masterpiece of television horror. A bit of noir, a bit of a procedural, a bit of a buddy movie, and surprisingly a great superhero movie about the “super” in us when we have something worth fighting for, that ultimately proves the elegant co-existing relationship between what is ugly and what is beautiful. A great deal of which is accomplished by way of craft in direction and Goyer's language, and to my focus here - the graceful, poetically large performances hiding in the well detailed husks of normality.

The dread in “The Autopsy” is existential. It's both very specific and nebulous as bodily invasion usually is. It is specific in its terror, the taking of our bodies without our consent (The very idea of being both intimate with something and also non intimate because the thing has no interest in the knowing of you) and unspecific in its horror, the varied, multi-layered and ultimately nonsensical fear of death. The balm for the tension caused by these two competing themes is very specific, it is the indomitable spirit of friendship, of connection, which in this story is one thing the enemy never counted on, never saw coming, and neither do we. It is at this intersection of fear and security our protagonist Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham) arrives at one Sheriff Nate Cravens (Glynn Turman) to take up the sword and prepare for battle. Neither we nor the protagonists know what they are here for and this makes for another tension as the story unravels these two become aware of each other and so too do we. The specter of death around and on the shoulders of both protagonists and antagonists, and this friendship, refreshing in its organic purity- is what makes the episode, and what makes all of this abundantly clear is in the performances of F. Murray Abraham and Glynn Turman.

The noir element makes it so the story unravels backward and forwards in time. Detail upon minor detail is discovered and piled up one after another until they coalesce into a clear understanding of what exactly is happening, still the thing we are introduced to right after the inciting incident is two friends reconnecting after years. Why? Because the writer and director want us to feel the connection between these two. The villainy and the heroism, the horror and the pleasure, intertwined and separate. The complexity is the central force of the narrative, and more importantly what is behind it. It is tied to their friendship and not just the bond in and of itself but what kind of bond. It's one built on principles and honesty the unusual kind that allows for unusual honesty wherein one cannot take themselves too seriously, where to some it could be seen as ugly to say as much. “You're so thin I could use you as a whip”. Interesting on two levels; it's bluntness and its inherent bite and how Winters will come to be Craven's whip of sorts. Its also in the way Dr. Winters upon being asked what’s going on with him thinks on it only a moment before telling his friend he has stomach cancer, (that most insidious and cruel villain) and most endearingly, and maybe most important to the story the way Dr. Winters corrects Sheriff Craven when he insists he is “cursed by God”. Bathed in the warmest most relaxing light of the episode F Murray Abraham's Dr. Winters reminds Sheriff Craven directly that “he's just not that important, that's ego”. This (ego, arrogance) becomes a repeated theme. Turman relays a horrid story and ugly sentiments in glorious lighting, the mortifying and the beautiful always hand in hand, toe to toe in a dance. Murray's reaction is swift, Abraham says the words “thats ego” with a genial plainness tat belies his intention even before he continues with the rest, still, Glynn Turman is taken aback. Abraham says; “Who are you to claim special qualities of sin from the rest of us?” (Pouring himself a drink he had earlier scolded his friend about) “If you're cursed we're all cursed (beat) and I meant that in the nicest possible way”. As he says the last line Abraham gives Turman a cheery salutation with his drink. Turman holds a stern face a couple seconds, (his eyes already betraying the fact that he knows he has heard the truth ) but cracks before he can even give it any legitimacy and the laughter tumbles out of him already half into it's summersault. Its the kind of everyday poetry that escapes most storytellers, the kind that needs two actors with their skill and their sense of the grandiose and the simple to make it work. The details of what marks true friendship are often portrayed in wonderfully grand gestures to make them feel more powerful and robust to the audience, so that they resonate. Slow motion, a freeze frame of the moment, and close ups are all consistently used as signifiers of the moment. But Prior and Goyer trust the elegance of the moment (the ability to talk in this sort of straightforward fashion is a marker of deep friendship) and the grace of their actors to illuminate the poetry without pomp and it works

There is something to be said for the almost magical air of complex simplicity both Abraham and Turman bring to their characters. In both F Murray Abraham's Dr Winters and Glynn Turman's Sheriff Craven we find two actors who can cut through the fog of what classism has told us about the middle class, age, power, or nobility. A small town sherriff using words like “Maudlin” and “Posse Comitatus” doesn't feel right to common conceptions around the type of person holding these jobs. You need an actor like Turman who can bring a sense of grandeur to a school teacher who dies feeding a gremlin a candy bar to be able to pull off giving the common man an authentic sense of gravitas. Old men arent commonly heroes either. You need someone who inspires cunning and brilliance with an air of vulnerability like the man who once played to the hilt an insecure but talented hater in Amadeus in order to achieve a properly smooth subversion of the tropes and make a withered cancer ridden old man feel righteous as exactly the adversary this particular evil needed to he extinguished. There are all these tiny gears at play in their faces, hands, and bodies connecting you to both their seriousness and their playfulness. They're down home sensibilities, and manners, and their immense intelligence, and how that ultimately bonds them. A hand gesture, the jutting out of a lip, a lazy but deep sigh that lives only in expression. Each “tells” on just how important life is to them, how how precious their friendship is, and subsequently how precious humanity is to them. When Abraham shows concern for his friend he grips his cup tighter. Turman’s response to Abraham asking “if the situation is as bad as that” (in reference to his pouring a drink) is a sophisticated facial expression that more than anything undergirds the level of communication they’re on where most things don’t need be said. While Craven and Winters regard each other with deep affinity and professional courtesy, they care about people in general despite being in two professions not known for this type of care. In movies/TV and I would guess sometimes in real life the common refrain for people in these career fields (Coroner/Police) are things like “remain detached" “don't get too close to the case” “Don't get too close to the victim" “Don't make this personal”. The autopsy goes opposite not only in taking it and making the personal important, but making it central to what gives them an edge. Cravens speech about his own “uselessness” is a dead give away to just how much he wants to be of use, of service. Their powers are not only in the cliché powers of deduction but in attachment and explicit constant empathy. Sheriff Craven's complete bafflement at the heartless nature of the murders, comes not just from a clinical more sterile want of understanding what the hell is going on, or the obsessive desire to get his man, but from a deep respect for the sanctity of life, shown in how this thing tears at him. Every time someone disappears or is found dead Sheriff Craven reacts freshly as if it were brand new. Dr. Winters feels it too, even though his job requires a less emotional connection, there is still a very philosophical and poetic respect for life. He politely asks each body for forgiveness as he opens them up, a detail that shows and tells on the level of empathy the character has for humankind far better then any speech could. Abraham’s provides a majestic refined touch to the expression of these small pleas which directly addresses the discourse we have around how victims are treated in true crime as after thoughts. Here are two men deeply wounded by and not merely angry or enraged by the loss of life. That same empathy, combined with the fortitude of his friendship with Craven, supersedes the murders, the stomach cancer, and their egos. Dr. Winters who upon revealing the nature of his affliction and it's impending doom remarks “We're all headed to the same destination” maybe reserved and capitulating about his own death, but about his friends life or the treatment of others as insignificant, he is not for play. When the story finally arrives where it arrives it is that friendship with Craven, that kinship with humanity that motivates him to sacrifice the unthinkable, to keep going even as each pain is more excruciating than the last. Abraham's cavalier response to his impending doom - not just with the cancer - but in the face of the monster, as compared to his response once the monster tells him of its plans for his friend is discernably different. From that point on his resolve becomes more ..well resolute. This is so explicitly relayed and so beautifully understated it dulls even the sharpness of some gnarly mutilation and the tragedy of Winters sacrifice somehow ends up feeling…good.

The notions that those who hold power or authority or who are chosen by some version of divine right, blood, entity, or position in a hegemonic system, are the ones who need to save us is far too common of a narrative that doesn't really empower us. The power of “The Autopsy is then two fold; A. It lends power to the idea that heroism is in the hands of the common man as well. That we can all fight and win and scrap and thrive, even while being honest about the cost. B. It brings catharsis with that win. By the end of the episode, just when it seems death and gloom have won over we find our Daniel Webster has outsmarted the Devil and in that has won the day or at least a reprieve for humanity as represented in their friendship, a friendship illustrated by way of nuance and fine stitching. Craven’s power was in his reaction to being powerless, which shows his character. He willingly accepts help, growls, hurts, drinks, but he doesn't punish anyone else for his shortcomings. He doesn’t start lashing out on the town, throwing power around and arresting errant “punks". He mourns these losses and resigns himself to the idea that he may be up against something bigger than him while (without actually making a decision to do so explicitly) continuing to work the case. Winters sees this and offers his own life (which is a death sentence and a divine sacrifice) to stop this monsters task, but again mostly to save his friend who to him represents everything right with humanity. That's cathartic. In film and television catharsis, a release of tensions arriving from emotions held in suspension for any elongated amount of time can be powerful, maybe one of cinema’s most potent weapons as well, but its power is in having had tension in the first place, holding it for as long as possible for the third of your story. Too many times catharsis arrives with little stress. The characters don't feel genuinely threatened, the stakes don't feel genuinely impressed upon, death is never really on the table until the very very end, and no one is ever really truly dead until their contract is up and then there's just a new “Dread Pirate Roberts”. So Catharsis may come but it comes in a form that is dimmed. Something akin to a candle in the sun. When it's done right though, when the stakes are clear, concise, and impactful. When the tension has a vice grip on the audiences imagination, when death is absolute and then suddenly, out of the darkness, you show a hand reaching in to pull us up out of the abyss, well then that story, that catharsis it sticks, and that release is never really forgotten. To make the gist of that impact the sword of that death blow friendship? That may not be new, but it is refreshing and more to the point it’s not far from the truth. To have two actors with as much poise, elegance, passion, intelligence and charisma lends it even further weight. There is a desire that you have right from the gate because these are two actors you want to see win, then through the skills they embody the characters with it extends to the characters they create. Their on screen chemistry injects a richness to the authenticity of the love between these two that friends that says it more profoundly than had the words been actually uttered. The philosopher Epicurus said of friendship; '“The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration also enables us to see that even in our limited conditions of life nothing enhances our security so much as friendship”. “Nothing enhances our security so much as friendship” is a proper ending to a show where the darkness in every single way imaginable seems poised to win. It places the episode firmly in the same sphere that made “Seven” so appealing to me, which is that it isn't an argument for all of humanity as beautiful and worth saving in and of itself, it's an argument that those places where humanity as one of nature's best ongoing experiments does work, works so profoundly, so beautifully that it makes all the rest worth saving. And in these dark days a much needed balm if nothing else.

Donnie Brasco: The Gangster Film You Needed.

If you were to ask me to make a list of the all time greatest gangster films I'd run off The Godfather pt II, Goodfellas, The Public Enemy, and Donnie Brasco. Mike Newell's film - based on the true story of FBI agent Joe Pistone's infiltration of the Bonnano mafia family , under the alias of Donnie Brasco - doubles as one of the great undercover films largely because of its nuanced look at what the work would do to anyone, and because it features one of Johnny Depps finest performances as said undercover agent. But while I think what it has to say about that particular work has been said or done before in films like The Departed, and Deep Cover. What it has to say about life in organized crime, how it depicts that life, is something we hadn't really seen before, and not much after. I may actually watch other films of the genre more ( Scarface, White Heat, Casino, and of course two of the three Godfather's) but while I don't watch it as much as those films, I feel very passionately that what Brasco manages to do that almost no other gangster film has done this well, is make these people, this life seem completely unattractive (which is saying a lot considering how handsome Johnny Depp is in it). It doesn't normalize the racism, violence, and paranoia, it makes it look very normie, cumbersome, mediocre. It doesn't have any of the feel of a winning formula (even if for a time) one can siphon off from other films in the genre. This not to say its the mission of those films to do so, but rather there is something to say in talking about the place characters like Vito, Michael, Sam Rothstein, Tony Montana, and Tommy DeVito have occupied in hyper-masculine circles ( such as Hip Hop). If the gangster film (intentionally or not) made the environment and people look like a 300 dollar pair of slacks, Donnie Brasco puts them in “Dad” jeans. Crews and bosses seem petty, tacky and cheap. Prone to bouts of furious delusions of grandeur they stomp about town carrying out heinous acts for no other reason than percieved disrespect. This about actual disparaging, or defamatory remarks made over a shoe shine job when one was a kid. In one scene Donnie, (Johnny Depp) Sonny Black, (Michael Madsen) and his gang viciously beat up an Asian restaurant employee merely doing his job in a bathroom and it's not the cooled honorific hate in other gangster movies where they say things like “Give the drugs to the niggers their animals anyway” which is more distant, and less visceral, and mostly about them and their staunch belief in their own supposedly superior ethics than their hatred, - it's a messy, cruel, up close hot blooded bit of nasty raw racism that a cop uses to get out of being found out because even though he doesn't know to what degree, he knows it's the button to press to get the desired effect.

The violence and the politics are made to look messy, to look like hard work, to look like stress, because, (along with the also underrated Road to Perdition), Donnie Brasco is a gangster film for and about the working class, that remains about the working class. While it's counterparts are significantly about an expressway out of the blue collar life. It is not the cops and robbers film that is The Untouchables. Pistone is not Elliot Ness, a straight laced do- gooder dedicated to his job out of a moral superiority (for that matter neither was the actual Ness). Director Mike Newell’s film is neither a total indictment of the path, nor a rousing accidental exaltation of gangsterdom, merely a stern, gripping, stare into the bare face of that life, and it all starts with it's penetrative look at it's central character Lefty Ruggiero.

Ruggiero is a bit of everything to this film. He is it's conscious. It's reckoning, it's soul. Lefty is not only undercover Detective Joe Pistone’s way into the heart of the mafia, but our way into the heart of the movies central themes. Understanding what makes Lefty different from anything else we've seen from a crime syndicate figure on film is key to understanding why the film is different from anything we've seen in crime syndicate films. Up until this movie, the American gangster on film is one of the purest of white American male fantasies on screen. Although they were usually anti-establishment, anti- authority figures, the gangster would still none-the-less be the flip side of a mirror image of the establishment hard-working American who rises to the top by way of ethics, attitude, ingenuity, and talent. That they functioned outside the purview of the law did little to disrupt the institutional philosophy, it just made them a whole lot more interesting, and desirable. Up until Donnie Brasco these men we're presented largely as reliable narrators of their own rise to power. How they saw themselves was exactly in essence how we were going to see them. They were men of indomitable wills, they were tough, intelligent, and ladies men. They lived lavishly from goon to kingpin and along their rise to power came to enjoy the best of things. Though all of the great films of the genre would also interrogate the underside of the fantasy, they would also engage in portions of it. The Scarface movies showcased their lust for power, Godfather romanticized their codes of honor, Goodfellas the brotherhood. They were all tragic figures, but the tragedy was the fall of the empire, or that none of it was ever real in the first place. Then comes Lefty Ruggiero, and Brasco where the tragedy is futility, of these men's lives, of Donnie Brasco's work. All of this to get out of a lifestyle (working class) that for the most part they are still in. There is no rise to power for Lefty, his gang, or his protege in Brasco. No honor or true sense of brotherhood amongst these theives. They are all willing to berate, betray or kill one another for a dream which will never be realized for any of them. Their lust for power is not attractive, or ambitious, but ugly and small. It is not a story of rise and fall by way of strength and weakness, but simply an ongoing tale of mediocrity and ruin, and Lefty is at the center of all of it. There are no tailored three piece suits, and gorgeous lapels and colors as in Casino, but hideous track suits, and mismatch outerwear. There are no palatial villas, stately mansions, or even quaint track homes, merely small cramped apartments with tacky furniture. Lefty is not an avatar for white alpha male potency and supremacy, but the sad sack reality of an average moe scraping and scratching for a seat at the table. He is a hypochondriac, and a liar, not particularly smart or ingenous, and prone to overstating his importance. He is also a loving father, an at least a decent husband, and a loyal friend, not as an act but as a character trait. It's maybe Pacino's most sympathetic and pathetic role since Panic in Needle Park and Dog Day Afternoon. There's his patent sadness round the eyes, less posture, but always posturing. There is a scene maybe Midway through the film that exemplifies all of this where Lefty is in the hospital anxiously awaiting word on the condition of his son, an addict who has OD'd. As Lefty begins to emote just a little over his son, he begins to show sincere signs of guilt, of recognition, of vulnerability, and you can tell his son is a source of deep pain for Lefty but you don't know exactly how much until suddenly, Pacino lets out this gut wrenching whimper. It’s not long and he immediately composes himself, but it's a level of being right there in that exact place, in that exact emotion that has a degree of difficulty for an actor on the same level as Denzel's single tear in Glory, and it's indicative of the kind of lived in acting Pacino commits to the entire movie.

Pacino plays Lefty as a small man, with a bigger heart than he lets on. A character with traits that resemble a loyal dog with a mixture of bite and bark, who chooses to bark more than bite. One who doesn't have much heft, but likes to throw his weight around, and Pacino makes it a literal part of physicality. He tosses weight from one side of his body to the other while walking, and talking. His constant anxiety is transmitted into Pacino's many repetitions. Chain smoking cigarettes, appearing ready to ash a cigarette, but returning to his mouth as if by compulsion. Repeating words and sentences, rhetorical questions repeated at least twice. A quarter turn in the hospital hallway directly followed by another. A longing look to the boss for some form of acknowledgement, directly followed by another, like someone checking the mailbox twice for that important piece of mail they've been waiting on...

Ultimately what becomes vital to understanding Pacino's Ruggiero is nothing other than existing in the current state of perpetual unease in the American economy. Lefty is not a trumped up , souped up Lamborghini version of a champagne drenched masculine fairy tale. He's the Toyota Camry and stale beer reality. He's a hump, who all his life carried other peoples water in hopes that one day he'd be swimming in his own pool, looking into his own mansion filled with people that respect and revere him as the top dawg. He blinked and it was twilight, and there he was relatively in the same place he began. All the death all the lies, the hard, herd work, and the indoctrination for what? There is a scene later in the movie where he and Donnie are in the car discussing the death of Nicky (Bruno Kirby) a former associate and friend whom Lefty murdered with the okay of his boss over a completely unconfirmed suspicion. In yet another bit of astoundingly layered acting by Pacino we watch the doubt, realization, creep into his conscious, break down his defenses, and set the timer for implosion of his whole life, plunging into chaos, right before he cuts the blue wire and returns to his ordered world.

The tragedy of Donnie Brasco and Lefty Ruggiero, is that they are both acutely aware that they are just spokes on a wheel, and that both of them want out , but are held prisoner by their own convictions, and belief in the systems they perform from within. They believe them because they can't afford not to. In a physical sense, but even moreso a psychological. If the fantasy, the dream of each of their piece of America isn't real , then what is it all for? The alternative is far too depressing, far too morose, and it's both part of the films power, and what makes it a hard watch. The film credits roll, and though Donnie Brasco isn't beguiling us, it isn't selling us, it ain't even preaching to us, it feels punishing merely existing in its “too close for comfort” realm of plainness. A somber meditation on loyalty, code, and the illusory nature of the American dream , where it's protagonist is no hero, and it's antagonist no villain, nor the reverse. They're merely humps carrying the load of other people's success to and from them on their way to their own fates, much like the rest of us. What this makes Donnie Brasco in effect is almost repellent. The movie bucks a long-standing understanding of what audiences are supposed to expect from the genre by creating a film that is less a movie about ascension, than detention. The movie is not the realization of potential, but the holding back of by various external forces and self impediment. Lefty Ruggiero is not a manifestation of a particular desire in us for affirmation of our mobility in the increasingly narrow margins of society, but a confirmation of our worst fears, that it may all be for naught. The movie is in a state of flux, of anxiety, and unease about it's characters, their relationships, and ultimately the ending. What is Pistone doing this for? Putting himself through this for? Lefty's lies, cause Pistone to consider his own. Lefty's sins his own. Pistone's minor rebellions and revolts against upper management are not merely a matter of the undercover work wearing on him, but the image of himself and his job becoming more and more visible for what it is. Lefty and Joe are both on the same journey of existential, saddening self discovery, and it makes their friendship one of poetic melancholy , and the movie an ice cold slap of water to the face in the midst of a deep sleep. It is an enjoyable, quotable, and sometimes even funny movie, but also the sobering reality of what it feels like to be a gangster in a world where missteps very likely mean death, and in that light is not the gangster film we wanted, but the gangster film we needed.

HALLOWEEN IS A FUN RIDE BACK TO THE ROOTS OF WHAT MADE THE ORIGINAL SO GREAT.

Halloween is just one of those movies that originally and now in this latest iteration knew exactly what it wanted to be, and it’s one of the highest compliments I can pay it. I've recently been discussing with my friends this age where so many people want to do so many things and try to be so many things to so many different people and subsequently how that affects various arts. When you have people making tentpole movies, almost all year round (especially of this sort ) aiming marketing towards trying to be a little something to a great deal of various crowds it creates quite a few films where you can feel the hodgepdge of ideas running into and coagulating into a bloody mess. What I feel like I’m applauding when I'm applauding films like this year’s “Mandy” and Halloween is a kind of laser focus on the crowd that you know you want. On the audience most likely to appreciate your art on its face.   You may end up getting a larger base to come around and appreciate it too, as is the case with Halloween, or you may only reach that exact niche as was the case with Mandy , but either way you find success. 

Halloween has always been one of those movies that can please  multiple audiences.  It's both a cult movie and a movie with a clear mainstream audience.  But I would venture to say one extends from the other. Fully acknowledging that this isn't a new argument at all - I still think great art comes from a place that ultimately seeks to please oneself first and by extension of the self…Others. I think we've made the mistake of dichotomizing the issue of art for arts sake or for entertainment when the answer is both.  Artist like John Carpenter understood themselves firstly and then instinctively understood that others who may see the world in similar ways to them would probably like to share in the delight of seeing this vision come to life. But as expressed by Carpenter in interviews he had no way of knowing it would become as popular as this. And when this sentiment is genuine (as I believe it is in this case) it belies the fact that the artist was most likely not considering a massive audience and what they might like to see, but rather a small circle of friends and imagined like minded folk. As Long as you don't get caught up in the awe of your own imagination. You'll always want the mission to be to use what it is you have, your gift as a tool to connect with others .   But first you have to find your unique voice. That's the way to legacy.  The way to legend, the way to becoming a classic, to becoming something unforgettable. 

John Carpenter interviewed by Mark Kermode for Halloween's 21st Anniversary. 1999. Part 1 of 3.

Carpenter's films, but especially have always been simple, but effective. And I mean to say that there's a precision, and concise power to the kind of horror that galvanizes or acts as the engine behind Halloween and ultimately, Michael Myers. A forcefulness that is big enough, deep enough to create a space for the kind of commentary that you might get around something that has a lot more existential or philosophical questions surrounding it, like this years earlier horror entry Hereditary.  This latest entry - as conceived of by the duo of Danny Mcbride and David Gordon Green - Understands that, and it also understands the power in exploring the dynamic in the relationship between Michael and Laurie Strode. Much like my other beloved horror entry this year - Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House - this Halloween explored the trauma of the kind of event bound to have a ripple effect on the life of someone like Laurie Strode. And that we see again also represented in hereditary, lingering memories of suffering, pain, and stress that finds itself seeping into the lives of our spouses and our offspring.  The focus is not quite as tight, It's not quite as broad or as in depth, but it is there. And when combined with the core understanding that the power of Michael Myers is not in who he is, or the sight of him, or what might or might not be behind the mask, but instead his anonymity. The idea of him as this almost spectral construct of sheer will and pure evil incarnate, that makes him so scary... That THAT is the driving force behind this series, then you have what makes this movie work so well. Once again it caters to both of its audiences, whereas previous installments like h2o cast too wide a net, and others like Rob Zombies Halloween were far too niche (and in truth lost sight of the actual core tenets for even its core audience) this Halloween delivers to both the crowd that will always be there for it, even when it’s bad, and that more fair weather audience.

This is a well done, sharply executed horror film with a strong central performance (as I think any horror film movie has to have) by Jamie Lee Curtis. Just from a physical aesthetic standpoint Curtis comes prepared. In so may ways Laurie hasn’t changed, her hair, her body in general resembles some semblance of itself. It is only her hair color, the glasses, the wear of years of hurt, a map of her trauma all along the lines of her face - that betray how much has changed. This stagnation, this staticness is represented not only by her mental state, but by the forlorn fortress that she's turned her home into. The decrepit nature of anything in or around it that doesn't have to do with home security. It's represented in her inability to seemingly function at even a dinner party. To allow herself the space to be happy for even just a moment and it's all Curtis - working in conjunction with what ultimately is a great script - that really provides us with the clues as to just how ripped apart, how beaten and weathered Laurie Strode has become, but in the same sentence how she's also turned that energy into a crystallized will of her own.  Laurie strode has become the perfect mirror image for Michael Myers in that she too has now steeled herself to become a force of nature, fashioned herself into a creature made up of anger and rage, who will not be stopped, who will not be beaten, who will not go down. And as such has set herself up for Mano y Mano battle of good and evil. 

Halloween also features some strong supporting performances from the likes of Judy Greer. And will Patton, but ultimately, this is Jamie Lee Curtis's movie and of course Michael Myers. It’s gruesome (apropos to the genre and franchise) its scary, and I found the tension built well over the running time of the movie, which really you do not feel at all. The pacing is extremely well done, and your kind of in there and out of there before you know it. Something akin to a great rollercoaster ride. Much like the Panos Cosmotos indie project “Mandy” I just really enjoyed myself in this film. I settled right in to it and was immediately reconnected with the characters, with the tone, with the town, (which is something that I sort of took issue with In the latest remake of “IT” where I felt like in the town of Derry, I didn't feel how these events had really settled in or affected the town),  but in Halloween I did. Haddonfield and the people who live there some 40 years later still feels like a town that has the residue of these grisly murders on its structural, and cultural conscious, it's on the kids lips, and it's in the police department, it's in the homes and sort of in the air, you just feel it, and I think the filmmakers did a great job of creating that. Ultimately I highly recommend Halloween, I think it's a great movie for the season, I think it's one of the better horror films to come out this year, and ultimately in some weird kind of way as horrifying and terrifying as it is, it's a feel good movie. I came out of there like “Yeah, I got to escape for a little bit”. And thats very valuable as something I think we could use more of right now.