Bite Me, Tony

  Eight Maids a-Milking--Eyes Wide Shut There are enough Christmas trees, twinkling lights, ornaments and decorations to qualify this blog entry as a holiday film. But it's grim as all get out and the festivities tend to lean towards the darker side. To be sure, the number of maids a-milking in Stanley Kubrick's grand finale is far greater than eight but we'll leave it at that for now. Yes, today we're getting into the spirit of the season with Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1999 (alleged) erotic thriller,  Eyes Wide Shut .  Both revered and reviled by critics and moviegoers, the highly controversial film was released four months after Kubrick's death from a heart attack--a shame, really, since the late director would almost certainly have enjoyed seeing talking heads exploding from sea to shining sea.   Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella,  Traumnovelle , the plot of the story has been transferred from fin-de-siecle Vienna to end-of-the-mi...

The Beast in Me In the exclusive enclave of Oyster Bay, Long Island, author Agatha (Aggie) Wiggs dwells in a state of abject misery. High strung and withdrawn, Aggie tolerates the good intentions of her townsfolk even as she isolates herself from them. Having written a massive bestseller a few years earlier, Aggie now finds herself running low on funds. The accidental death of her young son and dissolution of her marriage has left her with a severe case of writer's block. Wallowing in grief, and with her editor breathing down her neck about deadlines, Aggie is desperate for some sort of divine inspiration that will help her complete the manuscript she promised to her publishers. The book, however, is a bore, as one character will proclaim, and the publishers aren't doling out any more cash advances until they see some progress.  As if heaven-sent, billionaire Nile Jarvis and his second wife, Nina, move into the mansion next door. Nile is no ordinary billionaire (or maybe he is)...

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein For a good long while now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that esteemed Mexican film director, Guillermo del Toro may be just a tad bit... .overrated . Of the 10 feature-length films he's made, I've liked about half of them. (For the record, 2017's Oscar-winning The Shape of Water is not one of them.) So there was a 50/50 chance that his adaptation of Mary Shelley's enduring 1818 classic was finally, after a decade of disappointments, going to hit my sweet spot . Let's say that I was cautiously optimistic. And now here we are with del Toro's  Frankenstein  finally debuting on Netflix last week. It is certainly every bit the lavish, atmospheric monster movie that we've come to expect from del Toro, but that doesn't necessarily make it a great movie.  By now, Shelley's tale of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation has been filmed often enough that most everyone knows the story: arrogant scientist p...

  Misericordia  With nods to Hitchcock and his late French counterpart, Claude Chabrol, Alain Guiraudie continues to chart his own path in the 2024 suspense film, Misericordia . Unleashing mayhem and eroticism in placid settings is a Guiraudie specialty, and with  Misericordia , he delivers a bookend to 2013's much-lauded  Stranger By the Lake ( L'Inconnu du lac ) . Both films have similar themes of death and desire  among a small group of troubled souls in rural France. However, in the case of  Stranger By the Lake , the story unfolds through the eyes of the morally conflicted witness to a murder, while in  Misericordia , the protagonist  is  the morally conflicted murderer. Dispensing with the explicit sexual imagery of  Stranger By the Lake , Guiraudie, instead turns up the heat with what he  doesn't  show: it's a tease that works.  The plot of Misericordia  seems deceptively simple: when a young man named Jeremie...