What Lies Beneath (Movie Summary and Review)

(2000) 2h 10min

It's weird that I didn't see it when it first came out. I mean, it's got Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford in the lead roles. One does trust A-Listers such as these to pick good scripts, doesn't one? After all, Pfeiffer and Ford have each been outstanding in everything, from comedy and adventure to dramatic roles. Moreover I can't think of a single clunker starring either of them, can you? And yet, whenever the conversation turns toward ghost stories, I'm always surprised at how few people have seen What Lies Beneath. 

...more of this post

While you guys bicker about when to start decorating for Christmas...

...more of this post

#RolandMartinUnfiltered

Hey, required viewing, okay? All I ask of you today. Please.

...more of this post

Try 2-in-1 Shampoo and Conditioner, They Said

This one works great for me!, they said. 

Yeah, that's gonna be another "no" from me, dawg. Imagine if this were August? My hair wouldn't fit through the door. This is pure Sicilian lockage, folks. If you don't know, the Sicilians hail from Arab and African cultures colliding and merging. Then invaded by Vikings. I looked it up, having always wondered why these green eyes and light brown hair when the rest of my family is so olive-skinned, dark-eyed and chestnut-haired. Because, invaded by Normans. Apparently I come from a long line of ice cream, spicy pasta sauces and religious tolerance as an ethical ideology. And that's how come this ghostly spectre half-lifer has got to have pistachio, fra diavlo, and zero assholes in my life. And, yes, a serious no-foolin'-around conditioner. Graci,

@SuperLowBudge

💓💙💚💛💜

...more of this post

Reunion 2018 and #Throwback to 1984

October 2018 Reunion

1984

You May Also Like: What Story Will You Tell A 6th Grader?

...more of this post

#Throwback Thursday: 2016

MORE...

...more of this post

#Throwback Thursday: February 2006

I remember that night! Joe had just installed an editing tool on his Mac. I was cooking and he said "Come here and look at this!" 
So I came over to see. He had his webcam set to this Warhol mode, and he was laughing. Just as I was saying, "Whaaaaat?" he snapped this frame. We don't remember what tool that was and this is the only time Joey took a screen shot. There's a printed version of this framed, on the wall in his studio. He's the best, I love him so much.

...more of this post

Being At War With Each Other

The Way We Were came out on Columbia Records in 1974 when I was three and a half years old. My mom played the hell outta this one. I loved Barbra Streisand. Babs was my first punk.

Songwriter: Carole King

Being at War with Each Other lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Everyone comes from
One father one mother
So why do we complicate
Our lives so much
By being at war with each other

Maybe I'm crazy
But I don't understand it
Why do we seem to vote
To dig more holes?
It's such a waste of a planet

There must be a reason
That I can't see
Maybe somebody else knows
better than me

All I know is
Everyone else is
A sister or a brother
So we've got to look around
Again and stop
Being at war with each other

Oh
Maybe I'm crazy
But I don't
No, I don't understand it

There must be a reason

That I can't see
Somebody else must be
Better than me
All I know is
Everyone else is
A sister or brother

So we've got to look around
Again and stop
Being at war with each other

...more of this post

#Throwback Thursday: 2007

On "Performing Monkey Syndrome"

Throwing back to my 2007 interview with Jonathan Spottiswoode. - md

[EXCERPT]
Spottiswoode: Ah, the performing monkey syndrome. Lexi, it’s all about feeling alive. We all go through life in a numb state most of the time. Some of us more happily than others. Artists do what they do for various reasons. But mostly just to feel alive, to feel that they are expressing themselves in the moment, transcending their troubles. Of course, attention from fans can make you feel alive too. Everyone likes attention. It is incredibly rewarding to hear strangers ask you to play a song you’ve written, especially when you’re starting out. It’s a dream come true. I understand if folks in the audience feel that the artist is ungrateful if he or she doesn’t grant a request. Okay, here’s the other side of the coin…you’ve played a particular song in many places. You’ve had magical moments with that song, unforgettable even. The song is like a lover. If you play it too often, especially when you don’t feel like it, it can dilute the memory and the affection you have for it. The other thing is this: every set of music is an emotional journey for an artist, especially an artist playing their own songs. Each song you play means something significant to you (even the so-called “novelty songs”). And they mean something different to you on any particular night. This is the part about feeling alive.

SuperLowBudge: So it can be like a restaurant patron asking the chef to please pass the salt.

Spottiswoode: Perhaps you have played a few soulful songs and a few songs about past relationships. Perhaps that combined with the weather and the lighting etc. has taken you to a raw and melancholy place. At which point someone requests a funny song or an angry song. On a particular night, that song may be the perfect prescription for you to snap out of where you are and take the show to the next place. But on another night, it just feels wrong and dishonest and abrupt. Not to the audience, I understand. But to the artist as an individual with his or her own tired bag of emotions and memories. Each song in a set is an antidote to the song that came before. The wrong combination and you can poison yourself.
 
SuperLowBudge: That's quite deep.
 
Spottiswoode: Call me a low budget drama queen. ∎

[Go to full interview]

...more of this post

I will never

ever, ever forgive any person(s) who is still supporting this lunatic. Where. Is. The. Goddamn. Cavalry. For the love of all that doesn't suck, somebody do something.

Related: Dude, I Told You

...more of this post

I Went Away For Five Nights

This is the list that I left Joey 

when I went away for five nights. 

He did a great job.

...more of this post

We Lived In A Haunted House

Today I got back from a long weekend visiting friends and family, and my mom reminded me of the time she startled a ghost in her room. - md

Tales From Connecticut

When I was sixteen, my mom woke up one morning and announced that our house was haunted. There was little doubt. For one thing, my mother is not the sort of woman given to flights of fancy, hallucination or anything of that nature. She's a rock. In addition, the house was built in the 1800s. This all happened where I grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut. Ours wasn't even the oldest house on the street. Roxbury people speak of ghosts without smirking. They're like "Oh yeah, the ghost." Like everybody's got one. We lived with our ghost for about four years. Nobody minded.

The Grave

There was some sort of flat stone slab that we found out back in the underbrush. It was probably just an old well, but isn't that kinda creepy on its own? Of course our imaginations led us to "unmarked grave!"

Mom Told Us About The Woman in White

This is how it went.

She'd been asleep. She heard a scraping metal sound, and that's what woke her. She thought she might have been hearing an animal outside eating the dog's food, so she got up to chase away whatever-it-was messing with Grover's food dish on the porch. There wasn't any animal, and the dog was snoozing. So then she did a walk-through, as parents are wont to do when they're woken up by a sound at night. Nothing was amiss, so my mom got back into bed. Before settling back into sleep mode, my mom asked Lou, "What time is it?" No answer, so she leaned over Lou to look at the clock on his nightstand. She leaned far over—that's important to know. She explains, "Picture that I left my whole side of the bed open, plenty of room for someone to sit down there. That's what she did." Because when my mom sat back, she startled a tall woman in a white nightgown. "She leapt back, then she sunk to the floor, back against the wall like she was terrified." They locked eyes. We asked, was she transparent? "No, she was solid." The woman in white was tall, too, which my mother says she could tell because when the woman sat on the floor she drew her legs up close, hugging her knees which were right under her chin. As short women, that's something we would both notice about a tall woman with long legs. My mom tried waking up Lou but he couldn't be roused. That's the last thing she remembers until morning. "The second I woke up, I asked your father if he remembers me asking him if he hears Grover's food bowl, and me asking him what time it was," and when he did remember, that made her certain that it wasn't a dream. It was firmly established: she was definitely awake.

The next person my mom told her story to was Eleanor Hurlbut, the lady of the house across the street. A lovely old couple, Eleanor and her husband Alden were multi-generational farmers with a large, well-respected family. Cream of the literal crop, you couldn't find nicer neighbors. And there were a lot of Hurlbuts. There was a street named Hurlbut. My mom and I both loved Eleanor. We visited with Eleanor a lot. When my mom described the Woman in White, Eleanor didn't even stop pouring the tea. She just said, "Now who might that be, hmmmm."At some point, it was suggested that this tall gal was someone named Ruth.

I Told the Warrens

The next person to hear about Ruth was Lorraine Warren, and she heard it from me. I grew up assuming everyone in the world knew about Ed and Lorraine Warren, but I would later find out that it was kind of a Connecticut thing. I met them at The Curtis House (Woodbury, CT) one night when me and a friend went to hear the Warrens speak.  During the Q&A, I got up the nerve to ask my  question.

"When my mom saw a ghost in our house, she couldn't wake my father, and he's usually a light sleeper."

Lorraine said that happens, actually. She said the theory was this: when a spirit manifests, it draws the energy from the room, and that's why my father never woke up when my mom was shaking him. Also, Lorraine Warren added, the room might get very cold." Funny she would say that, because there was one bedroom that we didn't use as a bedroom, because it was always cold, even though you could feel the heat if you put your hand directly on the radiator in there. It was the room next to her bedroom, on the other side of the wall where the Woman in White was last seen, and my mom used that room as her closet. She's something of a vintage clothing and accessory maven, and it was suggested that the vintage finery might have encouraged Ruth to make a connection.

Though we weren't afraid of the ghost, to this day, my mom does everything possible to avoid any sort of portal. "I could never do a Ouija Board," she told me matter-of-factly this weekend, "because I know I'm the kind of person they'll seek out." That's what Lorraine Warren advised, too.

Good advice. Don't provoke the spirit realm, because once the portal opens, anything might come through. 👻

...more of this post

The Conjuring (Movie Summary and Review)

(2013) 1h 52min

The Conjuring opens in the apartment of two young nurses who are telling Ed and Lorraine Warren their story. Tearfully, they explain how they'd invited the spirit of a lonely little girl to inhabit a doll. "You did what? It was a big mistake acknowledging this doll," scolds Ed Warren. Lorraine Warren explains there was never any little girl ghost named Annabelle, but rather a diabolical non-human entity. "Demonic spirits don't possess things," Lorraine tells the women. "They possess people. It wanted to get inside of you." Sound of film projector clacking, a film ends, the action pulls back, lights come up—the Warrens have been relating this demon doll story to an auditorium audience.

Backing into a story this way, by having someone relate it to an audience after it's already happened to someone else, is an excellent device for horror, because we subconsciously make a decision about our level of buy-in whenever events are told second-hand. The auditorium scene is a neat twist on the device generally ascribed to Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Purely from a story structure point of view, all we really know for certain is what the terrified nurses told the Warrens, and what the Warrens told their lecture audience—and some of them are laughing. The Warrens take questions. Someone asks, "What do people call you?" The Warrens look resigned and admit that "kooks" and "wackos" is something people call them, but they prefer demonologists.This intro also assures mischief managed: the doll is no longer a threat and has been hidden "someplace safe." So The Conjuring begins with the Annabelle story, for the moment, over...?

"Oh God, We're In The Middle of Nowhere"

The main action of The Conjuring begins at a large ramshackle house in Rhode Island, with the Perrons, a congenial blue collar family who are relocating from New Jersey because 1971 was so weird. Yes, of course a snotty teenager is mad about the move—as if you even need to ask? Then one daughter finds a creepy antique toy and talks to an invisible playmate, then another daughter is a sleepwalker...haunted! The house is haunted. And because there are so many children, the movie almost rents itself out as a biggest-hits-of-haunting anthology. Even aside from the events that happen to each of these children, there's a metric ton of trope here. In no particular order:

• Dog whines and refuses to come inside the house.
• Dad breaks into a sealed-up door to a hidden basement.
• Mom's body shows mysterious marks and bruises. 
• Clocks all stop at the same time every night.
• It's always cold no matter how high the heat is turned up (make a point that it's not the furnace).
• Something smells bad.
• Sheets are suddenly yanked off the bed while people sleep.
• Pictures fall off the wall.
• A music box.
• An antique wardrobe.
• Doors creak open.
• Doors slam shut
• A devoted mother becomes terrified that something horrible is happening in the house and she gets Ed and Lorraine Warren to come over and purge the demon before it's too late.
• The end...?

How come always the dog. Come on, man.

*It's About Family, Grandpa!

A pause here to talk about a major theme of The Conjuring. "Family" is the fraught centerpiece of this particular haunting, and this theme reverberates from the world of the living (the Warren and Perron families) to the realm of the dead (ghosts) and non-living (demonic spirits). In the world since the Amityville Horror (not the movie, I mean the real-world tale from the original Warren files) we know Lorraine Warren as clairvoyant, and we know her as demon-vanquisher, but we've never seen Lorraine Warren as a mother. Here, Lorraine helps a fraught Carolyn to escape the wrath of dark spirits hell bent on possessing Carolyn and turning her from loving mom to murderous madwoman. Two families, that means two devoted mothers who become terrified that something horrible is happening in her house, and one of them is Lorraine Warren, well-played here by Vera Farmiga. And doesn't the other mother just happen to be perpetually-haunted Lily Taylor as Carolyn Perron.

*I am poking nerdy fun. "It's about family, grandpa!" is an unforgivably corny haunted-Lily Taylor line from another movie entirely, The Haunted. I couldn't resist using it here, because...Lily Taylor!


Fast-Forward This Review

Tell you what. I'm sure there's loads of super-detailed reviews penned by stronger souls than mine, and any number of scene-by-scene video essays to provide you with the full-tilt-boogie effect of following The Conjuring story lines as concurrent, past and future events unfold, merge and play out through to the end of this chapter, for "chapter" it is! Because behold! The Conjuring is a franchise, and it's growing fast, so it looks like **we'll have this thing around for as long as we've had The Amityville Horror, with loads of prequels, sequels, and spins-off.

**Generation X knows no world without 112 Ocean Ave.

All told, yes, I like The Conjuring, despite its super-dense plot...it's a lotta threads all in one span of 112 minutes. I even like every single one of its movie cliches, from the demon toy to the furnace that won't heat the house. Because I'm not sure these are flaws or "movie sins." Instead, I offer up an alternative way to look at it, having to do with the legend of Ed and Lorraine Warren. 

The Warren Effect

Okay, I'd heard The Conjuring described as the most chilling movie since The Exorcist, that's one reason I put it on the list this month. The other reason is that I'm an easy sell on any Ed and Lorraine Warren story however heavily fictionalized. I'm from Connecticut. The Warrens were like, a whole thing. They're legendary. Their case files have been used as source material for loads of books and movies, most famously The Amityville Horror. Still, I'm kind of a hard sell on forsaking plot for scares, that is to say, when "story" falls apart the minute you stop watching through your fingers, and this Conjuring story seems incredibly dense. There's more than one thing doing the haunting. There's a witch, there's a demon, some ghosts...and what about that doll?! My initial reaction was that the whole movie churns to the point where it's distracting to keep track of which witch, what demon, who is this ghost, is that a ghost or what IS it, and wasn't there something about a doll in the beginning...? That's my initial reaction until I remind myself that, actually the franchise aspect means that of course there will be un-answered questions. In a franchise, they can close those loops in the next movie, or in the one after that. 

• Why does Lorraine tell the young nurses that spirits don't possess things, when she's got a huge storeroom in her house with a lot of possessed things in it?

• If those nurses said the doll was moving all around their apartment, even came back once after they tried throwing it in the trash, how come Ed thinks it's "safe" in a glass display case in a locked room that his daughter seems to sneak into any time she feels like it?

• If Ed views his primary role as debunking (finding a logical explanation for) weird goings-on, why does he start right out telling the Perrons such terrifying things the minute he steps into their house before he even entertains any logical explanations first?

Call me hardcore, but to me a good story still means sequential events that unfold in relation to each other, no matter how many Warrens come along to exorcise however-many demons from however-many haunted toys. When I say "it's a lotta threads all in one span of 112 minutes," I must add that as a viewer I expended actual energy trying not to be distracted by "but what about that whole demon doll thing?" from the opening scene. Waiting for something to loop the doll into the main action in the Perron household is the wrong kind of "suspense." Well, what if the viewing audience is meant to doubt the Warrens, and to question the facts of their cases, and to worry about the strength of that lock on that storage room where they keep Annabelle and all the other collected haunted and cursed talismans, conduits and vessels. That's the right kind of suspense.

Trope-a-Dope

As for the "movie sin"  where every horror cliche is represented here like a collected anthology, how about another way to look at it? What if The Conjuring asks the viewing audience to suspend our cumulative knowledge of the past 40 years of movie-making and climb inside the 1971-era Warren universe, which means all those movie events aren't cliche yet at all? In the world where these events take place, one might attend a lecture given by Ed and Lorraine Warren who nobody has heard of yet. The scenes of their lectures (those really happened, by the way) might serve as annotations meant for us, the viewing audience. Notice no one is raising their hand to say "Oh, the old 'speaking in tongue's routine, sure." They ask "What do people call you?" What the Warrens present is new to their in-movie 1971 auditorium audience, if not to us, the modern movie-viewing audience. We see these things as movie cliche, where a demon latches onto a little girl, beds shake, possessed people speak in languages they haven't learned. It's at one of the lectures where Carolyn Perron tracks down Ed and Lorraine, begging them to come to Rhode Island and help figure out what's happening in her house. The lectures do something else, too. The content is relevant not only to the current case (the Perron house) but to the next case after that. The Lutz family doesn't move to 112 Ocean Avenue until 1974, you guys. One might suggest that not only does The Conjuring launch its own canon with sequels, prequels and spins-off, but that it's a prequel itself, next stop Amityville, Long Island. These Conjuring franchise people are definitely going to do their own version of Amityville Horror, and that works for me. 👻 

Dear Reader,

I'm always curious to find out 

who reads my blog before seeing the movie, 

and who likes to watch the movie 

and then come read what I wrote. 

If you would be so kind, please leave a comment. 

Yours, 

@SuperLowBudge

Related: We Lived In A Haunted House

...more of this post