Sinister: A New Way to Do Old Horror

      Don’t have a creepy attic.  If you buy a house with a creepy attic – DESTROY IT IMMEDIATELY!  That is the primary lesson I learned from Scott Derrickson’s Sinister this weekend.  That and don’t be an asshole who lets your family live in a house where a bunch of people just got horrifically strung up on the tree in the backyard.  Because lets be honest, even without the supernatural that’s just asking for trouble.

      Sinister centers around a true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, masterfully played by Ethan Hawke, desperate to get his name back in the spotlight.  One element that raises this movie above the typical horror film clichés, is Ethan Hawke.  My friend turned to me during the movie and muttered, “oh hey, that guy’s actually acting.  Huh”.  But yes, having someone who recognizes the benefit of subtly and emotional depth adds a real layer to what could be another one note ‘been there done that’ addition to the genre.

     What really intrigued me is that the plot, while layered and surprisingly continuous, held no real surprises.  The entire mystery was spelled out almost from the beginning.  And nothing legitimately terrifying happened for a long time.  Yet it was the tension of what could be that frayed my nerves and kept me on the edge of my seat.  The all too real home videos and the red herring camera movements meant that I was always expecting a more chilling image or something to pop up in the unused left side of the frame. 

    Yes, there were cliches: the "creepy child", scary attic, and against all common sense, yelling at the screen idiocy of nighttime wanderings after noises in the dark.  Yet Derrickson took these cliches and layered it with real depth and emotion; there was a legitimate plot of a man who puts everything, including his family, below his need to regain a lost fame. Finally, a modern horror movie that doesn't rely on gratuitous violence and gore, but on suspense, emotions, and chilling and lasting fear. 

Putting our world on a screen: how our private lives become public

It’s amazing how we have found ways to translate something as uniquely sensory as food so that we can appreciate it when we are unable to use taste: the ink in cookbooks, the images flashing on our television and against the glow of a computer screen all conjuring memories of food past and hopes of food to come.  Julie and Julia explores this journey through technology using the parallel lives of famed food personality Julia Child and devoted blogger, Julie Powell.  Amy Adams and Meryl Streep bring charm, humor, and determination to their respective Julies and it’s easy to see where a bit of hero worship is warranted.  The movie alternates between eight years of the life of Julia Child in tantalizing Paris and a little over a year of the life of modern day Julie Powell.  Both women begin the movie lost and out of place:  Child, despite her exuberant love for Paris, her husband, and food, finds herself bored and itching for more.  Powell, dissatisfied with both job and new apartment, follows adoring husband Eric’s off hand suggestion that she begin a blog.  And that is the start of these two women’s adventure together; while they never meet, their lives continue on similar trajectories:  they find something they love, culinary school and Julia Child’s comforting recipes, face success, failure, rejection, and acceptance, and live their lives finally pursing something to the end.  Their parallel is best displayed in a montage of changing technology:  steel versus aluminum, a churn versus a food processor, type writer versus a computer.  Regardless of the differences, technology dramatically affected these two women’s lives: literally, as their means to success and symbolically, as a catalyst for change in relationships and dynamics between the great big world and their little dreams.

The movie explores the muddling of private and public life brought about by this technology.  Julia Child, after making a mistake during her cooking show, reassures “you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s to see”.  The irony of that statement and her mistake being aired on television for generations to come to watch is thick.  Likewise, Julie’s world is lived online.  She both gets lost in it, miserably breaking down and worrying about her readers and their comments, while finding her self in it too.  Everyone knows her business, it is how her mother found out she was having problems with her husband.  Yet at the same time, it was her apologetic, self-deprecating blog entry that brought her husband running back home.  Jane Lynch, as Julia’s sister Dorothy, gave a sad yet uplifting summation of the girls’ lives: “from the beginning we just didn’t fit in.  So we don’t!”.  Julie felt that too, her uncomfortable glances and awkward interjections at the Cobb Salad lunch with her friends revealing to her feelings of inadequacies and insecurity.  Yet through the blogging she was able to create her own persona, find herself, and have her own successes and failures.  She was able to create a niche for herself just as Julia Child did in her day. 

Food Coma on a Screen

How does someone watch a sizzling plate of crispy roasted chicken or the decadent oozing of chocolate streaming into a pie crust without feeling sympathy hunger pains, without having it tingle on the taste buds in phantom enjoyment?  In Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron explores the start of enjoying food on a sensory level that excludes taste.  Julia Child is a pioneer of food television and might be partially to blame for the creation of an entire network devoted to showing us things we can’t eat but WANT TO SO BADLY!  Julie Child started a craze, she changed how we think about food in this world and decades later Julie Powell honored that memory by blogging her way through Child’s cookbook.  This movie made me feel just as a delicious meal does: warm, cuddly, with a hint of a smile and the knowledge that it would be a very bad idea to have another bite.  Julie and Julia hit the right note, idealizing a legend while showing that sometimes that idol is just in our head; it was sweet and loving but moved from those romantic scenes quickly enough that we did not get bogged down in their cuteness or feel like the focus of the movie was romance instead of these pioneering women.  In the end, I wanted to be at both tables, Julia’s perfected originals with paper hearts and Julie’s modern day hit or misses.  Because both tables had friends, laughter, and most importantly, FOOD!