Police (Not So) Procedural

Film: Normal
Format: Streaming video from HBO on gigantic television.

Bob Odenkirk has an odd career trajectory. He made his bones in comedy as one half of the two heads of HBO’s Mr. Show, then became much more of a household name with his connection to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Recently, though, Odenkirk has become an action star, but a vastly different one in a lot of ways. Odenkirk’s action characters don’t spit one-liners and walk away with a couple of scratches. His characters get hurt—shot, stabbed, beaten, and bruised. And rather than one-liners, he’s going to have speeches and moments of surprising badassery. This brings us to Normal.

It’s also worth noting that there was a film made in the early 2000s that was also called Normal. It featured Tom Wilkinson and Jessica Lange as a married couple in a situation where he realizes that he is transgender and wants to undergo sex reassignment surgery. I say this not because these two movies would ever be confused beyond the name, but because it was filmed a few miles from where I live. Odenkirk’s Normal is not a story of discovery, but an extremely bloody action comedy with a surprisingly high body count and multiple Rube Goldberg-style deaths.

Ten Days of Terror!: A Field in England

Film: A Field in England
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

There is a trend in modern horror films, or at least a branch of modern horror films, where the horror specifically comes from not knowing what is going on. The horror isn’t about physical danger (although that is often a part of it), or some terrible creature from beyond space and time, but about a disconnection from reality and a possible descent into insanity. I’m not sure when this started—movies that have played with bending reality have been around for a long time. But they feel a lot more common right now, and they seem very specifically to crop up over and over in the horror realm. There were some before the success of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), but they seem to be everywhere now. One of those early pre-Oscar-win adopters is Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England.

The story takes place during the English Civil War. A man named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) has been charged by his master, an alchemist, to track down a man who stole materials from him. During a battle, Whitehead is rescued by a man named Cutler (Ryan Pope). The two then encounter two deserters, the rough and brutal Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and the simple and open Friend (Richard Glover). Cutler claims there is an alehouse in the vicinity, and the four go off to find it.

Cultists Gonna Cult

Film: Kill List
Format: DVD from Woodstock Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

Watching movies more or less in the order they come across my desk creates some interesting ideas. What often happens is that I discover movies where a movie made first reminds me of a movie made later. I get the order mixed up in that respect. That’s clearly the case with Kill List for me. While I can see influence of a movie like The Wicker Man on this, I also want to say that it was influenced by movies like Hereditary and Midsommar. However, since this came out in 2011, that influence (if it exists) clearly runs in the other direction.

Kill List is a movie of two halves, or rather a first two acts that function one way and a third act that functions in an entirely different way. What this means is that we have a third act that, while clearly connected to the first two acts, it’s also very unexpected and strange. It’s also a movie that takes a few very dark turns, and since it’s about a couple of assassins taking a strange job, it starts out pretty dark.