A Postscript on Candyman (Or: The Trouble with Me)

A friend made me feel really stupid about my review of the new Candyman. He said I was “way wrong about a lot of fundamental things.” Pressed to explain, he wrote: “In a nutshell, that the movie was designed for people like you and me – for a prototypical white-person audience. I’d argue that that’s the very reason DaCosta doesn’t give us the scenes we expect, and why the only violence we see is directed toward white people. Black people don’t NEED to see more violence toward Blacks. It’s fine for it to be implied.”

Missing with That Killer Hook (Or: The Trouble with Candyman)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Candyman

Nia DaCosta’s Candyman begins and ends so well and is loaded with enough potent ideas that it’s easy to mistake for a good movie. It’s actually a botch in ways that should feel familiar – from the original movie or from producer/co-screenwriter Jordan Peele’s Us.

Double Trouble

Just like us, only different

Jordan Peele’s Us didn’t really scare me, and that’s not a complaint. I didn’t find it particularly suspenseful, which is also not a criticism. Those two sentences reflect not the craft of Us as a horror movie but the writer/director’s use of metaphor and symbolism – an area where he overplays his hand and gets into serious trouble.

Marvel’s Superpower

Brie Larson in 'Captain Marvel' We finally have a good point of comparison for the comic-book titans DC and Marvel: Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. They were released less than two years apart; they both represented the first solo vehicle for a female superhero in their respective universes; they were both directed or co-directed by a woman; and they’re both origin stories that largely stand apart from ongoing narratives. In a narrow test of brand strength, they strongly support the idea that Marvel drinks DC’s milkshake.

Failure in a Moment

A race against dementiaSometimes the success or failure of a movie, book, or television show hinges on a short passage. If that small part works, so does the whole; if the crucial bit comes up short, the entire enterprise falls apart. For me with the third season of creator/writer Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO series True Detective, the moment comes late in the finale when former cop Wayne Hays drives up to the house of a person he strongly suspects is Julie Purcell, who disappeared with her brother Will 35 years ago and has eluded him ever since.

Finding Darkness in the Light

Revisiting Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House helped clarify the fundamental dissonance of the show – that running counter to its hopeful, tidy conclusion is something far messier in both its ghost and family stories. Yet the early episodes carve out room for readings that substantially darken the whole, undermining without negating the tone of its final minutes.

A Solution Without Satisfaction

'The Man from the Train'Bill James’ The Man from the Train is an ugly book, but for the most part you shouldn’t read that as a criticism. It’s ugly in three ways, and two of those were certainly unavoidable given the subject – the murders of more than 100 people in the early part of the 20th Century. But the third way could have been mitigated to at least some degree.