Thomas F. Cook

I’m pretty sorry to hear that Horizon Chapter 2 has been pulled from its original August release. I saw Chapter 1 again and it was much clearer the second time around. It still suffers from the basic flaw of not knowing who the characters are when they first appear on the screen. Jenna Malone, for example, goes up to some house, shoots a man in the chest twice, then flees with some horses and a baby in her wagon. First she lets a horse out of its pen and slaps it on the rump to make it run away. That’s the last time we see her until, perhaps, an hour later when Kevin Costner has finally entered the movie. She is living in some mining town which has a corner store and a hotel and presumably a saloon. She has a woman living with her who appears to be a local prostitute. The baby is a bit grown now, maybe 2, and at first I couldn’t fathom what they were all doing together. But it turns out that the prostitute was hired to look after the baby while Jenna did other chores. There is a man involved who she doesn’t seem to like too much and he’s got some sort of idea that he can get more money for some land he leased to this pair of brothers. This gets him killed. But after the second viewing I finally understood that these brothers have been chasing her to get back the child. You don’t know what happens to Jenna Malone. But the prostitute ends up leaving the child with some Chinese family and disappearing. The implication is that she is going to go to Horizon and try to make a life there. This is the same town that keeps getting burned, and I’m guessing, over the course of the four movies, the town will be established after a shit load of blood shed. In fact, everything in the first installment, suggests that all these diverse characters are making their way to Horizon. Costner, the prostitute, a wagon train with Luke Wilson, some horribly written and acted English couple, with two obvious rapists, and an assortment of sod busters. One brother is dead and now the other is trying to find Costner, who killed him. He’ll probably end up in Horizon too. Then it occurred to me why he called this town “Horizon.” Because all roads lead to (the) Horizon.

The music is not as good as I thought, so I have to take that back, although I did enjoy the final montage. But it’s really the characterization that does the movie under. You just can’t figure out who is who and in some cases what they even want. These are amateur mistakes. And it was extremely disappointing that Costner is catering to the right wingers by quoting Glenn Beck. (The maga crowd didn’t show up to save the movie in any event.) And he’s also shooting the third installment now, so maybe people will come around, the way they came around to Shelly Duvall’s performance in The Shining and a smaller number came around to Michael Cimino’s disaster, “Heaven’s Gate.”

Speaking of (RIP) Shelly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a genuine scream as that moment when Jack Nicholson is chopping at the bathroom door with the axe, and the moment when she sees the entire head of the axe come through the door. Her screams go gutteral and raw just at that moment, as if she hadn’t realized it was really an axe that he was using. It was like she “shone” for a moment, and saw her dead body.

It’s hard to review a 4 chapter movie that’s only released its first part. But unlike the critics, I actually enjoyed this quite a bit, and in the audience I was with, there was a smattering of applause at the end. I checked rotten tomatoes and sure enough, the critics and public don’t agree.

There are many – and I mean many – problems with the movie. Characters aren’t introduced and as a result, for the first hour we don’t really know who these people are.

Horizon is the name of a town — or at least a potential town — on the bank of a river in the southwest — Arizona to be more specific.

This is Apache country, and because this settlement, which is being sold by someone named Pickering and sounds like a bit of a scammer, is being built exactly in the center of the Apache’s river crossing, it is under constant attack. The first happens when 2 men and a young boy attempt to survey the land and set up division lines. They are slaughtered and later found by a priest who buries them and leaves makeshift crosses on their graves. Apparently, some years later, a wagon train has arrived and set up mostly tents, plus one house on the opposite side of the river from the graves. They decided the grave-side of the river must have been the cause of the previous deaths, but we know that the first three were working on both sides of the river, and a bit later we learn why they were killed (they are driving away all the game).

The settlers have a dance and shortly afterward, the Apaches attack and burn the entire place down, including the wooden house. Mind, we still don’t know who these people are, including the First Peoples. (I prefer that Canadian term to “natives,” or “native Americans.” The word “native” always sounds insulting to me and I dare say, it will one day become an insult. Indigenous, which is the word one of the characters uses, is okay, and in my own family history I have come across documents which describe “negotiations with the indigenous people there.” (This was upstate New York.) But First Peoples doesn’t disparage second, third and fourth waves of immigrants. It just acknowledges that there was a group here who were first. Anyway, this long diatribe of words I like and don’t like has a lot to do with this movie, and its reception.

Simple minded people have written online stuff like, “Manifest Destiny, in 2024? You’re joking right?” “I don’t need to see the genocide of native peoples.” And so on. I think what Kevin Costner is trying to do — and the reason he called it a saga instead of a story — is not really bring back the magic of the western — but retell those stories in a way that is sympathetic to both sides of that war. It’s significant, in my opinion, that most of this movie takes place during the civil war, and there are a few nods to The Union. But this is like the story of the hidden war.

And then he did something quite extraordinary I thought. I was wondering how he was going to end Chapter 1 when we barely could remember the characters and knew almost nothing about them. But then as a team of scalp hunters rides off into the distance, suddenly there is this very long montage of scenes from the next movie. None of those scenes gave away the story, but with the music and a sort of whiff of the next movie, which comes out in a few weeks, it actually finished an open ended movie. Plenty of people were not satisfied with that ending, but I thought it was wonderful.

And the soundtrack is absolutely spectacular. It is beyond perfection. I’m a soundtrack fanatic and I had never heard anything by John Debney, and that’s probably because I would never go see the types of films he has scored. But with this I was constantly feeling the music.

Anyway, I loved it, except for the continuity which was very spotty, and the multiple story lines where I couldn’t tell, sometimes, where we were.

The preview for this movie makes it seem like this is going to be the biggest tear jerker in a long while, but it’s actually quite bizarre, and that makes it a rather special movie, I think.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, Lola Pettigrew plays her extremely ill daughter Tuesday, and Arinze Kene plays Death. Death, in this case, is a cockatoo of some kind. (Update: it was a macaw.)

The first scene is of the millions of voices of the earth, reflected in a globe and pulling back through clouds and such in the manner of the opening scene of Contact. But this time, we land not in a human eye but in the cockatoo. He is able to hear all the human suffering going on in the world.

Whenever a voice in pain cries out louder than expected, he makes his way over to that person, waves one of his wings over the person and that person dies. He does this for several different people, and then he hears the cries of Tuesday. He immediately flies over to where she lives in London and when he enters her room, she understands that he is Death and she asks, “Are you here to kill me?” He replies in the affirmative and she asks if he can wait until her mother gets home from work. He reluctantly agrees. He’s covered in soot and dirt so she fills up her sink and lets him take a bath. He turns out toe be extraordinarily beautiful. He can also shrink down to the size of a tear duct or expand, like Alice in Wonderland, to the size of a house. All of this becomes important in several aspects later in the movie.

When her mother gets home from work, she is very obviously avoiding the subject of her dying daughter because she tries to go straight upstairs complaining that things went south at work and they have to start some project over. Tuesday’s home health nurse (this is England where they actually have health care), begs her to stop in and say hello to her daughter. At this point, Death is hiding in Tuesday’s ear canal and her mother doesn’t know it, but at Tuesday’s insistence, death flies out of her ear and grows to a normal size bird. Like everyone in the movie who encounters this bird, Zora knows who or what it is, and on some denial-instinct, beats the bird and smashes it with her foot. Death hobbles out the door and into the garden, knocking over plants and things on the way and just before he can recover himself, Zora starts beating him again with a heavy book. Then she pours alcohol on him and lights a match and burns him until she thinks he is dead. While she’s digging a hole to bury him in, he says, “You need to let her die,” and suddenly with that comment, she grabs the bird — about the size of her hand now — and eats him and swallows him down.

Now, in what screenwriters usually refer to as the vast wilderness of Act II, the most difficult part of a script, the mother and daughter actually get to know each other, and it turns out there are significant secrets the mother has kept from the daughter, which the daughter knew anyway. Zora lost her job a long time ago and has been pretend going in to work and sometimes falling asleep on park benches. To get by, she has been selling all the belongings of the second floor of their house, including many of Tuesday’s favorite things, like dolls. Also, the city starts to become strange and weird. There seems to be an uncontrolled fire at St. Paul’s. There is a man with bloody stumps of legs dragging himself across the road, screaming in agony. Reports come over the radio of cows who were “bolted” in the brain (to become meat), just walking around like zombie cows. Eventually you sort of realize that because Zora “ate” death, nothing can die anymore and the consequences are horrible.

During an argument with her daughter about fixing a light, Zora suddenly grows to the size of the house. And then somehow, either her daughter or herself, she realizes that she has the power of death. So she straps her daughter to her back, grows to the height of the trees and starts walking all over the place, waving her hand to help the suffering people (and cows) die.

But this is a temporary illusion on her part — that she has become death. Because while at a beach with her daughter, she runs off to a secluded place to have a pee and suddenly, for the first time, she hears her daughter’s suffering and pain. This makes her run and eventually puke up the bird. They have an argument and from the daughter’s point of view, she can’t tell what they are fighting about. But whatever’s going on, the bird shrinks down and jumps back into her belly. But he says, “If you don’t tell her, I’ll rip you to shreds from the center of your body.”

And it turns out, all she needed to say was that she didn’t think she was going to survive after her daughter is gone. (That’s in the preview.) This scene did not turn out to be so awful after all, though it was indeed very moving. But what I liked about it is how hard it was for her to get to that simple statement, which seems so very true to all of us. I can’t remember whether the daughter dies at Zora’s wave of the hand or of the birds wave of his wing, but it’s irrelevant. Some time later, it’s clear that Zora is not holding on and is probably suicidal. But then death returns, not to kill her, but to see how she’s doing.

Anyway, it was a delightful movie I thought. I don’t normally look at Rotten Tomatoes for scores or anything like that because usually I think who cares, I’ll never agree. But this one has a hugely divergent rating between the critics and the audience 82 to 49%. I’m firmly with the critics.

Once again, the NYTimes has come out with another stupid review of a movie and this time it was Thelma. This review was by Jeannette Catsoulis, who appears to be on the movie staff and not just some rando “media” commentator.

Her big complaint was that it was increasingly absurd and unbelievable: “Barely more plausible than Sharknado,” is how she put it.

The absurdity of complaining about plausibility in Sharknado is is remarkable, since that movie was meant to be a kind of joke, like Snakes on a Plane. But I can guarantee that most people would not be thinking about the plausibility of this movie because it has some heart to it, and when people follow or listen to a story, it isn’t the plausibility they’re thinking about or relating to. Some people, more icey than most, go immediately to the question of “could this happen,” and it’s one of the reasons I myself can’t watch Bridgerton and never will. Additionally, almost all stories are preposterous and implausible. All fairy tales are practically drug induced animal/human dreams that are meant to expose our inner most fears that we are, simply, animals and vulnerable. 3 pigs and the wolf? Goldilocks and the 3 bears? Hansel and Gretel and the witch living in a house of candy? Even with Cinderella, the animals help her — at least in the Disney movie. I don’t remember the original story except that all her horrible sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to fit into the dainty glass slippers. Take another movie that was released this weekend: Kinds of Kindness. Plausible? No. Nobody is going to chop off their thumb and cook it for someone, or cut out her own liver.

This movie didn’t seem that difficult to swallow because there were times, for example, when Thelma, the main character, played by June Squibb, finds herself alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood. This stuff happens, especially to people in their 90s who may or may not be losing some memory. Or when she fell and couldn’t lift herself.

The other reason I hated this review and most of her reviews is that she specifically mentioned the exceptional cast and left out one person — probably the 2nd most important character in the movie — which was the stand in for the author Josh Margolin. This young, sort of rootless character, is played by Fred Hechinger who was first noticed in The White Lotus as the constantly brutalized little brother. He was outstanding. He conveyed love, concern, self loathing and self hatred, and, probably the very common issue of not knowing what to do in this world.

Instead she singled out the performances of, correctly, June Squibb who born in 1929 and will be 95 in November, and, also correctly, Richard Roundtree, who died in 2023 at the age of 81. But also Parker Posey, Clark Gregg and Malcolm McDowell. All of whom might be good actors, but have incredibly small parts. I think Gregg has four lines at the most. It was a slight. A way of saying she didn’t like Fred Hechinger without saying she didn’t like him or that he was miscast.

The movie isn’t a tear jerker, although there are some very moving parts and a woman behind me couldn’t stop sobbing — maybe she had just lost a grandparent. But as someone with a mom who got suckered into sending money to a scam place (she was able to get it back, but I think there was a bank fee involved), this reviewer seemed really clueless about the elderly and the issues they face, including being prey through no fault of their own, having to face the dreaded senior living facility; striving to remain independent; stubbornness and especially memory issues and not really understanding how the world works now. (Malcolm McDowell provides a tirade against Amazon.)

And it was extremely funny. So yes, rent it or, if you’re lucky enough to live where they might have a theatre that runs independent films from Sundance, go see it.