Director: Wes Craven
This was one of a few 1970s, grindhouse-style horror "classics," along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that I had never seen. While I've always been able to appreciate a good horror movie, watching this one reminded me that my appreciation only goes so far. Simply put, these grittier, wilder flicks don't do anything for me.
In a short 89 minutes, the movie chronicles a small family; including an elder married couple, their four children and children-in-law, and an infant granddaughter, whose trailer breaks down in the middle of a desert closed to the public. A weathered old man at a worn out service station gives them parts, but also warns against some sort of menace out in the wastelands. Sure enough, a pack of savage cannibals emerges and terrorizes the family over the next 24 hours.
A film like The Hills Have Eyes is really just too sweaty and wild for my tastes. Don't get me wrong - it's an impressive feat that Wes Craven pulled off here. On a razor-thin budget, he created an entire mood of agoraphobic menace amidst a blasted landscape that could be the stuff of nightmares. Still, I only found the movie so compelling. I admire Craven's willingness to not just threaten the innocents in this movie, but to actually kill a few of them, which in my mind is in keeping with true horror. That aside, the film only did so much for me.
Director: Craig Gillespie
An entertaining "based on real accounts" telling of the infamous ice skater-on-ice skater crime that was the entire Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics.
Anyone who grew up in the U.S. and is over the age of 35 almost certainly remembers the Harding/Kerrigan scandal, wherein Kerrigan was infamously bashed in the leg by a man hired by associates of Harding. It was one of the biggest, weirdest stories during the early years of sensational, 24-hour news cycles. Using on-the-record testimony from both Tonya Harding and her former husband Jeff Gillooly, the movie offers their versions of the wild story. There are bizarre characters everywhere in it, and none of them had the smarts or awareness to deal with what they had unleashed.
I knew and remembered a fair bit about the entire affair from when it all broke, since I was in my late-teens at the time. This movie, though, offered plenty of fascinating nuggets about those involved and their more personal stories. While realizing that more than a little of the narrative is coming from Harding's own accounts, I couldn't help but admire and sympathize with her in a few ways. Unlike most stars in the women's figure skating world, she grew up dirt poor. She also had a vile and abusive mother who bullied her daughter constantly. Still, Harding broke into the world of "ice princesses" and became a champion, such was her raw skill and power on the ice. But through bad relationship decisions and an inability to reckon with her dysfunctional husband, Jeff, she ended up the center and the blame of the entire scandal.
Though there are certainly sad elements about Harding's life - and they are depicted as such - the movie manages to balance that with a humorous tone much of the time. The root of most of it is in the breathtaking ineptitude of the dopes who end up orbiting Harding during her time leading up to and through the Winter Olympics in 1992 and 1994 (this was when the reshuffling happened, resulting in the Winter Games occurring only two years apart). Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and especially his buffoonish friend Shawn Eckardt (Paul Walter Hauser) provide plenty of laughs just for how doltish they are. Then there's Tonya's mother, LaVona, played in an Oscar-nominated, foul-mouthed performance by Alison Janey. The circus of characters keeps things entertaining, despite the strain of darkness that runs through their lives.
There's always something questionable about making a "bio-memoir" about people who are still alive, especially when it's not long after the actions which made them (in)famous. I suppose it's easier to swallow when nobody was killed. But this is the movie's final message and question: since it was Tonya Harding herself who came out of the affair as the primary villain, being banned for life from the sport which was the one thing that she was great at, who are we looking to blame when our collective narratives fall apart? This is what elevates I, Tonya above merely a salacious re-telling of gossip magazine fodder or strange sports trivia.
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