Movies I watched in January, Part 3

Here goes the final chapter of the first month of 2017. Three movies, all pretty good, one pretty creepy...


The trailer for this M. Night Shyamalan thriller looked cheesy as hell, and thankfully, that’s what the movie is – high-grade cheese handled with smarts, style and imagination. Things get started quickly as high school loner Anya Taylor-Joy (star of “The Witch,” a movie I loved) and her two more popular pals are kidnapped by James McAvoy, a very dangerous man with a dozen or so personalities running around in his head. Some of those personalities are friendlier (or at least more naïve) than others, and Taylor-Joy, no stranger to the dark side of life, does her best to keep the girls alive while McAvoy’s plans for something very scary-sounding slowly but surely lurch toward fruition. I don’t want to reveal too much here, mostly because the fun in “Split” comes from seeing how crazy Shyamalan is willing to get (and, slight spoiler, he’s willing to get surprisingly crazy), but this is definitely a return to form for the once-acclaimed writer/director, right up there with “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs” as far as taking an outrageous concept and really milking it for all it's worth. McAvoy is excellent (and obviously having a ball) as the badguy, and Taylor-Joy is great as a sort of last girl trying to outwit a seemingly unbeatable villain. And yes, there is a twist, but it’s not really connected to the plot. It’s connected to something else, something very promising – but I wouldn’t think of spoiling it here. See it for yourself.



I thought I knew all about the early days of the U.S. space program, but I have to admit, my repeated viewings (and re-readings) of “The Right Stuff” didn’t tell me anything about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three African-American woman (among many others, apparently) who contributed a great deal to getting the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions up and running. “Hidden Figures” (nice title, by the way) does a solid job of telling their stories with what I suspect is a heaping helping of Hollywood gloss. I’m guessing, for example, that Kevin Costner’s character, even if he weren’t a fictional amalgam of several different guys, never really smashed the “Whites Only” sign on the ladies restroom so Johnson could finally use a facility that didn’t require her to walk a mile from her office. Still, corny or not, it’s consistently entertaining, and though I don’t know if “Hidden Figures” deserves a Best Picture nomination, it’s the sort of empowering, informative movie that was obviously going to get one. The cast is top-notch, with Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae in the three lead roles (Spencer is especially good in the least showy part) and strong support from Costner, Mahershala Ali (nominated for “Moonlight”), Kirsten Dunst and Glen Powell as nice-guy John Glenn. Definitely worth a watch, and be sure to stick around for the coda, which reveals how much Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson accomplished over the course of their lives.

Amy and I sat down to watch this HBO documentary figuring it would be interesting and maybe a little unnerving, but we had no idea just how unnerving it would be – and for a reason we didn't suspect. "Beware the Slenderman" tells the story of two seemingly normal 12-year-old girls who, in the spring of 2014, stabbed a classmate 19 times because they thought it would win the favor of an online bogeyman known as “Slenderman.” An urban legend born of online tales and photoshopped images, Slenderman is something of an underground phenomenon, the sort of spooky thing kids latch onto when they hit that tender age when they realize the world can be, in fact, a frightening place, and one way to cope with that disturbing fact is to claim something frightening (and often fictional) as your own. I remember latching onto gory horror movies, Dungeons & Dragons and Stephen King novels when I was hitting my early teen years. “Beware the Slenderman,” which features heartbreaking interviews with the parents of the girls and footage of the girls themselves (the victim survived, but isn’t interviewed), gets under your skin – or at least it got under ours – making you wonder how that sort of dark curiosity has changed in the world of online media, when anything is accessible at any time. I know while Amy and I watched it in the comfort of our living room, we were thinking of our own pre-teen girl asleep down the hall in her bedroom. She's a smart, curious kid who, among other things, loves “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Undertales” and other creepy entertainment that, to be honest, we don’t know that much about. And that, my friends, is scary.