Cine-View reviews Suburbicon

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In the black comedy Suburbicon, George Clooney takes us to the small town, white bread America that Donald Trump wants to MAGA us back to and uncovers that it wasn't as great as all that. It joins the race for the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival.

George Clooney hit the ground running as a director with the wonderful Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the Oscar-nominated Goodnight and Good Luck. But his luck has been down with the interminable Leatherheads and instantly forgettable if commercially successful Monuments Men. Re-jigging an old Coen Brothers script with close collaborator Grant Haslov, Clooney has produced the marginally better Suburbicon. Your ears might prick up once you hear old Coen Brothers script, but that means a script they decided not to make because they thought Ladykillers was worth doing.

Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge, an accountant with Mad Men slicked hair, a glossy car and the pair of glasses he wore in The Good Shepherd. He lives with his son Nicky (Noah Jupe), his wheelchair bound wife Rose (Julianne Moore) and her twin sister Margaret (also Julianne Moore) in a small house in the picture perfect new town of Suburbicon. An animated sequence at the beginning of the film depicts it as a Norman Rockwell dream, and lauds its diversity: basically a bunch of WASPs from different parts of the country. That is until a black family move in, to provide a subplot that feels so pasted on that you can see where the glue has gone over the edges.

Something - and not only the escalating racial tension - is not well with this place and we are introduced to Gardner as he gets his son out of bed because there are men in the house; two bad guys (Michael D. Cohen and Glenn Flesher) who want to tie up the family and rob them. Gardner is strangely acquiescent and when his wife dies as a result of the chloroform, Nicky suspects something is up.

As with the woefully underappreciated Bob Balaban film Parents, mostly everything is viewed from Nicky's perspective. He slowly befriends the black kid living across the garden fence; tolerates his burly Uncle Mitch's comedy routines and eyes with growing suspicion his aunt and dad's grieving process, part of which involves some rumpy in the rumpus room with a table tennis paddle. Suburbicon is reminiscent of many other films, but none more than Fargo with which it shares a plot. The danger here is that the TV show Fargo is already remaking this twice over.

Clooney only shows flashes of comic moxy, and everything is drowned in a now tiresome fetishizing of the 1950s aesthetic, with gizmos and supermarkets, office furniture and hairdos glossily remade. Damon puts in one of those good sport performances and there are some nices flashes of unsuspected nastiness in the pudgy middle class complacency. But Moore is sadly underused and the film only really comes alive with the arrival of Oscar Isaac's insurance investigator, who, alas, doesn't hang around.

The darkness at the heart of the town grows as the deplorables opposing integration go from cold looks to throwing rocks and building fences - cue the topicality siren. At the same time, the domestic criminals in Nicky's home begin to unravel and the boy finds himself in all sorts of trouble. Violence increasingly takes the place of punch lines - not so much Grand Guignol as Petit-Bourgeois Guignol - and throughout the whole film Alexandre Desplat's score is as ubiquitous as the music in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. In the end, Suburbicon is a town not only that you're glad to leave but that you wish you hadn't bothered picking up the brochure for.

AdventuresinPoorTaste reviews Halloween Tales

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With only about two months until Halloween, what better way to get prepared than reading a collection of bone chilling stories? Oliver Boiscommun and Denis-Pierre Filippi are bringing three mysterious tales to life in this Halloween Tales collection. Plus if you’re not only into the scary and sneaky, there are even some life lessons to be learned. Take a chance and see what lies inside Halloween Tales, which Humanoids is releasing this September.

Boiscommun has done a great job connecting the storylines and they’re really interesting to read. To be honest, when I started to read this set I wasn’t really looking for much emotion. I was hoping for some great scary stories and maybe a twist or two. One of the great things you find is that he’s really trying to work some serious topics into the underlying suspense.

You’ve got three stories to read here: "Halloween," "The Book of Jack," and "The Story of Joe." Out of the three, "Halloween" is definitely a favorite. It’s not the spookiest or the best story, but it gave me a bad case of the feels. You start reading and you don’t expect the extent of emotions that will take you over. The visuals are spectacular with this one. The main character is a little girl who’s in her Halloween costume, which becomes a part of her story and really showcases her torment. As you probably expect, there’s a lot of dark and light contrast throughout the book but there’s an amazing amount of detail in even the most basic shadows.

The next story — all in black and white — is "The Story of Joe." I honestly got lost with this one and had to read it a few times to get the idea of what was going on. The first read made me think he was just imagining what was happening — it’s more of a mysterious puzzle than the other two sections. The art worked really well with the story idea, though. It’s a nice change into a darker area.

"The Book of Jack" is a pretty intense read. The premise behind the story is pretty disturbing but allows the imagination to go wild. It’s got a nice Hocus Pocus feel to it

What’s really nice is that you have the same characters from Halloween throughout the other stories, they just branch off and make their own path. Just be aware if you’re looking for intense, gory ghosts and ghouls you won’t find it here. There are some creepy creatures and spooky sections but nothing really over the top.

If anything, some of the stories could be a little better organized. I lost a few key points in some places with a bit of an overstimulated page here and there. I would have liked to see some more definition in some of the characters’ appearances. It looks like they kept the blurry edges to help with the feeling of the stories but it could have been done a bit better.

I absolutely love the meaningful undertones of each story. I would definitely suggest this to the avid spooky reader but be wary that it’s not as scary as one may expect. The stories flow wonderfully together and all three stand alone very well too. This is a great addition to the Humanoids collection of works.

SyFy.com on the Black Tapes

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The end is near. But for those of us who listen to The Black Tapes, we’ve known that for a while.

Created and written by Paul Bae and Terry Miles and launched in May of 2015, The Black Tapes is a docudrama hosted by Alex Reagan, a public radio journalist for Pacific Northwest Stories, and follows her as she investigates the mysterious Strand Institute and its more mysterious founder, Dr. Richard Strand. Over the course of the first two seasons, things go from creepy to downright apocalyptic.

The podcast quickly went from a spooky serial to igniting a small pod empire, leading to sister podcasts Tanis and Rabbits, both written by Terry Miles. A television version of Tanis has been announced and will be produced by Sam Raimi and Debbie Liebling’s POD 3 along with Dark Horse. Bae has his own solo project launching around Halloween of this year, and the two have other projects together and apart. “We have lots of stories to tell,” Miles says.

Today, the premiere episode was released for the third and final season of The Black Tapes, the podcast that started it all. I talked to the writers and creators about the end of the show -- and the end of the world as we know it.

What is the writing process like?

Paul Bae: It’s a switch-off. We do it half and half. It’s like a feedback loop; we’ll feed it to each other and go off what the other wrote, especially for Alex’s narration.

Because the other shows, Terry, you write those yourself?

Terry Miles: Yeah.

How’s that experience different?

TM: It takes longer. (laughs) I don’t have Paul’s genius to lean upon. I go back and forth with myself.

How much input do the actors have in their characters?

TM: Well, accepting the fact …

Yeah, I kind of wondered if we’d talk about that at all, since you’re both pretty adamant about the show being “real.”

TM: Yeah ... If they were actors -- which they are not -- they would stick to the script.

This is really a reality prison you’ve built yourselves.

TM: Yes. Definitely. But it’s fun.

Well, you guys are so good at the social media aspect, where it does feel like these are all real people. Was that important to you, or did that come organically?

TM: It was important. I didn’t grow up with radio dramas. The affection is there, but not necessarily the enjoyment. If it didn’t have hinged-upon-reality element to it, I probably wouldn’t be that interested.

What were some of the influences -- for the story in general, but also the universe you’ve created around it?

PB: We talked about War of the Worlds quite a bit, about what the impact would have been at the time, and how immersive storytelling is a thing we’re both really into. The world of podcasting is another way in; it’s so intimate. Someone’s in your ear. It feels more direct and intimate than, say, watching something on a screen. That’s what it felt like when we started this, so we thought we should capitalize on that intimacy.

TM: In regards to the shared world of characters [between The Black Tapes and his other shows, Tanis and Rabbits], a big influence on me was Michael Moorcock and Elric and Eternal Champion series of books, because the characters in those books crossed over into the other series and it was just so exciting as a kid. It was like, “Holy shit. No way. This character is in this novel all of the sudden?” It was so thrilling.

Has that been a challenge to figure out how much interaction there would be between the characters and how much crossover there would be? Because there’s no Black Tapes and Rabbits crossover, but Tanis exists in both worlds.

TM: It becomes more complicated when you look at moving the podcast into other media. That’s the short answer. Initially, you think “All things combined!” and it’s going to be one amazing universe, and then it becomes, “Well, Paul and I are doing this podcast, and I’m doing these podcasts, and someone else wants to turn this into this,” and it becomes more challenging.

Getting into the story itself, how much was outlined off the bat? Was Season 1 its own distinct thing, or did you know pretty much how things were going to go over the course of all three seasons?

PB: I think of myself as the psychic there. We saw the end coming. We had to write all of Alex’s intros first, so we had a good idea of where it was headed. That way we could just allow the story to unfold.

TM: And there were definite surprises along the way. We really leave ourselves room to let the characters and events drive our recording of them, so to speak. There are all kinds of large tentpoles that were surprising.

PB: When you kind of allow the characters to do what comes naturally, we were sort of surprised. We surprised ourselves bringing some characters back, like Dabic and Simon.

Did you have Strand’s journey mapped out, like how his childhood would play in?

PB: As producers there’s always things you hoped would happen, but sometimes a character, just the way they are, it takes a direction you didn’t expect, and it’s always a pleasant surprise when that happens.

TM: Strand and his family remain enigmatic to us to some degree. I mean, there’s a limitless podcast there about the Strand family. The Strand Family Radio Hour.

It seems like with podcasts specifically, because since there’s not a canonical look for a character, people feel more empowered to decide what a character looks like or “off-camera” headcanons, the same with books.

PB: I just read that word "headcanon" for the first time about a month ago. I like it. I find it fascinating. I’m kind of honored people would spend their time doing this, spend a chunk of their day expanding our world, this world we’ve immersed ourselves in. I’ve read some of it, and a lot of it’s quite good.

TM: Yeah, it’s quite impressive. It’s hard to go down that path and not spend six hours looking at fan art.

PB: Oh my God, the fan art is amazing.

TM: I feel like I have to set aside a day because you get lost so deeply.

Anything you can tell me about this final season?

PB: It’s gonna satisfy a lot of people in some ways, and it’s gonna piss off a lot of people in some ways.

Is the world going to end? Are we all gonna die?

PB: *laughs* I can’t answer that.

TM: I mean, eventually yes.

Was there any conversation about continuing it, or did you know you were done?

PB: We knew this story would have to close here, right now, at this moment.

Was there a reason for that? Did it feel right narratively, or are you both just so busy?

PB: There are a lot of factors. It’s hard to talk about. When you get to the end, it will become self-explanatory.

TM: It’s not that other projects are taking away from Black Tapes, contrary to what we’ve heard on Twitter.

PB: That’s not the reason.

TM: We could continue, but it feels like this is where the story ends. For now, at least.

Yeah mate, we know you could continue. You could probably squeeze another two seasons just by fucking pausing for hours between each sentence like you do on Tanis. Pfft.

On-set photo from Eerie, Indiana pilot, ForeverWare

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Featuring Marshall meeting Betty Wilson and her twins for the first time.

More Eerie, Indiana fanart from GrantedPlaneart

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Marshall and Dash

And fanon characters Lucas and Riley.

Reddit post on the best fourth wall breaks...

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I liked Eerie Indiana's 4th wall break in the last episode more. I'm having trouble finding it but basically all of the actors go off set and start acting like irritated pampered actors.