[thanx to Josh Hollis for the header. He can be found wherever there is a repeat of NCIS, NCIS: LA and occasionally NCIS: NO.]
Mad Men, a popular show for people whose job it is to write about Mad Men, is starting its final slate of episodes tonight. Don Draper got shitfaced for your sins. Barring a sudden shift to the year 1995 and everyone’s got that terrible old age makeup/CGI used in Watchmen and Captain America 2, I believe we can expect seven more weeks of Draper drinking, Sterling saying/doing something hilarious and Peggy often fruitlessly trying to find a place in the world for herself. (That is, provided, if Matthew Weiner continues to not use my “Don Draper’s actually a werewolf” pitch I made a few years back.) In addition to being a meditation on cultural change and nipple cutting, Mad Men is distinguished by its cast of relative unknowns. Michael Chiklis was The Commish, Timothy Olyphant had Deadwood in the rear view and Bryan Cranston had an extensive body of work, it just wasn’t necessarily dramatic. For Mad Men, though, Matthew Weiner pulled a Billy Beane and found a perfect complement of undervalued, underused actors and actresses. In keeping with my status as Rhymes With Nerdy’s resident garbageman, I thought it might be a nice tribute to the show to take a look at what the cast was doing before they became ad people in the 60s. Let me tell you, they oughta thank their lucky stars.
I do think this tells you everything you need to know about the movie.
Our first entry in what is certainly my most creative article series title yet is The Attic, starring Scientology’s Elisabeth Moss (aka Peggy Olson) and directed by Pet Sematary‘s Mary Lambert. The film leans heavily on the ‘director of Pet Sematary‘ credit; it’s on both sides of the case (yes, I had to fucking buy the DVD) and in the trailer. Pet Sematary was not a good movie, Pet Sematary 2 which Lambert also directed was a worse movie, and everything since then has been varying shades of garbage. The Attic is your classic haunted house psychological thriller mash ‘em up, and by “classic” I mean “cliched”, not “renowned”. Elisabeth Moss is Emma, a college student whose family moves to a creepy looking house somewhere in New Jersey for the stated purpose of being able to afford her college tuition. The family consists of the guy from that aging ship episode of The X-Files, the love interest from Weekend at Bernie’s and the screenwriter, as the father, mother, and retarded brother respectively. Their relationship to Moss’ character is the lion’s share of their characterization.
Things become creepy in the cheapest possible way, involving lights that flip off at unexpected times, Elisabeth Moss with raccoon eyes and pale makeup and some whispering in the back of the sound design. If there’s any unifying element to The Attic, it’s cheapness. Upon her first experience with the supernatural, Emma refuses to leave the house. What a great way to never need to have to use another set! So what if agoraphobia and fear that the house you’re living in is has evil shit going on don’t mesh? At least James Brolin and Margot Kidder left the house some of the time. Although only 80 minutes, the film has the distinction of feeling much longer due to the paucity of plot. Lambert piles scene upon scene atop each other that can be summarized as “Emma alleges supernatural happenings; people are reluctant to believe her”. Now, you can do interesting variations on that base premise, but The Attic never does. Instead it’s repetitive nonsense of the family asking, suggesting, pleading, extolling Emma go outside, eat something, maybe think about college and her refusing on the grounds of…well, I don’t know. There’s no explanation for why she doesn’t even go out for a breath of fresh air past “I can’t”, and no one really challenges it. Not her family, not her hilariously unhelpful therapist, and not her nominal love interest.
Is not blacklight Satanism the best Satanism?
Owing to the occasional double Elisabeth Moss in the attic mirror (that is draped over, requiring someone’s actions to reveal it because obviously there’s to be a punitive aspect in a horror movie), Emma starts to believe there’s some evil twin shit going on. Her quasi-boyfriend confirms she had a twin sister who died within 12 days of birth. The twin’s name was Beth. Well, why WOULDN’T you name an evil twin “Beth”? For anything I write afterwards to make sense I ought to explain the quasi-boyfriend. Early on, Emma explores the attic, some nonsense occurs, she falls downstairs in what looks hilariously fake. She’s checked out by a pair of detectives and some EMTs, as that is typical of white people receiving a bump on the head. No one considers her story that there was someone up in the attic, that there were Satanic symbols hanging around, that the mirror was smoking pot, etc. except for part-time paramedic/full-time detective John Trevor. He has the same name as the lead character on that show New York 187. I wish I could make fun of that name for being stupid idiocy that doesn’t resemble a real TV show, but I remember Detroit 187 happened. (Both still take place where California’s penal code 187 isn’t.) Their scenes together are porno-esque in their lack of quality. That’s not to say any other scene is a masterclass of acting. They’re not. But Emma and Trevor are worse; you just expect at any moment a “I’ve never even been kissed before” will happen and, soon after, fucking. Don’t expect an acting gem in the rough; it’s all rubbish.
When 80% of your film’s scares are tire swing based, you’re fucked.
After a certain point Emma’s family realizes that anorexia and agoraphobia are not good things and send in a therapist. These scenes establish something questionable: Emma’s a shit. She’s not sympathetic. In her first therapy session, she asks if her therapist’s fucking her mom, as he’s a family friend. She also hates her dad because he’s cheap and mistreats her brother (there is no evidence he mistreats the brother). For the second half she’s seeing bullshit in the attic that no one else sees (mainly Satanic symbols, because I guess she’s going for a Jeffrey MacDonald defense), asking Trevor to deliver some research exposition to her and bitching out the therapist. Moss is supposed to be showing growing paranoia that’s justified by her readings of other characters, but she’s terrible. Elisabeth Moss is a great actress on Mad Men and she has especially excelled in scenes in which emotions are ambiguous, hard to read, and the only indication are the performers’ actions, their facial responses, the emphasis on syllables of words. This is not her in The Attic. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t phone it in. She should’ve, though. The Attic doesn’t make or break a career. She should be pissed her Scientology connections got her this bullshit.
She becomes of the belief that her dead twin is alive again due to her parents’ Wiccan resurrection ritual. There’s a nice “what is Wicca? Should I shield my kids from it?” scene starring the coffee loving Dr. Cofi and I wanted to shut off my PS3, throw the DVD into the woods and instead review how the raccoons hang out at my apartment complex’s dumpsters. Lending further evidence to the hypothesis are Satanic tattoos so conspicuous on dad that Charles Manson would consider it a bit much. That the family responds to Emma giving up on college, never eating and not going outside for over a month with resignation and half-hearted opposition belies her therapy talk of them being pricks who…something. Hid a deceased child whose death was inevitable because she had a partially formed brain? If that’s your issue, you’re the type to place a stillborn child on the couch and require every other Sunday “the baby” gets to decide what they watch that night, even if it’s always The Bourne Ultimatum. AKA Rick Santorum territory. It hits a turning point when Beth kills the poor retarded brother, who was only trying to help his Peggy Olson on an excursion. I’d have more sympathy if screenwriter Tom Malloy didn’t play the role as a caricature. It’s a tough role to do, fraught with opportunities to be insensitive even in an innocuous fashion, but Malloy does it like he’s making fun of retarded people. That’s why I don’t feel bad for saying you’d have to be retarded to write The Attic.
She’s so terrible she isn’t even successful at an eating disorder.
Everyone believes she’s responsible for her brother’s death, but Emma remains committed to the Beth theory. I dunno. She hasn’t even appeared as a pale raccoon and threatened to kill my gerbil when I fell behind on Gardockustified, but sure. Finally someone witnesses a twin catfight and lends a reality to the proceedings. John Trevor urges her to leave the house, but Emma’s “I can’t” wins him over and he decides to go find detectives and get things sorted, giving her a gun for protection. No one who watched hit show New York 187 would accept this crackerjack police procedure. Emma finds her parents home, trying to Valium up her orange drink. She thinks they’re conspirators trying to get her out of the way after their Bether Soldier rubbed out retarded brother; they believe her to be a murderous mentally ill girl possibly fucked up on street drugs. Like the NRA says, the only thing that can stop two possible Satanists who are unarmed, it’s a Peggy Olson with a gun given to her by a paramedic detective named after a popular television character. On Mad Men, killing one’s parents is metaphorical, with the exception of Roger having his mother lick a load of toxic envelopes. Here it’s both literal and unintentionally hilarious on part of the actors. I don’t blame them; they know what they were in.
From there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to the revelation that you figured 55 minutes ago: there is no Beth or Satanist cabal, Emma was just crazy. That consequentially means the character named after someone on TV isn’t real either. When Emma points the gun at Trevor, she’s pointing it at herself, and when she pulls the trigger you get the answer to the What If of Peggy Olson Budd Dwyered. You might wonder where she got the gun from if Trevor never existed, and The Attic answers your query with a hearty “fuck you”. That’s the tip of the iceberg, in terms of narrative plot holes and inconsistencies, but I don’t feel like going into it. The Attic‘s not earned the effort. Of course it fucking doesn’t make sense, it’s poorly made!
Like I said when Shailene Woodley had a gun to her head in Insurgent: “Do it.”
I will say fuck you for it setting up The Attic 2. The house is sold again and the teenage-ish girl of the family is not having moving in to the place. She goes up to the attic, moves the cloth off the mirror and John Trevor appears out of nowhere, now claiming to be a realtor. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other, you and I” he says upon his exit. So the house’s modus operandi is ensnaring girls who are just legal into getting killed by their doppelgangers or in a police standoff. What I take most from this post-plot tag is that some parents haven’t taught their daughters the signposts of predators. A girl who received adequate education on the subject would know realtor Trevor is a pervert. Really, for everyone, “unexpected person in attic” is a wonderful indication of diddling intent.
The trap I fell into with this movie is common; I overanalyzed it, figuring certain things signaled something, when in reality it was poorly made bullshit that didn’t try to achieve more than a below average episode of Goosebumps. She’s anorexic, oh, well, the antagonist is an externalized instance of that. Emma says her dad did something and she can’t tell him? Of course it’s a metaphor for abuse! In the end it’s fucking nothing, it’s a stupid ghost mental illness story that fails at doing both. Emma’s never established prior to the house, and at the house she’s nothing more than an actor’s shitty attempt at a crazy person, so at no point are you sympathetic towards her. Really, a horror exploitation Anne Frank picture called The Attic would’ve been a better picture.
Oh, I forgot to talk about the sex scene. Well, it’s terrible.
The next victim says it best when she accuses the house of “maybe it was an Indian burial ground or something.” Maybe something or other is the premise of The Attic. Maybe supernatural pushing. Maybe mental illness. Maybe New Jersey has to kill a percentage of people per year to satisfy the Ice God Morarrr. Maybe the evil twin can turn invisible and bend reality. Ambiguity and a narrative lacking in explication is fine for horror; I recently saw It Follows and loved it for that very reason. But The Attic is clearly the case of a number of ideas nobody knows what to do with; to wit, there’s a cold open with Alexandra Daddario in a bath tub and the movie fails to capitalize on it. If you fuck that up, you shouldn’t make movies.
Bad Men #1: The Attic
Mad Men, a popular show for people whose job it is to write about Mad Men, is starting its final slate of episodes tonight. Don Draper got shitfaced for your sins. Barring a sudden shift to the year 1995 and everyone’s got that terrible old age makeup/CGI used in Watchmen and Captain America 2, I believe we can expect seven more weeks of Draper drinking, Sterling saying/doing something hilarious and Peggy often fruitlessly trying to find a place in the world for herself. (That is, provided, if Matthew Weiner continues to not use my “Don Draper’s actually a werewolf” pitch I made a few years back.) In addition to being a meditation on cultural change and nipple cutting, Mad Men is distinguished by its cast of relative unknowns. Michael Chiklis was The Commish, Timothy Olyphant had Deadwood in the rear view and Bryan Cranston had an extensive body of work, it just wasn’t necessarily dramatic. For Mad Men, though, Matthew Weiner pulled a Billy Beane and found a perfect complement of undervalued, underused actors and actresses. In keeping with my status as Rhymes With Nerdy’s resident garbageman, I thought it might be a nice tribute to the show to take a look at what the cast was doing before they became ad people in the 60s. Let me tell you, they oughta thank their lucky stars.
I do think this tells you everything you need to know about the movie.
Our first entry in what is certainly my most creative article series title yet is The Attic, starring Scientology’s Elisabeth Moss (aka Peggy Olson) and directed by Pet Sematary‘s Mary Lambert. The film leans heavily on the ‘director of Pet Sematary‘ credit; it’s on both sides of the case (yes, I had to fucking buy the DVD) and in the trailer. Pet Sematary was not a good movie, Pet Sematary 2 which Lambert also directed was a worse movie, and everything since then has been varying shades of garbage. The Attic is your classic haunted house psychological thriller mash ‘em up, and by “classic” I mean “cliched”, not “renowned”. Elisabeth Moss is Emma, a college student whose family moves to a creepy looking house somewhere in New Jersey for the stated purpose of being able to afford her college tuition. The family consists of the guy from that aging ship episode of The X-Files, the love interest from Weekend at Bernie’s and the screenwriter, as the father, mother, and retarded brother respectively. Their relationship to Moss’ character is the lion’s share of their characterization.
Things become creepy in the cheapest possible way, involving lights that flip off at unexpected times, Elisabeth Moss with raccoon eyes and pale makeup and some whispering in the back of the sound design. If there’s any unifying element to The Attic, it’s cheapness. Upon her first experience with the supernatural, Emma refuses to leave the house. What a great way to never need to have to use another set! So what if agoraphobia and fear that the house you’re living in is has evil shit going on don’t mesh? At least James Brolin and Margot Kidder left the house some of the time. Although only 80 minutes, the film has the distinction of feeling much longer due to the paucity of plot. Lambert piles scene upon scene atop each other that can be summarized as “Emma alleges supernatural happenings; people are reluctant to believe her”. Now, you can do interesting variations on that base premise, but The Attic never does. Instead it’s repetitive nonsense of the family asking, suggesting, pleading, extolling Emma go outside, eat something, maybe think about college and her refusing on the grounds of…well, I don’t know. There’s no explanation for why she doesn’t even go out for a breath of fresh air past “I can’t”, and no one really challenges it. Not her family, not her hilariously unhelpful therapist, and not her nominal love interest.
Owing to the occasional double Elisabeth Moss in the attic mirror (that is draped over, requiring someone’s actions to reveal it because obviously there’s to be a punitive aspect in a horror movie), Emma starts to believe there’s some evil twin shit going on. Her quasi-boyfriend confirms she had a twin sister who died within 12 days of birth. The twin’s name was Beth. Well, why WOULDN’T you name an evil twin “Beth”? For anything I write afterwards to make sense I ought to explain the quasi-boyfriend. Early on, Emma explores the attic, some nonsense occurs, she falls downstairs in what looks hilariously fake. She’s checked out by a pair of detectives and some EMTs, as that is typical of white people receiving a bump on the head. No one considers her story that there was someone up in the attic, that there were Satanic symbols hanging around, that the mirror was smoking pot, etc. except for part-time paramedic/full-time detective John Trevor. He has the same name as the lead character on that show New York 187. I wish I could make fun of that name for being stupid idiocy that doesn’t resemble a real TV show, but I remember Detroit 187 happened. (Both still take place where California’s penal code 187 isn’t.) Their scenes together are porno-esque in their lack of quality. That’s not to say any other scene is a masterclass of acting. They’re not. But Emma and Trevor are worse; you just expect at any moment a “I’ve never even been kissed before” will happen and, soon after, fucking. Don’t expect an acting gem in the rough; it’s all rubbish.
When 80% of your film’s scares are tire swing based, you’re fucked.
After a certain point Emma’s family realizes that anorexia and agoraphobia are not good things and send in a therapist. These scenes establish something questionable: Emma’s a shit. She’s not sympathetic. In her first therapy session, she asks if her therapist’s fucking her mom, as he’s a family friend. She also hates her dad because he’s cheap and mistreats her brother (there is no evidence he mistreats the brother). For the second half she’s seeing bullshit in the attic that no one else sees (mainly Satanic symbols, because I guess she’s going for a Jeffrey MacDonald defense), asking Trevor to deliver some research exposition to her and bitching out the therapist. Moss is supposed to be showing growing paranoia that’s justified by her readings of other characters, but she’s terrible. Elisabeth Moss is a great actress on Mad Men and she has especially excelled in scenes in which emotions are ambiguous, hard to read, and the only indication are the performers’ actions, their facial responses, the emphasis on syllables of words. This is not her in The Attic. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t phone it in. She should’ve, though. The Attic doesn’t make or break a career. She should be pissed her Scientology connections got her this bullshit.
She becomes of the belief that her dead twin is alive again due to her parents’ Wiccan resurrection ritual. There’s a nice “what is Wicca? Should I shield my kids from it?” scene starring the coffee loving Dr. Cofi and I wanted to shut off my PS3, throw the DVD into the woods and instead review how the raccoons hang out at my apartment complex’s dumpsters. Lending further evidence to the hypothesis are Satanic tattoos so conspicuous on dad that Charles Manson would consider it a bit much. That the family responds to Emma giving up on college, never eating and not going outside for over a month with resignation and half-hearted opposition belies her therapy talk of them being pricks who…something. Hid a deceased child whose death was inevitable because she had a partially formed brain? If that’s your issue, you’re the type to place a stillborn child on the couch and require every other Sunday “the baby” gets to decide what they watch that night, even if it’s always The Bourne Ultimatum. AKA Rick Santorum territory. It hits a turning point when Beth kills the poor retarded brother, who was only trying to help his Peggy Olson on an excursion. I’d have more sympathy if screenwriter Tom Malloy didn’t play the role as a caricature. It’s a tough role to do, fraught with opportunities to be insensitive even in an innocuous fashion, but Malloy does it like he’s making fun of retarded people. That’s why I don’t feel bad for saying you’d have to be retarded to write The Attic.
She’s so terrible she isn’t even successful at an eating disorder.
Everyone believes she’s responsible for her brother’s death, but Emma remains committed to the Beth theory. I dunno. She hasn’t even appeared as a pale raccoon and threatened to kill my gerbil when I fell behind on Gardockustified, but sure. Finally someone witnesses a twin catfight and lends a reality to the proceedings. John Trevor urges her to leave the house, but Emma’s “I can’t” wins him over and he decides to go find detectives and get things sorted, giving her a gun for protection. No one who watched hit show New York 187 would accept this crackerjack police procedure. Emma finds her parents home, trying to Valium up her orange drink. She thinks they’re conspirators trying to get her out of the way after their Bether Soldier rubbed out retarded brother; they believe her to be a murderous mentally ill girl possibly fucked up on street drugs. Like the NRA says, the only thing that can stop two possible Satanists who are unarmed, it’s a Peggy Olson with a gun given to her by a paramedic detective named after a popular television character. On Mad Men, killing one’s parents is metaphorical, with the exception of Roger having his mother lick a load of toxic envelopes. Here it’s both literal and unintentionally hilarious on part of the actors. I don’t blame them; they know what they were in.
From there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to the revelation that you figured 55 minutes ago: there is no Beth or Satanist cabal, Emma was just crazy. That consequentially means the character named after someone on TV isn’t real either. When Emma points the gun at Trevor, she’s pointing it at herself, and when she pulls the trigger you get the answer to the What If of Peggy Olson Budd Dwyered. You might wonder where she got the gun from if Trevor never existed, and The Attic answers your query with a hearty “fuck you”. That’s the tip of the iceberg, in terms of narrative plot holes and inconsistencies, but I don’t feel like going into it. The Attic‘s not earned the effort. Of course it fucking doesn’t make sense, it’s poorly made!
Like I said when Shailene Woodley had a gun to her head in Insurgent: “Do it.”
I will say fuck you for it setting up The Attic 2. The house is sold again and the teenage-ish girl of the family is not having moving in to the place. She goes up to the attic, moves the cloth off the mirror and John Trevor appears out of nowhere, now claiming to be a realtor. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other, you and I” he says upon his exit. So the house’s modus operandi is ensnaring girls who are just legal into getting killed by their doppelgangers or in a police standoff. What I take most from this post-plot tag is that some parents haven’t taught their daughters the signposts of predators. A girl who received adequate education on the subject would know realtor Trevor is a pervert. Really, for everyone, “unexpected person in attic” is a wonderful indication of diddling intent.
The trap I fell into with this movie is common; I overanalyzed it, figuring certain things signaled something, when in reality it was poorly made bullshit that didn’t try to achieve more than a below average episode of Goosebumps. She’s anorexic, oh, well, the antagonist is an externalized instance of that. Emma says her dad did something and she can’t tell him? Of course it’s a metaphor for abuse! In the end it’s fucking nothing, it’s a stupid ghost mental illness story that fails at doing both. Emma’s never established prior to the house, and at the house she’s nothing more than an actor’s shitty attempt at a crazy person, so at no point are you sympathetic towards her. Really, a horror exploitation Anne Frank picture called The Attic would’ve been a better picture.
Oh, I forgot to talk about the sex scene. Well, it’s terrible.
The next victim says it best when she accuses the house of “maybe it was an Indian burial ground or something.” Maybe something or other is the premise of The Attic. Maybe supernatural pushing. Maybe mental illness. Maybe New Jersey has to kill a percentage of people per year to satisfy the Ice God Morarrr. Maybe the evil twin can turn invisible and bend reality. Ambiguity and a narrative lacking in explication is fine for horror; I recently saw It Follows and loved it for that very reason. But The Attic is clearly the case of a number of ideas nobody knows what to do with; to wit, there’s a cold open with Alexandra Daddario in a bath tub and the movie fails to capitalize on it. If you fuck that up, you shouldn’t make movies.
Ronnie Gardocki
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