Thanksgiving, etc.

Thanksgiving was a quiet affair this year.  Jami's mom was off to Wisconsin to a Covid superpreader event (I wish I was joking) but Thomas graciously consented to being ferried home and back from Ann Arbor on the day (last Thursday, the 26th), if only to eat mashed potatoes, absent-mindedly stroke Martha and chase Sylvester around.

It was nice.  Jami experimented with making an apple crumble in the Instant Pot and it was strangely successful. I rather hoped that he would stay the night but by the time Frederick and I came back from our post-prandial walk, Jami was halfway to Ann Arbor with him - he had a gaming date set up, and had been separated from his computer for uncomfortably long.

Normally this is a good break from teaching, just as enthusiasm for the semester is hitting a low ebb, but this year I hardly feel like I'm teaching, as all I do is wait for papers to roll in in response to materials and lectures I've prepared long before.  I did use the time to put what I hope are the finishing touches on an anthology about Philosophy of Love (seemed like a good idea at the time I sent out the prospectus, but I discovered that, as with many things, what philosophers are saying about love these days seems rather beside the point).  Look for it in your local bookstore some time in 2021, with this cover, if I get my way (it's a bit corny but I was given VERY few options, and had to push not to use an incredibly ugly generic cover)

What else?  Oh yes, Emily had a birthday for which Frederick (with a bit of help from Jami) made a ceramic ornament of a smiling sun and got to go to a socially-distanced gathering yesterday in their backyard.  Here he is waiting to deliver it:

(Please note the BEAUTIFUL hand-painted card that Frederick made on top of the present.)

And here are card and present on display (with Ava in the foreground)

And here's a closer look:

Good thing it happened yesterday, because this was today:

Ah well, back to the grind.

Film review: Remember the Night (1940)

This is supposed to be a Christmas Classic, and it's also written by Preston Sturges (before he started directing himself), AND it stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, who also team up in the greatest Film Noir of all time, Double Indemnity, so (I thought, upon hearing about it) sign me up!  Well, the first thing to note is that their characters are about as far from those in Double Indemnity as you could imagine (even though Stanwyck is putatively a hardbitten shoplifter), and the second thing is that this is more like the Sturges of Sullivan's Travels, particularly the part when Sullivan gets thrown in prison, than the knockabout Sturges of Miracle of Morgan's Creek.  This is much more "heartwarming" than it is "gutbusting."  The funniest part of the film is probably the trial at the beginning.  The film begins with Stanwyck's Lee Leander lifting a valuable bracelet from a jewelry store but then getting arrested when she tries to pawn it.  Then we see a bit of business as the DA insists that his star prosecutor, MacMurray's John Sargent, be the one who prosecutes her, as he's particularly good at getting convictions against women (and as it's just before Xmas, when juries are particularly soft-hearted, this conviction will be especially tricky).  The funny part is Lee's defense attorney, who is a giant ham and has just about convinced the jury that Lee is a victim of hypnotism when John insists that such a charge requires confirmation by an expert witness, who is on holiday until after Xmas, so the trial will have to be adjourned.  This is really because he knows that if the trial were to wind up today the defense will surely win.  However, he feels a bit guilty that Lee will have to spend Xmas in jail, so he asks the bail bondsman, Fat Mike, if he will bail Lee out as a favor.  Mike misunderstands and thinks that John wants to abuse his position and get himself some action from a desperate woman, and so he drops Lee off at John's apartment (which he shares with his (lamentably simple) black butler).  Lee is naturally wary at first, but then relieved and then a bit insulted that it's all a misunderstanding and John has no interest in her.  She also reveals that she's got nowhere to stay because she got turfed out of the hotel she had been staying in for not paying the rent.  John takes her out for a meal 

(and gets seen by the judge who is naturally horrified at the prosecuting cavorting with the defendant) and discovers that Lee, like him, is from Indiana, where he's about to drive to visit his mother.  He offers to drop her off at her mother's and pick her up on his way back, and she takes him up on the idea, after allowing him to convince her that her mother will be pleased to see her.  Her mother is not pleased to see her.  We discover this after some adventures in Pennsylvania, where a detour strands them in a farmer's field 

and they almost get arrested, but Lee's quick thinking allows them to escape.  Anyway, her mother has remarried and is an old harridan who has never forgiven Lee for "borrowing" money that was earmarked for religious purposes, and John quickly decides that she should come and stay at his family farm.  The contrast is stark: where Lee's mother's house looked deserted, with all the lights out, John's mother's farm is ablaze with light.  She lives there with her spinster sister Emmy (with whom she has a very warm, if bickering relationship) and a younger male relative, Willie (played by voice-of-Pooh Sterling Holloway) who seems as simple as John's butler.  

They welcome Lee into the bosom of the family, even though John lets his mother know that she's a thief.  

Over the Xmas break, Emmy becomes convinced (and is happy about it, not knowing about the thief business) that John and Lee are in love, and she also convinces Ma Sargent, who is less pleased.  She goes to Lee and gently convinces her that it would be selfish of her to wreck John's career (which he had to work hard to build, particularly given their poverty when he was little).  

This weighs heavily on Lee, and although John is smitten, and takes her on a detour through Niagara Falls, and plans to tank his prosecution, she is torn.  Back in the courtroom there is further jeopardy: the judge who saw them at the restaurant is divulging his misgivings to John's boss, and says that John will probably sabotage the prosecution.  Will everything go wrong?  Will love tank all that John has worked for?  Can Lee love herself?  All is revealed in the thrilling, bittersweet conclusion.

Film review: Spy (2015)

There are some people who are just funny.  They exude it.  Just their very presence can be funny.  Bill Murray is an example.  This can have its downsides, at least for those people, if they have ambitions to do serious acting.  Watch Bill Murray in The Razor's Edge, a passion project for him, and he just can't come across as sincere.  Anyway, Melissa McCarthy is another.  Her version of Sean Spicer made the early days of the Trump years almost bearable.  But another trouble that a lot of these people encounter is that filmmakers seem to get lazy when they've got such people on board.  It's almost as if they think the film doesn't have to be good.  Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams and yes, Bill Murray have been in more than their share of stinkers as a result.  But Spy is an example of doing it right: have an actual film with an actual plot as the sturdy scaffolding that can contain your funny person's brand of riffing.  And it helps to surround her with a ton of talented co-conspirators.  The basic premise is that McCarthy is the eyes and ears, sitting behind a computer in the basement of CIA headquarters, of handsome hot-shot agent Jude Law.  

But really she should be an agent herself, it's just that she's got a crush on Law's Bradley Fine, and he persuaded her that they were the perfect team.  But then, after the opening mission where he (accidentally) kills a Hungarian villain who has his own nuke, he is tracking down said villain's daughter (the only person left who might know the nuke's whereabouts) when she kills him, but only after announcing to the camera contact lens through which McCarthy's Susan Cooper can see what he sees that she knows all of the CIA's top agents in the field and will dispatch any that follow her.  This is Susan's chance to go into the field herself, and because she has a (tough as nails) female boss (Allison Janney) who is not persuaded by the male agents' scoffing at Susan's suggestion, she gets her wish (and her basement pal, played by British comedian Miranda Hart, 

slides over into her old seat).  Susan isn't exactly being given Jude Law's job - she's only supposed to observe and report, and she is given a string of absurdly dowdy and demeaning aliases, 

but so disgusted is top CIA agent Rick Ford (Jason Statham - why are most of the CIA's employees British? - who sends himself up nicely)

by her appointment that he quits in disgust and will show up in the field complicating matters for her.  There follow lots of highjinks, chase scenes and stunts that, while played for laughs, are as well executed as any Bond film (well, maybe any Roger Moore Bond film), 

and some truly gnarly kills.  Is it a good film?  No, not really.  Is it a film that I laughed out loud at more than at any film in recent memory?  Absolutely!  And that's all down to McCarthy, who is given space to be just very very funny.  See it if you need cheering up, or even if you don't.  There's even a twist that neither of us was expecting.

Film review: Housekeeping (1987)

For about fifteen years after I first saw it (I believe as part of a double bill with Chariots of Fire at the Wellesley cinema in Wellington), I would probably have said if asked that Gregory's Girl was my favorite film.  For that reason I have long wanted to see Housekeeping, the one good American film by the same director, Bill Forsyth.  And now, thanks to the Criterion Channel, I can happily report that it is his masterpiece.  Apparently he said of it that it was an advert intended to get the viewer to read the novel (by Marilynne Robinson), and I fully intend to, now.  The film, which is set in the 50s, is about two sisters (Lucille, small, no-nonsense, Ruthie, tall, dreamy) 

in the care of their slightly ethereal aunt Sylvie.  

They arrive in this situation through a series of misfortunes.  First, their father leaves their mother (this happens before the film), then their mother takes them from their apartment in Seattle into rural Idaho where she drops them off at the house (in a town called Fingerbone) she grew up in and tells them to wait for their grandmother to come home.  She then drives off and drives her (borrowed) car into a lake.  The grandmother does her best to raise the two young girls but Ruthie, who gives a voiceover to the film that is reassuring once you know how it ends, reports that in the seven years she did so, the only person younger than 60 that they saw was the mailman. The grandmother is understandably extra protective of the girls, because not only did her daughter commit suicide, she lost her husband (a figure whose presence looms over the film) in a rail accident when the train he was on went off the rail bridge that goes out of the town and plummeted through the ice, leaving only a couple of suitcases and a lettuce as evidence of the over 200 humans on board).  

The grandfather had moved to the town from his prairie home drawn by the lure of the mountains, and indeed the surrounding mountain scenery is breathtaking.  Anyway, the grandmother dies after seven years, when the girls must be around 14, and they are left alone in the house the grandfather had bought.  Briefly, a couple of the grandmother's sisters move in with them, but they are used to life in the city and can't stand the cold, so they invite Sylvie, who is an itinerant wanderer, to come and stay, whereupon they abruptly depart.  The girls are initially suspicious of Sylvie, who seems, to put it mildly, unreliable, and has strange habits, like hoarding newspaper and tin cans, 

but gradually Ruthie is drawn to her.  Lucille, on the other hand, wants a more normal life and realizes that Sylvie's strangeness is making them local pariahs.  She starts to drift away.  And that's more or less the film.  Sylvie draws Ruthie in and repels Lucille.  Sylvie is played in a career-defining (by her own admission) performance by Christine Lahti, while the girls are non-actors who more-or-less never acted again.  Apparently they were recruited from locals in Canada, where the film was made.  A small tale, but everything is in the telling, and it's done beautifully.  I am amazed at how assured it is, given Forsyth's weakness for whimsy, particularly in the progressively poorer American films he would make.  Perhaps he felt a duty to the novel.  Anyway, it has very funny moments, but the overall feel of the film is poignancy about what you lose as you grow up.  I found the final shot rather uplifting (Lucille has already left, and Ruthie is at risk of being taken away because of a nosy cop, so things are coming to a head) but Jami found it depressing.  You be the judge - I say that this is where the fact that Ruthie is telling the story in voiceover is important.  Anyway, if you haven't watched it, you're in for a treat.  But ask yourself - are you a Ruthie or a Lucille?

Film review: The Caine Mutiny (1954)

Another recommendation from one of Jami's law professors, and a right rip-snorting tale.  Actually, it was surprisingly slow and grounded.  This starts with the general seediness of the Caine itself, which is an unglamorous minesweeper.  Our protagonist is Ensign Willie Keith (played in one of his tragically few roles by Robert Francis, who looks like an All-American quarterback), 

whom we first see graduating (supposedly from the Naval Academy, but it's obviously (to us, anyway) filmed at USC) and experiencing a tug of war between his mother and the woman he loves, a nightclub singer.  His mother is a wealthy bigwig and so disapproves both of the Naval career and the woman.  But this whole subplot is tiresome and boring, so I won't return to it.  Next Keith boards the Caine and is shocked not just by how dilapidated the Caine is ("it's the rust that's holding it together") but how sloppy its crew are.  Facial hair, untucked shirts (or no shirts at all) and when he's introduced to his captain, he's sitting in his cabin wrapped only in a towel.  However, Keith gets on well with the crew, especially aspiring novelist Lt. Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray) and straight arrow #2 to the captain, Lt. Steve Maryk (Van Johnson - who has an amazing facial scar), 

and even the grunts, which include Lee Marvin in a surprisingly small role as "Meatball".  All goes fairly well until the captain is replaced by Captain Queeg, played, of course, by Humphrey Bogart, in one of his last roles and not looking too healthy (which works fine for the role).  At first, this is just what the doctor ordered for Ensign Keith, because Queeg is equally appalled by the sloppiness and immediately institutes draconian rules about personal appearance.  But he soon takes this too far and is berating Keith for not enforcing the "no untucked shirttails" rule and ignoring the helm, when the Caine circles round and severs the cable that is dragging the minesweeper thingie that is part of a naval exercise they're involved in.  Instead of admitting his mistake and retrieving the thingie, Queeg, to avoid being last back in port, insists on claiming that the cable was sub-standard and just snapped, and that it is somebody else's job to collect aforementioned thingie.  Things get steadily weirder, not helped by Queeg's nervous habit of clacking two ballbearings in his hand when agitated.  

Worst is when they actually see action (the year is 1944) and the Caine is supposed to escort some boats full of Marines as near the beach as possible, Queeg first gets too far ahead of them (presumable to avoid the shelling the boats are getting) and then turns tail and runs before getting near enough to the beach.  

This earns him the nickname "Yellowstain" from the crew.  Afterwards he gathers the officers and gives a sort-of-half-admission-half-justification of the failing, which just makes him look contemptible.  Soon afterwards our writer Keefer starts whispering in Maryk's ear that Queeg is a classic paranoiac (clearly the psychological obsession du jour), and that he, Maryk, might have to relieve him of command.  At first Maryk angrily dismisses this kind of talk - he's no fan of Queeg, but he's a loyal Navy man - but we soon see Maryk worriedly reading from a book called "Mental Disorders", and writing in his journal at some other strange behavior.  Worst of all is the Strawberry Incident, where Queeg demonstrates (using sand) 

that the portions the officers ate of frozen strawberries would have left at least a pint behind, and yet there are no frozen strawberries, ergo some were stolen!  This, he insists, is because somebody has made a copy of the key to the larder, something that happened when he was a young ensign and he solved a cheese-theft.  However, in reality the mess-workers ate the strawberries, and what's more, a friend of our main three characters reveals to them that he told Queeg he saw this happen, but Queeg refused to believe him and insists that the entire ship be searched.  Maryk is finally convinced that Queeg should be reported to the Admiral (who is in a nearby ship, as they are traveling in a fleet at the moment) and convinces Keith and Keefer to come with him.  But once there, Keefer, the man who started this whole thing, gets cold feet, rightly pointing out that none of the incidents that have convinced them will sound convincing to someone on a well-run ship.  So they return to their ship, in a hurry, because a typhoon is coming.  And it's in the typhoon that Queeg's nerve snaps, and Maryk is forced to relieve him of command to stop him steering the ship to disaster.  Hence, the title.  Thus begins the trial that makes up the final act of the film, and José Ferrer, playing Maryk's defense attorney, comes in to steal the film.  

And the trial manages to be gripping without being played for melodrama (a bit like the one in Anatomy of a Murder), complete with a surprise betrayal and a Bogart meltdown.  Solid meat-and-potatoes 50's epic film-making, and a great late performance from Bogart, proving that he could play tragic and weaselly just as well as heroic and hard-bitten.

Film review: Save The Green Planet! (2003)

 

The Criterion Channel has a collection of "New Korean Cinema" (presumably to ensnare those intrigued by Parasite), and I have to say it's rather a dark and grim assortment.  So I picked this one as looking light and fluffy and comedic.  Hm.  While there are some definite Kung Fu Hustle (yes I know that's from Hong Kong) moments, the underlying plot is about a man who has endured nothing but tragedy and abuse his whole life apparently descending into madness and taking it out on those he identifies as most responsible for his misery.  The film starts with him (Lee Byeong-gu) showing his seemingly slightly-simple ex-circus-tightrope-walker girlfriend a film he has put together explaining how aliens have infiltrated humanity and one in particular (who has "royal DNA") must be stopped from communicating with the "prince" of the aliens.  This one turns out to be the CEO of a chemical company, which, coincidentally Lee and his mother used to work for, until she fell into a coma.  We see him (Kang Man-shik) being dropped off home after a drunken night out and stiffing the cab driver, and in general demonstrating that he is an obnoxious asshole.  He is then violently (well, perhaps it's his fault for resisting) kidnapped by Lee and Sun-ni (the girlfriend, who calls Lee "Honey") dressed in giant plastic bags and fantastic headgear with electronics to shield from the alien telepathy.  

He is then taken to Lee's mountain (well, steep hill) top compound and strapped in a chair in the basement, his head shaved (because his hair is how he telepathically communicates with the prince) and menthol rubbed into his feet (one of the alien weak spots, along with the eyes and genitals).  

Lee proceeds to question Kang about alien activity to his apparent bemusement, while the lunar eclipse (a deadline of some sort, I can't quite remember why) approaches.  Kang surprises Lee by (a) being surprisingly tough and defiant, and (b) recognizing him and remembering that his mother is in a coma, and his previous girlfriend was beaten in a protest (presumably against the chemical firm).  Meanwhile two groups are trying to find Kang: one the main group of cops led by a fatuously self-satisfied, very short chief, and the other (much more competent) consisting of an ex-detective who was fired in some kind of scandal, and the young hotshot who's supposed to be part of the former team but knows full-well that the ex-cop is the true professional.  

MEANWHILE, while Lee is out getting more menthol (and is bullied by an old tormentor, on whom he will get clever revenge before the film is out) Kang gets into Sun-ni's head and convinces her to run off back to the circus.  With just him and Kang, Lee seems to get even more unhinged, which is not good news for Kang, although he almost escapes, and inflicts some violence of his own on Lee.  Meanwhile the ex-cop finds Lee's compound, but is almost convinced by Lee that he's harmless, when he finds human bones in Lee's dog's kennel, and is trying to call in support when Lee catches up with him and sics his bees (yes, bees) on him.  There are several twists and turns after that, including Kang reading Lee's diary and crying over his awful life (before he lost his mother, he lost his father in a mining accident - this film doesn't have much faith in corporations' concern for their workers and the public at large), not that it stops him trying to kill him later - and the return of Sun-ni.  And then a final twist that perhaps you might see coming.  Am I glad we watched it?  I guess I am: it wasn't what I was hoping for, but it was utterly engrossing, and very stylishly made.  There's the weird tonal shifts familiar from a lot of Asian films, from mawkish sentiment to slapstick to extreme violence.  And other than "a lot of people are shitty" and "unchecked capitalism is shitty", I'm not sure what the message is.  Watch it and tell me.

Film review: Blonde Crazy (1931)

I enjoyed this film even more than I expected to.  You really can't go wrong with either Jimmy Cagney or Joan Blondell, and together they're even greater than the sum of their parts.  This doesn't get great reviews elsewhere, the general consensus being that the plot is hackneyed but elevated by the great chemistry of the leads, and while I agree with the latter part, I actually really enjoyed the plot, too.  Perhaps it's because this kind of plot, about grifters grifting during the Depression was played to death at the time, but it's certainly not boring when watched from a 2020 perspective.  The film starts with Blondell's Anne Roberts arriving to interview for a job (in "linens") at a hotel.  Cagney's Bert Harris spots her walking through the lobby, and though he knows the job's been filled by another bellhop's girlfriend, he convinces the woman in charge (sweettalking her along the way) that this is actually the person she hired, then goes to the bellhop and pays him enough so that he'll tell his girlfriend that the hotel changed its mind.  Anne is cautious about Bert, as he's super slick and cocky (and soon deals him the first of the many mighty slaps she administers throughout the film), but she obviously also finds him appealing, in part because they're both smart and ambitious and chafing at the bit in the hotel.  He wins her over by ripping off a pervy customer who was trying to hit on her (and got slapped and pearls stuffed down his trousers (you'll have to watch it now) for his trouble) 

in the first of his many schemes.  So many schemes has he that he keeps a scrapbook of them, and pastes new ones out of the paper every time they're reported.  

After making some money off his hooch-selling business, and much more out of a scam where a co-conspirator dressed as a cop helps them chisel a cool $5000 out of a married man the cop catches with the hooch and Annie in an illegally parked car, they're off out into the world.  Bert thinks they'll be sharing a train car, but Anne has planned ahead and booked her own berth, once again thwarting Bert's advances.  Next we see them, they're in the big city, living high, but keeping an eye out for scams.  Bert thinks he's identified a fellow scam-artist when he sees "Dapper" Dan Barker (played by the very familiar-looking (presumably because he's in a bunch of films we've seen, including The Asphalt Jungle) Louis Calhern) hanging around, and pretty much immediately Dan invites him in to a scheme involving counterfeit $20 bills.  Anne isn't so sure about Dan, and it turns out she's right, as Dan and his own blonde accomplice Helen trick Bert out of the $5000.  Too ashamed to tell Anne about it, Bert cooks up a rather ingenious scheme of getting a jewelry store to deliver a diamond bracelet to the fancy house of a family whose daughter is getting married to some other bigwig, and then telling the butler that it's been delivered by mistake and giving him the card he got off the jewelry store employee as identification.  He then pawns the bracelet for $5000.  But he plots revenge, and knowing that Dan is headed to New York, he and Anne head off there.  However, on the train, Anne bumps into a very young Ray Milland, who is in some fancy Wall Street job and has a cultured family and reads poems, and is a pathway to a better life.  

Bert pouts, but Anne helps him scam Dan for much more than he ever took off them after having bumped into Dan and convinced him that she and Bert had parted company (which prompts Dan to boast about tricking Bert, which in turn causes her to grill Bert about how he really got the $5000).  Anyway, the scheme that tricks Dan involves a reverse grift, where he is made to think he's scamming, but is in fact himself getting fleeced.  

And at the end he finds a note that the scheme he fell for was in Bert's scrapbook, something he'd been shown but had only mocked.  Bert is overjoyed at their haul and decides that now is the time to visit Europe and finally learn what life is like for swells.  He proposes to Anne, but she rebuffs him.  She says she would have married him if he'd asked earlier (what, when she was slapping him all the time?) but all he cares about is the money, and now she's fallen for Ray Milland.  So she marries him, an event Bert watches from a cab across the street, before heading off to Europe on his own.  However, it bores him and he's back in under a year, and is seen moping around in New York, his former associates trying to persuade him to get back in the game, a game for which he's lost the taste.  But then Anne shows up again and reveals that Ray Milland has got into trouble.  He took money from the company's safe to "invest" in a scheme, and has lost it all, and an audit is coming in a couple of days.  Bert takes a certain amount of bitter satisfaction from the fact that Mr. Goody-two-shoes poetry-lover is just a cheap embezzler, and offers to help the couple out by "robbing" the safe so nobody will ever know that the money had already been taken.  But all is not as it seems in a tense final ten minutes-or-so.  Will Anne realize she should've been with Bert all along?  Will Bert survive and stay out of prison?  You'll have to watch it and see.  Top entertainment, and as always, Cagney is just a magnetic screen presence.  He almost literally crackles with energy, and all the little faces he makes and dance steps he throws in just make him an utter joy to watch. (The way he says "Honey", his pet name for Anne, is completely infectious - you'll never be able to say it otherwise afterwards.) He is what they used to call a "pistol".  Oh, and this film features one of his most oft-imitated lines: "That dirty double-crossin' rat!"  Oh, and this is definitely a pre-code film: you get to see Joan Blondell in the bath, and Bert has to root around in her bra to get the money he needs to borrow off her.

And despite some reviewers pooh-poohing the quality of the material, there are some truly great lines in this film.  Bert says that it's not the age of chivalry, it's the age of "chiselry", for example.  Really, you can't go wrong with this film.

Film review: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Four years ago, things were already going for Trump when we tried to distract ourselves by watching a movie, specifically this one.  But it didn't work.  I remember very little about it, and I'm sure if I watched it again I'd get PTSD.  THIS time, I avoided ANY election news all election day (yesterday) and as a result could actually enjoy the film.  Is it a great film?  No.  But it's certainly not boring, and it has several good performances (perhaps surprising given that the only recognizable face is Robert Forster, in his last role) and good writing.  I'm a sucker for werewolf movies, perhaps because I saw Children of the Full Moon at a very impressionable age, not to mention the all-time classic American Werewolf in London fairly shortly thereafter.  (If you know me you will have heard me tell the story of how my evil father made me take the compost bucket to the compost heap, at the bottom of the garden, after dark (because I hadn't done it during the day) and when I got there, and was about to spring back to the light of the house, I heard a snuffling sound that seemed deafening.  I nearly added my own contribution to the compost heap right then and there, but when I dared to look round, I could see it was in fact a hedgehog.  No such thing as a were-hedgehog, at least to my knowledge.)  Anyway, it's surprising how few good ones there are (probably the next best is Dog Soldiers) and this one got good reviews, so...  What's that you say?  What's the plot?  Well: it begins with a couple of city slickers showing up at a rented cabin in the small Utah ski town of Snow Hollow.  After getting into a disagreement with some redneck locals, they retire to the hot tub, at which point I asked Jami to guess which one would be the one to die.  This is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been, as there's been a trend (since Halloween) of having a "final girl" (they even named a film after this trope) who survives the monster.  But in this case, he goes inside to shower, prior to getting it on, but he hears something, and when he comes back out to check on his beloved ("Brianne"), she is in bloody chunks.  We then get introduced to our actual protagonist, John, who is the son, and next-in-line, to the local chief of police (Forster, who is effortlessly good in the sadly little he has to do).  

He's also the writer and director of the film, so it's no surprise he set aside the juiciest role for himself.  Background: he's a recently-separated father of a teenage daughter, who is also a recovering alcoholic whose mother abandoned him and his father (may have died, I can't remember) when he was a kid, which the daughter later suggests may be responsible for some of his issues.  This is a bit of a theme for the writer/director, as one can gather from reading the synopsis for his other film.  Meanwhile, the killer strikes again, this time a female ski instructor, and we actually see the killer, and it is indeed a giant bipedal wolf-man.  

This would not please John who is insistent that all suggestions (sparked by giant wolf footprints, copious hair samples and giant bite-marks on the corpses) that it is an animal are mistaken, and the killer is just a man.  He gets quite insistent about this (he has a bit of a hair-trigger temper, and is wont to rant loudly about the incompetence of his fellow officers - and often fire them (after punching them first)).  Helping him (his father isn't much help, as he has a dicky heart and should've retired), is the long-suffering Detective Julia Robson (whom I swear I recognized, and I have now realized that she's the tall one from Garfunkel and Oates).  Where John is all raging toxic masculinity (although he's not actually sexist - he respects Julia more than any of his male colleagues, he just has a tendency to try to solve things with his fists), she is all no-nonsense, low-key, conflict-minimizing problem-solving.  Meanwhile, the wolfman's next victim is a mother and toddler daughter, the mother who had come in to tell the police about a guy who was harrassing her and they didn't listen, which adds to John's self-hatred.  As well as panic about his teenage daughter in a town where young women are being torn to shreds.  And guess what, she decides to sneak out and meet her boyfriend in his parked car...  

What's best about this is that it's got no fat on it.  It's well-constructed, well-acted, has some good little horror bits (although none of the kills can approach this one in AWIL) and a nice little denouement.  And the right person ends up as the new chief of police.  Check it out on Amazon!