Tate Taylor
107 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
But the good thing is that the movie knows it; just as director Tate Taylor knows it; and star Octavia Spencer knows it too, with the Oscar-winning actress giving a swing-for-the-fences performance that trods some of the same territory as Kathy Bates in Misery and other madcap portrayals of that ilk.
Spencer, too, is quite good in a role that seems as inspired by the kind of work Kathy Bates did in Misery as by a white person’s perception of a “sassy” black woman.
“Ma” reminds me just a bit of vastly superior films like “Carrie” and “Misery.”
Of course, if you saw “Greta” — or if you’ve seen “Misery,” “Single White Female” or any other psycho-thriller about a woman with a crazy possessive streak — there is little in this terminally silly schlock exercise that will surprise you.
…that Sue Ann whips out and threatens to cut off while he’s bound to a bed ala Misery .
There are times when Spencer’s character feels less subversive and more like a gonzo Annie Wilkes from Misery; it’s clear that the filmmakers understand how to write Sue Ann in opposition to tropes, less clear that they know how to turn that into something meaningful.
“Ma” reminds me just a bit of vastly superior films like “Carrie” and “Misery.”
What unravels is a film with elements of Carrie and Misery mixed with a John Hughes nightmare.
“Ma” is indebted to horror films of the ’70s and ’80s, most notably “Carrie,” with its warnings about the revenge of outcasts.
Instead, writer Scotty Landes drags the film over several days and devises a backstory that references shades of “Carrie” (1976), “Misery” (1990) and “The Sixth Sense” (1999) with a pinch of dread, but no real terror.
The trauma that Sue Ann absorbed won’t be inherited; her terror concludes in a blaze reminiscent of the final scene of “Carrie,” with a gratuitous magical-Negro flourish.
Four decades ago, Brian De Palma's Carrie asked us to follow a similarly wounded and humiliated young woman -- albeit one with deadly telekinetic powers -- but, by placing us directly in Carrie's horrific life, with an abusive mother and the constant jeering of her peers, it addressed the idea of audience sympathy in intriguing ways (by the end, during Carrie's eventual psychic tirade, everybody -- bad, good, or indifferent -- suffer equally).
Hawkins’ novel drew similarly unflattering “Gone Girl” comparisons when it was published last year, though both Gillian Flynn’s book and David Fincher’s razor-sharp movie adaptation possessed a surgically precise wit — a willingness to merge the preposterous and the satirical — that neither version of “The Girl on the Train” is equipped to match.
Imagine if “Gone Girl” had been developed as a toothless network television pilot — if it had been stripped of its subversive approach to gender dynamics, bludgeoned free of its sadistic gallows humor and shot like a very special episode of “NCIS: Suburbia.”
Though much has been written comparing this film to Fincher’s salacious Gone Girl , they couldn’t be more dissimilar in tone, context, and execution.
Rather than offer any positive definition of its heroines, the film saddles them with tragedies and ugly aspersions: Infertility and adultery are running themes, and the closest the screenplay gets to the zeitgeisty topicality of Gone Girl .
The novel is often compared to Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” another book about an unreliable narrator.
It's "Rear Window" crossed with a soap opera, a throwback to "Single White Female"-style preposterous thrillers, a light ripoff of satirical psychodrama "Gone Girl" and a lurid slice of faux-forbidden post-ironic exploitationist crap a la "Fifty Shades of Grey."
Those who loved the novel will probably enjoy the film but anyone expecting a stirring, powerful drama in the vein of Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning will be disappointed.
It's certainly not Mississippi Burning (1988); it's Mississippi on Low Heat.
But this film is a far cry from, say, “ Mississippi Burning ,” which made white FBI agents into civil rights heroes.
But not Davis, whose monologues – for example, recounting the death of Aibileen’s son – give the script a depth it otherwise lacks, Yet her contributions also seem oddly out of place, as if she just stepped in from the set of Mississippi Burning.
Unlike most "civil rights" films, from "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to "Mississippi Burning," "The Help" doesn't function primarily as a security blanket for white viewers who want to feel good about themselves for not sharing the overtly racist attitudes of the white characters onscreen.
To be clear: In terms of ambition and execution, “Ma” is very far from “Get Out,” though the two pictures do share a producer, Blumhouse Productions, with a thrifty, profitable sideline in politically charged horror.
Like Allison Williams’s character in “Get Out,” Sue Ann uses her visibility as invisibility; she camouflages her power by seemingly conforming to peoples’ idea of her, this lone and unremarkable assistant.
The bullying she faced both in school and at work is framed as the consequences of being “unpopular" when racism and misogynoir were right there for the same producers of Get Out to mine.
At a time when both coming-of-age and horror movies are on the up, it’s logical that Blumhouse, the company behind the Oscar-nominated Get Out and the teen-slasher franchise Happy Death Day , would come up with something like Ma —a mutant that is at once a high school dramedy and a back-to-basics scary movie.
Blumhouse Productions – home of low-budget horror ( Paranormal Activity ), more ambitious genre fare ( Get Out ) and the occasional critically acclaimed drama ( BlacKkKlansman ) – have a rare misfire on their hands with this disappointing psychological chiller, directed by The Help 's Tate Taylor.
In 2017, Blumhouse Productions changed the contemporary horror industry with the release and success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
2016’s The Girl On The Train followed in its wake, and it seems that director Paul Feig ( Bridesmaids, Spy, Ghostbusters) has set up to contribute another story in the same mystery-thriller vein.
In light of media attention over the case, her mommy vlog goes viral.It would be easy to compare "A Simple Favor" to other recent films based on popular, female-driven literary thrillers2014's " Gone Girl " and 2016's " The Girl on the Train " instantly come to mindand, indeed, there are stylistic parallels in their whodunit, howdunit, and whydunit destinations.
Indeed, A Simple Favor: The Movie comes damn close to being a parody of the "murder mystery among the wine moms" genre, typified cinematically by 2014's Gone Girl and 2016's immodestly schlocky The Girl on the Train .
In The Girl on The Train , Emily Blunt, reeling and drunk after breaking up with Justin Theroux, uncovers a web of lies that leads to his messy demise, his comeuppance, in fact.
But the man behind crowd-pleasing comedies including Bridesmaids , Spy and The Heat turns out to be the perfect person to ensure that the adaptation of Darcey Bell’s 2017 novel A Simple Favor doesn’t just come off as another second-rate version of Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train .
Continuing Hollywood’s obsession with film adaptations of pulpy book club page-turners (think Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and Big Little Lies), A Simple Favor is based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Darcey Bell.
Much like The Help (2011), this movie condemns racism as if it’s an easy fix that was solved long ago and not an ongoing complicated struggle.
A play-it-safe crowd-pleaser in the family-friendly vein of “Hidden Figures” and “The Help” — movies that condemn racism as if the problem were already solved rather than still alive and well — “Green Book” may as well be “Driving Miss Daisy” in reverse, focusing on the inevitable fireworks when an elegant black man hires an ill-mannered guy from the Bronx to drive him around the South.
I walked out of “Green Book” thinking I had just seen one of the biggest eventual hits of TIFF—this movie has what I would call the “10th Best Picture Nominee” potential a la “The Blind Side” and “ The Help ” in that it’s wildly crowdpleasing with the kind of easy-to-swallow message that a lot of critics will consider pandering and problematic while mainstream America eats it up.
Those who saw powerful character catharsis in The Help but found distasteful its scene of shit literally served to racists?
Recent films such as Loving and Hidden Figures have explored falsehoods as well as expectations, but films like The Help can also minimize impact by making “casual racism” seem quaint and old-fashioned, most often when the lead character is white.
Better, it oftentimes feels authentic and real, Farrelly rarely pandering to the audience in overtly sentimental or mawkish ways that could transform this story into a distaff Driving Miss Daisy meets The Help variation.
Taylor and screenwriter Scotty Landes are clearly aiming for an edgy John Hughes vibe in the film's many party scenes (the Hughes-penned Pretty in Pink is even referenced in the dialogue), but with the exception of Maggie, the teens are too one-dimensional for us to care about.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
influenced The Girl on the Train (2016), Ma (2019)
Themes Visuals Plot Characters
But here, Taylor (who also directed 2012 best picture nominee “The Help”) deftly layers time, truth and perception into a psycho-sexual thriller that would belong in the same class as “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct,” except the characters in “Girl” are deeper and less cartoony.
Think “Peyton Place” as staged by the Adrian Lyne of “Fatal Attraction.”
Who knew director Tate Taylor ( The Help , Get On Up ) aspired to be Adrian Lyne ( Fatal Attraction , Unfaithful )? Taylor’s R-rated adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ bestselling debut novel The Girl on the Train comes awash in nudity, laden with sex scenes and psychotic violence.
It hinges on the bullshittiest of bullshit plot turns, and Taylor can’t even twist (and I do mean twist) its Fatal Attraction bathtub-style climax into a crowd-pleaser.
Violent in thought and deed, The Girl on the Train is a true thriller reminiscent of Fatal Attraction , the undercurrent of darkness relentless and cruel to Fincher-esque proportions (do note the R16 rating!).
Blunt plays Rachel Watson, bedraggled and drunk, just a boiled bunny shy of Fatal Attraction obsession with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux); his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson); and their baby.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Directed by Robert Mulligan
influenced The Help (2011)
Characters Themes
She makes you imagine that this might be how Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird might have turned out had she become a journalist: Too inquisitive, sensitive and empathetic not to brush aside the common wisdom of the day to see eternal truths about human beings.
Skeeter's book, when it arrives, is credited to "Anonymous," which makes it a group effort as well as a Skeeter ego-boost, and emphasizes the notion that Skeeter is a collaborator and partner rather than a superior (such as Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" or even taciturn Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird").
This is the kind of heartfelt liberal picture that Robert Mulligan (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) or Martin Ritt (“Sounder”) would have made forty or fifty years ago, but with a different subject—what black women working for wealthy white families in Mississippi in the early nineteen-sixties (and, by extension, at any time and place) felt about their lives and about their female employers.
This flawed adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel about black maids and their white employers in early-1960s Jackson, Miss., aims for “To Kill a Mockingbird” significance, but lands in “Steel Magnolias” territory.
Skeeter’s exposé is meant to empower both the subjects and the author, but “The Help’’ joins everything from “To Kill a Mockingbird’’ to “The Blind Side’’ as another Hollywood movie that sees racial progress as the province of white do-gooderism.
Or Ghosts of Mississippi, which makes Medgar Evers’ widow, Myrlie, a supporting player in her own story?
"Ma" is a curious match of director and material with Tate Taylor, known for glossy, rather anonymous mid-budget Oscar bait such as "The Help", "Get On Up" and "The Girl on the Train", getting down and dirty with Blumhouse, the hit-making genre house behind "The Purge" and "Get Out".
Curiously, this film is backed by Blumhouse, the studio behind the recent strand of blatantly socially conscious horrors such as The Purge (2013), Get Out (2017) and Us (2019).
Luego, esto parecía, desde los trailers, un intento más de lectura social estadounidense a través del terror; algo que no es completamente ajeno a Blumhouse, a pesar de su tendencia al horror barato, y que vimos con cintas como Get Out , Cam , Whiplash y The Purge .
It comes from Blumhouse Productions, the scrappy company that profits with misfit, low-budget franchises like “Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” “The Purge” and “Happy Death Day,” in addition to the great “Get Out.”
The ensemble is so delightful, it recalls the 1930s heyday of Hollywood women's pictures, when the contributions of actresses were genuinely prized and such movies as "The Women" and "Stage Door" crowded their casts with Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Katharine Hepburn and other remarkable female performers.
Rather, he’s essentially making a Sean S. Cunningham movie for modern audiences, a The New Kids for an audience in need of that kind of entertainment (especially since it’ll take years for the college scam business to stop weighing all of Lori Loughlin’s old back catalogue down like a stone made of pure irony).
Basic Instinct (1992)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
influenced The Girl on the Train (2016)
Themes Visuals
But here, Taylor (who also directed 2012 best picture nominee “The Help”) deftly layers time, truth and perception into a psycho-sexual thriller that would belong in the same class as “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct,” except the characters in “Girl” are deeper and less cartoony.
Unfortunately, the quality is more on the level of “Sliver” than “Basic Instinct.”
It has a Basic Instinct vibe (although Tate Taylor lacks Paul Verhoeven’s talent for pushing envelopes and wallowing in the salacious).
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Directed by Victor Fleming
influenced The Help (2011), Ma (2019)
Characters
Despite being a southern belle, the inspiration for her character seems to be Butterfly McQueen’s turn as Prissy, the maid in Gone With the Wind who goes to pieces just before uttering the words “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!”
Seventy-one years ago, Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Academy Award when she took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as the house servant, Mammy, in "Gone With the Wind."
Long since the days of Hattie McDaniel, when she famously played one in Gone with the Wind , mammy figures have always been a comfortable, go-to trope in Hollywood for black actresses: someone who’s submissive, dutiful, nurturing and excessively joyful in personality.
It made me think of Carol Clover’s comment in Men, Women and Chain Saws that Jonathan Demme’s 1988 prestige rape-revenge thriller The Accused “ends where many women’s fear beings, at the moment the jury delivers the guilty verdict” and that “its implication that the story is over when the men are sentenced is pure Pollyanaism.”
Psycho (1960)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Ma (2019), The Girl on the Train (2016)
Themes Visuals
In the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, that can get you Psycho .
They linger because Carrie and Psycho and countless other pieces of great genre trash strategically train our gaze on the most sensationalistic aspects of human nature.
Of course, Maggie and a friend inevitably ascend the stairs, where they discover a dark secret about Ma in a suspenseful scene inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
The pieces are easily assembled – this isn’t an obtuse or complicated jigsaw puzzle – but it adds a little Carrie to what might otherwise be a purely Psycho-inspired entry.
Frequently, race-issue films act as if black victims of racism don’t matter at all; Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), about South African leader Stephen Biko, is focused almost entirely on Kevin Kline’s fleeing journalist.
Based on the bestest-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help joins Glory , Cry Freedom , Driving Miss Daisy , and many other noble adaptations in filtering the black experience through the white experience, but credit Stockett (and the film) for conceiving a sneaky end-around.
It's also familiar because Hollywood stories of racism usually skew to the white character leading the charge against injustice (Mississippi Burning, Glory, Cry Freedom).
Instead, writer Scotty Landes drags the film over several days and devises a backstory that references shades of “Carrie” (1976), “Misery” (1990) and “The Sixth Sense” (1999) with a pinch of dread, but no real terror.