Movies
Wake
“At moments Wake is stylish, creepy and downright bizarre (don’t miss the wonderful sequence in the 24/7 diner). Even though Wake falls short at the end, Feehan still puts on display his ability to craft a well-rounded film and will be on my radar from here on out.”
Chad Feehan got his feet wet producing the classic (and still unreleased) All the Boys Love Mandy Lane before jumping behind the camera for Wake, his Shining-inspired psychological thriller premiering at the SXSW Film Festival this month.
His producing talents have an immediate effect on this low budget indie project as Wake is tonally the same as Many Lane, only a completely different subgenre. Wake carries a bleak, nitty-gritty tone that’s strung together by the cinematography, set design and acting prowess of Josh Stewart (a highly underrated actor in Hollywood).
Driving to a wedding in Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert, Paul (Stewart) and Adrienne (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) pull off the highway and into Roy’s Motel and Café. This roadside artifact proves to be a strange and surreal place with an unsettling mix of travelers that are all intertwined in some cosmic way.
While the first two acts are satisfying and incredibly engaging, the finale is so ill-conceived and obvious that it’s the first movie of this new decade that I exclaimed, “Man, that was so the 2000’s.” To prove my point, I’ll let you in on a little plot point that happens in the opening segment; If you can’t figure out the twist, I don’t know what to tell you: On their way to Los Angeles, Paul and Adrienne almost crash (close call!). Hmmmmmmm….
Even if Wake carries the most obvious twist possible, a well-told story can negate the cliché oversight (Scorsese proves this with Shutter Island). Unfortunately, Feehan treats the audience as feeble morons and crashes the movie into a brick wall. All of the build, all of the intrigue and all of the oddities are explained away in fine detail leaving nothing to the imagination. In fact, he goes as far as to literally seal up every single loose end as to ensure nobody leaves the theater with a thought bubble over their head. The best movies leave you guessing, and that’s a fact.
With a significantly shorter and more ambiguous finale Wake could have really been a solid mind-f*ck. At moments Wake is stylish, creepy and downright bizarre (don’t miss the wonderful sequence in the 24/7 diner). Even though Wake falls short at the end, Feehan still puts on display his ability to craft a well-rounded film and will be on my radar from here on out.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
You must be logged in to post a comment.