Crimson Peak

I felt sorry for the actors. Guillermo del Toro's mashup of every gothic storyline known to man is only terrifying in its cheesiness. I have never been a fan of Del Toro's excessively corny fantasies, and this one takes the cake. A goulash with chunks of plots from Cinderella, Jane Eyre, vampire stuff, ghost stories and heavy borrowing from movies like The Shining, Crimson Peak is heavy-handed and overstuffed.
Where to begin? Young Edith Cushing (as in Peter Cushing, one supposes) consorts with ghosts. The ghost of her dead mother appears to her with a warning about bewaring of Crimson Peak, whatever that means. Edith (Mia Wasikowska, a good actress that seems to be stuck forever in the 19th century), soon falls in love with the dashing and charming Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston, valiantly giving it his all). He has a somber sister, Lucille, (Jessica Chastain, who smartly understands that the only way to go is camp) who is suspiciously jealous of Edith. They live in a remote and ghastly house somewhere in England, where they manufacture red clay or red pigment that comes from clay, the color of blood. I won't go into the intricacies of a plot that Del Toro doesn't bother clarifying. All I can say is that one look at that dilapidated mansion out of the Chapultepec amusement park, and Edith should have either redecorated or run for her life. That she does neither is a sign that the director has no sense of humor, or of human nature.
The movie is a hodgepodge of ideas that he didn't really think through. I was convinced, for instance, that this was a solidly PG-13 movie until a ridiculous sex scene and then a plot about incest that seems to have sprung from the feverish imagination of a 14-year old. The motivations of the Sharpes are unclear: do they need money to keep the family business going, or they need blood because they are evil? Beats me. I defy anyone to recount the plot of this movie coherently.
Del Toro's ghosts look like the kind of Halloween decorations you buy at J.C. Penney's. They are too cheesy to be really scary. I pined for movies like The Innocents or even The Sixth Sense, in which the apparitions are deceptively real and truly spooky, not ghoulish puppets that are ridiculous rather than scary. Apparitions that are manipulated with clanging sound effects are not honest scares, and this is the cardinal sin of this movie. A horror movie may be cheesy and improbable and stupid, but if it manages to scare us, it has done its job. That is not the case here. If people jump, it is not because Del Toro knows how to stage a scary scene, it's because he uses loud sound effects instead.
The production design is meaninglessly cluttered, the costume design is an exaggerated parody of Victorian dress; even the nightgowns have puffed sleeves. The wigs are outrageously phony, the lighting makes everything look like a garish disco in the 1980's.  The somber elegance of real Victorian gothic, the perverse stylishness of an Edward Gorey are absent here.
I was reminded of Mexican telenovelas. Chastain, in particular, seems to be channeling the evil villainess Catalina Creel in Cuna De Lobos (Cradle of Wolves, a fabulously campy Mexican soap from the 80s). I also thought of cheesy Mexican horror films like El Santo Vs The Zombies. It is not inconceivable that these are some of Del Toro's influences. The question is whether he knows this. He seems to take his own cheesiness too seriously.

Maps To The Stars

The evil sister to Birdman, this bitterly vicious satire by David Cronenberg, based on a novel by Bruce Wagner, is happily, and like Cronenberg's best films, a movie about human horror. Maps To The Stars is about the needy, insecure, monstrously warped egos inbred by Hollywood culture, but in contrast to the genial Birdman, which is a feel-good movie in which vanity motivates creativity, Maps To The Stars is about egos so selfish and diseased they sow nothing but destruction.
The movie is at times clunky, the story and its symbolism are heavy handed and not clearly mapped out. The script strains to organize the complicated plot, in which the central metaphor is incest. The writing (the script is adapted by Wagner from his novel) is uneven. The satire is sharp but the plot is fuzzy. Still, Cronenberg meanders down extremely dark, uncomfortable places and summons his formidable capacity to shock.
More than just a facile look at Hollywood's notorious nastiness, Maps To The Stars is like a Freudian funhouse. It's a labyrinth of selves untethered by decency, empathy or common sense, that leads back to what made them sick in the first place, a recurring nightmare. Fame + Money = Crazy. Maps To The Stars makes Birdman look like a kiddie ride at Disneyland. The ignorant filth that comes out of the mouths of teenage actors in this movie makes the hacked Sony emails sound like they were written by Emily Post.
A spectacular Julianne Moore, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes, plays Havana Segrand, a hilariously vapid, damaged, prematurely fading movie star. Havana is the product of a traumatic childhood, courtesy of her dead movie star mother, who she believes or fantasizes, it isn't clear which, sexually abused her as a child. This being Hollywood, a remake is being made of the movie that made her mother famous, and of course, Havana wants to play her mom like a cat chasing its tail.
A hot mess of insecurity and narcissism, Moore is pitch perfect as an emotionally tortured character who boasts the casual cruelty of the utterly self-involved, complete with perky boobs and a perfect L.A. accent. She is scarily good. Havana is not the main character in the movie, but Moore steals it, and you realize how much you miss her whenever she is not onscreen. I am kind of freaking out at the Jungian implications of the same actress playing the Alzheimer's ridden neurosurgeon of Still Alice the same year as this crazy Hollywood bimbo. In my humble opinion, she won the Oscar for the wrong movie. Those endearing journalists from the Golden Globes got it right when they nominated her for both films. Not to take anything away from her sensational work in Still Alice, but her turn as Havana Segrand is an equally brave tour de force. She goes through every feeling, genuine and fake, known to man. She is, as they say in this movie, beyond.
An excellent John Cusack plays Stafford Weiss, a wealthy self-help guru who, in true self-help guru fashion, only cares about his book tour, even as his family collapses around him. Cusack approaches the phony he plays with icily controlled glee. Stafford gives expensive and painful massages and whispers psycho-spiritual mumbo jumbo to clueless stars who confuse his shtick with therapy.
Weiss has spawned a little monster, Benjie (the creepily good Evan Bird), a Bieber-like bundle of nastiness; a rotten, entitled kid who makes millions for his incompetent parents by working in crappy sequels and sitcoms. In comes the mysterious Agatha (Mia Wasikowska, excellent, as usual) all the way from Florida, with burn scars in her face. She lands a job as Havana's personal assistant, thanks to her close Twitter "friend" Carrie Fisher, who appears as herself in a perversely funny cameo. Down this Tinseltown rabbit hole everyone is connected, not only through schmoozing, name-dropping and other, more sexual activities, but by virtue of sharing the same nightmares and stories; by virtue of the ongoing incest between the movies, the lives, rehabs and deaths of movie stars, and the starfucking of executives, wannabes and audiences.
Cronenberg pulls no punches satirizing low hanging fruit like these Hollywood types, but as a master of horror he is not content with just skewering a town that skewers everybody for a living. There is something visceral in his judgement. What to make of Benjie's mother (Olivia Williams), who both pimps out her child and lets him abuse her, refusing to set a single lousy boundary? And she is not alone. Every adult is powerless around Benjie. This kid is a cash cow, hence he can be vile to everyone.
As comical as Havana is, her life is painful, lonely, full of drugs and debasement, even as she goes on eighteen thousand dollar shopping sprees.  The kids in this movie are so beyond help, it's actually shocking. Hollywood is shown to be such a den of iniquity that only violent, vengeful purification is in order. Maps To The Stars is a welcome addition to the wonderful genre of acid movies about Hollywood like Sunset Blvd., The Player, and Mulholland Drive, and if it's not quite as polished as these movies, it is deliciously disturbing.