Single White Female (1992)

We've all had bad roommates. It's a part of growing up in the modern world – trying to find a place to live, coming up short on cash and having to move in with some psychopath who starts to imitate your every move.

Wait, what?

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Starring: Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Yes, this is one of those 1990s films which has since become a sort of punchline - “don't go Single White Female on me,” cries many a half-joking roommate, crossing their fingers and hoping they don't end up on the front page of the newspaper as the victim in a crime story. But back in 1992, it was just a movie. A weird, weird fucking movie.

The film begins with a woman named Allison (Bridget Fonda), in bed with her husband when her husband's ex-wife conveniently calls and leaves a message saying the two slept together. Wow. That's awfully contrived that she called RIGHT FUCKING NOW, like some silly stage play, isn't it? The husband feebly tries to save face, but really, it's all over. There is nothing to do anymore, and the relationship is dead in the water. Now, it's just time for crying alone on a bed:

"This is even worse than the time I was in Lake Placid!"

She goes through a bunch of potential roommates, most of whom are a little bit weird and say bizarre things, so they're all obviously terrible and not even worth considering. Like this girl:

Yes, it looks hopeless. Who will she ever find as a roommate? Who will spare her from these awful cretins who deserve to die?

But all is not lost – eventually, as she's sitting there crying in the kitchen, a random girl walks in without being invited, which doesn't raise any alarm bells for some reason. The girl, introducing herself as Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), offers to make her tea, but when they try to turn on the sink, it showers them with water.

I wonder how they'll bond when the toilet gets clogged.

Let's recap that: She was crying in the corner, Hedy broke in without even knocking or anything, and the sink exploded on them. Seems like a match made in heaven to me!

So they're pretty much instant BFFs, trying on clothes together and they even get a dog, which they take pictures with and even sleep in the same bed with. It's all pretty candy coated.

I can feel my teeth rotting just watching these scenes!

And hell, Allison even promises Hedy that she'll never get back together with her old husband. Weeeeeellllllllll....

She's basically a big liar!

Yup, they get back together almost instantly, without any scenes of them talking or anything. I guess that's a blessing though, as the film is already close to two fucking hours long. Which honestly begs the question – why did they break up at all? Why not just make a film about a younger couple who weren't living together and the girl got a new roommate? Why have the breakup/marriage plot at all? I guess they really needed the extra 10 minutes tacked onto this already overlong film.

Anyway, Hedra doesn't take their getting back together well – there are even a couple of scenes where she sits around eating and watching TV! The horror!

You would think after The Hitcher, she would be able to take this a little bit better. But I guess not.

At least she has the dog, though – oh, wait, no she doesn't. The dog starts ignoring her too.

I guess the dog is just able to tell which person it should pay attention to because the movie's plot needs to move forward.

Which doesn't make any sense, because Hedy's the one who has been actually paying attention to and feeding the dog! Allison has mostly been ignoring it or not there. But in this movie's world, it wants Allison only, even though she never seems to do anything with it, over Hedy who does everything for it and is always there. But Hedy doesn't take THIS injustice lying down... she retaliates by throwing the dog out a window.

Ha! Take THAT, you dumb dog!!!

If seeing a dog die makes you uncomfortable, just pretend the dog was an advocate for the anti-vaccine movement.

My favorite part of this is how Allison believes the bullshit story Hedy feeds her - the dog jumped out of the window of its own volition. Like yeah, that's something a dog would just do at random, because dogs have no sense or intelligence at all and are just helpless dumb animals who commit suicide at any given moment. Does this movie understand dogs at all? Well, a better question would be, does the movie understand anything? I don't think it really does.

Things get even stranger, though, when Hedy gets a makeover and dyes her hair to look exactly like Allison. This is all extremely weird, but does Allison take any action about it beyond being a little annoyed? Nope! It's just kinda weird, is all. I dunno, if my best friend showed up wearing the same clothes as me with the same hairstyle, I'd stop being friends with them.

I guess Allison does start to get worried about her though, after she finds a box under Hedy's bed containing a bunch of letters and stuff that prove she was lying about her past. Allison confides in her best friend, a gay guy upstairs, who tells her they should definitely call a therapist and get her institutionalized. That seems like the obvious thing to do, but then, I live in real life, and not a strange fantasy land like these characters.

But Hedy takes care of him well enough, so whatever, you know?

If a scene where Hedy sleeps with Allison's husband while pretending to be her sounds like a fucking Dr. Phil episode, well, I wouldn't blame you for thinking so. But I'll give the movie one concession – most Dr. Phil episodes don't end with the woman killing the man with a high heel to the head. Though, that would give me more incentive to watch fucking Dr. Phil.

Not all deaths are equal. Some deaths are cool, like dying valiantly saving a friend from an assassin's bullet. Other deaths are not cool, and this is one of those.

So Allison finds out Hedy killed her husband, and that immediately flips Hedy's evil switch. Like, boom, it's fucking instant – she's suddenly just Saturday-morning-cartoon-character evil. Now, she holds Allison hostage at gunpoint, forcing her to buy plane tickets so they can escape. Hedy leaves for a while and Allison, tied to a chair, tries to escape by turning up the volume on the TV to try and get someone's attention to come save her. Which is exactly the way my father survived his own kidnapping in 1993, so I have an emotional attachment to this scene.

Hedy gets back and is about to finally kill Allison, when Allison decides to kiss her on the mouth, which stops Hedy from doing anything. The least they could have done at this point was add in some hot lesbian action, but no, all they do is kiss and then she rests her head on Allison's lap.

This is just her favorite kind of foreplay.

Well, that's one way to stop from getting killed. Though I doubt it would work in every situation...like, a fucking Mafia hitman probably wouldn't be swayed by that.

So let's run down a checklist of what this movie considers mentally ill people to be: they're super clingy and can turn into serial killers at the drop of a hat for almost no reason. Just remember, people with mental health problems: this could be you! Make sure to feel completely ashamed and feel awful about yourself. This movie's got you figured out.

Oh, and the gay best friend guy survived. How? Did he just hide out in his house pretending to be dead for several days? Why not go to the cops and tell them what's happening? Maybe he's just attracted to the fucking danger of all of it. He does give it his best shot at beating Hedy up, but he can't even do that right, as this isn't the real climax!

You get a B minus for effort though.

The real climax involves Allison escaping and running around in the basement air vents like a fucking Die Hard action scene – I'll give the movie a few points for that, as I honestly didn't think THAT would be in the movie. But mostly that's because it's a complete non-sequitur with where the movie was going.

She's like the John McClane of privileged white girls in NYC.

Eventually, though, all things must come to an end, via a stab in the back:

Et tu, roommate I kidnapped?

What did we learn from this movie? Mental health problems means you're crazy and have always been crazy. There's no hope for you, and you'll probably die by being stabbed in the back.

Seriously, this is a pretty silly flick. It's not that good, with little character or story development – it's all strictly shallow and surface-level stuff, existing only as an excuse for the cheap thrills. To be fair though, the thrills can be kinda fun in a dumb way, and the movie was never outright bad. Jennifer Jason Leigh's acting is actually really good, and the other actors aren't bad either.

Talking about it afterwards, Michelle and I both concluded that this was a product of its time, a relic that seems dated now, but also kind of innocent in a way. Like, they didn't know any better. This was made in a time when the world didn't have the Internet giving everyone a voice, including people with mental health problems who would have said 'hey, this is insensitive as fuck.' The people making the movie were living in a much simpler world, without the societal context to know what they were doing was inaccurate and silly. They just wanted to make a scary, fun movie.

It really is interesting in that way, to watch Single White Female in the context of today's super aware world. Social media did a wonderful thing by allowing minority voices to come out and express their feelings and make the complexities of life more visible – that way, they're not as confusing, and the average person can understand the plight of the mentally ill better now without, you know, having to go to school and learn that shit in books and stuff.

But hey, at least we make great and insightful movies now, that only show mental illness in realistic ways!

... On second thought, I'll show myself out.

Images copyright of their original owners. We own none of them.

REVIEW: The Machinist (2004)

Director: Brad Anderson

Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/

Christian Bale’s 2004 film is one most often noted for the actor’s choice to go so far into character, in order to make the movie the way the director envisioned, that he lost a ton of weight and looked like an anorexic ghoul for the whole thing. He really went all out, and I think that that’s worthy of respect. He’s devoted to his job. Everyone’s got what they’re good at, and all you have in life is the ability to do it and be respected for it by your peers – I think Bale is more than worthy of that respect.

But the film is notable for more than that, such as the directing of horror/thriller master Brad Anderson, who also directed the sublime Session 9 4 years prior. Anderson seems to be channeling Jacob’s Ladder with this, as there are a lot of similarities, but you know what? I welcome it. Jacob’s Ladder is an excellent film, and while at first The Machinist might look like a cheap knock-off, it uses the influences – psychological horror, the surreality, the fact that you never know what’s real – to comment on very real things and talk about an issue just like the original film did a decade prior. This is a film about a man racked with guilt. He cannot sleep and has been losing weight ever since his terrible ordeal (which I won’t spoil here). Far from a shallow brain exercise, this is an emotional and disturbing picture of a man on the edge of himself, starting to crumble.

It builds through discordant, jarring psychological twists even from the beginning, with Bale’s character Trevor immediately thrust into a host of mind bending situations. He meets a man named Ivan who claims to work for his company, but how come no one else has ever heard of him? He finds strange post-it notes on his refrigerator, on his walls. He forms relationships with two women, a prostitute (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a waitress at an airport diner (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), both of which become entangled in the film’s morass of plot.

His personality becomes revealed to us through the subtle things. In the beginning of the film he costs a co-worker at his factory an arm when he becomes distracted and accidentally turns on a machine at the wrong time, and that’s the catalyst for the rest of the film’s decadent insanity. His physical and mental decay are linked together through his tragedy, his terrible mistake. Everything slowly starts to fall apart from his jobs to his relationships.

A lot of these kinds of movies turn out as shallow and vapid intellectual exercises with little real human depth, but Anderson’s directing lets the depth shine through all the macabre creepiness and seedy atmosphere. The Machinist is a movie about a long spiral of degradation and guilt, and it’s made relatable by the fact that this kind of thing happens in real life, if not quite to the same extreme extent. The human mind can only live with so much guilt until it breaks.

The power of the film lies in Bale’s performance and the unfurling but clear realization of exactly what happened to make him the way he is. We have to know, and although the film is obscure and odd from its onset, it takes no shame in clearing the clouds by the end, and yet without making the viewer feel stupid. Once we know, the film stops being a guessing game of ‘what’s real, what’s in his head’ and more of a statement on the human conscience and what we have to do to make things right, to achieve even the most base level of peace. Powerful, sad and unnerving, mostly for how long it took for Bale's character to do the right thing.

REVIEW: The Hitcher (1986)

Director: Robert Harmon

Starring: C. Thomas Howell, Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091209/

“Stop me.”

-John Ryder

Oh hell yeah. This is The Hitcher from the 80s and it’s pretty much awesomeness personified. How can you get cooler than this movie? This is basically an amalgamation of several great genre tropes – horror, Western, action – into a triumvirate of mindblowing coolness. True, it’s none of those genres exclusively, making it a sort of mutt of the movie world, but then, that’s part of the reason why I like it so much. It’s its own thing, and it hails from a time period when that kind of genre-blending made movies into a unique concoction that can only be described as ‘the 1980s.’ True, there was a lot of crap from that time too, but this isn’t one of them; oh boy, it isn’t. Let’s dive right in.

First off, just…the actors. This whole movie is basically just Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell duking it out. The Hitcher is not a film with a boatload of characters, and these guys pretty much carry the movie all by themselves, even if there are a few cops and Jennifer Jason Leigh along for the ride as well – it’s still Hauer and Howell in the driver’s seat all the way, and both actors give a powerhouse performance. Howell, who plays a young guy named Jim Halsey, is a bit of a typical 80s guy, with big hair and a cocky if earnest personality. He had the whole slightly-bad-boy thing going for him that so many 80s thriller and horror characters often had – he might be a bit of a daredevil, but he’s also nice and pretty much harmless in the long run. He does a good job just by virtue of how tough his character is. He’s also smart, which helps out in the film as he must constantly dodge the cops AND Hauer at the same time.

And Hauer, playing the devilish John Ryder, is just great, too. He plays the villain of the film as a mysterious and sadistic hitchhiker with a smile on his face, completely confident in whatever he’s doing. He does a number of completely impossible things and seems to have no goal but to screw with Howell, framing him for several things and just generally pushing him to the edge, the total brink of his sanity. Hauer doesn’t actually have many lines in this movie, but when he does speak, as in the chilling first scene where he threatens very calmly to dismember and kill Howell, he’s just terrifying. What a great performance.

Jennifer Jason Leigh also does a good job as Nash, the humble but tough waitress who Howell befriends on his madcap rush through the desert. She’s cool because she’s so atypical for a female character in these kinds of movies. Usually they’d be all over-sexed and demure and giggly, but Leigh plays the character here as very cool-headed and reserved. She isn’t afraid to fight, she doesn’t wear skimpy clothes and she’s willing to stand up for what she believes in. She just seems like the kind of chick you could be friends with and talk to as well as have a relationship with – if she wanted to, that is; this is not a girl you’ll be dominating any time soon. Oh, and she doesn’t scream in a manner that makes me want to go deaf. Until her tragic last scene at least…but I’m not spoiling anything.

The action is all top notch here. Tons of cool scenes like one where Ryder plows through a gas station in this big truck and sets everything on fire, causing it to explode, or the chase scene where the cops all think Jim and Nash are the real bad guys. This is a very fast paced and exciting film that will keep you on the edge of your seat all the way, and I love it for that. There is not a dull moment. The film ricochets flawlessly from careening action scenes to blood-chilling suspense and horror, and it all kind of muddles together into a coalescence of cool, cool stuff that you won't want to miss if you like either genre at all.

The theme of the film is pure, primal battle, almost animalistic in its feral nature. Jim and Ryder tear across the countryside in an epic, explosion-fueled chase that brings them both to their worst. Ryder is more of a force of nature than a man. Look at the scene where Jim wakes up in jail and finds his cell door open, along with every cop in the building brutally murdered. That is just chilling. No normal human being could do this so mechanically, so thoroughly destructively. It’s more like a tornado of violence swept through than like a man killed these guys one by one.

One of the other scenes that always gets to me is Nash’s death scene. Tied and gagged between two large trucks and threatened to be pulled apart, her life is hanging in the balance and all Howell and the cops can do is watch. By the red and blue lights of the cop cars, Howell and Hauer have one final scene together inside the truck Ryder has hijacked. Jim cannot stop him. It is tragic, affecting and bitter. This is the point where Jim really goes over the edge and is prepared to kill Ryder – you can see it on his face, and in every inch of his stiff and rigid body movements.

And again, how about that opening scene? I briefly mentioned it above, but it really does bear a more elaborate review. Jim, being the earnest 80s guy he is, lets Ryder into his car on the middle of a rainy road. They talk for a bit, but even before anything happens, you can sense something is wrong, as it just feels off. Then they pass a car and Ryder mentions, very casually, that he killed everyone in it, after they picked him up too. “And I’m going to do the same to you,” he says, still quiet and calm. He puts a knife to Jim’s eye. “Stop me,” he says – a challenge.

This pretty much sums up the theme of the movie in a nutshell. Hauer is a destructive and malicious force playing a weird sort of game with Jim all throughout the film. “Stop me” – a challenge that he knows is futile, as he can’t be stopped. Or can he? This whole movie is about Jim’s character getting pushed around more and more until he just can’t take it anymore and snaps at the end. I get the idea that Ryder, this entire time, was just looking for someone worthy to play his twisted ‘game.’ He killed the other people who picked him up off the road because they didn’t have it in them to fight back. Jim did.

Really this is just a classic. The action scenes are awesome, the suspense is racked up high and the whole thing is supremely enjoyable and powerful on every level. It’s an epic thrill ride the way only the 80s could do it. This is a dark, punchy film for people who love tension and grit in their movies, and for those who can’t get enough of that old 80s-style brilliance. One of the best you’ll get. Highly, highly recommended!