"Green Room" Asks the Question: How Will Today's 20-Somethings Fare in a Horror Movie Crisis?

Green Room is an abysmal new horror-thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) about a punk-metal band trapped inside a dive-bar by a bunch of white supremacists. The movie recalls, loosely, the exploitation shockers from the 70s like Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, but Green Room never builds to the fever pitch of Last House or other similar films that, as reprehensible as most of them are, at least had the courage to embrace total insanity. Green Room certainly embraces its own gruesome and unpleasant nature, but this movie never loses control, never just goes full-on crazy. If it did, perhaps it would be better. Green Room is too calculated for that, like a sociopath who just wants you to think he’s bonkers. And the movie never develops the kind of loose energy that great exploitation movies need: it’s all fits and starts (the attackers attack, the victims fight back, things settle down, they heat up again, and so on). Furthermore, Saulnier weighs the movie down with too much inane dialogue between his characters. Saulnier rightly wants to give his audience little breaks from the tension, but his dopey characters utter their lines with such bland disinterest that they might as well be filming their Behind-the-Music documentary when they’re not fending off machetes and attack dogs.

Here’s the setup: At a dive-bar somewhere in Southern Oregon, Patrick (Anton Yelchin), a guitarist in a punk-metal band witnesses a murder and tries to call 911 before one of the killers wrests the phone from him and he and his band-mates are locked inside the green room. Inside with Patrick are Reece (Joe Cole), Sam (Alia Shawkat), and Tiger (Callum Turner), along with one of the white supremacist’s girlfriends, Amber (Imogen Poots), and keeping watch is one of the Neo-Nazis, a big bear of a man named Justin, who pretty successfully takes on three of the skinny 20-somethings with ease, until one of them gets him in a death grip and holds him there until the others can snatch his gun.

But it doesn’t matter: these white supremacists are well-organized. They stage a fake stabbing in order to lose the police, and then summon Darcy, their icy, calculating neo-Nazi leader (Patrick Stewart), to figure out what to do with the band-mates. Instead of quickly dispatching with their prisoners, Darcy and his men wage a relentless, strategic, escalating attack against four skinny middle-class 20-something who may be the least resourceful smart kids I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Perhaps this is a cautionary tale about how millenials will fare in a crisis: They argue about who has to hold the gun, they make too much noise when they try to escape, and Patrick has to trick himself that it’s all a game in order to fight back. (This is after he nearly loses his hand in a particularly grueling scene.)

But, in their defense, the band-mates do have a few tricks up their sleeves: They use microphones and speakers to create feedback in the monitors, which makes the attack dogs whimper and retreat. Sam makes effective use of a fire extinguisher; other band members use any makeshift weapon they can find, from a mic stand to one of those long, glow-stick-like fluorescent light bulbs.

Patrick emerges as the film’s unlikely hero, although he’s aided by the surprisingly funny and strong-willed Neo-Nazi girl Amber. At the beginning of the movie, we hear Patrick waxing on about the beauty of live performance as the only true way to experience music. But in the green room, none of his eloquent theories about art matter. He’s reduced to his own instincts and physical strength, and initially he cowers. But Patrick is the one who finally psyches himself up enough to fight back, by imagining it’s all just a game, that he doesn’t have to worry about death. He can never fully embrace the reality of the situation. “This is a nightmare,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be panicking?” Except for his reaction to the aforementioned injury, Patrick’s emotions do not fluctuate; he’s never truly affected by anything, not even the deaths of people he cares about.

Those little quips like “shouldn’t we be panicking?” are uttered in mockery of the situation, and they amount to decidedly lackluster attempts at levity. Green Room may be too self-serious to start making light of things in the first place. Saulnier wants to horrify us with his images, like when he cuts to a close-up of a character’s mangled neck: he’s just been ferociously mauled by a hell-hound, Baskerville style. Saulnier establishes a lame running joke too: Early in the film, when the band-mates are being interviewed for some underground radio show, the host asks each of them what band they’d want to listen to if stranded on a desert island. As perhaps another cynical jab at 20-somethings, Saulnier lets the band-mates agonize over their choices, as though the scenario might one day present itself for real, and they’d be really sorry if they accidentally picked the Ramones over the Sex Pistols (but secretly really wanted Madonna).

Near the end of the movie, Patrick, who has been unable to think of an answer, says, “I figured out my desert island band.” Amber, the white supremacist chick who’s been thrust into their world as a fellow prisoner, retorts, “find somebody who gives a shit.” The joke works beautifully, thanks to Amber’s droll delivery. (Poots is really the stand-out in this movie.) Anton Yelchin, who brandishes his husky voice like a velvety cutlass, is a strong performer, and he’s able to carry Green Room in spite of its many short-comings. (And of course, Patrick Stewart is perfectly cast as the Neo-Nazi Father, running the show, keeping dangerously calm throughout.)

But no one saves Green Room from being irritating and unpleasant. Gore hounds may enjoy this movie, although it’s not really that gory. It has a few hard-to-watch scenes. More than anything, Green Room is about survival, about being stripped of the BS that we normally carry around as armor, when we realize none of it will keep us safe in the face of a truly surreal crisis. But this idea wasn’t enough to make me care about the movie. I felt a lot like Amber did. 

Why I Love Going to the Movies

Last night, Jacksonville’s independent cinema darling, the Sun-Ray, ran a double feature of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). I adore Alien (and enjoy Aliens quite a bit), but I almost didn’t go. Having seen it a number times on DVD (and before that, on cable, which rendered an already dark, at times murky-looking film almost indiscernible), I figured it wouldn’t be worth going out on a school night and shelling out eight bucks. Nevertheless, I found myself standing in line at 6:55, suddenly cursing myself for arriving five minutes before show time. The theater was packed. This annoyed me, because it meant potential difficulty in finding a good seat; but it also delighted me, because it means that my city’s little theater has built up enough of a reputation over the past three-plus years to get us out in droves on a Tuesday night for a 37-year-old movie.

But don’t let those 37 years fool you. (Why should they? American movies were at their peak in the 70s.) Alien is sheer, terrifying cinematic pleasure from start to finish. I found myself recoiling in horror at scenes I fully knew were coming; seeing it in that dark theater packed with fellow movie-loving strangers, Alien was suddenly at its most powerful. I’ve never been particularly scared by movies like this. (It’s the true crime thrillers that give me the shivers.) Seeing Alien on the big screen felt like a happy regression from desensitized horror junkie to unsuspecting scaredy cat, and I relished it. I knew when Cain (John Hurt) bent down to get a closer look into that enormous lumpy grey egg that some other-worldly creature was going to jump out at him. It didn’t matter. I jumped too. When the thing sneaked up behind Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the spaceship’s infirmary, I jumped again. When the thing burst from the long-suffering Cain’s chest, my jaw dropped in horror, as though I had never witnessed this infamous scene before.

How does seeing a movie on a massive scale have such an effect on someone who’s seen it before, perhaps a dozen or more times?

Now more than ever, we need to see our movies big. There are too many distractions getting between me and movies at home: my phone, social media, work, the fact that any random question I have can and must be immediately answered by an Internet search. I stand here guilty of being utterly distractible, even though I love movies and want to disappear inside them. The darkened theater is the place where we can do just that. All these new ways to watch movies are terrific, and sometimes invaluable. (All of my friends with young children have basically bid farewell to going to the movies for the foreseeable future; I’m happy they can rent movies from Redbox or stream them online.) But the movie theater remains unrivaled in what it has to offer. In the theater, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the expected suddenly surprising. On a TV, or even via my projector, movies somehow aren’t as commanding. They don’t dominate the entire screen. I’m not bound by social rules to keep quiet and stay seated and keep my phone turned off and tucked away. In the dark theater, Alien becomes truly terrifying. The subtle yet sinister, tense yet gorgeous music by Jerry Goldsmith washes over us, fills us with dread and wonder. It’s not just background music: It’s the audial language of a movie that’s relatively scant on dialogue. The space art, wondrous and magnificent, becomes a valentine to 2001: A Space Odyssey. (And, for cinephiles, a high-grade rip-off of a Mario Bava sci-fi thriller from 1965 called Planet of the Vampires.)

In the crowded theater, the humor pops just as much as the scares. I had forgotten how many funny lines Parker (Yaphet Kotto) has: he and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) are the two repairmen who feel disenfranchised by the others, and their friendship, as well as their adversarial relationship with some of the other crew, breeds amusing tension in the first half of the movie. I had also never quite noticed the tenderness Ripley displays toward other characters in the movie; Not just for the adorable cat Jones, but for Dallas (Tom Skerrit), the captain of the ship, and Cain, the first victim of the alien. In the crowded theater, all that spacecraft lingo feels important and real: when the crew of the Nostromo is disembarking from the main ship in order to explore an ominous planet, we hear the voice of Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) counting down from 20. Somehow, in Cartwright’s delightfully kooky voice, we feel unspeakable tension and dread.

I tried to imagine what it was like to see Alien in theaters back in 1979, when audience members had no idea what they were in for. This made the experience all the more thrilling. It’s like going to the symphony, when you close your eyes and go wherever the music takes you. Seeing Alien at the movies was transportive. I’ve never needed to be convinced that movie theaters are the best way to watch movies, but as a child of the VCR age, I grew up owning movies, collecting them. I grew up in a world where you could watch movies you liked over and over again. This kind of obsessive return to what we’ve already experienced is wonderful in its own way, and yet it also robs us of a fuller experience. Things become too familiar, and we take them for granted; the old scares and jokes and emotions dry out. On the television screen, so many movies really do lose their power. (On the other hand, there are movies that improve on TV, bolstered by the effect of lowered expectations, or perhaps by gratitude, when you’re somewhere you don’t want to be and grateful for any diversion.)

Say what you want about the state of movies today. They’re in an equally weak and strong place, I suppose. So many of them feel utterly, shamefully debauched by mediocrity and the spinelessness of studio executives who just want to make money. Simultaneously, we’ve reached a new age of nostalgia for certain classics, which can be regressive in its own way. But as long as we’re able to see great movies writ large, there is hope for us yet.

'Miles Ahead' Never Quite Captures the Heart and Soul of the Music Behind the Troubled Man

I discovered Miles Davis in college. A group of us were sitting in one of the student buildings at the University of Central Florida talking about music among other things, when a classmate of mine mentioned Miles Davis’s landmark album Kind of Blue. I had never heard of Miles Davis before, nor had I listened to Kind of Blue. A few weeks later, I was back home visiting my parents, and there in my old bedroom was a beat-up copy of Kind of Blue. My dad had found it in the backseat of a repossessed car at his workplace, and thought I might be interested.

It’s not clear in my mind when I first played the record. What is clear, what comes back to me every time I listen to Kind of Blue, are memories of reading novels in the university library (like any good English major) into the wee hours of the morning with the soulful, melancholy, deliriously cool music of Miles Davis providing the soundtrack via headphones. Miles Davis did more to mature my music taste than practically any other musician, and I still love to disappear into his music, which comes alive at night in a dimly lit room with a glass of wine and good conversation. It speaks without words, and that is the most powerful music there is.

In Miles Ahead, director-star Don Cheadle delves into that vortex of madness that so often accompanies artistic genius. Miles Davis was plagued with his share of demons, and the film wants to expose those demons with vivid ferocity. The movie jostles between the Miles Davis of 1980—forlorn, haggard, loopy, reclusive—and the Miles Davis of the 1960s, still eccentric but much more productive and hopeful about his career. 

In one scene circa 1980, Davis is listening to a radio retrospective of his music, and the moment is punctuated by the nagging fear that he no longer resembles the legend being lauded on the airwaves. Plagued with anxieties and suspicions, addicted to drugs, unable to perform, Davis is no longer the person they’re talking about. He’s worse than dead. A Columbia Records flunky even quips, “He’s more profitable dead than alive.” But Miles cannot wrap his brain around all this sound and fury. He’s still riffing in his mind on some endless jazz trip, and feebly trying to figure out the calculating world around him.

Much of the film involves a Rolling Stone interview conducted by a music writer named Dave Braden (played by Ewan McGregor), a particularly sleazy and opportunistic cad who’ll do just about anything to get at Davis. When we meet Braden, he’s sporting a shiner from his ex-wife’s boyfriend only to be clocked again by Davis himself, who resents being hounded by the press. Braden finagles his way inside Miles’s New York apartment anyway, is chased at gunpoint, and finally establishes some trust with Davis by offering to score him some really good coke. (That’s after they make quite a scene at Columbia, with the raspy Davis waving a gun at various music executives while one sly suit tries to pacify him with boxing tickets and money.)

Miles Ahead is well-made. Cheadle fancies little devices to help him switch between present-day (1980) Davis and past (1960s) Davis. We see shards of a romance between Miles and Frances (played with guts by Emayatzy Corinealdi), one of the loves of his life. (The film makes no mention of Davis’s equally long relationship with actress Cicely Tyson, who pulled him into sobriety.) But Cheadle gets caught up in this idea of Miles Davis the mad genius, spouting nonsensical poetry as he’s being swindled and coddled and patronized by various people, including his fair-weather Rolling Stone chum Dave Braden. (I’ve never detested Ewan McGregor before; but everything about this guy, from his stringy hair to his Scottish brogue oozes with calculation and hucksterism.) 

As for Don Cheadle, there’s something labored about his performance (as good as it is) and his movie, as though we’re being forced to suffer through the worst of Miles Davis so we can have a deeper appreciation for the best of him. Sure, I can accept that Miles Davis was crazy at times, and he was apparently abusive to his wife, who finally walked out on him. But Miles Ahead drifts by like a fever dream, never fully grasping the weight of either Davis’s talent or his tortured life. Cheadle works so hard to imitate the raspy whisky voice and the mindless pap about “social music” that he loses something in the process: the fact that when you listen to Kind of Blue (and number of other Davis records), you’re transported, you’re lifted to some kind of other-worldly cocktail party in the sky.

When we hear the music, it’s no longer about the man and his demons. The movie makes it clear that in the middle of recording sessions Davis was probably drinking or getting high or beating up on his devoted wife. He’s no saint. But we don’t necessarily need to know this. What matters about jazz, about Miles Davis, is the mood the music creates, and that mood runs deep and eternal, like moonlight or like a long-remembered dream. Miles Ahead feels almost airily insignificant in its texture: It mistakes its own obsession with the musician’s tortured existence for an appreciation of the depth and beauty of the music itself. But Cheadle doesn’t revel in this music, or he doesn’t appear to anyway. He appears to be conducting an acting experiment, a test of his own skills, rather than an exploration of that magical concoction being created in-between flights of madness and self-destruction. 

Like Tennessee Williams, who extinguished himself as fast as he could with booze and pills and bad relationships, Miles Davis was too much to last for too long: but what he gave us is alive and pulsating and vervy and thrilling. This is a decent biopic, but I don’t think it’s the one Miles Davis deserves. Movies are like jazz in their own way, and there’s something self-defeating about a biopic applied to someone like Miles Davis, like trying to write down the notes of a song and memorize them, so you can play them the same way every time. That was never the point with Miles Davis, or with jazz.