Weapons: there has been an online buzz around this movie and the movie Sinners which I reviewed a couple of weeks back. People are raving about it, and I was intrigued. The horror/thriller genre has gone through a shift away from the gross-out hacker/slasher films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw and Halloween into more psychological thrillers with less gore and more jump. Sinners was a good example of this. This movie too was a different take on a thriller with a novel approach. It stars Ozark‘s Julia Garner, Josh Brolin and Benedict Wong. I was entertained. It didn’t suck and kept my attention, despite a couple traditional and anticipated scare tactics.

Garner plays an elementary school teacher, and one day she comes to work to find that all her students except one have disappeared inexplicably. She is stunned, and quickly the townspeople are anxious to get answers from her. The movie is filmed in six separate segments that focus on different characters in the story. Individually they show one perspective, but as more segments are seen, then more pieces come together. It is very effective, most notably when the segment with the principal, played by Benedict Wong is revealed. There are a few good shocks as the mystery around these children deepens.

Brolin plays a father of one of the missing children, and he is impatient with the police and their apparent lack of progress, and lack of investigation into the teacher. Garner too decides that she needs to reach out to her only remaining student and ask some questions, despite being cautioned against doing so by the principal. It is all good fun, and the climax comes together as a surprise. I won’t reveal any more than that because I was surprised by the resolution and the notion involved. I will say that the actor involved in it, who I have seen in many roles, looks virtually unrecognizable. It is startling but a nice pay off with a satisfying resolution. All in all, I like this trend with horror movies and enocurage it. Others like Hereditary, Nope and Talk To Me are fine additions along with Sinners which to me is a notch above. This movie is worth your time if you like a good thought-provoking scare once in a while.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery CBC Documentary: I watched this on YouTube this past week. Lilith Fair was a women’s music festival organized by Canadian Sarah McLachlan from 1997 to 1999, with a brief reboot in 2010. McLachlan was already an established star with numerous hit albums to her name. She has come up with the idea of having a music festival that would focus on female artists of all genres in music. Despite her success, she had heard a typical refrain from (male) music business executives that she can’t have multiple women music acts and “it just won’t sell”. Earlier in her career she had heard that some of her new music couldn’t be released at a certain time because another artist, like Sheryl Crow (who was a member in Lilith) had released a song and they couldn’t have them together. Determined as Sarah is, and wishing to show those naysayers what can be accomplished she gathered up some female artists and had a concert at The Gorge amphitheatre in Washington State on July 5, 1997. The event had 15,000 tickets sold out to see the all-female performers including Sarah, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Fiona Apple and the Indigo Girls. It was a rousing success.

McLachlan not only wanted to support female artists, she also wanted to support causes that she and women generally believed in. A portion of ticket sales would be used for charity in the cities where Lilith played. Charities like Planned Parenthood, Battered Women Shelters and many others were supported. Over the first three years, over $10M was raised for charity alone. As part of the event, there would be multiple stages, and this would allow for up and coming artists to be seen and heard encouraging more female artists. In total there would be 139 shows in those first three years. The documentary shows the backstage interaction among the artists as well as the challenges in booking certain acts. Getting Tracy Chapman was a big deal, but also Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders. Artists came and went with a core group that stayed throughout. It was strange to hear about the backlash about the concerts. First there wasn’t enough diversity in acts and their ethnicity. Then it was exclusion of men that became an isssue. Also there was push back in markets like Texas where they objected to Planned Parenthood to be encouraged along with abortion. You can see the look on Sarah’s face when asked about these issues, as she just wanted to be a positive and support women, without really considering all the other angles in which it can be viewed. The artists were very good, they all proved a valid point that an all-women line up can sell out concerts, and they had fun while doing it. Charity benefitted. New artists benefitted. I think that Sarah McLachlan showed the music world that for that time, this was a niche that needed to be filled. In 2010 they tried once again to modest success. It won’t be resurrected again, as in this day and age an artist like Taylor Swift has shown that a female artist can be a dominant force in music with the largest and most successful tours. I enjoyed seeing this, as I never did get out to see the festival when it was playing near Toronto. I missed out in that.

The Lost Bus: This is a new movie released on Apple TV starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera based upon a true story in Paradise California back in late 2018. It is a survival story about a wildfire which starts small but quickly grows into a massive scale. It surprises the residence in a nearby town eight miles away from where the fire first starts. The story focuses on a bus driver McConaughey, Kevin, who can’t seem to buy a break. He has a sick mother who has medical bills that are piling up, and he is divorced from his wife, and they share a teenage son. His father had recently passed but they weren’t close, and he needs jobs to get on top of these bills. He acts as a bus driver for the local school board where he has a strained relationship with the bus manager and dispatcher who finds him to be unreliable. She isn’t wrong.

Kevin ends up on the day in question when the fire begins running late and ending up picking up 23 school children from a school in the evacuation zone, along with a teacher where they were supposed to move about ten minutes away to an evacuation gathering point where the children’s parents would be. Unknown to them as Kevin picks them up, the fire has intensified, with firefighters having no luck slowing down the inferno. The evacuation gathering point is overcome with flames and they cannot proceed there. There is traffic. There are flames gathering around as the bus looks to make some headway into getting away from the flames. All the while Kevin’s teenage son is under the weather and with a flu. His ex-wife is calling him and wanting to know the son’s status. The story continues.

What I learned from this story is that school busses and virtually indestructible. They are a modern day tank. The bus Kevin drives, goes through hell and back in places it appearing like the fire was going to get the better of them all. There were some scary moments, and a whole lot of therapy will be required for these young students should they ever get out of the bus. The movie feels like a composite between Speed and Backdraft ably directed by Paul Greengrass who directed the Bourne movies with Matt Damon. I have to imagine that filming fire and working with it wouldn’t be easy. All is handled well in this film. Jamie Lee Curtis is involved as a producer, and she has been doing the talk show circuit on this. This didn’t suck. There are certainly parts of it that seemed to be unbelievable. The size of this fire and how quickly it spread, along with the number of casualties was very surprising. This is the highest death toll fire in American history. The fire chief during a press conference talks about such fires happening more frequently and with greater intensity and shakes his head as how little is done to combat them proactively. Global warming deniers are put into their place. I am glad that I saw this and I was entertained.