The Weekend Snack 7.14.24

Is Longlegs the scariest movie of the decade?

Jul 14, 2024

Welcome to the Weekend Snack - a quick roundup of my favorite bites from the past weekend.

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Happy Sunday! I’m writing from my heavily air-conditioned office, attempting to escape the dreadfully humid New York City air. We spent last weekend in the Southern Utah desert, and the temporal proximity of experiencing 110° desert heat vs. 93° and 87% humidity city heat within a week of each other makes me feel extra qualified to declare that dry heat is FAR preferable to humidity. Sure, it’s rough hiking in 110 degrees, but at least I can rest easy knowing that a shower will make me feel clean. I can’t say the same right now in my permanent state of stickiness. We’ve reached peak summer where I dream my curly locks are reminiscent of My Best Friend’s Wedding-era Julia Roberts when, in reality, they’re giving pre-makeover Mia Thermopolis. But if I’m being honest, I’m complaining for the sake of complaining because New York summer is my favorite, and the humidity does wonders for the skin. So all that’s to say, I’m a frizzy mess, but I’m a happy, frizzy mess. And with that, here are a few bits I’ve been enjoying:

🎬 Sing Sing. I can’t say it enough, but this film is incredibly special. Sing Sing tells the real-life inspired story of inmates incarcerated at the titular New York correctional facility (now decommissioned) who find compassion and humanity in a prison theater group, Rehabilitation Through Art (RTA). The film stars the incomparable Colman Domingo as the group’s eloquent and thoughtful leader, but the rest of the cast are mostly formerly incarcerated men who were actual members of the RTA. Domingo’s performance is nuanced and memorable and will likely get him much-deserved awards attention. But formerly incarcerated Clarence Maclin (playing a version of himself) is arguably equally strong as he shows the power of performance arts to imbue confidence and empathy. The film is brimming with heart but also grounded in reality and lacking sentimentality. It’s unlike any prison movie you’ve probably seen, focused less on the violent stories of prison we know and more on what actual rehabilitation looks like (RTA members have a 3% recidivism rate vs. the 43% rate for New York State generally). It’s a meaningful story about the healing powers of art, the capacity for humans to evolve, and the ripple effects of belief and kindness. Even behind the scenes, the film took a revolutionary approach, with everyone involved being paid the same amount and receiving equity in the film’s success - a model the filmmakers are planning to repeat in the future. Do yourself a favor and see this as soon as you possibly can. You won’t regret it. No doubt it will be on my top films of the year list.
🎬 Longlegs. **While this discussion doesn’t contain spoilers, it does give some background for the movie themes. If you prefer your thrillers with no context, skip until after you see it.** Longlegs is the latest, buzzy Neon-distributed thriller, helmed by writer/director Oz Perkins. The story follows FBI Agent Lee Harker (played by reigning Indie scream queen Maika Monroe) as she searches for a Satan-worshipping serial killer (an unrecognizable and chilling Nicolas Cage). As she solves the mystery of his murderous spree, the case leads her closer to home, and repressed childhood memories come flooding back. There’s a lot of chatter about this film, primarily due to an expertly crafted marketing campaign from Neon that included a Zodiac killer-style full-page ad in the Seattle Times and one of the most brilliant scary movie trailer gimmicks I’ve ever seen (see below). But the hype is a double-edged sword. Early viewers deemed the movie as “the next Silence of the Lambs” (it’s not) and “the scariest movie of the decade” (it isn’t for me, but scary is subjective). Hype gets people in seats (early box office reports predict the movie will set new records for Neon), which we desperately need with dying interest in going to the movie theaters. But hype also gives people unnecessarily high expectations. As of today, the film’s initial 97% Rotten Tomatoes has already market-corrected to 87%. But that doesn’t mean those early reviews were wrong. You just need to readjust your expectations and not get caught up in the hype cycle.
The truth is that this isn’t really a serial killer thriller. In fact, that part of the story becomes somewhat incidental and arguably a farce, as Cage’s Longlegs is, at times, more darkly comical/inept than menacing. Instead, the FBI procedural framing serves as a way to talk about what Perkins actually wants to explore - family secrets. Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins (who played Norman Bates in Psycho), and his parents married after his father was forced to undergo conversion therapy to “rid him” of his homosexuality. Perkins has very openly talked about the trauma that resulted from his father's sexuality being hidden and his mother’s efforts to keep their nuclear family together. Tragically, Perkins’ father passed away from AIDS, and his mother died in the September 11th attacks as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11. He describes all of his work as an attempt to unpack his own experiences and acknowledges that everything he writes has a personal truth at the center. In Longlegs, Perkins explores the well-intentioned lies parents tell to keep their children safe. But he also acknowledges that children instinctively know something is lurking, even when they don't have the language to understand it. In Longlegs, we’re forced to confront what's hiding in our psychological basements. The cinematography is so precise, with dutiful attention paid to the empty space surrounding the characters in the frame, that it creates a persistent dread of what we can’t see. And by the time we can, it’s too late.
As a self-proclaimed Legally Blonde scholar, I’m embarrassed I didn’t know that Oz Perkins, the writer/director of Longlegs, is Elle’s law school classmate, David Kidney!
Not all of it worked for me (the third act wasn’t my thing), but it’s masterfully shot, well-acted (special shout to that Kiernan Shipka cameo), and a must-see if you enjoy thrillers. Over the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with how horror filmmakers use the genre to explore personal and societal traumas through the conceit of the unknowable. Longlegs does that hauntingly. While my initial reaction was that the film was scary but not terrifying, the images keep lingering and finding me in moments I wish they wouldn't (i.e., when I’m trying to fall asleep). The only other movie that’s done that for me in recent memory is Ari Aster’s Hereditary (my personal scariest of the past decade). See Longlegs, and let's chat about it!
A photo I snapped along the stunningly beautiful Subway hike!
🥾 The Subway Hike in Zion National Park. Last weekend, we braved the heat in the wild desert of Southern Utah and checked this special hike off our Zion National Park bucket list. The Subway hike is a 9.5-mile out-and-back journey to an other-worldly Navajo sandstone slot canyon, majestically carved by water and wind erosion over the last 190 million years. You can access the canyon from the top or bottom, but a top-down journey requires canyoneering (we took the bottom-up route; I’m not canyoneering-level outdoorsy). The hike requires minor route-finding as you follow the river and scramble over boulders and waterfalls - a proper outdoor adventure! If this might be your thing, you can apply via the permit lottery here. They award 80 permits daily (60 from the advanced lottery and 20 from the daily lottery). I recommend trying it if you’ve already hiked the Narrows and Angels Landing. For most of the trek, we were completely alone - a rarity at Zion in the summer and a magical way to experience the canyon.