mama: ...pretty much a trailer!

(link)

so apparently mama is the grandest new scary bullshit brought to you by the master of poetically creepy and terrifying-looking stuff, guillermo del toro.

we've decided to take a closer look at this, for science! and cause, well. we love creepy shit.

as with most dumb-ass trailers for commercial-looking horror vehicles, the trailer is rated G, meaning "G-ee go see this." Give me a redband trailer any day (this gives us an idea...)

so anyway, the trailer starts with an older gent coming upon an abandoned looking cabin in the woods.

clearly it would be a great idea to go inside. so, he does. said inside features spooky dark hallways, eerie light through windows, a bird, and an exceedingly dirty, scary child moving about like a spider.

then jaime lannister shows up.
yup, real as shit, jaime lannister.
yeah yeah, call him nikolaj coster-waldau if you must, but we all know that's jaime lannister.

(link)

during some scenes with the kingslayer, a voice over instructs us, thankfully, that
some girls ("victoria" and "lilly") lived there, alone. in deplorable conditions. their parents gone... possibly as long as five years. said girls are seen in various locales, being studied and watched.

as the voice over continues, we learn that ol' jaime here is the girls' uncle luke (by way of being their daddy's brother, you see) we also learn that the girls have many hobbies, like scurrying about in a disturbing fashion, staring at walls, huddling in corners, and hiding under beds.

we cut from all these random scenes to a court room, where we learn that the voiceover was actually testimony from a psychologist/psychiatrist/social worker/children's aid representative/white dude and he concludes "with a loving family environment, victoria and lilly have a real chance at a normal life."

with that, we cut to uncle luke and aunt... tba? anyway, she's played by jessica chastain - in the bedroom.

"you sure about this?" he asks her.
"nope," she replies, and slaps him on the shoulder.  romance!
we know that the cuteness is over though, because we get some more title cards, and eerie piano music featuring some very fancy reverse effects to this engineer's liking.  next, we get a quick montage of various scenes involving the girls and their adapting to "a loving family environment."  the small one (not sure which is which) seems to enjoy not wearing shoes, hiding behind her sister, and calling things mama (all of which she does upon their arrival.)

(link)

"there is no way these girls are ready for this, and there is no way that i am ready for this," aunt tba tells jaime/uncle luke while washing some dishes. this is evidenced pretty well by the scenes spliced around this conversation, which include a fun round of sibling trichophagia; followed by screaming and slapping adults; and creepy dirty dolls being buried in the yard.

cut to a scene of moths flying around in a hallway and the girls drawing on walls.
it's about to get all del toro in here.

"how have they been affected?" asks court-appointed smart-guy in the next cut. man, this guy is on the ball. top notch. one for the good guys.

(link

"they talk to the walls," auntie tells him.

"and what do they say?" he responds

cut to a dark hallway and the little one saying "mama" to some some very creepy children's drawings that one assumes are the titular character.

"it'll get better, i promise," the kingslayer tells his bride in the next cut. somehow i doubt it... thinking this might get worse.

from here we cut to more title cards and typical "woom!" horror jolts. the screen tells us that "this january... they've come home... but not alone" and we get a quick montage of auntie being alone in the house with typical creepy children whispers from the walls and vents with flickering lights all about the house.

auntie notes later "i think someone's coming to visit them," and i find that level of vaguery pretty cute.

next up, mr. honey-i-shrink-the-kids is asking the little one to tell him about mama, spliced with more creepy hallway business.

"i'd like you to tell me about mama," he says.
"no," the little girl replies.

in the next splice, she's hugging someone and staring behind them. this is, well, sort of a thing she does a lot in this trailer... except this time in turns out the other sister is in the hallway, staring her down and shaking her head. it's pretty disturbing.

(link)

next up, auntie is asking the older girl what's wrong.

"i don't want you to get hurt," she tells her surrogate guardian.

from here everything devolves into your typical jolt-fest. including scary scenes of:

-children laughing and playing at night!
-something in the closet!
-something under the bed!
-the children laughing and playing at night with things in the closets and under the beds!
-dark obscured figures walking through fields!

adhesive medical strips! (link)

-spindly, wood-looking arms reaching for children!
-skeletons buried in backyards!
-children perched spookily on top of things!
-moths and cracks in ceilings!

this and much, much more!

as everything slows down for a second, a title card tells us "a mother's love never dies."
...gee, wonder what the story is here.

"who is mama, victoria?" auntie asks in the next cut.
after that some stuff reaches through the aforementioned cracks in the roof while ser jaime takes a tumble trying to investigate.

as...you...wiiish!

(link)

what i presume to be the creature sounds very cool in this part.

victoria is then seen screaming "mama, stop it! you promised!"  seems like we might be in for some pretty decent acting from this kid!

and we're back into the JPM cuts with: some flasbacks for the children, crab-walking tree people,

possessed-looking kids, more monsters under beds, more screaming, and floating evil black cloud people.

it's a crazy, like, nine seconds.

ultimately this looks like a pretty scary movie... definitely a step up from your usual paranormal activity in the hostel and whatnot. it'll be interesting to see if all the del toro fun is negated by typical "new" horror conventions, or if the movie is given the space to move and breathe in a manner that would really lend to an original spooky factor.

our verdict?

...yeah, we'd probably pay money to see this.

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Steve Zahn

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Interview with Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem

SIMONINI: Jim, do you make much music on your own outside of this project?

JIM JARMUSCH: For the last five years, I’ve been making music with a band called Sqürl [with Carter Logan and Shane Stoneback]. It’s very slow kind of molten stoner-y stuff. We’ve been making a lot of stuff for this new film that I’m working on.

SIMONINI: Which film?

JJ: It’s called Only Lovers Left Alive, with Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin, and Jeffrey Wright. It’s kind of a crypto-vampire movie. It’s a love story between two people who have been together for centuries and who happen to be vampires. It takes place in Detroit and Tangier, Morocco. It’s pretty strange. The characters have been alive for so long—she’s like 2,000 years old and he’s maybe 500 years old, and he’s actually a musician, the character. This mixing of lute music—this older, beautiful renaissance style—with electric feedback and the heavy rock trance drone stuff works beautifully in this film.

SIMONINI: Do you ever consider making videos for your music?

JJ: I’d rather let other people make them. In a lot of my endeavors I’m a control freak, but with Jozef, he’ll title things, he’ll throw pieces to me, he’ll have ideas for sequencing things and for mixing them. He’ll say, “Why don’t you play that here?” He guides me, which is a relief because I’m usually the one organizing all the details.

SIMONINI: You’ve used the phrase “the agnostic concept of the godhead” a few times when discussing your song “Etimasia.” What does it mean?

JOZEF VAN WISSEM: It comes from this idea of Hetoimasia, which means “empty throne.” A lot of people don’t know if there’s a god or if there’s heaven. What is heaven? What is this concept of afterlife? And we just like to leave it open, to leave it at that.

JJ: I’m not monotheistic. I’m not into this one god thing. I’m interested in Buddhism and indigenous cultures but I’m not a practitioner. I learned some years ago that in Lakota Sioux, “god” is translated to “the great mystery” so there’s no definition of what it is. It’s just something that’s strong and mysterious but there’s nothing saying, “He will judge you.” It’s just the mystery of nature, of everything, the universe. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I think being agnostic means that you’reopen but you don’t have an opinion. I’m vegetarian but I don’t go around telling people why meat is murder. I think a sin in any religion should be telling anyone else what they should believe. That should be a crime. You should be slapped. You should be allowed to believe whatever you want. You want to stand on your head and worship Donald Duck? Man, that’s your choice.

SIMONINI: Is there a musicality to filmmaking?

JJ: They’re inherently related: a film passes before you on its own timeframe like a piece of music. It’s not like reading a book or looking at a painting—it has its own time signature. You take the ride, and you don’t control the speed or direction. You just get on the boat.

SIMONINI: You have to just go with it, or—

JJ: Jump off.

Read the interview in full at Bullet.

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Interview with Mike Patton

THE BELIEVER: Do you ever practice singing?

MIKE PATTON: Nope. Never have and probably never will.

BLVR: So you just make these sounds naturally?

MP: I started on a really basic level. I was just screaming. Then I realized, Yeah, well, I’m OK at that. Let’s try some other things. And I discovered this thing called singing. So I snuck it in every now and again. In Mr. Bungle, we easily got bored with what we were doing, which was, at that point, in the mid-’80s, death metal and hardcore, which has a very limited palate. It’s so isolated up there [in Eureka, California], but I was lucky enough to work at a record store, so I was able to hear different things. But it wasn’t like we could go to a concert every night and get our minds blown. And this is what I love about small-town bands or musicians. They gotta work hard to be inspired. There were no venues when I lived there. There was a bar and grill that played blues. There was a bowling alley for, like, five minutes. We would pool together money and rent out a grange hall, like an Elks Lodge type of place. We’d buy the insurance and put on a show. A few hundred people would show up and we’d be happy. So I guess the answer to your question is: I learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that I was around. It wasn’t me sitting in a room by myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly. And I feel like I still am.

BLVR: Did some of your extended-singing techniques come from imitating sounds in the world?

MP: Well, from a young age I was definitely imitating birds, but I didn’t know it at the time. This is what my parents tell me. Once I started making these weird sounds with my voice, they gave me this little flexi-disc of mouth sounds, like guys that could make odd sounds. I don’t know why they gave it to me, but that was one of my favorite records. It all comes from what I’ve discovered and the things I’ve been able to try. Play with a saxophone player and a drummer, see what happens. I’m not a studied, learned, academic musician.

BLVR: You’ve played with a lot of musicians who are learned, though.

MP: Those are the people you learn from. I think that one of the things that really cracked my head open was starting to improvise, after I met John Zorn. He encouraged me. And when you come from a band- and song-based background, it’s like, How do you improvise? I mean, that’s literally the way that I thought: Well, what do I do if I don’t know what I’m doing? He’s like, “That’s the whole point.” And when you start to kind of immerse yourself in that improvisation culture, you gotta be comfortable enough with your instrument to throw yourself into a really potentially dangerous situation. Sometimes that’s not so kind for the audience, but, hey, I’m not sure that we’re really here for an audience.

Read it in full at The Believer

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