Boy meets girl. Girl erases boy. Boy tries everything within his mental capabilities to remember girl. So goes the plot of 2004’s, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, two men who live in surreality and matryoshka fables. Main characters, Joel and Clementine’s story begins from the outmost edge, and then travels inward to reveal the messy intricacies of what it means to know and love someone. At the painful end of a two-year relationship, Clementine decides remembering Joel, and the person she became while with him, is too painful. Luckily, Lacuna Inc. specializes in misery removal. This company maps relationship memories (a former flame, a deceased pet) within your brain, and subsequently eradicates the very neurotransmitters that would ever lead you to think of the forgotten ever again. It is a procedure based on finality; but what if someone, in the throes of the drugged-up procedure, wants to call it off? Joel also carries the emotional baggage of his memories of Clementine, and upon finding out that she has erased him entirely from her life, he chooses to undergo the procedure as well. We spend the bulk of the film within Joel’s memories as Lacuna is gradually taking them away. As Lacuna travels further and further back in time within his mind, the tarnish of the negative memories disappear, and Joel begins to see the good memories more clearly than he had in months. Lacuna doesn’t discriminate between good and bad memories, and per their policy, all memories must go for their work to be truly successful. Joel, trapped inside his extremely paralyzed body, (but remembering happier and happier moments of love), becomes desperate to stop the procedure. The Clementine version of Joel’s subconscious suggests hiding her in memories altogether unrelated to their union, hopefully saving a piece of her in a memory Lacuna won’t be able to find. Eternal Sunshine certainly succeeds at intimating a beautiful romance rife with real problems, but it does itself one better by also subtly signaling the importance of self-awareness. Joel’s first revisited memory when Lacuna begins the procedure depicts him as an unreliable narrator. A conversation he had just had with his neighbor is repeated, but with missing dialogue, to set the tone for the remainder of the memories. If even the most recent of memories is not entirely accurate, it’s safe to say the further distanced memories have the possibility to be distorted as well. The Clementine we see Joel falling back in love with may not be the real Clementine, but her caricature is raw and genuine. Joel remembers both himself and Clementine as incredibly flawed messes of people: he even paints himself as less than charming in many circumstances. We revisit wily Clementine challenging reserved Joel, and vice-versa, but after many small and large blows to their egos, they forgot the importance of appreciating their differences. Externally from Joel’s mind, two Lacuna Inc. employees also face the backlash of one choosing to undergo the procedure. Dr. Howard Mierzwiak and his receptionist, Mary, had an affair in their past, but only he knows about it. Mary erased the affair from her memory, but it didn’t change the way she ultimately feels about him, causing history to repeat itself. Erasing the memories of the past is one thing, but Lacuna doesn’t specialize in dissecting the emotions associated with the heart. Howard has to reveal their past to Mary when she, in a passionate admission, kisses him and tells him she’s been in love with him for a very long time. The knowledge of her past completely changes her opinion on the work that they do. She once saw it as a beautiful kindness done unto their patients, removing their pain and giving them a fresh start; she now sees the procedure as a robbery. In her grief, Mary decides to mail Lacuna’s patients their files, detailing their forgotten memories. Her actions force the recently reunited Joel and Clementine to face their past and question their importance to each other. What Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does so well is portray a couple of people who ultimately might not be the right fit for each other. Their relationship is complicated and conflicting, but they care about one another immensely, or at least they did. Although Lacuna may provide a polarizing procedure, the benefit for Joel and Clementine is that they get to begin their relationship anew with the knowledge they can drop their facades. By admitting their faults up front, the relationship has the freedom to honestly breathe, and the two can enjoy reacquainting themselves with what they love about each other. The puzzle-of-a-plot screenwriting lyrically expresses the beauty in letting someone be who he or she is, baggage and all. Joel and Clementine know they can get under each other's skin, but they choose to accept it. In Joel’s last Lacuna-stolen memory, he confesses to Clementine that he wished he had stayed with her the first night they met, but left her in confusion and embarrassment. Deciding to stick around for the second run of their relationship is just the first step in their emotional recovery. Deciding to embrace their differences and forget their associated hang-ups, that’s what commitment’s all about. Bernadette Gorman-White Bernadette graduated from DePauw University in 2011 with a Film Studies degree she’s not currently using. She constantly consumes television, film, and all things pop culture and will never be full. She doesn’t tweet much, but give her a follow @BeaGorman and see if that changes. #Newsletter #Articles #BernadetteGorman #March #EternalSunshineoftheSpotlessMind

2016 was a polarizing year for many film fans, and I’ve witnessed a lot of negativity and scorn surrounding certain films. Some justifiably, like Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad , and others less deservedly, like Rogue One . I’ve been getting real sick and tired of all this negative movie talk, so here on Story Screen, let’s get positive and talk about my ten favorite movies of the year. I wouldn’t call this list the “best” films of the year, on a technical level. These are the films that affected me the most, both on a technical and emotional level, whether it would be making me belly laugh to the point where I’d be on the floor, tense up in my seat to the point where I’m chewing the skin off my fingers in anxiety, or leaving me teary-eyed and somber. Either way, these are the ten films that stuck with me the most this year, and will continue to do so for years to come. 10. Zootopia Non-Pixar Disney films, while they are technically impressive and a good time, never really stick with me besides humming a song or two from the soundtrack on occasion. Zootopia , however, really impressed me because it was a Disney film that had a genuine opinion and took a stance on a real issue. Big studios like to play it safe, and they don’t like to risk alienating audiences, so you don’t generally see such entertainment juggernauts tackling sensitive subjects like racism, profiling, gentrification, and general discrimination often, if at all. Zootopia offers a reflection on the ugly aspects of how we treat our fellow human beings through the lens of anthropomorphic zoo animals. It’s not the subtlest of social commentaries, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a lesson worth presenting to all ages. At the same time, Zootopia is a terrifically funny film, offering clever jokes at light speed pace with plenty of likeable and well-realized characters that were easy for me to root for. This is the best animated film Disney has put out in years. 9. 10 Cloverfield Lane Around this time of year, a lot of movie blogs put out lists of their most anticipated films of the coming year. That’s all well and good, but I could never do that, because my most anticipated films are the ones that I don’t expect, like the films that come out of nowhere and blow me the hell away. Films like 10 Cloverfield Lane . It’s a truly claustrophobic rollercoaster of a movie, anchored by a terrifying performance from John Goodman. It’s the kind of performance that keeps you on edge because he’s not immediately a full-blown psycho like Walter in The Big Lebowski . He’s a ticking time bomb, slowly and calmly filling the tiny bomb shelter with suffocating tension. You never feel as though the protagonists are safe at any moment from Goodman’s character, and that tension never lets go in its 90-minute runtime. Hell, I even like the ending! 10 Cloverfield Lane is a promising debut for director Dan Trachtenberg, and I’m excited to see what he does next. 8. The Neon Demon Nicholas Winding Refn certainly tends to get a rise out of people, doesn’t he? Except for Drive , I guess, discussions of his films are usually split one way or another, and there is never a unanimous agreement on whether his films are good or not. When it comes to The Neon Demon , I lean towards the film being awesome. I was hypnotized by the dreamlike atmosphere presented by Cliff Martinez’ haunting score, and Natasha Brier’s colorful cinematography, as well as its use of symbols and visuals to tell its bonkers story of a teenage girl getting in way over her head into a world she doesn’t fully understand, and then descending into hell. It’s not a film for everyone, but it was definitely for me. The film also has a surprisingly awesome and weird performance by Keanu Reeves, so it gets bonus points for that. 7. The Nice Guys If Shane Black could turn the amount of pure style that he puts into his films and convert it into a food source, he’d be able to solve world hunger. This is even more apparent in The Nice Guys , a purely concentrated pulpy noir-comedy set in the backdrop of a nostalgic 1970’s Los Angeles. There’s not as much Christmas as you’d expect in a Shane Black film, but there’s more than plenty of quotable banter between the unlikely duo, convoluted mysteries, unpredictability, and just pure tight direction and execution of scenes. You don’t see zippy mid-budget action comedies like this anymore. If this were to come out in the 90’s, Russell Crowe’s character would be played by Bruce Willis and Ryan Gosling’s would be played by…Woody Harrelson maybe? Anyway, I’m glad Shane Black hasn’t lost his style, because he created one of the funniest and exciting films of the year. 6. Hell or High Water The lesson I get out of these terrific modern day westerns is that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” You could copy and paste the story of this film and set it in 1856, and I doubt much of Taylor Sheridan’s excellent screenplay would change. However, the film is set in modern day and it feels incredibly relevant. Set in economically desperate small towns of rural Texas, this film shines a light on how the modern day economy has left many small towns in that area desolate and scrambling to get by, and serves as a unique backdrop for our protagonists and antagonists. Speaking of which, what I love about this film is that it smartly doesn’t present the thief protagonists (Chris Pine and Ben Foster), and the State Trooper antagonist as straight good or evil. Both sides have reasonable motivations you can get behind, and no one is really a bad person, so the interpretation of who the protagonists and antagonists really are is up to the viewer. It’s an excellent modern western full of great performances that I would recommend to everyone, and I’m glad it’s getting the award recognition it deserves. 5. The Invitation Now, admittedly, this isn’t one of the best movies that have come out in the past year on a technical level, but goddamn did this movie leave me devastated. Maybe it’s because I empathize with the subject matter; I’ve witnessed something like this happen first hand, but god damn, did it still hit me hard. It was like an emotional flash bang went off next to my ear. It didn’t hit me in a manipulative way, like a Lifetime movie would try to do. It’s superbly effective at grabbing you by the neck in the very beginning of the movie, slowly tightening its grip as it moves along to the point where you can’t breathe, let’s you go at the very end, and then punches you in the gut. It’s bleak, suspenseful, heart wrenching and a terrific film all around. I don’t really want to mention what it’s about because I believe it will be more effective going in blind. It’s on Netflix and it’s absolutely worth giving a watch, and it absolutely deserves a spot in my top 5. 4. Green Room If you’re familiar with the programming of Story Screen, you’ll know this is a film that’s been shown in the past, and you know, it could be shown again and again and again, and I would be all for it. Of all the films that are on this list, Green Room is the movie that I’ve watched the most, and it holds up tremendously with each viewing - from the details in the environment that make it feel alive and genuine, to the subtleties of performances from Sir Patrick Stewart, Macon Blair, and the late Anton Yelchin, as well as the film’s powerful use of violence. This is a film that does so much in such a small setting that it would be criminal not to give Jeremy Saulnier and crew the proper credit they deserve. If you wanna know more about what Green Room does so well, read my brother’s article about it on this very website here. 3. The VVitch This was one of the first movies I remember seeing in the theater in 2016. After walking out as the credits rolled, I knew right then and there that this was going to be a hard movie to top. Holy shit, I could go on and write multiple articles dissecting how much of a miracle this film is. It seems like there’s a lot of A24 films on this list, and that might make it look like I’m biased towards them, but I’m really not. They just happen to fund and produce excellent films! I really have to thank them for taking the chance with first time director Robert Eggers to fund and distribute his film, because he somehow created a horror masterpiece on his first try. What The VVitch gets so right that most horror films get wrong is the consistent sense of paranoia and dread throughout the story. You never know who’s going to turn on who, who’s going to snap first, and if what they’re afraid of is actually real or a product of their hallucinations due to isolation. Much like The Invitation , it grabs you by the throat at the beginning of the film and doesn’t let go until it ends. What sets it above The Invitation , is its high quality of acting across the board, especially from child actors Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, and Lucas Dawson, as well as its authentic 1630’s New England setting, delivering an eerie and paranoid tone. People have complained that horror has gone downhill in recent years. To that, I say: watch The VVitch ; it is probably the best horror film released since The Shining . 2. Arrival I firmly believe Denis Villeneuve is one of the best new filmmakers of the 21st century. Every film he’s directed ( Incendies, Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario ) has blown my mind in one way or another, and Arrival is no exception. Take a premise that’s as old as filmmaking itself: Aliens visiting Earth, and mix it with a haunting, poetic, and beautiful story about the potential of humanity, and what it can accomplish when it works together to achieve a common goal. Arrival gave me a new outlook on communication and language, what it means to communicate with one another, how we do it, WHY we do it, and it accomplished telling its story with grace and maturity. Its cerebral ideas kept me up at night, while its emotional core – anchored by the layered performances of Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, as well as a chilling score by Johann Johannson – kept me invested and moved by the characters and their actions. Not many films have accomplished both of those at the same time, not even 2001: A Space Odyssey , in my opinion. I recommend Arrival to anyone and everyone. It’s a beautiful film that I’m sure will be referred to as a Science Fiction classic for years to come. 1. Swiss Army Man I’ve never seen anything quite like Swiss Army Man . While the rest of my Top 10 are tremendous films in their own right, they also fit into their respective genres. The VVitch is a terrific horror film, Arrival is a terrific Sci-Fi drama, The Nice Guys is a terrific Action Comedy, etc. But where should I put Swiss Army Man ? Is it a Comedy? Is it Fantasy? Is it a Surrealist film? Is it a Musical? It’s all those genres and best of all, it’s completely original. I’m not giving it high praises just because it’s original, however. I’m giving it high praises because it affected me in so many ways. It made me think about what it means to be alive, and what you can do with your short amount of time on this earth, even if that means just making an impact on one other human being’s life. It brought up excellent points about what it means to be “weird” and strange. Why does society demonize those that just want to be different? Why does being “weird” have to be such a bad thing in the eyes of others? Why can’t we just embrace new ideas? Why does society make you feel so alone for being different? These are all aspects of my own life that I’ve struggled with since I was a little kid obsessed with shows, movies, and other offbeat shit that my peers were perplexed by, and Swiss Army Man emulates those feelings through Hank and Manny so goddamn perfectly. Swiss Army Man made me laugh hysterically, tear up either through joy or sadness, and feel genuine excitement with what was going to happen next. I didn’t want Hank and Manny’s journey to end. Sure, it’s a bit (okay, a lot) different to a lot of people’s sensibilities when it comes to movies, but isn’t that exactly what movies are about? Taking a creative vision and applying it through visuals and sound to create a story? Why can’t a film be about a farting corpse? What rules say that can’t work? In Swiss Army Man’s case, it works perfectly, and it is my favorite film of 2016. If you want to read more about this wonderful film, please read Mike Burdge’s article from a couple months back here . Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is younger than he looks, and has passionately studied the art and craft of filmmaking for as long as he can remember. He is currently a freelance wedding videographer, and is also heavily involved in Competitive Fighting Games. IG: jeremyko95 #JeremyKolodziejski #Newsletter #Articles #Top10 #2016

Let's talk about what a “Top 5” list means: first, the distinction between “best” and “favorite” is very important. There is no perfect movie. There are movies that venture close, but none can truly be perfect by nature; they are art and art is subject to opinion. Now let’s talk about “favorite.” The reasons why I choose to like, love, hate or despise a movie is complicated, and most likely derives from deep-seeded complications with my childhood or love life. What I’m trying to say is: these are some of my favorite cinematic experiences of this year. Everyone likes a movie for different reasons, and you’re all entitled to your opinion. Unless you think Batman v Superman was a good movie, in which case I am judging you and think you are an insane person. Alright, let's get into it… Honorable Mention: The Jungle Book The 1967 cartoon version of The Jungle Book was never my childhood favorite. I watched it like everyone else did growing up, but young little BaeBae was more about The Lion King and Aladdin . After seeing director Jon Favreau’s interpretation of the story, this has become one of my favorite Disney movies. Idris Elba’s Shere Khan is one of the best on-screen villains I’ve ever seen. All of the characters, excluding Mowgli, are digitally created, and the quality of their design is unprecedented. The Jungle Book is a movie that grabs you from the very beginning and doesn’t let go until the credits. This movie gives me faith in Disney’s live-action reimagining of Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King in years to come. 5. Don’t Think Twice For full disclosure: one of my many passions in life is Improv Comedy. I’ve been taking classes at Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) for the past year and have fallen in love with the art form that encourages being a dingus on stage. Don’t Think Twice boasts a great cast of UCB alums and is a painfully accurate portrayal of what this comedy culture is like. It’s both a very accessible movie, for newcomers to the art of Improv, and a movie for people like me, an aspiring improviser. 4. Arrival Arrival’ s execution is immaculate. The plot is huge. First alien contact is a tried and true trope, but its scope is narrow; we experience the entire story through Louise Banks’ (Amy Adams) point of view. The film is all about communication and language. There’s no giant space battles here, and that’s why I enjoyed the film so much. It was an intimate sci-fi story. The major “twist” of the film is excellent, and will make you want to view it again and again. 3. Rogue One I feel strange throwing this movie on the list, not because it wasn’t amazing or deserving of its acclaim, but did I love Rogue One , or do I just love Star Wars ? Have I become poisoned by its nostalgia? Regardless of my existential crisis on the matter, I really did feel like a ten year-old watching this movie and that’s hard to do. Our benevolent leader here at Story Screen, Mike Burdge, likes to call movies like this “popcorn.” You get what you get and you know what you’re getting even before you get it. It's how you get it that's important. This Star Wars flick had things I’ve always wanted to see in this universe. A side-step in the typical Skywalker family drama that gives us a war film. A dark, brutal war film. 2. Swiss Army Man Swiss Army Man is a movie I’ve always wanted to exist, but never thought would. When I heard the mumblings of a movie featuring Daniel Radcliffe playing a farting corpse, I was smiling from ear to ear at the premise. The movie successfully stays aloof and strange while also grounding the action of the film in real human emotion. It’s a ridiculous notion, to make an audience empathize with a corpse for an hour and half, but that’s exactly what this movie is, ridiculous. 1. The Lobster Though it came out towards the end of 2015 in Ireland, we here in the States didn’t get to see the flick until 2016, so I’m throwing it on the list because: ‘Murica. Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist look into the idea of love is one of the most viscerally uncomfortable movies I’ve ever sat through. After viewing the flick, I left feeling like someone tore my heart out and calmly said, “Welp, you’re not gonna need this anymore.” This is exactly why it’s the number one movie on my list. One of the objectives of a film is to elicit emotions from a viewer. The Lobster makes you feel dread, despite being a story about love. Without spoiling the film, I will say that there is a moment of hope for these characters, but even then it is painfully stripped away by the film’s conclusion, leaving you with your jaw to the floor and in need of a hug. Robert Anderson Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter @RoBaeBae #2016 #Top5 #Articles #Newsletter #RobertAnderson

Listen, 2016 has been a real turd of a year and my memory is not as good as it once was (it was never good). So, presented here (in no particular order) are five movies that even at the end of December 2016, still stand out as memorable. The Lobster The Lobster is not a fun movie. There’s a fair argument that the film actively challenges you to enjoy its two-hour runtime. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to admit that I actually enjoyed watching it. However, the one-two gut punch of this movie’s midpoint and finale left me reeling in a way that I rarely experience from film. Coupled with humor so bone-dry and dark as the night that it could break even the toughest skin, The Lobster , left an impression that still haunts me months later. Arrival Arrival ’s heady brand of sci-fi expertly postulates the question of first alien contact with a far out metaphysical twist that sunk in deep. How would we ever communicate with extraterrestrial beings whose very principle understanding of reality may seem foreign to us? Would the governments of the world remain peaceful and cordial, or react to invaders with itchy trigger fingers? With a twist that may leave certain literature fans with a familiar “ah-ha” moment, (I won’t name the book, just to avoid spoilers) Arrival delivers an emotionally heavy story in conjunction with a hard sci-fi setting that fills a similar niche to last year’s Ex Machina, another of my favorites. Swiss Army Man The surreal nature of Swiss Army Man presents a story that blurs the line between delusion and magic. You’re never quite sure whether the events that unfold are all in the mind of a very sick, very lonely person, or if Daniel Radcliffe's farting corpse actually has magical survival abilities. And that’s exactly where the beauty of this film lies. Ultimately for Paul Dano, the film’s lead protagonist, it doesn’t matter whether or not his conversations with this corpse are real. To him, he’s found a true source of love, compassion, and friendship in a world that has otherwise rejected him. For me, that’s a pretty warm message, especially for a year that I think left the majority of us in dire need of a hug. Bone Tomahawk Bone Tomahawk saw limited release among festivals in 2015, but only gained wide release when it landed on Amazon Prime in 2016, so I’m counting it. Bone Tomahawk expertly blends the lines between western and horror, creating a genre mash-up that practically has my name stamped right on it. Kurt Russell’s grizzled lead chews scenery and slings six-guns like he was born on the back of a horse. The design of the horrific troglodytes is nightmarish, and the use of gore is incredibly effective while remaining restrained and tactful. There’s a real sense of tension and danger throughout that leaves an unrelenting feeling of unease. On top of all that, I’d challenge anyone to come up with a name harder than Bone Tomahawk . The VVitch That thing I said about no particular order to this list? That was a lie. The VVitch is my #1 movie of 2016 by a very, very wide margin. I rarely watch movies more than once, and I hardly make it out to theaters anymore. I saw The Witch in theaters three times. The film oozes with atmosphere brought to life by Robert Eggers’ washed out color pallet and haunting soundtrack that provides the feeling of starving to death in the harsh New England winter. Seeds of cancerous paranoia plague the characters as they turn on each other, one by one, in the same religious hysteria that caused the Salem Witch Trials. The Victorian English is beautiful to listen to, and the hushed, rapid dialogue left me picking up more and more detail with each successive watch. The VVitch was not only my favorite movie of 2016, but has firmly solidified itself amongst my all time favorites. Jack Kolodziejski Jack makes drugs for a living, but not necessarily the fun kind. He enjoys international travel and discussing music, movies, and games in excruciating detail. #2016 #Top5 #Articles #Newsletter #JackKolodziejski

When researching trends, ideas, and cinematic evolution in the history of film there’s seldom a better reference point then viewing the several interpretations of King Kong . The classic story of a giant beast falling in love with a young blonde woman – exploring an unfamiliar and dangerous world and the destruction caused by what happens when man’s greed tampers with the natural order – remains timeless to this day and can be remade forever, without any aspect tarnished by time. Hollywood certainly agrees, as King Kong has had sequels, remakes, sequels of remakes, reboots, crossovers, rehashes, reheats, reloaded and revolutions! But I digress. The interpretations of the giant ape I’m going to focus on are from the 1933 original, the 1976 remake produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the 2005 Peter Jackson remake and finally, 2017’s Kong: Skull Island . What do these films have to say about the decades they were created in? What trends, values, and ideas can we document via King Kong? King Kong (1933) In 1927, the cinematic landscape was changed forever when The Jazz Singer premiered. It blew everyone away by incorporating actual spoken dialogue and sound into film, despite its uncomfortable racist imagery. A mere six years later, films went from putting spoken words into film, to creating whole worlds beyond imagination, thanks to the directorial efforts of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, as well the fascinating and engrossing visuals of special effects wizard, Willis O’ Brien, which truly bring the film to life. Sure, The Lost World was also about larger than life creatures coming to life on the silver screen - the effects were even done by O’Brien himself - but Kong , as well as being a better film, was also released during a time where it made a much more significant impact: in the midst of the Great Depression. Millions of people needed a way to escape from the daily misery of scraping by. They needed a character like Ann Darrow, who was going through the same hardships many were going through at the time. They could relate to her; every person could attach a little bit of themselves to Ann. They needed Kong to transport them to somewhere new and to show them something they’d never seen before, something surreal and fantastic, and something to give them that brief moment of wonder. King Kong certainly delivered. It revolutionized adventure storytelling and Willis O’Brien invented several special effects techniques that were used in films decades later. What’s there to say about this film that hasn’t already been said? It’s still one of the greatest and most influential of all time, and it is also one of my personal favorites. But what happens when other filmmakers attempt to give the giant ape a try? King Kong (1976) The 1970’s are considered one of the greatest decades in film history. “The Age of the Directors,” as some liked to call it. During this decade, a young filmmaker (who some may know as Steven Spielberg), created a quaint little film about a giant man-eating great white shark. Jaws took the world by storm and ushered in a new era of blockbusters. One year later, producer Dino De Laurentiis (some may know his granddaughter Giada from the Food Network) wanted a piece of the action. He wanted the money Jaws made. Instead of creating his own monster to compete with the shark, he went back to the classics and wanted to bring the giant ape himself back to modern audiences. He even approached Roman Polanski to direct the film at first, but instead went with John Guillerman. You thought gritty reboots were a recent development? Far from it! This Kong was going to be darker, grittier, bloodier, slower paced, more dramatic and less adventurous. Instead of the motivation for making a film by Carl Denham, we have Fred Wilson who’s searching for oil, a much more topical subject. It would be set in modern times, Kong would be bigger, the dinosaurs would be removed to make a more grounded and “realistic” story, and instead of the eighth wonder of the world climbing the Empire State Building, it would climb the brand new World Trade Center, as a way to show off the building to the world. The 1976 film is a classic example of financial gain taking priority over artistic integrity. Other than the novelty of watching now veteran actors Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange interact with a giant ape, as well as a few impressive action sequences (including an attack on a train and a fight with a giant snake), as well as the aforementioned climb up the WTC, and creature effects by special effects god Rick Baker, there’s very little this film has to offers. It’s dry, dull, slow, and none of the characters are as interesting as Carl Denham, Jack Driscoll, and Ann Darrow. It’s not an awful film, but other than viewing it for historical context, there’s no real reason to watch this film again. King Kong (2005) It was the early 2000’s, and three-hour sprawling period epics were all the rage. Gladiator , Kingdom of Heaven , Troy , The Last Samurai , and Master and Commander , were all cleaning up the box office, as well as the award season. People were constantly fiending for more, but none of these were quite as monstrous a success story as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, directed by filmmaker, Peter Jackson. From humble beginnings creating cult splatter films such as Bad Taste and Dead Alive in his home country of New Zealand, to being on top of the world, Peter Jackson could do whatever he wanted next. He chose to remake one of his childhood favorites. The film that made him want to become a filmmaker in the first place. What else but Kong ? Instead of re-arranging the plot to be modern and run parallel to current affairs, he transported audiences back to 1933, and for the most part, he did a good job. The motion capture effects from Andy Serkis bring King Kong to life and remain impressive to this day. Skull Island, as well as the 1933 Time’s Square, is lovingly crafted with expert detail, even going as far as collecting some of the last of the 1930’s Ford cars to use as props. The main problem with the film was a problem that plagued many of the epics at the time: it was simply too long for its own good. I always welcome when a story wants to take the time to flesh out its characters before jumping into the action and conflict, but this Kong took too long to do so. During the segment on the boat traveling to Skull Island, there is an almost endless supply of filler and awkward encounters between various characters. Instead of keeping you on the edge of your seat yearning for the monster to arrive like in Jaws , you’re left bored and checking your watch. When the film eventually does get to Skull Island, it’s spectacular and fills me with the same wonder and excitement I get while watching the original. In fact, of all the remakes and reboots Kong has gone through, this one is my personal favorite, and despite its length, is of the highest quality. If someone could create a fan edit to make it more in line with the original film’s pacing, it would be almost perfect. Kong: Skull Island (2017) The 2017’s choice of film trend is that of the “cinematic universe.” Popularized by Marvel Studios, the goal is to branch together seemingly unrelated films, sprinkle in references to each other, and eventually come together for a big crossover event film such as The Avengers , Justice League , or whatever the hell Universal thinks it's doing with its monster franchise, and of course, culminate with an eventual showdown between King Kong and Godzilla. Of all the remakes and reboots Kong has gone through, this one is certainly the most different. The setting is changed to 1970’s post-Vietnam War, and gone entirely is the romantic story between King Kong and Ann Darrow (or Dwan, if you will). Kong: Skull Island has other priorities in mind: pure mayhem. At about minute fifteen of the film’s runtime, we’re already in Skull Island. The now 100-foot tall Kong wreaks havoc on unsuspecting American soldiers and does not let up until the credits roll. The tension is constant as the characters are constantly harassed and murdered by gigantic lizards and freakish bugs. The film has a sense of humor and camaraderie the previous Kong films did not have. It takes itself less seriously. Instead of trying to bring us into a whole new and unfamiliar world, Skull Island just wants us to have a good time. If the filmmakers have a creative idea for a visual, they just throw it in there. I don’t want to go into details, and I know this film has flown under the radar for some, but it’s certainly worth seeing while it’s still in theaters, even though it might not be as thematically strong as the 1933 or 2005 versions. Overall, the story of Kong is a good blank canvas for filmmakers of all eras to flex their creative juices and deliver something new in all eras. From the classic story and charming special effects of the original, to the grand scale of the 2005 version, to the pure energetic chaos of Skull Island , hell even the 1976 version has production design and a few select scenes to admire, either way, we haven’t seen the last of the big monkey, because his story is so timeless, and I’m excited to see what future filmmakers will do with him next. Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is younger than he looks, and has passionately studied the art and craft of filmmaking for as long as he can remember. He is currently a freelance wedding videographer, and is also heavily involved in Competitive Fighting Games. IG: jeremyko95 #Newsletter #Articles #KingKong #KongSkullIsland #JeremyKolodziejski

When it comes to Christmas movies catered towards adults, there are usually two extremes: your raunchy comedies like Bad Santa , with a Christmas setting where Billy Bob Thornton irreverently curses out the holidays with a drunken slur, or the classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation , which puts the ugly side of visiting relatives during the holidays front and center. On the other hand, you have your horror and action movies that use Christmas as a juxtaposition of tone to emphasize the horrible and violent actions occurring onscreen – whether it be sorority girls being brutally murdered by toy unicorns in Black Christmas , or a barrage of bullets from a machine gun (ho ho ho) being fired 20 feet adjacent to the office Christmas tree in Die Hard . Michael Dougherty’s Krampus , however, reaches both heights in a more accessible and light-hearted fashion without losing the true essence of what makes both genres so enjoyable. Dougherty accomplishes the unique tone of Krampus by balancing comedy, drama, and horror and showing proper restraint on everything, while still retaining quality. Krampus never leans into the comedy too hard by being too vulgar or by pandering to the lowest common denominator with fart jokes or slapstick. It never leans too hard into the horror either, at least when it comes to explicit violence. You don’t see innocent people being pulled apart by gingerbread men, or people’s eyes being gouged out by icicles, or snowballs being used as frag grenades blowing people’s arms off into bloody bits, which are then stuffed into Santa’s bloody Christmas sack as blood drips down Santa’s beard, turning it from white into crimson red… Anyway, you don’t necessarily see any main human character die onscreen. The way the titular Krampus and his bag of evil toys operate is quite similar to how Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompa’s function in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory . Most of the children (or family, in Krampus ’ case) aren’t quite killed by all the demented contraptions of Willy Wonka, but are instead dragged off screen by some various kind of weird device, and death is only implied, but not necessarily confirmed. The comedy and horror instead rely on each character’s interactions with each other. The whole family fits into many of the caricatures associated with both the comedy and horror genres. The parents, Tom and Sarah, are too wrapped up in their own egos and daily stresses to even notice that their son, Max, just wants the family to come together and be happy again. The Southern gun-happy Uncle Howard, and the hesitant Aunt Linda, come to visit with their tomboy children, adding to the pure disconnect the family has with each other. And their misunderstandings of each other just add to the awkward humor the first act presents itself with anchored by Conchata Farrell’s belligerent and drunken, Aunt Dorothy. You’ve seen this dysfunctional family in countless holiday films: (usually in the Hallmark Channel films my mom watches on a daily basis this time of year), the family learns their lesson through communication, melodrama, and the “power of love and Christmas” or whatever. In Krampus , the family learns the hard way what happens when you’re douchebags to each other during Christmas time by getting their asses handed to them by an army of Christmas demons. When said army of Christmas demons, led by the titular Evil-Goat-Santa, arrive at the Engel family’s front door, they arrive hard and relentless. The tension is real, and the creatures while humorous in their design, with cutesy high-pitched voices, are a real threat to the family’s lives. While the characters are initially unlikeable, we watch them grow together through their horrible circumstances. The humor, sprinkled throughout the horror, is grounded, and makes the characters more relatable, and thus, we care about their fates and whether or not they get out of their Christmas nightmare scenario alive. The balance keeps you at the edge of your seat, but you’re laughing while leaning on the edge, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable to watch. All these traits make Krampus a truly well rounded Christmas horror comedy, and I hope it becomes a staple tradition for many folks in the mood to celebrate the holidays with a little, but not too much, edge. Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is younger than he looks, and has passionately studied the art and craft of filmmaking for as long as he can remember. He is currently a freelance wedding videographer, and is also heavily involved in Competitive Fighting Games. IG: jeremyko95 #Articles #Newsletter #Krampus #December #HorrorComedy #Family #Holidays #JeremyKolodziejski

It’s hard to know where to start when writing about a Tarantino flick. If you know a thing or two about film, you no doubt have a concrete opinion on Quentin Tarantino and every one of his movies. Shit, even if you don’t know dick about movies you probably have a solid opinion on which is better: Kill Bill Vol. 1 or Vol. 2 (the correct answer is you’re supposed to really see them as one complete movie, or, Vol. 1 is better). Regardless of your aptitude towards the silver screen, a Tarantino flick has no doubt graced your eyeballs. Over his twenty-five year legacy Tarantino has risen to the mainstream blockbuster level without ever watering his films down. If anything, his work has grown more and more complex. Tarantino constantly puts out movies that subvert your expectations, unlike anything else out there. He’s his own genre; a culmination of pulp and noir with a dash of revenge, that all create a film that draws us out to the theater so that we can see “that new Tarantino joint.” The Quentin Tarantino phenomenon all begins with a little low-budget darling called, Reservoir Dogs . “K-Billy’s super sounds of the 70’s weekend just keeps on truckin’…” In 1992, Reservoir Dogs graced the Sundance stage and although it didn’t win any of the festivals awards, it was the talk of the show. The film was made with a $1.8 million budget and generated $2.8 million at the box office. Tarantino originally planned to make the flick with $30,000 in a 16mm black and white format. Described as a “dialogue driven heist movie,” the film became something mainstream audiences had never expected. The film’s infamous torture scene made Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde) so uncomfortable during filming he had trouble shooting the scene. With such a limited budget, Reservoir Dogs makes the most of its 1.8 million dollars. The warehouse that serves as the group’s post-heist meet-up spot was actually an old mortuary, the upstairs of which became Mr. Orange’s (Tim Roth) apartment. The film’s budget did not allow for police traffic control, so in the scene where Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) is running from the cops and forces a woman from her car, it could only be filmed while all the traffic lights were green. For future filmmakers Reservoir Dogs outlines how to make an incredible movie with an incredibly small budget. The structure of Reservoir Dogs becomes the template for most of Tarantino’s future films. Its main plot moves linearly – the cold open at a diner is the true beginning of the tale Tarantino is telling – the ending being the now legendary standoff in the warehouse. However, the use of flashbacks makes the film flow non-linearly. Flashbacks are used not only to fill in the gaps and give the audience context for our ensemble of characters, but also as a way to give context to the film thematically. The flashbacks themselves range drastically: from seeing Mr. Pink outrun cops after the heist goes awry, to seeing Mr. White or Mr. Blonde’s relationship to kingpin Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), to the film’s entire last act, the twenty minute flashback where we learn how an undercover cop, infiltrates a crew of thieves. Future Tarantino movies build on this structure and in cases like Pulp Fiction , become completely non-linear. This style creates a plot that uses the sum of all its parts. We skip the road that gets us to the end quickly; instead we take the scenic route, still getting to the destination right on time. There is one very important scene we never see in Reservoir Dogs : the actual heist. Two major themes of the movie are anonymity and ambiguity. Our group of shit-talking thieves only knows each other (at least at first) by their code names. The reason for this is control and protection; if anyone involved gets caught by the cops they can’t rat out the rest of the group. When Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) just mentions a sports team he won a bet on, members of the team get a clue to where he is from. Staying anonymous is tantamount to survival in the film. The opening of the film gives us characters without letting us learn their origin stories or full relationships to Joe Cabot. What we do learn is their opinions on Madonna and tipping waitresses, and that’s enough to teach the audience just exactly who these people are. The ambiguity of the heist scene makes it far more effective. Hearing that Mr. Blonde “went psycho” and shot unarmed civilians makes his appearance later in the film that much more terrifying; we learn how dangerous this man sipping on soda is by the other character’s reaction to him. Learning, slowly, about just how wrong the heist goes helps us keep up with the characters emotionally. The heist is given to us in bits and pieces; it’s a muddled story that would’ve been far too clear if we were to actually see it. The heat of confusion, and just how fucked everything that went down (in that five minutes we didn’t actually see) is fully expressed by dialogue, more so than if we witnessed the shoot out. Reservoir Dogs is Tarantino’s origin story as a filmmaker. It’s the DNA where all his films derive from. Though his films have become more complex with even bigger budgets, while his skills as an artist have grown over the last of twenty-five years, Reservoir Dogs still stands the test of time as an incredible film, because Tarantino’s brand of storytelling remains timeless. Robert Anderson Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter @RoBaeBae #Articles #November #Newsletter #RobertAnderson #ReservoirDogs #SHH

(WARNING: This article contains spoilers for “THE GUEST”) A super soldier makes it his mission to help a fallen comrade’s family, but ends up becoming the Michael Myers of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard’s genre mash up, “The Guest.” A void is left in the home and hearts of the Peterson family after the death of their son, Caleb, during his time serving overseas. The film jumps right into it with the arrival of David (Dan Stevens) at the Peterson’s doorstep. He claims to have served with Caleb and was present to hear his dying wish: “…To check on ya’ll, you and your whole family here. He wanted me to tell you that he loved you. Specifically wanted me to tell each one of you…that he loved you and was thinking about you till the very end”. By the end of the film, David succeeds in communicating Caleb’s dying wish, while also leaving a trail of bodies, some of them being the Peterson's. David quickly (almost comically) fills the void left behind by Caleb. Throughout the film's first act, he begins to infiltrate the multiple tiers that make up the Peterson family by appealing to each character individually. First it’s Laura Peterson, (Sheila Kelley), the matriarch of the household. At the beginning of the film she is staring teary-eyed at a photo of the late Caleb, communicating to the audience that perhaps she is taking his death the hardest. When David arrives to tell her Caleb’s wish, she is overcome with emotion, refusing to let David stay at a motel, instead offering up Caleb’s old room as a place for him to stay the night. Next it’s Spencer Peterson, (Leland Orser), the father of the family. Spencer is originally the most resistant to David spending the night, afraid David might have “the PTSD.” But after a few late night brews with David, Spencer warms up to the idea of him staying not just the night, but a few nights. Luke Peterson, (Brendan Meyer), the youngest son of the family, is your typical anti-social, bullied high school student. David picks Luke up from school one day and follows the group of hooligans who have harass Luke to a local bar. Once there David entices the crew into a brawl, in which he beats the ever-loving shit out of them, in very over-the-top, action-hero-esque fashion. Finally, there’s Anna Peterson (Maika Monroe), the twenty year-old daughter of the family who eventually becomes the hero of the film. Anna’s parents coax her into inviting David to a party she’s going to and while there, David's basically the coolest dude at the party: bringing in two full kegs with his inhuman strength, smoking the Devil’s Lettuce (marijuana), hooking up with the host and winning another fight. On the ride home from the party, David is also a shoulder for Anna to lean on, post fighting with her boyfriend earlier in the scene. And by the end of the first act, there is seeded sexual tension between the two of them. At this point in the film David has filled the void left behind by the death of the Peterson’s eldest son. The second and third acts of the film are far more different: David becomes the antagonist, while Anna takes the position of the protagonist. It’s during the second act that we see David murder in cold blood, becoming a somewhat typical horror villain. It’s in the third act that we see David commit monstrous atrocities: stabbing Laura Peterson in the chest, shooting Spencer after hitting him with a car, murdering Anna’s best friend, then blowing up the diner they work at with frag grenades. David becomes the Anti-Action Hero, the evil Tom Cruise. This however is not fully David’s fault because of one key plot point: his neurological condition. Anna’s first red flag that David may not be who he claims to be is when overhearing a phone call he’s having one early morning. David’s talking to a plastic surgeon, asking for a new face and the erasing of his finger prints. Anna looks into his past, learning that David Anderson Collins died months prior in a military hospital by way of an oxygen tank accident. We eventually learn that David is one of the failed test subjects of ‘Project Aegolius," a secret military experiment designed to create super soldiers. Major Carver, (Lance Reddick), the man who was in charge of Project Aegolius, tells Anna of David’s condition: “David has a neurological condition, Miss Peterson. Designed to protect him and the experiment. If he feels like his identity may be compromised he… he’s programmed to clean up all loose ends. I doubt he could stop himself now even if he wanted to.” This brief paragraph of heavy exposition reveals that this horror film's monster is indeed self-aware. David can essentially be broken down into two distinct characters in the film: the version of David in an environment where he feels safe, and the version of David where his programming is triggered. But both types are hidden under his beautiful, monotone face. In the very beginning of the film when Laura tells David he should spend the night at the house, David tries to say no, claiming he wanted to stay a night at the motel up the road then catch a bus to Florida in the morning. It is revealed that the surgeon that would do David’s identity-altering procedure works out of Florida, implying that staying with the Peterson family for any amount of time more than keeping his promise to Caleb is time he wasn’t planning on, essentially making all the time he spends with Peterson’s, and all the acts of kindness he does for them, genuine. David is a man who was broken and put back together, which explains his unusual, monotone demeanor. Is beating up high school freshmen at a bar a true act of kindness? Not really, but in his eyes it might be the only solution he understands. This mindset is further explored with Spencer. In the scene where Spencer first begins warming up to David, he explains that he’ll never get a promotion at his current job because he doesn’t have a college degree. Fast forward a half hour in movie-time and Spencer nervously explains to his family the mysterious suicide his boss committed, making Spencer the new regional manager. In a scene where Anna tells the family that she’s been looking into David’s past, he corners her afterwards and makes a plea of sorts: “I promised Caleb I would do anything I could to help your family. I’ll be moving on in a couple of days, so you don’t need to put up with me much longer.” David’s basically saying, “if you continue to look into this, I’m going to have to kill you.” David knows full well what his programming can make him do. He doesn’t want an identity change to go a vengeful murder spree; he wants it because he will be liberated. Without his old face he will no longer be recognizable, and if he’s unrecognizable his programming cannot be triggered. It is once the military tries to take out David at the Peterson household that he becomes fully triggered and the events that turn David into a villain begin. Once David’s identity is compromised he has to erase the evidence, that being in this case, the Peterson family. In a similar fashion to how he infiltrates the family, he begins to take them out. During the seize of the house, Laura is hiding in the kitchen and yells at David, “Did you even know my son?” “I did…yes, we were in the same program, and he would understand what I have to do here.” This implies that Caleb was also a brainwashed super solider, and after this quote he murders Laura. He then takes out the entire military squad chasing him (sans Major Carver, naturally) and goes on to kill Spencer, then Anna’s best friend, all the witnesses, and eventually Major Carver himself (naturally). The only reason Luke and Anna survive is because David fakes his own death. The film ends with Luke and Anna, sitting in the back of an ambulance outside the wreckage of the high school gym, where their final stand-off with David took place. The last scene of the film contains a limping fireman exiting, who is revealed to be David. Anna notices but it doesn’t matter. With all of the military personnel who knew David’s secret now deceased, along with the Peterson elders murdered, David is free, and the children survived, but at a very, very high cost. Robert Anderson Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter @RoBaeBae #Newsletter #Articles #RobertAnderson #TheGuest #Perspective

An egotistical CEO, a naïve computer programmer and a trapped artificial intelligence are the major players in Alex Garland’s critically acclaimed film, Ex Machina . The film begins with Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) winning the adventure of a lifetime, a week-long retreat to the estate of Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), the illustrious CEO of Blue Book, a software company with a powerful, Google-esq, search engine. Upon Caleb’s arrival, he learns his “prize,” is to be the human component of Nathan’s Turing Test of a “living, breathing artificial intelligence,” Ava (Alicia Vikander). Over the course of the film, Caleb develops sympathy for Ava, seeing her as a damsel in distress, while she views Caleb as a means of escape. Ex Machina constantly begs the question, “What does it mean to be human?” As Caleb’s sympathy for Ava grows, he goes as far as to cut open his own skin, making sure it is flesh and blood instead of circuits and gears. Ava, the focal point of empathy throughout the entire film, is trying to convince the audience that she is not all that different from a human, as well as convince Caleb she is not all that different from a woman. The least human character in the film seems to be Nathan Bateman. Sharing a last name with famous film sociopath, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho , Nathan is just that. A man embodied so much in his ego he has become distant from humanity. In the latter half of the film, we find ‘skeletons’ in Nathan’s closet, the previous AI models, now deactivated and strung up in cabinets like vertical android coffins. Regardless of how human Nathan’s creations look, he is so desensitized from them that he can only perceive them as machines. Nathan, one of the most colorful characters in the film, juxtaposed against his shallow, inhuman actions, really makes up his character: a genius sociopath with a God complex. It is pure dramatic irony to have Nathan be the one to test Ava’s consciousness. The Turing Test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, evaluates a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Ava’s physical form is very distinguishable from that of a human, the only ‘skin’ she has is on her face, while the rest of her body is visibly mechanical. During her sessions with Caleb, she actively flirts with him, which eventually wins over his sympathies. Nathan later reveals that the real test was to evaluate Ava’s attempt to escape his facility, using all the resources she has at her disposal. “Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy...and she did. If that isn’t true A.I., what the fuck is?” Nathan reveals this to Caleb after his coup d'etat was seemingly a failure. Ava’s escape tools were turning the tropes of being human into the spoon that would slowly chisel her way out of a cell. She passes Nathan’s test with flying colors, not only does she escape the facility, she fully assimilates into human life by the end of the film. The last few moments of the film harken back to a quote by Caleb in an earlier scene, when he describes a thought experiment called “Mary in the Black and White Room.” Caleb describes a scientist named Mary, who studies color and lives in a room that is black and white, where she can only experience the rest of the world through a black and white monitor. She knows everything there is to know about color, but has never experienced color herself firsthand. While in the room gathering data on color, she is a machine. When she leaves the room and experiences color for the first time, in a way, she is human, she is conscious. Ava’s black and white room is the idea of humanity. Nathan tells us in the film that Ava’s ability to interact with other humans is the product of him hacking every cell phone camera and microphone across the planet, giving him the data he needed to give Ava believable facial and vocal interactions. She is born knowing everything there is to know about being human. She is born being able to communicate, she is aware of customs like romance and and is capable of making works of art, but while in her cage, with the less-than-human Nathan as her creator and overseer, she is still a machine. Just as Caleb is the human component of the Turing Test, he is also the ‘color’ of the Mary thought experiment. Caleb is Ava’s first real experience of human contact; it is in their first session that she is awoken with consciousness and the first thing she does with her new found awareness is to attempt to escape Nathan’s cage. In Judith Butler’s essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” she quotes Simone de Beauvoir as saying: “One is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes a woman. In this sense gender is no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed.” While Ava is in the confines of Nathan’s home, her gender - an umbrella that includes her sexuality and femininity - is only another tool at her disposal. In the film when Caleb asks Nathan why he assigned Ava a specific gender, Nathan argues that she would have no imperative to interact with anyone without gender. This however, is not true. If Ava is a conscious, captured creature, whose only goal is to escape captivity, then THAT is her imperative to interact. For the entirety of the movie Ava is genderless and not human. Her flirtations with Caleb are a tactical escape plan that involve the utilization of her assigned gender. It is only AFTER her escape, during the film’s denouement that she becomes human and a woman. It is after Nathan’s death that she takes the skin from the other failed A.I. and constructs her feminine body. It is only after she walks out of Nathan’s estate for the first time and experiences nature, that she becomes truly human. The driving forces that facilitate Ava’s escape are the male egos of Caleb and Nathan. Nathan’s estate is a small-scale patriarchy kingdom, with an entourage of robotic female slaves. He has a God complex and his mind is clouded by his own intellect. Nathan has no intention of releasing Ava; even if she proves to have complete consciousness, he will never view her as anything more than a machine. This is Nathan’s downfall. By invalidating Ava’s status as a living consciousness, he is blinded to her ability to succeed in escaping his facility. He never suspects that she would be one step ahead of him. Caleb facilitates Ava’s escape by falling for the classic ‘damsel in distress’ trope. He belittles her intellect by seeing her as a victim. Ava understands this immediately. She puts herself in the role of the romantic victim, knowing full well that it will be the only way she can escape. Leaving one with the question of, “Why does Ava leave Caleb for dead in Nathan’s facility at the end of the movie?” Perhaps just as Nathan would never validate her as a being with consciousness, Caleb will never validate Ava as an independent woman. In the post-escape world of Ex Machina , if Ava were to bring Caleb back to civilization with her, her escape would not be her own, it would be a product of Caleb’s ‘heroics.’ Ava is independent and conscious enough to have desire, a desire to make her escape HER design, not Caleb’s, nor anyone else’s. Ex Machina masterfully injects feminist theory and design into an already tried and true genre. As the audience we are constantly rooting for Ava’s escape. While we are not calling for the death of Nathan (at first) or the trapping of nice guy Caleb, by the end of film we understand their fates. Without either of them, Ava lives in no man’s shadow, she steps out into the world and experiences what it means to be human, victorious and for the first time. Robert Anderson Robert has a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting and works in multiple genres. He's just your typical man-child who enjoys most things nerd culture. You can follow him on Twitter @RoBaeBae #RobertAnderson #ExMachina #Theory #Articles #Newsletter

Unpacking the ethics of truth-telling in documentary and dramatic license in adaptation. If you go back and read the various iterations of my Story Screen writer bio over the past five years you'll see it ends with a little joke - that I have a film degree from Vassar College that I do not use. This is true. I graduated with a BA in film from Vassar in 2007 and then proceeded to fall into a career in accounting and finance-related roles in a number of industries. While you'd think writing about film, and television criticism would mean that I bust out that knowledge I spent four years (and a fairly significant amount of money) to obtain, the truth is most of my writing in this space has been to analyze media and pop culture through the lens of personal narrative. HBO's recent fictional miniseries The Staircase (based on the true crime docuseries also named The Staircase ) is the first time that I actively regretted having sold all of my film textbooks back to the Vassar bookstore and boxed up all of my class notes for recycling 15 years ago. What I would give, right now, to still have my books about documentary filmmaking, and the art of adaptation. How I wish I still had my handwritten notes. And the reason for that is that the HBO series made me incredibly angry. Not angry at the fallibility of the justice system - though that is certainly a pertinent aspect of the story of Michael Peterson. Not angry at the death of Kathleen Peterson - though certainly, I am angry that a by-all-accounts intelligent, lovely, and loving woman died in a senseless way with no clear resolution as to what really happened to her. No, I'm angry at HBO for letting showrunner and creator Antonio Campos make this piece-of-drek miniseries in the first place. I'm angry that Campos has been nominated for a writing Emmy and a directing Emmy for this show. I don't care about the positive reviews. I don't care about the praise for Colin Firth's performance as Michael Peterson, despite my grudging admission that he did portray Peterson well and I'm not terribly surprised he's been nominated for an Emmy for his work. This miniseries should not have been made. * Let's back up a little. The original docuseries The Staircase , directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, depicts the story of the death of Kathleen Peterson, a Nortel executive living in Durham, North Carolina, and the subsequent murder trial of her husband Michael Peterson, a writer and local politician. In December 2001, Michael Peterson discovered Kathleen at the bottom of the eponymous staircase in their home in a pool of blood and called 911. He told the police that they had just had a quiet evening staying in watching a movie, drinking, and having a nice time discussing their lives and their kids outside by their pool, and then she went inside to answer a couple of work emails before bed while he stayed outside finishing his wine. When he came inside, he discovered her at the bottom of the stairs and panicked, assuming that she had tripped and fallen due to being tipsy and had died alone while he was still outside. Police did not believe Michael's story; they concluded that he had beaten his wife to death with a fireplace tool (missing from the house) - specifically a blow poke - and Peterson was charged with murder. Their reasoning as to why Michael would suddenly lash out in violence towards his beloved wife (all of their friends described their marriage as a happy one - one that many of them envied) was evidence they found during a search of the house on Michael's computer - Michael identified as bisexual (though not publicly) and had downloaded gay pornography and had also been corresponding with a few male escorts. The working theory that the Durham County District Attorney's office went to trial with was that Kathleen did not know her husband was bisexual, discovered the evidence when she went to check her email that night, confronted him, and in a desperate attempt to not be outed, he bludgeoned her. Michael claimed that this was absolutely not the case, but there was no one in the Petersons' lives who could confirm or deny whether Kathleen was aware of his bisexuality. The autopsy and crime scene photos were gruesome given the amount of blood, but the cause of death did not exactly fit the prosecution's theory as to what had happened; despite Kathleen's scalp showing several lacerations, she did not have any fractures to her skull, which should have been present for a bludgeoning that resulted in death. Regardless, the prosecution stuck with this theory - even when the mysterious blow poke was finally found in the Peterson garage, covered in dust (and therefore safe to assume it had not been used in years, either in the fireplace or as a murder weapon) - and their case hinged upon key testimony from State Bureau of Investigation Agent Duane Deaver, who performed blood pattern analysis tests that seemed to corroborate the bludgeoning theory, as well as a hefty dose of good old-fashioned homophobia, portraying Michael as a closet case who would have done anything at any cost to keep his sexuality a secret - even murder his beloved wife. If this story seems complicated, I haven't even gotten to the half of it. The Peterson family was a blended one - the Brady Bunch with a twist - composed of Todd and Clayton Peterson, Michael's two sons from his first marriage, Caitlin Atwater, Kathleen's daughter from her first marriage, and Margaret and Martha Ratliff, two girls adopted by Michael and his first wife, while they were stationed in Germany during one of his tours with the Marines. Margaret and Martha's biological parents both died when they were very young, and after Michael and his first wife divorced, he married Kathleen, and they stayed with Michael. They were a close-knit family who adored each other - Todd and Clayton referred to Kathleen, their stepmother, as "Mom," and the Ratliff girls called Kathleen and Michael "Mom" and "Dad." Caitlin by all accounts, also deeply cared for her stepfather. These kids were not your average step-siblings - they all felt as connected as real siblings. And so, the first big tragedy, after Kathleen's death, was when Caitlin, along with Kathleen's sisters, Candace and Lori, saw the autopsy photos and became suspicious, and then convinced, of Michael's guilt, while the boys, Margaret, and Martha, stood by their father, causing an irreparable split. Michael's defense attorney David Rudolf does a hell of a job in the series, defending him in court, but in the end, the jury, heavily influenced by SBI Agent Deaver's testimony and also, (it is implied), influenced by the homophobic undercurrent in the prosecution's case, convicted him, and he was sentenced to life in prison. This is where the original docuseries ended. It was completed in September 2004, and it first aired in January 2005, after the trial had concluded. This was by design. David Rudolf did not want the documentary to have any impact on the outcome of the trial or any subsequent appeals. (Put a pin in that for a second.) The docuseries was well-received and won a Peabody Award. The Peterson family, though obviously disappointed in Michael's conviction, was happy to have their story told. Eight years later, Lestrade returned to film Michael and his family for two "sequel" episodes because it was discovered that Duane Deaver had lied under oath during Michael's trial and his blood pattern analysis experiments were scientifically flawed. Since the jury had cited Deaver's testimony as the most compelling reason for conviction, Rudolf fought to have the conviction overturned due to a lack of due process and won. Michael was released from jail under house arrest pending a new trial. Two years later, Lestrade returned to Michael Peterson one more time to make three more sequel episodes, in which Michael decided not to pursue a new trial and instead, take what is known as an "Alford plea," where he accepted a manslaughter conviction and was sentenced to time served. Simply put, an Alford plea is when a defendant in a criminal case maintains their innocence, but admits that there is sufficient evidence that would likely find them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. While Michael was loathed to even accept any conviction in his case (to this day he says he did not kill Kathleen), he did it to put an end to the ongoing drama for the sake of living his elderly life in peace and restoring some measure of normalcy to the lives of his children and grandchildren. The series finally ends with Michael and his family finding some semblance of closure, despite the flaws of the justice system and no clear answer as to how Kathleen died, and Kathleen's daughter and sisters hopefully finding some semblance of closure knowing that Michael will have a guilty plea on his record for the rest of his life. All thirteen episodes of Lestrade's docuseries (the original eight episodes and the five sequel episodes) are available to stream on Netflix, and I highly recommend watching them. It's very well done, and very thorough (despite having had the Durham DA and Kathleen's family pull out of participating very early on in the proceedings), and it is probably the first real example of a "true crime" series - a genre that, as we all know, has become very popular in light of programs like Netflix's "Making a Murderer," the first season of the Serial podcast (covering the case of Adnan Syed), and of course, the recent spate of "white collar grifter true crime" shows that I wrote about earlier this year. * Filmmaker Antonio Campos has reportedly been obsessed with Lestrade's docuseries for years. He began developing a scripted adaptation of the story back in 2008, before Lestrade went back to do the sequel episodes. In 2019, his passion project finally made its way out of development hell and was greenlit by Annapurna Television, who shopped the idea to several networks and streaming services until it finally landed at HBO Max as a limited series consisting of eight episodes, six of which were to be directed by Campos himself. And here is where things start to get messy. Campos reached out to Lestrade expressing his admiration for the docuseries and asking for guidance as he developed the scripted miniseries. Lestrade and Campos talked about the story extensively, and Lestrade allowed Campos access to all of the footage he had captured about Michael Peterson's case over the years - even footage that never made it into the original documentary. Campos began writing the show along with American Crime Story's Maggie Cohn (who also served as an executive producer and showrunner). In the meantime, a star-studded cast became attached to the show - Colin Firth as Michael Peterson, Toni Collette as Kathleen Peterson, Michael Stuhlbarg as David Rudolf, Rosemary DeWitt as Kathleen's sister Candace, Parker Posey as one of the Durham County prosecutors Freda Black... and Juliette Binoche as Sophie Brunet, the editor of Lestrade's documentary. Yes, Campos had decided to make the documentarians characters in his telling of the story. Vincent Vermignon was cast as Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. Things are about to get very messy now. Full disclosure: when I was in film school, I interned for a film company, in the editing department, that was making a feature-length documentary. I know what it's like to be on the inside of a documentary filmmaking team. I know how hard it can be to separate oneself from the work, especially once you build a rapport with your documentary subjects and start to care for them. It's an interesting choice Campos made, to include Lestrade and Brunet as characters in the film, and not necessarily a bad one because the story of The Staircase that viewers of the original docuseries knew was created and shaped by real people. People who have sympathies and biases. Not to mention the fact that the very act of observation - in this case, cameras on a subject at all times - can change how the subject behaves. Campos' miniseries could have provided a very interesting meta-commentary about how the experience of being the subject of a documentary impacted Michael Peterson and his family and lawyers as they went through this harrowing experience. And to be fair - before I excoriate Campos for what he ultimately did - I would like to point out some aspects of the HBO miniseries that are actually done well. For starters, by making Kathleen Peterson a significant character in the show, we, as the audience, finally get to see her humanity and her experiences, a glimpse of what her life may have looked like in her own eyes, and a sense of her own voice. Toni Collette does a wonderful job of making Kathleen feel like a real, lived-in character. She's a real person, not just a dead body. This is something that was obviously impossible with Lestrade's docuseries because Kathleen was no longer alive and could not speak for herself - all we were left with were the memories her family shared, and ultimately, those got swallowed up by the enormity of Michael's trial, prison time, appeal, and release. Campos also spent an entire episode of the series exploring a theory for Kathleen's death, originating from the Peterson’s next-door neighbor, that seems like complete insanity at first, but then, weirdly enough, starts to seem like the most plausible theory for what actually happened to her given the flaws in the prosecution's bludgeoned-to-death theory and Michael's she-fell-down-the-stairs theory: that Kathleen was attacked by an owl, and said owl's talons are the only reasonable explanation for the pattern of the lacerations on her scalp, the amount of blood lost, and the lack of skull fractures. There were apparently many owl attacks in Durham that winter. This theory is so out-there that Lestrade never included it in his docuseries, but true groupies of the Peterson case have been talking about this for years. I don't want you all to think I'm a loony, but... I actually believe the owl theory. Additionally, Campos reveals something that I myself was not aware of and something that presumably many people who watched the original docuseries weren't aware of either: editor Sophie Brunet began a romantic relationship with Michael Peterson while he was in prison. She felt that she had fallen in love with him during her experience editing him for Lestrade, and they struck up a correspondence, which blossomed into friendship and romance and eventually her splitting her life between being a mom and editor in Paris and being Michael's companion in Durham. Remember how I said things are getting messy? Campos depicts the relationship between Michael and Sophie as starting while she was still editing the film and heavily implies that she and Lestrade were editing the film in such a way as to portray Michael as innocent and help his case and trial. And remember how I asked you to put a pin in something earlier when I was summarizing the docuseries? Yeah. In real life, Lestrade and Brunet were not editing the film in a rush in collusion with defense attorney David Rudolf to help Michael's case. The film was not meant to be seen - and indeed, was not seen - until Michael's trial had concluded and he was sent to prison. By showing Brunet's growing feelings for Michael influencing the way she edits the film (she has many arguments with Lestrade and their executive producer in Campos' version of the story trying to defend her editing choices that downplay some of the more suspicious aspects of Michael's character), it implies that she and Lestrade were a part of the defense team. It portrays them as unscrupulous and unethical. Documentary filmmakers have to maintain impartiality - or at least the appearance of it - as much as they can for their stories to remain truthful and not become propaganda. Lestrade's docuseries actually threads this needle pretty well; while understandably, we spend a lot of time with Michael and his family and his attorney (because the Durham County DA's office and Kathleen's family refused to participate in the film), Lestrade never makes a definitive case for Michael's guilt or innocence. He shows us how the trial went down, and he shows us the developments after the trial, but there is no smoking gun one way or another. While there are holes in the prosecution's version of Kathleen's death, there are holes in Michael's story as well, and Lestrade lets you sit with that discomfort, even as you see how valiantly his children and attorney are fighting for him. In Campos' retelling of events, we are clearly meant to think that Brunet believes Michael is innocent - okay, fair enough if she ended up in a relationship with the guy - but we are also meant to believe that Lestrade believes in his innocence as well. There is no ambiguity here - in a celebratory scene at a restaurant after Michael's conviction is overturned (not something shown in the original docuseries), Campos shows Lestrade actually sitting with the Peterson family and Brunet in the restaurant. He is celebrating too. This is not even remotely true, according to Lestrade. He did not consider himself to be an ally to Michael (just an observer), he most certainly was not making a film to exonerate him, and he did not eat a celebratory taco dinner with the Peterson family when the conviction was overturned. And according to Brunet, her relationship with Michael, while admittedly a bit eyebrow-raising, did not start until after she completed her work on editing the film. As the HBO miniseries was airing back in May and early June of this year, both Lestrade and Brunet gave multiple interviews with Vanity Fair (among other publications) talking about how upset they were at how they were being portrayed in Campos' miniseries. Lestrade said he felt, "very uncomfortable, because I feel that I've been betrayed." Brunet shared similar sentiments - like Lestrade, she had opened her doors (and home!) to Campos in order to help him develop the miniseries, and she was rewarded with a gross misrepresentation of her relationship with Michael and her own professionalism. Campos shows Brunet's relationship with Michael lasting for many years far beyond what it actually did in real life. Their relationship came to an end shortly after his conviction was overturned, and she was no longer involved with him at all by the time of the Alford plea; whereas Campos shows them living together in Durham after his conviction, shows her convincing him to take the Alford plea, and shows them planning to live a life together in Paris once the Alford plea is entered. In the final episode of the miniseries, Campos shows their relationship blowing up literally the night before they are to leave for Paris, because Sophie feels hurt that in interviews Michael keeps talking about how much he misses Kathleen and doesn't admit to his relationship with her, despite her having taken care of him for years and building her life around his. Michael feels that his relationship with Sophie has become too much like what he didn't like about his relationship with Kathleen - that all she wants is to control him - and sneers that "he does not want to live with a woman anymore." This ugly moment is foreshadowed by an earlier scene between Michael and Lestrade before the Alford plea, in which Michael recounts a lengthy anecdote from his youth about the first time he realized he was attracted to men and women, and then confesses that he had lied to everyone during the original trial that Kathleen was aware of his bisexuality. “We’re friends, right Jean?” Firth-as-Michael says. (NO THEY WERE NOT, says the real-life Lestrade by the way.) Michael then asks him not to say anything to Sophie about what they just filmed, only to show it to her later - presumably, after he torpedoes the relationship. As if he had premeditated breaking it off with her. Just to make this clear - in Lestrade’s original documentary, in the lead-up to the Alford plea, Michael does recount this same story of when he first realized he was bisexual, but he goes on to explain that in 1954, it just wasn’t something he could talk about. When he joined the Marines, it still wasn’t something he could talk about. And so he suppressed it for years, which became decades, and didn’t talk about it to anyone… including Kathleen. He doesn't say he lied. He says he buried it. That is not just semantics - not for a man who grew up in the 50s, not for a former Marine and Vietnam vet. He says this is the first time he’s really talked about it with anyone. This context is important - in the docuseries, he is speaking about it as a 73-year-old man thinking about how he wants the course of his life to go, how he wants to take the Alford plea and move on. It’s a sort of philosophical meandering on the topic of what it meant to grow up in an era where bisexuality or homosexuality wasn’t talked about, how it just continued throughout his life, and what it means to him now, as an elderly widowed man in 2019. He was no longer in a relationship with Sophie Brunet at this time. That relationship was long over. This sequence was just a part of the winding down of the story of The Staircase docuseries, a part of the winding down of this last chapter of Michael Peterson, the Defendant. In the fictional miniseries, this same anecdote is conveyed in a far more sinister way - he demands to do the interview with Lestrade completely out of nowhere in a conference room after fighting with Brunet and Rudolf about the Alford plea wording, and there is no contextualization about the homophobia of the era in which he grew up. It is simply used as an admission that he is a liar, as a dishonorable way to break up with Brunet, and as a suggestion that he might be lying about other things - like whether he killed Kathleen. By distorting the timeline of Michael’s relationship with Brunet and completely taking the story of his bisexual awakening out of the context in which it was depicted in the docuseries, Campos is trying to create a smoking gun. He tries to manipulate the audience into believing that Michael’s bisexuality is the key - the only key - that can explain whether he was responsible for Kathleen’s death. As I watched this, I thought, "Really? This is what Campos wants to hang the story on? The same kind of bullshit homophobic arguments that the Durham County DA’s office used to manipulate their jury during the original trial?" These inaccuracies are rampant in Campos’ miniseries. Michael’s attorney David Rudolf is also reportedly livid about it - he actually started writing a regular column in a Durham newspaper while the show was airing to refute plot points in real time. For instance, a scene in the miniseries in which the Peterson family essentially has a fire sale to clean out everything in their house so as to afford Rudolf's legal fees for the appeal? Didn't happen. Rudolf was working for Peterson pro bono by that time, he so strongly believed in his client's innocence. Rudolf resents how that scene makes him look mercenary and uncaring. Additionally, one of the complications in Michael's original trial was the fact that 20 years earlier, Margaret and Martha Ratliff's (the adopted daughters) biological mother died of a brain aneurysm in Germany... which resulted in her falling down a set of stairs in her home while Michael was visiting their home. In the docuseries, Rudolf and his team take this strange coincidence in stride and Rudolf actually travels to Germany to interview Michael's ex-wife, visit the house where Margaret and Martha's mother died, and look at the reports from the German medical examiner that confirm that the death was due to an aneurysm and not Michael having some sort of disturbing hobby of murdering women on staircases. In the miniseries, the discovery of the circumstances of the Ratliff girls' biological mother's death is played for humor - "THERE WAS ANOTHER WOMAN WHO DIED ON A STAIRCASE AND I'M ONLY JUST FINDING OUT?!" Stuhlberg-as-Rudolf yells at Firth-as-Michael, who stands there looking befuddled. I mean, come on. This shit isn't funny. It's just not. A woman died. A man is facing life in prison. Hahaha, another dead woman on a staircase? Gross. And in the Campos miniseries, Rudolf doesn’t take the trip to Germany to learn more, he just laments how much harder the case has gotten. It's flippant and it's a cheap laugh and it changes the reality of what was actually happening in the trial prep, in a harmful way. (Speaking of things that are played as funny but are actually quite offensive, Rudolf is not wild about how his character is introduced in Campos' series at a diner eating a pastrami sandwich. "I don't even like pastrami," Rudolf said in an interview, but beyond that, he wasn't wild about the LOOKEE HERE AT THIS NEW YORK JEW LAWYER subtext in that scene. Yes, that is indeed not okay.) But by far the worst aspect of Campos' miniseries - the thing that left me reeling - was his portrayal of the Peterson children. In Lestrade's docuseries, once Caitlin Atwater sides with her mother's sisters about Michael being Kathleen's murderer, we spend a lot of time with the remaining children - the older Peterson boys, and the adopted Ratliff girls - and it's so easy to see, even given how young they all were when the original trial was happening, how unshakeable their faith in their father's innocence was. And when Lestrade rejoins the family for the conviction being overturned, Margaret is actually editing together footage from the original trial to help Rudolf build his case against SBI Agent Deaver to prove perjury, and we see scenes of Michael being visited in jail by his children and grandchildren, and it's so clear how much they love him and how full of hope they are about this final appeal. In Campos' retelling, the kids start to fall apart and splinter while Michael is in jail. Todd struggles with alcohol addiction and sobriety. Clayton, who was always a bit of a fuck-up in his youth, begins to rise to the occasion and keep his family together. The combination of Todd’s struggles and Clayton’s turning his life around creates a very strange dynamic of sibling rivalry between the two brothers that seem to exacerbate Todd’s issues with sobriety. Martha struggles to come to terms with her own sexuality and falters in her attempts to pursue a future in dance, and grows resentful of the family for not giving her space to explore herself; she visits her biological mother's sister and hears a different side of the story of their life in Germany, which includes several unflattering anecdotes about Michael's temper. She even travels to Germany, despite her sister Margaret being less than supportive, to try to learn about her childhood and heal. Now admittedly, we do not know what happened in the lives of the Peterson children in real life between the first eight episodes of Lestrade’s docuseries and the subsequent five sequels. Maybe Todd did struggle with alcoholism, and possibly Martha did need to take a journey of healing and ended up in her childhood bedroom in Germany looking at the trees and finding peace. But it doesn’t come up during the sequel episodes - all we see is a family that has grown up amidst tragedy and chaos and has come together and become even stronger - Margaret says so herself at one point, in those words. This ordeal has made them stronger and more together as a family. The negative portrayal of the Peterson kids gets worse as the Campos miniseries continues. During the post-conviction celebratory dinner, Michael struggles with being out in the world again and gets a bit irritable and short with everyone. This is completely understandable - THE MAN HAS BEEN IN PRISON FOR THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, this is a LOT to adjust to - but his kids view this as bizarre and mean and evidence of their father being "difficult". Todd relapses with a couple of giant tequila shots while Clayton looks at him with pity and dismay. After dinner, when everyone has gone home, Margaret and Martha come together over cigarettes on a bench, talk about Martha's trip to Germany, and promise to each other that they are only going to live their own lives going forward and not waste their focus on their father’s ongoing plight. When it comes time for the Alford plea, Campos shows only Brunet present in the courtroom with Michael and David Rudolf, implying that his children have all abandoned him at this point. He hammers this in further with a scene of Todd, Clayton, Margaret, and Martha on a group chat in their own homes far away from Durham, sharing photos of their kids and talking happily about Margaret's job and Martha’s upcoming dance performance: MARGARET Did you guys see Dad took the plea? MARTHA Thank god TODD Finally CLAYTON Should we have gone today? MARGARET No, it’s still too hard to be around him MARTHA I agree. We all have better things to think about. This is when I started shaking with incandescent rage and almost wanted to cry. This is when I began to hope and pray that none of Michael's children were watching this miniseries. Because in real life, when it came time for Michael to decide whether to take the Alford plea, he discussed it at length WITH HIS CHILDREN. After a long chat with David Rudolf, he speaks with Todd on the phone and then gathers Clayton, Martha, Margaret, and Clayton’s wife on the couch to talk about Alford vs. a new trial. This is a long scene in the docuseries, where the family all talks about how their faith in the justice system has been irreparably destroyed by their experiences. Martha and Margaret try to push him to pursue a new trial, despite it potentially taking another two years with no real guarantee of acquittal. Clayton disagrees, saying that Michael has somehow gotten entangled in this never-ending mess and it’s time to just cut it off and move on, don't risk more jail time, no matter how much it pains them all that he has to admit guilt to anything in order to make it go away. As a family, they come to realize that the Alford plea is the best decision - for Michael, and for everyone else. Verbatim quotes from the documentary: MARTHA I just don't want to lose you again, Dad. MARGARET Yeah. I feel like we only just got you back. MARGARET I can't lose you again. CLAYTON It's time to put this to rest, Dad. This is the conversation that occurred in real life, in reality, in actuality, right before Michael took the Alford plea. This is what Lestrade captured. Michael's kids never abandoned him. Never. Not once. If they found him “difficult” to be around, they certainly don’t reveal it here. If they think they have “better things to think about”, they - well, I’m not going to go there, because clearly, they don’t. Clearly, they love their father and want to participate in helping him make the best choice for himself. Campos shows them pointedly decided not to get involved in the Alford plea, and hammers it home by showing Michael calling each of the kids after Sophie leaves him in tears, and all of the calls go to voicemail. What in the actual fuck is going on here? Why on earth would Campos so grossly misrepresent the lives of Michael's children - actual people, real people who lived through this unspeakable tragedy, traumatized human beings who stood by their father's side no matter what in real life - by showing gratuitous scenes of hypothetical addiction struggles, resentment towards their father, and literally ignoring him at the end - when there is actual, irrefutable proof that this is NOT what Todd, Clayton, Margaret, and Martha did? I cannot imagine, if any of them were watching Campos' miniseries, how painful this would be to see, how devastated they would have felt, watching their fictional selves abandon their father in his old age as he figures out how he feels about the Alford plea when in reality they all sat with him and counseled him on whether or not to take the plea at all? This is a story about real people. This is a story about real human suffering. This is a story about a woman who died under mysterious circumstances, her husband who may or may not have been wrongly convicted, and their children who bore the burden of this trial and never faltered in their support of their father - and there's proof of that, in Lestrade's docuseries. And Campos - a filmmaker who claims he was obsessed with the docuseries - betrayed Lestrade's trust and turned it into a salacious soap opera about unethical documentarians, children who lost their way in the aftermath of their mother's death and began to resent their father, and oh yeah, also clearly if you're a bisexual man of a certain age, you're probably gonna murder anyone who finds out. That's the takeaway from Campos' version of this story. And worst of all, for people who haven't seen the original docuseries, Campos' all-star miniseries is going to be what stands as their understanding of the truth of this story - especially given that the docuseries and the miniseries have the same fucking name (which, I tell you, is driving me absolutely CRAZY as I try to write about them both). The final episode of Campos's series aired on June 9, 2022. It's been two months. And thinking about it still makes me sick. * All right, Reeya, you're probably thinking right now. So, Antonio Campos wanted to adapt a documentary and turn it into a scripted piece. And he only had Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's original documentary footage to use as a source. Campos is a filmmaker, he's a storyteller, and the crux of good filmmaking and storytelling is imagination. How do you distinguish his story from the one Lestrade told? You need... dramatic license. Yeah, I agree. Dramatic license is a thing. And in cases of adaptation, it is a necessary thing. As I mentioned before, there is no actual footage or documentation of what Michael Peterson's kids were going through during those eight years in jail. Heck, there is no actual footage of Michael in jail (only a memoir he wrote about the experience after the fact), and there is no footage of his relationship with Sophie Brunet. And of course, there is no footage of Kathleen Peterson, alive. So, he filled in the blanks to tell a more well-rounded story, so that we weren't just watching Colin Firth and Michael Stuhlbarg and the actors playing the kids recite transcripts of the original documentary word-for-word. And maybe that's fine. Campos never said that HE was making a documentary. He was telling a story based on true events - based on Lestrade's documentary. There is no obligation of impartiality or concrete truth from Campos given this, the way there implicitly is from a documentarian like Lestrade. But in this case, I'm going to argue that the fact of Lestrade's work - 13 hours in total, telling this wrenching story over the course of 15 years - the fact that there is so much footage that has been released and published by Lestrade in the docuseries, the fact that he won awards for it, the fact that it is a famous docuseries because it was one of the first modern examples of long-form true crime reportage, the fact that everyone in the original documentary is still alive, and the fact that Lestrade allowed Campos unprecedented access to his archives in order to help him, means that Campos does have a bit of an obligation not to turn this story into a fucking smear campaign against Lestrade, Brunet, and Michael Peterson's kids. I think that much is fair. I think there was a way to tell the story of Michael Peterson - and the story of the documentary about Michael Peterson - without making key players in the story who are alive and well and WATCHING look like complete assholes. And I think Campos completely failed. And I think that is actually a huge problem. It's funny, when I started watching the fictional miniseries, my boyfriend was watching with me - this is after I had subjected him to the entirety of Inventing Anna and The Dropout earlier this year. Tim has trouble with adaptations of real-life events. He doesn't like excessive dramatic license. He can sense when excessive dramatic license is happening. And it makes him less interested in watching the show. After we had watched the first episode of the miniseries, Tim told me he had a feeling he wasn't going to like it. "I feel like they're taking way too many liberties," he said. "I just know it." Tim had not watched the original docuseries - honestly, the man is just not a fan of true crime. But when he said that to me, and I read some initial reviews of the first episodes of Campos' miniseries where it was noted that viewers of the original docuseries would recognize a lot of things that were taken verbatim from the docuseries, I grew curious. And so I put the HBO version aside for three days, switched over to Netflix, and binged the entirety of Lestrade's docuseries. And then when I returned to the HBO fictional series and followed it to the end, I began to get angrier and angrier. And that's when I started pouring over any articles I could find from the real players in the story, and I found the interviews that Lestrade, Brunet, and Rudolf gave refuting the miniseries and how upset they found the experience of watching it. And I was livid. I listened to HBO Max's companion podcast while I was at work and was thoroughly disgusted by its self-congratulatory tone - they clearly think this is a brilliant work of art. And of course, that's all been reinforced by the Emmy nominations. But what was interesting to me was how at the beginning of the show being aired, HBO was allowing full journalistic access to Antonio Campos and his co-showrunner Maggie Cohn - and then when the interviews with Lestrade, Brunet, and Rudolf began gaining traction in the media, HBO suddenly cut that off. That felt telling to me. It felt like HBO knew that they were on the verge of being in hot water, and embargoed their beloved Campos to keep their property safe. After the finale of the HBO miniseries aired and I wanted to throw things at my television screen, I went on Facebook and described what I had just watched as "an absolutely appalling, infuriating, historically distorted, and quite frankly irresponsible exercise in filmmaking... shame on Antonio Campos for abusing the trust of Lestrade, shame on Colin Firth, Toni Collette, and Juliette Binoche for participating in this, and shame on HBO for allowing this to happen." Since then, Michael Peterson has spoken out about the miniseries as well. Apparently, no one told him or his family that Campos was making a scripted series about his case, so, that was a horrific surprise for them all. And while he's upset at the inaccuracies in Campos' version of the story, he's angrier at Lestrade for allowing Campos in. He feels Lestrade sold them out to HBO. And finally, I found a brief comment from Margaret Ratliff about the HBO series as well. She watched some of it and then decided she didn't need to see the whole thing. But her takeaway wasn't "How dare Campos do this to my family," either. She said that now, with the miniseries out there and with hindsight, she wished that her family hadn't participated in Lestrade's documentary to begin with. Imagine that. The blowback from Campos' gratuitously inaccurate adaptation of Lestrade's documentary has resulted in the Peterson family being angrier at Lestrade than at Campos. And now I find myself completely at a loss as to what my own takeaway from the experience of The Staircase - both docuseries and miniseries - is. * In the final episode of the miniseries, as Firth-as-Michael is fighting with Binoche-as-Brunet, he bellows at her, “I had a WHOLE LIFE before that documentary that you know NOTHING about!” This is what I keep thinking about now, now that I know that the real-life Michael Peterson feels that Lestrade “pimped them out” (verbatim quote from a recent press interview) and that the real-life Margaret Ratliff wishes they hadn’t done the original documentary. They had lives before they all got pushed into the public eye by Lestrade’s docuseries. Kathleen Peterson was a real person, with real joys and real struggles. She and Michael were in a real marriage, a by-all-accounts happy one. They had a big happy, slightly dysfunctional but loving blended family. They didn’t ask for this kind of publicity. But when Kathleen died, Michael was accused, Caitlin Atwater sided with her aunts against her siblings, and Lestrade approached them about the documentary, the Peterson clan decided to participate - because even though Lestrade’s intention was never to help or hinder Michael’s case, the family thought that it might be beneficial for their story to be told. They had a life before the documentary. They also had a life after the documentary and before Campos’ fictional adaptation of the documentary. They seemed fine with the documentary up until the point when Campos came along and tampered with their life stories for his own gain. Now the HBO miniseries is throwing all of these years of work - the family’s, David Rudolf’s, and Lestrade’s - into question. In the final episode of the docuseries, Candace Zamparini, Kathleen’s sister, gives a statement at the Alford plea hearing. “Alford shmalford,” she says. “You are guilty, and you are admitting guilt.” It seems that the Alford plea might finally bring some closure, not only to Michael and his children but also to the members of Kathleen’s family who have been chasing the version of justice they believe is righteous - the version of justice where Michael is held accountable for the murder they believe he committed. But then Candace goes on and implicates Lestrade in her tirade. "This French film company came along, and now there is a film, The Staircase film, that my family didn’t give permission to make or consent to participate in, giving Michael Peterson the opportunity to pontificate on and on about how incompetent the Durham police department is, and the DA is, and how great he is. He says in multiple episodes that he believes he wouldn’t be in a courtroom if ‘Candace would just keep her fucking mouth shut.’” Candace is correct; Michael does say this more than once during the docuseries. And he does like bashing the cops and the DA (understandably), and he does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice (but he was an aspiring politician). But it made me realize that of course, Candace had a life before the docuseries as well. A life that no one knew about. And now, all that people know of her is that she shows up in court every time Michael is in court and passionately speaks up on her sister’s behalf. All that people know of her is that he is convinced her brother-in-law is a murderer and is capable of ranting about it in a way that at times comes across as borderline unhinged. “Wow. Dad,” Margaret says to Michael when he checks in with her after the Alford plea is over. She wasn't in the courtroom (Michael told the kids not to bother with the trip this time) but has just seen the footage of Candace in the courtroom on the news. “Candace is craaaaaaazy.” But is she? Or is she also just like them - stuck in her grief over the senseless death of her sister, with no clear resolution or satisfying bowtie of justice? The HBO miniseries depicts Candace giving the “Alford shmalford” speech too, but for some reason, Campos leaves out the moment where she calls out Lestrade and the documentary for the harm they have caused in her life. It’s a puzzling choice, given that he’s spent seven episodes portraying Lestrade and Brunet as unethical and unprofessional. Maybe he didn’t include it in his scripted series because it was one moment where he could tell himself that he wasn’t doing a hatchet job on the documentary filmmaker whose work he loved so much? I don’t know. Like I said before, it’s hard for me to know what my takeaway is at this point. I firmly believe that Campos’ miniseries is an exercise in completely irresponsible filmmaking. If he wanted to tell a story about ethical ambiguity and closeted bisexuality and whether we ever really know anyone we’re close to at all, why not write a completely fictional story, using elements of the Peterson case, and refrain from using the real-life names of anyone involved? Remove it just enough so that it’s not a smear on actual real people who are still alive and able to speak up? Or who are alive and will be hurt? But maybe Lestrade’s original docuseries - despite the awards, despite the accolades, despite the polish - maybe that was also an exercise in irresponsible filmmaking. Is it really okay to purport to tell an unbiased story about a murder trial but only hear the voices of the accused, his attorney, and his loyal family? Is it really ok to then view that documentary as your own personal intellectual property even though it only exists due to the real-life stories and pain of other people? Is it ok to then take that intellectual property and hand it over to an enthusiastic filmmaker with a decade-long passion project and a giant check from HBO Max without saying a word? Campos had a responsibility to treat Lestrade with respect when Lestrade gave him access to his archives, yes, but didn’t Lestrade have a responsibility to his documentary subjects too? Not just in the creation of the original docuseries, but in asking Michael Peterson and his family if he had their consent to allow Campos to adapt his work that was literally the story of their lives? I feel bad that Lestrade and Brunet have been maligned, but I ache for Michael Peterson’s kids. I hate how Campos distorted their relationships with each other and with their father. I hate everything about it. And maybe it would have just been better for everyone involved to have stayed out of the limelight. Can’t do anything about it now, unfortunately, and as far as I can tell, aside from Lestrade, Brunet, Rudolf, Michael, and Margaret, I’m the only one who feels this strongly that Campos has gone and fucked up big-time here. He has done the genre of scripted true crime a great disservice in the way he treated his source material from my point of view, but critics loved the show. There are Emmy nominations. It could well win some of them. And then what, exactly, is the message we are supposed to take away if it does? Ethics don’t matter when it comes to true crime? Once your story is out there, you stop being human and turn into a character in someone else’s narrative, and your life can be manipulated until you are unrecognizable, and it could cause you emotional harm, traumatic harm, but that’s okay because that’s show business, kid! As a former film student, as a former documentary editor in training, and as a current storyteller both in writing and in song, everything about The Staircase - both versions - is going to trouble the hell out of me for a long time. Reeya Banerjee Reeya is a musician and writer based in NY's Capital District. Her debut album The Way Up was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

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