Ghost Stories V: The Haunting of Hill House 🏘
What I watched this week: 'Uncut Gems' and 'Marriage Story'
🍁 Happy Friday!
Since it’s the weekend and the perfect time to binge something, I’m going to be recommending a miniseries that blurs the line between TV and movies. And since it’s Friday, I’ll tell you about a couple of movies I watched this week.
Okay, here’s day 5️⃣.
Today’s recommendation: The Haunting of Hill House
STREAMING ON NETFLIX
What it’s about: Alternating between the past and the present, The Haunting of Hill House follows the Crain family as they deal with memories of their childhood home and the haunting that drove them from it.
Why it’s great: I wanted to talk about The Haunting of Hill House because it’s formally interesting. You could easily edit down the ten episodes into a single film with a clear beginning, middle, and end. What creator Mike Flanagan did was fill in the rest of the time with additional development and color that you’d miss from a shorter story. The result is a terrifying and emotional family drama dripping with ghosts — both literal and figurative. Oddly, it’s comforting to watch. It feels so much like a classic ghost story brought into the modern age. And while I hate the term “binge-able", this is a very binge-able series.
The key players:
🎬
Mike Flanagan
🎭 Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Elizabeth Reaser, Oliver, Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel, Victoria Pedretti, Timothy Hutton
The details:
⏳ 10 episodes // 🗓 2018 // 📺
Trailer
Fun fact:
“Two Storms” — my favorite episode of the series — was filmed in multiple long takes without edits or cuts. The longest continuous take is the first 16 minutes.
What I watched this week
Today was my last day covering the New York Film Festival (for the first time as press!!) and I really went out on a high note with two really interesting movies. My full review for both movies will be on smashcutreviews.com.
Uncut Gems 💎
The Safdie Brothers, who directed Good Time (recommended in the newsletter here), have returned with yet another New York crime thriller starring Adam Sandler.
Sandler plays a diamond dealer whose greed constantly gets him into trouble as he dives deeper and deeper into debt.
The movie moves at a mile a minute with little time to breathe — although it’s also hilarious. It’s thrilling and claustrophobic to a fault with a career-high performance by Sandler.
Marriage Story 👪
If you told me that a comedy-drama by Noah Baumbach would be one of my favorite movies — if not, my favorite — I’d probably think you were lying. I’ve always struggled with his movies — the tone, the characters, and the stories just never resonated with me.
However, Marriage Story, which follows a couple (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson) going through a messy bi-coastal divorce, hit home in a way I wasn’t expecting. It’s a funny and emotional portrait of two people figuring out how to untangle their lives and become their own people, which leads to bombastic arguments, skeevy lawyers, and not one but two numbers from one of my favorite musicals, Company.
And that ends our week dedicated to ghost stories! I’ll be back next week with a new theme and a new format for the newsletter. Cliffhanger!
❤️ Do something nice for yourself this weekend.
See you next week! 🌆
Karl (@karl_delo)