Everything will be fine movie review9/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Soderbergh seems to set this up as a filmmaking challenge: Can a life's story be told exclusively in the words of the deceased, with no aid from secondary sources of any kind, and in a way that also makes some sense of his death? And at first the approach makes the film feel something like a highlight reel, a disconnected clip collection without narration, intertitles or much context to link together the bits of film and video culled from various points in Gray's career.Ī man of many talents, Gray was a playwright and screenwriter as well as an actor and performance artist. In devising an appropriate summation of his subject's life, the director decides to just let Gray do what he always did best: tell his own story. It's a fitting quote for Steven Soderbergh to lift for the title of his documentary about Gray, who died in 2004 in an apparent suicide: There's a careful composure and grace in Gray's monologues that belie the emotional turmoil and familial dysfunction that they often described. As the story builds to a verbal crescendo, and as the imperfections and cracks in his father's carefully constructed world surface within Gray's stream-of-consciousness barrage, he periodically inserts one particular phrase - a mantra meant to indicate his father's denial that there might actually be anything wrong: "And everything is going fine. And placing Fishburne at its heart is a fine move the man oozes credibility, giving the potentially schlocky hellhouse nastiness an unnerving element of real fear.In a particularly manic passage from one of Spalding Gray's extended autobiographical monologues, the actor and writer relates the story of how, after his mother's suicide, his father attempted to create a perfect new life with another woman. Event doesn't just borrow from fine antecedents, it takes their future shock value to new heights, using genuinely original FX and creepy camerawork to great effect. This, though, is never at the expense of the visual craft. Inevitably the horror sags: invisible forces sucked from other dimensions allow too much in the way of corner-cutting, and the lack of any credible explanation leaves you unsatisfied. It's not long before things have become so fraught that you're fit to burst. Jones' wisecracking rescue king et al (all very Alien) - tries to fathom heinous visions, offal-strewn control decks and other crew members chucking themselves out of airlocks. The point is that this is not a bug movie but a ghost movie - so surrealism is allowed.Īt first, this conjures up some of the most visceral tension seen in a movie since Ridley Scott first let a spiky insectoid go walkabout on the Nostromo, as the crew - Fishburne's taciturn captain, Richardson's stiff XO, Kathleen Quinlan's serious medic, Sean Pertwee's salt-of-the-earth helmsman, Richard T. Problem is, it went somewhere it shouldn't and has brought back an incumbent "evil force" from a place beyond our imagining etc., etc. The ship was a secret government project - designed by passenger Neill - which could create its own black hole and zap across the universe in no time at all. With preamble kept to a bare minimum, Captain Miller (Fishburne) and his crew of salvage and rescue grunts are whisked to deep space to find out where Event Horizon has been since it disappeared seven years previously. ![]() Not quite "The Shining In Space" of its aspirations, it works more as effect than concept. And despite script and storyline shortcomings, is sick, nasty and gruesome enough to rattle the cages, frazzle the ganglions and jerk the patellas of those unable to boast lead-lined nervous systems. Superbly styled in techno-Gothic space-grunge chic, this sci-fi/horror cross-breed is a directorial triumph of reference and homage. As soon as the camera peers around the desolate spacecraft Event Horizon, circling Neptune's storm ravaged atmosphere in a decaying orbit, it's pretty obvious that director Paul Anderson spent his youth swotting up on all the right directors: Kubrick, Scott, Cameron, Hitchcock. ![]()
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