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dir: Anthony Hemingway
Star Wars Episode 7: The Tuskegee Airmen Strike Back
It’s a story that’s been told a few times, but one that bears repeating, and that is clearly deserving of a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. Also, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen deserves all the attention George Lucas, his money, and his film technology can bring to the experience, surely.

After all, don’t African American actors deserve, at long last, to repeat all the corn, cheese and clichés of the Hollywood war movies of yesteryear they were so unfairly segregated from? Aren’t they due their dues by now, at long last, in this enlightened age?

Red Tails, in case you didn’t know and probably don’t care, is a story about African American pilots during World War II. It is a story George Lucas wanted to tell for decades, apparently, because of his deep connection to the subject matter(?) Look, I don’t know his real reasons, because who knows why he really does half of the stuff he does, as opposed to his publicly stated reasons. Does anyone on the planet really understand why it meant so much to him that Han Solo shooting Greedo first had to be expunged from the official record, despite the fact that we all saw it happen?

No, we don’t. When you’re that powerful, have more money than Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, and can make whatever you want, other people don’t have to understand your desire to shape reality to your whims, they just have to cut you a check and say “Yes, George.”

I remember seeing Lucas on The Daily Show talking about this film, and about how he had great difficulty getting studios to pony up cash for it, because they couldn’t imagine audiences wanting to see a film with so many African American actors in it. So he funded it himself. I don’t know if that’s true or not, because you can never tell with George, but if that was the reason it took so long to come to fruition, well, George got his wish in the end, and he also got to make a flick with aircraft getting into dogfights and blowing shit up without requiring Anakin Skywalker getting in on the act and fucking things up.

dir: Ben Wheatley
Even hardened killers aren't safe in the English countryside
Pretty nasty. Pretty goddamn nasty. Ugly and goddamn nasty would perhaps be most apt.

Trust the Brits to make a flick about work-a-day hitmen that’s probably closer to the reality of what such monsters must look like. None of this aestheticisation of murder crap for them, no.

Oh, fuck the ethical / moral arguments about it; they’re not worth having, they can’t be had because no-one’s arguing the contrary. What I’m saying is, considering the sheer abundance of films with characters who are hitmen, in reality, such professionals are probably more like the chaps here than, oh, let’s say George Clooney in The American.

I’m not just talking looks-wise here. Although I am. Bless the Brits for doing something to ensure unattractive people get to make a living. No, I mean it just feels more credible to have two chaps like the ones here, Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley) doing what they’re doing, rather than two rarefied, classical-music-listening, Faberge-egg-collecting pretty-boy buff chaps, which would be the norm if you believed a lot of movies with the subject.

Nah. Working class chaps all the way, ex-Army, who don’t mind getting their hands bloody in order to pay the mortgage and keep their scrag wives in the luxury (of jacuzzis and Katie Price designer hand bags) they’ve become accustomed to. A job, a grinding trade-like job. One where you’d think they could wack on some overalls, get their lunchbox and a thermos of tea, and wander off after kissing the wife and ruffling the hair of their kid, to a full day of brutal murder.

With a name like Kill List, presumably people aren’t expecting My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic! Despite Jay’s reluctance, he eventually agrees, after a dinner party with Gal and his girlfriend, to work on another project. Various characters make regular allusions to Jay’s last job, which apparently didn’t go very well. Kiev, they say, everything went wrong in Kiev. Everything always goes wrong in Kiev.

dir: Sean Durkin
You're not allowed to look at us, it's against the rules
A strange film. A strange, awkward film about a strange, damaged girl called Martha (Elizabeth Olsen). Well, her name is usually Martha, and then someone else anoints her as a Marcy May, and then later on, when asked her name on the phone, she calls herself Marlene, just like all the woman in her cult when they’re on the phone.

There’s your explanation of the title, if that’s what was perplexing you. It’s also the only way to remember the title itself. For months people would refer to the film or ask me if I’d seen it, and we’d both be flustering or dribbling “you seen that Marley uh Macy Grey, uh Mandlebrot movie yet?” in the struggle for a title.

I’m not sure if it’s a character study, or if it’s just an uncomfortable look at a mildly insane woman, but what it ends up being is a tedious drag. I know it’s meant to be a great film, and that it garnered a lot of praise last year for the central performance and for the creepy and oppressive atmosphere it generates, but I really, in the wash up, don’t see what the fuss was about. I'm not trying to be oppositional just for the sake of it, nor am I disliking it just because critics wanked over it.

Olsen has a very expressive face, though, for my money, she’s more reminiscent of Maggie Gyllenhaal than her evil twin sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley. Her performance is strong at times, and weak at others. I wasn’t sure if it was the characterisation or the character that was the most inconsistent, but I found her compelling only rarely. Quite often, the character and the actress annoyed me, and not in a way that made me sympathetic to the portrayal or the film. If readers feel that I'm being unfair, I'm all ears (or eyes, as the case would be on the internets), and I am looking forward to someone putting forward the case that it's actually great, for this and this and this reason. Good luck, by the way.

dir: Steve McQueen
You've got nothing to be ashamed about, unless you start doing ads for Coke
I understand shame. Believe me, I have a deep appreciation of shame, both the concept and the feeling, the horrible feeling, of shame.

I don’t think I really understood Shame.

The main reason is this: I don’t understand what it was trying to say. I think I understood what it said, in the way that if someone says to me “my cat’s breath smells like cat food”, I understand the individual words and the overall sentence. If the statement was made to me when I was standing at a shop counter asking for a pack of smokes, though, you can understand my lack of understanding from the context.

Michael Fassbender is a tremendous actor, and I’ll happily watch him in anything he does. All I did in this flick was watch him. He is this entire film, and he’s definitely a major presence, in or out of this flick, in or out of the nude. I still didn’t get what he was doing here, though, or why.

Let me be blunt: his behaviour in this flick, except for the visit to a certain type of club towards the end, is what most guys are like, or at least most guys wish they were like. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm sorry to say, ladies, that this is what men are like all day every day. They're pigs, and you only have the barest appreciation for how truly piggish most of us are. His character here is an alpha male who, for the purposes of this flick, is meant to be some kind of sex addict. That's meant to be the key: this is supposed to be a gruelling trawl through the dark world of sex addiction.

I find this a bit perplexing, because most of the guys on this planet do the same when they have the time, money, looks, confidence and inclination. In fact, let me phrase it more concisely: this is what guys who probably aren't defined as sex addicts act like, every fucking day of their delightfully full lives.

I'm not talking from personal experience, lest you think, dear reader, that I am raising myself to the lofty or lowly heights of gods amongst men like Michael Fassbender or the characters he plays. I am so far from being an alpha male that I don't think using the designation of "omega" would even cover it. But I do, unfortunately, know plenty about the male mind, more than any human should ever want to know, to the point where I despair for our entire species sometimes.

See, men live in this reality, which is a cold, grey, grim concrete world with brief glimmers and sparkles of joy and meaning. But part of the male mind, or at least around six inches of it, permanently resides in that porno fantasy land where sex is always potentially in the offing, always just around the corner, and is always a possibility no matter how unlikely or sexless the circumstances.

dir: Gary Ross
Needs more flames
For readers of the book the only question is whether Jennifer Lawrence is a credible Katniss Everdeen. For people who haven’t read the books, it would surprise me if they care at all, and surprises me even more that they went in such droves to watch this film, which they have. It’s the biggest film of the year, thus far, which is pretty surprising in itself, and also gratifying.

In my mind at least, the success of The Hunger Games trilogy has always been a statement of quality against that other titan of the teen – young adult genre, being the Twilight series of abominations. Katniss is the anti-Bella Swan, in that she’s a decent and enjoyable female character to follow, who has agency and makes tough decisions concerning her fate and the fates of others. In contrast, Bella is a blank who has two hot supernatural boys fight over her.

There’s no need to fight over her, boys, she’s definitely not worth it.

But Katniss, Katniss Everdeen… It was like Suzanne Collins was saying ‘this kinda thing can be done right’. And so even if the story comes across as a melange of Battle Royale, Running Man, Predator, Nineteen-Eighty-Four and every reality television cliche of the last ten years, it's still the product of a worthy endeavour.

Let me say up front that I loved the books, have read them all, so I'm fairly conversant with the source material. In the interests of being a semi-responsible reviewer, I will set aside that so I can try to talk about it purely as a film.

Nah, can't do it. It's impossible. I can’t pretend to not know what’s coming, or what’s left out.

Right off the bat I’ll say that it’s a reasonable adaptation of a book that’s not that complex. The problem in adapting it is that the book’s narrated in the first person, and a lot of that narration colours what Katniss does and why. Without that insight into why she’s doing things, it’s hard to differentiate (for those who don’t know) between what she seems to be doing, and what she’s actually doing. Some of this was communicated non-verbally, to good effect, but a lot of the time it looks like Katniss is behaving wildly out of character.

It took me a long while to warm to Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. She doesn’t match the Katniss I carry around in my head from the books, though that’s not to say she doesn’t do a good job. She does the best she can, and after the halfway point, it no longer matters.

The film is equally split, exactly on the hour, into the pre-Hunger Games section and the Games themselves, so there’s a fairly long set up. Some people I’ve spoken to prefer the first half, but I have to say that it didn’t really click with me until the second half.

The story is set in some distant Cowardly New World that Aldous Huxley himself would spit on in terror if he ever beheld it. The United States we love and cherish is no more. It is now called Panem, and is loosely modelled on both an Orwellian depiction of a totalitarian state and the worst elements of the Roman Empire. There’s the Capital, where everyone dresses like Nicki Minaj (if you don’t know who that is, she generally looks like a combination between a sugary dessert and a child’s toy), and there are twelve districts where the majority of the population live in misery and starvation.

dir: Jason Reitman
No, it's not Paris Hilton; it's someone way worse
Charlize Theron was terrifying in Monster, where she played serial killer Aileen Wuornos all those years ago, snagging an Oscar for her performance.

There are scenes in Young Adult where she’s even more horrifying.

She does this thing with her eyes where she leeches them of all human sentiment or human feeling. They transform into the eyes of some infinitely old and infinitely cold alien who observes our species with nothing but contempt.

And then she just acts like a self-centred brat who’s never grown up from being the high school mean/popular girl, who is doomed to be nothing but this for the rest of her life.

When Mavis (Charlize Theron) receives a group e-mail announcing the birth of her married, high-school boyfriend’s daughter, who has been out of her life for decades, she somehow twists this to mean that now is the time for her to return to her shitty home town to rescue him from a life of domesticity and human feeling.

She is a piece of work, a true piece of work. Her alcoholism is only one of her many estimable qualities. When she piles in to her car in order to drive back home to Mercury, Minnesota, with miniature dog in tow, she puts in a tape that dates back to her glory days, to the halcyon, to the peak of existence.

That tape, a mixtape, is just one of the many testaments to a certain age, here. What kids make mixtapes these days? I would hazard a guess that there’s possibly only about five people constructing even ‘mixtape’ CDs worldwide, and they’re probably just perverts.

What’s the contemporary equivalent? Sending a text message with a playlist that has links to the torrentz where some songs could be downloaded? Cram that up your iPod’s nethers and smoke to it, freaks and groovers.

Mavis plays the same song again and again. Actually, not even the entire song. She keeps repeating the intro mostly, again and again, just to hear the words “She wears denim wherever she goes / says she’s gonna get some records by The Status Quo oh yeah / Oh Yeah.”

Oh, yes indeed, it’s a great song from a great album, being The Concept from Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub. It’s meant to date not the film but the protagonist. The strangest thing, for me at least, is that it perfectly situated me in a time and place so I could understand the exact era these halcyon days of hers were meant to be from: the early 90s. If it had been a Nirvana song, that would have been too broad, and too on the nose, too easy. But this song narrowed it down even more.

It’s the way that she keeps playing the first bit of the song that’s even more telling, or possibly even more telling. She can’t even let the rest of the song play, or the tape itself. As if that wasn’t subtle enough, the song plays a key part later on as well.

dir: Bruce Robinson
Hunter S wishes he looked like Depp at his worst
You didn’t know this, but The Rum Diary is a superhero movie, of a different stripe. More specifically, it’s a superhero origin story, and it stars Johnny Depp.

Yes, yes, we’re all tired of those. But the superhero in question is Hunter S. Thompson, and the origin is that of his relentless, drug-fuelled campaign against the ‘Bastards’, which only came to an end seven years ago in 2005 when he decided to blow his own brains out.

Now, lest you think he fought against people whose parents weren’t married when they were born (a terrible fate for anyone not born lately, apparently), the battle I refer to is that against the dark forces, the forces of greed, the bastards who would carve up paradise and sell it by the gram, laden with sugar and other life-leeching chemicals. The Rum Diary is about how he found his voice, and how he started writing for the public in order to take the Bastards down.

Or, to at least make life difficult for them in the court of public opinion.

That’s, I think, what the purpose was behind the flick. Johnny Depp, who apparently loved the man deeply and profoundly, is trying to convert everything written by the man into a film, and has essentially played Thompson twice now, both here and in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I suspect that every few years, whenever there’s a lull in his schedule, he’s going to make more flicks as Hunter S, alternating between him and Captain Jack Sparrow in those damned Pirates of the Caribbean flicks. Damned unnecessary, I say!

dir: Stephan Elliot
Get back to England, you ten pound Poms
I am a simple man. Anyone who’s ever met me or read these here reviews will probably have figured that out for themselves by now. So if I watch a comedy whose sole purpose is to make me laugh, presumably, then I consider that comedy to be a success if I laugh.

In that light, to put it very simplistically, this movie made me laugh, it is a comedy, so therefore I give it my highest honour possible, being “eh, it wasn’t too bad.”

That’s not to say that it’s a good film, by any definition other than the one I just offered. It’s clumsy, it’s poorly acted, it’s erratically edited, it’s got actors in it who shouldn’t be in it, or in films in general and specifically, and it’s got a lot of crude, stupid humour.

Shit like that, though, literally and figuratively, makes me laugh sometimes, and I laughed a handful of times while watching this trenchant and probing examination of marriage in the current milieu.

Being a simple man doesn’t stop me from over-complicating things endlessly, though. The main reason for that is this: I’m a simple man who’s also intensely neurotic. So allow me to offer apologies and explanations for this here review and this here flick.

I thought this was an Australian flick made for domestic consumption, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It became pretty obvious after a while that there was a thoroughly misguided attempt to make this flick in Australia aimed at a British audience.

Most of the flick transpires at a stately country manner perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Blue Mountains, possibly one of the most beautiful parts of the entire world. Every time the flick used a certain shot where the big sky appeared in the background, I would filter out the humans in shot, and whatever the hell they were saying, and just sigh at the beauty of that vista, of that panorama, of that exquisite vision splendid.

Then I’d be rudely dragged back into a very contrived and very clumsy story relating to a bunch of Brits acting like total fuckwits in Australia.

dir: Jennifer Westfeldt
You're smiling, but none of you are funny in this
Look, those of you who don’t have kids and who have friends with kids: I know that those of us with them can be pretty annoying, but you don’t have to try to punish us by making films about it. Honestly, most of us aren’t that horrible. Some of us are, but not most, I hope.

Some friends who have kids, sure, are worse than fifty Hitlers, and are completely self-obsessed and self-focussed, and are constantly telling you how little they’re sleeping and how hard they’re doing it, and what saints they goddamn are for doing something no-one forced them to do and that billions of other people seemed to have managed without turning it into such a goddamn saga, but that’s not the fault of the kids.

Let’s be honest, they were probably annoying fuckers to begin with. As a wise man once said: Look into your hearts. You know it to be true.

This flick might have arisen from the simple observation of some people, being Jennifer Westfeldt, that some of her friends became arseholes when they became parents. Maybe it wasn’t a general observation, maybe it was a specific one, maybe Jennifer and her husband’s friends did all turn into horrible, sniping, perpetually angry arseholes. Maybe they’re exaggerating a little bit to justify making a movie about it. Perhaps some viewers will see some similarities between these gorgons and zombies onscreen and their own friends; perhaps it will resonate with millions of angry, dejected people who mourn the loss of their friendships with Friends who now have Kids.

At the very least I would hope that a fair number of viewers would see this flick, if they bother to, and think, “Goddamn, your friends, Jennifer, totally suck, because my friends, on the other hand, seem to do okay as parents, didn’t transform like werewolves once their kids dropped out of their fecund wombs, don’t pressure me/us horribly on a daily basis to breed as well, and still retain some of the qualities I enjoyed about them before they became ‘dreaded’ parents.”

I hope that holds true for some people, because if this flick is any accurate portrayal of what everyone everywhere is like (it isn’t), then we parents have a lot to answer for, possibly at the Hague in front of a war crimes tribunal.

People certainly can become a bit boring once they become parents, but that hardly justifies a whole romantic comedy about it. Romantic comedies, like the death penalty, should only be used in the most extreme and untenable of circumstances. Anything less than that, and you risk throwing the whole moral structure of human civilisation out of whack.

dir: Roman Polanski
Let's work this out together like civilised adults
Parents, as any teenager will tell you, are the worst. They’re just horrible people, perpetually using their children as surrogates, stand-ins and battlefields for all their fears, failures and furies. At least as far as movies are concerned

And they’re always convinced that they’re right, even when and especially when they’re wrong.

Four people get trapped in an apartment, unable to leave, held in place like insects in amber by societal niceties, the social contract, the fear of litigation, and eventually, the shittiness of their own marriages. What a recipe for success!

And it's all over an eleven-year-old hitting another eleven-year-old with a stick.

At least in the Australian context, it's hard not to think of The Slap, which uses the slap of the title to show the fault lines and flaws in the relationships of dozens of interlinked people. The realisation of this story, though, couldn't be more different. This flick is based on a play, and it shows. The 'action' doesn't move from the apartment, well, it only moves as far as the outside of the apartment, as two sets of parents try to wrest some kind of meaning from each other, to make up for the lack of it in other areas of their lives.

Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) are the parents of the child who was struck. They present a cheery, amenable front, but Penelope, especially, is so very prickly and brittle. Words, using just the 'right' words in any given context, has the potential to set her off. Words matter to her. When the parents of the other child, the one who perpetrated the horrifying, callous, monstrous, banal act use the 'wrong' word, Penelope pulls them up on it, because she feels like they aren’t taking the seriousness of the situation, the obvious seriousness of the situation, seriously enough.

dir: Jeff Nichols
Once you go down, you might not come up again
Michael Shannon is the new Christopher Walken, only even more unsettling. And now they’re giving him lead roles in movies, which is going to scare even more children down the track.

Scooch closer, children, don’t make me tell you again about the scooching.

Take Shelter is a meditative, unsettling, measured story about a man overwhelmed by dread. Curtis (Michael Shannon) has dreams and visions of something awful that’s about to happen, and yet, because of his family history of mental illness, he allows for the possibility that it all might just be in his head.

This is a man who sees his dreams as omens, and takes actions in the ‘real’ world, which, obviously, look like the actions of an insane man, after a while. He knows they’re dreams, but, for him, it would be a crime not to prepare for what is coming. He loves his family too much to ignore the signs, and sees as absolute his obligation to do right by all of them.

His wife (Jessica Chastain, who I think was in every movie released in 2011), apart from being a redhead, is a rock, is a cornerstone, is a heroically supportive woman, but even she has her limits. Anyone would. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, though, she’s the embodiment of the concept of standing by your man to the bitter end.

They live in one of those places in the States, those flat, featureless, godforsaken places where tornadoes seem to happen all the time. By godforsaken, I really mean that the Christian, American God seems to really hate the people living in these places, and so He keeps sending twisters at them to destroy their mobile homes and double-wides. Why does He hate them so? I dunno, it doesn’t seem fair, does it?

A cautious approach to tornado safety wouldn’t seem inappropriate. It wouldn’t seem to be obsessive compulsive. Having a storm shelter, then, would seem entirely reasonable. When you start installing air extractors and buying gas masks, though, people are less understanding.

dir: Stephen Daldry
The absence of you talking would be greatly appreciated
This is the last of the nominees for Best Picture this year (well, at the 2012 Oscars scheduled for the 26th of Feb) that I have seen and reviewed, well, am reviewing right now. That’s the only reason I saw it, or at least endured its entire length without walking out, and the only reason I’m reviewing it is so I can at least have the tenuous justification for having an informed opinion about the worthiness of the flick that ends up winning.

And, at the very least, I can say that this flick should definitely not win.

At even very leaster, I can say that this flick should definitely not be watched by anyone, either.

I can’t say if it’s a faithful rendering of the book, because I’m never going to read the book that produced such an aggravating movie. An actively irritating, unsatisfying, unfulfilling, unenjoyable movie.

It’s safe to say that if it didn’t include a lot of footage of the World Trade Centre attacks, an abundance of footage and references and elegiac scenes of people falling, or the smoking towers, or the last (fabricated) words of someone about to die in one of the Towers, this flick would have never seen the light of day. I don’t think people can be casual or dismissive about September Eleven stuff yet, hence the nomination, but, goddamn is this flick unpleasant to spend time with.

Oskar (Thomas Horn) is possibly one of the most abrasively annoying kids to ever grace the silver screen. It was intentional. I think? It’s not made clear in the flick if he’s retarded, or autistic, or schizophrenic, but he occasionally displays all three. He tells a character that his father (Otm Shanks) once had him tested for Asperger’s, but that the tests proved inconclusive.

I find that… hard, to believe.

dir: Josh Trank
Murky morally and visually
With great power comes great responsibility, as well as a great opportunity to get back at everyone who ever did us wrong, right?

Chronicle is a pretty keen take on the superhero genre, told through the non-narrative construct of handheld camera / found footage telling us the story. For that to work, it means that the person filming, at least initially, has to have some reason other than what’s about to happen for filming themselves. At least in theory.

That person is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a pale and isolated jerk in high school, as are all Andrews, really. Has he got a decent reason for being a loner jerk who films himself with a camera? Well, maybe. The first instance we see worthy of immortalisation, which opens the flick, is him filming himself and his bedroom door, because his violent drunken jerk of a father (Michael Kelly) is threatening him through that door.

We also find out that Andrew’s mother is dying, very slowly, so things aren’t going that well for any of them. And at school, naturally, the other teenage scum sense his vulnerability, and bully the heck out of him. He does have, at least, a cousin who’s on friendly terms with him, which makes him seem like the only person in the world who gives a damn. Matt (Alex Russell) seems like a kid too tall and popular to give a damn about a scrawny skeleton like Andrew, but care he does, all the same. Inexplicably.

Perhaps in efforts to decrease his own burden, Matt insists that Andrew come to a rave with him, so he can get out there and alienate a whole new bunch of people. At that rave, which seems oh so 1990s, Matt, Andrew and another student called Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find some strange rock / crystalline thing down a hole which changes them profoundly.

No, it’s not a metaphor for hot guy-on-guy sex. Wait, maybe it is.

dir: David Cronenberg
Tell me about your mother, Dr Freud
Famous and frightening Canadian director Cronenberg’s love affair with Viggo Mortensen continues, with every film he comes up with having Viggo in a crucial role. Who can blame him? Viggo is awesome. And even more than Viggo being thoroughly awesome, he was also great in those last two flicks of his, being A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

Michael Fassbender’s no slouch in the awesomeness department either, so casting these chaps as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, the two titans of psychoanalysis in the early part of the 20th Century, would seem like a sure-fire box office blockbuster.

Maybe not. Both of these chaps bring solid acting chops to a story that isn’t that well known. Freud’s name is common currency, but Jung’s not as prevalent, since people don’t make Jungian slips that often, perhaps, or at least they don’t admit to it. The point of this story, however, is not a biopic about the lives of the two men instrumental into identifying and pathologising a lot of the craziness out of there. It’s about Jung’s relationship with a crazy woman, played very crazily by Keira Knightley foremost, and then it’s about the falling out between Freud and Jung.

Fassbender gets a lot, if not the lion’s share of the screen time. His Jung is a restrained, brilliant man who searches, endlessly searches for knowledge. The conflicts that arise for him come about mostly because of his frustrated desires as they relate to his wife, his patient Sabine (Knightley), and his relationship with Freud, the stern patriarch of their newly ploughed field of psychoanalysis.

Unfortunately. Keira Knightley gets too much screen time. Any screen time is too much. At her ‘craziest’, to indicate how out there Sabina is, she does this really weird thing where she looks like she’s unhinged her jaw like a Burmese python trying to swallow some poor creature whole. She juts that thing out there, frightening more than the children. As her sanity increases, we can thank the gods that the jaw jutting reduces in frequency and distance.