Pearl

Year 16, Day 299 - 10/25/24 - Movie #4,880

BEFORE: Let's send a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Mia Goth, born October 25, 1993, who also seems to have the perfect last name for horror movies, right?  She carries over from "X" and she WILL make the year-end countdown, I've seen to that. But also I wonder how many birthday SHOUT-outs I've shouted out this year, I don't think there have been many. 

Now, regarding "Maxxxine", the new sequel to "X", I've looked for a way to shoehorn this film in at the last minute - I had no idea this film would be streaming so soon, it's already on HBO Max and it caught me off guard.  I've checked with the ruling committee, and their hands are tied, I'd already filed the paperwork certifying my movie path to Christmas, so really, at this point, my hands are tied.  I'll file an appeal, sure there's a process, but this film just came on the scene far too late.  I can't drop anything from the remaining twenty films of the year  - well, I could, but that would mean that something I was going to clear off my DVR is not going to get cleared, like I could delay "Speed Racer" again but I've already pushed it back twice, maybe three times.  It's either "Maxxxine" or "Speed Racer", really.  Most everything else will cause a break in the linking if I delete it.  

Or "How It Ends" - if the committee were to approve the addition of "Maxxxine" at the last second, I could shift some things around in these last days of October, and cut from "Ready or Not" to "Freaky" in a switcheroo and drop "How It Ends", but again, that's a desperate play, and then THAT movie may never get watched.  Bottom line, "Maxxine" links to a number of other horror films on the list, and I've got a good chance of circling back to it next October, because it's got some name actors in it, like Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito, who appear in other horror films too.  So that's that, "Pearl" is in and "Maxxxine" is out, at least for not.  The third film in this weird little trilogy just arrived too late for me to work it in.  

Well, I could do it but then I'd be unhappy about what I'd have to cut to make that possible.  Sorry, Ti West. Sorry, Mia Goth.  If this were March or April I'd add another film and stay up late watching a double feature, but it's not, it's late October and both Halloween and Christmas are coming, I have a schedule to maintain.  "Maxxxine" is going to be fine, fingers crossed that this choice may end up helping me connect a full month of horror films in 2025.  Or 2026.

Meanwhile, this Halloween is UNDER a week away. It's time to start separating out the Reese's peanut butter cups from the Almond Joys, if you know what I mean. Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfingers, either. 

THE PLOT: In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm. 

AFTER: Well, sure, I got what I wanted, this movie dug deeper into the back-story of Pearl, aka the farmer's wife, and she was pretty messed up in "X".  But how did she get that way?  And where did the car in the pond come from?  And are there really alligators in Texas?  More to the point, WTF?  I mean, WT-actual-F was up with Pearl?  It's worth pointing out that every old person you see was young once, and probably made a few mistakes, and those mistakes over the years made them who they are.

Well, this film comes very close to explaining that nothing was really Pearl's fault.  Life was not kind to Pearl, the film starts out in 1918 when she just couldn't get a break.  Her husband was off fighting in World War I and she had no idea if was going to come home or not.  At some point he stopped writing letters home, and well, that's not a good sign.  Also there was some kind of pandemic going on, that would be the Spanish flu - so people were dying both at home and abroad, about 50 million people worldwide died from the flu.  Pearl was told repeatedly to cover her face, but she was young, carefree, and she just wanted to ride her bike and feel the wind.  Relatable to today's audiences, some of whom refused to wear a mask during the COVID years despite all the medical evidence saying it was the proper thing to do.  To be fair, even Dr. Fauci and W.H.O. got the mask thing wrong for a while, because in 2020 they were telling us to not go outside without a mask on, but once we were home, it was OK to take the mask off if we were home with our family.  This was almost 100% backwards, because a year later people were dining outside without masks and being encouraged to go outside where they were LESS likely to get COVID, however it was possible for someone in your family to go to work or school, catch COVID and bring it home to infect their whole family.  So the mask policy got reversed upon further reflection, or maybe it should have been like that all along.  I guess maybe the rules had to change once people started going back to work, and the bottom line is, kids are nothing but germ factories that will infect you, so my advice is to stay away from your own kids, or better yet, don't have any in the first place. 

Oh, right, back to Pearl.  She lived on her parents' farm while her husband was off at war, and her father was paralyzed or brain-dead or something, perhaps from the flu or maybe it was polio or something else, there was a lot of bad diseases back then.  And her mother was a mean taskmaster who made Pearl do chores on the farm AND also take care of her father, feeding him and bathing him and you know, changing his dirty drawers.  The family was of German descent, and man, I found this all too familiar, having been raised by a German grandmother. I used to think my grandmother was demanding and negative and frugal because she'd lived through the Depression, but yeah, also part of that was because she was German. I feel your pain, Pearl, you just want to go out to the movies and have fun with your friends, and someday you're going to be working in the theater or making movies, but not if your German mother has anything to say about it.  Been there. 

Pearl finds comfort in the arms of the movie theater's projectionist, who lets her in for free so she won't get in trouble by spending her mother's change, and also wants to show her movies of nekkid people dancing around after the crowd goes home.  Damn, Pearl was right there when porn got invented, only nobody back then was able to charge money for it. Don't worry, one day they'll figure it out.  Pearl gets so worked up she has sex with a scarecrow on the way home, but then realizes having sex with the projectionist is a much better idea.  

It's good that Pearl has an outlet for her hostility, it's just a little odd, though, that the outlet is killing farm animals and feeding them to her pet alligator Theda, named after Theda Bara. Normally farm life does involve slaughtering animals, but you kind of get the feeling that Pearl does it just for fun.  Hollywood movies kind of glorified farm life, with little mention of the down-sides, namely the hard labor and all the killing.  Don't get too attached to those animals, OK?  Even in "The Wizard of Oz" there's not much about farm life, maybe a few minutes before Dorothy gets whisked off to the land of fairies and munchkins by a tornado, and so I doubt that she ever had to kill a pig or a cow.  But what do you suppose the effect of farm life might be on a teenage girl?  Maybe it's not such a large leap from killing chickens and geese to killing people. 

Pearl gets the chance to audition for a dance troupe that's going to tour the state, and she sees this as her ticket off the boring family farm.  But her mother refuses to allow her to attend the audition, so they argue about it, and meanwhile her mother's dress catches fire and well, let's just say that clothes were more flammable back then, and also nobody had invented "Stop, drop and roll" just yet.  Sure, it's an accident but Pearl starts to realize that she'll be free to do whatever she wants with her life if she could just kill all of the people who are standing in her way - including her sister-in-law, Mitsy, who was selected for the dance troupe over Pearl just because she was blonde and the type they were looking for.  No, it couldn't POSSIBLY be that Pearl was only an average dancer, could it?  But you can see the reasoning here, if Pearl just kills Mitsy, well then there'll be an open spot on the dance troupe again, right? 

Well, the good news is that Pearl's husband, Howard, eventually does come home from the War.  Only he comes home to a very different Pearl from the one he left behind.  She's been through some stuff, she's killed some animals and perhaps a few people, creating something of a dilemma, perhaps.  I guess there's a lesson there, you let your daughter go to the movies by herself ONE TIME and before you know it, she's an unhinged serial killer.  Sure, it could happen, films came along and changed everybody, suddenly boring old reality wasn't good enough for people who all wanted to be rich and famous, like the actors and the characters they portrayed.  

Also starring David Corenswet, Tandi Wright (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Matthew Sunderland (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Amelia Reid, Lauren Stewart, Todd Rippon, Grace Acheson, Gabe McDonnell, Shaman Theron

RATING: 6 out of 10 bales of hay