This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts
Plot Overview
This 1990s whodunnit is set in Oregon, my neck of the woods, whose irony plays off of our history. We started out forbidding Negroes in our territory, which seemed to be our right. As for black history, the Louisiana Purchase entailed a long political debate about free states and slave and the status of the Negro. One may read in George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings, about the Missouri Compromise:
Thus we can hardly blame the members of the Sixteenth Congress if … their assault upon Missouri should have failed because they could not bring themselves to believe in the equality of the Negro. The most humane philosophers had been unable to reach this conclusion. (234–5)
Come the Civil War Oregon
had its own small potatoes battle in a town just south of Portland.
The opposing sides lined up on opposite ends of the street and threw
rocks at each other. So, there!
More recently when the Portland NAACP noticed that Eugene—Oregon's second
largest city—didn't have any street name honoring Martin Luther
King, they proposed we rename one for him. They picked for consideration
Centennial Boulevard. Since it was a major thoroughfare without
many businesses on it to be inconvenienced, they figured it for
a slam dunk. It wasn't. It had already been named Centennial
at Oregon's centennial celebration in honor of our pioneers.
Furthermore, it went past the University of Oregon's Autzen Stadium,
and MLK's rep as a plagiarist & womanizer didn't
seem fitting to flout before the students. The application was tabled
to investigate if there were not a more appropriate street to rename.
Our resident Diversity Expert went ballistic at the council meeting. “GOD WILL JUDGE YOU!” she shouted. The council reversed itself and approved the change, but the tantrum-throwing expert returned to California in a huff lamenting she knows how we felt.
There are
a few colored people living in Eugene, but not many. Mostly they settle
in cosmopolitan Portland to make a go of it there, and they are
virtually unknown in our interior parts. In “Longlegs”
female fibby Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is being coached by her black
superior, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) trying to find the putative
accomplice of White, suspected serial killer, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage.)
Virtually all serial killers operate exclusively within their own
race, and Longlegs targets families of white girls chosen for
their birth date. Agent Carter's wife Anna (Carmel Amitis) is Caucasian
and their pickaninny Ruby (Ava Kelders) has a qualifying birth
date fast approaching. Being half white, she's enough of a target to be a
concern, with her black dad up for collateral damage. A black man whose
home is outside of Pdx with its endemic
black-on-black violence and in Oregon's interior where he's taking his
chances with whitey. I think we know how this will turn out.
Ideology
In John Fowles novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, a sophisticate is interviewing a woman for the position of companion:She passed Sarah her Bible and made her read. Mrs. Poultenay had devoted some thought to the choice of passage; and had been sadly torn between Psalm 119 (“Blessed are the undefiled”) and Psalm 140 (“Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man”). She had finally chosen the former; and listened not only to the reading voice, but also for any fatal sign that the words of the psalmist were not being taken very much to the reader's heart. (36)
In “Longlegs” we might look
at, (Psalm 119:62-63) “At
midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous
judgments. I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them
that keep thy precepts.” We find a sleepless Lee at night sitting
at a desk with a Bible on it. She turns to the last book
Revelation—she's careful not to add an s on the end.
In answer to her mother's phone query, she denies she'd been praying,
but she was just being humble not admitting it. The passage she reads
is, (Rev. 13:1) “And I stood
upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having
seven heads and ten horns.” This is a cryptic reference to the ancient
kings of Rome a country that superseded Greece. Greece was notorious for hiding
a raiding party inside a giant, wooden Trojan horse that the superstitious
inhabitants of a besieged Troy drew into their city, and lost the war when
the soldiers emerged at night to open the gates from within.
Oregon would be a beast rising from the river, not the
sea, inasmuch as it was named after a river smelt the natives called
ooligon. The Trojan horse in this movie would be a birthday gift
containing a magic totem delivered by the accomplice in clerical garb. Its
spell would bewitch the family into a mass murder/suicide. That Bible passage had long legs.
Oregon is the least churched state in the lower forty-eight. The devil was targeting nuclear families who attended church, passed their faith on to their children, but who were lax in their prayers.
Production Values
“” (2024) was written and directed by Oz Perkins. It stars Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Kiernan Shipka and Alicia Witt. The actors were uncommonly good and worked well together. Cage made such a weird villain that the feds concluded he must have an accomplice for people to open their doors to him.
MPA rated it R for bloody images, violence and language. It was filmed on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, which can easily pass for the Pacific Northwest save for the lightning that's rare here in Oregon. The principals were framed dead center producing a reflexive, back at ya effect. Its typical three parts were needlessly labeled as such. The long drives in the country were probably the most boring ever seen on film, but there's tension when we're not so sure a black man wants to live so far from people around there. His friendly wife alleviates our concern. The credits scroll in the opposite direction we're used to putting the joke on us. Runtime is 1 hour 41 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
The protagonist is a good example of a Christian, professional woman. She reads her Bible at night, prays earnestly in secret, and competently performs her duties. She never mouths off to anybody and shows respect for her worried mother.
The plot was creative and the actors all upheld their needful parts. It worked well as a whodunnit.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Well done action flick. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Well done special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Five stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, embedded text.
Dangerfield, George. The Era of Good Feelings. New York: Harbinger Books, 1963. Print.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. Copyright © 1969 by John Fowles. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org