Pictureland

If you have begun to grow restive with the lapses in logic in my film, please be very quiet.  Director, co-writer and wide-eyed paterfamilias John Krasinski in A Quiet Place. A quiet place indeed, any movie theater (I'm extrapolating from my own experience at a small screening room at Chicago's New 400 Cinema, usually a lively neighborhood house) in which one might take in John Krasinski's A Quiet Place during its highly successful first run. One of the points on which A Quiet Place  impressively succeeds is immersing its audience into the experience and plight of the Abbot family, stepping very softly through some sort of post-monster-invasion American landscape in which drawing attention to oneself with any sort of noise can quickly prove fatal.  So too does the audience almost breathlessly proceed through the film, especially the nearly silent early stages.  While it is both unusual and extremely refreshing to be among an American film audience in which su...

We have Austrians.  Handsome and blonde Austrians!  And they sing!   Goodnight Mommy begins in such a fashion, a large family (noticeably without father) singing Brahms' Lullaby, the lovely children in black velvet dresses and lederhosen.  At the conclusion of this doctored bit of graininess, a television show that probably never was, the mother bids us a tender, "Gute nacht."  At the conclusion of Goodnight Mommy , the film's main characters, a woman and her twin boys serenade us, arm in arm, with the German hymm, "Weisst Du wieviel Sternlein stehen."  Before you consider Goodnight Mommy for your next holiday film sing-along, know that there's actually very little song between those Austrian idylls that open and close the film.  And what transpires between is much closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than the family Von Trapp.   In counterpoint to the fair-haired wholesomeness on display in Goodnight Mommy , there is quickly establis...