Page 2 July 4, 2019
Entertainment
Check It Out
Film Review
Midsommar Aims to Scare the
Living Daylight Out of You
By Morgan Rojas for Cinemacy
Before I start writing any film review, I like
to listen to music that reflects the tone of the
film so I can reorient myself back into the
fictional world of the movie. While I didn’t find
the official soundtrack for Midsommar anywhere
online, I did find a Spotify playlist called
“Midsommarmorgon,” which felt like the
universe wanted me specifically to listen to it
(“morgon,” phonetically similar to “Morgan,”
means “morning” in Swedish).
An innocent enough coincidence, undoubtedly.
But after watching the visionary horror
film Midsommar, you find that even unquestioned
assumptions can hide dark and
deadly truths.
A surrealist drama based on heartbreak and
psychotic unraveling, Midsommar is edgeof
your-seat horror at its best. After Dani
(Florence Pugh) receives unexpected news of
a family tragedy, she turns to her emotionally
unavailable boyfriend Christian (Jack
Reynor) for support. More so out of guilt
than good intention, he haphazardly invites
her to join his upcoming boys’ trip to rural
Sweden, planned by their mutual friend, Pelle
(Vilhelm Blomgren). Hesitant, but ultimately
agreeing to go, Dani finds herself in a remote
Swedish village celebrating “Midsommar” -- a
week-long festival and tradition that brings
together members of a small, off-the-grid
community who gather to reflect and pay
homage to their ancestors.
The blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swedes welcome
Dani, Christian and their friends Josh
(William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will
Poulter) with open arms. Like a scene from a
folklore fairytale, the vibrancy of the natural
surroundings and their matching ancestral
garb, paired with the seasonal occurrence
of 24-hour sunlight, squash most initial
feelings of uneasiness. Not all, but most.
Dani struggles to strengthen her connection
with Christian during the trip, which seems
to get better when they endure the rituals
of the festival together. However, as the
gatherings turn darker and alarmingly more
deranged, the group soon discovers that the
festival masks a much more harrowing and
threatening experience.
Midsommar is another grand slam for the
beloved A24 production company, as well
as director Ari Aster and all involved. It’s
Pugh as the terror-induced Dani who carries
the weight of the film, and whose bloodcurdling
screams rival that of Toni Collette’s
in Aster’s breakout directorial debut, Hereditary.
Midsommar accomplishes great visual
moments as well. The cinematography soars
and glides so seamlessly that it feels like a
VR experience, and psychedelic drug trips
are so visceral that they feel like extended
sequences of Gaspar Noé’s recent horrorhallucination
film, Climax.
Now, the question on everyone’s
mind: How does Midsommar compare to
Hereditary? I’d say the answer is complicated.
If you’re looking for more subtle psychological
torture, you may find Midsommar
to be too grandiose (at two hours and 20
minutes, it’s certainly a challenging amount
of excessive violence to bear). However,
the world Aster imagines in this isolated
commune is achingly beautiful and only
made better by empowering our young
female heroine. So while Hereditary may
have put indie director Aster on the map,
Midsommar solidifies him as the current
king of horror.
Day or night, it doesn’t matter when you
watch Midsommar. The slow-building tension
creates energy so palpable, it will do more
than give you chills -- which I can attest
to, as I actually had a nightmare the night
after watching. So I’ll probably need to wait
to watch this one again, as well as pause on
listening to that Spotify playlist – for now.
Now playing in theaters everywhere. •
Midsommar, Courtesy of A24.
Morgan Rojas
The Moon Landing: Curiosity
Replenished 50 Years On
By Tommy Vinh Bui, MLIS, Associate
Librarian, Inglewood Public Library
The moon hangs low in the sky tonight.
Blaring a full circle bright and auspicious in
the aether above. The moon has long been a
gatherer of our collective wonder and curiosity,
an epicenter for our existential questions and
long revered throughout different cultures
and epochs. And it’s time to fix our gaze
upwards again and marvel at the ostentatious
orb as we commemorate a major milestone
in human achievement.
This summer we’re celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the historic moon landing. It
was a monumental step forward for science
and civilization as we blazed bravely into
the unknown -- a pivotal moment when we
all held our bated breathes in anticipation
together and aspired toward heretofore ungrasped
greatness. Our eyes all welded to
television screens, Apollo 11 represented an
unprecedented feat of ingenuity and boldness
to explore the outer reaches of space. It was
an era that ably captured imaginations and
propelled future generations toward careers
in aeronautics and space exploration. It was a
time when science was seemingly butting up
with science fiction. Through sheer grit and
engineering moxie, we had contrived to slip
the surly bonds of earth and finally arrived
on a surface untouched by human footprints.
Not to be outdone and to cement its place
at the forefront of groundbreaking forays into
new knowledge, NASA resolved to make a
moon landing a reality. It was an ambitious
objective for our intrepid travelers and the
culmination of long-debated speculation of
the feasibility of whether or not it could be
done. By the 1960s, there was still much
that we didn’t understand about the moon
and the logistics of safely placing humans
onto the moon’s surface was a daunting and
seemingly foolhardy task. The terrain of the
moon was perilous and presented myriad
potential logistical problems. The moon’s
surface was inhospitably a roiling maelstrom
of pitch-dark, dusty plains kneaded by volleys
of meteor craters and winnowed by long
vanished lava oceans and magma-brimmed
impact basins. Hardly the most welcoming
of environs.
You know how the story ends. We got
there and back intact and human history
has never quite been the same since. And
mankind’s thirst for lunar knowledge remains
unquenched. Space agencies continue to
send unmanned probes to other moons along
with robotic rovers that collect and transmit
useful data back for research. The moon is
festooned with countless probes and landers
that were invaluable to gathering information
and contributing to our richer understanding
of the moon. We’ve also ventured farther
out than the moon. Our Voyager crafts are
currently traversing interstellar space at a
distance of more than 11 billion miles away
and still communicating new information to
us stalwartly.
Ove the years, astronauts have brought back
an array of lunar material for study. They’ve
lugged back samples of pebbles, soil and dust
for scientific scrutiny. But what was more
interesting were not the items collected and
brought back, but the tchotchkes smuggled into
space. John Young from Gemini 3 infamously
snuck in a corned beef sandwich stealthily
aboard and noshed on it. Alan Shephard during
Apollo 14 schlepped along a six-iron golf
club to work on his swing. Walter Schirra
from Gemini 6 had handy a little harmonica
and serenaded among the stars. And Neil
Armstrong carried with him a piece of the
original Wright Brothers’ wooden propeller
to pay homage to the leaps and bounds that
mankind has undertaken in aviation from a
rickety 12-second flight covering 120 feet
to blasting off past the atmosphere and into
the inky blue-black expanse of space. Along
with those mementos smuggled spaceward did
they also convey our aggregated awe at the
progress we’ve made together as a society.
The allure of space still lodges itself
firmly into our craniums and dominates the
imagination duly. It’s a healthy obsession
with the unknown. And one that the library
is happy to enable and foster. So stop by our
shelves and feel free to flip through our many
books and resources recounting the first moon
landing. Our aisles are wide open and eager
for your footprints. It’s one small step for you
and one giant leap toward the constellations
already swirling in your cranium. •
Tommy Vinh Bui
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“I enjoy getting riled up, and nothing’s gonna
do that for you like a good scary movie.”
– Sophia Bush