Mike Flanagan's series

[Z Buck McFate]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1469026606781849601

News broke a couple days ago (possibly only for those of us who aren't familiar with sources that break Flanagan news sooner) about his next series being an admixture of Edgar Allen Poe, and Flanagan posted the cast on Twitter. I'm super excited about Rohul Kohli, Henry Thomas, and Kate Siegal all coming back. And the other Flanagan regulars too, but especially those three. The woman who played Hannah in Bly will also return. The only one whose presence I think I'll miss is Victoria Pedretti.

(Going with "Flanagan's series" instead of "Fall Of the House Of Usher" to make it more Flanagan centric than "House Of Usher" centric).

 

[Totenkindly]

I was kinda blown away to hear about Mark Hamill and Frank Langella joining. Suck on that, AHS...

 

[Totenkindly]

f***ing hell!!!

what the hell did he do

Frank Langella Fired From ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ After Netflix Investigation

The role of Roderick Usher will be recast in the Mike Flanagan limited series, which is halfway through production

www.yahoo.com

 

[Z Buck McFate]

f***ing hell!!!

what the hell did he do

Frank Langella Fired From ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ After Netflix Investigation

The role of Roderick Usher will be recast in the Mike Flanagan limited series, which is halfway through production

www.yahoo.com

He's being replaced with Bruce Greenwood. Hard to say if that'll bode well. I do like Greenwood in the Atom Egoyan movies I've seen him in (and anyone good in an Egoyan movie would probably work well in a Flanagan story; there's an unsettling feeling to them in spite of a narrative with a strong hook).

Elias Koteas is coming to mind as someone who might have worked (as Roderick Usher).

 

[Totenkindly]

He's being replaced with Bruce Greenwood. Hard to say if that'll bode well. I do like Greenwood in the Atom Egoyan movies I've seen him in (and anyone good in an Egoyan movie would probably work well in a Flanagan story; there's an unsettling feeling to them in spite of a narrative with a strong hook).

Elias Koteas is coming to mind as someone who might have worked (as Roderick Usher).

Yeah, while I'm a Greenwood fan in general, maybe not as great for this role. (He's worked with Greenwood before, obviously, though.) Yeah, Koteas might have worked.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

​

Fired By Netflix, Frank Langella Refutes Allegations Of “Unacceptable Behavior”​

By Frank Langella. Cancel culture has become a bit much, but similarly douchebags have been blaming warranted consequences on it. So it's hard to have an opinion with so little information. Anyway.

I think Mary McDonald is the actress who plays his wife.

I sure miss the days when we could copy/paste without getting obnoxiously big/bolded text.

 

[Totenkindly]

​

Fired By Netflix, Frank Langella Refutes Allegations Of “Unacceptable Behavior”​

By Frank Langella. Cancel culture has become a bit much, but similarly douchebags have been blaming warranted consequences on it. So it's hard to have an opinion with so little information. Anyway.

I think Mary McDonald is the actress who plays his wife.

I sure miss the days when we could copy/paste without getting obnoxiously big/bolded text.

Mary McDonnell? Donnie Darko's chain-smoking mom? Weird that she would complain about innocent things (so was it actually something more?), and they are from the same generation of thespian.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Mary McDonnell? Donnie Darko's chain-smoking mom? Weird that she would complain about innocent things (so was it actually something more?), and they are from the same generation of thespian.

Well, in his account, he wrote "young wife." Mary McDonnell plays his wife, but she is not young. So .

ETA: Actually, she might be playing his sister. It's difficult to find a list of cast with who they're playing, and I suspect it's to protect the actress from the crazies (who hate "cancel culture").

 

[Totenkindly]

Well, in his account, he wrote "young wife." Mary McDonnell plays his wife, but she is not young. So .

ETA: Actually, she might be playing his sister. It's difficult to find a list of cast with who they're playing, and I suspect it's to protect the actress from the crazies (who hate "cancel culture").

i see a few younger actresses in that, including Willa Fitzgerald, who actually was so great in the Amazon Prime "Reacher" recently.

I don't really know Britney Katelyn Miller.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

i see a few younger actresses in that, including Willa Fitzgerald, who actually was so great in the Amazon Prime "Reacher" recently.

I don't really know Britney Katelyn Miller.

She was great in Reacher! I knew the name sounded familiar. Flanagan uses such fantastic actors.

I keep meaning to watch other Flanagan work while waiting for Usher, and I just never get around to it.

 

[Totenkindly]

She was great in Reacher! I knew the name sounded familiar. Flanagan uses such fantastic actors.

I keep meaning to watch other Flanagan work while waiting for Usher, and I just never get around to it.

What haven't you seen yet? (He's got a growing list, but I think the largest time sinks are just his three tv series for Netflix. The rest I think are movies.) Sorry if you have mentioned it all before.

Everything is watchable, although I personally enjoyed Hush and Before I Wake the least.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

@Tokenkindly Do you have a favorite outside of the Netflix series?

Besides the Netflix series, the only movies I've seen are Oculus and Doctor Sleep. I liked both, but not as much as I like his series.

I only got 20 minutes into Hush before my attention span pooped out, and I never got back to it. Same with Gerald's Game. I keep meaning to get back to both, if only because (in addition to it being Flanagan) I'm so fond of both Siegal and Gugino.

I'd made mental notes about trying Before I Wake and Absentia next, though I can't remember exactly why.

 

[Totenkindly]

@Tokenkindly Do you have a favorite outside of the Netflix series?

Besides the Netflix series, the only movies I've seen are Oculus and Doctor Sleep. I liked both, but not as much as I like his series.

I only got 20 minutes into Hush before my attention span pooped out, and I never got back to it. Same with Gerald's Game. I keep meaning to get back to both, if only because (in addition to it being Flanagan) I'm so fond of both Siegal and Gugino.

I'd made mental notes about trying Before I Wake and Absentia next, though I can't remember exactly why.

Absentia actually is decent for how low a budget it is -- he can't really depend on sets or props or even fancy lighting for ambiance -- I mean, it suffers from the low budget but the haunting ending still lingers.

I really like the Doctor Sleep extended cut (vs the theatrical), although some parts of it are a bit inert. Curran (Abra) and Ferguson (Rose the Hat) are just superb.

I think as a full work, Oculus is probably my favorite. It might also be the first Flanagan thing I saw and immediately promised myself to track his career. I think it was his first major budget ($5 million) even if not super-large (he made Absentia on $70K), and he shows off all his major tricks as a film maker in later higher-budget productions, including the ability to tell a story that leaps back and forth between time periods without losing the audience and yet still feeling pretty trippy. It's kind of surreal and you can't ever quite tell what is real. Plus it's got Karen Gillan in it, who I gush over.

Ouija: Origin of Evil manages to take a lousy franchise and make an actual watchable film. It's got some jump scares that are still effective and also gets some decent performances and ambiance.

I really did not like Hush. Everyone else seems to like it. I got really bored with it especially after mid-point.

 

[Totenkindly]

Eldest wanted to watch Absentia last night, which he'd never seen. (Now he's griping because the only thing left he hasn't seen is Gerald's Game, which he finds a bit disturbing.) It held up on second watch; only a $70K budget, and that shows, but the acting is fairly decent, Doug Jones has a cameo, and the editing is superb. You can see a lot of Flanagan's skills showcased here, leading to what he could do with a larger budget.

---

Started watching The Midnight Club last night. Based on the source (which more directed towards teens), it feels a bit different than other Flanagan work and does feel directed towards a younger audience. It might end up feeling a bit more anthology-like as well, if episodes are more based on each of the (I presume short?) books by the original author and there are 28 of them.

Still, it does have the emotional impact of much of Flanagan's work. The first 15 minutes was rather harrowing/sad.

A lot of actors from other Flanagan series have small roles in this show as well. And they even cast William Davis (Cigarette Smoking Man) here somewhere.

Fairly talented young cast, esp the leads.

 

[Lexicon]

Eldest wanted to watch Absentia last night, which he'd never seen. (Now he's griping because the only thing left he hasn't seen is Gerald's Game, which he finds a bit disturbing.) It held up on second watch; only a $70K budget, and that shows, but the acting is fairly decent, Doug Jones has a cameo, and the editing is superb. You can see a lot of Flanagan's skills showcased here, leading to what he could do with a larger budget.

---

Started watching The Midnight Club last night. Based on the source (which more directed towards teens), it feels a bit different than other Flanagan work and does feel directed towards a younger audience. It might end up feeling a bit more anthology-like as well, if episodes are more based on each of the (I presume short?) books by the original author and there are 28 of them.

Still, it does have the emotional impact of much of Flanagan's work. The first 15 minutes was rather harrowing/sad.

A lot of actors from other Flanagan series have small roles in this show as well. And they even cast William Davis (Cigarette Smoking Man) here somewhere.

Fairly talented young cast, esp the leads.

The Midnight Club was decent— I won’t give any spoilers. Flanagan is hoping to do multiple seasons of this particular show, apparently. That’d be interesting.

It drew from Christopher Pike novels (meh), but they did well with it. Flanagan also mentioned he drew some inspiration from Nickelodeon’s show, Are You Afraid of The Dark? which I LOVED as a kid in the ‘90s.

This series felt a bit softer on the horror, but still had the emotional depth of the others.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Finally watched Absentia (glad this thread bump reminded me), and he's just so good at coming up with an analogy that's deeply haunting precisely because it's a real human experience wearing the costume of a ghost story. The thing that really got under my skin and feels key here is the way they ask "You can see me?" I'm not sure how to describe the human experience under the ghost story costume except to say I think there's an existential black hole that others can't see us fall into. Or something. And yeah, though it's clearly low budget, pretty much everything else about it is well done. (And I think that's the first time I've seen Doug Jones acting without some elaborate costume).

And now that I've seen Flanagan's original, the Amazon series is even more terrible than I realized. It's like the final season of Game of Thrones compared to the middle seasons. Or like someone watched Flanagan's movie and thought: "this would be great if it was 25% this and 75% NCIS."

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Okay, more thoughts on the underlying human experience: addiction is a good example, and pretty much any kind of addiction applies. It's like the big creature (that we never actually see in the movie, except for claws or shadows or makes its presence known with chittering sounds) is the experience we are afraid of, and we'd rather flee into addiction (it's a form of 'disappearing') than face it.

The version of the person who shows up and asks "You can see me?" is a version that we barely see ourselves - it's what we are fleeing into addiction to *avoid* seeing - so it's doubly surprising that someone else would be able to see it. That it's only visible for fleeting moments - and it's never even fully visible - tracks.

 

[Totenkindly]

Finally watched Absentia (glad this thread bump reminded me), and he's just so good at coming up with an analogy that's deeply haunting precisely because it's a real human experience wearing the costume of a ghost story. The thing that really got under my skin and feels key here is the way they ask "You can see me?" I'm not sure how to describe the human experience under the ghost story costume except to say I think there's an existential black hole that others can't see us fall into. Or something. And yeah, though it's clearly low budget, pretty much everything else about it is well done. (And I think that's the first time I've seen Doug Jones acting without some elaborate costume).

The only other thing I recall where he was in "human form" was "John Dies at the End."
I thought it was cool he did a cameo in this, and of course he does a bit of a contortionist thing there...

Definitely elements of people who kind of just drop by the wayside and vanish from the human story/society.

I recognized the one story he told -- it's a permutation of the "kid goes to well on a snowy evening and they never find him again, his footprints lead into the middle of a snowy field and then just stop." But it's kind of tying into how Callie was also a recovering addict who just moved from place to place and no one knew quite where she had gone either. People just kind of "get lost" although in this version they are taken. Those are some decent insights you had, I hadn't really thought of it along those lines before.

I purchase the film "The Addiction" awhile ago (horror film, 1995? - I think it stars Lili Taylor), I should actually watch it and see if it follows that thru-line or something else. I suspect it is more of a vampire movie and probably along the lines of the Korean film "Thirst."

And now that I've seen Flanagan's original, the Amazon series is even more terrible than I realized. It's like the final season of Game of Thrones compared to the middle seasons. Or like someone watched Flanagan's movie and thought: "this would be great if it was 25% this and 75% NCIS."

I didn't even know there was a series, yeah it looks a lot more like NCIS than this kind of thing.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Some interesting q&a on Mike Flanagan's tumbler revolving around Doctor Sleep: https://www.tumblr.com/flanaganfilm...ello-and-howdy-mr-mike-flanagan-im-excited-to

 

[Totenkindly]

Some interesting q&a on Mike Flanagan's tumbler revolving around Doctor Sleep: https://www.tumblr.com/flanaganfilm...ello-and-howdy-mr-mike-flanagan-im-excited-to

Wow, I will have to finish that later because it's pretty long -- but I love it and I'm glad he was able to connect with both the studio and King so adeptly. Look forward to finishing it later!