This time last week, Scottie gritted it out to win his way back into the Big Brother house.  Now, he could be sent back to the jury house just as quickly.  With he and Haleigh failing to win the veto in last night’s episode, and Level Six still split on who to send home, tonight’s evictee is far from set in stone.  But with the seeds of discord firmly planted within the powerful alliance thanks to JC’s scamming, will both nominees see the growing divides as their way to safety?

With this week’s nominations unchanged after the veto, both Scottie and Haleigh are uncertain of their respective fates. Both are being told they’re not this week’s target, but clearly someone’s being lied to. Haleigh runs to Tyler for the umpteenth time to ask if she’s really the target, which is starting to visibly annoy the usually collected HoH. When she tells him that Scottie declared himself the pawn this week, Tyler again tries to calm Haleigh down as she tells him she’s not freaking out (even though she clearly is). Later on in the kitchen, an overly confident Scottie shares a laugh with Tyler about Haleigh’s campaigning as he’s convinced that he’ll be safe. Tyler tells the diary room he feels bad about having to blind-side Scottie yet again, but that it’s all just for old times’ sake. Another Tyler and Angela moment in the HoH room is interrupted by JC, who, after Angela leaves, asks Tyler to define the nature of their relationship. Tyler tries to brush it off as a simple friendship, but JC reveals that Brett’s picking up on their showmance as well and that he’s looking to target Angela and Kaycee next week. “I need to get through to Tyler somehow, this is just another tactic,” JC says in the diary room. Tyler tries to shut down the talk, telling JC it’s a dumb idea while keeping his final two deals with both ladies close to his vest.

As late-night approaches, Tyler cuddles with Angela and spills about JC’s snooping and gossipping about their showmance. Angela laughs it off but tells the diary room that she’s ticked off with JC’s antics, even if it is just his strategy. She wonders aloud if JC plans to catch them in the act and reveal their showmance to Brett in an attempt to split up Level Six. Tyler doesn’t believe this is the case, but Angela keeps at it by declaring that JC may need to be dealt with before Haleigh.

Tyler again is dismissive of all this, believing JC sticking around may be better for him than keeping Angela. Tyler’s quickly realizing that he may have dealt himself into oblivion and is a red-faced anxious mess in the diary room. “I like Angela a lot, and I know JC wants to come for her. Game-wise, it’s way better for me to just let JC take a shot at her because I can’t do it myself,” he says in maybe his most explicit strategy reveal in weeks. The fact that Tyler is so willing to throw away his showmance and alliance with Angela for a far-from-certain F2 with JC is both a bizarre and possibly fatal move with only three weeks left in the season.

Even though Scottie is the likely target for eviction this week, Brett decides to pick his brain about what the view from the jury house looks like. Scottie fills him in on everything from Angela wanting to use him as a “shield” in the game to how everyone there hates Angela for her smug attitude and goodbye messages. Brett, already thinking of flipping on Angela, starts to believe that if he manages to be the one to send her packing that he could finagle some veto votes simply on goodwill. He meets with JC in the hammock to commiserate on their shared dislike of Angela’s effect on Tyler and determines that if one of them wins HoH next (ha), they’ll absolutely have to get her out. Knowing that she has both Kaycee and Tyler firmly in her pocket, the two determine that it has to be a backdoor situation, as both would use the veto on Angela. Brett ultimately tells the diary room that while he’s truly aligned with Level Six, he’s taking part of JC’s “paranoia” so that he gets no blood on his hands if JC wins HoH (again, ha) and takes a shot at Angela on his own.

We then get a one-on-one between Julie and BB16 winner Derrick as he gives his thoughts on the season so far. He gives Level Six props for becoming a dominant alliance so early in the game and sticking together for this long, though he wonders when they’ll start to turn on each other. Derrick provides an adept view on how the game’s panned out, giving reasons for how everyone left in the house (except Sam for some reason) could win. When asked about Tyler’s multitude of final two deals, Derrick points out the need for jury management to win the game. “It’s not only about getting to the end, it’s how you get there,” he says, adding that bringing Kaycee to the end may end up backfiring on Tyler as she’s managed to maintain positive relationships with everyone in the jury. On that note, we move to the live vote and eviction. Scottie channels Degeneration X by telling everyone but Tyler that they can suck it if they don’t make the right choice, while Haleigh revisits her Shakespearean roots and urges them not to banish her to the freezing cold before switching to her usual love and light. When the results come, it’s Scottie who’s evicted for the second time this season with his second unanimous vote of the season. In his spastic interview with Julie, Scottie owns his unpredictability and says that he figured he’d be evicted once again because the houseguests are bad liars. He calls Tyler a “coward” for always following what the house wants but also says he would have likely continued working with him over Haleigh because he had the numbers, so who knows where exactly his head’s at.

The HoH competition, “Shell or High Water,” has the houseguests maneuvering a three-pronged “seaweed” ramp by hand to land three pearls onto three oysters at the end of each of the ramps. The first person to land pearls on all three oysters and buzz in will be the new HoH. Kaycee lands her three pearls in quick order and wins her first Head of Household of the season, making this her fourth major competition win in 4 weeks (the hacker competition, two vetos and now the HoH). While this gives Level Six all the power once again, it’s almost anyone’s guess what the outcome will be this week. With JC  eager to split up Tyler and Angela by any means necessary, will they simply consider him too much of a risk to keep around? Or will they take the easy route and send Haleigh packing? There’s a good chance both these events could happen next Thursday as we get our first double eviction of the season. If past doubles are any indication, next week could be the moment Big Brother 20 changes once and for all.

Warning! Light spoilers for Greta ahead. 

The image of Isabelle Huppert giddily dancing to Chopin in a flowing skirt and pantyhose before plunging a syringe filled with a lethal liquid into an unsuspecting man’s neck is, on the surface, the stuff of nightmares. But as the scene plays in The Crying Game director Neil Jordan’s new film Greta, it’s a campy dance between darkness and humor that Toronto International Film Festival audiences — and the actress herself — ate up.

“The point about a genre like this — and it’s kind of a psychological thriller, I wouldn’t call it quite horror — is it’s a matter of seeing how grotesque you can [make] the situations,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker told a riled-up crowd at the movie’s 2018 TIFF world premiere Thursday night. The showing marks the debut of Jordan’s first feature since the 2012 vampire thriller Byzantium. “How much you can push [the audience] toward that level of grotesquery that is so grotesque it’s almost funny, you know?”

Such is the tonal throughline in his insanely pulpy crowd-pleaser, which follows a motherless woman, Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz), who returns a lost purse to the project’s titular widow (Huppert) after finding it abandoned on the New York City subway. The two form a sweet platonic bond that quickly turns sinister as Greta’s true intentions rise to the surface through a series of shocking, unhinged, and disturbingly comedic developments ranging from heavy stalking to Huppert — clad in what appears to be a Chanel suit — literally flipping a table during an outburst inside a fancy restaurant.

“What attracted me to the movie was it wasn’t about vampires and it wasn’t about demons and monsters who lived for 2,000 years in a dark hole under the earth. It was actually about somebody who is deeply, deeply insane and psychopathic,” Jordan told the audience at the Canadian city’s Ryerson University theater. Huppert, however, remained characteristically brief in revealing why she was drawn to Greta: “Well, she’s a monster. That’s enough.”

“I loved it. I thought it was very funny, too,” Huppert, appearing on stage after the screening next to Jordan, Moretz, and costar Maika Monroe, continued, expanding her take on the gleeful sadist she plays in the film. “There is nothing to [redeem] her, actually, and it is precisely what I like about her; [there’s] nothing to justify this monstrosity in her. Yes, as we were doing the movie Neil kept saying it could be out of loneliness or her being a ruthless person. Anything is possible…. but what’s interesting was exploring this very thin border between normality and abnormality and how you cross that border. Hopefully, very few people do it.”

Moretz, however, navigated a different line while making the movie, pushing her threshold for fear to the limit during a scene which sees her character trapped inside a small, coffin-sized box.

“I will say that Isabelle was an incredible help on that because [she] had control over the lid, and she would keep her little fingers underneath and she’d be like, ‘As long as the fingers are there, Chloë, you know that it’s okay,” the admittedly claustrophobic actress said as the audience laughed. “And I would get underneath this box and it would shut and I’d just see her little fingers and be like, it’s ok.”

And on Moretz’s end, that sense of trust was fostered far before the actresses met for the project.

“When I read the script, I knew that Isabelle was potentially attached to be Greta, and I knew it was an opportunity that I couldn’t really miss to be able to work with someone who in my eyes has always been such an inspiration to me as a young woman coming up in my career,” she said. “She taught me to be formidable and not to be afraid to take chances and take risks in characters, so the opportunity to work opposite Isabelle was…. a dream come true.”

Peppermint

type

Movie

Genre

Action

release date

09/07/18

performer

Jennifer Garner

director

Pierre Morel

distributor

STX

mpaa

R

We gave it a D+

If I were to describe the plot of something by saying, “It’s about a person whose family is murdered who then becomes obsessed with getting revenge,” you would be forgiven for rolling your eyes. That sentence more or less describes Death Wish, the 2018 Death Wish remake, almost every iteration of Batman, The Punisher, Deadpool 2, John Wick (dogs count as family), Gladiator, and, if you replace “murdered” with “kidnapped,” Taken — which happens to be directed by Pierre Morel, the man who’s also behind the Jennifer Garner disaster Peppermint.

All you really need to know about Peppermint can be gleaned from its title sequence, a hodgepodge of heavy-metal music, filters, and camera effects that would make more sense in a 2000s Simple Plan music video than they do here, in a film starring America’s sweetheart. Garner plays Riley North, a mother and bank teller who sees her husband and 10-year-old daughter gunned down in front of her as they’re making their way back from a carnival. (The husband had a friend who got on the wrong side of a local drug kingpin.) Although North identifies the suspects, the case is dismissed thanks to a corrupt judge, a corrupt prosecutor, and a corrupt D.A.

And so that very day, a woman who has up until that point only ever been a housewife and a low-level bank employee disappears off the grid, steals thousands of dollars from the bank at which she works without getting caught, and begins her life as an international badass vigilante who, five years later, returns to Los Angeles to punish those who ruined her life.

Amazing Michelle Obama arms notwithstanding, it’s very difficult to believe anyone can turn into Batman in a little longer than it takes to get an undergraduate degree. This woman is an expert in everything: breaking and entering, surveillance, guns, hand-to-hand combat, surgery, explosives. At least Liam Neeson already had a “particular set of skills” to begin with.

Whatever moments of fun there are watching Garner infallibly tear through the ranks of the drug gang are canceled out by the movie’s lack of creativity and imagination. Case in point: North’s daughter was gleefully eating an ice cream cone (three guesses which flavor) and it was her birthday (!) on the day she was murdered. North becomes a folk hero on social media for her anticorruption crusade, and is so revered by the skid row neighborhood she’s turned into her base of operations that someone has painted a giant mural depicting her as a guardian angel.

As the story slogs on and it becomes obvious that this film has resigned itself to the cliched mediocrity one might have predicted from looking at its poster, even the action sequences fail to merit attention. In a world where John Wick and Atomic Blonde exist, ho-hum shootouts in drug dens feel like a waste of time. There are stunts, but no choreography; there’s violence, but no impact. Even a random Method Man appearance three-fourths of the way through the film doesn’t make it fun. Only Garner’s inimitable charm and a 100-minute runtime make this film at all watchable. There’s a more compelling Jennifer Garner tragedy in the expression on her face in that now-viral photo of her handing ex-husband Ben Affleck a bag of Jack in the Box.

And so, even with Garner’s game efforts and those of actor John Gallagher Jr. as the police detective on her trail, none of the characters emerge as anything more than lazy tropes: the tough-as-nails woman who grits her teeth and uses vodka to clean her wounds, the policeman we know has seen a rough few years thanks to his undone collar and the alcohol he pours into his morning coffee.

All this criticism is without mentioning the problematic and racially insensitive nature of a movie about a white lady machine-gunning down a group of scary, tattooed Mexican drug dealers, even in the utterly dissociated world in which this ludicrous plot exists. But the rest of the movie is so slapdash that wokeness unfortunately becomes about the 15th most important thing that needs correction here.

All of us, but especially Jennifer Garner, deserve better. D+