Evan loosely tied a dress sock around his cat’s neck, informing her that she was a fancy lady who wore jaunty scarves. She seemed disinterested in the idea, but didn’t actively try to remove her new accessory, which is exactly how you would expect a fancy lady to behave in that situation. He then began free-association singing, giving a shoddy melody to a series of stream-of-consciousness nonsense words concerning the nature of being a cat, and the fact that she had two brothers, who were also cats. Evan wanted to transition into a song from the musical “Cats,” but he didn’t know any, so he settled for describing the color of his pet’s fur to the cadence of Lou Bega’s “Mambo Number Five.” He cut himself short when he heard a frantic tapping on his window, next to his bed.
He leaned over and opened the blinds, but saw nothing when he peered outside. It could have been a squirrel, he supposed, but he didn’t think so. There had been a rhythmic sentience to the tapping, as if someone had been trying to get his attention.
“What the hell are you doing?” It came from behind Evan, inside his room.
“Ahhh!” Evan said, jumping in surprise. His cat, who was usually very placid, started hissing. He followed her gaze, and saw, standing in his doorway, a tall, hulking figure of a man, with long, spindly limbs, and a camera lens in place of all other facial features. “Oh, hi, Kinobrax.”
“Oh, hi yourself, bro. What’s your problem?”
“Huh? No problem. I’m good, man. How about you?”
“You’re good?”
“Yeah, just kinda kicking it.”
“Cool. Why is there a sock around that cat’s neck?”
“Oh, this? That’s her jaunty scarf. She’s a fancy lady.”
“Uh-huh. Look, man. It’s been three weeks, and you haven’t reviewed another movie. I thought we had an understanding.”
Evan furrowed his brow in confusion. “Yeah, I thought so too. You said I could just do one whenever I got around to it.”
“Yeah,” Kinobrax said, clearly exasperated. “But I assumed you would get around to it more frequently.”
“Yeah, well, you…thought wrong.”
Kinobrax seemed to expand to three times his size. He now barely fit under the room’s ceiling, hunched over and poised to strike like some gigantic Mr. Hyde of the surveillance state. “I WHAT?” he boomed.
“Woah, sorry, man. I didn’t mean that,” Evan said, one hand held in the air in a placating gesture, the other stroking his cat’s head to calm her down. “I meant that I’ve been busy.”
Kinobrax sighed, and as he exhaled, he deflated back to original size. “No, you haven’t.”
“No. I haven’t.”
“But I didn’t mean to go all demon on you there. I’m just very self conscious. I tend to over-react.”
“It’s cool, dude. Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay. Anyway, I really do need you to give me another review.”
“Alright, man. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you do it now?” Kinobrax asked.
“Oh, well, you know, the new William Gibson book just came out yesterday, so I was gonna read that for a while, and I have…” He gestured down to his cat, as if it was obvious that playing with her would take up an entire afternoon.
“Just knock it out real quick, and you can go back to doing all that stuff. You’re cursed, remember? You don’t really have a choice.”
Evan sighed. “Okay, fine, I’ll do one.”
“Good. What movie were you thinking of doing?”
“Um…” Evan looked out into space, wholly unable to think of one.
“Oh, not this again,” Kinobrax said. “It’s any movie. Just fucking pick one and do it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes it is. Have you watched any movies since Jurassic Park?”
“Of course. I saw ‘1917.’ It was really good.”
“Cool. Do that.”
“Nah, that would be a bummer.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to do it eventually.”
“Yeah, I know, but…”
“Okay, what else have you seen?”
“I saw ‘Hackers’ for the first time. That would be a good one.”
“Yeah, it would.”
“But no, that’s too much like Jurassic Park. Nineties jokes, and stuff.”
“The point isn’t just to be funny and original here, you know that, right?”
Evan looked offended. “That’s always the point.”
“Okay, fine. There are countless other movies. Pick one.”
“Um…I can’t.”
“Look,” Kinobrax said, bending down to Evan’s level. “I’m gonna count to three, and then you just say the first movie that pops in your head.”
“Okay.”
“One…two…three.”
“Uhh…”
“Jesus Christ, man. Come on.”
“I can’t, if you’re gonna put me on the spot like that. I mean, you do it. I’ll count to three and you--”
“’The Mothman Prophecies.’”
“What?” Evan said.
“2002. Richard Gere. Good bye.”
And with that, Kinobrax was gone, leaving Evan in his room alone, with just his fancy lady to keep him company.
That’s an odd choice, but whatever. Somehow, I had never seen this movie before today, despite the fact that it came out when I was in high school, and it is exactly the kind of bullshit my friends and I would have checked out back then: a PG-13-rated spook-fest based on urban myths, and starring a guy who is rumored to have once put gerbils up his ass. It’s kind of a shame that Richard Gere is “known” for that, because I actually think he’s something of an underrated actor. In “The Jackal,” he plays an incarcerated former IRA sniper who is recruited by Sidney Poitier to stop Bruce Willis from assassinating the First Lady, and it somehow makes sense. But the gerbil thing overshadows many of his achievements, which is unfortunate. (Not to say that one should have to earn their way out of ridicule for their sexual proclivities by creating good works. Unskilled people should be just as accepted for doing kinky stuff as their skilled counterparts. But (and I’m aware that I may be being problematic here, feel free to cancel me if that is the case) maybe keep living rodents outside of your body? I mean, by their very nature, they cannot consent to such activities, and they could possibly get hurt, and nobody wants that.) Anyway, this movie is bad. But it’s bad in a way that made me sad, because I can see how it could have been badass.
We begin in what appears to be the actual, real-life newsroom of the Washington Post, where our protagonist John Klein, hot-shot reporter played by Richard Gere, is talking on the phone, when he hears an odd screeching noise. Thinking nothing of it, he hangs up and checks in on his editor, who tells him that he is very good at journalism, and should be proud of himself. That’s not exactly the dialog, but it’s not far from it. This movie is not great at subtext, and often characters will simply say important thematic notions to one another in conversation. Klein thanks him for his praise, and explains that he will not be attending the paper’s Christmas party, much to his editor’s chagrin, because his wife Mary is waiting for him. The lovely couple have a romantic night planned, apparently, as we see Mary, played by Debra Messing from “Will & Grace,” getting ready at home. When Klein arrives, we learn that their big plan, the one that kept them from partying, is that they have to meet with a real estate agent to look at a house they are interested in buying. I imagine this Christmas party was occurring on a Friday night, so why the viewing couldn’t wait until the next day, so they could, you know, see how the house looks with sunlight shining through its many windows, is beyond me. The real estate agent tells them that the house is theirs if they want it, but they have to act now, though that seems more like a selling tactic than an actual deadline. I’m not the best when it comes to making large financial decisions, but I do try to avoid making them at the behest of a stranger bombarding me with peer-pressure in the dead of night. But what do I know? I just paid four dollars to watch “The Mothman Prophecies” on Amazon Prime, so don’t listen to me.
Anyway, Gere and Grace take a look through the house and start trying to fuck in the closet. They don’t get very far into the process before the real estate agent finds them and repeats his exact lines from before, about needing to act fast. Gere, mainly in an attempt to get this cock-blocker out of the way, agrees that they’ll buy the house, then re-closes the closet door, presumably to have full-blown sexual intercourse to completion with only a thin piece of wood maintaining the illusion of privacy. “Act fast,” indeed.
While driving back to their apartment, high off the post-coital house-purchasing endorphin rush, the two lovebirds are attacked by this weird winged man creature thing, causing Grace to slam on the brakes and wrench the steering wheel to one direction. Doing this begins a twelve second Tokyo drift, culminating in Grace’s head smashing against the car window. They go to the hospital, where Grace asks Gere if he “saw it too.” He’s like, “what are you talking about?” and she says that she thinks there’s something wrong with her.
The doctor agrees. Grace has a super rare brain tumor. After a single sad scene showcasing her treatment, she tells Gere that she just wants him to be happy, which is movie script-speak for “I’m gonna die now.” She does. As Gere is gathering her things the next day, a nurse comes into the room and tells him that Grace knew she was about to die, because she had been drawing angels. Gere looks through her drawings, which were clearly of the winged creature, and not angels. They’re actually pretty good renditions, as if they had been drawn by the art director of a film, or something. But they’re spooky as shit. Only William Blake or Hieronymus Bosch would be able to look at one of these sketchy hellscapes and think, “angel.” But whatever.
Two years pass, and Gere’s friend tries to get him to go out this woman named Gwen. At this point, I was like, “oh no, is this whole thing gonna be a metaphor for Richard Gere getting over the death of his wife and moving on without her?” Of course it is. “I just want you to be happy.” Fuck. Oh, well, at least we’ll get some cool cryptid action, along the way, I thought. Spolier: not really. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Gere flakes on Gwen and then gets in his car and drives towards Richmond Virginia at one in the morning, for no apparent reason.
While on the highway, his car breaks down, so he gets out and walks to a nearby house to ask if he could use the phone. Now, this movie came out in 2002, when cell phones were not as ubiquitous as today, but I’m pretty sure they’ve already shown that Gere has one. I don’t know if they showed that it was messed up or something, as, much to my shame, I did catch myself getting distracted several times during this viewing. Whatever. The point is, when Gere knocks on the door, the house’s inhabitant yanks him inside and proceeds to hold him hostage in the bathroom, with a shotgun pointed at his head. Gere, it turns out, has been to this exact house three nights in a row at exactly the same time, asking to use the phone, but the good folks who live here have tried to warn him away. Gere has no memory of this. At this moment I was like, “fuck yeah, let’s get weird,” but the movie felt it necessary to disappoint me. A police officer, played by Laura Linney, shows up to defuse the situation, and to introduce herself to the audience as the woman who will eventually become Richard Gere’s new love interest. Gere explains that he’s never been to this house before, but the guy who lives there, who is now revealed to be named Gordon Smallwood, says that he has. Can’t blame a guy named Smallwood for living life with a chip on his shoulder; that cannot have been an easy adolescence.
Laura Linney takes Richard Gere to a motel, explaining that he’s not in trouble since he didn’t actually break any laws. As he’s checking in to the motel, he learns that he is in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, about four-hundred miles away from where he had intended to be. And to top it off, he made it there in only an hour and a half. Spooky. The next day, he goes to the garage where his car got towed, only to be told that there isn’t anything wrong with it. Weird. That night, Gere decides to go back and stake out Smallwood’s house, to see if another version of himself shows up. This doesn’t happen, but Laura Linney does arrive, and she makes him sit in her police car with her until the magic hour has passed. Nothing happens, so Laura Linney decides to tell this strange man she only just met, the only known fact of whom being that he is a famous journalist, about multiple bizarre police calls from recent days. But that’s not a big enough breah of procedure, apparently, so she takes Gere to the police station and shows him a bunch of files. I don’t know why she does this, but I’m not a cop, so maybe there’s something I’m missing.
What follows is a montage of Gere and Linney talking to the townsfolk about their recent strange occurances. This movie is based on a book that was supposed to be based on a true story, so I think these accounts are supposed to be interpreted as the real ones. Which makes sense, as they are as vague and unconvincing as you would expect, here in the real world. One woman just saw some big winged animal close to her window, and another guy saw something scratching against a tree in his back yard. Gere kind of implies that the creature they’ve seen is the same one his wife saw during the accident, but he doesn’t quite say those words yet.
The next day, Gordon Buttonboner approaches Gere and explains that a voice emanating from his sink told him not to be afraid, and that ninety-nine people were going to die in Denver. You might notice that the two parts of that statement don’t seem to work together, but I guess they’re not in Denver, so fuck it. Tinypenis then shows Gere a drawing that he says he didn’t draw, but was on the piece of paper he was doodling his sink ramblings on, when he woke up this morning. Of course it is the winged beast Grace had drawn before she died.
Gere takes Microcock to the doctor to check for a tumor, but the doctor says that he can’t see one in the x-ray. Littledick refuses to believe that he is cancer-free, and he storms off. His wife stops him and convinces him to go to a diner to eat with her and Richard Gere. I’m not glossing over anything there. That’s just what happens. While in the diner, Gere notices a news report on the television about a plane crash in Denver which killed ninety-nine people. Finally, about an hour in, we have our first prophecy.
The next day, Ittydong tells Gere that he has met the man from the sink, and his name is Indrid Cold. Cold has informed him that three-hundred people will die along the equator. An earthquake strikes Ecuador, killing three-hundred people. This guy is good. That night, Bittyprick calls Gere and says that Cold is there with him. Gere has a spooky conversation with Cold, during which the strange character proves that he knows things he shouldn’t. We also hear the weird screeching noise from the beginning of the movie, and I think it’s supposed to mean that this whole scenario has been in the works for two years. But that doesn’t really make any sense, even within the rules of this film, so let’s just ignore it.
In fact, however much sense any of this has made so far, this is where that stops. The rest of the movie is less a story and more a sequence of events that only barely have any connection to one another. Gere goes to Chicago to talk to a writer who wrote about the winged creature (who you may have noticed has played a very miniscule role in this affair, so far). The writer, more than half-way through a film entitled “The Mothman Prophecies,” utters the word “Mothman” for the first time. He says that they can see the future, because of their perspective from a different dimension, or something, then tells Gere to stop looking into them, because it will take over his life, or something. Most people are not sensitive enough to see Mothmen, the writer explains, but those who have experienced trauma can. I guess that means that the town of Point Pleasant is populated with a statistically high number of trauma survivors. The writer also says that humans are as incapable of understanding the motivations of the Mothmen as cockroaches are of understanding humans. Maybe we should do experiments where we traumatize a bunch of cockroaches, and see if they start to get it.
Gere goes back to Point Pleasant, where he learns that fifteen more people have seen the Mothman. He goes to his motel room and looks in the bathroom mirror and slams his head into his own reflection, which is exactly what happens at the end of season two of “Twin Peaks,” the television show this movie thinks it is, but clearly is not.
Babyweiner calls Gere, sounding all strange, then dies in the woods, for some reason.
Gere listens to answering-machine recordings he made of his conversation with Indrid Cold, and gets it in his head that a factory in Point Pleasant is going to explode when the Governor arrives in a couple days. I know it sounds like I’m just saying a bunch of random things, but this is the movie. I’ve left a good bit out of this summary, but none of it makes this make any more sense, I promise you. No one will believe him about the factory, which is good, because it doesn’t actually explode. While getting drunk at the bar at the Marriot, Gere receives a note telling him that his dead wife will call him at his house in Washington D.C. at noon on Friday. He goes there, and gets a call five minutes early. It is Laura Linney, telling him that she has purchased a plane ticket for him to come back to Point Pleasant that instant, so he can spend Christmas Eve with her. It’s Christmas Eve, apparently. He says he can’t because his dead wife is about to call, but she convinces him that that’s fucking crazy. He hangs up. At noon, the phone rings, but he rips the cord out of the wall, refusing to answer. Since it’s a spooky phone call, it keeps on ringing, but he leaves, having decided to fall in love with Laura Linney.
The end, right? Oh, no. Not by a long shot. Gere goes back to Point Pleasant, and ends up at the Silver Bridge, where a problem with the traffic lights has caused a gridlock. He suddenly realizes that this was the catastrophe he was supposed to stop. He can see the factory in the background, so that’s good enough for me. He starts trying to get people out of their cars before the bridge collapses. He rescues a few, during the literally five-minute-long sequence of the bridge falling down, but still, THIRTY-SIX PEOPLE DIE. That’s how this movie ends. With thrity-six people dying. Now, the Silver Bridge really did collapse in 1967, and it is a pivotal part of the real-life Mothman legend, and forty-seven people died then, so…progress?
And what was the point of this movie, you might ask? What lesson are we supposed to take away, besides the “your dead wife wants you to eventually get with a new woman” message that every fifth movie has? I don’t know. The “prophecies’ prove utterly pointless, as they always come to pass, exactly as this Indrid Cold fellow says they will. The narrative device known as “storytelling” dictates that our protagonist succeed in altering at least one of them, saving some people and proving that we are capable of writing our own destinies. Or, failing that, that there at least be a problem of some kind that the protagonist is expected to confront. But nah. The closest we come to that is Laura Linney’s dream, which she had inexplicably confided to Richard Gere, like in their third scene together, in which she dies underwater, and a voice refers to her as “number thirty-seven.” So they overcame that prophecy…which…actually wasn’t a prophecy, but a dream someone had. And even if that was the supposed takeaway, why am I expected to accept that saving one cop you want to bang is a win, amidst the loss of thirty-six innocent lives? What are you trying to tell me? We only see the actual Mothman once in the entire film, and that’s only for a brief instant before the opening car crash. They only even say the words “Mothman” like seven times. This movie can’t decide if it’s surrealist or realistic, and that’s its main problem. It’s not a movie. It’s a two-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.
When the plot of a film doesn’t tell you anything, you can often look to the other cinematic devices for guidance. The most apparent one of these is the cinematography. After all, the plot doesn’t matter if it doesn’t allign with what you see on screen, right? Generally, you can take this notion to its logical conclusion, and understand that all you need to know will be conveyed with the camera. As I mentioned earlier, I recently saw “1917,” which was shot by Roger Deakins, possibly the greatest director of photography of all time. The dialog and sound design in that film are amazing, and the score is fantastic, but you could have taken all of that away, and the film still would have made perfect sense. In fact, Stanley Kubrick was known for saying that a movie should make as much sense on mute as it does with sound. And I’m not simply saying that we should see what happens in the story, either. It’s entirely possible to glean all the intended information from some images that don’t follow any narrative structure. This film tries to tell the story through its visuals, but it gets caught somewhere in between showing and telling. For one thing, there are a bunch of super close-up shots at crooked Swedish angles, meant to skew your grasp of place and increase unease, but they all happen in the middle of more traditionally shot sequences, so it feels more like the extreme close-up camera view from old “Wayne’s World” sketches. A few times this movie uses every film student’s go-to shot of focusing on something innocuous in the foreground while the action happens out of focus behind it, and it is as effective as you might expect.
The main “out-there” technique in this movie is the use of subjective camera. That just means first-person view, like in a “Jason” movie when the teenagers are running directly away from us. Not a bad choice for this story, actually. What better way to understand the Mothman than to be the Mothman, viewing the action from afar? There are shots of people looking up at the sky, as we swoop in from above, and I got what they were going for. Even though the shots showing people watching us as we flew away imply that the Mothman escapes encounters backwards, like kicking off from the wall of a swimming pool, I appreciated the choice. Except that there are also voyeuristic shots from ground level, of Richard Gere walking down the street during the day, and I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to think that the Mothman was just out running some errands. The idea was for us to think that Gere was being watched but didn’t know it. But we know it, and it doesn’t work. Then, to make matters worse, the film would react to these far-away shots by following them with dialog scenes where the camera was so far up in peoples’ faces, you could practically smell their breath.
The film is edited very strangely, but not in a bad way. Certain basic rules of editing are broken (there are jumpcuts and the 180-degree rule is treated more like a suggestion) but I always knew that they had been broken on purpose, in an attempt to make me question what I was seeing. Unnecessary, as I had no fucking clue what I was seeing, at any point, but I was okay with the editing.
This could have been a dope movie, if only they hadn’t chickened out and tried to ground it in the real world. I know they claim it’s based on a true story, but they already change enough of it that the original account is practically unrecognizable here. And, oh yeah, it’s a fucking ridiculous “true” story, to begin with. I already mentioned “Twin Peaks,” which this film obviously references. But that show is famously preposterous, and that’s what makes it so cool. If there had been an episode where Kyle MacLachlan sat someone down and had a normal conversation with them, it would have immediately sucked all the magic out of it. “Twin Peaks” is bonkers, from begining to end, and that’s what “The Mothman Prophecies” should have been. In fact, I think that they should have taken it even farther. “Twin Peaks” is crazy, but you can basically understand what’s going on. This movie should have gone full Jodorowsky, with people tripping their brains away after catching a glimpse of some inter-dimensional intelligence powerful enough to re-program their human psyches. Show me the Mothman flapping his wings in hypnotic slow-motion for eight full minutes while fractal designs dance behind him and a cello run through an amplifier and played by a fax machine blares in my ears. Make me think that I just fell out of Willy Wonka’s acid boat and into a river of mescaline. Convince me, against all logic, that the “prophecies” the Mothman offers up pertain to me, in the real world, outside the diegesis of your shitty little movie. If this film had really leaned into the avant-garde, it could have been something truly special. What kills me is that there are moments (only a couple, but they’re there) when I thought it might do that. It teased me with the prospect of a trippy mind-bender, and then made me watch a man scowl his way through his grief. The little summary on Amazon Prime said that Richard Gere learns that the Mothman sightings might point to an alien invasion, and that was a blatant lie, designed to reel in people who like cool shit. There are no aliens in “The Mothman Prophecies.” Hell, there are barely any prophecies, and there basically isn’t a Mothman.
When I was in the ninth grade, my English teacher assigned us a project where we had to analyze the lyrics of one of our favorite songs. I chose the song “Sell Out,” by the ska band Reel Big Fish, because I am very cool and badass. Another of my fellow students (who I won’t name…nah fuck it, his name was Joey) chose the Blink-182 song “All the Small Things.” When we had turned our papers in, our teacher read some of them aloud to the class. When she got to Joey’s piece, she ripped into it mercilessly, claiming that it was so bad as to be practically unreadable. She wasn’t wrong, but still. But one of her criticisms has stayed with me, through all of the subsequent years. She said that Joey’s paper should have been much better, because Blink-182 had already done most of the work for him. That’s how I feel about this movie. There was already an established mythos to work with, here. This is far from the first film to attempt to discuss things like this, so they could have referenced some of them, when they got into a pickle. Hell, this movie is based on a book, which I have to assume made more narrative sense. You were handed the keys to a 2019 Camaro, then came back with a 1972 Vega, and thought no one would notice, because they both say “Chevy” on the back.
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