Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his favorite Halloween costume from when he was growing up (a grandfather clock) and his least favorite (a pack of Bubble Yum chewing gum — cool concept, but squat execution, rendering movement difficult). Pitra thought it behooved him to ask Schulz because we will not be hearing from him until after the holiday. The three then discuss the one film Schulz saw this week: Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, and Scott Shepherd. At three-and-a-half hours’ runtime, Schulz was divided in concluding whether it was too long for a film or too short for what should have been a miniseries event. Compared to Killers, The Irishman, Scorsese’s last marathon opus, skipped on by at a jaunty clip; with Killers, you feel every second pass you by. Schulz figures The Irishman had lower stakes, whereas Killers offers more gravitas, given the story concerns the series of murders of the Osage people that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s, owing to the oil deposits discovered beneath their land. The crime rings in The Irishman involved internecine slaughter amongst criminals — gangsters being gangsters — whereas the ring that undertook the Osage’s extermination would have been prosecuted in the Hague for crimes against humanity, had there been an International Court of Justice around at the time. When a director is working from such material (in this case, the 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, written by David Grann), one cannot be so frivolous about certain facts: Whereas the mobsters of Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman existed in a grey area of ethical ambiguity, where they had long passed the point where they might plausibly sue for slander and libel, the principals of Killers of the Flower Moon have relatives who do not want the historical record to be distorted beyond the damage that has already been inflicted unto their nation. So that isn’t the problem; Scorsese is sympathetic to the Osage’s plight. For Schulz, some of the problem rested on his conception of Ernest Burkhart, the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Freshly returned Stateside from the abattoir that was the First World War, Burkhart doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Enter William King Hale, Burkhart’s uncle, played by Robert De Niro. Hale has an idea for such a slab of beef as Burkhart: Why not marry into the Osage — particularly Mollie Kyle (Gladstone), whose family own oil headrights on a patch of Oklahoma turf — and slowly, but surely, kill them all off so that the rights revert to the surviving white boy? Burkhart betrays a couple moments of remorse when slipping Kyle some arsenic into her diabetes medicine, but nevertheless he proceeds to Hale’s long game. In order for Burkhart’s actions to be believable, Schulz felt that Scorsese might have chosen another, younger actor to portray Burkhart, given that the character is in his early-to-mid-twenties with an unformed moral code, and DiCaprio is pushing fifty and looks like he should know better. Even more to the point, DiCaprio looks like he knows Burkhart should know better — a form of character- telegraphing that never happens with an actor like Daniel Day-Lewis (with whom DiCaprio starred in Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York). While Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is gorgeous, and Scorsese brought his attention to period detail down to the atomic level, with an ending that (per Schulz) “shook me,” Killers of the Flower Moon was a film that he could admire, but, ultimately, not love outright. Levora and Pitra discuss why films of that length don’t allow for intermissions anymore, given that the majority of the movie theaters’ profits come from concessions. Killers is a film that deserved an intermission, because a viewer is taking a real narrative gamble whenever s/he decides when to hop over to the bathroom. As for the previews, Schulz was happy that he got one of his young nephews to see Five Nights at Freddy’s, as she’s a fan of the book series and the games. Directed by Emma Tammi and starring Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Matthew Lillard, Freddy’s concerns what happens when a security guard stays overnight at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza and finds out that the animatronic mascots turn techno-feral after the rest of the city has powered down. Given this is the first film in what is clearly meant to be a franchise film series, Schulz thought it looked appropriately creepy (“that game is plenty scary!”) and perhaps even entertaining. Concerning Freelance, directed by Pierre Morel and starring John Cena, Alison Brie, Juan Pablo Raba, and Christian Slater, the film looks redolent of every other film that has used an “escape into the wild” as a plot device, so if that’s your bag. . . Then there’s Anatomie d’une chute, aka Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet and starring Sandra Hüller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Bentaieb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, and Sophie Fillières. Anatomy premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, and Schulz is willing to schlep out to Iowa City to find out what all that is about. Since it was advertised as a French courtroom drama thriller, one expects the atmosphere to be overwhelming Gallic. And heavy on the courtroom dramatics. But, y aura-t-il des sensations fortes? Schulz will let us know. . .

Killers of the Flower Moon