I was talking with a friend just the other day about how some artists have bodies of work that really excite you at the start of their career but then manage to not go anywhere.  Or at least not to ever reach the heights of what you saw previously.  This isn’t actually a knock on the artists because art is hard.  More importantly you spend your entire life creating your first book/album/movie/whatever.  It’s been bouncing around forever, you have always been building to it.  Then you spend 2 years making the next one.  That Sophomore slump seems inevitable.  I also just think there is only so much in us sometimes.  Some people are truly transcendentally talented.  It is what makes them great.  Some people are just talented and you know Louis, Louis is a great song but the Kingsmen didn’t really seem to have anything else in them.  That’s ok because that’s great.  I actually see this a lot in horror and part of it is no doubt that horror is hard.  Very hard to make unique, very hard to make special.  I can list so many people whose first or second movie was just outrageously good and for a long time I was excited about what was going to come next and nothing ever really delivered.  This is a long build up to talking about seeing a movie called Lovely Molly, which is directed by Eduardo Sanchez, who directed the Blair Witch Project.  The Blair Witch Project was special to me because I grew up in the area the film makers lived in, my friend dated Eduardo’s cousin, and I saw a rough cut copy in a basement with the belief this was real and kind of wondered why the fuck we weren’t in the woods looking for those poor kids.  The movie was a cultural phenomena and man the poor people associated with it had no where to go but down.  Obviously there are worse things than having a smash hit movie but no one want to peak early.  Lovely Molly was ok.  It was not great.  It has flaws.  Which is kind of typical of all of his output since.  Still, it had things to recommend it and the thing it really had was Gretchen Lodge.  This was her first movie and she was fantastic.  See how that comes full circle?  I don’t know what the future holds for her, I haven’t seen her in anything else but I thought she was very good in what was frankly a very demanding role.  The movie didn’t fully come together and the entire thing rested on her shoulders.  She did her part.  A recovering addict in a haunted house all alone is the sort of thing that can go very, very poorly in a horror movie.  She managed to somehow bring it all together.  And she was beautiful as well.  I really was taken with her performance and today I want to fuck Gretchen Lodge.