Year: 2016

Don’t Breathe (2016)

/ swampflix / 22 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Don’t Breathe is quite the experience. It’s being touted as a return to form for the horror genre, and while it’s certainly memorable, tense, and well-acted, there’s a fine line between well-earned praise and overhype, and the promotion of this film may have already crossed that event horizon.

The film follows Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto, of the strangely similar It Follows, but more on that in a moment), three Detroit teenagers whose varying levels of desperation to get out of their dying city lead them to theft. Using Alex’s father’s private security company connections to get in and out of homes without setting off any alarms, the trio land on the idea of robbing the home of a blind military veteran (Stephen Lang) who was given a large civil settlement when the daughter of a rich family was found not guilty of vehicular manslaughter of his only child. Once they make their way inside, they find that the Blind Man is more than they bargained for, and is hiding secrets that they could not have imagined.

I went into the film mostly blind, for lack of a better term. I knew very little about the plot from the outset other than that the film was supposed to be the best horror flick of the year, and I was expecting something along the lines of an inverted Wait Until Dark. I was also excited in the very first scene, as it reminded me of Hans Weingartner’s 2004 flick The Edukators, of which I am a big fan. The film quickly shifted tone, however, and although there are elements of Wait Until Dark at play here (most notably in a scene in which a blind individual turns off all of the lights to put themselves on equal footing with the people invading their home), this is a very different film.

We recently discussed in the roundtable for our September MotM outing The Box that it was hard to sympathize with the protagonist family and their need for more income because of their relative place of privilege, and Don’t Breathe is certainly more identifiable on that front, but the characters never quite reach a point where we can fully sympathize with them. The only main character of color, Money (Zovatto is Costa Rican), is the least fleshed out and has the least characterization; his character is the least likable of the three mains, and Zovatto seems to be playing an exaggerated version of the same sleazeball he played in It Follows. Further, Don’t Breathe seems to take place in the same alternate universe Detroit as It Follows, by which I mean both films are nearly devoid of black people. It’s understandable that director Fede Alvarez chose not to cast actors of color for these roles; having black actors play Detroit thieves would have unfortunate implications of their own, but since I only counted two extras of color (one in the overhead flyby at the start of the film and one getting coffee at the station at the end), there’s a lot of missed opportunity here. The film effectively portrays Detroit as a dying city with homes full of broken windows and empty streets, but focusing on the economic problems of (mostly) white teenagers creates an incorrect perception both of the city’s real problems and of the people who are usually victims of economic inequality.

The scene we see of Rocky’s family (including the deadbeat mother’s unsubtly swastika-tattooed boyfriend) attempts to communicate in a very short time frame the reasons why Rocky so dearly desires to leave Detroit behind, but it’s a little clumsy in its overtones and fails in comparison to a later scene where Alex talks about her childhood in a much more effective demonstration. And we learn the least about Alex, except that he seems to have a fairly decent home life, and his investment in the thefts is largely because of his romantic interest in Rocky, which the film never states is either problematic or loving. It’s also not the only problematic thing in the film other than the whitewashed Detroit, as there is a scene near the end that uses the ol’ rape-as- drama cliche, although not in the way you would expect. It’s effectively unsettling, but I’m not sure if the “I’m no rapist” line is meant to show off the blind (sorry) self-deception of the character saying it or an attempt to head off any attempted interpretation of the line (which it obviously has not, based on some of the think pieces emerging in the wake of the film’s release). I’m hesitant to say more than that for the sake of retaining the film’s surprises. It’s enough to sour the experience somewhat but not enough for me to say the film should be skipped, although I definitely recommend a big trigger warning for those viewers sensitive to sexual assault.

Even with all of its flaws, Don’t Breathe is a delightfully wicked and taut horror thriller with great influences from other films in the same genre and outside of it. Beyond the “blind person fends off home invaders” similarities to Wait Until Dark and the superficial similarities to The Edukators, there’s a lot of The People Under the Stairs in Don’t Breathe’s DNA (minus that film’s exploration of the race-related nature of economic disadvantage, which, as noted, is lacking here). There are also minor elements that are reminiscent of this year’s earlier horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane, particularly in one of the fake-out endings and the scene of a woman climbing through an air vent in a desperate escape attempt (this scene is also evocative of my favorite horror film, Alien, from which 10 Cloverfield borrowed some of its imagery). Alvarez’s beautiful cinematography and lingering camera work elevate what could otherwise have been a fairly run-of- the-mill horror movie. There’s an attention to detail that bespeaks a greater knowledge of the language of film, and Alvarez is obviously well on his way to being a master linguist. I can’t remember the last time, other than The VVitch, where I felt so much tension in my spine  while taking in a fright flick, and I was haunted by the movie for hours after walking out of the theatre. If you have a strong stomach and can handle the anxiety, Don’t Breathe gets a“recommended” from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death Ship (1980)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

trianglethreehalfstar

campstamp

A cruise liner is minding its own business when suddenly an empty, ghostly freighter rams it. The wreck leaves only a handful of survivors, including a hard-ass Captain Ashland played by George Kennedy. The survivors drift on a raft until the freighter appears again. Like every group of protagonists in every haunted location based movie, they willingly enter a situation despite the obvious red flags. They board the Death Ship. We learn that the boat is a “Nazi interrogation vessel,” still on its mission to kill. In fact, it needs blood to keep running. Eventually the Death Ship possesses captain Ashland, and generally terrorizes the lot, killing off a few of them.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that makes Death Ship engaging. It’s a disappointment in most regards. The acting is terrible, the characters are under-developed (to the point of wondering if anyone even tried at all), and the premise is never really fully explained. There are some shocks, but they’re too hokey to be convincing or effective. In fact, there’s almost nothing redeemable about this film at all. Yet, I still enjoyed it. Maybe not as a spooky Shining-esque boat horror I assume they intended, but as a campy masterpiece.

One of Death Ship‘s many enjoyable flaws is the unexplained nature of, well, everything. A lot of strange things happen and have strange consequences. For example: a woman writhes around in a blood shower in one sequence and in the next we just get the information that she’s dead. How did she die? Why does a ship that needs blood waste so much blood on a shower? You don’t get answers, but do you really need them after watching someone squirm around under a shower head oozing fake blood? There are so many moments like this.

Death Ship is great, but it is also bad. Unlike cult films like Troll 2 — which is tone-wise the best movie to compare it to, where unknowns deliver the best performances they can muster under bizarre direction and bad writing — Death Ship manages to get a similar style of performance with actual actor, and actual Oscar winner, George Kennedy. The idea of a Nazi Interrogation vessel still sailing back and forth on the atlantic looking for victims isn’t developed much more than this one sentence. I think the strongest thing it’s got genuinely going is the ominous synth-y soundtrack.

-Alli Hobbs

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

three star

One year after the Art Deco silent horror masterwork The Bat made the jump from stage to screen, Universal Studios got their feet wet in the horror game with an adaptation of a very similar play, The Cat and the Canary. Along with the much lesser trifle Midnight Faces, The Bat & The Cat and the Canary combined to establish what would become a very popular subgenre of early horror: the “old dark house.” In the “old dark house” story, guests at an ancient, spooky mansion are terrorized by seemingly supernatural events & a mysterious killer. At the story’s natural end the killer’s identity is revealed and all of the preceding supernatural events are explained to be their doing. This was a very popular murder mystery/horror plot form the 30s throughout the 50s until the murder mystery aspect was dropped & the supernatural elements were played up & developed into the “haunted house” genre. By the 1970s & onward the “old dark house” plot was spoof fodder for properties like Murder by Death, Clue, and Scooby-Doo, but in the 1920s it played remarkably fresh, with The Cat and The Canary standing as a prime example of the horror genre’s merits as an artform. Unfortunately, in retrospect the film feels a lot less special & a little more flawed than it did to the audiences it floored in 1927, especially with the towering presence of The Bat casting its shadow over the ordeal.

A wealthy eccentric on his death bed bemoans the fact that his family hungers after his money like a gang of cats circling a caged canary. In order to fight them off, he sets the reading of his will 20 years into the future, when the family returns to learn that the money has been willed to his most distant relative. There is then a conspiracy to drive this distant relative insane as a means to strip them of their newfound wealth due to incompetence. In the meantime anyone foolish enough to get in the way is mysteriously murdered and, because the mansion setting is so very spooky, their deaths are blamed on “ghosts.” The Cat and the Canary boasts a very straightforward plot structure that calls a lot of attention to its stage play origins, but what the film lacks in a unique narrative, director Paul Leni makes up for in pure atmosphere. The German Expressionist filmmaker brings an incredible eye for visual play to the big screen, a bridge between art house Europe & the more rigid spectacle of Old Hollywood that I believe would guide the heights of Universal horror productions for decades to come. Leni unlocks the silliness of the film’s stage play origins and allows the camera to move in subtly haunting ways, as if exploring a crime scene with a flashlight (quite literally in an early moment). He also relies heavily on German Expressionism’s penchant for drastic lighting & dreamlike imagery. Gigantic cats & medicine bottles tower over a dying man. Overlaid images like a doorknocker, an envelope, and a gloved hand shift large in perspective, foreshadowing the deep focus technique Citizen Kane would pioneer in the early 40s. Just examining gorgeous, isolated frames of the film, it’s no wonder that The Cat and the Canary was known as the definitive  & haunted house movie,  inspiring no less than five other feature film adaptations of the same play & influencing horror giants like Alfred Hitchcock with its visual style.

The problem with The Cat and the Canary is a fairly common one with old school horror productions. It’s actually the sole reason I had to knock a half-star off my rating for the otherwise flawless The Bat. In order to soften the cruel blow of the film’s supernatural (and potentially blasphemous) terrors, old fashioned horror was often mixed with hokey yuck-em-up comedy, particularly in American productions. In The Bat, a dopey, dim-witted maid makes an ass out of herself by continually mis-guessing the true identity of The Bat. In Midnight Faces, the “old dark house” genre’s other founding father, the comedy takes the ugly form of racial caricature in a scaredy cat black sidekick. The Cat and the Canary, unfortunately, stretches the comedy element across as many characters as it can, turning what is otherwise a beautifully-constructed art film into a painfully hokey farce. Now-tired gags like a scared character stuttering, “G-g-g-g-ghosts!” & incomprehensible relics like, “It’s about time you climbed on the milk wagon,” (what?) drag a lot of what makes The Cat and the Canary special down into the depths of eyeroll-worthy comedic tedium and it’s honestly a damn shame.

There’s certain old-world cheese that I can forgive given this film’s ancient release date, such as the way it hammers home the central cat & canary metaphor that gives it a title over, I believe, three separate repetitions. That I can live with. The way the film’s hokey comedy routines drain the blood out of its supernatural horror, however, is a true bummer. The Cat and the Canary is ultimately a film at war with itself. As a cornerstone of what American horror would come to look like in it wake, the film is an indispensable artifact and an occasionally breathtaking one at that. It’s also a failed comedy, though, which is up there with the most difficult kinds of films out there to enjoy. This is a problem made even worse by the fact that it’s bested by The Bat in every single possible regard, especially in the look of its central killer antagonist, which is not at all catlike in his visage in comparison to the other film’s humanoid creature. The result is a flawed work that I admired, but also found a little disappointing. I hope somewhere else in Paul Leni’s career there was a film that made proper use of his stunning cinematic eye without cheapening it with broad humor.

-Brandon Ledet

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

I love the Internet. I spend a lot of time here. I’m also a huge sci-fi nerd. I love looking towards the future, thinking about highly intelligent A.I., and I’m not afraid of the great robot uprising. On top of all of that, I’m a big Herzog fan. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World kind of seems like it was tailored specifically for me. All that considered, though, it’s ambitious subject matter to tackle. How would anyone make a film about the Internet and how it’s affected our society? Herzog’s solution to that problem is to separate it into vignettes.

The first vignette is about the very beginning at UCLA’s campus. Very early on we get Herzog’s dry sense of humor as he remarks about how hideous the corridors are in the building that houses the start of this massive cultural and technological revolution. Then, we get the basic good and bad sides of the Internet, learning about the widely released EteRNA game which helps researchers learn about new RNA molecules and also meeting a family who’s faced very real harm after a privacy invasion. As the film progresses, however, the ideas and themes sort of spiral out of control in a way that mirrors what the Internet has done.  At some points, the spiral seems less intentional than at others and often times it’s unsure whether or not Herzog — who admittedly didn’t even make his first phone call until age 17 and still doesn’t have a cell phone — really understands the information being passed to him.

The real strength of any Herzog documentary is in the interview subjects. He has a strength in finding the most interesting people to talk to. He also handles each subject with such neutral respect. Whether it’s talking to Elon Musk or students trying to program soccer robots in the attempt to beat the World Cup champions or people in technology rehab, he’s never combative and respects their boundaries.

One thing I really appreciated about this documentary was all the technology-positive viewpoints. So often in our age of smart phone and augmented reality games people are extremely and unfoundedly critical. It was truly refreshing to hear people say positively that the Internet has been a great equalizer and that the conveniences brought on by robots and self-driving cars will be helpful. Yes, Herzog still interviews people who think the Internet is the embodiment of the antichrist and others who believe that wireless radiation is ruining their lives and causing chronic pain, but they are in the minority. Everyone else looks towards the future inquisitively and optimistically.

Lo and Behold is sprawling and out of control and at some points it feels like Herzog was in over his head like someone’s misguided documentarian great uncle. There’s history to speculation, best case scenarios, and worries about an impending apocalypse included here. The film is out of control in the way the Internet has become.

-Alli Hobbs

Movie of the Month: The Box (2009)

/ swampflix / 21 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Box (2009).

Brandon: “Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You sit in your home staring at a box. It erodes your soul while the box that is your body inevitably withers, then dies, whereupon it is placed in the ultimate box to slowly decompose.”

No, that’s not lyrics to a Bright Eyes song or a page ripped from your 15 old self’s poetry-filled diary (or both if you’re Conor Oberst). It’s an explanation from The Box’s mysterious villain Arlington Sterward when he’s asked the simple question, “Why a box?” Steward’s rambly, heavy-handed response (delivered expertly by character actor Frank Langella) is a typifying example of writer-director Richard Kelly’s filmmaking style in that it’s both far outside any semblance of normal human communication and it represents a nonstop torrent of ideas that Kelly can’t help but spill onto the page all at once. His debut film, Donnie Darko, was a weird 80s throwback sci-fi horror that’s just bonkers enough to serve as art film training wheels for disgruntled teens (it worked for me, anyway), but also stylistically restrained in a way Kelly hasn’t been since. His follow-up, the sprawling & delightfully incomprehensible Southland Tales, is a punishing assault of strange ideas that plays like a big budget adaptation of a crackpot conspiracy theorist’s 4,000 page manifesto on the state of the modern & supernatural world. The Box, Kelly’s most recent film to date, splits the difference.

As Kelly put it himself, The Box was an attempt “to make a film that’s incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining [his] artistic sensibility.” I’d say it’s almost successful in that way, tempering Kelly’s bottomless wealth of bizarre ideas with a familiar realm of cinematic tones that lands somewhere between Hitchcock suspense and the Spielbergian throwback horror of titles like Super 8 & Stranger Things. I honestly believe The Box is his best work to date. However, if Kelly thinks that this overwhelming tale of deadly ultimatums, alien invasions, mind control, interdimensional gateways, and spiritual ascension has “broad commercial appeal” he’s gotta be out of his fucking mind (and I’m sure there’s more than a little truth to that). Audiences hated The Box. It’s one of the few films to ever receive an “F” Cinemascore, which is typically a very forgiving grading system. It flopped financially in 2009 & has since been largely forgotten by time. General audiences have been known to hate a lot of great art, though, and I think that there’s an argument to be made that this film deserves to be recognized as such.

The first half hour or so of The Box might actually be the work of “broad commercial appeal” Kelly believed he was delivering. The film opens as a retelling of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Button Button” in which a young couple receives a mysterious box that prominently displays a giant button and comes with an even more mysterious offer: if the couple pushes the button someone they do not know, somewhere in the world, will die & they will receive $1million cash. Long story short, the couple pushes the button, receives the cash, and are informed that the box will now be passed onto a new couple, someone they do not know. Like the best of The Twilight Zone, “Button Button” is a tight, efficient story of supernatural dread that reinforces the value of The Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. Kelly faithfully delivers that tight, controlled life lesson and then, leaving broad commercial appeal behind, explodes it into a galaxy of strange ideas that explore the identity of the man who delivers the box (or “the button unit” as Steward puts it”), the question of whether or not humanity is an enterprise worth preserving, and theories on what could possibly exist beyond our basic understandings of reality & mortality. All of these heady topics are interjected with whatever weird ideas pop into Richard Kelly’s head from moment to moment – say, lightning as a means of alien-to-human communication, motel pools as gateways to other worlds, entire armies of It Follows-style demons (“employees” of Steward), etc. etc. etc. It’s all perfectly overwhelming and I enjoy every frame of it, but I can’t fathom a world where it could’ve been a runaway commercial success.

Richard Kelly seems very much interested in trying to convey the vague menace of the unknown here, an overreaching ambition that leaves a lot of character development by the wayside in favor of otherworldly ideas & never-ending suspense. As a result, a lot of the film’s dialogue & character motivations can fall just on the campy side of eerie. It can also be a little difficult to care about any particular character’s fate, including the film’s central family, since they remain near-strangers for the entire runtime as they try to piece together exactly what’s happening to them. As unnerving as The Box can be, its lack of compassion for its characters & its subversively campy humor can play just as thick as Cameron Diaz’s godawful Virginian accent (she really is laughably bad in her lead role as the matriarch).

Britnee, how do the corny acting & unclear character motivations play into the film’s nonstop assault of spooky ideas for you? Are they a distraction or do they add to the film’s strange, off-putting appeal?

Britnee: First of all, when I found out that The Box was going to be the September Movie of the Month selection, I got it confused with the 2015 film The Gift. Jason Bateman graced the cover of The Gift, so I kept waiting for him to make an appearance in The Box, which, of course, he never did. It turns out that movies about mysterious boxes are more popular than I thought.

The insanity that is The Box should come with a warning label. Those with severely high blood pressure or epilepsy should never watch this movie because they will end up in the emergency room before the film is over. The constant twists and turns are just too much to handle, but I loved them all. The acting of just about every character, especially Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, really contributes to the movie’s wacky charm. Diaz’s performance as one of the film’s main characters, Norma Lewis, really sticks out for me. It’s really as bad as it gets, but her horrible accent, unconvincing attitude, and missing toes all come together to make The Box a hell of a good time. As Brandon mentioned previously, it’s difficult to give a damn about the fate of any of the film’s characters because viewers aren’t given the opportunity to really connect with them, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed not worrying about whether or not Norma and Arthur would survive the terrors brought on by the box because I was able to focus my attention on the all the confusing supernatural happenings.

There were many times in the film where I thought the movie was concluding, such as when Arthur goes through his chosen portal in the library and ends up in his bedroom with Norma, but then the film continues and the story develops even more. Alli, did you find the constant twists in the film to be irritating or did you enjoy them? Was there any point in the film where you thought it should’ve ended?

Alli: It’s hard to say when a movie this in-over-its-head in a bizarre concept should have ended. I think maybe somewhere on the writer’s desk someone should have come in and asked about some plot holes and maybe talked Kelly out of some of them. But as you guys are saying, they’re all a part of this movie’s goofy charm. After a certain point of being jerked around I kind of gave up and just let it take me along for this strange little ride and part of me even felt like it could have kept going, honestly. There were so many more questions than answers. Not that I think I could have stood Diaz’s accent for another hour, but I really wanted to know more about these employers of Mr. Steward. I want to know more about this film’s philosophy as well.

A thing this movie brushed over and possibly unintentionally made a argument about was free will. In the end, did the new family being offered the box have a choice at all? He clearly knew that everyone he offered these options to were going to choose the easy way out, if you can call it that, otherwise some sort of transmitter would actually have to be in the box for him to know. I know there’s an argument to be made for supernatural surveillance, but it seems like he and his employers knew all along what human nature would lead these people to do. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a heavy-handed monologue about that.

But then again, this is a movie that only left me half satisfied. We’re vaguely introduced to aliens but we don’t learn much more about them other than they want to prove humans are unworthy. We’re given some suspense but nothing too bad, except for like Brandon said the occasional It Follows moment of a stranger being outside the window. We’re given an ideal suburban family in an ideal suburban town that’s slightly claustrophobic but not quite. Everything seems to fall just barely short of hitting whatever target he was aiming for. Boomer, is there anything you really wish had been expanded or clarified that wasn’t?

Boomer: Honestly, I had the opposite feeling. Although I definitely like the spookiness of the Steward hive mind followers and the general impenetrability of concept that is a hallmark of Richard Kelly’s work (like Brandon, Donnie Darko served as a kind of Baby’s First Jacob’s Ladder for me as well), there’s a certain simplicity to the existential dread of the original Richard Matheson short story that is absent here. In the short “Button, Button,” the story ends with the enigmatic Steward retrieving the button in a box from the protagonists, departing as he “reassures” the couple that they should not worry, as the next recipients of the box won’t be anyone that they know, with all the implications thereof. Does that mean that there is a direct link between the immediate recipients of the button and the previous button-pushers, or just a chilling reminder that their karmic comeuppance will come someday, without warning? It’s classic Matheson that way, and I adore the story (it’s adaptation in the eighties Twilight Zone revival has a different, more obvious ending, and I, like Matheson, don’t care for it; he went so far as to have the story idea credited to a pseudonym). There’s a quietness and intrigue to the original story that this film, which uses the original story less as a template and more of a jumping-off point for spiraling but utterly watchable madness, doesn’t possess.

That having been said, there were some things that I would have been interested to see more of. I was particularly intrigued by the use of realistic grounding in the life of the family before the box arrives, like the discussion of Norma’s foot injury and Arthur’s spacey aspirations. While it’s true that much of what makes the film captivating is the unexpected paths that it takes, I would have preferred to see the story retain that level of grounding throughout rather than grow exponentially more wild. It’s as if there are two films here, and I would have liked to see a Kelly flick that had the alien test plot and a second, different film that followed the mundane lives of the Lewises after the button is pushed, as they navigate the quandary of the immoral actions taken as a result of Steward’s visit. As it is within the film, everything that follows Norma’s impulsive push that affects them is an external force, not an exploration of the fallout of committing such an act, which would have been a more interesting film to me.

As far as other elements that I would have liked to see more of, Deborah Rush is criminally underutilized here as she was in her previous MotM appearance in Big Business, and every time I see her in any role I wish she had more to do. I also would have liked to know more about what Steward was like before he became the host for the alien entity that is sitting in judgment of humanity; was he chosen because of a similarity between his pre-possession personality and the ideas of the Hive? Was he the opposite? It could have been interesting to see the dichotomy between his former self and his new one, especially as a mirror of the change in personality between some of the button-pushers we saw pre- and post-button mashing; an objective correlative metaphor is never a bad idea, and could have illustrated the difference in the self that occur as a result of chance (Steward) versus those that follow deliberate action (the Lewises). What do you think, Brandon? You mentioned that the campiness and spectacle of the movie are its big draws for you; would you feel that you would enjoy it more, or at least as much, if it had been more of a character piece than a moderately coherent, not-quite-on-target, effects-heavy scifi fable?

Brandon: I’m a little amused by that question because I assume Kelly believes he was delivering a character piece, or at least his version of it. I don’t think stripping the film of its excess of The Day the Earth Stood Still-modeled sci-fi ideas on testing humanity’s worthiness through complex alien puzzles would necessarily improve its narrative in terms of entertainment value, but I do agree that the film starts weaving some interesting threads about the Lewises that might’ve lead to some truly powerful character-based moments had they been given enough room to breathe & develop. For instance, the family’s early financial troubles, born solely of their apparent disinterest in living within their means, is played merely as motivation for their activation of the button unit, but could’ve instead lead to genuine dramatic tension were Kelly interested in building it. He also suggests an interesting spousal dynamic when the couple negotiates the button unit’s terms & conditions and Marsden’s scientist-dolt husband asks, “What is it to really know someone? Do you know me?” I wouldn’t trade those lines of inquiry for the ludicrous sci-fi spectacle we’re gifted with instead, but I do think they would’ve been better received if they had been more fully developed, ideally without sacrificing the sci-fi backdrop that contrasts them.

The problem with fitting the character study elements and Kelly’s immense idea flood into a single vehicle might be a question of form. In some ways a two hour feature film isn’t nearly expansive enough to encompass everything The Box wants to contain. The film takes the idiom “biting off more than you can chew” as a direct challenge & a mission statement, an approach that doesn’t always sit well with a movie-going audience. I feel like the property’s ideal self would be as a prestige television series on AMC or HBO, a medium that would fix several immediate problems like allowing more room for grounded character study, giving each out-there sci-fi idea time to breathe instead of running through them all at once, forgiving a little bit of the television-grade acting choices made by Diaz & Marsden, etc. I’m imagining it like a Twin Peaks or a Welcome to Nightvale, where monster-of-the-week alien threats (or in this case, alien puzzles) would all inexplicably occur in a single town & follow a small family unit as they struggle to make sense of the phenomenon. The first episode of The Box: The Television Series would be the same “Button, Button” remake the movie uses for a launching point, except that it would end with the couple pushing the button in a cliffhanger, waiting for the story to be picked up at the beginning of episode 2. As I’ve said, though, a large part of the fun of The Box for me is in being overwhelmed by its wealth of ideas in such a short amount of time & I think there’s a value to experiencing all of that otherworldly absurdity in a tightly paced, cinematic punch that is somewhat lost when you’re, to risk referencing something so of-the-moment twice in one conversation, binge-watching all 8 hours of Stranger Things over the course of a week.

Speaking of the sprawl of sci-fi ideas included here, one of my favorite concepts in The Box didn’t come from Richard Kelly himself, but is instead a quote from sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, conveniently read aloud for the viewers following along at home: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Unable to resist piling even more literary quotes onto the film’s DNA, Kelly also makes several allusions to Jean-Paul Satre’s play “No Exit,” both mining its title for easy existential dread & expanding its infamous line, “Hell is other people” to “Hell is other people seeing you for who you truly are,” in an offhand stab at literary analysis. Kelly’s pulled off this trick before in Donnie Darko as well, which includes an extensive classroom analysis of the Graham Greene short story “The Destructors.” Britnee, do you think these two literary references, Clarke & Satre, as cool as they are, provide any legitimate sort of insight into what kind of story Kelly was trying to tell in The Box or were they just easy modes of injecting profundity into what’s at heart a very pulpy sci-fi premise? Was their inclusion earned in the film’s content or did it come across as a little try-hard?

Britnee: Kelly’s use of the Clarke and Satre references you mentioned, Brandon, caused me to give a big eye-roll as I was thinking back to when they occurred in the movie. It’s difficult for me to take anything in this film seriously, so I would definitely have to say that the presence of these literary references is a little ridiculous. Obviously, Kelly didn’t throw them into the film to add to the campiness, but ultimately, that’s exactly what happened. I get what he was attempting to accomplish, but this movie was just too silly for anything profound to exist within it. Then again, my knowledge of anything by Clarke and Satre doesn’t go beyond Brandon’s previous statement, so maybe I’m the crazy one and Kelly’s got the right idea.

I feel like I’m being a little harsh on The Box. There were a few moments where I caught myself thinking about monumental life choices I’ve made and what motivated me in my decisions. The Lewis family painted a picture of how ugly being selfish and greedy really is, which is why I didn’t have much sympathy for them. The fact that they decided to take the life away from another human being so they could keep up with their suburban lifestyle made me sick to my stomach. Alli, do you think the film’s “protagonists” would have been more likeable if they were worse off (e.g. Their kid was dying, and they needed money for a lifesaving transplant)?

Alli: You know, I actually do think they would be more likeable if they were in more dire circumstances, but I think making them shallow suburbanites is either some sort of misguided attempt in a post-2008 financial crisis world to say, “This is you!” to the audience or to do the high and mighty, “Yes, you as the audience gets it. Look at the normies struggling with their mixed up priorities.” And if it was the second I’m not sure if they were ever supposed to be likeable at all and it’s just about the schadenfreude. Given the smug literary references and all of Donnie Darko, pretty much I’m leaning towards that interpretation, but it seems like there’s a lot of ways to read this movie.

Even though I never liked them and never sympathized as the movie progressed, I managed to like them even less as it went on, until finally it reached a point where I actually despised them. That point was at the end when they have to choose between having a deaf and blind son or Arthur shooting Norma. I hope I’m not spoiling too much by saying this, but what the hell? The idea of a disabled son being worse than a dead wife is really upsetting to me, especially when you have a million dollars and can afford to find ways to make your life more accessible. Not only is it a cheapness of life thing but just some casual ableism thrown in. And I just shudder to think that someone watching this somewhere probably thought that that was a reasonable choice to make.

Boomer, was there any point more “upsetting” (I’m not quite sure that’s the word I’m looking for) than others to you or did nothing really stand out to all?

Boomer: The most upsetting thing to me was seeing poor little Britta passing through the long hotel hallway while being met with the stares of various Steward acolytes. I know that a lot of people find hotels to be inherently creepy automatically (I’m not one of them) and so they probably found this even more unsettling than I did, but there was something about her apparent innocence and the way that she was bandied about by forces outside of her control. I don’t recall that we ever really get much of an explanation as to who she is or what she was doing; was she, like the man from the previous box cycle from whom Arthur learns about the nature of Steward, an escapee from the “plan” who was trying to make sense of her upturned world? Was she merely an unwilling accomplice in the larger goals of the mysterious entities? It is perhaps my fondness for Gillian Jacobs alone that led me to be so thrown off by this sequence, but it was generally disturbing.

I disagree with your reading of the final scene, however. Not that there are no ableist connotations in the scene (that interpretation is certainly valid), but I don’t feel that Kelly’s intent was to make it seem that having a blind/deaf child was worse than a dead wife/mother, but was more of a demonstration of Steward’s willingness to give Norma a second chance to prove that she could make the “right” decision, since it was her impulsive pushing of the button (despite Arthur’s hesitation and apparent ultimate refusal) that doomed the family in the first place. In response to your question, what was perhaps most disturbing was the fact that Steward and his overseers were testing “free will” in a way that influenced the participants; in fact, given that none of us can come to an agreement as to whether there is free will in this situation (given the way that deaths of previous users of the box rely upon the next user making the wrong decision), it’s unclear what, if anything, could be gleaned from these experiments.

Although I hesitate to sympathize with the Lewises because of their vapid engagement in consumerism (it’s important to note that the original story did, in fact, feature a family in a much worse economic situation than the Lewises), they were living within their means until Steward manipulated events in their life, like causing Arthur to lose his candidacy for promotion and taking away the tuition reduction plan that the family relied upon in order to send their son to the best possible school In a way, the film could be seen as a modern(ish) retelling of the story of Job, substituting mild setbacks for utter familial destruction and replacing faith in God with the willingness to perform acts which enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. Viewed through this lens, Norma and Arthur have their faith tested and Norma fails, but is given the opportunity to correct this wrong through self-sacrifice. I don’t necessarily think that this is the reasonable choice, but I feel like this was more likely to be Kelly’s intent. Regardless, just as with Job, none of the characters that we see would be in the situations in which they find themselves without divine (or unholy) intervention. Maybe this means that The Box is really an exploration of the philosophical conceit that if (a) the divine is all knowing and pre-ordains all actions and (b) humans are thus unable to exercise free will despite the appearance that they can, then (c) punishing mankind for acting in accordance with preordination is unreasonable and perhaps evil. Probably not, though.

EPSON MFP image

Lagniappe

Britnee: While The Box left me with loads of unanswered questions, what I want to know more than anything else is the current whereabouts of the prosthetic silicon foot that Arthur made for Norma (using materials from his workplace!). Did Diaz take it home as a souvenir from one of her most desperate roles? Does Kelly keep it in a curio cabinet in his family room?

Alli: Coming back to the disabilities/deformities thing. I just really think it’s super messed up that someone like Norma, who lives with a limp has some sort of hierarchy of disabilities. Like, Mr. Sterling’s face makes her feel better about herself instead of her being able to identify with him. I know she’s worried about the teasing and ridicule when it comes to her son, but it’s still terrible.

Brandon: There’s so much to cover in The Box that I feel like I could never touch on all of it even if this conversation went on for two more rounds. There’s the curious case of its Arcade Fire-provided score that never reached physical media release, the weirdly wonderful feeling of seeing a babyfaced Gillian Jacobs in an early dramatic role, the peculiarly detailed prop of that Human Resource Exploitation Manual Arlington Steward supplies to his employees, and a whole lot more I could never get to with all the time in the world. Instead of trying to gather all these details like so many Pokémon, I’d just like to follow up on a couple things Alli & Boomer mentioned that interested me.

I totally agree with their assessment that the film’s musings on free will are muddled at best. This is never more apparent to me than at the film’s climax when two couples are given an ultimatum by Steward and they make their decisions simultaneously, one directly affecting the other. Whose free will is being exercised there? It’s a question (among many) that the movie is far from interested in answering. A heavy handed Steward monologue on the subject would’ve been nice. However, I do want to buck Alli’s assertion that not enough suspense is earned through interactions with the It Follows “employees”. They’re creepy as all hell and, unlike most of the film, tastefully employed in small doses. The three big moments I’m thinking of are the aforementioned zombified man in the kitchen window; the babysitter’s long, troubling walk down a motel hallway; and that incredible sequence in the library where the employees threaten to form into an angry mob. I know I’ve poked fun at how ludicrous The Box can be from minute to minute, but I do believe the suspense it generates is genuine and a lot of it comes from those creepy, dead-eyed employees of Steward’s.

Boomer: When I was working at the Urban Outfitters in the French Quarter in grad school, James Marsden came in to shop (I think he was working on the remake of Straw Dogs at the time). I rang him up and I cannot tell a lie: he really is that pretty in real life. I’m not going to say that I got lost in his eyes or anything, but I’m also not going to pretend that I didn’t. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life was the gradation of colors in the rings of Saturn through a refraction telescope at the top of the observatory in college; the viewer was the size of a dinner plate, and from ringtip to ringtip, the rings were six inches across, with nothing between me and this distant planet but glass and space. It was humbling, awe-inspiring, and absolutely stunning. The second most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was James Marsden buying tank tops. Take from that what you will.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
October: Britnee presents Funhouse (1981)
November: Boomer presents  The Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

Creative Control (2016)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

“It’ll be weird when we all have chips in our brains.”
“It won’t seem weird then. It’ll seem inevitable.”

Some of the most effective sci-fi works are the ones that don’t have to reach too far into the future to find something worth saying. The recent indie cheapie Creative Control doesn’t say exactly what year it’s supposed to be set in, but it might as well be next year, maybe even next month. Walking through the CBD in New Orleans every week, I see tons of tiny tech startups clacking away on their Apple computers in the giant, unobscured windows of their rented, cubicle-free workspaces. I usually assume most of these businesses are in the search optimization market or something similarly intangible, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be hammering away at creating or advertising Augmenta, the central technological advancement that drives the plot of Creative Control. The film starts from an entirely plausible place & doesn’t stray too far from that contemporary anchor, a decision that helps keep its technophobic paranoia surprisingly relatable, despite its hamfisted smartphone addiction shaming & the general unlikeablility of its characters.

The fictional technological advancement Augmenta, in case you haven’t guessed it, is posed as the next logical step in augmented reality. Housed in the clear plastic frames of hipster glasses, Augmenta is much more stylish than the Borg-ish look of Google Glass & aims for a Steve Jobs-esque attention to clean, fashionable visual aesthetic. The company hired to sell this product is a hipster Brooklynite version of Mad Men, complete with rampant alcoholism, model-chasing adultery, and hypermasculine ennui. This is cheap, casual sci-fi with occasional moments of off-putting acting choices, but it’s grounded in a very specific world of money-chasing advertisers & profit > people manufacturers that’s likely never going away, so it actually comes across as relatively pertinent to our current consumer culture. Creative Control toes the thin line that divides technology & magic, exploring the way that A.R. advancements attempt to “enhance real life with a magical layer in front of it.” It uses the uncanny, inevitable future of every consumer wearing a “face computer” to moralize about a modern society increasingly “addicted to misery & pain” and decreasingly engaged with life head on as characters multitask in both the real & digital worlds simultaneously, never fully focused on a single interaction in a constant attempt to focus on them all. Creative Control presents big ideas about digital & tangible interactions in a very realistic future, but those concerns merely color the anxieties of its beyond-grating cast of capitalist brutes rather than lead to some kind of grand, epiphanic statement about where our culture is headed.

For all of its see-through smartphones, holographic lap dances, and strange, geometrically-shaped pills, the world of Creative Control is still very much like our own. It’s even crawling with the same cocaine-numb bro monsters, douchebag fashion photographers, and overly flirtations yoga instructors that currently infest the masculine end of modern hipsterdom as we speak. Creative Control’s plot mostly revolves around a tangled web of adultery & romantic jealousies where an ad agency jerk (with a Yoni Wolf fashion sense) satisfies his lust for a skirt-chasing buddy’s girlfriend by masturbating to her avatar in his Augmenta-created fantasy world. In the process he loses touch with his girlfriend’s wants & needs and the basic demands of his job as he slips further into a drug & alcohol fueled confusion that blends reality & fantasy into a difficult-to-parse mess of petty romantic betrayals.

No one in the male-dominated film isn’t an asshole except the two girlfriends who get sucked into their partners’ corrosive bullshit and they’re treated like a nagging shrew & a magic pixie dream girl ideal, respectfully. The one exception there is Reggie Watts, playing himself as Augmenta’s chosen spokesman. It’s in Watts’s prankster-minded screen presence and in the film’s crisp, black & white digital cinematography that Creative Control finds its own voice as a distinct work. Its fretting over technology addiction & its anxious gaze into modern romance is a little less special, but also a natural element of its pedigree as a contemporary sci-fi drama. I left Creative Control glad to see Reggie Watts get paid for being his wonderfully weird self (along with a cameo role H Jon Benjamin) and super glad that I don’t have to deal with the film’s tech startup bros in my own life, though I know for sure that they exist. It worked pretty well for me in that way even if it wasn’t the cinematic breakthrough equivalent of augmented reality or “face computer” technology.

-Brandon Ledet 

Miles Ahead (2016)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

“When you’re creating your own shit, man . . . even the sky ain’t the limit.” –Miles Davis, supposedly

After watching Miles Ahead in its entirety it’s difficult to tell if the above quote, which appears on an opening title card, was actually something Miles Davis said or if it’s something in the spirit of what Miles Davis would say. Either way, first-time filmmaker, longtime badass Don Cheadle holds onto the sentiment of that quote like a mission statement or a war cry. Miles Ahead is dressed up like a Miles Davis biopic, but functions much more like an expressionistic gangster film, mirroring the way Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song falls just on the art film side of blaxploitation. This Don Cheadle passion project (starring, written, and directed by Cheadle himself) pursues an over the top dedication to creative license with his subject’s life story that makes for a disjointed, but controlled variation on biopic conventions and, wouldn’t you know it, the result feels a little like jazz. I could see how someone could find Cheadle’s many eccentric decisions silly, but I found myself impressed by his cavalier ambition. In the end I believe your enjoyment of Miles Ahead boils down to whether or not you think its choices & attitude are, for lack of a better word, cool. Personally, I was buying all of the cool cat absurdism Cheadle was selling with very few reservations.

Instead of following the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative of biopic tedium, Miles Ahead focuses on two distinct points in its jazz legend’s career. In one storyline he’s the famous jazz world equivalent of a rockstar, struggling with typical music giant clichés you’d see ripped to shreds in spoofs like Walk Hard & Popstar: intense recording sessions, pressure to succeed, hedonistic lovemaking with strangers, trouble with a too-understanding spouse, etc. This lens is mostly a glimpse into the tame, by the numbers biopic Miles Ahead could’ve been. The other fixed temporal point is a highly fictionalized down period where Davis is a strung out, Howard Hughes style loner, except trading in germaphobia for depressive squalor. In this 1970s spiritual low point he teams up with a Rolling Stone reporter charged with writing his supposed comeback story to go on a guns & coke-fueled caper to maintain control of his latest unreleased recordings in the face of the record company execs & thugs desperate to rip him off (by satisfying his contract), including an eternally underutilized Michael Stuhlbarg among their ranks. This bifurcated structure recalls the genre subversion of last year’s Love & Mercy, except that Cheadle chooses not to keep his two halves separate. The haze of memory & drug fueled hallucination allow the walls of reality to break down and the two timelines bleed together, mixing the action thriller absurdism & glory days revisitation into a highly explosive cocktail that might be more interesting than essential, but is certainly much more entertaining that it would’ve been if Cheadle played the material straight.

A lot of viewers have been turned off by Miles Ahead’s gleeful tampering with its subject’s life story (with curmudgeony critic Rex Reed being the biggest whiner/detractor out there, which is usually an automatic sign of greatness), but I think the film’s gambles pay off just fine as soon as you separate the real life Miles Davis from the fictional, gun-wielding drug addict Cheadle brings to the screen. This is not a biographical portrait so much as an attempt to capture Davis’s energetic spirit in the weirdly cool & inherently tragic shape of an action cinema anti-hero. Where I find this experiment brilliant is in Cheadle’s willingness to trade in one genre’s flat, uninteresting, trope-laden formula for the much more exciting, much trashier energy of an entirely different kind of picture, one audiences usually have a much easier time focusing on. The writer-director-star has even admitted that he constructed Ewan McGregor’s Rolling Stone writer character merely because he needed a white face onscreen to sell more tickets & secure better funding, which is obviously fucked, but incredibly practical. Cheadle obviously holds tremendous adoration for Davis and wanted his film, which he believes captures the artist’s spirit, to reach the widest audience possible, presumably to spread that adoration.

Ultimately, though the results in Miles Ahead are too strange for wide commercial appeal, mirroring too many eccentric energies from Davis’s work, whether funk or jazz or subculture cool, for any hopes of runaway commercial success. The movie’s similarly unlikely to win over a large chunk of the art film crowd either, since they can be less kind to experimental, but messy debuts from actors-turned-directors, as we saw with Ryan Gosling’s better-than-its-reputation Lost River last year. I don’t want to suggest that Miles Ahead is 100% successful in capturing spirit instead of truth or bringing jazz’s idiosyncrasies to cinematic life. I do think, however, that it’s a surprisingly fun & playful marriage of fine art technique with trash genre thrills, which is more or less my favorite kind of movie magic formula. The only time Don Cheadle’s gambles don’t particularly work for me is in a closing concert sequence that bleeds into the end credits. I’m willing to overlook that discomfort, though, and mileage may vary there since, truth be told, I don’t really like jazz (sorry y’all). I mostly showed up for Miles Ahead’s dangerous, iconoclastic experiments with action-packed absurdism. Cheadle’s debut did not disappoint there. I hope he gets more chances to step behind the camera & deliver more work this confidently strange in the future, despite his first film’s muted reception.

-Brandon Ledet

Louis Malle’s Unsettling Takes on Pubescent Femininity in Black Moon (1975) & Pretty Baby (1978)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

One of the most discomforting aspects of August’s Movie of the Month, Louis Malle’s art house fantasy piece Black Moon, is its depiction of a young woman on the verge of adulthood. The film has a way of patronizing & infantilizing its seemingly teenage protagonist, a dynamic Malle likely picked up from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland along with that source material’s down-the-rabbit-hole story structure. It’s not uncommon for Malle to face controversy for the sex politics of his films, something that even cropped up here when Alli questioned the intent behind Black Moon’s literal war of the sexes and Boomer expressed discomfort with the film’s panty-dropping gag in our original Swampchat discussion. Though, if Black Moon‘s depiction of a young girl’s journey into womanhood is uncomfortable, then Malle’s follow-up film Pretty Baby was an unapologetic act of aggression. If the director’s coldly detached, yet oddly lighthearted depiction of a young woman being indoctrinated into fantasy realm domesticity & interspecies breastfeeding is discomforting, then his application of that exact same tone to a preteen girl’s life as a sex worker in a turn of the century New Orleans brothel is an outright horror show. At the very least it was a bold choice for the French filmmaker’s American debut. At its worse it was a deliberate, pedal to the floor provocation.

That’s not to say that Pretty Baby is empty or spiritually corrupt filmmaking. If you remove the underage aspect from its protagonist sex worker’s character traits, what you’d get really wouldn’t be that far off from the film’s cutesy Oscar bait equivalent Rambling Rose. Pretty Baby faced accusations of being child pornography and was banned in a couple regions of North America, mostly for its nude depictions of a far too young Brooke Shields, but it’s a much tamer work than what those accusations suggest. Set during the final days of New Orleans’s storied Storyville district, where prostitution was once legal, Pretty Baby is for the most part a tame costume drama staged at a very specific time in this city’s history. Although its more sensationalist content is what immediately comes to mind when the film is mentioned, it’s for the most part a laidback, melancholy hangout in the heat & humidity of New Orleans courtyards. Just like how Black Moon is more interested in carving out a very particular fantasy realm to dwell in than following the more action-packed aspects of its wartime plot, Pretty Baby is a quiet, languid, depressive work with an oddly detached, carefree worldview despite the stakes of its central conflict. You could argue that it’s that exact judgement-free take on the material that makes the film so uncomfortable in the first place, but it’s still difficult to claim that its main goal was to shock & disgust. It more obviously just wants to hang around in its own earth tone drunkenness & historical accuracy.

Not yet a teenager, Brooke Shields stars as young sex worker in a very busy brothel. Her mother, played by (the always beautiful & forever talented) Susan Sarandon, is a cruelly dismissive employee of the same madame and pushes to have her daughter’s virginity auctioned off as quickly as possible, so that the young girl can become self-sufficient. After a particularly painful experience with a john and her mother taking off with a new husband/former client, the child runs away from “home” and into the arms of a fine art photographer named Bellocq. Apparently modeled after a real-life photographer who documented Storyville sex workers, Bellocq forms a strange domesticity with his new, unexpected ward and marries her, despite her horrifically young age. Although they’re husband & wife, Bellocq & his child bride have a clear father-daughter dynamic that would be oddly sweet if it weren’t for all the icky lovemaking (something that would easily be defined as rape by today’s standards). Malle maintains an emotional distance in the way he covers the material here, the same detached vibe he brought to Black Moon’s fantasy dreamscape. It can be more than a little alarming considering the inflammatory nature of the material he’s working with, (unlike Black Moon, Pretty Baby could in no way be mistaken for a fairy tale), but it also feels true to the long dead era he’s trying to evoke, unlike the softened melodrama of works like Rambling Rose.

Even beyond their judgement-free, yet male gaze tinted takes on pubescent femininity and their shared, dreamlike sense of languid pacing, Black Moon & Pretty Baby occupy a surprising amount of common thematic territory. They’re both stories about young women (one very young) trying to navigate worlds where they don’t belong. They both feature naked children running wild & free (although in a far less sexualized context in one case) and a strange fascination with breastfeeding (sometimes with a human baby, sometimes with a talking unicorn). Pretty Baby’s voodoo priestess recalls Black Moon’s mode of immersion in Natural Magic.  Black Moon’s varying examples of what the womanhood its protagonist is entering looks like are echoed in Pretty Baby’s performances from the always-welcome B-movie goddess Barbara Steele & and an elderly madame with a braying, John Waters cadence to her line delivery. Although the settings of these films are wildly different, it’s easy to see the specific touch Louis Malle brings to both pictures and how they work as a thematic pairing. The question of how that thematic throughline handles the hefty topic of pubescent femininity in either work is up for debate, however. And since Malle stubbornly remains detached in both pictures, that debate largely falls on the shoulders of his audience.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, Louis Malle’s surrealist fantasy art piece Black Moon, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison of its lame duck unicorn with the divine unicorns of Legend (1985), and last week’s look at how its surrealist take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland compares to the 1988 stop-motion animation classic Alice.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Ponyo (2009), and the Weirdly Relaxed Plotting of Hayao Miyazaki Features

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Although the animation medium he works in sometimes pigeonholes his accomplishments, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of the masters of cinema, right up there with names like Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Corman. And just like with a lot of the masters of cinema, I’ve only seen a small fraction of his work and I’m scrambling to catch up. Lately I’ve been making more of an effort to familiarize myself with a wider range  of Miyazaki classics outside re-watching Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro multiple times a year, which has lead me to a few less readily recognizable titles like Howl’s Moving Castle & Princess Mononoke over the past year. It’s been difficult for me to distinguish Miyazaki’s work form the rest of the filmmakers at Studio Ghibli in terms of style outside of his fascination with themes like immersion in the natural world & the wonder of flight. While recently watching the features Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service in a single weekend, though, something struck me about the way Miyazaki’s features’ approach plot & pacing I hadn’t yet noticed. Once the director establishes the majesty of his films’ worlds & settings, he’s remarkably comfortable with bringing the story down to a full stop simply to marinate in the immense beauty he’s constructed. I had never noticed before how his films all tend to work this way in their own individual moments of lowkey self-reflection & immersion in setting before watching these two titles in rapid succession. Nor had I noticed how oddly comforting that plot structure can be.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple story about a young witch coming of age as she leaves home to start a new, autonomous life in a foreign city. In an early jaunt of exposition the Miyazaki trademarks of intricate, detailed animation (seen most easily in its shots of wind blowing through tall grass) & wonder with the majesty of flight (she’s a witch after all; she even made her own broom) seem to promise an epic story of witchy misadventures as Kiki tries to find her footing in an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying world. I was more or less expecting The Worst Witch restructured as a big budget adventure epic. The film does feature some dangerous run-ins that fit the mold I’m describing, like an early tussle with some vindictive crows & a climax revolving around a downed zeppelin, but for the most part action & adventure are the furthest thing from the film’s mind. Most people in Kiki’s new city are supportive of the witchy visitor, especially once she becomes familiar & finds a sense of purpose in her broomstick-driven delivery business. For the most part the film’s plot is centered on small scale concerns like “Will she make new friends?” “Will she make her deliveries on time?” and “Will she beat the rain?”  Kiki’s Delivery Service isn’t a tale of a witch venturing out into the world as much as it’s about a witch finding confidence & autonomy within herself, with the film’s most major crisis being whether or not she’ll get her mojo back once her magic begins to fade. The way Miyazaki allows this inner struggle to play out & resonate is to establish a living space (an indoor-kid’s fantasy of an attic loft above a bakery with an ocean view) and allow Kiki to ruminate within it, as if she were morphing inside a cocoon. To pile any more action onto the plot would detract from the impact of Kiki’s inward journey & Miyazaki’s brilliance is in the way he’s comfortable with letting his protagonist’s downtime breathe & slowly mature.

Although its setting trades Kiki’s Delivery Service’s high in the sky adoration with flight for a polar opposite physical realm deep under water, Ponyo follows a similar trajectory in terms of plot & pacing. Miyazaki opens the movie with an immensely intricate galaxy of deep sea wonders, dazzling the audience with a majestic display teeming with underwater lifeforms. This peaceful balance is disrupted when a humanoid fish befriends a small human boy on dry land & shapeshifts to please him, playing out a strange slant on the fairy tale structure of The Little Mermaid. Ignoring the warning that “Fishes with faces who come out of the ocean cause tsunamis,” the two unlikely friends explore a life together at everyone else’s expense, causing a massive flood, as promised, that separates parents – both underwater wizards & overworked nursing home employee mothers alike – from their young children. Again, what’s interesting in the way Miyazaki constructs this fable is that he doesn’t push for big, exciting action sequences at every turn in Ponyo but instead seeks out a languid kind of majesty that’s remarkably confident & emotionally affecting in the way it allows you to sink into the places he’s created. Ponyo’s story works twofold in its development of a heartfelt, but doomed friendship and its sense of loss & confusion in the search of a misplaced loved one. What sticks with you in the film isn’t necessarily specific events or plot points, but rather visual details like a jellyfish galaxy or a candle-powered boat and, yet, an emotional story arc caries through in that setting-specific artistry

I think a large part of the brilliance of Miyazaki’s slow crawl pacing & sparse plotting is the way it allows you to sink into a space. The underwater world of Ponyo & the above-the-bakery apartment of Kiki’s Delivery Service live vividly in my imagination long after the end credits, feeling as real or as tangible as real-life spaces I’ve physically inhabited. As I look back to past films I’ve seen from the director I realize that this aspect has always been a major aspect of his appeal to me. I don’t always remember the finer points of the various adventures & mishaps in his films as much as I remember details like the gloriously crowded bedroom in Howl’s Moving Castle or the inside of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro or the old woman’s cottage in Spirited Away. I was pondering the other day about what didn’t quite work for me in the recent French animated feature April and the Extraordinary World and I’m starting to think it had something to do with the film’s decision to crowd its runtime with an action chase plot instead of slowing down & luxuriating in the intricately detailed space it had created. The only animated film outside of Studio Ghibli I can think of that similarly pulls this trick off is Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (it even features a Ponyo-like flood), which, no surprise, Miyazaki himself had apparently worked at some point during its long, troubled production. The director’s reverence for defined space over quickly plotted pace has a special touch that allows you to mentally live in his worlds that some less pointed works would allow to fly by in a blur. For some reason it took rapid succession viewings of Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service for me to catch onto that aspect of his work, but looking back I realize it had been there with me all along.

-Brandon Ledet

Princess Mononoke (1999)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

I’ve gradually become accustomed to a certain warmth & comfort in Hayao Miyazaki films, where a slow, languid pace allows the plot to trickle as we come to settle in an infinite, domestic space full of immense wonder. Even otherworldly dangers like Howl’s Moving Castle’s bird wizards & Spirited Away’s No Face are tamed & consoled by the warmth & domesticity of Miyazaki’s intricate, natural worlds. His characters always seem to find their way to calmness & peace in interior space, occasionally contrasted with the expensive majesty of flight. Imagine my shock, then, when I recently watched Miyzazki’s Japanese folklore masterpiece Princess Mononoke for the first time. It was like a glorious, unexpected punch to the face. Princess Mononoke might be the single most metal animated feature I’ve ever seen. Its shapeshifting warthog demons, severed arms, decapitations, and eco warrior terrorism were not only unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a Miyazaki film before; they were also inexplicably invigorating in a way that only the best of cinema can be. Its PG-13 violence was shocking, but also darkly beautiful and added a whole other layer of complexity to a director I’ve been gradually less able to fully understand or pigeonhole with each passing feature. It’s an exciting feeling.

The story of Princess Mononoke appears to be heavily steeped in Japanese history & folklore, but its basic elements are fairly understandable to a cultural outsider. A young prince must leave his village on a quest to lift a curse from his arm he incurred while slaying an undead demonic boar. His cursed wound allows him to “fight like a demon,” but being a mighty warrior is a small consolation prize for a spreading illness that will eventually bring his death. On his journey he finds himself stuck between two sides of an impending war. On one end stands an industrial iron-producing village helmed by a warmongering matriarch, representing the modern world. On the opposite end stands the natural world, represented by mythically large talking beasts, ancient spirits, and a Jungle Book-type princess who was raised by a pack of wolves. The prince must negotiate a peaceful balance between the modern world & the natural one before the two sides’ bloodbaths get out of hand, an escalating tension reflected in the way his cursed wound pulsates & worsens each time they clash.

It’s difficult to capture the fierce beauty of Princess Mononoke in words. I can’t describe the pure badass beauty of its titular character riding into battle equipped with a spear & mask on a giant wolf’s back, but nothing could supplant seeing it for yourself. Although his accomplishments are typically contextualized solely within the world of animation, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of cinema’s modern masters & Princess Mononoke is one of his finest works, as complex & violent of an outlier as it is. The film juggles concepts as varied as war, deforestation, ghosts, industry spirituality, and the basic instructions on how to kill a god, all without ever feeling bogged down or overstuffed. In some ways its story is as simple as a young man fighting on both sides of a war he finds abhorrent in order to put an end to it & find peace. The implications of what that war means and how we define balance in a modern, industrialized world is much vaster & more fascinating, though, a depth Princess Mononoke commands in very few brushstrokes. Besides, it really is just so goddamn metal. You really need to see that girl riding that wolf into battle.

-Brandon Ledet