Year: 2016

Sausage Party (2016)

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onehalfstar

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When I was an innocent little preteen nü-metal doofus in the late 90s my stepdad used to take me to the theater to see films rated above my age range by the MPAA, but made perfectly for my (im)maturity level. I’m thinking of titles like the South Park musical Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, the post-apocalyptic Pam Anderson vehicle Barb Wire, and the deservedly forgotten Keanu Reeves sci-fi cheapie Johnny Mnemonic. It always felt like a special treat, an excursion to pluck the most low-hanging forbidden fruit imaginable. Were it still 1999 & I still a snot-nosed KoRn fan, I probably would’ve enjoyed our most recent journey together to Chalmette Movies to see the Seth Rogen-helmed shock comedy Sausage Party. Instead of leaving the theater transgressively delighted, however, I felt drained, spiritless, exhausted. I don’t know if that sensation speaks more to the movie’s maturity level or my own, but I will say that its moronic dedication to its own despicable worldview & self-congratulatory navel-gazing not only felt like a product of an entirely different century; it also distracted from the film’s main draw: CG animated raunch.

An obvious labor of love, Sausage Party is a Pixar-spoofing filth fest about anthropomorphic food products that somehow skates by without an NC-17 rating despite its fetishistic use of “foul” language & onscreen depictions of sexual congress. A tale as old as time, the film mostly follows one hotdog (voiced by Seth Rogen) as he embarks on a quest to get all up inside his complimentary bun (Kristen Wiig, whose thankless performance I pity the most in this production). It’s the same bros-trying-to-get-laid plot structure Rogen & his writing partner Evan Goldberg have been endlessly repeating all the way back to 2007’s Superbad, except this time with cartoon food. Buried somewhere in this gleefully stupid passion project, which features an entire grocery store full of talking foodstuff characters & the godlike shoppers who free them from the shelves, is about 20 minutes of pure schlock cinema brilliance. Whenever the film acts like a horror comedy, depicting little sentient potatoes & baby carrots being ruthlessly destroyed by gigantic human monsters they mistook for divine saviors, it can be quite funny. There’s a Cleanup in Aisle Whatever gag that spoofs the Omaha Beach invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan that rings as particularly inspired, especially in the detail of a can of spaghetti trying to re-contain its “intestines.” I’ll also vouch for the climactic hedonism that concludes the film with a nihilistic, anything-goes cocktail of sex & violence that smartly picks apart the basic stupidity of the anthropomorphic [fill in the blank]s of the various CG animated features the film is spoofing. The problem is that these flashes of brilliance are lost under an insurmountable garbage heap of cruelty-for-its-own-sake nastiness & pseudo-philosophical self-importance. Sausage Party knows how to tell an occasional good joke, but its soul is overall corrupted & inherently unlovable, so the punchline is always a short-lived pleasure.

Where Sausage Party derails its own sense of fun in delightful stupidity is in its supposedly necessary quest to construct a narrative more complex than just a nihilistic fascination with sex & violence. Its missteps in that regard are threefold:

  1. The film characterizes its individual food products based on racial & sexual stereotypes. The bagel is a Woody Allen-flavored Jewish caricature. The Twinkie is a twink. The bottle of tequila is a Hispanic scoundrel (among many other “illegal products,” including an oversexed lesbian taco voiced by a surprisingly game Salma Hayek). The hotdog buns are airhead female sex objects patiently awaiting their corresponding wieners. 40oz bottles of malt liquor & sentient boxes of grits are coded as black. The wise bottle of “Fire Water”-brand alcohol is a Native American mystic who smokes weed out of a kazoo. The lavash looks forward to an afterlife stocked with 70 bottles of extra virgin olive oil. The film is a relentless dedication to an “If everyone’s offended, nothing’s offensive” line of humor that’s no funnier the first time than it is the 1,000th and once you realize that its pursuit to racially categorize each of its many foodstuff personifications will eat up its entire runtime in the place of a worthwhile story or all-out debauchery, there’s nothing left to feel but exhaustion & despair.
  2.  Unsatisfied with its surprisingly brilliant depiction of human beings as cruel, uncaring gods who promise these talking food products passage to “The Great Beyond” (where, unknown to them, they will be mutilated & consumed), the film instead mostly follows the much less interesting threat of an anthropomorphic douche. I’ll tip my hat to the spot-on casting of comedian Nick Kroll as said douche, but much like the film’s above-referenced “have your cake & eat it too” satire of racial coding in foodstuffs marketing, his entire role should’ve been reduced to a short-form gag & not a full-length plot device. Let’s think for just a half-second what a villainous douche in a shock comedy would spend most of its time pursuing in order to create conflict. Did you picture roid rage-themed sexual assault? Apparently, Rogen & Goldberg didn’t think of it for much longer than a half second either, since they also pictured rape and thought that was funny enough to run with for the length of an entire film.
  3.  Perhaps the most damning fault of all this is that this shameless raunch fest actually thinks it has something to say. From its aggressively pedantic Richard Dawkins branch of atheism to its musings on the frivolity of the Israelian-Palestinian conflict to its juvenile depictions of a Hitler figure getting his comeuppance (a moment that apparently called for more rape humor, since there’s just never enough), Sausage Party captures exactly what’s so exhausting about being trapped in a confined space with the world’s worst subreddit’s didactic neckbeard internet philosophers or, more simply, watching an especially preachy episode of Family Guy. I swear a hotdog even mouths a “Giggity!” to seal the deal on the film’s overriding aesthetic just before the blood orgy climax. Somewhere along the way Rogen & Goldberg became mistaken that audiences wanted a self-important lecture on the meaning of life in the midst of comedic gags about hotdog ingredients cussing & fucking, particularly one with the stinger that man-boy stoners are the world’s true enlightened philosophers with all of The Answers. I can respect the film’s go-for-broke dedication to its own inane depravity, but I can’t at all get on board with its self-congratulatory stabs at know-it-all philosophy.

All three of these fatal flaws point to a major structural problem at the heart of Sausage Party‘s toxic unlikability. This should have been a short film. I’m thinking fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Any entertainment value Rogen & Goldberg pull out of anthropomorphic foodstuffs’ nihilistic sex & violence in the face of their human god consumers’ cruelty could’ve been efficiently fired off in that window, with the added bonus of allowing less room for the film’s “comedic” obsessions with race, rape, and the dirty word. Sausage Party should’ve kept to a short film format, just like how the equally exhausting Minions & Deadpool movies should’ve been instantly relegated to their current status as lazy Facebook memes instead of being developed into feature films in the first place. I’m glad I saw Sausage Party in the theater with my stepdad, not only for its occasional short film-worthy moments of depraved schlock brilliance, but also because it took me back to a special, nostalgic time in my cinematic past. The year was 1999, I was twelve, and I would’ve loved every minute of this shit stain of a movie. Unfortunately, there are just some places you can never go back to (and some you’d never want to if you knew what was waiting there).

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #12 of the Swampflix Podcast: The Marine (2006) & Pro Wrestling Documentaries

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #12 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twelfth episode, James & Brandon discuss five essential pro wrestling documentaries with friend & WTUL radio DJ Brandon Lattimore. Also, James makes Brandon watch the John Cena action vehicle The Marine (2006) for the first time. Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Shock (1946)

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threehalfstar

Like a lot of people, I always picture Vincent Price as an older man when his name comes up, as if he were air-dropped into the world as an already-established horror legend in the 50s or 60s. The truth is that Price toiled away as a workman character actor for decades before he was really set loose to chew the scenery in pictures like The Abominable Dr. Phibes & The Masque of the Red Death. One of the earliest glimpses of the Vincent Price that was to be came in the form of the 1940s tawdry noir thriller Shock. A subpar Hitchcock descendant that functions entirely within the rigid boundaries of its genre, Shock is a fairly standard sample of in-its-prime noir, one that might not be especially worth digging back up from its ancient cinematic grave if it weren’t for Price’s villainous performance. The babyfaced future-legend is a lot more measured here than he would become at the height of his onscreen treachery, but there’s enough mad scientist stirrings in this early performance to telegraph the weird, wonderful trajectory his career would eventually take. If you’re a fan of Price’s horror work, this early landmark should not be casually dismissed or overlooked.

A soldier returning from deployment in World War II discovers his wife is frozen in a state of stone-faced shock, despite seeming healthy over the phone mere hours before his arrival. Her doctor passes this catatonic state off as a symptom of stress due to her husband’s delayed return from the war. The truth is that the woman witnessed the doctor (played by Price) murder his own wife through a hotel window in a fit of rage. In order to cover his tracks the doctor holds the woman hostage in a mental institution, attempting to convince her & anyone who’ll listen that she’s crazy & the murder was a hallucination. With the doctor’s mistress whispering in his ear & the patient’s husband becoming increasingly skeptical of the diagnosis, the walls start to close in on the dastardly cretin and his cruelty grows in its self-preserving wickedness. Will his evildoing be exposed before his unnecessary shock treatment procedures forever destroy the mental stability of his victim/patient? Surely, if you’ve seen any thrillers from the era before you know the answer to that question, but the because this film is built on suspense instead of mystery, the fun is in the performances & the melodrama, not in guessing what happens next.

Hitchcock expertly, leisurely surfed the balance between trash & art and this knockoff certainly falls on the less prestigious side of that divide. Even 1940s audiences bristled at its tawdry insensitivity, especially miffed that it exploited shock treatment & PTSD, which were hot topics on the heels of WWII, for cheap dramatic weight. In a modern context these transgressions play more entertaining than they do offensive.The film’s mental health mumbo jumbo is quaintly (if not horrifyingly) out of date and it’s actually fairly easy to accept the way it sleazily turns real life issues like women wrongly committed to mental institutions & the real world practice of insulin shock therapy into tawdry thriller fodder, thanks to its distance in time. There’s actually an almost progressive, Rosemary’s Baby type criticism built into the story about the way women are manipulated & institutionalized by men who patronize & refuse to believe them (not that shrieking, “I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!” helps at all in this particular case). There’s one specific moment when the victims’ soldier-husband confides to Price’s wicked doctor, “She’s out of her head. She’s got a crazy idea that she saw a murder. I don’t know what to do,” that had me screaming, “Well, did you try believing her?!” and I assume that was an intentional effect on the movie’s part. There’s plenty to pick at here, misogyny-wise, especially in the way that it’s only the women’s lives that are ever threatened & the fact that the doctor’s heartless mistress manipulating him with her womanly ways is largely to blame for the villainy, but Shock does have its surprising moments of feminist critique peaking through some of its thick noir sleaze.

Like I said, you’re not going to get much out of Shock that you couldn’t find in some other trashy thriller of the era, except if you look to Vincent Price’s performance as the wicked psychiatrist. There are a few moments of post-German Expressionism weirdness in the imagery, but they’re mostly relegated to a single dream sequence featuring the troubled protagonist running in a strange void & a passage of time montage steeped in calendar page-turning noir cliche. A young Vincent Price stands as the film’s sole beacon of distinctiveness, but he delivers in an uncharacteristically dialed back, measured performance that becomes increasingly ridiculous as his rash decisions reflect the walls closing in around him. The movie serves as a sort of bridge between two eras of the iconic actor’s career, starting with a dramatic stage play seriousness, but ultimately touching on some distinct mad scientist vibes by the time he attempts to erase the woman’s memory (and possibly her existence) through overdoses of insulin & hypnosis. Price’s performance makes Shock more than worthwhile as you watch the early formation of a distinct onscreen personality that fully blossomed in the decades that followed, but is rarely seen with such grounded dramatic weight & dead-serious delivery. The campy impulses in me might’ve wished that he went even more over-the-top with the role, but by toeing the line between those halves of his career, he delivered something much more special, something you can only find in Shock.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 18: Call Northside 777 (1948)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Call Northside 777 (1948) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 140 of the first edition hardback, Roger recalls meeting Chicago newspaperman Jack McPhaul, whose reporting inspired the events of the film. He recounts McPhaul’s anecdote of a photographer at a 1940s demonstration of an atom being split pitching the following preposterous photo spread: “I’ve got a great idea for a series of three photos for the top of page one. You puttin’ in the atom, splittin’it, and standin’ around looking at the pieces.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: Ebert never officially reviewed the film, but he does mention it in his essay “The Best Damn Job in the Whole Damn World,” a collection of thoughts on what it means to be a newspaperman. Again, he mentions meeting McPhaul, an opportunity he clearly considered to be an honor.

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There’s a long history of celebrated newspapermen in celebrated films, from the William Randolph Hearst archetype of Citizen Kane to the Watergate investigation team of All the President’s Men to the recent Oscar-winning profile of Bostonian sex abuse scandal breakers in Spotlight. Roger Ebert was lucky to be born in a time, perhaps the end of a time, when print journalism was still a viable career and he knew it, proudly calling his occupation at The Chicago Sun-Times “the best damn job in the whole damn world.” Long before The Chicago Sun & The Chicago Times merged into a single paper, it had its own movie-worthy story of a newspaperman doing good. Besides boasting a general pride for his career path, Ebert was proud to have met/worked with Jack McPhaul, who he credited with penning the articles that inspired the “based on true events” drama Call Northside 777. The opening credits of Call Northside 777, however, state that the film is “based on an article by James P McGuire.” The truth is that both Chicagoan newspapermen were responsible for penning the articles that freed the wrongly convicted “Stop Me Before I Kill Again Killer” Joseph Majczek after 11 years of imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit. Instead of playing the story like a group effort of an investigative team, however, Call Northside 777 sells its narrative as the efforts of one dedicated reporter’s “refusal to accept defeat,” presumably because it made for a better story.

Said amalgamation of McPhaul & McGuire is brought to life by none other than Old Hollywood mainstay Jimmy Stewart. Structurally speaking, Call Northside 777 isn’t too much to speak of in terms of innovation. It borrows a page from Citizen Kane in mixing newspaper reel stock footage & narration in with its narrative to establish a documentarian tone and attempts to construct the shadowy crime world aesthetic of a noir (except with a missing sense of urgency or moral ambiguity to its danger), but doesn’t do anything particularly inventive or memorable with either element. It’s the specificity of James Stewart’s lead performance as a skeptical-but-noble reporter, from his unmistakable vocal patters to his little-guy-vs-the-big-system demeanor, that makes the film a joy to watch. Although a 2010s audience wouldn’t likely be as familiar with the real-life events the film was based on as a 1940s audience would be, it’s still all too easy to guess how the story will turn out in the end (there wouldn’t be much of a plot if Macjzek were guilty). As so, the entertainment appeal of this non-mystery depends largely on Stewart’s performance, a burden he handles well. At first Stewart’s eternally exhausted newspaperman believes Majczek (or his fictionalized surrogate Wiecek) is guilty and only takes on the story because of a pushy newspaper editor & the prisoner’s sympathetic mother, who scrubs floors to earn money to investigate his long dead case. At first he’s reluctant to follow up on the supposed innocence of a man who I believes to be a cop killer, asking “Don’t I get time off for good behavior?” but he eventually unravels a story about drunk lawyers, faulty investigations, spineless judges, and Prohibition-era police department corruption that reveals Majczek/Wiecek to be a victim of the system. Stewart plays the part with a befuddled nobility only he could sell with such immense credibility and his efforts to free his articles’ star subject are likened to his wife’s hobby of slowly piecing together complicated jigsaw puzzles. It’s a methodical, frustrating process, but it’s rewarding when the picture finally comes together for the newspaperman & the wrongly convicted “cop killer.”

Besides Jimmy Stewart’s show-stealing performance Call Northisde 777 is mostly interesting for its historical curiosities. The first Hollywood production shot on location in Chicago, the film tried, when possible, to include actual locations from the real-life Mazcjek story to help establish its documentary tone. The inventor of the polygraph test, Leonard Keeler, plays himself & puts on a very extensive, detailed demonstration of his invention/methods. There’s also great attention paid to old fashion newspaper press machinery & the magic process of sending a photograph over a wire. For the most part, though, this 1940s non-noir is of interest for the way it captures an ancient Chicago, struggling to portray its immense, dangerous spirit, with its great fires, great violence, great corruption, and great newspapermen. Although Stewart’s noble sweetheart protagonist is an unmistakably decent guy, he still navigates an ancient journalism world built on lies, hard liquor, hard work, and cigar smoke. The true crime mystery thriller Call Northside 777 tries to sell isn’t particularly interesting or unique, but Stewart’s portrayal of noble newspaperman in an ignoble world is an easy emotional rallying point and it’s no wonder that meeting the man who helped inspire the character was a proud moment for Ebert, as McPhaul represented “the best damn job in the whole damn world” in what I’m sure the legendary critic considered the best damn city in the whole damn world.

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Roger’s Rating (N/A)

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

Next Lesson: Tootsie (1982)

-Brandon Ledet

Scooby-Doo! & WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon (2016)

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three star

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I’ve gone on record as enjoying the first WWE/Scooby-Doo collaboration WrestleMania Mystery (the Flintstones collaboration Stone Age SmackDown was even better), but was a little skeptical that a sequel could find much more room to play around with the concept of a Scooby-Doo pro wrestling picture than what’s established in the original. The first film brings the gang to WrestleMania where they meet a bunch of famous “WWE Superstars” at the company’s biggest annual event & help solve the mystery of an improbable specter threatening to ruin the spectacle, in this case a bionic ghost bear (seriously). I expected a sequel would simply repeat the same exact scenario with a fresh batch of pro wrestlers & lazily call it a day, but Curse of the Speed Demon accomplished much more than that on the creative end. Recognizing that its larger-than-life cast of musclebound characters don’t necessarily have to live in a wrestling ring in their animated form, Curse of the Speed Demon picks an entirely new context for them to flex muscles & deliver promos in: off-road monster truck racing. The sequel to WWE’s original Scooby-Doo collaboration plays less like an animated pro wrestling picture & much more like a little kid’s imagination as they smash together Hot Wheels toys in a sandbox.

Instead of attending a second WrestleMania, Scooby & the Mystery Gang find themselves at Muscle Moto X, an impossible Vince McMahon startup that combines monster truck mayhem with dirt track speed racing. (Though, I guess if McMahon were to start a dirt track monster truck racing division of his brand, that name might not be far off, considering the long-gone XFL.) The film gets further & further away from realistic versions of what off-road pro wrestling monster truck races might look like (as unrealistically goofy as that starting point is on its own), eventually just says “Fuck it.” and indulges in some Mario Kart-type cartoon race tracks you’d find doodled in an eight year old’s dream journal. Much like the ghost bear of the last Scooby-Doo/WWE picture the proceedings here are mucked up by an otherworldly threat, in this case a literal speed demon known as Inferno, which may or may not be someone involved with the company trying to sabotage the success of Muscle Moto X. Although the wrestlers are not in their usual squared circle habitat, they’re more than willing to bodyslam & tussle with Inferno on the dirt track until the demon’s true identity can be revealed. WWE personas mix with Scooby-Doo’s harmless, trademarked stoner humor and, viola!, you have an enjoyably campy kids’ picture that captures the spirit of pro wrestling without all that pesky pro wrestling getting in the way.

Of course, as a pro wrestling fan, a lot of the fun of indulging in disposable trash like this is in seeing beloved WWE performers doing their thing in animated form. For the most part, the contributions are enjoyable, if not predictable here. Michael Cole & Seamus do their usual thing: inanely providing play-by-play & interspersing action with unprompted shouts of “Fella!” respectively. Paige bounces some of her mall goth sarcasm off the similarly difficult to read Lana & Rusev, which is an interesting dynamic that would likely never occur in a wrestling storyline. In-the-ring high-fliers Kofi Kingston & Los Matadores defy gravity in some really goofy cartoon logic. Vince, HHH, and Stephanie McMahon present a human face for the company & A-Lister The Miz constantly points to the absurdity of the whole ordeal in lines like “Another monster attack? Really?” & “Strangely enough, I’ve been mauled by a monster on a midnight jog before,” referring to events of the first film. It’s the more over the top characters who really steal the show, though. The Undertaker is especially game, gravely reading lines like “Rust in Peace” [to his deeply mourned, irrevocably smashed vehicle] or gleefully driving a souped-up, sandwich-shaped food truck & saving the day with a sausage link lasso. It actually makes sense that Taker would be in the center of this film’s story, given that the auto-performer Grave Digger is pretty much the monster truck version of the wrestler & I suspect that exact dynamic is what the film was initially built around. Taker fills the role well, bouncing off the Mystery Gang’s comedic sensibilities (with the voice of Velma now filled by half of Garfunkel & Oates, Kate Micucci, and Shaggy being the eternally imprisoned in the role Matthew Lilard), but he’s not the most interesting player in the game. That would be the Rhodes family.

I think there’s great camp value potential in WWE’s collaborations with the Hanna-Barbera brand that’s not quite fully realized yet at this third-film-in juncture. Curse of the Speed Demon finds a lot of goofy room to play with its basic “super stars & super cars” concept, like in the Michael Cole-shouted line, “Only The Undertaker could fly a sandwich out of the jaws of oblivion!” However, I think they could push the cartoon absurdity even further, as evidenced by the way the film uses the Rhodes brothers Goldust & Stardust. Because the temporal demands of production necessitate that these collaborations will be behind on current WWE storylines, Curse of the Speed Demon brings Goldust & Stardust back to the delightful heights of their absurd, magical “Cosmic Key” era of promos, which I believe was back in the late summer of 2014. Including other now-outdated storylines like The Authority (or, for that matter, the now departed from the company/galaxy Stardust and, even more sadly, the departed from this mortal coil Dusty Rhodes) is a little awkward, but the magic of The Cosmic Key silliness suggests an even more out-there kind of goofery the company could reach for, with all of the characters’ magic dust &strange hissing. At the end of my review for the first Scooby-Doo/WWE film I suggested that I’d like to see a Stardust Meets the Jetsons picture (something that’s pretty damn unlikely now). I want something like Huckleberry Hound in a New Day unicorn & rainbows cartoon. I want to see the concept pushed to the point where Hanna-Barbera characters meet WWE performers in their own strange worlds nestled in their gimmicks instead of their profession.

Curse of the Speed Demon starts to hint at that go-for-broke cartoon logic potential by giving Goldust & Stardust so much strange screen time (along with their now deceased father, which was about as sincerely touching of an inclusion as you could expect from a Scooby-Doo pro wrestling feature) & by removing the action from the wrestling ring in favor of an outlandish monster truck racing setting. I say push it even further. Much like the works of Mario Bava & Dario Argento (who I’ll admit I’m only referencing for the absurdity of it), the mysteries at the heart of Scooby-Doo are not nearly as important as the style in which they’re told, which is typically a campy take on old-fashioned haunted house horrors. There’s a lot of room for playing within that dynamic while sticking to kayfabe in the in-the-ring gimmicks of folks like Stardust or the Undertaker or The New Day or, hell, even the Wyatt Family (who I loathe to watch due to their monotonous promos, but could totally work in a haunted house cartoon). Curse of the Speed Demon finds the right tone of the cartoon-wrestling hybrid I’m describing in certain moments (The Miz putting the speed demon Inferno in a figure four leg lock or the Undertaker tombstoning him come to mind, as does the film’s basic premise, which feels like something I might’ve come up with while riding my WWF Big Wheels as a kid). It just needs a little more of a push into that detached-from-reality direction for this cartoon WWE Universe to really stand out as a memorable campy delight. As for now, they’re doing some surprisingly amusing work & I’m sure a lot of the wrestling-obsessed kids out there are eating it up, which is good enough to keep my attention for now.

-Brandon Ledet

Nine Lives (2016)

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fourstar

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Mark August 2016 down as the exact moment 90s nostalgia reached peak ridiculousness, since we’re apparently now making movies about corrupt businessmen who learn life lessons by getting turned into talking animals again (in this case a cat). And I’m talking real movies with real theatrical releases, too, not just some straight-to-DVD trifle from Air Bud Entertainment. Said talking animal comeback film, Nine Lives, even features two (!!!) Academy Award-winning actors and hinges its lovable furball antics on topics as hefty as greed, adultery, the ethics of leaving a vegetative state loved one on longterm life support, and attempted suicide. The result is a violent clash of tones that, as evidenced by the surprisingly well-attended screening I just witnessed, will have both toddlers and gin & soda-clutching wastoid drunks (It me.) alike laughing for the entirety of its runtime, albeit for wildly different reasons.

The most impressive thing about Nine Lives to me is how it finds a way to satisfy both sides of the toddler-drunk divide in its audience. For instance, the movie opens with a montage of cat videos lifted from YouTube, a tip of the hat to the audience that says, “Hey, we all know why you’re here, you pathetic thing you.” If you regularly find yourself losing valuable time to internet wormholes of cat-themed home video, you’re likely to get a kick out of Nine Lives‘s simple pleasures: a cat drinking scotch, a cat falling over, a cat slow-dancing with his human daughter, a cat rushing to prevent his human son’s attempted suicide. You know, the little things. If that weren’t enough, and if you don’t mind me spoiling a climactic moment in a children’s talking cat movie, Nine Lives presents internet permakitten Lil Bub as if she were the biggest celebrity cameo get of all time (and she very well may be). The movie’s dedication to broad comedy is inherent to its DNA, so it already has younger kids on the hook, but it also finds ways to rope in a goofier older set who showed up to chuckle at some cat-themed schlock. It does so both in its reverence for internet cat irreverence and in its subversive tendency to tackle dark, chilling topics in an incongruously lighthearted way.

Nine Lives opens with a greedy businessman (Kevin Spacey, Oscar Winner #1) ignoring his wife’s texts & daughter’s birthdays in pursuit of constructing the largest tower in the Northern Hemisphere, a monument to his own grotesque ego. Through a texting-while-driving PSA machination, our business prick anti-hero finds his body trapped in a coma and his mind trapped in an ordinary house cat. This arrangement is orchestrated by a mysterious pet shop owner (Christopher Walken, Oscar Winner #2), who uses his magical, secretive powers as a “cat whisperer” to teach the absent father, now known as Mr. Fuzzypants, a thing or two about humility & familial love. Mr Fuzzypants’s wife & daughter are super bummed about the unexpected coma patient in the family for about the length of a cab ride home and then immediately shift focus to the wacky hijinks of their new furball pet, who meows up a storm in frustration. In between getting drunk, spying on his wife’s suspected infidelity, leeringly watching her undress, and trying to maintain control of his business, Mr. Fuzzypants walks the audience through an inner monologue journey of sarcastic quips until he finally realizes, “I should’ve been a better dad.” His daughter comes to the same realization, declaring “I wish Daddy was more like the cat,” and bonding with the fatherly feline over slow-dances to The Coasters’ “Three Cool Cats” & retaliatory attacks on snotty preteen social media bullies. It’s all very silly (until you reach the suicide crisis of the climax, a moment so shockingly out of place it’s worth mentioning thrice).

One of the weirder aspects of Nine Lives I haven’t touched on yet is the film’s visual palette. Overall, it has an uncannily unreal, cheap feeling to its slick, CG look, recalling the living cartoon artificiality of titles like Speed Racer, Spice World, and Cool as Ice. The overall look of its sarcastic cat protagonist, however, is actually fairly realistic. This obviously isn’t the state of the art technological epiphany of Jon Favreau’s recent Jungle Book adaptation, but the cat genuinely looks pretty great considering the film’s budget. What’s really weird is how the realistic feline navigates the shoddy Photoshop aesthetic of his environment, creating a  strange fantasy realm space in the drastic contrast. Nine Lives thankfully doesn’t pull any last second “It was all just a dream” revelations in its conclusion, but its entire story could have all been revealed as a coma-induced hallucination at the end and the visual style would’ve comfortably supported the twist.

The king of anthropomorphic animal schlock in 2015 was undoubtedly the Jack Russell terrier pro wrestling picture Russell Madness. Nine Lives is a clear winner for 2016 so far (though it could’ve easily been surpassed by The Witch or The Shallows were they nudged a little harder in that direction). There’s something absurdly anachronistic about Nine Lives‘s very existence that makes it a fascinating watch as a modern theatrical release. Beyond its Jack Frost-type plot structure & cheap CG production design, Nine Lives manages to feel out of step with time in small details like its multiple George W. Bush & mean ex-wife jokes and its Gremlins-esque magical pet shop. And all this 90s-00s nostalgia haze serves to do is mask a truly disturbing tonal clash between toddler-friendly physical humor & pitch black subject matter, sometimes fused together, like in gag where the mysterious cat whisperer threatens to have Mr. Fuzzypants fixed.

I can’t promise you’ll get as hearty of a laugh out of lines like [trying to operate a computer tablet] “Ironically, I could use a mouse right now” & “Is this cat my dad?!” as I did, but I do think Nine Lives is recommendable for its horrific train wreck appeal in its inner conflict of tone vs. subject matter. When I first bought my ticket I was shocked that it was stamped with the incredibly high rating of PG. By the end credits I was shocked that it was marketed for kids at all. But there we all were, laughing in the theater together, children & tipsy adults alike, each clutching our respective juice boxes & hard liquor containers, finding a wealth of small joys in a dumb movie about a talking cat. A lot of people have declared this a dull summer for major releases without any particular film standing out as a one-of-a-kind event, but I can’t imagine a more essential cinematic experience than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Look Who’s Back (2016)

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threehalfstar

Look Who’s Back, the latest German satirical comedy from the writer-director who unleashed Wetlands upon the world, just might be the weirdest film to hit Netflix’s streaming service since, I don’t know, Wetlands? David Wnendt’s last two features seem to be establishing a pattern where the filmmaker bravely dives head first into adapting controversial, provocative German novels for the big screen that challenge the outermost boundaries of basic human decency: one a slapstick romance about an anal fissure & the other a Borat-style farce in which Adolf Hitler clumsily navigates & eventually finds popularity in the modern world. The latter film adaptation, Look Who’s Back, mixes seemingly tame, broad comedy with fiercely biting, unforgiving political satire, a tonal whiplash that recalls the unlikely romantic comedy/vulgar gross-out mashup of Wetlands. Look Who’s Back isn’t quite as successful as the delightfully depraved film it follows, but it does help solidify Wnendt’s status as a prankster provocateur, a comedic mind very much astute in finding delight in modern human grotesqueries.

Part of what makes Look Who’s Back such an odd delight is how difficult it is to classify. The film starts with a sci-fi/fantasy premise where Adolf Hitler is mysteriously transported to modern times Germany and follows his first-person POV as he tries to make sense of concepts like selfies, television, the internet, etc. This broad, cheaply campy farce mostly functions as a Trojan horse for the film’s real bread & butter: unscripted, Borat-style street interviews where Hitler interacts with the modern public. A lot of folks treat Hitler like a joke — hugging him, posing for pictures, chirping “I love Hitler!” & honoring him with a Nazi salute — an uncomfortable gaze at toxic hipster irony & modern refusal to engage with life sincerely. These subjects recall the pitch black satirical attacks of works like The Comedy, but they’re not the darkest place the film goes. Look Who’s Back‘s main mode of political satire is in pairing Hitler with real-life, unscripted people who agree with his nationalistic, horrifically racist rhetoric when it comes to the issue of Muslim immigration. They aren’t all easily identifiable neo-Nazi skinheads, either. Think of the German equivalent of your average diehard Trump supporter and you pretty much get the picture. It takes very little effort for Hitler to push German citizens’ Islamophobic rhetoric into verbal support for eugenics & racial purity, a deeply disturbing revelation of a barely-concealed ugliness. As if that weren’t enough territory for an eerie camp comedy to cover, the back half of Look Who’s Back indulges in some weird Adaptation-type meta play where the film indicts itself and its source material for their cultural popularity in a modern media landscape it openly loathes. It’s a singularly strange work, however overstuffed, that finds a lot worth mining in its initially limiting premise.

Comedies don’t always translate well across cultural borders & language barriers and I’ll readily admit Look Who’s Back starts from a shaky place in its early farcical camp machinations. Once the film digs its talons into its not-at-all subtle political commentary, though, it can manage to be a downright harrowing glimpse at modern racism, a nightmarish terror just barely hiding under the guise of concern for “border security.” I was particularly haunted by Hitler’s post-credits tour of modern German where he thinks to himself, “I can work with this.” It’s chilling. Look Who’s Back‘s main conceit is that Hitler just sort of reappears, which initially seems like a far-fetched starting point until you realize that his rhetoric has already done the same. The film’s structure is a strange patchwork that initially mines humor from the visual comedy of a modern times Hitler (Hitler in dad jeans, Hitler in bumper cars, Hitler at the dry cleaners, Hitler bowling), then reminds its audience how dangerous the dead dictator’s very much alive ideology still is in a modern context in candid street interviews, and concludes by pointing a finger in the mirror for not taking history seriously in a meta reflection on the dangers of reducing such a fucked up cultural figure to a casual gag in the first place. Not every joke lands, especially in the early proceedings, but the way Wnendt shoehorns biting political commentary & self-lacerating attacks on ironic humor into the shape of a campy farce holds just as much shock value as the de Sade levels of sexual depravity & beyond-unsanitary pizza toppings of Wetlands. Look Who’s Back is something of a structural mess, but it’s a fascinating mess with a surprising amount to say about the current political attitude towards immigration that disgraces a vast majority of The West, America included (obviously). Wnendt uses the hacky device of a campy Hitler comedy to strike a vary particular nerve in his viewers. It evokes a strange feeling, but it’s a surprisingly potent effect considering the trash pedigree of its chosen genre context.

-Brandon Ledet

Elvis & Nixon (2016)

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threehalfstar

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In 2011, Vanity Fair broke a real-life story about Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, and Liz Taylor hopping into a car for a road trip to Ohio to escape NYC during the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Yes, that really happened. Early this year, it was announced that this beyond bizarre story will be adapted as a made-for-British-TV movie, which is about the most perfect next logical step for that odd pop culture anecdote I could imagine & something I can’t wait to see. In the meantime, while we’re impatiently counting the hours until the Brando-Jackson-Taylor road trip comedy of our dreams materializes, we have a much more well-known odd pop culture anecdote to tide us over: Elvis & Nixon.

Written around the photo op/publicity stunt in 1970 when Elvis Presley visited the White House & was awarded an official title as a federal narcotics agent, Elvis & Nixon is a low-energy camp delight. Taking great pleasure in its own historical inaccuracies & caricaturist liberties, the film finds easy camp value in casting Michael Shannon as Elvis & Kevin Spacey as Richard Nixon and propping the mismatched pair up in a room (the Oval Office, of all rooms) merely so it can stew in its own unlikelihood. The result isn’t anything mind-blowing or revolutionary, but it is an offbeat pleasure to behold.

A large part of what makes Elvis & Nixon an interesting exercise is its ridiculous casting. Despite wide cultural success on a much-watched Netflix drama, Kevin Spacey is in a weird moment of his career right now. His biggest silver screen role of 2016 is a business man who gets magically transformed into a cat so he can learn a life lesson, so his participation in this other camp delight kind of makes sense. Spacey’s Nixon impersonation is, predictably, serviceable and, although neither actor look any more like their respective historical figures than the stars of Bubba Ho-Tep, you can occasionally forget that you’re looking at a famous actor at certain moments in his performance. Michael Shannon, on the other hand, is still in the art film cycle of his career, having just starred in the brilliant sci-fi chase thriller Midnight Special, so it was amusing to see him pop up in something so goofy in a full-length role instead of a one-off cameo gag. Shannon’s Elvis is a singularly strange performance, maybe his weirdest outlier role since he played Kim Fowley in the Runaways movie.Thankfully, Elvis & Nixon knows exactly how interesting that performance is, allowing Shannon to dominate a majority of the screen time, relegating Spacey’s Nixon to a curiously small, supporting role despite what the title suggests.

Shannon plays Elvis with the weird, soft-spoken energy of a late-in-life Michael Jackson, portraying The King as an out-of-touch loner with unlimited cult of personality power. Elvis is acutely aware of how strange & eccentric he appears, intentionally leaving himself “buried under gold, jewels, and money” so that he becomes “an object” instead of a person, lost inside his own icon status & blending in with his own impersonators. Still, he’s dead serious about joining the War on Drugs and doesn’t care at all how many people he has to confuse or inconvenience to achieve that goal. Shannon’s Elvis is oddly delicate & childlike, but also a powerful force that won’t take “No.” for an answer, a perfect foil for Spacey’s much more realistic, but equally stubborn Nixon.

Elvis & Nixon finds its best possible self in its laidback, weirdly relaxed vibe. Instead of pushing for big, unlikely moments between The President & The King, the film instead finds lowkey fascination in a past-his-prime rock ‘n roller living out a fish-out-of-water comedy in a political atmosphere he knows nothing about. Why a presumably pilled-out millionaire would suddenly become so concerned about the rise of popularity of Communist leanings among hippies and attempt to stop the ways “drug culture is ruining our youth” is anybody’s guess, an avenue of inquiry the film’s barely interested in exploring. Elvis’s plan to win the war between “The Establishment” & “The Youth” is even more bizarre & seemingly half-baked once you realize he believes he can go “undercover” as a federal agent thanks to his experience in costume & disguise from his roles in dozens of feature films, despite having one of the most famous faces on the planet. How much of Elvis’s dedication to pro-Establishment/ant-drug sentiments is true to life is surely up for debate, but the movie is clearly just having fun with the absurdity of the idea, not at all dedicated to pursuing historical integrity.

Spacey’s Nixon is just one player among many (including a strange supporting cast of Johnny Knoxville, Colin Hanks, and indie popstar Sky Ferreira) who are here to gawk at the bizarre presence of The King, with his weird little laugh, his outburst of amateur karate, and his large stockpile of firearms. Shannon plays the lowkey humor of the situation beautifully and Elvis & Nixon’s best moments are in watching the cultural icon perform simple tasks like watching television, eating a donut, and waving politely. The climactic meeting with Nixon promised in the title (and in the infamous photograph that inspired the film) is just icing on the highly unlikely, yet oddly enjoyable cake. Michael Shannon’s soft-spoken Elvis is the magic in the batter.

-Brandon Ledet

Sing Street (2016)

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I can relate to the teenage punk wannabes of Sing Street more than I should probably admit. The film’s depiction of an all-boy Catholic high school as an oppressive hellhole shaped by a Kafkaesque adherence to The Rules & a constant, violent power play of toxic masculinity rang particularly true, though it’s an environment I experienced in mid-00s New Orleans, not mid-80s Dublin. So, what do you do in that creativity vacuum where the priests are worse than the bullies and your drab homelife only serves to feed your depressive teenage angst? You start a punk band with your fellow angsty friends, dummy. You shamelessly mine music & pop culture knowledge from people who actually know what they’re talking about (in this case a stoner older brother) & you start holding band practice in your friend’s garage. The only things that don’t ring true about Sing Street‘s central conceit for my own experience is that its high school punk band is actually pretty good (mine was a goofy mess) and that it was mostly formed to impress/woo a girl. That latter point is actually where the film loses it’s way, too, as it forgets to focus on what makes it special as an against-the-odds rock ‘n roll story in favor of a much less distinct sappy romance fantasy.

I don’t know if the titular teenage band of Sing Street would necessarily categorize their music as “punk”. They seem to prefer the term “futurist,” which is apparently a grey area between new wave & new romanticism that formed in punk’s mid-80s European ashes. This is a pop culture environment where Duran Duran’s music video for “Rio” is considered revolutionary art and teens form all over Ireland & rural England are flocking to London to become part of the scene. Sing Street doesn’t follow those kids, though. It instead tells the story of the less-wealthy punk wannabes who can’t afford to move to London & have to stay behind. The film’s early proceedings play like a less fantastical version of Moone Boy as our “futurist” rock heroes try to assert themselves as small town radicals, wearing makeup to a Catholic school & filming dirt cheap music videos for each new song in Dublin’s back alleys. The coming-of-age aspect of the film works quite well, especially  in the way the central band is allowed to start shitty & gradually improve as they mimic each passing fad in the music industry. Unfortunately, a lot of this goodwill gives way to a story about “getting the girl,” a preposterously rose-tinted tour through heartfelt teenage romance that drags down a lot of the film’s good vibes & aesthetic specificity into mind-numbing tedium. Sing Street is a great exemplifier of the dreaded critical cliché “third act problems.” The film drops a lot of what makes it interesting to clear room for its will-they-won’t-they teenage romance (something that never lasts, no matter where you leave off by the end credits) and an extended concert sequence that drags the pace down to a crawl with its diminishing returns musical numbers.

I don’t want to sound too down on Sing Street as a whole, though, even if my own enthusiasm was greatly deflated by its concluding half hour of romantic doldrums. At the very least I enjoyed it more than I expected to, based on the fairly generic trailer. It’s a pleasant film more than a challenging or ambitious one, but it does recall some feel-good aspects of (better) recent works like We Are the Best & God Help the Girl. You could do much worse for a lazy afternoon’s entertainment than enjoying Sing Street for its catchy mid-80s pastiche soundtrack or its period specific visual cues, like its wardrobe’s overindulgence in denim & wire-frame glasses or its accurate lampooning of the era’s music video clichés. The film just loses a little steam when it stops cheering for the band to succeed & starts cheering for an obviously doomed romance instead, with little to no implication that it knows how improbable that couple’s chances really are. Once you start to realize that only one or two members of the six piece punk, uh, futurist band are going to be developed into any kind of full-blown characters, it’s difficult not to feel at least a little disappointed. This is a pretty good movie, but if it stuck to its original trajectory it could’ve been something truly great.

-Brandon Ledet

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

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The Night of the Hunter startlingly opens with heads floating against a starry sky. A few of them are children and one is an old woman. The old woman is giving a bible study lesson about Jesus. I’m not quite sure what I expected from this movie, but I don’t think I was anticipating anything this strange. But it’s actually a really perfect intro into what the movie is: a fairy tale- not the Disney kind, but the true dark kind of fairy tale where people die and children get eaten.

This movie has an otherworldly quality, which is not just from the floating heads. One part of that is the strong expressionistic influence. There’s a lot of monstrous shadows being cast on walls. Nosferatu-esque shots of creeping up stairs. There are sharp black and white angles. The nighttime of this world is strongly opposed to the daylight, which is idyllic and warm. The day feels safe and reassuring. The night is all around eerie.

In the middle of the Great Depression, two children John and Pearl are playing in the yard when their dad, Ben, rushes in with a gunshot wound. Fed up with his children having to live in squalor, he’s robbed a bank. Before the cops catch up with him, he hides the money inside of Pearl’s doll and makes both children swear not to tell anyone where the money is hidden. He gets arrested and sentenced to death. While in jail Ben meets the big bad wolf of this story, Reverend Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum). Harry Powell manages to marry the children’s widowed mother while in search of the money. John and Pearl soon after have to flee the murderous Reverend, as he gets increasingly violent towards John while asking about the money.

Reverend Powell is an iconic villain, right down to his knuckle tattoos, which read “LOVE” and “HATE,” that are referenced time and time again. When he displays these tattoos, his hands resemble terrifying, gnashing jaws as he makes them play wrestle each other. Perhaps most terrifying of all is his charisma. He summons up a whole town to his cult-like fire and brimstone sermons. He can flash a disarming smile and get his way almost every time. It’s terrifying to watch a villain with so much self righteous evil gain so much control.

I like the way this movie is scary. Yes, it feels like a fairy tale, but all the reasons to be afraid are very real. It’s scary because the town the kids live in is very judgmental and single minded while posing itself as idyllic. This town is susceptible to a charismatic stranger changing all of their views, and it’s scary because small towns often function this way. It’s scary because there’s no witchcraft or magic. This is just a regular man, which realistically there are few things scarier than a bad man. It’s scary because John is a kid isolated and no one believes him as he’s pursued and there’s few things more frightening than having bad things happen to you and having no one listen.

The Night of the Hunter tells the classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with it’s sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil step parents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.

-Alli Hobbs