Year: 2016

The Lost World (1925)

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fourstar

King Kong is often thought of as the first major special effects spectacle of early cinema. More specifically, if you ask someone to picture stop motion animated dinosaurs battling in an ancient film it’s highly likely King Kong would be the first image to come to mind. However, the very first movie to employ stop motion models as its main form of special effects outdates Kong by eight years. The Lost World might be a little more artistically muted than the art deco heights reached in King Kong, but the two films are thematically similar & The Lost World beat Kong to the punch in bringing dinosaurs (and humanoid apes, for that matter) to the big screen in what was at the time a majestic display. The same way the blend of CGI & animatronics floored audiences with “realistic” dinos in Jurassic Park‘s 1994 release, the stop motion dinosaurs of 1925’s The Lost World were an unfathomable achievement at its time. When the source material’s author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle screened test footage for the press (at a magician’s conference of all places) The New York Times even excitedly reported “(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily life like. If fakes, they were masterpieces.” Imagine writing that “if fakes” qualifier in earnest & how quickly that writer’s head would have exploded if they got a glimpse of Spielberg’s work 70 years later.

At this point in time it’s understandable to be more than a little jaded about the visual accomplishments of The Lost World. Show this film to a young child following a screening of something loud, shiny, and new like Captain America: Civil War & they’re going to struggle caring or paying much attention. It probably doesn’t help that the film takes its audience’s jaw-dropped awe for granted either. Its razor-thin narrative strands a hunter, a professor, a journalist, a beautiful woman, and other assorted crew (including, in true 1920s fashion, a deeply uncomfortable blackface character named Zambo) in a modern prehistoric world hidden away somewhere along the “fifty thousand miles of unexplored waterways”in South America. Among a wealth of living, breathing dinosaurs & missing-link type primates, the in-peril crew alternates from being mystified by the old world wonders laid before them & fighting for their lives due to immediate concerns presented by the terrain. It’s a story that’s been adapted & co-opted countless times since 1925 (even with the added bonus of removing the colonialism-minded racism). Even its way of starting with more “harmless” breeds of dinos like the brontosaurus & working its way up to tn he gigantic T. Rex’s & Allosauruses of the (lost) world is a structure that’s been mimicked to death.

I’ll admit that it takes a certain joy in silent era hokeyness to enjoy this movie’s charms at face value in a modern context. I delight in the fact that the stop motion teradons look exactly like Pterri on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Simple characterizations like Professor Challenger challenging the public to confirm his discovery amuse me (when they’re not tied to racial caricature, at least). Likes like “What are you thinking of, Paula- in this lost world of ours?” are a pure pleasure for me instead of groan-inducers. I’m also a huge sucker for stop motion animation in general, so the mix of handmade sets & real animal footage (sloths, jaguars, bear cubs, etc.) with claymation dinos is my idea of cinematic heaven. For some people this movie’s artificial dino safari will play as dull as the special effects “spectacle” of the exhaustively soulless Bwana Devil, but this is totally my happy place.

Where that for-fans-only attitude might shift is in the film’s final ten minute stretch, where it makes the same genre leap as King Kong & Spielberg’s unfairly maligned camp delight The Lost World (1997): bringing the dinos to the modern world. A brontosaurus is set loose on the streets of London, feeling like the stop motion beginnings of the kaiju genre & transcending what you might expect from a 1920s fantasy horror about a dino exploration mission. I feel like anyone with a deep affection for stop motion animation should watch this film either way; they’ll find so many handmade treasures big & small in its early special effects landmarks. If that kind of old world pleasure sounds quaint or too outdated for you, however, I urge you to at least watch the film’s concluding minutes of brontosaurus-run-wild mayhem. There’s something anachronistically bizarre & over-the-top in that segment that feels very much inline with the modern blockbuster landscape & I think a lot of people would get a kick out of its movie magic lunacy.

-Brandon Ledet

Great Expectations (2013)

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three star

I have a real soft spot in my heart for modern movie adaptations of classic British literature. In fact, I think I’m one of those terrible people who likes watching these movies more than reading the books. Every time I see one on Netflix, I have to either put it on my list or if I have time, consume it right then and there.

Great Expectations is a book that I haven’t read in its full version. As a child, I had the abridged illustrated version (Great Illustrated Classics). I loved it. I think I must have read it four times. It’s interesting to have an illustrated edition of any book and then watch the movie. You have a very clear idea of the characters and the movie version either smashes that idea or surprises you with something better. I think in this case my childhood ideas were a little smashed but maybe I shouldn’t come into BBC productions with great expectations (whomp whomp).

Great Expectations is about Pip, an orphan boy raised by his cruel sister and her docile blacksmith husband, Joe. Pip meets a wild bunch of characters: Magwitch, an escaped convict; Miss Havisham, a crazed depressed shut-in who sits around in an old wedding dress; and Estella, Miss Havisham’s spoilt brat of an adopted daughter. He goes from being a poor boy apprenticed to a blacksmith, to a real gentleman living in London built on the funds from a kind, anonymous benefactor.

It’s with this cast of characters that I have a problem with. Ralph Fiennes feels awkward in his role of Magwitch. It may be because recently the only roles I’ve seen him in have been effeminate dandies, but I think his performance feels very forced. Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham is very hit or miss. She plays it up with her typical kookiness, but instead of being the haunting, old skeleton bride necessary for the role, she feels like something out of a My Chemical Romance music video. And Jeremy Irvine (of Stonewall infamy) I feel was too much of a pouty-lipped pretty boy for an adult Pip. Although I was glad to see Bebe Cave in it as young Biddy. I liked her so much in Tale of Tales it’s good to see other things she’s done.

Not everything’s wrong with this movie. Obviously if you’re watching movies like this for the right reasons, you’re in it for the sets and the costumes. I loved the way they played up the Gothic themes of the novel, Helena Bonham Carter aside. The inside of the Satis House, Miss Havisham’s spooky abode, is delightfully dilapidated. There are ghastly relatives sitting in chairs in the hallways, dust motes flying around, and a banquet table left to rot. The costumes are equally sombre, full of dark, subdued colors. Maybe a little too subtle for my tastes, but still good.

I may have gone into this movie with my preconceived notions of what the story should look like based off a children’s version of the novel I read 20 years ago, but I still think it was an average, yet faithful adaptation. It definitely satisfied the part of me that loves this sort of thing. Sometimes you just need to mindlessly watch the movie adaptations of great British classics you’ll never get around to reading.

-Alli Hobbs

Heart of a Dog (2015)

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fourhalfstar

Laurie Anderson is one of the world’s greatest living artists, full stop. I’m throwing that accolade out there not only because it’s so very true, but also to admit a bias before I review her latest work, a “documentary” that pushes the boundaries of not-for-everyone cinema to a ludicrous extreme. Those turned off by loose, experimental filmmaking will likely find Heart of a Dog‘s philosophical navel-gazing insufferable. Obsessive cinephiles might also recoil at the film’s cheap, blasé mode of rough visual collage, an aesthetic that combines 80s art school technique with the most disposable of digital photography available. Both sides of that divide might find plenty reasons to groan or roll eyes at Anderson’s verbal meditation & casual poetry. Heart of a Dog is a work that I love & appreciate deeply, but would never be shocked to hear that someone else didn’t feel the same way. It’s the same tone of affection I have for the out-there art of pro wrestlers, John Waters, Death Grips, and Xiu Xiu. You’ll never hear me incredulously ask, “You didn’t like that? Why not?!” I totally get why not. The only difference with Heart of a Dog is that it stimulates a more intellectual, philosophical area of my mind than some of those acts & the type of art I generally seek out typically do.

Heart of a Dog is being billed as a documentary & its distribution was recently picked up by the HBO Docs imprint, but I believe that genre distinction is wildly misleading. The film is more like an act of meditation or hypnosis, playing like a weird lecture from an alternate dimension, a Dianetics DVD for the terminally bizarre. Even though I’m a huge fan of Anderson’s decades of spoken word & experimental pop music work, I’ve been a little weary of watching this film since it was released, because I expected it to be a brave, emotionally bare account of her beloved rat terrier Lola’s death that served as a means to deal with the also-recent death of her husband, Lou Reed. I was selling the artist a little short there. The losses of Lola & Lou inform every frame of Heart of a Dog, but they’re part of a larger tapestry of ideas that cover everything from the modern surveillance state to living in New York during 9/11 to the tenants of Buddhism to the existence of ghosts. Lou Reed’s absence weighs heavily on the proceedings, cropping up in an occasional image or song or dedication, but speaks volumes as Laurie Anderson instead discusses the process of accepting loss in terms of her dog, her dog’s sight, the twin towers, a world before the omnipresence of modern technology, and a mother she feels she never genuinely loved. As with all of Laurie Anderson’s work, Heart of a Dog is a writer’s delight, an intense meditation on the bizarre nature of language, but this film stands as her most fiercely personal work to date. It not only covers the whirlwind of painful change & transition she’s survived in recent years; it also lays out in simple, clear terms how she sees the known world & the unknown one that follows. Nearly every word, sound, and image in the film was created by Anderson herself and by the end credits the film feels like a snapshot of her very soul.

As weighty as that description sounds, Heart of a Dog is just as playful as it is philosophical. When making a “documentary” about death, loss, and the basic structure of the known & unknown universe, it probably helps to keep the mood as light as possible, which Anderson accomplishes by centering the POV on that of a dog. When Lola was alive she was taught to paint, sculpt, and play piano, all on display for the camera. Besides exhibiting these canine works of fine art, Anderson also shifts the camera’s POV to a dog’s-eye-view, playing with shaky, blue-green messes of birds, puddles, trash, and other dogs. You know, dog stuff. There’s also a few wonderfully surreal accounts of Anderson’s dog-themed dreams that toe the line between morbidity & absurdist humor. Anderson knows exactly how ridiculous these moments are, too. As part of Heart of a Dog‘s press tour & post-release growth she’s been screening the film for canine audiences & performing concerts for dogs on talk shows & in art gallery spaces. You always get the sense that she takes the dogs & her performances for the dogs seriously, but there’s also a sly smirk to the whole endeavor that suggests the ridiculousness of the situation (and of life in general) is all part of the act.

If you’re not thrown off by Anderson’s meditative, hypnotic musings on life & the afterlife, you’re just as likely to be resistant to Heart of a Dog‘s oddly cheap & off-putting visual poetry. The film employs a kind of layered visual collage that plays like a shoddy take on the works of Dave McKean, Guy Maddin, and Don Hetrzfeldt in attempt to mimic the scattered, blurred shape of memory & personal perception. Anderson mixes stock footage, digital photography, home movies, and animation to bring her trademark spoken word work to vivid, visual life. Heart of a Dog can sometimes play like a tangled mess of power lines, pyramids, smoke, helicopters, tree branches and, duh, dogs. However, it’s a distinct, deliberate visual style that not only exists to serve Anderson’s intense soundscape & language play, but also taps into the immediacy & intimacy of a private home movie collection.

It’s difficult to say if Heart of a Dog would be a great primer for becoming a fan of Anderson’s work. I didn’t find it to be any more or less accessible than her magnum opus United States I-IV, except maybe that it demands 1/4th of that masterpiece’s run-time. As someone already won over by her particular, peculiar philosophy, language and music, however, I’ll say that I could gladly continue to watch her make these weird little meditative art films forever, though perhaps without the heartache & despair that inspired Heart of Dog in the first place. I wouldn’t want her to have to live through that pain again, but I’d gladly reap the rewards as long as they’re as winning & engaging as this wonderful film.

-Brandon Ledet

Sleeping With Other People (2015)

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fourstar

“Are we in love with each other? What are we going to do about it?”

Sometimes the universe will provide you with the perfect contrast-and-compare examples to show you how a movie formula is done right & how it’s miserably flubbed. Consider the difference between Ryan Coogler’s inspired Rocky sequel Creed & last year’s other boxing world drama, Southpaw. Both films use the structure & tropes of the tried & true boxing picture to tell their respective stories, but Creed was so much more distinct & powerful in comparison that it’s easy to forget that the punishingly mediocre Southpaw was even released that same year. A more recent & much less macho example of that dichotomy would be the pairing of How to Be Single & Sleeping With Other People. How to Be Single is one of the least enjoyable films I’ve seen so far this year (it’s no Gods of Egypt, but it’s not far off) and yet it shares a lot of DNA with the low-key charmer Sleeping With Other People, a brilliant utilization of the traditional romcom format that feels entirely modern without ever working like an arms-length subversion. Sleeping With Other People is a feat in genuine emotion & sincerity in a genre that can often lack both, but it’s also remarkably similar to a recent film that gets it all so very wrong. There’s a lesson to be learned in the difference between how those two titles play onscreen & it’s almost certainly a question of craft.

A will-they-won’t-they romcom with an unfathomably stacked cast of talented actors (Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Jason Mantzoukas, and Natasha Lyonne to name a few), Sleeping With Other People is a story of the star-crossed & emotionally damaged. Two recovering sex/love addicts form a sexless, but deeply romantic bond while carrying on affairs with people they care far less about (hence the title). A lesser film would use this scenario to slyly poke fun at or sarcastically subvert the tropes of the romcom genre it operates in, but the brilliance of Sleeping With Other People is the way it feels sexy, smart, adult and, above all, honest all while operating within its genre boundaries. It commits. The film may admittedly be a little more vulgar than what we’re used to from the genre, though. It’s not likely that you’ll ever hear lines like “In your specific case I think you should fuck that sex addict,” or watch a woman learn how to masturbate as demonstrated on an empty juice bottle in My Big Fat Greek Funeral or Garry Marshall’s Veteran’s Day Eve. However, Sleeping With Other People is still instantly recognizable as a by-the-books romcom that delights in the way it plays by the rules. From its onscreen text message exchanges to its falling-in-love montages to the basic confines of its “We’re not a couple, but we act like one” plot, this is a true blue romcom with little to no pretension of being anything else. It just also happens to be well made, uproariously funny, and brutally truthful, a credit to both its writer/director Leslye Headland (who also helmed the underappreciated dark comedy Bachelorette in 2012) & its two stunningly-talented, sincere leads.

There’s recently been a sort of rejuvenation of the romcom format both on the big screen (Wetlands, Obvious Child) & on television (Love, Master of None) that’s encouraging for a genre that for a while seemed like it was on its last legs. How to Be Single felt like a growing pains process for bringing the low stakes romantic comedy into the modern era, never fully committing to letting go of its old-fashioned values despite what the title suggests. Sleeping With Other People, a film that shares two actors & a sex-addicted chauvinist protagonist with that lesser work, is much more adept at balancing a modern sensibility with that same timeless comedic structure. It’s likely there will be plenty of romcom junkies who enjoy How to Be Single well enough, but Sleeping With Other People has much more universal appeal to it. It’s a great movie first & a romcom second. I’d love to know if anyone else senses even the slightest correlation between the two (there’s always a chance I’m dead wrong about these kinds of arbitrary connections), but for me their differences & similarities are as clear as day. It’s also just as clear to me which one will stand the test of time.

-Brandon Ledet

The Nice Guys (2016)

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fourhalfstar

For as long as Shane Black has been writing stylistically strong cult classics in Hollywood (three decades), it’s incredible to think that he only has three feature credits to his name as a director. Black penned two childhood favorites of mine, The Monster Squad & Last Action Hero, along with major commercial successes like Iron Man 3 & the entire Lethal Weapon franchise, but he still stands as a kind of Hollywood underdog story, seemingly struggling to get his due as an auteur. The Nice Guys, a Ryan Gosling/Russell Crowe action comedy that’s currently struggling to earn back its relatively slim $50 million budget, may not be the runaway commercial success Black has been searching for as a director, but it does find him operating beautifully & efficiently on an artistic level. All of the hallmarks that make a Shane Black film distinct — witty dialogue, slapstick violence, children involved in activities way above their age range, stale genre tropes made to feel fresh — are on wild, brilliant display in The Nice Guys. This is the pinnacle achievement of a wickedly funny storyteller that sadly serves as yet another just-short-of-success story in a summer that’s been surprisingly lackluster in ticket sales, but immensely rich in hidden gems.

It’s difficult to discuss The Nice Guys‘s merits without comparing it to other works, as if it were a miracle of Frankensteined genre science. Its young girls braving the nasty waters of 1970s sexuality felt like a shoot-em-up action comedy version of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, something I never thought I’d want to see, but was giddy to experience. Its general aesthetic lies somewhere between Lethal Weapon & Boogie Nights, another unlikely genre mashup resulting from its cartoonishly violent detective work set against a 1970s California porn industry backdrop. Its precocious, smart-mouthed kid detective dynamic plays like Veronica Mars, except with an even younger protagonist & an even more adult/dangerous mystery to unravel. The list of similar titles the film might remind you of is virtually unending: Pulp Fiction, Bored to Death, Taxi Driver, The Big Lebowski, etc., etc., etc. And yet Shane Black juggles all of these pre-existing aesthetics without ever feeling rote or derivative. He understands exactly what genre toys he’s playing with, but retools them all to create his own distinct work with an incredibly strong, idiosyncratic comedic voice. This is a movie made by a passionate nerd who loves watching movies and that affection is immediately obvious in every scene. The call is coming from inside the audience.

Due to The Nice Guys‘s mystery plot structure it’s difficult to describe too much of its basic story without spoiling its rewards. At heart it’s a mismatched partners buddy cop flick where neither of the leads are cops, exactly. Russell Crowe plays a mercenary muscle, a hired goon with heart of severely tarnished gold. He teams with Ryan Gosling, a con-artist private detective who doubles as an alcoholic buffoon, to find a missing teen with ties to California’s thriving porn industry. Our team of in-over-their-heads antiheroes is rounded out by the single father private eye’s young daughter, who is never invited on missions, but often proves herself the most competent member of the crew. I would say this crack team of violent fuckups fall down the rabbit hole of the seedy side of 1970s Los Angeles, but since all sides of 1970s Los Angeles were likely seedy, that descriptor is more than a little redundant. Either way, they’re far from prepared for the political conspiracies, mass murders, life-threatening pollution, and hedonistic porn industry parties that complicate what should prove to be a cut & dry missing person’s case, but snowballs into something much larger.

If I had to assign The Nice Guys an exact genre I’d be tempted to classify it as “sleaze noir,” but that would greatly overlook what largely makes the film feel special: slapstick violence. Shane Black has an adept way of portraying violence that both shocks & amuses. There are certain violent displays in the films that had me gasping in their realistic & sudden brutality and others that had me struggling to breathe between laughs. A lot of what makes The Nice Guys funny is the matter-of-fact dialogue of phrases like, “Dad, there’s like whores here & stuff,” but much of the film’s entertainment value is in its violent physical comedy. Alternating between slapstick cruelty & genuinely devastating displays of brutality is a dangerously fun & wicked mode of entertainment that I’m not sure Black has ever topped before. It’s a solid, accessible base that even leaves room for more surreal inclusions like unicorns, mermaids, and gigantic insects. Seriously. The Nice Guys might be dying at the box office but the packed theater I saw it with last weekend was eating it up, wholly engaged with every weirdly cruel & surreally funny place the film decided to take them. Hopefully someone will take notice & help Shane Black bring more works this weirdly pleasing to the big screen. He’s surely earned a few more leaps of faith.

-Brandon Ledet

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

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fourstar

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is doing dismal numbers at the box office right now, but so did the cult classic comedy it most closely resembles: Walk Hard – The Dewey Cox Story. The Judd Apatow-penned John C. Reilly comedy Walk Hard applied ZAZ-style spoofery to the musician’s biopic genre and wound up covering the entire history of rock & roll from its blues origins to its Vegas crooner swan song. Popstar picks up exactly where Walk Hard leaves off, mixing ZAZ spoofery with a Spinal Tap documentary format to skewer the modern state of pop music as it has developed since Walk Hard‘s release nearly a decade ago. It’s a shame both of these films failed to make waves financially (Popstar‘s seemingly complete lack of advertising couldn’t have helped there), but they do promise to hold onto a more significant longevity among their respective comedy nerd fandoms. Case in point, just look to the other The Lonely Island film that failed at the box office & found a second life among dedicated fans, Hot Rod. Popstar is just as funny as Hot Rod & just as primed for repetitive viewings, so there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll get the same cult comedy treatment as that militantly goofy title in the long run.

The really interesting thing about that lack of immediate financial success, though, is the way it plays directly into Popstar‘s plot. In the film former SNL player Andy Samberg embodies a versatile stand-in popstar archetype that covers enough ground to resemble any popstar of note you could name from Kanye to Bieber to Skrillex to whoever. Samberg’s titular popstar struggles to repeat past success with a solo record & tour that only do a fraction of the numbers landed on his hit releases. Over the course of the film he learns to put past grudges & current hubris behind him & give the people what they want: a cash-in reunion of the Beastie Boys-esqe pop group that first made him famous. In a lot of ways Popstar itself is Samberg’s way of giving the people what they want. Presuming that Hot Rod didn’t make as much money as it could have because its delightfully moronic daredevil subject matter isn’t exactly what audiences would expect from a The Lonely Island movie, Samberg & company return to their roots here to construct a full-length version of what made their SNL sketches & comedy albums popular decade ago: pop music parody. According to the film’s fantasy version of this well-deserved cash-in, they should be making absurd amounts of money right now, but that’s not exactly how things are working out despite the product being on-point.

Box office numbers & middling reviews aside, Popstar stands as Andy Samberg’s greatest achievement to date. His deeply silly magnum opus lovingly skewers the totality of hedonistic excess & outsized hubris on the modern pop landscape. The film nails the feel of modern pop documentaries in terms of style coopting the on-screen text & social media illustration of titles like Amy along with talking head “interviews” with folks like Nas, Questlove, and Pharrell, the exact kind of contributors you’re likely to see pop up in films like Fresh Dressed. Popstar builds a solid, believable base to hang its gags upon & that in-the-know confidence allows the humor to go as broad or as absurd as it needs to in any particular moment without throwing the audience off track. You’re never entirely shaken by a throwaway gag like a baby playing drums like Neil Peart or an artist responsible for the “brilliance” of catchphrases like “#doinkdedoink” having the self-confidence to declare the Mona Lisa “an overrated piece of shit” because the movie is well-calibrated enough to support those kinds of over-the-top indulgences. The format, the character, his world, and our own pop music terrain all back up each ridiculous gag Samberg throws at the wall,  making the film out to be an efficient little comedy machine in comparison to the sprawling, Apatow-dominated landscape comedic cinema’s been exploring to death in recent years. There’s certainly loose improv afoot in Popstar, but it’s arranged & edited into highly functioning efficiency.

I don’t think I’d call Popstar my favorite comedy of the year so far (it’s got the looming presences of Hail, Caesar!, The Mermaid, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, The Nice Guys and The Bronze to deal with there), but I do think it outshines its closest comparison point in recent months: Zoolander 2. My main complaint with Zoolander 2, a movie I quite enjoyed, was that it gets “a little exasperating in its never-ending list of cameos & bit roles […] The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two.” Popstar somehow adopts that exact cameo-saturated format & makes it work like gangbusters. It’s impossible to review this film without name dropping some of the musicians (RZA, Usher, A$AP Rocky, Arcade Fire, etc.) & comedians (Sarah Silverman, Eric Andre, Bill Hader, an actually-utilized Tim Meadows, etc.) involved, but their presence is actually necessary for the format to work instead of being distracting & dilutive the way they were in Stiller’s film.

Popstar smartly & lovingly dismantles the entirety of pop music’s current state of ridiculousness from EDM DJ laziness to the devastation of a negative Pitchfork review, to Macklemore’s no-homo “activism” to U2’s invasive album release snafu. Celebrity obsession & absurd acts of cartoonish hubris play right into that surreally vapid world, so Samberg has established a work here where needless cameos &  unhinged silliness are a necessity just as much as they’re an indulgence. Long after the lack of critical or box office buzz are forgotten, Popstar might just stand as Samberg’s greatest to work, the most efficient application of his distinct sense of humor put to record.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #8 of The Swampflix Podcast: Documentarian Tim Wolff & A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #8 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our eighth episode, Brandon interviews local filmmaker Tim Wolff about his gay Mardi Gras culture documentary The Sons of Tennessee Williams (2011). Also, James makes Brandon watch Roy Andersson’s Swedish black comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015) for the first time. Enjoy!

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

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973)

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fourstar

Self-described as a “non-science fiction, not quite realistic, and not strictly historical film” and a “comedy of anxieties” Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (sometimes distributed under the ridiculous title Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future) is both just like & completely unique from every zany comedy title that immediately comes to mind. It’s easy to see echoes of the film’s sense of flippant, whimsical humor in works as varied as Monty Python, Scooby-Doo, and ZAZ comedies, but at the same time I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before. I’m not sure how many Soviet Russian slapstick comedies the average American movie buff watches in their lifetime, but this was a first for me.

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession is remarkable for its ability to dabble in the same visual play & artistic pranksterism as titles like the infamous, surreal Czech comedy Daisies while maintaining the accessibility of a sketch comedy show or a weekly sitcom. It’s about as fun as any crossroads between camp & high art as you’re ever likely to see and it’s one that boasts an unlikely specificity & context due to its USSR setting. Rarely is a comedy this artistically rich so recommendable for its entertainment value & basic humorous appeal to audiences who would normally turn up their noses at the idea of watching a hoity-toity foreign film outright. I could easily see it sitting among the works of folks like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson as the perfectly attractive gateway drug to drag youngsters into a life of art cinema geekery. Basically, I’m saying I greatly enjoyed this film as an adult, but really wish someone had shown it to me in high school. It would’ve saved me a lot of time in helping define & develop my own cinematic tastes.

The film’s plot is an exercise in cartoonish artificiality. A scientist/inventor risks losing the attentions of his beautiful actress wife by constantly hammering away at his latest project: a time machine. On the first, disastrous operation of his “apparatus”, the scientist opens the wall to his apartment to a hundreds-years-old castle setting and, through machinations not worth describing in detail, winds up swapping the places of his landlord, Ivan Vasilievich, with the 16th century dictator Ivan the Terrible. The landlord has a difficult time adjusting to his new digs. He’s initially mistaken for a demon by his newfound contemporaries before he disastrously assumes the throne of Ivan the Terrible in disguise (in addition to sharing a name & similarly predatory occupations, they also share an exact likeness). The “real” Ivan the Terrible, by contrast, does fairly well in the modern world. After briefly struggling with confounding inventions like recorded music, lightbulbs, and racy pin-ups, he somewhat comfortably settles into a world that still finds his demanding, violent attributes disconcertingly appealing. While the befuddled scientist struggles to return both Ivans to their proper places in time, the film bifurcates itself into being both a fish out of water comedy in modern times & a violent comedy of errors in ancient ones. It’s all very silly.

It’s difficult to describe the plot of Ivan Vassiliech without making it sound like a very thin, minimal work. Indeed, even certain gags within the film feel like something out of Benny Hill sketch or a mimicry of silent-era hamming. What’s most incredible about this film to me is in the way it distinguishes itself in the details. Its central time-bending apparatus is bizarre mess of sciency vagueness that makes Rick Moranis‘s goofy shrink ray in Honey I Shrunk the Kinds look downright realistic by comparison. Visual techniques like alternating between color and black & white film and mixing live action photography with animation heightens the film’s consistent playfulness to its own unique artform. The shattered fourth wall & movie-within-a-movie meta structure leads to inspired gags like the “real” Ivan the Terrible auditioning for a leading part in a movie about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan Vasilievich is flexible enough to both impress the idea with its meticulous, color-coded set design & to inspire guttural laughter with lines like “Please don’t put me to death, kind sir!” It’s an old-fashioned song & dance comedy that leaves enough room for genuine awe in its majestic Russian castle settings, which are used almost like a playground. Even the would-be bummer of a cop-out ending is significantly softened by the very polite concluding title card of “Ciao! Thank you for your attention.”

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession hits that perfect sweet spot of smart, well-crafted cinema that’s also eager to please & easy to digest. As soon as the first watch I felt like it had already been in my life for decades, like a fuzzy memory triggered by a particular scent. That kind of instant familiarity is difficult to come by, especially with a product this silly & this finely tuned.

-Brandon Ledet

Theatre of Blood (1973)

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three star campstamp

I’d love to live in a world where Vincent Price is considered “the world’s greatest actor”, but not like this. Not like this. Theatre of Blood is a puzzling meta horror vehicle for Price, both striking in the range it allows for the B-movie legend to chew scenery (plus its gore grotesqueness his films don’t usually approach) and disappointing in its lackluster execution. By all means, this gimmicky revenge thriller should be the exact kind of genre trash that has me head over heels, especially considering how unhinged Price manages to be in his lead performance, but by the end I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for what I had seen. This is decent schlock, but it had the opportunity to be much more significant than that. I didn’t hate it, but I really wanted to love it.

Price stars here as “the world’s greatest actor”, Edward Lionheart, a true thespian of the stage who refuses to take on any role unless it’s the lead part in a Shakespeare production. Fans agree that he is truly the world’s finest performer, but theater critics lock him out of all accolades due to his Shakespearean limitations. After a failed suicide attempt the bitter actor comes seemingly from beyond the grave to make each critic individually eat their own words (and, in one particularly brutal case, their own dogs) by killing them in elaborate ways that recall Shakespeare’s most notable works. There’s great subtext here about Vincent Price himself getting revenge on his own critics for brushing off his work as genre schlock by proving he’s at ease with difficult classical works, but for the most part the film is only exciting for its dozen or so brutal murders, which reportedly required six gallons of fake blood to bring to the screen.

What most confuses me about Theatre of Blood is its 96% approval rating on the Tomatometer. The film was a personal favorite for Price because he enjoyed being able to make money performing various Shakespeare monologues instead of pure horror cheese, which is totally understandable (if not more than a little sad). The truth is, though, that when Price isn’t performing these soliloquies or murdering his critics for an audience of Mortville bums, the film gets very one-note & boring, playing at best like a televised police procedural. It’s likely that people had fun with the film’s very campy tone & I’ll admit that the novelty of a grindhouse-esque work from Price that manages to be this silly is enjoyable in & of itself. I especially love its alternate title, Much Ado about Murder, as a note of exceptional  goofiness. However,  the film has nothing on similar revenge-minded works from the actor’s catalog like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, so there’s an oppressive cloud of seen-it-all-before hanging over the production. It’s at best on par with his other middling 70s meta horror, Madhouse, which isn’t too great of a position to be in at all.

Theatre of Blood is a serviceable Vincent Price flick probably best enjoyed in YouTube clips compiling its various gimmicky kills instead of watching its rough around the edges totality. As a critic, saying this might be inviting Price to rise from beyond the grave to smite me, but I’m okay with that. There are surely worse ways to die.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 13: 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968)

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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 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On pages 88 & 395 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that the film’s infamous, evil A.I. robot was built at his alma mater, writing “Chills ran down my spine when I first heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana.” He also mentions on page 153 that 2001 was one of the biggest “event” films of his early, formative years as a professional film critic.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Kubrick’s universe, and the space ships he constructed to explore it, are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect, impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there too. But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick’s actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.” -from his 1968 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” -from his 1997 review for his “Great Movies” series

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“Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” – Ancient proverb

The arthouse space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey is madman auteur Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus. Or, wait, maybe that’s The Shining. Or maybe Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick boasts too many crowning achievements to definitively rank any particular one as king beast, but 2001 certainly inspires that kind of lofty thinking, just in mere acknowledgement of its grand scale ambition. It’s a film that attempts to encapsulate the totality of time– past, present, and future– and does a fairly successful job of it. Its iconic scenes of space epic obfuscation have in time become so seminal that they now almost feel cliché, considering the one million and ten times they’ve been referenced & parodied in later, lesser works. This film is an unimaginable technical achievement for 1968, however, and I’m still scratching my head over the practicality of how some of it was accomplished through practical effects. Because each scene in the film is so overly-familiar to the public lexicon at this point, it’s near impossible to tell if I’ve actually watched it from front to end before. I do distinctly remember falling asleep to it once or twice in high school at the very least. As majestic & awe-inspiring as any particular achievement in 2001 can be, the film is also a slow, plodding, dialogue-light downstream drift that dares you at nearly every turn to lose focus & nod off. This is more or less the definition of challenging cinema. It takes a determined effort to stay on board for the journey, but the destination’s rewards are bountiful.

The funny thing for me on this most recent watch was that the movie I always think of as being 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie where a crew of astronauts are murdered by an evil A.I. named HAL 9000, is just one segment of many in the film’s cinematic patchwork. 2001 functions almost like a horror anthology, with each of its four separate segments providing only a small window into its larger narrative. Each section of the film is dominated by the throughline talisman of the monolith, but they each stand as rigidly divided works of art, just in the same way Kubrick allows nearly every shot of the film to hang in the air like an isolated, precious object worth examination. 2001 is an art gallery just as much as it is a narrative motion picture.

In the first segment the film takes poetic license with evolution & the Dawn of Man and depicts the all-important monolith teaching humanity’s primate ancestors how to use tools, a development that immediately leads to the world’s first coldblooded murder. In the second segment a second monolith is discovered by astronauts on the moon and its effect is largely shrouded in mystery, other than the signal it projects that points to Jupiter. As this film was released just one year before the real moonlanding (an event some eccentrics believe Kubrick himself had a part in “faking”), the mysterious terror of this piece points to modern anxiety about what comes next on the frontier of scientific discovery. The third segment answers that question loud & clear, proposing that our near future will be dominated by pompous A.I. robots with murderous intent. The closing segment, beautifully titled “Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite” is a somewhat-open-to-interpretation trip though religious transcendence, a gateway into the next step in our evolution. The lucky astronaut who endures that final chapter’s monolith as a test subject emerges on the other end as some sort of unknowable space fetus. The future of humanity is left open-ended here, but given that all previous monoliths in the film were directly followed by murder, the outlook is just as chilling as it is majestic.

Much like how the monoliths transformed the state of humanity at several points throughout the film, 2001 transformed the state of sci-fi adventure media. Long gone are the days of Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers, although they would later return with 2001-esque special effects in George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise. The HAL 9000 segment of 2001 functions somewhat like a genre film if you squint at it the right way, but the other 3/4s of the picture are so gloriously obscured & open-ended that Kubrick’s version of a space adventure is a much stranger, more artful beast than the examples that preceded it. There is a clear narrative progression here in the evolution of humanity, but the source, nature, and purpose of that evolution is so immense & mysterious that the “odyssey” of the title is more figurative than it is literal. I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke’s novelized version of this story (which he wrote for the film as a collaborator) is much clearer than what’s onscreen, but I feel like any concrete, extraterrestrial explanation of what transpires would cheapen the movie’s poetry. The aliens in this film may as well be an all-knowing god or The Will of the Universe, considering the immensity of what’s onscreen. I left the film with few solid answers and took delight in that ambiguity.

Not everyone feels that way. Ebert noted in his “Great Movies” review of the film that there were several walkouts during the 1968 Los Angeles premiere he attended. Most notably among the miffed was an especially exasperated Rock Hudson, who was visibly livid that the couldn’t pin down the film’s exact plot. Indeed, 2001 feels determined at every turn to spurn its audience, like an ornery mechanical bull in a dive bar (except one bucking in spectacular slow motion). This is a film that will either bore or terrorize you depending on how game you are for its journey. As much as I loved it as an immersive cinematic experience I’ll even admit that a couple dialogueless shots where the soundtrack was dominated by heavy breathing & mechanical whirs tested my patience a great deal. I’d even go as far as to say it got on my nerves. That’s not to say this is  humorless, highbrow work without a touch of pedestrian entertainment value, though. I think the shock of starting the film among the unevolved primates was something of a sly joke, maybe even serving as Kubrick’s way of poking fun at human folly & hubris. Hal 9000, however creepy, is subtly funny in its own cold, biting way, even downright bitchy in intonations of phrases like “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Frank.” There’s even an honest-to-God, outright gag in the film where a character perplexedly reads a long list of instructions for a zero gravity toilet.

Of course, humor & genre thrills are not likely to be anyone’s biggest takeaway from 2001. For those who can stay on board for its demanding runtime, glacial pace, and deliberate obfuscation, the film delivers a perfectly crafted, near-flawless glimpse into the unknown, which is a rare treat for any kind of art, much less a cinematic space adventure. The violence on display here ranges from blind rage to cold calculation, but never for a minute feels exploitative. The visual effects & smooth, spinning camerawork are dizzying achievements of technical prowess, but feel more purposeful than showy. An old-fashioned overture & intermission feel entirely earned given the scope of the film’s ambition. I’m not sure if 2001 is Kubrick delivering a passionate work of narrative art so much as a perfectly calibrated machine that begs to be gawked at as it functions with divine precision. Either way, it’s a real beaut.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

-Brandon Ledet