Year: 2016

Hardcore Henry (2016)

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fourstar

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Hardcore Henry is, in essence, a video game come to life. This is either a compliment or a complaint depending on the perspective of the individual members of the audience. Roger Ebert, who had a thing or two to say about video games as a lower tier art form, would likely balk (or perhaps even puke) at this premise. As someone who hasn’t owned a video game console since the Nintendo 64, I’m almost equally an outsider to the medium, but I still found the film to be a blast. Hardcore Henry‘s central gimmick of mirroring the look of 1st person shooters by mounting GoPros to its camera/stuntmen is a lot to handle for 90 minutes of action cinema & the video game-thin plot & villains that accompany it don’t help much either. Audiences have largely rejected the Russian-American co-production outright based on its marketing & the movie has made back only less than half of its budget on its opening weekend. Still, there’s certainly an audience for this pure-adrenaline macho-hedonism out there and I have no doubt Hardcore Henry will endure as something of a cult classic in the long run whether or not the immediate returns are looking optimistic (they’re not).

Besides being a live action, narrative video game of a movie, Hardcore Henry could also be understood as a sci-fi action thriller, even if it’s as a stubbornly vacuous one. Brought to life as a Robocop-esque “cybersoldier”, the titular hero/audience surrogate Henry is half man/half machine (or “half machine/half pussy” as one of his combatants puts it) who must save his scientist wife & the world at large from an evil sorcerer who looks like a bitter cocktail of Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, and Viserys Targaryen. Obviously, the sci-fi plot is mostly present as a delivery system for the film’s true bread & butter of action & gore. Much like in video games, Henry is mostly provided short-term goals & destinations by an in-the-know guide (Sharlto Copley of District 9) that he must achieve by obliterating all human (and inhuman) obstacles in the way with guns, grenades, wine bottles, screwdrivers, windshield wipers, etc. Every now & then the sci-fi element will lead to a hilarious line like “Put down the proto-baby!”, but for the most part this genre marker is pure background filler. Even my favorite aspect of the film, the telekinetic sorcerer video game villain with the terrible hair, is more fantasy than he is sci-fi, so it’s probably best not to think too extensively on why the plot unfolds the way it does. Just try to enjoy it for its own tasteless, disgustingly violent self.

I guess I should be clear about this: there’s far more to hate about Hardcore Henry than just its video game gimmick. Its rampant misogyny, gay panic humor, and constant, gleeful violence & gore are sure to turn off a lot of folks & rightfully so. However, I don’t personally see much of a difference between the misanthropy on display here and the macho-hedonism of any other generic shoot-em-up. Hardcore Henry is loud, obnoxious, one-note, nearly plotless, and entirely over the top in its meat-headed self-indulgence, but so are a lot of my favorite hallmarks of action cinema: Commando, Rambo IV, Invasion U.S.A., etc. I’ll contend that the film’s glaring, perhaps even deplorable faults are all outweighed by its consistently goofy tone (particularly in the scenery-chewing sorcerer villain) & 1st person POV visual experimentation). There are hordes of 13 year olds who’ll latch onto Hardcore Henry‘s naked girls, guns, and cocaine version of masculinity in an unsavory way, I’m sure, but I never really look to my dumb action movies for moral high ground and, truth be told, those kids will grow out of it eventually. Hopefully.

As much as I enjoyed Hardcore Henry as a violently campy good time, a large part of me is somewhat relieved that it’s floundering financially. If the film were a runaway success we might’ve been flooded with an untold number of 1st person shoot-em-up knockoffs for decades, just as The Blair Witch Project spawned a legion of subpar found footage horrors in its wake. Truthfully, I like Hardcore Henry‘s reputation positioned exactly where it is. It’ll be heralded by select fans as an overlooked classic, but never imitated to an extent where the gimmick becomes overbearingly redundant (I hope). I personally enjoyed the film with the same sick fascination a lot of folks have with GoPro videos of Russian teens hanging off of skyscrapers with just one hand & no safety gear (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google it). I was appalled & more than a little concerned,but also undeniably made giddy by the sheer novelty & audacity on display.

-Brandon Ledet

Midnight Special (2016)

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fourhalfstar

“Y’all have no idea what you’re dealing with, do ya?”

Michael Shannon is, without a doubt, my favorite actor working today. There’s an unmatched level of intensity in his screen presence that ranges from hilarious to alarming to terrifying depending on how he wants you to react, but he always gets a reaction. Some directors aren’t entirely sure how to harness this intensity & Shannon is often asked to dial it to eleven in every scene. This is fun to watch, but not necessarily the full extent of what his unique talent can bring to the screen. The madman actor does, however, have one long term collaborator in Jeff Nichols who knows exactly how to put his talent to full use. Jeff Nichols often allows Michael Shannon to play his intensity quietly, providing the actor more room to fully do his thing than any other director I can think of (outside maybe Herzog in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? or the show runners on Boardwalk Empire).

With Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols continues his career pattern of alternating between intimate thrillers & ambitious sci-fi. As far as ambition goes, this marks his riskiest, most far-reaching work to date, drowning out even the widespread mania of his sophomore work (and last sci-fi outing) Take Shelter. Mirroring the best eras of sci-fi cinema giants Steven Spieldberg & John Carpenter, comparison points you wouldn’t want to evoke lightly, Midnight Special is massive enough in its imagination & awe-inspiring mystery to establish Nichols as one of the best young talents in the industry today. Much like folks like Jonathan Glazer & Miranda July, his catalog is modestly small, but each film is a preciously crafted gift well worth waiting for. Nichols & Shannon have been close collaborators on four films in the last decade and Midnight Special easily stands as their most rounded & complete work since their first outing in 2007’s near-perfect Shotgun Stories. It’s also the best example of sci-fi action & supernatural mystery by any filmmaker in recent memory, perhaps going back for years, which is impressive given its pedigree as a mid-budget work from a director who’s still working just outside the Hollywood system.

It’s difficult to speak too extensively on Midnight Special‘s plot without ruining what makes the movie, well, special. For so much of the film’s runtime the audience is left in the dark with only brief flashes of game-changing revelations (literally) illuminating exactly what is going on. Just getting an exact handle on who’s involved in the film’s sci-fi chase plot (kidnappers, parents, cultists, federal agents, etc.) and whether their intent is good or malicious can be a lot to process. One thing in the film is clear: there is an 8 year old boy at the center of the chaos who has a mysterious, perhaps supernatural connection to a world beyond ours. The boy, Alton Meyer, is destined to travel to a specific location for  a specific date, but the purpose of that mission & the source of that intel is largely unclear. As one character puts it, “That’s all we have. This date & place is everything.” As an audience member, you’re better off not knowing any more than that yourself. Like the characters surrounding the young, enigmatic Alton Meyer have faith that the child’s very existence serves some higher purpose, you just have to have faith as an audience that Midnight Special will culminate all of these obfuscated, grandiose elements into a worthwhile whole. I am here to witness to the fact that there is indeed a payoff. I’ve seen the light. I am a true believer.

Midnight Special is like a perfectly calibrated feature-length episode of The X-Files, but without the sex appeal. The only thing I can really fault the movie for is not taking the time to develop the emotional impact of its central relationships the way past Jeff Nichols films have. The air of mystery is so oppressively heavy here that I was far more concerned about what would happen next & what small clues might be lurking in the details than I was with the film’s emotional core. This is kind of surprising for a plot centered around a vulnerable child in worlds of trouble and it may very well be the case that its emotional impact will hit me harder in future viewings now that I know where the plot is going. Honestly, though, these concerns feel downright minuscule in light of what the film accomplishes as a mid-budget sci-fi. Jeff Nichols creates an intimidatingly massive world here with the most basic of tools. Slight visual references to comic book staples like X-Men & Superman and real-life doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate & Jonestown carry so much significance in terms of storytelling economy that the world’s most expensive CGI team couldn’t muster with a limitless budget & absence of a deadline. Just look to Alton Meyer’s headgear (plastic ear muffs & swimming goggles) to see how otherworldly the film can make even the most basic elements feel.

Nichols & Shannon have quietly built a concise little catalog of small, intimate stories with massive emotional impact in their collaborations. Midnight Special may be the director’s most ambitious work to date in terms of scale, but he’s smart to keep the individual parts that carry the hefty, supernatural mystery of the narrative just as small & intimate as he has in past familial dramas like Mud & Shotgun Stories. Shannon is similarly subdued & bare bones in his performance, which is a nice change from the long line of explosive roles that ask him to go larger than life with every breath. Together, they’ve delivered an incredible work with a near-limitless scope, but it’s one built an intricately detailed foundation of grounded, believable worldbuilding & old fashioned character work. Midnight Special may allow its ideas to outweigh its emotion in a general sense, but you never lose sight that these are real people struggling with an unreal situation. Honestly, the most difficult thing to believe in this wildly imaginative film is that there are working payphones in rural Texas in 2016. It might not be my favorite collaboration of theirs to date (that’s a bit of a close call), but it’s easily recognizable as their most ambitious & it really ups the ante for where their work is headed & what they could achieve with the right resources.

-Brandon Ledet

Darkman (1990)

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I’ve never been much of a Sam Raimi fan. His Spider-Man films felt like the height of superhero cinema mediocrity to me in their heyday. The Evil Dead series was never really my thing, mostly because of the rapist tree & my contention that Bruce Campbell is a second-rate version of Jim Carrey’s worst tendencies. As far as I knew until recently, Raimi’s greatest contribution to the cultural zeitgeist was as a producer on the television show Xena: Warrior Princess, with his directorial work not mattering much to me in any significant way. I appreciated the over-the-top cartoonishness of his aesthetic, but it never connected with me in the same way that the work of, say, Peter Jackson did. Darkman changed all that.

A comic book-inspired noir riding on the coattails of Tim Burton’s Batman, Darkman is a masterfully goofy work of genre cinema. Its comic book framing, over-the-top performances, and stray Ken Russell-esque freakouts were all perfection in terms of trashy entertainment value, pushing the lowest-common-denominator of trash media into the realm of high art. Darkman is not only the finest Sam Raimi film I’ve ever encountered, it’s also one of the most striking comic book movies ever made . . . which is saying a lot considering that it wasn’t even based off of a comic book. Given our current climate of endless adaptations, remakes, and reboots, it’s bizarre to think that Darkman was made from an original idea of Raimi’s & not from bringing a pre-existing character to the screen. The film’s two superfluous, direct-to-video sequels would fit in just fine with our current trend of endlessly returning to the well, but the original Darkman really went out on a limb with its central idea & it’s a risk that paid off nicely.

Tim Burton’s Batman (a film Raimi had actually once been considered for as a potential director) seems like the most obvious point of reference for Darkman‘s cultural context. Released just one year after Batman‘s release, Darkman was a similarly dark, gritty, noir-inspired comic book landscape that even brought longtime Burton-collaborator Danny Elfman in tow for its score. The original idea for Darkman had nothing to do with the Caped Crusader at all, however. It wasn’t even conceived as an homage to comic books. Raimi had first conceived Darkman in a short story meant to show reverence for Universal Studio’s horror classics of the 1930s. It’s very easy to see the mad scientist ravings of characters that would’ve been played by folks like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff in an earlier era (or both in the case of The Invisible Ray) in Darkman‘s DNA. The outfit the anti-hero uses to hide his face even more than closely resembles that of The Invisible Man. The combination of this monster movie pedigree & the newfound comic book seriousness of Burton’s Batman were a great start for Darkman as a launching pad. Add Sam Raimi’s particular brand of cartoonish camp to the mix & you have a perfect cocktail of violently goofy cinema.

Liam Neeson stars as Darkman‘s titular anti-hero, a brilliant scientist & kindhearted boyfriend working on the secret of creating new body parts for scratch with the world’s first 3-D printer (of organic material, no less). The doctor’s girlfriend, played by Frances McDormand, inadvertently gets him mixed up with some rough mobster types who burn down his lab with the poor man inside it & through some shaky-at-best comic book/monster movie shenanigans, he emerges alive, but forever altered. Horrifically scarred, unable to feel pain, and freakishly strong due to an increase in adrenaline, the doctor emerges as the masked vigilante Darkman & sets out to exact his revenge on the Dick Tracy-esque mobster villains who destroyed his life. His masks alternate from the Invisible Man get-up mentioned above to temporary organic faces contrived from his pre-mutation scientific research & his revenge tactics go beyond basic vigilantism into full-blown, cold-blooded murder. Instead of struggling with the inner conflict a lot of violent superheroes deal with regarding which side of the law & morality they stand on, Darkman truly enjoys exacting revenge on the goons who wronged him in the cruelest ways he can possibly devise.

It’s not just remarkable to me that Sam Raimi happened to direct a movie I enjoyed. What’s most surprising is the ways that Darkman couldn’t have been made by any other auteur. Raimi’s personal aesthetic is what makes the film work and although he could’ve easily allowed the formula to go off the rails (he really wanted Bruce Campbell in Neeson’s role, which would’ve been a disaster), it’s his own cinematic eye & sadistic sense of humor that makes it such an iconic accomplishment. With Batman, Burton had brought comic book movies out of the dark ages, proving that superhero media wasn’t just the goofy kids’ media of Adam West yesteryear. Raimi combined both those extremes, the gritty & the goofy, in Darkman in an entirely idiosyncratic way (as Burton also would in the similarly masterful Batman Returns). The film indulged in some Batman-esque brooding, especially in its noir lighting & in introspective lines like “The dark, what secrets does it hold?”, but those elements are all so over-the-top in their inherent ridiculousness that there’s never any sense that Raimi is doing anything but having fun.

Although Darkman isn’t technically a comic book adaptation it exudes comic book media in every frame. Darkman‘s onslaught of drastic Dutch angles, 1st person shooter POV, Oingo Boingo circus aesthetic, Alterted States-esque hallucinations, and wild tangents of practical effects gore all feel both like classic comic book imagery & classic Sam Raimi. I can’t speak too decisively on the entirety of Raimi’s catalog since there are more than a few titles I’ve intentionally skipped over, but I can say for sure that the director has at least one certified masterpiece of goofball cinema under his belt: Darkman. It’s a work that not only surprised me by becoming an instant personal favorite, but also by inspiring me to consider giving Raimi’s catalog a closer second look to see if he ever repeated the trick.

-Brandon Ledet

Batkid Begins (2015)

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threehalfstar

While preparing for a recent review of the 90s Franky Muniz/Jack Russell terrier sapfest My Dog Skip, I ran across this Ebert pullquote: “A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.” Ebert might as well have been talking about the recent documentary Batkid Begins in this assessment. Batkid Begins is a document of a six year old leukemia survivor’s Make-a-Wish-fulfilled fantasy in which the entire city of San Fransisco pitched in to help him realize his greatest wish in life, “to be a real Batman”. It’s essentially a feature-length version of a feel-good viral video you might stumble across & skim through on your Facebook feed, but you’d have to be a total monster to not be somewhat touched by the volume & enthusiasm of the generosity on display in the doc. Batkid Begins lays it on thick from the get-go, playing a stripped down choir version of David Bowie’s “Heroes” while the titular superhero tyke is shown realizing his dream of being Batman for a day in slow motion, but none of that emotional manipulation really matters from a critical standpoint. No matter what its tactics are, the movie moves you emotionally.

A son of a fourth generation farmer, young leukemia survivor Miles Scott obviously had no clue that his simple wish “to be a real Batman” would inspire tens of thousands of people to flood San Franciscan streets in a ludicrously large/public display of charity. The Make-a-Wish Foundation representatives who helped dream & orchestrate Miles’s day as a superhero were also overwhelmed by the flood of enthusiastic engagement with their event, which snowballed into a huge, city-wide production. In some ways Batkid Begins is a document of how information is spread from word of mouth to social media to national press, blowing up small, intimate events into worldwide phenomenons. At the center of this chaotic escalation is true life hero & Make-a-Wish coordinator Patricia Wilson, who masterminded much of the Batkid phenomenon from the ground level. She planned Batkid’s entire day, finding a suitable mentor in an adult Batman to lead Miles around (as well as treacherous villains for them to thwart) and engaging city officials like San Francisco’s mayor & chief of police to give the event an air of authenticity in Miles’s imagination. As the event spiraled out of control in terms of scale, Wilson began to think of the necessity to put on a show for the untold thousands of participants & Batkid’s dream ended up becoming something of a public production & a shared fantasy fulfillment. There’s a lot to get emotional about in Batkid Begins, but it’s also interesting on an intellectual level to watch how a small event can become a huge staging through a step by step escalation that the documentary follows in a logical A-B progression. Much of the film is reach-for-your-handkerchief sappiness, but there’s just as much attention payed to the logistics behind the achievement at hand.

Form-wise, Batkid Begins isn’t too flashy in any particular way. Miles’s backstory of heartbreaking cancer recovery through bone marrow biopsies, chemotherapy, and blood transfusions is told through a comic book illustration that sets a tone for the uplifting payoff to come. As the logistics of the event are being mapped out it’s difficult to tell exactly what is being documented as it happens & what is being pieced together after the fact, which is a testament to director Dana Nachman’s visual/editing room sense of storytelling. Miles’s first intro to Batman as a character was through the Adam West television series from the 1960s so the actual stage production of the day is colorful & cheesy enough to meld well with the Hallmark sentimentality on display here. The only thing you can fault the doc for, really, is its emotional provocation. In particular, its  minor`notes piano score & talking head interviews about what superheroes mean to children & adults alike in terms of good vs. evil & bodies vs. illness can both be a little overreaching in their sentimentality. Again, though, it’s difficult to criticize the film too harshly. It exists outside of that language. No matter how many times a stray moment might make you roll your eyes in its mawkishness, there’s no way to fully resist the uplifting nature of the charity on display. Just one gesture of the in-remission Miles flexing his little superhero muscles after stopping the dastardly Riddler or Penguin in their tracks will have you blubbering like a baby. The film might be occasionally saccharine or obvious, but it remains consistently heartwarming throughout.

-Brandon Ledet

The Monster Maker (1944)

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three star

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After being remarkably impressed by the ahead-of-its-time meta horror of 1958’s How to Make a Monster I was curious to know if there were any previous films that similarly depicted movie set horror mayhem. Turning to the very similarly titled 1940’s work The Monster Maker turned out to be a complete dead end in that regard. Despite what you might assume given their near-identical monikers, The Monster Maker is less of a precursor to How to Make a Monster than it is a distant echo of the Bela Lugosi classic The Raven. Both The Monster Maker & The Raven feature mad scientist types with Eastern European accents lusting after young women they meet at concerts who happen to closely resemble their long-deceased wives. If there were any doubt that this connection were a mere coincidence, consider that the wicked Dr. Makoff (aka The Monster Maker) is indicated through close-up shots of his eyes to have hypnotic powers (a Lugosi trademark from the horror legend’s Dracula days) & that his deceased wife’s name was Lenore, the same as Lugosi’s in The Raven & the narrator’s in its Poe-penned source material. I went into The Monster Maker expecting a groundbreaking work of meta horror & ended up watching a photocopy of a far superior work I had already seen.

Derivative or not, The Monster Maker gets by just fine as an old school creepshow. The dastardly Dr. Makoff, inevitably spurned by the woman who resembles his wife, hatches a wicked plan to steal her hand in marriage by any means necessary. Namely, he injects the poor girl’s concert pianist father with “Formula x54” (or some such nonsense) that rapidly debilitates him with a glandular disease with horrific disfigurement of the head & hands among its chief symptoms. As Makoff is the sole expert in the field of this particular disease, all medical roads lead the girl’s now visibly-deformed father back to the wicked doctor’s “care” so he can negotiate for her hand in marriage in exchange for an experimental cure. Makoff does his best to accelerate the severity of the situation, explaining “For a professional pianist, it’s fatal . . . that is, for his career I mean,” and only his morally adept assistant has the power to set the record straight and limit his villainous power. It all amounts to a kind of non-starter of a climactic confrontation, but the film’s “monster” make-up & villainous cruelty make for a suitably entertaining example of classic horror spookiness.

I can’t laud The Monster Maker as a “lost classic” or any other kind of hyperbolic praise, but I will way that the film’s 3% score on the Tomatometer is vastly unjust. The film has its campier flourishes, like when a vicious “gorilla” (read: actor in a gorilla suit) attack materializes out of nowhere in the third act or when Makoff is experimenting with very sciency science equipment in his sciency science lab, but for the most part it works as a grim, small cast horror. Critics at the time of its release complained that the film lacked action in its monster mayhem, but I think what’s much more interesting is the abhorrent behavior of the film’s villain rather than the violence of his “creation”. Makoff has a fascinating, horrifically bleak backstory similar to a Don Draper scenario that wonderfully complicates & darkens his quest to reclaim his connection with his deceased wife that really elevates the film above its campier tendencies in certain moments. If The Monster Maker were released today it would undoubtedly face claims of being “problematic” for the way it treats physical deformity & disability as a source of terror, but given the time of its release I believe those sins can be reasonably forgiven. I went into the film expecting an entirely different kind of monster than what the evil Makoff delivered, but I still enjoyed the inhumane cruelty of its central conflict for what it was as a derivative work of genre cinema.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Make a Monster (1958)

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fourstar

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I had previously complained in a recent review that the film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein had moved away so far from the original formula of its predecessor I Was a Teenage Werewolf that the two films had almost no reason to share a title at all (except, of course, for the former to make a quick dollar off the latter’s notoriety). I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a huge financial & cultural success largely due to its first-ever depiction of a teenager transforming into a murderous monster, a basic concept it’s near-impossible to imagine modern horror without. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was then rushed out within five months of that film’s release and, although it boasted an impressively cruel villain & killer monster design, the film featured no actual teenagers to speak of, completely missing the point of its predecessor’s success. The bridge that actually connects these two disparate works wasn’t to come until a year later.

1958’s How to Make a Monster combines the monsters from I Was a Teenage Werewolf & I Was a Teenage Frankenstein into a single picture, but not in the way that you’d expect. Much like how the second film in the series moved away from the Teenage Werewolf original’s formula for success & originality, How to Make a Monster ventured even further out to sea and somehow found its own legs to stand on as a unique work of meta horror. Instead of staging a logical physical altercation of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein from the previous pictures, How to Make a Monster instead depicts a movie production of that altercation. Set on the American International Pictures movie lot, the film centers on the make-up artist who created the look of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein and his mental unraveling during the production of a film where the two monsters meet onscreen. It’s the exact kind of meta horror weirdness I was a huge sucker for in Wes Craven films like New Nightmare (except maybe a little cheaper & a little goofier) and it works like gangbusters.

Much like with the first two films, the only narrative through-line How to Make a Monster holds with its loosely-connected franchise is the idea of a mad scientist exploiting innocent teenagers in their experimental medicine.  Instead of trying to save the world through treacherous experimentation like in the first two pictures, however, this mad scientist is a make-up artist trying to save the monster movie as a genre. Once he discovers that he’s been laid off by the studio due to the decline in monster movie popularity, our dastardly mastermind applies hypnosis through homemade experimental make-up to turn his two latest creations, Teenage Frankenstein & Teenage Werewolf, into literal monsters that “scare” studio heads into changing their minds . . . by murdering them. There’s a lot of industry talk in How to Make a Monster about the artistry of monster movie make-up, the cycles of genre films’ popularity, typecasting among horror actors, and the “therapeutic” qualities of horror films for audiences that all make the movie feel like a love letter to the industry. A lot of the movie works like a pretty standard monster movie genre piece, but the rest holds such a high reverence for cheap horror as a finely-crafted artistry that its reliance on the genre’s basic tropes actually serve the film well.

If you’re going to watch just one film in this franchise I highly recommend sticking with I Was a Teenage Werewolf. It’s a rare example of a cheap drive-in monster flick that actually finds high art in its genre trappings & taps into the subconscious fears that spring from puberty in an oddly authentic way. However, How to Make a Monster does a great job of molding that past success in horror filmmaking into an entirely new format. It’s a standard monster movie in terms of its monstrous thrills, but it repurposes those tropes into a meta, self-reflective work that genuinely surprised me in its genre innovation. The film functions nicely as a connector between the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein flicks that came before it, but it also stands firmly on its own as a unique work in the 50s drive-in horror genre, especially in the way it reflects on what that genre is & what it means to the American movie-going public.

-Brandon Ledet

Fan Art: Honey I Skunked the Kids

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The dog throws the baseball
through the Raygun Room window
and, of course, all four kids get shrunk
and swept up with Rick Moranis’s skunk weed crumbs.

They fall face-down in the dry stem tree trunks,
look up to find plastic walls Zip-locked shut.

After dark, the sleeping teens wake to Rick’s God-hands
pinching their bodies together in paper bed sheets.
The red cherry sun burns down the forest
as they share their first kiss. Meanwhile,

the younger kids crawl around alien munchie landscapes,
calling out to Rick in synthesized squeaks.

The gang re-unites in the ashtray’s gray mush,
crawls up a balled-up receipt’s crinkled ladders,
and makes itself noticeable in the bifocals
folded on Rick’s stacked 80’s crap comics tower.

Rick, the mid-life crisis scientist with a nerd’s wet lisp,
blows up the kids and sends them dazed to bed
to rest for the morning’s sequels and syndicated TV serials.

-Brandon Ledet

The Skeleton Twins (2014)

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fourstar

In the WWE there’s a little used, very illegal tactic of winning matches known as “twin magic“. This particular form of cheating occurs when wrestlers Brie & Nikki Bella swap places mid-match beyond the ref’s comically limited vision and use their identical twin likeness to win in a dire situation. It’s typical heel behavior, but also very specific to their sisterly gimmick (and also amusing because they barely look similar to one another at this point in time). I mention all this because the idea of “twin magic” exists far beyond the wrestling ring & the concept of confusing twin identities. “Twin magic” can also refer to, in my mind at least, the inexplicable mental link twins seem to have on an almost telepathic level. Twins can sometimes relate to each other in a supernaturally close, metaphysical kind of way that strains our understanding of the basic ways two human minds can communicate with one another. Their connection is, in a word, “magic”.

The recent indie drama The Skeleton Twins opens with an example of “twin magic”much more bleak than any you’re likely to see between pro wrestling’s The Bella Twins. The film opens with estranged twins (played by SNL vets Bill Hader &  Kristen Wiig) both preparing to commit suicide in bathtubs on opposite ends of the country. Spooky. Hader’s attempt is the more “successful” of the two & the shock of the news of her brother’s anguished state brings Wiig to stage a reconciliation after a decade apart. This is about as dark of a place as a movie can start off and, indeed, The Skeleton Twins is sadistically committed to piling on even more tragedy from there. A fuzzy childhood memory of a parent’s death, a past controversy involving a teacher’s sexual exploits with an underage student, and a current struggle with substance & sexual addiction all weigh heavily on the film’s grim proceedings. Another bit of “magic” at work here, however, is how the film’s talented cast & understated writing keep this tragedy from feeling soul-crushingly dour. It’s a sad film, for sure, but it also can be soulfully uplifting & deliriously funny in spurts.

Hader & Wiig have incredible chemistry from their SNL days that sells the The Skeleton Twins‘s central sibling bond much more comfortably & believably than would even be necessary for the movie to work. Wiig has delivered so many of these depressive, self-hating performances in past projects like Welcome to Me & The Diary of a Teenage Girl that at this point her dramatic chops are even more finely tuned than her comedic ones. Hader is more of the newcomer in the soul-crushing cinema game & it’s genuinely fascinating to watch him embody what his character calls “another tragic gay cliche” in a way that feels realistic enough to be genuine. Hader’s twin is more of a tightrope in terms of characterization, since his effete homosexual mannerisms could easily devolve into caricature, but the actor pulls it off in a wholly convincing, endearing way (despite his theater kid theatricality & gothy acerbic sarcasm). Oddly enough, it’s Luke Wilson who steals the show on the comedic front, playing a naive “Labrador retriever” of a dopey husband. Wilson is so on point in this role that he can make the simple act of eating a frozen waffle & talking about his shoes a total knee-slapper of a character beat. Hader & Wiig are more in charge of the film’s lowkey line of pitch black dramedy and it’s their intimate exchanges of sour worldviews & mental anguish that make the film sing in its own quiet, understated way.

I was just complaining that the recent indie drama Adult Beginners failed to coalesce its interesting ideas & talented cast into a cohesive product above anything beyond basic mediocrity. The Skeleton Twins is a perfect example of how the same approach of small stakes understatement & depressive humor can work when it’s handled a little more confidently. The film’s Halloween costume motif is a great example of how a metaphor can be developed with very simple gestures (in this case linking current familial tragedies to ones buried in the past) instead of the way Adult Beginners briefly addresses its central swimming lessons metaphor without any clear intent for its meaning. Both films are, perhaps, exercises in small ambition indie drama, but The Skeleton Twins makes the formula work in an engaging, even devastating way. I don’t know if it’s a case of better writing or the “twin magic” performances of Hader & Wiig that make the difference, but The Skeleton Twins is a shining (and depressing) example of the lowkey indie dramedy done exactly right.

-Brandon Ledet

Adult Beginners (2015)

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three star

Not every film is greater than the sum of its parts. Case in point: the cast for last year’s indie dramedy Adult Beginners is just oozing with talent, but the film itself if a little mushy & muddled in a way that can’t help but underwhelm. A Duplass Bros production starring Nick Kroll, Rose Byrne, Jane Krakowski, Jason Mantzoukas, and Bobby Cannavale sounds like a perfect formula for a lowkey drama with real emotional & comedic staying power, but Adult Beginners struggles to be much more than light entertainment with a promising premise & a failure to launch. The film is serviceably entertaining as decent Sunday afternoon romcom viewing fare, but I expected a little more out of it considering the level of talent involved. It’s an enjoyable film, but not a particularly efficient or memorable one.

Nick Kroll begins Adult Beginners as a cocaine-addicted sexual deviant with an endless appetite for greedy monetary gains, displays of power, and notoriety among his sycophant peers. In other words he’s a run of the mill NYC business man (in movie speak, at least). When his empire inevitably crumbles & he becomes a business world pariah, he has to move back home under the roof of his somewhat estranged sister (Byrne) & her increasingly emotionally distant husband (Cannavale). In order to pull his weight & learn humility, Kroll’s heartless business prick must care for the stressed couple’s hyperactive child Teddy,. He treats Teddy like a monstrous terror, but the truth is the kid is just a perfectly normal toddler. Not much changes once this comedic set up is established. The family learns to adjust & become comfortable with its unexpected shift in household dynamic & Kroll’s broken protagonist learns to become comfortable acting like a decent, empathetic human being. Throw in a third act crisis to shake things up a bit & a rapid resolution to that last minute monkey wrench and you have your basic outline of a typical romcom-style dramedy with an exceedingly charming cast.

Part of the reason why Adult Beginners is so frustrating is that it could’ve been so much more than that kind of charming, but ambitionless middle ground. I smelled trouble as soon as the opening scroll announced a “Story By” credit for three different writers (Kroll among them). At Adult Beginners‘s worst moments it feels like it was compiled from a Frankenscript of several half-cooked stories that didn’t quite come together as a cohesive whole. Byrne’s stressed out mother has troubling alcohol addiction & workplace politics issues that threaten to complicate her livelihood & her pregnancy, but never amount to any clear kind of narrative conflict. Kroll’s business douche protagonist never really shows any personal growth or epiphany within the film other than growing increasingly comfortably with his role as a “manny” (man nanny). Cannavale’s gloomy husband admits his mistake in growing distant, but the couple’s reconciliation is never on public display. Worse yet, the film’s central/titular metaphor about an “adult beginners” swimming class is lazily introduced & referenced only briefly, never materializing into anything too significant or incisive. It’s tempting to think of these half-cooked ideas as intentionally understated narrative & character beats, but the film never really earns enough confidence to warrant that kind of patience & understanding. It’s a messy movie that only remains endearing through the sheer will of its talented cast. It’s not something I’d recommend as a greatly orchestrated, highly impactful small scale drama, but it’ll do as light viewing when you’re in need of this kind of cinematic comfort food. The letdown is that there are germs of two or three much better movies lurking just right under the surface of that mediocrity.

-Brandon Ledet

Cooties (2015)

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threehalfstar

campstamp

I’ve become increasingly fascinated with Rainn Wilson’s career choices in recent years. Every now & then he’ll put in great dramatic character work (like in last year’s excellent psychological horror The Boy), but for the most part Wilson’s choices in movie roles seem to amount to almost Dwight Schrute levels of misanthropic nerdiness.He played a low-rent superhero in James Gunn’s Super, a megalomaniac supervillain in the AI sci-fi cheapie Uncanny, a depressed schlub in the metalhead-oriented dark comedy Hesher, etc. It’s possible that Wilson is being offered roles on the nerd spectrum because of his years as Dwight Schrute, but either way his non-Office work has been fascinating if not only to watch him build a King Nerd catalog of niche projects. Wilson is a great actor I’d love to see get put to bigger purpose in high profile dramas from auteur directors (a Paul Thomas Anderson project would be a perfect fit, to be honest), but for now I genuinely enjoy seeing what niche, nerdy indie production he’ll pop up in next.

To that point, I was delighted to see Rainn Wilson star as a romantic foil in last year’s child zombie horror comedy Cooties. Wilson fills a role that’s more or less legally reserved for David Koechner in these kinds of productions. A small town hick with an ego that’s outsized only by his pic-up truck, Wilson’s villainous cad is a perfectly-casted alpha male counterpoint to Elijah Wood’s diminutive coward novelist protagonist. While working his way through the manuscript of a hilariously inept-sounding novel, Wood’s intellectual weasel protagonist returns to his home town of Fort Chicken, Illinois. Known more for its chicken farming industry than its mental facilities, Chicken Fort is sort of a professional step back for our lowly hero, who has been pursuing a career as a literary author in New York City. He takes a summer job as a substitute teacher along with a cast of eccentrics who most certainly don’t belong in front of children (including among them Jack McBrayer, Nassim Padrad, Allison Pill, and, yes, Rainn Wilson). This comedic setup is a little awkward & labored in away that can be distracting, but Cooties eventually finds a rhythm when it introduces its true bread & butter: zombie mayhem. An infected chicken nugget from one of Fort Chicken’s less-than-stellar food processing plants leads to an outbreak of juvenile mutation that claims all children in sight into its murderous army & dismembers every adult who dares exist in its general vicinity. Lots of gore & viscera ensue, as does grade school-themed horror comedy.

What best separates Cooties from the 10,001 zombie horror comedies of the last decade is its gleeful exploitation of its grade school setting. Its tiny child terrors are foul mouthed monsters before they’re infected by a rotten chicken nugget & turned into bloodthirsty cretins. They eat boogers, rough house, and bully each other with teasing like “If my butthole had a butthole, that’s what you’d look like.” When the titular cooties epidemic first spreads across the playground it’s almost mistakable for typical childhood play. It’s only until you squint closer that you realize the kids are using as severed head for a tether ball, eyeballs for marbles, intestines for jump rope, etc. Cooties may be a dirt cheap horror comedy, but it finds a downright lyrical, disorienting visual language in the spread of its central epidemic. You feel like a little kid who just spun too fast while playing ring around the rosie watching the film’s violence unfold. It’s fun to watch as a horror fan, but it must’ve been even more fun to film for the little kids who got the chance, given how much of the film’s violence resembles typical playground activity.

I could single out almost any performance in this film as being of interest, as its small cast of oddball comedic personalities are an eternally underutilized crew of talents. Elijah Wood in particular has been building just as much of a nerdy career & even cosigned this film as a producer. Still, I think Rainn Wilson’s role as the brutish alpha male romantic foil is the film’s most significant addition to the cast in terms of his career. There’s a point in Cooties when Wilson suits up in Turbo Kid-style armor using gymnasium equipment (directly referencing the action film suiting-up montages of classic titles like Commando) that pretty much seals his position as the films’ most interesting player. Wilson brings a highly specific form of hearty enthusiasm to the screen here is less like Dwight Schrute than it is like his horror geek victim in House of 1000 Corpses. I like to think that the reason he keeps popping up in these genre pics is that he’s a genuine fan & is more than merely collecting paychecks. Given the limited artistic & financial scope of films like Cooties, it’s doubtful that he’s in the nerd market for the money, but it does look like he’s having fun.

-Brandon Ledet