Year: 2016

Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

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threehalfstar

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I honestly don’t expect a lot out of my genre films in terms of dialogue or narrative. The most tepid performances & the most dully hamfisted morality play plot structures are totally excusable to me as long as the film can make up for its shortcomings in terms of style. Something that really tickled me about the time travel sci-fi cheapie Beyond the Time Barrier is that it wholly commits its entire style/aesthetic to a single-minded image: the triangle. According to this film everything in the future is made of triangles: doorways, TV screens, desks, windows, goatees. Even the (too frequent) transitional wipes between scenes are triangle shaped, a choice that dives head first into stylistic overkill. Beyond the Time Barrier‘s anti-nuclear war message wasn’t likely to stand out too much amidst much better films with the same technology-has-gone-too-far-too-fast sentiment: Godzilla, Them!, The Fly, etc. The way it wholly commits to an all-triangles future makes for an interesting, memorable look for such a dinky little cheapie, though, and I have great respect for genre films with that kind of stylistic followthrough.

A US Air Force pilot in the dead center of the Cold War space race flies a newly designed aircraft into the upper atmosphere that speeds beyond the sound barrier, breaking “the time barrier” and landing in the year 2024. After a brief 28 Days Later style tour of Earth’s desolated surface (something to look forward to next election cycle, I guess), he becomes a victim of a surveillance state tasing, gets dragged to an Oz-like “citadel,” and is imprisoned in a bell jar. His new temporal home is a sort of space age variation on the HG Wells classic The Time Machine. Radioactive mutants roaming the wasteland outside the citadel are rounded up & imprisoned underground (behind trangle-shaped jail cell bars, of course). Those not fully mutated were left sterile & abandoned by the humans who escaped to the new colonies on Venus & Mars. They plan to breed their latest captor, the American alpha male pilot, with their last hope: a telepathic mute daughter of their new nobility. She is a strange cocktail of the ideal 1950s macho male fantasy (cheerful, quiet, smart, obedient), but our hero longs to return to his own time anyway, escaping a life as a future-gigolo so that he can selflessly warn the people of Earth that their Cold War nuclear proliferation will lead to a global plague. The variation in the plot here is that the planet never had a chance to be destroyed in a nuclear war because merely testing the bombs poisoned the atmosphere enough to cause a global unraveling, but otherwise it’s not so different from any other atomic age paranoia sci-fi you can conjure. It just happens to feature more triangles than you’re used to.

Does our hero make it back to his own time to warn the people of Earth about the consequences of their evil atomic ways? I’ll bet you can answer that question for yourself. Again, there’s nothing especially radical about Beyond the Time Barrier in terms of narrative, but the film does manage to get by on the strength of its detail. Besides the Mid-Century Modern sleekness of its triangular future world, the film also features some nifty moments of plague-zombie chaos and a cool Twilight Zone reveal about how time travel can drastically affect the way your body ages. Of course, with a genre film this evidently cheap there’s going to be details that are only good for a laugh: Ed Woodian reliance on stock footage, oscillating bleep bloop machines, adorably pathetic aircraft miniatures, brushed off explanations of psuedo-science peppered with phrases like “certain mathematical equations . . .”; you get the picture. A little camp value is more than welcome in a small scale genre picture like this, though. Beyond the Time Barrier is efficient in its omni-triangle futurism, and consistently goofy in its heavy-handed sci-fi browbeating. As someone who watches way too many of these things on a regular basis, I can gladly say that was more than enough to make this one worthwhile. I’ve seen plenty of other films with the exact same basic structure play out with much less entertainment value & far less style, even if all of this film’s style was tossed in one trangle-shaped basket.

-Brandon Ledet

The Iron Giant (1999)

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fourhalfstar

I was a little surprised last year when Brad Bird’s live action Disney sci-fi epic Tomorrowland failed to find an audience, but I probably shouldn’t have been. For some reason, atomic age sci-fi throwbacks have an iffy history among moviegoing audiences, which has played to the detriment of films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The Rocketeer, despite (in my mind) the genre’s easy likability. Given this track record, I guess what should more surprising than Tomorrowland’s lackluster response would be Brad Bird’s past success with making an actually popular atomic age throwback in the late 90s. The problem is that success was entirely critical & the movie financially flopped.

Brad Bird’s directorial debut, The Iron Giant, has earned a glowing reputation in the years since its release, but it bombed hard in the theaters, losing more than half of its production budget. I don’t know what it is about atomic age sci-fi that lends itself to slow-building goodwill instead of immediate success. Perhaps the era’s clean-cut suburban earnestness suggests a hokey aesthetic people associate with microwave popcorn on the couch VHS rentals instead of large group family outings to theater. Whatever the cause, Bird’s two stabs at the genre have both proven to be gambled-and-lost endeavors financially for major studios who’ve backed him. The difference between them is that The Iron Giant has had a consistently strong critical reception since its release, one that’s only grown as the children who did happen to catch it in the VHS rental era of their lifespan have grown up remembering it fondly. No word yet on if Tomorrowland will enjoy a similar kind of longevity in the public imagination, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The Iron Giant is an animated tearjerker about two out-of-place misfits who form an all-too brief friendship in the face of a world hellbent on tearing them down. One friend is a loner nerd middle school student who fills his days with adopting strange pets & his nights with watching 50s sci-fi schlock on television broadcasts. The other is a seamless combination of those two interests: a physically damaged space alien robot with the mind of a child. The unlikely pair form a sort of dual coming of age story while hanging out in a beatnik’s junkyard & evading persistent inquiries from the NSA. The human boy learns to take on responsibility & to adopt a “Who cares what those creeps think?” attitude towards his bullies. The gigantic robot learns to hate the very thing he’s designed to be (war & weaponry) & to exercise free will in a way that allows him to overcome his nature. Their greatest enemy is a warmongering G-Man just drooling to see the alien “invader” destroyed & their story plays out against a Cold War suburbia backdrop that contrasts the innocence of carefree youth with details like a duck-and-cover nuclear bomb scare film titled ATOMIC HOLOCAUST. Perhaps the film’s greatest accomplishment is how it provides a satisfying arc for both the boy and the robot, as well as an emotionally taxing climax, all while feeling like a relaxed hangout film about two buds being buds.

There’s a lot of interesting technical aspects to The Iron Giant that suggest Brad Bird came out of the gate as a strong directorial talent. First of all, the film knows the source material it’s evoking quite well, cobbling together plots from other sci-fi fare like Superman comics, giant robot stories, and alien invasion features into a single, The Day the Earth Stood Still-style parable that makes great use of its various influences. The film also looks like a feature-length adaptation of a toy raygun, perhaps the most accurate evocation of the era’s style since Joe Dante’s Matinee. I’m not a huge fan of CG animation, but the way The Iron Giant‘s computer graphics mix with its hand drawn style actually serves the mechanical nature of its subject matter quite well. Even the sound design is on point, pulling great period setting authenticity from The Coasters song “Searching” & utilizing a rusted metal vocal performance from a Groot-mode Vin Diesel as the titular robot without overworking the gimmick. Bird’s first feature is an amazingly balanced work that impresses both in its narrative & technical proficiency as well as its ability to inspire a genuine emotional response. It’s downright bizarre that it didn’t immediately strike gold at the box office, but it’s also no wonder that it eventually found an enthusiastic audience once it hit home release.

Having only seen The Iron Giant & Tomorrowland once a piece, I can confirm that the former is the better work & totally deserving of its reputation as such. I’d like to think that there’s enough room in the world’s heart for both atomic age children’s epics to earn long-term success, though, and I hope Tomorrowland eventually joins The Iron Giant’s ranks as an initially-overlooked crowd favorite. If nothing else I’d just like to see its esteem grow so Brad Bird could maybe, just maybe, find funding for a third product within the genre, despite its reputation as box office poison. He’s damn good at making these things & I honestly believe his two entries in the genre are his best, most personally distinct work to date (no offense to the diehard Pixar crowd who’d likely stand up for The Incredibles or Ratatouille in that regard). We don’t have many directors working who still understand the appeal of the genre as Brad Bird & it’d be a shame to let something as pedestrian as money stop him from making more.

-Brandon Ledet

Moonlight (2016)

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fourstar

I had a certain amount of anxiety going into Moonlight that the film might slip into a lot of the clichés queer dramas often succumb to. Specifically, I didn’t want to suffer through yet another devastating tragedy where being homosexual meant an automatic death sentence & the audience was made to feel awful about the cruel world we live in that killed the fictional character the film created. A lot of the once-controversial empathy in those narratives has become so stale & so dispiriting at this point, while openly celebratory or even normalized queer narratives remain a rarity in major cinematic releases. As a queer drama set in an impoverished POC community in the South that deals with both drug abuse & childhood bullying, Moonlight had plenty of room to slip into this familiarly dour mediocrity. My anxiety wasn’t entirely off-base, as the film does traffic in a justifiably sad, tragic tone for a large bulk of its runtime, but there’s no honest way to claim that Moonlight is at all a more-of-the-same cliché, queer cinema or otherwise. Director Barry Jenkins delivers something much more wonderfully strange & strangely wonderful than what I could have expected, feared, or hoped for based on the film’s advertising. Moonlight is its own singular experience. It cannot be understood through the trappings of any genre convention.

A large part of what abstracts Moonlight and saves it from dramatic banality is its basic structure as a triptych. Bedsides functioning as a queer narrative about how homosexual desire violently clashes with traditional ideas of black masculinity in the modern world, the film also works as a coming of age & self-acceptance story for a single man who’s forced to navigate & survive that clash. We see Chiron as a child, a teenager, and an adult man. All three stages are portrayed by different actors. All three are devastatingly lonely. All three desperately hang onto the small displays of tenderness & solidarity they can scrape together in a world that considers their very existence an act of violence. Chiron is an amalgamation of varied struggles under social & economic pressures he was born into without asking. As the audience pieces together what these three parts of his life amount to when assembled into an single character, Chiron attempts to make sense of himself in a similar way. A more conventional movie might have been attempted to span his entire life, like in a sap-coated biopic, but instead we get glimpses of thee formative moments, each alternating between tenderness & abuse from minute to minute. Narrowing down Chiron’s life to these temporal snapshots allows us to dive deep into the character instead of casually empathizing from the surface. And the result is not nearly as bleak as I’m making it sound here, I promise.

Jenkins somehow, miraculously finds a way to make this meditation on self-conflict, abuse, loneliness, addiction, and homophobic violence feel like a spiritual revelation, a cathartic release. So much of this hinges on visual abstraction. We sink into Chiron’s dreams. We share in his romantic gaze. Time & sound fall out of sync when life hits him like a ton of bricks, whether positively or negatively. The camera lingers on the beauty of multi-color lights reflected off black skin (perhaps in a nod to the stage play source material In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue). My eyes welled up with tears at various times during Moonlight, but it wasn’t always in disgust with how cruel the world can be to a black, queer man struggling to emulate traditional modes of masculinity. Sometimes it was the slightest, most microscopic physical or emotional displays of support & solidarity that stirred a reaction in me. Barry Jenkins managed to pilot a potentially middling, by the books queer drama away from woe & despair mediocrity into an ultimately life-affirming adoption of Under the Skin levels of visual & aural abstraction. With Moonlight, he sidestepped an infinite number of filmmaking pitfalls to deliver something truly precious, a fascinating work the world is lucky to have seen materialize out of the mist.

-Brandon Ledet

Certain Women (2016)

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threehalfstar

There’s a growing cult following for writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s work that I don’t yet fully understand, as I’ve only seen a couple of her pictures to date. As with the Michelle Williams canine drama Wendy & Lucy, perhaps Reichardt’s most well-known film, the recent release Certain Women didn’t quite hit me with the full, emotionally devastating force it has with some critics. For me, Reichardt’s work has the impact of an encroaching tide, not a crashing tidal wave. I leave her films quietly sad, subtly moved, but not rocked to my core. Certain Women finds Reichardt telling three separate stories in a loosely connected anthology, each vignette beginning & ending on an open, ominous note like the movie equivalent of distant, lightningless thunder. I understand how certain audiences can latch onto this less-is-more approach to storytelling and easily sink into Reichardt’s quiet, but confident filmmaking style, but I can never get past feeling like an appreciative observer, casually peeking into an uncovered windows as I stroll by unchanged, but intrigued.

Honestly, this is the kind of movie I would typically wait to watch until it reached a convenient at-home state of availability. There’s no visual poetry or genre thrill to Certain Women that’s especially enhanced by watching it large, loud, and with a crowd. I mostly turned up at the theater for this title because of the talent promised in the cast. Besides the consistently rewarding Reichardt alum Michelle Williams, Certain Women also boasts featured performances from Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, two immensely talented & eternally undervalued actors I respect deeply. A great, front & center performance from Dern is always worth cherishing, considering the surprising rarity of her lead roles, but I have to admit Stewart’s inclusion is what really perked my ears in this case. Stewart has a quiet, measured presence in her dramatic roles I imagined would be a perfect fit for Reichardt’s own dedication to discipline & subtlety, an expectation that payed off nicely. Their pairing here makes for an all-too-appropriate director-actor team-up and, although I’ll readily admit I’m a much bigger fan of Stewart’s, I’d love to see them continue to work together on future projects just because their wavelengths are already so in sync.

Williams plays a contractor attempting to secure a delicate businesses deal for precious sandstone building materials she desires for her own home. Dern is a lawyer frustrated with an increasingly unhinged client who won’t accept the finality of a failed workman’s comp claim. Stewart, who is admittedly in the second bill slot in her segment, plays a young lawyer & night class teacher who becomes the unrequited target for flirtation from a lonely horse rancher. Each segment has stray themes and details that make them feel connected in a significant way: a shared character, a clear dichotomy between blue collar workers & their wealthy employers, the way men can undercut a woman’s authority without even noticing, etc. It’s really Reichardt’s understated gaze at desolate Midwestern expanse & small town relationships that makes the film function as a single unit, though. The routine of horses feeding, the dim lighting of strip malls & late night diners, a title credits scroll over a slow moving train; there’s a quiet frustration in Certain Women‘s imagery that links its individual parts together more than any of its overarching narratives strive to.

Kelly Reichardt guides this film with a confident command. As the writer, director, and editor, she holds a godlike control over the production that results in a work unmistakably her own, yet confoundingly light on stylistic flourish. Much like Todd Solondz’s recent anthology-style film Wiener-Dog, Certain Women finds a director delivering exactly what they’re known for, except dissected & presented in isolated pieces, almost like a career retrospective or an artist’s manifesto. A major difference, though, is that Reichardt’s work intentionally avoids grand, sweeping statements, so it’s all too easy to overlook the immensity of what’s covered in the film. Certain Women doesn’t aim for the earnest lyricism of an American Honey. It’s a very different portrait of Nowhere America, one deliberately dulled by an almost absent score & a filter of digital grain.

Personally, I usually look for a little visual poetry and cinematic escapism in my movies. Reichardt’s filmmaking style is a little outside my comfort zone, to put it mildly. I do think she has a great way of framing disciplined & meaningful performances from her actors, though. Williams, Dern, and Stewart all convey an impressive range of humanity here (along with Lily Gladstone, who is devastatingly effective as the horse rancher) without calling attention to themselves in a way a more obnoxious drama would invite. There’s a lot I admire in Reichardt’s work, but it’s the stage & environment she sets for her actors that keeps me coming back for more. I’ve yet to wholly fall in love with one of her films, but the dramatic performances they deliver consistently make the effort worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Atomic Rulers of the World (1964)

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threehalfstar

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It almost seems unfair to review the public domain cheapie Atomic Rulers of the World as a legitimate feature film, because it has such a ludicrous pedigree. Edited together for American television from two Japanese shorts in a series titled Super Giant, this is a work that just barely qualifies as proper cinema. As far as made-for-TV schlock goes, though, Atomic Rulers is too fun to resist. In a melting pot plot of for-kids camp that touches on sci-fi, espionage, and Adam West-era Batman vibes in its all-encompassing quest for genre thrills, Atomic Rulers of the World is a live action comic book sugar blast that literally & figuratively represents the best of old-fashioned serial storytelling. The first of four films following the out-of-this-world superhero Starman as he attempts to save Earth from destroying itself in a nuclear holocaust, Atomic Rulers looks, feels, and resonates like comic book camp. In a modern context, where all comic book cinema is super serious & adult-oriented, though, its particular band of Saturday morning inanity is oddly infectious.

There are several more infamous superheros Starman could be compared to (as well as some more obscure reference points like Fletcher Hanks’s Stardust character), but there’s no clearer reflection of his character than, arguably the most famous superhero of all time, Superman. Like Superman, Starman is a bulletproof alien with movie star handsomeness, inhuman strength, and a frequent indulgence in green screen flight. The only aspects he’s missing are the adoptive parents & laser beam eyes. Instead of crash landing in Kansas as a wee babe, Starman lives on a distant world known simply as The Emerald Planet. The high council of The Emerald Planet (who look like every episode of the 1950s Dr. Who series smashed together as a dinner party theme) becomes concerned with Earth’s impending doom as the radiation from atomic weapons testing leaks from the atmosphere & poisons other worlds. They deploy Starman, who can master intergalactic flight without any kind of vessel, to stop an evil nation from deploying “atomic superweapons” that would lead to intentional nuclear peril. The alien superhero occasionally does Superman-esque things like landing on the outside of the airplanes to physically steady their landings or alternating between skin-tight supergear & sharply tailored suits, but for the most part Starman acts as a solo agent in Cold War espionage. When a gangster accuses, “You’re a police agent!” he responds “Not of this earth,” which isn’t exactly a denial. By the time he fences like a swashbuckler & engages at length in hand-to-hand martial arts, Starman seemingly encompasses all genre film cliché in a single vessel, but Superman certainly provides his basic framework.

Paced & narrated for television, Atomic Rulers of the World occasionally suffers a boring stretch of narrative or a rigidly episodic story structure, but it’s a format that works well in a superhero cinema context. In the first half of the film, Starman sets out to rescue an orphan boy kidnapped by an evil organization attempting to hold Japan hostage with “atomic superweapons.” In the second half, he has to rescue a second hostage, this time a young woman, while thwarting the impending nuclear holocaust. As this was made for 1960s children’s television, it goes without saying that Starman succeeds in both instances (even though one encounter ludicrously requires him to survive a mini-nuke in an enclosed space). If I hadn’t known that there were three more Starman films to follow, I might have found the story a little slight, but it at least feels totally self-contained. At the end of the movie Starman decides not to destroy the atomic superweapon, but to return it to the “good guys,” urging them to “use it for peace.” It’s a simplistic solution for a massively complex problem (that still hasn’t been solved half a century later), but it still works well enough as a standalone product in an episodic series. I’ve certainly seen films in the MCU with less in-the-moment stakes & frustratingly unresolved “until next time” conclusions.

Anyone who’s curious about watching Atomic Rulers of the World isn’t likely all that interested in the film’s narrative ambition, though, and it’s a work that survives largely on the novelty of its multi-genre thrills. The villainous nuclear cult that plans to take Japan hostage boasts some interesting details in the meth lab futurism of their secret base & their preferred execution method of the world’s most convoluted, slow-moving guillotine. There’s also a quaint charm to the film’s cheap production design, with its half-assed dubbing & green screen flight. The real joy of Atomic Rulers, however, is the introduction of intergalactic superhero Starman. Actor Ken Utsui’s near nude outer space get-up & everything-to-everyone invincibility/versatility turns the character into something of a campy joke, but I do have a strong nostalgia for this kind of over-the-top cartoon superhero media. Some of Atomic Rulers‘s best moments are when Starman is simply delighting an orphanage full of kids who ooh & ahh as he demonstrates his ability to fly or to mangle firearms with his bare hands. I often found myself getting giddy right along with those impressed & overwhelmed tykes, as Starman is a high camp superhero I didn’t know I needed back in my life until Atomic Rulers showed me the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Cheerleader (2016)

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fourstar

One of the more overlooked aspects of the 90s was just how strong its high school comedies were. Titles like Clueless, But I’m a Cheerleader, Bring It On, Election, Jawbreaker, and 10 Things I Hate About You don’t get nearly enough credit for being some of the most playfully subversive and visually meticulous comedies of the past few decades. Every now and then we’ll see an admirable throwback to that era that pretty well captures the vibe: Mean Girls, The To Do List, The DUFF, etc. However, with the new microbudget indie release (& debut feature for writer-director Irving Franco), Cheerleader, we see the 90s high school comedy contorted into an entirely different, newly exciting beast. Cheerleader is a surprisingly dark comedy that repurposes the subversive bubblegum pop of 90s teen movies for a quietly surreal fantasy piece. The film exists in a cartoon reality of its own outside time & logic and uses familiar teen comedy beats to establish a darkly surreal mood and a tender mode of complete emotional devastation. It’s subtly brilliant, quietly intricate, and deserves the mass attention of wide distribution, especially considering the way it evokes an era of currently bankable nostalgia by reimagining instead of merely mimicking.

Helping establish its function as a fantasy piece, Cheerleader deals strictly in archetypes: The Jock, The Burnout, The Gossip Queen, Her Cohorts, etc. Their high school hierarchy is disrupted when the Popular Girl cheerleader sets up a date with the Total Nerd loser in order to make her on again/off again boyfriend, The Jock, jealous. While on the date Mickey discovers that she actually has genuine feelings for the hopelessly awkward Buttons. It’s an unexpected turn that not only throws off her plans to rouse jealousy in both her captain of the basketball team beau & her too old to still be in high school scumbag of a secret lover side fling, but also reveals to her what true desire feels like. While trying to make a big deal out of silly high school mind games Mickey accidentally discovers something that is a Big Deal, but can’t wrap her mind around how to work it into her already set in stone public persona.

Told from Mickey’s perspective, Cheerleader starts with a gentle mocking tone that pokes fun at the way its protagonist gets lost in thoughts like, “It’s nice to look nice or feel good or whatever” and the way she constantly thinks aloud, qualifying each statement with a “I think,” “I feel,” “I guess,” . . . or whatever. As you get to know her, though, her anxiety about being eternally self-aware about her public image & her constant need to feel desired takes on a decidedly tragic air. That’s why it hurts so much that when she actually experiences that genuine attraction from the equally self-conscious & anxious Buttons, she’s not sure what to do and mostly just allows herself to mentally & emotionally detach. The film starts like a lightly satirical comedy, but it morphs into something much darker & more empathetic over time.

One of the more immediately striking aspects of Cheerleader is its intensely meticulous visual palette. This film is 100% Tumblr-ready. Although its temporal setting is never made explicit, its timeline seems to fall somewhere between 1988-1992. Pastel windbreakers, Max Headroom-style screensavers, notebook grid wallpaper, French fries, and scrunchies map out a familiar era of past fashion & graphic design, but serve more to exaggerate an artificial fantasy space than to generate nostalgia. In Cheerleader‘s more lyrical moments the nonsense computer graphics of Buttons’s garage full of bleep bloop machines eat up the entire screen & serve to amplify the ever-intensifying unraveling of Mickey’s internal psyche. For a film so wrapped up in the meaningless machinations of high school relationships between 2D archetypes, it’s incredible how much of Cheerleader‘s visual palette plays like a quietly psychedelic art piece.

It’s so easy to get wrapped up & lost in Cheerleader‘s visual detail: the pink & blue lights, the gold eyeliner, the light-up make-up mirrors. This is an intensely sensual film. The atmospheric loops of its dreamlike score sound like the opening sample to a hip-hop song where the beat never actually drops. There’s a purpose to that sensory disorientation that extends far beyond art for art’s sake surrealism, though. Cheerleader creates an artificial environment and populates it with cookie cutter archetypes, but uses those pieces like players in a stage play to dig into some upsetting revelations about internal & external pressures on the teen psyche.

I’ve seen that same artificiality put to similar use in the best teen comedies of the 90s (Clueless & But I’m a Cheerleader being personal favorites), but nothing about Cheerleader plays like a going through the motions retread. The film quietly & confidently carves out its own loopy, dreamlike space within that genre that plays much more like deliberate subversion than empty nostalgia. It’s a consistently surprising work that at once functions as a satirical comedy, a doomed romance, and a surreal mental health drama without any of those individual parts conflicting with each other, a difficult balance to strike considering its dedication to subtlety & tenderness. I hope it gains more traction as more people get to see it, because I could easily see a (much-deserved) cult following easily forming around it.

-Brandon Ledet

My First Kiss and the People Involved (2016)

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threehalfstar

A grainy digital camera indie about a group of mental patients in a halfway home, you might be tempted to brush off My First Kiss and the People Involved as something that can easily be understood & forgotten within its opening minutes of lyrical daydreaming. It’s not the film you’re expecting. Surely, My First Kiss and the People Involved traffics in the standard indie drama empathy inherent to small scale films about systemic mental health care. However, it also mirrors the helplessness & delusion of its disenfranchised subjects by veering into the unexpected territory of a psychological horror. At times, the film’s tense paranoia & dread of sudden violence plays like the silent horror classic A Page of Madness by way of a classic Hitchcock thriller, which is not at all the expectation or precedent it sets in its more tender, but familiar first act.

Our window into the goings on of the halfway home is a wordless, listless patient named Sam. As she’s largely nonverbal & extremely sensitive to sensory overload, we specifically experience this world through her hands & singsong daydreams. The movie opens with Sam getting lost in small details: pinwheels, spider webs, flowers, magazine advertisements, television static. In a way she’s the world’s least reliable narrator, in that she doesn’t have the ability to narrate. We just watch her navigate a chaotic space in a daze, which is perfectly fine with the film’s early, minor events. Her quiet, easily-overloaded perspective adds an air of lyricism to her housemates’/fellow patients’ negotiations about movie night or living room masquerades or introduction to a cute rabbit as a household pet. Things get too intense when Sam starts to feel romantic stirrings for a fellow patient, though. That anxiety fully kicks into gear with her witnessing a possible murder, a traumatic event she can’t report or communicate to the outside world due to the limitations set by her particular condition.

Out-of-nowhere actor India Menuez is having a great year professionally, appearing in supporting roles in the two much-hyped indies White Girl & Nocturnal Animals. Her starring turn as Sam in My First Kiss and the People Involved offers a much quieter, tenderer showcase of her talents than those smaller roles are likely to, though. We experience the world through her physical touch & her internal paranoia. When a rabbit appears to speak or when a boy leans in for a too-much-too-soon intimacy we’re dazed in the same overwhelmed, disjointed mind frame. There’s something of a 90s indie movie vibe in My First Kiss’s more familiar aspects. The grainy digital haze, the Courtney Love vibes in its more tragic counselor and the ripped up & faded blue jeans all recall the era. Where a 90s work might’ve stopped at generating empathy for its vulnerable, fractured protagonist, however, this film pushes further into the paranoia of a psychological horror, forcing the audience to perceive the world through that vulnerable lens instead of merely pitying it. Menuez does a great job of anchoring the empathy in this way, bringing a light, but frustrated tenderness to a role that requires surgical precision to work. The film does its best to surprise & subvert expectations within the confines of its means & genre, but it’s Menuez’s performance that allows that subversion to hit with full, meaningful impact.

-Brandon Ledet

Miss Hokusai (2016)

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fourstar

Brandon directed us to keep it spooky this past October, and although that’s normally my forte, there was a dearth of time to check out much horror goodness this past month (notably, my only review last month was of Magnificent Seven, while my review of tense anxiety-driven thriller Don’t Breathe found itself online during September). I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of the animated feature Miss Hokusai, which, despite not being a scary movie, does have a lot of the hallmarks thereof: ghosts, dragons, demons, and spectres.

The film exists less as a straightforward narrative and more as a series of vignettes that depict short periods of time in the life of Katsushika Ōi, the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai, a painter most well known in the west for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which I (and probably you) had a poster of in college. Plot descriptions of the film imply that the plot will largely center on the fact that Ōi was herself a painter whose own work was overshadowed by her more famous father, but this is actually a relatively minor element. The most overarching themes are Hokusai’s failure as a father to Ōi’s blind younger sister O-Nao (a character invented for the narrative), whom he ignores in favor of his work and because he feels responsible, as well as Ōi’s attempts to transcend her own artistic limitations. Along the way, she fends off an overzealous suitor and spends time with O-Nao, taking her for walks and treats.

The more striking visual elements come largely from dream sequences and a few scattered moments of magical realism. Most notably, a dragon that Ōi paints (after ruining Katsushika’s painting of the same) appears in the sky over their humble abode, and a courtesan whose neck is rumored to grow overnight is shown to have a spectral head that leaves her body in the night and attempts to fly away, but is kept in check by bed netting. In another sequence, a woman is haunted by dreams of Hell and the demons therein after receiving one of Ōi’s paintings depicting just that scene; Katsushika must correct this error by including an image of salvation in a tiny corner, underlining the apparent message that art releases beauty and terror into the world in equal measure. Ōi herself is also haunted by strange dreams of being trampled by gods when she realizes that O-Nao will die, and that the young girl fears damnation because her handicap prevents her from being a “good daughter” to her parents.

There’s a lot more going on in Miss Hokusai than is first apparent, but the film is not without its flaws either. The vignette nature of the film leaves something to be desired narratively, and there are musical choices that are, frankly, puzzling. Still, this is a beautiful movie with images that intrigue and disquiet, and it’s well worth watching if you can track down a screening.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Unknown Terror (1957)

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three star

Common wisdom tends to posit Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as an art film upheaval of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, but I think there’s something undeniably pulpy in the film’s final act that compromises that reading. Marlon Brando’s infamous performance as Colonel Kurtz is an intensely weird vision of madness that elevates the material in a last minute left turn, but the more I mull over the character the more he plays like a true archetype of a mad villain than a modern subversion of that trope. This rings especially true after watching the drive-in horror cheapie The Unknown Terror. The villain of The Unknown Terror is a mad scientist type who has won over the hearts of a remote Mexican community by “conquering the God of Death” with First World medicines, an act of “charity” that has made him something of an unchecked deity among the locals. Much like Kurtz, the wicked Dr. Ramsey loses control of his hubris and lets the newfound power go straight to his head. He also loses his sanity and becomes enraptured with the natural world, dangerously so. The idea that Dr. Ramsey would be modeled after Kurtz isn’t too much out of the ordinary, given the influential nature of Conrad’s novel, but the way his character is played for cheap drive-in thrills in The Unknown Terror points to a pulp aspect of Brando’s odd mode of scenery chewing in Apocalypse Now, an energy he would later repeat in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Even outside of its context under the umbrella of Heart of Darkness adaptations/bastardizations, The Unknown Terror is still an entertaining slice of schlocky sci-fi horror. In a way it plays like the major studio productions in the decades before its time that promised to have something for everyone: music!, adventure!, romance!, scares!. Yet, it still avoids feeling entirely like cookie cutter tedium, since each of these individual elements are executed surprisingly effectively. The musical performances are badass calypso tunes about a mysterious Cave of the Dead that haunts local superstition, featuring menacing lyrics about how Man has to “suffer to be born again.” The adventure is an Indiana Jones-style spelunking effort meant to retrieve a man lost to the Cueva Muertes, a cave believed to be a physical manifestation of Purgatory, where you can hear the screams of the damned. The romance is a love triangle disturbed by a crippling accident in the past & a seething air of jealousy that bubbles to the surface in the rescue mission attempts to recover the missing explorer in the Cueva Muertes. The scares are, of course, what they find in the cave and what has been driving the once reputable Dr. Ramsey to the point of madness. What Ramsey has been hiding from the villagers is that the screams coming from the Cueva Muertes are not at all the screams of the dead, but rather the screams of the very much alive survivors of his cruel science experiments on unsuspecting human subjects.

The same way the evil scientist of The Flesh Eaters cultivates & weaponizes a pre-existing, natural virus, Dr. Ramsey orchestrates the horrors of The Unknown Terror by cultivating & weaponizing a killer fungus. The Cueva Muertes is covered in a very peculiar fungus that spreads through “binary fusion,” latching onto parasitic hosts, namely humans, and transforming them into hideous fungus monsters.  The visual effects of this cave fungus are more or less on par with what you’d expect from this era of filmmaking. The “monsters” are men in Halloween costume getups. The “fungus” covered set looks like a combination of a Buck Rogers alien terrain & a nightclub foam party with a science fair volcano theme. What makes The Unknown Terror at all memorable is the strength of its ideas within its cookie cutter genre film shape, dragging in the specificity of its Of Human Bondage disability shame & the Heart of Darkness vibes of its mad scientist villain to elevate the auto-pilot material, when it didn’t need to try nearly as hard to fulfill its destiny as double bill drive-in fodder. I would never suggest pairing any film with Apocalypse Now, since Coppola’s supposed masterpiece is already an overlong three hour affair, but I do think The Unknown Terror shines some unexpected light on how that film mixes a little genre film cliché into its overreaching art film ambition, especially when it comes to the character of Kurtz. The Unknown Terror is entertaining enough even without that connection to a beloved 1970s classic, but the way it resembles the standard-issue shape of so many of its contemporaries means it wasn’t likely to be remembered otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Girl Asleep (2016)

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fourstar

There’s only so much twee preciousness some people can handle, so I’m just going to throw out a few cultural references up front to send the haters running: Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson, Napoleon Dynamite, Juno, Miranda July. I can say with total confidence that the surrealist coming of age comedy Girl Asleep is not a by-the-books exercise in twee whimsy that closely resembles any of those particular cultural markers, but I do believe you need to have an enthusiasm for that thematic territory to take delight in its many charms. Romantic awkwardness, paper mache costumes, animated album covers & photographs, piles of origami birds: Girl Asleep is sure to roll many an eye in its Etsy shop dreamscape, but I can’t relate to anyone who would dismiss a film outright for being intensely manicured in its visual palette, yet impressively loose in its blurred divide between reality & fantasy. After championing little-loved titles like The Future, Mood Indigo, and Gentlemen Broncos in the past I may not have the best track record in distinguishing which twee movies are going to delight or annoy general audiences, but I found that Girl Asleep easily fit in the upper tier of that genre, as divisive as it is.

A young teenager (Bethany Whitmore, who provided some voice work for the excellent forgotten gem Mary and Max), suffers a perfect storm of coming of age anxieties on the cusp of her 15th birthday. She moves to a new town. Her parents bicker loudly over their dwindling passion. Her older sister acts out in a way that makes her invisible. The popular girls at her new school bully her into acting the way they see fit and the only boy who’s nice to her wants to become “more than just friends.” All of this culminates in the disastrous pressure put on her when her parents invite the entire school to a birthday celebration she does not want to attend, especially not in the homemade dress they pick out for her. Unable to ease her anxiety entirely through her stress origami, she naps a large chunk of the party away & works through her inner turmoil in a surrealist dreamscape where she turns the journey from girlhood to adulthood into a literal trek across a physical threshold. In her dreamworld her dad takes the form of a grotesque booger monster who wants to “protect” her & make corny jokes into infinity. Her mother is a frigid ice queen. Her romantic stirrings take on overwhelming nightmare vibes. She fights the popular girls with physical force instead of verbal sparring (not unlike in the ludicrous Jane Austen bastardization Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Girl Asleep filters the nerve-racking expectations & pressures of “becoming a woman” through a handmade surrealist fantasy realm and the results are consistently endearing, surprising, and ambitiously unhinged. It’s a simple story with a familiar tone that could have easily been mishandled (*cough* Me and Earl and the Dying Girl *cough*), but the film somehow pulls through to make for a delightful, idiosyncratic experience.

Something I greatly respect Girl Asleep for is its disinterest in establishing a hard dividing line between its reality & its fantasy. The film traffics in a disco era psychedelia, complete with Soul Train dance breaks and earth tone sprites hiding in its brown stone walls & wood paneling, long before its protagonist indulges in an angry party nap. I occasionally found its squared-off television format aspect ratio to be a distraction that undercut the expansiveness of some of its individual shots, but my initial expectation of that choice differentiating between “reality” and a wider aspect ratio for the dreamworld thankfully never came to be. Instead, the whole film worked as one long fantasy piece where the rules of its loose grasp on what’s “really” happening were constantly shifted to fit the mood & intent of the moment. Often, when films choose to incorporate dreamscape surrealism into the personal growth crises of their protagonists, they’re careful to distinguish a barrier between the two realms. Girl Asleep waves off the necessity of those barriers with an infectiously flippant confidence. It allows its choreographed disco freakouts & Moonrise Kingdom costumes to bleed into its real world high school melodrama and the result is a thorough delight & a constant surprise.

Again, this film is going to be a love it or hate it experience depending on the audience’s stomach for twee whimsy & sweetness. Personally, I was eating out of its hand for the entire runtime and left the theater smiling, fully sated. I’m trying to think of other titles from this year that came across this imaginative & this aggressively feminine, and the only two that immediately came to mind were Nerve & The Dressmaker, two films I absolutely adored. Coming of age comedies are a dime a dozen & many will likely claim that the whimsical surrealism on display here is nothing too new or too inventive, but I found Girl Asleep to be a wildly anarchic & imaginative fairy tale despite its familiar framework. I’m admittedly a huge sucker for dream logic in my film narratives & have a high tolerance for twee as an aesthetic, but I honestly found it to be one of the most memorably uplifting and surprisingly adventurous cinematic experiences I’ve had all year. Girl Asleep is likely to find the right audience once enough people can get the chance to latch onto its dog whistle charms and I sincerely hope it earns the longevity it deserves.

-Brandon Ledet