Author: swampflix

Bring It On (2000)

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fourhalfstar

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The cartoonish cheerleader comedy Bring It On is one of those films I watched way too many times as young lad merely because it was one of the few movies my sister & I could agree on (other titles on that short list included Clueless & My Cousin Vinny). Nostalgia can be a blinding force when it comes to judging art on its own merits, though, so I was pleased to discover on a recent drunken night after a friend’s wedding that Bring It On still holds up as a high-functioning farce. This cinematic time capsule fits in with its eras finest high school comedies: movies like Clueless, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, and But, I’m a Cheerleader!. Although there’s an imperfect choice of POV that somewhat weakens its central message (more on that in a minute), Bring It On is wholly committed to its camp value in an endearing way, moves at a breeze of a swift/efficient pace, and has its heart in the right place even if it missed out on making a solid socio-political statement. It also opens with one of the greatest musical numbers ever put to film, a two minute-long performance I could gladly watch into infinity.

Instead of adopting the typical ugly duckling/beautiful swan makeover story structure that dominated much of the 90s high school movie landscape (spoofed recently in the underappreciated Mae Whitman comedy The DUFF), Bring It On follows a traditional sports movie formula and tracks the progress of a Californian cheer squad as they work their way up to the all-important, ESPN-televised “Nationals.” Although the film does include a superfluous will-they-won’t-they love triangle, it’s at heart about ethics in cheer choreography. Bring It On‘s head cheerleader, cinema’s most prominent Torrance (brought to bubbly life by my lifelong celebrity crush Kirsten Dunst), deals with the fallout of the discovery that her former captain had been stealing routines from an predominantly black school in East Compton. Crushed by the betrayal, Torrance has to reconcile with the fact that her “entire cheerleading career is a lie.” When reminded that it’s only cheerleading, Torrence retorts, “I am only cheerleading.” It’s true, too. Her squad had become her sole identity, a concern that overrides any anxieties about her education or the boys chasing after her. (I particularly enjoyed the way that latter conflict was deflated with the line, “Do us all a favor and get over yourself and tell her how you really feel.”)

I’ll give kudos to Bring It On for making its romance plot a backseat concern in relation to a sports movie conflict involving white teens ripping off black artists without recognition. It’s kind of a gutsy choice for an innocuous teen comedy from nearly two decades ago. Where the film falters is in failing to give said black cheerleading squad much to do in a story about their own artistic exploitation. A Bring It On told from the POV of the East Compton Clovers would most likely serve this story of artistic integrity & cheerleading ethics much better. From the mostly white, well-to-do Toros’ perspective, it instead become a story about white guilt & “trying to make it right.” As much as the film could’ve handled its socio-political inquiries better, though, it does find a way to completely sidestep any shameless white knighting and its Big Competition conclusion is a satisfying end for both the Toros & the Clovers in a genuinely earned moment of feel-good movie magic.

Although I’m focusing on the implications of Bring It On‘s narrative here, what makes the film such a winning success is not its sense of storytelling, but its deliriously saccharine sense of humor. I get a dreamlike sense of an overwhelming sugar rush in this film, one matched only by titles like Josie & The Pussycats and Cool as Ice. Ant-Man director Peyton Reed establishes a punishing sense of rhythm in the film’s pacing, delivering campy humor in a nonstop barrage of rapidfire dialogue set to a “You Wouldn’t Steal a DVD”/Run Lola Run style of pop music production. UCB co-founder Ian Roberts drops by as a painfully corny/horny hired gun choreographer who derails the Toros with a Fosse-obsessed “spirit fingers” routine. There’s also plenty of delightfully inane cheerleading humor like in the line, “This is not a democracy; it’s a cheerocracy,” and and in the concept of “cheer sex” (eyefucking a member of the audience during a routine). Despite a stray joke or three threatening to indulge in body shaming or sexual assault and a pair of wallet chain-sporting nu metal bozos, Bring It On never fully sours on its cheery worldview. It manages to feel like a live action cartoon in details like rigorous.toothbrushing, religious reverence for something called a “cheer stick”, and a disgusting younger brother character straight out of Teen Witch. It’s thoroughly endearing & more than a little overwhelming in is high fructose energy, a tone that fits its subject nicely.

It’s a little shallow to say so, but I really do believe Bring It On‘s entire argument for cult following legitimacy as a campy delight hinges on its opening dream sequence cheer routine. It’s a beautiful, aggressive, surreal splash of cold water that happily indulges in its own inanity, as typified in the line, “Hate us because we’re beautiful, but we’ don’t like you either. We are cheerleaders.” It’s as iconic of an opening as film could ever ask for even before it reaches its Golden Age of Hollywood musical number conclusion. Bring It On might’ve stumbled in how it handled some of the political implications of its narrative (mostly in the diminished role of the Clovers), but it’s a wildly confident camp comedy that finds its own surreal voice in its manic cheerleading humor. If you need any proof that the film is worth a look, I urge you to watch the opening number in the clip below. It’s the same kind of cinematic perfection that won me over with “Floop’s Floogies” in Spy Kids, a perfect encapsulation of what makes the film such a rare, bizarre treat.

Side Note: How weird is it that the film’s titular line is actually “Bring It.” and not “Bring it on.”? It’s a very minor distinction, but it’s one I find fascinating, not only because the studio likely found that the one word difference tested better for some strange reason, but also because the line has been culturally altered by various & plentiful spoofs that read it as “Bring it on.” Really makes you think.

-Brandon Ledet

Get Excited! Swampflix is Returning to NOCAZ Fest This Weekend

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Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! We will be exhibiting this Saturday (November 19th) & Sunday (November 20th) at the third annual New Orleans Comics & Zines Festival along with a bunch of other super cool comics & zines exhibitors. For this year’s festival we made print versions of Boomer & Brandon’s Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. conversations, spanning the first two “phases” of the MCU in just two zines.

We will be also selling print versions of our “Marabunta Cinema“, “Lugosi Vs. Karloff“, and “Wrestling Cinema” pieces, as well as 2015’s Movie of the Month conversations in their entirety. They all feature dozens of new illustrations & hand-transcribed text from the site and the Movies of the Month zine is a ~90 page whopper featuring work from everyone who contributed to the site last year.

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We will be tabling from 11am-4pm on Saturday & 1pm-4pm Sunday at the Main Branch of the Orleans Public Library on Loyola Ave. For more info on the festival, check out their website at Nocazfest.com & refer to the poster below.

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We hope to see y’all there!

-The Swampflix Crew

 

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)’s Black & Chrome Makeover

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When I first reviewed George Miller’s high octane action spectacle Mad Max: Fury Road last summer, I was a little late to the table and the film had already been relegated to cult classic status, earning high marks from fans & critics, but failing to beat out less memorable films like Tomorrowland & San Andreas at the box office. Before reviewing the film I watched it twice in the theater in two different formats, 2D & 3D, and contextualized it by plowing through Miller’s entire catalog for perspective (for the record, it was just slightly bested by Babe 2: Pig in the City & The Witches of Eastwick as a career high for me). Despite all of that effort I floundered to find anything new or interesting to say about the film that wasn’t a mere echo of the praise it was already lauded with. Over a year later, I’ve now seen Fury Road reach its third theatrical format, the colorless Black & Chrome edition, and I still have nothing significant to add outside an echo of how wonderfully bizarre & overwhelmingly kinetic this film is. It’s still one of the best action films in recent memory. Immorten Joe is still a total fucking nightmare. Not much has changed in this most recent theatrical release but the color, so don’t beat yourself up if you couldn’t catch it in theaters (especially since there’s a Black & Chrome release on BluRay & VOD currently available for the still curious).

All that being said, I absolutely loved returning to the theater to witness this bizarre work unfold for a third time. Catching Fury Road in three distinct formats has been illuminating in that it allowed me to appreciate different aspects of the film in each run, while I still don’t believe I’ve seen it enough times to fully take it all in. While the campy, drive-in spectacle of watching it in 3D was my personal favorite way of experiencing the film, there was a definite novelty to the Black & Chrome version that highlighted aspects of what Miller accomplished I don’t remember noticing before. The story goes that while screening a work print of Fury Road without a score & without color, Miller found his preferred version of the film. The studio obviously rejected the idea of releasing the film in that state for fear of scaring off general audiences, but a year later a home video & brief theatrical release has made its way into the world after this production anecdote piqued fans’ interest (although with the score intact). As the title suggests, the black & chrome Fury Road is a little shinier and higher contrast than a traditional colorless film is presented, particularly in details like when Immorten Joe’s “war boys” spray that mysterious chrome substance across their teeth as a pick-me-up. This aspect of the print is emphasized in-film by lines like “Look at that! So shiny! So chrome!” and “You will ride eternal, shiny & chrome.” Although the color change doesn’t entirely alter the film’s DNA (how could it?), it is a shift that’s often justified & accentuated by the script.

I caught the black & chrome Fury Road at the only theater in Louisiana (and one of only a few dozen in the nation) that was screening a print. A little dazed by catching Moonlight earlier that afternoon & enjoying a few cocktails downtown in the meantime, I was confronted with two major annoyances at the cinema: a very talkative older couple who were brazen in their interruptions since there were only three of us “witnessing” Miller’s glory & a loud, hideous whine emanating from the projector. In an attempt to escape both distractions, I moved to the very front row of the tiny theater, completely immersed in the black & chrome madness blasting before me. Although I was mostly annoyed by the talking, I was a little amused when, after the glorious dust storm finish to the first chase scene, a man exclaimed, “Son of a bitch. I’m worn out! That was fucking genius.” As long as I’m echoing already-expressed sentiments here, I guess I have to whole-heartedly agree with that drunk man-child. Fury Road wore me out every single time I’ve seen it long before the end credits rolled. And, despite my exhaustion, it was indeed “fucking genius”. There’s an undeniable, infectious “how did this get made?” quality to Fury Road (as if it’s something Miller got away with, not just something he filmed), that strikes me every time no matter what row I’m sitting in, how disruptive the audience is, or in what state it’s being projected. There was something especially cool about watching it a few feet away from the screen, though. I’ll readily admit that, even if it wasn’t my first choice.

Overall, I am saying that the Black & Chrome edition of Fury Road isn’t an entirely unique experience, but that doesn’t mean nothing changed for me in that format. In a lot of ways, the black & white digital grain makes the film feel more 90s, recalling Aronofsky’s π or, once the supermodels appear, the world’s craziest perfume ad. A lack of color also called attention to the film’s dust & grit, as if it were a feature length adaptation of a White Zombie music video (the Russ Meyer-inspired “Thunderkiss ’65,” specifically). The horror of the zombie-like war boys popped off the screen more in the opening capture & detainment sequence. A little of the CGI is clouded without the color, making it play like a forgotten relic, maybe along the lines of Hardware or, hell, even Metropolis. All of these elements were already lurking in Fury Road to begin with, though. All switching formats does is make them more obvious. Some would even argue that the original version of the movie is near-monochromatic to begin with, so the difference is negligible at best. Personally, I would miss the bright reds & purples of details like the dust storm or the guitar goblin if this were the only version of the movie available, but thankfully it’s not. There’s now three versions of Fury Road out there waiting to impress & confound you as to how something so goddamn insane was ever made in the first place. I’m lucky to have seen it even once, let alone from so many angles & shifted perspectives. If nothing else, the black & chrome flavored Fury Road is at least worth seeking out to add that extra layer of appreciation to something we all already knew was wonderful. When you seek it out, though, just try to avoid the whining projectors & talkative drunks out there aiming to distract from it. There are many roadblocks to avoid on the path to Valhalla.

-Brandon Ledet

Doctor Strange (2016)

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twohalfstar

Earlier this year Boomer wrote a wonderfully incisive piece on the political reasons he’d be abstaining from watching Doctor Strange until he could conveniently view it for free, thus decidedly not contributing to its already massive profits. So much ink has already been spilled here & elsewhere on the myriad of ways the film fumbled the issue of racial representation in its casting, particularly in the controversy of awarding Tilda Swinton the role The Ancient One, a character that traditionally would be played by an Asian man. Director Scott Derrickson has since admitted in interviews that in trying to avoid the “Fu Manchu” stereotype pitfalls of that character’s source material he had made an even bigger mistake in whitewashing the role, a transgression that many Hollywood productions have been indulging in lately. As Boomer & many others have already covered in their thoughts on Doctor Strange‘s insensitivity to whitewashing & cultural appropriation (not to mention its intenional omission of references to Tibet), including Derrickson himself, it’s no surprise that the film had several glaring problems in the cultural mindfulness department. What has been surprising, though, is that Doctor Strange has been earning very high critical marks outside of that controversy context. Some have even called it one of the best films of the MCU, comparing its wide appeal to the first Avengers film & Guardians of the Galaxy. I personally don’t understand the praise, as its storytelling structure dialed the franchise all the way back to the first Iron Man, with almost a decade of MCU creativity & innovation lost in the process.

The one thing that really worked for me in Doctor Strange was the exact selling point that put my butt in the seat in the first place: the visuals. The film has a kaleidoscopic, Inception-inspired way of folding space & time in on itself to create a psychedelic viewing experience unrivaled in most straightforward action adventures of its ilk. Even within Marvel’s own ranks only the microscopic & subatomic shenanigans of Ant-Man come close. Entire cities geometrically fold over like complicated origami. Galaxies expand, contract, and implode as characters’ astral projections tunnel through them. Time inverts, changes direction, and ties itself in knots as both complications and solutions to the Good vs Evil plot. And yet, for all of Doctor Strange‘s mind-bending, gorgeous, playfully surreal visual treats, the story they support is one of the laziest, most simplistic stabs at hacky comedy & unearned redemption narratives since the lifestyle porn beginnings of this franchise in Jon Favreau’s original Iron Man feature. It’s a dispiriting backslide into the worst corner of the MCU, where an egomaniacal monster is celebrated for his immense skill & wit instead of being shamed as the villainous shit that he so obviously is. I don’t regret catching this film in its IMAX 3D format while it’s still screening at every conceivable cineplex, as it gave me the best possible shot at enjoying what was truly a beautiful application of CG psychedelia. I just left the theater feeling more than a little let down by the story that technology was wasted on.

Heartless ass Stephen Strange is the Western world’s foremost neurosurgeon, a fame-obsessed brute who plays pop music trivia during intense surgical procedures, lives in a fabulously expensive apartment the audience is meant to envy, and scoffs at any philosophical ideas that cannot be explained through logic & modern science. His hubris is temporarily put in check after a violent car wreck destroys his most precious assets: his hands. It’s a classic tale of ironic tragedy that dates back to horror cinema as old as The Monster Maker & The Hands of Orlac, if not further, and Strange intends to right this universal wrong by traveling to Nepal and getting himself some of that good old-fashioned Far East mysticism. He’s shamed & trained into momentary submission by the aforementioned Ancient One, who, while dressed in the garb of a Tibetan monk, is actually a centuries-old Celtic woman, for what little it’s worth. We’re then bombarded with a whole lotta Marvel bloat: two(!) new-to-the-franchise villains, a loyal crew of underserved sidekicks, astral projections, alternate dimensions, space-time continuums, all kinds of nonsense. Before you know it, two post-credits stingers later, the whole thing has blown over without leaving much of anything in its wake.

At the center of all this and, apparently, all things in the Universe is the film’s main problem, Stephen Strange himself. The movie asks, “Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?” with the intent to humble him, but the answer the story gives is that he is Everything. No other character is afforded a second of importance that isn’t in some way tied to Strange’s magnificence. His unconvincing turnaround from badboy heel to crowd favorite babyface is made more important than the potential collapse of the Universe. He immediately masters an ancient art others have been steadily studying for decades, yet his rich white man in the East vacation is supposed to be a humbling spiritual journey. Much like with the irredeemable blowhard cad Tony Stark, the audience is asked to sympathize & laugh along with a jokester bully here, buying into a reformed badboy storyline at a moment’s notice, with no significant behavioral or personality change and a very brief loss of wealth & social status. In my recent dive into the entirety of the MCU, I’ve found that I connect with truly good, sincere superhero archetypes like Captain America much more easily than I do with sarcastic anti-hero villains in superheroes’ clothing like Stark, so my distaste for Dr. Strange as a character is certainly the result of a personal bias. I enjoyed this film well enough on a purely sensory level, but was overall soured by its narrative return to an Iron Man aesthetic. Given the immense popularity of the Iron Man franchise & this film’s early critical praise, I expect to be in the minority on that point, but I’m okay with that.

It’s easy to see on a strategic, Kevin Feige level why Marvel felt the need to bring in Dr. Strange as connective tissue in its ever-expanding universe (well, “multiverse” now, I guess). The psychedelia, witchcraft, and real world magic Strange brings to the table easily makes room for Feige & company to tie in the outer space reaches of Thor, Thanos, and the Guardians with the Earthbound characters of the Avengers and the inner space microverse Ant-Man antics. Why tie all of that narrative glue to a character who both closely resembles a protagonist you’ve already built your franchise around and whose origins are so hopelessly backwards in their racist depictions of Eastern stereotypes that you have to rewrite & whitewash them into a barely more acceptable compromise? There are more Marvel characters than I could ever care to count and surely somewhere in there one of them could’ve been a less problematic and more narratively distinct franchise-unifier. Off the top of my head, my two favorite characters in the Marvel pantheon could’ve easily done the job: Howard the Duck & The Son of Satan. I’d understand how past financial performance would set a bad precedent for Howard’s inclusion (despite his outer space origins & the casual disruption of the rules of reality in his often magical villains), but The Son of Satan could surely carry all of Strange’s multiverse-spanning psychedelia without any of the cultural baggage inherent to his origin story. And these are just two characters I know about, not being at all well-read in the vastness of Marvel folklore.

The point is that if Doctor Strange was such a difficult work to adapt with a culturally sensitive eye, there’s really no reason that it should‘ve been adapted at all. There must have been other, better options. This feels especially true once the cookie cutter mediocrity of the story sinks in. For all of the film’s reality-shifting visual creativity, it winds up feeling like so many Marvel origin stories we’ve already seen in the past, never justifying a necessity for its existence as an isolated property instead of as a connective piece for a franchise, which is a total shame & one of Marvel’s most frequent blunders. Maybe if I had any particular affinity for (the eternally forgettable charisma void) Benedict Cumberbatch as an actor I might be singing a different tune, but even my beloved Tilda Swinton couldn’t save this film from banality and she was backed by some of the most beautifully disorienting imagery I’ve ever seen put to use in action cinema. Doctor Strange is a feast for the eyes, but fails to nourish on any comedic, narrative, spiritual, philosophical, or emotional level. For a work that’s inspired over a year of think piece controversy and a few weeks of hyperbolic Best of the MCU praise, it mostly exists as a flashy, but disappointing hunk of Nothing Special.

-Brandon Ledet

Paperhouse (1988) as a Warning Shot for the Atmospheric Horror of Candyman (1992)

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When we were first discussing November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, we were very adamant that the film didn’t entirely fall under the horror genre, despite the way it carried itself with a horror atmosphere. The film’s alternating dream world vs reality dichotomy lent itself to some horror genre hallmarks: an eerie score, a mutilated villain, an overwhelming sense of dread. Yet, the story was about a young girl exuding godlike control in a self-created dream space as a means of bucking against the health & home life helplessness she suffered in the “real world,” sometimes with the two realms meeting in unexpected ways. That’s not exactly the blueprint for the ghost stories, slashers, and monster movies we usually pin under the horror umbrella. Four years after Paperhouse, however, director Bernard Rose repurposed a lot of the dread-stirring techniques of the children’s film for something entirely different: Candyman. The supernatural slasher Candyman is certainly Rose’s most infamous film to date, but a lot of what makes it work as a bone-chilling, reality-disrupting horror can easily be traced back to the familial drama nightmare of Paperhouse.

Just like how Paperhouse distinguises between the natural world and the dream world of its protagonist’s crayon drawing, Candyman exists in two distinct spaces: in front of & behind the mirror. The killer from this Clive Barker-penned story is summoned in a mix of Beetlejuice lore & “Bloody Mary” urban legend shenanigans. After someone/anyone says “Candyman” five times in the mirror, the spirit of a brutally murdered slave with a hook for a hand and a body full of bees materializes to murder them. What’s brilliant about the way Candyman’s mirror realm is presented onscreen is that it partly exists as a physical space characters/victims can climb into through the back of medicine cabinets. This space exists both as a physical part of the building and as a dream world where the Candyman can hold hostages, sometimes infants, as bait to lure his more prized victims into full cooperation with his evil plans. The fantasy realm in Paperhouse works likewise. It’s physically represented in a crayon drawing the protagonist can manipulate while awake and as a dream realm she can only enter while asleep. The way one realm can affect the other in Paperhouse is also reflected in the way the Candyman frames his victims for murder while they’re under his spell, enacting a physical change in the “real” world while the protagonist is helplessly trapped in a supernatural one.

Besides their established dichotomies between “real” and fantasy spaces & the occasional crossovers that disrupt them, Paperhouse and Candyman also share a general sense of fairy tale storytelling. Paperhouse most notably feels like a classic fairy tale, following a young girl who can enter & change the world through her own drawings. Candyman, however, is specifically about the power of urban legends & myth making. It’s not too difficult to draw a line between traditional fairy tale folklore and the modern urban legend, particularly in the case of the Candyman’s legend, which includes supernatural detail in its mirror realms & its Biblically massive swarms of bees. The Candyman himself is desperately concerned with the strength and prominence of his own legend, focusing as much effort as possible on making sure people still believe in his fairy tale folklore as if his (after)life depends on it. As the series continues in its campier, less effective sequels, the Candyman even begins to somewhat reflect the intention of the eyes-scratched-out dream Dad of Paperhouse, specifically tormenting the living members of his family as part of his revenge strategy. By the third film in the series, his supernatural power is also revealed to be tied to a work of art, a self-portrait, which is even more of an encroachment on Paperhouse territory. Bernard Rose had no discernible influence on those diminishing returns ventures, but the fairy tale aesthetic & power he established in both Paperhouse & Candyman mirror each other close enough even without that connection.

There’s a lot to dissect in Paperhouse & Candyman‘s shared fairy tale narratives about dueling reality & fantasy realms, but it’s the way director Bernard Rose establishes a distressing mood in both films that truly ties them together. The menacing score from Hans Zimmer that makes so much of Paperhouse feel like a nightmare is recognizably echoed in Phillip Glass’s masterfully eerie work in Candyman. Both films turn cheap, cold sets into assets, distorting reality by making everything feel tactile, but off. The disorientation in how the two works distinguish between fantasy & reality similarly put the audience on edge. Paperhouse sets the table for a lot of the horror genre thrills Rose later pulled off in Candyman. Even though that latter work’s sequels pushed it into more traditional slasher territory, the film itself doesn’t ever feel like a strict horror narrative. Clive Barker’s writing style surely had an influence there, as his works like Hellraiser & Nightbreed never exactly fit into the traditional Jason Voorhees-type slasher box (despite Pinhead often being referenced in that context). Anyone who’s looking for standardized Candyman thrills where atmosphere is made secondary to violence & gore would likely find the most solace in that film’s less-than-stellar sequels. On the other hand, if the atmosphere & surrealism is what made Candyman feel special to you in the first place, Paperhouse demonstrates just how effective Rose can make that tone feel even with most of the horror removed. Paperhouse is remarkable in many ways that has nothing to do with Rose’s latter work in Candyman, but the film is still noteworthy as proof that his best known effort would still be horrifying even if it were completely removed from the horror genre.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

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)

/ swampflix / 31 Comments

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)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

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