Author: swampflix

Chappie (2015)

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three star

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As a sci-fi action thriller with prodding questions about private sector weapons production, the drone/surveillance state, and the nature of consciousness and personal identity, Chappie is an utter failure and deserves all of the vitriol that’s it’s been drowning in. As a feature-length Die Antwoord music video, however, it’s a winning success. I’m honestly happy to report that the distinguished pedigree of pop-music movie vehicles like Cool as Ice, Crossroads, Glitter, Spice World, and KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is alive & well in 2015. Honestly. I’m happy with Chappie for what it is: a two hour long commercial for a South African “rap-rave group”, a living, breathing internet meme that scored a surprise one-hit wonder status five years ago.

Although Die Antwoord has released three full-length albums and nearly a dozen music videos at this point, it’s still tempting to categorize them as a one hit wonder. Hell, pop star Tiffany has eight full-length albums and a documentary and she’s still defined by the success of “I Think We’re Alone Now”. Die Antwoord’s own “I Think We’re Alone Now” is a 2010 trash pop oddity called “Enter The Ninja.” Unlike a lot of Die Antwoord’s more repetitive, rave-friendly songs, it’s a real ear-worm in its own bizarre way and it had the added benefit of introducing a their then-fresh world of graffiti-soaked visual art in an eye-popping music video that went “viral”. In the five years since the release of “Enter The Ninja” their act has worn a little thin on me (as one-hit wonders often do), but they’ve developed a devoted niche audience for their version of the South African “zef” aesthetic, an audience that takes their music & visual art very seriously. If Die Antwoord was conceived as a joke or a meme, it’s impressive how committed they are to the gag, seemingly integrating it into their personal lives & physical appearances to the point where it doesn’t matter whether they’re “for real” or not.

It’s no surprise, then, that Die Antwoord’s singular hit “Enter the Ninja” plays over the final shot & end credits of Chappie. When I first spotted them in the trailer for the film, I assumed their role was a severely limited one, a glorified cameo. I was wrong. Die Antwoord are to Chappie what Vanilla Ice was to Cool as Ice, what Eminem was to 8 Mile, what The Village People were to Can’t Stop the Music. This is their vehicle. They play themselves. Their music dominates the soundtrack. They flaunt their own merch. Their visual aesthetic (crude phalluses, expletives, and all) is drawn all over every inch of the set. What outfits vocalists Ninja & Yolandi Visser are going to wear from scene to scene are vastly more interesting choices than what their far more famous co-stars Hugh Jackman or Sigourney Weaver are going to do or say. Even the basic appeal of the titular robot Chappie revolves around the duo, since they raise him like their baby and teach him to walk & talk their brand of zef culture. This is unmistakably Die Antwoord’s movie.

The movie vehicle for flash in the pan one hit wonders was an artform I had assumed long dead, but Chappie brings it back to life with the modern update that the group in question started essentially as a meme. Director Neil Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) tried to elevate the material with questions like “Where is our privatization of military weapons production & law enforcement headed?”, “Why are we so cruel to what we don’t understand?”, “What is a soul?” and blah, blah, blah. In this line of questioning, Chappie is nowhere near as insightful as its robot movie ancestors, like the near-30 years old (and near perfect) RoboCop or, hell, even the severely flawed Short Circuit. It is, however, particularly exciting as a return to form for fans of campy vehicles for pop music icons and one-trick ponies. In this case, Die Antwoord. If you’re looking for a thought-provoking sci-fi action flick with well-considered themes explored to their full potential, you will hate Chappie. If you like (or are amused by) Die Antwoord and wonder what a trashy action movie about armed robots & roving gangs ransacking Johannesburg that Ninja & Yolandi would imagine themselves starring in would possibly look like, you have a pretty good chance of enjoying yourself. The only thing it was missing on that end was a live performance.

-Brandon Ledet

Ingmar Bergman & the Silence of God

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In our conversation about March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, James pointed out that the film’s central struggle with faith in God & acceptance of death would over time become a recurring theme for its director, Ingmar Bergman. He said the film “tackles one of the deepest and most disturbing questions of existence: Why, in the face of so much evil, does God remain silent? The Silence of God is a theme Bergman would explore in later films like Through a Glass Darkly and Cries & Whispers but in those films he found more nuanced ways to get his message across. In The Seventh Seal, by contrast, Bergman strips away everything in the story that doesn’t embellish the allegory, making it feel almost like a sermon. And as with most sermons, the effect the film has on you depends greatly on if you are on board with its message.” Although James is right that The Seventh Seal does have the feeling of a sermon in the conviction of its central message, it’s somewhat strange that such an assertive message would be a question: Why does God remain silent? The questioning of one’s faith is such an uneasy, intangible theme that it’s a peculiar one to repetitively, emphatically broadcast from a cinematic pulpit.

It turns out that Bergman was so vocal about the question of faith & God’s silence because it was a struggle he experienced personally over the course of his young life. Raised as the son of a Lutheran minister (who at one time served as chaplain to the King of Sweden), religious faith was exceedingly important to Bergman’s upbringing. As he grew into his own, he gradually shed the piety of his youth, but it was a troubled transition. As religious discussion was a significant aspect of his upbringing, due to his father’s profession, Bergman also openly & frequently discussed his own questioning & eventual disregard of his faith in his own profession: filmmaking. The themes of God’s silence in the face of intense suffering and the indifference of death were repeated in his work long after The Seventh Seal. The most thorough exploration of this theme, however, came very soon after in what is commonly known as his Trilogy of Faith.

The unlikely trio of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence weren’t initially conceived as a spiritual trilogy, but as they were released consecutively and each share a similar philosophical exploration of God’s absence, even Bergman himself later conceded their significance as a set. As James already explained, his modes of religious exploration would become subtler in these post-Seventh Seal efforts, but not by much. They are still fairly straight-forward in their intent, just more abstract in their tactics. Bergman’s particular brand of religious self-doubt still functioned as honest, agnostic sermons in the Trilogy of Faith, but the question became even more hurtful and muddled as the implications of its consequences became more widespread.

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Although Bergman’s message may have been more understated in his Trilogy of Faith films than in The Seventh Seal, all films in the trio do share the Movie of the Month’s compact, intentionally artificial staging. Working with small casts & spatially limited settings, Bergman gives his explorations of religious doubt the figurative severity of a staged play, where images & dialogue feel grandly symbolic due to their isolation. Through a Glass Darkly, my personal favorite in the trilogy, is the most constricted of all, limiting the entire physical scope of the film to the interactions of four family members retreating on a small island. One character even refers to the intensity of this isolation (as well as a larger, less tangible sense of confinement) directly, saying, “I wonder if everybody feels caged in. You in your cage. I in mine. Each in his own little cube. Everybody.” Besides the caged-in feeling, the religious musings, and inclusion of Max Von Sydow, the movie also depicts a staged play within the film, just as The Seventh Seal noted its own artificiality by including the traveling performances of Jof & Mia.

The main difference between the two films is that Jof & Mia’s familial love were shown as a form of Earthly divinity, an admirable way to confront life & death. In Through a Glass Darkly, familial love is also divine, but in a decidedly twisted way that suggests that incest can “burst reality open” and create a direct path to God. Indeed, God does make an appearance of sorts in the film, but his presence is even more unsatisfying that his silence. He appears as a grotesque display that calls into question his very existence and the division of reality & divinity as well as anxiety-caused mania & good mental health. If the Trilogy of Faith is Bergman shouting a message of self-doubt from a cinematic pulpit, Through a Glass Darkly is the best on-film representation of that doubt, as it leaves so many questions intentionally unanswered.

Winter Light (1962)

Speaking of pulpits, Winter Light begins & ends with sermons in the church of a seemingly desolate community. If Bergman’s cinematic explorations of his religious doubt are to be understood as a sort of therapy in which he sheds the baggage of his son of a preacher upbringing on film, you can’t get much closer to a direct statement than Winter Light. Hell, this sample prayer for the film asks the questions about as directly as you can: “God, why have you created me so eternally dissatisfied? So frightened so bitter? Why must I realize how wretched I am? Why must I suffer so hellishly for my insignificance?” In the face of these questions God, of course, remains silent. Winter Light is the only film in the trilogy that directly references the phrase “God’s silence” and it’s that blunt attitude that makes it so arresting.

The insular nature of the small community, the Max Von Sydow role, and the philosophical fretting all connect Winter Light with The Seventh Seal & Through a Glass Darkly, but it’s the staged performance within the film that distinguishes it. The subversion here is that the staged performance is the protagonist pastor’s sermons. The rituals of performing his duties as pastor have become an empty performance to the protagonist, who has become removed from his closeness to God. When patrons ask him to quell their own concerns of faith, he only reinforces them, saying that the complete absence of God makes more sense than his existence because man’s cruelty would need no explanation. There’s a directness to these meditations that are somewhat obfuscated in Bergman’s other cinematic questions of faith, as reflected in an extensive scene where a character reads a letter directly into the camera, making intense eye contact with the viewer as she speaks. We can also feel Bergman’s gaze from the other side of the camera through much of the film, as if he was speaking directly to us about his doubts and his eventual agnosticism. This directness is almost entirely absent in the final, most elusive film in the Trilogy of Faith, The Silence.

The Silence (1963)

The most intentionally obfuscated title in the trilogy, The Silence feels like Bergman finally letting go of his nervous handwringing over shedding his faith in God and breaking free to explore the questions raised by the consequences of that divine absence: If there is no God, then what is the point of morality? In fact, what is the point of anything? Stripping the dialogue & setting down to a barebones production, The Silence, of course, raises these questions with no intent to answer them. It’s tempting to read into the film’s hotel setting as a metaphor for our temporary stay in the world or a mother’s indifference toward her son as a metaphor for God’s silence or the two sisters’ clashing personalities as representative of different basic human attributes, like youth & old age or piousness & sensuality, but it’s unclear specifically what Bergman meant to say through these individual elements or if he had anything specific to say at all.

In Through a Glass Darkly, the staged play within the film resulted in the uncomfortable unearthing of a familial conflict between a father & his children. In Winter Light, the staged play was a pastor treating his sermons like a pointless ritual, the words having lost their meaning, which in a way was Bergman himself unearthing a familial conflict with his own father. In The Silence, a central character goes to see a staged play as well, but is distracted by a couple having public sex in the theater seats. The meaning of the play takes a backseat role to a completely different kind of performance, one concerned with more immediate, bodily pleasures. Although Bergman had explored the self-doubt of faith before in The Seventh Seal and he would again in titles like Cries & Whispers, the Trilogy of Faith feels like he is not only shedding the importance of religious faith in his personal life, but also in his work. At first he struggles with big, philosophical questions about God & family, but by the time he reached The Silence it felt like he had broken free of those concerns. They were no longer his sole mental occupation, but rather a doorway that opened him up to other big questions, liked the ones asked about personal identity in the brilliantly strange Persona. Freed from the weight of religious fretting, Bergman was able to expand the scope of his films exponentially, but it took many titles released over several decades to get there and the work he put in to achieve that freedom was in compelling in its own right, including some of most accomplished films of his career, like Through a Glass Darkly and The Seventh Seal.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, 1957’s The Seventh Seal, visit our Swampchat discussion of the film, and explorations of its thematic similarities with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and its surprising differences with Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death.

-Brandon Ledet

Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985)

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three star

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Later today I will be cramped in a friend’s living room with a pile of fellow drunken weirdos shouting at a television screen as WrestleMania XXI unfolds live from Santa Clara, California. It’s an exciting, yet nerve-racking day to be a fan and a difficult feeling to describe to those who don’t share in it. I’m expecting a potent cocktail of camp & violence tonight (along with the usual variety of potent cocktails), the spirit of which is difficult to capture in words. It’s also difficult to capture on film. The allure of pro wrestling is an elusive, intoxicating, yet deeply flawed quality that’s better served experienced in a crowd than it is described on paper or depicted in film. Attempting to accurately capture pro wrestling’s appeal in a fictionalized setting and sell it back to its fans as a feature film has been a struggle for decades, a struggle that saw a significant uptick during the sport’s bloated spectacle heyday of the 1980s (as previously discussed on this site in our coverage of 1986’s Body Slam and 1989’s No Holds Barred). It’s a difficult task for several reasons, but not least of all because both the people making the films weren’t genuine fans of the sport themselves and because there’s a basic blending of reality & fantasy at play that’s entirely lost when a story is fully fictionalized.

Of the few 80s stabs at capturing this particular brand of lighting in a bottle I’ve seen so far, 1985’s Grunt! The Wrestling Movie was by far the most successful. A surprisingly funny mockumentary about the sport, Grunt! exemplifies both pro wrestling’s charms and (unintentionally) its crippling faults. You can tell the film was made by true fans of “sports entertainment” (as well as comedies like Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap). Grunt! captures both the camp and the violence of pro wrestling early and often (like in the opening scene when a competitor is comically decapitated during a match), but also has the good sense to lose itself to the action in the ring, knowing when to drop the mockumentary gimmick and “mark out” at the already-ridiculous-enough spectacle on display. It’s far from tastefully made and can at times be overwhelmingly corny, but those qualities make it all the more akin to the subject at hand.

Grunt! is a nerdy wrestling comedy made by wrestling-loving nerds, as is on full display when the director (as depicted in the film) explains, “Ever since I was a young child and I walked into my parents’ bedroom and my father said to me ‘Get out of here! We’re wrestling,’ frankly I’ve been fascinated by it.” That brand of juvenile sex humor isn’t the only thing the movie gets accurate (trust me, it’s accurate) about pro wrestling’s appeal. It also captures the chair shots, interfering managers, rings pelted with trash by booing crowds, snarling promos and shameless merchandising that surrounds the matches as well as the sport’s less savory features, like racial & cultural caricature and the embarrassing mockery of little people. Grunt! isn’t entirely purposeful in its documentation of the sport’s faults, but even when it’s incidental it’s fascinatingly accurate. For instance, the film’s absolutely horrendous rock & roll soundtrack is all too close to the reality of wrestling. Original songs that make declarations like “I’m only happy breaking bones”, “Do you wanna dance? Do you wanna body slam?”, and “Wrestling tonight! Everything is bigger than life!” are almost so bad that they’re downright punk and it’s that exact sentiment of unashamed cheese (along with the bone-crunching violence) that makes the sport appealing.

Grunt! isn’t a necessarily well-made movie, but it is one that serves its subject well. Its decision to tell its tale through mockumentary was downright brilliant in that it allowed the film to blend reality & fiction the same way pro wrestling does in the ring. There are some artistic touches to the way the actual matches are shot, especially in its disorienting reliance on a strobe light effect, but for the most part the film is a straightforwardly cheap comedy about a straightforwardly cheap sport. Much like the way Grunt! occasionally stops telling tawdry jokes and loses itself in the spirit of the in-the-ring action, there are times tonight when I will lose my grip on what’s “real” or what’s funny and lose myself in the actual consequences of WrestleMania XXXI. Even when the film’s jokes don’t land (though it’s surprising how often they do, considering its pedigree) it’s still incredible that they managed to capture that aspect of the sport on film, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Play the Battlefield Earth (2000) Drinking Game

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Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 is exact kind of film that’s benefited by a drinking game. A visually repulsive, verbally repetitive sci-fi box office bomb, it’s a movie that plays best with a rowdy crowd at the end of a drunken night. The film’s overlong, mindless action gets to be a bore without a talkative midnight movie crew to fill in the empty space, but every moment John Travolta’s hideous mouth is moving is a blessing. One not-Travolta character notes early in the film, “They told me this planet was ugly, but this has got to be one of the ugliest crapholes in the universe.” The movie itself is undeniably one of the ugliest crapholes in the universe, sharing a similar Burning-Man-in-space vibe with its temporal peer Ghosts of Mars, but that’s only part of the draw for camp-hungry audiences. It’s the absurd repetition of nonsensical, pseudo futuristic buzzwords that make the film a fun watch and a great candidate for a drinking game.

The Three Drinking Prompts

1. Drink every time a character says “leverage”. Leverage is more or less the theme of the film, so I honestly expected this one prompt to be more than enough. It turns out, however, that a lot of the “leverage” in Battlefield Earth is visually represented and it takes a little while before the verbal “leverage”s start popping up. Just so you don’t get bored (or worse yet, sober!) before the leverage ball gets rolling, you’re going to need a couple more prompts.

2. Drink every time a character says “man-animal”. Despite my expectations, this prompt is twice as effective as “leverage”, racking up over two dozen instances in just two hours. Of all the inane, repetitive phrases in the film, “man-animal” is both the most inane and the most repetitive, which is no small feat. So, be careful with this one, ya lowly man-animals.

3. Choose your own prompt. Abiding by the Rule of Three, it would feel wrong to not provide players a final prompt, but there’s just so much empty, pseudo futuristic jargon to choose from that I’m going to leave the choice up to you. So choose your third prompt from this list of Battlefield Earth-approved gibberish: “kerbango”, “demon”, “Greener”, “Psychlo”, “Clinko”, “cycles”, “credits”, “pictocameras”, “crap”, “knowledge machines”, “rat-brain”, “planetship”, “mine the gold”, “breath gas”, “gas drone”, “piece of cake”, and “blow the dome”. All terms listed should be more or less effective, but if I had to make a recommendation I’d go with “rat-brain”. It just pairs so well with “man-animal” . . . and cheap beer.

A Warning: Choosing to make your third prompt either unnecessary Dutch camera angles or unnecessary barn door camera wipes may result in alcohol poisoning. There’s just too many of both for it to be a healthy choice.

As always, play safe, ya rat-brained man-animals! And go get yourselves some leverage.

-Brandon Ledet

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

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three star

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In my review of The Fast and the Furious, 2001’s kickoff to the hyper-masculine car racing franchise, I supposed that somewhere down the line there would be some “sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels”. The series did not waste any time getting there. 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. Sure, we’re blessed here with sex god Tyrese Gibson (who wastes little time in removing his shirt, of course) instead of Vin Diesel and a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris instead of the much-less-captivating Ja Rule, but the two films are more or less the same. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem.

It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious delivers on the action end early, opening with a ridiculous high speed drag race that features hooligans breaking into a bridge control booth to create a makeshift ramp. The ramp, of course, results in Paul Walker leapfrogging the competition as well as a competitor comically smashing through a Pepsi advertisement. Later, in the cop drama portion of the film, a second car is launched into the air (this time into a yacht) and a much more brutal highway race results in some dude driving a convertible being unceremoniously crushed by an 18-wheeler. The vehicles themselves are updated with some nifty new features: weird lights, Barbie car paint jobs, fire-breathing tail pipes, steam-shooting pistons, and nitros-powered ejection seats. The cops have upped their technology game as well, employing a futuristic, electrified grappling hook that somehow disables car engines through a kind of EMP device. As far as the movie’s 00s ideas of cool go, the CGI camera movements are hilariously dated, there’s a not-so-sly verbal reference to Ludacris’ hit “Move Bitch” (which honestly should’ve been the theme song), the Universal logo in the title card morphs into a spinning rim, and in the opening scene we’re treated to the defining hallmark of only the uppermost echelon of classy movies: break dancing.

2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. As a cultural time capsule, there are a couple differences between its worldview and the one from just two years before. For one thing, there’s thankfully no more rap rock on the soundtrack and for another there’s an abundantly frequent use of the sharp uptick of the chin gesture that roughly translates to “What’s up?” The sequel also one-ups its torture game from force-feeding someone engine oil in the first picture to forcing a rat to eat through a stooge’s stomach wall in second one. For the most part, the two films are nearly identical, though. Although nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, 2 Fast 2 Furious is essentially a shameless retread of its precursor, but it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

Serena (2015)

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onehalfstar

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Serena is a masterclass in piss-poor editing. On paper, it’s baffling that a prestige costume drama featuring two of Hollywood’s currently best-selling acts, Jennifer Lawrence & Bradley Cooper, would skip a wide theatrical release and go straight to VOD. On film, it’s entirely understandable. Drowning under an endless flood of inept editing choices is the raw material for a potentially great movie that’s gasping for air, but never allowed to surface. Alternately, Serena is also just a few cuts away from being a brilliantly funny camp classic, but it’s not even allowed to be enjoyable as a terrible film. It’s downright fascinating how frustrating this movie can be. It’s rare that a Hollywood film is released this unpolished and . . . off, but that doesn’t help the fact that it’s not even entertaining as a total disaster.

On the side of the film’s fight for legitimacy there’s an oddly old-fashioned big studio classic feel to the whole affair. Having two of Hollywood’s biggest stars struggle to negotiate their romantic & professional dynamic in an ancient, treacherous locale feels like the exact kind of movie that would’ve been made by every major studio 50 to 80 years ago and it’s charming to return to that familiar Old Hollywood vibe. This is a world where brassy women assert their power with lines like “I didn’t come to Carolina to do needlepoint,” in traditionally male arenas occupied by lumberjack types with perma-stubble & prison tattoos. Cooper & Lawrence aren’t gruff enough to believably sell the dangerous frontiersman developer and his half-feral wife routine, but their natural charisma and the effortlessly pleasant nature of costume dramas in general makes me want to root for the movie to turn out well. If the pacing had the good sense to slow down and let any of these elements breathe it really could’ve been something. That is not what happened.

There is so much more arguing for the movie to go in the camp classic direction. We’re introduced to Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena as she’s galloping on a horse in slow motion, a horrendously tender acoustic guitar plucking away in the background. The music doesn’t improve from there, with its slow, sappy, meaningless musings poisoning nearly every moment. The emptily symbolic animal imagery doesn’t stop there either. Bradley Cooper’s character spends the entire film on a laughably maudlin, metaphorical panther hunt and Lawrence finds empty metaphors of her own in the repetitive scenes where she trains an eagle to hunt the snakes that have been biting Cooper’s workers. The animal imagery, like nearly everything else in play, is almost always followed by blunt interjections of Cooper & Lawrence fucking, as if the film were edited by a half-awake Russ Meyer on cough syrup. Immediately after we meet Serena on the horse she’s squirming under the sheets and she comes out of an abrupt montage a married woman. The same The Room-esque sex interruptions occur after her eagle kills its first snake and after she hits on her husband’s investors at a ball in yet another scene that goes nowhere (except back to the bedroom). The images in these montages all feel like placeholders for longer scenes to be added later, a task that no one ever got around to. Oddly enough, the one image afforded the most room to breathe is the most disturbing one of all, a vigorous bathtub fingering that I’m likely to never forget thanks to Cooper’s intense, empty stare. In time, that bathtub moment might be the only image from this film I remember all, both because it’s so uncomfortable and because the other contenders are way too brief to make a lasting impression.

The scale really is tipped for Serena to reach a camp classic status, but it just never gets there. Besides the sex & animals, there’s also an evil, jealous, homosexual henchmen and a mystic, murderous woodsman who has “visions” that both feel like odd caricatures out of a different, thankfully bygone era. Also, any credibility Serena’s struggle to assert herself professionally adds to the plot is severely undercut by her gradual transformation from a confident woman to a murderous Lifetime Movie sociopath in the wild, like a knife-wielding Nell. I promise that sounds so much more fun than the film allows it to be and just as the characters are prone to fast, flat mumbling, so is the film’s editing. Each scene in Serena bleeds into the next in a way that makes no particular moment feel any more or less significant than the one preceding it. A hand being chopped off feels just as important as miscarriage or a blood transfusion or a town hall meeting. It’s all fast, flat mumbling here.

I truly believe someone could recut Serena‘s raw footage into something worthwhile, (starting by pulling brief images out of the endless montages to allow them room to breathe and scrapping the entire awful soundtrack wholesale) and come out the other end with a polished finished project that would have audiences counterintuitively rooting for Cooper & Lawrence to chop down thousands of trees as well as impregnate & murder their employees. It’s entirely possible. It’d be even easier to cut it into an over-the-top melodrama ripe with Lawrence going full, feral Mommy Dearest on the frontier folk. It’s almost there. In Serena’s fight for either legitimacy or camp, it was decidedly much closer to camp, but thoroughly disappointing as either. If nothing else, if someone wanted to learn how not to edit a film’s separate parts together into a cohesive whole, this would be a great place to start.

-Brandon Ledet

Mood Indigo (2014)

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fourstar

The word “twee” is a loaded descriptor that is sure to chase away a large section of any potential audience. A lot of people bristle at the mere mention of twee, generally construing it as a brand of unbridled, whimsical cuteness. That dismissive conception entirely disregards the bottomless depression of twee genre staples like Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, and the music of Belle & Sebastian. It’s a bookish, sentimental sort of sadness, but twee generally plays its grief so close to the heart that it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate it from the heights of its cheery sweetness. Any twee work that’s worth a damn is just as depressing as it is joyful; the problem is that a lot of audiences don’t find any of it worth a damn to begin with.

Director Michel Gondry has received near universal acclaim for his music video work with acts like Björk & The White Stripes, but whenever he helms a feature film his name has a tendency to be an automatic turnoff for a lot of folks just as much as some people are turned off by the mere mention of the twee genre he often gets categorized within. His films, (titles like The Silence of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) can be downright infuriating when you’re not on their wavelength, but they can also be deeply rewarding for those not alienated by their fanciful sentiments. Personally, I’ve always been a fan of Gondry’s, finding his films to range from pretty good to absolutely fantastic. My only slight qualm with his filmmaking style is that he always feels somewhat restrained by the format, like he needs to bend over backwards to justify the dreamlike loopiness of his practical effects visuals with a narrative purpose. In his short-form music video work, Gondry was free to experiment with visual techniques and surreal logic without having to provide context for their existence (like the video stores, dream sequences, and memory erasure in the titles mentioned above), but that sense of liberation has been difficult for him to translate to feature films.

In a lot of ways last year’s Mood Indigo finds Gondry at last discovering that sense of freedom on the silver screen. The film’s narrative makes no attempt to justify Gondry’s visual whimsy, but instead rolls with it as if it were a normal part of everyday life. It’s not a film that’s going to win over Gondry’s detractors, but it is instead one that caters to his established audience, assuming they are already game for the intricate, dreamlike quirk he is sure to throw at them. Entirely unrestrained, Gondry allows his imagination to run wild here, like an especially quirky Rube Goldberg contraption on the fritz.

Mood Indigo is just crawling with weird, loopy inventions like alarm bells that infest kitchen walls like bugs, pianos that mix hard liquor “harmonic cocktails”, see-though plexiglass limousines, elephant-shaped tanks, and a species of bird people that takes that concept even more literally than the movie Bird People. The film’s first half is a frantic flurry of Gondry whimsy that gets so overly excited that its elements blend together, causing a strange sort of synesthesia: vinyl records can be watched, food can be heard, sounds can be drank, etc. If the pace of the first half had kept up its blinding speed even I might’ve turned on the film. It’s a near-exhausting flood of strange ideas that begin to feel as if they are connected by no unifying concept at all, as if Gondry were the Richard Kelly of twee. Fortunately, if you stick with the film, it eventually relents and begins to reveal it does indeed have a very strict method to its madness. As the protagonist says to a friend, “Despite the complexity of your words you might be onto something.”

The loopy dream logic of Mood Indigo initially feels formless, but it’s eventually revealed that the movie’s fundamental reality is influenced directly by the mood of the characters that inhabit it. The film tells the basic full-cycle story of a life-long relationship from lovers being introduced by friends at a party to their blissful marriage to their eventual dissolution. The constantly shifting, optimistically energized mood of the first half (wherein everything from the food to the household appliances feels alive & happy) fades as the central couple suffers through sickness & poverty, a change sparked by a seemingly harmless water lily. As the mood sours, the pace slows tremendously; the walls literally start closing in, cobwebs form over once sunshine-blessed windows, characters age rapidly, and ominous shadows start coming to life. One character explains, “As you go through life spaces seem smaller.” It’s a sad statement that rings punishingly true as the ostensibly invincible young love from early in the film succumbs to the pressure of life’s heaviest burdens and the even the frame of the film itself begins to constrict & turn grey.

Mood Indigo is almost certain to alienate the twee-averse very early in its proceedings and may even push a large part of the remaining audience a little too far (the same way an increasingly fussy Wes Anderson has seemingly been testing how much Wes Anderson people can take in recent titles like Moonrise Kingdom & The Grand Budapest Hotel). From what I understand, the film’s original European cut was a full 40 minutes longer than the American home video version and that massive edits were made to cut down on its overabundance of ideas. Honestly, that extra 40 minutes probably would’ve poisoned even my viewing experience and I really, really liked the movie. As is, Mood Indigo is a spontaneous, lively film balanced out by the soul-crushing dread of its final hour. For audiences already on board with Gondry’s hyperbolic visual imagination, it’s refreshing to see the director set free by such a vague narrative structure as a gradually shifting mood and Mood Indigo might rank among titles like Eternal Sunshine as his best work. For those who find the idea of that lack of restraint insufferable, it’s best that you stay far, far away. If nothing else, the movie finds Gondry at his Gondriest, which can go either way for you depending on your tolerance of the heights & depths of both Gondry & twee.

Mood Indigo is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

The Congress (2014)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

It’s difficult for a film to blend animation with live action in a credible way. It’s been more than 25 years since the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and I can’t think of a single picture since that does half as good of a job combining the two techniques. Last year’s The Congress sidesteps this problem by keeping its live-action & animation segments almost entirely separate. There’s a purpose to its partitioning of its separate halves, though. The front, live-action end of The Congress depicts a drab, near-future full of anxieties, disease, fears, and oppressive commercialism. The animated second half is an escapist fantasy that offers sanctuary from that depressing world, its own crippling faults buried deep underground. There’s a vibrant world of possibility (both elating & horrifying) offered by The Congress’ choice to animate its outlandish, dystopian future. It was a wise decision that saved the film from being a decent sci-fi exercise and instead made it an engaging cinematic oddity.

The opening, live-action segment of The Congress has an interesting way of providing flat, nonchalant reads of big concepts. Playing off the idea that movie studios literally want to own their talent (like in early Hollywood, if not like now), the not-quite-fictional powerhouse Miramount Pictures offers Robin “Princess Bride” Wright (playing herself here) a life-changing professional opportunity. They offer her a large sum of money to “hermetically scan” her likeness using a futuristic technology that would allow them to insert her digital self into any film project they want. The contract would prevent her from ever acting in the flesh again, but if she doesn’t sign it she’s also risking the studio erasing her work from the screen forever. It’s an interesting concept that brings to question a lot of notions we have as an audience about celebrities (real-life, breathing human beings) as consumable products. In addition to her contract negotiations with Miramount (she eventually signs the contract, of course) the film also interweaves some half-baked, purple prose musings about her son’s deteriorating health and obsession with kites & airplanes. The overreaching sentimentality of these scenes reminds me a lot of the soft sci-fi of the over-the-top camp fest Upside Down and a lesser movie would’ve stopped there and not pushed its crackpot ideas any further (like in Upside Down). The Congress, thankfully, keeps pushing.

After Wright allows herself to be “hermetically scanned” the film jumps 20 years further into the future into a world where people escape from the shackles of an unfulfilling reality by snorting a chemical that allows them to live in a vibrant, animated fantasy world. The “Animation Zone” is a complicated mess of art influences; like an art deco take on Dr. Suess’ wavy line landscapes with whales, dragons, constellations, rainbows, and genitals-shaped fish populating its blinding, neon color palette. It’s stunning. From this point on, it is difficult to tell exactly how much of the film is “real” and how much of it is happening only in Wright’s mind. As one character puts it, “Ultimately everything makes sense and everything is in our minds.” Playing off the celebrities-as-commodities concept of the first half, film studios in the animated future have found a way to convert actors into chemical compounds that can be eaten, drank, and ultimately copied. Instead of watching your favorite celebrities act out fantasies onscreen, you can now become them, so the world is littered with endless copies of familiar faces like Tom Cruise, Ron Jeremy, Jesus Christ, Michael Jackson, Zeus, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, and Muhammad Ali. It’s terrifying.

The animated back end of The Congress is by far the more impressive half of the film, but its slow introduction through the “technophobic”, soft sci-fi of the first half is partly what makes it work. There have been a lot of recent films that attempt to tackle the emptiness of celebrity culture (Birdman & Maps to the Stars, for example), but none push their concepts to such a far, overreaching end as The Congress. The film isn’t entirely successful. The significance of the kite & airplane metaphors, while serving as a decent through line between the two segments, were difficult to grasp as a viewer; there’s an uncomfortable line of thought near the climax that risks making the entire film feel like a screed on anti-depressants; the stilted nature of the dialogue on the front end can be alternatingly amusing & frustrating, etc. However, its faults feel trivial in consideration of how ambitious & assertive the film plays as a whole. The Congress may be an overwrought mess in some ways, but it’s a fascinatingly idiosyncratic mess that’s impressive in its aspirations of pushing its musings on celebrity culture to the most far-reaching ends possible, putting good taste & tact aside in favor of a thorough, bizarrely unrestrained exploration of its themes. It’s the exact kind of mess I like.

-Brandon Ledet

Body Slam (1986) and the Often Superfluous Nature of Bloated Spectacle in Pro Wrestling

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wrasslin

Like most adults find themselves doing from time to time, I spent this past Friday night yelling myself hoarse at sweaty, costumed men as they wrestled each other in a middle school gymnasium. It was my first exposure to New Orleans’ own pro wrestling promotion Wildkat Sports, at an event called Wildkat Strikes Back. Sitting in a cramped, hot gymnasium with a crowd that ranged from screeching children to their elderly grandparents to hardcore, middle-aged wrestling nerds to roving gangs of way-out-of-place crust punks was a welcome alternative to the way I usually enjoy the sport: in the cold, TV-provided glow of living rooms. There was an intense, communal vibe in that gym that can be lacking in the larger, televised promotions and it made me realize just how much of a spectacle the sport can be on its own merit. When stripped down to its bare bones (sans the slapstick comedy sketches, celebrity cameos, pyrotechnics and half-baked stunts that can exhaust a more bloated program), pro wrestling is still entertaining in a genuine, visceral way.

Sometime in mid-80s pro wrestling had reached its most bloated point in history. With the rise of Hulkamania, the undeniably potent likeability of Andre the Giant, and the cutthroat business-sense of juggernaut promoter Vince McMahon, WWE (then WWF) reached the pinnacle of its cultural dominance when WrestleMania III broke the all-time attendance record of an in-door sporting event with more than 93,000 fans present in the stands (a record that still holds today). The level of sheer spectacle that accompanies events like WrestleMania is as disparate from the brand of pro wrestling you’d see at events like Wildkat Strikes Back as the difference in size of their respective crowds, but that spectacle isn’t exactly necessary to make “sports entertainment” . . . entertaining.

Arriving just a year before that record-breaking crowd at WrestleMania III (and a whole three years before WWE got into the film business themselves with No Holds Barred), the 1986 film Body Slam similarly gets confused about what makes pro wrestling entertaining, putting more value into the spectacle surrounding the sport than the sport itself. In the film’s laughably convoluted plot (it is a comedy, after all) rock ‘n’ roll manager Harry Smilac is struggling to make it with only one client under his wing (a band called KICKS) when he fortunately expands his roster by signing on pro wrestler “Quick” Rick Roberts (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), mistakenly assuming that he is a musical act. Despite his initial repugnance toward pro wrestling, Smilac discovers that there’s good money in the sport and pretty much dives head first into the wrestling business until he (late in the film) has the brilliant idea of combining KICKS & Quick Rick’s talents and voila! Smilac gives birth to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Wrestling”. The spectacle of a live rock band playing while sports entertainers perform is treated here like the discovery of the cure for cancer. Smilac is lauded as a genius.

In Body Slam’s logic, Smilac not only improves pro wrestling with this invention, but he also improves rock ‘n’ roll. These are two forms of art that don’t need improvement. Both rock and wrestling are perfectly appealing when reduced to their most basic parts; they don’t need 80s-tinged grandstanding to make them worthwhile. It’s fitting, then, that the band Smilac manages, KICKS, is an obvious stand-in for the band KISS, who are no strangers to using theatrics & merchandising to distract audiences from their okay-at-best brand of rock ‘n’ roll. In the movie’s logic, KICKS’ songs (as well as their deep love of pyrotechnics) are not only a draw for the crowd, but they also give the wrestlers (well, the faces at least) strength to overpower their opponents. They’re breathing life into a far-from-dead brand of entertainment that really didn’t need their help in the first place.

Of course, Body Slam is a silly trifle of a film that shouldn’t be judged too harshly about what it has to say about pro wrestling as a sport, because it doesn’t have too much to say about anything at all, much less wrestling. However, the film does have some charms as a campy delight. The 80s cheese is thick enough to choke you as early as the opening scene, which features Smilac hanging out of a convertible, hair slicked back, hitting on bikini babes by showing off his gigantic car phone. There’s also some corny humor in exchanges like when a friend asks Smilac, “What are you gonna do, Harry?” and he responds “What I always do: manage!” The campy appeal of the rock ‘n’ roll wrestling plot doesn’t really get going until the last third of the film, but the montages are so worth it, especially the one that’s accompanied by the Body Slam theme song. There’s also, of course, a wide range of 80s wresters to gawk at here. Besides the aforementioned Roddy Piper, the film includes “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, “Captain” Lou Albano, “Classy” Freddie Blassie, “The Barbarian” Sione Vailahi, and several members of the Samoan Anoaʻi family (including Roman Reigns’ father Sika), among others. Besides the innate fun of seeing them all in a feature film, they’re also more or less abysmal at acting, which helps keep the mood light. With all of this 80s-specific cheese flying around, the inclusion of always-welcome Billy Barty & Charles Nelson Reilly is somehow just icing on the cake.

It’s not a great movie, but Body Slam is effective as a time capsule of the 80s as an era of corny comedies, show-off musicians, and the birth of bloated spectacle in wrestling. The time capsule aspect goes both ways, though, both funny in its quaintly out-of-date aesthetic and disturbing in its penchant for finding cheap humor in topics like misogyny, racial caricature, cross-dressing and pedophilia. Those offenses aside, there are moments late in the film when they finally get the basic appeal of pro wrestling down when during a rock ‘n’ roll wrestling performance the band KICKS is attacked by a group of heels and the whole show devolves into chaos. There’s also a particularly bloody street fight match involving chains that feels pretty close to what a lot of hardcore fans are looking for in the sport, despite an announcer’s exclamation that “This is setting wrestling back 1000 years!”

When considered from the perspective of an enterprising showman (like a Harry Smilac or an Eric Bischoff), Body Slam is an interesting case study of what outsiders often get wrong in their assumptions about what makes pro wrestling entertaining. I’m not saying that local promotions like Wildkat Sports are inherently better than their televised, large scale, rock ‘n’ roll wrestling competitors; I’ll still be eagerly watching all 4 bloated-spectacle hours of WrestleMania XXXI this coming Sunday. I’m just saying that the sport is entertaining enough on its own merit, even when stripped of the fireworks, the KISS-knockoffs, and the David Arquettes. There’s a basic appeal to its violence & pageantry that’s evident whether you’re in a middle school gym with 1,000 sweaty nerds or an outrageously packed stadium of 90,000 rabid fans. The bloated spectacle is delicious lagniappe at its best and unnecessarily excessive at its worst. In Body Slam, it’s mostly the latter, though the film argues otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Mother Night (1996)

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inaworld

threehalfstar

Mother Night is an outstanding novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., arguably his best work outside the holy trinity of his titles that get the most attention: Slaughter House Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night is surprisingly just as great (if not better) than any of those books, but what makes it even more surprising is that was remarkably adaptable for film. In addition to hitting my costume drama sweet spot (a low bar to clear, for sure) 1996’s Mother Night was also the best Vonnegut adaptation I’ve ever seen (another low bar, since I’ve only seen the not-very-good Breakfast of Champions). It obviously doesn’t touch anything near the greatness of Vonnegut’s novel (how could it?), but it was effective as a summary of the film’s best touchstones with some inspired casting choices helping bring his words to life.

Playing a role that would likely be filled by Bruce Dern if it were released in 2015 and not 1996, Nick Nolte is damn good in the film’s central role as Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright turned Nazi propagandist during World War II. In some ways Vonnegut does for the Nazi scumbag what Nabokov did for a pedophile in Lolita: he makes Campbell a complicated, richly human character that is at times sympathetic and at other times beyond contemptible, even to himself. Especially to himself. Campbell is a Nazi propagandist who says gut-wrenchingly evil things about Jews as a people in his radio broadcasts, but he’s also an American spy who transmits sensitive information about the war in those very same broadcasts. Nolte carries the gruff, broken spirit of Campbell well, selling the alternating self-hatred and self-aggrandizing of his inner conflict exactly as I imagined it while reading the novel.

Vonnegut’s plot allows a lot of room for consideration in the ways morality during war is a lot more questionable than the typical good vs. evil narrative that’s usually depicted. For Campbell that means that the coded spy language that’s infused into his hateful Nazi broadcasts makes his sin & his virtue inseparable. As his German father-in-law puts it, it does not matter whether he is a spy or not, because the hate in his propaganda is so effective that there is no way he could have served the enemy (America) as well as he served his adopted country (Germany). Campbell tries to remain impartial to the Nazi/American divide, saying that he only feels allegiance to his marriage (“a nation of two”) but the impossibility of that lie is a lesson he learns too late. It’s a moral he summarizes as “You must be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end you are what you pretend to be.”

Mother Night is not only commendable in its competence at capturing Vonnegut’s tricky sense of humor on film; it’s especially praiseworthy because the task in this particular case is made even trickier by the story’s habit of culling amusement out of the horrors of Nazism. It’s partly successful because of its willingness to let the hateful things Campbell says ruminate, like in a scene where a filmed version of one of his broadcasts is projected onto his horrified face as he truly listens to his own words for the first time. Although Campbell is occasionally sympathetic, the movie rarely lets him (or the audience) forget that he is a monster. Besides Nolte’s excellent turn as the central propagandist, there are plenty of other performances to praise here: Alan Arkin’s role as his best friend; Sheryl “Laura Palmer” Lee as his German wife; a perfectly cast John Goodman as the American agent that recruits him as a spy; and Kirsten Dunst as an adorable, pint-sized Nazi moppet, among others. There are some really dark touches to the film’s humor, like when Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” plays over images of a concentration camp or when Campbell makes sensual love to his wife while one of Hitler’s impassioned speeches blares on the bedside radio. These touches all feel oddly subversive, as the whole film has a decidedly old-fashioned feel to it, like black comedy version of The Rocketeer. As a film, it’s more than just a rushed, abridged version of a great novel; it’s also a handsome, well-acted historical drama that finds a peculiar line of humor in narcissism, self-hatred, and genocide.

-Brandon Ledet